[A useful, short sketch of the history of allegory, especially on its connection to Platonism.]
ALLEGORY IN LITERARY HISTORY
ANGUS FLETCHER
Dictionary of the History of Ideas, U. Virginia
In the expansion of Western thought allegory has played a major part from the earliest times to the present. Allegories have taken many forms, from mere emblems like the eagle and the dove, to the simple fables of Aesop and parables of Christ, to vast poetic structures like The Divine Comedy and equally large forms like the patristic glosses and commentaries on the Bible. Essentially a means of structuring language so as to produce continuously linked series of double or multiple meanings, this symbols mode depends largely upon syncretic mixtures of symbols from which it builds up “levels of meaning,” sometimes as few as two, or as many as seven. Minimally it holds that no single literal meaning can stand alone, but that a valid utterance must possess a transcendent meaning as well, a symbolic surplus beyond the literal level. Most allegories are images of cosmic order, and their fixed, hierarchical, and timeless character becomes problematic whenever such cosmic orders are subjected to temporal analysis. The key to the permanence of allegory throughout history appears to be its ornamental surface, which allies it with changes in cosmology and decorum and gives it an exploratory as well as a traditional and conservationist function.
Terminology. Following classical tradition, the seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville called allegory an inversion of speech, alieni loquium, aliud enim sonat, aliud intelligitur, whereby, in saying one thing a person conveys or understands something else ( Etymologiae I, 47.22). Such deceptively simple formulas, which abound in the history of allegory, suggest, if nothing else, the fundamentally oblique character of this symbolic mode. When Saint Augustine speaks of “a mode of speech in which one thing is understood by another,” his very open definition is based on the assumption that some primary or literal ( ῥητη̂) level of sense may include another secondary or even more remote sense, which the trained interpreter will seek out through a process of reflection. Such secondary meanings may be imposed upon a text, or an author may clearly build them into a text, but no clear dis-
tinction separates the interpretive and creative aspects of allegory, since the two are poles in a single communicative method. The allegorical poet encodes an oblique, multiple (Dante called it a “polysemous”) meaning in his fiction, using emblems and iconographic devices, for example, the scythe of time, or the apple of discord, and the stories that go with them. The allegorical interpreter decodes this same complex message, which assumes that allegory is a structural reality within the text. Nevertheless, though allegory may exist in a text as a structure, the key to this structure is usually found in some system of values or ideas that lies outside the immediate context. “The allegorical method means the interpretation of a text in terms of something else, irrespective of what that something else is. That something else may be book learning, it may be practical wisdom, or it may be one's inner consciousness. All these are matters which depend upon external circumstances” (Wolfson, Philo, I, 134). Allegory thus not only assumes a certain stability of literal meaning, but also the legitimacy of a movement back and forth between that literal meaning and some external frame of reference. In the history of the mode both creators and interpreters have en joyed wide freedom in the w ays they have understood the internal and external dimensions of their texts, and the historian is faced with a bewildering variety of allegorical procedures. Theologians, however, have often sought to systematize the allegorical method. A plethora of traditional technical terms conveys the encyclopedic spirit of this procedure. Hardly an idea in the history of Western thought has failed to find allegorical expression, at some period or other. Major allegorists like Dante and Spenser have often summed up the world views of their time. The term “allegory” itself comes from the teachings of Greco-Roman rhetoricians, Demetrius, Cicero, Quintilian, and others, who take it to mean a series of linked metaphors, as exemplified in Horace's Ode (I, 14), in which the poet elaborates on the “ship of state,” subdividing the single main figure of speech into a series of nautical/political 042 parallels. Unlike the single metaphor, however, allegory tends to depart from the world of senseexperience, moving toward rumination. Metaphor sees, but allegory thinks, and thus often creates an effect of geometric abstraction. Allegory is furthermore highly ornamental, using elaborate symbolism and personification. Deriving from Greek allos + agoreuein (“other + speak out”), allegory implies only the most general kind of semantic doubling, and classical rhetoric draws rather uncertain lines between allegory and other figures of speech, metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and
