chapter 8

Theology and Logology

1979

The main purpose of this long essay is to define, illustrate, apply, and defend lo-
gology —pretty much against all comers. Theology is used as a comparison and
contrast to logology and is the central concern of the essay, as it was, say, in The
Rhetoric of Religion (1961). This essay is probably the most complete on the sub-
ject of logology, how it works, what its basic assumptions are, and why it should
be taken seriously as a way of dealing with words (symbolic action) and the human
condition (which includes the realm of motion). It is a summing-up essay, which
means that there is quite a lot of repetition of material that appears in other essays
before and after this one. Burke had finished this essay by the fall of 1977 when he
came to Chicago for talks at the National Humanities Institute at the University of
Chicago, where I was a fellow. The institute typed the essay for him, and he had
made all of his corrections by the spring of 1978, when he returned to Chicago to
give a series of talks at Northwestern University that was arranged by Lee Griffin,
and featured Burke’s latest definition of humans as “bodies that learn language.”
Nothing is more basic to late (post 1970) logology than this definition, which
replaces his old one, “symbol-using animals.” As Burke liked to say, you can
“spin” everything else from it, and he did. A distinctive human trait now be-
comes the intrinsic inherited species trait: the ability to learn a language, any lan-
guage from the thousands that are spoken worldwide. All “normal” human be-
ings have this ability to understand and speak a language, and, with training, to
read and write it. One learns the language of the tribe more or less automatically
if one is socialized and grows up where the language is spoken. No other living
species that we know of has this ability, perhaps because no others have a neu-
ral network complex enough to accomplish the feats of memory required to
learn, and learn how to use, thousands upon thousand of words in hearing,
speaking, reading, and writing. Prodigious feats of memory are characteristic of
humans in their relationship to language.
Burke is not really so interested in these feats of memory as he is in the fact
that the ability to learn and use a language is ubiquitous in humans and that lan-
guage (symbolic action) has a logic (logologic?) of its own that affects every part
of our lives, the more so since the advent of the age of print technology and, later,
of radio, television, and computers. Logology is the study of words, and words
about words. Burke likes to point out that even “reality” is not real, rather than,
say, nature or some other nonverbal subject until it has been turned into words,
and major events (spring, love, marriage) are not complete until we have a song
or poem to go with them. We literally see with words and name everything we
see to incorporate it into the verbal realm so that we can refer to it when it is not
present and make appropriate use of it. The “illiterate” Indians of the Amazon
jungle have named and learned how to use hundreds of natural substances for

172
Theology and Logology 173

medicinal and other purposes. The Eskimos have a huge number of words for
every kind of snow. The Plains Indians had a language more complex than
Greek. Print technology gave us the world of books, which many of us still in-
habit. We may yearn for an unmediated experience of the natural world (Burke’s
realm of motion) but it is impossible, no matter what the ecocritics and ecolo-
gists tell us. We have no images that are not tainted with words. Dogs may smell
their way through the world, but we talk our way through it—and beyond it.
In these matters, Burke is absolutely correct in his relentless insistence that the
way to knowledge and understanding of what it means to be human is through
words, in all of their many forms and permutations. In and through words; be-
yond words he once wrote. But beyond words there is nothing. God after all is
nothing but a word in logology. It is hard to imagine what could be beyond
words in logology, except nothing. Maybe a pure, powerful musical experience,
such as Beethoven’s last piano concerto might give us an experience beyond
words, though the second music critics or conductors or players begin to discuss
it, they have brought it into the realm of words because they have no other way
to get it out of the pure musical state it is in when we hear it.
I seem to be far afield, but I’m not. Burke’s example of the air conditioner in
the movie theater is meant to illustrate how mind affects body, or what the
rhetorical properties of a film can do. The body that learns language is also the
body that suffers from it—what you see in the theater is nothing but images;
what you hear is nothing but words and whatever sound effects and music are
part of the movie. There is nothing real about it except that it is happening to you
as you internalize what is on the screen and what is coming from the speakers.
As Burke points out, no one is really being killed, tortured, burned, buried alive,
raped, or having an orgasm up there. There are no real bullfights in Hemingway’s
novels, nor is there any actual violence in Faulkner’s novels. However, the power
of words (and of images on the screen) is so great, and the connection between
words outside the head and words inside the head is so extensive and the neural
network is so complex that the whole body is affected by what it sees and hears.
In spite of the fact that we know it is not real, what we read and see on the screen
can make us shout, weep, laugh, close our eyes, even leave the theater or TV to
avoid any more of that experience. This interactive relationship is the field of lo-
gology: the nature of words (symbolic action), what words can do to us, how
words behave, what we can do to and with words as bodies that learn language.
“No mind without body,” Burke says over and over again in discussing the realm
of symbolic action. Even inside the head, language is an embodiment and the
brain is a clutter of words. There may be 50,000 to 100,000 in there. The only
escape seems to occur when we dream, which is often wordless.
This is Burke’s realm. If I go on, I’ll get lost in it, lost in words about words,
lost in the logological trap. Once in there (say, in a text) how can you ever get
back out except by using more words about words? Artists painted abstract pic-
tures and left them untitled to escape the tyranny of words. But even to call it
“Untitled” is to rely on words again.

***
174 Logology

foreword
There is the possibility of confusion, in connection with my use of the
term “logology.” Though I shall constantly be encountering occasions
where theology (as “words about God”) and logology (as “words about
words”) overlap, particularly as when logology was taken literally to
mean “the Doctrine of the Logos” (the reference to Christ as the Word
in the Gospel of John), in my discussion I shall be stressing the secular
meaning of the term.
Technically, each term could treat the other as of narrower scope. For
logology in the secular sense could class all sorts of “isms” and “ologies”
and many other kinds of utterance, including itself, as modes of “verbal
behavior.” And theology would certainly look upon any such theoriz-
ing as far less comprehensive in scope than theology’s concern with the
relations between the human, word-using animal and the realm of the
supernatural.
Professor J. Hillis Miller, most notably in his essay on “The Linguis-
tic Moment in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ ” (The New Criticism and
After, edited by Thomas Daniel Young [Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1976], pp. 47–60), has expertly discussed Hopkins’s way of
fusing a fascination with words in general and a devotion to Christ as the
creative Logos. And when elsewhere he refers to “the peculiarly precar-
ious Feuerbachian pose which says, in effect, ‘All the affirmations of
Christianity are true, but not as the believers believe,’ ” I thought of the
kabbalists who said that biblical references to God as though he had a
human body are not figurative; they are literal. But only God knows how
to interpret their literal meaning—and the nearest we can come is by un-
derstanding them as figures of speech.
Our bodies are gestated and born in wordlessness—and out of such a
state grows the doctrinal (that is, the verbal, the scriptural even). Them-
selves speechless, they help us learn to speak.

i
We have heard much talk of a “birth trauma,” the shock of a fetus in be-
ing exiled from an Edenic realm in which it had flourished but which its
own stage of growth had begun to transform from a circle of protection
into a circle of confinement. With its first outcry after parturition it is
started on its pilgrimage as a separate organism, its sensations, its feel-
ings of pleasure and pain, being immediately its own and none other’s.
Theology and Logology 175

We assume that such immediate experiences of a particular physiologi-

cal organism are like the experiences of similar other organisms. But at
least they are far from identical in the sense that your pleasures and pains
are exclusively yours, and no one else’s.
Whether or not the organism’s radical change of condition at birth is
a “trauma,” a wound that leaves a deep scar, we do know that under or-
dinary favorable conditions the organism begins to flourish, and even so
much so that in later life the vague memories of its early years can as-
sume an Edenic quality, presumably the material out of which myths
about a primal Golden Age can take form. And this is the stage of life
during which the infant (that is, literally the “speechless” human organ-
ism) learns the rudiments of an aptitude which, to our knowledge, dis-
tinguishes us from all other earthly beings: namely, language (or, more
broadly, familiarity with arbitrary, conventional symbol-systems in gen-
eral—insofar as traditions of dance, music, sculpture, painting, and so
on are also modes of such “symbolic action”).
But the kind of arbitrary conventional symbol-system that infants ac-
quire in learning a tribal language differs from the other media in at least
this notable respect: It is the one best equipped to talk about itself, about
other media, and even about the vast world of motion that is wholly out-
side all symbol-systems, that was going on long before our particular
kind of symbol-using animal ever came into existence, that is the neces-
sary ground of our animal existence, and that can go on eternally with-
out us.
Rousseau tells us that our kind was born free. But that formula can
be misleading in its implications. Every infant emerges from organic in-
fancy (speechlessness) into language during a period of total subjec-
tion—subjection to the ministrations of “higher powers,” the familial
adults with whom it comes to be in what Martin Buber would call an “I-
Thou” relationship. Under favorable conditions these powers are be-
nign; sometimes they are malign; or there is an ambiguous area, inas-
much as ministrations that the powers conceive of as well-intentioned
may be interpreted otherwise by the maturing infant, since its condition
does not enable it to clearly recognize the limitations imposed upon the
higher powers which the infant conceives of as all-powerful.
The first cry of the infant had been a purely reflex action. But as the
aptitude for symbolic action develops, the child acquires a way of trans-
forming this purely reflex response into the rudiments of communica-
tion. In effect, the cry becomes a call, a way of summoning the higher
powers by supplication. In out-and-out language, it becomes a way of
176 Logology

