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Chapter 2a: Reason, Sensuality and Allegory

The conflict between Reason and Sensuality in medieval literature grows out of “the most characteristic feature of mediævalism, the almost universal dualism of thought. . . . A World of sense images on the one hand was set over against a universe of analogical and mystical meanings on the other, the former being strictly subordinated to the latter” (Assembly xliii). For medieval writers and theologians, the physical world was made up of symbols, signs and enigmas which, if properly apprehended by the senses and understood with the help of reason, could reveal the higher, spiritual world. The influence of platonic or neo-platonic philosophy on these ideas is clear and comes to the Middle Ages through the teachings of early church fathers, the most important of whom is Augustine.

Augustine explains the relationship between the things in this world and the things of a higher world, which are comprehended by reason when he says, “if we wish to return to our native country where we can be blessed we should use this world and not enjoy it, so that the ‘invisible things’ of God ‘being understood by the things that are made’ (Romans 1:20) may be seen, that is, so that by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual” (10). The signs and symbols of the physical world can be read like words on a page to reveal divine, eternal truths. This desire to find a spiritual meaning in temporal things is at the heart of what Umberto Eco calls “perhaps the most typical aspect [of medieval aesthetic sensitivity], the one which we tend to look upon as uniquely medieval . . . the medieval tendency to understand the world in terms of symbol and allegory” (52).

Definitions of allegory and detailed descriptions of its workings vary just as the precise delineations of the parts of the human soul do, but as with the various partitionings of the microcosm, there are fundamental similarities in most of the definitions of allegory. Samuel Levin gives some examples:

“In the simplest terms,” writes Agnus Fletcher, “allegory says one thing and means another.” Some such observation about the disjunctive or dualistic nature of allegory is made by just about everyone who writes on the topic (so Quintilian: “Allegory . . . presents one thing in words and another in meaning”). According to Northrop Frye, “We have allegory when the events of a narrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure of events or ideas . . ..” (quoted in Bloomfield Allegory 23)

Modern critics generally start from this simple definition of allegory and go on to argue about specific details such as the difference between allegory and symbol, the necessity of personification in allegory, whether allegory is a genre or a trope and whether allegories are unified or discordant systems.*See for example Bloomfield, Allegory 23-25; Eco 52-64; Lewis, Allegory 44-48; Robertson 57-58; Teskey 1-5; Tuve 25-27; Van Dyke 15-20, 25-28; Whitman 1-13. But for Augustine and the medievals who followed him, allegory was most importantly a way of understanding the world. The definition of allegory as something that says one thing but means another was standard in the Middle Ages and is broad and simple enough to include all the ways that the world and the scriptures might speak to medieval Christians.*For a discussion of the development of the word allegory and its use in the Middle Ages see Whitman 263-268. Any corporal and temporal thing can reveal eternal and spiritual truths to those who have the ability to properly interpret them. Augustine’s examples of signs and enigmas include natural phenomena such as the behavior of animals and the properties of materials, historical events like the story of Abraham and Isaac, and man-made signs such as words. The world and literature, particularly the Bible, can, and indeed must, be interpreted with spiritual meanings in mind because the inner, spiritual meanings are of greater importance than the outer, temporal meanings. Carolynn Van Dyke talks about the popular images of veil and object or husk and kernel that were often used to represent the two parts of an allegory and says, “In all such pairs the second element is more authentic and more valuable. A similar difference in authenticity emerges from the common medieval association of the immediate meaning with the illusory, sensible realm and the delayed one with the everlasting spiritual reality” (203).

This allegorical interpretation is not unique to the Middle Ages or to Christianity. Classical writers allegorized mythological tales and the writings of Homer, and Philo relied heavily on allegorical readings for his interpretation of parts of Jewish history. But allegorical interpretation, like the idea of the microcosm, flourished during the Middle Ages in an unparalleled way. As Van Dyke explains, “Christianity provided . . . a particularly strong base: the conviction that the intelligible is more authentic than the sensible, and the equally important belief that the sensible nonetheless participates in intelligible reality” (65). Christ declared himself to be the fulfillment of Old Testament signs,*E.g. John 3:14-15 and his incarnation was seen as the ultimate example of the combination of a temporal exterior with a spiritual interior. In the writings of St. Paul medieval Christians found examples of allegorical interpretation. Paul even used a form of the word as he declared Abraham’s two sons to be an allegory of the covenants made at Sinai and Jerusalem (Galatians 4:22). From Augustine’s explanation of history in The City of God to Bernard of Clairvaux’s series of sermons on the Song of Songs, the belief that, “a metaphysical ‘reality’ exists beneath the ‘actuality’ of the empirical world of the senses” (Schmidt xxxvii), led medieval Christians to look for a higher significance in everything around them.

A proper interpretation of signs, whether in nature or the arts, requires that the senses and reason work together. Augustine says that, “a sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses” (34). The senses must receive the impression and then reason must be put to work comprehending the spiritual meaning. St. Gregory described allegory as:

. . . a kind of machine to the spirit by means of which it may be raised up to God. Thus when enigmas are set before a man and he recognizes certain things in the words which are familiar to him, he may understand in the sense of the words what is not familiar to him; and by means of earthly words he is separated from the earth. Since he does not abhor what he knows, he may come to understand what he does not know. For the things which are known to us from which allegory is made are clothed in divine doctrine, and, when we recognize the thing by an exterior word, we may come to an interior understanding.