the like. It associates allegory with notions of design, with terms like paradeigma and schema, and later critics link allegory with figura, impresa, and emblema, which point to vision, structure, and external form. By contrast the older Greek term for allegorical meaning refers us to a veiling function of language. Hyponoia (ὑπόνοια ) was the term which, Plutarch tells us ( De audiendis poetic 4.19), the “ancients” had used, and it implies a hidden meaning, a conjectural or suppositious sense, buried under the literal surface. Plato ( Republic II. 378d), Euripides ( Phoenicians 1131-33), Aristophanes ( Frogs 1425-31), Xenophon (Symposium III, 6), all use hyponoia to mean what is later subsumed under allegory (Pépin, pp. 85-86). Hy ponoia furthermore has a noetic character; the reader or listener will have to think his way through a semantic barrier, beyond which lies a realm of mystic knowledge. Thus Philo Judaeus may equate the hy ponoia of a text with its latent theme, its mystery, its secret, its unexpressed, unseen, nonliteral, or simply intelligible meaning. While theological and other exegetes stress the mysteries of allegory, and classical rhetoric stresses its semantic form, analyzing the shift from hidden to open meaning as a semantic inversion, both exegetes and rhetoricians alike possess a large store of technical synonyms, among them parabole,
typos, fabula, symbolon, ennoia, fictio, figmentum, insinuatio, significatio, similitudo, figura, imago, inter pretatio, involucrum, integumentum. Some of these terms define the “external circumstances” of allegory as a theological framework, others as philosophy, still others as rhetoric or poetics. In most of the terms obliquity and mystery are the chief emphasis. Augustine observes in his De doctrina (2.7-8) that “when something is searched for with difficulty it is, as a result, more delightfully discovered.” If an ascetic interpretive rigor is one main source of pleasure in allegory, exegetical intricacy is the vice of the mode. From a certain angle allegory is merely a mode of systematic commentary upon a text, as opposed to an unmediated, direct, or literal reading of the text, and thus exegesis must depart from its source in the text. This departure may become obsessive. Dante labels his Commedia “digressive,” while typically the medieval commentator ringed his text with marginalia. The medieval distinction between a gloss and a commentary allowed the latter to stray further from the literal sense. The interpreter often thought of himself as boring his way through a “rind” or “bark,” so as to allow the hidden symbolic truth to flow outward from the textual center. In the Middle Ages at least a text would be valued in the measure to which its lode of inner meaning appeared to defy exhaustion.
Continuities in the History of Allegory. A literary method which encourages the search for multiplicity
of sense is bound to provoke attack from rationalist quarters, a situation we observe with Plato, whose rejection of the poets from his ideal republic includes a rejection of the allegorical defense of Homeric myth. Early Greek philosophers, among them Heraclitus and Pythagoras, had found a piety toward god, nature, and man in apparently scandalous passages concerning the gods. Philosophy inverted myth, so that, for example, the jealousy of a god would “truly” represent the physical activity of a natural force. Such a means of saving Homer for morality proved both superficial and irrational in the light of Plato's dialectical analysis. For Plato this allegorical transformation of evil-minded myths did more harm than good, for it permitted the continuance of poetry in preference to the higher pursuit of philosophy. The wisdom saved thereby was, in principle, sophistry. Ironically, Plato himself provided the most substantial mechanism and authority for the persistence of Western allegory. The Platonic theory of ideas has two aspects which lead to allegorical interpretations of both signs and things, provided the overarching authority of dialectic is allowed to fade from sight. In the first place the ideas may be taken to constitute the formulas, if not exactly the forms, by which the allegorist's “something” is interpreted as “something else.” If the snake is an emblem of jealousy, then it is the idea jealousy that organizes the “coaptation” of the snake for this symbolic purpose. To speak of “the idea of a thing” is almost to invoke the allegorical process, for the idea transcends the thing, much as the allegorist's fiction departs from the literal sense of an utterance. Yet this is not the strongest Platonic support for allegory, powerful though it is. More important is the Platonic arrangement of the theory of ideas as a vast hierarchical construct, from lower to higher forms. By adopting the “principle of plenitude,” the notion that an intelligible world would possess all possible forms of all possible things—as the effluence of the One—Plato answered the allegorist's 043 encyclopedic demand for a plenitude of “somethings” by which to symbolize his “anythings.” Plenitude also implied an infinitely subdivided universe, while it led to an otherworldly tendency within the whole approach to life, such that a Platonizing allegorist would always be happy to think of X in terms of Y, since this would achieve transcendency beyond the bonds of mere material reference. By questioning the essential value of material nature, the Platonic dialectic opens the way to a spiritualizing of nature, and in the case of Plato himself this leads to the use of allegory precisely at the moment in his dialogues when the analysis of nature has reached the highest point of transcendence describable in natural, human terms. At that point
