Chapter 3: The Interpretation of Scripture
Chapter 3
The Interpretation of Scripture
Devote yourself to the Reading of Scripture
Sometime in the latter portion of Origen’s life, after he had moved to Caesarea and established a school there, he had a student named Gregory from Cappadocian Pontus. Gregory had already spent time studying rhetoric and Roman law in other places before he encountered Origen’s school at Caesarea. He was captivated by Origen and remained under his instruction in Caesarea for several years. When he left, he composed and delivered a long speech in honor of Origen. In this speech, after briefly sketching his own life prior to his encounter with Origen, he describes Origen’s teaching in his school at Caesarea in glowing terms. He was deeply impressed both by the subjects treated and by Origen as a teacher. It is generally recognized that the second portion of Gregory’s speech describes the syllabus followed in Origen’s school. It began with the study of dialectic, went on to physics, geometry, astronomy, and ethics, and climaxed in the study of theology. The latter meant primarily the study of Scripture and especially the search for the deeper meaning in Scripture.
Gregory’s speech makes clear that the study of philosophy was pursued rigorously in Origen’s school. He began by using a Socratic approach to teach his students how to question their own thoughts, and think clearly about a subject before speaking. He also put a strong emphasis on ethical instruction, but not, as Gregory says, of the knowledge alone of ethics, but of ethical living. This, Gregory goes on to say, Origen accomplished most effectively by the example of his own life. Origen also insisted on a wide and careful reading of the philosophers; he did not emphasize any particular philosophy over another. The students were counseled, moreover, not to become the devotees of any particular school of philosophy, but to devote themselves only to God and his prophets. The school curriculum reached its pinnacle in the study of theology. Over and above his mastery of the other disciplines for which Gregory praises Origen, he says he excelled as an expositor of Scripture, and especially of Scripture’s “dark and enigmatic” sayings. This exceptional insight into the deeper meaning of Scripture causes Gregory to conclude that Origen must participate in the same divine Spirit who inspired the prophets who composed the Scriptures.
Sometime after Gregory’s departure from Origen’s school Origen wrote a letter to Gregory. The opening of that letter gives the impression that Gregory had not yet decided what profession he was going to follow when he left Origen. Origen begins by praising Gregory’s intelligence and natural abilities. “Your natural facility can make you an accomplished Roman lawyer and a Greek philosopher of the highly regarded schools of thought. But my wish,” Origen says, “is that you use the full power of your natural facility completely for the Christian faith.” In the remainder of the letter there is a very slight hint that Origen may fear that his emphasis in his school on secular subjects, and particularly on philosophy, may have nudged Gregory toward a life in philosophy. He immediately urges Gregory to take the things from philosophy that might be useful as “preparatory teaching for Christianity” and to take from the other educational disciplines such things as would “be useful” for interpreting Scripture. He compares this to the Hebrews asking the Egyptians “for vessels of silver and gold” when they left Egypt in the exodus. The Hebrews constructed “the objects in the Holy of Holies from what they took from the Egyptians,” Origen says. In other words, they made holy use of unholy, foreign objects. He hastens to warn Gregory, however, that such alien learning must be used with caution and discretion; otherwise it can work to the harm of both the person using it and the church, for some, he says, have used it to construct heretical fabrications in the Scriptures. This leads Origen to his concluding exhortation to his student: “Devote yourself primarily to the reading of the divine Scriptures.” It is not a passive reading, however, that Origen urges on his student. Gregory is to read Scripture with Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:7 ringing in his mind. He is to “knock” at Scripture’s closed doors, and “seek the meaning of the divine Scriptures that is hidden from the majority.” But this is not enough. “The Savior urges us on to this,” Origen adds, “saying not only, ‘Knock, and it will be opened to you,’ and, ‘Seek, and you will find,’ but also, ‘Ask, and it will be given to you.’” Scripture, to be understood, must be studied in the context of prayer. Such was Origen’s concluding counsel to his former student: Don’t be wooed from the faith by philosophy. Philosophy can be a useful tool for understanding Scripture, but it can also be dangerous. Use it with caution.
This interaction between Gregory and Origen provides us with an important perspective on Origen’s relation to Scripture and philosophy. Earlier scholars of Origen often saw him as a philosopher who loosely related Scripture to his philosophy. The interaction with Gregory, however, shows Origen as a person who certainly knew philosophy, but whose life was centered on interpreting Scripture.
It can be said confidently that “[w]hoever would understand Origen must take the Bible into serious account, for it stood at the center of his work, his thought, and his entire life.”
His life was that of an exegete. This is not an unusual view to find expressed today. Origen scholarship has moved on from the old approach to Origen as primarily a philosopher. Peter Martens published a book in 2012 with the title, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life in which he argues that for Origen “Biblical interpretation was . . . a way of life.” In an essay published in 2013, Lorenzo Perrone, in searching for autobiographical evidence in Origen’s writings said, “[T]he personal expressions to be found in Origen’s writings . . . point first and foremost to his activity as a biblical scholar.” Origen took his own advice, and devoted himself to the reading of Scripture. This reading, however, was not to discover historical facts in Scripture, but to ferret out its deeper, spiritual meaning.
Opening the sealed book
The fifth chapter of the Apocalypse of John opens with a vivid scene set in the throne-room of God. John sees the one on the throne holding a scroll sealed with seven seals and having writing on both sides and hears an angel crying out, “‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?’” When no one was found who could open the scroll John says he began to weep. He was then consoled by one of the elders who told him not to weep because “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David” had conquered and could consequently open the sealed scroll. When John looked, however, he did not see a lion, but a lamb “standing as if it had been slaughtered.” When the slaughtered lamb took the scroll, “the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb.” They “sing a new song, saying, ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation.’”
This scene, with its imagery of the sealed book and the slaughtered lamb who alone can open the book is an important key to understand Origen’s view of Scripture and its interpretation. He identifies his understanding of the crucial reference to the sealed book in a discussion in his Commentary on John written early in his life in Alexandria.
