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the sudden illumination, with the cognitive ecstasy, with the flashing vision of which modern theories of symbolism speak. The medieval metaphysical symbol is neither epiphany nor revelation of a truth concealed under the cloak of myth. Symbolism must make rationally conceivable the inadequacy of our reason and of our language. Challenged by this difficulty, Dionysius's commentators tried to translate his approach into rational terms: when Scotus Erigena (De divisione naturae 5.3) says that "nihil enim visibilium rerum, corporaliumque est, ut arbitror, quod non incorporale quid et intelligible significet," he is no longer speaking of a network of ungraspable similitudes, but rather of that uninterrupted sequence of causes and effects that will later be called the Great Chain of Being.
Aquinas will definitely transform this approach into the doctrine of analogia entis, which aimed at being a proportional calculus. Thus at the very root of medieval pansemiotic metaphysicswhich was sometimes defined as universal symbolismis the Quest for a Code and the will to transform a poetic approximation into a philosophical statement.
3. Scriptural Interpretation
Parallel to the Neoplatonic line of thought is the hermeneutic tradition of scriptural interpreters, interested in the symbolic language by which the Holy Scriptures speak to us.
The semiosic process involved in the reading of Scriptures was rather complicated: there was a first book speaking allegorically of the second one, and a second one speaking through parables of something else. Moreover, in this beautiful case of unlimited semiosis, there was a puzzling identification among the sender (the divine Logos), the signifying message (words, Logoi), the content (the divine message, Logos), the referent (Christ, the Logos)a web of identities and differences, complicated by the fact that Christ, as Logos, insofar as he was the ensemble of all the divine archetypes, was fundamentally polysemous.
Thus both Testaments spoke at the same time of their sender, of their content, of their referent. Their meaning was the nebula of all possible archetypes. The Scriptures were in the position of saying everything, and everything was too much for interpreters interested in Truth (see Compagnon 1972 and the discussion in Eco 1984, ch. 4). The symbolic nature of the Holy Books thus had to be tamed; in order to do so, the symbolic mode had to be identified with the allegorical one.
This is a very delicate point, because without this profound need of a code, the scriptural interpretation would look very similar to our mod-

 
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