If you're taking a literary theory course, you might find that your anthology typically has very
few medieval texts in it, but an exception often is Dante's letter to Can Grande Della Scala. One
of the reasons why Dante is included is because he gives us a very nice introduction to the four
modes of allegory ... and that's what we'll be looking at in this video. Now Dante talks about
other things as well. He talks about the nature of comedy and tragedy and things of that sort,
but we're really just going to focus on how he how he explains allegory. I should also say that
some people feel that Dante may be not the author of this letter. This is probably a minority view,
but there's some controversy about this in the world of Dante criticism because it appears that
some of the the things that Dante writes in this letter seem to contradict things
he says elsewhere. So there is a controversy out there, [but I'm] not going to deal with it
or take a position in terms of its merits. Okay, so four modes of allegory then ... Dante suggests
that we can look at a passage such as Psalm 114: this is from the New International Version
and we can interpret it in a number of different ways. The the first way in which we can interpret
it is on the literal level. ... What we mean there is that this is simply what happens.
There's no need for extra explanation, but we can simply say that this passage from Psalm 114
describes how Moses, the old testament leader, led the people out of Egypt. So it's the exodus:
the exodus from Egypt ... and that's simply what happened -- pretty straightforward -- but we also
have three other modes, three other forms of interpretation. All three of them together can
be described as allegorical. So all of them are allegorical, or they are a form of allegory. We
can call this "figurative" as well. Maybe that's another word you might like. This is figurative.
But the first mode, the first mode in these three allegorical modes is also called allegory!
Okay, so we have allegorical here as well, and that's confusing because this is a specific kind
of allegory. It's good to keep these things kind of separate here, so what do we mean here? Well,
the literal, as we said, is what happens. ... The allegorical, particularly when we apply it to
the Bible is what we believe ... and what we believe in relation to how the Old Testament
tends to prefigure the New Testament. We'll just write that the OT, the Old Testament,
leads up to the New Testament, and in that sense stories that happen in the Old Testament can kind
of foreshadow the story of Christ and the story of of his passion in the New Testament. Another
word for this kind of criticism is what what is often called "typological" criticism. ... The idea
here is that an Old Testament character might be a type of a New Testament one -- might be a kind of
a figure or a representation that runs parallel to something that happens later.
For example, King David is often seen as a type of Christ. In this case, Moses leads the Exodus from
Egypt, and we can also say that Christ redeems -- redeems us from our sins. So we'll just write
"redemption," which is a kind of exodus out of our sin to something which we might call a state of
salvation. Alright, then the third level here, or the second allegorical type of interpretation, is
the moral type, and this is basically what we should do based on our reading of the
story. ... It's a kind of moral application. Now we start to apply the story to ourselves,
and in this case we might say that this narrative of the Israelites coming out
of Egypt going to Canaan to the promised land. This is also a kind of story about repentance
and conversion. So on this level applying it to us we are going to repent repentance:
we are leaving behind our sins, which are associated with Egypt, and we are heading
to a kind of conversion -- so, slavery in Egypt is like the way in which we are indebted to sin,
and we leave that behind, and we are converted, and we might call this the conversion of the soul.
The soul travels out of the realm of sin and into the realm of salvation.
Then the last level, and this is often the hardest one to remember, is what we call the anagogical
level. ... The anagogical level refers to where we are heading, so where we are going or heading.
In particular, within the Christian tradition we are heading to the afterlife, we are heading
to heaven, so this kind of interpretation is often focused on what we call eschatology,
which is the study of the end times. To apply this to our Bible passage, we can now say that we are
also looking forward to an entrance into heaven. In other words, this world then becomes like Egypt
and we say a kind of farewell to earthly corruption. ...
We leave that behind and we enter into heaven. So those are the different parts
of our allegorical interpretation. As it turns out, not every Bible passage can necessarily
be interpreted on all four levels. We normally have the literal level and then we might have one
or more allegorical levels potentially, or maybe none, but the interpreter should always be aware
of the potential for those allegorical levels to be there. Now one distinction that Dante seems to
make elsewhere is that sometimes he distinguishes between the allegory of the poets ... versus the
allegory of the theologians. One critic who has really worked this out, who has talked
about this a fair bit, is Charles Singleton. You can look him up if you like. There we go,
and if we think about this distinction, the main difference is that for the theologians
the literal level turns out to be true. So on the literal level, what happens in the Old Testament,
let's say, really happened in real life, whereas for the poets the literal level can be fictional.
