Marianne Wifstrand Schiebe
The Definition of Allegory in Western Rhetorical and Grammatical
Tradition
Chapter One: Introduction
If one should ask a number of people today the question ‘What is allegory?’, no
doubt a few at least would be able to give a fairly satisfying answer. Some
would presumably describe it as a personified abstract concept in art, others
would mention some famous literary work or other, such as Swift's Gulliver's
Travels or Spenser's Faerie Queene. Some would perhaps give both alternatives,
and a few might even be able to give a definition more or less in accordance
with, e. g., Encyclopedia Britannica (2006): ‘a symbolic fictional narrative that
conveys a secondary meaning not explicitly set forth in the literal narrative.’1
Rather soon, it would turn out that all those who actually answered our
question invariably were well educated people, most of them academics. We
would never get an answer from, say, a ten year old school child.
Not so in the Middle Ages. Any school boy, and any even modestly
educated person of any age, would promptly have answered our question⎯
though not in the same way as our modern informants⎯and most answers
would have been in exactly the same words, no matter by whom they were
given. What is more, these words would have been the same in the sixth as in
the fifteenth century⎯the words of Donatus.
In the Middle Ages, whoever could read a book knew that ‘allegory’ was
first and foremost a stylistic device, a ‘figure’ or a ‘trope’ that was used by
1
http://www.britannica. com/eb/article–9355030 (July 2006). Cf. the slightly more extensive
definition in an earlier edition (1969, i, 641): ‘Allegory is the intentional conveying, by means of
symbol and image, of a further, deeper meaning than the surface one.’
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classical and other authors to adorn their style.2 The definitions of allegory and
of all the other ornaments of style were taught in school as part of the
elementary instruction in grammar. This had been so ever since Antiquity:
Quintilian recommends that the figures of style be part of the young boy's
instruction at the grammaticus.3 Jerome once tells us that ‘strictly speaking,
allegory belongs to the category of grammar, and already as small boys we
learn at school how it differs from metaphor and the other tropes’.4 These
definitions were primarily a tool for explaining the school texts, notably the
Latin classical poets. The school boys were expected to discover and explain the
stylistic ornaments by means of the definitions they had learnt by heart. This
was a concern of elementary grammar that remained very much the same in
contents and technique for more than 1500 hundred years, from late Antiquity
until well into the nineteenth century.
Naturally enough, the ornaments of style were also part of rhetorical
theory and instruction. Our classical testimonies⎯Cicero, Rhetorica ad
Herennium, Quintilian⎯belong to this category. However, rhetoric in its
classical sense of a practical art of giving speeches began to loose its function
very early; the significant classical texts were less read, and at the beginning of
the Middle Ages, several of them had next to disappeared from circulation. In
the course of the Middle Ages, rhetoric changed character and turned into
either an auxiliary discipline for logical theory and scholastic theology or, on
the more practical level, into instruction in giving sermons, or in writing letters
2
Note, thus, that the term ‘allegory’ is used to denote 1) (in text or visual arts) a strategy to
express a further, deeper message in addition to the one superficially expressed; 2) a certain
kind of figurative use of linguistic means intended to embellish the message expressed.
3
Quint. Inst. 1.8.16.
4
‘Allegoria proprie de arte grammatica est, et quo a metaphora, vel ceteris tropis differat, in
scholis parvuli discimus’, PL xxvi.389. Jerome is commenting on Galatians 4.24., cf. here below,
with note 5.
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and petitions to superiors and authorities in an appropriate way.5 For these
latter branches, the stylistic devices were held to be important, indeed very
important. The surprisingly great number of still extant medieval manuscripts
from the later Middle Ages devoted to the ‘figures of style’ bears witness to the
general need for guidance in this field.6 Another need for practical instruction
on how to use the ornaments of style⎯although practical in a somewhat
different sense⎯grew out of an increasing interest in poetry and the process of
creating poetry in the High Middle Ages, a boom which apart from resulting in
great works of innovative poetry (mostly from Platonizing poets) also led to the
appearance of a new grammatical-rhetorical genre, the handbook of versecomposing (Ars poetrie).
