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Auerbach Was a Friend, but a Greater Friend Is TruthAuthor(s): William WhallonSource: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 36, No. 4 (1999), pp. 294-305Published by: Penn State University Press

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AuerbachWas a Friend,but a Greater Friendis Truth1

WILLIAM WHALLON

When I spent a year in Germany in the 80s, my host, Janos Riesz of

Bayreuth, remarked that in Europe also, not in America only, ErichAuerbach was regardedas the finest reader of literature in living memory.The chief mark against him in the judgment of René Wellek is the dis-dain he had of methodology,2 and truly his magnum opus ÎAimesis does

seem greater for its parts than as a unified whole.3 (Those of us who stud-ied with Mr. Auerbach and Mr. Wellek at the same time would go fromthe explicationde textesof the one to the Literaturwissenschaft f the other,and it was like the even contention between the giants and the gods,except that good humor prevailed at every moment.) What no one hasventured concerning any specific matter is that Auerbach might be wrong.That is the aim here, as I offer diriment impediments to his two mostfamous chapters: the one on Homer and the Old Testament, the other onDante. Many will say that I hardly have the right to joust with such a

prince of letters, and I agree; but my arguments are not always trivial.

IAuerbach contrasts the narrative about the scar of Odysseus with the

equally ancient and equally epic (Mimesis 7) narrative about the offer-

ing of Isaac by Abraham. The one takes place in a virtually present mo-ment where no-one ages and many outcomes are foreknown; any naturalor man-made thing is apt to have a noncontextual epithet (spears areoften long-shadowing spears, sponges are sometimes poroussponges );and thoughts tend to be told fully with perfect grammar.The other nar-

rative has momentous aging, suspense, scant description, and the elo-

COMPARATIVEITERATURETUDIES,ol.36,No.4, 1999.Copyright © 1999 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

294







AUERBACHAND TRUTH 295

quence of silence. It is high style against forcible plain style. In summa'tion Auerbach defines the one by its fully externalized description, uni-form illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all eventsin the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements ofhistorical development and of psychological perspective - in contrastwith certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abrupt'ness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed background* quality, mul-

tiplicity of meaning and the need for interpretation, universal-historicalclaims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and

preoccupation with the problematic (23).This is excellent for Homer, inadequate for the Old Testament.

Nearly the entirety of the Psalms, the Proverbs,and the Song of Solomon,the larger part of Job, much of Ecclesiastes, and great parts of Isaiah andthe other prophets, not to mention brief parts of the books of history, areclothed in a garment utterly dissimilar. If the stories of Isaac, Lot, and

Jephthah are plain style, these other passages are high style- a style ofsuch loftiness that whatever the subject matters may be seems unimpor-tant. The style consists, as a rule sometimes broken, in parallelism: one

half of a twofold statement mirrors the other: Will I eat the flesh ofbulls, or drink the blood of goats? (Ps. 50.13, Authorized Version); Buthe was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities(Isa. 53.5); For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth

knowledge increaseth sorrow (Eccles. 1.18). The rhythm is not dactylicor iambic, but a balance of concepts, a rime riche of thought. The con-ventional name for it is poetry, in contrast with the other OT style, theone that Auerbach described, which is prose.

To create the parallelism, Hebrew poets had a resource in ready-made word pairs: 'enol man / 'adam man (Job 25.6, 36.25, Ps. 8.4,73.5, 90.3, 144.3, Isa. 13.12, 51.12, 56.2), harîm mountains / g'ba'ôt

hills (Ps. 114.4, Prov. 8.25, Cant. 8.6, Isa. 2.2, 40.12, 41.15, 54.10, Jer.4.24, Hos. 4.13, 10.8, Joel 3.18, Mic. 4.1, Hob. 3.6), mawet death / rôl

grave (2 Sam. 22.6, Ps. 6.5, 18.5, 89.48, Prov. 5.5, 7.27, Cant. 8.6, Isa.

