Burke, Kenneth, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology
(Berkeley: U of Cal. Press, 1961, 1970).

Course taught by Wayne Booth, Winter 1998
Reading Notes by Adam Kissel

Definitely needs two readings or more. Everything seems rather dopey in the first reading, but give him a second chance.

A lot of fun, a variety of topics discussed as a dialogue between The Lord and Satan. Mankind will make up all kinds of theologies, it is said, believing that existence plus reason dictates ethics--but TL says that ethics are placed in man's way in order to give people a moral No which they can abstract to an existential Non-Being (e.g. Genesis "[if you eat of the tree] you will surely die"). So primary is man's relationship with God; ethics are secondary. [that's not quite how Burke says it]

Language is like religion because in language there is always a difference between the referent (thing) and the index (word); there is always a transcendental leap from the thing to the idea. And yet the thing exists separately from the word. But for some words, it's unclear if the thing really does exist [red cow] or obvious that it doesn't [purple two-headed cow]. Words are like god-terms, but especially words about the supernatural are like god-terms; they come as a result of trying to describe the Indescribable. So we might talk of God as partly unknowable, which has no real existence to us but which exists anyway, the supernatural; and partly knowable, God's real manifest existence to us, in "natural" terms. Burke tends not to talk about the knowable part of God, as though all we can say of God is about God's unknown-ness.

Burke also makes an unfair jump between man as homo faber, the symbol-maker, and man as homo faber the maker of mechanical technology, pp. 40-41.