Ovide's Allegories

Ovid Isn't Scripture and That's a Good Thing

I have been reading The Medieval French Ovide moralisé (OM) that was recently published by Boydell & Brewer. I have to say, it does what it says on the tin. It really does moralize Ovid!

Ovid. Picture from Wikipedia

The lengthy introduction to this series is worth the read as well. It’s roughly 70 pages long, but it covers the background of this gigantic poem, how it is structured, the theology baked into it, and most importantly, how the poet moralizes Ovid. It is this last topic that I am writing about in this post.

The introduction itself asks, “How does the OM moralize?” “Standard procedure for the OM is to alternate retelling and moralization, explaining every episode from Ovid after relating it in French, and the moralizations go according to the four senses of Scripture.” The four senses of Scripture are the literal/historical, the moral/tropological, the allegorical/symbolic, and the anagogical/eschatological.

The literal/historical reading is the possible historical event that inspired Ovid’s myth. This could mean that the gods were humans and the transformations were metaphorical, or the gods were planets or other natural forces acting on the world. I think there is something useful to this approach, even though it de-mythologizes the stories.

The moral/tropological reading involves the moral, ethical lesson the reader ought to gain from the story. This type of reading judges the characters at the level of human action and addresses the right way for people to live. The allegorical/symbolic sense is used to point everything in the story to Christian truth. Everything in the story is a visible symbol pointing to an invisible reality revealed in Christ. The last sense, the anagogical/eschatological, is similar to the allegorical sense but it has to do with the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgement.

Not every story from Ovid gets all four senses applied to it, but this is the general structure of the poem. The most striking and alarming aspect of this approach is that these readings can have dramatic inconsistencies with one another. For example, the introduction goes through the story of Orpheus using the four senses of Scripture. I will provide a summary of the story of Orpheus as told in the introduction OM and then a description of the four senses.

Orpheus: Book 10 vv. 1-195, moralized in vv. 196-577

Orpheus and Eurydice

Summary: The musically gifted Orpheus, son of Phoebus Apollo, marries the nymph Eurydice. After the wedding she is propositioned by the shepherd Ariteus. She rejects him and frolics on the grass until a snake bites her and she dies. Orpheus descends into hell and sings to Pluto and Proserpine, who are so moved that they let him leave with Eurydice, on condition that she follow him and he not look at her until they have exited hell. In his eagerness and concern, he turns around too early and sees her melt back into the shadows, and from then on hell is barred to him. He mourns her intensely for a week, then forswears the love of women and moves to the mountains of Thrace, where he originates the practice of having sex with young men.

1. Historical interpretation: a man named Orpheus once married a woman named Eurydice, who was bitten by a snake and died. In his immoderate grief, he turned to homosexuality.

2. Moral interpretation: folded into the historical interpretation is a condemnation of homosexuality, “in which, contrary to nature, a male is made feminine, without any hope of offspring.” We are told to avoid it.

3. Allegorical interpretation: in keeping with Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, Orpheus is the rational part of the soul, and Eurydice is the sensitive part. Their “marriage” puts reason in charge of sensuality, which makes it possible for sensuality to embrace the good life, represented by the shepherd. When sensuality rejects the good life and frolics unsupervised among earthly delights, it exposes itself to the snakebite of sin, and the soul experiences the “hell” of inner torment in the heart. Reason visits the heart and tries to show sensuality the error of its ways. If reason leads the way, the soul can be brought back to life. But if reason gets turned around and follows sensuality, the heart then shuts it out entirely and refuses to acknowledge truth.

4. Anagogical interpretation: Orpheus is a type of Christ. The snake is the devil. Eurydice represents humanity tempted by the devil and condemned to hell through original sin. Christ rescues us from original sin through His death and Resurrection, but if individually we backslide into freely chosen sin, he won’t get us out of hell a second time, and at the Last Judgement we will be condemned. God likes people who are not spiritually soft and “feminine” and recidivist, but spiritually “virile” and passionate for union with him, which corresponds to the young men in the mountains of Thrace.

The introduction goes on to say that the reader misses the point by saying that Eurydice’s rejection of the shepherd was right on the moral level, but wrong on the allegorical level. For the medieval reader, these layers of meaning were not in competition and could all coexist. Each layer points to a different aspect of human experience and each contains truth.

I would go on to say that the layers don’t parallel one another very well for the simple fact that Ovid is not one of the inerrant authors of Scripture. That takes the pressure off of Ovid! I’m not a Scriptural scholar, but I would be willing to bet that the four senses, when applied to Scripture, would be in much greater harmony (depending on how they are applied), than any other book. That being said, there are also different valid ways of interpreting Scripture with the appropriate limits and guardrails.

To summarize, these pagan stories are powerful in themselves and are worth reading. Moralizing them in the way that the author of the OM does connects them to the Christian story and offers an aid to interpretation. These aides can preserve and polish them, thus helping readers collect the golden veins of truth that flow through them. Even the aspects that make us uncomfortable have the capacity to be seen in the light of Christian truth. Let’s recover this approach to reading mythology and dive into the often sublime, often gruesome stories of the ancient world.

Happy reading!