The efficacy of salvation in the allegorical reading of scripture: learning from Origen.

Morgan, Brandon Lee

Introduction

This article explores the possibility of returning to the practice of ancient allegorical interpretation as a resource for developing a post-critical theological reading of Scripture that prioritizes its formative significance for contemporary scriptural readers. What I am after is not the specific theological conclusions proposed within an ancient reading of a scriptural text. Those conclusions are, no doubt, interesting, but often force the comparison between ancient allegorical practice and various modern exegetical strategies in a distracting and unhelpful way. I want instead to see allegorical reading as a phenomenon that arises within a set of theological commitments about the impact of scriptural reading--its soteriological efficacy--on the reader.

I go about this task in three steps. First, I problematize the contemporary scholarly distinction between typology and allegory, seeing it as supporting an often unwarranted anxiety about ancient allegorical practice. This anxiety, usually involving the relationship between interpretation and history, presses allegorical readings into a predetermined opposition to history in a way that argumentatively begs the question in favor of discreet typological reading. It will be important to notice how such modern discreet categories not only obscure the variety of nonliteral reading practices in the ancient period--not noticing how they work together--but also belie certain theological commitments about the efficacy of scriptural reading that gives allegorical forms their force. Second, I take up the discussion of "figural" scriptural reading in Erich Auerbach's essay "Figura," showing how his theory of figural interpretation both preserves and surpasses the assumptions of the allegory/typology distinction, thus providing a framework that pinpoints the benefits and dangers of nonliteral interpretation. Nevertheless, recognizing Auerbach's hesitance to affirm the procedures of the allegorical readings of Origen of Alexandria, the paragon of ancient Christian allegorical interpretation, I turn to Origen's theology and his second homily on Genesis to explore how his reading strategies depend on a picture of scriptural soteriological efficacy, bringing the ancient writings to bear on the contemporary ecclesial formation of the Christian reader. With the help of Henri de Lubac and Karen Jo Torjesen, I argue that Origen's allegorical reading presumes a theological relationship between Scripture and the reader that allows past events preserved in ancient Scripture to contribute to the contemporary soteriological formation of the reader, thus including the reader into the transformative import of the scriptural text. (1)

Allegory and Typology

The term "allegory" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] has been used since the ancient period and is associated with interpretive strategies that have been questioned and criticized for about just as long. No doubt the origin of its meaning, literally "to say something other," (2) has often sparked a suspicion that interpretive uses of allegory do a disservice to the meaning of the text under analysis. Yet the Christian incorporation of allegory as a way of reading Scripture has involved a distinct set of questions that attempt to determine whether ancient Christian allegorical reading bears direct methodological influence from early Platonic, Gnostic, and Philonic uses of allegorical interpretation. Attempting to differentiate between allegory and what has come to be called "typology" (derived from the Latin typologia) has been thought to assist modern scholarship on ancient Christian exegesis in differentiating between properly Christian interpretive commitment regarding Scripture and otherwise non-Christian influences that bore on ancient Christian interpretation.

One of the first twentieth-century scholars to incorporate this distinction, Jean Danielou, attempted to discern what in Origen's exegetical writings derived from the Christian tradition and what involved carryover from other non-Christian sources. (4) According to Danielou, typological interpretation concerned the correspondences between events, persons, and institutions in the Old and New Testaments and therefore derived from a noble Christian heritage for discerning the inherent unity of the Canon. Contrarily, "allegorical" reading within the Alexandrian Christian tradition (specifically Origen) derived from the symbolism of Philo, which assumed (among other things) that the entirety of Scripture was subject to symbolic meaning and that that meaning could be applied directly to the moral description and formation of the soul. (5) Danielou thought many of Origen's allegorical conclusions regarding the soul signified a departure from the normative Christian practice of typology and thus from interpretive content that remains substantially fixed to the biblical text itself.

Henri de Lubac took offense to Danielou's rendering of the matter, accusing him of displacing the Christian terminology and use of allegory (used by Paul in Gal 4:24) and introducing a concept foreign to ancient Christian exegesis--typology. (6) This obscured the fact that allegory bore a distinctively Christian heritage in a way that the term typology did not. (7) What is of importance in this debate is the way the scholarly distinction between allegory and typology underwrote a strategy to differentiate those elements in ancient exegesis that were hallmarks of Christian exegetical practice and those elements that were fundamentally foreign to proper scriptural exegesis. For instance, Origen's various renderings of scriptural passages as bearing import for the description and moral formation of the soul is read within the allegory/typology distinction as a Philonic carryover fundamentally disconnected from scriptural meanings.

