HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Origen’s allegory dissolve the literal and historical sense of Scripture?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the interpretation weighed here is that Origen’s threefold exegesis presupposes the letter rather than abolishing it: the historical sense is the foundation his method builds on, he affirms that Scripture is true in its plain sense far more often than not, and he sets aside the literal reading only where he judges the text itself to signal it. That core is strong, and it is the settled modern rehabilitation of Origen the exegete. But it overstates if pressed into “his method never dissolves inconvenient history.” Origen really does dehistoricize particular narratives — paradise, Eden, God walking in the garden “took place in appearance, and not literally” is his own stated position, not a hostile invention — and he grounds this in a general theory that the Spirit wove deliberate “impossibilities and incongruities” into the text, on a criterion (“who that has understanding will suppose…”) elastic enough that the Antiochene tradition rose specifically to resist it. The reading is strong by Alexandrian lights and weak by Antiochene ones; the sharpest single charge attached to it — that Origen read the “coats of skins” as the human body — is genuinely disputed and not securely his.

The claim

Sixthly, he so allegorises Paradise as to destroy historical truth, understanding angels instead of trees, heavenly virtues instead of rivers, and he overthrows all that is contained in the history of Paradise by his figurative interpretation.

— Jerome, Against John of Jerusalem 7, relaying the charge-sheet Epiphanius pressed against Origen, link.¹ That is the accusation in its sharpest form: Origen’s allegory does not merely add a spiritual sense on top of the history, it destroys the history — and, the charge continues, it does so wherever the letter is inconvenient, until nothing in the text is safe from dissolution. The interpretation weighed here is the counter-reading urged by Origen’s defenders, ancient and modern: that his method does the opposite of what the charge says. His famous threefold sense — body, soul, spirit — makes the “common and historical sense” the very body of Scripture, the ground everything else is raised on; he states plainly that the passages true in their plain historical sense are “much more numerous” than those that carry only a spiritual meaning; and he denies literal historicity not at whim but at the narrow set of points where he judges the text itself to have flagged the impossibility. On this reading the charge takes a disciplined, self-limiting exegesis and caricatures it as an acid that dissolves whatever it touches.

Who advances it

The charge is old and continuous. Pamphilus, answering the accusations from prison around 308, already lists sixth among them that Origen “dissolves the historical narratives of Scripture.”² Epiphanius made it a fixed article of heresy 64 — the Origenists “allegorize Paradise, the heavens and all the rest” — and it passed through Jerome into the standard Latin indictment.³ It was not only a heresiologist’s complaint: the method itself provoked a running exegetical resistance, of which the fullest surviving specimen is Eustathius of Antioch’s treatise On the Belly-Myth, against Origen, which attacks Origen’s handling of the witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28) and, through it, the allegorical technique at large;⁴ the later Antiochene exegetes Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia built a whole rival hermeneutic of historia and theoria in conscious opposition to Alexandrian allegoria. The counter-reading — that Origen’s spiritual exegesis rests on the letter rather than razing it — is Origen’s own, set out in the fourth book of Peri Archōn, and it is the thesis of the great twentieth-century rehabilitation of him as an interpreter, Henri de Lubac’s Histoire et Esprit (1950), followed by R. P. C. Hanson and Frances Young.⁵

The evidence for

The threefold sense keeps the letter as the foundation, not the casualty. Origen’s programmatic statement of method, in Peri Archōn IV, describes three senses answering to body, soul, and spirit — and the first, the lowest but the base of the other two, is the plain historical reading: “all the more simple individuals may be edified, so to speak, by the very body of Scripture; for such we term that common and historical sense.”⁶ The letter is not an obstacle to be cleared away but the body a soul and spirit inhabit; the simplest reader is fed by it, the more advanced move through it, not past it. This is the point de Lubac made central: for Origen the spiritual sense is “the spirit borne in the history,” so that the history is presupposed by the very move that goes beyond it.

He affirms that most of Scripture is true in its plain sense. The charge implies a reader who reaches for allegory to escape the text; Origen states the reverse ratio in as many words. Having granted that some passages have no bodily sense, he immediately guards the letter of the rest: “the passages which hold good in their historical acceptation are much more numerous than those which contain a purely spiritual meaning,” and he instances the plain commands — honour your father and mother — that “of themselves” need no spiritual gloss to bind.⁷ A method that dissolved the historical sense “wherever it is inconvenient” would not carry, printed at the head of its own manual, the admission that the historical sense holds in the great majority of cases.