28.15, 28.18, 38.18, Hos. 13.14), fire/ flame, waters/ flood, dragons/ owls, messengers ambassadors, father mother, gold/ silver, God

/ Lord, sun / moon, Sodom / Gomorrah, and any number of others.There is some promiscuity; the two partners are not faithful absolutely,but they are so to an interesting degree. The poets also had a supply of

entire verses and half-verses, such as And they shall beat their swordsinto plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks (Isa. 2.4, Mic. 4.3,cf. Joel 3.10).4 Homeric poets, who needed to create dactylic hexameters,had a comparable resource in ready-made phrases of different rhythm.







296 COMPARATIVE LITERATURESTUDIES

When okeashippous swift horses' (Iliad 3.263, 5.240, Odyssey3.478, 4.28,and fifteen other instances) was unsuitable because it began with a vowel,mOnuchas ippous single-hooved horses' (II. 5.236, Od. 15.48, and twenty-four other instances) came to mind instead. As the meter requires, shipsare sometimes fitted with oars, and sometimes have good benches; nowthe ships are black, now they have vermilion prows. And besides thesebriefer elements, the Homeric poets - like their Hebraic brothers-in-craft had a supply of entire verses, such as: the soul flew away from the

body, lamenting her fate, leaving behind manliness and youth : sixteen

beautiful syllables in Greek, used first for Patroclus and then, three thou-sand lines later, for Hector (II. 16.857, 22.363).5

Among the repeated verses we may notice He poureth contemptupon princes, and causeth them to wander in the wilderness, where thereis no way in Ps. 107.40 and Job 12.21-24. Was the distich borrowed fromone of those contexts into the other? More probably it was a national

property,a formulaic element available to all poets. That would seem the

general rule for the Old Testament and also for Homer. But we have been

given a rare look into the process of composition. The Psalms passage has

the poureth contempt verse in its pristine form; the Job passage has alengthy interpolation between the hemistichs. And if there is secondarymatter here, so may there be elsewhere, throughout the Old Testamentand throughout Homer as well. Have the interpolations been for the bet-ter or for the worse? My impression, not to be demonstrated in a fewwords, is that the editing and rewriting- the assembling and shaping of

primary, secondary, and tertiary matter- though almost always done su-

perbly in Homer, were often done badly in the Old Testament. That isone reason why the poetry of Job and the other books does not alwaysdiffer so sharply from the prose as it may once have done.

What is Old Testament poetry used for, and when is it used?It is notused for narratives about persons or events, and accordingly it is not epic,nor in itself is it even dramatic; it is nothing other than lyric. It does nottell of particulars, but of universals, such as the majesty of God, his kind-ness or unkindness, the wonders of nature, the ways of the world, maleand female beauty, the usefulness or uselessness of virtue, and whateverelse has always been thought by all peoples. Is there more powerful char-acterization in the OT than in Homer, as Auerbach argues?That asser-tion might at least be weighed if it openly declared that only OT prose

was in the balance. OT poetry is utterly different; with regardto charac-terization, it is the absolute opposite; characterization in the OT belongsto the prose, and not to the poetry.








The question now is, When is the poetry used, instead of prose?Theone occasion for OT poetry is speech, sustained or elevated or both.6Parables,such as the story of the ewe lamb, in Nathan's judgment of David,may also, though prose, be speech. It is still true that poetry is speechinvariably. The two forms, the poetry and the prose, regularly occur to-

gether, the prose naming the speaker of the poetry, and the situation. Inthe Book of Job there is a prologue in prose with some poetry for speech.Asked where he has come from, in the first chapter, Satan replies in syn-onymous parallelism, Fromgoing to and fro in the earth, and from walk-

ing up and down in it (1.7). Next there are cycles of speeches, in poetry,by Job and his comforters, a line of prose introducing each speech. Then,after such a line of prose, the Lord speaks, in poetry, from the whirlwind.

