Anagoge (pronounced an-uh-goh-jee)
(1) The
spiritual or mystical interpretation of a word or passage beyond the literal,
allegorical or moral sense (especially in Biblical criticism); A form of
allegorical interpretation of Scripture that seeks hidden meanings regarding
the future life.
(2) A
spiritual interpretation or application of words (following the tradition with
the Scriptures.
(3) In psychology,
deriving from, pertaining to, or reflecting the moral or idealistic striving of
the unconscious.
(4) The
mystical interpretation or hidden sense of words.
1350-1400:
From the Middle English anagoge, from
the Late Latin anagōgē, from the
Medieval Latin anagōgia & anagogicus from the Ancient Greek ἀναγωγή
(anagōgḗ) (elevation; an uplifting; spiritual or mystical
enlightenment), the construct being an-
(up) + agōgḗ (feminine of agōgós)
(leading), from anagein (to lead up,
lift up), the construct being ana- (up)
+ agein (to lead, put in motion) from
the primitive Indo-European root ag- (to
drive, draw out or forth, move). In
theology, the adjective anagogical was from the early sixteenth century the
more commonly used form, explaining the ways in which passages from Scripture
had a “secondary, spiritual sense”. The
idea of a “spiritual, hidden, allegorical or mystical meaning” spread to literature and
other fields where it operates as a special form of allegorical interpretation. The alternative spelling is anagogy. Anagoge is a noun, anagogic & anagogical
are adjectives and anagogically is an adverb; the noun plural is anagoges.
In literary
analysis, there does seem a fondness for classifying methods into groups of fours. Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) was an
English novelist and poet but despite a background in literature and little
else, through family connections he was in 1819 appointed an administrator in
the East India Company (which “sort of” ran British India in the years before
the Raj). It was an example of the
tradition of “amateurism” much admired by the British establishment, something
which didn’t survive the harsher economic realities of the late twentieth
century although some still affect the style.
Despite being untrained in such matters, his career with the company was
long and successful so he must have had a flair for the business although his
duties were not so onerous as to preclude him from continuing to write both
original compositions and works of literary analysis. In 1820 he published Four Ages of Poetry which was regarded as a “provocative” and although a serious critique, the
tone was whimsical, poetry classified into four periods: iron, gold, silver &
brass. His friend Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792–1822) understood the satire but seems to have been appalled anyone would
treat his art with such flippancy, quickly penning the retaliatory essay Defence of Poetry although the text was
unfinished and remained unpublished until 1840, almost two decades after his
death. It’s remembered now for its final
sentence: “Poets
are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” With that, the few thousand souls on the
planet who buy (and presumably read) poetry collections might concur but for
the many more who can’t tell the difference between a masterpiece and trite
doggerel, it may sound either a conceit or a threat.
Peacock not treating poets and their oeuvre which what they believed was due reverence left a mark and while Shelly died before he could finish his reply, more than a century later the English poet & academic literary I.A. Richards (1893–1979) in Science and Poetry (1926) still was moved to defend the poetic turf. Although approvingly quoting the words of English poet (and what would now be called a “social commentator”) Matthew Arnold (1822–1888): “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything.”, he nevertheless admitted “Extraordinary claims have often been made for poetry…” Tellingly too, he acknowledged those claims elicited from many “astonishment” and the “more representative modern view” of the future of poetry would be that it’s “nil”. Modern readers could decide for themselves whether that was as bleak as Peacock’s conclusion: “A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past... In whatever degree poetry is cultivated, it must necessarily be to the neglect of some branch of useful study and it is a lamentable thing to see minds, capable of better things, tunning to seed in the spacious indolence of these empty aimless mockeries of intellectual exertion.” Take that poets.
There’s more than one way to read Richards and it may be tacitly he accepted poetry had become something which would be enjoyed by an elite while others could spend their lives in ignorance of its charms, citing the sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) as an experience for “the right kind of reader”. So there it is: those who don’t enjoy poetry are the “wrong” kind of reader so to help the “right kind of reader”, Richards also came up with a foursome. In Practical Criticism (1929) he listed the “four different meanings in a poem”: (1) the sense (what actually is said, (2) feeling (the writer's emotional attitude to what they have written), (3) tone (the writer's attitude towards their reader and (4) intention (the writer's purpose, the effect they seek to achieve).
