More on Benjamin and Allegory

For Benjamin, the origins of allegory lie, partly, in the re-coding of Pagan symbols by Christianity in the Middle Ages, when the ruins of that antiquity - making evident the “impermanence of things” - were everywhere[1]. The Pagan world leaves in its wake idols, ritualistic objects, symbols of worship, which Christianity, far from discarding, seizes and re-uses, presiding over these dead gods - in all their recalcitrant otherness and extinct dignity – with a sovereign interpretative - and destructive – power:

“Venus/ Aphrodite, for example, once the natural symbol that raised human Eros to the level of divine love, lived on as ‘Dame World’, the profane, allegorical emblem of earthly passion.”[2]

The pantheon of ancient gods, “disconnected from the life-contexts out of which they sprang”, became “dead figures”, standing arbitrarily for the philosophical ideas they has once embodied as living symbols… They survived as demons, as astrological signs, as the faces of Tarot cards".[3]

What Benjamin takes to be at the origin of the allegorical impulse, is given first of all in the hard-wiring of monotheistic religion. Take for instance Judaism. Scholem writes as follows:

Jewish worship implied a renunciation, indeed a polemical rejection, of the images and symbols in which the mythical world finds its expression. Judaism strove to open up a region, that of monotheistic revelation, from which mythology would be excluded. Those vestiges of myth that were preserved here and there were shorn of their original symbolic power and taken in a purely metaphorical sense[4].

The theologians and philosophers, says Scholem, were “ concerned first and foremost with the purity of the concept of God and determined to divest it of all mythical and anthropomorphic elements” (88) “.. tended to empty the concept of God”.

To empty Divinity of mythic figures, palpable semblance, of worldly flesh, is, conversely to empty mythic embodiments of any divinity. Myth is now redeemable only as a collection of manipulable signs, merely ‘signifying’ what they were once thought directly to express.

And given that there is no longer any worldly idiom appropriate for God’s expression, a different Nature now appears to humanity, no longer the image or appearance of Divinity, but a fallen realm of abandoned spaces and empty clues.


[1] See OGTD. p. 223: ".. the world of the ancient gods would have to die out, and it precisely allegorywhich preserved it. For an appreciation of the transciencey of things, and the concern to rescue them foreternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory.”
[2] Buck-Morss, p. 163.
[3] Buck-Morss, Dialectics, p. 165.
[4] Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Routledge, 1965), p. 88