From the Tree to the Labyrinth (25 page)

We have only to read Comparetti’s
Vergil in the Middle Ages
(1885) to see what sources the invitation to the Middle Ages to read the Roman poet allegorically came from. Medieval scholars may have been familiar with a commentary on Homer by Donatus that has since disappeared; they certainly knew Servius’s commentary and Macrobius’s observations on Virgil. Virgil was considered not only the greatest of poets (Homer was merely a legend, and his actual texts were unknown) but also the wisest of men. Accordingly, Bernard of Chartres, John of Salisbury, or Bernardus Sylvestris, among others, read the first six books of the
Aeneid
as a representation of the six ages of life. But what difference is there between this search for the epic’s allegorical
sententia
and the discovery of the parabolic meaning of a fable? The parabolic meaning seems to depend closely on the literal meaning, at a less subtle level than that of the allegorical
sententia.

Ulrich of Strasbourg (
De summo bono
I, 2, 9; cf. De Bruyne 1946: 2:314) says that fables, though they evidently say false things, can be taken as true, since the thing meant is not that conveyed by the words but by the sense that those words express. Alexander of Hales suggested adding to the four senses of Scripture (historical, allegorical, moral, and anagogical) the parabolic sense, which he reduced to the historical, distinguishing, however, within the historical sense, the sense
secundum rem,
in other words, the literal sense of the facts narrated, and that
secundum similitudinem,
as occurs in parables.
²¹

De Bruyne (1946: 2:312–313) attempts to systematize these differences between the various senses in the following way: the literal sense may be
proper
(or historical, in which an account is given of the actual events),
figurative
(typical, in the sense in which the individual represents the universal),
parabolic
and moral (in the secular sense, as in fables), or
allegorical
(or typical-figural,
in factis
); the spiritual sense, on the other hand, may be
tropical
(or moral) or
anagogical.

At this point, we should underscore a difference between the metaphorical sense (in which the letter appears to be mendacious, unless we understand it to be figurative) and the moral sense of the fable, which could be ignored without the fable ceasing to signify things that are understandable, though considered false. But perhaps to the medieval mind it seemed equally false that a meadow could smile or that an animal could talk, only, in the first case, the falsity was
in adjecto
and, in the second, in the course of the events narrated. On the other hand, in these instructions for reading texts, the importance of identifying the metaphors is stated, but it does not seem that particular hermeneutical efforts are to be brought into play, whereas if one reads Aesop one must make an interpretive effort, however minimal, to understand the moral truth the author wished to express. The fact is we are faced with three different senses: (i) the sense of the metaphors, which, as we have seen, never poses a problem; (ii) the parabolic sense of the fables, in which we must indubitably attribute to the author a moralizing intent, if we are not to remain attached to the mendacious letter—and yet this moral sense is not obscure but evident; and (iii) the sense of the allegory, which allows us to know
per speculum et in aenigmate.

To make things still more complicated, we find in doctrinal circles impatience with the allegorical interpretation of secular poetry, and John of Salisbury, for instance, will say that, since humane letters must not draw a veil over sacred mysteries, it is ridiculous, harmful, and useless to look for anything beyond the literal sense (
Polycraticus
VII, 12).
²²

This knot will be loosed, in exemplary but—to our way of thinking—astonishing fashion, by Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas (
Summa Theologiae
I, 1, 9) asks if the use of poetic metaphors in the Bible is permissible, and he seems to come to a negative conclusion, when he quotes the current opinion by which poetry is an
infima doctrina
or inferior teaching. And he seems to share this opinion when he says that “poetica non capiuntur a ratione humana propter defectus veritatis qui est in eis” (“human reason fails to grasp the import of poetical utterance on account of its deficiency in truth”) (
Summa Theologiae
II–II, 101. 2 ad 2). However, this affirmation should not be taken as a putdown of poetry or as a definition of the poetic in eighteenth-century terms as
perceptio confusa.
Instead, it is about recognizing poetry’s status as an
art
(and therefore of
recta ratio factibilium
or right judgment regarding things to be made), in which
making
is naturally inferior to the pure
knowing
of philosophy and theology.

Thomas had learned from Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
that the efforts at storytelling of the earliest poet theologians represented a childlike form of rational knowledge of the world. In fact, like all Scholastics, he is uninterested in a doctrine of poetry (a subject for the authors of rhetorical treatises who taught in the Faculty of Arts and not in the Faculty of Theology). Thomas was a poet in his own right (and an excellent one at that), but in the passages in which he compares poetic knowledge with theological knowledge, he conforms to a canonical opposition and refers to the world of poetry merely as an unexamined alternative. He is impervious to the idea that poets can express universal truths, because he has not read Aristotle on the subject, and he therefore sticks to the received wisdom that poets recount
fabulae fictae.
On the other hand, he admits that the divine mysteries, which go beyond our ability to understand, must be revealed in allegorical form: “conveniens est sacrae scripturae divina et spiritualia sub similitudine corporalium tradere” (“Holy Scripture fittingly delivers divine and spiritual realities under bodily guises”) (
Summa Theologiae
I, q. 1, a. 9 co.). As for the reading of the sacred text, he specifies that it is based first and foremost on the literal and historical sense: when Scripture says that the Hebrews went out of the land of Egypt, it relates a fact; this fact is comprehensible and constitutes the immediate denotation of the narrative discourse. But the
res,
the things of which the sacred text supplies the record, were arranged by God as signs. The spiritual sense, then, is that meaning by means of which the things signified by the language refer to other things, and it is based accordingly on the literal sense. Thus, God disposes the same course of events, subject to his divine providence, to endow them with a spiritual meaning.
²³