Despite the multiple criticisms of Danielou's argument, the allegory/typology distinction continued to function in the twentieth century along similar lines, mapping those forms of interpretation proper to Christian tradition and Scripture and those forms foreign to it. Or in Peter Martens's words, "Over the course of the next half-century, a dominant trajectory of the scholarship would insist, with [Danielou], that 'typology' and 'allegory' ought indeed to serve as markers for the better and worse forms of nonliteral exegesis." (8) Exemplary in this regard are the essays by G. W. H. Lampe and K. J. Woollcombe printed under the title Essays on Typology. (9) In the first half of his essay "The Reasonableness of Typology," Lampe mounts a defense of the recurrent need for typology as a form of scriptural interpretation, particularly in response to its rejection by critical biblical scholarship. In so doing, he recognized the need to acknowledge and defend uses of types and anti-types, figures and fulfilments that the New Testament writers deployed as a way to make sense of Christ's coming and the unity of the Christian narrative and Canon. This use of intra-textual (10) biblical typology was "grounded in a particular view of history which the New Testament writers undoubtedly held themselves and which Christians for whom the Bible is authoritative can scarcely repudiate." (11) The second half of his essay, however, is a diatribe against allegorical exegesis, which views Scripture as a "single vast volume of oracles and riddles, a huge book of secret puzzles to which the reader has to find clues." (12) Within the allegorical strategy, "the historical significance of a passage, its contexts in the process of covenant-history and the intention of its original author are all of very minor importance, if any." (13) Like Danielou, Lampe sees allegory as an anti-historical Hellenization (14) of the biblical author's implicitly historical perspective and, thus, inherently opposed to the "recognition of historical correspondences" that typology explicates.

Woollcombe's essay follows suit by helpfully defining what he means by "typology" and "allegory." According to his account, "Typological exegesis is the search for linkages between events, persons or things within the historical framework of rerelation, whereas allegorism is the search for a secondary and hidden meaning underlying the primary and obvious meaning of a narrative. This secondary sense of a narrative, discovered by allegorism, does not necessarily have any connection at all with the historical framework of revelation." (15) Following Lampe and Woollcombe, R. P. C. Hanson's definition of the difference between these forms of interpretation is almost verbatim: "Typology is the interpreting of an event belonging to the present or the recent past as the fulfillment of a similar situation recorded or prophesied in Scripture. Allegory is the interpretation of an object or person or a number of objects or persons as in reality meaning some object or person of a later time, with no attempt made to trace a relationship of 'similar situation' between them." (16)

Hanson states this on the first page of his volume on Origen's exegesis, Allegory and Event, perhaps the most influential English text on the topic. Beginning his inquiry into Origen's scriptural interpretation with the allegory/typology distinction, Hanson unnecessarily predetermines his negative judgment on Origen, who, in Hanson's mind, correlates events, persons and objects in a subjectivist fashion that fails to "trace a relationship of 'similar situation' between them." Origen's allegorical interpretations never allowed him to speak from within the content of Scripture, seeking often to reconcile its content with foreign moral or philosophical commitments. Specifically, Origen cannot acknowledge history in a way appropriate to the biblical narrators' understanding of revelation. "In [Origen's] view history, if it is to have any significance at all, can be no more than an acted parable, a charade for showing forth the eternal truths about God." (17) Allegorical reading, given its penchant for interpreting events as "other" than history, as, say, about the contemporary status of the soul, cannot but fail in the exact way typology succeeds.

What surfaces starkly in Lampe and Woollcombe's essays and Hanson's judgments against Origen is the claim that allegory neglects the historical associations recognizable to the biblical author and reader as inherently scriptural, thus leaving the historical field through which revelation has come to human beings. It risks arbitrariness because it attempts to make extra-textual associations no longer related to the biblical narrative, therefore inscribing biblical texts with foreign extra-Christian meanings. Again, what is at stake in the distinction between ancient allegory and typology is the ability to differentiate between properly Christian attention to history as the medium of revelation and the non-Christian practices that fail to acknowledge that history.

