By Schubert Ogden
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If, on the other hand, terms are held to be used analogically only in the broad, general sense in which "analogy" and its cognates are ordinarily used, their meaning cannot be different in kind from that of any other terms-whether "metaphors," "images," "figures," or what not-that obviously have a symbolic kind of meaning. To be sure, not all terms having such meaning need be, in all other respects, of simply the same kind. To say, for example, "The Lord is my shepherd" or "A mighty fortress is our God" is clearly a vivid way of speaking, in the primary context of theistic faith and witness, of the loving care of God or of God's utter reliability. But both oft hese of these expressions, also -- "loving care" and "utter reliability" -- are themselves symbolic ways of speaking, even though, arguably, the interpersonal symbols they employ arise from a another deeper, more religiously relevant stratum of human experience than that disclosing either shepherding sheep or constructing military fortifications. Nor is it in principle any different if the symbols employed allegedly refer to certain "pure perfections" that-so the argument goes-are better for any being to have than not to have and that God therefore, as the unsurpassable being, has to have in an eminent sense. Thus "mind" or "experience" is said to refer to just such a pure perfection, once its meaning is so generalized as to refer no longer to any specific kind of mind or experience but only to what is called "mind in general" or "experience as such." The profound difficulty with such reasoning, however, is that all such phrases are, for all anyone has shown to the contrary, merely verbal, if not subtly self-contradictory, in somewhat the same way as "'the greatest possible number." The plain truth of the matter is that obviously categorial terms such as "mind" or "experience" cannot be intelligibly employed as though they were the transcendental terms that they most certainly are not. For they clearly do not retain the same literal sense in any of their uses, nor are their senses when applied either to God or to beings other than God literal senses, unless, of course, the only intelligible, more than merely verbal, meaning that can be claimed for them is real1y only that of the literal transcendental terms that they and all other uses of language necessarily presuppose. But these difficulties with obviously symbolic uses of terms pretending to some third kind of"analogical" meaning I have discussed at length in other places (cf., especially, The Point of Christology: 127-147; Doing Theology Today: 187-209). All that needs to be said here is that the kind ofmeaning that al1 such terms have, insofar as they have any meaning at all, is reducible to, even if it is not to be simply identified with, that of symbolic uses of terms generally. The conclusion, then, is clear: the only kinds o fmeaning involved in theistic metaphysics, by whatever names they may be called, are either literal or symbolic. Tertium non datur.
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