Letter #66: Reclaiming the Allegorical

Let’s Get Medieval

Well, I have to confess, your letter yesterday was so inspired, it made me wonder if I should’ve been nicer to you when you were little. When I played with your Lego sets while you were sleeping and you woke to find the majestic pyramid of Giza had become the despair-drenched diner of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks — I can see now that might’ve been traumatic for you. Sorry about that.

Reclaiming the allegorical — the medieval sense that there is meaning in the material of life — seems a noble goal. Recently, I was reading through Aquinas and it struck me for the first time what a great psychologist he was. If Freud was right that our actions prove a material force of eros is energizing us from within, wasn’t Thomas at least equally correct that our conscience represents a spiritual force infusing us with virtues from without? A therapeutic culture that recognizes not just the mechanisms of the mind, but also the yearnings of the soul might heal us more completely than what we’re living with now.

The gifts of the Enlightenment shouldn’t be minimized, the sinister involvement of French philosophers notwithstanding.  Great inventions arose from breaking free of stifling allegory, from taking mankind just as it appears. Capitalism, which harnessed the individual’s natural desire to better himself, created wealth untold. Folk singer and Soviet stooge Pete Seeger could sing derisively all he liked about the “little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” that were the homes of middle-class Americans. The working man of every prior century would have traded his arm to live in such comfort. Likewise, republican democracy, which gave each man a say in his own governance, allowed talent and genius to rise above its station despite the snobbery of useless noblemen.

That said, the very effectiveness of these systems masked their moral emptiness. Capitalism bred a rabid consumerism that gives value to trash and leant a moral sheen to rapacious greed. And republicanism fed the fallacies that the voice of the people is the voice of God, that popularity is grace, and that a life lived for likes is somehow worth living.

But then, humanity is ill-fashioned for the golden mean. When I was a kid, I loved Malory’s King Arthur stories. I even read them in the original Middle English despite the mockery of my older brother. I went back to them recently though and found them hard to focus on. The characters were too vaguely drawn. The individual character was a product of medieval allegory but, once he was made, he burst the bounds of meaning. And here we are.

But yes — that’s my short answer to your question. It’s time to go back. Who knows what it’ll lead to? Shakespeare thought he was recreating Roman drama, but he was really inventing something altogether new. What might we make if we brought back the long-rejected medieval idea that — wait for it — life actually means something more than itself?

Dad