Paul Kolbet - Rethinking the Rationales for Origen's Use of Allegory

How best to understand Origen’s use of allegory was one of the more controversial topics in twentieth century patristic studies. Perhaps this is not surprising since Origen’s method of scriptural interpretation was disputed in his own lifetime. Scholars have sought to determine allegory’s provenance, the extant that it preserved or abrogated the historical sense of texts, and speculated about its social function suggesting, among other things, that it was an ingenious tool to imbue authoritative texts with respectable meanings. It has long been known that Origen’s methods were largely shared with the Hellenistic grammatical and philosophical schools. Recent studies of ancient philosophy have clarified how allegorical reading could be construed as a legitimate mode of philosophical inquiry. It is now possible to see how Origen himself may have understood his own exegetical strategies to be part and parcel of his intellectual practice. Origen’s sense of human finitude, ignorance, and death was profound and largely determined the shape of his intellectual project. His understanding of the indeterminacy afflicting human knowledge of ultimate things led him to engage in daring modes of intellectual activity (such as allegory) that readers can find unsettling. Exegesis was a form of inquiry into the nature of things that accorded with the limits of human knowing. By examining a number of Origen’s texts ranging from De principiis, Contra Celsum, and passages from his homilies, I will trace how Origen practiced biblical interpretation more as a hermeneutical exercise fostering certain habits of mind than as a quest for fixed meanings outside the self. When seen from this perspective, Origen’s characteristic theological themes correlate with his interpretive methods. He advocated a reading of scripture that had a progressive quality where one begins with the biblical surface (or narrative meaning) only to delve more deeply into matters of the soul and eventually into the Spirit itself. By learning to read scripture in all its dimensions, one learned how superficial one’s ordinary perception of everything else truly was. Origen believed that the training in interpreting images supplied by scripture led skilled readers through moral conversion to the limits of human knowledge only finally to peer beyond the created realm as the mind’s love pushed it to long to contemplate the incorporeal God.