What Makes a Book Holy? Metaphors and Isomorphisms in Literature
Written by Harry James. He is a recent Cambridge graduate, now undertaking an MPhil in Economic Research there.
Anybody who takes literature seriously recognises that there is something in great stories that makes them truly great. It appears to me that what is being recognised is that great literature has the ability to convey eternal underlying truths about the world and the people that inhabit it. In this way the difference between great literature and religious scripture is not obvious.
The truths implicit in literature are of an abstract and eternal nature which cannot be conveyed without the use of stories, otherwise they would be. So, taking this as true, and assuming for the length of this essay that there are inherent truths in the world, how should we categorise literature? What is a great story? Stories act as extended metaphors that tell us something deep about life, and the only way in which they diverge from a standard metaphor is that it is more difficult to explain what they are metaphors for. For example, one can describe a car going fast down a road as a firework, and it is understood that the truth that is carried through the metaphor is the speed and violent propulsion of the thing. The metaphor is not suggesting that the car is made of cardboard nor that the car is a hundred feet in the sky. Great stories help us to understand truths about characteristics like love and death which are much more difficult to explain on their own.
So how does this relate to religious scripture? Many modern atheists scorn religious stories as absurd because they think that to believe in the story, one must believe in the historical accuracy of the events of the story. While there are some stories that certain religions do require to be taken as historical, many stories are increasingly not taken as such. For example, it is possible to not believe in the historical reality of Noah and his Ark, and yet be a faithful Christian or Jew. Many non-believers take Biblical stories to be highly profound, and yet still claim no faith. So how should we categorise the stories of the Bible and other scripture? And what does it mean for a book to be holy?
The perspective I would like to offer is that the difference is in the expected fidelity of the story. In other words, how accurate we expect the metaphors about life that the story contains to be. While a lover of Dostoyevsky might expect his work to contain great truths, they would still identify him to be just a man. Men are fallible, and their art may in fact contain metaphors for deep things that are not entirely accurate. Belief in scripture is belief that there are no mistakes in the metaphors, even though one cannot say what they are about. Faith is having full confidence that this is so.
To understand this perspective further, I would like to introduce the mathematical concept of an isomorphism, and contrast it with the concept of metaphor. An isomorphism, in non-technical terms, is simply when two things map to one another while keeping some particular structure fully intact. In other words, it's a perfect metaphor. When we make metaphors, we are trying to get across certain qualities of a situation, like the car being fast and violent like a rocket. This works to convey some important essence of the thing. When doing this, it is implicitly understood that there may be imperfections in the metaphor. Is the essence of the car's speed exactly like that of a firework? Is it violent in exactly the same way? Probably not, but it’s close enough to be useful. If the two things were isomorphic with respect to speed and violence, the relationship would be precise and we could describe the car by invoking a firework, and a firework by invoking the car, to anyone who saw the car, and no detail at all would be lost in terms of understanding its speed and violence. From my point of view, this is the fundamental difference between a great story, and a holy story. One contains metaphors, and the other, if you’re a believer, contains isomorphisms.
While this article can be read as an argument for a certain perspective being correct, I would urge the reader to instead consider the following questions. Do literature and scripture actually act as metaphors and isomorphisms? Or is the relationship between metaphors and isomorphisms just a good metaphor for the relationship between literature and scripture? And perhaps most importantly, does it matter which it is?
