How Allegory Opens the Door to Contemplative Reading

Allegory is often dismissed as shallow due to its one-to-one symbolism, simplicity, and minimal demand on the reader. Spend any time studying curriculum guides or talking to administration teams and you will realize that the great allegorical works of the past have few homes in our schools. They have been tossed to the side, only to be found in small casual conversations about the great books of our past. Yet this is a mistake. C.S. Lewis in his essay, “The Vision of John Bunyan,” argues that allegory does far more than prescribe meaning. Allegory demands a certain level of attentiveness, and it prompts the reader to grow in the habit of more sustained and contemplative searches for meaning.

Even though allegory does bear a certain simplicity, Lewis claims that it is incredibly challenging to read allegory well. He accurately identifies a poor reading habit that many of us have, intentionally or not. Lewis, rather starkly, writes about the tendencies toward poor reading that are made apparent in the genre of allegory, criticizing “the pernicious habit of reading allegory as if it were a cryptogram to be translated.” As readers, we desire meaning within the text, we search for it. Good books make you pursue it: sometimes it sits on the surface, sometimes it is found on the very last page, nevertheless we are all hoping to find it hidden in between the lines of the page. If there was no meaning, then the book would never be held in our hands, never lie on our shelves, never be recommended, and most likely, never make it to the publishing house. Meaning in an allegorical work may seem to lie right on the surface. Yet rather than try to peel the allegory off the pages, Lewis urges us to flip the allegory on its head and push it through the story. Paradoxically, Lewis writes, “We ought not to be thinking ‘This green valley, where the shepherd boy is singing, represents humility’; we ought to be discovering, as we read, that humility is like that green valley. That way moving into the book, not out of it, from the concept to the image, enriches the concept. And that is what allegory is for.” If this ‘for’ is an act of stepping in and not out—and I think that Lewis is right—how do we teach students something so abstract as flipping symbolism on its head? Every administrator and teacher knows that time is short in the school year; why spend it reading allegorical books if it is likely students will misread them? What follows argues that the reading of allegorical literature cultivates two habits, and that these habits contribute to a deeper and more contemplative engagement with all literature.

A good teacher expects more than mere memorization and repetition of a list: he ought to expect personal possession of the terms that can be produced, created, and refined in a way that demonstrates a certain mastery of language. Teaching abstract ideas and concepts is incredibly hard and teaching something like allegory or symbolism in figurative language is no exception, but the simple regularity of allegory grants the student a certain amount of comfort. Now, this is obviously not the case for younger students. The knife of abstraction must be sharpened on the block of repetition. Yet, this does not mean that something as abstract as symbolism must be dull.

Allegory teaches attentiveness. No one enjoys reading a book whose ideas fly over our heads. In fact, many of us probably have memories of giving up books that might have in fact been good books, books that ought to be read, but that must be set aside. Within the first few pages we realized that we are out of our depth. I have done this many times; setting the book down and hoping that in the next weeks, months, and years of study, I will be able to revisit the book at long last. Students feel the exact same way. Understandably, the curriculum at a school must press the reading level higher every year, often to the groans of students who feel inadequate to tackle the verbose language of Dickens, or who don’t see the inherent beauty in a syllogism, or who don’t see how Saint Athanasius has anything to do with the Christian faith in the twenty-first century.

However, teaching allegorical books can offer students an opportunity to put the pieces of reading together themselves. The puzzle pieces lie waiting, and with guidance and help from the teacher, the wonder and joy of reading can come alive. The mystery of symbolism forces students to slow down and contemplate not only the narrative at large, but what the narrative actually means. What is the author trying to say? As they cultivate this habit of attention, students are being prepared to face more challenging books.

Secondly, allegorical literature is a gateway to further learning; it is not an end in itself. This is why middle school and even perhaps upper elementary need to be teaching what it means to read symbolically. This is a whole new mode of thinking for the students. Yet if the difficult skill of abstraction is cultivated, the ability to see the function of symbolism in allegorical literature becomes rather intuitive. Beware of a danger: once students possess this skill of allegorical reading, all books may start to look like a nail as they swing away their allegorical hammer, smashing till there is little story left. The structure of a beautiful story lies in rubble. In the blink of an eye, Edmund is Judas, Gatsby is America, Achilles is pride, Hector is virtue, Charlotte’s web is the gospel, the list goes on. Teasing out the allegorical relationships within a story demands a certain skill, but it is not how one should approach every book. We must see the skill of allegorical reading as a stepping stone that enables students to be able to both refine the skill of abstract thought and a tool that lends itself to contemplative reading. If a student approaches a book with the confidence to seek out the truth, something that lies just under the surface of an allegorical work, then the teacher may send that student to the next class or teacher with a bit of hope in his heart.

Despite these benefits, allegory is rarely given the time it deserves. If schools hope to teach students to contemplate the ideas given in a text, we must see the purpose of allegorical reading as a light that shines forward, a light that makes the darkening path of wisdom a bit brighter. Many teachers forget that in order to get to the “capstone” books in high school, a series of steps must be taken earlier. My senior year Integrated Humanities class was chock full of incredibly challenging texts. From a vast array of primary sources, to reading W.T Jones’s History of Western Philosophy series out loud for weeks, every one of these books was made possible because my middle school years laid the groundwork for contemplative reading. Let our students see the wonder and mystery that lies within the symbolism of allegory. Don’t take the “Short cut to Mushrooms,” for if Bunyan, Spenser, or Lewis have anything to teach us, it’s that, as Lewis writes, “short cuts lead to very nasty places.”

Image Credit: Josef Danhauser, “Novel Reading” (1841)