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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