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183 chaPTer 7 FIVE KEY METAPHoRS IN EARLY QUAKER SERMoNS, 1671–1700 Although many types of rhetorical appeals, including arguments, are discovered in extant early Quaker sermon texts, I believe that the most significant linguistic appeal, what turns out to be the conceptual essence of the sermons, is discovered in the preachers’ rehearsal of five recurrent key metaphors.1 Early Quakers tended to see the noumenal world in terms of the phenomenal; the idea in terms of the image.2 In the idiom of Kenneth Burke, early Quaker preachers “discuss something in terms of something else,”3 which is to say, they spoke analogically or metaphorically.4 By this observation, I am not claiming that early Quaker preachers were unique in this characteristic among other religious speakers of their day, or religious speakers of any day, for that matter. Indeed, I. A. Richards argues that “Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom .”5 The most obvious way in which early Quaker sermons differ from those of their contemporaries is that Quaker preachers rejected the doctrine-use sermon structure, which encouraged preachers to raise doctrinal points from a biblical text, present reasons for the doctrines’ acceptance, and then apply the doctrine to the listeners’ lives, all of which favored rational, tightly constructed argumentative discourse. Consequently, surviving early Quaker sermons do not, and canot, stand or fall on the basis of their argumentative structure, although early Quakers were able debaters, as their tract literature attests.6 The sermons themselves reveal that their essential linguistic strategy is the use of metaphor.7 Another way of viewing this difference is to observe that Quaker preachers do not see metaphor as an ornament. In the majority of instances, they do not “tack on” metaphors to amplify or beautify the train of thought as one dons clothing, so that if one were to remove the metaphor, the thought would still stand. Their metaphors 184 PREACHING THE INWARD LIGHT are actually conceptual. In most cases, if one removes the metaphor from a sentence of an early Quaker sermon, the sentence is dealt a mortal wound; little substance or appeal remains. Early Quaker sermons thrive on the basis of key recurrent metaphor clusters drawn from Scripture and everyday life, which together become the conceptual analogical system through which they view spiritual truth.8 In this chapter, I will first briefly situate the following discussion of the metaphors within the burgeoning scholarly literature on metaphor. Then I will illustrate and examine the five most important and prominent key metaphors that appear in the extant early Quaker sermons: (1) the light-dark cluster, (2) the voice cluster, (3) the seed cluster, (4) the hunger-thirst cluster, and (5) the journey-pilgrimage cluster. Finally, I will focus on the functions these metaphor clusters served in the context of impromptu preaching. The BurGeoninG sTudy of MeTaPhor There is neither pause nor paucity in the scholarly discussion of metaphor , and not just in the fields in which one might expect it to occur. Scholars in the sciences, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, theology, rhetorical studies, and literature have produced an impressive collection of essays and books on the subject.9 Here my purpose is not to produce a comprehensive review, but instead to concentrate on a selection of authors who have helped me form the analysis presented in this chapter. I have already mentioned I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke, to which I must add the name of Richard M. Weaver, all from the ranks of rhetoricians, writers who share the sense that metaphor is more than mere ornament and rhetorical flourish. However, Richards’ radical notion that thought itself is metaphoric, which he published in his Philosophy of Rhetoric in 1936, lay dormant for quite a while, as well it might, because it was groundbreaking and radical. In one intellectual leap, metaphor went from mere linguistic decoration—a trope that occasionally could and did present all sorts of “problems” in hearers’ understanding and also impeded the chain of logical connections—to become the very basis of conceptualization itself. Nineteen years later, Max Black argued that metaphor was not simply “emotive,” but could also achieve “cognitive” status.10 Ted Cohen sees Black’s essay as “the pivotal text” in broadening the conception of metaphor.11 However, it was the 1980 book Metaphors We Live By that set the intellectual world on its head. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson urge that met- [52.14.221.113...

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