Some types of literary meaning.

Metaphor. “An implied analogy which imaginatively identifies one object with another and ascribes to the first object one or more of the qualities of the second or invests the first with emotional or imaginative qualities associated with the second” (Holman 264). Metaphor may be analyzed in terms of tenor, the idea to be conveyed, and vehicle, the image or term of comparison. What happens is that the ranges of connotative meaning of the tenor and the vehicle are perceived as overlapping or are asserted to overlap. If we say something like “he is a pig,” we are asserting that “he” has qualities that we associate with pigs. The tenor is not really “he”, but his greed or gluttony or lustfulness, and the vehicle is “pig,” which is assumed to have those traits.

Allegory is a type of metaphor.

In Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviary (1132-52), the palm tree is said to represent the salvation of the righteous because a palm tree is difficult to climb, but bears sweet fruit at the top, just as it is difficult to lead a righteous life, but this will lead to salvation. Metaphorically, the connotative fields of “palm tree” and “salvation through righteousness” include the idea “difficult, but rewarding.”

Note two things: 1) medieval thinkers could interpret the palm tree allegorically because they believed that all created things had been given meaning by God, the creator; 2) the metaphor relies on a rather elaborate, pre-existing system of thought: without Christian theology, you could not create this metaphor.

To understand how allegory differs from other metaphors, consider, first, that allegorical meaning works in two directions. There is the allegory of interpreters (allegoresis), who interpret pre-existing texts or things allegorically, and there is the allegory of poets, who deliberately create structures of allegorical meaning. Historically, allegory may have arisen from the effort of interpreters to explain texts that are important to them in ways that are compatible with ideas that are important to them. In ancient Greece, many philosophers (including Plato) thought that poetry, and in particular Homer, was untrue and promoted immorality. But in the end “The Greeks wished to renounce neither Homer nor science. They sought for a compromise, and found it in the allegorical interpretation of Homer” (Curtius 204). The Greek tradition of allegorical interpretation of Homer was adapted to the interpretation of the Old Testament by a Greek-speaking Jew, Philo, who lived about the time of Christ, and Christian allegoresis was inspired by Philo. Medieval Christians practiced allegorical interpretation in the first place because they needed to explain the meaning of parts of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, that didn’t seem, on the surface, to have anything to do with Christian doctrine.

Thus allegorical interpretation can be defined as “the uncovering of a hidden meaning in texts . . ., which are interpreted not according to the [usual] meanings of the words, but according to predetermined systems of meaning” (Wilpert 15). The interpreter assumes that Homer is compatible with his philosophy, or that the rather erotic poem known as the Song of Songs must have a meaning relevant to Christian salvation and sets out to prove it.

The allegory of the poets works in the opposite direction: the poet (or other artist) sets out with a clear message that s/he wishes to communicate, and looks for metaphors that will allow the communication of that message. Allegory is “the visually lively representation of an abstract concept or a clear pattern of thought” (Wilpert 15). In theory, then, the allegorical poet sets out with an idea, a sort of a thesis (probably religious, philosophical, or political) and creates an artistic form to convey the idea. In principal, this is the absolute opposite of the mode of artistic creation in which the artist starts with a feeling, an experience, an image, or a story, and presents it in such a way as to endow it with meaning. In practice, the two modes are surely not always so diametrically opposed or so clearly separable. Priest Konrad [author of a German adaptationof the Song of Roland] probably meant for readers to find allegorical meaning in Roland, but he probably did not sit down one day thinking “I want to write a poem about salvation; which images shall I use?” He probably decided to write a poem based on the French Song of Roland, and the allegorical aspects arose as he worked with the material.

For a working definition of allegory as practiced in the Middle Ages, we might say that allegory is a type of metaphor in which the tenor, which is usually unstated, is a very precise and clearly definable correlate in a non-artistic system of thought. In the Middle Ages, this system of thought will nearly always be Christian theology.

If, for example, the battle against the pagans in the Song of Roland may be seen as representing the Christian’s struggle against sin, then the metaphor would work like this: “pagan” connotes “being turned away from God,” “sin” connotes the same thing; ergo, metaphorically, to be a “pagan” is to be a “sinner” and to fight “pagans” is to fight “sin.”