So you can make it up if you like. And then you can add these extra layers of meaning.
There is some controversy again as to whether Dante's Divine Comedy is also an allegory of the
poets or an allegory of the theologians. Does he mean for his story, where he travels through hell,
purgatory and paradise -- does he mean for this to be interpreted realistically,
as if this actually happens? So again there's quite a bit of discussion about that,
and I should say that the letter to Can Grande is also a kind of preface to the Paradiso,
to the last part of the Divine Comedy. Now a few more things here. One of the terms that Dante
uses to describe these four modes of allegory is the term "polysemous."
"Polysemous" here is related to words like "semantic" and so on. It has to do with meaning,
whereas " poly" means many. The idea here is that this is a text that has multiple
meanings -- it has many meanings. This is also a word that's useful when you start studying
postmodern authors, because many of them like this word to suggest that the text
has quite a number of different meanings that are often in tension with each other.
For Dante they tend to work together with each other to create a full picture, whereas
for a postmodern author these different senses might actually be creating problems in some way.
Now this notion of different meanings functioning in relation to each other
is something that Dante had actually talked about earlier in the letter to Can Grande
in a very interesting way. So we might call this a kind of relational truth. All of these
modes of allegory relate to each other and you might see them as parts of the whole.
Dante actually talks then about how some kinds of truth are relational,
and if we think of concepts we can see this. If we take, for instance, the concept of
"father," we need to think of another word like "son" or "daughter." And then we can
kind of complete the concept, we can make sense of it. Similarly, if we think of "double" then
we need to have other words such as "half." Or if we have "master" we probably have to have the word
"servant" or "slave" or something like that, in order to kind of make sense of this relationship.
Dante's point then is that if we think about being, there are some things that we might call
absolute being. In other words, they are complete in themselves, and of course the
perfect example is God, which is why Dante grounds all truth in God, and the Paradiso also ends with
this beautiful description of what God is like, as far as we can actually describe him.
We might then contrast absolute being to this kind of dependent being -- this is more
dependent: one term is related to another one term, depends on another.
If we then think of allegory we can see how this works now, because all these different aspects,
these different levels and layers of meaning, relate to each other. They're more like
dependent meaning. They are the parts of the whole, and together they form a kind of truth.
And then ultimately for Dante again that truth goes back to God because God is in
the realm of being, outside of the realm of becoming, and as a result he remains stable.
I'll finish with one more thought here and this is the question of whether Dante's
sense of allegory is entirely original or not. I think this is an important point because often
Dante is taught as if he's the first to really use allegory and apply it to secular texts.
Is he the first to to take this religious mode and start applying it to secular texts?
Now one of the big questions is would Dante have made such a distinction in the first place?
Would he have seen his Divine Comedy as secular or religious? I think that
that first has to be answered, but I also think that we can go back and see that within
the Christian tradition this kind of approach is actually there from the beginning, and the person
to really look at is somebody known as Augustine. I'm sure you've heard of him -- the church father!
He comes up with this notion that when we read classical texts, often by pagan authors,
allegory is a great way to actually take truth and and learn something from these pagan authors.
This kind of approach of taking the best from the pagan world Augustine refers to as "spoiling
the Egyptians," which is a great image that actually ties in very well with Dante's example.
The story goes in the Old Testament that when the Israelites left Egypt
the Egyptians were just so happy to see them go that they gave them all kinds of treasures,
and they used these treasures later not only for the golden calf obviously,
which was an idol, but also for the tabernacle and for the worship of God. Augustine's point then is
that it it is entirely fitting for Christians to take pagan culture, take the best of it, and read
it, rededicate it to the glory of God. Augustine says it's in part because he loves authors like
Plato and he doesn't want to discard them even, though he's committed to a Christian worldview.
The point then is that when we come back to to Dante as well,
we can see how allegory becomes this incredibly productive tool for taking anything that we
we meet in literature basically and taking a lesson out of it -- that can be a Christian lesson
and which fits within a particular world view. So allegory then is this incredible way of kind of
mastering reality, of mastering a text and finding truth in it -- a very complex kind
of truth, which then applies to us today and also potentially to us in the future.