saying “Please.” There we see emerging the profound relationship be-

tween religion and prayer. The Wailing Wall is not a cry of despair. The
Wailing Wall is a cry of hope. It is not the cry of Hell, as with Dante’s
line, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The cries of Hell are eter-
nally hopeless. But the prayers of religion are in their essence as with the
infant’s cries, which had become transformed from a condition of
sheerly reflex expression into a plea, the very essence of prayer.
I would consider these paragraphs a logological observation about the
“cradle” of theology. Theology is words about God; logology is words
about words. Logology can’t talk about God. It can only talk about
words for “God.” Logology can make no statement at all about the “af-
terlife” and the related concept of the “supernatural.” Logology can’t ei-
ther affirm or deny the existence of God. Atheism is as far from the realm
of logology as is the most orthodox of fundamentalist religions. All lo-
gology is equipped to do is discuss human relations in terms of our na-
ture as the typically symbol-using animal. In that regard, without pro-
nouncing about either the truth or falsity of theological doctrine,
logology does lay great emphasis upon the thought that theology, in
purely formal respects, serves as a kind of verbal “grace” that “perfects”
nature. It “rounds things out,” even if such fulfillment happened to be
but the verbal or doctrinal completing of the pattern that the infant “nat-
urally” experiences when first learning language, and its modes of sup-
plication in an “I-Thou” (familial) relationship with “higher powers.”
Logology involves only empirical considerations about our nature as
the symbol-using animal. But for that very reason it is fascinated by the
genius of theology; and all the more so because, through so much of our
past, theologians have been among the profoundest of our inventors in
the ways of symbolic action. Also, everywhere logology turns, it finds
more evidences of the close connection between speech and theologic
doctrine. Saint Paul tells us, for instance, that “faith comes from hearing
[ex auditu],” which in the last analysis amounts to saying that theology
is exactly what it calls itself etymologically, an “ology.” The story of
Creation in Genesis is an account of successive verbal fiats (“and God
said”). And in the New Testament the Gospel of John tells us that in the
beginning was the Logos.
But these issues don’t stop with such obvious cases as that. In my es-
say on “Terministic Screens” (Language as Symbolic Action [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973], pp. 44–47), after having noted how
the nature of our terms affects the nature of our observations, by direct-
ing our attention in one way rather than another (hence “many of the ‘ob-
Theology and Logology 177

servations’ are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of

which the observations are made” [46]), I turned to the formula which
Anselm had developed at great length from Isaiah 7:9 (nisi credideritis,
non intelligetis): “Believe, that you may understand” (crede, ut intelligas).
It is my claim that the injunction “Believe, that you may understand,”
has a fundamental application to the purely secular problem of “ter-
ministic screens.”
The “logological,” or “terministic” counterpart of “Believe” in the
formula would be: “Pick some particular nomenclature, some one ter-
ministic screen.” And for “That you may understand,” the counterpart
would be: “That you may proceed to track down the kinds of observa-
tion implicit in the terminology you have chosen, whether your choice of
terms was deliberate or spontaneous.” (47)
Or, in my The Rhetoric of Religion (“On Words and the Word: Sixth
Analogy” [1961; reprint edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1970], pp. 29ff) I have tried to show how “the rela-
tion between the name and the thing named would be the Power (equals
the Father); the name would be the Wisdom (equals the Son, which the
Father “generates” in the sense that the thing named calls for its name);
and the two together “spirate” Love (equals the Holy Spirit, in the sense
that there is the perfect correspondence between the thing and its name,
and the perfect term for such correspondence or “communion” between
the terms would be Love).
And as for “Perfection” itself, the theological idea of God as the ens
perfectissimum has a striking logological analogue in the astoundingly
many ways in which terminologies set up particular conditions for the
tracking down of implications. The whole Marxist dialectic, for instance,
is so designed as to foretell fulfillment in what logology would class as a
Utopian perfection, a dialectic so “perfect” that it is to inevitably culmi-
nate in the abolition of itself (with the “withering away of the state,” a
state of the political state that may be quite dubious, but that can make
claims to inevitability if we substitute for the state of the body politic the
analogous state of the human body).
In more restricted ways, the tracking down of implications towards
various perfections manifests itself in our many technological nomen-
clatures, each of which suggests to its particular votaries further steps
in that same direction. Such expansionist ambitions are near-infinite in
their purely visionary scope; but though they have no inner principle
of self-limitation, their range of ideal development is restricted by the
ways in which they interfere with one another, including academic
178 Logology

problems to do with the allocation of funds among the various de-

partments.
This logological principle of perfection (which I would call “ent-
elechial,” restricting the Aristotelian concept of the “entelechy” to the
realm of nomenclature, “symbolicity”) can also be seen to operate in ar-
eas which we do not ordinarily associate with the idea of perfection, ex-
cept in such loose usages as “perfect fool” or “perfect villain.” But its
powers along that line are terrifying. It showed up repeatedly in theo-
logical charges of heresy, in which the heretics were nearly always sad-
dled with the same list of hateful vices. And in our day the Nazis did the
most outrageous job with “perfection” in that sense by the thoroughness
of their charges against the Jew. It takes very little inducement for us to
begin “perfecting” the characters of our opponents by the gratuitous im-
putation of unseemly motives. Thus, all told, in my logological definition
of humankind, I put a high rating on my clause “rotten with perfection.”
Satan was as perfect an entelechy in one sense as Christ was in another.
Doubtless Machiavelli was thinking along those lines when he told his
prince that, whereas one should be wary of hiring mercenaries, the way
to get the best fighters is make the war a holy war.
Language is one vast menagerie of implications—and with each chan-
nel of such there are the makings of a corresponding fulfillment proper
to its kind, a perfection in germ. For the logological study of dialectic
teaches us that there are two quite different ways of introducing the “en-
telechial principle of perfection,” thus:

1. There is the thing, bread.

2. There is the corresponding word, “bread.”
3. Language being such as it is, with no trouble at all I can make up
the expression, “perfect bread.”
4. We may disagree as to which bread could properly be called
“perfect.”
5. A mean man, or a dyspeptic, or a philosopher might even deny
that in this world there can be such a thing as “perfect bread.”
6. Nevertheless, theologians can speak of God as the ens perfectissi-
mum—and the expression “perfect bread” is a secular counter-
part of such dialectical resources.
7. Nay more. Even if there is no such thing as perfect bread in
actuality, I can consider bread from the standpoint of perfect
bread “in principle.”
Theology and Logology 179

8. “Here is some perfect bread”; or

9. “As compared with perfect bread, this bread I am offering you
is a dismal substitute”; or
10. “I can assure you that, humble as it is, this bread represents
perfect bread in principle.” (It “stands for the spirit of perfect
bread.”) (Kenneth Burke, Dramatism and Development [Barre,
Massachusetts: Clark University Press, 1972], p. 59; appendix
to essay on “Archetype and Entelechy.”)

But the question of the relation between logology and theology also
requires that we look in another direction, namely, the question of the
relation between logology and behaviorism. A handy way to introduce
this issue is by reference to a passage in my review of Denis Donoghue’s
recently published admirable collection of essays, The Sovereign Ghost:
Studies in Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976):

On going back over Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, I ran across a

footnote in which with regard to the “desynonymizing” of the terms
“imagination” and “fancy,” he says: insofar as any such distinctions
become accepted, “language itself does as it were think for us.” It is a
chance remark which the structuralists would make much more of than
would either Coleridge or Donoghue. (“The Sovereign Ghost by Denis
Donoghue,” The New Republic 177 [September 10, 1977]: 30–31)

In effect Coleridge is saying that words are doing what the theologian
would say that the “mind” is doing, an interesting twist inasmuch as Co-
leridge, in his day, was known much better for works like his theologi-
cal Aids to Reflexion than as a literary critic, though his works generally
had a theological cast. Yet in passing, Coleridge there hit upon a quite
strategic substitution, since the immediate context of situation in which
words are learned is the realm of nonsymbolic motion, whereas “mind”
is more readily associated with an ultimate supernatural ground beyond
the realm of physical and physiological motion.
Logology here is in an intermediate position between theology and be-
haviorism (which monistically acknowledges no qualitative difference
between a human organism’s verbal and nonverbal behavior). Logology
is as dualistic in its way as theology is, since the logological distinction
between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion is as “polar” as the-
ology’s distinctions between mind and body, or spirit and matter. Lo-
gology holds that “persons” act, whereas “things” but move, or are
moved. And “personality” in the human sense depends upon the ability
180 Logology

and opportunity to acquire an arbitrary, conventional symbol-system

such as a tribal, familial language.
However, logology need not be driven to a “mentalist” position when
in controversy with a behaviorist. Indeed, seizing upon a behaviorist
term, logology needs but point to the empirical distinction between ver-
bal behavior (which logology would call “symbolic action”) and “mo-
lecular” behavior (which logology would call “nonsymbolic physiologic
motion”).
To adapt some comments from Western Speech (summer 1968), I
read somewhere that, when thrillers are shown in movie houses, the air-
conditioning plant must be accelerated, owing to the audience’s in-
creased rate of respiration, and so forth, in response to the excitement of
the fiction. The fiction is in the realm of “symbolic action,” with which
the air-conditioning plant has no relation whatever. The air condi-
tioner’s “behavior” is in the realm of nonsymbolic motion, which relates
directly to the physical conditions produced in the theater by the body’s
nonsymbolic molecular motions correlative with the symbol-using or-
ganism’s responses to the story (which as a story is wholly in the realm
of symbolism, though the sights and sounds of the story, in their role as
mere uninterpreted vibrations, are but in the realm of motion). For in the
empirical realm, no symbolic action is possible without a grounding in
motion, as words on the screen can’t even be words unless they can be
seen or heard.
But logology would hold that their symbolic dimension cannot be
monistically reduced to the order of physical motion alone. Whatever the
mutation whereby our prehistoric ancestors acquired their aptitude with
symbolicity, from then on the human animal was a composite organism,
be the duality conceived in theological terms of mind and body, or in lo-
gological terms of symbolic action and nonsymbolic physiological mo-
tion. The principle of individuation was in the body, with the immedi-
acy of its sensations. The realm of symbolism, with its many modes of
identification (family relationships, geology, history, politics, religious
doctrine, and so on), shaped the public aspects of human awareness and
personality.