Allegory can function on a micro-level in medieval texts, as when Karl is compared to the sinful David, or on a macro-level, at which an allegory may be the controlling idea behind an entire work; for example, if we accept the idea that the Song of Roland is an allegory of the Christian’s struggle against sin.

Contrary to what some definitions of allegory imply, in I do not think the fact that something in a text has an allegorical meaning excludes it from having any other meanings. Certainly it can have more than one allegorical meaning. If Roland represents a sinful soul struggling towards salvation, that does not mean that he does not also represent a proud warrior trying to balance prudence and bravery, a young man trying to figure out his relationship with his step-father and his royal uncle, and any number of other things.

Confusion often arises because one type of allegory, what might be called “personification allegory,” really does create characters that have no other purpose than to mean things. When the late antique poet Prudentius creates personifications of the sins and virtues in his Psychomachia and has them fight each other, there is no question that the angry female called “Pride” in, in fact, an allegorical representation of Pride, and little if anything else. But in medieval allegorical interpretation of the Bible, understanding the allegorical senses does not destroy the historical sense; and the same is true in poetic allegories created in analogy to theological allegory.

Beyond the basic idea of allegory, medieval intellectuals often worked with more elaborate schemes of allegory on multiple levels, one of the most common being the “four-fold” scheme of the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels.

Typology is a special kind of allegory in which the tenor and the vehicle are separated by time, usually by belonging to different eras of the history of the world, as understood by medieval Christians, and the tenor is seen as a sort of fulfillment of the vehicle. To put this another way, in typology, the “predetermined system of meaning” is the Christian understanding of history, in which the New Testament (or, more generally, the Christian era) fulfills the promises of the Old Testament (or more generally, the time from the Fall to the coming of Christ).

For example, in the “Melk Song of Mary,” the burning bush that Moses sees is seen as a type or prefiguration of Mary’s ability to give birth without losing her virginity. The tenor is the virgin birth, the vehicle is the burning bush, and the shared connotation is the idea that something undergoes a process that ought to consume it, but it is not consumed.

Typology “sees historical change as elevating the past event onto a new level, on which the past event is carried forward, unchanged in its own essence, but validated, and, in its fulfilment, superceded” (Haug 2).

Typology is rooted in the New Testament itself, and in the interpretation of Old Testament events as prefigurations of New Testament events. The term becomes meaningless if it is extended to any and all comparisons in which the two terms are separated in time. Bush supporters who compare the president to past leaders that they admire and Bush opponents who compare him to past leaders that they see negatively are not engaged in typology.

This does not mean that we we must reserve the term “typology” for the association of Old Testament types with New Testament antitypes. The 14^th-century Mirror of Human Salvation associates each episode in the story of Christ with three types. (For one example, see http://www.camden.rutgers.edu/dept-pages/german/religiousart.html.) While the great majority of the types are from the Old Testament, some are not. For example, the scene in which Christ, in heaven after his ascension, shows his wounds to God the Father is associated with Mary showing her breasts to her son as she intercedes for sinners, with Esther pleading with her husband, the Persian King Ahasuerus not to massacre the Jews, and with the Roman soldier Antipater, showing his scars to Julius Caesar to prove that he has been a good and loyal soldier (Mirror, in Niesner, ch. 39). Only one of these types actually comes from the Old Testament, and the image of Mary showing Christ her breasts even seems to violate the basic chronological rule of typology: “The type, in every case, comes before Christ, the antitype in Christ or after him” (Ohly, as quoted in Niesner 34). Here we are in a gray area where we might ask whether the author of the Mirror is still practicing typology, or doing something else that is clearly influenced by typological thought but is no longer typology in the strict sense. Similar questions might be raised about, for example, Priest Konrad’s comparison of Karl to Joshua. Whatever we call them, such comparisons still follow the basic principle of typology: allegorical metaphors in which the system of meaning that defines the tenor is the Christian understanding of history.

WORKS CITED

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, 1953.

Haug, Walter. Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts: Eine Einführung. Darmstadt, 1985.

Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature, 4^th ed. Indianapolis, 1980.

Hugh of Fouilloy, Aviarum, in Willene B. Clark, ed. and trans., The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarum. Binghamton, 1992.

Niesner, Manuela. Das Speculum Humanae Salvationis der Stiftsbibliothek Kremsmünster. Cologne, 1995.

Wilpert, Gero von. Sachwörterbuch der Literatur. 6^th ed. Stuttgart, 1979.