Allegorical exegesis

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Allegorical exegesis is the practice of reading a text for senses beneath its surface — on the working assumption that a scripture or a poem says one thing and means another, and that the deeper meaning is the one that matters. Greek writers first called the hidden sense hyponoia, the “under-meaning,” before allegoria — from allos, “other,” and agoreuein, “to speak in the assembly” — displaced the term and named the speaking-otherwise that the older word only gestured at. Modern scholarship sometimes prefers allegoresis, a coinage that keeps two operations apart: composing an allegory, where an author builds the second sense into the work on purpose, and reading allegorically, where an interpreter draws a second sense out of a work that may never have been written to carry one. The distinction is sharp. An allegory invites the key it was made for; allegoresis arrives with a key the text did not request, and the whole long argument over the practice turns on whether such a key unlocks something already there or forces a door that was never a door.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, “The Apotheosis of Homer” (1827), Louvre — the kneeling figures personify the Iliad and Odyssey, the poems whose scandals first drove readers to seek a hidden sense. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The quarrel with Homer

The method is nearly as old as Greek philosophy’s quarrel with Homer. The poems were the common schoolbook of the Greek world, the nearest thing it had to scripture, and they were also full of gods who lie, lust, steal, and brawl. By the late sixth century the philosophers had begun to object: Xenophanes complained that Homer and Hesiod had loaded the gods with every human disgrace, and the charge, repeated and sharpened, eventually drove the poets out of Plato’s ideal city. Readers unwilling to lose Homer rescued him by reading him otherwise. Theagenes of Rhegium, working perhaps around 525 BCE and named in the later tradition as the first allegorist, is said to have read the battle of the gods in Iliad XX as a clash of physical elements — fire against water, the dry against the moist — so that Apollo and Hephaestus and Poseidon became forces of nature rather than quarreling persons. Others moralized the same scenes: the gods at war became powers of the soul, reason against appetite, and the scandal of the divine brawl dissolved into ethical doctrine. The two strategies — physical allegory, which finds cosmology under the myth, and moral or psychological allegory, which finds the inner life — set the pattern that every later allegorist would inherit, whatever the text in front of them.

Stoicism made the procedure systematic. For the Stoics the cosmos was a single rational order pervaded by the Logos, and the gods were names for its forces and phases; reading the myths as an encrypted physics was therefore not a rescue operation grafted onto poetry but the recovery of a knowledge the old poets had held and veiled. Stoic etymology became a favored instrument — Cronos parsed as chronos, time that devours what it brings forth; Hera as aēr, the air; the divine names treated as compressed natural philosophy. The first-century handbook ascribed to a certain Cornutus, the Compendium of Greek Theology, gathers this learning into a teaching manual, and the longer treatise that goes under the name Heraclitus, the Homeric Problems, defends the poet outright: Homer would be wholly impious, its author argues, if he were wholly unallegorical. The claim is the hinge of the whole tradition. It assumes that the offense of the literal sense is itself the signal that a second sense is intended — that the stumbling stone is placed, not stumbled over by accident.

From physics to contemplation: the Neoplatonic turn

What the Stoics treated as a system of natural philosophy the late Platonists turned into something close to a rite of contemplation. In the hands of Plotinus and his school the sensible world was itself an image and overflow of intelligible reality, an emanation descending from the One through Intellect and Soul; to read a myth allegorically was then to perform in little what the soul does in its ascent — to pass from the image to what the image is of, and through that passage to be drawn upward. Porphyry of Tyre, who edited Plotinus into the Enneads and wrote his life, gave the method its most celebrated single performance. Taking a few lines of the Odyssey — the cave of the nymphs on Ithaca, with its perpetual water, its bowls and amphorae, its looms of stone where the nymphs weave sea-purple cloth, and its two gates, one for mortals to the north and one for the gods to the south — he read the whole scene as a map of the cosmos and of the soul’s descent into the world of becoming. The cave is the material world, beautiful and dark at once; the stone looms are the bodies woven onto the descending soul; the two gates are the tropics through which souls come down into birth and return. Nothing in the passage is left as mere furniture. The short treatise that records this reading, On the Cave of the Nymphs, survives intact and became a model of how a sacred text might be made transparent to the order of all things.

