From the Tree to the Labyrinth

3

From Metaphor to Analogia Entis

3.1. Poetics and Rhetoric

In Chapter 2 we saw how the notion of the cognitive value of metaphor, as outlined in Aristotle, was without influence on the thought of the Latin Middle Ages. Our next step will be to see whether and how a notion of metaphor not directly related to Aristotle’s definitions developed in medieval circles.

Ideas concerning the figurae elocutionis reach the Middle Ages from classical rhetoric, especially from the rhetorical works of Cicero, from the Rhetorica ad Herennium (formerly attributed to Cicero), and from Quintilian, as well as via Latin grammarians like Donatus and Priscian. To what extent Aristotle’s notions become transformed as they are handed on by these authors is fairly evident from the divisions of metaphor proposed by Quintilian (Institutio VIII, 6). Whereas, for the Aristotle of the Poetics (1457b), metaphor meant the transferral of the name appropriate to one thing to another thing, Quintilian too (Institutio oratoria 8, 6, 1) speaks of “verbi vel sermonis a propria significatione in aliam cum virtute mutatio” (“a shift of a word or phrase from its proper meaning to another, in a way that has positive value”), in such a way that not only is the form of the words changed, “sed et sensuum et compositionis” (“but also the forms of sentences and of composition”). But Aristotle distinguished metaphors based on transferral from genus to species, species to genus, species to species or by analogy, while Quintilian, though he speaks of comparison (as in this man is a lion, which is an abbreviated simile), considers comparisons or substitutions between animate genera (steersman for charioteer), between animate and inanimate (he gave the fleet more rein), inanimate and animate (the wall of the Argives, for the resistance they oppose), and the attribution of animation to something inanimate (the river Araxes, who spurns bridges). The four modes are further divided into subspecies that contemplate changes from rational to rational, irrational to rational, rational to irrational, irrational to irrational, from the whole to the parts and vice versa.

What remains Aristotelian in Quintilian is the notion that the metaphor, in addition to being an ornament (as it is when we speak of lumen orationis or of generis claritas), may also be an instrument of knowledge, when it finds a name, and therefore some semblance of a definition, for something that otherwise would not have one—when farmers, for instance, speak of the buds of the vine as gems or of crops as thirsty. But it cannot be said that Quintilian insists further on this function, which, more than cognitive, might be called “lexically substitutive,” since it serves to make up for penuria nominum or the scarcity of names for things.

Another suggestion came from Donatus (fourth century), in whom Quintilian’s scheme was taken up with a hint of semic analysis: in fact metaphor is spoken of as a translatio from animate to animate, inanimate to inanimate, animate to inanimate, inanimate to animate, with all the appropriate examples.¹

There follows the definition of all of the other tropes, and it is interesting to point out that for allegory and enigma Donatus bases himself on an implicit criterion accepted throughout the Middle Ages and still valid for modern rhetoric. Taken at face value, a metaphor may appear to be absurd (semantically unacceptable), and we must therefore assume (today we would say by implicature) that we are dealing with a figurative usage. On the other hand, we have allegory when the letter of the text is meaningful but we must infer a secondary sense on the basis of certain contextual clues (as Augustine teaches, but we will get to that later). Donatus gives the example of Virgil’s “et iam tempus equum fumantia soluere colla” (“and now it is time to unyoke the necks of our smoking steeds” [Georgics II, 542]), to say that it is time to end the poem, and, though this may strike us as a valid metaphor, Donatus is right to point out that it does not seem unreasonable for someone to want to remove the horses’ harnesses (though odd in that particular context), and that therefore this is an example of allegory and not of metaphor. The same criterion holds true for enigma.²

Nevertheless, in these definitions of Donatus it is not specified to what extent obscurity is a vehicle of knowledge. Finally, we find something in Donatus that recalls Aristotle’s eikon, that is, the simile: “Icon est personarum inter se vel eorum quae personis accidunt comparatio, ut ‘os humerosque deo similis” (“Icon [or simile] is the comparison between persons or between the properties that belong to them, such as ‘godlike in face and shoulders’ ”) (Ars maior III, 6, ed. Holtz, p. 673).³

Among early medieval definitions, the following is taken from the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville (I, 37. 2): “metaphora est verbi alicujus usurpata translatio, sicut dicimus ‘fluctuare segetes,’ ‘gemmare vites’ ” (“metaphor is an adopted transference of some word, as when we say ‘cornfields ripple’ or ‘the vines put forth gems’), which is clearly derived from Cicero and Quintilian, from the second of whom Isidore borrows the distinction of the passage from animate to animate, animate to inanimate, and so on. There is no hint that these substitutions have a cognitive function, indeed “things are transferred very elegantly from one kind to another for the sake of beauty, so that the speech may be greatly adorned” (I, 37, 5).

Isidore is among those, and there are some among the moderns, who—while they are prepared to accept a metaphor like fluctuare segetes—consider its opposite, segetare fluctus inacceptable,⁴ as if its unprecedented boldness were an offence to metaphorical common sense, while they find the interchange of a bird’s wings and a ship’s oars reciprocal, precisely because both are said: “alae navium et alarum remigium dicuntur” (ibid., my emphasis). A good metaphor, then, is something that “is [already] said.” It appears, then, that there is little room left for uncodified daring, which evidently “non dicitur …”(“is not said”).

Donatus’s definitions are found almost verbatim in the De schematibus et tropis of the Venerable Bede, and from there they are handed on with minimal variations to a number of later medieval texts. Compared to Donatus, what changes, if anything, are the citations and the comments on them.⁵

It is never made explicit whether the trope is witty because of its difficulty, though it is implied that it should be clarified by the reading of the text’s interpreter. The tradition will tend to privilege readily comprehensible tropes over obscure and ingenious ones.

An invitation to moderation could already be found in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (IV, 45): Translationem pudentem dicunt esse oportere, ut cum ratione in consimilem rem transeat, ne sine dilectu temere et cupide videatur in dissimilem transcurrisse” (“They say that a metaphor ought to be restrained, so as to be a transition with good reason to a kindred thing, and not seem an indiscriminate, reckless and precipitate leap to an unlike thing”).⁶ Alcuin (De rhet., in Halm 1863: 37) reminds us that we must learn the good things that past authors have done, and when one has become accustomed to their manner of speaking, one will inevitably speak in an ornate style.

Alcuin affirms that the function of good metaphors is to make clearer something that could not be said in any other words, though exaggerations are to be avoided. Literary education, at least as organized from the Schola Palatina on, is based on imitation of the ancients, and the metaphorical arsenal too must stick to tried and true models. The examples given are the canonical ones (gemmare vites, luxuriari messem, fluctuare segetes), and the question of how far one may experiment with overbold metaphors is answered with an appeal to moderation, and a provocative metaphor such as the term of abuse stercus curiae (“the droppings of the curia or court”) is consequently rejected.⁷

Centuries later, a refined proto-humanist like John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon will inform us that grammar provides the tropes, but “solis eruditissimis patet usus eorum: unde et lex eorum arctior est, qua non permittuntur longius evagari. Regulariter enim proditum est, quia figures extendere non licet” (I, 19) (“The employment of tropes, just as the use of schemata, is the exclusive privilege of the very learned. The rules governing tropes are also very strict, so that the latitude in which they may be used is definitely limited. For the rules teach that we may not extend figures”) (I, 19).⁸

He will cite Quintilian reminding us that “virtus enim sermonis optima est perspicuitas et facilitas intelligendi” (“what is desirable first and foremost in language is lucid clarity and easy comprehensibility”) and he will say that tropes are motivated by necessity or ornament.

Again, it is John (Metalogicon III, 8) who, while he praises metaphors which highlight what we would call the physical resemblance between two things, condemns expressions like “the law is the measure (or image) of things that are just by their very nature” because in the concept of law there is nothing that resembles either measure or image (in point of fact he takes the example from Topics VI, 2, 140, 7 et seq.).

Does this perhaps mean that medieval poets were incapable of inventing unprecedented metaphors? Naturally, the whole history of medieval poetry is there to affirm the opposite, and we still find Dante’s “aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci” (“the garden plot that makes us so aggressive,” Pd 22, 151) or “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse” (“Galahad was the book and whoever wrote it,” Inf 5, 137) admirable in their boldness. And that is not all: much of medieval poetry and prose frequently succumbed to the fascination of enigmatic expression. We have only to think of the so-called Hisperica Famina (cf. De Bruyne 1946: 1:4, and Herren 1974), or of the Epitomae of that bizarre seventh-century rhetorician Virgil of Bigorre (cf. Polara 1979), not to mention the hermetic trobar clus of the Provençal poets.

Nevertheless, it seems that the very authors who show their appreciation for enigmas and obscurity by composing such texts or quoting them admiringly are far more circumspect when it comes to theory. Virgil of Bigorre, for instance, says that there are poetic compositions which aspire to wit and whimsy, which he calls leporia (calling to mind Aristotle’s asteia), but he reminds us that in so doing poetry is distinct from rhetoric because it is cramped and obscure (“angusta atque oscura,” Epitomae IV, 6). The word-polishers (“tornores logi,” IV, 7), are therefore to be condemned; the leporia displays a certain mordacitas but does not always escape mendacity. Can we say “sol in occasu metitur maria,” when no created thing, not even the setting sun, can plumb (metiri) the depths of the seas? Better to say “sol in occasu tinguit mare.” Can we say “ventus e terra roborum radices evellit altas” (IV, 8), when we know that the wind only makes oaks quake and does not tear them up by their roots? We might say that for Virgil inventing neologisms, coming up with outlandish etymologies, and composing riddles in cipher was all in a day’s work, but when it came to metaphors you had to watch where you were headed.

Among the Provençal poets (cf. De Bruyne 1946: 2:332), Allégret warns us that his verse will seem incomprehensible to fools, and Bernart de Venzac promises veridical words that will be a source of perturbation for the wise and scandal for the foolish, unless they accept a double reading. Guiraut de Borneill, however, while defending on the one hand the obscure style (“I will seek and lead by the reins fair words burdened with a meaning at once strange and natural that not everyone will discover”), on the other hand opts for the trobar plan or leu chanso over the trobar clus, and recognizes that it makes more sense to write intelligibly than to tangle up the words (“Qu’eu cut c’atretan grans sens / es, qui sap razo gardar, / com los motz entrebeschar” [“I think that it’s just as much good sense / if one can keep to the point, / as to twist my words around each other”]).

It is true that, in the various discussions of the lofty style, the perplexity that must be aroused in the mind of the reader, in such a way that the diversity of the examples may dispel boredom, is often praised and “tamquam cibum aurium, invitet auditorem” (“like food for the ears, invite your listeners”) (Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi Faral: 272);⁹ usually, however, the examples do not concern difficult metaphors, but amplifications and descriptions that produce hypotyposis, as when, to say that travelers go on board ship and prepare for the voyage, the writer is advised to compose eight lines describing the action and making it vivid.

In other words, we seem to be witnessing a gap between poetic practice and rhetorical theorization. It appears, from the theoretical point of view, that straightforward, immediately comprehensible metaphors, preferably already codified, are to be preferred.

