From the Tree to the Labyrinth (31 page)

14
. “Every created thing in the world is like a book or a painting or a mirror to us. A faithful image of our life, of our death, of our state, of our fate. The rose depicts our state, and on our state provides a fitting commentary, a teaching for our lives. Though it blossoms in the early morning, it fades a petalless flower in the old age of evening. Thus the flower expires respiring, while it withers pale and wilting, dying as it is born. At once a dotard and a damsel, at once a maiden and an ancient, the rose is rotting as it rises. So the springtime of mankind blossoms briefly in the early morning of our youth.”

15
. Cf. De Lubac 1959–64, Compagnon 1979, Bori 1987, and, on the twelfth century, Valente 1995.

16
. On Augustine’s semiotics, see Manetti 1987, chap. 10, and Vecchio 1994.

17
. See, for instance, Jerome (
In Matt
. XXI.5)
cum historia vel impossibilitatem habeat vel turpitudinem, ad altiora transmittimur
(“When the story speaks of impossible things or turpitudes, we are being directed toward higher things”); or Origen (
De Principiis
, 4.2.9, and 4.3.4), according to whom the Holy Spirit interpolates into the text superfluous little details as a clue to its prophetic nature.

18
. See too
Epistola
102.33:
sicut humana consuetudo verbis, ita divina potentia etiam factis loquitur
(“Just as it is the custom of human beings to express themselves in words, so the divine power expresses itself in actions”).

19
. On the use of myths in twelfth-century philosophy (by William of Conches, Abelard, Hildegard of Bingen, and others), cf. Dronke 1974, who in his first chapter points to a series of keywords connected with symbolism (or allegorism), such as
aenigma
,
fabula
,
figura
,
imago
,
integumentum
,
involucrum
,
mysterium
,
similitudo
,
symbolum
, and
translatio
.

20
. “Expositio tria continet, litteram, sensum, sententiam. Littera est congrua ordinatio dictionum, quod etiam constructionem vocamus. Sensus est facilis quaedam et aperta significatio, quam littera prima fronte praefert. Sententia est profundior intelligentia, quae nisi expositione vel interpretatione non invenitur. In his ordo est, ut primum littera, deinde sensus, deinde sententia inquiratur. Quo facto, perfecta est expositio” (“Exposition involves three things: the letter, the sense and the inner meaning. The letter is the congruous arrangement of words, which we also call construction. The sense is a certain plain and straightforward meaning that the letter presents on the surface. The inner meaning (
sententia
) is the deeper understanding that can be discovered only through interpretation and commentary. Among these the order is: first the letter, then the sense and lastly the inner meaning. And when this is done, the exposition is complete”) (III, 8).

21
. “De parabolico intellectu dicendum quod reducitur ad historicum. Sed historia dicitur dupliciter secundum rem et secundum rei similitudinem. Secundum rem, sicut in rebus gestis: secundum similitudinem sicut in parabolis. Parabola enim est similitudo rerum, cum per rerum differentem similitudinem ad id, qod per ipsam intelligitur, pervenitur” (“As for the meaning of parables it must be said that it can be reduced to the historical narrative. But the narrative is defined in two ways, with respect to the thing itself and with respect to the likeness of the thing. With respect to the thing, as in what actually happened; with respect to the likeness of a thing, as in the parables. In fact the parable is a relation of likeness among things, when, through the different resemblances among things, we arrive at the knowledge of what it is intended to convey”) (
Summa, Tractatus Introductorius
I, 4 ad 2).