a leap of iconographic faith takes place, as in the vision of love Diotima gives Socrates, when the realistic and human drama of the Symposium gives way to a “conceptual myth,” a spiritual diagram of a love which cannot be represented “in terms of” ordinary human experience. The Platonic use of allegory, itself allegorized in the Myth of the Cave, reaches a climax in the Timaeus. There, since the universe is not explicable in purely natural terms, its ideal character is permitted to surge up in a fanciful, visionary theory of cosmic order. The Platonic example may be archetypal for the history of allegory, in that his attack upon Homeric allegorizing is not as general or consistent as at first it seems. He is perhaps open to the charge that he is attacking any allegory which differs in its frame of reference from his own. Throughout the complex development of Hebraic-Christian exegesis such private invectives are common. The Christian exegetes attack their pagan counterparts, and then proceed to employ the rejected hermeneutic method. At the same time, while rejection and resistance to allegory occur periodically within and between contending schools of thought, the method can survive attack largely because its principle of semantic inversion enables the allegorist to shift his ground freely whenever an opponent questions him. Since in the theological context of most serious ancient allegory there is scarcely room for a scientific theory of language, since, in short, language is here a means of revelation, there seems to have been no way for the allegorist to gain perspective on his own activity. By the second century A.D., as a treatise like Plutarch's Of Isis and Osiris will show, a multiplicity of Mediterranean religions had grown up, yielding an unrestrained exchange of figures between variant faiths, each one providing the materials for iconography within the framework of some other faith. In spite of the intricacy of much exegesis the mode generally depends for its force upon the belief that words have magical power, a belief that is evident in the influential treatises of Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Celestial Hierarchy and On the Divine Names. Plotinus had already systematized the hierarchical aspect of the Platonic ideas, giving to each hypostasis of the One a particular magical quantum of effluence and influence. Within such frameworks allegory can play a double role. In its Neo-Platonic aspect it looks “upward” to a transcendental plane of purer Being, but at the same time it retains the primitivist drive of a language system in which every term has its own share of magical force. By the same token most allegorical fictions are romantic myths, in which the characters make full use of magical weapons, vehicles, settings, and quests. The history of allegory is, strictly speaking, not the history of rival theologies and philosophies. The
logic of allegory is only remotely rationalistic. Instead, we observe a struggle of magic-thinking to survive within a climate of ever-increasing intellectual and semantic sophistication. This is the more curious in the light of the allegorist's frequent pretense of being logical and rational. The pretense covers the true situation, which is that allegories are strict in the manner of magic rituals, substituting mechanical for rational rigor.
Allegorical Syncretism. The creation and interpretation of allegorical texts seems to depend on an acceptance of syncretism, the kind of colloidal mixture of religious, philosophical, and cultural beliefs which particularly marks the Hellenistic Age, the second century A.D., and the High Renaissance, although in the Renaissance syncretism is strongly aesthetic in its combination of elements. Syncretism may be iconographically distinguished from synthesis, insofar as the former preserves the individual traits of the combining beliefs, whereas the latter would achieve a radical transformation of disparate cultural forces, until a single set among them came to dominate and control the assimilation of other sets as minor premisses in the logic of the culture as a whole. Syncretism is the cult of diversity within a culture yearning for unified order. It is often to be associated with gnostic spirituality, since the experience of gnosis includes a transcendence of the multiplicity of faiths by entertaining all their claims on an equal footing. Thus Gnosticism finds its sources in Greek Orphism, Pythagoreanism, Mazdean dualism, Jewish apocalyptic, Egyptian mysteryreligions, Hellenistic astrological cult, and various kinds of numerology, “along with the crass 'spirituality' of mediums, quacks, and religious adventurers” (Grant, Roman Hellenism, p. 74). The early centuries of Christian expansion spanned a period of syncretism in the Mediterranean world, a fact not without its bearing on the development of 044 Christian exegesis. The Alexandrian School, most notably Clement and Origen, who anticipated the visions of the fourth-century fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa, introduced key notions from Greek philosophy, which was given authority for them by the syncretism of Philo, who, although a Jew, stands at the head of this tradition. The broadly allegorical structure of Augustine's two cities, of God and Man, may owe something to his own syncretic background. In such a climate the religious convert may bring remnants of his former faith with him into the new faith. Syncretism has this great advantage for the allegorist: it gathers in, rather than expels; but at the same time it preserves the sense of diverse origins and intellectual styles.