Geoffrey of Vinsauf (Poetria nova, 1705–1708) will affirm that there are three ways to develop one’s style: through the art whose rules one follows, through custom to which one conforms, and through the imitation of models. John of Salisbury (Metalogicon I, 24) tells us how Bernard of Chartres conducted his classes: he pointed out what was simple and in conformity with the rules, he demonstrated the grammatical figures, the rhetorical colors and the subtleties of argumentation and, to teach the splendor orationis (“splendor of discourse”), he demonstrated the marvels of translatio (in other words, metaphor) “ubi sermo ex causa probabili ad alienum traducitur significationem” (“whereby speech is transferred to some alien meaning for a most likely cause”). The student who did not observe his strictures was educated “flagellis et poenis.” (“with whipping and punishments”). But he did not punish plagiary, though he pointed it out—as if to say that theft was preferable to having an overbold metaphor betray the causa probabilis, or the affinities acceptable between metaphorizer and metaphorized.

Be that as it may, in the classical rules for distinguishing the lofty style, the mediocre and temperate, the vicious or extenuated, the bucolic or pastoral and humble, the georgic and mediocre, and the epic or sublime or grand styles—from the Rhetorica ad Herennium to the Schola Vindobonensia ad Horatii Artem poeticam (probably dating from the eleventh century) to the De ornamentis verborum of Marbode of Rennes, down to the artes poeticae of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland)—the examples of the words to be preferred are always canonical: lychnos is preferable to lucerna; in referring to Karolus, it belongs to the lofty style to say that he is “Ecclesiae clypeus et pacis columna” (“the shield of the Church and a column of peace”), but vicious to say he is “clava pacis” (“the cudgel of peace”); it is temperate or mediocre to say he is “Ecclesiae custos” (“the guardian of the Church”) and vicious that he is “militiae baculus” (“the staff of the military”); it is humble to say “In tergo clavem pastor portat, ferit inde—presbyterum, cum quo ludere sponsa solet” (“the shepherd carries a club on his shoulder, then he strikes the priest with it, who is wont to sport with his wife”), but it is vicious to say “Rusticus a tergo clavem trahit et ter tonse (or pertonso)—testiculos aufert, prandia laeta facit” (“the peasant takes the club from his back and tears off the priest’s testicles, of which he makes a good meal”). And even the metaphorical terms defining the styles are themselves defined by the tradition, “fluctuans et dissolutum, turgidum et inflatum, aridum et exsangue” (Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria I, 30).

What is most appreciated in metaphors is the color rhetoricus they bring with them, and hence their ornamental value, since for the theoreticians of medieval poetics the proper end of poetry is invariably grace and elegance: for Matthew of Vendôme (Ars III, 18) “fiunt autem tropi ad eloquii suavitatem” (“the tropes are made for the pleasantness of the discourse”).

A somewhat singular attempt to provide a logical-semantic rule for the generation of good metaphors is the one proposed by Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who in his Documentum de arte dictandi et versificandi (Faral: 285–289) endeavors to establish codified procedures, based on the identity of properties between metaphorizer and metaphorized.¹⁰ Hence, it is established that the verb nasci (to be born) is properly used only of animals, but it has something in common with other actions, such as “to begin.” In which case, we can say “nascuntur flores” (in the sense that the flowers begin to be “incipiunt esse”), or “nascitur istud opus,” or “nata est malitia in diebus nostris” (“evil is born in our day”). And, by an analogous procedure, we can say “pubescit humus.” For Geoffrey, this artifice “est planissima via ad inveniendum translationes” (Faral: 287).

Some historians (Dronke 1986: 14–16 and Bertini 2003: 35) have identified in Geoffrey a precise notion of the cognitive function of metaphor, in the sense in which it would be taken up by Dante in his Letter to Cangrande della Scala (Epistole XIII, 29), where he says of the things seen during his celestial journey that, since they cannot be expressed “sermone proprio” (“in everyday language”), they must be spoken of “per assumptionem metaphorismorum” (“by the employment of metaphors”). Nevertheless—setting aside Dante, to whom we will return—Geoffrey repeats that in constructing metaphors it would be wrong not to draw the properties from among those that are “expressissime et apparentissime similia” (“most expressly and apparently similar,” II, 3, 17–18). Obviously, milk and snow are white, and honey is sweet, but Geoffrey does not seem to advise identifying properties that are nonself-evident in order to create unexpected likenesses. Indeed (in II, 3) he denounces as “turgidus et inflatus” (“turgid and inflated’) that style “qui nimis duris et ampullosis utitur translationibus,” (“which has recourse to crude and bombastic metaphors”), such as saying “ego transivi per montes belli” (“I have crossed over the mountains of war”) instead of settling for “per difficultates belli” (“the hardships of war”).

And in fact the same author, in his Poetria nova (765 et seq.), suggests the use of prefabricated metaphors, so to speak. Instead of “aurum fulvum, lac nitidum, rosa praerubicunda, mel dulcifluum, flammae rutilae, corpus nivis album” (“tawny gold, limpid milk, a rose redder than red, smooth-flowing honey, ruddy flames, a body white as snow”) it is better to say “dentes nivei, labra flammea, gustus mellitus, vultus roseus, frons lactea, crinis aureus” (“snow-white teeth, lips of flame, a taste like honey, rosy cheeks, a milk-white brow, golden hair). It is acceptable to say that spring paints the earth with flowers, that fair weather soothes, that the winds are sleeping, that deep valleys lie, because, by transferring human actions to nonhuman things, man sees himself in nature, as in a mirror. But this is still the canonical procedure of the anthropomorphization of the inanimate. Furthermore, though Geoffrey may venture a rule which we have dubbed logical-semantic, in point of fact he does not suggest any criterion for the proper identification of the relevant properties.

3.2. References and Examples in Philosophical Thought

We might expect greater commitment on the part of the philosophers, who deal with the correct meaning of terms and the difference between univocal and equivocal signs. In her essay “Prata rident”, Rosier-Catach (1997) examines a canonical topos in medieval doctrinal thought: the metaphor of the smiling meadow (already present in Ad Herennium 4). It is striking how this same example occurs over and over again in very different authors, from Abelard to Theodoric of Chartres and William of Conches, down to Thomas Aquinas, eventually spilling over into the discussions of analogy or translatio in divinis, in other words, the use of metaphors to speak of God.

Abelard’s point of departure is an annotation in Boethius’s commentary on the Categories, according to which, if one calls the “gubernator” (helmsman) of a ship its “auriga”(charioteer), and if one does so “ornatus causa,” there is no ambiguity. Abelard says he agrees, because in that case the text assumes the transferred meaning only for a limited time, as occurs when one says “ridere” instead of “florere” of a meadow (Glossae super Predicamenta, in Geyer 1927: 121). The transferred meaning does not occur per institutionem but only in a specific context, “per abusionem translationis, ex accidentale usurpatione” (“for an abuse of metaphor, as a result of a casual inappropriate use.” Super Peri herm., in Geyer 1927: 364). What we have here is not an instance of translatio aequivoca based on penuria nominum. The case is instead somewhat similar to that of oppositio in adiecto (“opposition in the attribute”), as in homo mortuus, where homo signifies (here and here alone) “corpse.”

William of Conches (Glosae in Priscianum) will speak of locutio figurativa more or less as Abelard does (Rosier-Catach 1997: 161–164). Robert Kilwardby says that in the case of the trope the expression is not understood as “intellectus primus” but as “intellectus secundus,” not “simpliciter” but “secundum quid.” The Flores Rhetorici (by the twelfth-century Master of Tours) speaks of words united in “decente matrimonio,” and there appears to be a timid allusion to the inferences that can be drawn from a metaphor, so that from “prata rident” one may proceed to “prata luxuriant floribus or prata floribus lasciviunt.” Here Rosier-Catach (1997) speaks of evidence of awareness of metaphorical productivity, but we personally find the allusion if anything quite tenuous. In the same vein the Dialectica Monacensis (II, 2, in De Rijk 1962–1967, II: 561) finds it extravagant and inappropriate to hazard the following syllogism: “Quicquid ridet habet os—pratum ridet—ergo habet os” (“Whatever smiles has a mouth—the meadow smiles—therefore it has a mouth”).

From a logical point of view, the position could not be more reasonable. And yet, if we want to know how to go about making metaphor an instrument of new knowledge and invention, we have only to see what the Jesuit Emanuele Tesauro, in the baroque period, is able to make of a “fair flower of rhetoric” that by his day was beginning “to stink.” We have only to read the lengthy analysis in the Cannocchiale aristotelico (ed. Zavatta, 1670: 116 et seq.) dedicated to the smile of the meadows, where he demonstrates how many new ideas and revelatory images can spring from a productive development of the initial trope. For upward of five pages of variations by inference on the original nucleus, in a virtuoso pyrotechnic display of baroque wit, Tesauro shows how the metaphor can give rise to infinite ways of seeing the fecundity of the meadows: “Iucundissimus pratorum RISUS, RIDIBUNDA vidimus prata, RIDENTER prata florent, Pratorum RISIO oculos beat, RIDENTISSIME prata gliscunt …” (“The most delightful smile of the meadows, we have seen the meadows smile, the meadows smile in flowering, the smiling of the meadows delights our eyes, the meadows rejoice most smilingly”). Whereupon he proceeds to invert the metaphor, “Hac in solitudine MOESTISSIMA videres prata. Sub Canopo squalida ubique prata LUGENT” (“In such solitude you would see the meadows most mournful. Under the bright star of Canopus the mournful meadows are weeping”), or, by the subtraction of human properties, we get, “Prata RIDENT sine ore. RISUS est sine cachinno” (“The meadows smile without a mouth. The smile is without laughter”), and, by the extension of the metaphor to component parts of the meadow or to the whole earth, we get “Virides rident RIPAE. Laeta exultant GRAMINA, Fragrantissimi rident FLORES. Alma ridet TELLUS. Rident SEGETES” (“The verdant banks smile. The grasses exult joyfully. The most sweet-smelling flowers smile. The life-giving earth smiles. The crops smile.”) And Tesauro enthusiastically continues:

Che se hora tu ligherai questa proprietà del rider de’ prati, con le cose Antecedenti, Concomitanti & Conseguenti: tante Propositioni, & Entimemi arguti, ne farai germogliare; che tanti fiori apunto non partoriscono i prati al primo tempo. Chiamo antecedenti le Cagioni di questo metaforico Riso; cioè: il ritorno del Sole dal tropico hiberno al Segno dell’Ariete. Lo spirar di Zefiro fecondator della terra. I tiepidi venti Australi. Le piogge di Primavera. La fuga delle neui. Le sementi dell’Autunno. Onde scherzando dirai: SOLI arridentia prata reditum GRATVLANTVR, Vis scire cur prata rideant? … Suavissimis AUSTRI delibuta suauijs, subrident prata, Dubitas cur prata rideant? IMBRIBVS ebria sunt. (Tesauro 1968, pp. 117–118)¹¹

And so on and so forth. And if we may grant a human smile to the meadows, why not grant them also the features that accompany the smile? Hence, “Pulcherrima pratorum FACIES. Et se la faccia ha le sue membra: ancor dirai; Tondentur falce virides pratorum COMAE, CRINITA frondibus prata virent. Micantes pratorum OCULI, flores” (“ ‘The FACE most fair of the meadows.’ And if the face has all its attributes, then you will say: ‘The green LOCKS of the meadows are mown by the sickle. The meadows are green with their COIFFURE of leaves. The flowers are the flashing EYES of the meadows’ ” (ibid., p. 118).

This appeal to Tesauro, however, merely serves to underscore, by way of contrast, the timidity of all medieval theories of metaphor.

