Machelling Metaphors

As regards what I mean by metaphor, I want to stress how I am employing this concept borrowing on Soskice’s claim that we should understand metaphors just as a way of using our language. Therefore, models, allegories, symbols, may elicit or connect to metaphoric language, but are different from metaphors as they have a non-linguistic nature. This is important, as often metaphor is simply a synonym for allegory. This, is exactly what Schelling thinks symbols are not, as allegories are always to be understood as posing for something else which is their true meaning, according to a one-to-one relationship. As a matter of fact, to understand metaphors as allegories otherwise named, is also akin to a view that Soskice disagrees with and understands as opposing her reading of the concept of metaphor. She calls this the substitution theory of metaphor, namely an account of metaphors as the replacement for something else.
Hence, by linking Schelling’s reading of symbols to Soskice’s understanding of metaphors, I am not denying what he calls their tautegorical as opposed to allegorical character. By this term, Schelling means that symbols signify
As Jerry Day puts it, symbols are primordial forces connected to what remains unarticulated beyond our thought and language. By ‘suggesting’ the divine reality they give us a perspective on him, and new metaphors bring new ways of speaking and relating ourselves to God, hence further articulating this ground of which Day writes about. Accordingly, symbols are that which originates what Hans Blumenberg calls fundamental metaphors. These, are representations of the unfathomable totality, something in virtue of which an entire conception of the reality, both divine and human is born. These fundamental metaphors are also then the basis from which we derive our conduct and way of looking at the