A similar, if theologically less complicated syncretism surrounds the artist, poet, and scientist during the Renaissance. The “survival of the pagan gods” can occur then, as during the Middle Ages, because while their pagan attributes are assimilated by allegory to moral and mystical frameworks, all of which are guided by Christian principle, their identities as pagan gods are still preserved in ornamental forms within the work of art. This “neo-paganism,” as we may call it, had arisen early in the West and its legacy remains alive even during the Middle Ages, although only when the Renaissance saw a fresh sense of freedom within the domain of vision and imagination could the cult of diversity be permitted to express itself in designs of universal harmony. There is thus no conflict in the fact that Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, bases an important episode and much of the detail of his Fifth Book on “Egyptian” lore, coming from Plutarch, Of Isis and Osiris, and Lucian, De Syria dea, while allegorically the poet ties these materials to the legend of Saint George of England, the Arthurian Legend, fairy lore, and so on, weaving the whole structure with fine traces of Hermetic philosophy, number symbolism, and the cosmology of Giordano Bruno. Such combinations sus pend their elements in a sort of mosaic. On the surface such iconographies are richly textured and decorated. Piety may be the chief source of syncretic abundance. The allegorist does not wish to lose any of the materials present to his mind. This is clear in the case of both Homeric and biblical allegory. A range of motives may contribute to such systematic “accommodation.” Piety begins with the mystery of the word itself, spoken in fine verses or written down in magical alphabetic characters. Ancient allegory also displays a reverence for age, naturally enough, since men obeyed inherited social, political, and religious forms of authority. Finally, piety includes the widely held belief that poets, prophets, lawmakers, priests, and philosophers—wise men, in short—enjoyed their wis dom because they were divinely inspired. Inspiration in particular could account for the jumble of disparate pieces that, over time, found its way into a sacred canon. The inspired and mystical meaning was proved rather than disproved by the appearance of arbitrary inclusion. The more erotic the Song of Songs, the better its candidacy for allegorical interpretation as a myth of hierogamy between divine and human partners. Once the alien document is compressed into the overall vision, its message, assumed to be an inspired revelation, takes on a transcendental character, and allegory must follow. To piety as the conservative force of syncretism may be added its debased form, superstition. A higher motive, which is harder to define, is the conciliatory and accommodating desire to permit a diverse world of many faces and characters. This motive comes into play when rival world views meet in conflict at their borders, when the opposite impulse would, as with icono-
clasm, seek to destroy the rival iconography. Allegory here becomes a diplomatic medium of thought. PseudoHeraclitus, for example, tries to balance different interests in his Homeric Problems (first century A.D.). He claims that Homer's Apollo represents the sun, in a physical allegory of the origins of the plague in the Iliad, while his concern is with cosmogony in reading Iliad XVIII, where the Shield of Achilles becomes for him a vast cosmological symbol. Yet with these materialist readings he aligns others of a different sort, as when he moralizes Athena to mean wisdom, or Hermes to mean eloquence and reason. Finally, his overall syncretism stretches to include a quasi-historical allegory, by which the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite represents the mythic origin of metalworking, while the ejection of Hephaistos from heaven stands for the physical discovery that heat can be focussed by mirrors, to create fire. The immediate aim of these varied interpretations is the defense of Homer against his moralizing detractors, but beyond this, and perhaps more deeply felt, is the exegete's desire to use Homer as the encyclopedic container for a wide and disparate variety of intellectual disciplines. Philosophy ceases to be the framework for Homer; Homer becomes the framework for philosophy. Homer has attained the canonical status of a sacred literary body. The bolder allegorical syncretisms arise when the elements to be contained by the allegory are historically accidental inclusions within an inherited literary corpus. The problem is clearest with the Old Testament. Origen, who believes in the mysterious revelations of Scripture, is aware how absurd it is to believe, literally, that God planted a garden like a farmer, or that He walked about in the garden. With the New Testament Origen recognized the patently implausible 045 character of the story that the Devil could show the kingdoms of the earth from a single mountain top. “And the careful reader will detect thousands of other passages in the gospels like this, which will convince him that events which did not take place at all are woven into the records of what literally did happen” ( De principiis IV.3.1). The allegorist therefore proposes to supplant the literal inconsistency by a spiritual equivalent possessed of inner truth, precisely, in short, what had been veiled by the inconsistent literal surface. Believing that “the skillful plan of [God] the providential ruler is not so clear in things on earth as it is in regard to the sun and moon and stars,” Origen asserts the revelatory function of language when dealing with sacred literature. Origen is influenced by Philo Judaeus, through the intermediary Clement of Alexandria, and this Alexandrian tradition, which would show parallels in the development of Hellenistic allegory, suggests that