In literary
theory, anagoge is one the classic “four levels of meaning” and while there is
no consensus about the origins of the four, it’s clear there was an awareness
of them manifest in the Middle Ages. It
was Dante (Dante Alighieri (circa 1265–1321))
in his Epistola a Cangrande (Epistle XIII to Cangrande della Scala (described usually as Epistle to
Cangrande)) who most clearly explained the operation of the four. Written in Latin sometime before 1343, the epistle
was the author’s letter to his patron Cangrande della Scala (1291–1329), an
Italian aristocrat and scion of the family which ruled Verona between 1308-1387;
it was a kind of executive summary of the Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321))
and an exposition of its structure.
Dante suggested the work could be analysed in four ways which he
distinguished as (1) the
literal or historical meaning, (2) the moral meaning, and (3) the allegorical
meaning and (4) the anagogical.
Among scholars of Dante the epistle is controversial, not for the
content but the matter of authenticity, not all agreeing it was the author who wrote the
text, the academic factions dividing thus: (1) Dante wrote it all, (2) Dante wrote
none of it and (3) Dante wrote the dedication to his patron but the rest of the
text is from the hand of another and it’s left open whether that content
reflected the thoughts of Dante as expressed to the mysterious scribe or it was
wholly the creation of the “forger”.
Even AI (artificial intelligence) tools have been used (a textual
analysis of the epistle, Divine
Comedy and other material verified to have been written by Dante) and while the
process produced a “probability index”, the findings seemed not to shift
factional alignments. Dante’s authorship
is of course interesting but the historical significance of the “four levels of
meaning” concept endures in literary theory regardless of the source.
So the critics agreed the anagogical meaning of a text was its spiritual, hidden, or mystical meaning so anagoge (or anagogy) was a special form of allegorical interpretation. Whether it should be thought a subset or fork of allegory did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries trouble some who argued the anagogue was a wholly separate layer of meaning if the subject was biblical or otherwise religious but merely a type of allegorical interpretation if applied to something secular; that’s a debate unlikely to be staged now. However, given the apparent overlap between anagogical and allegorical, just which should be used may seem baffling, especially if the work to which the concept is being applied has a religious flavor. There is in the Bible much allegory (something which seems sometimes lost on the latter-day literalists among the US Republican Party’s religious right-wing) but only some can be said truly to be anagogic and although the distinction can at the margins become blurred, that’s true also of other devotional literature. The distinction is more easily observed of less abstract constructions such John Bunyan in The Pilgrim's Progress calling his protagonist “Christian”, the choice not merely a name but symbolic of the Christian soul’s journey to salvation, hinted at by the book’s full title being The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come. For something to be judged anagogical, the text needs to look beyond the literal and moral senses to its ultimate, transcendent, or eschatological significance, illustrated by applying the four-fold technique (literal, moral, allegorical & anagogical) to the biblical description of Jerusalem which deconstructs as: (1) Literal (the actual physical city in history), (2) Allegorical (the Church), (3) Moral (the soul striving to find a path to God and (4) Anagogical (the heavenly Jerusalem, the final destiny of those humanity who kept the faith). The point of the anagoge was thus one of ultimate destiny or divine fulfilment: heaven, salvation, forgiveness and eternal life.
That does not however mean the anagogical is of necessity teleological. Teleology was from the New Latin teleologia a construct from the Ancient Greek τέλος (télos) (purpose; end, goal, result) genitive τέλεος (téleos) (end; entire, perfect, complete) + λόγος (lógos) (word, speech, discourse). In philosophy, it was the study of final causes; the doctrine that final causes exist; the belief that certain phenomena are best explained in terms of purpose rather than cause (a moral theory that maintains that the rightness or wrongness of actions solely depends on their consequences is called a teleological theory). The implications which could be found in that attracted those in fields as diverse as botany & zoology (interested in the idea purpose is a part of or is apparent in nature) and creationists (anxious to find evidence of design or purpose in nature and especially prevalent in the cult of ID (intelligent design), a doctrine which hold there is evidence of purpose or design in the universe and especially that this provides proof of the existence of a designer (ie how to refer to God without using the “G-word”)). Rationalists (and even some who were somewhere on the nihilism spectrum) accepted the way the phrase was used in philosophy & biology but thought the rest weird. It was fine to accept Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) point the eye exists for the purpose of allowing creatures to see or that it’s reasonable to build a theory like utilitarianism which judges actions by the outcomes or goals achieved but to suggest what is life of earth is an end, purpose, or goal which can be explained only as the work of a “creator” was ultimately just “making stuff up”. So to reductionists (1) the allegorical was “means something else”, (2) the anagogical was “points upward to our ultimate spiritual destiny” and (3) the teleological was “explained by its end or purpose”.
