"It is not, therefore, Origen who ought to be termed the parent of
allegories amongst the Christians, but Philo . . . many of the Jews, and in particular the Pharisees and Essenes, had indulged much in allegories before the time of Philo, but of this there can be no doubt, that the praefects of the Alexandrian school caught the idea of interpreting Scripture upon philosophical principles, or of eliciting philosophical maxims from the sacred writers by means of allegory, and that by them it was gradually propagated amongst the Christians at large. It is also equally certain that by the writings and example of Philo the fondness for allegories was vastly augmented and confirmed throughout the whole Christian world; and it moreover appears that it was he who first inspired the Christians with that degree of temerity which led them not infrequently to violate the faith of history and wilfully to close their eyes against the obvious and proper sense of terms and words . . . particular instances of it . . . may be shown from Origen and others, who took him for their guide, and who, manifestly, considered a great part both of the Old and New Testaments as not exhibiting a representation of things that really occurred, but merely the images of moral actions."
One can express with a sigh the wish that the discerning practice of
Origen and Philo had persisted down the centuries!
The Schaff-Herzog dictionary of religious terms gives four meanings for such a name as "Jerusalem," following the gradient of classification laid down by Philo. Literally the name means the city in Palestine; morally, the believing soul; allegorically, the Church; and anagogically the city of heavenly peace, located only of course in consciousness. While this scheme of interpretation permits it to mean the geographical town, it by no means confines it to that rendering, which the historical view does.
In the Anti-Nicene Library (Vol. XXIV, p. 127) in the section of
Selections from the Prophetic Scriptures we read: "We must therefore search the Scriptures accurately, since they are admitted to be expressed in parables, and from the names hunt out the thoughts which the Holy Spirit . . . teaches by imprinting his mind, so to speak, on the expressions . . . that the names . . . may be explained and that which is hidden under many integuments may, being handled and learned, come to light and gleam forth."
Jowett, Plato's academically accredited interpreter (Thomas Taylor's
most discerning work being frowned upon) writes: "I am not one of those who believe Plato to have been a mystic or to have had hidden
meanings,"--this in the face of evidence that is mountainous in height
and weight. It is now far over a century since C. F. Dupuis published his once-famous and still valuable work, L'Origine de Tous Les Cultes, in which he asserted that John the Baptist was a purely mythical personage, and identified his name with that of the Babylonian Fish-God, Ioannes, of the Berosan account.
We should not omit reference to a statement by Isaac Myer, the learned
Kabalist scholar, in his work The Oldest Books in the World (VII): "There was undoubtedly an extremely subtle and sublimated thought in
existence among the learned of the ancient Egyptians which modern
thinkers have not yet fully grasped and which busied itself mostly with endeavors to arrive at the bond uniting the unknown and the known or materially existing; this was more especially limited to a religious philosophy and in that mostly to the spiritual nature in man. The mural paintings on the walls in ancient Egyptian tombs are not for decoration; they are symbolical and mystic and the figures thereon are intended for a religious purpose."
In the Gemara of the Jews, it is said that he who has learned the
scripture and not the Mishna "is a blockhead." The Bible, they say, is
like water, the Mishna like wine, the Gemara liked spiced wine. The law is as salt, the Mishna as pepper, the Gemara as balmy spice. To study the Bible can scarcely be considered a virtue; to study the Mishna is a virtue that will be rewarded, but the study of the Gemara is a virtue never to be surpassed. Some of the Talmudists assert that to study the Bible is nothing but a waste of time. The Gemara embodied the anagogical or esoteric interpretation.
Rabbi Simeon Ben-Jochai, compiler of the Zohar, taught only the esoteric signification of doctrines, orally and to a limited few, holding that without the final instruction in the Mercavah the study of the Kabalah would be incomplete. The Kabalah itself says (iii-folio 1526, quoted in Myer's Qabbalah, p. 102): "Each word of the Torah contains an elevated meaning and a sublime mystery." "The recitals of the Torah are the vestments of the Torah. Woe to him who takes this garment for the Torah itself. The simple take notice only of the garments or recitals of the Torah, they know no other thing, they
see not that which is concealed under the vestment. The more nstructed
men do not pay attention to the vestment but to the body which it
envelops."
Godbey, in his searching work, The Lost Tribes a Myth (p. 697), asserts that the Jews lost the origin and meaning of the term "Israel" more than two thousand years ago. "There is no agreement in their ancient literature upon that point. All record and tradition of the old Peniel sanctuary where Jacob became 'an Israel' has been lost."
But one of the most revealing intimations that the Christian movement
early departed from the genius and spirit of the well-known esoteric
methodology is found in a sensational passage quoted in Mead's Orpheus
from Origen in his work Contra Celsum: "The story of Dionysus and the Titans is a dramatic history of the wanderings of the 'Pilgrim-Soul.' And curiously enough we find the story of the resurrection of Dionysus . . . compared by the most learned of the Christian Fathers with the resurrection of Christ. Thus Origen (Contra Celsum IV, 171, Spenc.), after making the comparison, remarks apologetically and somewhat bitterly: 'Or, forsooth, are the Greeks to be allowed to use such words with regard to the soul, and speak in allegorical fashion (tropol egein), and we forbidden to do so?' . . . thus clearly declaring that the resurrection was an allegory of the soul
and not historical." (Orpheus, pp. 185-6).
It will be well to place alongside of Origen's lament over the
deterioration of splendid allegory into crass literalism the unguarded
utterance of Synesius, a Bishop of Alexandria after Origen's time: "In
my capacity as Bishop of the Church I shall continue to disseminate the fables of our religion, but in my private capacity I shall remain a philosopher to the end." By the "fables" he meant the mass of
literalized legend which the Fathers purveyed to the ignorant laity, of which Celsus says that they were so outlandish that even a stupid
child's-nurse would be ashamed to tell them to children. And what he
meant by remaining a "philosopher" would shock the churchmen who have
for centuries decried the great Platonic and Neo-Platonic systems which, in spite of their protestations, have contributed so much to the foundations of Christianity. The unedifying spectacle of a Bishop
fooling the populace with fables he knew were fictions, whilst he fed
his own mind upon the deeper meanings of philosophy from pagan schools, goes far to support the claims made in this work and elsewhere as to the nature and causes of the terrible calamity that befell Christianity in the third century, ending in the conversion of allegory into a literalized Gospel and the befuddlement of the world. |
