Allegory

Jeremy Tambling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134298303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Indispensable to an understanding of Medieval and Renaissance texts and a topic of controversy for the Romantic poets, allegory remains a site for debate and controversy in the twenty-first-century.

In this useful guide, Jeremy Tambling:

• presents a concise history of allegory, providing numerous examples from Medieval forms to the present day
• considers the relationship between allegory and symbolism
• analyses the use of allegory in modernist debate and deconstruction, looking at critics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man
• provides a full glossary of technical terms and suggestions for further reading.

Allegory offers an accessible, clear introduction to the history and use of this complex literary device. It is the ideal tool for all those seeking a greater understanding of texts that make use of allegory and of the significance of allegorical thinking to literature.

1
CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY

This chapter does three things. First, it discusses the understanding of allegory that existed in classical Roman writing, and which was passed on to the medieval world. It then discusses Dante, and the allegorical writing of the Commedia, looking at this in three ways: first, through the idea of fourfold allegory, which proposes that there are four ways to interpret each text; second, through the idea that allegory acts as a ‘veil’, and third, through a figural reading of the text. After seeing how these different approaches offer three perspectives on Dante’s allegory, it turns, finally, to another medieval allegory, Piers Plowman, and speculates on the reasons for, and significance of, the medieval world thinking so much in allegorical terms.

ALLEGORESIS

It was classical Roman writers who established definitions and uses of the term ‘allegory’. They thought of it both as a mode of writing or speaking rhetoric, and as a form of interpretation. Modern commentators, partly influenced by E. R. Curtius, have termed the latter allegoresis (Curtius, 204–5). We may gloss this term as ‘interpreting a text in an allegorical manner’. It appears, then, that allegorical interpretation, as with St Paul’s interpretation of the Old Testament for the Christians in Galatia, seems to be older than the conscious writing of allegory. Allegoresis predates the practice of consciously writing one thing and meaning another.

St Paul’s example shows how allegorical interpretation was associated with the beginnings of Christianity in Roman times, but it goes further back: in Judaism to the commentaries on the early books of the Bible that were developed late in Old Testament times (the Midrash), and in Hellenism to Greeks such as Theagenes and Anaxagoras (500–428 BCE) who interpreted Homer (c. eighth century BCE) as though he had written veiled philosophy, the rational logic (logos) of which was perceptible underneath the story (mythos). That a text could be read in two ways, and that the logos might be more important than the mythos, suggests the existence of a tension between philosophy and literature. In these Greeks, in Plato, and in St Paul, much influenced by Platonism, a duality develops between literature, with its surface, or apparently ‘natural’, meaning, and the more ‘philosophical’, hidden meaning beneath. But although Plato identified allegory as a mode of reading, he was opposed to the process of allegorizing texts for specifically educational purposes.

In the first sense, as a Latin word taken over from Greek, ‘allegoria’ appears in Cicero (106–43 BCE) in De Oratore (III. xxxiv. 46, xxvii. 94). He defines it as continuous metaphors (continuae tralationes). Before Cicero, the term had appeared in the work of a near contemporary, Philodemus of Gadara (c.110–35 BCE) (Whitman, 1987:264–65). Another early user of the term was Plutarch (46–120 CE), who observed that hyponoai, the word used by Plato, and referred to in the introduction, are now called allegoriai. Plutarch, looking at legends of gods such as Isis and Osiris, contended that myths should not be interpreted as though they were true accounts, but that ‘we should adopt that which is appropriate in each legend in accordance with its verisimilitude’ (Moralia 374E, quoted in Collinson, 1981:6). This statement, when paraphrased, suggests that the truth that the legends convey is already known and that the task of interpretation is to read them so that these pre-existent truths will surface.

Cicero’s primary concern in discussing allegory was to bring out ways of writing or speaking effectively and persuasively, as in oratory. He defined irony – which included sarcasm – as though it was a form of allegorical speech: as saying one thing and meaning another (De Oratore III.liii.203). Allegory, riddling, using allusions, and permutatio (alteration or substitution of terms; the word implies exchanging goods or bartering), were all identified and assembled as rhetorical devices. Cicero’s successor Quintilian (c.35–100 CE), in his Institutio Oratoria, VIII.vi.44 (‘The Training of an Orator’), defined allegory in such a way as to emphasize its two ways of being read; he defined it as ‘a figure called inversion, where it is one in words and an other in sentence or meaning’ (Fletcher, 1964:2, quoting the translation of Thomas Elyot in his Dictionarie of 1559). This gap between latent and manifest meaning, between words as they appear, their lexical function, and what they may mean, their semantic function, is crucial to understanding allegory. These rhetoricians linked other tropes with allegory: ‘irony’, ‘inversion’, ‘metaphor’, ‘translation’ (Latin, translating the Greek ‘metaphor’). For the medieval world, drawing on this Roman tradition, the definition of allegory that was taken over from this classical heritage was that of the seventh-century Spanish encyclopaedist, Isidore of Seville, ‘Allegoria est alienoloqium, aliud enim sonat, aliud intelligutur’ (‘Allegory is other speech, for it occurs when one thing is said and another is understood’ – Etymologiae 1.xxvii.22). Isidore made allegory a form of irony (Hollander, 2001:97).

Allegorical interpretation was used, politically, to synthesize the various religions in the Roman world, Judaism and the polytheistic religions of Greece and Rome; its function was to allow for syncretism. Its exemplars include the Judaic-Hellenistic Philo of Alexandria (c.30 BCE–45 CE) who wrote commentaries on the Old Testament; the Christian Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215) and his pupil Origen (185–254); and, outstandingly, Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Philo interpreted the Old Testament both literally and figuratively, so that Abraham was made both a typical man of wisdom and, allegorically, the soul inclined to virtue and so searching for God (Collinson, 1981:8). Where, however, the literal sense seemed puzzling or inadequate, Philo simply interpreted the text allegorically, not literally at all. As Collinson writes, ‘literalists will be bothered by the eunuch Potiphar’s having a wife [Genesis 39], but the passage is no problem for those, who, like Philo, read allegorically’ (Collinson, 1981:9).

Inspiration for Christian writers to interpret allegorically came from St Paul, who had written of his ministry that God ‘hath made us able ministers of the new testament [or covenant], not of the letter but of the spirit, for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ (2 Corinthians 3.6). This argument assumes that interpretation of the Old Testament could proceed either literally or spiritually. The Old Testament is the ‘letter’, which needs the supplement of another text which will interpret it allegorically and spiritually. If ‘the letter kills’, that is because literal interpretation, associated with Mosaic law, is death, and the text must be read outside the rigid constraints of the literal, outside the letter of the law. Thinking allegorically means escaping the material; so St Paul’s successors in biblical interpretation disregarded the literal meaning of the Bible in their reading. This raises the question: what is required to guarantee the correctness of any interpretation? Augustine had an answer, in On Christian Doctrine (3.10,15): ‘Scripture teaches nothing but charity, nor condemns anything except cupidity’, therefore, ‘whatever appears in the divine Word that does not literally pertain to virtuous behaviour or the truth of faith you must take to be figurative’ (quoted in Robertson, 1962:295). In other words, anything that cannot be read literally to promote the rule of charity is ironic: it must be read in a figurative manner in order to promote the overall meaning or significance of charity. This view, that any text, no matter how apparently unassimilable to Christianity, could be made to yield a Christian meaning, became influential in North America in the 1950s and 1960s, for the interpretation of medieval texts, such as The Romance of the Rose, or the works of Chaucer. For example, D. W. Robertson, Jr, and his followers such as J. V. Fleming, regarded medieval texts as always, secretly, if not openly, Christian, and the controversy that this occasioned caused a reaction against allegory amongst those other medievalists who did not share such Robertson’s omnivorous Christian perspective. The source of the controversy was the claim, neither provable nor disprovable, that a text could possess a particular kind of secret meaning.

BEGINNING ALLEGORY

Allegory develops rapidly from a new approach to Latin classical texts which took place during what some scholars, beginning with Charles Homer Haskins writing in 1927, call the French ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’. This included a new sense of the importance of Plato, known directly only through the Timaeus, which had been translated into Latin by Calcidius. A century later, Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle’s works, began to appear in translations derived from Arabic writers. The twelfth-century writer William of Conches distinguished in a text between the fabula (the fable: Latin writers had used it to translate the Greek mythos) and the integumentum. The latter could mean the text’s hidden meaning; but the complexity of making this distinction between the story and what clothes the story is apparent, because the integumentum (‘covering’) could mean, as Peter Dronke has suggested, ‘both a fable that covers hidden meanings (especially moral and cosmological ones), and the hidden meanings of the fable themselves. The integumentum is primarily the covering, but also what is covered by it – so closely are the two seen as related in William’s thought’ (Dronke, 1971:23–25).

