ethics. Not cosmogonic myths, but moral meanings, he had discovered in his document.
Advancing along the path which Philo found, Christian allegorical interpretation undertook to substantiate the validity of the Gospel. To this end it fixed special symbolical meanings upon the Old Testament narratives, so as to make them into prefigurative testimonies to the truth of Christian teachings.[1] Allegory was also called on to justify, as against educated pagans, certain acts of that heroic but peccant "type" of Christ, David, the son of Jesse. Such special apologetic needs hardly affected the allegorical interpretation of the Gospel itself, which began at an early day, and from the first was spiritual and anagogic, constantly straining on to educe further salutary meaning from the text.
The Greek and Latin Church Fathers created the mass of doctrine, including Scriptural interpretation,[2] upon which mediaeval theologians were to expend their systematizing and reconstructive labours. Through the Middle Ages, the course of allegory and symbolism strikingly illustrates the mediaeval way of using the patristic heritage—first painfully learning it, then making it their own, and at last creating by means of that which they had organically appropriated. Allegory and symbolism were to impress the Middle Ages as perhaps no other element of their inheritance. The mediaeval man thought and felt in symbols, and the sequence of his thought moved as frequently from symbol to symbol as from fact to fact.
The allegorical faculty with the Fathers was dogmatic and theological; ingenious in devising useful interpretations, but oblivious to all reasonable propriety in the meaning which it twisted into the text: controversial necessities readily overrode the rational and moral requirements of the "historical" or "literal" meaning. For the deeply realized allegorical significance was a law unto itself. These characteristics of patristic allegory passed over to the Middle Ages, which in the course of time were to impress human qualities upon the patristic material.
- ↑ Cf. Taylor, Classical Heritage, p. 97 sqq.
- ↑ Ante, Chapters IV., V.