ii
With Coleridge’s passing remark that, if a new distinction becomes gen-
erally established, in effect the corresponding words think for us, we are
at the very center of logological inquiry: the close but indeterminate re-
Theology and Logology 181

lationship between substitution and duplication. There is obvious dupli-

cation in the very fact that we have verbal parallels for nonverbal things,
processes, and relationships. There is substitution inasmuch as, given the
thing bread and the word “bread,” the person who asked for bread with
the proper symbol (the word for bread in that particular language) might
be given instead another symbol, the money with which to buy it. One
could spend a lifetime doing nothing more than tracking down the in-
tricately interwoven manifestations of these two principles, which are
perhaps more accurately discussed not just as aspects, but as the very
essence, of language. For present purposes, let us cite a few such aspects
at random:
First, there are the extensions of language by analogy, what Jeremy
Bentham called “fictions,” a term that itself is probably a metaphorical
extension of the expression “legal fictions.” Terms that have a quite lit-
eral meaning as applied to physical conditions can be adapted figura-
tively to subject matter that does not admit of such usage. For instance,
if we speak of one object as being at a certain “distance” from another,
our statement can be strictly literal, capable of verification by measuring
the distance. But if we speak of one person’s views as being “distant”
from another’s, we are employing a “fiction” which admits of no such
literal physical test. Or, in saying that a certain leaning object has an “in-
clination” of thirty degrees, we are using the term literally, in contrast
with the statement that a person has an “inclination” to do such-and-
such. In this connection Bentham observes that our entire vocabularies
of psychology and ethics are made up of such “fictive” duplicates, with-
out which we could not talk about such matters at all. Go to the etymo-
logical origins of all such terms, and you will spot the literal images im-
plicit in such ideas.
The relation between our sensory experience as individual speechless
physical organisms and the vast public context of symbolicity we acquire
as social beings sets up the endlessly complex conditions for such dupli-
cation as is revealed in the spontaneous use of terms for the weather as
a nomenclature for “states of mind,” or “attitudes.” And one can
glimpse how a whole magic world of human relations might develop
from that mode of duplication whereby, as one pious person fearsomely
plants a crop, another (an expert in the lore of mythic counterparts) “col-
laborates” by contributing his skill to the process, in scrupulously per-
forming the “necessary” attendant ritual of a planting song (“necessary”
because, man being the symbol-using animal, the realm of nonsymbolic
natural motion is not completely humanized until reduced to terms of
182 Logology

symbolicity; hence spring calls for a spring song, harvest for a harvest
song; marriage, death, changes of status, and so on similarly attain their
“completion” when thus ritually paralleled).
The resources of duplication and substitution are revealed most
clearly of all in such mathematical operations as the use of the symbol π,
instead of 3.1416, or the internal relationships whereby 2 plus 2 can be
the same as 4 times 1. And surely mathematics began with that primal
substitution whereby, in making three marks to stand for three apples,
one also had a sign that would stand for three of anything, whereupon
one’s symbol had advanced to a “higher level of generalization” whereby
the number itself could be operated on in its own right, without refer-
ence to any particular numbered things.
On inspecting more closely this aspect of what we might call the “du-
plication-substitution complex,” we come upon a similar usage that, at
first glance, might seem of a quite different sort. Insofar as some partic-
ular ritual is ceremonially repeated in identical fashion on different oc-
casions (which would also include annual seasonal occurrences, since no
two situations are identical) in effect the ritual acts as a mode of classi-
fication that abstracts from any particular occasion, just as numbers be-
come abstracted from any one particular instance of their use. Thus, a
marriage rite is an institution whereby all sorts of couples are
“processed” in identical fashion. It is not like a situation where John and
Mary are consulting a marriage counselor about their particular prob-
lems. Rather, it is individualized only insofar as there is a blank space to
be filled with whatever proper names are to be included under that head
this time.
The ubiquitous resources of substitution probably attain their pro-
foundest theological embodiment in the doctrines and rites of vicarious
sacrifice. I plan to discuss later the distinctions between theological and
logological concerns with the principle of sacrifice. But let us now con-
sider the astounding thoroughness (even to the edge of paradox) with
which Christian theology developed the logological principle of substi-
tution. Of all victims that were ever offered as redemption for the guilt
of others, surely Christ was conceived as the most perfect such substitute,
even to the extent of being perfectly abhorrent, as bearer of the world’s
sinfulness. Thus Luther said:
All the prophets saw that Christ would be the greatest brigand of all, the
greatest adulterer, thief, profaner of temples, blasphemer, and so on, that
there would never be a greater in all the world. . . . God sent his only
begotten Son into the world, and laid all sins upon him, saying: “You are to
Theology and Logology 183

be Peter the denier, Paul the persecutor, blasphemer, and wild beast, David
the adulterer, you are to be the sinner who ate the apple in the Garden of
Eden, you are to be the crucified thief, you are to be the person who
commits all the sins in the world.” (I translate from Leon Chestov,
Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle [Paris: Vrin, 1948].)

Thus, in terms of the specifically “Christian logology,” the most per-

fect divine Logos also became the perfect fiend, in serving as the substi-
tute vessel for the guilt of all.
With regard to the vexing issue of the relation between words and
“mind” (whereby some nomenclatures would substitute “words” for
“mind,” as per the tangential remark we have cited from Coleridge), be-
fore moving on to other aspects of our subject we should consider J. Hillis
Miller’s ingenious and penetrating essay “The Linguistic Moment in ‘The
Wreck of the Deutschland.’ ” This essay is particularly relevant since
Hopkins’s exceptional involvement in strictly logological concerns is so
strikingly interwoven with the most poignant of theological devotions.
Miller here notes “three apparently incompatible theories of poetry . . .
each brilliantly worked out in theory and exemplified in practice”:

Poetry may be the representation of the interlocked chiming of created

things in their relation to the Creation. This chiming makes the pied beauty
of nature. Poetry may explore or express the solitary adventures of the self
in its wrestles with God or in its fall into the abyss outside God. Poetry may
explore the intricate relationships among words. These three seemingly
diverse theories of poetry are harmonized by the application to them all of a
linguistic model. This model is based on the idea that all words rhyme
because they are ultimately derived from the same Logos. Nature is “words,
expression, news of God” (Sermons, 129), and God has inscribed himself in
nature. The structure of nature in its relation to God is like the structure of
language in relation to the Logos, the divine Word; and Christ is the Logos
of nature, as of words. (47–48)

Coleridge, when commenting on how words can think for us, and
noting that the two words “imagination” and “fancy” (the one from the
Latin, the other from the Greek) were often used synonymously, pro-
posed to “desynonymize” them, so that they would have different mean-
ings. But Hopkins proceeded in the other direction; he let the word “Lo-
gos” think for him by refusing to distinguish between its secular meaning
as a word for “word” and its meaning in Christian theology, where the
New Testament word for Christ was the “Word.” Hopkins’s thinking
could not possibly have been as it was had those early sectaries, the “Alo-
gians,” succeeded in their attempts to exclude the Gospel of John and
184 Logology

Revelations from the Christian canon because in both texts Christ was
referred to as the Logos.
Saint Augustine had in effect desynonymized the two usages by explic-
itly referring to his conversion from his career as a pagan rhetorician (a
“peddler of words,” venditor verborum) to a preacher of the Christian
Word. But he had also Christianized the very beginning of the Old Testa-
ment by noting that God’s successive acts of Creation had been done
through the Word (when he had said, “Let there be . . .”)—and thus in
effect the Creation was done by the Father’s Word, which was the Son.
Miller begins his essay: “By linguistic moment I mean the moment
when language as such, the means of representation in literature, be-
comes a matter to be interrogated, explored, thematized in itself” (47).
While his engrossing study of what B. F. Skinner might call Hopkins’s
“verbal behavior” is essentially logological, the very fact of Hopkins’s re-
fusal to “desynonymize” the two usages keeps the study of the “linguis-
tic moment” constantly infused with the theological implications of
Hopkins’s poetics.
As might be expected, variations on the theme of “duplication” and
“repetition” are plentiful; even talk of a “primal bifurcation” is a signal
to look for ways of tying the issue in with the distinction between speech-
less nonsymbolic physiological motion (analogous to the traditional
terms, “matter” or “body”) and the publicly infused realm of symbolic
action (analogous to the traditional terms, “spirit” or “mind”). In this
connection Miller has a footnote which succinctly bears upon “polar”
aspects of the human being as a dualistic, “composite” individual, in
contrast with the monistic assumptions of behaviorism, which denies
any qualitative distinction between verbal behavior and nonverbal be-
havior (in brief, it “thinks” by refusing to “desynonymize” the term “be-
havior”). Referring to an “admirable passage in Hopkins’s commentary
on The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius,” Miller quotes:

And this [my isolation] is much more true when we consider the mind;
when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself,
that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more
distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell
of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to
another man. (47)

In my view of logological dualism (which Hopkins comes close to re-

placing with a monism exactly the reverse of the behaviorists’, insofar as
Hopkins would reduce everything to terms of the universal Logos) the
Theology and Logology 185

“linguistic moment” proclaimed by that resonant sentence implicitly

pronounces the principle of “inscape” in what are essentially “problem-
atical” terms. The “selfhood” of a Catholic priest must obviously be
grounded in Catholic doctrine, which is necessarily “spiritual,” on the
side of what logology would call public “symbolicity.” But he expresses
the sense of his separate identity in terms of immediate sensation, which
is in the realm of the individual’s sheer physiology.
True, poets have traditionally used the terminology of sensation to
give the feel of the internal immediacy that Hopkins aims to suggest. And
there is no good reason for denying poets such a time-honored rhetori-
cal device. I am but pointing out that the essential polarity or duality of
the human condition is not actually bridged (it can’t be) but is stylisti-
cally denied. The mode of expression is thus in effect a “linguistic ele-
ment” that represses an explicit statement of the case. Whereupon the
“return of the repressed” reveals itself in the person of Hopkins himself
as the “wreck” with which the poem starts out (significant timing!) by
being explicitly and exclusively concerned.
The first five stanzas are in the form of an “I-Thou” prayer. Forty lines
in all, there are nineteen cognates of the first-person pronoun, fourteen
of the second. The second half of the first part is transitional, in that the
pronouns move farther off (first-person plural and third-person singu-
lar). The second part, two-thirds of the poem, is built explicitly around
the wreck of the Deutschland, a “pied” name if there ever was one (“O
Deutschland, double a desperate name!”—as the home of both the nun
Gertrude, “Christ’s lily,” and the “beast,” Luther). With regard to the
poem as a structure, we could say that it transforms the “pied” nature
of the poet’s personal problems into the grander interwoven ambiva-
lences of sinking and salvation.
At the end of the essay Miller adds a footnote:

Kenneth Burke, in remarks about this paper after its presentation at the
Ransom Symposium at Kenyon College in April of 1975, argued that I
should add something about the multiple meaning of the word wreck in the
title. The poem, he said, is about Hopkins’s wreck. This was a powerful plea
to relate the linguistic complexities, or tensions, back to their subjective
counterparts. Much is at stake here. That the poem is a deeply personal
document there can be no doubt. Its linguistic tensions are “lived,” not mere
“verbal play” in the negative sense. . . . In “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
Hopkins is speaking of his own wreck. . . . The danger in Burke’s sugges-
tion, however, is, as always, the possibility of a psychologizing reduction,
the making of literature into no more than a reflection or representation of
something psychic which precedes it and which could exist without it. . . .
186 Logology

Subjectivity, I am arguing, with all its intensities, is more a result than an

origin. To set it first, to make an explanatory principle of it, is, as Nietzsche
says, a metalepsis, putting late before early, effect before cause. (59–60n)

