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can assume many meanings, but when they show up in a given context they have to be decoded in the only possible right way. |
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Thus the rise of a scriptural hermeneutics encouraged the growth of a universal symbolism and the real world became as much "perfused with signs" as were the Holy Scriptures. But in both cases one should speak more rigorously of scriptural and universal allegorism. The Middle Ages could not have understood the antinomy outlined by Goethe. |
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However, the universal allegorism implemented a sort of hallucinatory experience of the world according to which mundane creatures and historical facts counted, not as "these" creatures and "these" facts, but insofar as they were standing for something else. Such an attitude could not be accepted by the Aristotelian naturalism of the thirteenth century. |
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Aquinas was pretty severe with profane poetry and allegorism in verbis. Poetry is an inferior doctrine: "poetica non capiuntur a ratione humana propter defectus veritatis qui est in his" (Summa th. III.101.2 ad 2). But since Aquinas was a poet himself, and a gifted one, he admitted that sometimes divine mysteries, insofar as they exceed our comprehension, must be revealed by rhetorical figures: "conveniens est sacrae scripturae divina et spiritualia sub similitudine corporalium tradere" (Summa th. I.1.9). However, apropos of the Holy Text, he recommends looking first of all for its literal or historical sense. When the Bible says that Hebrew people escaped from Egypt, it tells literally the truth. Only when one has grasped this literal sense can one try to catch, through it and beyond it, the spiritual sense, that is, those senses that the scriptural tradition assigned to the sacred books, namely, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical or mystical ones. Up to this point it does not seem that Aquinas is so original with respect to the previous tradition. But he makes two important statements: |
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1. The spiritual sense only holds for the facts told by the Scriptures. Only in the course of the sacred history has God acted on the mundane events to make them signify something else. There is no spiritual sense in the profane history, nor in the individuals and facts of the natural world. There is no mystical meaning in what happened after the Redemption. Human history is a story of facts, not of signs (see Quodl. VII.6.16). The universal allegorism is thus liquidated. Mundane events are restituted to their naturality. If they are meaningful, they are so only for the eyes of the philosopher who sees them as natural proofs of the existence of God, not |
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