were being formed into a new volume of sacred writings, side by side with the old. It was so applied, in the first instance, not by the Apologists, but by the Gnostics. It was detached from the idea of prediction. It was linked with the idea of knowledge as a secret. This extension of the method was inevitable. The earthly life of Christ presented as many difficulties to the first Christian philosophers as the Old Testament had done. The conception of Christ as the Wisdom and the Power of God seemed inconsistent with the meanness of a common human life; and that life resolved itself into a series of symbolic representations of superhuman movements, and the record of it was written in hieroglyphs. When Symeon took the young child in his arms and said the Nunc dimittis, he was a picture of the Demiurge who had learned his own change of place on the coming of the Saviour, and who gave thanks to the Infinite Depth.1 The raising of Jairus' daughter was a type of Achamoth, the Eternal Wisdom, the mother of the Demiurge, whom the Saviour led anew to the perception of the light which had forsaken her. Even the passion on the Cross was a setting forth of the anguish and fear and perplexity of the Eternal Wisdom.2 The method was at first rejected with contumely. Irenæus and Tertullian bring to bear upon it their batteries of irony and denunciation. It was a blasphemous invention. It was one of the arts of spiritual wickedness against which a Christian must wrestle. But it was deep-seated in the habits of the time; and even while Tertullian was writing, it was establishing a lodgment 1 Iren. 1. 8. 4, of the Valentinians. 2 Ib. 1. 8. 2. inside the Christian communities which it has never ceased to hold. It did so first of all in the great school of Alexandria, in which it had grown up as the reconciliation of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology. The methods of the school of Philo were applied to the New Testament even more than to the Old. When Christ said, "The foxes have holes, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head," he meant that on the believer alone, who is separated from the rest, that is from the wild beasts of the world, rests the Head of the universe, the kind and gentle Word.1 When he is said to have fed the multitude on five barley-loaves and two fishes, it is meant that he gave mankind the preparatory training of the Law, for barley, like the Law, ripens sooner than wheat, and of philosophy, which had grown, like fishes, in the waves of the Gentile world.2 When we read of the anointing of Christ's feet, we read of both his teaching and his passion; for the feet are a symbol of divine instruction travelling to the ends of the earth, or, it may be, of the Apostles who so travelled, having received the fragrant unction of the Holy Ghost; and the ointment, which is adulterated oil, is a symbol of the traitor Judas, "by whom the Lord was anointed on the feet, being released from his sojourn in the world: for the dead are anointed." 3 But it may reasonably be doubted whether the allegorical method would have obtained the place which it did in the Christian Church if it had not served an other than exegetical purpose. It is clear that after the first 1 Clem. Al. Strom. 1. 3, p. 329. 3 Id. Padag. 2. 8, p. 76. conflicts with Judaism had subsided, the Old Testament formed a great stumbling-block in the way of those who approached Christianity on its ideal side, and viewed it by the light of philosophical conceptions. Its anthropomorphisms, its improbabilities, the sanction which it seemed to give to immoralities, the dark picture which it sometimes presented of both God and the servants of God, seemed to many men to be irreconcilable with both the theology and the ethics of the Gospel. An important section of the Christian world rejected its authority altogether: it was the work, not of God, but of His rival, the god of this world: the contrast between the Old Testament and the New was part of the larger contrast between matter and spirit, darkness and light, evil and good. Those who did not thus reject it were still conscious of its difficulties. There were many solutions of those difficulties. Among them was that which had been the Greek solution of analogous difficulties in Homer. It was adopted and elaborated by Origen expressly with an apologetic purpose. He had been trained in current methods of Greek interpretation. He is expressly said to have studied the books of Cornutus.2 He found in the hypothesis of a spiritual meaning as complete a vindication of the Old Testament as Cornutus had found of the Greek mythology. The difficulties which men find, he tells us, arise from their lack of the spiritual sense. Without it he himself would have been a sceptic. 1 This was the contention of Marcion, whose influence upon the Christian world was far larger than is commonly supposed. By far the best account of him, in both this and other respects, is that of Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, ler Th. B. i. c. 5. 2 Euseb. H. E. 6. 19. 8. "What man of sense," he asks,1 " 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.2 In this way, as a rationalizing expedient for solving 1 Origen, de princip. 1. 16. 2 Ib. c. 15. the 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.1 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.2 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 nature 1 Clement. Recogn. 10. 36. 2 Clement. Hom. 6. 18. |