major allegory requires a belief in miracles and epiphenomena, at least on a verbal level. Origen notes that it is “the most wonderful thing” that spiritual truths could be veiled under “stories of wars and conquerors and the conquered,” and he notes that “the Word of God has arranged for certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and hindrances and impossibilities to be inserted in the midst of the law and the history.” Such barriers are providential—the more strange they seem, the more they goad the reader to “learn from the Scriptures.” Like many allegorists, Origen can suddenly undercut his own appearance of caprice. He holds that the historically true passages are “far more numerous than those which are composed with purely spiritual meanings.” Yet whenever a historical scandal appears, he can, if he chooses, fall back on a spiritual interpretation. For this reason his method has appeared to one of his close students “unchartably subjective.... Whatever Origen's theory of allegory may have been, it is quite inaccurate to call his application of its systematic” (Hanson, p. 245). Now, if allegory is expected to have what Hanson calls “rules,” it seems clear that Origen and all other major allegorists are “unchartably subjective.” But then, so is syncretism in general, and for that reason, in describing his own work, Dante used his term “polysemous,” or ambiguous. Yet another approach will demand both more and less from allegorical syncretism and will perhaps justify its endless prolixity. This approach is to be found in the Origenist and Philonic belief in the mystery of the Word. Prophecy assumes that the prophet not only sees the vision of the truth, but can “speak out” for this vision, sharing in the divine Logos. Philo may allegorize any portion of the Old Testament, any single image or word, any story, any disparity or contra dictory episode. But he does not do this in a spirit of negative or defensive reaction, but rather as the expression of an intellectual or speculative freedom. This mode employs philosophic methods, but Philo is perhaps less a philosopher than a prophet of philosophy. Thus he may go beyond the Platonic use of the Ideas as the forms, or paradigms, of things in the universe, and can hold that the Logos is everywhere immanent in the cosmos—“the totality of the powers of God existing within the cosmos itself” (Wolfson, Philo, p. 327). This Logos, unlike the Stoics' material logos, is immaterial, and on that basis can lead to allegories judged “unchartably subjective” from the perspective of natural and human history. Phrased differently, the Philonic use of an immanent logos directs hermeneutic towards mystery, which is buried within the Word, whereas the Stoic logos directs it away from mystery towards reason. Yet Philo and the allegorical tradition stemming from him may not be identified with the via negativa of the mystics, since rather than draw his cosmological interpretations into such a spiritualism of the Logos that they reach evanescence, in a cloud of unknowing, he draws them toward an infinitely ramified, but consistently word-centered universe of
discourse. What saves his allegory from irrationality is its recognition that “rationality, when conceived as complete, as excluding all arbitrariness, becomes itself a kind of irrationality” (Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, p. 331). Philo is continuously interested in the verbal, linguistic aspect of the Word. He shares the almost immemorial use of exegetical etymologizing, which is finally canonized in the encyclopedic Etymologiae of Saint Isidore. If we broaden the Philonic approach to include images and figures of speech as well as the literal or referential materials of language, we may speak of the “logology” of poets and artists as well as of theologians and philosophers (Burke, Rhetoric of Religion ). The underlying wisdom of the Philonic strain of allegory is its stress on the freedom of the interpreting mind, on what a seventeenth-century divine called “the liberty of prophesying.” Its vice is ingenuity, but its virtue is the corresponding one of a compulsion to investigate and comment upon the Word and its progeny, words. The noblest document composed with such allegory in mind is the Fourth Gospel. Common to all such Logos-centered allegories is the belief that words contain wisdom, and the form in which we inherit words from the past is itself not without reason, if we can only discover the inner web of motives that led to the slow formation of that legacy. It is often said that allegory, outside the specifically historical mode known as typology, is antihistorical. When morality and ethics are the reference-point, this is true enough. 046 But because words are an essential mechanism of human thought, their recorded forms of combination and formation are primary resources of the historian, and the allegorist's accommodative impulse includes a desire to preserve these resources, rather than see them destroyed by advances or regressions of a cultural set. When the ancient gloss identifies Zeus as “life,” because his name coincides with the Greek word for life, an element of history enters the interpretation through what may be a false etymology. Such equations hold that the universe is coherent when read as a logos.
