Christian exegesis also is of Greek origin, but Greek exegesis sprang
in the first place from a rationalistic motive. The first case of
allegorical interpretation of the scriptures of which we know occurred
in the sixth century before Christ, and was an attempt to moralize one
of the most scandalous passages in Homer, the battle of the gods in
the twentieth book of the Iliad. Reason and morality had already
combined at that time to acknowledge a uniform course of action in
nature, and to make the gods the guardians of this uniformity. What
could be said therefore of a hand-to-hand scrimmage between the
guardians of the order of the world? Why, it could be said, and
Theagenes of Rhegium said it, that the gods represented inimical
natural powers or inimical passions of the mind. "Against Hephaestos
stood the great deep-eddying river whom gods call Zanthos and men
Scamandros." Naturally, since fire and water cannot dwell together in
unity. Science adopted this attractive way of dealing with scripture.
Diogenes of Apollonia, who devoted his life to the effort to reconcile
every system to every other, declared that Homer used the myths to
propagate scientific truth. Antisthenes and the Cynics--a preaching
order--developed the method to the full. When Christianity was making
its way into a Hellenized world, the principle was established that
the written word might have three meanings, the obvious one, the
inferential ethical meaning and the symbolic meaning. This principle
was eagerly adopted by educated Jews, and applied to their own
scriptures. "The application," says Hatch, "fulfilled a double
purpose. It enabled educated Jews on the one hand to reconcile their
own adoption of Greek philosophy with their continued adhesion to
their ancestral religion, and on the other hand to show to the
educated Greeks with whom they associated, and whom they frequently
tried to convert, that their literature was neither barbarous nor
unmeaning nor immoral." Christian exegesis naturally adopted the same
method in order to find Christianity everywhere, not only in the
Pentateuch but in Homer. And it was inevitably applied to the New
Testament, for the time came when the story of the life of Christ
needed as much squaring with theology as the old traditions of the
Hebrews. Irenaeus says, for instance, that "when Simeon took the young
child in his arms and said _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." As the pope said
later to Father Tom, "the figgers of spache are the pillars of the
church."
Plato had deprecated the symbolic method. He causes Socrates to say,
_à propos_ of the story of Boreas and Oreithyia, "If I disbelieved it
as the philosophers do, I should not be unreasonable: then I might
say, talking like a philosopher, that Oreithyia was a girl who was
caught by a strong wind and carried off while playing on the cliffs
yonder; but it would take a long and laborious and not very happy
lifetime to deal with all such questions; and for my own part I cannot
investigate them until, as the Delphian precept bids me, I first know
myself." Plato's own method of exegesis consists quite simply of
expurgation. "The chaining of Hera, and the flinging forth of
Hephaistos by his father, and all the fightings of gods which Homer
has described, we shall not admit into our state, whether with
allegories or without them." To this method also Christian exegesis
owed a great debt. Plato's famous short way with Homer and the other
poets, his rejection of all myths that do not tend to edification, and
that detract from the goodness of the gods, showed the fathers how to
deal with what scandalized them in the Hebrew scriptures. Anyone who
reads the last pages of the second book of Plato's _Republic_ will see
whence Clement took his cue when he wrote: "Far be it from us to
believe 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 savor
of sacrifices, who is it that needeth nothing? and if he delights in
lamps, who is it that set the stars in heaven?"
V
But many feel that all these phenomena--cult, doctrine and exegesis,
important as they are in the composition of Christianity, are still
not the essential matter. Essential Christianity is a state of mind
and a rule of life, and its basis is generally held to be the
principles of the Sermon on the Mount. But while a great many people
assent theoretically to the Sermon on the Mount, no one has ever put
it in practice in its entirety and all the time. So-called Christian
society is not organized on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount. It
is not organized on the principle of self-abnegation tending to
self-perfection, but on the principle of the development of the
individual as a unit of society, with duties laid upon him by his
relation to society, and rights guaranteed him by the society he
supports. Our ethics are not conceived as founded on laws god-given
and final, but as evolved by the growth of society, and subject to
endless and progressive change. Where the interest of society requires
that the desires of the bee shall be subordinated to the welfare of
the hive, Christian ethics is often called in as an ally; but if it
were fully in control, society as now organized would disintegrate.
The ethics in which we live and move is that of Roman law, and Roman
law is to a considerable extent a practical version of the ethics of
the Stoics. Moreover the ethics of the Christian church is based on
the doctrine of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and the doctrine of Ambrose
is based on Cicero _de Officiis_, and Cicero's book is based on the
works of Panaetius the Greek stoic of the second century before
Christ. Socrates and Plato had long ago bidden men to love their
enemies, to take no heed for the morrow, to die rather than do wrong,
and to hold their goods in common. The fathers were astounded by the
Christlike utterances of these pagans, and cried in admiration that
they were Christians before Christianity. When the old scholiast read
how Plato's Socrates said that "there is no good thing which is not
the gift of the gods," he wrote on his margin: "Every good gift and
every perfect gift cometh from above." The anti-national character of
Christianity, its determination to ignore frontiers, was anticipated
in the Stoic and Cynic movements. The world was full of missionaries,
and the itinerant Cynic preacher was very near to the Christian.
Epictetus, who exhorted men to remember that they were sons of God,
and to make their lives worthy of their divine parentage gives us a
picture of the true Cynic apostle. That he may be free to deliver his
message to his fellowmen the true Cynic goes as naked, homeless, and
houseless, as a Christian apostle. Like the Christian he goes without
wife, child and friends, if only he may thereby bring others to a
knowledge of themselves and of God. We know of actual cases where
Cynics became Christians, and Christians became Cynics, without any
very great ado. It was, however, the Stoic system, embedded in Roman
institutions, that conquered the world.