Afterword Preconception and Understanding: The Allegorists in Modern Perspective

What has been elaborated here is the history of perhaps the most powerful and enduring of the "strong misreadings" (to use Harold Bloom's term) that make up our cultural heritage. I have avoided any attempt to hold that reading of Homer up against others, to affirm or to deny it, beyond occasional observations on analogies between these ancient interpretive critics and those of our own time. My reticence on this score reveals an implicit model of reading with similarities to Bloom's, and no doubt in part derivative from it. Beyond his definition of the poles of interpretation as strong and weak misreading, I would add that strategies of power on the level of the definition of sanity intervene to regulate the history of interpretive traditions. At any given moment, in any given interpretive community, a range of (mis-)readings of any text is possible, and outside that range lies—if not madness—then at the very least a mode of discourse easily consigned to the categories of the odd, the quirky, the intellectually negligible. Today, the Neoplatonists' reading of Homer is beyond the pale. Its advocates (if indeed it has any) may not be certifiable on this basis alone, but if not, then they owe their sursis only to the tenuous and exquisite moment of crisis in literary theory in which we live. For a thousand years, however, their reading had just the opposite status—it was central to the sane, to the possible range of interpretation, and I know of no more compelling criterion of validity.

The heart of this study has been the thesis that this oldest surviving European tradition of interpretive criticism was in part responsible for the birth of developed allegorical literature in late antiquity, and that it formed the background for the next great contribution to the epic tradition, the Divina Commedia . This thesis does not depend on our "taking

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seriously" the interpretive efforts of the Neoplatonic allegorists, nor does it require that we read Dante any differently. If correct, however, it does throw light on the way in which a mode of reading first generated a mode of writing, and then, through the pervasive influence of its claims for the scope of the meaning and intention of early epic, established the conditions for future contributions to that tradition.

But what of the allegorists' efforts themselves? Allegorical interpretation, ancient, medieval, and modern, has a bad reputation in our time. We imagine the allegorists to have been guilty of willful deception in distorting the meaning of texts, imposing foreign ideas upon them, and then compounding their crimes by appealing to those texts as authority for the very ideas they have fraudulently attached to them. But if we cannot "take seriously" the claims we find in Porphyry and in Proclus regarding the meaning of the Iliad and Odyssey , then we are left with a curious and unsatisfying model of the cultural process in question. "Garbage in" the tradition's computer seems, against all odds, to have generated not "garbage out" but the Paradiso .

If we say that in ancient terms "allegorical interpretation" is coextensive with what we are accustomed to call "interpretation" tout court , we are left with the same dilemma, for the modern dislike of allegorical interpretation carries over to interpretation of a sort we would not call allegorical. The hostility takes many forms, from the now somewhat dated esthetic polemic of Susan Sontag's famous essay "Against Interpretation" (1964) to the staid disapproval of G. M. A. Grube's discussion of ancient reading quoted earlier.^[1] It is interesting that Sontag incorporated into her essay a historical model widespread in classical scholarship, though by now surely discredited, when she claimed that interpretation made its first appearance in "late classical antiquity."^[2] This is an idea that has died hard, and classical scholarship has been reluctant to admit that interpretation, which is doubtless as old as reading itself, was every bit as much a part of the intellectual life of classical Athens as it was eight or nine centuries later. This reluctance was eloquently expressed in Hugh Lloyd-Jones's initial resistance to a mid-fourth-century date for the Orphic interpretive papyrus from Derveni.^[3] One must be sympathetic to the im-

[1] See Preface above.

[2] Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," p. 5.

[3] "Well, if they are right, this is a most sensational fact from the point of view of content," he observed. "Who ever knew that the Greeks were writing commentaries on poetry, and on Orphic poetry at that, as early as the fourth century? . . . it would be exceedingly dangerous if the hypothesis of an early date were to be generally accepted without careful consideration of all the difficulties involved." Discussion of the paper of S. G. Kapsomenos, "The Orphic Papyrus Roll of Thessaloniki," Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 2 (1964):20. Lloyd-Jones seems to have adjusted his views over two decades, however, and wrote recently with apparent sangfroid, in a review of a new Homer commentary, "The Greeks themselves started to write commentaries on Greek poems as early as the fourth century B.C. " (London Review of Books 4, no. 16 [1982]:14).

