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).