Rahner's Primordial Words and Bernstein's Metaphorical Leaps: The Affinity of Art with Religion and Theology

Karl Rahner's notion of primordial words and Leonard Bernstein's conception of music as intrinsically metaphorical are engaged to suggest that there is a fundamental affinity between artistic and religious imagination. The affinity is grounded, in part at least, in metaphoric process—an elemental cognitive act in which the human spirit is stretched so that its expressions can address what lies beyond them. My aim in this essay is to suggest that metaphoric process grounds a fundamental affinity between artistic and religious imagination. This argument draws on and advances the seminal but not entirely satisfactory accounts of the German theologian, Karl Rahner, and the American composer, Leonard Bernstein. Put very briefly, Rahner contends that there is a fundamental affinity between religious and poetic speech. He explains this in terms of Rahner worked out his seminal notions of the "primordial word," "primordial symbol," and "realsymbol" [Urworte, Ursymbol, and Realsymbol) in essays published from 1953 to 1960 and included in his Theological Investigations, 23 vols, (various publishers of different volumes including Baltimore: Helicon Press; New York: Herder and Herder; Seabury; and Crossroad, 1961-92) [Schiften zur Theologie, 16 vols. (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1960-84)] cited respectively hereafter as TI and [ST]. 1953 "'Behold This Heart!': Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart," TI, 3: 321-30 [ST 3: 379-90]; cited hereafter as "Behold This Heart!"; 1956 "Some Theses for a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart," TI, 3: 331-52 [ST, 3: 391-415]; "Priest and Poet," TI, 3: 294-317 [ST, 3: 349-75]; 1958 "The Theological Meaning of the Veneration of the Sacred Heart," TI, 8: 217-28 [ST, 8: 481-90]; 1960 "The Theology of the Symbol," TI, 4: 221-52 [ST, 4: 275-311]; "Poetry and the Christian," TI, 4, 357-67 [ST, 4: 441-54]. In several places I have amended translations in deference to more inclusive language. The German is provided in cases where I have used significantly different translations. Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). HORIZONS 33/2 (2006): 276-297 Masson: Rahner's Primordial Words 277 his concept of primordial words. He contends that such words manifest transcendence and mystery insofar as they are able to intimate more than they say and insofar as they do so with original freshness, power and a distinctive unity between the words themselves and that which they seek to communicate. Rahner contends that both the poetic and the religious are characterized by the use of such words. Because of this, he suggests, a capacity for poetic imagination is a necessity for believers and theologians. Likewise, he proposes that poetry can be seen as sharing, or at least anticipating, aspects of religious imagination. Rahner's discussion of primordial words provides a suggestive scheme for characterizing in very broad and general terms this intuition about the fundamental affinity between religious and poetic imagination. It does not provide, however, a rigorous, comprehensive or ultimately satisfactory account of the kinship. It is dependent on aspects of his thought that many people find problematic, inaccessible, or too speculative. It makes it sound as though poets and believers have some sort of privileged vocabulary and unmediated resource of symbols apart from what our world offers. Finally, Rahner's account overstates somewhat the priority of the word as a human means for manifesting transcendence and mystery. By way of contrast, Bernstein argues that music surpasses poetry in naming the unnamable and communicating the unknowable. For him the point of affinity between art and transcendence is grounded in metaphor and in a fundamental analogy between what he calls the grammars of the poetic and musical imaginations. As in Rahner's case, the issue is whether Bernstein's analogies are rigorous enough to provide a convincing and satisfactory account of the relationship. At key junctures in his argument, Bernstein admits that he is making huge "leaps." One could object that his analogies are so suggestive only because he so prodigally and profligately forces them. But successfully "forcing" uncalled-for analogies in a way that reshapes our fields of meanings is precisely the sort of conceptual move that Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell have so fruitfully analyzed and that they call "metaphoric process."1 propose that the affinity between art and the religious that Rahner seeks to capture in his notion of See Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell, Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1984); and New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (New York: Continuum, 2001). I have published more detailed discussion of their account and its potential in a number of essays: "The Force of Analogy," Anglican Theological Review 87/3 (2005): 471-86; "Saving God," Horizons 31/2 (2004): 239-71; "Refraining the Fields," Zygon 39/1 (March 2004): 49-62; "Metaphor As Apt for Conversation: The Inherently Conversational Character of Theological Discourse," in Theology and Conversation. Developing a Relational Theology, ed. Jacques Haers and Peter de Mey (Leuven: Peeters Press, 2003), 145-61; "The Clash of Christological Symbols: A Case for Metaphoric Re-