This week I’m teaching a course at Thomas More College’s high school summer program on “The Role of the Catholic Writer”. I am privileged to have a fine group of highschoolers from across the length and breadth of the United States, from Los Angeles to New York, and from Yankee New England to the Deep South of Tennesee. The focus of the course is the way in which the great writers of western civilization have employed differing forms of allegory to convey moral, theological and philsophical truth.

We began with the most basic level of allegory discussed by St. Augustine in his work on Christian Doctrine, in which he talks about natual and conventional signs. At this most basic level, it can be seen that all words are allegories, i.e. literal things that point to other things. For example, the word “dog” is literally just a monosyllabic sound, when spoken, or a series of three shapes, when written, which points to a thing that is a four-legged canine. This most basic level of allegory is important to our understanding that thought is itself dependent upon allegory.Thought, which is the way that we communicate our understanding of things to ourselves, needs words or numbers, which, as conventional signs, point to the things that they signify. Similarly, these same conventional signs are the means by which we communicate with each other. Allegory on this most basis level is therefore necessary and unavoidable. Everybody allegorizes all the time!

We then proceeded to Christ’s employment of parables, which are stories that point to applicable moral lessons beyond themselves. Since Christ had Himself sanctified storytelling by His own telling of stories, He sanctions literature as a legitimate, good and bona fide way of conveying the deepest truths.

Moving on, we discussed formal allegory and its use of personified abstraction: Lady Philosophy in Boethius; Christian and the Giant Despair in Bunyan; Reason and the Spirit of the Age in C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress.

From formal allegory, we turned our attention to the fourfold interpretation of scripture taught by St. Thomas Aquinas in which the Angelic Doctor explains that Scriptural exegesis invites three levels of allegorical meaning beyond the literal meaning, namely the allegorical prefiguring of the New Testament in the Old, the moral meaning that emerges from the text, and the anagogical meaning relating to eternity.

Having discussed the fourfold interpretation of Scripture we proceeded to ask whether it was legitimate to seek to read other texts in the same manner. Dante suggested that the Divine Comedy could and should be read in accordance with this four-fold exegeticial approach. A discussion ensued in which it was considered whether Shakespeare’s plays could be read in this way.

Fables were next on the agenda, with those of Aesop being discussed and also the fable of Chauntecleer and Pertelote, which is told by the Nun’s Priest in the Canterbury Tales.    

Next was a discussion of the use of numerical allegory in Beowulf in which the number of Beowulf’s followers is employed as a code inviting a connection with the Gospel narrative. The influence of Beowulf’s allegorical dimension on the way in which Tolkien employs allegory in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit was duly noted.

Homer’s use of allegory, especially in book xxiii of the Iliad, was paralleled with Shakespeare’s use of the play within the play in Hamlet. The extent to which Odysseus can and cannot be seen as homo viator in the Christian sense was a topic of debate, which invited parallels between Odysseus’ journey and the journeys of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.

And this is as far as we have got at this stage. Tomorrow we will look at the way that allegory is subsumed in Shakespeare and the manner in which Divinity is subsumed in Hopkins. We will also examine the intertextuality of Eliot and Waugh and the subtextuality of Waugh and Greene before climaxing with the use of supposal and applicability in the works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. 

Oh what a joy it is to spend such quality time with engaged and engaging young men and women in the presence of the giants of our civilization and the truth that they served and revealed! Deo gratias!