Allegory and the Cosmos. The history of allegory is tuned to the history of cosmological speculation, so much so that allegory might be defined as figurative cosmology. Each such fiction presents the image of a universe (and this is true even of short works), or implies that its details fit into a cosmic picture. Yet this imagery is not identical with the scientist's use of theoretical models. The allegorist does not prove and disprove hypotheses which are then dropped if they fail to hold up as fact. Allegory does not move toward the certainty of fact; it moves toward tenacity of belief. Analogy serves the allegorist, as it serves the cosmologist, but here the test of the figurative schema is not
its yield of experiment or observation, but its fertility in leading to still further figuration. The allegorist treats his universe as if its being were literal, as if it were a book. Thus there arises the tradition of “book as symbol,” in which Homer and the Bible hold the first place. Such works are simply large enough to contain a world of words. In them the cult of the One gives way to a cult of the Universe. As distinct from the Hellenic, a somewhat less physical notion of cosmos governs the Hebraic-Christian tradition. Here, from the encyclopedic resources of the Old Testament come theories of the Law as the form of the universe. Philo found the Law “complete and true and good,” and in this total system “anything that seemed to be lacking in it was really hidden behind the literalness of the words and it was the task of the student to search it out” (Wolfson, Church Fathers, p. 25). Not necessarily the truth or the goodness of the Torah led to its exegetical treatment, but rather its assumed completeness. For Christians this unity carried over into the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy by events recounted in the New. The structure of the Bible as it finally evolved into the canonical Books, bounded by Genesis and the Apocalypse, implies the cosmic analogy on which its Logos is ordered. Syncretism in ancient Mediterranean religious life raised the question of universal order, while the influence of Alexander also led in this direction. The monolithic pretensions of Augustan Rome may likewise have influenced the strongly allegorical cast of Vergi lian and Ovidian poetry, so different from Homer. But it was not until the Middle Ages that the drive toward universal containment and encirclement led to the complete dominance of allegorical methods. From the eleventh century onwards influences from PseudoDionysius, Plato, and Plotinus give exegetes a secure sense of philosophic direction. The Timaeus and the Celestial Hierarchy provide terms and images. But in all areas of life this period shows universalist pretensions, which Maurice de Wulf characterized simply as “a tendency toward unity.” Political dreams of a universal brotherhood, intellectual dreams of a totally organized body of knowledge, theological dreams of a total theological summa—these were the natural background for allegorical literature. Bernard of Clairvaux finds infinite detail in a closed world, by imagining four infinitely reflexive “mirrors” of knowledge—the natural, intellectual, moral, and historical. Dante's Commendia, whose form and setting rival the universe, finds a parallel in his De monarchia, a theory of political unification. By symmetry the actual physical universe is converted into a symbol, and we can speak of a “symbolic mentality” which denied the more immediate puzzles presented by the senses. The flight from the limited toward the infinity of the Divine Being kept its balance only, if at all, by asserting that man's world was closed and finite. Ockham's principle of parsimony was invented, it seems, to stem this icon-
ographic tide, since scholastic thought, at first rationalizing, ends by absorbing the medieval compulsion to turn relations into icons. In a sense allegory thrives even more abundantly during the Renaissance, because the new cosmology does not at once drive out the old, so that visionary and scientific cosmologies coexist, their very difference enriching the imagery of poets and theologians. The main development of the mode is the gradual rejection of the theory of “levels” of meaning. Most allegorists have in fact used two levels, whatever they may have claimed to do. They take a sentence and give it a double meaning. At its simplest this process will be seen in the parables of Christ. Clement of Alexandria, however, distinguished four levels on which he could read a sacred text, a literal level and three subsidiary