Have you ever been frustrated by a conversation — perhaps on social media — where someone invokes an analogy that you can clearly see is flawed, maybe even dishonest? Alternatively, have you ever felt that you had found the perfect analogy to explain your position only to have it dismissed out of hand?
Analogies are an essential part of human communication. The most basic way for humans to learn new things is by analogy with things we already know. Unlike the angels, we are situated in a particular time and space, and so our knowledge grows incrementally as we add new experiences and insights to our existing body of knowledge. If angelic knowledge is immediate and universal, human knowledge is mediated and particular. The Bible tells us that even Jesus learned this way, increasing in wisdom as time went by (cf. Lk 2:52).
The best teachers and communicators are masters of analogy. Doctors use analogies to explain medical conditions to patients; financial advisors use them to explain how the stock market works; politicians use them to make sense of social realities or policy proposals; mechanics use them to explain what is wrong with your car; they are the stock-in-trade of comedians and satirists; and preachers use them to proclaim the Gospel. Jesus himself is probably this method’s most famous practitioner. “How shall I describe the kingdom of God? To what shall I compare it? It is like ….”
Jesus’ analogies (for that is what parables are) ranged from concise similes (“the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed”), to more elaborate metaphors (“a sower went out to sow …”), to lengthy and complex stories (“There was a man who had two sons …”). But they all try to teach his audience by reference to things like farming practices or familial relations — things with which his audience had intimate knowledge.
Analogies are not merely useful. They are practically unavoidable to anyone who wants to be understood. If you learn to watch for them, you will see them absolutely everywhere. They are also dangerous.
Some readers might have found my description of politicians in the above list a little naive. We do not always think of politicians as people who help us make sense of social realities or policy proposals but often as people who seek to manipulate and confuse us about such matters in order to get reelected or to serve some ideological agenda. However just or unjust this image may be, the point here is that analogies can work just as well to obfuscate as they can to clarify. Demagogues and conspiracy theorists are also masters of analogy.
This ambiguity is not simply because people use flawed analogies, though they certainly do. It is because analogies are flawed by definition. There is no such thing as a perfect analogy. Anything that was exactly the same as the thing it was trying to describe would stop being an analogy and become a duplicate. At this point, its explanatory power disappears. Analogies, to be analogies, must be both similar to and different from the thing they are trying to illuminate. It is an analogy to say Jesus is the good shepherd. He cares for and protects his sheep. He does not kill and eat them.
Sensitivity to the use and misuse of analogy is essential to the work of theology. Theology is thinking about God. And the Church has dogmatically defined (at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215) that we may use analogy to think and speak about God (indeed, it is the only thing we can use), but also that we must always bear in mind that any such analogy fails more than it succeeds. God is king, and God is father, and God is craftsman, and God is warrior, and God is gardener, and God is midwife; but God is also more unlike any of these things than like them. Indeed, that’s why we need so many metaphors! Each one says something true but also something that, if it were not supplemented by other images, would be completely inadequate and misleading.
To use analogies well, it is not necessary — nor is it possible — to find perfect ones. The question is not whether the analogy is perfect but whether it is valid. Does it do the work it is being asked to do? Answering this means sifting through the various elements of the analogy to find which elements apply and which do not.
When we dismiss other people’s analogies as inadequate, we are quite adept at noting where the analogy breaks down. The deeper question is whether it breaks down at a point that makes it unworkable for the issue in question. When others dismiss our analogies as inadequate, we might well feel misunderstood or even misrepresented because they seem to have zeroed in on some superficial element that ignores what we really meant to say. The deeper question is whether that element was in fact superficial or if it actually did impair our analogy’s ability to function.
When we invoke an analogy with the Holocaust, for instance, we want people to see that something is deeply evil and dangerous. But this is playing with fire. You cannot use something that has become our culture’s go to image of unique evil to illuminate other evils. That does not mean there is nothing whatsoever analogous to elements of the Holocaust in contemporary issues. It means that any such analogous elements are so overwhelmed by the disanalogy that the image is more likely to obscure (not to mention enrage) than clarify.
And even valid analogies can end up being misleading if we forget that they are analogies! When this happens, the analogy starts to control the interpretation of the situation instead of serving to explain and understand it. Richard Dawkins, for example, famously developed the idea of memes on an analogy with genes. The spread of cultural ideas (memes), he suggested, could be understood as analogous to the spread of genes within populations, with more successful ideas outcompeting less successful ones — a kind of intellectual survival of the fittest. As an analogy, this does some valuable work, and really can contribute to a better understanding of the spread of cultural ideas. But when we forget that there are also elements of disanalogy at play here — for example, cultural ideas can be true or false in ways that genes cannot be — we will soon be led astray. As many have pointed out, Dawkins himself does not seem particularly sensitive to such dangers.
Theologians learn to use analogies with great care because of the need for humility before the mystery of God. We must never be tempted to think we have managed to put God inside the box of the human mind. Humility is also necessary for fruitful public discourse. Learning to recognize both the value and the limitations of the analogies we use to communicate about fraught topics is something that can introduce a measure of humility into our public conversations, helping us both to be understood and to understand.
Brett Salkeld writes from Canada.
