|
|
|
|
|
|
as symbolic messages. With Aquinas one witnesses a sort of secularization of postbiblical history and of the natural world. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2. If there is a spiritual sense in the Holy Scriptures, where facts mean something else, there is no spiritual sense in profane poetry. Poetry displays only its literal sense. The statement seems undoubtedly too crude and radical: Aquinas, as a poet, knew very well that poets use rhetorical figures and allegories. But the poetical second sense is a subspecies of the literal one, and Aquinas calls it "parabolic." This sensethe one of tropes and allegories"non supergreditur modum litteralem" (Quodl. VII.6.16). It is simply a variety of the literal sense. When the Scriptures represent Christ by the image of a goat, one is not facing a case of allegoria in factis but of simple allegoria in verbis. This goat is not a fact that symbolizes future events but only a word that parabolically (literally) stands for the name "Christ" (Summa th. I.1.10 ad 3, and Quodl. VII.6.15). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In which way is the parabolic sense different from the spiritual senses of the Scriptures? To understand this highly controversial point, one must understand what Aquinas meant by "literal sense." He meant the sense "quem auctor intendit." The literal sense is not only the meaning of a sentence but also the meaning of its utterance. Modern pragmatics knows that a sentence such as "It is cold here" is, according to the dictionary, a simple statement about the temperature of a given place; but if the sentence is uttered in given circumstances, it can also convey the actual intentions, the intended meaning, of its utterer, for instance, "Please, let us go elsewhere." It must be clear that, for Aquinas, both sentence meaning and utterance meaning belong to the literal sense, since they represent what the utterer of the sentence had in his mind. From that point of view, one understands why the sense conveyed by tropes and allegories, insofar as it represents exactly what the author wanted to say, can be easily reduced to the literal sense. Why are the spiritual senses of the Scriptures not equally literal? Because the biblical authors were unaware of conveying, through their historical report, the senses that (in the mind of God) facts should have assumed for the future reader able to read, in the Old Testament, the forecast of the New. The authors of the Scriptures wrote under divine inspiration, ignoring what they were really saying (see Eco 1986a and 1956). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
It does not seem, however, that Aquinas's proposal was so influential. A first disquieting instance of it is given by the theory of allegorical reading of the Divine Comedy, as put forth by Dante in the Epistula XIII. |
|
|
|
|
|