Continental Biblical Scholarship and the Sources of William Baldwin’s The Canticles or Balades of Salomon

Introduction This article explores the possibility of returning 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 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 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 history in a way that argumentatively begs the question in favor of discreet typological reading. It will be important 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 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 affirm the procedures of the allegorical readings of Origen of Alexandria, the paragon of ancient Christian allegorical interpretation, I turn Origen's theology and his second homily on Genesis explore how his reading strategies depend on a picture of scriptural soteriological efficacy, bringing the ancient writings 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 contribute 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 [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 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 determine whether ancient Christian allegorical reading bears direct methodological influence from early Platonic, Gnostic, and Philonic uses of allegorical interpretation. Attempting differentiate between allegory and what has come be called typology (derived from the Latin typologia) has been thought 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 incorporate this distinction, Jean Danielou, attempted discern what in Origen's exegetical writings derived from the Christian tradition and what involved carryover from other non-Christian sources. …

Early Christian Readings of Genesis One: Patristic Exegesis and Literal Interpretation

My meditation on restitution as a critical practice evokes obvious conceptual corollaries, such as the twin issues with which it is associated most frequently in contemporary theoretical discussions. The first of these, nation studies, is historical, and concerns the ways in which cultural evidence is marshaled to describe the contents of a national imaginary, often buried or at least unattended. The role of the critic in such practice is to restitute cultural contents that play a role in discourses that either construct or undermine collective identities, such as those encompassed by the concept of nation. Yet clearly the gap between the original nature of those contents and its eventual critical restitution, its retrospective rendering, ought to be mediated by, or at least checked against, the primary evidence of the national archive. And, needless to say, such practice does not always work neatly in favor of encompassing all the identities that are in need of articulation. The other issue, allegory, which is rhetorical rather than historical, would seem to go to the heart of the restitutive will, in the sense that every allegorical interpretation, by its very definition and structure (allegory being literally the discourse of the other, albs agoueirein), attempts to translate one code or set of ciphers onto another, perhaps more accessible, set of signs. Thus allegorical reading would appear to be a primary restituting activity, as decipherment, subject to speculation or correct reading, remains a matter of constant slippage.

In his writings on the Eucharist, Thomas More defends the literal interpretation of scripture and berates Protestants for their inordinate allegorizing. While literal reading may seem more characteristic of a Protestant hermeneutic, More's writings suggest that, when it came to the Eucharist, literal reading was no less a Catholic practice, though differently motivated. In his discussion of the Eucharist, More embraces literal reading so as to reclaim the faith, mystery, and transcendence he believes Protestants had discarded when they relied too heavily on allegorical interpretations. The dangers and limitations he ascribes to allegory shape Utopia, a fictional text whose eponymous world is defined by the absence of restrictive figuration. Reading Utopia in this light reclaims More's theological writings as pertinent to his literary contributions. As such, his work helps us renegotiate the lines between literal and allegorical reading and demonstrates the vitality of the Eucharist in shaping early modern literature.

It is commonplace in the exegesis to consider Qoh. xii 1-7 as an allegory of old age. Commentators do not agree on the details of allegorical interpretations or even the verses where, in their view, it should be necessary, we must reiterate that the allegorical reading is not the only one, of this text has been maintained for centuries: Hippolytus of Rome, Gregory the Wonderworker and Didymus the Blind defended an eschatological type of interpretation. The author adds that the allegory, in the words of the commentators who accept it, do not in all Qoh. xii 1-7. If one says that there is physiological allegory in these verses while the majority of them are the only verses 3, 4 and 5b; but, he repeats, their agreement is far from perfect. Finally, to address the text correctly, the author highlights the literary structure. Keywords: old age; allegorical interpretations; physiological allegory; Rome; literary structure

