Che se hora tu ligherai questa proprietà del rider de’ prati, con le cose Antecedenti, Concomitanti & Conseguenti: tante Propositioni, & Entimemi arguti, ne farai germogliare; che tanti fiori apunto non partoriscono i prati al primo tempo. Chiamo antecedenti le Cagioni di questo metaforico Riso; cioè: il ritorno del Sole dal tropico hiberno al Segno dell’Ariete. Lo spirar di Zefiro fecondator della terra. I tiepidi venti Australi. Le piogge di Primavera. La fuga delle neui. Le sementi dell’Autunno. Onde scherzando dirai: SOLI arridentia prata reditum GRATVLANTVR, Vis scire cur prata rideant? … Suavissimis AUSTRI delibuta suauijs, subrident prata, Dubitas cur prata rideant? IMBRIBVS ebria sunt. (Tesauro 1968, pp. 117–118)11
And so on and so forth. And if we may grant a human smile to the meadows, why not grant them also the features that accompany the smile? Hence, “Pulcherrima pratorum FACIES. Et se la faccia ha le sue membra: ancor dirai; Tondentur falce virides pratorum COMAE, CRINITA frondibus prata virent. Micantes pratorum OCULI, flores” (“ ‘The FACE most fair of the meadows.’ And if the face has all its attributes, then you will say: ‘The green LOCKS of the meadows are mown by the sickle. The meadows are green with their COIFFURE of leaves. The flowers are the flashing EYES of the meadows’ ” (ibid., p. 118).
This appeal to Tesauro, however, merely serves to underscore, by way of contrast, the timidity of all medieval theories of metaphor.
3.3. Metaphor, Allegory, and Universal Symbolism
Why does the Middle Ages confine metaphor to a merely ornamental function and fail to recognize, at least on the theoretical level, its cognitive possibilities? The answer is twofold: (i) for the Middle Ages, our only teacher, who speaks through “real” metaphors (in rebus), is God, and all man can do is to uncover the metaphorical language of creation, and (ii) if man would speak of God, then no metaphor is equal to the challenge, and no metaphor can account for his unfathomable nature any more than literal language can.
If we wish to study this aspect of medieval culture and its implicit semiotics, we must establish precise distinctions between metaphor, symbol, and allegory—which is what we did in Eco (1985), and to which we will return later.12 For now, we may speak generically of figural language for all those cases where aliud dicitur, aliud demonstratur, in which there is some kind of translatio from one term or a string of terms (or better, from the contents they express) to another, which somehow constitutes its secondary meaning.13 What interests us here is how the Middle Ages fixes its attention on phenomena of secondary or figural meaning, which are not those of literary metaphor.
Our starting point is Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:12: “Nunc videmus per speculum et in aenigmitate, tunc autem facie ad faciem” (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face”). The most elegant solution poetically speaking is that supplied by the Rhythmus alter, formerly attributed to Alan of Lille (PL 210: 578C–579C):
Omnis mundi creatura,
Quasi liber, et pictura
Nobis est, et speculum.
Nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,
Nostri status, nostrae sortis
Fidele signaculum.
Nostrum statum pingit rosa,
Nostri status decens glosa
Nostrae vitae lectio.
Quae dum primo mane floret,
Defloratus flos effloret
Vespertino senio.
Ergo spirans flos exspirat,
In pallorem dum delirat,
Oriendo moriens.
Simul vetus et novella,
Simul senex et puella
Rosa marcet oriens.
Sic aetatis ver humane
Iuventutis primo mane
Reflorescit paululum.14
The world is to be interrogated as if every item with which it is furnished had been put there by God to instruct us in some way. As Hugh of Saint Victor will remark, the sensible world “quasi quidam liber est scriptus digiti Dei” (“is like a book written by the finger of God”) (De tribus diebus VII, 4), and, according to Richard of Saint Victor, “habent tamen corporea omnia ad invisibilia bona similitudinem aliquam” (“and yet all corporal things bear some resemblance to the goods we cannot see”) (Benjamin major II, 13).
The fact that the world is a book written by the finger of God is seen not so much as a cosmological notion as an exegetical necessity. In other words, this universal symbolism starts out primarily as scriptural allegorism and goes on to become what has been defined as “universal symbolism.”
Commentators spoke of allegorical interpretations well before the birth of the patristic scriptural tradition: the Greeks interrogated Homer allegorically; in Stoic circles there arose an allegorist tradition which saw the classical epic as a mythical cloaking of natural truths; there existed an allegorical exegesis of the Jewish Torah, and in the first century Philo of Alexandria attempted an allegorical reading of the Old Testament.
In an attempt to counterbalance the Gnostic overemphasis on the New Testament, to the total detriment of the Old, Clement of Alexandria proposes viewing the two testaments as distinct and complementary, while Origen perfects this position by insisting on the necessity of a parallel reading. The Old Testament is the figure of the New, it is the letter of which the other is the spirit, or, in semiotic terms, it is the expression of which the New is the content (or one of the possible contents). In its turn, the New Testament has a figural meaning, inasmuch as it is a promise of future things. With Origen the “theological discourse” is born, which is no longer—or no longer simply—a discourse on God, but on His Scripture.15
Origen already speaks of a literal sense, a moral (psychic) sense, and a mystical (pneumatic) sense. Hence the triad—literal, tropological, and allegorical—that will later become the foursome expressed in the famous distich of Augustine of Dacia (thirteenth century): “littera gesta docet—quid credas allegoria—moralis quid agas—quo tendas anagogia” (”the letter tells us what went down—the allegory what faith is sound—the moral how to act well—the anagogy where our course is bound”).
From the beginning, Origen’s hermeneutics, and that of the Fathers of the Church in general, tends to favor a kind of reading that has been defined as “typological”: the characters and events of the Old Testament are seen, because of their actions or their characteristics, as types, anticipations, foreshadowings of the characters of the New. Some authors (such as Auerbach 1944, for example) attempt to discern something different from allegory, when Dante, instead of allegorizing openly—as he does, for instance, in the first canto of the Inferno or in the procession in the Earthly Paradise—brings onstage characters like Saint Bernard who, without ceasing to be living and individual figures (in addition to being authentic historical personages), become “types” of superior truths on account of certain of their concrete characteristics. Some would go so far as to speak, apropos of these examples, of “symbols.” But in this case too, what we are probably dealing with is allegory: the vicissitudes, interpretable literally, of one character, become a figure for another (at best what we have is an allegory complicated by Vossian antonomasia, inasmuch as the characters embody certain of their outstanding characteristics).
However we describe this typology, it requires that what is figured (whether a type, a symbol, or an allegory) be an allegory not in verbis but in factis. It is not the words of Moses or the Psalmist, qua words, that are to be read as endowed with an secondary meaning, even though they appear to be metaphorical expressions: it is the very events of the Old Testament that have been prearranged by God, as if history were a book written with his hand, to act as a figure of the new dispensation.
A useful distinction between facts and words may be found in Bede’s De Schematibus et tropis, but Augustine had already addressed this problem, and he was in a position to do so because he had been the first, on the basis of a profoundly assimilated Stoic culture, to create a theory of the sign. Augustine distinguishes between signs that are words, and things that may