An interest in distinguishing, and then uniting, the literal sense and the allegorical sense appears in the writings of Bernard Silvestris (c.1140). In his Cosmographia, ‘interpretive and compositional allegory at last converge with full force, [and] decisively transform the allegorical tradition as a whole’ (Whitman, 2000:219). In other words, the tradition of allegoresis created in its turn a new form of writing, a text consciously written as allegory with such concepts of interpretation in mind. Not much is known of Bernard Silvestris, who was based in either Tours, or Chartres. His commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid (c.19 BCE) adopted the interpretation of earlier Roman writers: Servius (late fourth century), Prudentius (348–410), Macrobius (c.400), and Fulgentius (c.500–600) who wrote a commentary entitled, The Exposition of the Content of Virgil According to Moral Philosophy. Servius had allegorized Virgil according to four modes: (a) the historical, whereby the fictional poem represented real people and events; (b) the physical, where gods represented physical forces in nature; (c) the moral, where gods were identified with abstract qualities, and the text was read for ethical significance; (d), the euhemeristic, where gods were rationalized as being deified heroes, and mythological stories rationalized as historical occurrences (Jones, 1961:217–26). For Bernard Silvestris, the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid represented the state of infancy. The second dealt with childhood, and the third adolescence. Dante (1265–1321) takes this view over completely in his prose work the Convivio (c.1305), written before he began work on the Commedia. In book 4, chapter 26, Dante offers an allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid books 4 to 6. In this section Aeneas leaves Dido, who commits suicide, and journeys to Italy. His father, Anchises, dies, and Aeneas, before founding Rome, must descend to the underworld:

Virgil, our greatest poet, describes Aeneas as acting in such an unbridled way [i.e. unbridled by reason] in the part of the Aeneid where this stage of life is symbolically portrayed [si figura], comprising books four through six. How Aeneas bridled himself when, after having received so much pleasure from Dido, and when experiencing delight with her, he tore himself away in order to follow an honourable, praiseworthy and beneficial course! What a spurring onward occurred when the same Aeneas had the courage to go alone with the Sibyl down into hell in quest of the soul of his father Anchises, exposing himself to so many dangers! It is clear, then, that in our maturity being perfect necessarily involves being ‘temperate and strong’. A good nature produces and displays these qualities, as the text expressly says.

(Dante, 1989:190)

Dante reads Virgil’s text as a charting of the ages of man, which, as a moral allegory, teaches virtue. In the quotation, the emphasis is on temperance, one of the four classical cardinal virtues. The text that Dante refers to in the words ‘temperate and strong’ is one of his own lyric poems, written to encourage the practice of virtue, and defining true nobility. He comments on his own poem, in order to show that it must be read allegorically.

Similarly, Bernard Silvestris wrote not only allegorical commentaries, but allegory. The Cosmographia is a creation myth, using allegorical figures: Natura (Nature), Noys, meaning the divine mind, or soul, and Hyle, primal matter. In the first book, the universe is formed out of primal matter into a complete order. In the second, Man, as the microcosm of the universe, comes into being through the agencies of Noys, Natura and Urania, who represents celestial knowledge. Here, the tradition of practising allegoresis offers Bernard Silvestris a particular freedom: that of being able to interpret non-Christian classical, pagan writings in such a way that they yield broadly Christian meanings. He felt no opposition between classical non-Christian texts and Christian texts, or between secular and spiritual wisdom, and although he was a Christian, he could write an allegory whose mode is syncretic, and whose personnel do not derive from Christianity. Because his mode of writing was allegorical, the disparity between the pagan and the Christian could be eliminated.