The attempt to understand the relation between history and literature in the seventeenth century encounters the problem of allegory immediately. The more closely we read certain plays and non-dramatic poems, the more they seem to be offering covert advice on contemporary politics, and the greater is the temptation to translate their figures (in both senses) into topical allusions. The process is invited by Absalom and Achitophel or The Duke of Guise, but what are we to make of the stag-hunt in Cooper's Hill, or Dryden's epistle to Dr. Charleton, or the political overtones of heroic tragedy? I shall refer mainly to works by Dryden, but one section of my argument will be illustrated from Denham, Sir Robert Howard, and Thomas Otway. I have already revealed that I am using the word allegory, in a sense that is fast becoming antiquated, to mean the hiding of a specific reference, either conceptual or topical, behind a metaphoric veil. By definition, allegorical poems then possess levels of significance, translatable meaning, and neat analogical equations. Spenserian criticism of the past five years, however, has mounted a concerted attack on the theory implied by such paraphrase, without altogether avoiding paraphrase in practice. The Faerie Queene has been cut loose from its moorings to a rigid conceptual framework outside the text, and has been explored either as a poem of rhetorical process which develops complex psychological reactions in the reader, or as a world of its own that generates subtle meanings within itself. It is becoming harder to distinguish allegory from other kinds of poetic discourse, although Rosemond Tuve has concluded that true allegory is always fundamentally religious and concerned with matters of right belief. The crest of the latest critical wave has not yet hit us, and the next five years are likely to see the rewriting of Northrop Frye's dictum that all commentary is allegorical interpretation so as to read commentary turns all works into

This chapter clarifies some questions regarding Maimonides' allegorical readings of Scripture. Maimonides' position struck Spinoza as 'noxious, useless, and absurd'; for according to it, one could never know what a biblical text meant until one conducted an independent scientific investigation and determined whether or not its plain meaning contradicted reason. Of course, Spinoza was able to reject Maimonides' position regarding the allegorical interpretation of Scripture because, unlike him, he was not committed to the reasonableness of the biblical text. Maimonides' position regarding the allegorical interpretation of Scripture is similar to that of his contemporary and fellow Cordovan, Averroes. Maimonides' allegorical interpretations of Scripture are often highly creative, and may indeed seem outrageous to the fundamentalist or to the critical Bible scholar, yet they are almost always rooted in classical Rabbinic midrash. Keywords: Averroes; biblical text; classical Rabbinic midrash; Maimonides' allegorical readings; Scripture; Spinoza

The Sidney Sperry/Heber Snell Debates: Critical Biblical Scholarship and Mormon Tradition

Reviewed by: Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West Eric Hayot (bio) Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West. By Zhang Longxi. Cornell University Press, 2005. x + 256 pp. $39.95. This book continues the project Zhang Longxi began in The Tao and the Logos (1992) and made explicit in Mighty Opposites (1999): to assert, against those who would argue for the incommensurability of cultures, that whatever differences appear through the lens of anthropological or literary hermeneutics do not cut one kind from another. "I will argue," he writes in the introductory chapter, "that the belief in the possibility of common knowledge and cross-cultural understanding, in the availability of conceptual tools for [End Page 122] the interpretation of human behavior across the boundaries of language, geography, culture, and time, can indeed come from a genuine appreciation of the equal capabilities of different individuals, peoples, and nations" (11). As in Mighty Opposites, where a distinction between the "identical" and the "equal" grounded in explicitly Heideggerean terms allowed Zhang to insist on the possibility of cross-cultural comparison based on a universalist egalitarianism, Allegoresis aims to undermine the "cultural relativists" who would insist, sometimes from a sense of superiority, sometimes from a desire to protect others from misunderstanding, that no hermeneutic that does not emerge from a given epistemological "inside" can ever fully grasp the structures, habits, meanings, or values of that interiority, much less its obscene and wondrous hopes and possibilities. Readers from Chinese studies will recognize in the book's title a reference to the decades-long debate over the "problem" of metaphor in Chinese literature, a debate more or less settled for me, a non-sinologist, by Haun Saussy's The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1995). The related claim that Chinese literature does not have allegories, and is thus not susceptible to allegorical interpretations (aka "allegoresis") has nonetheless been remarkably hard to bury, and it claws its way out of the grave one more time in Zhang's first few chapters. He dispatches it with a number of vigorous blows from the hermeneutic shovel, moving back and forth between hypercanonical works from a number of traditions—the biblical Song of Songs and the Confucian Shi jing [Book of Poetry] in chapter 2, utopias like More's and Zamyatin's, and the early twentieth-century work of Kang Youwei in chapter 4. (The admirable range of Zhang's references generates for me one small quibble: why subtitle the book "Reading Canonical Literature, East and West," when all the "Eastern" literature is Chinese, and the boundaries of the "West" are so expansive—is the Song of Songs really "Western," or did it become so, and is this a difference worth remarking?) In general, Zhang's procedure is to begin with a recognizably "allegorical" work from the "Western" tradition, to present the history of its reading and interpretation, and then to follow up with texts from the Chinese tradition, which prove in each case to be not only amenable to an allegorical reading (which would suggest that serious critical effort can find allegory anywhere), but in fact to have consistently been subject to allegorical readings by the very people who were not supposed to believe in or have allegory in the first place. Layered over Zhang's interest in the question of allegoresis are a series of comments that attempt to parse the general and situational ethics of allegorical reading, and indeed of literary critical interpretation more generally. These occur often enough, and in enough crucial places, to establish a sort of [End Page 123] shadow thesis behind the book. This second thesis appears most prominently at the beginning of the book's third chapter, when Zhang tells the story of the powerful prime minister Zhao Gao, who in the third century B.C.E. brought a stag into the court and announced to the emperor that it was a horse. Zhao Gao's naming the animal as he saw fit tested the emperor's power and the loyalties of his court. His dislocation of the stag's "literal" meaning made interpretation an allegory of his domination, a domination that became profoundly literal when those who agreed with the emperor...

