are, in fact, nothing else than the five mental faculties of man, perceived comprehensively. The logos, especially as understood by the pre-Socratics, includes them all, but rhetoric and later philosophy alike tended to fragment and specialize the logos (which was translated from Greek as ratio et oratio). Both the ideal poet and the ideal orator shared the encyclopedic training indispensable to true eloquence.
Here are the five divisions as they appear in the work of Cicero:
And, since all the activity and ability of an orator falls into five divisions, I learned that he must first hit upon what to say; then manage and marshal his discoveries, not merely in orderly fashion, but with a discriminating eye for the exact weight as it were of each argument; next go on to array them in the adornments of style; after that keep them guarded in his memory; and in the end deliver them with effect and charm....61
The poets of preliteracy hold the key to tropology and to the moral and anagogical levels: mimesis. De Lubac is quite explicit about the process, though he does not use the word mimesis when he discusses the mystical experience of the last two senses of Scripture.
First, the “trope” in “tropology” is a turning-inward. History and allegory are out there, outwardly manifested and available to the outward senses. So, after two levels of outward attention, comes the big trope, the process of interiorization:
Now it is no longer we who are acting; it is these words, once having been introduced, which act within us, releasing the spirit of which they have been made, the meaning and sonority included within them, and which veritably become spirit and life, and action-producing words. They belong to a place beyond our mental control; there is a certain irresistible force of authority and order in them. But they have ceased to be exterior; they have become ourselves. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; one must understand the whole captivating, appropriating power of these two words: in nobis.62
The experience de Lubac here describes is of exactly the same pattern as the mimesis used by Homer and the oral-poetic establishment before the introduction of the alphabet.
Mimesis is the technique of interiorization: knowing by putting-on, knowing by becoming, intellectually and emotionally, the thing known. That is, integral, interiorized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect of the hearer; in other words, by the hearer’s soul. Direct experience by total submergence.
De Lubac frequently links interiorization to the moral sense (and, later, to the anagogic sense). The trope in tropology is also a turning—from symbolic theology to mystical theology.
Gilson points out that
...to know is to be in a new and richer way than before, since it is essentially to cause to enter into a thing which is in the first place for itself alone what another thing is in the first place for itself alone This fact is expressed by the statement that to know a thing is a kind of becoming that thing.63
Or, as the maxim goes, “the cognitive agent is and becomes the thing known.” Proficiency with such unmediated direct perception would call for much experience of contemplation on the beholder’s part. So these mystical senses of the Scriptures would be particularly available to contemplatives—the monastic orders.
Plato decided to champion the rationality that appeared in Greece alongside the phonetic alphabet. He declared war on the poets and their use of mimesis to communicate the oral encyclopedia.64 Mimesis was the exact opposite of rational objectivity and detachment—traits that characterize the phonetic alphabet.65 The classicist Eric Havelock pays careful attention to the matter in Preface to Plato:
Plato is describing a total technology of the preserved word...a state of total personal involvement and therefore of emotional identification with the substance of the poetized statement...A modern student thinks he does well if he diverts a tiny fraction of his psychic powers to memorize a single sonnet of Shakespeare. He is not more lazy than his Greek counterpart. He simply pours his energy into book-reading and learning through the use of his eyes instead of his ears. His Greek counterpart had to mobilize the psychic resources necessary to memorize Homer and the poets...To identify with the performance as an actor does with his lines was the only way it could be done. You threw yourself into the situation of Achilles, you identified with his grief or his anger. You yourself became Achilles and so did the reciter to whom you listened. Thirty years later you could automatically quote what Achilles had said or what the poet had said about him. Such enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity...This then is the master clue to Plato’s choice of the word mimesis to describe the poetic experience. It focuses initially not on the artist’s creative act but on his power to make his audience identify almost pathologically and certainly sympathetically with the content if what he is saying...what [Plato] is saying is that any poetized statement must be designed and recited in such a way as to make it a kind of drama within the soul both of the reciter and hence also of the audience. This kind of drama, this way of reliving experience in memory instead of analyzing and understanding it, is for him the “enemy.”66
Havelock points out that
Plato was correctly concerned with the emotional pathology of the poetic performance, and it explains also why he chose the term mimesis to describe several aspects of the poetic experience which we today feel should be distinguished. The translation “imitation,” it can now be seen, does not adequately translate his word. “Imitation” in English presumes a separate existence of an original which is then copied. The essence of Plato’s point, the point of his attack, is that in poetic performance as practiced until then in Greece there was no “original.”67
He says later in the book:
The minstrel recited the tradition, and the audience listened, repeated, and recalled and so absorbed it. But the minstrel recited effectively only as he re-enacted the doings and sayings of heroes and made them his own, a process which can be described in reverse as making himself “resemble” them in endless succession. He sank his personality into his performance. His audience in turn would remember only as they entered effectively and sympathetically into what he was saying and this in turn meant that they became his servants and submitted to his spell. As they did this, they engaged also in a re-enactment of the tradition with lips, larynx, and limbs, and with the whole apparatus of their unconscious nervous system. The pattern of behavior of artist and audience was therefore in some important respects identical. It can be described mechanically as a continual repeating of rhythmic doings. Psychologically, it is an act of personal commitment, of total engagement and of emotional identification.68
The “pattern of behavior” brought into play by the poets is the same experience described by de Lubac, above (pp. 21-22), as tropological knowing. Tropology entails using all of the senses, of both modes of sensus communis, simultaneously.
Havelock’s observation that the modern student “simply pours his energy into book-reading and learning through the use of his eyes instead of his ears” echoes strangely two familiar statements by St. Paul. “Faith comes by hearing...” he wrote to the Romans (10:17); that is, it would appear now, faith comes by mimesis, by participatory experience, not as mere concepts.69
This saying has long seemed mysterious and enigmatic to us, but considered in the context of a society of non-literates still susceptible to the mimetic spell it would be an accurate technical observation about the operation of media. The second statement is another familiar, and puzzling, declaration: “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life” (2 corinthians 3:6). This, too, could be read as a technical observation about the effect of alphabetic writing: it kills mimesis, as Plato knew, and Aristotle, too. Both men were at pains to sidestep
