American Academy of Religion

Theology and LogologyAuthor(s): Kenneth BurkeSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Jun., 1979), p. 298Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1463255 .

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLVII/2 Supplement (June, 1979), H*

Theology and Logology Kenneth Burke

ABSTRACT

Such traditional, non-empirical opposites as body and mind, matter and spirit, may be examined in the light of an analogous, empirical set of terms: non-symbolic motion (body, matter) and symbolic action (mind, spirit). At birth, each of us is an organism living wholly in the realm of non-symbolic motion (body), but as we learn the tribal languages, we acquire proficiency in the realm of symbolic action (mind), without which the world as we know it would not exist for us. Logology studies the verbal transformations by which we extend the world of symbolic action. The logologist focuses on the element of deception in the use of language (the unintended and inevitable consequence of our having to use the same words in different contexts), and makes explicit the strategies that are implicit in our attempts to make our world of symbolic action cohere.

Logology involves only empirical considerations about our nature as a symbol-using animal. For that very reason it is fascinated by the genius of theology, because so many theologians have been so inventive in the ways of symbolic action. Once we note how the nature of our terms affects the nature of our observations, by directing our attention in one way rather than another, we see that the observations are but implications of the particular terminology in which they are couched.

"Language itself does, as it were, think for us" (Coleridge). This logological insight can be applied to Plato's theory of ideal forms, to Anselm's formula ("Believe that you may understand") to the doctrine of the Trinity, to the ideological notion of perfection, and to the Biblical account of Creation and Fall. The story of Genesis and its later theological deductions furnish a striking example of the thesis that philosophic terminologies derive from earlier narratives and define as first principles what primal "myth" or narrative describes in terms of temporal firsts.

Kenneth Burke makes his home in Andover, N.J., after twenty years of teaching at Bennington College. The recipient of many awards and distinctions, his major works include: Counterstatement (1931), A Grammar of Motives (1945) The Rhetoric of Religion (1961) and Language and Symbolic Action (1966).

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