Thinking Allegory Otherwise

By Brenda Machosky

Thinking Allegory Otherwise is a unique collection of essays by allegory specialists and other scholars who engage allegory in exciting new ways. The contributors include Jody Enders, Karen Feldman, Angus Fletcher, Blair Hoxby, Brenda Machosky, Catherine Gimelli Martin, Stephen Orgel, Maureen Quilligan, James Paxson, Daniel Selcer, Gordon Teskey, and Richard Wittman.

The essays are not limited to an examination of literary texts and works of art, and in fact focus on a wide range of topics that includes architecture, philosophy, theatre, science, and law. The book proves the truth of the statement that all language is allegorical, and more importantly it shows its consequences. To "think allegory otherwise" is to think otherwise— to rethink not only the idea of allegory itself, but also the law and its execution, the literality of figurative abstraction, and the figurations upon which even hard science depends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Dec 18, 2009
• ISBN: 9780804773508

Book preview

Introduction

A Protean Device

BRENDA MACHOSKY

Embedded in museum displays, providing the structure for scientific thought, underlying the legal system, evading the hegemony of the idea, allegory is thriving in the twenty-first century. The call to think allegory otherwise initially led to a stimulating academic conference at Stanford University in February 2005. Some of the usual suspects were present, but there were also new voices, young scholars and academic veterans who were willing (and eager) to consider their work in an allegorical mode. The final result is this collection of essays, and our hope is to inspire broader and deeper engagements with this protean device, as Angus Fletcher so aptly named it.¹ Even though the work contained herein has evolved and changed substantially since the conference, the title of the conference has been retained because thinking allegory otherwise remains the best descriptor of this limitless project.

Allegory is perhaps as old as language itself and certainly as variable as the languages and styles in which it has been written. The early readers of Homer allegorized the great epics. Philo of Alexandria adapted an allegorical system of interpretation for the Hebrew Bible. Augustine carefully explained the structure of allegory inherent in language. Aquinas differentiated the allegory of the theologians from the allegory of the poets. Dante countered Aquinas with a divine allegorical poem. In the medieval period, allegorical figures took the stage in mystery plays and pageants, adorned churches and monuments. De Lorris and De Meun, Chaucer, Tasso, Pizan—all produced fabulous works of allegory. Even during the Reformation, when icons were suspect, allegory maintained its presence. The Romantics tried to devalue allegory’s particular system of representation, preferring the presumed coincident signification of the symbol, but allegory persisted. Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man challenged the Romantic view, and allegory became a formidable force in literary theory of the twentieth century. And allegory also continues to receive uninterrupted attention in the study of medieval and early modern works. Between occasional pinnacles, allegory has maintained a constant presence in artistic forms and humanistic study. All on its own, allegory inspires great works of literature and insightful commentary.

The powerful works of allegory can be so inspiring, in fact, that it is hard to wrest free of their influence. What person writing about allegory in English literature can avoid Spenser? In French, who can avoid Le Roman de la Rose? What allegorical theorist can ignore the Romantic judgment? This volume challenges such limits. Some of the greatest minds thinking about allegory in the past few decades were asked to think about it differently. And what of the great thinkers who haven’t really thought about allegory? These scholars were challenged to think otherwise just by thinking about allegory. The results harness the excitement of a conference in presenting a variety of topics, not restricted to historical period or generic mode, in offering experimental ideas, in posing complex questions, in provoking further discussion and inspiring new work.

Angus Fletcher challenges the role of metaphysics in allegory by thinking about allegory without reference to ideas. Gordon Teskey reads the allegorical construction of colonialism and the ideology of the museum. Richard Wittman, an architectural historian boldly entering the fray, discovers allegorical structures in the architectural debates and broadsides of early modern Paris. Daniel Selcer reveals allegory in the performative aspects of diagrams in texts by Bruno and Galileo. Karen Feldman identifies an allegorical structure in philosophy by way of Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind. James Paxson explores the place of allegory in contemporary scientific discourse. Literary texts also receive new treatment in the essays by Maureen Quilligan (Christine de Pizan and Mary Wroth), Stephen Orgel (Spenser), Blair Hoxby (John Ford and Henry Purcell), and Catherine Gimelli Martin (Bacon and Milton).

