EMILE MALE ~ The ALLEGORICAL METHOD
EMILE MÂLE ~ The ALLEGORICAL METHOD
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[Excerpted from The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the 13th Century by Emile Mâle, translated by Dora Nussey. Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1958]
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Had mediaeval artists confined themselves to historical cycles there would be no reason to dwell on them further, but there was in the thirteenth century another and infinitely more curious reading of the Old Testament. The artists preferred for the most part to adhere to the spirit rather than the letter. To them the Old Testament seemed a vast figure of the New. Following the guidance of the doctors, they chose out a number of Old Testament scenes and placed them in juxtaposition with scenes from the Gospel in order to impress on men a sense of the deep underlying harmony. While the windows in the Sainte-Chapelle tell a simple story, those at Chartres and Bourges show forth a mystery.
Such a method of interpretation was entirely orthodox. But since the Council of Trent the Church has chosen to attach herself to the literal meaning of the Old Testament, leaving the symbolic method in the background. And so it has come about that the exegesis based on symbolism of which the Fathers made constant if not exclusive use, is today generally ignored. For this reason it seems useful briefly to set forth a body of doctrine which so often found expression in art.
God who sees all things under the aspect of eternity willed that the Old and New Testaments should form a complete and harmonious whole; the Old is but an adumbration of the New. To use mediaeval language, that which the Gospel shows men in the light of the sun, the Old Testament showed them in the uncertain light of the moon and stars. In the Old Testament truth is veiled, but the death of Christ rent that mystic veil and that is why we are told in the Gospel that the veil of the Temple was rent in twain at the time of the Crucifixion. Thus it is only in relation to the New Testament that the Old Testament has significance, and the Synagogue who persists in expounding it for its own merits is blindfold.
This doctrine, always taught by the Church, is taught in the Gospels by the Savior Himself: As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up, and again: Even as Jonah was three days and nights in the belly of the whale, so shall the Son of man be three days and nights in the depths of the earth.
The apostles taught the early Christians the mystic harmony of the Old and the New Law. It is insisted upon more especially in the epistle to the Hebrews. The newly converted Jews, still attached to the letter of the Law, are told how the ceremonies of the Old Covenant were merely figures destined to shadow forth the New, and that Melchizedek, king and priest, was an image of the Son of God, who was both pontiff and king. Several passages in the first epistle to the Corinthians and in the epistle to the Galatians, as also several verses in the first epistle to St. Peter, show that the allegorical method of interpretation was known to the apostles....
It is in Origen that the allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament first appears as a finished system. He begins by laying down as an axiom that the meaning of Scripture is threefold. For Scripture is a composite whole made like man after the image of God. Even as there are in man three components, body, vital principle and soul, so there are in Scripture three meanings, the literal, moral, and mystical. But, he adds, all passages of Scripture do not lend themselves to a triple interpretation; to some it is convenient to attach a literal meaning only, to others a moral or mystic sense. Origen challenges the literal sense in particular, for to him the letter seemed to contain absurdities and contradictions which had given rise to every heresy....
Origen attempted to justify this intrepid method; the kind of interpretation he adopted had come from the apostles and been orally transmitted down to his time. But it is evident that he allowed himself to be carried away by his own vivid imagination. In the flame of a genius which has been compared to a furnace in which even brass liquefies, the literal meaning of Scripture vanishes. Celsus and the mediocre minds who adhering to the letter of scripture saw in it only contradictions, found themselves refuted, but Origen himself at times went beyond the limits of orthodoxy and in his turn ran the risk of being accused of heresy. From Origen and from the other Greek Fathers the allegorical method passed into western thought. According to St. Jerome no one did more to familiarise the Latin world with it than St. Hilary. Sent into exile to Asia Minor by the emperor Constantine, Hilary for four years had leisure to study Greek and to read the works of doctors of the Eastern Church. On his return to Gaul he wrote a commentary on the Psalms in which the spirit of Origen lives again.
Brought from the east by St. Hilary this method of allegorical interpretation only became popular through the teaching of St. Ambrose. It was by his preaching that he spread the doctrine of Clement and Origen, for it can hardly be doubted that his treatises on Cain and Abel, on Noah's Ark, and on Abraham and Isaac were in their original form popular sermons. He set out in these homilies to make known the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures and to explain all the hidden truths to the people. On this we have the valuable testimony of Augustine. Often, he says in his Confessions, did I rejoice to hear Ambrose telling the people in his popular discourses that the letter killeth and the spirit maketh alive, and interpreting in a spiritual sense passages which taken literally seemed to be an exhortation to vice. It was in this way that Ambrose finally won over Augustine, who was still intrenched behind difficulties of biblical interpretation.
