Likeness and Translation: On Metaphor in Henry Suso

Abstract: Metaphor, the translation of a word from its standard application to another one on the basis of likeness, has always been problematic for Christian theologians confronted with the Bible's use of metaphors to describe a God who is essentially beyond all likeness. In a tradition starting with Pseudo-Dionysius in the sixth century CE, theology emphasizes the unlikeness in metaphorical predicates of God, the deficiency or failure of whatever likeness their translations propose. The mystical and devotional writings of the fourteenth-century Dominican friar Henry Suso (Heinrich Seuse) share this evaluation of divine metaphor while at the same time proliferating a "likeness-giving discourse," as the author calls it, about God. This article performs close readings of metaphors and analogies from Suso's German writings and shows how his routine denials of their likeness are subject to disturbances and perturbances which point to the possibility of another language, one that would comprehend God directly and essentially. Like the "pure language" ( reine Sprache ) toward which, according to Walter Benjamin, interlingual translation orients its source text as it fails to be like it, this possible language is not one that anyone could ever speak; it is a muteness inhabiting Suso's actually enunciated discourse, turning the failure of its metaphorical translations into the "falling into silence" ( Verstummen ) that Hans Blumenberg diagnoses as the form of linguistic comportment appropriate for believers who feel compelled to speak of a deity about whom, fundamentally, nothing can be said.