“What man of sense,” he asks,[131]“will suppose that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun and moon and stars? Who is so foolish as to believe that God, like a husbandman, planted a garden in Eden, and placed in it a tree of life, that might be seen and touched, so that one who tasted of the fruit by his bodily lips obtained life? or, again, that one was partaker of good and evil by eating that which was taken from a tree? And if God is said to have walked in a garden in the evening, and Adam to have hidden under a tree, I do not suppose that any one doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history being apparently but not literally true.... Nay, the Gospels themselves are filled with the same kind of narratives. Take, for example, the story of the devil taking Jesus up into a high mountain to show him from thence the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: what thoughtful reader would not condemn those who teach that it was with the eye of the body—which needs a lofty height that even the near neighbourhood may be seen—that Jesus beheld the kingdoms of the Persians, and Scythians, and Indians, and Parthians, and the manner in which their rulers were glorified among men?”
“What man of sense,” he asks,[131]“will suppose that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun and moon and stars? Who is so foolish as to believe that God, like a husbandman, planted a garden in Eden, and placed in it a tree of life, that might be seen and touched, so that one who tasted of the fruit by his bodily lips obtained life? or, again, that one was partaker of good and evil by eating that which was taken from a tree? And if God is said to have walked in a garden in the evening, and Adam to have hidden under a tree, I do not suppose that any one doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history being apparently but not literally true.... Nay, the Gospels themselves are filled with the same kind of narratives. Take, for example, the story of the devil taking Jesus up into a high mountain to show him from thence the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: what thoughtful reader would not condemn those who teach that it was with the eye of the body—which needs a lofty height that even the near neighbourhood may be seen—that Jesus beheld the kingdoms of the Persians, and Scythians, and Indians, and Parthians, and the manner in which their rulers were glorified among men?”
The spirit intended, in all such narratives, on the one hand to reveal mysteries to the wise, on the other hand to conceal them from the multitude. The whole series of narratives is constructed with a purpose, and subordinated to the exposition of mysteries. Difficulties and impossibilities were introduced in order to prevent men from being drawn into adherence to the literal meaning. Sometimes the truth was told by means of a true narrative which yielded a mystical sense: sometimes, when no such narrative of a true history existed, one was invented for the purpose.[132]
In this way, as a rationalizing expedient for solvingthe difficulties of Old Testament exegesis, the allegorical method established for itself a place in the Christian Church: it largely helped to prevent the Old Testament from being discarded: and the conservation of the Old Testament was the conservation of allegory, not only for the Old Testament, but also for the New.
Against the whole tendency of symbolical interpretation there was more than one form of reaction in both the Greek and the Christian world.
1. It was attacked by the Apologists in its application to Greek mythology. With an inconsequence which is remarkable, though not singular, they found in it a weapon of both defence and offence. They used it in defence of Christianity, not only because it gave them the evidence of prediction, but also because it solved some of the difficulties which the Old Testament presented to philosophical minds. They used it, on the other hand, in their attack upon Greek religion. Allegories are an after-thought, they said sometimes, a mere pious gloss over unseemly fables.[133]Even if they were true, they said again, and the basis of Greek belief were as good as its interpreters alleged it to be, it was a work of wicked demons to wrap round it a veil of dishonourable fictions.[134]The myth and the god who is supposed to be behind it vanish together, says Tatian: if the myth be true, the gods are worthless demons; if the myth be not true, but only a symbol of the powers of nature, the godhead is gone, for the powers of natureare not gods since they constrain no worship.[135]In a similar way, in the fourth century, Eusebius treats it as a vain attempt of a younger generation to explain away (θεραπεῦσαι) the mistakes of their fathers.[136]
2. It was attacked by the Greek philosophers in its application to Christianity. There are some persons, says Porphyry,[137]who being anxious to find, not a way of being rid of the immorality of the Old Testament, but an explanation of it, have recourse to interpretations which do not hold together nor fit the words which they interpret, which serve not so much as a defence of Jewish doctrines as to bring approbation and credit for their own. It is a delusive evasion of your difficulties, said in effect Celsus;[138]you find in your sacred books narratives which shock your moral sense; you think that you get rid of the difficulty by having recourse to allegory; but you do not: in the first place, your scriptures do not admit of being so interpreted; in the second place, the explanation is often more difficult than the narrative which it explains. The answer of Origen is weak: it is partly aTu quoque: Homer is worse than Genesis, and if allegory will not explain the latter, neither will it the former: it is partly that, if there had been no secret, the Psalmist would not have said, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may see the wondrous things of thy law.”
3. The method had opponents even in Alexandria itself. Origen[139]more than once speaks of those who objected to his “digging wells below the surface;” and Eusebius mentions a lost work of the learned Nepos of Arsinoê, entitled “A Refutation of the Allegorists.”[140]But it found its chief antagonist in the school of interpretation which arose at the end of the fourth century at Antioch. The dominant philosophy of Alexandria had been a fusion of Platonism with some elements of both Stoicism and revived Pythagoreanism: that of Antioch was coming to be Aristotelianism. The one was idealistic, the other realistic: the one was a philosophy of dreams and mystery, the other of logic and system: to the one, Revelation was but the earthy foothold from which speculation might soar into infinite space; to the other, it was “a positive fact given in the light of history.”[141]Allegorical interpretation was the outcome of the one; literal interpretation of the other. The precursor of the Antiochene school, Julius Africanus, of Emmaus, has left behind a letter which has been said “to contain in its two short pages more true exegesis than all the commentaries and homilies of Origen.”[142]The chief founder of the school was Lucian, a scholar who shares with Origen the honourof being the founder of Biblical philology, and whose lifetime, which was cut short by martyrdom in 311, just preceded the great Trinitarian controversies of the Nicene period. His disciples came to be leaders on the Arian side: among them were Eusebius of Nicomedia and Arius himself. The question of exegesis became entangled with the question of orthodoxy. The greatest of Greek interpreters, Theodore of Mopsuestia, followed, a hundred years afterwards, in the same path; but in his day also questions of canons of interpretation were so entangled with questions of Christology, and the Christology of the Antiochene school was so completely outvoted at the great ecclesiastical assemblies by the Christology of the Alexandrian school, that his reputation for scholarship has been almost wholly obscured by the ill-fame of his leanings towards Nestorianism. It has been one of the many results of the controversies into which the metaphysical tendencies of the Greeks led the churches of the fourth and fifth centuries, to postpone almost to modern times the acceptance of “the literal grammatical and historical sense” as the true sense of Scripture.
The allegorical method of interpretation has survived the circumstances of its birth and the gathered forces of its opponents. It has filled a large place in the literature of Christianity. But by the irony of history, though it grew out of a tendency towards rationalism, it has come in later times to be vested like a saint, and to wear an aureole round its head. It has been the chief instrument by which the dominant beliefs of every age have constructedtheir strongholds.[143]It was harmless so long as it was free. It was the play of innocent imagination on the surface of great truths. But when it became authoritative, when the idea prevailed that only that poetical sense was true of which the majority approved, and when moreover it became traditional, so that one generation was bound to accept the symbolical interpretations of its predecessors, it became at once the slave of dogmatism and the tyrant of souls. Outside its relation to dogmatism, it has a history and a value which rather grow than diminish with time. It has given to literature books which, though of little value for the immediate purpose of interpretation, are yet monuments of noble and inspiring thoughts. It has contributed even more to art than to literature. The poetry of life would have been infinitely less rich without it. For though without it Dante might have been stirred to write, he would not have written theDivine Comedy; and though without it Raffaelle would have painted, he would not have painted the St. Cecilia; and though without it we should have had Gothic cathedrals, we should not have had that sublime symbolism of their structure which is of itself a religious education. It survives because it is based upon an element in human nature which is not likely to pass away: whatever be its value in relation to the literature of the past, it is at least the expression in relation to the present that our lives are hedged round by the unknown, thatthere is a haze about both our birth and our departure, and that even the meaner facts of life are linked to infinity.
But two modern beliefs militate against it.
1. The one belief affects all literature, religious and secular alike. It is that the thoughts of the past are relative to the past, and must be interpreted by it. The glamour of writing has passed away. A written word is no more than a spoken word; and a spoken word is taken in the sense in which the speaker used it, at the time at which he used it. There have been writers of enigmas and painters of emblems, but they have formed an infinitesimal minority. There have been those who, as Cicero says of himself in writing to Atticus, have written allegorically lest open speech should betray them; but such cryptograms have only a temporary and transient use. The idea that ancient literature consists of riddles which it is the business of modern literature to solve, has passed for ever away.
2. The other belief affects specially religious literature. It is that the Spirit of God has not yet ceased to speak to men, and that it is important for us to know, not only what He told the men of other days, but also what He tells us now. Interpretation is of the present as well as of the past. We can believe that there is a Divine voice, but we find it hard to believe that it has died away to an echo from the Judean hills. We can believe in religious as in other progress, but we find it hard to believe that that progress was suddenly arrested fifteen hundred years ago. The study of nature and the study of history have given us another maxim for religiousconduct and another axiom of religious belief. They apply to that which is divine within us the inmost secret of our knowledge and mastery of that which is divine without us:man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.