Allegory. Shocking I know.
Why on earth would I find the use of allegory disturbing? Because it brought to light an area of my mind and heart that have always seemed to be in constant friction with the rest of the world which I never even started to understand until maybe now.
The article argued that we misuse and misunderstand allegory because its roots are deeply buried within medieval tradition and worldview that we have lost and replaced with our own modern and postmodern traditions and worldviews which should hardly be surprising. The article talked about how CS Lewis convincingly argues that allegory, as understood from how the Medievals saw the world, is powerful, beautiful, and incredible art. Works like Pilgrim's Progress, and Faerie Queene epitomize medieval allegory and it was unthinkable that anyone who had the capacity to read should not have read them. Today they seem flat and uninteresting. The reason provided in the article was that the medieval world was ordered where everything has its proper place and people tended to think of the image and the abstract together whereas today the world is disordered where everything is up in the air and people have trouble putting images and abstractions together in the same way.
Why is this disturbing? I'm getting there I promise.
We read allegory like Pilgrim's Progress today and tend to roll our eyes because the characters seem flat and the direction of the narrative appears to be obviously rigged. We read about a character named Christian or Evangelist or Lust and we lose interest because they aren't real characters, they don't have life struggles or relational connections or any real depth to them. We expect characters to be like what we would find in a novel, actual persons with actual struggles and connections to the world.
In a medieval worldview though the characters take on a very different shape and meaning.
For them, “Venus” signified multiple things simultaneously: a planet, a Roman goddess with a set of stories attached to her, a literary figure, the image of feminine beauty, the force of erotic love, God’s will manifested in the fruitful union of a man and a woman, and so on. Christianity formed a bedrock for this way of thinking, but no one of these is the “true” meaning of Venus to which all others can be reduced. Their characters may seem “thin” when compared with those in a great novel, but their images are much fuller and richer.
Laura Miller - Save the AllegoryThis is the power of medieval allegory. This is the richness and fullness that we have lost in our own worldviews.
Is this the disturbing part? We're almost there.
I think in medieval allegory. I relate images to abstract things. I see a character and I see immediate symbolism and I view the symbolism as just as important (if not more-so) than the character. Yeah, the narrative of Pilgrim's Progress is simplistic, but I still have the Christian worldview and quite possibly enough medieval worldview to find it thoroughly meaningful and a valuable read where so many who chose literature as their direction of study would find it childish and morally oppressive.
Here is where I become disturbed. I think in ways that most others do not. I watch The Lord of the Rings and see the characters, their stories, and the grander narrative flawed and riddled with sensationalism though it may be but what I take away from it is Christ triumphing over the powers of the sin, death, and the world and I see myself as part of that story. What I see as the most important and most impressive aspects do not even appear on most peoples' radars.
And so I began reflecting upon my own psychology. I've always felt that I have a difficult time communicating my thoughts and I think this might be one of the reasons why. I'm operating and trying to communicate on a different wavelength. How much of my thought process is medieval / allegorical? How can I properly translate this into common speech? What other implications does this have for how I process information or try to communicate with others? The connections I make between things in my mind that seem insubstantial when I try to describe them, are they allegorical connections and if they are are they real? Is this why I chose theology as my centre of focus? Since I am finding so much personal meaning in the concept of a literary device should I have maybe studied humanities instead? Will people think me or my thinking obsolete?
"Medieval," after all, is a disparaging adjective (describing word). If we call something "medieval" what we mean is that it is archaic, out dated, crude, primitive, old-fashioned, unenlightened, draconic, or obsolete. I've always been convinced that this is, as CS Lewis put it, "intellectual snobbery" whereby we fail to understand the past and foolishly assert that everything that took place or was created before our time was not as good as what we have / think today.
I don't think my thinking is obsolete, and I don't think that my thinking my thinking is not obsolete is the product of obsolete thinking. Every contemporary historian of the medieval time period I've ever read has blasted today's misunderstanding of history that has made 'medieval' a dark age of dismal nothing between the light of Classical Rome and the light of the enlightenment. It was an age of thought, art, music, color, philosophy, literature, education, architecture, and new technology.
It's been a few hours since I started writing, the disturbance within me has dissipated. I guess to sum up I discovered another aspect of how I am different from most other people and how some of the foundational things I take for granted (like how I process thought and see the world) are not 'normal'. If the foundations are shaken then everything on the foundations are also shaken and now I suppose my subconscious will spend years realigning things with little epiphanies and realizations as things click back into place.
In the meantime I will stop navel gazing and put my mind toward more product things like loving and caring for my family and preparing myself to clean up the physical, emotional, relational, actual, and allegorical aftermath of a backed up toilet, rangy children, and a computer reset.
Greg Out
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