By: Claire Noring
In this section, I will explain the history of allegory, what allegory is, and the shift away from writing allegorical texts that occurs in the 18th-century.
Allegory has been around since the 3rd century when the biblical scholar Origen of Alexander suggested that the Bible be read allegorically for the full complexity of its meaning to be revealed. The literal sense simply could not encompass the varied meaning and messages of the text.
The Bible and Christianity are the pillars of both the beginning and the continued popularity of allegory. In the Middle Ages, allegorical interpretation was used by Christians to study the differences in the two Testaments. Christianity needed to reconcile the Old Testament with the new, therefor stories in the Old Testament were read as allegories for Jesus’ story.
For example, the story of Jonah, who spent three days and three nights in the belly of a fish before being spat back up on land. Through the allegorical lens, this story is pointing to Jesus’ three-day death and then resurrection. This way of interpreting the Bible was widespread in the Middle Ages, and through this, the popularity of the allegorical form reached a fever pitch. It culminated in The Divine Comedy by Dante, Everyman, and Piers Plowman. In fact, this popularity means that allegory extends beyond a simple literary narrative—it is also indicative of the Medieval way of looking at life.
Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia offers us a definition of allegory as a literary expression that contains “a symbolic meaning that is parallel to but distinct from, and more important than, the literal meaning.” A simple illustration of this is a fable. Take, for example, the fable of the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. A wolf disguises himself as a sheep and eats a lamb who is fooled by the disguise. The next day the shepherd goes to kill a sheep for his supper and accidentally kills the wolf. The moral is this:
“The evil-doer often comes to harm through his own deceit.”
The literal meaning of this fable is the story of the wolf that puts on a sheepskin and is killed because of it. The symbolic meaning connects the wolf and all of mankind. A person who deceives might profit from it, but will ultimately come to some sort of harm. The literal meaning is inherently non-sensical and requires the symbolic meaning to make sense of it.
However, in the Middle Ages, there was more than just a single symbolic meaning to an allegory.
Biblical interpretation provides the basis for allegory, and biblical interpretation was done at four levels. The first was the literal sense, the second was the allegorical sense, then moral sense and the anagogical sense, or allusions to the afterlife (Coyle 654). For example, the kingdom of Jerusalem as referenced in the Bible is a historical place, but also signifies the Church, stands for “the souls of faithful Christians,” and represents the kingdom of heaven. All four levels of allegory offer a fresh take on a passage that, when read literally, would seem rather bland.
Below is a helpful translated Latin phrase to simplify the four levels of allegory:
“The letter teaches what happened, the allegorical what to believe, the moral what to do, the anagogical towards what to aspire.”
“Allegory: Ante-Purgatory, Purgatorio 2.” Allegory, danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/textpopup/pur0201.html.
One aspect of allegorical writing that I will be focusing on is the use of names to signify the symbolic meaning of a text. For example, in Piers Plowman, the main character, Will, meets a woman called Holy Church and dreams of a whole cast of characters, whose names include: Theology, Conscience, Reason, and False. While these are names of characters, they also serve as explicit references to the concepts embodied in its symbolic meaning.
The literal reading of a text, or reading a text simply for the plot, would seem alien to medieval readers. Coyle asserts that “since the Bible was the model for all secular literature such ways of reading naturally became the model for the way in which all books were to be read” (653). Therefore, The Divine Comedy, finished in 1320, is not meant to be read in a literal sense. Instead, it is an allegory about the soul’s journey to heaven.
There is a distinct shift away from literary allegory and allegorical thinking from the Middle Ages to the 18th-century. This focus shifts with the introduction of the novel in the 18th-century. Now, describing reality within the pages of a text takes precedence over signifying a larger meaning. Reality and nature are the substance of 18th-century texts. Defoe, a writer at the time, claimed that his novel Robinson Crusoe was “a just history of fact.” Naturally, this new focus works directly against what the allegorical form accomplishes.
- Sources Cited:
- “Allegory.” Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, Jan. 2018, p. 1; EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=funk&AN=al069800&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
- “Allegory: Ante-Purgatory, Purgatorio 2.” Allegory, danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/textpopup/pur0201.html.
- Coyle, Martin, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of literature and criticism. Routledge, 2002.
- Joseph Milne (2018) Medieval Mystical Allegory, Medieval Mystical Theology, 27:2, 118-128, DOI: 10.1080/20465726.2018.1545673
- “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.” Library of Congress Aesop Fables, www.read.gov/aesop/022.html.