There are, however, at least two distinct problems embedded within the allegory/typology distinction, both of which risk obscuring the picture of the relationship between Scripture and the reader that partially animated Origen's Christian allegory in particular. First, the distinction obscures the variety of words and concepts Origen uses to describe his readings. This also leads over simply to Origen's direct association with Philonic exegesis, which is more generically moral and not Christological. (18) Second, the distinction pits typology and allegory as contradictory opposites, occluding the ways these exegetical strategies can often depend on and animate each other. This logic of opposition, moreover, risks further oppositions, say, between history and spirit, past and present, literal and non-literal, in ways that misconstrue specific theological commitments that animate Origen's allegory. Specifically, it misses in Origen's allegorical reading his commitment to making ancient events and occurrences within Scripture uniquely efficacious for the present-day reader in Christological and, thus, soteriological ways. The question facing Origen is not only the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, but how the unifying revelation motivating those Scriptures (i.e. the Logos of God) is represented to the reader of Scripture with soteriological efficacy.

The first problem arises through misunderstanding the concepts at play in Origen's interpretive strategies. According to de Lubac, Origen is not even exclusively tied to using [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] to describe his task, using along with it: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (anagogy), [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (tropology), [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (understanding), [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (thinking), [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (type) and various terms related to [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (spirit). (19) Using these multiple terms to describe, for instance, the relationship between truth and types or between understanding and the object understood, gives the impression that Origen's interpretive strategies are difficult to categorize through the contemporary definitions of either allegory or typology. Not to mention, there are times when Origen uses [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (allegory) in a pejorative way about non-Christian interpreters. According to Martens, it appears that Origen simply uses allegory to reference any kind of nonliteral interpretation, appropriate or not. (20) This differs from the contemporary scholarly definitions of allegory, which appear to describe it only pejoratively and neglects other criteria for determining positive or negative varieties.

As for typology, this word is foreign to Origen, though he does use [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (type, though never [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) to convey the "representation," "image," "symbol," or "figure," of something. (21) However, "type" is also used synonymously in Origen with allegory to connote forms of nonliteral reading and not, as in the contemporary literature, to reference an opposition between historically attentive and inattentive readings. (22) Furthermore, like allegory, type also has a pejorative use, referencing those interpretations that remain fixed on the type or figure itself and refusing the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or spiritual truth of the figure. (23) Thus, Origen appears to see strategies commonly associated with allegory and typology as working together to achieve a spiritual understanding of Scripture.

Recounting the ways Origen's vocabulary of terms can possibly interact, it becomes easier to see his nonliteral interpretations as comprising multiple strategies to relate persons and concepts within the Old and New Testaments as well as those persons and concepts with later non-canonical ones (e.g., the contemporary Church or the reader). Because Origen sees allegorical reading extending beyond the limits of intra-canonical associations, he more easily recognizes relationships between Scripture and the contemporary reader. This allows him to trace their "similar situation" through their shared proximity to the Logos of God who both organizes Scripture's spiritual import and motivates the perfection of the reader in the present. Interpreting Origen, not through the opposition between typology and allegory, but through their multiple mutual interrelations, assists picturing Origen's reading as involving the extension of figural associations within the canon to extra-canonical associations that make the spiritual efficacy of Scripture perpetually present to the reader. In this reading, the allegory/typology distinction fails to suffice, not only because it does not capture the multiple uses of Origen's exegetical vocabulary, but also because it obscures the ways allegory and typology arise in Origen to support his theological commitment of viewing Scripture as vital to the fashioning and perfecting of Christian scriptural readers.

But what about the logic of opposition assumed in the allegory/ typology distinction, especially the historical and the spiritual features of interpretation? Does this picture of allegorical reading invariably associate persons, concepts, and objects from within the biblical narrative to, say, the contemporary reader in such a way that undermines the historical particularity of the biblical narrative? Do we risk turning historically recounted narratives into parables for the moral growth of the soul? These questions about allegory are perennial and I do not intend to answer them definitively here. No doubt, the contemporary judgment of allegorical reading gathers around the question of whether or not it gives history its due. And in Origen's case in particular, the question of history is raised within a suspicion that, like Philo's often moralized reading of the Old Testament Pentateuch, Origen's interpretation attends to spiritual matters wholly detached from biblical history. But since the issue here is not a defense of allegory per se, but of the ways that its use points to a fruitful theological commitment of Origen's about the relationship between Scripture and the reader, I will only say enough to problematize the strict opposition between history and spirit that often underwrites the allegory/typology distinction and other criticisms of allegory. To attend to this question, I turn to Auerbach's account of figural interpretation in order to sharpen the question about the relationship between history and the spiritual.

