Scott-Coe's Essay
Submitted by Ed Appel on Tue, 2005-08-02 09:19
I certainly agree with both Hawhee and Fitzgerald that it's time to push Burke's RHETORIC OF RELIGION more into the mainstream, not just for its insight into the forms of language (it's surely gotten its share of attention, within Burke studies, on that score), but also for its shrewd commentary on the imperatives of human nature. At the panel on Burke and education at NCA last month, Robert Wess raised the question of why there's so much religiosity in the air right now. The woman sitting next to him on the plane (I think it was) reading her Bible, among other mainifestations of Christian faith to cross his path, apparently filled him with wonder and trepidation. Where's all this presumptive fanaticism---the gist of Bob's inquiry---coming from in this enlightened day and age? I responded with Burke's definition of logology---the systematic study of theological terms for the light they may throw on the forms of language---with its implicit assertion that theological concepts and beliefs will surely be with us always, even unto the end of the age.
I should have gone further with that thought, however. It's Burke's philosophy that can explain the recrudescence of Fundamentalism in our time, not any positivism, empiricism, or scientism. From a scientistic standpoint, red-state revulsion at rampant sexuality and secularism in our popular culture is inexplicable. To a modernist, maybe even postmodernist, mindset, liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick's naive prediction of 75 years ago would make eminent sense: Someday everybody's going to think like me. The dictates of the hortatory negative and its perfectionist residues will be rescinded. Under the irresistible weight of scientific demystifications, religion, except in its etiolated mainstream forms, will wither.
In my view, Scott-Coe brilliantly brings these issues to the fore once again. She makes Burke's inherently theological system (well, Chesebro called it a System in the title of HIS book) stand out clearly, figure/ground, in apt comparison with Augustine and counterpositioning with Ramus. Was Burke a theologian, and if so, what kind? Scott-Coe offers some neat stuff in partial answer to that query. (A definitive answer is not in the offing to that, as well as many other, questions about Burke and his philosophy.)
I hope to get to some of this neat stuff in later posts. If I can find them in my deep files, I might share, also, a couple of Burke's epistolary answers to my claim that he was, in fact, a theologain of a kind.
Poet, then actor, then theologian---aren't those the metaphors Burke proposed, in serial progression, for the symbol-using animal?
If you dare, tell me that's not so.
Comments
So, I sent Burke a letter and a paper of mine in late 1983 that set forth some of the reasons I claimed he was a theologian. He replied in the negative. I then sent him another long letter developing my case even further. Burke responded again, apparently still not convinced. I wrote one more time, then saw and talked to him at the Burke Conference in Philadelphia in March of 1984. The second day of the conference, I walked into the ballroom at the Bellevue-Stratford and was accosted by Herb Simons. Herb said to me that Burke had mentioned me in a conversation the night before, a confab that included KB, Bruce Gronbeck, Herb, and some other luminaries. Herb said that Gronbeck had asked Burke during the exchanges, Are you a theologian? (I was in Bruce's seminar and must have introduced the subject.) Burke's reply, according to Simons, was, Well, Ed Appel has made a powerful argument that I am.
Needless to say, that made my day and my conference.
Here's the first of those two replies I received from KB, dated November 24, 1983:
Dear Mr. Appel
Your MS recd. I'll be a while getting around to it. But a glance at your letter suggests that you might read my letter to the editor in the London TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT of August 12 (anent 'Dramatism and Logology'). I think that my analogizing of Dramatism with Ontology and Logology with Epistemology might be useful. Also, the two definitions of the term 'logology' in the OED. Or for a first rough approximate: Theology wd. pronounce the term with the accent thus: 'words about GOD,' logology wd. accent it: 'WORDS about 'God.' And in Dante's set-up, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise would each have its particular kind of 'perfection.' Perhaps, if any of this suggests a modification of your position, you might write me a page or so to that effect, before I read your pages.
Best wishes, K. Burke
None of that suggested a modification of my position, so I wrote Burke, at length, again. Here's what he had to say in reply:
January 9, 1984
Mr. Edward C. Appel 69 Hickory Lane Leola, PA 17540
Dear Mr. Appel,
You have done plenty of conscientious, observant work on your presentation. Yet I do believe the whole issue can be reduced to a few basic points.
First, Logology my style is in line with William James on 'the will to believe.' Though one might PERSONALLY be a theist or an atheist, my analysis of how the WORD 'God' behaves can provide no such judgment. You undertake to show how it fits if the term refers to an actual entity so called.
Two, since I claim that it should fit, be there or be there not a God, I 'naturally' welcome your testimony to the effect that you find my analysis in keeping with a belief in God.
Three, how outright, downright atheists might respond I don't yet know. But with those who are agnosltics or tepidly along the slope of disbelief, I mostly confront comments to do with the sheer dialectics of the case.
But in all fairness I should point to this consideration with regard to the 'principle of perfection.' Logology uses the term not just 'straight,' but IRONICALLY. Satan in his way is as 'perfect,' as 'to the end of the line,' as God. Hell is as 'perfect' as Heaven. I 'gin fear that, in o'er-desecularizing my logological involvements with the negative, you will 'prove' me to be a Manichee, with Mephisto as real as the Logos.
Sincerely,
Kenneth Burke
[P.S.] Regretably, my trip South [Burke was at Emory University as I recall] involved quite a scrambling of my material - and I'm beginning to conclude that your pages are not with me, for a final check. So I must be frank about this matter. But I cannot see how the issue would be otherwise than I have summed it up. A believer's ATTITUDE towards a divine entity is EMPIRICALLY REAL whether there is or is not such a being.
Right, KB. And your philosophy posits, implies, in effect forcefully argues, that such an attitude will inexerably, relentlessly, empirically bubble to the surface in human life and community in the large whatever the environing conditions or cultural constraints. Freud might call it the return of the repressed. We'll call it, after our favorite philosopher/theologian, the ubiquity and power of the theological motive of perfection.