Interpreting Scripture in the early church

How Scripture is to be read: literal and spiritual senses, allegory, typology, and rules of interpretation. Part of Scripture and canon.

Epistle of Barnabas 10.2Anonymous · ca. 70–135 (often ca. 130) · The food laws were spoken spiritually, not literally.
Epistle of Barnabas 10.9Anonymous · ca. 70–135 (often ca. 130) · Israel misread spiritual teachings as rules about food.
Dialogue with Trypho 112.1Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Read literally, Moses' bronze serpent would break his own law.
Dialogue with Trypho 112.2Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · The bronze serpent must be a symbol of the crucified Jesus.
Dialogue with Trypho 112.3Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Understood as types, the prophets' deeds are blameless.
Dialogue with Trypho 114.1Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · The Spirit speaks through types and through future events described as past.
Diatessaron, section 16Tatian · ca. 160-180
Diatessaron, section 17Tatian · ca. 160-180
Diatessaron, section 53Tatian · ca. 160-180
To Autolycus 2.15Theophilus of Antioch · ca. 180–185 · The sun and moon are types of God and humanity; the three days before the lights are types of the “Triad” of God, his Word, and his Wisdom; the stars represent the prophets, the righteous, and the apostate.
Against Heresies 1.8.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Irenaeus compares the heretics' use of Scripture to rearranging the jewels of a king's mosaic into the image of a fox.
Against Heresies 1.8.2Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The Valentinians read Jairus's daughter, Paul's “untimely birth”, the veiled woman, and the cries of Jesus's passion as figures of Achamoth.
Against Heresies 1.8.3Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The Valentinians find their three kinds of men in Jesus's sayings to would-be followers, the parable of the leaven, and Paul's letters.
Against Heresies 1.8.4Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The lost sheep, the lost coin, Simeon, Anna, and texts on wisdom and marriage are made into figures of Achamoth, the Demiurge, and the conjunctions.
Against Heresies 1.8.5Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The Valentinians read the prologue of John's Gospel as a description of their first eight Aeons.
Against Heresies 2.10.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Obscure parables must be explained by what is clear, not by inventing another God, which only adds a greater riddle.
Against Heresies 2.24.3Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The measurements of the tabernacle, ark, lampstand, oil, and incense fit none of their numbers, and any number at all can be found in Scripture.
Against Heresies 2.27.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Parables must be interpreted by the clear passages of Scripture, or there will be as many conflicting truths as interpreters.
Against Heresies 2.27.2Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Scripture plainly teaches one God who made all things; the heretics admit their Father appears only in secret, obscure teaching.
Against Heresies 2.27.3Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Building doctrine about God on parables rather than on what is certain is building on sand.
Against Heresies 2.28.2Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Since we cannot explain many things in nature, it is no wonder that we cannot solve every question in Scripture; such things are left to God.
Against Heresies 2.28.3Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Some questions, such as what God did before creation, must be left to God; Scripture then remains in harmony.
Against Heresies 3.7.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · In 2 Cor 4:4 “of this age” belongs with “unbelievers”: God has blinded the unbelievers of this age; there is no separate god of this age.
Against Heresies 3.7.2Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Paul often transposes words, as in Gal 3:19 and 2 Thess 2:8–9; read correctly, 2 Cor 4:4 speaks of the true God.
Against Heresies 4.21.3Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Jacob’s life prefigured Christ and the Church: the heel, the birthright, the blessing, the spotted sheep, the two wives, and Rachel, a figure of the Church.
Against Heresies 4.26.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Christ is the treasure hidden in the Scriptures, which remain riddles until his cross explains them; read by Christians, the law is a treasure, but to the Jews it is like a fable.
Against Heresies 4.31.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The presbyter taught not to reproach the ancients for sins Scripture rebukes, and to seek types where it does not, as in Lot and his daughters, a figure of the two synagogues.