What we have here is not a rhetorical procedure, as would be the case with tropes or allegories
in verbis;
instead what we have are pure allegories
in factis,
in which it is the things themselves that act as signifiers of higher truths.
²⁴

Up until this point Thomas would not have been saying anything new. But in his allusions to the literal sense he emphasizes a rather important notion, namely that the literal sense is
quem auctor intendit.
Thomas does not speak of a literal sense as the sense of the sentence (what the sentence says denotatively according to the linguistic code to which it refers), but rather as the sense attributed to the act of enunciation! Accordingly—we are interpreting Thomas’s words—if the sentence says that teeth are
made of snow,
we are not to understand that, grammatically speaking, the sentence expresses a mendacious proposition. The speaker’s intention, in using that metaphor, was to say that the teeth were white (
like
snow) and therefore the metaphorical construction is part of the literal sense, because it is part of the content that the speaker intended to say. In
Super epistulam ad Galatas
too, Thomas reminds us that both
homo ridet
and
pratum ridet
(figurative sense) are part of the literal sense (VII, 254). In
III Sent.
he says that in scriptural metaphors there is no falsehood (38, 1, ad 4).
²⁵

In short, Thomas is prepared to speak of a secondary or spiritual meaning only when senses can be identified in a text that the author
did not intend to communicate, and did not know were being communicated.
And this is the case for an author (like the author of the Bible) who narrates facts without knowing that they have been prearranged by God as signs of something else.

While we may speak, then, of a secondary sense of Scripture, things change when we move on to secular poetry or any other human discourse that does not concern sacred history. In fact at this point Thomas makes an important affirmation, which in a nutshell is this: allegory
in factis
is valid only for sacred history, not for profane history. God, so to speak, has limited his role as manipulator of events to sacred history alone, but we must not look for any mystic meaning after the Redemption—profane history is a history of facts not of signs: “unde in nulla scientia, humana industria inventa, proprie loquendo, potest inveniri nisi litteralis sensus” (“hence in no science discovered by human industry can we find, strictly speaking, anything beside a literal sense”) (
Quaestiones quodlibetales
VII q. 6 a. 3 co.).

On the one hand this move—inspired by the new Aristotelian naturalism—calls into question universal allegorism, with its bestiaries, lapidaries, encyclopedias, the mystical symbolism of the
Rhythmus alter,
and the vision of a universe populated by entities at a high symbolic temperature. And naturally it sounds like an out-and-out repudiation of allegorical readings of the pagan poets. On the other hand, it tells us that when, in secular poetry, a rhetorical figure occurs (including metaphor) there is no spiritual sense, only a
sensus parabolicus,
which
is part of the literal sense.
²⁶

When, then, in the Scriptures Christ is designated through the figure of a goat (a scapegoat) what we have is not
allegoria in factis,
but a simple poetic procedure:
allegoria in verbis.
The poetic expression is not a symbol or an allegory of divine or future things, it simply signifies—parabolically and therefore
literally
—Christ (
Quaestiones quodlibetales
VII, 6, 15).
²⁷

There is no spiritual meaning in poetic discourse or even in Scripture when they use rhetorical figures, because that is the meaning the author intended, and the reader easily identifies it as literal on the basis of rhetorical rules. But this does not mean that the literal level (as the parabolic and therefore rhetorical sense) cannot have more than one meaning. Which means in other words, though Thomas does not say as much
apertis verbis
(because the problem does not interest him), that there may be more than one level of meaning in secular poetry. Except that those different levels of meaning, couched in the parabolic mode, belong to the literal sense of the sentence as understood by its enunciator. To the extent that, since the author of the Scriptures is God, and God can understand and intend many things at the same time, it is possible that in the Scriptures there are
plures sensus
or several meanings, even according to the merely literal sense.

Likewise, we may speak of a simple literal meaning for liturgical allegory too, which employs not merely words but also gestures, colors, and images, since in that case the administrator of the rite intends to say something precise by means of a parable and we must not look, in the words that he formulates or prescribes, for a secret unintended meaning. Though the ceremonial precept, as it appeared in the old law, may have had a spiritual sense, when it was introduced into Christian liturgy it assumed a significance that was purely and simply parabolic.

Thomas reorganizes a series of scattered notions and implicit convictions that explain why the Middle Ages paid so little attention to the analysis of metaphor. If what the author intended to say literally must be clearly understood through the trope, any attempt to create bold and unexpected metaphors would compromise their natural literalness. Medieval theory would not have been able to accept as a good metaphor or simile Montale’s bold comparison between life (and its travails and frustrations) and walking along a wall that has fragments of broken glass cemented on top of it, because the similarity had not been codified.
²⁸

Dante does not appear to pay the slightest attention to Thomas’s strictures (cf. Eco 1985). In
Epistola XIII,
explaining to Cangrande della Scala the keys for reading his poem, he says that the work is
polysemos,
that it has several senses, and he lists the four canonical levels—literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.
²⁹

To clarify what he means he gives a biblical example, citing Psalm 114: “In exitu Israel de Egipto, domus Jacob de populo barbaro, facta est Judea sanctificatio eius, Israel potestas eius” (“When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language; Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion”).

Dante reminds us that according to the letter the meaning is that the children of Israel went out of the land of Egypt at the time of Moses; according to the allegory the meaning is that we are redeemed by Christ; according to the moral sense that the soul goes from the darkness and sorrow of sin to a state of grace; and according to the anagogical sense the Psalmist says that the blessed soul emerges from the slavery of earthly corruption into the freedom of eternal glory.