DANTE: FOURFOLD ALLEGORY

If the Convivio uses allegoresis to interpret Virgil’s Aeneid, then such a reading would generate meanings that Virgil would never have suspected. The Convivio contains a meditation on the nature of allegory and allegoresis. For example, Dante quotes two love poems that he has written, and then interprets the woman in them as an allegory of philosophy: it is to be noted that when he quotes a poem whose subject is not love, he refrains from allegorizing his verse. There is a teasing implication in this, which is that allegory is associated with love, and this requires further exploration. But as things stand, it should be noted that Dante distinguishes two forms of allegory. The first is ‘the allegory of poets’, and the second ‘the allegory of theologians’. He says that in the ‘allegory of the poets’, the quarry is the truth ‘hidden under a beautiful fiction’ (Dante: 1989, 43), and that there is no necessary truth in the literal story being told. But the Bible is characterized by the ‘allegory of theologians’, where both the literal level and the allegorical levels are true.

But both these forms of allegory are said to possess four distinct meanings within them. A fuller explanation of these four appears in a letter of perhaps around 1320, called Epistle X, written to the Veronese lord Can Grande della Scala, who gave Dante patronage in his exile. (The authenticity of this letter is questionable, but we will assume it for now for the sake of convenience.) Epistle X defines the allegory of theologians, by running through the four levels of meaning of scripture which had been argued for by such commentators as Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) in the Summa Theologiae 1a.q1.a.10 (Minnis in Whitman, 2000:232–33). Dante discusses these different levels of meaning, and extends them to the interpretation of his own poem, the Commedia, which records a journey that Dante made through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Claiming that these different levels are to be found in the Commedia, he says that the work is therefore ‘polysemous’, that its meanings are multiple. These four levels comprise: the literal, the allegorical, the moral or tropological and the anagogical. Dante expounds them from Psalm 114:1,2, referring to the Old Testament narrative of the exodus of the Israelites from their captivity in Egypt:

It must be understood that the meaning of this work is not of one kind only; rather the work may be described as ‘polysemous’, that is, having several meanings; for the first meaning is that which is conveyed by the letter, and the next is that which is conveyed by what the letter signifies; the former of which is called literal, while the latter is called allegorical or moral or anagogical. And for the better illustration of this method of exposition we may apply it to the following verses: ‘When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion’. For if we consider the letter alone, the thing signified to us is the going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption through Christ is signified; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to a state of grace is signified; if the anagogical, the passing of the sanctified soul from the bondage of the corruption of this world to the liberty of everlasting glory is signified. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may one and all in a general sense be termed allegorical, inasmuch as they are different from the literal or historical.

(Reynolds, 1962:45–46)

Like other accounts we have discussed, this distinguishes first between the literal and the allegorical. The allegorical is then subdivided into three categories. The first of the three, also, confusingly, called the allegorical, states the spiritual meaning of the literal event, which means seeing how an Old Testament event, recorded in the Book of Exodus, prefigures a central New Testament event, i.e. the redemption of the world by Christ. The tropological meaning indicates what the effect should be on the reader, e.g. in terms of moral response. If the reader examines the text tropologically, s/he will know how to act and behave. The anagogical level of meaning implies how the things which are recorded prefigure what lies ahead for the Christian in eternal glory (‘anagogy’ means a ‘going up’; ascending to the highest level of meaning, or destiny). These three spiritual / allegorical meanings can be further linked to teachings about the triad of spiritual qualities faith, hope and charity which comprise the theme of St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13.13. Faith appears in the allegorical meaning, which tells you what to believe, charity in the tropological, which tells you how to behave lovingly towards others, and hope in the anagogical, which tells you what you can expect in the future.

A first point to be noticed here is that allegory is no longer the ‘A equals B’ type which was discussed in the introduction in relation to St Paul’s allegorizing in the Epistle to the Galatians. It has now become associated with diverse meanings, which may even be irreconcilable with each other. A second point is that it is difficult to limit the ‘polysemous’ nature of the text to the fourfold classification, or even to decide which classification fits which reading. For example, the Epistle states that the literal subject matter of the Commedia is the state of souls after death. Those critics who have contested its authorship point out that that is not the Commedia’s literal subject matter: literally, it is ‘about’ the journey that Dante takes through Hell and death’s other kingdoms. And since allegory has several meanings it is even impossible to decide what ‘reading literally’ means. Is not a literal ‘meaning’ already an allegorical one, in the sense that to read about an event means to ascribe a meaning to it? The act of interpretation, because it moves outwards...