Allegory

John MacQueen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351982023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Biographies littéraires

First published in 1970, this book examines the use of allegory in religious, philosophical and literary texts. It traces the development of the device over time from the Classical period through to the early modern and modern periods, demonstrating its evolution from the transmission of myths and religious beliefs to a literary device.

1

Greek and Roman Allegory

The origins of allegory are philosophic and theological rather than literary. Most of all perhaps they are religious. From the beginning, however, allegory has been closely associated with narrative. All western and many eastern religions have found their most perfect expression in myth – a narrative, that is to say, or series of narratives which serves to explain those universal facts which most intimately affect the believer, facts such as times, seasons, crops, tribes, cities, nations, birth, marriage, death, moral laws, the sense of inadequacy and failure and the sense of potential, both of which characterize the greater part of mankind.

Those myths are transmitted, orally at first or in ritual, eventually sometimes by way of the written word. Often they are mysteries, the interpretation of which is revealed only to a priesthood, or to a larger body of initiates whose understanding is to be obtained by way of elaborate, sometimes dangerous or painful, ceremonial. Sometimes too there are degrees of initiation, with full enlightenment reserved for those who reach the highest level. Yet the myth could not have come into being without some interpretation, and it is reasonable to assume that from prehistoric times onwards myth and interpretation went hand in hand. Provided that a sequence of historical events was felt to have a special relevance to a particular society or group of people within a society, a myth might perfectly well have a basis in historical fact. The more extensive the group, the greater the power of the myth.

Examples are not difficult to find. If for instance we restrict ourselves to the classical world of Greece and Rome, the myth of Ceres and Proserpine (in Greek, Demeter and Persephone), which in the seventeenth century still retained its power over the imagination of Shakespeare (Winter’s Tale IV iv, 116–27) and Milton:

Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpin gath’ring flow’rs

Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis

Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world

(Paradise Lost IV, 268–72)

began as an allegorical explanation of the process of sowing and harvesting corn. By an almost inevitable extension, it became an allegory of human immortality, or perhaps rather rebirth, after death. In a sense, both Ceres and her daughter Proserpine are the corn. This is more obviously true of Proserpine, but in Latin poetry, for instance, the word Ceres is sometimes used simply to mean ‘corn’, as by Virgil in Aeneid I, 177–9, when he describes the meal prepared by Aeneas’s companions after the storm which had so nearly shipwrecked them:

tum Cererem corruptam undis Cerialiaque arma

expediunt fessi rerum, frugesque receptas

et torrere parant flammis et frangere saxo.

(Then, weary of life, they fetch out Ceres, spoiled by the waves, and the arms of Ceres [i.e. the implements for grinding and baking] and prepare to bake the recovered grain and to crush it with a grindstone.)

In Greek likewise the word Demeter is used to mean bread. At this level, Dis or Pluto, the god of the underworld who rapes Proserpine, is the earth in which the seed is buried and germinates. At a different level, however, Dis is death, and Proserpine is the human soul, subject to death, but redeemed by the toils of the mother goddess, Ceres. For a Greek, initiation into the mystery of Demeter at Eleusis near Athens probably involved the revelation of just this level of meaning.

Here then we already have two levels of allegorical interpretation, one which the late Greek philosopher, Sallustius, whose work is discussed below, would probably have called ‘material’ and one which he would have called ‘psychic’. As I have said, both levels remained familiar and were still used by English poets at a comparatively recent date. Pope makes use of the material level (and incidentally imitates Virgilian usage), when he writes:

Another age shall see the golden ear

Imbrown the slope and nod on the parterre,

Deep harvests bury all his pride has plann’d,

And laughing Ceres reassume the land.

(Moral Epistles IV, ‘The Use of Riches’, 173–6)

Milton in the passage just quoted uses the psychic level. His reference occurs in the description of Paradise as first seen by Satan when he is perched in the form of a cormorant on the Tree of Life. In terms of the poem, the rape of Proserpine corresponds to the fall of Adam and Eve, Dis is equivalent to Satan, and Ceres to Christ the Redeemer. The general subject of the poem is Man’s first disobedience, which

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat.

(Paradise Lost I, 3–5)

Milton makes the comparison primarily because Enna was a place of legendary beauty like that of Paradise, but he knew the allegorical interpretation, an understanding of which enhances the reader’s imaginative and intellectual experience.

A later classical myth which never, in all probability, possessed an interpretation at the material level, is that of the search through the underworld by the musician Orpheus for his dead wife Eurydice. The search in the earliest versions was probably successful, but in later versions Orpheus failed when, at the very instant of success, he glanced backwards. The myth was central to the mystic and philosophic Orphic cult in classical Greece. The allegory is psychic. Orpheus and his music represent the higher intellectual and redemptive powers of the human soul, Eurydice the lower, more appetitive powers which are particularly subject to evil and death. The sufferings of Orpheus in the upper and underworlds represent the sacrifices necessary if the soul is to redeem the lower self which it loves, and without which it cannot find salvation. The origin of the story may, as E. R. Dodds has suggested, lie in shamanistic beliefs and practices, but by classical Greek times, the main emphasis certainly fell on redemption, on salvation.

This emphasis in turn made it easy for theologians at a later date to treat the myth as an allegory of Christian redemption. An elaborate specimen of this Christian interpretation in one of its many forms is to be found in the Orpheus and Eurydice of the Scottish poet, Robert Henryson (c. 1420–90). Two centuries later, Milton made incidental use of it in his Paradise Lost. The passage occurs in the address to light at the beginning of Book III. Milton, as narrator of the infernal scenes which form a necessary prelude to the fall and salvation of man, compares himself, with some advantage, to Orpheus:

Escap’t the Stygian Pool, though long detain’d

In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight

Through utter and through middle darkness borne

With other notes than to th’ Orphean Lyre

I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,

Taught by the heav’nly Muse to venture down

The dark descent, and up to reascend,

Though hard and rare.

