From the Tree to the Labyrinth (24 page)

Origen already speaks of a literal sense, a moral (psychic) sense, and a mystical (pneumatic) sense. Hence the triad—
literal, tropological,
and
allegorical
—that will later become the foursome expressed in the famous distich of Augustine of Dacia (thirteenth century): “littera gesta docet—quid credas allegoria—moralis quid agas—quo tendas anagogia” (”the letter tells us what went down—the allegory what faith is sound—the moral how to act well—the anagogy where our course is bound”).

From the beginning, Origen’s hermeneutics, and that of the Fathers of the Church in general, tends to favor a kind of reading that has been defined as “typological”: the characters and events of the Old Testament are seen, because of their actions or their characteristics, as types, anticipations, foreshadowings of the characters of the New. Some authors (such as Auerbach 1944, for example) attempt to discern something different from allegory, when Dante, instead of allegorizing openly—as he does, for instance, in the first canto of the
Inferno
or in the procession in the Earthly Paradise—brings onstage characters like Saint Bernard who, without ceasing to be living and individual figures (in addition to being authentic historical personages), become “types” of superior truths on account of certain of their concrete characteristics. Some would go so far as to speak, apropos of these examples, of “symbols.” But in this case too, what we are probably dealing with is allegory: the vicissitudes, interpretable literally, of one character, become a figure for another (at best what we have is an allegory complicated by Vossian antonomasia, inasmuch as the characters embody certain of their outstanding characteristics).

However we describe this typology, it requires that what is figured (whether a type, a symbol, or an allegory) be an allegory not
in verbis
but
in factis.
It is not the words of Moses or the Psalmist, qua words, that are to be read as endowed with an secondary meaning, even though they appear to be metaphorical expressions: it is the very events of the Old Testament that have been prearranged by God, as if history were a book written with his hand, to act as a figure of the new dispensation.

A useful distinction between facts and words may be found in Bede’s
De Schematibus et tropis,
but Augustine had already addressed this problem, and he was in a position to do so because he had been the first, on the basis of a profoundly assimilated Stoic culture, to create a theory of the sign. Augustine distinguishes between signs that are words, and things that may function as signs, since a sign is anything that brings to mind something else, over and above the impression the thing makes on our senses (
De Doctrina Christiana
II, 1, 1).
¹⁶
Not all things are signs, but all signs are certainly things, and, alongside the signs produced by man intentionally to signify, there are also things, events, and characters that can be assumed as signs or (as in the case of sacred history) can be supernaturally arranged as signs so as to be read as signs.

In this way Augustine teaches us to distinguish obscure and ambiguous signs from clear ones, and to resolve the question of whether a sign is to be interpreted in a literal or in a figurative sense. Tropes like metaphor or metonymy can be easily recognized because if they were taken literally the text would appear meaningless or childishly mendacious, but what about those expressions (usually involving a whole sentence or a narration, and not a simple term or image) that have an acceptable literal meaning and to which the interpreter is instead led to assign a figurative meaning (as is the case, for example, with allegories)? A metaphor tells us that Achilles is a lion, and from the literal point of view this is a lie, but an allegory tells us that a leopard, a she-wolf, and a lion are encountered in a dark wood, and the statement could perfectly well be taken at face value.

To get back to the author of the
Rhythmus alter,
more than a metaphor, what we have here is an allegory, indeed, it represents a set of instructions for decoding allegories. He does not say
life is a rose
(an expression that would be absurd if taken literally). Instead, he lists all the qualities that pertain to the rose, qualities which (while still remaining literally comprehensible) become or may become (if the proper interpretive tools are provided) an allegory of human life. In fact, before listing the properties of the rose, he informs us that it is a depiction of our state (“nostrum statum pingit rosa”), and goes on to furnish the necessary elements to make the parallel clear.

How do we understand that something that has an acceptable literal meaning is to be understood as an allegory? Augustine, discussing the hermeneutical rules proposed by Tyconius (
De doctrina christiana
III, 30, 42—37, 56), tells us that we must suspect a figurative sense whenever Scripture, even if what it says makes literal sense, appears to go against the truth of faith or decent customs. Mary Magdalene washes the feet of Christ with perfumed ointments and dries them with her own hair. Is it thinkable that the Redeemer would submit to such a lascivious pagan ritual? Obviously not. So the narrative must be a representation of something else.

But we must also suspect a secondary meaning whenever Scripture gets lost in
superfluitates
or brings into play expressions poor in literal content. These two considerations are amazingly subtle and modern, even if Augustine found them already suggested by other authors.
¹⁷

We have
superfluitas
when the text spends an inordinate amount of time describing something that might have a literal sense, but without the
textually economical
reasons for this descriptive insistence being clear. We have semantically poor expressions when proper names, numbers, or technical terms show up, or insistent descriptions of flowers, natural prodigies, stones, vestments, or ceremonies—objects or events that are irrelevant from the spiritual point of view. In such cases, we must presume—since it is inconceivable that the sacred text might be indulging a taste for ornament—that
aliud dicitur et aliud significatur,
one thing is said and another is intended.

Where are we to look for the keys to decoding, since the text must after all be interpreted “correctly,” that is, according to an approved code? When he speaks about words, Augustine knows where to look for the rules—in classical grammar and rhetoric. But if Scripture speaks not only
in verbis
but
in factis
(
De doctrina christiana
II, 10, 15)—if there is, in other words,
allegoria historiae
in addition to
allegoria sermonis
(cf.
De vera religione
50, 99)—then one must resort to one’s knowledge of the world.
¹⁸

Hence the resort to the encyclopedia, which traces an
imago mundi,
giving us the spiritual meaning of every worldly thing or event mentioned in Scripture. The Middle Ages inherited fascinating descriptions of the universe as a collection of marvelous facts from pagan culture: from Pliny to the
Polyhistor
of Solinus or the
Alexander Romance.
All they had to do was to moralize the encyclopedia, attributing a spiritual meaning to every object in the world. And so, following the model of the
Physiologus,
the Middle Ages began to compile its own encyclopedias, from the
Etymologiae
of Isidore of Seville to the
De rerum naturis
of Rabanus Maurus, to Honorius of Autun’s
De imagine mundi
or Alexander Neckham’s
De naturis rerum,
to the
De proprietatibus rerum
of Bartholomaeus Anglicus and the
Specula
of Vincent of Beauvais. The task was to provide, backed by the authority of tradition, the rules of correlation that would make it possible to assign a figural significance to any element in the physical world. And since authority has a nose of wax, and since every encyclopedist is a dwarf on the shoulders of the encyclopedists who went before him, they had no problem, not only in multiplying meanings, but in inventing new creatures and properties, that (on account of their curiouser and curiouser characteristics) would make the world into one immense speech act.

At this point what is dubbed indifferently “medieval symbolism” or “allegory” takes separate paths. Separate at least in our eyes, which are looking for a handy typology, though these modes in fact interpenetrate continuously, especially when we consider that poets too will soon start writing allegorically like Scripture (see below what we have to say about Dante).

We may distinguish, then, under the generic heading of symbolism (or the
aliud dicitur aliud demonstratur
), a series of different attitudes (
Figure 3.1
).

Figure 3.1

What we may call “metaphysical pansemiosis” does not interest us in the present context. This is the approach of Scotus Eriugena, for whom every element with which the world is furnished is a theophany that refers back to its first cause: “nihil enim visibilium rerum corporaliumque est, ut arbitror, quod non incorporale quid et intelligibile significet (De divisione naturae” (“there is nothing among visible and corporeal things that I can think of that does not signify something incorporeal and intelligent”) (
De divisione naturae
, 5, 3). Like the Victorines, Eriugena does not speak simply of the allegorical or metaphorical resemblance between terrestrial bodies and celestial things, but in particular of their more “philosophical” significance, which has to do with the uninterrupted series of causes and effects known as the Great Chain of Being (cf. Lovejoy 1936).

Universal allegorism is that of the encyclopedias, bestiaries, and lapidaries: it represents a fabulous and hallucinatory way of looking at the universe, not for what it makes apparent but for what it might allude to: the difference, with regard to metaphysical pansemiosis, lies in the different philosophical awareness, in the metaphysical foundation, to be precise, of the ulterior meaning of sensible and corporeal things.
¹⁹

We have already spoken of scriptural allegorism and will do so again shortly; and what liturgical allegorism might consist of is intuitive.

Poetic allegorism is that abundantly employed by secular poetry: Dante’s dark wood, say, or the whole of the
Roman de la Rose.
It imitates the modes of scriptural allegorism, but the facts presented are fictitious. If anything, oriented as it is toward moral edification, it may at most aspire to a cognitive function. But it is precisely in the case of the allegory of poets that a nexus of interesting problems comes to the fore.

The Middle Ages abounds in allegorical readings of poetic texts (cf. De Bruyne 1946, I, 3, 8). Fables provide the first instance: naturally they speak of happenings that are patently false (talking animals and the like), though they do so with the intent of communicating a moral truth. If we read the various treatises that prescribe ways of correctly reading poetic texts (see, for instance, the
Dialogus super auctores
of Conrad of Hirsau), we will see that what they consist of are exercises in textual analysis. Faced with a poetic text, we must ask who is its author, what was the author’s purpose and intention, the nature of the poem or the genre to which it belongs, and the order and number of the books before going on to examine the relationship between
littera, sensus,
and
sententia.
As Hugh of Saint Victor observes in his
Didascalicon,
the
littera
is the ordered disposition of the words, the
sensus
is the obvious and simple meaning of the phrase as it appears at first reading, and the
sententia
is a more profound form of understanding, which can only be arrived at through commentary and interpretation.
²⁰

All the authors insist on the primary need to examine the letter, expound the meaning of difficult words, justify the grammatical and syntactical forms, identify the figures and tropes. At this point one proceeds to interpret the meaning intended by the author, as this is suggested by the letter of the text. Then, to the hidden meaning, according to the formula
aliud dicitur et aliud demonstratur.
Now, it would appear that opinions differ concerning the distinction between
sensus
and
sententia.
For some interpreters analyzing a fable by Aesop or Avianus, the
sententia
would be the moral truth contained in the fable, according to which, in the fable of the wolf and the lamb, wolves are evil and lambs are good. But is this meaning, which the author makes so explicit beneath the
integumentum
or covering of the parable, the
sensus
or the
sententia?
For some interpreters, fables have a
parabolic
meaning, offered immediately to the reader, while the
sententia
would be a more deeply hidden allegorical truth, similar to that of the Scriptures (cf. De Bruyne 1946: 2:326–327).