And what book does John see which has writing on the front and back, and is sealed, and which no one could read and loose its seals, except the lion of the tribe of Juda, the root of David who has the key of David, and who opens and no one will close, and closes and no one will open? For the whole Scripture is what is revealed by the book which has writing on the front because its interpretation is easy, and on the back because it is hidden and spiritual.
In this reference to the scene in the throne-room of God Origen not only identifies the sealed book with the entirety of Scripture, but he also uses the statement about writing on the front and back to point to his understanding of the two levels of revelation in Scripture: a literal or surface meaning that is understandable and beneficial to all readers, and a hidden or spiritual meaning that is understandable only to the few who have the interest and the ability to search below the surface of the words in the text.
What is most important in Revelation 5 for Origen’s approach to Scripture, however, is the statement that the sealed book can be opened only by the crucified Christ, the slaughtered lamb. It is the crucified Christ who unlocks the mysteries of Scripture. This is what Christ taught the two travelers on the road to Emmaus the evening of the resurrection when he told them that the Christ had to suffer the things that had happened to him in Jerusalem and then took them through the texts of Moses and the Prophets showing them how these scriptures spoke of himself. Origen joins the words from Revelation 5 with Luke 24 when he says to his audience in a homily on Exodus:
I fear . . . lest by too much negligence and dullness of heart the divine volumes be not only veiled to us, but also sealed. . . . [W]e must not only employ zeal to learn the sacred literature, but we must also pray to the Lord and entreat “day and night” that the lamb “of the tribe of Juda” may come and himself taking “the sealed book” may be gracious enough to open it, for it is he who “opening the Scriptures” kindles the hearts of the disciples so that they say, “Was not our heart burning within us when he opened to us the Scriptures?”
Christ was present, Origen believed, both speaking and spoken of, in the writings of the Old Testament. His presence was not discernible, however, but was sealed in the words of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms until his passion. The passion of Christ created the good news of the gospel. Consequently, the gospel transforms the writings of the Old Testament into a kind of gospel themselves as the light of the gospel of the cross sweeping over the texts of the Old Testament allows Christ to be seen and heard in them. “Nothing of the ancients was gospel,” Origen says, “before that gospel which came into existence because of the coming of Christ. But the gospel, which is a New Testament, made the newness of the Spirit . . . shine forth in the light of knowledge. This newness of the Spirit removed us from ‘the antiquity of the letter.’”
The coming of Christ was like yeast added to the lump of dough of the Law and the Prophets. As the yeast brings the lump of dough to life, so to speak, so the passion of Christ infused new life into the words of Moses, the prophets, and the psalmists. What Origen means when he talks about the gospel making all other Scripture gospel is that finding Christ in the old Scripture depends on the death and resurrection of Christ. It is the gospel (message) contained in the Gospels (the four books) that makes all Scripture gospel or, as Origen says, using a Pauline metaphor in the On First Principles, “[T]he light contained in the Law of Moses, but hidden by a veil, shone forth at the sojourn of Jesus, when the veil was taken away and the good things, of which the letter had a shadow, little by little became known.” Finding Christ in Moses, David, or the prophets, for Origen, depends on reading them in the knowledge of the Christ revealed in the Gospels. He believed that the Old Testament was a sealed book, so far as learning about Christ was concerned, until it was opened by the slaughtered lamb of Revelation 5.
The unity of the Old and New Testaments centered on Christ was extremely important to Origen. He discusses it on several occasions expressing the unity in differing images. One is based on the “peacemakers” who are pronounced “blessed” and “sons of God” in Matthew’s beatitudes. After discussing two kinds of peacemakers he turns to what he calls a third kind of peacemaker. This is the person who can show what appears to be an inconsistency between parts of Scripture is not actually so, but rather is harmonious. The apparent inconsistency might be between the two Testaments or any of the other recognized blocks of Scriptural text, such as the text of one Gospel with that of another. Origen then compares the whole of Scripture to a harp with strings that can be quite discordant if a person who knows nothing about music begins to strum it. In the same way, he says, “those who do not know how to hear the harmony of God in the sacred Scriptures think the old Scripture is out of tune with the new . . . .” But when a musician such as David takes up the harp, this person produces “the music of God” knowing when to strum the strings of the law and when to strum those of the Gospels or the Prophets. Origen also takes the image of the cornerstone in Psalm 118 that Jesus applies to himself in Matthew’s Gospel and applies it to the important role that Christ has in our understanding of Scripture, saying that as cornerstone, he holds “together the two corners of the Old and New Testament.”
His most important discussion of Scripture’s unity when read from the perspective of Christ, however, is in his treatment of the transfiguration story in Matthew’s Gospel. This account of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah conversing on the mountain and the subsequent voice from the cloud later became a kind of icon used by many church fathers to indicate the unity of Scripture. Origen seems to have been the first to draw the symbolic connections between the three persons on the mountain and the literary collections of the Gospels, the Prophets, and the Law. He understands Peter’s suggestion to make a separate tabernacle for each of the three persons to represent an attempt to separate the Law, the Prophets, and the Gospels. The divine voice instructing the three disciples to “hear” the Son alone, however, prompts Origen to say, “For Moses, the Law, and Elijah, Prophecy, have become one only in the Gospel of Jesus.”
Reading the sealed book
What we have looked at so far provides the supportive framework for understanding Origen’s approach to Scripture. It opens the door, so to speak, to the Christian reading of the Old Testament, but it does not provide a map for the maze of texts found there in which even the most devoted Christian reader could lose her or his way. Origen attempts to provide a map of sorts early in his writing career in the On First Principles, where he proposes how Scripture should be interpreted. An equally important guide to how Origen understands Scriptural interpretation is also present scattered throughout his commentaries and homilies, where he applies various principles and techniques of interpretation and sometimes talks about them as he does so. It is to this map that Origen provides for reading Scripture that we now turn.