Allegories of War:Paul de Man’s Moby-Dick Translation Michael Boyden This article deals with a Flemish translation of Moby-Dick, published in Antwerp in 1945, which has been attributed to the deconstructive critic Paul de Man in the Belgian phase of his career. The article’s objective is twofold. First, it qualifies the well-intentioned but one-sided claim on the part of de Man scholars that the Moby-Dick translation constitutes a resolute turning point in de Man’s ideological trajectory. Second, in doing so, it draws out some of the aporias of allegorical readings of the postwar period, which adopt a redemptive framework geared towards the American nation. My main claim is that, contrary to American liberal critics, de Man did not approach Moby-Dick in terms of a larger struggle against totalitarian closure, but rather responded to the theme of antimodernism and Melville’s complex relation to imperialism. This interpretation is inferred from the modifications to the novel’s situation of address, the amplification of martial imagery, and paratextual insertions by the translator. Rather than arguing for or against a specific reading of Moby-Dick, the article’s larger aim is to highlight the displacements inherent in any allegorical interpretation of the novel. In a still dominant but by no means uncontested reading of Moby-Dick, the book’s larger theme is framed in terms of a struggle between the ideological closure embodied by the “monomaniac mind” of Ahab and Ishmael’s democratic alternative. The orphaned Ishmael has the last word, which for Charles Feidelson, F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Chase, R. W. B. Lewis, Leslie Fiedler, and others, indicated that the book displayed a characteristically American, “melodramatic” quality (Chase 157). At least since the end of the Cold War, this allegorical understanding of the novel has increasingly come under fire from the so-called “New Americanists,” notably Donald Pease, who in an influential essay links the “essentialized opposition” between Ishmael and Ahab to a discourse of exceptionalism inherent in American Studies (137).1 Similarly, WaiChee Dimock has stressed how Melville’s dream of freedom and democracy in Moby-Dick “is haunted always by its obverse” (138). Dimock sets her interpretation off from a long line of Melville scholarship that in her view posits [End Page 21] Ishmael as a central “redemptive figure” in the book (236n52). Although such revisionist interpretations have done their work in exposing some ideological presuppositions of liberal criticism in the Cold War era, their field of vision remains national. Despite the desire to go beyond the narrowly “national telos” of earlier critics, Pease constructs C. L. R. James’s Marines, Renegades and Castaways, which the Trinidadian critic completed while in custody at Ellis Island, as “an additional episode within Melville’s masterwork” that somehow serves to complete Melville’s “interrupted intention” (156). However radical in purpose, such exegetical gestures remain tied to utopian visions—representing Melville’s “actual” intention—of an alternative, more democratic America.2 My aim in this article is to approach Melville’s “cultural declaration,” as John Bryant has called it (70), from a slightly wider orbit by way of a relatively unknown Flemish translation of Moby-Dick, published in 1945, which has been attributed to the deconstructive critic Paul de Man in his early, Belgian career. The translation raises important questions about de Man’s ideological leanings during the war. But the case may equally illuminate the ideological constraints governing interpretations of Melville’s classic by forcing us to come to terms with Moby-Dick’s appeal in ideological contexts ostensibly diametrically opposed to American conceptions of democracy. When the de Man “affair” broke out in the late 1980s, well-intentioned friends and colleagues referred to the Moby-Dick translation, which de Man completed at the end of the war after he had ceased writing for the collaborationist press, as evidence of his moral right-mindedness.3 Thus, in an oft-quoted essay reprinted in her book Testimony, Shoshana Felman argued that the Melville translation signals an “absolute break” in the young de Man’s ideological orientation (134). Offering a forthrightly allegorical reading, Felman suggests that the Moby-Dick translation was for de Man a way of...