22
. “Divinae paginae libros, quorum singuli apices divinis pleni sunt sacramentis, tanta gravitate legendos forte concesserim, eo quod thesaurus Spiritus sancti, cujus digito scripti sunt, omnino nequeat exhauriri. Licet enim ad unum tantummodo sensum accommodata sit superficies litterae, multiplicitas mysteriorum intrinsecus latet. Et ab eadem re saepe allegoria fidem, tropologia mores variis modis aedificat. Anagoge quoque multipliciter sursum ducit, ut litteram non modo verbis, sed rebus ipsis instituat. At in liberalibus disciplinis, ubi non res, sed duntaxat verba significant, quisquis pro sensu litterae contentus non est, aberrare mihi videtur, aut ab intelligentia veritatis, quo diutius teneantur, se velle suos abducere auditores, Polycraticus VIII, 12.
Quod aliter legendi sunt libri divini, aliter gentilium libri
” (“I would perhaps concede that the Holy Scriptures, whose every tittle is filled with holy signs, should be read with such solemnity for the reason that the treasure of the Holy Ghost by whose hand they have been written cannot be entirely plumbed. For although on the face of it the written word lends itself to one meaning only, manifold mysteries lie hidden within, and from the same source allegory often edifies faith and character in various ways. Mystical interpretation leads upward in manifold ways, so that it provides the letter not only with words but with reality itself. But in liberal studies where not things but words merely have meaning, he who is not content with with the first meaning of the letter seems to me to lose himself, or to be desirous of leading his auditors away from an understanding of truth that they may be held by him for a longer period”) (Pike 1938, p. 264).

23
. “Illa vero significatio qua res significatae per voces, iterum res alias significant, dicitur sensus spiritualis, qui super litteralem fundatur, et eum supponit” (“The meaning, however, whereby the things signified by the words in their turn also signify other things is called the spiritual sense: it is based on and presupposes the literal sense”) (Gilby 2006: 37–39). “Deus adhibet ad significationem aliquorum ipsum cursum rerum suae providentiae subjectarum” (“God uses the very course of the things subject to his providence to signify certain other things”) (
Quodlibet
VII. q. 6 a.3 co).

24
. “Sensus spiritualis … accipitur vel consistit in hoc quod quaedam res et figuram aliarum rerum exprimuntur” (“The spiritual sernse can be grasped or consists of this: that certain things are expressed in a figurative way through other things”) (
Quodl
. VII. q. 6. A. 2 co.; see also
I Sent
. 3.3 ad 2).

25
. “Quia in figurativis locutionibus non est sensus verborum quem primo aspecto faciunt, sed quem proferens sub tali modo loquendi favere intendit, sicut qui dicit quod partum ridet, sub quadem rei similitudine intendit significare prati floritionem” (“Because figurative locutions do not have the meaning they seem to have at first sight, but the meaning the person speaking in that way intends to give them: such as when someone says, The meadow smiles, intending to express the flowering of the meadow using a similitude”) (Cf. Dahan 1992).

26
. “Fictiones poeticae non sunt ad aliud ordinatae nisi ad significandum” (“Poetic fictions have no other objective but to signify”) and their meaning “non supergreditur modum litteralis sensus” (“Does not go beyond the mode of the literal sense”) (
Quodl
. VII.6.16, ob. 1 and ad 1).

27
. “Nam per voces significatur aliquid proprie et aliquid figurative, nec est letteralis sensus ipsa figura, sed id quod est figuratum” (“For words can signify something properly and something figuratively; in the latter case the literal sense is not the figure of speech itself, but the object it figures”) (
S. Th
. Ia q.1. a. 10 ad 3).

28
. [
Translator’s note:
The allusion is to the poem
Meriggiare pallido e assorto
, from twentieth-century poet Eugenio Montale’s first collection of verse
Ossi di seppia
(1927), which concludes: “E andando nel sole che abbaglia / sentire con triste meraviglia / com’è tutta la vita e il suo travaglio / in questo seguitare una muraglia / che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia” (“And walking in the blinding sun / to feel with sad surprise / how the whole of life and its labor / is in this following a high wall / topped with sharp shards of bottle glass”).]

29
. “Ad evidentiam itaque dicendorum sciendum est quod istius operis non est simplex sensus, ymo dici potest polisemos, hoc est plurium sensuum; nam primus sensus est qui habetur per litteram, alius est qui habetur per significata per litteram. Et primus dicitur litteralis, secundus vero allegoricus sive moralis sive anagogicus” (“For the elucidation, therefore, of what we have to say, it must be understood that the meaning of this work is not of one kind only: rather the work may be descibed 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”) (
Epistole
, XIII, 7). Dante Alighieri,
Epistole
, a cura di Arsenio Frugoni e Giorgio Brugnoli, in
Opere minori
, tomo II, Milano-Napoli, Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1979, p. 611).