He suspends the letter only where he judges the text itself to signal it. Origen does not allegorize at random; he claims a textual trigger. The Spirit, he says, “took care that certain stumbling-blocks, or interruptions, to the historical meaning should take place, by the introduction into the midst of the narrative of certain impossibilities and incongruities,” so that the reader, halted by what cannot be read flatly, is driven to look for the deeper sense.⁸ The paradise narrative is his showcase precisely because he thinks its letter breaks down on inspection: days with evening and morning before the sun and moon were made, a God who “after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden,” who “walk[s] in the paradise in the evening” while Adam hides under a tree. Of these he writes: “I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.”⁹ The criterion is that the surface, read as bald history, yields something unworthy of God or physically absurd — not that the surface is merely inconvenient. And where a pagan critic mocked the same story as an “old wife’s fable,” Origen defended its allegory as reasoned reading, not evasion: the details of Eden “might of themselves lead a candid reader to see that all these things had not inappropriately an allegorical meaning.”¹⁰

The sharpest specific — “coats of skins” = the body — is not securely his. The single most damaging item on the charge-sheet is the reading of Genesis 3:21: that the garments of skin God made for Adam and Eve after the fall are the human body, so that before the fall they had, as Jerome jeers, “neither flesh, sinews, nor bones.”¹ Yet this reading reaches us chiefly through the hostile witnesses — Methodius, Epiphanius, Jerome — and its attribution to Origen is genuinely disputed among his modern students. In the few places where his own surviving text touches Genesis 3:21 there is no clear statement that the skins are the body; Methodius, who made the verse a weapon against him, actually read it the other way, as mortality rather than as flesh; and whether Origen held the body-as-garment doctrine at all is the express subject of a continuing scholarly exchange.¹¹ On the reading’s most incriminating detail, the defenders are right that the record is a prosecution file, not a confession.

Adversarial assessment

He did dehistoricize particular narratives — the charge hardens a real position, it does not invent one. The counter-reading is at its weakest when it is made to say that Origen never denied the historical sense of anything the church took as history. He plainly did. That paradise, Eden, the trees, and God walking in the garden are “not literal” is not Epiphanius’s slander of Origen but Origen’s own considered verdict, stated in Peri Archōn and defended in Contra Celsum. Jerome’s “he so allegorises Paradise as to destroy historical truth” is polemical in its “destroy,” but the thing it points at — that for Origen the Eden narrative “took place in appearance, and not literally” — is exactly what the text says. The defense that best fits the evidence is not “he preserved the letter everywhere” but “he denied it in a bounded set of cases and by a stated rule” — a narrower and more defensible claim.

His theory makes non-historicity a designed feature of the text, not a rare exception. The “stumbling-blocks” passage cuts both ways. It supplies the method its principle of restraint — allegory is triggered by textual difficulty, not convenience — but it also asserts something far larger than the critics’ caricature: that divine wisdom deliberately seeded the narrative with “impossibilities and incongruities” so that the letter would fail and force the reader upward. That is not a grudging concession that a handful of passages resist literal reading; it is a positive doctrine that the text was built to defeat the literalist at chosen points. A reader who found in that a licence for the learned to overrule the plain sense was not misreading Origen so much as taking him at his word.

The criterion is elastic, and the Antiochenes rose precisely against its want of a limit. “Who that has understanding will suppose…” locates the trigger in the interpreter’s judgement of what is worthy of God or possible in nature — a standard with no fixed edge, which is why the same method that dehistoricized Eden could be turned, in other hands, on Sarah and Hagar, the conquest of Canaan, or the raising of Samuel. Eustathius of Antioch wrote a whole treatise to insist that the witch of Endor really did not bring up Samuel and that Origen’s allegorizing had loosed the plain sense of a plain narrative; Diodore and Theodore of Mopsuestia founded a rival school on the conviction that the historical historia must anchor whatever higher theoria is drawn from it.⁴ Their objection was not that Origen allegorized at all — every ancient reader did — but that his principle set no controllable boundary to it. That is a serious charge, and it is the reason the interpretation is strong by one discipline’s lights and weak by another’s.

Even the rehabilitation concedes the point it is invoked to deny. De Lubac’s Histoire et Esprit is rightly cited for showing that Origen’s spiritual reading is history-borne, not history-dissolving — but the study itself takes for granted what its manuals had long noted, that Origen denies a literal sense in some passages of both Testaments, meaning that he denies the historical reality of an event, or the force of a law or precept. The rehabilitation reframes the allegory as disciplined and Christ-directed; it does not, and does not try to, show that Origen left every narrative historically intact. Used to prove that much, it proves too little; used to prove that Origen’s method presupposes the letter as its foundation and suspends it only under a stated rule, it is exactly right.

Assessment

contested. Taken as the accusers took it — that Origen’s allegory dissolves the historical sense of Scripture wherever the letter is inconvenient — the charge is a caricature, and the defense is strong against it: the threefold sense makes the “common and historical sense” the body on which everything else is raised, Origen states that the historically-true passages are “much more numerous” than the purely spiritual, he suspends the letter by a stated textual trigger rather than at convenience, and the single most incriminating item — the “coats of skins” as the human body — is reported by hostile witnesses and is not securely his. That is the settled modern rehabilitation of Origen the exegete, and it holds. But the interpretation weakens as it broadens. Origen really did dehistoricize particular narratives, paradise foremost, on his own account and not merely his enemies’; his theory of divinely-planted “impossibilities” makes the failure of the letter a designed feature of the text rather than a rare exception; and his criterion for when the letter fails is elastic enough that the Antiochene tradition — Eustathius on the witch of Endor, Diodore and Theodore on historia against allegoria — arose precisely to supply the limit it lacked. Strong where it answers the sweeping charge, weaker where it is pressed into “his method never dissolved inconvenient history,” and caught between two exegetical disciplines that weigh the same texts differently, the reading is genuinely contested.

Sources