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19. “Studiosi homines possunt a longe olfacere eius sentenciam, non gustare: vinum enim, quod de tercio vase transfusum est, virtutem non retinet in vigore” (“Learned men can get a distant whiff of his meaning, but not taste it. For a wine that has been poured into three successive containers does not keep its virtue in all its strength”) (Moralis Philosophia VI, 267, cited in Rosier-Catach (1998: 95), to whom we are also indebted for the references that follow).

20. “Moderni … duos libros logicae meliores negligunt, quorum unus translatus est cum Commentum Alpharabii super librum illum, et alterius expositio per Averroem facta sine textu Aristotelis est traslata” (“The Moderns neglect the two best books on logic, one of which has been translated with the commentary of al-Farabi, while the commentary on the other composed by Averroes has been translated without Aristotle’s text”).

21. “Quoniam autem libri Logica Aristotelis de his modis, et commentarii Avicennae, deficiuntur apud Latinos, et paucae quae translata sunt, in usu non habentur nec leguntur, ideo non est facile esprimere quod oporteat in hac parte” (“On the other hand, since the books of Aristotle’s Logic regarding these methods, together with Avicenna’s commentaries, are not available to the Latins, and the little that has been translated is not used or read, it is no easy matter to express what needs to be expressed in this part”).

22. “Quoniam vero non habemus in latino librum Aristotelis de hoc argomento ideo vulgus ignorat modum conponendi ipsum; sed tamen illi, qui diligentes sunt, possunt multum de hoc argumento sentire per Commentarium Averrois et [forse in] librum Aristotilis, qui habetur in lingua latina, licet non sit in usu multitudinis” (“Since we do not have, in Latin, Aristotle’s book on this subject [Bacon is alluding to the Poetics], most people therefore do not know the way it was composed; those, however, who are studious can learn much on this topic from Averroes’s Commentary and the book by Aristotle that we do possess in the Latin language, though not many people make use of it”).

23. Interest in the two Aristotelian texts apparently reawakens in the fourteenth century, when citations from Hermann’s translation appear in several florilegia; see Bogges (1970).

24. Still unpublished; see Marmo (1992).

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).