In the opening essay, Fletcher’s thinking primes us for a reconsideration of allegory in a variety of modes and serves as an apt introduction to the entire volume. Fletcher dives deeply into the problem of thinking allegory otherwise by thinking Allegory without Ideas.² This seminal essay rethinks the allegorical tradition against what it has become and suggests a new origin with connections to ancient philosophy (Aristotle), medieval challenges to universalism (Ockham), and modern theories of nominalism (Quine). The essay is the sort of de/re/construction of which only a scholar of Fletcher’s erudite breadth and freely roaming thought is capable.

In the first part, Performing Allegory, only one of the three essays focuses on theatrical production as such. The drama is but one form in which allegory takes the stage. With her extensive knowledge of medieval theater, Jody Enders turns to the performance of the law in medieval France and articulates the ways in which allegory was embedded in the performance of capital punishment. Enders argues that the death penalty, especially in its medieval performances, is a supremely allegorical event in which criminals become signs of themselves, simultaneously literal and allegorical. Death penalty victims, in staging their own death, allegorize themselves. And Enders does not leave her observations in the medieval past. She forces us to consider the significance of the modern tendency to hide the images of a justice that imposes death. True to the promise in her title, Back to the Medieval Future, Enders’s realizations about the performative executions of the past point out the darkened allegory that continues to haunt the practice of capital punishment in the present.

In his essay on Galileo’s Massimi sistemi and Bruno’s La Cena de le Cenari , Daniel Selcer points out that performative allegory also plays a role in the written text. Selcer demonstrates that the drawing (or misdrawing) of Copernicus’s diagram within the dialogues of Galileo’s and Bruno’s texts is itself a staging that takes place on the surfaces of the pages themselves, a materialization of natural contemplation. Developing the implicit and explicit critiques and reconfigurations of allegory presented by both philosophers, Selcer shows that Galileo’s text advocates a script of naturalized allegory in which the book of the universe is written, while Bruno claims that the field of philosophical contemplation is the only one in which the extreme tendencies of allegorical language can be controlled. Empirical data and mathematical order are shown to constitute a series of figures with which meaningful scientific discourse will correspond. The book of nature receives the allegorical text otherwise limited by Galileo to the sacred book. The allegorical nature of nature requires its readers to read allegorically. For both Galileo and Bruno, the philosophical-scientific text is a performance of allegory in which the authors, the characters, and the readers must participate.

Concluding the part on performance is Blair Hoxby’s revised theory of allegory in baroque tragic drama. Counter to the claims of Walter Benjamin that the Trauerspiel or tragic drama is a demonstration of mourning and melancholy distinctly different from tragedy that induces a response of mourning, Hoxby argues that tragic drama uses allegorical modes in tandem with dramatic mimesis to create an experience of mourning. He challenges and expands Benjamin’s notions of the genre by examining a conventionally tragic drama, The Broken Heart, replete with the accoutrements of death so characteristic of Benjamin’s view. However, through a detailed reading of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Hoxby also shows how the trappings of mourning are not essential to the form. This theatrical experience reconnects these dramas to ritual practices and the origin of drama itself. Thus Hoxby aligns the experience of tragic drama with seventeenth-century expectations about the pleasure of mourning.

Allegory has also been performed in more concrete media, particularly in public buildings and monuments, where figures or other conventional images are designed to express meaning. In the next part, Gordon Teskey and Richard Wittman expand the thinking of allegory in these other spaces. Teskey’s study follows the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 through its ideological display and its current place in the recently opened Musée du Quai Branly. Teskey continues to acknowledge the violent capture of meaning constitutive of allegory, as thoroughly articulated in his book, Allegory and Violence. However, he also notes a fundamental change in the convention of allegory through the history of colonialism, as represented in the museum and in service of French nationalist ideology. Whereas the allegorical body has traditionally served to both bear and conceal meaning, in the modern context, especially (but not exclusively) of colonialism, the body bears its use value and serves to conceal an imperial ideology. Be it a diorama of live natives at work or the very locus of the exhibition in the working-class suburbs of Paris and the subsequent shifting frames of reference into which such images are forced, in modernity work itself becomes the work of allegory.

