Overview: Medieval man is bookish. Millions are illiterate, but the masters were scholarly, pedantic. The medieval man was a literate man who had lost most of the books and forgotten how to read his Greek books: Not that he is uncivilized but that he has survived the loss of a civilization destroyed by the barbarian invasions of the fifth century.

Major Medieval writers:

Dante 1265-1321 (Italian)

Chaucer 1340-1400 (English)
 

Major Medieval thinkers:

St. Aquinas

St. Augustine

What did Aquinas and Augustine do? Reconciled Greek (pagan) thought to Christianity: What does reconcile mean? During the early Christian era, many of the new converts to Christianity were so zealous that they burned ancient Greek and Roman manuscript. These converts believed that reading these "pagan" texts would endanger one's immortal soul. St. Aquinas and St. Augustine, both well-educated men and admirers of ancient literature, found a way to rationalize the reading of ancient texts that would not conflict with Christian thought.

A. Aquinas: reconciles Aristotelian (Aristotle, a Greek philosopher) thought to the Church. The result is the Great Chain of Being. He argued that everything in the universe has a purpose and meaning. He urged an acceptance of the order of the universe, which also meant an acceptance of social hierarchy.

B. St. Augustine (354-430), was a church patriarch who wrote early church dogma and influenced the way the West regarded ancient literature, the Hebrew Bible, and the purpose of literature, past and present and future. He reconciled (rationalized) classical (Greek and Roman) literature to Christian thought during a time when Christian zealots believed reading anything pagan would endanger one's immortal soul.

Augustine's rationalization: he argued that figurative expression was divinely ordained (created by God) to overcome pride and to prevent the mind from disdaining a thing too easily grasped.

Figurative Expression is:

Allegory

Symbols

Analogy

A. Symbolism, metaphor, simile. Where do they come from? Symbolism comes to us from Greece. It makes its first effective appearance in European thought with the dialogues of Plato: The Sun is the copy of the Good; Time is the moving image of eternity. All visible things exist just in so far as they succeed imitating the Forms. The poetry of symbolism does not find its greatest expression in the Middle Ages but rather in the time of the romantics, and this, again, is significant of the profound difference that separates it from allegory. (C.S. Lewis, Allegory of Love)

B. Why did God invent ("divinely ordained") figurative expression: Augustine reasoned that after the fall of Adam and Eve from paradise (Eden), all humankind inherits their sin (Original Sin). Because of this sin, all persons' hearts were hardened to the word of God. According to Augustine, God, therefore,must speak to humankind obliquely (slantwise), must speak in enigmatic (puzzle-like) figures: figures or figurative language. If it was too easy to understand, people would not appreciate the message (God's word in the world), he argued. Literature should be difficult; it should force us to analyze the enigma, the correspondence between the visible and the invisible truth.

C. Definition of allegory: use of the concrete to suggest the abstract. Enigma: it says one thing and means another. Red, for instance, is a concrete color -- that is, we can see it -- that is often used to suggest an abstract emotion -- which we can't see -- such as rage, anger.

D. How to read allegorically: Assuming that everything written in the past was an allegory, the Christian read the Old Testament and classical (Greek and Roman) literature forbidden meanings. It wasn't possible to know what these hidden meanings were until the birth of Christ.

Example: Moses, therefore, who rescues his people from slavery in Egypt and leads them, after 40 years of wandering in the desert,to the Promised Land (Jerusalem/Israel) is a figure representing the abstract, invisible truth.
Example: Odysseus, who wanders around the Mediterranean sea for 10 years, looking for his home in Ithaka is a figure representing the invisible truth. 

E. How to write allegorically: The accepted technique for an artist in the medieval period involved the use of an enigmatic arrangement of visible things which would serve to call attention to invisible truth. For instance, a knight in armor in service to his king is a figure for a Christian in service to God.

Example: Dante goes on a trip through hell in the Inferno. Hell and the journey are visible truth, but what is the the invisible truth? He says one thing -- a journey through hell-- but he means another. What? Dante is lost in a dark wood. Being lost in the wood is visible but what is the invisible; in other words, what does he really mean?

Example: "The Nun's Priests Tale" in The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer is, on the face of it, a story about a rooster, his wife, and a fox and how the fox tricked the rooster into exposing himself to mortal danger, and how the rooster tricks the fox in his turn. Augustine would approve of this tale, because he would say that, of course, the story is not about farm animals but is, under this silly surface, a serious debate on fate and freewill. As Augustine said and Chaucer repeats in this story, "Strip the chaff from the grain." The chaff of the wheat kernel is the hard outer non-nutritious part of the grain that must be stripped off -- in the milling process -- to expose the grain, the nutritious part of the grain, the part that we make bread from; allegorically that grain is the story's Christian truth.

Everyone after Augustine interpreted all literature allegorically. Everything written had to have a high moral purpose; nothing could be written just for fun; literature was supposed to instruct the readers in the Christian way of life; literature was supposed to save the souls of the readers.