Reading Scripture correctly Origen believed depended, first of all, on understanding how and why Scripture had been composed. He has no doubt that the Scriptures come ultimately from God. He discusses the divine inspiration of Scripture as a sort of preface to his instructions on how to interpret Scripture. His usual way of describing the authorship of Scripture is that it is the product of either the Holy Spirit or the Logos (Word) of God. When he uses the latter expression, he is not referring to a written or spoken word, but to the Logos (Word) of which John speaks in John 1:1 when he says, “In the beginning was the Logos (Word), and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God.” Thus, Origen means the second person of the Trinity when he refers to the Logos as author of Scripture. He did not confuse the person of the Logos and the Holy Spirit, but he did recognize some areas of overlap in the functions ascribed to them in Scripture. One such area was revealing the will of God. Origen may refer to either as the revealer of Scripture with no intended differentiation of Scripture’s divine source.
Origen was a highly educated person, especially in the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. Part of the educational process that he would have participated in as a student and later as a teacher involved a set of questions that were addressed to a literary text as teacher and student began reading the text together. The number of questions addressed to a particular text ranged from two or three to nine. Which questions were used depended on the type of text being studied. Three questions appear repeatedly in Origen’s exegetical studies. The more important and most often mentioned question involves the aim of the author in the text. A second question—not necessarily in the order of discussion—asks about the usefulness of the text being discussed. The principle of usefulness was a corollary for Origen of his view that every word of Scripture comes from the Holy Spirit. Paul had said in 2 Timothy 3:16 that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” In a homily on Joshua, Origen argues, in connection with 2 Timothy 3:16, that we should not reject even those Scriptures we do not understand, because “we believe that ‘all Scripture inspired by divine influence is useful.’” He compares it to a physician prescribing a treatment for an ailment. The prescription performs its healing work even if we do not understand the relationship between the prescription and the ailment. In the same way, he concludes, we should believe that Scripture “is useful and benefits the soul even if our perception at the present does not understand why.” In a homily on Numbers 33, a text that describes the encampments of the Israelites between Egypt and Canaan and which most people both then and now would see as void of material for Christian edification, Origen insists that nothing in a writing that comes from the Holy Spirit can be useless. He proceeds to develop a significant homily on the spiritual journey of the Christian through this world by tracing the encampments of the Israelites on their way to Canaan. A third important question that Origen raised in relation to the biblical texts he interpreted did not come from the lists of questions used in secular education. It was a theologically driven question based on his understanding of the nature of God. Is this meaning of the text, he asked, worthy of God?
In On First Principles Origen says that the Spirit had two aims in the composition of Scripture. The first was to hide the deeper doctrines beneath the surface of the literal text of Scripture. This aim of the Spirit, he says, “was pre-eminently concerned with the unspeakable mysteries regarding the affairs of human beings . . . in order that one who is capable of being taught may, by searching out and devoting himself to the deep things of the sense of the words, become a participant in all the doctrines of the Spirit’s counsel.” These doctrines expressed in figures and mysteries concern the Father and the Son, and particularly the nature of the Son, his incarnation, and his activity. Also included are subjects related to those Origen called “rational beings,” by which he meant angels, humans, and demons. He also included in the mysteries hidden in Scripture the world and the reason for its existence and the problem of evil. The list he provides in Book 4 of On First Principles of the doctrines that are hidden beneath the literal meaning of Scripture to be searched out by those who are able is very similar, though not identical, to what he sets forth in the Preface to On First Principles as a general “rule,” drawn from the apostolic tradition, to guide all theological discussion.
Origen recognized that there were multitudes of people in the church who for one reason or another lacked the necessary prerequisites for this searching kind of study of Scripture and yet claimed faith in Christ. In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew he uses the distinction that appears frequently in the Gospel between the crowds and the disciples to distinguish between these multitudes in the church who could not or did not engage in this deeper study and the smaller group that did. He did not doubt that these people were Christians just as much as the more inquisitive ones who would try to search out Scripture’s secrets. There was, therefore, he argues, a second aim of the Holy Spirit in Scripture. That second aim was to conceal the spiritual doctrines in a narrative that would benefit those persons lacking the aptitude necessary for investigating the spiritual meanings of Scripture. This second aim did not, in Origen’s thought, represent a disparaging view of the narrative of Scripture. He can, in fact, become quite defensive of the literal text of Scripture when he perceives it under attack. For example, when Origen discusses the story of the Samaritan woman in his commentary on the Gospel of John, he identifies the Scriptures with the well of Jacob in the story. The Scriptures, he says, function as introductions to the higher understanding Jesus gives, which the story refers to as a spring of water producing eternal life. But, Origen continues, before one can partake of this higher understanding one must first have drunk regularly and diligently from Jacob’s well, that is, one must have attained a broad understanding of the literal meaning of the Scriptures. He then says that the gnostic theologian Heracleon had referred to the water from Jacob’s well, that is the literal meaning of Scripture, as “insipid, temporary, and deficient.” Origen considered this a slanderous attack on “the ancient words.”
He defends the literal meaning of Scripture again much later in his life to refute the arrogant arguments of the philosopher Celsus, who ridiculed the stories in Scripture, including those about Jesus. Origen replied that it was because God cares for all people, not just the educated, that he employed a style that common people could understand in Scripture. Once they have taken their initial steps in the faith, these very people can be introduced to the doctrines hidden in Scripture. “For,” he says, “it is obvious even to an ungifted person . . . that many passages can possess a meaning deeper than that which appears at first sight.” Then he makes a very important point: the perception of deeper meaning in Scripture is not dependent solely on a person’s intelligence or education, but depends on the energy and time one invests in studying Scripture and, perhaps even more importantly, on the effort one makes to live as it teaches.
In a homily on Exodus Origen discusses the general lack of energy and time the majority in the church invest in the study of Scripture. We must recall that very few, if any, of Origen’s congregants would have possessed a copy of Scripture of their own to read and study at home. What the majority learned about Scripture they learned in the assembly of the church, where Scripture was read and then interpreted in a homily. He castigates his congregation for the lack of attention they give to Scripture in comparison to the attention they focus on education in the liberal disciplines such as grammar or rhetoric. He poses the hypothetical situation of the education of their children and asks if they do not give a child “freedom from all other things” and “make him give his attention to this one study.” You provide the child, he says, with “paedogogues, teachers, books, and expenses” until the child has completed his education. Then Origen turns to the way his parishioners treat the study of Scripture. “Who,” he asks, “seeks a divine education with as much zeal and work as he sought a human education?” He complains that some leave the assembly of the church immediately after the texts for the day have been read, before there has been any explanation of them, others leave during the reading, and some are so occupied in talking that they do not even know if Scripture has been read.
