Episode 5: A Brief History of Allegory Transcript

Episode 5: A Brief History of Allegory

Hello and welcome back to the Plutarch Project Podcast. I’m your bipedal host Josh Nieubuurt and today’s topic is allegory.

An “allegory is a metaphor in which a character, place or event is used to deliver a broader message about real-world issues and occurrences.” It works because “it can readily illustrate or convey complex ideas and concepts in ways that are comprehensible or striking to its” audience. An easy one that has entered the social sphere again and again since it was published in 1944 is George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

If you go to the website, click podcasts in the upper menu and click transcripts for this podcast I was able to find a complete free version for anyone wanting to check it out just click the link in the transcripts and BOOM, it’s all yours. This goes for many of the texts we will talk about here as well. I try to find and link as many as I can to open sources.  

Anyways, there might be some of you kind hearted folks who are little rusty on their vocabulary. That’s okay,  a metaphor is “a figure of speech that directly refers to one thing by mentioning another.It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas.” For example, saying that social media is like the ruthless unabashed small town gossip of yesteryear, would be a metaphor comparing social media and a gossip to show their similarities. But enough of that. Where did it all start?

We are going waaay back to 5th century BCE! Once again we find ourselves in ancient Greece. Oooweee it feels good to be back doesn’t it?  Allegory is a term and a concept developed during the “analytical revolution” of the mid first millennium BCE.

Once the Greeks had begun shifting to start to thinking in terms of logic, analysis, and philosophical morality, a large amount of what had been placed on a pedestal on the topshelf of their highest-prestige literary documents didn’t measure up to their new ways of thinking about the world. Homer’s epic poems, in which many experts agree were of the oral tradition before 1000 BCE, were about bronze age warrior nobles traveling around the known world and fighting each other with pointy metal objects. Come to think of it neither the heroes of these works (and their 10 thousand generations of titles they feel the need to talk about) nor the gods who showed up to kick ass and impregnate people while in the form of some animal were exactly the epitome of logic or morality. The myths and the new ways of thinking just didn’t match up.

Allegory was the solution to the problem of a culture at odds with an older non-analytically revolutionized history of high-prestige literature trying to retain that older literature as relevant and appropriate in a new age of thinking. Rather than “rebooting” them like we see in Hollywood today they expanded the dimensions of a text to display multiple meanings hidden behind the face value.

The etymology-or origin of the word- allegory is pretty straight forward. It didn’t show up in English until about 1382-coming from old french, latin, and its original Greek: allegoria “figurative language, description of one thing under the image of another.” To break it down even further “Allos” is Greek for “other.” “Legein” in Greek means “to read.” So an allegory is simple an other reading of a text.

The intellectual ancient Greeks looked at Homer and other early texts and myths, and reinterpreted them. Then they had their face value and a deeper level of meaning that fit with their own new beliefs and agendas. They also embraced this new rhetorical device to create their own myths and stories. chief among them being Plato’s, Allegory of the Cave. Once again if you check out the transcripts I’ve linked to an open source version of that text.

Allegory gave people new ways to explain abstract philosophical concepts and issues in a storytelling framework that was more vivid and accessible than just using plain old logic.

To recap, allegory is superb at retaining an esteemed older literary texts while reinterpreting it in a way that fit with more current values and agendas.  With Homer, his works came to be read as a moral allegory. They taught ethical values or discussed philosophical issues at a surreptitious or symbolic level. After the fall of ancient Greece, ancient Rome-a huge fan of the arts and intellectualism of the Greeks- so much so that they would basically enslave intellectuals to teach their noble families-carried on this tradition of incorporating allegory for their own agendas and ideas.

When Christianity came along, allegory became incredibly important to their success as a new religion. All that had to be done was take pre-Christian text that was held in a position of prestige, and interpret it as an allegory of Christian values and beliefs. Badda-bing-badda boom! Checkmate Jupiter! whatchu got?

Early Christians reasoned that because God had created and always-keyword here “always”- governed the world pre christian peoples living in the world(let’s just call them pagans), would indubitably come across and incorporate many aspects of truth without having any access to Christianity directly. Especially for the folks who lived thousands and thousands of years before the invention of Christianity. Let’s take a step back and see how this all played out.