3.3. Metaphor, Allegory, and Universal Symbolism

Why does the Middle Ages confine metaphor to a merely ornamental function and fail to recognize, at least on the theoretical level, its cognitive possibilities? The answer is twofold: (i) for the Middle Ages, our only teacher, who speaks through “real” metaphors (in rebus), is God, and all man can do is to uncover the metaphorical language of creation, and (ii) if man would speak of God, then no metaphor is equal to the challenge, and no metaphor can account for his unfathomable nature any more than literal language can.

If we wish to study this aspect of medieval culture and its implicit semiotics, we must establish precise distinctions between metaphor, symbol, and allegory—which is what we did in Eco (1985), and to which we will return later.¹² For now, we may speak generically of figural language for all those cases where aliud dicitur, aliud demonstratur, in which there is some kind of translatio from one term or a string of terms (or better, from the contents they express) to another, which somehow constitutes its secondary meaning.¹³ What interests us here is how the Middle Ages fixes its attention on phenomena of secondary or figural meaning, which are not those of literary metaphor.

Our starting point is Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:12: “Nunc videmus per speculum et in aenigmitate, tunc autem facie ad faciem” (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face”). The most elegant solution poetically speaking is that supplied by the Rhythmus alter, formerly attributed to Alan of Lille (PL 210: 578C–579C):

Omnis mundi creatura,

Quasi liber, et pictura

Nobis est, et speculum.

Nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,

Nostri status, nostrae sortis

Fidele signaculum.

Nostrum statum pingit rosa,

Nostri status decens glosa

Nostrae vitae lectio.

Quae dum primo mane floret,

Defloratus flos effloret

Vespertino senio.

Ergo spirans flos exspirat,

In pallorem dum delirat,

Oriendo moriens.

Simul vetus et novella,

Simul senex et puella

Rosa marcet oriens.

Sic aetatis ver humane

Iuventutis primo mane

Reflorescit paululum.¹⁴

The world is to be interrogated as if every item with which it is furnished had been put there by God to instruct us in some way. As Hugh of Saint Victor will remark, the sensible world “quasi quidam liber est scriptus digiti Dei” (“is like a book written by the finger of God”) (De tribus diebus VII, 4), and, according to Richard of Saint Victor, “habent tamen corporea omnia ad invisibilia bona similitudinem aliquam” (“and yet all corporal things bear some resemblance to the goods we cannot see”) (Benjamin major II, 13).

The fact that the world is a book written by the finger of God is seen not so much as a cosmological notion as an exegetical necessity. In other words, this universal symbolism starts out primarily as scriptural allegorism and goes on to become what has been defined as “universal symbolism.”

Commentators spoke of allegorical interpretations well before the birth of the patristic scriptural tradition: the Greeks interrogated Homer allegorically; in Stoic circles there arose an allegorist tradition which saw the classical epic as a mythical cloaking of natural truths; there existed an allegorical exegesis of the Jewish Torah, and in the first century Philo of Alexandria attempted an allegorical reading of the Old Testament.

In an attempt to counterbalance the Gnostic overemphasis on the New Testament, to the total detriment of the Old, Clement of Alexandria proposes viewing the two testaments as distinct and complementary, while Origen perfects this position by insisting on the necessity of a parallel reading. The Old Testament is the figure of the New, it is the letter of which the other is the spirit, or, in semiotic terms, it is the expression of which the New is the content (or one of the possible contents). In its turn, the New Testament has a figural meaning, inasmuch as it is a promise of future things. With Origen the “theological discourse” is born, which is no longer—or no longer simply—a discourse on God, but on His Scripture.¹⁵

Origen already speaks of a literal sense, a moral (psychic) sense, and a mystical (pneumatic) sense. Hence the triad—literal, tropological, and allegorical—that will later become the foursome expressed in the famous distich of Augustine of Dacia (thirteenth century): “littera gesta docet—quid credas allegoria—moralis quid agas—quo tendas anagogia” (”the letter tells us what went down—the allegory what faith is sound—the moral how to act well—the anagogy where our course is bound”).

From the beginning, Origen’s hermeneutics, and that of the Fathers of the Church in general, tends to favor a kind of reading that has been defined as “typological”: the characters and events of the Old Testament are seen, because of their actions or their characteristics, as types, anticipations, foreshadowings of the characters of the New. Some authors (such as Auerbach 1944, for example) attempt to discern something different from allegory, when Dante, instead of allegorizing openly—as he does, for instance, in the first canto of the Inferno or in the procession in the Earthly Paradise—brings onstage characters like Saint Bernard who, without ceasing to be living and individual figures (in addition to being authentic historical personages), become “types” of superior truths on account of certain of their concrete characteristics. Some would go so far as to speak, apropos of these examples, of “symbols.” But in this case too, what we are probably dealing with is allegory: the vicissitudes, interpretable literally, of one character, become a figure for another (at best what we have is an allegory complicated by Vossian antonomasia, inasmuch as the characters embody certain of their outstanding characteristics).

However we describe this typology, it requires that what is figured (whether a type, a symbol, or an allegory) be an allegory not in verbis but in factis. It is not the words of Moses or the Psalmist, qua words, that are to be read as endowed with an secondary meaning, even though they appear to be metaphorical expressions: it is the very events of the Old Testament that have been prearranged by God, as if history were a book written with his hand, to act as a figure of the new dispensation.

A useful distinction between facts and words may be found in Bede’s De Schematibus et tropis, but Augustine had already addressed this problem, and he was in a position to do so because he had been the first, on the basis of a profoundly assimilated Stoic culture, to create a theory of the sign. Augustine distinguishes between signs that are words, and things that may function as signs, since a sign is anything that brings to mind something else, over and above the impression the thing makes on our senses (De Doctrina Christiana II, 1, 1).¹⁶ Not all things are signs, but all signs are certainly things, and, alongside the signs produced by man intentionally to signify, there are also things, events, and characters that can be assumed as signs or (as in the case of sacred history) can be supernaturally arranged as signs so as to be read as signs.

In this way Augustine teaches us to distinguish obscure and ambiguous signs from clear ones, and to resolve the question of whether a sign is to be interpreted in a literal or in a figurative sense. Tropes like metaphor or metonymy can be easily recognized because if they were taken literally the text would appear meaningless or childishly mendacious, but what about those expressions (usually involving a whole sentence or a narration, and not a simple term or image) that have an acceptable literal meaning and to which the interpreter is instead led to assign a figurative meaning (as is the case, for example, with allegories)? A metaphor tells us that Achilles is a lion, and from the literal point of view this is a lie, but an allegory tells us that a leopard, a she-wolf, and a lion are encountered in a dark wood, and the statement could perfectly well be taken at face value.

To get back to the author of the Rhythmus alter, more than a metaphor, what we have here is an allegory, indeed, it represents a set of instructions for decoding allegories. He does not say life is a rose (an expression that would be absurd if taken literally). Instead, he lists all the qualities that pertain to the rose, qualities which (while still remaining literally comprehensible) become or may become (if the proper interpretive tools are provided) an allegory of human life. In fact, before listing the properties of the rose, he informs us that it is a depiction of our state (“nostrum statum pingit rosa”), and goes on to furnish the necessary elements to make the parallel clear.

How do we understand that something that has an acceptable literal meaning is to be understood as an allegory? Augustine, discussing the hermeneutical rules proposed by Tyconius (De doctrina christiana III, 30, 42—37, 56), tells us that we must suspect a figurative sense whenever Scripture, even if what it says makes literal sense, appears to go against the truth of faith or decent customs. Mary Magdalene washes the feet of Christ with perfumed ointments and dries them with her own hair. Is it thinkable that the Redeemer would submit to such a lascivious pagan ritual? Obviously not. So the narrative must be a representation of something else.

But we must also suspect a secondary meaning whenever Scripture gets lost in superfluitates or brings into play expressions poor in literal content. These two considerations are amazingly subtle and modern, even if Augustine found them already suggested by other authors.¹⁷

We have superfluitas when the text spends an inordinate amount of time describing something that might have a literal sense, but without the textually economical reasons for this descriptive insistence being clear. We have semantically poor expressions when proper names, numbers, or technical terms show up, or insistent descriptions of flowers, natural prodigies, stones, vestments, or ceremonies—objects or events that are irrelevant from the spiritual point of view. In such cases, we must presume—since it is inconceivable that the sacred text might be indulging a taste for ornament—that aliud dicitur et aliud significatur, one thing is said and another is intended.

Where are we to look for the keys to decoding, since the text must after all be interpreted “correctly,” that is, according to an approved code? When he speaks about words, Augustine knows where to look for the rules—in classical grammar and rhetoric. But if Scripture speaks not only in verbis but in factis (De doctrina christiana II, 10, 15)—if there is, in other words, allegoria historiae in addition to allegoria sermonis (cf. De vera religione 50, 99)—then one must resort to one’s knowledge of the world.¹⁸

Hence the resort to the encyclopedia, which traces an imago mundi, giving us the spiritual meaning of every worldly thing or event mentioned in Scripture. The Middle Ages inherited fascinating descriptions of the universe as a collection of marvelous facts from pagan culture: from Pliny to the Polyhistor of Solinus or the Alexander Romance. All they had to do was to moralize the encyclopedia, attributing a spiritual meaning to every object in the world. And so, following the model of the Physiologus, the Middle Ages began to compile its own encyclopedias, from the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville to the De rerum naturis of Rabanus Maurus, to Honorius of Autun’s De imagine mundi or Alexander Neckham’s De naturis rerum, to the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus and the Specula of Vincent of Beauvais. The task was to provide, backed by the authority of tradition, the rules of correlation that would make it possible to assign a figural significance to any element in the physical world. And since authority has a nose of wax, and since every encyclopedist is a dwarf on the shoulders of the encyclopedists who went before him, they had no problem, not only in multiplying meanings, but in inventing new creatures and properties, that (on account of their curiouser and curiouser characteristics) would make the world into one immense speech act.

At this point what is dubbed indifferently “medieval symbolism” or “allegory” takes separate paths. Separate at least in our eyes, which are looking for a handy typology, though these modes in fact interpenetrate continuously, especially when we consider that poets too will soon start writing allegorically like Scripture (see below what we have to say about Dante).

We may distinguish, then, under the generic heading of symbolism (or the aliud dicitur aliud demonstratur), a series of different attitudes (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1

What we may call “metaphysical pansemiosis” does not interest us in the present context. This is the approach of Scotus Eriugena, for whom every element with which the world is furnished is a theophany that refers back to its first cause: “nihil enim visibilium rerum corporaliumque est, ut arbitror, quod non incorporale quid et intelligibile significet (De divisione naturae” (“there is nothing among visible and corporeal things that I can think of that does not signify something incorporeal and intelligent”) (De divisione naturae, 5, 3). Like the Victorines, Eriugena does not speak simply of the allegorical or metaphorical resemblance between terrestrial bodies and celestial things, but in particular of their more “philosophical” significance, which has to do with the uninterrupted series of causes and effects known as the Great Chain of Being (cf. Lovejoy 1936).

Universal allegorism is that of the encyclopedias, bestiaries, and lapidaries: it represents a fabulous and hallucinatory way of looking at the universe, not for what it makes apparent but for what it might allude to: the difference, with regard to metaphysical pansemiosis, lies in the different philosophical awareness, in the metaphysical foundation, to be precise, of the ulterior meaning of sensible and corporeal things.¹⁹

We have already spoken of scriptural allegorism and will do so again shortly; and what liturgical allegorism might consist of is intuitive.