I wrote Miller, calling attention to the closing paragraph of an essay by

me concerning Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Symbolic Action in a
Poem by Keats,” A Grammar of Motives [1945; reprint edition, Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], pp. 447–63). In
that essay I had noted respects in which traces of the symptoms of the dis-
ease he was to die of manifested themselves. But I added this qualification:

We may contrast this discussion with explanations such as a materialist of

the Kretschmer school might offer. I refer to accounts of motivation that
might treat disease as cause and poem as effect. In such accounts, the
disease would not be “passive,” but wholly active; and what we have called
the mental action would be wholly passive, hardly more than an epiphe-
nomenon, a mere symptom of the disease quite as are the fever and the chill
themselves. Such accounts would give us no conception of the essential
matter here, the intense linguistic activity. (462–68)

In that last paragraph, I wrote Miller, “At least I say I’m not doing
exactly what you say I am doing.” Then I added: “However, I’ll meet
you halfway. I think the relation between the physiology of disease and
the symbolic action of poetry can be of the ‘vicious circle’ sort. One’s po-
etizing, in the very act of transcending hints got from the body’s passions,
can roundabout reinforce the ravages of such sufferings.” I had in mind
here such a “reflexive” process (I guess current cant would call it “feed-
back”) as the role of “psychogenic” asthma in Proust’s search for essence
by the “remembrance of things past.”1

iii
Let us now list some cases the discussion of which might most directly
help us inquire, by comparison and contrast, into words about the di-
vine, the supernatural (theology), and words about words (logology), in-
cluding words for the divine and supernatural, whether or not there be
such a realm, which theologies have words for.
Since theology in our tradition is so clearly grounded in the relation
between the Old Testament and the New, let’s begin logologically from
there. The formula of the Christian theologians was stated thus: Novum
Testamentum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet. How translate it ex-
actly? “The New Testament was latent in the Old Testament. The Old
Theology and Logology 187

Testament becomes patent in the New Testament.” Or “The implica-

tions of the Old Testament became explicitly manifest in the New Tes-
tament.” It was a way of both letting the Jews in and keeping them out,
unless they became converted or, like an old Testament patriarch, each
had been an anima naturaliter Christiana; I forget whether Socrates was
adjudged such, but his association with the symbolic action of Platonism
might well include him, for his Hellenic contribution to the cult of Lo-
gos that the early Alogian Christians wanted to rule out.
In any case, the Christian theology, with regard to the relation be-
tween Old Testament and New Testament, would see in the Old Testa-
ment many stories about characters that were conceived as what they
were only insofar as they were “types of Christ.” Indeed, the Jewish tribe
itself, in its Exodus from Egypt, was but a type of Christ. Thus its Jew-
ish identity was, in effect (in principle), being viewed not as that of a tribe
in its own right, but as an emergent stage of the Christian future.
Exactly, then, what does logology, as a purely secular cult of the Lo-
gos, do with that particular localization of dialectical resources? Obvi-
ously, the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac (telling of how the
father, in obedience to God’s Law, would consent to sacrifice even his
most beloved person, his son) can be conceived of as incipiently, prophet-
ically a type of the New Testament story of an all-powerful Father, the
very soul of justice, who actually does fulfill the pattern, in completing
the sacrifice of his most precious person, his only begotten Son. And lo-
gology looks upon both stories as variations on the theme of sacrifice.
In my early scattered readings among mediaeval texts, I found a sen-
tence that fascinated me. It was probably a rule of some monastic order,
I don’t know which. And though I have lost track of the original, I still
incline to go on repeating my translation, which is as resonant as I could
make it: “If any one have any thing of which he is especially fond, let it
be taken from him.” There is even the ironic possibility that I got the
Latin somewhere from Remy de Gourmont, a nonbeliever if there ever
was one; and he taught me to appreciate, in a kind of twisted nostalgia,
the forlorn fragmentary beauty of such accents. The fantastically “ma-
terialistic” George Santayana’s gallant Realm of Spirit is also in that
groove.
But the main consideration, from the standpoint of logology, is the
fact that, however variously theologians may treat of the relation be-
tween the Old Testament and the New Testament, they have in common
the theological stress upon the principle of sacrifice. As viewed from the
standpoint of logology, even the most primitive offering of animals on
188 Logology

the altar can be equated with the Crucifixion of Christ insofar as any and
all such rites embody the principle of sacrifice (which, given the ubiqui-
tous logological resources of substitution, turns out to be synonymous
with vicarious sacrifice).
As viewed logologically, the theological story of the Creation and the
Fall (in the opening chapter of Genesis) would be summed up thus:
The story of Creation, in representing the principle of Order, neces-
sarily introduced a principle of Division, classifying some things as dis-
tinct from other things. In this purely technical sense, Creation itself was
a kind of “Fall,” inasmuch as it divided the principle of Unity into parts,
each of which has a nature of its own, regardless of how they might in
principle be “unified.” (As seen from this point of view, even a project
for “unification” implies a grammatical gerundive, a “to-be-unified.”)
Thus, viewed from the other side, the orderly principle of Division is seen
to contain implicitly the possibility of Divisiveness.
The possibility of Divisiveness calls for a Law against Divisiveness.
(In a world set up by the creative word, how keep Division from be-
coming Divisive except by a word, a Law, that says, “Don’t do whatever
would disrupt the Order”?) So the story includes a “don’t” that, stories
of that sort being what they are, stands for the sheer principle of Law,
as the negative aspect of Order. But implicit in the idea of “Don’t” there
is the possibility of Disobedience. One says, “Do” or “Don’t” only to
such kinds of entities as can be able to respond (that is, can have the re-
sponsibility) by in effect saying, “Yes” or “No” (that is, being obedient
or disobedient).
But Saint Paul’s theology was quite in keeping with logology when he
said that the Law made sin, as Bentham was to say that the Law makes
crime. However, note that, in introducing, via Law, the possibility of
Disobedience, one has by implication introduced the principle of Temp-
tation (the incentive, however originating, to fall afoul of the Law).
Where, then, locate the “origin” of that Temptation, as befits the nature
of narrative (story, myth)?
At this point, the implications of terms for Law and Order surface by
translation into terms of role. These are two kinds of “priority.” There
is logical priority in the sense of first premise, second premise, conclu-
sion. Or in the sense that the name for a class of particulars is “prior” to
any particular included under that head, quite as the term “table” al-
ready “anticipates” the inclusion of countless particular objects that
don’t even yet exist. Or there is temporal priority in the sequence
yesterday-today-tomorrow.
Theology and Logology 189

As a result of this doubling, one can state matters of principle (that is,
firsts or beginnings) in terms of either logical or temporal priority.
(Hence in my Rhetoric of Religion I put major emphasis upon the ety-
mological fact that both the Greek and Latin words for “principle”
[arché and principium] refer to priority in both the logical and temporal
senses of the term.) I said somewhere (I think in my Grammar of Mo-
tives, but I can’t locate it) that a Spinozistic translation of the first words
in the Vulgate Bible, “In principio Deus creavit,” would be not “in the
beginning God created,” but “in principle God created” For his basic
equation, Deus sive Natura, amounts exactly to that, since he would
never associate the words “God” and “ nature” in terms of a temporal
priority whereby God “came first” in time. Though such equating of
God and nature was pantheistic, hence anathema, in its sheer design it
resembled the thinking of those Orthodox Christians who attacked Ar-
ianism by insisting that the “priority” of Father to Son was not in any
sense temporal. We here confront a purely logological kind of “priority,”
as we might well say that the number 1 is “prior” to any other number,
but only “in principle”; for no number in time is “prior” to any other,
since an internal relationship among numbers is nontemporal. “Before
numbers were,” 3 was less than 4 and more than 2, though we can “go
from” one such to another. And logologically we confront an analogous
situation with regard to the narrative or “mythic” translation of “non-
temporal” implications among terms into terms of story, as with the nar-
rative ways of stating the principles of Order in the first three chapters
of Genesis, under “primal” conditions involving an audience for whom
the poetic ways of story came first; however, such expressions were later
to be sophisticated by the “traumatic” step from poetry and mythology
to criticism and critically mature theology.
The Old Testament begins in its way quite as the New Testament
Gospel of John begins in its, with pronouncements that overlap upon
these two kinds of priority. Genesis “tells the story” of the divine word’s
informative power. John tells the story of the Logos, a Hellenistic stress
upon the word that a “Judaizing” sect among the emergent Christian
doctrinarians had unsuccessfully attempted to exclude from the canon.
Hence, though the term in English seems to have begun by reference to
the Logos in the Gospel of John (a usage that is ambiguously implicit in
these present shuttlings between theology and logology), both the Book
of Genesis and the Gospel of John present their cases in terms of story.
And we now take on from there.
Logologically, we confront the fact that, given the fluid relation between
190 Logology

logical and temporal priority, the logical “firstness” of principles, when

stated in the ways of story (mythos), as with the opening chapters of
Genesis, calls for translation into terms of temporal priority. Thus the
narrative way of saying what Saint Paul had in mind when saying that
the Law made sin and Bentham when he said that the Law made crime
was to say that the first human being sinned against the first Law decreed
by the first and foremost Law-giver.
The principle of the Law, implicit in the principle of Order, is identi-
cal with an astounding seiendes Unding that human language has added
to nature, the negative (a purely linguistic invention unknown to the
world of sheer wordless motion, which can be but what it positively is).
Thus, implicit in the legal negative, the “thou shalt not” of the Law
(which, the story of Beginnings tell us, was born with the creation of
worldly order) is the possibility that its negativity can be extended to the
negating of negativity. There is thus the “responsibility” of being able to
say no to a thou-shalt-not.
But the tactics of narrative personalizing (in effect a kind of substitu-
tion that represents a principle in terms of a prince) raise a problem lo-
cal to that particular mode of representation itself. If this kind of “first”
is to represent the possibility of disobedience that is implicit in the de-
creeing of a Law, where did the “temptation” to disobedience “come
from”? Up to this point, we have been trying to show that a logological
analysis of the case would coincide with a theological presentation, in
that theology has said implicitly what logology says explicitly; namely,
the conditions of the Fall were inherent in the conditions of the Creation,
since the Divisiveness of Order was reinforced by the divisive possibility
of saying either Yes or No to the primal Law of that Order.
However, the sheer psychology of personality is such that an act of
disobedience is but the culminating stage of an inclination to disobey, a
guilty disobedient attitude. And where did that prior step, the emergent
temptation to disobey, originate? Here theology’s concern with the
sources of such an attitude introduces a causal chain that turns out to in-
volve a quite different provenance.
Eve was the immediate temptress. But she had been tempted by the
serpent. But the serpent was not “entelechially perfect” enough to be the
starting place for so comprehensive, so universal (so “catholic”) a theo-
logical summation. The principle of substitution gets “perfect” embod-
iment here in that the serpent becomes in turn the surrogate for Satan,
the supernatural tempter beyond which no further personal source of
temptation need be imagined, since his personality and his role as ulti-
Theology and Logology 191

mate tempter were identical, in such total consistency that this supreme
“light-bearing” angel was the most thorough victim of his own vocation.