Auerbach, Figura, and History (24)

In Auerbach's important essay, "Figura," he recounts the etymology of this term, seeing its most vibrant and important uses within ancient Christian exegesis. Auerbach's understanding of what he calls figural interpretation involves three particular features: two historical persons or events, the relationship between them, and the act of interpretation that discerns this relationship. He defines figural interpretation this way:

   Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events
   or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself, but also
   the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. The
   two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real
   events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical
   life. Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a
   spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events
   whether past, present, or future, and not with concepts or
   abstractions. (25)

This definition accords with Auerbach's view of figura as "something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical." (26) A figura exists in history with the unique capacity to announce a future event or person also within history, which is related in distinctive ways to the initial figura. The future historical event Auerbach simply labels the fulfillment of the figura. In a certain sense, the figura, bearing a distinctive foreshadowing of its fulfillment, can also be said to contain its fulfillment. Nevertheless, the two historical persons or events related in terms of figura and fulfillment obtain fundamentally different positions in time and history. They are not, for instance, causally related.

As the definition of figural interpretation claims, determining a relationship between thefigura and its fulfillment (e.g., the relationship between the Red Sea and Christian baptism) requires what Auerbach terms an intellectus spiritualis, which is the only spiritual factor of figural interpretation. Neither the person nor event of the figura or of its fulfillment exists in abstraction from a historical and temporal location. For instance, when Tertullian relates the pool of Bethesda with baptism, they are both "concretely real, and all that is spiritual about them is the interpretation or effect." (27) Often in ancient Christian figural reading the fulfillment can be designated by veritas (truth) and the figure by umbra (shadow) or imago (image); "but both shadow and truth are abstract only in reference to the meaning first concealed, then revealed; they are concrete in reference to the things or persons which appear as vehicles of the meaning." Historical figures, in Auerbach's view, are thus "interpreted spiritually (spiritaliter interpretari), but the interpretation points to a carnal, hence historical fulfillment." (28) In this case, meaning remains affixed to the figural associations and arises only through recognition of that relation.

The question of independent meaning, according to Auerbach, arises within the temptation to supplant the historical character of either the figure or its fulfillment by characterizing their relationship through abstract reflection. This temptation arises within Christian figural reading itself, which placed the Old Testament in an "exegetic context which often removed the thing told very far from its ... sensory occurrence and toward its meaning." (29) According to Auerbach, the Christian view of reality suffers an inherent "antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning" (30) that perpetually tempts the reader away from the sensible features of the figure-fulfillment relationship and toward a third independent feature abstracted as "meaning" or "doctrine" that explains their associations. Non-sensible (i.e., non-literal) meaning risks undermining the figural significance of the figure-fulfillment association by what David Dawson terms the "figurative." (31) Figurative interpretation isolates meaning from figural associations, making the figural association a logically independent mode of representation. It is the logical independence of meaning from figural association that reduces it to mere representation, producing according to Dawson, "the binary opposition between literality and nonliterality." (32) Figural reading is meant to avoid this dichotomy. It is meant, more precisely, to view these associations as constitutive of meaning and not illustrative of it.

Auerbach concedes that figural interpretation is a form of allegory "in the widest sense." (33) But he criticizes most allegorical readings (Origen included) for exemplifying the figurative divorce between meaning and representation. By relating historical events and persons with extra-historical concepts, allegory often defaces the concrete reality of historical objects. There is, therefore, a tension in ancient Christian interpretation between figural historical associations and figurative extra-historical abstraction.

In effect, Auerbach seems to preserve pieces of the allegory/ typology distinction, specifically the oppositional character between historical and non-historical forms of interpretation. He appears to see historical reality as that which is sensible or bodily and struggles to account for the fact that nonliteral interpretation can hold between physical and spiritual objects without supplanting what is historical about them. More precisely, Auerbach's anxiety about allegorical interpretation surfaces from his presupposition that the fulfillments of biblical-historical figura cannot obtain to extra-historical (i.e., spiritual) entities (i.e., human souls) without undermining the historical aspects of those entities. There appears to be little traffic between historical and spiritual realities in Auerbach's figural interpretation, which risks the conclusion that past biblical events and occurrences are not efficacious or transformative for the spiritual perfection of the present reader. In fact, Auerbach's attention to "concrete history" is often so great that it is difficult to discern what is and is not included within his understanding of "history." To remain in this otherwise productive theoretical space would risk viewing allegorical readings as bearing only an abstract moral efficacy for the reader (as in Philo) and not a specified soteriological efficacy (as in Origen).

