On Metaphors and Life

I recently had the pleasure to join a lunch with Summit faculty and Andrew Kern from the Circe Institute. One of the questions he asked was why it seems artists, and that term is taken broadly to include graphic artists, poets, musicians, and so forth, are more drawn to Classical and Christian education than mathematicians and scientists. My own thoughts, scribbled in a notebook, led to the following.

Mathematical and scientific symbols...+, =, %, and so on...are metaphors just as are words. GIRL, for example, is not a girl. G-I-R-L is a one syllable word comprised of four letters...three consonants and a vowel. In English it represents a young female human, but it is not a young female human any more than the figure 8 laid on its side is infinity.

The difference between the metaphors in math and science and the metaphors in the arts is that the math and science metaphors are not treated as metaphors in our society. They are seen as reality itself, and a static, unchanging reality at that.

Poets, artists, and musicians never lose sight of their metaphors as metaphors, and this allows their metaphors to remain dynamic. Only when knowledge is dynamic can it stand against relativism, for in its dynamism such knowledge is alive and engaged with the matters of life. When knowledge becomes static, it is lifeless, a mere thing that can be manipulated to mean anything, and this leads to the slippery descent toward relativism.

Schools like Summit, of course, concern themselves with life and all that it entails. We seek the truth in all areas of life...in algebra, poetry, history, and song. The true mathematician and the true scientist would find a home here with the true poet and the true painter because we serve a God Who has said, "I am the way and the truth and the life." (John 14:6, NIV) Our knowledge is thus never static, but always dynamic and alive, as surely as is the One in Whom our knowledge is grounded.