C S Lewis’ ”The Language of Religion,” Part 2

This partial essay came at just the right time, and I find it one of his most fruitful. The topic is one of Lewis's favorites: language. We do seem to have differing ways of speaking, and they are not always working the same way. For our purposes in this essay, Lewis speaks of common language, scientific language and poetic language, asking how "the language of religion" fits in. Common language, of course, is the base from which the others spring. It is indexical. We use language to point beyond language, to convey information to others, whether in science or poetry. Now, this next is utterly central to the argument. Many dismiss poetry as merely the expression of emotion. Lewis rejects this as untenable, and for good reasons. Poetic language is about something, just like scientific and ordinary language. It expresses information in many cases by the only way that information can be expressed:

"This is the most remarkable of the powers of poetic language: to convey to us the quality of experiences which we have not had, or perhaps can never have, to use factors within our experience so that they become pointers to something outside our experience."

"My conclusion is that such language is by no means merely an expression, nor a stimulant, of emotion, but a real medium of information. Which information may, like any other, be true or false.... Because events, as real events 'really' are and feigned events would 'really' be if they occurred, cannot be conveyed without bringing in the observer's heart and the common emotional reaction of the species, it has been falsely concluded that poetry represented the heart for its own sake, and nothing but the heart."

That is, poetic language conveys concrete information from one subject to another, involving the whole subject, but it is no less ABOUT something (in philosophical language it is intentional) than scientific or ordinary language. Whereas scientific language is abstract, poetic language is concrete. An expression like, "it is -60 degrees centigrade" out there is impoverished, but precise language; it is not qualitative, but quantitative. "It's so cold out there your nose hairs freeze to your nostrils as you breathe, and your head feels likely to explode," is concrete, but also vague in expressing temperature, not quantifiable.

Religious language is usually conducted, like most of our language work, with ordinary language, but when we are pressed to explain what we mean by religious statements like "I believe in God," we will need to go one of two ways: toward the scientific, or toward the poetic, and while each attempt will be trying to convey the same information, they will suffer different strengths and weaknesses.

"Apologetics is controversy. You cannot conduct a controversy in those poetical expressions which alone convey the concrete: you must use terms as definable and univocal as possible, and these are always abstract. And this means that the thing we are really talking about can never appear in the discussion at all. We have to try to prove THAT God is in circumstances where we are denied every means of conveying WHO God is."

"Now it seems to me a mistake to think that our experience in general can be communicated by precise and literal [that is, scientific] language and that there is a special class of experiences (say emotions) which cannot. The truth seems to me the opposite: there is a special region of experiences which can be communicated without poetic language, namely, its 'common measurable features,' but most experience cannot. To be incommunicable by scientific language is, so far as I can judge, the normal state of experience."

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