Poetic allegorism is that abundantly employed by secular poetry: Dante’s dark wood, say, or the whole of the Roman de la Rose. It imitates the modes of scriptural allegorism, but the facts presented are fictitious. If anything, oriented as it is toward moral edification, it may at most aspire to a cognitive function. But it is precisely in the case of the allegory of poets that a nexus of interesting problems comes to the fore.

The Middle Ages abounds in allegorical readings of poetic texts (cf. De Bruyne 1946, I, 3, 8). Fables provide the first instance: naturally they speak of happenings that are patently false (talking animals and the like), though they do so with the intent of communicating a moral truth. If we read the various treatises that prescribe ways of correctly reading poetic texts (see, for instance, the Dialogus super auctores of Conrad of Hirsau), we will see that what they consist of are exercises in textual analysis. Faced with a poetic text, we must ask who is its author, what was the author’s purpose and intention, the nature of the poem or the genre to which it belongs, and the order and number of the books before going on to examine the relationship between littera, sensus, and sententia. As Hugh of Saint Victor observes in his Didascalicon, the littera is the ordered disposition of the words, the sensus is the obvious and simple meaning of the phrase as it appears at first reading, and the sententia is a more profound form of understanding, which can only be arrived at through commentary and interpretation.²⁰

All the authors insist on the primary need to examine the letter, expound the meaning of difficult words, justify the grammatical and syntactical forms, identify the figures and tropes. At this point one proceeds to interpret the meaning intended by the author, as this is suggested by the letter of the text. Then, to the hidden meaning, according to the formula aliud dicitur et aliud demonstratur. Now, it would appear that opinions differ concerning the distinction between sensus and sententia. For some interpreters analyzing a fable by Aesop or Avianus, the sententia would be the moral truth contained in the fable, according to which, in the fable of the wolf and the lamb, wolves are evil and lambs are good. But is this meaning, which the author makes so explicit beneath the integumentum or covering of the parable, the sensus or the sententia? For some interpreters, fables have a parabolic meaning, offered immediately to the reader, while the sententia would be a more deeply hidden allegorical truth, similar to that of the Scriptures (cf. De Bruyne 1946: 2:326–327).

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.

3.4. Metaphor in 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

3.5. Dante

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.

The controversy surrounding this Epistola is well known, whether, that is, it is the work of Dante or not, but as far as our problem is concerned, the discussion is irrelevant: even if the Epistola had not been written by Dante it would nonetheless reflect a medieval idea that deserves our attention.

On the other hand, in the Convivio Dante positions himself no differently. It is true that the second treatise, which concerns allegory, recognizes that “the theologians take this sense differently from the poets,” but immediately afterward the author affirms that it is his intention to interpret the allegorical mode in the sense of the poets. And the sense of the poets is that by which allegory transmits, under the “cloak” of fable, “a truth hidden under a beautiful fiction. Thus Ovid says that Orpheus with his lyre made beasts tame, and trees and stones move towards himself; that is to say that the wise man by the instrument of his voice makes cruel hearts grow mild and humble, and those who have not the life of science and art move to his will” (Dante 1909: 73).

This would appear to be another expression of deference to the parabolic sense, such as we found in the case of the fables. But now let us see what Dante does, for instance, with the poem “Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete”)(“You who with your understanding move the third heaven”). He devotes chapters II–IX to explaining how it speaks literally of the angels and the heavens, with ample astronomical clarifications, and he devotes the following chapters to the allegorical explanation: “I say that by heaven I mean science and by heavens the sciences, because of three similarities the heavens have chiefly with the sciences.… For each moving heaven moves around its center, which, as to its movement, does not move, and so each science moves around its subject,” and so on, taking care in addition to remind us how the Gentle Lady of the Vita nuova represented Philosophy. And this is the allegorical sense, fairly well hidden, like that of Scripture.

In the Convivio, however, both the literal sense and the allegorical sense are presented as intended by the author, and we are basically still talking about an allegory in verbis. In Epistola XIII, on the other hand, something further is suggested.

Prima facie, as an example of an allegorical reading the author interprets facts narrated by the Bible. It could be objected (see Pépin 1970: 81) that here Dante is citing not the fact of the Exodus but the words of the Psalmist who speaks of the Exodus—a difference Augustine was already conscious of (Enarrationes in psalmos CXIII). But a few lines before citing the psalm, Dante speaks of his own poem, and he uses an expression that some translations, more or less unconsciously, attenuate. For example, the Italian translation of the Latin Epistola by Frugoni and Brugnoli, in the Ricciardi edition of Dante’s minor works, makes Dante say “the first meaning is the one we have from the letter of the text, the other is the one we have from what was meant to be signified by the letter of the text” (“il primo significato è quello che si ha dalla lettera del testo, l’altro è quello che si ha da quel che si volle significare con la lettera del testo”) (Epistole XIII, 7, 20). If this were the case, Dante would still be talking about a parabolic meaning, intended by the author. But the Latin text says: “primus sensus est qui habetur per litteram, alius est qui habetur per significata per litteram,” and here it seems that Dante means to speak of the things “that are signified by the letter” and therefore of an allegory in factis, and there is nothing in the Latin to justify that “was meant to be signified” (“che si volle significare”) which appears in the Italian version. If he had wished to speak of the intended sense, Dante would not have used the neuter plural significata but some other expression such as sententiam.

How can we talk about an allegory in factis apropos of events narrated in the context of a secular poem, whose mode, Dante tells us in the course of the letter, is “poeticus” and “fictivus”?

There are two possible answers. If we assume that Dante was an orthodox Thomist, then we can only conclude that the Epistola, which clearly runs counter to Thomist principles, must not be authentic. In that case, however, it would be odd that all of Dante’s early commentators (Boccaccio, Benvenuto da Imola, Francesco da Buti, and so on) have followed the path indicated by the epistle. But the most economical hypothesis is that Dante, at least as far as his definition of poetry went, did not follow Thomas’s opinion.

Dante believes that poetry has philosophical dignity, not only his own poetry but that of all the great poets, and he does not accept the dismissal of the poet-theologians decreed by Aristotle in his Metaphysics (and commented upon approvingly by Saint Thomas). Sixth among so much wisdom (along with Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan—as he remarks in Inferno, IV, 48), he never ceased to read both the facts of mythology and the other works of the classical poets as if they were allegories in factis, a practice that, despite Thomas’s caveat, was cultivated in Bologna in the period during which Dante resided there (cf. Renucci 1958). These are the terms in which he speaks of poets in the De vulgari eloquentia (I, 2, 7), in the Convivio, and in many other places, and in the Divine Comedy he has Statius openly affirm that Virgil taught those who came after him “like someone who goes at night and carries his lamp behind him and does not help himself” (Purgatorio XXII, 67–69): the poetry of the pagan poet conveys additional meanings of which the author is unaware. And in his Epistola VII Dante offers an allegorical interpretation of a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, seen as a prefigurement of the destiny of Florence.

For Dante, then, the poet continues Holy Scripture after his own fashion, just as in the past he had confirmed or even anticipated it. He believes in the reality of the myth he has produced as he tends to believe in the allegorical truth of the classical myths that he cites, along with historical personages assumed as figurae of the future, even mythological personages like Orpheus. And Cato of Utica himself will be judged worthy of signifying, along with Moses, Christ’s sacrifice (Purgatorio I, 70–75), even God himself (Convivio IV, 18, 15).

If this is the poet’s task, to figure by means of a poetic lie facts and events that function as signs, in imitation of the signs of the Bible, then we can understand why Dante would propound to Cangrande della Scala what has been defined by Curtius as his “self-exegesis” and by Pépin as his “self-allegoresis.” It is plausible that Dante thought of the secondary meaning of his poem as being close to the secondary meaning of the Bible, in the sense that at times the poet himself, when inspired, is not aware of all he is saying. For this reason he invokes divine inspiration (addressing Apollo) in the first canto of Paradiso. And if the poet is someone who “when Love inspires him notes, and in the same way as Love dictates within goes signifying” (Purgatorio XXII, 52–54), in order to interpret what he is not always aware that he has said, we may then use the same procedures reserved by Thomas for sacred history. If a poetic text were entirely literal-parabolic, it is not easy to see why the poet would clutter up various passages with enunciatory instances in which he invites the reader to decipher what is hidden “beneath the veil of the strange verses” (see, for example, Inferno IX, 61–63).

That said, we are bound to admit that, as far as his manner of interpreting metaphors goes, Dante does not break with the ideas of his time and in particular with those of Thomas. Let us take the Vita nuova, and confine ourselves to examining how Dante explains the sonnet “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare.” The poem contains a number of metaphorical expressions, such as “benignamente d’umiltà vestuta,” “dolcezza al core,” not to mention the invitation, addressed to the soul, to sigh (sospirare). Well, Dante makes it immediately clear that “this sonnet is so easy to understand … that it has no need of any division.” And the same is true for the other compositions he comments on: he clarifies the general philosophical meaning, but it does not occur to him to explain the metaphors. If we turn to the Convivio, we find something very similar. Indeed, it is curious that, in explaining “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona” (and I would argue that the verb “ragiona” [“reasons, speaks”] is already a first metaphorical expression, to say nothing of the fourth verse, in which the intellect “disvia” [“goes off track”]), not only does Dante fail to explain his metaphors, but, in order to explain the profound meaning of his poem, he employs liberal quantities of additional metaphors as if they were readily comprehensible: “Lo quale amore poi, trovando la mia disposta vita al suo ardore, a guisa di fuoco, di picciolo in grande fiamma s’accese; sì che non solamente vegghiando, ma dormendo, lume di costei nella mia testa era guidato” (“Finding my life disposed toward ardor, this love later blazed up like a fire, from a small to a great flame, so that not only while I was awake but also during my sleep the light of her penetrated my mind”), going on to speak of the “abitaculo del mio amore” (“the dwelling of my love”), its “multiplicato incendio” (“spreading fire”), and so on. Similarly, apropos of “Voi che ’ntendendo,” whereas the canzone itself, philosophical in its content, does not contain many metaphors, in his commentary the author piles on metaphors intended to explain the text but which he makes no effort to explain, such as “trapassamento,” “vedovata vita,” “disposarsi a quella immagine,” “molta battaglia intra lo pensiero,” “rocca della mia mente,” and so on. For Dante too, then, metaphors are completely part of the literal (intended) meaning and do not require any effort of interpretation.

We have only to observe what happens when in Epistola XIII to Cangrande della Scala he explains how the poet has attempted to render the ineffability of the divine vision. Dante obviously cites Pseudo-Dionysius, and, even if he had not done so, we would have known perfectly well where the theme of the unutterability of God came from. He further warns us that “multa namque per intellectum videmus quibus signa vocalia desunt: quod satis Plato insinuat in suis libris per assumptionem metaphorismorum” (“in fact with the aid of our intellect we see many things for which we lack verbal expressions: which is sufficiently demonstrated by Plato in his works when he makes use of metaphors”) (Epistola XIII, 29). And, even using a very conservative definition of whether an expression is used metaphorically, in Paradiso 33, 55–145, we can identify seventy-seven metaphors and similes—some of which are among the most striking in the poem. But throughout the Epistola, it does not even occur to Dante, who seems determined to explain everything, and brings in philosophy and theology to elucidate what it was he wanted to say, to comment upon these metaphors. When he cites the opening lines of the Paradiso, “The glory of him who moves all things / penetrates and shines throughout the universe,” he confines himself to saying that what he says is “bene dictum,” explaining that the glory of God “penetrat, quantum ad essentiam; resplendet, quantum ad esse” (“it penetrates as to its essence, it shines as to its being”) Epistola XIII, 23). He says, in other words, what philosophical purposes these two metaphors are used for, but he feels no need to say in what way glory (in any case already a metaphorical expression) can be said to penetrate and shine.