But he warns that:

. . . the sacred Scripture with its words and senses is like a picture with its colors and things pictured. A man would be extremely stupid to confine his attention to the colors and to ignore the things that are depicted. And we, if we embrace only what the words say on the surface and ignore the other senses, are like those who ignore the things depicted and see only the colors. “The letter kills,” as it is written, “but the spirit gives life” [2 Chor. 3:6]; thus the letter covers the spirit as the chaff covers the grain. But to eat the chaff is to be a beast of burden; to eat the grain is to be human. He who uses reason, therefore, will cast aside the chaff and hasten to eat the grain of the spirit. For this reason it is useful that the mystery be covered in the wrapping of the letter. (quoted in Robertson 57-58)

In this way the literal or sensual level of an allegory can lead, if properly employed and controlled, to the development of the reason and the building up of the spirit. The interpretation of allegory can help bring the soul into the proper order and strengthen the soul’s ability to perceive and conform to virtue.

Gregory’s suggestion that the wise reader, “will cast aside the chaff,” or the literal sense of a passage of scripture, indicates the extent to which scholars during the earlier parts of the Middle Ages privileged the spiritual senses of allegory, but in the later Middle Ages, the reintroduction of Aristotle’s writings lead to a revaluation of the physical world which influenced all of the scholastic disciplines, including biblical exegesis. Late medieval writers still describe the spiritual senses as, “over and above the literal sense” (St. Bonaventure in Minnis and Scott 234), but they stress the need to have a firm foundation in the literal sense before searching for the higher, spiritual senses. St. Bonaventure explains that, “since [the Bible] hides several meanings under a single text, the expositor must ‘bring forth that which is hidden into the light’ [Job 28:11], and, having brought it forth, explain it, using another part of Scripture which is more open to understanding. . . . he who scorns the letter of Holy Scripture can never rise to interpreting its spiritual meanings” (Minnis and Scott 237). Similarly, Aquinas explains, “Truths which are taught under the guise of metaphor in one part of Scripture are explained more explicitly in other parts” (240). For these later writers, the spiritual senses of the Bible are still of greater value than the literal, but the literal sense is not chaff to be discarded. It is an integral part of the word of God and the foundation on which a higher, more refined understanding must be built.

This renewed interest in the literal sense is important in biblical criticism because the literal level of the Bible describes the lives of the prophets, the apostles and Christ and it is the word of God. The fictional surfaces of man-made allegories are not as valuable as the literal level of the Bible,*A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott describe the way that some late medieval exegetes began to question how much influence human authors had on the form of God’s word (205-212), but even with those questions, the literal sense of the Bible maintained a significance that the surface of poetry never achieved. but they are important because they provide access the deeper meaning of those allegories. As Dante explains,

the literal should always come first, as being the sense in whose meaning the others are enclosed, and without which it would be impossible and illogical to attend to the other senses, . . . in everything that has an inside and an outside it is impossible to arrive at the inside without first arriving at the outside. . . . since the literal meaning is always the subject and material of the other senses . . . it is impossible to come to an understanding of them before coming to an understanding of it. (41-42)

Even with man-made allegories, the inner truths can only be understood with the help of the information that comes from the outer layer.

The ability to read the divine meaning of the Bible, a poem, a picture or the natural world, is possible for man because he alone is “made in the image and likeness of God . . . in that he excels the beasts in the dignity of the rational soul” (Augustine 18). But without the senses reason would have nothing to work with. As Aquinas explains, “It is natural for man to reach intellectual things by means of sensible things, because all our knowledge originates in sensation” (Minnis and Scott 239). It is only by applying reason to the information that comes from the senses, only by the accord of reason and sensuality, that the allegories that fill the medieval world can be understood.

The literature that is contemporary with The Assembly of Gods emphasizes the role of Reason and Sensuality in the acquisition of knowledge and the understanding of higher things. Perhaps the clearest expression comes in Lydgate’s Reason and Sensuality. Nature explains,

Vnderstondyng and reson,
By whiche of rygyt, with-out[e] shame,
Of a man he bereth the name,
And throgh clere intelligence
Fro beasts bereth the difference,
And of nature ys resemblable
To goddys that be pardurable;
Knowynge through hys dignite
Many things that be secre;
Wher sensityf, this is certeyn,
Is in knowynge but foreyn,
As of the barke which is withoute
For-derked with a maner doute,
Of thinges which by accident
Ne ben but out-warde (but) apparent,
And ne kan no ferther wynne
To know the prevy pithe withynne;
Wher as man, in sentence,
By reson hath intelligence
To make hys wytt to enclyne,
To knowe thinges that be dyvyne,
Lastyng and perpetuel,
Hevenly and espirituel,
Of heven and of the firmament,
And of every element,
Whose wyt is so clere y-founde,
So perfyr pleynly and profounde,
That he perceth erthe and hevene
And fer above the sterris sevene,
So that he hath of euery thing
Verray perfyt knowlechyng
in secret ynwarde syght,
So that this vertu to no wyght,
Of reson and etendement
I mene as in this lyve present,
Is yiven oonly but to man.
And as me semeth trewly than,
He shoulde who so kan discerne,
Oonly by reson him governe,
Lyst that he, whiche wer grete shame,
Be depryved of hys name. (724-64)

It is the inability of Sensuality to see beyond the bark that makes him vulnerable to deception and unreliable as a source of judgement. And it is Reason’s ability to discover, “Many things that be secre;” “thinges that be dyvyne,/ Lastyng and perpetuel,/ Hevenly and espirituel,” with a “secret ynwarde syght” that qualifies him to govern.

