Anagoge

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Anagoge (ἀναγωγή), sometimes spelled anagogy, is a Greek word suggesting a climb or ascent upwards. The anagogical is a method of mystical or spiritual interpretation of statements or events, especially scriptural exegesis, that detects allusions to the afterlife.^[1] Certain medieval theologians describe four methods of interpreting the scriptures: literal/historical, tropological/moral, allegorical/typological, and anagogical. The four methods of interpretation point in four different directions: The literal/historical backwards to the past, the allegoric forwards to the future, the tropological downwards to the moral/human, and the anagogic upwards to the spiritual/heavenly.^[2]

Hugh of Saint Victor, in De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris, distinguishes anagoge from simple allegory as a kind of allegory.^[3] He differentiates in the following way: in a simple allegory, an invisible action is (simply) signified or represented by a visible action; anagoge is that "reasoning upwards" (sursum ductio), when, from the visible, the invisible action is disclosed or revealed.^[4] In a letter to his patron Can Grande della Scala, the poet Dante explains that his Divine Comedy could be read both literally and allegorically; and that the allegorical meaning could be subdivided into the moral and the anagogical.^[5]