51. For these operations performed by a culture, see also Demaria (2006).
52. Cited in Brown (2012: 109).
53. “This was precisely what the medieval encyclopedia … aspired to, not only through the topical arrangement of knowledge, but also, more concretely, by means of diagrams, miniatures, illuminated initials, and so on. With a single image it was possible to embrace the whole of being, from God to the angels, from man to the stones, and retain it in the memory thanks to the power of the imagination” (Cevolini 2006: 96).
54. On textuality as one means of creating forgetfulness, see Lotman and Uspensky (1975), as well as Demaria (2006: 43): “Cultural memory is the result of different strategies of selection of what may become a memory—that is, of different enunciative praxes which form identities in different ways.”
2
Metaphor as Knowledge
Aristotle’s Medieval (Mis)Fortunes
In Chapter 1 we observed that Aristotle’s major contribution to the theory of metaphor lay in the emphasis he placed on its cognitive value. Since we are accustomed to seeing the Middle Ages as the age of the rediscovery of Aristotle and indeed of his near-canonization, it should prove interesting to inquire whether the Middle Ages somehow picked up on and profited from this suggestion of his. Let us say from the outset that our investigation was sparked by the conviction that the answer is in the negative. What we must try to understand, then, is why there exists no medieval theory of metaphor as an instrument of knowledge, at least in the aforementioned Aristotelian sense. The answer, which we will attempt to document in what follows, is that not only did medieval authors gain access to the Poetics and the Rhetoric at a very late date, but they also became acquainted with these texts in translations that were, to say the least, somewhat misleading. We will see later (in Chapter 3) what the other sources of medieval reflection on metaphor were, and what other tools (such as, for example, the concept of analogia entis or “analogy of being”) they did attribute a cognitive function to.
2.1. The Latin Aristotle
It is no secret how protracted and tormented were the fortunes of the Aristoteles Latinus. In the sixth century Boethius had translated the entire Organon, but for centuries only one section of it, the so-called Logica Vetus—translations, in other words, of the Categories and the De interpretatione, accompanied by a version of the Isagoge by Porphyry and a number of treatises by Boethius on categorical and hypothetical syllogisms, on division and on topics—was in circulation, and that for the most part in a corrupt form.1 Boethius had also translated the Prior Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Refutations, but these works did not circulate at all until they were revised or retranslated, from Greek or Arabic,2 along with the Posterior Analytics, in the twelfth century. True, this last-named work had also been translated by Boethius, but his version had been lost and remained practically unknown.3 With the twelfth century the Libri Naturales also make their appearance: the Physics, the De coelo et mundo, the De generatione et corruptione, the Meteorologica, the De anima, the Parva Naturalia are translated, first from Arabic then from Greek. The Metaphysics too appeared, first in partial form in a translatio vetustissima by James of Venice, while another extended portion appeared—translated from the Greek—in the same century (the so-called translatio media). Thomas Aquinas will own a complete version only when William of Moerbeke, completing his rendering, will make Book K available to him. Partial versions of the Greek text of the Libri Morales also go back to the twelfth century. In the mid-thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste translated the Nicomachean Ethics, later revised by Moerbeke, and it will be the 1260s before the latter will provide a complete version of the Politics. It is likewise in the thirteenth century that Michael Scotus made versions of the books on animals from the Arabic, while at a slightly later date Moerbeke will also translate them from Greek. A rendering of De motu animalium by yet another translator was known to Albertus Magnus.
Coming to the two texts that most concern us, we note that Moerbeke did not translate the Poetics until 1278—in other words, after Thomas’s death in 12744—while Averroes’s Middle Commentary—composed in 1175—appears, translated by Hermann the German (Hermannus Alemannus), around 1256.
In the same year Hermann translated the Rhetoric from the Arabic. This translation is accompanied by the anonymous Translatio Vetus, from the Greek. And finally, around 1269 or 1270, there appears a version from the Greek by Moerbeke.
Thus, the Rhetoric and Poetics, when they finally appear in Latin, do so at an advanced date (and at a moment when a Logica Modernorum is on the rise—more interested in the Organon than in the remainder of Aristotle’s works). Thomas is the typical example of a thinker who was not influenced by any suggestion of Aristotle’s on this subject, and his theory of metaphor that “non supergreditur modum litteralis sensus” (“does not exceed the literal sense”) offers sufficient proof of this fact.5
2.2. The
Poetics:
Averroes’s Commentary and Hermann’s Translation
Averroes did not know Greek, he scarcely knew Syriac, and he was reading Aristotle in a tenth-century Arabic translation, derived in turn from a Syriac version.6 Both he and his sources have trouble rendering the various aspects of Greek poetry and dramaturgy to which Aristotle refers, and consequently try to adapt their examples to the Arabic literary tradition. Imagine what the Latin reader was able to make of Aristotle with the aid of Hermann the German’s Latin translation of an Arabic text, based in turn on an attempt to fathom the Syriac version of an unknown Greek original!