allegory, and we expound the letter not literally but 
     allegorically . . . as lion, according to the historical sense 
     means a beast, but allegorically it means Christ. Therefore 
     the word lion  means Christ.” (p. 93)

     To the oral man the literal is inclusive, contains all 
possible meanings and levels. So it was for Aquinas. But the 
visual man of the sixteenth century is impelled to separate level 
from level, and function from function, in a process of specialist 
exclusion. The auditory field is simultaneous, the visual mode is 
successive. Of course, the very notion of “levels of exegesis,” 
whether literal, figurative, topological, or anagogic, is strongly 
visual, a clumsy sort of metaphor. Yet: “Living over a century 
before St. Thomas, Hugh seems to have grasped the Thomist 
principle that the clue to prophecy and metaphor is the writer’s 
intention; the literal sense includes everything which the sacred