In ancient literature, the act of allegorical writing is preserved in texts with allegorical figures, and the act of allegorical readingallegoresis in texts that interpret a pre-text allegorically, as in Augustines Confessions . This chapter shows that Augustines Confessions do not just document allegorical readingthat is, of the biblical creation story in Genesis 1 and 2 in book 13,1346but rather that the first ten books may be read allegorically, which implies that they are written as a pretext to an allegorical interpretation. It is important to consider first the differences between the allegoresis of myths and of the Bible. In the course of his work on the biblical text Augustine constantly grappled with the questions of method that an allegorizing exegete asks himself. Also of importance for Augustines legitimization of allegoresis are his reflections on why the biblical text allows more than one reading. Keywords: allegorical reading; allegorical writing; Augustines Confessions

Allegorical readings of literary or religious texts always begin as counterreadings, starting with denial or negation, challenging the literal sense: 'You have read the text this way, but I will read it differently.' David Dawson insists that ancient allegory is best understood not simply as a way of reading texts, but as a way of using non-literal readings to reinterpret culture and society. Here he describes how some ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian interpreters used allegory to endorse, revise, and subvert competing Christian and pagan world views. This reassessment of allegorical reading emphasizes socio-cultural contexts rather than purely formal literary features, opening with an analysis of the pagan use of etymology and allegory in the Hellenistic world and pagan opposition to both techniques. The remainder of the book presents three Hellenistic religious writers who each typify distinctive models of allegorical interpretation: the Jewish exegete Philo, the Christian Gnostic Valentinus, and the Christian Platonist Clement. The study engages issues in the fields of classics, history of Christianity and Hellenistic Judaism, literary criticism and theory, and more broadly, critical theory and cultural criticism.

When faith traditions confront postmodern uncertainties regarding historical liturgical practices, political and cultural ideologies, the self and sacred space, the assurance of truth claims, allegorical readings and interpretations of sites where divine presence is found are equally questioned. Can allegorical interpretations offer a valuable strategy in postmodern understandings for identifying how Divine presence is embodied? One possibility is to discover how two Anglican women embody their faith community’s via media and in turn these women may be read as an “open icon.” To provide contrasting views, Orthodox Icons are particularly noted for their allegorical certainties that identify and point with sharp clarification to Tradition and the Church’s sacramental understandings. An allegorical frame “closes” the Orthodox icon. In a postmodern view, allegory “opens” said frame to a vast horizontal landscape that discovers spaces, places, and persons in which the Holy Spirit works mysteriously and unexpectedly. Both Evelyn Underhill and Barbara Brown Taylor writing almost a century apart and each encountering their respective historical reactions to “modernism,” trace the margins of their faith along the Anglican understanding of the via media. In doing so, both suggest the notion of “open” icon—the body itself.