Against Heresies 5.8.4Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The law’s clean and unclean animals figure the faithful, the Gentiles, the Jews, and the heretics, according to whether they walk firmly in faith and meditate on God’s words.
Against Heresies 5.33.3Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Isaac’s blessing of Jacob was never fulfilled in Jacob’s life and so refers to the kingdom, when, as the elders heard from John, the earth will bear marvellous abundance.
Against Heresies 5.33.4Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Papias, hearer of John, records the same teaching, and Isaiah’s peaceable animals are to be taken literally of the renewed creation, not only allegorically of converted nations.
Against Heresies 5.35.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The prophecies cannot be allegorized away; they will be fulfilled after the Antichrist in the resurrection of the just, when they reign in a restored Jerusalem, as the prophet (Baruch) foretells.
Against Heresies 5.35.2Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · These promises concern the earth in the times of the kingdom; afterwards come the general judgment and the new heaven and earth, with the new Jerusalem descending, all to be taken literally, not allegorically.
Who Is the Rich Man That Is Saved? 5.2Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–210 · Christ's words must not be taken in a fleshly way; their hidden meaning must be searched out carefully.
Who Is the Rich Man That Is Saved? 5.4Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–210 · Sayings that seem simple but bear on salvation itself, like this one, must be read with the mind fixed on the Savior's spirit and hidden meaning.
Miscellanies 1.28.179Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Paul knew the mystery by revelation and spoke to those able to receive it; the law must be read in three ways, as sign, as commandment, and as prophecy; Scripture must be studied carefully, not all lumped together.
Miscellanies 2.15.67Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Following Barnabas, Clement reads Psalm 1 with the food laws: scaleless fish, the pig, and birds of prey stand for kinds of sinners; a wise teacher read the three phrases as Gentiles, Jewish belief, and the heresies.
Miscellanies 5.4.20Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Prophecies and mysteries are veiled in riddles; the Egyptians learn three scripts, demotic, hieratic, and hieroglyphic, the last partly literal and partly symbolic, figurative, or enigmatic.
Miscellanies 5.4.21Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The Egyptians used enigmatic hieroglyphs, like the scarab for the sun; all theologians, barbarian and Greek, have veiled first principles in riddles, symbols, and allegories, as the Greek oracles did.
Miscellanies 5.4.25Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · All Scripture is spoken in parables, as the psalm says; Paul speaks God's hidden wisdom among the perfect, revealed by the Spirit; the unspiritual man cannot receive it.
Miscellanies 5.6.32Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Almost all Scripture speaks in riddles; the temple's enclosures and the high priest's robe are symbols, and the veil's four colors stand for the four elements that reveal God.
Miscellanies 5.6.34Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The Son is the Father's face, made flesh; the inner veil with four pillars signifies the four covenants and the four-letter divine Name, pronounced “Iaoue”; Christ alone as high priest enters the unspeakable; the seven-branched lampstand represents the sun among the planets.
Miscellanies 5.6.37Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The high priest's robe symbolizes the sensible world: the stones are the planets or ways of salvation, the 360 bells the year of the Lord's favor proclaiming the Savior, and the golden crown Christ's kingship as head of the church.
Miscellanies 5.8.46Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Symbolic interpretation serves theology, piety, and wisdom; children's primers teach the elements through obscure words like the Phrygian “bedy,” meaning water or air.
Miscellanies 5.8.51Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Moses' food laws are symbolic: the pig stands for greedy, unclean desire; as Barnabas explains, clean animals that part the hoof and chew the cud signify those who ponder God's word and live in this world while awaiting the next.
Miscellanies 5.9.56Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Scripture, the barbarian philosophy, is written symbolically for memory, brevity, and elevation; it is meant for those tested in faith and life, needing a guide; truth seen through a veil appears greater.
Miscellanies 5.9.58Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Epicureans, Stoics, and Aristotelians also had secret teachings, and the mysteries hid doctrines in myths; so much more should holy contemplation be veiled; yet Scripture and Plato's myths are not to be allegorized word by word, only in their general meaning.
