The need to sustain complex connections at the level of thought (not fact) through the evolution of mental abilities that are necessarily connected with developing all the metaphoric resources of language. The literal in contrast puts an end to thought. It offers the mind a way to shut down, to reify itself. It thereby exorcises the greatest fear: interpretation and its inevitable result, the conflict of interpretations and with it the terror of being forever bereft of dogmatic certitudes. A metaphor is the lighting flash of an intelligence that sees, as Aristotle asserts, connections that can only be sustained by a thought that thereby liberates itself from the immediate.
Literalism is the attempt to arrest all of this before it takes hold. It’s innermost necessity is the resistance to metaphor. For with metaphor one enters a world that has the power to unravel the literal mind. Let me offer one example. “There is no God and Mary is his mother.” In this great aphorism Santayana asserts an ontological impossibility and a psychological necessity. I once tried it out on some fundamentalist friends. They were at first puzzled by the unintelligibility of the statement then amazed that Santayana and I were so dumb we couldn’t see the contradiction. Finally the light went on, almost in chorus, the literalist deconstruction of the statement: “If he wasn’t a God how could she be a mother?” All attempts to suggest that the statement wasn’t meant to be taken literally only produced further confusion then frustration then anger. Santayana’s statement made no sense precisely because it was a koan, a paradox intended to produce reflection, even introspection. It was there I suggested that one would find the key to its meaning; not in the assertion that its meaningless constituted evidence that Santayana was perverse or mentally unbalanced. We were, of course, talking at irretrievable cross-purposes with no way to bridge the gulf between us. Which was, of course, the point of the exercise.
Literalism is the first line of defense of a mind that wants to put itself to sleep. A sensibility that like Nietzsche’s last man can only blink in blank incomprehension at anything that can’t be immediately understood. It is the great protection against a world teeming with complexities.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2005/01/08/the-psychology-of-christian-fundamentalism/