Edward John Poynter, “The Cave of the Storm Nymphs” (1903) — the sea-cave of the nymphs, the Homeric scene that Porphyry read as a map of the soul’s descent into the world of becoming. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The standard modern account of this whole development is Robert Lamberton’s Homer the Theologian (1986), which traces how the Neoplatonist reading of the epics reshaped the very idea of what a great poem could mean and carried it forward toward Dante. The Greek philosophical Hermetica belong to the same late-antique air: a literature of veiled instruction in which the surface is understood to hold a teaching reserved for those fit to receive it, and the act of reading is already an initiation. The kinship with gnosis is close here — the conviction that a saving knowledge lies hidden in the text, legible only to the awakened, gives allegoresis a soteriological charge it never quite loses.

Philo and the Torah

Philo of Alexandria, a Jew writing in Greek in the first century, did for the Torah what the Greeks had done for Homer, and did it with a conviction that the text deserved nothing less. Working in the Middle Platonist register and drawing freely on Stoic moral psychology, he read the patriarchs as conditions and stages of the soul — Abraham the soul that learns by instruction, Isaac the soul that knows by nature, Jacob the soul that wins its knowledge by struggle — and the four rivers of Eden as the cardinal virtues flowing from a single wisdom. His running Allegorical Commentary on Genesis, the spine of his esoteric work, treats the narrative surface as a screen across which the drama of the rational soul is projected. Yet Philo did not discard the letter. The literal Sabbath must still be kept, the literal circumcision still performed; the allegory rises from the law, it does not abolish it, and he had harsh words for those Alexandrian contemporaries who treated the discovery of the inner meaning as license to drop the outer observance. This double fidelity — the letter honored and the spirit sought through it — is Philo’s lasting bequest, and it set the terms on which the practice could be defended as recovery rather than evasion. His allegory of Hagar and Sarah, the slave-girl standing for the preliminary studies and the free wife for philosophy itself, passed almost verbatim into Christian use.

Origen’s anatomy of scripture

Origen of Alexandria carried the method into Christian scholarship and gave it an anatomy. Scripture, he argued in On First Principles, has a body, a soul, and a spirit, answering to the body, soul, and spirit of the human being — a literal or fleshly sense for the simple, a moral sense for those advancing, and a spiritual sense for the perfect. The third is the goal, but the way Origen reached it is the striking part of his account. He held that the spiritual sense had been placed in the text by its true author, the divine Word, and that to drive readers toward it the Spirit had deliberately woven into the letter things that cannot be taken literally at all: impossibilities, contradictions, commands no one could obey, scandals of the narrative surface. These are not flaws but signals — stumbling blocks set on purpose, so that the reader who trips on the letter is made to look up and seek the meaning that does not trip. Here the principle latent since the Homeric Problems becomes explicit doctrine: the offense of the literal is the fingerprint of intention. Origen’s threefold scheme, his practice in the homilies and the great Commentary on John, and his inheritance of the library at Caesarea made him the pivot through whom Philonic allegory entered the Latin and Greek churches alike.

The fourfold sense of the Latin West

The medieval West built the result into a standard fourfold sense. The schema was already cataloged by John Cassian in the fifth century, who used the single word Jerusalem to show all four at once: historically a city of the Jews, allegorically the Church of Christ, morally — tropologically — the faithful soul, and anagogically the heavenly city to come. A much-quoted Latin distich, attributed to the thirteenth-century Dominican Augustine of Dacia and made famous by Nicholas of Lyra, fixed the scheme in a memory verse: the letter teaches what was done, allegory what to believe, the moral sense what to do, the anagogical where one is bound. The literal records events; the allegorical teaches doctrine; the moral directs conduct; the anagogical points to last things. The four were imagined as a building raised on the foundation of the letter — history first, then the walls of faith, then the conduct that lives in the house, then the roof open to heaven — and the order mattered: Thomas Aquinas insisted that every spiritual sense must rest on the literal, that nothing necessary to faith is contained under the allegory which scripture does not elsewhere teach plainly. The great twentieth-century reconstruction of this whole edifice is Henri de Lubac’s Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture (French 1959–64, English from 1998), which recovered the medieval reading as a coherent theology of history rather than the fanciful word-game its critics had made of it.

Frontispiece of the Bible moralisée (Codex Vindobonensis 2554, France, c. 1220–1230) — the picture Bibles set scriptural scenes beside their allegorical meanings, the fourfold reading turned into a program of images. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

This is the matrix within which the emblematics of the Renaissance later flowered — the emblem book, with its motto, picture, and verse, is an allegoresis turned into a small machine, training the reader to look through the visible image to the moral or spiritual sense it carries.

