Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/781

HE E MEN. EU TICS 745 Jeliovali s revelation in the Jewish Church and the Christian. Every particular in prophetic passages like Gen. xlix. 9-12 had a mystical reference to Christ and His salvation, His passion being signified by the washing of the garments in wine, the Jews by the ass, the Gentiles by the colt. The allegorical method, which offers itself as a natural expedient for harmonizing difficulties between religious faith and philosophical feeling, and which had been freely applied to Homer by Plato, found a most congenial home in Alexandria, where Philo s influence was strong. It became a recognized principle with the entire catechetical school, firmly rooted in the distinction which there prevailed between 7rio-ri9. and yi/okrt?. Clement of Alexandria, who seems to have been the first to bring the New Testament no less than the Old under its scope, finds a parabolic meaning in all Scripture, and affirms that the literal sense carries us simply to the elementary stage of Christian know ledge called faith, while it is only through the allegorical or mystical interpretation that we can reach that higher wisdom which implies insight into the essence, reason, and real relations of faith s objects. He speaks of a "tradition of the church," an " ecclesiastical canon," or " canon of the truth," which gives the key to the true understanding of Scripture, and is identified with the yvSo-is or spiritual apprehension of divine mysteries as that was first communi cated by Christ to the apostles in oral form, and by them transmitted to their successors. This canon is described as " the consent and harmony of the law and the prophets with the covenant delivered during the Lord s presence. " In accordance with this Clement discovers in the Mosaic law three senses in addition to the natural. The terms in which the precepts are expressed are images of other things, rules for the direction of life, and predictions of the future. The high priest s robe is an emblem of the world of sense ; the bells upon it are a symbol of the acceptable year of the Lord. The decalogue itself is spiritualized, the fifth com mandment being taken to refer to the Heavenly Father, and that divine Wisdom which is the mother of the just. 1 A position of commanding importance must be claimed for Origen, whose genius secured wide and long-continued acceptance for his greatest extravagances. Exact grammati cal exegesis is by no means alien to his homilies and com mentaries, and many of his strangest uses of Scripture may be viewed as practical applications rather than scholarly expositions. Fanciful modes, however, are so predominant that he has been generally regarded as the chief allegorist of the Christian Church. Yet the disservice thus done by his example cannot cloud the lustre of his merits in Biblical studies. His Platonism, his adhesion to the Alexandrian idea of yi/okrt?, his wish to defend and elucidate the Christian religion by reason and philosophy, his exaggerated notion of inspiration, combined to commend a mystical style of interpretation. In terms of the Platonic division of man into body, soul, and spirit, he held that Scripture had a threefold sense, crw/x.artK05, I^V^KO?, Trveu/xart/co?. The first, or obvious, sense was meant for the edification of the simple. The second, which was to be sought for under the letter, and embodied the soul of Scripture, exhibited the bearing of the word upon the practical needs of the moral life, and addressed itself to the more advanced. The third, which lay still deeper, and imparted the spirit of Scripture, disclosed pure unmixed truth, exercised the speculative powers, and was intended only for the perfect, such as are described in 1 Cor. ii. 6, 7. He has been sometimes credited with the promulgation of the fourfold distinction afterwards so current, especially in the Latin Church, and expressed in the couplet (given, e.g., by Lyra): 1 See especially Strom., vi. p. 676-89; also Baur, Die Christliche Gnosis, and Kaye, Some Account of the Writings and Opinions of Clement of Alexandria. Litera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia. Such terms, however, as tropological, mystical, allegorical, pneumatic, anagogical, are rather interchangeable with him. The literal sense, too, is so far from being dispensed with that he has even been regarded (e.g., by Ernesti) as the first who secured for it its primary value, particularly in New Testament exegesis. But, while he maintains that the spirit and the letter are generally to be taken together, and admits that no small portion of the contents of Scripture (e.g., the decalogue, precepts of universal obligation, even many of the narratives) may not be allegorized, his practice is greatly in the direction of esteeming the literal cense only as the protecting shell of secret treasure. Wherever the letter yields a meaning which seems to him unworthy, or opposed to reason and possibility, a mystical sense is discovered. He stumbles at the record of creation when ifc introduces the sun after the third day, at many of the Mosaic ordinances, at the realism of Christ s temptation. He finds mysteries or figures of spiritual things in Eden, Abraham s wives, Piebecca s visit to the well, the waterpot* at Cana, and many other narratives. The later type of Alexandrian hermeneutics is seen in Cyril, who, without wholly abandoning the literal sense, carries typical inter pretation into unqualified allegorical extremes in dogmatic and polemic interests. The Western Church exhibited the same tendency, not only in the marked artificialities of such teachers as Hippo- lytus, Hilary, and Ambrose, but in the eminent instance of Augustine. Though not the first to attempt a statement of hermeneutical canons (having before him, for instance, the seven rules of Tichonius, which he states and criticizes at length), he constructed more of a system in this line of in quiry as in some others. Many of the principles which are enunciated in different parts of his writings, and most defi nitely in his De Doclrina Christiana, are of permanent value. He conceives the object of interpretation to be the discovery of the thoughts of the writer exactly as he meant to express them. He shows that the real sense is often not to be got by insisting merely on expressions as they stand by themselves ; that they must be compared with the immediate context, with similar passages elsewhere, and with the essentials of Christian doctrine; that faith and the aids of the Holy Spirit cannot supersede the use of science ; that a reverent and sympathetic mind is indispensable. But along with such rules as these he propounds others which served as grounds for his allegorical procedure. He affirms, e.g., that whatever cannot clearly be seen to bear upon honesty of morals or the truth of faith must be taken figuratively. He speaks of several different modes of interpretation, the historical, the aetiological, the analogical, the allegorical. He usually practises the first and the last of these. His profound spiritual experience gave him a truer insight than his canons indicated into many parts of Scripture, and above all into the Pauline epistles. Yet over most even of the New Testament he allows the allegorical fancy to range freely. His influence perpetuated the reign of the allegorical method for many centuries throughout the Western Church. In Gregory the Great, the Venerable Bede, Hrabanus Maurus, Hugo de S. Caro, and many others, we see it steadily extending rather than merely maintaining its sway, until in Bonaventura we find the current four senses historical, tropological, allegorical, anagogical enlarged to seven by the addition of the symbolical, synecdochical, and hyperbolical. 2. The second great hermeneutical tendency, which we call the Dependent, has an equally instructive history. It is easy to understand how extreme allegorizing would lead to a counter movement, and how this would be helped by the exigencies of dealing with heretics who were themselves

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