Anagoge (pronounced an-uh-goh-jee) should not be confused with Anna Gogo (pronounced an-uh-goh-goh, left), a chartered engineer at Red Earth Engineering or Anna Go-Go (pronounced an-uh-goh-goh, right), persona of the proprietor of Anna's Go-Go Academy (a go-go dancing school). Ms Go-Go is also a self-described “crazy cat lady” and the author of Cat Lady Manifesto (2024); she is believed to be high on J.D. Vance’s (b 1984; US vice president since 2025) enemies list. Note the armchair's doilies, a cat lady favorite.
There is also Anna's Gogo which is "Anna explaining the Goggomobil TS 250 Coupé” (in Russian). The TS 250 was a version of the Goggomobil two-door sedan, one of the many “microcars” that emerged in post-war Europe. First displayed in 1954 by Bavaria-based Hans Glas GmbH of Dingolfing, the Goggomobil T 250 sedan was about as conventional in appearance as microcars got and its configuration (RWD (rear-wheel-drive) with a rear-mounted 245 cm3, air-cooled parallel twin engine) was not unusual, the economy of production made possible by adapting for four (sometime three) wheeled use mechanical components from motor-cycles. Although rising prosperity, increased average road-speeds and safety concerns ultimately doomed the sector (in its original form although it survived in an urban niche and there’s been something of a modern revival), more than 200,000 of the little sedans (some with displacements a large as 392 cm3 which can be thought of (loosely) as the “muscle car” or “big block” version) manufactured, production finally ending in 1969.
Glas publictity shot for 1955 Gogomobil T 250 (left) and 1957 Googlemobile TS 250 Coupé (right).
The TS coupé appeared three years after the sedan and used the formula which for more than a century has proved profitable for the industry: Take the platform of a prosaic, mass-market car and drape atop a “more stylish and sporty” body, sometimes with (a little) more power and always a higher price. The approach was in 1964 exemplified by the original Ford Mustang but the TS 250 was unusual in that to achieve the desired style, the coupé was actually longer than the sedan (3,035 mm (119.5 inches) vs 2,900 mm (114.2 inches) but describing the accommodation as “2+2” was more accurate to modern eyes than the “full four-seater” claim attached to the sedan although, in the era, it wasn’t unusual for families of five or more to be crammed inside. Like the sedans, the coupés were offered in “muscle car spec” and on the Autobahns, if given long enough and without too many aboard, over 100 km/h (60 mph) was possible.
1959 Gogomobil Dart.
The platform also provided the underpinnings for the quirkiest of the breed, the Goggomobil Dart a fibreglass-bodied “microcar roadster” developed in Australia, with what seems now a remarkable 700-odd sold between 1959 to 1961. Even when using the “big 392” (not to be confused with the 392 cubic inch (6.4 litre) Chrysler Hemi V8 which in the US had just ended production), it wasn’t “fast” but, weighing only 345 kg (761 lb), with a small frontal area and what was at the time industry-leading aerodynamic efficiency, it was lively enough in urban use and, on short circuits, some even appeared in competition. The slippery lines however, while adding a little to top speed, hadn't benefited from wind-tunnel testing to ensure downforce was sufficient for high speed stability and even at around the 70 mph (110 km/h) the specially tuned versions could reach on race tracks, the drivers reported "front-end lift" and unpredictable directional stability. All things considered, it was probably just as well the factory stopped at 392 cm3.