Origen believed that the stories in Scripture’s literal narratives contain many lessons that are obvious and valuable for instruction in the faith, and that the law contains numerous commands that are important to be obeyed literally. There are places in his commentaries where he interprets the text on the literal level alone, as, for example, in the first two books of his commentary on John. It is important, however, to take note of the distinction between the meaning of “literal” and “historical” in Origen’s thought, and in that of most early Christian authors as well. Occasionally the literal sense of a story may convey historical facts, but this identification is not the more usual meaning of the term “literal” in the interpretative literature of the church fathers. One might, for example, explain the facts in Homer’s story of the plague that was destroying the Greek army at Troy, which Homer says was the result of the Greek god Phoebus Apollo answering the prayer of his priest, who had been humiliated by Agammenon, leader of the Greeks. By explaining the details about what was happening in the story the interpreter would provide a literal interpretation. This would say nothing about the historical veracity of the story; it would ask none of the questions that modern historians of Greek history would ask to establish whether the story was historically true or false. Origen himself used Homer’s Iliad to highlight the difficulty in establishing whether or not any story about an event in the past actually occurred. Some in his time, as also in modern Homeric scholarship, claimed that the Trojan war had not actually occurred because of the fictitious stories about the gods that Homer had included in the text. Origen did not accept this negative view but believed that Homer had taken a real event and adorned it with mythological stories about the gods. He had outhned a similar approach to Scripture much earlier in his writing career. He began his description of the second aim of the Spirit in Scripture, which was discussed above, by explaining how a narrative helpful for those who could not investigate the hidden doctrines in Scripture had been composed that included such subjects as the creation of the world and humanity, the multiplication of the human race, the righteous and unrighteous activities of human beings, wars, conquests, and legislation. In producing this narrative, he explains, the Spirit’s primary aim was to show the connection of spiritual events that was hidden within the story of the events themselves. Events that actually occurred in history were used whenever there were those that would accurately convey the spiritual event. When this was not the case, however, things that had not happened, perhaps could not even happen, were interwoven into the narrative to communicate the truth of the spiritual event. This, he believed, was true not only in the Old Testament but in the New Testament as well.
It is quite clear in all of Origen’s writings that the hidden meaning in Scripture was the meaning that he considered the more important and that this was the meaning he was most interested in discovering and communicating. In my opinion, Origen is referring to the distinction between those who seek out the deeper meaning in Scripture and those who are satisfied with the literal meaning in the comments he makes on Paul’s words about “what God has prepared for those who love him.” “Scripture knows the difference,” he says,
. . . between those who love God and those who fear God, and it knows how much those who love him rise above those who fear him. Some things, therefore, have been prepared even for those who fear him, but he has prepared more for those who love him than what has been prepared for those who fear him.
How did Origen go about discovering the spiritual meaning hidden in Scripture? He looked to Scripture itself for his guidelines. The Epistles of Paul were especially important to Origen in understanding how Old Testament Scripture was to be interpreted. Paul, the expert in interpreting and obeying the law, had to reread the Hebrew Scriptures after his encounter with the crucified, risen Christ on the road to Damascus. The bright light of the resurrected Christ that burst blindingly into his life consequently illumined his reading of the Hebrew Scriptures and caused him radically to rethink and reinterpret them. To oversimplify greatly the results of Paul’s rereading, we can say that he learned that the necessity of Christ’s passion and the salvation of gentiles as well as Jews had “been encoded in Scripture for centuries.” The epistles of Paul are filled with references and allusions to deeper, hidden meanings in Old Testament texts such as his statement that God had promised the gospel “beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures,” or that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” where “scriptures” mean the writings of the Old Testament, or that the rock from which the Hebrews drank water in the wilderness was Christ.
The Pauline Imprint on Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture
Origen considered Paul the master exegete and theologian. He repeatedly appeals to Paul’s authority for exegetical moves that he makes in interpreting Old Testament texts. There were seven Pauline texts especially to which Origen appealed to explain or defend his interpretations: Romans 7:14; 1 Corinthians 2:10–16; 9:9–10; 10:11; 2 Corinthians 3:6; 3:15–16; and Galatians 4:24. It was 1 Corinthians 2:10–16, however, that provided the essential pieces to Origen’s approach to interpreting Old Testament Scripture. We are fortunate to have some fragments preserved of Origen’s comments on these verses. We will examine what he says in these fragments on 1 Corinthians 2 for they provide a kind of macro view of the underpinnings of Origen’s spiritual exegesis of Scripture.
It is the Spirit, Origen says, not the human soul, that is able to search “even the depths of God.” He means the Holy Spirit, not the spirit of a person, for the Spirit of which he is speaking must “come to be” in us so that “with the Spirit we may interpret all things, even the depths of God.” He proceeds to say on 1 Corinthians 10:11, “Let us understand the things given to us by God, for if the Spirit which is from God is not in us teaching us, we cannot say that ‘we know the things given to us by God,’ for indeed no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.” When Origen refers to “the things given to us by God,” he means primarily the words of Scripture, for he goes on to say, “For the Spirit which is in the person who is seeking and searching for the truth enlightens him, and thus by the continual renewal of his mind he discovers things which he has not learned from human beings.” Origen has argued in these remarks on 1 Corinthians 2:10–12 that the interpretation of Scripture depends on the presence of the Holy Spirit enlightening the mind of the interpreter.
This enlightening of the interpreter’s mind by the Holy Spirit does not, however, imply that the interpreter is simply a passive receptacle waiting to receive an interpretation from the Spirit. Origen certainly did stress the necessity of prayer in the interpretative process, as we have already noted above concerning his letter to Gregory, where he cites Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:7–8, “Ask, and it will be given to you.” But there, prayer is joined with “seeking” and “knocking,” both activities in which the interpreter must also engage. The same is also true in his discussion of these statements of Paul about the necessity of the interpreter of Scripture being filled with the Spirit from God. He immediately raises the question about the interpreter’s necessary activities and supplies the answer from Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2:13.
