It would be easy to interest you, perhaps even to amuse you, by quoting some of the strange meanings which Philo gives to the narratives of familiar incidents. But I deprecate the injustice which has sometimes been done to him by taking such meanings apart from the historical circumstances out of which allegorical interpretation grew, and the purpose which it was designed to serve. I will give only one passage, which I have chosen because it shows as well as any other the contemporary existence of both the methods of interpretation of which I have spoken—that of finding a moral in every narrative, and that of interpreting the narrative symbolically: the former of these Philo calls the literal, the latter the deeper meaning. The text is Gen. xxviii. 11, “He took the stones of that place and put them beneath his head;” the commentary is:[104]
“The words are wonderful, not only because of their allegorical and physical meaning, but also because of their literal teaching of trouble and endurance. The writer does not think that a student of virtue should have a delicate and luxurious life, imitating those who are called fortunate, but who are in reality full of misfortunes, eager anxieties and rivalries, whose whole life the Divine Lawgiver describes as a sleep and a dream. These are men who, after spending their days in doing injuries to others, return to their homes and upset them—I mean, not the houses they live in, but the body which is the home of the soul—by immoderate eating and drinking, and at night lie down in soft and costly beds. Such men are not the disciples of the sacred word. Its disciples are real men, lovers of temperance and sobriety and modesty, who make self-restraint and contentment and endurance the corner-stones, as it were, of their lives: who rise superior to money and pleasure and fame: who are ready, for the sake of acquiring virtue, to endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold: whose costly couch is a soft turf, whose bedding is grass and leaves, whose pillow is a heap of stones or a hillock rising a little above the ground. Of such men, Jacob is an example: he put a stone for his pillow: a little while afterwards (v. 20), we find him asking only for nature’s wealth of food and raiment: he is the archetype of a soul that disciplines itself, one who is at war with every kind of effeminacy.
“But the passage has a further meaning, which is conveyed in symbol. You must know that the divine place and the holy ground is full of incorporeal Intelligences, who are immortal souls. It is one of these that Jacob takes and puts close to his mind, which is, as it were, the head of the combined person, body and soul. He does so under the pretext of going to sleep, but in reality to find repose in the Intelligence which he has chosen, and to place all the burden of his life upon it.”
In all this, Philo was following not a Hebrew but a Greek method. He expressly speaks of it as the method of the Greek mysteries. He addresses his hearers by the name which was given to those who were being initiated. He bids them be purified before they listen. And in this way it was possible for him to be a Greek philosopher without ceasing to be a Jew.
The earliest methods of Christian exegesis were continuations of the 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.