iv
In his epic, Paradise Lost, Milton turns that story into a further story. Be-
ginning with theology’s search for the grandest personalized source of
temptation, Milton reverses the mode of derivation as we have traced it
logologically. Thus, whereas logologically the story of the revolt in
Heaven would be derived from motivational ambiguities whereby the
eventuality of the Fall was implicit in the conditions of the Creation, Mil-
ton’s theological route would proceed from the revolt in Heaven to the
Fall, and consequent expulsion from the Garden.
Although there are many respects in which logology and theology are
analogous (respects in which the two usages, words about words and
words about the Logos, can go along in parallel) there are also the many
occasions when, as we have here been noting, they will unfold a series of
interrelated terms in exactly the reverse order. A good example is a cre-
ation myth that I learned of from Malinowski (compare Language as
Symbolic Action, pp. 364–65n).
According to this myth, the tribe is descended from a race of supernat-
ural ancestors (in this case, subterranean ancestors, since their original an-
cestors were thought to have lived underground). These mythic ancestors
had a social order identical with the social order of the tribe now. When
they came to the surface, they preserved the same social order, which has
been handed down from then to now. In this case, obviously, whereas con-
ditions now are mythologically “derived” from imputed primal conditions
“then,” logologically the mythic imputing of such primal conditions
“then” would be derived from the nature of conditions now. (I hope later
to discuss respects in which we might distinguish between mythology and
theology; but in a case of this sort they are analogous with regard to their
difference from logological derivation. And they have the advantage of
providing much simpler examples, at least as usually reported. Also, their
polytheistic aspect makes them much easier to “rationalize” than the ways
of the single all-powerful personal God of monotheistic theology, who tol-
erates so much that seems to us intolerable. Since logology makes no judg-
ment at all about the truth or falsity of theologic doctrine, its only task is
to study how, given the nature of symbolism, such modes of placement are
logologically derivable from the nature of “symbolic action.”)
Logologically considered, the issue may be reduced to the matter of
192 Logology

the negative, another aspect of the condition that arose in the story of the
Creation when God introduced the “thou shalt not” of the Law. Implicit
in the negative is the possibility of polar terms which bear a timeless re-
lationship to each other. This relationship is “timeless” in the sense that
although, with polar terms like “order” and “disorder,” each implies the
other, their relationship doesn’t involve a temporal step from one to the
other. But the supernatural realm of eternity is timeless. And Heaven was
the realm of timeless perfect order. But inasmuch as the genius of the
negative makes such terms as “order” and “perfection” polar, so far as
such terms were concerned they contained the timeless implication of
their contrasting term. Also, there are two kinds of polar negative: the
propositional (“is, isn’t”), the hortatory (“do, don’t”). And they tend to
lose their initial distinctness.
Myth, story, narrative makes it possible to transform this timeless re-
lation between polar terms into a temporal sequence. That is, myth can
tell of a step from either one to the other. Thus, with regard to the per-
fection of Heaven outside of time, the resources of narrative made it pos-
sible to carry out the implications of polar terms such as “order” and
“perfection” by such stories as the revolt of Lucifer in Heaven. And the
timeless nature of such polarity is maintained eternally in the unending
establishment of Heaven and Hell, the one all Yes, the other all No.
Polytheistic myths didn’t have the acute problems with this terminis-
tic situation that monistic theology has. Joseph Fontenrose’s volume
Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins (New York: Biblo &
Tannen, 1959; which I use as the basis of my essay “Myth, Poetry, and
Philosophy,” reprinted in my Language as Symbolic Action), takes as its
point of departure the myth of the combat between Apollo and Python,
then extends the discussion to two main types in general. There is a late
type, concerning a struggle between an “older” god and a “new” god,
with the new god triumphing and founding a cult. But this is said to be
derived from an earlier type, concerning a struggle between a dragon and
a sky-god, with the sky-god triumphing.
In such cases, the principle of negation in polar terms can accommo-
date itself easily to such stories of personal combat. Also, the timeless na-
ture of the negative in such terms can be preserved, since the vanquished
combatant, though “slain,” is yet somehow still surviving, like Typhon
buried by Zeus beneath Sicily and fuming through Aetna, with the con-
stant threat that he may again rise in revolt. Or the two may reign in suc-
cession, the vanquished principle taking over periodically, for a season.
Or under certain conditions the opposition can be translated into terms
Theology and Logology 193

more like cooperation, with both powers or principles being necessary

to make a world, whereby the principle becomes itself a species of order,
too. Even the kingdom of Darkness is not just a rebellion against Light,
but has its own modes of organization. Polytheistic mythology could
thus readily accommodate temples to rival gods, for there was general
agreement that all such powers should be propitiated. And the meaner
they were, the more reason there was to appease them with cult.
In transforming these resources of polytheistic myth, monistic theology
encounters many serious embarrassments. And some years back, when I
happened to be dealing with some of my logological speculations in a sem-
inar at Drew University, William Empson’s polemical volume Milton’s
God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965) came along. Obviously, Empson
had decided to play the role of a very bad boy. But what interested me in
the book was the fact that its quarrels with Milton’s theology would serve
so well to help point up my “neutral” concerns with logology.
As judged from the logological point of view, there is no “combat”
among terms. In my Rhetoric of Religion, the “Cycle of Terms Implicit
in the Idea of ‘Order’ ” is a set of mutually interrelated terms which sim-
ply imply one another. Though terms can confront each other as anti-
thetically as “reward” and “punishment,” nothing “happens” until they
are given functions in an irreversible, personalized narrative. Terms like
“disorder,” “temptation,” “disobedience” come to life when Adam is
assigned the role of personally representing the principle of sin, and Sa-
tan is assigned the role of ultimate tempter. God has the role of setting
up the Order and giving the critical negative order, so terministically nec-
essary before a Fall can even be possible.
There is no one strict way to select the “cycle of terms” for such a
chart. In general, the ones I suggest are quite characteristic of the theo-
logical tradition for the discussion of which I am offering a pragmatically
designed pattern (with, behind it or within it, thoughts on the strategic
interwoven difference between temporal priority and logical priority, the
distinction itself being logological).
The interesting twist involves the way in which “supernatural” time-
lessness parallels logological timelessness, with both becoming “mythol-
ogized” (that is, translated into terms of a temporally irreversible story,
along with an ambiguity whereby history can be viewed as both in time
and in principle, for instance when Christ’s Crucifixion is both said to
have happened historically once, and to be going on still, in principle).
Thus, quite as Orthodox Christian theology would condemn Arianism
because it treated the Son’s coming after the Father in a temporal sequence,
194 Logology

whereas the Father’s priority was but such in principle, so logology would
point out that there can be no temporal priority between two such terms.
The very relationship that makes a son a son is, by the same token, the
relationship that makes a father a father. Thus, in effect, the Father can
but “generate” the Son in principle.
Looking upon both mythology and theology as involved in the prob-
lem of translating supernatural “timeless” relationships into terms of
temporal sequence, logology tentatively views monotheism as in various
ways struggling to “perfect” the simpler rationales of polytheism while
still deeply involved in the same ultimate motivational quandaries. But
logology approaches the matter this way: If you talk about local or tribal
divinities, you are on the slope of polytheism. If, instead, you talk about
“the divine” in general, lo! you are on the slope of monotheism. (On pp.
406–9 of my Language as Symbolic Action, in the article I have men-
tioned on “Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy,” I list several ways in which
polytheism “verbally behaved” in this situation. And I do think that on
page 408, with regard to my point about “the divine,” I stumbled into a
real surprise, though my inadequacies as a scholar make me fear that
something may have gone wrong with my Greek.)
In any case, logology quotes this passage from a letter of Saint Ambrose:

The devil had reduced the human race to a perpetual captivity, a cruel
usury laid on a guilty inheritance whose debt-burdened progenitor had
transmitted it to his posterity by a succession drained by usury. The Lord
Jesus came; He offered His own death as a ransom for the death of all; He
shed His own Blood for the blood of all. (Drawn up by His Eminence Peter
Cardinal Gasparri, The Catholic Catechism, translated by Reverend Hugh
Pope [New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons], p. 291)