We must learn how someone is taught by the Spirit from the words of the apostle, for [he says] “interpreting spiritual things with spiritual things,” [that is] by searching out and examining this text along with this text and bringing together similar things, the mind, as it were, of Scripture is revealed. For in this way I understand the things of God and I am taught by the Spirit, not only by having learned the things of the Spirit who moved Isaiah, but also by having the same Spirit which shut and sealed the words of Isaiah. For unless the Spirit opens the words of the prophets, the things which have been shut cannot be opened.
What Origen lays out in this discussion is a comparative method of studying Scripture in which the interpreter looks for similar words and ideas in other passages of Scripture and uses these comparative passages to come to an understanding of the meaning of the passage being interpreted. The general procedure Origen outhnes here of comparing one passage of an author with another of the same author, stripped of its spiritual connections, was a common approach to interpreting ancient texts among ancient commentators in general. “It was used by the Greek grammarians to interpret Homer, by philosophers to interpret Aristotle or Plato, and by Hellenistic Jews such as Philo, but also by the rabbis, to interpret the Old Testament.” The procedure was to look to other texts by the same author where the same word or idea occurs. Origen, however, was not limited to looking for comparative passages in Isaiah or Jeremiah, for instance, in his search for the meaning of a puzzling word or concept in one or the other of these prophets. He could range over the entirety of Scripture for comparative texts because he believed that the one author of all Scripture was the Holy Spirit.
Origen’s comments on comparing spiritual things with spiritual things highlight a major difference between Origen’s approach to understanding Scripture by this method and the approach, for example, of an ancient grammarian comparing one text of Homer with another to understand Homer’s meaning. Origen says, in the conclusion of the passage quoted above, “For in this way I understand the things of God and I am taught by the Spirit, not only by having learned the things of the Spirit who moved Isaiah, but also by having the same Spirit which shut and sealed the words of Isaiah. For unless the Spirit opens the words of the prophets, the things which have been shut cannot be opened.” There are two activities of the Spirit mentioned in these statements. The Spirit is at work in the interpreter in bringing together appropriate passages for comparison, and it is the same Spirit who was also at work in the prophet as he wrote the words that are now being interpreted. The Spirit who inspired must also be the Spirit who interprets.
Origen continues following Paul’s reasoning in 1 Corinthians 2:14–15 arguing that the “natural person” cannot know the things of God because they are “spiritually discerned.” He then develops an essential point in his interpretative program for the spiritual reading of Scripture. This point is foreign to all ancient secular interpretative methods as well as to most modern ones. The ability to interpret Scripture correctly is directly related to the interpreter’s relationship to the Spirit who inspired Scripture. Origen speaks of this person using the Pauline phrase, “the spiritual person.” The spiritual person, Origen says, is
. . . the one who no longer lives according to the flesh but lives according to the Spirit and continually grows in his attention to the Spirit, and by stirring up the gift of God more and more, prepares himself to become spiritual, and when he becomes such he is competent to discern “all things,” those of the Greeks, the barbarians, the wise, and the foolish, but no one can scrutinize him because of the greatness of his understanding and of his arguments.
Then, again using the words of Paul, but this time from Galatians, he provides some discernible markers that define what a “spiritual person” is.
Now if you want to recognize the spiritual person, you will recognize them from their fruits. And what are the fruits of the spiritual person by which one must recognize who the spiritual person is? Listen to the apostle saying, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control.” Where these are present, there the Spirit is present; that person is spiritual. But where some of these are lacking, that person is not yet spiritual.
This discussion underlines a subtle, but basic principle that Origen applied to Scriptural interpretation. The general life of the person who interprets Scripture is an important factor in interpretation and this life is discernible, even perhaps measurable, by the presence or absence of the virtues Paul lists as the fruits of the Spirit.
Discerning the Details in the Text
We must take one further step in our investigation of how Origen read the sealed book. What we have considered to this point is the macro vision mentioned above of Origen’s understanding of Scriptural interpretation drawn primarily from his comments on 1 Corinthians 2:10–16. These have been centered on the nature of Scripture and the faith and character of the interpreter. We must turn now to some of the literary techniques he applied in his interpretive reading of Scripture to draw out its hidden spiritual sense. There were a number of such techniques Origen drew on in the development of his interpretations. We will look at only some of the more prominent ones: figurative interpretation (tropologia), allegorical interpretation (allēgoria), anagogical interpretation (anagōgē), and prospological interpretation (prosōpon).
The first three techniques in this list are similar with only subtle differences. They are similar in that they all produce a meaning from a text that differs, sometimes quite strikingly, from what the literal words of the text say. Figurative interpretation understands the words of a text to be used, or at least understood by the interpreter, in a sense that they may suggest but do not mean in a simple reading of the text. Allegory was defined by the early second-century Greek author Heraclitus as a way of saying one thing but meaning something different from what was said. This definition suggests that if one refers to an interpretation as allegorical that the allegorical meaning stemmed from the author and that the interpreter is only uncovering the meaning that the author intentionally covered by the allegory. Anagogical interpretation refers to a lifting up of the meaning to a higher level than the simple text involves. This, again, puts the emphasis on the action of the interpreter and not of the author.
Of these three techniques, only allegory is mentioned in the New Testament. It appears in Galatians 4:24, which is one of the seven Pauline texts mentioned earlier that Origen appeals to in defense of his Scriptural exegesis. There Paul says that the story of the mothers of Abraham’s two sons “is an allegory.” The two women are two covenants. Hagar, the slave, means the Sinai covenant, slavery, and the literal Jerusalem on earth; Sarah, the free woman, means the Jerusalem above and is mother of the Christians. Origen quotes this text of Paul in his On First Principles when he discusses spiritual interpretation to prove that there are allegories in the law. The law, he says, alluding to Hebrews 8:5, contains “shadows” of “good things to come.” “And, generally speaking,” he adds, “one must seek everywhere ‘the wisdom hidden in a mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for the glory’ of the righteous.” The description Origen gives here of allegory is in harmony with the definition by Heraclitus noted above and the assumption that the allegory was intended by the person uttering the words classified as allegorical. Origen states this expressly in his commentary on John when he says, “It is clear that Moses saw in his mind the truth of the Law and the allegorical meanings related to the anagogical senses of the stories he recorded.”