One possible step toward remedying Auerbach's shortcomings here, as well as those of the allegory/typology distinction, is to see allegorical reading as extending figural associations between historical narratives and generic features of the created order. This position, advocated by Peter Martens, views "historical" as "created realities circumscribed by space and time." (34) For allegorical readers like Origen, this would include "angels, demons, the church, particular people, generic people (i.e., the soul), virtuous principles of living, etc." (35) This view of history is further supported in Origen's case by suggesting that his use of the phrase [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], usually interpreted as "according to the history" or "according to the historical sense," be more specifically rendered. Thus, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] would have the sense of "written inquiry," "report," or "narrative." (36) Therefore, even when Origen's allegory pushes him to contrast [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] with nonliteral interpretations, the distinction is between "an interpretation that recounts the details of what has been recorded about the past, and one that proposes a new referent--still historical--that the recorded past ... symbolizes." (37) This allows allegorical readings in general to more easily make figural associations between recorded historical or history-like accounts and generically historical features of the created order--like the perfection of the soul, or the acquisition of virtues or vice--which are not particularized but can be said to reside within created-historical space. It is that space, after all, where revelation occurs according to all Christian readers, allegorical or not.

With Martens's help, we can more easily adopt Auerbach's helpful insistence on preserving the historical nature of figural associations without isolating meaning as logically independent from those historical states of affairs that figural reading relates together. Meaning, therefore, remains fixed to relations between figural persons, events, and their generic or spiritual features, given that we see even these features as residing within the historical scope of created space and time. By not succumbing too easily to Auerbach's anxiety about spiritual or allegorical readings and their relation to history, we can more appropriately take on a number of Auerbach's theoretical concerns in our account of Origen's allegorical reading. In particular, we can see how his allegory supports a theological commitment about the relationship between scriptural narration and the soteriological (not simply moral) life of the reader by establishing and maintaining figural associations between them. Thus, Origen's readings are not reducible to Auerbach's fears about logically independent accounts of meaning. Origen's allegory, in this case, figurally makes present ancient scriptural narration to the contemporary reader, thus contributing, through Scripture, a form of holiness that Origen claims is vital to Christian perfection. To see how his allegory works to support these commitments, I turn to Origen's theology.

Figuring Salvation in Origen's Second Homily on Genesis

In order to better recognize Origen's commitment to the contemporary soteriological efficacy of Scripture, I will highlight two common structural features of Origen's "interpretive theory." (38) The first is the commonly referenced three-fold sense of Scripture (39) and the second is what Torjesen calls the two levels of pedagogy. (40) I will relate each in turn to the ways Origen maps the relationship between Scripture and the reader.

The three-fold sense of Scripture provides the structure through which figural associations between Scripture and the contemporary reader are elaborated. The distinct senses mark, for Origen, the progressive movement of the reader from the historical report of Scripture toward its underlying spiritual figurations. Thus, as Origen allegorizes from one sense to the next, he maps a trajectory for the reader to follow, conveying relationships along the way between the ancient narrated text and the formation of the reader (the reader's soul, to be exact). In On First Principles, he assigns these senses as 1) literal (historical); 2) moral (concerning the soul); and 3) spiritual (concerning the Christian faith). (41) No doubt, this division is common in Origen and shows up throughout his exegetical writings.

However, de Lubac recognizes a second form of the three-fold sense in Origen that subtly switches the latter two senses. According to this division the historical sense is followed by the mystical sense relating to Christ and the Church, which is then followed by a spiritual sense relating to the soul. De Lubac labels the two divisions this way:

1. Historical sense

Spiritual/Moral sense (soul)

Mystical sense (Christ/Church)

2. Historical sense

Mystical sense (Christ/Church)

Spiritual sense (soul)

While these two divisions appear similar, de Lubac views their differences as vital for understanding Origen's distinctively Christian interpretation. In his words,

   On the one hand, then, we had a kind of anatomy or physiology of
   the soul that, in principle at least, was not presupposing
   revelation. On the other hand, we have a salvation history of the
   soul in function of the salvation of mankind by Christ, or a call
   to the salvation of the soul in the common salvation of the Church.
   So one understands that the spiritual sense would come normally in
   third place, after the mystical sense; it deepens it, interiorizes,
   and completes it by applying it. (42)