Logology tends to see in such statements vestiges of the transitional

stage from polytheism to monotheism when the pagan gods were viewed
not as mere figments of the imagination but as actually existent demons.
You pay such high ransom only to someone who has terrific power over
you, not to someone to whom you needed but to say, “Be gone for
good,” and he’d be gone for good. Logology leaves it for the scruples of
theology to work out exactly why that damned nuisance has to be put
up with, by an all-powerful Ordainer of all Order. Logology’s only con-
tribution to the cause is the reminder that, to our knowledge, the Law,
be it Saint Paul’s kind or Bentham’s, is the flowering of that humanly, hu-
manely, humanistically, and brutally inhumanely ingenious addition to
wordless nature, the negative, without which a figure like Satan would
Theology and Logology 195

be logologically impossible, as also it would be impossible to put next to

a live wire a sign saying: “Danger, don’t touch.” Could even Heaven be
possible, if not defined by reference to its polar contradictory, Hell? I
have quoted from Fritz Mauthner’s Wörterbuch der Philosophie: “Die
Bejahung ist erst die Verneinung einer Verneinung” (Language as Sym-
bolic Action, “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language and Post-
scripts on the Negative,” p. 419). On the same page, from Dictionnaire
des Sciences Philosophiques: “Le néant n’est qu’un mot,” but think what
it has looked like, with “being” grounded in “non-being.”
But let’s sample a few of the problems that turn up with Milton’s the-
ological treatment of some logological situations:
Praise is a basic “freedom of speech.” There is great exhilaration in
being able to praise, since praise is on the same slope as love. But what
of God, as the august recipient of praise? Is He to be a veritable glutton
for flattery, with jealous signs of a Jehovah complex?
However, the principle of hierarchy so intrinsic to Order, and for-
mally perfected in the orders of Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms,
Virtues, Powers, could work well in one notable respect. For thus Satan’s
revolt could be treated as motivation for the obedient revolt of the an-
gels immediately under him. They were loyal to their local leader.
If God in His omnipotence lets the battle rage indecisively for quite
some time whereas He could have stopped it the moment it began, there
arises the question whether He is as powerful as He is supposed to be,
or is cruel. Yet if Milton disposed of the problem from the start, where
would the epic be? Under the conditions of polytheism the fight can go
on; Fontenrose codifies the stages that can be protracted ad libitum; for
both combatants are mighty powers in conflict. But under monotheism
there is but one power whose word is power in the absolute, except for
the one logological embarrassment that, implicit in polar terms, there is
a timeless principle of negativity which not only warns against the wiles
of Satan, but creates the need for Satan. The dragging out of the battle is
not a theological matter. As The Iliad shows, that’s the only way you can
write an epic.
Empson seizes upon the notion of the “Fortunate Fall” as a way of in-
dicting the Father on the ground that it proves Adam’s Fall to have been
in the cards from the start and thus to have involved the collusion of
God. But as regards the logology of the case, Adam’s fall was in the cards
from the start in the sense that his task, as the “first” man, was to rep-
resent the principle of disobedience that was implicit in the possibility of
saying no to the first “thou shalt not.” The only way for the story aspect
196 Logology

of theology to say that the Law made sin is by translating the statement
of such “principles” into temporal terms. Theologically, as a private per-
son, Adam didn’t have to sin. But logologically, if he hadn’t, the whole
rationale of the Bible would have been in ruins. By the logologic of the
case, he had a task to perform that only the first man could be “princi-
pled” enough to perform. Eve couldn’t do it. She could but serve as a
temptress. For it was a patriarchal culture, and such original sin could
only be established through the male line.
There was a Patripassian heresy that thought of the one God as of-
fering himself for the redemption of mankind. But the Trinitarian rela-
tion between Father and Son allows for a divine self-sacrifice without Pa-
tripassianism. Empson considers the same grammar without benefit of
logology but in his bad-boy method thus: “What Milton is thinking has
to be: ‘God couldn’t have been satisfied by torturing himself to death, not
if I know God; you could never have bought him off with that money;
he could only have been satisfied by torturing someone else to death.’ ”
There is quite a bit more of such discussion in the pages “Words Anent
Logology” I sent to the members of the class by way of a post mortem
on our seminar, later published in Perspectives in Literary Symbolism,
edited by Joseph Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1968, pp. 72–82). But this should be enough to indicate the rela-
tion between theology and logology as revealed by Empson’s somewhat
naively nonlogological treatment of Milton’s theological narrative.

v
A somewhat oversimplified pattern might serve best to indicate the drift
of these speculations. Ideally postulate a tribe of pronouncedly homoge-
neous nature. Its cultural identity has developed under relatively au-
tonomous conditions. That is, its contacts with other tribes have been
minimal, so that its institutions have taken shape predominantly in re-
sponse to the local material circumstances on which it depends for its
livelihood.
The tribe’s poetry and myths would thus emerge out of situations with
which the members of the tribe had become familiar in their gradual
transformation from wholly dependent speechless organisms, through
successive institutionally influenced stages along the way to maturity and
death, a major aspect of such institutions being the role of the tribal lan-
guage in shaping the sense of individual and group identity. In this con-
nection I would place great stress upon the notion that, though the tribe’s
Theology and Logology 197

language and myths were largely the work of adult experiences, usages,
and imaginings, they retained the vestiges of their “magical” origins. Im-
portant among these would be the child’s experiences as living among
“higher powers.” The proportion of child to adult would thus be mytho-
logically duplicated in the proportion of adult to “supernatural” beings,
in a realm also associated with the idea of death (a frequent synonym for
which, thanks to the genius of the negative, is “immortality”).
The closeness of the relation between poetry and mythology is clearly
attested by the long tradition of Western “literary” interest in myths of
the Greeks. Myths are grounded in beliefs. And beliefs are “myths” to
whoever doesn’t believe them. And the step from poetry to criticism
takes over to the extent that the conditions under which our hypotheti-
cal tribe’s body of poetry and mythology took form have become no-
tably altered.
One can imagine various such inducements. The tribe’s internal de-
velopment may have introduced new problems (as with the heightening
of social inequities). Climatic changes or invasion may cause migration.
The tribe may become much more closely associated with some other
tribe (by becoming a colony of some imperial power, for instance, or by
becoming an imperial power itself). And insofar as the voice of criticism
replaces the era of poetry, there is a corresponding step from mythology
to theology. At least such is the obvious case with regard to both Jewish
and Christian theology, which developed controversially (as monothe-
ism versus pagan polytheism), and with tense involvement in problems
of empire that radically modified the possibilities of purely internal
“tribal” development. But theology as I would place it still does tie in
closely with the aspect of mythology that shared the poetic sense of ori-
gins in the experiences of childhood, even to the stage when the speech-
less human organism was but getting the first inklings of the ways with
verbal utterance.
Also, it’s quite likely that a development purely internal to the medium
can favor a great stress upon criticism. The incentives to criticism increase
with the invention of writing, and it’s doubtful whether criticism could
ever realize its fullest potentialities without the acutely anatomical kind
of observation that the written version of a work makes possible. At least,
after our long reliance on the written or printed text, our reliance on the
record has probably hobbled our memory to the point that, whereas a
grounding in primitive illiteracy is in all likelihood the best condition for
poetry, criticism must write things down, the better to check on all the
subtleties of interrelationships among the parts of a text. Yet, although in
198 Logology

that respect logology is always much more at home with a text than not,
it must constantly admonish itself regarding the limitations of a text as the
adequate presentation of a symbolic act, and as instructions for the reader
to reenact it. In comparison with a well-edited musical score, for instance,
the literary text when considered as instructions for performance is seen
to be quite deficient. And think how impoverished the text of a drama is,
when viewed as instructions for the reader to reenact it in his imagination.
But what then, in sum, is “logology,” in relation to poetry, criticism,
mythology, theology, and the possible relation that they all have to the
realm of nonsymbolic motion in which all such forms of symbolic action
are empirically grounded? (That is to say, regardless of whether theology
is right or wrong, it is propounded by biological organisms that can
themselves propound anything only so long as they are physically alive,
hence capable of motion.) Whatever a theologian may be in some super-
natural realm, empirically he can’t be a theologian except insofar as his
symbolizings are enacted through the medium of a body—and logology
begins (and also necessarily ends) with questions about his nature thus.
Logology relates to all “ologies” in asking, as its first question, “What
all is going on, when someone says or reads a sentence?” There are some
things going on, with relation to the specific subject matter of the sen-
tence. And behind or beyond or within that, there are the kinds of
processes and relationships that are involved in the saying or under-
standing of any sentence. That approach to the subject in general sets up
logology’s first question, which necessarily puts the logologer on the un-
comfortable fringes of all the answers to all specific questions. It must
start from the fact that logology’s first question is a variant of the prime
Socratic question, the questioning of itself, and of its relation to nature
(whereby it becomes the purely technical analogue of the theologians’
“grace” that “perfects” but does not “abolish” the realm of nature’s
speechlessness).
Even at the risk of resorting somewhat to the mythical, let’s end by
surveying the field thus, as it looks in terms of logology:
First, although in many respects the speculations of logology bring us
much closer to behaviorism than is “naturally” the case with inquiries
into the nature of the word, there is one total, unyielding opposition. Be-
haviorism is essentially monistic, in assuming that the difference between
verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior (logology would call it a dis-
tinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion) is but a man-
ner of degree. But logology is dualistically vowed to the assumption that
we here confront a difference in kind. Hence, it puts primary stress upon
Theology and Logology 199

duplication, polarity, negation (and countless variations of such) as

the very soul of logological inquiry.
And where do such modes of duplication come from? In our nature
as sheerly physiological organisms there is the bisymmetry of the body,
there are the modes of reciprocating motion (systole and diastole of the
heart, the rhythm of respiration, the alternations and compensatory bal-
ances of walking). And in a vague way the gist of what Newton summed
up in his third Law of motion, “To every action there is always an equal
and opposite reaction,” is experienced to the extent that an organism
must sense the difference in alterity between pushing a reed and collid-
ing with a stone.
But a whole further realm of duplication arises from the nature of dis-
course as a “reflection” of the nonlinguistic situations in which the hu-
man organism’s prowess with language is acquired. This is the kind of
duplication that shows up most obviously in the critical difference be-
tween a physical thing and its corresponding name.
Further, by the nature of language such parallels (“completed” in the
relation between spring and a spring song, or between the physical
process of planting and a ritual designed to accompany such a process)
inevitably give rise to a vast realm of duplication due to the fact that
analogy is implicit in the application of the same terms when referring
to different situations—and all actual situations are different insofar as
no two such situations are identical in their details. Such “idealization,”
at the very roots of the classifying function intrinsic to the repeated ap-
plication of the same terms to different conditions (a property of speech
without which no natural language could take form or be learned), itself
involves an endlessly repeatable act of duplication.
This analogical aspect of language thus sets up possibilities of further
development in its own right, making for the fictive range of identifica-
tions and implications and substitutions which add up to the vast com-
plexities of the world as we know it. It becomes a realm in its own right
and essentially anthropocentric, in being verbally amplified by our
“isms” and “ologies” and mathematical reductions (all instances par ex-
cellence of specifically human inventions in the realm of symbolic action).
Such resources can become so highly developed out of themselves, by
analogical extension and the duplication of such analogies in corre-
sponding material implements and techniques, that the process of dupli-
cation can become paradoxically reversed, as in Plato’s theory of “imi-
tation.” By this twist things are said to “imitate” the “ideas” (logology
would call them the “class names”) which we apply to them, hence in
200 Logology

