Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08598_Field_TCGG T363.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 977b | 16 lines

     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