卡西爾 - 象徵形式哲學，第二卷； 神話思維
神話意識的辯證法, 頁309

(概括意譯文)

寓言化的意義在中世紀的思維裏漸進成屬靈意義。所有現實都失去了直接的意義，其存在的意義從屬於由宗教賦予的特定意義。所有現實背後都隱藏有其屬靈意義。

首先，從純粹經驗的事實來理解一個事件，然後以寓言的、比喻的和模擬的原則邏輯揭示其正確的內容及其倫理形上學的意義。

寓言形式提供了和給與現實新的、有特色的“焦點”，一種新的距離及距離和親近的關係。於是，宗教精神可以沉浸而不局限於現實中，因為它在現實中所看到的不是它的直接性，而是它的超越性。

符號與符號透過這世界所表達的內容之間的張力獲得了全新的廣度和內涵。

第一階段，標誌和所指的“事物”屬於同一平面：前者為感性的事物、後者為經驗性的事件，彼此作為其象徵和預兆。 然而，這裡不存在一種直接關係，而只是一種以反思為中介的關係。

「比喻」思維的形式將一切存在轉化為純粹的比喻、隱喻——然而，解釋這個比喻需要一種獨特的宗教“解釋學”的本領；中世紀思想則試圖將其簡化為一些制定規則。建立並使用這些規則，需要精神上超越「感覺」的世界與現實的「經驗-時間」世界發生了接觸，並直接互相滲透。

「寓言-比喻」學的解釋牽涉到救恩的基本問題，因而也涉及救世主作為其中心的歷史問題。
一切暫時的、自然的事件和人類行為，都從這個中心獲得它們的光芒：它將所有事件連結在一個有意義的宇宙中，並以“救贖計劃”作為必要的連結。從這中心，逐漸拓寬其解讀的圈子。

最高的「類比」發生於當它能暗示超然或暗示超然的出現，即教會事件最深入的屬靈解讀：
一切把自然存在精神化的做法都受到「邏各斯logos已經下降到感性的世界，它已經降生在時間上並具有唯一性」這預設和相反動機所約束。



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Cassirer - The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2; Mythical Thinking
Dialectic of mythical consciousness, p.309

This progressive spiritual process of allegorization is illustrated above all in medieval thinking. In it, all reality loses its immediate significance of being to the degree that it is subordinated to a specifically religious “sense-bestowing.” Its physical existence remains only cloak and mask, behind which its spiritual sense is hidden. It is this sense that must be interpreted – in the four fold form of interpretation that the medieval sources differentiate as the principle of historical, allegorical, tropological, and analogical interpretation . While in the first, a specific event isapprehended in its purely empirical factuality, it is the three others that disclose its proper content, its ethical-metaphysical significance. Dante still preserved this basic medieval view unchanged and his poetics is no less rooted in it than is his theology. In this form of allegory, anew and characteristic “focal point,” a new relationship of distance and proximity to reality is given. The religious spirit can now immerse itself in reality, in the singular and factual, without remaining confined in it,since what it beholds in reality is never its immediacy but its transcendent sense that finds its mediated presentation in this reality. The tension between the world to which the sign itself belongs and that which is expressed through it has attained an entirely new breadth and intensity here, and thus a new and intensified consciousness of the sign is also achieved.

At the first stage, signs and the designated belong, as it were, to the same plane: one sensible “thing,” one empirical event, points to another and serves as its symbol and omen. Here, however, no such direct relation prevails, but only a relation mediated by reflection. The form of “tropological” thinking transforms all existence into a mere trope, a metaphor– however, the interpretation of this metaphor requires a distinctive art of religious “hermeneutics,” which medieval thinking seeks to reduce to set rules.

To establish these rules and to use and apply them,one point, ofcourse, is required where the world of spiritually transcendent “sense” and the world of empirical-temporal reality come into contact, despite their inner diversity and antithetical opposition– and at this point, they directly permeate each other.

Every allegorical-tropological interpretation relates to the basic problem of salvation and thus to the historical reality of the savior as its fixed center. All temporal becoming, all natural events and human doing, obtain their light from this center: it orders them into a meaningful cosmos by appearing as necessary links in the religious “plan of salvation” by taking a purposeful place in it. And from this one spiritual center, the circle of interpretation gradually broadens.

The highest “analogical” sense of a text or a particular event is disclosed when an allusion can be found in it to the transcendent or to its immediate historical appearance, the Church Even in the most far-reaching “spiritual” interpretation, all the spiritualization of natural being is bound here to the presupposition and opposing motive that logos has descended into the world of the sensible, that it has “incarnated” in it in temporal uniqueness.