Chapter 3 : Medieval and Renaissance (from Mimesis to Creation)

Question 1

What are the two readings of Plotinus and Neoplatonism?

Answer 1

Augustine’s reading: medieval scriptural interpretation, intended to overcome the ambiguity of figurative language in order to reach the Word of God through authoritative and definitive textual interpretation. (For now we see through a glass mirror, darkly)

Late Medieval and Renaissance: a humanist understanding of literature as fiction and man’s creation.

Question 1

Describe the epochal shifts happening between late antiquity to late medieval and Renaissance literary theory.

What is the philosophical movement exerting strongest and most uninterrupted influence?

Answer 1

Literature as mimesis of Divine Reality to Literature as Human Self Creation.

God centered view to Human centered view.

Theology to Humanism.

Man’s submission to god and authority of church to emphasis on human dignity and creativity.

Medieval scripture interpretation (scholars) to the Renaissance idea of literature as human creation or fiction.

Neoplatonism : via Plotinus, who sees Plato as his philosophical master. With Plotinus, Plato’s thought undergoes a transformation or shift of emphasis.

Question 2

Plato’s thought undergoes a transformation or shift of emphasis that is important to Western thought.

How does Plotinus accomplish this via Neoplatonism? What does he say about art, the artist, and contemplation?

Answer 2

According to Plotinus’s reading of Plato, the ideal world of Forms is a creative force from which all things emanate (akin to a Christian God). While Plotinus was not a Christian thinker, we can see how he influenced and was influenced by Christian thinking.

For Plotinus, the Ideal world of Forms: THE ONE, THE INTELLECT, THE SOUL, THE WORLD. (both ascending and descending creation).

To Plotinus, art is an INTUITION, the way in which the artist (the ideal figure of intuitive contemplation) can access the Ideal world of Forms. Art is not an imitation of external reality but an intuitive contemplation of IDEAL REALITY.

The Arts are holders of beauty and ADD WHERE NATURE IS LACKING. (referential to Invention and creation)

Question 3

What does Plotinus believe knowledge or true reality to be? How is it different from a scientific Aristotelian way of thinking?

Answer 3

If we have failed to understand, it is that we have thought of knowledge as a mass of theorems and an accumulation of propositions, though that is false ever…

The artist himself goes back to that wisdom in Nature which is embodied in himself; and this is not a wisdom built of theorems but of ONE TOTALITY.

The intuitive understanding of the artist grasps true reality at once and SYNTHETICALLY, NOT GRADUALLY OR ANALYTICALLY.

Question 4

What is Augustine’s reading of Plotinus?

Answer 4

Literature (as figurative language or allegory) though ambiguous or enigmatic, gives us access to true reality.

It illuminates the ideal world of Forms, or for Augustine, the Word of God and Divine Reason.

Augustine’s aim is to ASCEND through interpretation, from figurative language of Scripture to its TRUE meaning, the Word of God, in the process, creating a Semiology (theory of signs) and Hermeneutics (theory of interpretation).

Question 5

According to Augustine’s semiology and hermeneutics, what is his definition of signs?

What is his aim through this theory?

Answer 5

Natural / Conventional:

natural signifies without intention like animal footprints, conventional signs are intentional signs that living creature use in order to communicate

Literal / Figurative:

literal is used to designate those things on account of which they were instituted, figurative signs are symbols, things which we designate by a literal sign that is used to designate something else

Because scripture like literature uses figurative signs, Augustine poses the problem of ambiguous signs. His aim is to overcome the ambiguity of figurative signs in order to have a stable and authoritative scriptural interpretation.

Question 6

In alignment with Augustine, what are the various literary tropes found in Scripture?

Answer 6

allegory (saying one thing meaning another)

enigma (allusive or obscene speech)

parabola (moral lessons via metaphors)

cathachresis (incorrect use of words)

irony/antiphrasis (saying one thing meaning the opposite)

Question 7

Besides ambiguity of Scripture, what else does Augustine find problematic?

Answer 7

The unstable nature of Scripture (various texts and translations) and multiplicity of sign systems emerges in a nightmarish way.

There’s also the paradox of scripture : signs given by god but presented to us by the men who wrote them.

Question 8

What are the main postulates of Augustine’s On the Trinity?

How do they help in comparing between medieval sign and modern sign?

Answer 8

1. Augustine posits the precession and ontological primacy of the SIGNIFIED over the SIGNIFIER, in particular, the primacy of a TRANSCENDENTAL SIGNIFIED (word of god), which precedes all signs by which it is signified.
2. Augustine further posits a necessary mimetic relation (or MIRRORING) between signified and signifier.

• Word of God and Human Thought (word spoken in the heart incorporeally)
• Human Thought and Human Language (passing through the body)

3. Makes the distinction that the kind of mimetic relation is not direct reflection but rather ALLEGORICAL FIGURATION, an obscure and enigmatic process.
4. Augustine’s “metaphorical signification” is deemed better suited to the expression of realities that are obscure and difficult to understand: “the difficulties of an enigma enhance rather than reduce its expressive power”

(St. Paul: glass mirror darkly)

In contrast to Augustine’s Medieval Sign, the Modern Sign is described by structuralists (Saussure: signifier primacy over signified) and poststructuralists (plurality of texts, no canonical or authoritative meaning exists).

Question 9

What is Thomas Williams (Augustine scholar)’s reading of Augustine’s semiology and hermeneutics?

Answer 9

Argues that Augustine doesn’t aim to police interpretations or arrive at one authoritative interpretation at the expense of others.

