ABSTRACT
Symbol and allegory are ideas with many tones and variations and perhaps should be approached from a little further off. This chapter looks at something with which they overlap, the way in which men describe themselves and their inner lives. In practice the Catholic stress on the closeness of relation between inner and outer tends to mean that the Catholic will value the outer more highly, seeing it as expressing religious or transcendental values, realities and acts more directly than does the Protestant, who tends to restrict these to the inner. One feels the indeterminateness of boundary between the inner and outer worlds, and the presentedness, the givenness, the objectivity of the whole double world much more subtly than in Margery in the allegories which were perhaps the most characteristic literary form of the entire Middle Ages.