Finally there is an epilogue in prose, answering to the prologue. And if itwere not for the prose we should often be unable to tell who the speakerwas. Is it Job or Eliphaz, or Bildad or the Lord, who says, They reapevery one his corn in the field, and they gather the vintage of the wicked

(24.6)? And the like is true for all the other books; without the prose, theoccasion of the poetry would be obscure. Psalms 3 is identified in its prose

heading as a psalm of David when he fled from Absalom; but neitherDavid nor Absalom is mentioned in the poetry, and there is nothing inthe poetry about enmity between father and son. The two styles are en-

tirely distinct. Auerbach remarks that much that is terrible takes placein the Homeric poems, but it seldom takes place wordlessly: Polyphemustalks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to the suitors when he begins to kill

them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and after (Mime-sis 6). And that is true; but where is the contrast? For nothingtakes placewordlessly in OT poetry; the poetry is speech and never anything else.

Fromthe rule of the separation of styles, says Auerbach, Homer is still

far removed. And yet he is closer to it than is the Old Testament (22).On the contrary: a separation of styles is immeasurably closer in the OT:

prose is for narratives, poetry for speech of high style.It is all the same in the New Testament; the difference between

Hebrew and Greek can be set aside. Jesus often tells parables, as Nathanhad done, and those words are prose. But in saying, Do men gather grapesof thorns, or figs of thistles? (Matt. 7.16, cf. Luke 6.44), he is a tradi-tional poet, using the word pair grapes figs just as Jeremiah (8.13) andHosea (9.10) had done, and those words are poetry, a prose context mak-

ing clear who the speaker is and where, and when he is speaking and why.So it is fair, with regard to style, to refer to the Bible simply, meaningboth Testaments together. Owing to its being formulaic to a goodly de-

gree, and to its never being used for anything other than speech, biblical







298 COMPARATIVELITERATURESTUDIES

poetry would seem to be pre-literary by nature- at first created within,and now derived from, an oral tradition. The poetry would accordinglyappear to belong, as a rule that may have exceptions, to an older stratumthan the prose. And there are four ways of confirming that this is so.First, the poetry has sometimes been misunderstood by the authors of the

prose. Sisera was standing, and afterwards fell, when Jael put her handto the nail, and her right hand to the workmen's hammer (Judg. 5.26).The two half-verses reflect each other and there is no advancement ofdetail; the words rendered as nail and hammer are actually synonyms

which might better, because more vaguely, be mauler and clout ; theconjunction waw is not additive; the same action is told of twice. But the

prose account, in the preceding chapter of Judges, has Sisera lying down;the author has failed to grasp the synonymy.7

The second reason why the poetry would seem an older style thanthe prose can be gathered from such elements as wine and strongdrink,which recur both as a series in prose neither let her drink wine or strongdrink (Judg. 13.14) - and in the parallelism of poetry: Wine is a mocker,strong drink is raging (Prov. 20.1). The prose did not need two syn-

onyms; either the one term or the other would have sufficed. But thepoetry needed the two so as to say the same thing twice in different words.It must therefore have been the poetry, and not the prose, that brought

wine and strong drink into companionship. The third reason whythe poetry seems older than the prose is that Jeremiah dictated his proph-ecy to the scribe Baruch (Jer. 36.4); words from the mouth of the poetflowed into the hand of the writer. The fourth reason is that the vocabu-

lary and the grammarof the poetry have affinity with, and can sometimesbe explained from, the hymns to Baal on the pre-biblical, bronze-age tab-lets of Ugarit.8

In its having a problem (parallelism) and a traditional solution (wordpairs), in its being used for speech, and in its antiquity, the poetry of theOT is like the poetry of Homer. Since Beowulfand The Song of Roland arealso comparable, Auerbach has gone far, in speaking of Homer, towards

describing the genre of oral poetry from many nations. Not that there areno great differences. OT poetry, defined by the parallelism of two half-verses within a verse, is yet more paratactic and immeasurably less con-tinuous than Homer. Though a thought is sometimes sustained through anumber of verses, usually a verse is a complete poem, owing little to what

has preceded. All the same, the traits Auerbach set down for Homer arealso those of OT poetry, one after another. There is no difference in worldview between the peoples, at least none that can be gathered from style.The difference is between two kinds of expression, both prominent in








the Old Testament and in the New as well. What Mimesiscompares witha passage from the Odyssey is a passage from Genesis. It would more justlyhave made comparison with such verses as: he hath borne our griefs,and carried our sorrows (Isa. 53.4), when the morning stars sang to-

gether, and all the sons of God shouted for joy (Job 38.7), the lips of a

strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother thanoil (Prov. 5.4), deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the

power of the dog (Ps. 22.20).