Miscellanies 5.10.63Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Barnabas reads the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey as a hidden teaching about Christ in the flesh; the Lord keeps his mystery for the sons of his house, and knowing the Father is eternal life.
Miscellanies 5.12.80Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Scripture repeatedly speaks of hidden wisdom: the unleavened cakes hidden in ashes, Paul's hidden wisdom, Christ's mystery of the kingdom, his parables, and the leaven hidden in the meal.
Miscellanies 6.15.125Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Christ spoke all things in parables, including the law and prophets, which are understood by the church's rule, the harmony of the two covenants; knowledge leads to prudence and then self-restraint, and the perfect man's righteousness comes from love of God.
Miscellanies 6.15.126Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Scripture hides its meaning so that we may keep searching and so that the unprepared are not harmed; its parabolic character matches the Lord who came as one of the world to lead us to higher realities.
Miscellanies 6.15.131Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Hermas copied his book letter by letter without grasping the syllables: the plain reading is for faith, the deeper reading for knowledge; Isaiah's new book foretold the unwritten tradition the Savior gave the apostles, now written on new hearts.
Miscellanies 6.15.132Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Joshua and Caleb saw Moses double at his assumption, one with the angels and one buried: some see only the letter of Scripture, others its meaning; as Peter knew Christ as Son of God by the Father's revelation, so truth is seen gradually.
Miscellanies 7.16.96Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Heretics use Scripture selectively, taking isolated ambiguous phrases and changing their meaning; the truth is found by reading Scripture as a whole and interpreting Scripture by Scripture in a way worthy of God.
Miscellanies 7.18.109Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Clement closes with an allegory of the food laws: clean animals both divide the hoof (faith in the Father and the Son) and chew the cud (meditating on Scripture); animals with only one sign stand for most Jews and for the heretics.
Against the Jews 9Tertullian · ca. 197–207 · The author argues that Isaiah's prophecies of Emmanuel, of the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria, of the name Jesus, of the rod from Jesse, and of Christ's preaching and miracles were fulfilled in Jesus, read figuratively rather than as warfare.
On the Shows 3Tertullian · ca. 197–202 · Though Scripture does not forbid the shows by name, the first psalm's blessing on the man who does not sit in the council of the ungodly applies to the crowds of the theatre and circus.
On Baptism 9Tertullian · ca. 198–206 · The crossing of the Red Sea, the sweetened water of Marah, and the water from the rock prefigure baptism, and water accompanies Christ throughout his life, even to the cross.
Didascalia 2.5Anonymous · first half of the third century
Didascalia 6.15Anonymous · first half of the third century · Converts from the Jewish people should leave the ritual observances of the “second legislation”; the abiding law is the Decalogue and the judgments, in which the name of Jesus is signified by the iota (ten).
On Proverbs, fragment 30Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 200–235 · ‘Parable’ has many senses; a parable compares spiritual things with sensible ones and presents the invisible through the visible.
On Proverbs, fragment 39Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 200–235 · On Prov 24:13: honey is the allegorical sense, the honeycomb the historical sense, and the throat the soul's power of nourishment.
Arabic Pentateuch fragment IV (on Gen 8:1)Hippolytus of Rome · unknown (transmitted in a medieval Arabic catena) · Hippolytus and Jacob of Edessa trace the ark's voyage in the four directions, which the catena reads as a figure of the cross, and its rest on Mount Kardu as Christ's return to the Father.
Arabic Pentateuch fragment XVII (on Num 13)Hippolytus of Rome · unknown (transmitted in a medieval Arabic catena) · The catena lists the twelve spies and reads them as types of the apostles, the cluster carried between two men as Christ on the cross between the robbers, and the forty days as the mission of the seventy.