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pulse to keep the classical moment of fifth-century Athens as a haven of clarity and directness, of rational inquiry, in contrast to the intellectual muddle of late Greek philosophy, riddled with dogmatism, theurgy, and long-dead certainties. But if there is much truth in the traditional formulation, there is also a powerful element of myth, particularly in the model of the relationship of reader and text, for all practical purposes the product of the Enlightenment, which we project into classical Athens.

Indeed, the myth is one of the many that we can trace to the Platonic dialogues and their dramatization of the intellectual life of the last years of the fifth century, and specifically to Socrates' rejection, in the Protagoras , of the discussion of the meaning of texts from the poets, "whom it is impossible to interrogate about what they are saying."^[4] It is this refreshing, rational, no-nonsense approach that is the most natural to us in confronting the problem of interpretation. "Texts don't mean anything, people do," we say in effect, and both the strengths and the weaknesses of that position can be traced right to Socrates' equation of the meaning of a text with the intention of its author and to his rejection of interpretation on the grounds that when texts are discussed, "some say the poet meant one thing, some say he meant another, and they go on talking about something they have no power to verify."^[5]

We may in general characterize Socrates' position here as the Enlightenment position, and indeed although it may well have been taken by the historical Socrates, and has affinities with the scholarly principles of the Alexandrians, its general application as a hermeneutical principle serving as the basis for a methodology probably does not antedate the Enlightenment. It leaves open only two paths of action. The first is the total rejection of texts as a means to truth (or even to understanding)—Socrates' position here, echoed in Plato's Letter 7. The other, more moderate and practical approach, is the reduction of problems of meaning to

^[4][5]

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the level of definition and syntax. This goes hand in hand with the assertion that the authors of texts "are quite capable of expressing their meaning clearly" to their audiences.^[6] In other words, what we have called the Enlightenment position denies the historicity of the reader and postulates an eternal and unchanging meaning lying behind the text, a meaning coextensive with the intention of the author at the moment of the creation of the text, and either recoverable or unrecoverable, but not in any case subject to significant deterioration or change over time. A text means what the author meant, or it means nothing, should that meaning escape us.

But there is an alternative to the Enlightenment position on meaning in texts and its attendant blanket rejection of interpretation. There is a view of the relationship of reader and text within which the efforts of the allegorists can be seen to have been a respectable intellectual endeavor, and not the offenses against reason and truth they have seemed to so many.

The debate on the historicity of the observer and its implications for the methodology of the disciplines whose object is man has its roots in German thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with Hegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Schleiermacher. In Schleiermacher, the problem of comprehension, of understanding a text, is one of the recovery of the original thought, an action made possible by the fundamental harmony of intellects, which transcends time. A similar sense of the relationship of meaning and text can be found in the English Platonist Thomas Taylor's remarks on translating ancient texts: "Since all truth is eternal, its nature can never be altered by transposition, though, by this means, its dress may be varied, and become less elegant and refined. Perhaps even this inconvenience may be remedied by sedulous cultivation."^[7]

It would be difficult to find the transparency of language asserted with such assurance since Taylor's time. From the same milieu sprang the thought of William Hazlitt, who generally receives too little credit for his contribution to Romantic hermeneutics. Placing himself in explicit opposition both to German idealism (entering English Romanticism through Coleridge) and to the Platonism of Thomas Taylor's circle, he located in the observer the power that renders possible the transcendence of time and the comprehension of texts from an earlier age, a power he called "the sympathetic imagination." Here in the interaction of ideal-

[6] G. M. A. Grube, quoted above in the Preface.