My purpose has been to study the definition of allegory in Western (i. e.,
on the whole, Latin) rhetorical and grammatical tradition from Antiquity and
onwards. The subject suggested itself to me when I noticed that there is a great
difference between the theory of allegory as expressed in the Latin classical
rhetorical texts and the definition of allegory in Donatus (Ars maior 3,6). In the
classical authors, one significant kind of allegory is explicitly linked to
metaphor; in Cicero, this is even the only type of allegory mentioned. In
Donatus, on the other hand, there is not a word on metaphor in this context.
This silence puzzled me, all the more so because I had read in Jon Whitman’s
Allegory. The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (1987) that the sense
of the word allegory as a continued series of metaphors ‘was the sense that
Quintilian, in the first century AD, canonized in his Institutio Oratoria’ (p. 265,
Appendix I, ‘On the history of the term Allegory’). To talk about canonization
in such a context surely implies massive and lasting influence. Since rhetoric in
the classical sense of the word soon lost its influence and the most important
relevant classical texts themselves were nearly out of use around the beginning
of the Middle Ages, the place where one would have to look for information on
5
For a brief overview of the development, cf. Ward (1978), 41–46.
6
Cf. Murphy (1974), 184.
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the ornaments of style on the whole is among the grammarians, Donatus‘ own
branch.7 But here, I could not find anything to substantiate Whitman‘s
statement. Indeed, I soon realized that if there is any definition of allegory
deserving to be labeled ‘canonical’ (outside the sphere of biblical interpretation,
cf. below p. 4), this would be Donatus‘, at least measured in times of duration.
Even in the Renaissance, when Quintilian and other ancient rhetorical texts, not
least Greek ones, became available again and provided a new basis for a more
sophisticated theoretical discussion of stylistic devices, Donatus succeeded in
retaining a certain position in the field, either directly, or indirectly, by way of
Alexander de Villa Dei, whose Doctrinale for that particular section is
dependent on Donatus. The influence lived on until well into the 16th century,
even in some of the new textbooks that were produced in great number.
In the course of the investigation, its scope and extension have widened
considerably. My first intention was to answer the question whether and when
metaphorical allegory is again explicitly defined as such. However, to isolate
this one kind of allegory from the others treated in the Rhetorica ad Herennium
and by Quintilian would in effect have resulted in a huge jump from Classical
times to the High Middle Ages, i. e., I should have had altogether to disregard
the Donatian branch, since it does not define metaphorical allegory. This
seemed unlogical, not least for the simple reason that Donatus formed the very
starting-point for my study. Furthermore, in the High Middle Ages, when the
Rhetorica ad Herennium had come into general use again and inspired the Artes
poetrie to rediscover and to discuss metaphorical allegory, this led to a certain
interaction between the rhetorical and the grammatical⎯i. e. Donatian⎯traditions on allegory, an interaction which cannot be well assessed without a fair
knowledge of both branches. Thus, after all, it turned out to be logical enough
to include the definition and classification of allegory as manifested in the
grammatical tradition, although the link to metaphor is missing. This decision
in turn entailed a need for studying the classification of allegory and its
7
Cf. Jerome‘s remark, above, note 2.
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subcategories in general and from a diachronic perspective. Finally, in the
otherwise rather static mainstream of unquestioned formulas, I here and there
observed occasional signs of analytical clear-sight and advanced thinking that
kindled my curiosity and made me look out for connections outside the basic
source material. For instance, it seemed prudent to familiarize myself with
Medieval linguistic philosophy. For in fact philosophical speculation also
seized upon the figures of style. The general starting-point for philosophical
reflection on style was provided by Priscian. But even here, Donatus crept in,
since allegory and the other tropes are not mentioned in Priscian. In ch. 4, we
shall have a glance on how the traditional definition of allegory was
philosophically analysed and influenced in the Middle Ages.