Arabic Pentateuch fragment XXHippolytus of Rome · unknown (transmitted in a medieval Arabic catena) · The catena explains Deuteronomy as the repetition of the law broken at the golden calf, and reads the eleven days' journey and five places of Deut 1:1–2 as the hours of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard.
Pistis Sophia 113Anonymous · 3rd century
On Mount Sinai and Mount Zion 2Anonymous · 3rd cent. (disputed) · From the meanings of their names and from Psalm 2, the writer argues that Zion is a heavenly, holy mountain and Sinai an earthly one.
On Mount Sinai and Mount Zion 3Anonymous · 3rd cent. (disputed) · Sinai is earthly and stands for the carnal people who received the law on stone tablets, while Rebecca's twins prefigure the division between the believing Gentiles and the unbelieving Jews; biblical names foretell their bearers' destiny.
On Mount Sinai and Mount Zion 4Anonymous · 3rd cent. (disputed) · The name Adam is spelled from the Greek names of the four quarters of the world, and its numerical value, 46, points to Christ's passion and to the temple of his body.
Against Hermogenes 19Tertullian · ca. 200–206 · The “beginning” of Genesis 1:1 is not a substance from which God made the world but the start of his works, or, in the Greek sense of archē, his sovereign power.
Against Hermogenes 26Tertullian · ca. 200–206 · Genesis first names a thing and then describes it, so “but the earth was invisible” describes the earth God had just made, not a hidden pre-existing matter.
Prescription against Heretics 38Tertullian · ca. 203 · Corrupt doctrine requires corrupted Scriptures: Marcion cut the text with a knife, Valentinus kept the text but twisted its meaning; the church's Scriptures are unaltered because its doctrine is original.
Commentary on Daniel 1.4-10Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 202-204 · Fragments on Daniel 1 and on Susanna: the order of the book, Hezekiah's sign, the youths' fidelity, Susanna's family, and Susanna and the elders as types of the church and its persecutors.
Commentary on Daniel 1.17-18Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 202-204 · Paradise as a figure of the church, its trees, river and two trees interpreted, and Susanna's garden, closed doors and hidden elders as figures of entry into the church and the devil's renewed assault.
Antidote for the Scorpion's Sting 11Tertullian · ca. 211–213 · Christ's sayings about losing one's life, answering before tribunals, and being hated and betrayed describe exactly what persecuted Christians experience, so they cannot be explained away as allegories.
On the Flesh of Christ 8Tertullian · ca. 206–211 · The followers of Apelles call earthly flesh shameful, but by their own myth the heavens too are tainted; Paul's “man from heaven” refers to Christ's Spirit, not to a heavenly flesh.
Against Marcion 2.24Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · When Scripture says God “repented” of making Saul king or of destroying Nineveh, it does not mean God erred; it means a just change of sentence in response to changing human conduct, since God “is not a man, that he should repent.”
Against Marcion 2.25Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · God's questions to Adam and Cain were not ignorance but invitations to confess, and his “going down” to Sodom was a threat, not uncertainty; Marcion's own god also “came down.”
Against Marcion 3.5Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · Before arguing from the Old Testament, Tertullian sets two rules: prophecy often speaks of the future as past, and often speaks figuratively, as Paul himself shows.
Against Marcion 3.13Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · Isaiah's warlike words about the infant Christ are figurative: the magi's gold was the power of Damascus, the converted magi the spoils of idolatrous Samaria, and Herod the king of Assyria.
Against Marcion 3.14Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · The sword of Psalm 45 is the Word of God, as John and Paul show; Christ's weapons and spoils are figurative, so the prophecies do not describe a literal warrior.
Against Marcion 3.16Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · The name Jesus, given to Joshua who led Israel into the promised land, was a figure of the Creator's Christ; both names therefore belong to the Creator's Christ.
Against Marcion 3.18Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · The cross was foretold in figures: Isaac carrying the wood, the horns of Joseph's bull, the hamstrung bull of Genesis 49, Moses' outstretched arms, and the bronze serpent.