For Augustine, God speaks “in my inward ear” and Augustine acknowledges that “ the truth is the common property of all right-thinking people”.

Question 10

Compare Thomas Aquinas theology between

Neoplatonism and Augustine

and

Aristotle

Answer 10

Aquinas agrees with Neoplatonism in that scripture uses figurative language like literature does to give access to “intellectual truths”. However, he acknowledges that while Scripture aims toward “elucidation of the truth” it uses metaphors that likely obscure the truth.

Aristotle’s logic is a new intellectual force at the time. Emergence of new science of theology which emphasized logic and empiricism rather than quoting Scripture. Aquinas maintains that though Scripture can have several senses, he aims to establish that polysemy is compatible with determinate meaning and access to truth, through their fundamental basis on the literal. (He defines the 4 senses in order to prove this: Aquinas’s Aristotelian Empiricism)

Question 11

What are the four senses of Scripture according to Aquinas?

Describe his Aristotelian Empiricism. How do the four senses relate to one another and illuminate scriptural interpretation?

Answer 11

1. Historical or Literal
2. Allegorical
3. Moral
4. Anagogical (Christ. metaphysical reality)

(2-4 are the spiritual sense)

Aquinas posits that these are not in conflict with one another, but instead build off each other. The spiritual sense is built off the literal. He concludes that “the fact that there is more than one meaning does not create ambiguity or any kind of mixture of meanings.” No confusion results since all the senses are based on one namely the LITERAL sense.

Question 12

In modern times, may critics question the distinction between Literal and Figurative meaning.

What does Barthes theorize?

Answer 12

Barthes rejects the distinction between denotation and connotation. Only connotation exists.

Question 13

According to the Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, Umberto Eco argues…

What does Eco consider Aquinas’s late-medieval scientific turn?

Answer 13

…that the aesthetics of Aquinas are reflective of the medieval worldview that priveleged and valued order, hierarchy, consonance, coherence, wholeness, and harmony.

The medieval mind is looking to ascend to God.

Aquinas, Eco argues, represents a late medieval scientific turn:

from the world as a storehouse of symbols, from a SYMBOLIC vision to a NATURALISTIC (ordered and empirical/scientific) vision.

Question 14

Compare Plotinus’s contemplation and Aquinas’s contemplation.

Answer 14

Plotinus: contemplation of artist/ mystic / poet.

Aquinas: gradual and painstaking work of the scientist.

Question 15

How does Eco compare Aquinas and Saussure (a structuralist linguist)?

Answer 15

Both theorize a SYNCHRONIC STRUCTURE for the world in which its parts are understood in their relations to one another.

For Aquinas, this the real synchrony of being: inherent in the logic of things themselves (Aristotelian forms / physics).

For Saussure, language is a synchronic structure, made up of the relations among empty values, defined only by their difference from other values.

Question 16

What is Dante’s significance within medieval literary theory?

Answer 16

Eco views Dante as a medieval figure very much within the medieval worldview.

For Dante, poets continue the work of the Scriptures and posited the “hidden truth” of poetry.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante pioneered the use of European vernacular language rather than Latin.

In The Banquet, Dante collects and interprets short poems in Italian, setting out his method of ALLEGORICAL INTERPRETATION, a DEPTH model of hermeneutics adapted from medieval scriptural commentary.

Question 17

What is Dante’s method of Allegorical Interpretation?

Answer 17

Depth model ; the interpreter needs to go below the surface of the letter:

• that which is hidden beneath the mantle
• a truth hidden beneath a beautiful falsehood

From Aquinas’s four senses:
Dante singles out as central the distinction between literal and allegorical sense (INSIDE/OUTSIDE). All three other senses can be considered one category (ALLEGORICAL) bc of their difference with respect to the LITERAL.

“For e/thing that has an inside and an outside, it is impossible to come to the inside without first seeing the outside.”

Question 18

What is D.W. Robertson’s commentary on the medieval metaphors of the chaff and grain or nucleus and shell?

Answer 18

Robertson argues that the medieval distinction is of a more valuable inside and an inferior outside. Unlike in modernity, in which Spirit and Letter are not opposites that are mutually exclusive.

Other medieval examples:

• Marriage is a well-ordered hierarchy btwn man (Morally superior) and woman (morally inferior)

-Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is hints to his contestation of hierarchical differentiation in the Wife of Bath via parody

Question 19

According to Auerbach, what is Dante’s afterlife like?

Answer 19

It possesses historical phenomenality and an overwhelming realism both eternal and phenomenal, changeless and full of history.

Nonetheless, she considers Dante’s humanistic tendencies as Christian in spirit bc of “the Christian idea of the indestructability of the entire human indivdiual”.

Question 19

In Mimesis, what is Auerbach’s reading of Dante?

Answer 19

Dante as an early originator of the HUMANIST notion of the individual.

Dante reveals the individual man’s inner life, the indestructability of the individual.

The image of man eclipses the image of God. Bc the Comedy is primarily committed to individual, living human beings, described with earthly realism and vitality.

Auerbach posits that Dante is not allegorical (does not use literal/historical to ascend to the higher divine reality), but rather joins the literal with the spiritual, integrating the individual/grotesque with the dignity of God’s judgment.

Question 20

What is Colish’s reading of Dante?

Answer 20

Like Auerbach, she considers Dante a humanist.

However, she argues that Dante is only half theologian since there is no yielding of the literal to allegorical or vice versa. Both are maintained and the literal can’t be discarded as irrelevant or ancillary to the allegorical.

In Plotinian terms, descent is as valuable as ascent.