3.6. The Symbolic Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius

At this point it remains to be seen whether metaphor, having forfeited its cognitive function in poetry and in the text of Scripture, could still assume a revelatory function in a theory of divine names—where the challenge is to name someone whom no literal expression can give a proper account of.

In the wake of Neo-Platonism, in the sixth century the idea of the One as unfathomable and contradictory enters the Christian world, through the agency of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (hereinafter “Dionysius”). In his works the Divinity is named negatively as something that is

the Cause of all [and] is above all and is not inexistent, lifeless, speechless, mindless. It is not a material body, and hence has neither shape nor form, quality, quantity, or weight. It is not in any place and can neither be seen nor be touched. It is neither perceived nor is it perceptible. It suffers neither disorder nor disturbance and is overwhelmed by no earthly passion. It is not powerless and subject to the disturbances caused by sense perception. It passes through no change, decay, division, loss, no ebb and flow, nothing of which the senses may be aware. None of all this can be either identified with it nor attributed to it.…

… It is not soul, or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech, or understanding. Nor is it speech per se, understanding per se. It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. It is not number or order, greatness or smallness, equality or inequality, similarity or dissimilarity. It is not immovable, moving or at rest. It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live, nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither knowledge nor truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it a spirit, in the sense in which we understand that term. (The Mystical Theology, trans. Luibheid, pp. 140–141)³⁰

And so on in this vein for page after page of dazzling mystical aphasia.

How then can we speak of divine names? How can we do this if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things, while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding? (The Divine Names, trans. Luibheid, p. 53).

Not knowing what else to name it, Dionysius calls the divinity “the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence” and “the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is” (p. 135). At first blush, these appear to be oxymorons, expressing a contradiction, and therefore the impossibility of an unambiguous definition; they are nonetheless oxymorons based upon metaphors.

Dionysius, however, continues to insist that no metaphor or symbol can express the divine nature. But in so doing he swings back and forth between a kind of mystagogic attitude (under the influence of various non-Christian sources) and a symbolic theology, designed to help even the simple-minded comprehend the nature of God.

From the mystagogic point of view God is ineffable, and the only way to speak adequately of him is to be silent: as we ascend from lower to higher things “we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing,” (The Mystical Theology, trans. Luibheid, p. 139). When someone speaks, it is to hide the divine mysteries from those who cannot penetrate them: “it is most fitting to the mysterious passages of scripture that the sacred and hidden truth about the celestial intelligences be concealed through the inexpressible and the sacred and be inaccessible to the hoi polloi. Not everyone is sacred, and, as scripture says, knowledge is not for everyone” (The Celestial Hierarchy, trans. Luibheid, p. 149). Symbolic discourses regarding God are “the protective garb of the understanding of what is ineffable and invisible to the common multitude” (Letter Nine, trans. Luibheid, p. 283).

This mystagogic attitude is continually contradicted by the opposite attitude, the theophanic conviction (and it is this mode that will fascinate Eriugena) that, since God is the cause of all things, he is rightly nameless and yet all names are fitting, in the sense that every effect points back to its Cause (The Divine Names, trans. Luibheid, p. 56). In this way the form and figure of a man are attributed to God, or that of fire or amber, his ears are praised and his eyes and his hair, his countenance, his hands, his shoulders, his wings, his arms, his back, and his feet “They have placed around it such things as crowns, chairs, cups, mixing bowls and similar mysterious items” (The Divine Names, trans. Luibheid, pp. 56–57).

The symbolic theology that attempts to make the nature of God comprehensible through similes or “aistheta symbola” (“perceptible symbols”) (Letter Nine, trans. Luibheid, p. 281) swings between these two extremes. Still, it must be clear that these symbolic references are always inadequate. Hence the need for these representations to display their feebly hyperbolic nature (if I too may be permitted an oxymoron):

Furthermore, I doubt that anyone would refuse to acknowledge that incongruities are more suitable for lifting our minds up into the domain of the spiritual than similarities are. High-flown shapes could well mislead someone into thinking that the heavenly beings are golden or gleaming men, glamorous, wearing lustrous clothing, giving off flames which cause no harm, or that they have other similar beauties with which the word of God has fashioned the heavenly minds. It was to avoid this kind of misunderstanding among those incapable of rising above visible beauty that the pious theologians so wisely and upliftingly stooped to incongruous dissimilarities, for by doing this they took account of our inherent tendency toward the material and our willingness to be lazily satisfied by base images. At the same time they enabled that part of the soul which longs for the things above actually to rise up. Indeed the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it could be permitted or true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful things. (The Celestial Hierarchy, trans. Luibheid, p. 150)

At the very end of this citation Dionysius continues with an apparent contradiction: he observes that “there is nothing which lacks its own share of beauty” (ibid., p. 150), given that Scripture states that God saw everything He had made, “and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). But what we have here is a bow in the direction of that pancalistic sensibility that will pervade the entire Middle Ages. The problem is rather that at this point Dionysius introduces the idea, which will return with some frequency throughout his corpus, of naming through dissimilar similarity or inappropriate dissimilarity (see, for example, chapter 2 of The Celestial Hierarchy, trans. Luibheid, p. 138), whereby the divinity is sometimes given a lowly name: “Sometimes the images are of the lowliest kind, such as sweet-smelling ointment and corner stone, Sometimes the imagery is even derived from animals so that God is described as a lion or a panther, a leopard or a charging bear. Add to this what seems the lowliest and most incongruous of all, for the experts in things divine gave him the form of a worm” (The Celestial Hierarchy, trans. Luibheid, p. 152).³¹

Concerning this point, it has frequently been understood that for Dionysius the name that best expresses the inexpressibility of the divine nature is based on an inverse analogy, according to which what is emphasized are not the similar but the opposed properties. Some occultist interpretations of these passages speak of an image of God reflected as it were on the surface of the terrestrial sea in inverted symmetry (and this would be the sense in the famous passage from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:12, where he says that we see now “through a glass darkly”). If this were indeed the case we might expect a theory of inverse analogy, which would go a long way toward confirming the idea of a symbolic naming that obscures in order to spur the intelligence to seek further—and we would therefore be quite close to the idea of metaphor as cognitive process. And this could be tied in with a strong suggestion from Aristotle (see Rhetoric 1405a): “since opposites are in the same class, you do what I have suggested if you say that a man who begs ‘prays,’ and a man who prays ‘begs’; for praying and begging are both varieties of asking.” And it would be quite a challenge to require a semiotics of metaphor to account for a process by which two things are substituted for each other based, not on the properties they have in common, but on the maximum tension between opposite properties (like calling the sea solid, God malevolent, the gaze of the Medusa benevolent, and so on). To tell the truth, none of the examples given by Dionysius constitutes a case of dissimilar similarity (in the above sense), but at most of audacious similarity, linking the divine and the human on the basis of “unseemly” resemblances, but resemblances nonetheless.

The most extreme case of dissimilarity is cited in Letter Nine, which examines a passage from Psalm 78 in which God appears to get drunk. Since the image of a divinity shamelessly intoxicated is unacceptable, Dionysius engages in a prodigious example of exegetic subtlety only to conclude as follows:

In our terminology, inebriation has the pejorative meaning of an immoderate fullness, being out of one’s mind and wits. It has a better meaning when applied to God, and this inebriation must be understood as nothing other than the measureless superabundance of good things which are in him as Cause. As for being out of one’s mind and wits, which follows drunkenness, in God’s case it must be taken to mean that incomprehensible superabundance of God by virtue of which his capacity to understand transcends any understanding or any state of being understood. He is beyond being itself. Quite simply, as “drunk,” God stands outside of all good things, being the superfullness of all these things. He surpasses all that is measureless and his abode is above and beyond all that exists (Letter Nine, trans. Luibheid, p. 287).

A memorable example of an author clutching at allegorical straws, whereas all the Psalmist is doing is describing the wrath of God: “Then the Lord awaked as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine” (Ps. 78:65). Describing God as wrathful is in keeping with the Bible’s normal process of anthropomorphization; and what we have here is actually a simile: God awakens so full of wrath as to appear to be drunk. A powerful image, that truly puts before our eyes, as Aristotle has it, the wrath of God, but which Dionysius, with his lack of interest in the mechanism of metaphor, does not see, his attention being concentrated on the subtler exercises of allegory. So that, as Augustine points out, seeing that the literal sense appears repugnant, we look in factis for a spiritual sense.

The real problem is that Dionysius does not make a clear distinction between metaphor and allegory and tends to lump both together in the category of the symbolic. The difference between metaphor and allegory has already been made abundantly clear. What constitutes a symbol, compared with these two rhetorical techniques, is still an open question at this point in time and will remain so for centuries (see Eco 1984a: ch. 4): an image in the form of a luminous glowing mandala may be thought of as a symbol in a number of cultures, without its being either an allegory or a metaphor. After all, maybe the best way to grasp Dionysius’s hallucinated semiotics is to reconsider Goethe’s famous distinction:

There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it. Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept always remains bounded in the image, and is entirely to be kept and held in it, and to be expressed by it.

Symbolism … transforms the phenomenon into idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and even if expressed in all languages, still would remain inexpressible. (Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Nos. 279, 1112, 1113)

Now, we might expect Dionysius to consider allegories as didactic procedures (or procedures calculated to conceal the truth from the eyes of the profane) and symbols as epiphanies that make secret knowledge evident. The truth is that all the examples of symbolic theology provided by Dionysius have nothing whatsoever to do with a modern theory of symbols, nor do they propose an alternative. Let us consider a few examples.

In chapter 2 of The Celestial Hierarchy (trans. Luibheid, p. 148), Dionysius affirms that the Scriptures use poetic forms to represent formless celestial intelligences. It is unclear whether by poetic forms he means allegories (in verbis) or metaphors. And in the passage previously cited in which he speaks of God being named through the lowliest creatures, such as the bear and the lion, the example Dionysius has in mind is clearly Hosea 5:12–14, where God, still angry with Israel, says that he will be unto Ephraim as a moth, and to the house of Judah as rottenness, and unto Ephraim as a lion, and as a young lion to the house of Judah. The moth and the young lion are not “symbols” of the divinity. The Bible does not say that God is a moth or a lion, but that in a certain circumstance He will behave as His children are used to seeing the moth and the lion behave. These are perfectly comprehensible similes or metaphors (in verbis naturally) to which the prophets have accustomed us. Thomas Aquinas would have said that what the biblical author intended to say literally was that God, at the height of his wrath, was not about to give his erring children any respite.

Similarly, when in Letter Nine (trans. Luibheid, pp. 286–287) Dionysius speaks of those “occult and audacious enigmas” in which the Scriptures compare divine things to dew or honey, he is still thinking of Hosea 14:5, where the Psalmist says, “I will be as the dew unto Israel,” or Psalm 19:9–10, where he affirms that “the judgments of the Lord are … sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.” This time God is not angry but most loving, and the metaphor makes this clear. In no sense, however, is honey a symbol of God.