terms of which we can be said to conceive of them. Here stating thoughts

of “essence” in terms of quasi-temporal priority, Platonism concluded
that the “ideas” or “forms” (that is, the class names) for the particular
existent things of our empirical, everyday world must have been experi-
enced in a supernatural realm prior to their “imperfect imitation” that
we see all about us.
As viewed logologically, such “forms” are “prior” in the sense that
the name for any class of objects can be viewed as “logically prior” to
the particulars classed under that head. And any particular can be called
an “imperfect” instance of that class name, because such a word (and its
“idea”) is not a thing, but a blank to be filled out by a definition, which
wouldn’t be a thing in that sense. Yet no particular thing could perfectly
represent the definition. To take Plato’s example: There is not one bed
which you could point to and say, “That’s bed.” Nor could any of the
countless other beds, variously different in their particulars from one an-
other, and many of them not even made yet, be selected as the bed. You
could say, “That’s a bed, “ but not just “bed” or “the bed.” Incidentally,
though you could thus use an indefinite article, Plato couldn’t; for there
is no such grammatical particle in his Greek.
That impinges upon another realm of speculation in which logology
is properly much interested. Consider the scholastic formula Nihil in in-
tellectu quod non prius in sensu. There is nothing in the realm of under-
standing which did not begin in the realm of the senses. Obviously, we
are there involved in the ambiguous relation between “images” and
“ideas” which directly bears upon the analogical factor operating in the
modes of duplication.
To that formula, Leibniz added, nisi intellectus ipse, “except the un-
derstanding itself.” The strictly logological equivalent of that addition
would be a concern with respects in which the given structure of a lan-
guage (such as its particular grammar, or even such sheer accidental
affinities as similarity in sound between particular words in a given id-
iom) sets up conditions intrinsic to the medium whereby we don’t just
think with a language, but the language can in effect think for us. Much
has already been done along those lines, and much can still be done. Ba-
sically, I take it, the study of words as words in context asks us to ask
how they equate with one another, how they imply one another, and
how they become transformed.
There are contexts in the sense that a whole text is the context for any
part of the text. There are contexts in the sense of whatever “back-
ground,” historical, geographical, personal, local, or universal, might be
Theology and Logology 201

conceived of as the scene to which the symbolic act of the author as agent
explicitly or implicitly refers, over and above the nature of the text’s
sheerly internal relationships.
But now let us consider again the behaviorist angle. On the issue
which I am to discuss here, don’t fail to consult a truly admirable arti-
cle, “Explanation, Teleology, and Operant Behaviorism: A Study of the
Experimental Analysis of Purposive Behavior,” by Jon D. Ringen, Phi-
losophy of Science, 43 (1976): 223–53. Though I doubt whether I quite
use it the way it was intended, it is so methodologically scrupulous a per-
formance, its accuracy speaks for itself.
There is “operant” conditioning and there is “respondent” condition-
ing. Pavlov’s (or Watson’s) was of decidedly a “respondent” sort. The ex-
perimental animal responds by salivating when you give it a sniff of meat.
Test its response quantitatively by checking its flow of saliva. Then, after
having by repetition established the association between the sniff of meat
and the ringing of a bell, ring the bell without the sniff of meat, and check
on the amount of salivation as a response thus conditioned.
B. F. Skinner experimented with an additional test. Give an animal a
goal, set up some simple condition whereby, if it pecks at a certain form
(or color) or presses a lever, it operates a mechanism that releases a bit of
food. Having been systematically starved to about four-fifths of its natu-
ral weight, it does whatever it can in the need for food. The laboratory
conditions are so set up that there are few things it can do. As the result
of its random motions, it learns to repeat the pressing or pecking opera-
tion that is most congruent with its “natural endowment.” And condi-
tions are so set up that this operation procures it food. The kind of in-
strumental “purpose” it thus acquires is called an instance of “molar”
behavior. And such methods of “control” can be employed by the exper-
imenter to teach the animal quite specialized modes of behavior, as com-
pared with its natural “repertoire” for getting food. At the same time, of
course, there is a kind of “molecular” behavior going on in the animal,
the purely physiological correlates of bodily motion such as Pavlov was
studying in his technique for measuring the degree of salivation with
which his dogs responded to his respondent mode of conditioning.
It is my notion that logology’s interest in questions of human “molar”
responses would primarily involve considerations of rhetoric and legis-
lation (as with matters of penal law and taxation). But whereas human-
istic studies usually show little interest in questions of “molecular” be-
havior, logology must stress this subject since it bears so directly upon
the possible correlations between physiological nonsymbolic motion and
202 Logology

symbolic action along the lines we touched upon in our reference to the
air-conditioning plant that had to use proportionately more energy
when a more exciting motion picture was being shown (which is to say,
when the audiovisual motions of the film were being interpreted by the
audience in terms of symbolic actions for which the correlative non-
symbolic motions of their bodies put a proportionately greater burden
upon the air-conditioning mechanism, which could have no direct re-
sponse to the film itself as a sequence of motions, but which its “sensors”
were designed to register, as translated from the film’s motions by the au-
dience’s actions, which were in turn reflected as correlative bodily mo-
tions). I have deliberately left that sentence in its present unwieldy con-
dition, the better to suggest the underlying problematics of such
logological concerns, though it is obvious that modern technology is de-
veloping at a high rate the resources for such clinical inquiries into the
“molecular” bodily motions that accompany our ways with symbolic ac-
tion (apparently including even inquiries into corresponding routines of
self-control).
When considering such mythic figures as the Worm Ouroboros, the
Amphisbaena, or the world conceived as a mighty Hermaphrodite, one
might plausibly derive them from designs purely internal to the resources
of symbolicity. For instance, even the range of meanings in the Greek
preposition amphi is enough to suggest how the thought of such around-
ness and aboutness might be “mythologized” (made narrative) in the im-
age of a creature that went both forwards and backwards. The mutual-
ity of ways in which terms imply one another might well suggest the
circular analogy of a creature with its own tail in its mouth (the design
here, long before there were dictionaries, suggesting what does charac-
terize the nature of a dictionary, as a wholly self-contained universe of
discourse, a kind of “circularity” in the way all the terms “circle back
upon” one another). And when the principle of polarity becomes local-
ized in terms of the sexes, it follows as a standard resource of dialectic
that such a quasi-antithesis can be “resolved” by the most obvious cor-
responding term for synthesis.
Logology does tentatively entertain the likelihood that such imagin-
ings may have a grounding in physiologically still existent vestiges of our
“ancestral” evolutionary past. However, even if there may happen to be
such survivals from our preverbal past, and should they still be mani-
festing traces of themselves in some of the verbalizing animal’s most es-
chatological myths, logology builds on the assumption that the differen-
tiating modes of sensation as immediately experienced by us animals
Theology and Logology 203

now contribute most to the imagery out of which a complex texture of

concepts and ideals can be developed by the resources of analogy intrin-
sic to the nature of terms.
By the adjective “intrinsic” here is not necessarily meant a “power”
of language. The same property can as accurately be called a mere limi-
tation of language, a limitation due to the fact that we cannot apply the
same expression to two situations without to some extent introducing
the principle of analogy, metaphor, “fiction” as a “creative” resource in
its own right.
Logology tentatively assumes that, quite as physically grounded “her-
maphroditic” tendencies are clearly indicated in many actual instances
of such “synthesis,” so such mythic figures as the primal worm feeding
on itself may be a response to physiological conditions (prior even to our
uterine stage) still vestigially within us, and acting as a source of imagery.
Though one may doubt whether such possibilities may ever yield much
in the way of further discoveries, I mention them simply to indicate the
range of inquiry which would be involved in the study of the human an-
imal’s nonsymbolic “molecular” behavior underlying the field of sym-
bolic action.
A more rewarding kind of inquiry along these lines might concern the
possibility that the socially morbid featuring of criminality, violence,
sadism, terror, and the like (many aspects of which show up in folk tales
for children) may have a double origin. As a social phenomenon (thus
wholly in the realm of symbolic action) the astoundingly large number of
mercenaries (writers, actors, and the various kinds of experts employed
in the purely technological aspects of such behavior) are obviously pro-
ducing commodities that are designed to attract ideally a maximum num-
ber of viewers as a means of establishing as large a marketplace as possi-
ble where the experts in sales promotion can best recommend their
clients’ products.
The social morbidity of such “art” is greatly aggravated by the nature
of current TV realism, in which there is no appreciable difference be-
tween a merely simulated act of violence and a real one (which would be
the equivalent of saying that there is no appreciable difference between
the artistic imitation of suffering in Greek tragedy and the actual bru-
talities witnessed by the mobs who attended the gladiatorial contests in
decadent Rome).
Apologists for the profitable selling of such wares will point to the
high degree of violence in, say, the greatest plays of Shakespeare. They
make no mention of the fact that the quality of the diction introduces a
204 Logology

notably different dimension. And as a matter of fact, writers for the cur-
rent market operate in a field which, by the very nature of contemporary
realism (or naturalism) as addressed to both eye and ear, wholly oblit-
erates the distinction between real and simulated happenings, a confu-
sion so “natural” to the medium that strictly scientific depictions of
moon-shots and the like must specifically keep admonishing their public
when they are not recording an instrument in motion but are merely sim-
ulating such.
If one must be so scrupulously specific in keeping that distinction
clear, what then of a child who watches quasi-real killings time after
time, with no warnings that the simulations appeal to a child’s imagina-
tiveness in a way whereby, after a few years of such fare, that child has
“been through” all those experiences. The incidents have become
“moral” in the most etymologically accurate sense of the term, that is,
“customary.” In that medium, such modes of conduct have become es-
tablished as “the norm,” and the child has been “educated” to think of
human relations in such terms.
Recall the case of the lawyer who recently tried to get his young de-
fendant declared innocent because the boy had been greatly influenced
by the depictions of violence on the tube. I doubt whether even a
Clarence Darrow could have used that defense successfully, if only be-
cause there is such a vast investment in the depiction of violence. Yet I
personally go along with those who believe that “entertainment,” as so
conceived, does function as a morbid kind of education. But the pres-
sures of the market are such that the suppliers of commodities for that
market must sacrifice a lot when cutting down on violence and hopped-
up sex, either of which can be a substitute for the other except when at-
tacks are directed with equal insistence against both. For any radical
elimination of them both would leave a void that other forms of sym-
bolic action are not equipped to fill.
But how far should we go when asking what is the source of such ap-
peal in these modes of substitution, depicting “criminal Christs” whose
“mission” it is to take on the burden of our guilt, suffer their imitated
passions in our behalf (as is also the case of “real victims,” offered for
the entertainment, fascination even, I mean for that inferior species of the
“tragic pleasure” we get from digesting the literal news of each day’s
crime and disaster)?
Might not the search for such sources of appeal lead us back to a kind
of purely physiological frustration? I do not refer to ways whereby imag-
Theology and Logology 205