Likewise, Richard Wittman brings allegory into a new realm of consideration, the history of architecture. Wittman studies the architecture and city planning of eighteenth-century Paris—in practice and in writing. Most people are familiar with the allegories built into churches and other edifices through the time of the Renaissance. The Enlightenment mood of the eighteenth century, however, precluded complex allegorical figures and styles in favor of transparency and clarity. However, as conventional allegory disappeared from actual buildings, Wittman observes, it resurfaced in criticism of those buildings. Even more interesting, allegory became a determining feature in written proposals for buildings and monuments never intended to materialize. By means of a narrative discursive practice, allegory provided a way for architecture to express its meaning without a material edifice. In a way, allegory became the material of architectural theory.

The Renaissance is an epoch that cannot escape allegorical consideration, and thus the third section revisits allegory in this important period. Whereas Wittman’s essay shows allegory as a means for an absolute abstraction from materiality, Maureen Quilligan’s contribution establishes a materiality in works where allegory seemed mostly abstraction. In rethinking allegory in the Renaissance, Quilligan returns to Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies and the way in which Pizan literalizes the metaphor of her literary work. With a close reading and reworking of Teskey’s argument in Allegory and Violence, Quilligan contributes a new and convincing argument in the long-standing discussion of the typically female gender of personifications and allegorical figures as materially and not merely metaphorically (or linguistically) gendered. In doing so, Quilligan also situates the female writers Christine de Pizan and Mary Wroth in a distinctive relationship against and within the patriarchal tradition of allegory.

Stephen Orgel, like Quilligan, discovers the fact of female agency within the patriarchal situations of sex and power in chivalric literature and art. In Spenser, and in a series of courtly images, Orgel shows that it is the women who are more typically active and the men passive. By considering What Knights Really Want, Orgel thinks through allegory without writing about allegory. His essay is important for what it does not do. The essay does not construe knights as conventional allegorical signs. Knights, in general and as individuals, do not mean something else. Chivalry is likewise not a metaphor for some other ideal. However, in the figures of Spenser’s knights, and in the women they love, Orgel reads a profound message about the tension between illicit sex and idealized love that underlies the chivalric tradition. Through a combination of textual and visual analysis, Orgel realizes that sex in Spenser, and in chivalry in general, is not a masculine action but a feminine one.

Catherine Gimelli Martin also revisits conventional views of Renaissance allegory and establishes a more complex understanding of the materiality of allegorical figures in Milton and Bacon. Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and other modern theorists have shown how the status of knowledge changed radically in the seventeenth century. Martin’s essay, together with Hoxby’s on seventeenth-century tragic drama and Selcer’s on Galileo and Bruno, explores the changes in the allegorical mode as expressions of this epistemological shift. Martin continues to think through the implications for particular allegorical figures in Milton’s Paradise Lost and their ideological originals in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. As Quilligan shows how female agency is as material as it is metaphorical in Renaissance allegory, Martin reminds us that allegorical significance depends not merely on an absent meaning but on a material presence as well.

Each essay included here explores the significance of allegory’s presence in all language, in the very being of language as such. The presence of allegory, in even the most ostensibly objective and straightforward language of sciences, forces us to think differently about allegory as such and to reconsider its essential value not only in our own language and forms of knowledge but also in our very way of being. Indeed, this ontological question is the driving force of the project to think allegory otherwise, and the concluding section brings allegory into dialogue with modern philosophical and scientific concerns. Karen Feldman argues that, as a form of metaphysical language, allegory constitutes the conditions of thinking and philosophy. Like Fletcher, Feldman points out that allegory provides the means for imageless thought (or thinking without ideas). She traces how the process of metaphorization makes imageless thought possible because figurality bridges the two worlds so essential to much of Western philosophy, but she also shows that this is not necessarily a hierarchical relation. This realization in turn challenges the oft-accepted view of allegory as a hierarchy, one privileging the signified, the meaning, over the sign or the figure. Nonetheless, allegory remains a slippery device. Feldman shows that while Hannah Arendt brings out the allegory of uncertainty in the history of philosophy, she does not fully realize the allegory of uncertainty within her own thought on figuration.

James Paxson concludes the volume with a challenge to the very realm that would seem most impervious to the threat of allegory, science. Paxson argues that most of the advancements in mathematical thinking, particularly in physics, depend on an implicit allegorical structure. He argues that by recognizing the role of allegory in scientific discourse and by not perceiving it as a threat to a scientific way of thinking, we may, in fact, gain a greater understanding of modern science. As Feldman demonstrated within philosophy, so Paxson argues that science itself will benefit by allowing for and realizing the presence of allegory in its theories and its evolution.

