IV
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?"