It should be obvious that these metaphors are comprehensible, because the traditional attributes of honey are its pleasant taste and sweetness, of the moth its annoying persistence, of dew its beneficial fertilizing qualities. When Dionysius is afraid that his audience may not be familiar with all the properties of the metaphorical vehicle, he lists them, as any self-respecting encyclopedist of the early centuries A.D. would have done. In The Celestial Hierarchy, for example, speaking of the symbolic presentation of fire, he points out that the Scriptures give us examples of flaming chariot wheels, fiery animals, men radiating fire, braziers of red-hot coals, rivers of flame, and he observes: “And indeed it seems to me that this imagery of fire best expresses the way in which the intelligent beings of heaven are like the Deity” (p. 183), and he proceeds to list a series of properties traditionally associated with fire. Fire passes through all things without mixing with them, it cannot be grasped but it seizes everything, it lies hidden until it finds the proper kindling, it transforms things, it vivifies them with its heat, it shuns adulteration, it tends upward, it penetrates, it moves by itself and makes other things move, it embraces everything but nothing can contain it, it is efficient, powerful, and when ignored it appears to be dead, but it springs unexpectedly to life when stirred, it flings itself upward and cannot be checked, and so on. With such an encyclopedia it is easy to produce not just metaphors but whole allegories based upon fire. Fire is not an obscure symbol that names without naming, that alludes without revealing: when intimately known in its very nature, as Dionysius shows that he knows it, it puts before our eyes the supernatural realities of which it is a metaphor or an allegory, and it does so effortlessly.

The same can be said of light, and of the sun as the source of light, to which Dionysius devotes a number of fine pages in the Divine Names (trans. Luibheid, p. 74), pages that will inspire many medieval theorists of the aesthetics of light (see Eco 1956, 1987).

The pages of the Divine Names in which Dionysius says that God can be called Good, Beauty, or Being belong to a different register. In this case he is not talking about earthly entities, animals, objects, natural phenomena capable of becoming images, or metaphors of divine things. Here he is talking about what the Scholastics will call the transcendental properties of Being. The problem is that we, knowing the moth from experience, can compare it to God, but we are able to say that something is good or beautiful only insofar as we are able to see that certain things in our experience participate in a reflected fashion in the properties of the divinity. “For we recognize the difference in intelligible beings between qualities that are shared and the objects which share them. We call ‘beautiful’ that which has a share in beauty, and we give the name of ‘beauty’ to that ingredient which is the cause of beauty in everything. But the ‘beautiful’ which is beyond individual being is called ‘beauty’ because of that beauty bestowed by it on all things, each in accordance with what it is” (The Divine Names, trans. Luibheid, p. 76).³²

Likewise, what is suprasubstantially Good and Beauty is “that which truly is and which gives being to everything else” (The Divine Names, trans. Luibheid, p. 98). “Every being and all the ages derive their existence from the Preexistent. All eternity and time are from Him. The Preexistent is the source and is the cause of all eternity, of time and of every kind of being” (The Divine Names, V, 5, trans. Luibheid, pp. 98–99).

What we have here is a leap. Here the trajectory is no longer upward (from the moth to God) but downward, from God to whatever is good and beautiful. The divine names belong strictly speaking to the divinity, and only at a subordinate level to things. This subordination, however, is not of a metaphorical order, but of a metaphysical one. If the properties of the moth are similar to those of God, it is because of a defect of our imagination. This is the only way can imagine the implacability of God’s wrath (which is obviously something quite different). The simile is couched in verbis, and the verba are clearly inadequate to express an object so sublime. Therefore the metaphor from low to high appears capable of making us know, by putting the thing before our eyes; but it makes us know in an extremely pallid fashion what is by definition unknowable. The properties of beautiful things on the other hand are what they are because they participate in the beauty of the divinity. The similitude is not in verbis but in re. The sharing of transcendental properties by creatures is always a pallid sharing, but it is not a pallor of the imagination (or of language); instead the pallor is ontological.

This is tantamount to saying that in the symbolic theology of Dionysius there is no room for a coherent theory of metaphor, and so be it. But this position implies a fine cognitive dilemma. In fact we have it on faith that God is Goodness and Beauty, but in what precise way He suprasubstantially possesses these properties we do not know. Or rather, either we know it by illumination or arcane knowledge, or we must imagine it in a pallid fashion taking the properties of things as our point of departure. A problem of which Thomas Aquinas (who is not a cultivator of any hidden or mysteriosophic science of the divinity) is fully aware when, from these very same pages of Dionysius, he derives the idea of knowledge by analogy: somehow or other, “prout possumus,” to the best of our abilities, we must elevate ourselves from earthly things to knowledge of the First Cause (Expositio Sancti Thomae V, 3, n. 668). Are we justified in saying, then, that such knowledge is merely metaphorical?

3.7. The

Analogia Entis

Rosier-Catach (1997: 167–173) cites a number of cases in which the canonical example of prata rident serves to highlight the difference between metaphor and translatio in divinis. Boethius (De Trinitate IV, 1, 5, 21) had already remarked that when predications had to do with God, the things predicated are thereby modified. Gilbert of Poitiers (Dialogus Everardi et Ratii) will say, apropos of the ten categories of Aristotle (praedicamenta), that “si quis ad divinam verterit praedicationem, cuncta [praedicamenta] mutantur” (“if one proceeds to the predication of divine things, all the [categories] change”). Theodoric of Chartres follows the dictum of Dionysius, according to which a substantial predicate does not mean that God is a substance, but that he is beyond all substance.

So, in the case of predication in divinis, it is not the thing that is predicated, only the name. At the same time, the idea makes headway that, despite this difference, the predicate “quodam modo innuit nobis substantiam” (“in a certain way suggests the substance to us”). As a result, what we have is not an unbridgeable divarication, and predication by pure negation, but instead some form of connotation.

To what extent the difference between univocal predication and predication in divinis posed an insurmountable problem is confirmed by the Regulae theologicae of Alain of Lille, in which a distinction is made (somewhat obscurely) between: (i) the transfer of the name and the thing, as in “linea est longa,” where length, which is the property of the body, is said of the line that distinguishes it and makes it possible to call it “long”; (ii) the transfer of the thing, as in “seges est laeta,” where the thing (in this case laetitia or gladness) is attributed to the subject, the cornfield; (iii) the transfer of the name alone, as in “monachus est albus”—in which the white monk is not himself white (we are talking about a white-robed Cistercian). But this is precisely the way we say “Deus est iustus.”

Later in the text, however, Alain admits that God is called just “a causa quia efficit iustum” (“rightly, since he brings about justice”). Here we are close to the position taken by Dionysius, for whom Goodness and Beauty really are divine properties and may be applied to earthly things only insofar as, through participation, they cause something very similar in them. In that case it is not simply a question of transferring the name: indeed it would not even be a metaphor (judging by the above-cited classification).

Since this is not the place to venture into the boundless territory of the discussions on the analogia entis (pointing out the frequently subtle differences between one author and another, right down to the Second Scholasticism of the Counter-Reformation, from Cajetanus to Suarez, we will simply attempt to see what were the basic models for univocal and equivocal discourse that inspired the whole of Scholastic debate. And the fundamental model is always the one derived from Aristotle (see Owens 1951) and from Boethius’s commentary.

The discourse on equivocity is already present in the Metaphysics, where Aristotle discusses how being can be “said in many ways.” After saying that there is a science that considers being in and of itself, when we might have expected his first tentative definition of the object of this science, he repeats as the only possible definition what had appeared in his first book (992b 18) only as a parenthetical observation: “being is said in many ways” (“to de on leghetai men pollachos”)—according to multiple meanings (1003a 33).

In fact, Aristotle reduces these many ways to four. Being is said: (i) as accidental being (this is the being predicated by the copula, whereby we say that a man is white or standing); (ii) as true—it may be true or false that the man is white, or that man is an animal; (iii) as potentiality and act, whereby, while it may not be true that this healthy man is ill right now, he could become ill, and (as we might say today) we can think of a possible world in which it is true that this man is ill; and finally (iv) as ens per se or as substance. However we speak of being, we say it “with reference to a single principle” (1003b 5–6), that is, to the substances: “The first meaning of being is the essence that signifies the substance (semainei ten ousian)” (1028a 14–15).

Is this saying in a number of ways an equivocal way of saying? Aristotle is unclear on this point. In the Categories (1, 1a) he says that we have homonymy or equivocity when entities that require a different definition have a single name in common. The classical example is zoon, used both for an animal and a painting, a homonymy that exists in Greek. It should be said that medieval thinkers, who did not know Greek, failed to grasp this homonymy, thinking that the word animal was used both for the animal and the image of the animal, and that Aristotle gave a broader meaning to equivocity than they did. See, for example, Thomas Aquinas: “Philosophus largo modo accipit aequivoca, secundum quod includant in se analoga” (“The philosopher takes equivocal terms in a broad sense, so they include analogous terms”) (Summa Theologiae I, 13, 10 ad 4).

As Aristotle sees it, we find ourselves faced with an example of accidental equivocation (in the Middle Ages they would have said it was due to penuria nominum). We have synonymity or univocality when the term corresponds to a single definition (when, that is, zoon is said of a man or an ox). And finally, we have paronymity when things are designated by the same term but with a different grammatical ending (“the grammarian” [grammatico] when it stands for “grammar” [grammatica]). Owen (1951) makes it clear that Aristotle considers equivocity or univocality to be properties, not of the term itself, but of the things for which a single term is used.³³ Thus, we have univocality when a single term is used for what is expressed by a single definition, and equivocity when we have a single term for two things that correspond to two different definitions.

Different uses of a term are broadly discussed in the Topics (I, 15, 106a 1–8), where Aristotle takes on for the first time the question of a twofold way of employing terms: it is one thing to say that justice and courage are called “good” univocally (because goodness is part of the definition of both) and it is another to say in various ways that what is conducive to health is good. The allusion here is to the original Aristotelian example, widely discussed in the Middle Ages, according to which both people in good health and the medicine conducive to good health, not to mention urine as a sign of good health, are dubbed “healthy.”

In the Nicomachean Ethics (I, 6, 1096b 23–29) the question of why honor, wisdom, and pleasure are called “goods” comes up again. The three things are different, and yet the use of the term is not an example of casual equivocation. Are they called “good” because they depend upon a single cause (“aph’enos”) or because they are directed toward the same end or good (“pros hen”)? Or is it by analogy, following the example of sight that is good for the body just as the intellect is for the soul? Here Aristotle clearly distinguishes the first case from true analogy, which sets up a proportion among four terms.³⁴

In Boethius’s Latin translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge, “aph’enos” and “pros hen” are rendered respectively as “ab uno” (the term “medical” used both for the doctor himself and for the doctor’s potions and instruments) and “ad unum” (the classical example of “healthy” said of the body, the medicine, and the urine). Clearly, however, the first example is a relatively weak one, since it could be reduced to a case of paronymy. In fact the concept that remains central in Aristotle is that of pros hen. Briefly put, to be named for the cause one proceeds from or for the end toward which one tends is to all intents and purposes the same thing (we could say that the relationship is based on a common cause, whether it be efficient or final). What we have, then, are two forms of equivocity, pros hen, which the scholastic tradition will dub analogy of proportion (and, in the case of Cajetanus, of attribution), and that by analogy, which the scholastic tradition will dub analogy of proportionality. For convenience sake, from now on we will use the two terms attribution, which for Aristotle was not a form of analogy, and proportionality, which for Aristotle was the only form of analogy.