The collection proves that there is no going back to the old, established ways of thinking about allegory. And yet, it also manifests a realization about allegory that we should have known all along. The standard definition for allegory is to say one thing and mean another. Allegory has always demanded that we think otherwise. While the contributors to this volume faced a challenge in thinking allegory otherwise, the resulting essays demonstrate the facility and flexibility that this protean device really has and the pervasive power that it exerts in all language, not merely in the explicitly figural language of poetry and art but, far more interestingly, in the literal language of architecture, nationalism, philosophy, science, and even in the literal language of art and literature.

Those of us who work with allegory often feel defensive about the topic. There is a rumor, a perception, that allegory is passé, not as interesting as other modes of interpretation and theory. In fact, this collection, along with the books and articles and conferences about allegory that appear each year, proves that this perception really is just a rumor. The rumor perhaps reveals more about those who propagate it than about allegory as such. The rumor is perhaps an attempt to disempower an indisputable force in language of all kinds. Even in historical moments when it doesn’t receive pronounced attention, allegory has always continued its work.

As part of its protean nature, allegory changes not only its form and its applications but even its name. Allegory is not always called allegory. This is what so many of the essays here prove. The thinking of allegory cannot be limited to the things that call themselves allegory. Self-identified allegory may provide clues about how allegory works; but, even then, as the essays that here revisit established allegories show, the ways of allegory challenge us to think otherwise. We hope that this volume will promote a continued conversation, a broader and deeper thinking of allegory. More than this, however, we hope that this collection will inspire more thinking otherwise, not only to think allegory otherwise, but that, in thinking allegory, thought will think itself in other ways.

Notes

1 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1964), p.1.

2 Angus Fletcher originally wrote this paper for a plenary session of the conference. The essay was first published in Boundary2 (Spring 2006) and has been reproduced here by permission of boundary 2 .

ONE

Allegory without Ideas

ANGUS J. S. FLETCHER

1

As Renaissance authors used to say, allegory is the captain of all rhetorical figures of speech, and we might ask, Is it a ship of fools or a dreadnought? Certainly this "figure of false semblaunt" commands a large percentage of the world’s symbolic activity, mainly because it permits the iconic rendering of power relations. Realism in fiction, history, and journalism may seek the inherent power connection of allegory, as we know from its structural properties, especially its demonic agency and cosmic range. The key to understanding how allegory works is to focus on its mode of agency, and here we find that from ancient times to the present, under varying guises, the demonic—not necessarily bad—is the embodiment of primordial agency; the daimons of Greek myth have a unique power to act without impediment, obeying a system of absolute, single-minded, purified intention. By

This essay is reprinted, with slight revisions. See Angus Fletcher, Allegory without Ideas, in boundary2, volume 3, no. 1 (Spring), pp. 77–98. Copyright, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

radically simplifying purpose, the allegorist looks at life as if it were a game of getting and exploiting power. This confers on the method a vast general relevance, while other broad modalities do not have either this semiotic depth or this cultural—and significantly religious—usage. Even prophecy and typology in biblical interpretation lack the allegorical scope.

If iconologies of power are the issue, it must follow that we cannot understand the languages of politics and their rhetoric until we understand the allegorical method. It makes no difference what particular political order is in place; the defining allegorical structures will operate and will convert to the new situation, whenever a major political or cultural change of manifold occurs. Let us for reference purposes consider a rough rhetorical definition: Allegory is a method of double meanings that organizes utterance (in any medium) according to its expression of analogical parallels between different networks of iconic likeness. In setting up its correspondences between a certain story, let’s say, and a set of meanings (the significatio of medieval exegesis), the method usually gives a vague impression of system. As rhetoricians ancient and modern perceived the process, a particular allegory will be either a composition or an interpretation based on a correspondence between images and agents (actions and the impressions they make) falling on one side of a wall of correspondence. Allegorical narratives, say a biblical parable or an Aesopian fable such as Animal Farm, lead us to imagine a set of meanings located on the other side of this hermeneutic wall. In political and cultural terms, these meanings lying on the other side of the wall comprise parts of the whole of an ideology—its commentary and interpretation.