The way that the senses and reason work together in the interpretation of allegory is a perfect model for the way that reason and sensuality should work together in the soul generally. Images used to describe the appropriate relationship of the two in directing the actions of the soul precisely match those used to describe the interpretation of allegory. To allow the sign to have only the significance that its impression makes on the senses would be analogous to taking Sensuality as our guide rather than Reason. Augustine says:

. . . when that which is said figuratively is taken as though it were literal, it is understood carnally. Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul (Romans 8:6) than that condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from the beasts, which is understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the pursuit of the letter. He who follows the letter takes figurative expressions as though they were literal and does not refer the things signified to anything else. . . . There is miserable servitude of spirit in this habit of taking signs for things, so that one is not able to raise the eye of the mind above things that are corporal and created to drink eternal light. (84)

The Parson in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales uses equivalent language as he describes the “servage and subjecction” that follows when we allow sensuality to have lordship over reason (275) and, in Nature, Man is warned that, “if thou abandon thee to passions sensual,/ Farewell they liberty! Thou shall wax thrall” (48). To comprehend the higher meaning of a sign with the help of “the thing which distinguishes us from the beasts” is one way that Reason can lead Man on the “celestiall” path to the East “which ys so bryght/ and casteth forth so clere a lyght” (Lydgate Reson 665-66). To allow the literal meaning of a sign to dominate the understanding is one way that Sensuality can turn the proper order of things “up-so-doun.”

In one sense then, the conflict between the different levels of meaning in an allegory constitutes a discord between reason and sensuality as sensuality tries to promote the outward meaning and reason seeks to explain the inner truth. To fail to understand an allegory would indicate that sensuality had overcome reason. And when the process of interpretation works correctly and reason and the senses work together to expose the deeper meanings, reason and sensuality are brought into accord. As Alan of Lille says in the introduction to Anticlaidianus, “For in this work the sweetness of the literal sense will caress the puerile hearing, the moral instruction will fill the perfecting sense, and the sharper subtlety of the allegory will exercise the understanding nearing perfection” (quoted in Robertson 60).

St. Gregory’s statement that allegory is, “a kind of machine to the spirit by means of which it may be raised up to God,” and Alan of Lille’s claim that “the literal sense will caress the puerile hearing, the moral instruction will fill the perfecting sense, and the sharper subtlety of the allegory will exercise the understanding nearing perfection” (Robertson 57, 60) make an important claim for allegory. Allegory does not simply educate the mind or provide information, it trains reason to control sensuality. It helps prepare the soul to follow the guidance of reason in making decisions. And as Nature explains, “reson/ Vnto vertu ay accordeth” (Lydgate Reson 777). The process of interpreting allegory can help people learn to live more virtuously by giving them an opportunity to exercise reason and overcome sensual influences. The refining process of bringing reason and sensuality into accord to understand an allegory is as important as, if not more important than the information that might be gained from the experience. This may explain to some extent the late medieval tolerance for repetition and the recycling of old images and ideas that modern readers interested primarily in information and entertainment often find tedious. For the medieval reader, the process of unraveling the allegory, of peering through the outward appearance to the inner significance trains the soul and helps prepare the individual to exercise reason in making choices and overcoming the world.

The physical world of the Middle Ages is filled with signs, symbols and enigmas which conceal, and yet provide access to, the truths of eternity. Each of these is an allegory which presents one thing on the surface, but contains something else within. The outward signs of these allegories are perceived through the senses, but the inner meanings can only be understood by those who apply reason to the information that comes to the senses. When reason and sensuality work together in this way, allegory creates an accord between these two aspects of the soul which improves the soul’s ability to discern and follow virtue.

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Introduction

Chapter 1
a. Reason and Sensuality in Medieval Literature
b. Reason and Sensuality in The Assembly of Gods

Chapter 2
a. Reason, Sensuality and Allegory
b. Reason, Sensuality and Allegory in The Assembly of Gods

Chapter 3: Literary, Visual and Dramatic Allegories
a. Literary
b. Visual
c. Dramatic

Chapter 4: Death and the accord of Reason and Sensuality
a. The Allegory of Death
b. The Accord of Reason and Sensuality in Death

Conclusion

Appendix 1
a. The Poem
b. Authorship and Date
c. Manuscripts
d. Title

Appendix 2: Critical response to The Assembly of Gods

Works Cited

Chapter 2a: Reason, Sensuality and Allegory

Contents