Aristotle explains the attribution in the Metaphysics (K. 3, 1060b 36–1061a 7) where he takes as examples of speaking “in several ways” the adjectives medical and healthy: they are used in reference to (pros) the same thing: a medical discourse and an instrument are both called “medical” because the medical discourse proceeds from medical science and the instrument is useful to that science; in like manner, things that are signs or causes of health are termed “healthy.” Now, health is something that is only found in a body and is not present in the color of the urine or that of the medicine (we ought to speak, then, of a patently equivocal situation in which a single term is referred to things that have different definitions). Both the urine and the medicine, however, refer to health. Just as the term being is used in various senses but with reference to one central idea (pros hen), and is therefore not equivocal, the same goes for the term “healthy.” Both express a common notion (legonthai kath’en).

Attribution is a relationship involving two terms: medicine is healthy because it causes health, and we cannot say that medicine is to the sick body as health is to the healthy body. The case of analogy is different. Here four terms are required, as we are also reminded in the Poetics and the Rhetoric. The stone is shameless because it is to Sisyphus as the shameless man is to his victim (Rhetoric, III, 11, 1412a 5, in Bollingen ed., p. 2253). Now, whereas the examples of attribution are always given as instances of the stereotyped use of language (healthy medicine, healthy urine), for Aristotle the analogy is an instrument of knowledge, and he makes use of it, when it serves him, in his books on nature too. “The underlying nature can be known by analogy” (Physics I, 7, 191a, in Bollingen ed., p. 326).

At this point let us reconsider the very nature of metaphor. As proposed in Eco (1984a: sect. 3.8.3), let us suppose that metaphor and metonymy can be explained on the basis of a componential analysis in the form of an encyclopedia which in the definition of a given term includes its form (or morphological aspect), cause, matter, and end (or function).

Property 1, form

Sememe A

Property 2, cause

Property 3, matter

Property 4, end or function

The idea was already present among the Scholastics: see, for instance, how Thomas (De principiis naturae, 6) admits that sometimes the like properties are predicated with respect to the cause, and at others with respect to the end.

To formulate the metonymy drink a glass (container for content), it is not necessary to compare two terms: one identifies in the encyclopedic definition of the glass the fact that it contains wine; the substitution is therefore one of semic interdependence within the same sememe. To call the glass the shield of Dionysus on the other hand I must compare the properties of Dionysus and the god of war Ares, recognize that in both the same morphological property appears (a typical instrument or emblem), identify a property that the two instruments have in common (both being round and concave in form), and activate the exchange. In both cases the substitution first occurs on account of the semic identity among sememes, then two sememes are crossed with two semes.

Now, it appears that metaphor imposes a comparison between two entities that were previously separate, thereby increasing our knowledge, whereas metonymy presumes prior knowledge of the thing played upon. Hence the greater cognitive power of metaphor.

Attribution seems to be akin to metonymy: we call medicine “healthy” because we already know that the property of medicine is to procure health. But if this is the case, then many of the metaphors cited by Aristotle, from genre to species and vice versa, are in fact forms of metonymy or synecdoche, given the fact that genre ought to be a property of the species. Just as being an animal is a property of mankind, and makes it possible for Francesca da Rimini to address Dante with the vocative “O aminal grazioso e benigno,” similarly standing still is a property of being at anchor. We have only to look at Emanuele Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico ([1670]1968: 284). He has no qualms about calling metaphors from genre to species and vice versa “analogiae attributionis.”

On the other hand, when Aristotle calls the stone shameless, he is attributing to it a property (certainly justified by the context) that had not previously been recognized. Let us take another look at the example calling pirates commercial purveyors. First of all, a four-term analogy is set up: the pirates are to the transportation of stolen property as merchants are to that of the goods they acquire. The impression of identifying a genre X, of which pirates and purveyors are both species, is a consequence of the analogical operation. In fact it takes two independent sememes and identifies in them a common property (that of being transporters of goods). Only when we have understood the metaphor can we say that pirates and purveyors belong (unexpectedly) to the same genre, or the same whole. The property they share, surprisingly brought to the fore, becomes a common genre.

purveyors

transporters

pirates

The entire Scholastic discussion of the analogia entis (despite the great variety of its outcomes) is fundamentally based on a choice between analogy of attribution and analogy of proportionality, and the examples are similar to those given by Aristotle when it comes to finding attributions or proportions between medicine and health and meadows and smiles.

The real problem, already looming in Dionysius, arises when the divine names come into play. When we say that medicine is healthy is that the same kind of attribution as saying that God is Good? We recognize the properties of health and we are familiar with the properties of both medicine and urine (one causes health, the other reveals it). Combining together known properties, we perform the attribution. What happens, however, in the case of the divine names?

There are only two possible solutions.³⁵

(i) We know the goodness of things per prius and we infer per posterius that the cause of this goodness must exist in God. But what we have at this point is an inference from something known to something that must exist, but whose nature is unknown to us. And it is not enough to suppose that the cause must somehow resemble the effect. All the more since, in the course of his discussion of analogy, Thomas (in Summa Theologiae I, 45, 7, for example, following the lead of Augustine) distinguishes two types of likeness between cause and effect. The effect may represent “quantum ad similitudinem formae” (“by reason of the similarity of its form”) and this is the case with the “repraesentatio imaginis” (“the representation of an image”), in other words, of the statue of Mercury that resembles Mercury. But it can also represent by “causalitas causae” (“the causality of the cause”), in which case there is no morphological likeness but rather “repraesentatio per vestigium” (“representation by way of a visible trace”), as occurs both in the relationship between smoke and fire and that between a man and the footprints he leaves behind him. (Thomas—following Albertus Magnus—grants that the footprints may resemble the form of the foot, but he points out that the imprint of the foot is not similar to the man who left it and therefore cannot tell us who that man was.³⁶ In Scriptum super libros Sententiarum I, 8, 1, 2 he gives the example of the sun, which produces heat but is not hot in itself.) If then we go back from the goodness of things to their divine cause, we do so out of causalitas causae, but we have no idea of what this goodness is like. We call Goodness the cause of goodness merely to make up for the penuria nominum, and hence a case of equivocation. It is as if, seeing smoke and not knowing anything about the fire that caused it is, we were to name this unknown quantity Hypersubstantial Smoke, thinking that what we were faced with was an example of repraesentatio imaginis and not repraesentio per vestigium. Let us consider the disturbing consequences of such a solution: if the mechanism of attribution were still valid, given that, among our actions and among the events of the world, some things are bad (a crime, rotten food, an illness), why do we not attribute the cause of these things to God, thereby making him responsible for Evil? Because we know a priori that there is no Evil in God (whereas there is Goodness). But if we already knew that, there was no need to look for an analogy. All that remains, then, is the second conclusion.

(ii) We know (by faith or revelation) the attributes of the Divinity, and it is therefore per prius, on the basis of these attributes, that we predicate per posterius the goodness of terrestrial things. We know, in other words, that God is ontologically Good per prius and that things are good per posterius, insofar as they share in the goodness of the Divinity. The attribute “good” characteristic of a certain thing is the equivalent of the attribute “animal” that characterizes a cat. We understand that a cat is an animal because we already know what an animal is. Thus we have a predication of a metonymical type from one known thing to another known thing: the attribution does not lead us to discover anything we did not already know.

Alternatively, predication in divinis implies an analogy of proportionality. But, in the case of the Aristotelian analogy, we discover an identity of properties between two things both of whose properties are known (the discovery involves the unsuspected relationship established between two known things). In an analogy extended in divinis, on the other hand, the trick would be to identify (and this would be truly unsuspected) an identity of properties between something about which we know everything and something about which we know nothing. In other words, the proportion established is not (as was the case with the shield of Ares and of the cup of Dionysus) A:B = C:D, but A:B = x:y, where x and y are unknown properties. This would in fact be the proportionality according to which we could say that human knowledge bears the same relation to the human mind as divine knowledge does to the divine mind. The most one could hazard is that between divine knowledge and the divine mind (both unknown) a relationship is established in some way similar to the one established between human knowledge and the human soul. But similar how? By repraesentatio imaginis or by causalitas causae? The comparison established between Achilles and the lion works as long as we already know what the wrath of Achilles is like, as well as the fierceness of the lion, and only then does the wrath of Achilles appear more convincing. But saying that divine Knowledge is to the divine Mind what human knowledge is to the human mind teaches us less than the comparison does about Achilles. In the second case, the wrath of the warrior, of which we already have some inkling, is reinforced through the comparison with the lion with the attributes of fierceness and courage. We learn something new. In the case of predication in divinis, we learn that something, we don’t know what, bears a pale resemblance to human intelligence. Accordingly, if predication in divinis were analogy of proportionality it would teach us less than a good metaphor teaches us.

Unless we already know what God is and what his qualities are, in which case the analogy would tell us something interesting about whatever is compared to God, not about God, about Whom we already know all there is to know.

It could be argued that the cases in which God is truly spoken of metaphorically are exempt from this criticism. The poetic metaphors of the Bible that speak of a God raging like a lion or as persistent as a woodworm tell us something about his wrath or his obstinacy. Granted. But these metaphors are not designed to reveal to us God’s nature, which is unknown, but the effects of his operations, which we already know. They do not posit an unknowable God but a God already anthropomorphized, like the pagan gods. Proceeding from the known to the known, these metaphors place something before our eyes, but in the mode of a simile. We are on this side of, or in any event outside of, an analogical discourse in divinis.

This is the fundamental weakness with any discussion of the analogia entis, and in fact all it permits the philosopher to discover is what the philosopher already knew on faith. It is no accident that discussions of the analogia entis engender prodigies of subtlety, but end up dissipating with the Scholasticism of the Post-Reformation. In fact, whenever we have to speak of the divine attributes, if we assume a Platonic-Augustinian position, then we already know everything about God for innate reasons, and only because we have this knowledge of the divine can we say that something shares (pallidly) in His Goodness or another of the transcendental properties of being. These appear to be the terms in which authors like Alexander of Hales, who speaks of the soul as “imago Dei,” or Bonaventure, for whom the soul possesses “principia per se nota,” handle analogy. And analogy is not so much a pathway to knowledge as a proportion known by illumination (see Lyttkens 1952: 123–153).

Otherwise we must take experience as our starting point, in which case the analogia entis is reduced to the rational demonstration of God’s existence, or to the formula that basically reiterates Thomas’s five ways: given a chain of cause and effect in the world, ergo there must exist a causeless first cause. Apart from the fatal weakness of the argument (the ergo that leads up to the final conclusion is exactly what was supposed to be proved—that is, just as the things of the world suppose a chain of causes and effects, so the chain of causes and effects of the world supposes an otherworldly cause—an argument that fails to withstand Kant’s criticism), we should note that what the five ways tell us at the most is that God must exist, not what God is like.

In point of fact, any discussion of analogy only serves to remind us that all we can predicate of God is Goodness, Truth, Fullness of Being, Unity, Beauty, but nothing further. And it can only come up in a culture that already assumes that God is Goodness, Unity, Truth, and Beauty.

Precisely on account of this dramatic impasse, which will lead to its collapse, the analogia entis has less cognitive value than a good metaphor.

3.8. Conclusion

The poetry and prose of the Middle Ages abound in metaphors, while contemporary theory, be it philosophical or poetic and rhetorical, is inadequate to account for this richness. This should not surprise us, as it is a commonplace that the culture of the time frequently shows a dichotomy between theory and practice. The typical example is music, a field in which the doctrinal discussion is extremely abstract, based on Pythagorean models, relicto aurium iudicio (“setting aside the judgment of the ears”), as Boethius remarked, and as a result deaf to the evolution of musical practice (see Eco 1987 and Dahan 1980: 172). But at least in the case of music there is an explanation, which is, as we mentioned, the weight of the Pythagorean tradition as transmitted by Boethius. Can we find a similar reason in the case of the theory of metaphor?