[7] Thomas Taylor, Introduction to "Concerning the Beautiful" (= Plot. Enn . 1.6), reprinted in Raine and Harper, eds., Thomas Taylor the Platonist , p. 137.

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ism and Hazlitt's peculiar extension of the empiricist tradition of British thought, we find the essence of the problem as it survives today—the recognition of the historicity of the observer as a factor in the interpretation of texts removed in time, and the elaboration of a theory of understanding, of apprehension, to describe that relationship.

The form taken by twentieth-century thought in this area is largely dependent on the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, and his development of the concept of understanding (Verstehen ) as the distinctive mode of knowledge appropriate to the disciplines concerned with man. Recognizing the historicity of the observer, the human sciences become utterly estranged from the natural sciences on the levels of epistemology and methodology.^[8] The latter are left with a pretense to objectivity that, whatever its weaknesses, is largely unaffected by the problem of historicity. The former are left to redefine their goals.

It was with Dilthey that the concept of the "hermeneutical horizon" and the problem of the "hermeneutical circle" entered twentieth-century philosophy, to be developed by Martin Heidegger and reexamined in the context of a general theory of the human sciences by Hans-Georg Gadamer. With Dilthey, the horizon of the observer is for the first time accepted and recognized as a major, legitimate factor in his experience of the past, and the implications of this acceptance are explored. Foremost among these is the paradox that the observer's knowing of himself is continually a factor in his knowing of the past. This circularity extends beyond the comprehension of human phenomena removed in time to those that are contemporary but removed from the observer's "horizon."^[9]

It is the contemporary thinkers working in this tradition—and in particular Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur—who can provide us with a theoretical standpoint from which the hermeneutics of the ancient Neoplatonists can be understood sympathetically. Not that Gadamer and Ricoeur have any interest in allegorism as such,^[10] but their understanding of the role of commentary and interpretation as a function of the mediation between reader and text can lend to the endeavors of a Porphyry or a Proclus a seriousness that would be lost on the Socrates of the Protagoras . Literary criticism as we know it is inseparable from commentary and

[8] See Paul Ricoeur, "Expliquer et comprendre," for a summary of the development and some thoughts on reconciliation.

[9] On the "hermeneutic circle" and some of its implications, see Paul Ricoeur, "Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics."

[10] Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Hermeneutik," col. 1071, on the relationship of the allegorical hermeneutics of Augustine and Thomas to the tasks of modem hermeneutics.

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interpretation, and thus requires a theoretical substructure capable of lending legitimacy to these activities. It is not surprising that the influence of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur is felt throughout the range of contemporary criticism.

The influence of these ideas on our understanding of the tradition of ancient literature has, however, been minimal. What we have called the Enlightenment model of the relationship of reader to text has survived almost unscathed in the study of ancient literature. Voices of protest have been raised,^[11] and have inspired a substantial backlash against methodological innovation.^[12] The present situation would seem to be one of creative polarization within a field that has for too long taken refuge in a static and largely unexamined methodology.

It is not my intention here to champion methodological innovation—indeed, such a polemic would be inappropriate in a study that is itself quite conservative in method. But I do want to suggest that the tradition of Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer can help us to see the value of the interpreters of other periods (including the efforts of the allegorists).

There is one passage of Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode , explicitly dependent on Heidegger, that seems to me especially relevant. In it, Gadamer elaborates on Heidegger's discussion of the hermeneutic circle and the problem of prejudices (Vorurteile ). The model of the comprehension of texts developed here is based on Heidegger's ideas on the "fore-structure of understanding" (die Vorstruktur des Verstehens ):

The person who is trying to understand a text is always carrying out an act of projection. He projects before himself a meaning of the text as a whole just as soon as a first meaning is perceived in the text.

