To grasp how the form of these works are determined by their truth content requires a reconstruction of the baroque concept of the allegorical which structures its mood of melancholic contemplativeness. Benjamin’s claim is that a genuine understanding of the allegorical as it emerged in its highest form in the 17th century has been obscured by, on the one hand, the later Romantic aestheticizing of the symbol and, on the other, by the tendency to conceive the allegorical negatively in its contrast with this devalued, aesthetic concept. It is only by first recovering a genuine theological concept of the symbol, therefore, that we are able in turn to distinguish an authentic concept of the allegorical. This it to be done by reasserting the profound but paradoxical theological unity between the material and the transcendental found in the symbolic. The fundamental distinction between theological concepts of symbol and the allegory will then be seen as concerning not their differing objects (Idea vs. abstract concept), but the differing ways in which they signify, express or represent this object. Benjamin will conclude that this difference is, specifically, a temporal one. 