This way of reading Scripture often makes people uncomfortable because they think it is arbitrary. I will show below that it caused the same reaction among many in Origen’s time as well. Origen, however, was a very careful reader of Scripture and he had an exceptionally wide knowledge of Scripture’s contents. He was rarely arbitrary in his thinking about it. He noted details and distinctions that the average reader, both then and now, often overlooks. There is a very instructive passage in one of his homilies on Numbers where he shows how one should decide between what to take literally and what to take allegorically in the Mosaic legislation. The discussion in Numbers involves the law of the first-fruits that were to be offered to the priests. After summarizing the law Origen says, “I think this law, as also some others, must of necessity be observed even according to the letter. For there are a certain number of commandments of the law which even the disciples of the New Testament keep by compulsory observance.” He turns to Psalm 18 (19):8–11 as an example of the distinctions in legal terminology used in Scripture. He notes that the Psalmist refers to “the law of the Lord,” “the testimony of the Lord,” “the statutes of the Lord,” “the commandment of the Lord,” “the fear of the Lord,” and “the judgments of the Lord,” and that a different descriptive phrase is applied to each. He argues that if there were no difference between these terms Scripture would not have used a different description in relation to each. Because they are each described differently, he argues, we must conclude that each term is referring to something unique. He concludes this aspect of his argument by saying,
We may, therefore, show from these that a law is one thing, a commandment another, a testimony another, a statute another, and a judgment another. But differences between these are also clearly indicated in the law itself, where it is said, This is the law, and commandments, and statutes, and precepts, and testimonies, and judgments which the Lord commanded Moses. Since then these things are so and it is shown by the testimonies of the law itself that these divisions in turn differ from one another, we ought to give very diligent attention to these matters which are recited in the law, because wherever it is written, for example, this is a commandment, we must not immediately understand that a commandment is a law, or wherever it is written these are justifications, they should not be immediately assumed to be a law or a commandment. And likewise, wherever testimony is written, or judgment, one should not be confused with the others, but each one is to be understood separately from the others.
Origen then makes some applications showing how the knowledge of these distinctions should influence a person making decisions about what to keep literally and what to treat allegorically in the Mosaic legislation. He refers to Hebrews 10:2, where the law is said to hold “a shadow of good things to come.” This same thing should not be assumed, he says, about a commandment, statute, or judgment because the same statement about “a shadow of good things to come” is not applied to these terms in Scripture. He provides an example of how this knowledge works in the interpretation of Scripture by using Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 5:7 to interpret the law of the Passover in Exodus 12:43. “It is not written,” he says,
This is the commandment of the Passover, but, “This is the law of the Passover.” And because the law is a shadow of good things to come, undoubtedly the law of the Passover is a shadow of good things to come. When, therefore, I come to that passage which is written of the Passover, I ought to understand that there is a shadow of a good thing to come in that physical lamb and take note that “Christ, our Passover lamb has been slaughtered.”
He proceeds in the same way mentioning the feast of unleavened bread and other feast days that have the designation “law” attached to them in Scripture. What he has argued in this paragraph is that things labeled as “law” in the Mosaic legislation may be pointing forward to future things, but this does not apply necessarily to things labeled “commandment” or any of the other terms he has listed. He cites, as an example, “You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal,” and the rest of the commandments. “You will not find that these,” he says, “are put forward under the title of law and therefore these scriptures are not voided by the disciples of the Gospel, but are fulfilled because, as I said, it is not a commandment, but law that is said to contain a shadow of good things to come, and therefore we are to keep these literally.” He then points out that there are passages that should be kept literally but that also have an allegorical application, such as Jesus’ teaching about marriage in Matthew 19:5–6 and Paul’s allegorical use of these words in Ephesians 5:31–32.
Origen sometimes uses the terms allegorical and anagogical almost as synonyms. At other times he implies a distinction between the two concepts, as in the following passage.
But you will ask regarding the words in the seventy-seventh Psalm, “How he worked his signs in Egypt and his wonders in the field of Tanis,” whether “signs and wonders” differ in substance or are the same. On the one hand, in so far as they are signs, they occurred in Egypt, and Egypt itself carries certain spiritual meanings in the anagogical sense. On the other hand, in so far as they are wonders, they occurred “in the field of Tanis.” Neither the wonders qua wonders, nor the field of Tanis qua field of Tanis are given an allegorical interpretation. But both the wonders, in so far as they are signs, and field of Tanis, in so far as it is Egypt, require an anagogical meaning.
In his commentary on John 8:39, where Jesus says, “If you are children of Abraham, do the works of Abraham,” Origen distinguishes between imitating Abraham literally in all the things he did and imitating him by understanding his whole story allegorically. In the latter understanding Abraham’s going forth from his land refers to our leaving the connections that were not good that we had prior to obeying God and going forth to the good and abundant land that God will show us. In this way Origen works through the events in the story of Abraham in relation to a Christian obeying Jesus’ command to “do the works of Abraham.” He explicitly calls his interpretation of this passage allegorical and suggests that the whole story of Abraham can be read in this way, citing Paul’s words from Galatians 4:24, “which things are allegorical.”
Some in Origen’s day, as I said above, did not agree with his way of interpreting Scripture. Many to whom he preached thought Scripture should be interpreted literally in all its aspects, whether it was the beginning of Genesis or the end of Revelation. In a sermon on Psalm 80 (81) we get a glimpse of the tension between Origen and his congregation as he dialogues with what he assumes is their reaction to what he is saying.