[11] See the studies in Arethusa 10 (1977) and 15 (1982), the latter honoring Jean-Pierre Vernant. The French have been more adventurous in this area than the Germans and Anglo-Saxons, and the work of Vernant and Marcel Detienne has broken new ground. For German philology and its relationship to advances in hermeneutical theory, see the articles in H. Flashar et al., eds., Philologie und Hermeneutik im 19. Jahrhundert . These studies examine the period that forms the background to what Flashar in his introduction describes as a contemporary "Zurückhaltung, z. T. sogar Skepsis gegen Theorie und Methode innerhalb der klassischen Philologie." Terry Eagleton's observation is clearly germane: "Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people's theories and an oblivion of one's own" (Literary Theory , p. viii). Gadamer's own work on Plato and his influential work on methodology have had some influence among students of classical antiquity. See the papers in Contemporary Hermeneutics and Interpretation of Classical Texts (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1981).

[12] See, for example, R. L. Fowler in Classical Views , n. s., 1 (1982):77-81, with H. J. Westra's response in a later issue of the same volume, pp. 381-82.

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Even this first meaning emerges only because in reading the text he has definite anticipation of a certain meaning. In the working out of such a projection, constantly and freely revised according to what is revealed in the process of further penetration into the meaning, lies understanding what is there.^[13]

This model of the understanding of texts finds a suggestive analogy in recent discussions of the psychology of speech. In practice, our aural comprehension depends largely on the projection of meanings appropriate to the situation, against which we test the sounds we actually hear. Thus the entire process of comprehension becomes a breaking-down of preconceived ideas, an essentially destructive process by which the meaning of the text (or of the spoken sentence) realizes itself in our consciousness by displacing and modifying our preconceptions. Jean-Paul Sartre expressed the principle in more general terms in Qu'est-ce que la littérature , asserting that the meaning of a text is a collaborative act involving the text itself and the consciousness of the reader.

The consequence of this is, of course, that texts have meaning only in terms of readers, or, more specifically, in terms of the expectations of readers, which determine their apprehension of texts. And this in turn underlies our interest in ancient readings, however divorced from our own perception of the possible meanings of the text in question. We know next to nothing of the experience of texts in antiquity before Plutarch, and little before Porphyry. But what we can reconstruct of these early readings, of the encounters of these readers and their prejudices with texts we still possess, can open up new vistas in intellectual history.^[14] Instead of viewing Porphyry as a falsifier of Homer, wrong from the start and essentially useless to us, we can view the reading of the Odyssey he gives us as a remarkable opportunity to see a whole Odyssey . This is not a text in search of a reader but a text with meaning, appre-

[13] Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode , 2nd ed., p. 251; in (anon.) translation, Truth and Method , p. 236. The translation above is my own.

[14] Even if we are reluctant to take this sort of position on the positive value of ancient interpretive texts, we must nevertheless accept their monitory value. Cf. Anne Sheppard's comments on Proclus on Plato: "On the whole Proclus is not to be despised as an expositor of Plato's meaning and the recognition that he brings certain preconceptions about theurgy and about traditional Greek religion to his understanding of his authoritative text should put us on the alert for preconceptions which we in our turn may be foisting on Plato" (Studies , p. 110). I take it that the principal difference between Sheppard's position and mine is that I doubt the possibility, indeed the desirability, of removing our own preconceptions from their legitimate role in the reading of texts.

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hended and brought to life by the experience of a reader of the late third century—one ideally suited to communicate to us the quality of the intellectual life of his time.

What this last argument amounts to is a plea for a methodologically enlightened Rezeptionsgeschichte of ancient texts, dealing fully with the implications of the model of apprehension and meaning we have found in Gadamer and Sartre, and holding that the Iliad has had as many meanings as it has had readers. Proclus lies roughly halfway between our own moment in history and that which produced the Homeric poems. Dante lies halfway between ourselves and Proclus. By halving again and again, we reach Chapman, then Thomas Taylor, then the heyday of analytic criticism of the Homeric poems late in the nineteenth century. By this Eleatic process we demonstrate simultaneously the necessary (if illusory) impossibility of our own apprehension of Homer and the ultimate dependence of that apprehension on all previous readings, however tendentious they might appear in isolation.

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Date: 2015-12-17; view: 586