This assists in further particularizing Origen's figural associations between Scripture and the contemporary reader. What was, at one point, a description of the soul in general according to a generalized moral interpretation is now positioned after the specifically Christological and ecclesial sense, thus tracing more clearly the trajectory of the reader's salvific path. The reader, first tracing the historical narration in Scripture, figurally relates its features with the person and work of Christ in the New Testament and the mystical body of Christ (i.e., the Church) in the present. This figural association between the written narrative and the Christian life intensifies in the third sense as the reader "interiorizes" the Christological and ecclesial features within the soul and provides the uniquely soterio logical efficacy of scriptural reading to which Origen is committed. Furthermore, an account of meaning logically independent of the associations between narration, Christ, the Church, and the individual reader need not arise. Soteriological efficacy, in a real sense, depends for its effect upon the obtaining of these relations and not on the positing of abstract meanings that reduce such figural relations to mere representation.

This account of Origen's three-fold sense of Scripture can be related also to a two-fold structure of divine pedagogy. These two levels consist in: i) the original, historical pedagogy of the Logos in Scripture, whose agency guides the formation of the literal or historical sense; and 2) the contemporary pedagogy of the Logos directed toward the hearer through the spiritual sense. (43) This brings into focus Origen's claim that "the holy Scriptures were not composed by means of merely human words but were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit." (44) Because Scripture is infused with and guided by the presence of God, by "the very act of reading and diligently studying them, [the reader's] mind and feelings will be touched by a divine breath and he will recognize that the words he is reading are not the utterances of man but the language of God." (45) Thus, in the same way that the Word of God was present with Moses, the prophets, and the apostles, so through Scripture does the Word of God come to us "clothing himself in language in order to become visible and so offering himself in the form suited to each individual soul." (46) According to Torjesen, the discerning of the transforming power of the Logos through the spiritual sense (regarding the soul) allows the Logos to become contemporary to the reader. (47) The teaching and formation granted to the reader through confronting the Logos within Scripture represents the transformative agency of the Logos within the ancient text to the reader in the present. Therefore, Origen's figural readings are meant to internalize the transforming spiritual agency of the Logos within the reader herself through the very act of interpretation.

These structural features surface throughout Origen's exegetical writings. (48) I will only point to one as an example--the second homily on Genesis. (49) In this homily, Origen explicates the story of Noah according to the distinctive three-fold sense. First, he defends the story's historical veracity against a "disciple of Marcion" ([section]3, 76) who skeptically questions the ark's structure and its ability to hold the mass of animals as the text claims. He then addresses the construction of the ark, referencing its internal and external features. The internal decks of the ark are divided between two lower decks and three upper decks. The lower two are built for the animals, the lowest perhaps, he claims, for the waste they would, no doubt, accumulate. The upper decks were for Noah and his family, for "just as man, by means of his reason and wisdom, is said to have dominion over all things which are on the earth, so also he might be higher in place and above all the animals which were gathered in the ark" ([section]1, 74).

After acknowledging the written record of the ark's construction, Origen moves on to the second mystical sense of the passage, which figurally associates the ark and the Church. Through referencing Luke 17:26-27 ("For just as in the days of Noah ... the flood came and destroyed them all; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" [[section]3, 77]), Origen claims that the flood "which nearly ended the world at that time contains a form (forma) of that end of the world which really will be" ([section]3, 77). Like Jesus suggests in the Lukan passage, Origen relates Noah's flood with the eschatological return of Christ. Just as Noah preserved the animals from destruction, "so also it is said by the Father in the consummation of the ages to our Noah [e.g., Christ], who alone is truly just and perfect, that he makes himself an ark of squared planks and gives it dimensions filled with heavenly mysteries" ([section]3, 78). The ark is, therefore, figurally related to the Church with Christ ("our Noah") as its architect. The salvation provided for within the pitched walls of the Church are compared to those "men or animals which are saved in the ark" ([section]3, 78). Furthermore, just as the ark consists of multiple decks for diverse dwelling, so the Church contains different levels of progress and sanctification. By "ascending through the individual levels of the dwellings, one arrives at Noah himself, whose name means rest or righteous, who is Christ Jesus" ([section]3, 79). As for the outer planks that make up the ark-Church, they figurally relate to "the teachers in the Church" protecting the inhabitants from heathens and heretics who "stir up floods of questions and storms of strife" ([section]4, 80).