II

Auerbach admires the fortitude of Farinata, and pities the woe ofCavalcante, in the region of the heretics. What he adds to the apprecia-tions of other Dantists, and adds to his own Dante als Dichterder irdischenWelt, is the idea, worked out in his essay Figura, of figurai or typologicalrepresentation.9 The poet is hereby approached through a method of in-

terpreting the Old Testament in the light of the New. Jesus says of the

generation that is seeking for a sign: no sign shall be given to it, but the

sign of the prophet Jonah (Matt. 12.39, where the three days after thecrucifixion answer to the three days in the belly of the whale); and Paulsees Adam as the figure of him who was to come (Rom. 5.14). Butinstances in the Bible are rare; it is in the Fathers of the Church that themethod is developed fully. Like Isaac, Jesus is a beloved only son, carriesthe wood of sacrifice, and takes the place of a lamb; the lamb or ram is

caught in the thicket by its horns, the thicket answering to the crown ofthorns, and the horns to the cornua or arms of the cross. And similarlyfor other persons, other details. The type (the original, in the sense of a

blueprint or model) and the antitype (the copy, in the sense of a perfectproduct) are not abstract but concrete, not philosophical but historical.

In Figura Auerbach finds that Cato, Virgil, and Beatrice, on earth,prefigured what they would be in the next world. Cato is a figura, orrather the earthly Cato, who renounced his life for freedom, was a figura,and the Cato who appears here in the Purgatoriois the revealed or ful-filled figure, the truth of that figurai event .... Thus Virgil in the Divine

Comedy is the historical Virgil himself, but then again he is not; for thehistorical Virgil is only a figura of the fulfilled truth that the poem re-veals, and this fulfillment is more real, more significant than the figura 10

That is, Cato and Virgil in the afterlife are more quintessentially Catoand Virgil than they had been in the life before. Here we have the skel-eton key that Auerbach uses to unlock all the treasuryof Dante 's realismin characterization.11Farinata is interpreted as having foreshadowed on







300 COMPARATIVELITERATURE STUDIES

earth what he would be in hell, and as fulfilling in hell, to overflowing,the promise of what he had been on earth.

Why is this unacceptable? Because figurism or typology, in Scrip-ture and in the Fathers, has one figure complemented by another, not byhimself. As types and antitypes there are Adam / Christ, Isaac / Christ,Moses / Christ, Joshua / Christ, Elijah / John the Baptist, Eve / Mary,andbread of the Passover / bread of the Last Supper, the last of these beingcommemorated in the Lord'sSupper of Christians today. There is never a

pair like Cato / Cato, or Virgil / Virgil, or Farinata / Farinata. To say that

an earthly Cato was a figura or type of the Cato in the Purgatorio s thesame as saying that the historical Richard of Bordeaux was a figura of theRichard who unkings himself through the words With mine own tears Iwash away my balm (RichardH 4.1.207). The argument for wholesale

figurism in Dante must be abandoned. The poet's characterization is of-ten intense, and the appreciation in Mimesis is hardly to be matched, butthe general use of figurism or typology is unwarranted.