Because allegory is a mix of making and reading combined in one mode, its nature is to produce a ruminative self-reflexivity. A large-scale allegory such as The Divine Comedy tends always to ruminate on its own levels of meaning, its own hermeneutic imperative, in a fashion we do not encounter, for example, with realism as in the novel or in historical writing. Self-reflection is obsessively an aspect of the allegorical method itself; that is, allegory works by defining itself in its enigmatic use. The motto of the mode might well be the line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64, on time and the poet’s destiny: Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate. The rumination focuses on symbolic activity occurring on both sides of an interpretive barrier. If my rather too solid wall metaphor holds, there is in allegory something odd about the wall; each side seems cognizant of the other’s activity, but each needs to accept that a semiotic barrier of some kind intervenes between story and significance. For centuries it was common to think of allegory as the semiotic medium for enigmatic thoughts.

Two attributes of a basic ritual process—the traditional use of the interpretive guide—will illuminate this process, whereby interpretation is darkly enclosed within the boundaries of the fiction itself. Following this tradition of the interpretive guide, in The Divine Comedy Virgil and Beatrice accompany the narrator Dante; in The Pilgrim’s Progress a variety of friends counsel Christian on the meaning of his journey. Thus, in The Divine Comedy, the poet is shown the enigmatic meaning of his travel though the other world, meeting strange or strangely familiar persons from history or vision. These encounters constitute Dante the narrator’s experience of the state of souls after death, and they create in the reader a powerful curiosity and desire to interpret each step of the mysterious journey. So also in John Bunyan’s great Protestant work, Christian (and later his wife, Christiana, and their children) travels on a progress from temporal defeat to resurrection, and all along the way the story suggests ideas of trial, choice, hope, and fear attending that journey. Particular moments and events stem from a larger vision, in this case the virtually cosmic idea of a Christian life. Story and idea, both sides rather complex, are twinned along the journey. This ingemination, as a Renaissance poet would call it, amounts to a belief that creation and interpretation are doubles of each other; they need each other. If a poet writes an allegory, the resulting poem apparently invokes and then controls its own interpretation. In a modern science fiction novel, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the interpretive guiding principle is inherent to the discovery of Leibowitz’s banal shopping-list relic, a discovery made not casually but by a member of a desert religious order.

The principle of organization by which a story implies a set of parallel meanings will obviously not work with stories told merely for the sake of the plot; why should any tale as such correspond to anything except perhaps life itself? The story has to be structured to project repeatedly implied sets of oblique meanings. It then follows that ritual plays a central role in all allegorical compositions or readings.¹ In my own general theory of allegory, I have shown how such ritual spreads its effects widely, from an obsessive-compulsive psychic origin to the massed cultural inventions of sacred liturgical rituals or rituals of political rhetoric. Ritual seems to be one way to prevent excessive questioning of the wall metaphor to which I have referred, as if repeated actions could ease a hidden stress between the image and meaning. A skeptical view asks naturally for the grounding of such beliefs and practices, while to a great extent the unquestioning answer can usefully be that allegories flourish in the form of ritual interpretations. Given this ritual protection from skepticism, there seems to be no limit, either in religious history or elsewhere, to the number of adumbrations that may load discourse with extra meanings. Even when the plain sense of literal meaning conflicts with evolved doctrine of any kind, allegorical rituals employ methods of accommodating a privileged text to the system of ideas; another word for this accommodating art is commentary, and yet another, the broad term interpretation.

2

The interpretive dance of allegory is an ancient literary phenomenon, no doubt as old as the desire to convert speech and writing into scripture, where sacred writ is accorded an authoritative status. In the sixth century B.C., it was possible to read Homeric epic as an allegory of physical forces, so that the apparent irrationality of the chthonic and Olympian gods was made into an acceptable allegorical parallel to nature’s wildness. Much later, with the establishment of the Christian church, a quite different mode of accommodation developed into an elaborate semiotic system, whereby all events could be read as implying the omnipotent providence of God. The system of interpretation keeps on changing its court of appeal, usually slowly, but at times fast.

Medieval practice seems to be the most revealing stage to examine before attempting any reach into the strange kind of allegory I am proposing. Let us recall the most familiar tag from medieval Christian exegesis, the fourfold method, which is known to poets and theologians alike. Reams have been written—Henri de Lubac wrote four densely packed volumes—on this simple statement of policy, its origins in Judaism and early Christianity, and on the various ways allegory could be found in and around biblical texts, sermons, secular literature, and life in general. The interpretive method was encapsulated in four mnemonic lines:

Littera gesta docet;

Quod credas allegoria;

Quid agas moralia;

Quo tendas anagogia.