After explicating the mystical sense, Origen moves to the spiritual sense. This level relates the flood narrative and its associated ecclesial figuration of salvation directly to the individual soul. At this level, Origen pictures the reader internalizing the previous historical and mystical figures by "building an ark of salvation within his own heart" and dedicating "a library, so to speak, of the divine word within himself" ([section]6, 86). Matching the physical length, breadth and height of the ark, the reader erects "faith, love, and hope as [the internal ark's] length, breadth, and height. He stretches out faith in the Trinity to the length of life and immortality. He establishes the breadth of love with the compassion of gentleness and kindness. He raises the height of hope to heavenly and exalted places" ([section]6, 86). Furthermore, the reader who internalizes the ark of salvation in his own life is meant also to construct a library there, not from rough and unhewn planks of secular authors, but the squared and uniformed planks of the prophets and apostles. The solid planks of the internal ark of salvation are gathered from the very library of Scripture, whose salvific efficacy is secured through the reading and internalizing of Scripture. From this scriptural library of the soul one is meant to

   [1] learn the historical narratives; from it [2] recognize "the
   great mystery" which is fulfilled in Christ and in the Church. From
   it also [3] learn how to correct habits, to curtail vices, to purge
   the soul and draw it off from every bond of captivity, setting up
   in it ... various virtues and perfection. By all means "you shall
   cover it with pitch within and without" (Gen 6:14), "bearing faith
   in your heart, offering confession with your mouth" (Rom 10:10),
   having knowledge within, works without, advancing pure in heart
   within, spotless in body without. ([section]6, 87)

Origen's figurations in this homily come full circle, as he retraces again the movements of his three-fold reading. He begins with the physical construction of the ark and its role in the preservation of Noah and the animals. He then associates such salvation with the Church of Christ whose construction depends on worthy teachers and whose walls protect the faithful within the world. Lastly, he figures that salvific ark-Church within the individual soul, whose construction of the internal ark is made of the very scriptural narratives themselves, the internalization of which allows the reader to move again from the narration, toward Christ, his Church, and further salvific perfection of the soul. The cycle of figural relations at work here in Origen's broadly allegorical exercise not only makes Scripture present to the contemporary reader, but implants its salvific import within the soul itself by figuring the narrative of Scripture as the means of the soul's perfection. At no place along the way has Origen disassociated the figural connections between Genesis, Christ, the Church, and the individual, but preserves them intact and allows them to support the salvific role of scriptural reading.

Conclusion

The way of viewing allegorical reading that I have traced, one that sees the theological commitments of Scripture's salvific efficacy as allegory's primary animating feature, will, in my judgment, allow the future theological development of post-critical scriptural reading to learn in constructive ways from writers like Origen, whose vision so often outpaces our methodological constraints. While acknowledging that every figural or broadly allegorical exercise from Origen or any of the pre-critical exegetes cannot possibly survive even the limited constraints I have placed on them in this article, it is nevertheless possible to see them as companionable to the project of theological interpretation without forfeiting immanent critique. Overcoming scholarly road blocks like the allegory/typology distinction and thinking critically with other astute theorists of inter pretation like Auerbach in our reading of pre-critical exegetes are perhaps two practical steps that move the conversation forward in constructive ways and helps us avoid either leaving ancient interpretation behind or holding it up as a paragon of practice.

Notes

(1.) A primary source for the inclusion of the reader (or hearer) as a definitive element in Origen's allegorical interpretation is Karen Jo Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedure and Theological Method in Origen's Exegesis (Berlin, Germany: Walter De Gruyter, 1986). Her contribution to the scholarship of Origen's exegesis is the explication and development of a three-dimensional view of Origen's interpretive structure that includes "the text, the means of interpretation, and the hearer for whom this exegesis is conducted" (Torjesen, 13). I will be assuming her emphasis on the dimension of reader or hearer in the suggestions I make about the soteriological efficacy of scriptural reading.

(2.) For the early development of the use of the term "allegory" see David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

(3.) This term arose in English in the nineteenth century and is adapted from the Latin typologia, which derives from the Greek words [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. The Latin word typologia is, like "typology," unattested in patristic writings. See Peter W. Martens, "Revisiting the Allegory/Typology Distinction: The Case of Origen, "Journal of Early Christian Studies 16, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 300. Martens's work in this essay is vital to various portions of the issues I am taking up here.

(4.) Jean Danielou, Origen, trans. Walter Mitchell (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), Part II, Ch. 2 and 3.