The search for a higher sense, to further our idea of Cato in the

Purgatorioand Farinata in the Inferno, even to suggest some large truth

about the Commedia,might be rewarding all the same. Not only had theBible been interpreted through higher senses for a thousand years,12butin the Convivio (4.28.97) Dante had said that the return of Marcia toCato signified the return of the soul to God. And in the letter to

Cangrande he would say that the meaning of the Commediawas fourfold.Who could have thought it? Still, I believe there is a grand instance of

figurism, i.e., typology, though it is nothing like Cato / Cato. Of the foursenses laid out by Augustine of Hippo, three- the historical, the etio-

logical, and the analogical (or parabolical) - are literal, and only thefourth is allegorical. Of the four found by Thomas Aquinas, only the first

is literal, the others being the allegorical (or typological), the moral (ortropological), and the anagogical.13 Aquinas accounts for the difference

by saying that now the literal sense has been subdivided, now thenonliteral. As with the twelve peers in The Song of Roland,the lists differbut the sum is beyond dispute. Dante seems in the Cangrande letter tofollow Aquinas, and perhaps he will seem to do so in his poetry. Thereare some stumbling-blocks, though, to clear away or bypass. A later partof the letter (section 8), returning to the matter of manifold meaning,seems inharmonious with the earlier part (section 7), and to reconcile

the letter either with the Convivio or with the Commedia requires thesubtlety of a Byzantine. I will then set aside these words of the poet to his

patron. Even if they are authentic, a moot question, they may be rhetori-cal, not a reliable guide. Four senses can still be found in the poem with-







AUERBACHANDTRUTH 301

out the exercise of ingenuity, and to me there is no doubt that they wereintended.

The literal sense of the Commedia is the state of souls after death.The next most evident sense is the moral: some sins are graver than oth-ers, and each sin has its punishment, which may be condign: the sullen

gurgle in filthy water; the soothsayers are twisted so that they cannotlook forward. There are affinities with Wu Ch'eng-en's TheJourneyto theWest: ... we encountered in the Underworld all those who were trea-sonous to the state and disloyal to their parents, those who practicedneither virtue nor righteousness, those who squandered the five grains,those who cheated openly or in secret, those who indulged in unjustweights and measurements . . . suffering from various tortures by grind'ing, burning, pounding, sawing, frying, boiling, hanging, and skinning. 14

The third sense in my formulation is the anagogical,15which has todo with another realm of existence than the literal sense does- if not anexistence that is to come, then one that has been. When the state ofsouls after death is the literal sense, the life the sinners lived on earth isthe anagogical. As I speak of it, the anagogical is like what Auerbach

discussed as the figurai sense, but differs in two respects. To begin with, Ido not agree that in Dante the earthly life, as it relates to the life tocome, is comparable to the Old Testament as it is fulfilled by the New.And then, against the idea in Mimesis and Figura hat those in hell areintensified essences of what they were, I believe they holdtheir ast thoughtsfrom earth in a literal-anagogical continuum. If at the moment of deaththe sinner was repentant, the soul has gone to purgatory; if unrepentant,to hell. But only some of the souls in hell had their sin foremost in mindat the moment of death; most were thinking, mainly or entirely, about

wholly other things; and these last thoughts will be with them until the

day of judgment and perhaps forever. The carnal sinner Francesca doesreveal her sin: she is united with her lover and is mindful of her creed,

Love, which pardons no one beloved from loving (Inf. 5.103). ButFarinata is intent upon Florentine politics, and Cavalcante is concernedfor his son; what their sin was is virtually overlooked - though not quite,for the sin was disbelief in the immortality of the soul (10.15), andCavalcante, rather than wishing for his son eternal blessedness in heaven,persists in his disbelief and wants him to live long on earth. Brunetto is ascholar proudof his book and an older man affectionate towards a younger;

his sin too is nearly overlooked - but again not quite, for he is among thesodomites, who put a close eye upon the newcomers (15.22). Ulysses is

thinking of future adventures (26.98); the evil counsel he has been con-demned for is not evident; nor is the thief Vanni Fucci in the act of thiev-








ery, but in the act of blasphemy (25.3). Ugolino betrayed his party and is

punished with cold for that sin, but his passions are not his treason or his

suffering of the cold; they are the grief, hatred, and hunger of his lastmoments on earth (33.1-6). It is as if a stamp-collector, damned for, say,desecrating the sabbath or bearing false witness, were talking, not aboutthe sabbath or bearing witness, but about the inverted center on the 24-cent airmail. The souls in hell do not know what has happened since

they died, though sometimes a glimpse of the future has been given tothem (10.100-05). The like is true for the Bible, as Augustine (whom

Dante in this matter seems to follow) and Aquinas had seen; it is true forHomer as well; and though less clearly it is true for the Virgil of theAeneid,16who was a possible source as Homer was not. The rule is thatthe souls in hell think their last earthly thoughts and will continue to do so.