symbolic stages, the moral, physical, and theological. Origen held that as man is made of body, soul, and spirit, so interpretation must yield three levels of meaning, the literal, moral, and spiritual. Jerome invoked the literal, tropological, and mystical. Augustine held that all readings of Scripture, however structured, should express charity, yet he too could speak of a hierarchy of levels, for instance, historical, aetiological, analogical, and allegorical ( De utilitate credendi, 3.5). What became the classical formulation of Christian 047 method, the fourfold theory, appeared in Saint John Cassian, who set forth a system of historical (literal), tropological (moral), allegorical, and anagogical. This theory is encapsulated in the mnemonic distich, first cited in 1330, by Augustin de Dacie:
Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, Moralia quid agas, quo tendas anagogica. The effect of such planar theories of reading is that allegory becomes more mechanical in theory than it can or need ever be in practice. What was once available only to the instructed interpreter is now the common property of the experiencing subject. It is an error, however, to believe that romantic “symbolism” destroys allegory, although it loosens and reorders the “levels” on which texts are made and read. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is as much an allegory as the Psychomachia of Prudentius (348-?410). Where the mode radically declines in force is not as a creative method, but in the interpretive divisions of theology, where the new criticism of the Bible, with its scientific research into textual evolution, raises questions about the literary level which are so searching that the dependent symbolic levels pale in theological importance.
Allegory and Time. “Rationality has nothing to do with dates.” Thus Lovejoy epitomized the static and “absolutely rigid” form of the Great Chain of Being
as it had set up the framework of traditional allegory. The stasis of hierarchy is mirrored in the markedly static character of most allegorical fictions, be they stories, dramas, lyrics, or whatever. Allegorical narrative yields a fixated image of change, in which time is synchronic, never diachronic. Augustine imagines human destiny in the shape of a city, following the Book of Revelation. Joachim of Floris diagrams history as an allegorical tree with stems and branches. Time becomes a hypostatized form of becoming. Two aspects of the mode are thus historically problematic. (1) The Hebraic-Christian belief in prophecy asserts that historical figures may prefigure other historical figures, Joshua becoming the “type” of Jesus. Scholars have held that the historicity of the figurae radically differentiates them from allegorical emblems, such as the anchor of faith. Yet the typological figure is under constant pressure to revert to a timeless symbol, since typology in fact is collapsing the diachronic time-span and stopping the fluent openness of time by envisioning miraculous kairoi, or prophetic moments when time “stands still.” (2) Modern science attacks the fixation of allegory in yet another quarter, and here perhaps there exists a possibility of a radical change in the allegorical method. During and after the Renaissance new methods arise for the analysis and explora tion of the origins of things, along with their progressive development away from those origins. The text of the Bible is one such object of study, but the physical universe and the historical world of men are more crucial. In the Monads of Bruno and Leibniz the Great Chain of Being is “temporalized,” as the closed world of Ptolemy, so useful to the poet's need for a cosmos, gives way to an infinite universe. Even more upsetting is the discovery of anthropological development. With the Renaissance a somewhat aesthetic cult of Euhemerus arises, finding human origins for the gods, who are regarded as divinized heroes. Such beliefs lead, along with new historical and archeological knowledge, to new theories of human evolution, beginning with primitive forms and advancing to more complex societies. After Vico it is no longer possible for mythology or iconography to divorce itself from temporal change. First the philosophes of the Enlightenment debunk the allegorizing of the gods and daemons, then the ground shifts under all forms of imagination, so that developmental myths take over from the former static world view. The “new allegorism” tends to be more monolithic than the old, permitting a single theory of change, whatever it may be, to explain various possible modes of change.
