But within the Church the lovers of Greek literature did not have it all their own way. Tatian, Hermas, Theophilus, and Tertullian savagely attacked profane poetry, and in defending it Basil, Athenagoras, Clement, and Origen were forced not unwillingly to rely more and more on the traditional moralistic theory of poetry which was so familiar to them. St. Chrysostom records that in the fourth century Homer was still taught as a guide to morals.[[321]]
1. Allegorical Interpretations in the Middle Ages
Allegorical interpretation was the main weapon of the apologists for poetry. The basis, indeed, of the Gnostic heresies of the second and third centuries was an allegorical interpretation of the Greek poets and philosophers and of the Scriptures. This soon degenerated into an extravagant system of speculative mysticism. Clement of Alexandria and Origen rejected the extravagances, but sought to retain the mysticism of the Gnostics. They reconciled Greek literature and the Scriptures by allegorizing both, much as today Darwin and Genesis are reconciled by allegorizing Genesis.[[322]] Thus in the declining years of the Roman Empire the rhetoricians had become ecclesiastics, and the Church had adopted pagan literature with allegorical interpretation.
This tradition dominated the middle ages; Lady Theology reigned over the kingdom of the seven liberal arts, and to make Homer and Virgil theological it was necessary that they be interpreted allegorically. As Vossler has shown, theology and philosophy furnished, during the middle ages, the subject matter of poetry; they were the utile of Horace. The dulce became for them too exclusively the pleasing garment of style and story.[[323]]
Throughout the middle ages, however, many continued to look askance at poetry, and were skeptical as to its value. To Boethius, weeping in prison, came Philosophy to console him. She found him surrounded by the friends of his youth, the Muses, who now were inspiring him to write dreary verses of complaint. But these poetical Muses Philosophy sent packing. "Who has allowed," said she, "these common strumpets of the theatre to come near this sick man? Not only do they fail to assuage his sorrows, but they feed and nourish them with sweet venom. They are not fruitful nor profitable. They destroy the fruits of reason, for they hold the hearts of men."[[324]] Here Philosophy is voicing the objections of Plato. The arts are attacked because they are not successfully utilitarian, and because they appeal to the emotions instead of to the reason. In a later book Boethius gives a clearer key to the objection. He postulates four mental faculties: sensation possessed by oysters, imagination possessed by higher animals, reason possessed by man, intelligence possessed by God. Consequently man should aspire towards God instead of indulging his faculties of sensation and imagination, which he shares with the lower animals.[[325]]
But such objections as those of Boethius were usually explained away by allegory. When Isidore of Seville (†633 or 636), for instance, was compiling his book of universal knowledge, the Etymologiae, he incorporated his section on the poets in the chapter entitled Concerning the Church and the Sects. So between a section devoted to the Philosophers of the Gentiles and a section entitled Concerning Sibyls he wrote concerning the poets as follows:
Sometimes, however, the poets were called theologians, because they used to compose songs concerning the gods. In doing this, however, it is the office of the poets to render what has actually been done in a different guise with a certain beauty of covert figures.[[326]]
The poet, to Isidore, was the inspired bard who sings of the gods and the eternal verities, not directly, but under the veil of a beautiful allegory. Among these allegorical or indirect means of expression used by the poet to veil truth are fables.
The poets invent fables sometimes to give pleasure; sometimes they are interpreted to explain the nature of things, sometimes to throw light on the manners of men.[[327]]
His illustrations of a fable show that he is talking about allegory. For instance, the fable of the centaur was invented to show, by the union of man and horse, the swiftness of human life.