(5.) Ibid., 186. "This is particularly evident at the beginning of the homilies on Genesis, where the whole of creation is regarded as an allegory of the soul, as the macrocosm and microcosm." Origen's turn to the soul as an object of allegorical scriptural reading will become important when turning to de Lubac's rendering of the moral aspect of Origen's exegesis.

(6.) See Henri de Lubac, "'Typologie' et 'Allegorisme,'" in Recherches de Science Religieuse 34 (1947): 180-226.

(7.) Others have followed de Lubac on this score. See Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 118, and Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciations: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 73-78.

(8.) Martens, "Revisiting Allegory and Typology," 288.

(9.) G. W. H. Lampe and K. J. Woollcombe, Essays on Typology (London, UK: SCM Press, 1957).

(10.) By this I mean, typological association that are made within the canon of Scripture, mostly between the Old and New Testaments. This is opposed to inter-textual typology, which is association between Scripture and other non-scriptural texts, and extra-textual, which is association between Scripture and non-textual reality.

(11.) Lampe, "The Reasonableness of Typology" in Essays on Typology, 29.

(12.) Ibid., 31.

(13.) Ibid.

(14.) He also associates Hellenistic allegory with the interpretive practices of ancient Alexandria through which he places Origen within the Philonic tradition. So the typology/allegory distinction also motivates the historical distinction between the theology of Alexandria and Antioch. It is not my purpose to discuss this distinction, but only to suggest that a variety of historical as well as conceptual oversimplifications arise from this way of parsing out traditions of scriptural reading. This inevitably leads to reductive misreadings of theologians in Alexandria and in Antioch, many of which contributed to the ancient practice of allegory.

(15.) Woollcombe, "The Biblical Origins and Patristic Development of Typology" in Essays on Typology, 40.

(16.) R. P. C. Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Signifance of Origen's Interpretation of Scripture (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1959), 7.

(17.) Hanson, Allegory and Event, 364.

(18.) For a response to the relationship between Origen and Philo, see Henri de Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 172-90.

(19.) See de Lubac, History and Spirit, 141-42.

(20.) Martens, "Revisiting Allegory and Typology," 297.

(21). Ibid., 300.

(22.) For instance, in On First Principles, IV.2.6, Origen references Heb 8:5 ("You shall make everything [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [according to the pattern]") together with Gal 4:24 ("these things [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [happened allegorically]) to describe the existence of spiritual interpretation in Scripture. Here "type" and "allegory" are used to reference the same nonliteral spiritual interpretation.

(23.) For examples in Origen, see Martens, "Revisiting Allegory and Typology," 304-05. See also On First Principles, IV. 2.2.

(24.) Along with Auerbach's texts, I follow various questions concerning history and scriptural interpretations in Auerbach that have been raised in John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), chap. 4-6.

(25.) Erich Auerbach, "Figura" in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53.

(26.) Ibid., 29.

(27.) Ibid., 33.

(28.) Ibid., 34.

(29.) Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 48.

(30.) Ibid., 49.

(31.) Dawson, Christian Figural Reading, 86.

(32.) Ibid.

(33.) Auerbach, "Figura," 54.

(34.) Peter W. Martens, "Origen Against History? Reconsidering the Critique of Allegory," Modern Theology 28, no. 4 (October 2012): 642.

(35.) Ibid.

(36.) Ibid., 643.

(37.) Ibid.

(38.) Referenced in scarce quotes because, in fact, much of his explicit interpretive theory, for instance in On First Principles IV, is not consistently at work within his homilies and commentaries. Some of the specific structural features, therefore, have been drawn out by studying the commentaries themselves and how he appears to interpret according to consistent procedures. Taking into account such features that are not explicitly laid out in Origen's theoretical statements is a large part of the benefit of de Lubac's History and Spirit and Torjesen's Hermeneutical Procedure. I will be following their analysis quite closely here.

(39.) De Lubac, History and Spirit, 159-72.

(40.) Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedure, 13.

(41.) On First Principles, IV. 2.4.

(42.) De Lubac, History and Spirit, 164.

(43.) Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedure, 13.

(44.) On First Principles, IV. 2.2.

(45.) Ibid., IV. 1.6.

(46.) Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedure, 118.

(47.) Ibid., 146.

(48.) For an accessible summary and analysis of many such texts see Elizabeth Ann Dively Lauro, The Soul and Spirit of Scripture within Origen's Exegesis (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005).

(49.) Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 72-88. Further quotations will be parenthetical within the text. Perhaps the most famous example of these forgoing structural elements is Origen's Commentary on the Song of Songs. See The Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957).