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Page 13
accepts being honored and anointed by a courtesan, but it is impossible that our Savior encouraged such a lascivious ritual. Therefore the story stands for something else. In the same way, one should smell a second sense when the Scriptures play upon inexplicable superfluities or use literal expressions such as proper names or series of numbers. This eagerness to conjecture the presence of a symbolic mode when facing trivial events or blatantly useless details cannot but recall modern poetic devices such as the Joycean epiphany or Eliot's objective correlative. We look for the symbolic mode, not at the level of rhetorical figures, but at the level of a more macroscopic textual strategy, when a text displays a sort of uncanny liberality, of otherwise inexplicable descriptive generosity.
It must be clear that Augustine looked for symbols, not in the case of rhetorical strategies, but in the case of reported events: since the beginning, scriptural symbolism aimed at privileging the allegoria in factis over the allegoria in verbis. The words of the Psalmist can certainly be read as endowed with a second sensebecause the Holy Scriptures resort frequently to rhetorical devices; but what must necessarily be read beyond the letter are the series of "historical" events told by the Scriptures. God has predisposed the sacred history as a liber scriptus digito suo, and the characters of the Old Testament were pulled to act as they did in order to announce the characters and the events of the New.
According to Stoic teaching, signs were above all not words, onomata, but semeia, that is, natural events which can be taken as the symptoms of something else. Augustine received from the classical tradition the rhetorical rules allowing him to decode the allegories in verbis, but he did not have precise rules for the allegories in factisand, as I have already said, the significant facts told by the Scriptures cannot be "open" to any interpretation.
Thus in order to understand the meaning of the facts told by the Bible, Augustine had to understand the meaning of the things the Bible mentions. This is the reason for which medieval civilization, extrapolating from the Hellenistic Phisiologus or Pliny's Naturalis historia, elaborated its own encyclopedic repertories, bestiaries, herbaries, lapidaries, imagines mundi, in order to assign a symbolic meaning to every piece of the furniture of the "real" world. In these encyclopedias the same object or creature can assume contrasting meanings, so that the lion is at the same time the figure of Christ and the figure of the devil. The work of the medieval commentators was to provide rules for a correct textual disambiguation. Symbols were ambiguous within the paradigm, never within the syntagm. An elephant, a unicorn, a jewel, a stone, a flower

 
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