Loosely translating, we get:

The letter teaches events, actions, and history;

What you believe is the allegory;

What you should do is the moral;

Whither you leaning (your final purpose) is the anagogy.

Christian exegetes often reduced the fourfold to a dyadic set, with the first half being the literal sense of a text and items two, three, and four together constituting the spiritual interpretation of the letter. Augustine would have seen the method in that way, recognizing paradoxically that the literal is the most subtle part of the fourfold, for without a degree of grammar, utterance, and rhetoric, the letter could not function at all; because on the biblical view God created by speaking, no derived or original sacred text could be a pure grapheme, functioning as pure Derridean différance. Even so, while the chief mystery of language is packed into the first level—the literal—there is also, according to this patristic view, a standard efflux of extra meanings, those other three levels. Massive medieval texts, such as the Cosmographia of the twelfth-century author Bernard Silvestris, typically exfoliate their meanings in complex designs, all of them streaming from the fourfold sense of the text. The method descends especially from close readings of the works of Saint Augustine, for example, his treatise On the Trinity. The hermeneutic adventure has been fully documented and analyzed by modern scholars such as M. D. Chenu, Jean Daniélou, de Lubac, Jean Pépin, A. C. Charity, and, more recently, Jon Whitman, who, in his book on allegory, has reduced the wealth of issues to a manageable and analytically helpful conspectus.² The medieval fourfold system of reading is obviously the source of a rich semiotic because it can range from the most physical of senses to the most mysterious; if what is morally of concern (in the third level) is not understood as to its form of belief (second level), there will be a gap in the overall sense being conveyed, a kind of fragmentary loss of coherence. In fact, the four levels continuously modify each other as to meaning.

What is remarkable is that no exegetical scholar has given any weight to what appears to be the philosophical source of the fourfold system, that is, the theory of the four causes given in the Metaphysics and Physics of Aristotle. In Aristotle, all events and all change (as with natural motion, or kinesis) occur in relation to the four aspects, or fashions, of causation, as the philosopher Jonathan Lear would say.³ First, the material cause virtually states its own character because objects and events are composed in some sense materially, of matter, in one respect or another. Materiality is hence an initial type of causal efficacy. Second, things and events have a formal cause, in that the design of their changing gives a second essential attribute of their potential for change. Third, things and events have an efficient cause because they need energy and thrust to bring about their motion from a potential to actual state. Fourth, they possess a final cause, for any movement or change of state—materialized, formalized, and energized—still requires a goal or purpose, an end toward which their changing aspires. This famous tetrad directly parallels the medieval fourfold method of interpretation, and one can only suppose its neglect in the commentaries to result from a refusal of the secular aspect of the Physics.

The reason I stress this neglect is that it marks a failure to note the pre-Christian physical basis of the history of allegory. By neglecting to see that the allegorist’s four levels of meanings are actually four levels of natural causation—admitting that here we deal with Aristotelian, pre-Galilean science—we fail to establish our next step in the historical account of the fortunes of allegory in the West. Lurking under the veil of hermeneutic obscurity, as the Bible and other texts were read, there had always been an Aristotelian implication, if it is correct that the four causes underlie the four levels of Christian exegesis. That supposition may be historically impossible to prove; its point—the strong analogy between the two systems of fourfold explanation—remains viable. We commonly say that Aristotle explains change in terms of four causes; but, as Richard Hope shows, in his translation of the Metaphysics, the words aitia and aition have many shades of meaning, perhaps best summed in the phrase basic explanation.⁴ This in turn leads to a sense of cause as idea. The idea of a thing is in effect its cause, and, as idea, points us to the basic explanation of the thing being the way it is, not accidentally or contingently, but in essence. This sequence of relations in turn leads to the link between Aristotle (a fundamental Christian authority, of course) and the medieval allegory of the four levels of meaning. For each of these levels is an aition or system of aitia; and, in that respect, each level of interpretation is a basic explanation, or, as Hope translates the key term, cause is the basic explanatory factor in reading the phenomenon of change correctly. A level of meaning, finally, is a particular set of explanatory factors, as, for instance, materials of which an object is made, or purposes to which its design contributes, and these factors in turn are accorded the status of ideas. In every case, the hermeneutic system is naturalized by virtue of its link to Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and anterior to those founding texts, the platonic theory of ideas. Given