The fourth sense is the figurai or typological, and there is only one

grand-scale instance in the Commedia, so far as I can tell. Satan, Judas,and the pair Brutus and Cassius have a typological relationship with eachother, since they all betrayed the supreme being: God, Christ, and Cae-sar. It is true besides that Satan (in having been countenanced as Prince

of the East) had been favored by God, that Judas (in having been giventhe power of healing) had been favored by Jesus, and that Brutus andCassius (because their lives had been spared) had been favored by Cae-sar. Are then Satan, Judas, and Brutus and Cassius in the bowels of hellbecause of the primal majesty of those whom they betrayed, or becausethe betrayal of one's benefactor is the greatest of sins? Surely it cannothave been for both reasons? If among our friends we name the best ath-letes and also name the most prosperous, will the same persons come firston both lists? Not unless one of the two factors is dominant, controllingthe other (perhaps better athletes are more prosperous). Can it be that of

the two determinants - those who were sinned against, and the vilenessof sins in themselves - one does control the other? I believe that Danteas architect made the betrayal of one's benefactor to be the worst of sins,not because Aristotle or any one else had said it was the worst, but be-cause those who had committed that sin had wronged the Most High.That was an inspired realization, a making sense of universal history. Onlyafterwards would the poet claim that he had followed the philosopher(Inf. 11.80). So the whole moral structure of hell, the arrangement ofsins, was determined by the figurism or typology inherent in canto 34.

Auerbach did not find in Satan, Judas, and Brutus and Cassius anyhigher sense additional to the one he found in Farinata. By his theorythere can be no more than three senses of the four I have taken from

Aquinas. For the Infernothe three he found may be regardedas the earthly,the otherworldly, and the moral. The first two of these he thought to







AUERBACH NDTRUTH 303

resembleeach other in a figuraimanner,as Isaac and Christdo, exceptthat to him Farinata ulfilledFarinata,which to me is unsatisfactory.myselfam offeringan earthly,an otherworldly,a moral,and forcanto34 only a fourthsense, the typological.The first two of these I hold tobe a literal-anagogical ontinuumwhereinlast thoughtsfromearth havebeen brought nto the afterlife:Farinata ontinuesto be the Farinatahewas;there is nothing trulyfigurai n him, noranyrealfulfillment;Brutuscontinuesto be the Stoic he was,and doesnot cryout undertorture.Themoralsense is that to betrayyourbenefactor s the greatestof sins: work-

ing backwardshe poet ranked he other sins asdecreasinglygrave.Thetypological ense to be foundnowhereelse with suchclarityandpoweris that the archfelonsSatan,Judas,and Brutusand Cassius aretypesorantitypesorfiguresof each other becausehose whomtheysinnedagainst,God, Christ,andCaesar,aretypesorfiguresof each other as the supremebeing. In canto 34 the moral and the typologicalsenses fuse, owing tothe poet'sheaven-sentglimpseof a patternn the scheme of things.

ADDENDUM

Supposingthat I have not been wholly unsuccessful,what would thismasterof mine, who always reatedme with respectand kindness(whenhe gave me a paperconference, he paid for the Englishmuffins),havethoughtabout it all? To answerthat question,you should visualizehim.(I understandhat the ComparativeLiterature eopleat Yalehave a roomwith portraitsof Mr.Auerbach,Mr.Wellek, and, for some reason,Paulde Man.) The first time I saw Mr. AuerbachI thought to myself, Helookslike ClaudeRains, and the youngwomansittingnext to me whis-pered, He looks like ClaudeRains. The ironic mannerof Rains, thesense of a game where the better playermayhave a disadvantage,wasAuerbach's, oo. The account of his eleventh-hourescape fromfascistGermany, n the bookLiteraryHistoryand theChallenge f Philology:TheLegacy fErichAuerbach,11ohereswith a remark heardhim maketwice:

IIy a deux races qui ont de talent mais qui sont folles aux affairespolitiques:Tuneest la race allemandeand l'autreest la racejuive (if Iam rememberingn good French). It is a matterof knowingwhen youhave been wronged,andsufferingat the thoughtof it, but not becomingmaliciousin return.Similarlyfor an experiencewith Charles S. Single-

ton, whose most famouspaperwas an elaboratecomment on the climaxof the Purgatorio, here Beatrice can perhaps or a moment be regardedas a type of Christ.Auerbachhad previouslysaid as much, moresimply(in a better-known ournal).18Whydidnot Singleton acknowledgehim?Auerbach mentioned to his Dante class, my year,that he could not say








why, seeing that he and Singleton had often discussed the passage to-

gether. Not that I think the world needs to sort out who should be get-ting credit for this Beatrice-as-Christ idea, which seems to me of lowworth. What I would say is that Auerbach bore no malice, so far as onecould tell, for the scholarly affront, but introduced Singleton, when hehad invited him to lecture, with great praise. So, if my shade should en-counter Auerbach's in hell (he may have gone there for some significantwrong, difficult though I find that to believe), will he be resentful at mytwofold assault upon Mimesis? will he see a Christ-Judaspattern?I doubt

it, for it was never the academics whom he put store by, but the primaryauthors, the composers, the painters and sculptors- the creators.

East Lansing, Michigan

NOTES1. Attributed to Aristotle, about Plato: see IoannesPhiloponus,Deaeternitatemundi,

ed. HugoRabe(Hildesheim:Olms, 1963), p. 30, line 21. In this paperI amusingsomeearlier studies of mine.

2. A Historyof ModernCriticism:1750-1950, vol. 7 (New Haven: YaleUP, 1991)117. See, for example, 114 that, ratherthan a tome of method, it is a workof art.

3. Mimesis:TheRepresentationf Reality n WesternLiterature,rans. WillardR. Trask(Princeton:PrincetonUP, 1953). The Germanoriginalwaspublishedin 1946.

4. The repeatedstichs are cited in the marginalnotes in many an edition of theAuthorized Version.

5. In the Iliad and the Odyssey together, Carl EduardSchmidt, ParalleUHomer(Gôttingen:Vandenhoeck, 1885) viii, counted over 1800 different lines repeatedwithno change at all. Manypassagesof two or more lines such as Adaywill come whensacredTroyshall fall, / and Priam,and the people of Priamof the good ashen spear II4.164-65, 6.448-49)- also recur.

6. A primarymatterthat I once thoughtcould be claimed as mine. But it is well andfully statedby PaulDhorme,Le LivredeJob (Paris:Lecoffre, 1926) li.

7. ]. Wellhausen,Die Compositiones Hexateuchs ndderhistorischen ûcherdes altenTestaments,rd ed. (Berlin: Reimer, 1899), 94, citing as another instance Zech. 9.9 andMatt. 21.7: in the prophecy, lowly,and ridingupon an ass,and upon a colt the foal ofan ass, the wawjoining the hemistichs does not mean so much as and ; he ass andthe colt are a single animalspokenof twice in staircasesynonymousparallelism;n thefulfillment, Andbroughtthe ass,and the colt, andputon them theirclothes, and theyset him thereon, they are two animals,andJesus s placed uponboth of them, which isabsurd.

8. See the fascinatingintroductionsto the three volumesof the Psalms,ed. MitchellDahood (New York:Doubleday,1966-70: The AnchorBible).Individualmattersmaybefiercely disputedupon, but the largermatter will be agreed to, namely that the Ras

Shamra tablets are without price for understandingthe Old Testament, just as theQumranscrolls arefor the New.

9. Figura, rans.Ralph Manheim,in Scenes romtheDramaof EuropeanLiterature(New York:Meridian, 1959) 11-76. Figura was firstprintedin ArchivumRomanicum22 (1938): 436-89.