We can, and it lies in the weight that the commentary on Aristotle’s Categories had throughout medieval doctrinal culture thanks to the mediation of Porphyry.

Let us take another look at what we said in Chapter 1 (section 1.2.1) apropos of the Arbor Porphyriana: that it makes it possible, in other words, to classify, but not to define. In order to define, the tree would have to introduce many more differences than it actually does, or it would have to resolve itself into a network of differences. Every time Aristotle is faced with explaining a metaphor he has recourse to local “ontologies” that are far more flexible than a tree of genera and species.

Now, the doctrinal thought of the Middle Ages is unable to wean itself away from the model provided by the Arbor, and as a consequence, while it can easily understand and justify substitutions from genus to species and vice versa, it finds itself in difficulties when it comes to talking about the multiplicity of properties that enter into play in metaphorical substitutions. It is worth noting that Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who was not a philosopher, was not the only one to point out the need to take into consideration all of the possible properties of an object: philosophers and theologians too, when it came to analyzing a metaphor, were perfectly well aware of what, often peripheral, characteristics formed the basis of the amalgam of the two sememes. But when it came to constructing a theory of metaphorical invention (considering the subtleties they were capable of when discussing problems of logic), they found themselves without a sufficiently flexible semantic model, and they were loath to call into question the canonical model of the Porphyrian tree that had been such an integral part of their intellectual formation.

Why this instinctive reluctance to challenge the world order established by the Arbor Porphyriana? If what we said at the conclusion of Chapter 1 is true, resorting to flexible, even unexplored, “ontologies” to explain metaphorical expressions meant admitting that ontologies, like the Porphyrian tree itself, were practical, provisional tools, and not definitive images of the structure of the world and the Great Chain of Being. And not even the most faithful devotees of Aristotle in those centuries could escape the influence of Neo-Platonism (Thomas Aquinas himself commented not only on Aristotle but also on Dionysius).

To construct or suggest the possibility of an unexpectedly adequate ontology, we do not have to start with the supposition that the universe must always be seen according to a single organizational model according to preordained genera and species. But it was precisely this idea of an “ontological revolution” that could not even cross the mind of a medieval thinker, because their very image of the world was conceived along the model of a stable Arbor Porphyriana.

This helps us understand, I believe, why a historical period so rich in extraordinary metaphors (audaciously proposed by its poets) found itself unable to elaborate a theory of metaphor as an instrument of fresh knowledge.

This is a shorter, edited version of a paper delivered at a seminar at the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici of the University of Bologna in March 2001 in the context of a series of talks on the fortunes of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor. It appeared in Lorusso (2005).

1. “Tropus est dictio translata a propria significatione ad non propriam similitudinem ornatus necessitatisue causa.… Metaphora est rerum uerborumque translatio. Haec fit modis quattuor, ab animali ad animale, ab inanimali ad inanimale, ab animale ad inanimale, ab inanimali ad animale: ab animali ad animale, ut Tiphyn aurigam celeris fecere carinae; nam et auriga et gubernator animam habent: ab inanimali ad inanimale, ut ut pelagus tenuere rates; nam et naues et rates animam non habent: ab animali ad inanimale, ut Atlantis cinctum assidue cui nubibus atris piniferum caput et cetera: nam ut haec animalis sunt, ita mons animam non habet, cui membra hominis ascribuntur: ab inanimali ad animale, ut si tantum pectore robur concipis; nam ut robur animam non habet, sic utique Turnus, cui haec dicuntur, animam habet” (Ars maior III, 6, ed. Holtz, pp. 668–669). “A trope is an expression taken out of its proper meaning to a similar improper one for the purpose of embellishment or necessity.… Metaphor is the transformation of things or words. This takes place in four ways, from the animate to the animate, from the inanimate to the inanimate, from the animate to the inanimate, from the inanimate to the animate—from the animate to the animate, as Tiphyn aurigam celeris fecere carinae [P. Terentius Varro Atacinus, Argonautae]; for both auriga ‘driver’ [or ‘charioteer’: Lewis and Short] and gubernator ‘guider’ [steersman,’ ‘pilot’: Lewis and Short] have souls—from inanimate to inanimate, as ut pelagus tenuere rates (Aeneid 5.8) ‘when the ships gained the deep’; for neither naves ‘ships’ nor rates ‘rafts, ships’ are alive—from animate to inanimate, as Atlantis cinctum assidue cui nubibus atris piniferum caput; (Aeneid 4.248) ‘Atlas, whose pine-wreathed head is always encircled by black clouds,’ for these are animate, mons ‘mountain,’ to which human members are attributed, is not alive—from the inanimate to the animate, as si tantum pectore robur concipis (Aeneid 11.368) ‘if in your heart you nourish such strength,’ since robur ‘strength’ is not alive; likewise also Turnus, to whom these things are said, is a living being” (Trans. Jim Marchand, online at http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/texts/donatus.3.english.html).

2. “Allegoria est tropus, quo aliud significatur quam dicitur, ut et iam tempus equum fumantia soluere colla, hoc est ‘carmen finire’… Aenigma est obscura sententia per occultam similitudinem rerum, ut mater me genuit, eadem mox gignitur ex me, cum significet aquam in glaciem concrescere et ex eadem rursus effluere” (“Allegory is a trope, in which one signifies something different from what one says, as in “and now it is time to unyoke the necks of our smoking steeds” (Virgil, Georgics, II, 542), in other words, to finish the poem. An enigma (or riddle) is a proposition that is obscure because of a secret resemblance between things, such as ‘my mother gave birth to me and she will soon be born out of me,’ which means that water is changed into ice and then will flow once again from the ice”) (Ars maior III, 6, ed. Holtz, pp. 671–672).

3. The Virgilian simile is from Aeneid, I, 589.

4. The idea probably comes from Demetrius Phalereus (On Style, 79): not all metaphors are interchangeable: the auriga may be called gubernator and vice versa, but, though we may call the lower slopes of the mountain the foot of Mount Ida we cannot call human feet slopes.

5. Ab inanimali ad inanimal, ut Zachariae undecimo: Aperi, Libane, portas tuas. Item psalmo VIII: Qui perambulat semitas maris. Translatio est enim a civitate ad montem, et a terra ad mare, quorum nullum animam habet. Ab animali ad inanimal, ut, Amos I: Exsiccatus est vertex Carmeli. Homines enim, non montes, verticem habent. 4, Ab inanimali ad animal, ut, Ezech. XI: Auferam a vobis cor lapideum. Non enim lapis, sed populus animam habet (PL 90, 179D–180B). “From inanimate to inanimate, as in Zechariah 11, 1: ‘Open thy doors, O Lebanon.’ And likewise in Psalms 8, 8: ‘whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.’ In fact the metaphor is from the city to the mountain and from the land to the sea, and neither of these things is animate. From animate to inanimate, as in Amos 1, 2: ‘and the [head] of Carmel shall wither.’ In fact, men have heads, not mountains. From inanimate to animate, as in Ezekiel 11, 19: ‘I will take the stony heart out of [your] flesh.’ In fact, the stone is not animate, but people have a soul”. Examples follow of transferrals to birds, beasts, and so on.

6. The Latin quote is from Cicero 1954, p. 345.

7. “Undecumque licet ducere translationes? Nequaquam, sed tantum de honestis rebus. Nam summopere fugienda est omnis turpitudo earum rerum, ad quas eorum animos qui audiunt trahet similitudo, ut dictum est morte Africani castratam rem publicam et stercus curiae: in utroque deformis cogitatio similitudinis” (“Are we free to make metaphors out of anything we choose? Not at all, only from decent things. In fact we must avoid at all costs any vulgarity in the things to which the simile draws the attention of one’s listeners, as when someone said ‘The republic was castrated by the death of Scipio Africanus’ or the expression ‘the dung of the senate’; in both cases the conception of the comparison is dishonorable”) (Halm 1863: 38).

8. See McGarry 1955, p. 56.

9. For the citations from Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland, see Faral (1924).

10. “Considerandum est verbum, quod debet transferri, de quibus dicatur proprie; et, si ad aliam rem debeat transferri, cavendum est ut in ea proprietate sit similitudo. Sic autem debet inveniri similitudo: perscrutandum est in illo verbo quiddam commune, quod pluribus conveniat quam illud verbum; et quibuscumque aliis commune conveniat proprie, conveniet illud verbum traslative” (“You have to consider what the word to be used metaphorically can appropriately be used for; and if it is to be used metaphorically for something else, you must make sure that the comparison fits with its proper use. The comparison is to be found in the following way: one must seek carefully in that word something in common, something that fits other things in addition to that word ; and whatever other thing what they have in common is suited to, that word will also be suited metaphorically”) (Faral: 286).

11. “For if you now put this property of the smiling of the meadows together with its antecedents, concomitants and consequences, you will generate so many witty propositions and enthymemes that the fields themselves in springtime do not produce so many flowers. I call antecedents the causes of this metaphorical Smile: that is, the return of the sun from the hibernal tropic to the sign of Aries. The wafting of Zephyr fecundator of the earth. The warm Austral winds. The rains of Springtime. The retreat of the snows. The autumn seedtime. Thus you will say: Amico SOLI arridentia prata reditum gratulantur. Vis scire cur prata rideant?… Suavissimis Austri delibuta suauys, subrident prata.Dubitas cur prata rideant? Imbribus ebria sunt” (“The laughing meadows salute their friend the sun on his return. Do you want to know why the meadows are smiling?… Smothered with the cloying kisses of the Auster wind, the meadows smile. Do you not know why the meadows smile. They are drunk with the rains”).

12. Pépin (1958, 1970) and Auerbach (1944) have demonstrated with a wealth of examples that the classical world, too, understood “symbol” and “allegory” as synonyms, just as their patristic and medieval exegetes did. The examples, in which the term “symbol” is also used for those didactic and conceptualizing representations that in another context will be called “allegories,” range from Philo to grammarians like Demetrius, from Clement of Alexandria to Hippolytus of Rome, from Porphyry to the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, from Plotinus to Iamblichus.

13. We encounter various formulations of this maxim, as a definition of trope or allegory, in Cicero (De oratore, 3.41.166): ut aliud dicatur, aliud intelligendum sit (“so that one thing may be expressed and another understood”); Donato (Ars maior III, 6), Ambrose (De Abraham libri duo, I, 4, 28): Allegoria est cum aliud geritur et aliud figuratur (“We have allegory when one thing is presented and we imagine another”); Augustine (Sermo 272): Ista, fratres, ideo dicuntur sacramenta, quia in eis aliud uidetur, aliud intelligitur (“These things, brethren, are therefore called sacraments, because in them one thing appears and something else is intended”); Cassiodorus (Expositio Psalmorum, VII. 1,80): schema quod dicitur allegoria, id est inversio, aliud dicens, aliud significans (“The figure called allegory, that is, inversion, says one thing and means another”); Bede (De schematibus et tropis, II.2.12): Allegoria est tropus quo aliud significatur quam dicitur (“Allegory is a figure that signifies something different from what it says”); and Isidore (Etymologiae I.37.22): Allegoria est alieniloquium. Aliud enim sonat, et alius intelligitur (“Allegory is other-speech, because it says something literally and something else is understood”).

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.