Reviewed by: Contra la alegoría: Hegemonía y decadence en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XIX by Gustavo Faverón Patriau Ronald Briggs Faverón Patriau, Gustavo. Contra la alegoría: Hegemonía y decadence en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XIX. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2011. 198 pp. A century after José Enrique Rodó argued that the novel should be considered the epic of his era, Faverón Patriau’s Contra la alegoría: Hegemonía y decadence en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XIX shows just how central a role narrative continues to play in our understanding of the Spanish American nineteenth century. While Faverón Patriau does not confine his analysis exclusively to the novel, he writes in the tradition of scholarly attempts to piece together a literary nineteenth century defined by narrative, following in the footsteps of works such as Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991) and Carlos Alonso’s Modernity and Autochtony: The Spanish American Regional Novel (1990). With a deliberate eye toward textual fissures that subvert allegorical interpretations, Faverón Patriau offers his own close readings of Jorge Isaac’s María and Gertrudis Gómez de Avallaneda’s Sab—two novels that figure prominently in Foundational Fictions—as well as the Memorias of Juan Buatista Túpac Amaru (whose better-known brother was the leader of the 1780–81 uprising) and Juan Bautista Alberdi’s Peregrinación de Luz del Día, o Viaje y aventuras de la Verdad en el Nuevo Mundo. The book’s opening and closing chapters reimagine the legacy of the Baroque and the hermetic concept of the lettered city, in each case seeking a more deeply contextualized and historicized approach to allegorical rhetoric and its reception. While he stops short of rejecting allegory as an interpretive framework, Faverón Patriau makes a compelling argument that nineteenth-century Spanish American authors had multiple motives for creating works that would both attract and complicate allegorical readings. The end result is less an outright rejection of the sort of reading advanced by Sommer’s Foundational Fictions than an reorientation designed to make allegory a more nuanced and historicized interpretive tool. Faverón Patriau’s greatest debt is to Sommer, something the book’s first chapter acknowledges. Here he presents contragoría as a revision of Sommer’s allegorical readings of nineteenth-century novels. Arguing that the period’s narrative structures responded to a region-wide crisis of language and representation, he posits the contragoría-centered reading as one that explores the contradictions and fissures baked into the allegory. [End Page 401] This approach seems highly appropriate for Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru’s Memorias, a deeply problematic and contradictory text. Noting that Juan Bautista’s reconstruction of the rebellion was published just before his death in 1827, and that, given its author’s professed illiteracy, it was the result of some sort of collaboration with pro-independence priest Marcos Durand Martel, Faverón Patriau focuses on the inherent problem of narrating these events from the remove of three decades and across the conceptual gulf of independence. On the one hand, Juan Bautista finds it impossible not to conceive of his brother’s rebellion as a precursor of the Creole independence movement, while on the other hand, Faverón Patriau detects signs of the movement’s original indigenous nationalism concerned more with the restoration of a lost aristocracy than with the establishment of republican forms of government. What this reading yields is a text that produces anything but a seamless link between the Túpac Amaru II rebellion and the republics to come and rather reveals, as Faverón Patriau puts it, just how precarious the rhetorical project of nation building remained, both before and after independence. The chapters on Sab and María focus on the discordant forces lurking within the unity Sommer identifies with erotic attachment. In the case of Sab, where Sommer concentrates on the tension between Creole and African racial identity, Faverón Patriau emphasizes a third term, the indigenous, present as a racial marker in at least one important character and surfacing rhetorically in the narrator’s reliance on oral...

In his well-known Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church Manlio Simonetti asserted that Irenaeus of Lyons was unable to offer principled opposition to Gnostic allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures and, therefore, resorted to the authority of tradition. Such a reading not only overlooks the hermeneutical principles upon which Irenaeus founds his polemic against Gnostic interpretations, but fails to recognize the theory undergirding those principles. This article, the second of a two-part study, offers a new reading. I argue that Irenaeus opposes Gnostic interpretations of Scripture, including their allegorical readings (broadly conceived), by articulating and applying hermeneutical principles that draw upon ancient literary and rhetorical theory.