The ladder of pardes and the orchard’s fourth rung

Medieval Jewish interpretation raised a parallel ladder, distinct in lineage but strikingly similar in shape: peshat, remez, derash, sod — the plain sense, the hinted, the homiletic or sought-out, and the secret — whose initial letters spell pardes, the Persian loanword for a walled orchard or park that also lies behind the Greek paradeisos and the English “paradise.” The acronym was given its fourfold reading in thirteenth-century Spain, in the circle around Moses de León, though each of the four methods of reading long predated the name that gathered them. The fourth rung, sod, the secret sense, became the province of Kabbalah, where the words and even the letters of the Torah were read as a tissue of divine names and a script of the inner life of God — the most ambitious allegoresis ever attempted, in which the text is not merely about the divine but is woven of it.

Frontispiece of Portae Lucis (Augsburg, 1516), Paulus Ricius’s Latin version of Joseph Gikatilla’s “Gates of Light” — the first printed diagram of the sefirot, the divine structure that kabbalists read in the words and letters of the Torah. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Across the Islamic world, the exegesis of Sufism drew a comparable line through the sacred text, pairing the Qur’an’s outward zahir with an inward batin, the manifest wording with a hidden meaning yielded to spiritual unveiling — a distinction that runs deep into Shi’i and Sufi hermeneutics and made the reading of scripture itself a station on the path. These are not the arts of the diviner: the reader of sod or batin is unfolding a meaning held to be already present in the words, not casting for an answer the way the sortes opens a book at random for an oracle. The contrast is worth marking precisely because the two can look alike from outside — both treat the holy book as charged with more than it says — yet the allegorist reads continuously and the diviner consults by lot.

The standing objection

The method has never lacked opponents, and the strongest of them shared the allegorist’s reverence for the text while drawing the opposite conclusion from it. The school of Antioch — Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the preacher John Chrysostom — pressed the letter and the historical sense against Alexandrian allegory, allowing a disciplined theōria, a contemplative seeing of the spiritual realities that the events themselves foreshadowed, but refusing to let the narrative evaporate into symbol; for them the history had to stand if the figure built on it was to mean anything. Reformation polemic narrowed legitimate meaning further toward the literal and grammatical sense, suspicious of an interpretive freedom that seemed to let the reader hear in scripture whatever the reader already believed. Modern criticism, pursuing the author’s intention and the text’s first setting, has largely judged allegoresis a way of putting meanings into texts rather than finding them there — a transfer of the interpreter’s own framework onto a surface that never asked for it. That is the standing question, and it is interpretive on every side: whether the hidden sense is discovered or conferred. Practitioners did not doubt which. For Philo, Origen, and the kabbalists alike, the deeper meaning was the older one, set in the text by an author who was not, finally, human.

Texts and scholarship

The primary monuments of the tradition are largely accessible. Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs survives whole and may be read in Thomas Taylor’s translation hosted in the Library, the small classic of contemplative allegoresis. Philo’s allegorical commentaries on Genesis are available complete in C. D. Yonge’s nineteenth-century English (the only full public-domain Philo), superseded for scholarship by the Loeb edition of Colson, Whitaker, and Marcus; Origen’s On First Principles, where the body / soul / spirit scheme is laid out, comes down in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation and in the standard critical editions. The Hermetic literature that shares this late-antique habit of veiled instruction can be read in G. R. S. Mead’s rendering of the Corpus Hermeticum. For the Greek background, Robert Lamberton’s Homer the Theologian is the indispensable survey of the Neoplatonist reading of the epics, and Jean Pépin’s Mythe et allégorie (1958) remains the great history of the pagan and early-Christian practice together. For the Latin Middle Ages, Henri de Lubac’s four-volume Medieval Exegesis is the controlling work, recovering the fourfold sense as a theology of history; Beryl Smalley’s The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (1941) maps the parallel rise of the literal sense in the schools. For the Jewish ladder, the fourfold pardes and the place of sod are surveyed in reference accounts such as the Jewish Virtual Library’s entry on Pardes; Gershom Scholem’s studies trace how the secret rung became the kabbalists’ own domain. Across these literatures one continuity holds: the assumption that a text worth reading at all rewards reading more than once, and differently, the second time.

→ In the library: Porphyry — On the Cave of the Nymphs (Taylor, 1823) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

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