Then let us see what God commands us. For he says, in a kind of style that I need him in order to understand what he means, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” Let those who want us not to interpret allegorically consider, and tell us how we must open our mouth wide, without interpreting allegorically themselves. For the Logos does not want us to open it by spreading our lips widely does he? And how is it not shameful to suppose that God has said these things? How, then, will someone interpret these words if he does not treat the passage figuratively? How will one suppose that these things have been said in a manner worthy of God? For the promise which says, “I will fill it,” also impels us to seek that we may understand the words, “Open your mouth wide,” for when our mouth has been opened wide, God will fill it.
In this argument Origen appeals to one of the three criteria listed earlier in this chapter that he uses in determining how to interpret a passage of Scripture: Is this interpretation worthy of God? Does the literal sense of this passage express something that is worthy of God either saying or doing? What would it mean literally for God to say, “Open your mouth wide”? A few pages later he brings the homily to a conclusion with a sort of bantering tone, as he says, interpreting Psalm 80:17 (81:16),
“And he fed” us “from the fat of wheat and satisfied” us “with honey from the rock,” and “the rock” is “Christ.” “He led them up to the strength of the land; he fed them the fruits of the fields; they sucked honey from a rock.” We who believe in Christ are the ones who suck honey, for what is sweeter than the words of God? We, therefore, suck honey from the rock. For this reason too, this rock, gives us this word of which we say, “How sweet to my throat are your oracles, beyond honey and the honeycomb.” Solomon, in his Proverbs, says of this honey that we suck from the rock, “When you have found honey, eat what is sufficient,” and elsewhere, “Eat honey, my son, for it is good.” And he commands me to eat honey because this honey is good to eat. I am interpreting allegorically again; and some of you, again, are upset at my allegory. Perhaps the person who takes offense at what is being said about, “Eat honey, my son, for this is good,” says it is good to eat honey, and God, through the Holy Spirit, is commanding us to eat honey. But perhaps the Logos is ordering us to eat the sweet word which is from the rock, so that always loving to be nurtured by the holy word we may eat milk and honey in Christ Jesus, to whom is glory and power forever and ever. Amen.
Origen seems to me here to be prodding his audience in a teasing manner, as if to say, Think about the implications of reading these words literally. Does the almighty God really want to instruct us through the Holy Spirit to eat honey? Might he not rather want to instruct us to feast on “the sweet word” of our Savior? Whether one agrees or disagrees with Origen’s interpretation of Scripture, his approach can hardly be called arbitrary. There was method in his approach and careful distinctions were made.
There is one further literary technique that Origen frequently uses that differs from the three that we have just considered. Modern scholars call this technique prosopological exegesis. It focuses on identifying who is speaking in a text and sometimes also to whom the words are addressed. This approach to reading texts had its roots in the classical period of Greek literature. I was a classical philology major with a specialization in patristic literature in my graduate program. I read a lot of Greek drama, especially the tragedies. In every Greek text of a tragic drama just before the actual text begins, there is a page with the heading in Greek: ta tou dramatos prosōpa, followed by a list of the names of the characters in the drama. Very literally that Greek phrase means, the faces in the drama, but in more meaningful English, it means the characters in the drama. This phrase came out of the way Greek drama was performed. Every character wore a mask, a face that identified that character in the play. An exegetical procedure developed out of this in antiquity focused on identifying in what prosopon or “character” the author of the writing was speaking. The church fathers were educated men who had studied in Greek and Roman schools and had learned the techniques of how to study ancient texts and often applied these techniques to the Scriptures. Justin is the earliest Christian writer who makes conscious reference to this technique and actually alludes to its presence in the classical authors. Origen has a discussion of the technique in his very early small commentary on the Song of Songs, where he says, “The things that are said in Scripture cause a lot of confusion for a person who has not understood the unique feature of the characters (prosōpōn) in Scripture, that is, those who speak and those to whom the speech is addressed.”
This method was applied primarily to the Psalms and the Prophets and it was used especially to discover Christ either speaking or being spoken of in these writings. We must recognize, as in the previous techniques, that Origen does not arbitrarily decide that Christ is the speaking voice in a psalm or that it is to him that the speech is addressed. The basic question he asks when trying to determine the speaker in a psalm is, “Who could or would most appropriately say this?” He denies, for example, that the “you” in the statement, “He gave his angels a command concerning you, that they should raise you up in their hands, lest perhaps you strike your foot against a stone,” should be understood to be Christ. In homily one on Psalm 77 (78):2, “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter problems from the beginning,” Origen says, “As it is our custom in the Psalms and the Prophets to investigate what character is speaking, so here also we must investigate who the speaker is.” He notes that Matthew attributes these words to Jesus. I would have doubted that this statement should be taken “in reference to the Savior,” Origen says, had not Matthew applied the words to Jesus. His reasons for doubting that the words should be taken of Jesus arose from the following words in the psalm where the Psalmist refers to “things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us.” Origen did not think these words were fitting to be said by the Savior because Jesus did not know about things from hearing them from the ancestors. He then says, “Had not Matthew, therefore, said that the psalm is from the character of the Savior, I would not have dared refer the things recorded to the Savior. . . . What shall I do, however, since Matthew says these things?” Matthew’s application of these words to Jesus, in other words, was a kind of apostolic trump card that convinced Origen that the words should be understood as spoken by Christ. He notes immediately, however, that the following words should not be understood as spoken by Christ, but that the speaking character has changed, as frequently happened in the Psalms. Origen did not attribute words to Christ in the Psalms or Prophets carelessly. He looked carefully at what was said and considered who of the possible speakers would most likely have spoken the words in question.
Origen was an avid, careful, prayerful reader of Scripture. He plumbed Scriptures depths and offered his findings to the church. His primary concern was that his interpretations of Scripture be beneficial to the people of God. He was not, in the words of Henri de Lubac, an exegete in the sense of studying the text scientifically. His Scriptural exegesis was “a theological meditation on sacred history.” Scripture “was always, not in general, but hic et nunc, the Word of God.” It was “the two-edged sword whose sharp point pierces to the division of soul and spirit.”
Questions for Discussion
1.How would you describe Origen’s approach to interpreting Scripture?