Of course, there are other senses of the word ‘allegory’ than the one
studied here, as is clear already from the first paragraph of this introduction
and from footnote 2. Now and then, a glance at those other senses and contexts
will be called for. If I stated above that in a Medieval setting the question ‘What
is allegory?’ would have been likely to provoke answers to an overwhelming
extent exactly identical, this is not to say that we would never have met with
any other reaction. No doubt some informants would not have been content
with just one explanation but would have added that allegory also means a
hidden meaning (or hidden meanings) of biblical texts. Allegory in this sense is
a well-studied phenomenon, a very significant feature of the medieval history
of ideas. We shall see in the following how allegorical interpretation of the Bible
interacts with the grammatical theory of allegory as a stylistic device. Although
the latter was a pagan construction, and although the theological allegorical
exegesis is fundamentally different in practice, the influence of the grammtical
definition is visible almost from the beginning. Starting from Paul's words
about the allegorical sense of Abraham's two wives in the Epistle to the
Galatians 4.24,8 the Christian Fathers developed a doctrine of several levels of
meaning in Scripture, each to be respected in its own right. This was soon to
8
Significantly enough, this is the context of Jerome's words quoted above (note 2).
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become the dominant approach to the text of the Old Testament (and remained
so throughout the Middle Ages).9 Ever since Bede's highly influential De
schematibus et tropis, there was a tendency in texts dealing with the grammatical
or rhetorical tradition of the ornaments of style to append a section explaining
allegory in the biblical sense to the treatment of the definition of allegory.10 The
fact that allegory had such tremendous theological significance seems to have
given to the grammatical/rhetorical concept of allegory a certain prestige
which was never shared by the other figures and tropes.
Paul himself uses the word ‘allegoroumena’ in Gal. 4.24. In pagan texts
from approximately the same time, the word ‘allegory’ is used to denote ‘a
deeper meaning than the surface one’. Although it so happens that the earliest
instances of the word allegory that can be safely dated occur in rhetorical
contexts,11 its use may still be considerably older. The strategy to find alleged
deeper, hidden wisdom in (poetical) texts⎯that is, what we now call
allegorism⎯was practiced in Greece as early as around 500 BC. I am not going
to deal with ancient pagan allegorism in general;12 only in one particular detail
9
The standard scholarly treatment of biblical allegorical exegesis is still Henri de Lubacs four
volume Exégèse médiévale: les quatres sens de l'Écriture, now also in an English edition (cf.
Bibliography). For shorter, particularly clear and accessible surveys, I refer to Freytag (1982),
part A, 15–43, to Fr. Ohly (1977), and to Luisa Valente (1995).
10
Bede, De schematibus et tropis 164–169. Cf. below, ch. 3.3. (p. 31).
11
Philodemus, Rhetorica 1 p. 181 Sudhaus, and Cicero, Orator 94. Cicero and Philodemus are
virtually contemporaneous. The date of Demetrius, On Style (see §§ 100–102; 151; 286) is
controversial; arguments vary from the 3rd c. BC (Struck (2004), 68) to the 1st c. AD. The latest
and fullest treatment of the problem, Chiron (2001), ch. 9, argues for placing Demetrios in the
later second or early first century BC .
12
Allegorism is, thus, an interpretation assuming that the text has been cerated in accordance
with point 1 in footnote 2 above.
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shall I have to glance at ongoing discussion on ancient allegorism. This will be
in connection with the position and sense of the term ‘aenigma’ in rhetorical
and grammatical tradition of allegory, either as a recognized subcategory of
allegory, part of the definition proper, or treated as an unwanted negative effect
of too complex allegories.13 The word ‘aenigma’ is deeply rooted in the context
of allegorical interpretation. Its history in this field, contrary to what is the case
with the term ‘allegory’, is venerable enough: it is attested in this sense before
300 BC.14
According to a theory advanced recently by Peter Struck (2004), to look for
‘aenigmas’, i. e. for deeper wisdom and hidden knowledge, in poetry must
have been a far more frequent habit in Antiquity than has been understood by
modern scholars. Indeed, Struck argues, it was quite a normal attitude to
peoetical texts. The far-reaching consequences of this theory, if it is correct—
and I do think it is—do not as a rule pertain to the present investigation, but his
idea that ‘aenigma’ made its appearance in rhetorical tradition and in the
context of style because Aristotle wanted to combat allegorism and thus tried to
‘degrade‘ aenigma, from an accepted and much-spread aproach to poetry to be
simply an element of stylistics, and one generally to be avoided at that, may
perhaps help explaining a few of the problems connected with aenigma in the
tradition atudied by me.
