When, then, in the Scriptures Christ is designated through the figure of a goat (a scapegoat) what we have is not allegoria in factis, but a simple poetic procedure: allegoria in verbis. The poetic expression is not a symbol or an allegory of divine or future things, it simply signifies—parabolically and therefore literally—Christ (Quaestiones quodlibetales VII, 6, 15).27
There is no spiritual meaning in poetic discourse or even in Scripture when they use rhetorical figures, because that is the meaning the author intended, and the reader easily identifies it as literal on the basis of rhetorical rules.
But this does not mean that the literal level (as the parabolic and therefore rhetorical sense) cannot have more than one meaning. Which means in other words, though Thomas does not say as much apertis verbis (because the problem does not interest him), that there may be more than one level of meaning in secular poetry. Except that those different levels of meaning, couched in the parabolic mode, belong to the literal sense of the sentence as understood by its enunciator. To the extent that, since the author of the Scriptures is God, and God can understand and intend many things at the same time, it is possible that in the Scriptures there are plures sensus or several meanings, even according to the merely literal sense.
Likewise, we may speak of a simple literal meaning for liturgical allegory too, which employs not merely words but also gestures, colors, and images, since in that case the administrator of the rite intends to say something precise by means of a parable and we must not look, in the words that he formulates or prescribes, for a secret unintended meaning. Though the ceremonial precept, as it appeared in the old law, may have had a spiritual sense, when it was introduced into Christian liturgy it assumed a significance that was purely and simply parabolic.
Thomas reorganizes a series of scattered notions and implicit convictions that explain why the Middle Ages paid so little attention to the analysis of metaphor. If what the author intended to say literally must be clearly understood through the trope, any attempt to create bold and unexpected metaphors would compromise their natural literalness. Medieval theory would not have been able to accept as a good metaphor or simile Montale’s bold comparison between life (and its travails and frustrations) and walking along a wall that has fragments of broken glass cemented on top of it, because the similarity had not been codified.28
3.5. Dante
Dante does not appear to pay the slightest attention to Thomas’s strictures (cf. Eco 1985). In Epistola XIII, explaining to Cangrande della Scala the keys for reading his poem, he says that the work is polysemos, that it has several senses, and he lists the four canonical levels—literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.29
To clarify what he means he gives a biblical example, citing Psalm 114: “In exitu Israel de Egipto, domus Jacob de populo barbaro, facta est Judea sanctificatio eius, Israel potestas eius” (“When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language; Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion”).
Dante reminds us that according to the letter the meaning is that the children of Israel went out of the land of Egypt at the time of Moses; according to the allegory the meaning is that we are redeemed by Christ; according to the moral sense that the soul goes from the darkness and sorrow of sin to a state of grace; and according to the anagogical sense the Psalmist says that the blessed soul emerges from the slavery of earthly corruption into the freedom of eternal glory.
The controversy surrounding this Epistola is well known, whether, that is, it is the work of Dante or not, but as far as our problem is concerned, the discussion is irrelevant: even if the Epistola had not been written by Dante it would nonetheless reflect a medieval idea that deserves our attention.
On the other hand, in the Convivio Dante positions himself no differently. It is true that the second treatise, which concerns allegory, recognizes that “the theologians take this sense differently from the poets,” but immediately afterward the author affirms that it is his intention to interpret the allegorical mode in the sense of the poets. And the sense of the poets is that by which allegory transmits, under the “cloak” of fable, “a truth hidden under a beautiful fiction. Thus Ovid says that Orpheus with his lyre made beasts tame, and trees and stones move towards himself; that is to say that the wise man by the instrument of his voice makes cruel hearts grow mild and humble, and those who have not the life of science and art move to his will” (Dante 1909: 73).
This would appear to be another expression of deference to the parabolic sense, such as we found in the case of the fables. But now let us see what Dante does, for instance, with the poem “Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete”)(“You who with your understanding move the third heaven”). He devotes chapters II–IX to explaining how it speaks literally of the angels and the heavens, with ample astronomical clarifications, and he devotes the following chapters to the allegorical explanation: “I say that by heaven I mean science and by heavens the sciences, because of three similarities the heavens have chiefly with the sciences.… For each moving heaven moves around its center, which, as to its movement, does not move, and so each science moves around its subject,” and so on, taking care in addition to remind us how the Gentle Lady of the Vita nuova represented Philosophy. And this is the allegorical sense, fairly well hidden, like that of Scripture.
In the Convivio, however, both the literal sense and the allegorical sense are presented as intended by the author, and we are basically still talking about an allegory in verbis. In Epistola XIII, on the other hand, something further is suggested.
Prima facie, as an example of an allegorical reading the author interprets facts narrated by the Bible. It could be objected (see Pépin 1970: 81) that here Dante is citing not the fact of the Exodus but the words of the Psalmist who speaks of the Exodus—a difference Augustine was already conscious of (Enarrationes in psalmos CXIII). But a few lines before citing the psalm, Dante speaks of his own poem, and he uses an expression that some translations, more or less unconsciously, attenuate. For example, the Italian translation of the Latin Epistola by Frugoni and Brugnoli, in the Ricciardi edition of Dante’s minor works, makes Dante say “the first meaning is the one we have from the letter of the text, the other is the one we have from what was meant to be signified by the letter of the text” (“il primo significato è quello che si ha dalla lettera del testo, l’altro è quello che si ha da quel che si volle significare con la lettera del testo”) (Epistole XIII, 7, 20). If this were the case, Dante would still be talking about a parabolic meaning, intended by the author. But the Latin text says: “primus sensus est qui habetur per litteram, alius est qui habetur per significata per litteram,” and here it seems that Dante means to speak of the things “that are signified by the letter” and therefore of an allegory in factis, and there is nothing in the Latin to justify that “was meant to be signified” (“che si volle significare”) which appears in the Italian version. If he had wished to speak of the intended sense, Dante would not have used the neuter plural significata but some other expression such as sententiam.
How can we talk about an allegory in factis apropos of events narrated in the context of a secular poem, whose mode, Dante tells us in the course of the letter, is “poeticus” and “fictivus”?
There are two possible answers. If we assume that Dante was an orthodox Thomist, then we can only conclude that the Epistola, which clearly runs counter to Thomist principles, must not be authentic. In that case, however, it would be odd that all of Dante’s early commentators (Boccaccio, Benvenuto da Imola, Francesco da Buti, and so on) have followed the path indicated by the epistle. But the most economical hypothesis is that Dante, at least as far as his definition of poetry went, did not follow Thomas’s opinion.
Dante believes that poetry has philosophical dignity, not only his own poetry but that of all the great poets, and he does not accept the dismissal of the poet-theologians decreed by Aristotle in his Metaphysics (and commented upon approvingly by Saint Thomas). Sixth among so much wisdom (along with Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan—as he remarks in Inferno, IV, 48), he never ceased to read both the facts of mythology and the other works of the classical poets as if they were allegories in factis, a practice that, despite Thomas’s caveat, was cultivated in Bologna in the period during which Dante resided there (cf. Renucci 1958). These are the terms in which he speaks of poets in the De vulgari eloquentia (I, 2, 7),