Christianity started as kind of a neo-Judaism in the 1st century CE. After a short while a fascinatingly small minority of Jewish people decided that Jesus-who we will most definitely be talking about in future podcasts- had been THE messiah. So, Christianity decided to become a universal religion for everyone. Of course the modern power of the day, ancient Rome, fought against them for several centuries only to convert their entire empire to Christianity a few centuries later. It was Constantine who became emperor in the early 300’s CE and changed the course of theological history.

The vast borders of the Roman Empire started to splinter in the 2nd through the 5th centuries CE. The largest splinter wedged the empire into eastern and western halves. Interestingly enough this fragmentation reversed and replicated, the process by which the Empire had been built. The western half had been conquered and incorporated by Rome located in central Italy (looking at you Julius Caesar. In the city of Rome, the main  language of the educated and administrative people was Latin. To the East of Italy, were the areas that had previously been conquered by Alexander of Macedon (or more colloquially known as Alexander the Great) in the 4th century BCE. This eastern portion of the empire retained its Greek-speaking heritage even after being conquered by Rome. Keep in mind this eastern portion was huge as well. It ran from Greece, all across northwest Africa, and into western Asia to what is now Pakistan. And they all used Greek as their official intellectual and administrative language.

In the 3rd through 5th centuries CE germanic tribes started to invade and began taking over pieces of the western empire. Deep into the 3rd century CE the Imperial government split. This split eventually left the better-off eastern Greek-language half with their Constantinople (now known as Istanbul) capital, and a less stable western half still governed from Rome. After Constantine made Christianity the religion of Rome allegory became an even more important tool among Christian scholars.

In the fourth century Christian thinkers and authors began to allegorically interpreted works that had already been high prestige texts of ancient Rome. Especially those by prominent authors and poets such as Virgil.Just a side note here, Publius Vergilius Maro–  more commonly referenced as Virgil, is like the latin speaking Homer, he was an incredibly important author-some say the greatest ancient Latin poet. Like Homer he influenced countless authors after his time- including Dante Alighieri and his work, Divine Comedy.

One notable example of Christian’s using allegory can be found in their interpretation the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil. he fourth Eclogue is a 1st century CE poem about the birth of a noble Roman baby boy and the beautiful future they would surely inherit. The Christian’s of the 4th century interpreted it as an allegory for the looming birth of Jesus. From the fourth century onward it has often been referenced as, “the Messianic Eclogue.”

Here’s a small portion of it so you can see how they could treat it as a Christian allegory:

“Under thy guidance, whatso tracks remain

Of our old wickedness, once done away,

Shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear.”

If you’d like to see the full eclogue I’ve linked it in the transcripts. It’s easy to see how it could be adapted.

Christians carried the monotheistic torch forward from Judaism. Since they believed that God was completely in charge of everything, even those things in the large swaths of pre-christian history, they could easily justify that pagan authors would have Christian ideas sprinkled in their works. Perhaps, these ideas came from divine inspiration or just from the traces of God being gently tucked there into the pagan world experiences.They saw the universe as God’s grand book and God, being the grandest of authors, wrote things into history in order to give hints and ideas to those who were paying attention. These little God-sprinkles could then be adopted, adapted, and used by Christians to further their message. This idea stuck around for a very long time-heck you can still see it today in all kinds of religious thought.

Religious scholars of the late ancient and medieval period would later use allegory to interpret and understand the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Now keep in mind the Old Testament was actually their hand picked selection of pre-Christian Jewish religious writings. To be honest it wasn’t strictly Christian at all, which created necessary tool of allegory to help the texts conform to the ideas of Christianity. I’m sure a lot of folks out there, particularly the staunch atheist or anti-theists out there can point out a place or two where their ideas of Christianity desperately clash with the Old Testament.

The new Christian authors and thinkers of the first century CE-known as the “apostolic stage” of Christianity- didn’t create a lot of the detailed ideas that we have available to us now. Quite of few of them would come later on. Once again allegory was able to step in and create a bridge to later understandings of Christianity in regards to the New Testament. Christians embraced the Greek and Roman tradition of allegory after the New Testament was written and compiled.