As for Medieval allegorism, it was of course not limited to the texts of the
Bible, though this was the only field to develop something like a theory of its
own. There were whole-scale allegorical interpretations of classical authors: one
need only think of, e. g., the moralized Ovid or the commentary on the first six
In a forthcoming study on the ancient debate on the justification and origins of the
anthropomorphic image of the divine I shall discuss the presuppositions underlying ancient
allegorism of the myths as far as they concern the human shape of the gods.
13
Cf. Quintilian 8.6.56; 8.6.14.
14
First attested in this sense in the Derveni Papyrus, col. 7.
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books of the Aeneid attributed to Bernardus Silvestris. In fact, as Ernst Robert
Curtius has stressed, the allegorical method became the basis for all textual
interpretation whatsoever.15 This vast subject on the whole falls outside my
scope. In fact, the designation used for this kind of allegorism is not ‘allegoria’,
but ‘integumentum’ or ‘involucrum’ instead, at times also ‘fabula’. The
terminology itself hints at the source for this kind of textual approach: behind
the strategies and the terminology there lurks the voice of Late Antique
Platonism, e. g., Macrobius and Servius. There is, though, one significant
branch of allegorical interpretation of pagan texts where the term ‘allegory’
comes in: the autobiographical interpretation of Vergil's Eclogues. I have already
dealt with this topic in a small monograph in Danish,16 but to a certain extent, I
shall have to return to it in the present context, for initially at least, during the
imperial age, the tendency to read an autobiographical hidden meaning into
most Eclogues must have gained support from Quintilian's claim that the name
Menalcas in Vergil's Ninth Eclogue stands for Vergil himself and that this is a
kind of allegory, defined as ‘allegory without metaphor’(Inst. 8.6.46). No such
category of allegory is ever mentioned in the medieval theoretical tradition, but
the influence is still indirectly productive in that it was taken for granted that
all the Eclogues had to be interpreted ‘allegorice’, i. e., autobiographically. We
shall see below how the Quintilian subcategory ‘allegory without metaphor’
surfaces again in the theoretical discussion of the Renaissance, as an effect of
the new interest in Quintilian following on the turning up of long forgotten
Quintilian manuscripts, starting with Poggio’s sensational discovery of a
complete—or next to complete—Quintilian in St. Gallen in 1416.
I say ‘next to complete’ because as far as the definition of allegory is
concerned, the access to the whole text of Quintilian turned out not to be of
quite as fundamental importance as I had expected. As a matter of fact, the
reintegration of the concept of metaphorical allegory into the definition of
15
Curtius (1979), 205.
16
Wifstrand Schiebe (1998).
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allegory in Renaissance and Baroque theoretical discussion and technical
handbooks does not depend on Quintilian. When I began to study the early
printed Quintilian editions and commentaries in order to establish the sholarly
reactions to the full definition now at last available, I was baffled to find that
the definition was not complete: there was still a short but very important
lacuna in 8.6.44, leaving out the very five words that refer to metaphor. I was
baffled to find out eventually that this decisive element of the definition did not
enter the editions until 1831.17 That metaphorical allegory again became part of
the sholarly discourse on allegory was instead due to Cicero’s Orator and De
oratore, which were by now well known and intensely studied, together with
ingenious combinations and guesses from other passages of the now accessible
Quintilian by certain Renaissance scholars.