In his turn Augustine took up his master's method and made it known to the whole of the Christian world. But at the same time he laid it down for the centuries to come as the fundamental principle of symbolic exegesis, that the literal meaning so often scoffed at by Origen is sacred. Brothers, he says, I warn you in the name of God to believe before all things when you hear the scriptures read that the events really took place as is said in the book. Do not destroy the historic foundation of Scripture, without it you will build in the air. Abraham really lived and he really had a son by Sarah his wife ... But God made of these men heralds of His Son who was to come. This is why in all that they said, in all that they did, the Christ may be sought and the Christ may be found....
After St. Augustine further mystical interpretations were interwoven by St. Gregory, the last of the Fathers. In his commentary on the book of Job, so renowned in mediaeval days, he continually makes use of the allegorical method.
The vast legacy of symbolism inherited from the early Christian centuries was received with deep respect by the Middle Ages, which changed nothing and made but few additions.
Isidore of Seville summarised all the commentaries of the Fathers of the Church for the rude centuries that were to follow, and his Quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum is one of the essential links in the long chain of Catholic tradition. In the preface to his commentary he states that he has drawn largely from Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Fulgentius, Cassian and Gregory the Great. Although all the learning of the early doctors is condensed in his manual, it is their allegorical interpretations that especially attract him. He compares books to a lyre with cords of infinite resonance.
In order to make the allegorical character of the Bible more evident Isidore wrote a small pamphlet entitled Allegoriae quaedam Scripturae Sacrae, which is a sort of key to the Scriptures. He there enumerates the chief personages of the Old Testament, briefly indicating in what sense each, according to the Fathers, foreshadows the Messiah. Adam, Abraham and Moses appear as sacred symbols. All the patriarchs, heroes and prophets become with him the letters of that mystic alphabet used by God to write the name of Christ in history.
The works of Isidore of Seville gave definite form to the mystical commentaries on the Old Testament. The allegorical interpretations of the Fathers, henceforth sacrosanct, were repeated for centuries by mediaeval writers. The torrent des docteurs, as the seventeenth century put it, flowed on ceaselessly repeating the same doctrine. It is surprising when one glances through the commentaries of Bede or Rabanus Maurus to see how little originality there is in their books. If they did not merely copy Isidore of Seville, they copied the Fathers of the Church. It is evident, too, that their commentaries arc designed for teaching and make no pretence to any originality. On the contrary they take every care to remain scrupulously faithful to tradition.
It was from the school of Rabanus Maurus that there issued in the tenth century the Glossa ordinaria, the book which bewitched the Middle Ages by its quality of precision and remained famous until the Renaissance. The author, Walafrid Strabo, had no pretentions other than those of a clever compiler. The allegorical explanations which he gives of each verse of the Bible are in entire conformity with tradition. For the most part he even contents himself with verbatim quotations from the Fathers, or from Bede, Isidore of Seville or Rabanus Maurus. The vogue enjoyed by the Glossa ordinaria makes it an invaluable book for us, taking as it does the place of all other mediaeval commentaries... It remains one of the most valuable books transmitted to us by the Middle Ages, for by its help may be solved almost all the difficulties presented by allegorical representations of the Bible.
Thus at the beginning of the thirteenth century, at the very time when the artists were decorating the cathedrals, the doctors were teaching ex cathedra that Scripture was at one and the same time fact and symbol. It was generally admitted that the Bible might be interpreted in four different ways, and have historical, allegorical, tropological and anagogical meaning. The historical meaning made known the reality of the facts, the allegorical showed the Old Testament as a figure of the New, the tropological unveiled the moral truth hidden within the letter, and the anagogical as the name implies foreshadowed the mystery of a future life and eternal bliss. For example the name of Jerusalem which recurs so often in the Bible, could according to circumstances receive one of the four following interpretations. Jerusalem, says Gulielmus Durandus, in the historical sense is the town in Palestine to which pilgrims now resort ; in the allegorical sense it is the Church Militant; in the tropological it is the Christian soul; and in the anagogical it is the celestial Jerusalem, the home on high. All passages of the Bible do not admit of a fourfold interpretation. Some can be understood in three ways only. The sufferings of Job, for instance, have first of all the value of historical fact, they are then an allegory of the Passion, and finally in the anagogical sense they typify the trials of the Christian soul. Other passages permit of but two interpretations, while many must merely be taken literally.
This was the method adopted by the schoolmen. All that has gone before goes to show that in such matters the Middle Ages merely conformed to the tradition of the earlier centuries, and that they were neither more intrepid nor more subtle than the Fathers of the Church. The allegorical interpretation of the Bible is thus seen to be in the true line of Christian tradition.
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