From Myth to Metacosmos: Symbolic Orders of Possibility: 4 Allegory, Metaphor, and Narrative Machines

If theology and philosophy codified possibility through law and logic, medieval and early modern literature developed a parallel mode of construal: allegory and metaphor as narrative machines. These symbolic systems layered multiple registers of meaning within a single text, multiplying potentiality through the interplay of literal, moral, spiritual, and eschatological dimensions. Literature thus became a field where construal could be simultaneously theological, ethical, and imaginative, expanding possibility by stratifying it.

Allegory functions as a symbolic technology: a means of embedding multiple horizons of construal within one form. A single narrative event—say, a pilgrim’s journey—operates on several planes at once: literal travel, moral trial, spiritual ascent, and cosmic drama. This layering allows possibility to be refracted, such that each figure or episode opens onto several potentialities, each conditioned by its symbolic frame. The text becomes a machine for proliferating construal.

Dante’s Divine Comedy exemplifies this mode. The journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise maps not only the soul’s movement towards God but also the cosmic order itself, dramatising possibility as a path structured by justice, repentance, and grace. Each encounter actualises a symbolic node in the larger architecture: sinners embody choices foreclosed, saints embody realised potential, and the pilgrim’s passage embodies possibility as a dynamic unfolding. Dante’s allegory is not merely decorative; it is ontological.

Similarly, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales deploys allegory and narrative layering to situate human possibility within social, moral, and cosmic frames. Here, possibility emerges less as transcendence than as plurality: different voices, perspectives, and moral orders intersect, generating a field of potential that is dialogic rather than hierarchical. Chaucer’s narrative machine construes the cosmos as a polyphony of possibility, where truth is negotiated across voices rather than revealed from above.

In both cases, allegory and metaphor enable literature to function as a symbolic cosmos in miniature. The text itself becomes a world where potentialities are structured, constrained, and explored. Unlike philosophy’s abstractions or theology’s commandments, allegorical literature operates through indirection: it multiplies possibility by proliferating symbolic correspondences.

Through these narrative machines, medieval and early modern literature reveals that construal is not only about codifying possibility but also about layering and weaving it. Allegory’s stratified symbolic orders both reflect and expand the human capacity to imagine worlds.