Various levels and kinds of allegorical interpretation came into being-being applied just about anywhere they would work- and are now known as “scriptural allegoresis.” Christian thought also continued on the long ancient tradition of using signs and symbols-as we referenced in the episode on language and Saussure this is something that is common to language throughout time. Great thinkers like Augustine of Hippo-for the Catholic folks out there Saint Augustine of Hippo- worked diligently to maintain the legacy Christians had inherited from the Romans and Greeks and try to make sure they fit well with the newer Christian mindset. This is something that a ton of people worked on in late antiquity and the early medieval period. I hope you’re beginning to seeing a pattern here regarding just how influential allegory has been throughout history.

Christian thinkers eventually created an entire system called “typology,” which would help interpret the Bible and more recent historical events as a set of patterns and signs created by the divine. The tale of Noah’s Ark went from its literal interpretation of a guy building a boat and herding all the world’s animals onto it- to being an allegorical anticipation of the Church- all those animals representing all those that would be saved. Noah’s Ark was therefore seen as a type or pattern foreshadowing the arrival of Jesus, the Christian church, and the Roman church. The Bible is rife with interesting allegorical interpretations that might be unknown to contemporary audiences. Maybe someone should let the U.S. Creation Museum know?

Texts from ancient Greece up until the early Roman Church had two ways of being looked at. The literal interpretation and the allegorical. Literal being the plain and simple meaning that you read and allegorical being another referenced meaning through the use of signs and symbols. ok cool. BUT WAIT… THERE’s more! Allegory could be broken into two more subcategories: Moral and anagogical/eschatological.

Moral-pretty much has the same meaning it does today-it’s information and ideas in a text that display ethics and how people should act as a Christian. Anagogical or eschatological is information about what will happen in the afterlife- for the Christians mostly ideas about heaven and hell and the final judgement.

This would eventually spawn the fourfold medieval allegory system. Almost all of the fourfold medieval allegory comes from antiquity. It just happened to be later categorized and made prominent by medieval thinkers. To recap, middle age thinkers had the fourfold system of allegory to use when interpreting texts such as the Bible. They used the literal sense and the allegorical sense-which were meant to help view the past. The moral sense to help view the present. And finally, the anagogical sense-to help view the future. This system was referenced and used up until the mid 17th century.

The general allegorical sense was later splintered-basically only in name-into three categories: general allegory, tropological sense, and the figurative sense.

Tropological sense originates from the Greek word “trope” meaning “turn.” Analytical writers of antiquity used “tropos” for any method of “turning” language in a special way that couldn’t be filed under ordinary or literal.

The Latin word for tropes is-latin speakers forgive me for I’m about to butcher this word- “figurae” meaning “figures”. Romans associated the special uses of language as being like figures, shapes, or poses.This includes things like metaphors and similes. In regards to allegory, a “tropological sense” and “figurative sense” just meant any way of using or interpreting language that was not in a literal way.

Allegory would go on to play a large role in works throughout the middle ages and even into our own contemporary time. Allegory is a useful tool for displaying large complex ideas in a rather small package.

Modern allegory has even spawned allegoresis. Which is the act of reading, creating, or interpreting something as allegory. Quite often the act of allegoresis might not have been the intention of the creator/author of the work.

Today, in the time of 280 character tweets, news snapshots, and hypermedia long-form allegory is still alive and well. Books like Animal Farm, 1984, Life of Pi and a personal favorite of mine, The Alchemist, are still being made and read. The world is still being changed and molded by the wonderfully adaptable invention of allegory. We’d like to give a big shout out to a few listeners in Japan- Chris L., Cody D. And PJ. thanks for your support and keep doing your thing gentlemen. And for the rest of you, regardless of what level you interpret and analyze texts and the world around you- thanks for listening. Onward.

 

If you like what we’re putting out there consider helping to support us. You can click an add on the website plutarchproject.com (it’s simple and effective), shop through the Amazon banner (for those listening in the USA or Japan), or our Patreon page (patreon.com/plutarchproject). Thanks for your time! Good day!

 

Thanks for checking out the transcripts!