Marulić\u27s Tropology in the Light of Patristic Allegoresis (I.)

With the intent of synthesising in a single work the Roman and Christian Latin traditions, Marulić selected the form of the Virgilian poem, the history of Christ’s redemption as frame, and King David, the precursor figure for Jesus most men-tioned by church writers, as the central topic. He endeavoured to place his creative work under the aegis of the headquarters of the church via Cardinal Domenico Grimani. Adding to the Dedication and the poem the Tropological Interpretation as well, his intention was to present himself as both theologian and poet. Analysing the Tropologica Davidiadis expositio, this paper confirms the hy-pothesis already put forward that it is an inseparable part of the Davidiad, that it is announced in the introductory Dedication and motivated by the proem. In its organisation, which follows the events narrated in the Bible, and in its interpretation of the details of David’s life as a precursor or foreshadowing of Christ and his Church, this metalinguistic text does not make any distinction between the Biblical model and Marulić’s hexameters in which the prototype is put into poetry. Marulić’s concept of allegorical exposition from the short introduction is comparable with that of the Venerable Bede in the Allegoryca expositio in Samuelem. At this conceptual level, his statement of belief in the Christian doctrine concerning the authenticity of the Holy Spirit and the inseparability of the Old and New Testaments - without which allegoresis cannot exist - and the consistent production during the interpretation of just one of the three spiritual meanings, puts the key points of his system in direct contact with the syntheses of Tho-mas Aquinas. Although in this text he expounded Biblical events that were not in general interpreted by church writers, he was completely reliant on the tradition that started with Jerome and Augustine and went on via Gregory I, Isidore, Bede, Hraban Maur, Walahfridus Strabo, Angelomus of Luxeuil and others who allegorised details from David’s life. The paper shows that Marulić had points of contact with them, but that he nevertheless did not rely on individuals, rather on the entire tradition, which he held to be an indisputable and essential authority. Two key highroads are interwoven in Marulić’s Interpretation, which are varied by each individual whole. In the first place is a sequence of allegorical expositions, as objective level, and in second place, the occult links between Old and New Testaments as theological grounding. Together they generate the nature of the discourse, identifiable in the paralleling and suffusion of the codes of the literal and the spiritual sense, or in the application of the apologetic and the polemical codes in conjunction with the second highroad. The highest quality collisions of the codes of the literal and the spiritual sense are sublimated in Marulić in Christian metaphors, as they are called, which are the most powerfully expressive places in the context in which they are located. Although these are mainly tried and tested conjoinings of words used by many writers before Marulić, they are so interwoven into the context from which their expressiveness thus derives that hasty conclusions about their perhaps having been taken from Augustine, Paulino of Nola or Hraban Maur must be deferred. The references to the scriptures that commonly accompany the discourse of allegorical exposition as one of the evidentiary procedures are partially imprecise or incorrectly written in Marulić’s exposition. This paper shows, however, that such quotes are not accidental errors, rather a stylistic procedure in which church writers did quote more liberally, and in some of the examples from Marulić they are actually quotations from some of the Patristic authorities, whose works are referred to as their original context (Jerome, Gregory I). In proving his interpretations, Marulić made great use of etymology, sometimes only quoting the spiritual meanings of words, as did many church writers. He checked his approaches against the rich tradition of interpretation. Most of his etymologies coincide with the interpretations of Jerome, Bede and Nicholas of Lyra, or those from the Greek Lexicon of Hebrew Names. Very obvious in this procedure are his reinvestigation of and his search for the real meanings of the roots of the names