30
. This and subsequent quotations from the works of Pseudo-Dionysius are from Pseudo-Dionysius 1987. On this sixth-century Greek author, sometimes referred to as Denys or Dennis, and erroneously believed to have been the magistrate of the Athenian Areopagus converted by Saint Paul (Acts, 17, 34), see Rorem 1993.

31
. To be precise it is the psalmist who says he is a worm in Psalm 22, 6, though it is possible that an allegorical interpretation might see the psalmist as a prefiguration of Christ.

32
. Thomas will comment: “Ostendit quomodo Deo [pulchrum] attribuitur.… Dicit ergo primo quod in Causa prima, scilicet Deo, non sunt dividenda pulchrum et pulchritudo.… Deinde … ostendit qualiter attribuuntur creaturis; et dicit quod in existentibus, pulchrum et pulchritudo distinguuntur secundum participans et participatum, ita quod pulchrum dicitur hoc quod participat pulchritudinem; pulchritudo autem participatio primae Causae quae omnia pulchra facit: pulchritudo enim creaturae nihil est aliud quam similitudo divinae pulchritudinis in rebus participata” (In librum beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus expositio IV, 5: 335 and 337). “He demonstrates how beauty can be attributed to God.… He says first of all that in the First Cause, i.e., in God, the beautiful and beauty are not to be separated.… He then proceeds to demonstrate how they are attributed to creaures; and he says that in existing things the beautiful and beauty are distinguished with respect to participation and participants. Thus, we call something ‘beautiful’ because it is a participant in beauty. Beauty, however, is a participation in the First Cause, which makes all things beautiful. So that the beauty of creatures is simply a likeness of the divine beauty in which things participate” (Eco 1988, p. 27).

33
. See, however, the observations of Lo Piparo (2000: 60–61) who criticizes current translations of the beginning of the
Categories
which define synonymy and homonymy as properties of things and not of names. Owens (1951) would reflect a post-Aristotelian theory of synonymy.

34
. A convincing treatment of analogy in Aristotle can still be read in Lyttkens 1952.

35
. For an examination of Thomas’s theories on analogy from the point of view of their evolution, see Marmo 1994: 305–320 (with more exhaustive references to the literature on the subject).

36
. Which is after all the situation faced by Robinson Crusoe: he sees the footprints in the sand and knows they must have been made by a human being, but he as yet has no inkling that they were left by a particular “savage” whom he will call Friday.

4

The Dog That Barked (and Other Zoosemiotic Archaeologies)

By no means soft on Scholasticism, in his
De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum
(I, 24), Francis Bacon, after reminding us that Scylla had the face and bosom of a young and beautiful woman, points out that she subsequently revealed herself (according to Virgil’s
Eclogue VI,
75) “candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris” (“with howling monsters girt about her white waist”).
¹
Whereupon Bacon goes on to comment that in the writings of the Scholastics one finds concepts appealing at first sight, but which, when you delve more deeply into their distinctions and divisions, rather than proving fertile and capable of generating benefits for human life, “in portentosas et latrantes quaestiones desinunt” (“end in monstrous altercations and barking questions”).
²

The Scholastics could never have suspected that at the beginning of the seventeenth century their exquisite
quaestiones
would be rudely defined as “barking”
(latrantes),
particularly since, in a number of those
quaestiones,
they had devoted their respectful and benevolent attention to nothing less than the barking of the dog. What did they have to say on the subject? Did they have anything new to say or did they simply repeat traditional notions handed down from the ancient world?

In myths and fables animals never quit talking, and these anthropomorphic fantasies reveal how we human beings have always been fascinated by our inscrutable fellow travelers, always at the ready with promises of troubling and illuminating revelations.

As for the philosophers and encyclopedists, a comprehensive survey would take up too much space, and the relevant bibliography is extremely vast. We will therefore confine ourselves to a particular consideration of those arguments that, among the various animals, are concerned with the dog. The comparison between the philosopher and the dog recorded (albeit tongue in cheek) by Plato (
Republic
II, 375a–376b) is well known. Well-bred dogs are gentle toward their familiars and aggressive toward strangers, and this demonstrates a happy trait in their nature: “your dog is a true philosopher, I venture to say.” The dog can tell a friendly figure from a hostile one purely on the grounds that he is familiar with the one and not the other: How can we deny a certain learning ability to a creature who is able to distinguish friends and strangers simply on the basis of knowledge or ignorance?