2.How does Origen use Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:7 as a key for interpreting Scripture?
3.How does Origen understand the vision of the throne room of God in Revelation 5 to be related to the interpretation of Scripture?
4.Do you think the adjective “allegorical” adequately describes Origen’s interpretation of Scripture? Why or why not?
. Heine, “Three Allusions to Book 20,” 264.
. Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, ch. 7 (English in ANF 6, 28–30).
. Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, chs. 9–11 (ANF 6, 30–33).
. Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, ch. 13 (ANF 6, 33–35).
. Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, chs. 14–15 (ANF 6, 35–36).
. Grégoire le Thaumaturge, Remercient, ch. 15 (ANF 6, 36).
. Letter to Gregory 1. This and the following translations from Origen’s letter are mine from the Greek text of Crouzel (SC 148).
. Letter to Gregory 2
. Letter to Gregory 3.
. Letter to Gregory 4.
. See, for example, Eugène de Faye, Origène and, to a large extent, Hanson, Allegory.
. Heine, “Reading the Bible,” 131; see also Origen: Commentary, FOTC 80, 3.
. See Edwards, Origen against Plato.
. Martens, Origen, 1.
. Perrone, “Origen’s ‘Confessions,’” 9.
. Rev 5:1–9 (NRSV).
. ComJn 5.6, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 164, my emphasis. Origen has blended a part of Rev 3:7 about the key of David with Rev 5 in this citation.
. Luke 24:26–27.
. HomEx 12.4, trans. Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, FOTC 71, 372, revised.
. ComJn 1.36, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 41, my emphasis.
. ComJn 1.34, 36, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 41.
. Princ 4.1.6, trans. Origen On First Principles Vol. 2. 477; revised; 2 Cor 3:14–16.
. On this whole topic see the excerpt from Origen’s commentary on Psalm 1, preserved in Philoc 2.1–2.
. Matt 5:9. Origen’s discussion of this beatitude, while missing from the preserved text of his ComMt, has been preserved in Greek in Philoc 6. For an English translation see Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 321–22.
. These discussions have not been preserved.
. Ps 118:22; Matt 21:42.
. ComMt 17.12; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 287.
. ComMt 12.38, 40, 43; Cels. 6.68; HomLev 6.2; ComRom 1.10; Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 120–23.
. See Princ 4.2.1–4.3.15.
. Princ 4.1.1–4.1.7.
. See Neuschäfer, Origenes als Philologe.
. See Heine, “Introduction to Origen’s Commentary on John”; Heine, “Prologues of Origen’s Pauline Commentaries”; and Heine, “Restringing Origen’s Broken Harp.”
. HomJosh 20.2, trans. Origen: Homilies on Joshua, FOTC 105, 177.
. HomNum 27.1–2.
. Princ 4.2.7, trans, Origen On First Principles, Vol. 2.509–11.
. Princ 4.2.7; 1. Preface.
. See Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 7–11.
. Princ 4.2.8.
. Origen, ComJn 13.37–58, cf. 13.61, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 89, 76–81.
. Cels 7.60; Origen: Contra Celsum, 445–46.
. HomEx 12.2; trans. Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, FOTC 71, 369.
. Homer, Iliad 1.8–52.
. Cels 1.42.
. Princ 4.2.9.
. 1 Cor 2:9; Origene Esegesi Paolina 10 (70), my translation.
. Phil 3:4–9.
. See the account in Acts 9:1–22; retold in 22:1–16 and 26:4–23.
. See Acts 26:22–23; Holladay, Acts, 478.
. Rom 1:1–2; 1 Cor 15:3–4 (NRSV), my emphasis, 1 Cor 10:4. See also Rom 2:28–29; 7:14; 1 Cor 10:11; 2 Cor 3:6, etc.
. See Heine, “Reading the Bible,” 136.
. Origene Esegesi Paolina 10 (70).
. Origene Esegesi Paolina 11 (72).
. Origene Esegesi Paolina 11 (72).
. Origene Esegesi Paolina 11 (72). The Isaiah reference is to Isa 29:11–12.
. See Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 14–16.
. Heine, “Reading the Bible,” 136.
. Homer in Iliad 1.1 does call on the Muse of poetry to sing the wrath of Achilles, and in Odyssey 1.1 he appeals to the Muse to tell the story of Odysseus. But this is hardly the same thing as what Origen understands when he attributes the composition of Scripture to the Holy Spirit. And certainly no ancient grammarian claimed inspiration from the Muse for his interpretation of Homer.
. See 1 Cor 2:15.
. Origene Esegesi Paolina, 11 (74); quoting Gal 5:22–23.
. Heraclitus, 9.
. Princ 4.2.6, trans. Origen On First Principles 2, 505; 1 Cor 2:7. I have substituted quote marks for italics to indicate the quotation of Scripture.
. ComJn 6.22, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 174.
. HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.641A), my translation.
. See Deut 4:44; Num 36:13.
. HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.641C–642A), my translation and emphasis.
. HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.642B), my translation and emphases.
. HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.642B-643A).
. HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.643A), my translation.
. HomNum 11.1 (PG 12.643B-C).
. Ps 78:12 (English).
. ComJn 13.454, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 89, 165.
. ComJn 20.66–79, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 89, 219–23.
. ComJn 20.74, trans. Origen, Commentary, FOTC 89, 222.
. Ps 80 (81):11.
. Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 501–2.
. Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 507–8, my translation. The Scriptures quoted are 1 Cor 10:4; Deut 32:13; Ps 118 (119):103; Prov 25:16: 24:13.
. The definitive work on this subject is Rondeau, Les commentaries patristiques.
. See Justin, First Apology, 36.
. Philoc 7.1.
. Ps 90:11–12.
. HomLk 31.4. So also on Ps 45:1 in ComJn 1.283–87.
. See Matt 13:35.
. Ps 78:3.
. See Philoc 7; Origen: Commentary on Romans 2.11, FOTC 103, 135; and ComJn 6.53, Origen, Commentary, FOTC 80, 183.
. de Lubac, History and Spirit, 471, 431.