Allegory and Decorum. While a large view may portend the general undermining of allegory in the modern period, the close-up analysis of allegory makes this appear an unlikely development. Allegories are, as a symbolic mode, composed of ornaments—not,
strictly speaking, metaphors. Thus, the Greek term for the larger outlines of a major allegory would be kosmos, while in classical Greek the same term does double duty for the rhetorician's “ornament.” The same double usage appears in Latin decus, which grows into the English terms “decoration” and “decorum.” Allegory expresses the interplay of little and great worlds, which are ornamentally reflecting surfaces of microcosm and macrocosm. There is no reason to suppose that men will cease to decorate themselves or fail to recognize decorum. But modes of ornament continuously change. Conceivably the present world, with its increased standardization of artifacts and its diminishing barriers to travel, will see the speeding-up of allegorical processes. Whether revolutions undermine or reorder cosmologies has become the allegorist's chief problem. Allegory can no longer be what for centuries it had tried to be, the image of permanence in a world of flux. Franz Kafka is perhaps the greatest allegorical writer of modern times, and his work revels in cloudy interactions between wierdly undefined characters. Yet Kafka looks at this obscure scene with microscopic delicacy. He bases his fictions largely upon “the Law,” on which, 048 following the ancient Jewish tradition, he meditates and builds a vision of man's destiny as a creature caught up in a closed, imprisoning world. Generally speaking, modern allegory shows sings of breaking down many of the normal divisions between things, either by use of dream-mechanisms or by other surrealistic devices. The mode is creatively perhaps most alive in science-fiction, but it permeates the art of advertising, wherever decoration and decorum are the primary commercial interests. Philosophically and theologically there is less place for allegory than in earlier centuries, but one can discern traces of it in the subjectivism of the phenomenologist's concept of transcendence, and in the actual use of fiction by existentialist authors (for example, the novels of Camus, or earlier, the quasi-fictional treatises of Kierkegaard). As in previous times, the allegorist can today use many different media, including music (with “programs” and leitmotifs) and the visual arts (with emblems and icons).
BIBLIOGRAPHY General discussions: Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (Boston, 1961); Jean Daniélou, Sacramentum futuri: études sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris, 1950); Angus Fletcher , Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, 1964); Northrop Frye, “Allegory,” Dictionary of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, 1967); R. P. C. Hanson, Alle-
gory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance
of Origen's Interpretation of Scripture (London, 1959); Roger Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art (London, 1939); Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l'écriture, Parts I and II (Paris, 1959-64); Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939); Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: les origines grecques et les contestations judéochrétiennes (Paris, 1958); Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (Princeton, 1968); H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Vol. I: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Cambridge, Mass., 1956); idem, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1947). More specialized treatments: Erich Auerbach, “Figura,”
Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York, 1959); Edgar de Bruyne, Études d'esthétique médiévale (Bruges, 1946); Rudolf Bultmann et al., Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate (New York, 1961), translated from the German, Kerygma und Mythos, Vol. I; Manfred Bukofzer, “Allegory in Baroque Music,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 3 (1939-40); M. L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven, 1968); C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge, 1953); E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge, 1968); Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: the Making of St. John's Apocalypse (London, 1949); Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948); F. C. Grant, Roman Hellenism and the New Testament (New York, 1962); Adolf Katzellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art (London, 1939); G. B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: a Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936); Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); René Roques, L'Univers dionysien: Structure hiérarchique du monde selon le Pseudo Denys (Paris, 1954); Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: the Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (New York, 1953); C. S. Singleton, “Allegory,” Essays on Dante, ed. Mark Musa (Bloomington, 1964); Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore, 1963); Maurice de Wulf, Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1913); Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958). On literary conventions: Harry Berger, Jr., The Allegorical Temper (New Haven, 1957); Ernst Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. Trask (New York, 1953); Edmond Faral, Les Arts poétiques du XII et du XIII siècle (Paris, 1924); Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: the Making of Allegory (Evanston, 1959); C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936); E. D. Leyburn, Satiric Allegory: the Mirror of Man (New Haven, 1956); Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago, 1969).
A crucial, but very recent, publication is D. C. Allen,
Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1970).