10. Figura 5-66 and 71, returnedto in Mimesis195.







AUERBACH AND TRUTH 305

11. ... figurai realism (Mimesis 196); figure fulfilled, which the dead in Dante

represent (196); the idea of figure and fulfillment . . . explains the overwhelmingrealism of Dante's beyond (197); temporality figurally preserved in timeless eternity(198); the fulfillment serves to bring out the figure in still more impressive relief(200); to preserve the figure in its fulfillment (201 ); Dante's work made man's Chris-

tian-figural being a reality (202).12. On the rabbinic counterparts to some of the patristic terms for the methods of

biblical interpretation, see the introduction by Ralph Marcus to [the works of] Philo,Supplement [from the Armenian version of writings otherwise 90% lost], vol. 1, TheLoeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1961) ix. Philo applied to Gen-esis and Exodus the methods of the Stoic allegorists of Homer, and thereby broughtthose methods into Christian

theology.But as a

Jewwhose

thoughtand culture were

Greek and whose Bible was the Septuagint, Philo was regarded with suspicion by theHebraists, even though he had faced Caligula on behalf of the Jewish community inAlexandria. See Henry Chadwick, St. Paul and Philo, John Rylands LibraryBulletin 48(1966): 286-307, esp. 299 n. 1 for bibliography to the Stoic Neoplatonists, and 306,

Philo's infinite capacity for transforming epic stories from Genesis into a string ofcolourless humanitarian platitudes.

13. Augustine in Migne, PatrologiaLatina42.68; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, first part,question 1, article 10. See EdwardMoore, Studies n Dante, 3rd series (Oxford: Clarendon P,1896-1917)309.

14. Trans, and ed. Anthony C. Yu, 4 vols. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977-83) 1: 252.15. The upwards sense of ana is the primary one in anagogical, but the again sense

would be appropriate too, for the Inferno. It may be noted here that anagogical is cor-

rect, and analogical incorrect, in the sentence ... in the doctrine of the fourfoldmeaning of Scripture, it wholly determined one of the four meanings, the ethical, and

partly accounted for another, the analogical ( Figura 55 in both the Meridian andthe Minnesota printings of the translation). The original reads: ... sie hat in derLehre vom vierfachen Schriftsinn eine der vier Bedeutungen, die moralische, ganz und

gar, und oft noch eine zweite, die anagogische bestimmt (470).16. Augustine, On the Care to be Taken for the Dead, in Migne, PL 40.604-06;

Aquinas, Questions About theSoul, article 20, objection 3, and response; Odyssey 11.457-61, 492-97; Aeneid 6.487-88, 531-34, 690-94, and 890-92; Anchises does seem toknow of some things that happened after his death, but the other shades, like those inHomer, do not.

17. Ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996): see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Pa-

thos of the Earthly Progress 13-35, esp. 17-19.18. Singleton, Dante's Comedy: the Pattern at the Center, Romanic Review 42 ( 195 1):

169-77; Auerbach, Figurative Texts Illustrating Certain Passages of Dante's Commedia

Speculum 21 (1946): 474-89, esp. 477-82. If Beatrice is a Christ-figure because she ishailed (in the masculine) with the words Benedictus qui venis (Purg. 30.19) as Jesusis hailed in the gospels (e.g. Matth. 21.9), is she at the same time a Marcellus-figurebecause of the words that come next, Manibus o date lilia plenis (Purg. 30.21), fromthe Aeneid (6.884)? The griffin of the pageant, whose two natures are reflected in the

eyes of Beatrice (Purg. 31.121-23), would seem because of the two natures to be a Christ-

figure, which would rather forbid that she should be one as well. Interpretation is diffi-cult; De Sanctis and Croce had their own ideas about the passage, and Colin Hardie -

The Symbol of the Gryphon in Purgatorio xxix. 108 and following Cantos, pp. 103-

31, esp. 128, in Centenary Essays on Dante by members of the Oxford Dante Society(Oxford: Clarendon P, 1965) - has argued that the gryphon stands for Dante's restorednature in its two sides, animal and spiritual. I myself hold that only canto 34 is typo-logical in a way that repays thought.

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