Three Phases of Metaphor, and the Mythos of the Christian Religion: Dante, Spenser, Milton

Abstract

This article proposes three different tenor-vehicle relations for a three-phase metaphorics of the Christian mythos in late medieval and early modern literature. Dante, Spenser, and Milton are the chosen examples (with animadversion to Langland). The phases are equated with three phases of language in Vico’s New Science. The first phase is participative, mythic, “tautogorical,” and “hieroglyphic”; the second is analogical, typological, and figurative; and the third allusive, ironic, antiphrastic, and prosaic-discursive. Christ’s death and resurrection, for example, are liturgically-calendrically and participatively present to the pilgrim in the incarnational-reincarnational poetics and transfigurative metaphorics of the Commedia; they are analogical to—and allegorized somatically in—Redcrosse’s strength or weakness of faith in Faerie Queene I; and are referred to allusively and ironically in Adam’s coming to consciousness and revival to the presence of Eve in Paradise Lost. Similarly instanced and modally differentiated are the poets’ treatments of the harrowing of hell, the sacrament of the eucharist, the symbol of Jacob’s ladder, the sacred ground of religiously consecrated sites, despair of salvation, and the seven capital sins (e.g., cosmic grades of confessional descent and ascent in Dante, threats to faith’s allegorical health in Spenser, and the devils’ Renaissance virtues in Milton).