(III, 14–21)

(In classical tradition, it should be noted, Orpheus was the son of the Muse, Calliope.)

Under Orphic influence, the allegorical journey through the underworld became an essential part of classical epic poetry. The development is seen at its most powerful in Virgil’s Aeneid. Here Aeneas arrives in Italy, stained with the guilt of his passionate involvement with Dido at Carthage, stained too, in a more ritual way, by the deaths of his comrades Palinurus and Misenus. To obtain purification, and to enable him to carry out the divine purpose of founding Rome, it is necessary that he should make the descent to Hades and return purified to his task in this world. The descent to Hades is easy, but the re-ascent almost impossible:

facilis descensus Averno:

noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;

sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,

hoc opus, hic labor est.

(VI, 126–9)

The descent to Avernus is easy: night and day the door of black Dis stands open; but to retrace one’s step and escape to the upper air – this is the work, this the difficulty.

The descent of Aeneas is an allegory of the dark night of the soul as it is tempered to become the instrument of divine purpose. Milton clearly had the Virgilian as well as the Orphic allegory in mind when he wrote the address to light.

Very noticeably, Robert Henryson, in the poem to which I have already referred, sends Orpheus on a journey, not through the underworld only, but also through the upper world of the planetary spheres. His major emphasis is on the music, the harmony of the spheres:

Thair leirit he tonis proportionat …

This mirry musik and mellefluat,

Compleit and full of nummeris od and evin,

Is causit be the moving of the hevin.

(219, 230–2)

In the cosmos, the music of the spheres corresponds to the harmony of intellect in the little world of man, a harmony allegorically represented by Orpheus’s harp and its music. The journey through the spheres prepares him for the attempt to redeem the disharmonies of the underworld. Nor is Henryson’s treatment unique. By his time the journey through the spheres had become as common a feature of post-classical epic and narrative poetry as the underworld journey had been of the classical. One may instance the Anticlaudianus of the twelfth century Latin poet, Alan of Lille, or at a later date the Mutability Cantos of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. (These were published in 1609, ten years after Spenser’s death.) Often the two journeys, underworld and upperworld, are combined, as in the Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), with its three parts, Inferno (underworld), Purgatorio (transition) and Paradiso (upperworld). As a musician, Milton was particularly sensitive to such allegory, as may equally be seen in his early poem, ‘At a Solemn Music’, and in the fine verbal detail of the much later Paradise Lost. It is not, for instance, mere delight in his own verbal skill which makes him attempt in these verses to catch the contrasted sounds of the gates of Hell and of Heaven:

On a sudden op’n fly

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound

Th’ infernal doors, and on thir hinges grate

Harsh Thunder, that the lowest bottom shook

Of Erebus.

(II, 879–83)

Heav’n op’n’d wide

Her ever-during Gates, Harmonious sound

On golden Hinges moving, to let forth

The King of Glory in his powerful Word

And Spirit coming to create new Worlds.

(VII, 205–9)

The difference is itself an allegory of the intellectual gulf which separates the inhabitants of Hell from those of Heaven. Satan passes the infernal gates on a mission of destruction; the heavenly gates open to allow the Son to create a new universe. The music of the heavenly gates is directly related to the music of the spheres.

Henryson indicates the classical source of the allegory when in line 225 of his poem he refers to Plato and the doctrine that the harmony of the spheres is the Anima Mundi, Soul of the World, which Plato sets out in his Timaeus. Plato (427–348 B.C.) is in fact the effective founder of many aspects of the allegorical tradition. For a philosopher he was uncharacteristically aware of the limitations of human reason and knowledge. As a consequence, many of his dialogues include ‘myths’, allegorical narratives or developed metaphors, which serve to image truths beyond the reach of the discursive intellect. Many deal with the human soul. The Phaedrus provides an uncomplicated instance, when the soul is compared to a charioteer driving two steeds, one representing the spiritual, the other the sensual element in man, which the charioteer (reason) has to restrain. The Symposium contains a whole series of allegories, in different styles, on the subject of love.

In the Republic, the myth of the cave demonstrates the impossibility for the soul of reaching absolute knowledge so long as it is imprisoned by the fetters of sensual and corporeal life:

Every feature in this parable, my dear Glaucon, is meant to fit our earlier analysis. The prison dwelling (the cave) corresponds to the region revealed to us through the sense of sight, and the firelight within it to the power of the Sun. The ascent to see the things in the upper world you may take as standing for the upward journey of the soul into the region of the intelligible.

(VII 517. Cornford’s translation, p. 226)

Plato talks here of an ascent to see the things in the upper world; he was also a mathematician and a Pythagorean, for whom it was natural to believe in the doctrine of the link between the harmony of the spheres and the philosophic harmony of the universe. The full identification of the two is to be found in another myth from the Republic, the famous vision of Er with which the dialogue closes. Plato here combines the Orphic journey through the underworld with a vision of the harmony of the spheres represented by the whorl on the spindle of Neces...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• 1 Greek and Roman Allegory
• 2 Biblical Allegory
• 3 Allegory and the Course of Time
• 4 Medieval Theories of Allegory
• 5 Allegory and the Individual
• 6 Allegory and Satire
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX