methods which were common at the time to both Greek and Græco-Judæan
writers. They were employed on the same subject-matter. Just as the
Greek philosophers had found their philosophy in Homer, so Christian
writers found in him Christian theology. When he represents Odysseus as
saying,[105] “The rule of many is not good: let there be one ruler,” he
means to indicate that there should be but one God; and his whole poem
is designed to show the mischief that comes of having many gods.[106]
When he tells us that Hephæstus represented on the shield of Achilles
“the earth, the heaven, the sea, the sun that rests not, and the moon
full-orbed,”[107] he is teaching us the divine order of creation
which he learned in Egypt from the books of Moses.[108] So Clement of
Alexandria interprets the withdrawal of Oceanus and Tethys from each
other to mean the separation of land and sea;[109] and he holds that
Homer, when he makes Apollo ask Achilles, “Why fruitlessly pursue him, a
god,” meant to show that the divinity cannot be apprehended by the bodily
powers.[110] Some of the philosophical schools which hung upon the skirts
of Christianity mingled such interpretations of Greek mythology with
similar interpretations of the Old Testament. For example, the writer
to whom the name Simon Magus is given, is said to have “interpreted in
whatever way he wished both the writings of Moses and also those of the
(Greek) poets;”[111] and the Ophite writer, Justin, evolves an elaborate
cosmogony from a story of Herakles narrated in Herodotus,[112] combined
with the story of the garden of Eden.[113] But the main application was
to the Old Testament exclusively. The reasons given for believing that
the Old Testament had an allegorical meaning were precisely analogous
to those which had been given in respect to Homer. There were many
things in the Old Testament which jarred upon the nascent Christian
consciousness. “Far be it from us to believe,” says the writer of the
Clementine Homilies,[114] “that the Master of the universe, the Maker of
heaven and earth, ‘tempts’ men as though He did not know—for who then
does foreknow? and if He ‘repents,’ who is perfect in thought and firm
in judgment? and if He ‘hardens’ men’s hearts, who makes them wise?
and if He ‘blinds’ them, who makes them to see? and if He desires ‘a
fruitful hill,’ whose then are all things? and if He wants the savour of
sacrifices, who is it that needeth nothing? and if He delights in lamps,
who is it that set the stars in heaven?”
One early answer to all such difficulties was, like a similar answer
to difficulties about the Homeric mythology, that there was a human as
well as a divine element in the Old Testament: some things in it were
true, and some were false: and “this was indeed the very reason why the
Master said, ‘Be genuine money-changers,’[115] testing the Scriptures
like coins, and separating the good from the bad.” But the answer did
not generally prevail. The more common solution, as also in the case of
Homer, was that Moses had written in symbols in order to conceal his
meaning from the unwise; and Clement of Alexandria, in an elaborate
justification of this method, mentions as analogies not only the older
Greek poetry, but also the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians.[116]
The Old Testament thus came to be treated allegorically. A large part
of such interpretation was inherited. The coincidences of mystical
interpretation between Philo and the Epistle of Barnabas show that
such interpretations were becoming the common property of Jews and
Judæo-Christians.[117] But the method was soon applied to new data.
Exegesis became apologetic. Whereas Philo and his school had dealt mainly
with the Pentateuch, the early Christian writers came to deal mainly with
the prophets and poetical books; and whereas Philo was mainly concerned
to show that the writings of Moses contained Greek philosophy, the
Christian writers endeavoured to show that the writings of the Hebrew
preachers and poets contained Christianity; and whereas Philo had been
content to speak of the writers of the Old Testament, as Dio Chrysostom
spoke of the Greek poets, as having been stirred by a divine enthusiasm,
the Christian writers soon came to construct an elaborate theory that the
poets and preachers were but as the flutes through which the Breath of
God flowed in divine music into the souls of men.[118]
The prophets, even more than the poets, lent themselves easily to this
allegorical method of interpretation. The _nabi_ was in an especial sense
the messenger of God and an interpreter of His will. But his message
was often a parable. He saw visions and dreamed dreams. He wrote, not
in plain words, but in pictures. The meaning of the pictures was often
purposely obscure. The Greek word “prophet” sometimes properly belonged,
not to the _nabi_ himself, but to those who, in his own time or in after
time, explained the riddle of his message. When the message passed into
literature, the interpretation of it became linked with the growing
conception of the foreknowledge and providence of God: it was believed
that He not only knew all things that should come to pass, but also
communicated His knowledge to men. The _nabi_, through whom He revealed
His will as to the present, was also the channel through whom He revealed
His intention as to the future. The prophetic writings came to be read
in the light of this conception. The interpreters wandered, as it were,
along vast corridors whose walls were covered with hieroglyphs and
paintings. They found in them symbols which might be interpreted of their
own times. They went on to infer the divine ordering of the present from
the coincidence of its features with features that could be traced in the
hieroglyphs of the past. A similar conception prevailed in the heathen
world. It lay beneath the many forms of divination. Hence Tertullian[119]
speaks of Hebrew prophecy as a special form of divination, “divinatio
prophetica.” So far from being strange to the Greek world, it
was accepted. Those who read the Old Testament without accepting
Christianity, found in its symbols prefigurings, not of Christianity, but
of events recorded in the heathen mythologies. The Shiloh of Jacob’s song
was a foretelling of Dionysus: the virgin’s son of Isaiah was a picture
of Perseus: the Psalmist’s “strong as a giant to run his course” was a
prophecy of Herakles.[120]
The fact that this was an accepted method of interpretation enabled
the Apologists to use it with great effect. It became one of the chief
evidences of Christianity. Explanations of the meaning of historical
events and poetical figures which sound strange or impossible to modern
ears, so far from sounding strange or impossible in the second century,
carried conviction with them. When it was said, “The government shall be
upon his shoulder,” it was meant that Christ should be extended on the
cross;[121] when it was said, “He shall dip his garment in the blood of
the grape,” it was meant that his blood should be, not of human origin,
but, like the red juice of the grape, from God;[122] when it was said
that “He shall receive the power of Damascus,” it was meant that the
power of the evil demon who dwelt at Damascus should be overcome, and the
prophecy was fulfilled when the Magi came to worship Christ.[123] The
convergence of a large number of such interpretations upon the Gospel
history was a powerful argument against both Jews and Greeks. I need
not enlarge upon them. They have formed part of the general stock of
Christian teaching ever since. But I will draw your attention to the fact
that the basis of this use of the Old Testament was not so much the idea
of prediction as the prevalent practice of treating ancient literature as
symbolical or allegorical.
* * * * *
The method came to be applied to the books which 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.[124]
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.[125]
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 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.[126] 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.[127] 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.”[128]
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 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.[129] 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.[130] 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.
“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 solving 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.[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
nature are 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 a _Tu
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 honour of 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 constructed their 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 the _Divine
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, that there 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 religious conduct 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_.
LECTURE IV.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN RHETORIC.
It is customary to measure the literature of an age by its highest
products, and to measure the literary excellence of one age as compared
with that of another by the highest products of each of them. We look,
for example, upon the Periclean age at Athens, or the Augustan age at
Rome, or the Elizabethan age in our own country, as higher than the
ages respectively of the Ptolemies, the Cæsars, or the early Georges.
The former are “golden;” the latter, “silver.” Nor can it be doubted
that from the point of view of literature in itself, as distinguished
from literature in its relation to history or to social life, such a
standard of measurement is correct. But the result of its application
has been the doing of a certain kind of injustice to periods of history
in which, though the high-water mark has been lower, there has been a
wide diffusion of literary culture. This is the case with the period with
which we are dealing. It produced no writer of the first rank. It was
artificial rather than spontaneous. It was imitative more than original.
It was appreciative rather than constructive. Its literature was born,
not of the enthusiasm of free activity, but rather of the passivity
which comes when there is no hope. But as to a student of science the
after-glow is an object of study no less than the noon-day, so to a
student of the historical development of the world the silver age of a
nation’s literature is an object of study no less than its golden age.