{"id":17195,"date":"2015-04-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2020"},"modified":"2015-04-27T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T00:00:00","slug":"invention-of-allegory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/04\/invention-of-allegory\/","title":{"rendered":"Invention of Allegory"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

C<\/span>S. Lewis describes the formation of medieval allegorism in his classic\u00a0Allegory of Love<\/em><\/a>. He begins by distinguishing\u00a0between an allegorical and a sacramental or symbolic turn of mind. Allegory begins, he says, with \u201can immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience\u201d and finds ways to express those passions visibly. An invented person, Ira<\/em>, has a torch contends with another invented person, Patientia<\/em> (44\u201345).<\/p>\n

Symbolism works from the other direction. It assumes that the \u201cmaterial world . . . is the copy of an invisible world,\u201d and so symbolists or sacramentalists \u201cattempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archetype in the copy\u201d (45). <\/p>\n

For the allegorist, the depiction of a passion as a person is simply a literary device, a personification. For Dante, Amor<\/em> in the Vita Nuova<\/em>, is a personification of love. He is not pretending to find a transcendent something through the symbolism of love that he uses. Instead, as Dante says, love is not, according to the truth, \u201can intelligent\u201d or \u201ccorporeal substance.\u201d He adds, \u201cLove has not, like a substance, an existence of its own, but is only an accident occurring in<\/em> a substance\u201d (quoted, 47). Dante \u201chas no thought of pretending that it is more than a personification.\u201d<\/p>\n

This allegorical turn is given its impetus, Lewis argues, by the \u201ctwilight of the gods\u201d that was already occurring before Christianity took over. There is a double movement, a \u201cfading of the gods and the apotheosis of the abstractions.\u201d <\/p>\n

This double movement, he claims, is already inherent in polytheism. Polytheism isn\u2019t the simple opposite of monotheism. Rather than being the rival of polytheism, monotheism is its \u201cmaturity\u201d: \u201cWhere you find polytheism, combined with any speculative power and any leisure for speculation, monotheism will soon or later arise as a natural development.\u201d And when that happens, \u201cthe gods are to be aspects, manifestations, temporary or partial embodiments of the single power. They are, in fact, personifications\u201d (57\u20138). Thus, \u201cthe allegorization of the pantheon is . . . seen to depend on causes that go beyond merely literary history\u201d (58).<\/p>\n

A<\/span>nother factor that comes into play here is the shift from Aristotelian ethics and moral psychology to Rome and later Christian conceptions of ethics. For Aristotle, virtue wasn\u2019t a struggle. Instead, the point of cultivating virtue was to form a person who would do the right thing without a second thought, develop the habits that would make a person do the good with ease: \u201cthe man who is temperate at a cost is profligate: the really temperate man abstains because he likes abstaining. The ease and pleasure with which good acts are done, the absence of moral \u2018effort\u2019 is for [Aristotle] a symptom of virtue.\u201d No \u201cfight the good fight\u201d from Aristotle (59).<\/p>\n

In Roman and Christian ethics, though, the notion develops that the good life is a life of continuous combat, a life of temptation and resistance to temptation: \u201cThe first step . . . towards an understanding of the role which the abstractions play in Statius and in his successors is to remark that men of that age, if they had not discovered the moral conflict, had at least discovered in it a new importance. They were vividly aware, as the Greeks had not been, of the divided well, the bellum intestinum<\/em>. The new state of mind can be studied almost equally well in Seneca, in St. Paul, in Epictetus, in Marcus Aurelius, and in Tertullian\u201d (60). This requires that the mind turn in upon itself, and to do so is already to be \u201con the verge of allegory,\u201d with an allegory of combat between good and evil desires naturally arising.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CS. Lewis describes the formation of medieval allegorism in his classic\u00a0Allegory of Love. He begins by distinguishing\u00a0between an allegorical and a sacramental or symbolic turn of mind. Allegory begins, he says, with \u201can immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience\u201d and finds ways to express those passions visibly. An invented person, Ira, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[616,905],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allegory","category-medieval-literature"],"yoast_head":"\nInvention of Allegory<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"CS. Lewis describes the formation of medieval allegorism in his classic Allegory of Love. 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