Let me conclude with a few methodological remarks. The present
investigation has on the whole been confined to texts fairly accessible to me. I
have of course studied the ‘heavy’ texts known to have been the pillars of the
tradition (Donatus, Isidore, Alexander de Villa Dei...), but for the rest, I have
tried to pick out for treatment such texts as seemed representative to me. In
theory, it is not possible to assert anything for certain about medieval
grammatical concepts in general, for hundreds or even thousands of potentially
relevant texts lie hidden in the libraries of the world. In practice, however,
generalization may at least to some extent be perfectly sound, given the
tendency dominant in the Middle Ages to stick to routine and traditional
authorities. Thus I hope that my conclusions and generalizations can be
accepted.
Things are more complicated when we come to the Renaissance and the
Baroque. To be sure, we have the advantage that most texts can be studied in
17
I have told the story of my hunting for the five missing words through centuries of
Quintilian scholarship in my article (2004). No critical edition used to day gives the slightest
hint that all Quintilian MSS except for the Ambrosianus, nowadays always used as the basis for
editing Quintilian, are defective on this point.
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printed books (though many can be hard enough to get access to), but on the
other hand, the immense quantity of relevant works which by no means
conform to one single, static tradition makes systematization and generalization
much more hazardous than for the Middle Ages. Consequently, I shall limit
myself to giving just a few glimpses of some significant landmarks of the postmedieval evolution of the definition of allegory. Here, I am very much aware of
succumbing to what Murphy (1983, 23) calls ‘the sin of synecdoche’, i. e.,
picking out a few authors and disregarding a thousand others. On the other
hand, my aim is less to give an overall survey of possible positions, but rather
to convey an impression of what kind of definitions were spread through
education.
In the wake of the Enlightenment, the importance of Latin-based
instruction and of rhetoric as a concern of ordinary school education went
downhill.18 Latin grammatical instruction was narrowed and rhetoric ceased to
be considered a necessary preparation for life. To be sure, allegory was still
theoretically discussed, at times even intensely so, but the focus is from now on
primarily on allegory as a narrative or poetic strategy (including its use in the
visual arts), not least on the analysis of the ideas lying behind or generating
allegory as contrasted with the ideas characteristic of related strategies or
phenomena⎯witness the famous controversy on the distinction between
‘allegory’ on one hand and ‘symbol’ on the other that so occupied the minds of
aesthetic theorists in Goethe's days.19 Since then, allegory has been a concern for
specialists. Late 20th century literary theory has much favoured the topic,
following in the steps of such scholars as Angus Fletcher or Paul de Man. But
18
For the attractive view that rhetoric as a subject taught in general education was directly
linked to the role of Latin as the educational and cultural language per préférence, so that the
increasing importance of the national languages (‘die Nationalisierung des Geisteslebens’)
automatically caused the decline of rhetoric, see Fuhrmann (1983).
19
Convenient collection of relevant texts in Sørensen (1972).
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all this is part of a story I am not going to tell. The logical limit of my
investigation is when allegory ceases to be a concept familiar to every even
modestly literate person.20
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chiron, P., 2001, Un rhéteur méconnu: Démétrios (Ps.-Démétrios de Phalère). Paris.
Curtius, E. R., 1979, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. London &
Henley. (First published in German in 1948.)
de Man, Paul, 1979, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke and Proust. New Haven.
Fletcher, A., 1964, Allegory, the Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca.
Freytag, H., 1982, Die Theorie der allegorischen Schriftdeutung und die Allegorie in
deutschen Texten besonders des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts. Bern.
Freytag, W., 1992, ‘Allegorie, Allegorese’, in Ueding, G., Historisches Wörterbuch
der Rhetorik, vol. i.
Fuhrmann, M., 1983, Rhetorik und öffentliche Rede. Über die Ursachen des Verfalls
der Rhetorik im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert. Konstanzer Universitätstreden 147,
Konstanz.
Lubac, Henri de, 1959–1961, Exégèse médiévale: les quatres sens de l'Écriture.
20
For a richly documented overview of all branches of ‘allegory’, I refer to Freytag (1992). I
understand the present contribution as a more detailed supplement to certain parts of Freytag's
text (at times presenting slight corrections). It should be stated at the outset that I am much
indebted to it, especially for later ages.
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Rapids, Mich., and Edinburgh 1998 and 2000.
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Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London.
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