Brian Barrett - Origen’s Spiritual Exegesis as a Defence of the Literal Sense

This paper claims that Origen’s spiritual exegesis should be properly understood as a defence of the scriptural letter. His allegorical interpretation intends rather to elevate the letter’s revelatory function in relation to Scripture’s higher senses than to move beyond literal sense as if it were a foil. Particularly in de Principiis IV, Origen presents a pattern of Christian exegesis which disallows any exegetical strategies that isolate the literal sense. Indeed, his discernment of a christological configuration to the biblical text permits him to insist that the letter, along with the psychic and pneumatic senses, is constitutive of and integral to Scripture’s meaning. Both in Scripture and in his historical sojourn, the Word of God needs a body, not for his own sake, but in order to make himself available to frail human capacity. By thus refracting Scripture through the mystery of the Incarnation, Origen seeks to provide hermeneutical principles consonant with the economy of salvation fulfilled in Christ. A defence of the person of Christ is a defence of the economy of God’s revelation in Scripture.

Significant implications follow from this reading of Origen’s exegetical theory. Notwithstanding his claim that Scripture occasionally fails to provide a somatic meaning, the scriptural text is never without revelatory function with respect to content and form. On the one hand it must be demonstrated that the letter provides a control for spiritual interpretation, preventing a Gnostic spiritualizing extraction. There can be no uncovering of spiritual knowledge apart from how the letter reveals it. On the other hand, the very lowliness of Scripture’s outward form—its simple style, the σκάνδαλα of its absurdities and impossibilities—indicates what Origen calls its “divine character.” Because no words can adequately express the mystery of God’s saving economy, the revelation is clothed in the inadequacy of the letter so as to be made available. Scripture does not simply communicate divine Wisdom, but Wisdom allows itself to be borne in the letter’s weakness. Here the Word’s incorporation into the scriptural letter is perfectly continuous with his Incarnation as it materializes the character of the divine economy: God’s love of humanity revealed in the vulnerability of the Word made flesh.