GogoAnime is an online streaming site for anime and related TV content (the distinction between the genres escapes most but it's well-established so must be real) which maintains a large library of anime content “ranging from classic titles to the latest releases” and for international audiences offers both “dubbed” (voice in various languages) and “subbed” (on-screen sub-titles in various languages) versions although there's a sub-set of “hard-core” aficionados for whom that will mean little because they know the best way to watch anime is with the sound muted. Reviewers of GogoAnime praise its “intuitive and user-friendly interface” which makes streaming an effortless experience and it does appear the more disturbing anime content (much of which is available on physical media “off the shelf” in Japanese convenience stores) isn’t hosted. The lawfulness of GogoAnime offering “free streaming” of commercially released product seems murky so gogo-scrapers should probably stream while they still can.
Although long in the toolbox of theologians & Biblical scholars, anagogical analysis became an element for critics of poetry and, as the post-modernists taught us, everything is text so it can be applied to anything. One case-study popular in teaching was George Orwell’s (1903-1950) Animal Farm (1945) and that’s because there’s a interesting C&C (compare & contrast) exercise in working out the anagoge first in Orwell’s original book and then in the film versions distributed in post-war Europe, the fun in that being the film rights were purchased by the US CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) which prevailed upon the makers to alter the ending so the capitalist class didn’t look so bad. By conventional four-way analysis, Animal Farm traditionally is broken down as (1) Literal meaning: A tale of the revolt of the animals against their human overlords, and the outcome of that revolt, (2) Moral meaning: Power tends to corrupt'; (c) Allegorical meaning: Major=comrade Lenin; Napoleon=comrade Stalin; Snowball=Comrade Trotsky; Jones=corrupt capitalist owners of the means of production & distribution.
Although theologians
and literary critics alike prefer to apply their analytical skills to material densely
packed with obscure meanings and passages impenetrable to most, their
techniques yield results with just about any text, even something as
deliberately flat and affectless like The
Canyons (Paul Schrader’s (b 1946) film of 2013 with a screenplay by Bret
Easton Ellis (b 1964)) one intriguing aspect of which was naming a central character
“Christian” although unlike Bunyan’s (1628–1688) worthy protagonist seeking
salvation in The Pilgrim's Progress, Ellis’s
creation was an opportunistic, nihilistic, manipulative sociopath. The author seems never to have discussed any
link between the two Christians, one on a path to salvation, the other
mid-descent into a life of drugs,
sex, and violence. It may be it was just
too mischievously tempting to borrow the name of one of Christendom’s exemplars
of redemption and use it for so figure so totally amoral and certainly it was a
fit with the writer’s bleak view of Hollywood.
Structurally, the parallels were striking, Bunyan’s Christian trekking from
the City of Destruction to Celestial City whereas Ellis has his character not
seeking salvation but remaining in Hollywood on his own path of destruction,
affecting both those around him and ultimately him too. In interviews, Ellis said he chose the name
after reading the E. L. James (b 1963) novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) in which Christian Grey was a central
character and The Canyons does share more
contemporary cultural touch-points with the novel than with Bunyan’s work.
(1) Literal
or Historical Meaning (a trust-fund movie producer exercises control over his girlfriend
while being entangled in transactional and destructive relationships with
others in a decadent Hollywood; (2) Moral Meaning: Christian’s controlling,
voyeuristic cruelty and his girlfriend’s compromises illustrate the corrosion
of moral agency induced by narcissism and a superficial, consumerist culture);
(3) Allegorical Meaning (The Canyons is
built as a microcosm of what Hollywood is imagined to be, Christian representing
the ruthless producer; Tara the girlfriend as the powerless talent unable to
escape from a web of exploitation and other characters as collateral damage. The shuttered cinemas in inter-cut shots
serve as allegory for the death of cinema, replaced by shallow, formulaic “product”;
the film ultimately less about the two-dimensional characters than the descent
of a culture to a moral wasteland and (4) Anagogical Meaning (The film is an eschatology
of cultural decay; art corrupted by money, leaving something alive but spiritually
dead, something which some choose to map onto late-stage capitalism sustained
by atomized, voyeuristic consumption with human life cast adrift from moral
responsibility or even its recognition).
Of course for moral theologians accustomed to dancing on the heads of
pins, an anagogical viewing of The Canyons might allow one to see some hint of something
redemptive and the more optimistic might imagine it as a kind of warning of what
may be rather than what is, encouraging us to resist in the hope of transcendence. That’s quite a hope for a place depicted as owing something to what’s found in Dante’s nine circles.