Allegory and Symbolism

In the last chapter we traced the growth of the sentiment of courtly love down to a point at which that sentiment was already beginning to express itself by means of allegory. It now remains to consider independently the history of the allegorical method, and for this purpose we must return to classical antiquity…. It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms. What is good or happy has always been high like the heavens and bright like the sun. Evil and misery were deep and dark from the first…. To ask how these married pairs of sensibles and insensibles first came together would be great folly; the real question is how they ever came apart, and to answer that question is beyond the province of the mere historian.

I assume he is saying the peculiarly popular Courtly Love poems call light dark and vice versa. I have come to agree. Latent faults have been legitimized in them.

… This fundamental equivalence between the immaterial and the material may be used by the mind in two ways, and we need here be concerned with only one of them. On the one hand you can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and then invent visibilia to express them. If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia. This is allegory, and it is with this alone that we have to deal. But there is another way of using the equivalence, which is almost the opposite of allegory, and which I would call sacramentalism or symbolism. If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions, then it is possible that our material world in its turn is the copy of an invisible world. As the god Amor and is figurative garden are to the actual passions of men, so perhaps we ourselves and our ‘real’ world are to something else. The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archtype in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism or sacramentalism… the world which we mistake for reality is the flat outline of that which elsewhere veritably is in all the round of its unimaginable dimensions.

…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 in imitating Forms. Neither the lack of manuscripts nor the poverty of Greek scholarship prevented the Middle Ages from absorbing this doctrine. (p. 44-46)

I have been bothered by these first and second methods of approaching the material and immaterial. I think it is natural to try to “marry” them together, and indeed this is what the Orthodox teach Christ did in His Incarnation. His Divine and Human Natures were made undivided, distinct, unmixed, and unseparated, according to the Council of Chalcedon. And we attain deification of our human natures so that we will be one with God in the same manner as Christ’s human nature was, though through grace and struggle. To me this is what Christ’s parables were, illustrations of the struggle to attain this union with God. I don’t think they are allegories where a person is personifying a particular passion, but prophecies telling some passionate people’s fates. We want to be like the widow, so we literally are to give alms. We want to leave our passions behind to find the kingdom of God. The pearl of great price takes on a more literal quality, though it does symbolize something higher, but maybe that is even the wrong word. In trying to understand Platonic Forms I’ve come to believe that ultimate reality is more of a meeting in the middle, where the spiritual is seen to exist in the material and vice versa, with the essence of God being other (unmingled) but unseparated somehow. There is transcendence and an elevation of thought, but the material is not annihilated and doesn’t become insignificant once an immaterial “understanding” occurs. Also to relegate a whole person to one passion is dehumanizing and speaks more of total depravity, imo. I understand that we are meant to learn the consequences of sin that way and their tragic end is seen to justify their acting out, but I can’t separate the person from the passion in these stories. I have come to resent being made to feel angry at the person and want them dead because of their being inextricably linked to a passion. This is dualism, if I understand that right, and black and white, simplistic story telling. I don’t think Christ’s parables were used this way. People behaved badly, but it seems that there is more tension between who they are and how they act. They could have repented at any point, and it seems that Christ would have preferred they do so and then become a lesson for good instead of ill. I feel a sense of passionate revenge when a “bad” character meets his “just reward”.

Therefore the use of symbol seems too Platonically gnostic, and the use of allegory, as so far explained by Mr. Lewis, is too simplistic in it’s portrayal of characters. Both confuse essence and energies. Parable shows us how to unite the physical and material here and now. I know that Mr. Lewis has written the preface to most people’s copies of St. Athanasius’ Incarnation, but I also am learning he defends the western tradition, at least in his use and explanation of it. So when I read his (unintentional) allegorical works, I recognize that he may be using finite materials to explain the infinite kingdom of God, but at the same time he seems so tuned into Orthodox realities that I think we still can apply his works as helpful teaching aids. I believe he understands immaterial concepts very well such as faith, hope, love, and has had an idea of Presence, and so he can teach us what acquiring these things would be like, but I think Narnia, Malacandra, and Perelandra are more available here and now than he seems to think. The earth is real and good if we see with our real yet enlightened eyes. Perhaps our mind’s eye and our physical eyes are like spirit and material things too – through struggle and grace they become one: distinct, undivided, unmixed, and unseparated.