inary substitutes help us “compensate” by fantasies that fulfill our

wishes for dominance, sexual gratification, or vengeance, and like wishes
that are both stimulated and repressed by factors in the social order. I
have in mind a more paradoxical kind of frustration; namely, if human
bodies have been selectively disciplined through countless years of pre-
history to endure certain purely physical kinds of strain, might the con-
ditions of civilization frustrate the direct expression of such aptitudes as
get developed by, and inherited from, the conditions that prevailed prior
to the conditions of civilization?
To illustrate by an oversimplified anecdote, a spirited youth, living al-
most aimlessly in a modern slum, encounters kinds of frustration that a
young healthy Eskimo, at a time before Western civilization had con-
tributed so greatly to the deterioration of his tribal culture, could not
have had the slightest notion of. The physicality of his purposes would
have been clear. They would have been developed by traditions that also
developed his ability to undergo the kinds of effort and corresponding
strain indigenous to such a mode of livelihood. The conditions of his sit-
uation would also have selectively developed the physical and attitudi-
nal resources consistent with the purposes that the needs for survival un-
der those conditions called for.
Insofar as such an endowment was developed in answer to the “chal-
lenge” that the conditions themselves helped define, is there not a frus-
tration of the aptitudes that are, as it were, “inborn” in the very “genetic
endowment” of a species thus selectively trained, their bodies thus hav-
ing had “bred into” them whatever abilities to perform are by the same
token needs to so perform? After all, I am but saying that “inbred” in
birds there is the ability to fly; and insofar as that ability is not given ex-
pression, they are frustrated, in their very nature “repressed.”
Viewed thus, the spirited youth who becomes a “delinquent,” might
more accurately be thought of as seeking the “moral equivalent of war.”
But wars are largely social constructs, thus motivated by disorders in the
realm of symbolicity; and we are here asking about a possible reduction
to the realm of sheer nonsymbolic, physiological motion. The kinds of
strain or conflict that are being assumed here, and that the organism’s
“genetic endowment” needs to “express” if it is not to be “frustrated,”
would be wholly in the realm of motion. One gets glimpses of such a
motive in athletic efforts (now invariably corrupted from the very start
by their tie-in with modes of decadent symbolicity known as profes-
sional sports). They are grounded in an asceticism of training, training
206 Logology

to undergo (and thus express) the potentialities of the physiological or-

ganism to endure strain, potentialities that would otherwise be denied
expression.
In an early book (1935; Permanence and Change, second revised edi-
tion [Los Altos, California: Hermes Publications, 1954]), I exercised
considerably about a corresponding moral conflict that characterized Ni-
etzsche’s cult of tragedy, and that I related also to a salient aspect of his
style, its restless hankering after “perspectives by incongruity,” in the
service of an Umwerthung aller Werthe. In summing things up some four
decades later, I find that related speculations should be recalled. Recall-
ing them, I might sum up the whole “logological” situation thus:
There is (1) the principle of polarity with regard to the qualitative dis-
tinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion. This is the
prime source of duplication, insofar as the experiences of bodily sensa-
tion shape the materials which language draws upon as the source of its
“fictions,” in the realm of symbolicity. Within the realm of symbolicity
itself there is (2) the kind of polarity that the negative adds to nonsym-
bolic nature. It itself splits into the propositional (is-is not) pair and the
hortatory (do-do not) pair. In the realm of the body as a sheerly non-
symbolic physical organism there is (3) the polarity of the distinction be-
tween the need for struggle (in the effort to attain the means of liveli-
hood) and the rewards of relaxation (when a hunger has been sated). In
a highly complex social structure the resources of symbolicity are such
that the sheer physiology of such a distinction becomes greatly confused
by symbolic factors (property relationships, for instance). But we have
tried to indicate why we assume that it can function quite paradoxically
as a motive. (Leisure, for instance, can function as a mode of psycho-
logical unemployment, with twists whereby people can “make work” for
themselves by “inventing” confused purposes and relationships.)
Formal symbolic structures might be reduced to three terministic re-
lationships: equations (identifications), implications, transformations.
For instance, if some particular “ism” or “ology” or personality type or
location or whatever is explicitly or implicitly presented as desirable or
undesirable, it would be identified with corresponding “values”—and
such would be “equations.” “Implications” would figure insofar as one
term explicitly or implicitly involved a cycle or family of terms, as the
idea of “order” implies a companion-term, “disorder,” or implicit in the
idea of an “act” is the idea of an “agent” who performs the act. By
“transformations” would be meant what would be the “from-what,”
“through-what,” “to-what” developments in a symbolic structure. Such
Theology and Logology 207

unfoldings (from potentiality to actualization via a “peripety” of some

sort) can be either narrative or purely conceptual or both. The question
of “transformations” necessarily impinges upon the shifting choices be-
tween temporal, narrative priority (yesterday/today/tomorrow) and log-
ical priority (the syllogistic first premise/second premise/conclusion de-
sign—or the dialectical notion of a class name as “prior” to any
particulars that can be classed under that head).
In this connection, the route from logology to theology is via a logo-
logical criticism of Plato’s mythology because it assigns to his ideal forms
a realm narratively prior to their mode of classification as in effect gen-
eral names for worldly particulars included under those various “ideal”
heads. Such a procedure would be called the “temporizing of essence,”
in that it does “mythologize” (that is, translate into terms of story) a ver-
bal resource of classification that has no temporal dimension.
Since “eternity” is also a kind of nontemporality, the conditions are
present whereby the “timelessness” of the supernatural realm after death
(by extension involving a realm prior to all wordly existence) ambigu-
ously overlaps upon the purely technical sense of timelessness in the lo-
gological sense of polar terms timelessly implying each other. And inas-
much as theology necessarily uses narrative terms with regard to the
emergence of time out of timelessness, logology’s business is to discuss
such embarrassments that survive, even after theology has critically gone
beyond mythology.
But looking in the other direction, whereas logology is vowed by sheer
definition to be much concerned with the “molecular behavior” of the
body (thereby going along radically with behaviorist inquiries), logology
must insist categorically upon a polar distinction between verbal and
nonverbal behavior, in contrast with the behaviorists’ notion that they
are there concerned with but a difference of degree. Logology’s distinc-
tion between the symbolic and nonsymbolic realms is at least as absolute
as any distinction between “mind” and “body,” though it has a notably
different way of getting there. In fact, the distinction is as basic as that
between bread and the word “bread.” Or as the distinction between the
sea as a “mother symbol” and the sea as the physical body of saltwater
it is, vastly a sloshing-around.
With regard to the logological distinction between symbolic action
and nonsymbolic motion, it makes no difference whether the human an-
imal “thinks with language,” or “thought” and “symbolicity” are iden-
tical. In either case, insofar as the speechless human organism acquires
familiarity with a tribal language there arises a duality of motivational
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realms whereby the human animal’s way with symbols is not reducible
to terms of its correlative molecular behavior.
But when I read of hermeneutic experts who congratulate themselves
that the traditional Cartesian split between subject and object, thought
and extension, is being avoided, I would note that there are two quite dif-
ferent ways of considering any such development. If Descartes’s dualism
is attacked as a “psychology of consciousness,” it is in trouble. But we
should not let any reservations regarding the Cartesian formulation of
the dualism serve as a device by implication to discredit the dualistic
principle itself. For if we do so, we are in effect implying monism either
by smuggling in undeclared vestiges of idealism, or by willy-nilly sub-
scribing to the “materialistic” oversimplification of behaviorism. But lo-
gology’s “dramatistic” (or dialectical) view of language as symbolic ac-
tion is in its very essence realistic—and such a view is necessarily
dualistic, since man is the typically symbol-using animal, and the lin-
guistic invention of the negative is enough in itself to build a dualism,
even beyond the other two polarities we also included in our summation.
At least as a tentative working principle, logology holds to the notion
that the relations between poetry and mythology (and thence via criti-
cism and writing to theology, plus wholly secular offshoots or disrelated
growths, if there are such) must in all likelihood embody “imaginative”
traces intrinsic to any symbolic (that is, human) medium in its own right,
along with traces of the formative experiences undergone while the hu-
man animal is gradually acquiring familiarity with the medium (such as
its initiation in the ways of a tribal language). And such traces of the in-
ceptive are all the more likely to be still with us since experiences of that
sort are not a matter merely of a human organism’s infantile past, but
are ever born anew. For language is innately innovative. No one could
go on making his words mean the same, even if he expended his best ef-
forts to make them stay put.

notes
This essay was first published in The Kenyon Review 1 (winter 1979): 151–85.
1. Any such possible relationship between personal tensions and their use as
material for intense linguistic activity (to be analyzed and admired in its own
terms) might figure thus. But there are special, purely logological, incentives for
such a relationship between poetic activity and psychological passion. On vari-
ous occasions (particularly the essay, “The First Three Chapters of Genesis,” in
my Rhetoric of Religion [1961]) I have discussed the process whereby the effort
to characterize conditions now turns into a “story” of “origins” then, often a
Theology and Logology 209

purely “mythic” past. This endeavor can come to tie in with purely psychologi-
cal motives in such cases as, for instance, a poet’s inclination to dwell “regres-
sively’’ on thoughts of early years actual or imaginary vestigial memories of in-
fancy. Thus Wallace Stevens’s puzzlements about the “first idea” seem to me an
attempt, by an act of the “imagination,” to recover a sense of what things must
have seemed like to a child before things became codified by names, or even col-
ored by the assumption that anything unnamed was potentially namable.
Incidentally, with regard to Keats’s ode (which I take to envision a kind of
“art-heaven,” a theological heaven romantically aestheticized), by my interpre-
tation, the transforming of his disease’s bodily symptoms (fever and chill) into
imaginal counterparts within the conditions of the fiction would be a poetic em-
bodiment of the orthodox religious promise that the true believers would regain
their “purified” bodies in heaven. That is, the symptoms would have their “tran-
scendent” counterparts in poetic diction as indicated in my analysis.
I review these various considerations because the discussion of them offers a
good opportunity to at least indicate “humanistic” concern (the admonition to
“know ourselves”) that I take to be involved in the logological distinction be-
tween the human organism’s realm of nonsymbolic motion and the kind of
“self” it “naturally” acquires through its protracted, informative traffic with the
(learned) public modes of symbolic action.