Against Marcion 5.18Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · Marcion altered Ephesians 3:9 to make the mystery hidden from the Creator, but the context, Paul's spiritual allegories, his moral commands, his teaching on marriage as a great mystery, and the powers of darkness in Ephesians 3–6 all point to the Creator.
On the Soul 35Tertullian · ca. 210 · Carpocrates used transmigration to excuse every sin, twisting Christ's parable of the adversary; nor does John the Baptist's being “Elijah” mean reincarnation, since he came only in Elijah's spirit and power.
On Flight in Persecution 6Tertullian · ca. 208–213 · Christ's command to flee from city to city was given to the apostles for their mission to Israel; once the gospel went to the nations the apostles no longer fled, as Paul's refusal to avoid Jerusalem shows, so the command does not bind Christians now.
On Modesty 7Tertullian · ca. 210–220 · The parables of the lost sheep and coin concern heathen sinners, and even if applied to Christians they fit lesser sins, not adultery, whose guilty are counted as dead and expelled.
On Modesty 8Tertullian · ca. 210–220 · The prodigal son cannot stand for a Christian sinner, since the elder son does not fit the Jewish people; parables must be read by their own subject, not bent as the heretics bend them.
On Modesty 9Tertullian · ca. 210–220 · Parables must not be forced; the prodigal son is the heathen converted in baptism, not a Christian restored after grave sin, for that reading would make every apostasy pardonable.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 19Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Some heretics turn the resurrection into a figure for coming to knowledge or escaping the body, and deceive believers by saying one must “rise in this flesh.”
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 20Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · The prophets did not speak only in figures: Christ's birth, passion, and miracles, and the fates of nations, were foretold plainly and fulfilled literally.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 26Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Prophetic promises and threats addressed to “the earth” may be read of the flesh, taken from the earth; so figurative speech itself supports the resurrection of the body.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 27Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Scriptural garments can signify the flesh, and Isaiah's “storerooms” in which God's people hide until his wrath passes are the tombs from which bodies will come forth.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 28Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Moses' signs, God's promise to require the blood of the slain, and the word “I will kill and make alive” all point to the raising of the flesh.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 29Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones, clothed with sinews, flesh, and skin and brought to life, names the bodily substances explicitly.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 30Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Even if Ezekiel's vision figures Israel's restoration, a figure drawn from bones implies that bones will really rise, and God's testing of the prophet shows that the bodily resurrection is meant.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 32Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · God will restore even bodies devoured by beasts and fish, as Jonah shows; if what Scripture says of the soul is taken literally, so must be what it says of the body.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 33Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Christ did not speak only in parables, and even his parables are explained; his plain statements about judgment, the kingdom, and resurrection must be taken literally.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 37Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · “The flesh profits nothing” in John 6 refers to giving life, which belongs to the Spirit and the Word; the same Gospel says that all in the tombs will hear the Son's voice and come forth.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 52Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Paul's image of the seed shows that the same flesh that is sown in death rises, clothed by God with a new glory, just as grain rises as the same kind of plant, fuller and adorned.
On First Principles 1.0.8Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Scripture has both a plain and a hidden spiritual sense; the philosophical term “incorporeal” is not found in Scripture, and the saying in the Teaching of Peter does not use it in the philosophers' sense.
On First Principles 1.1.2Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · God as consuming fire consumes sins in the soul, and Scripture calls “spirit” what is opposed to body, as in the spiritual sense of the law.
On First Principles 2.4.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · God's anger in the Old Testament is matched in Jesus' parables; in both Testaments it is to be understood spiritually, in a way worthy of God.
On First Principles 2.11.2Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Some Christians, reading the letter only, expect after the resurrection bodily pleasures, marriage, a rebuilt earthly Jerusalem and earthly rule, misreading prophecies meant figuratively.
On First Principles 3.1.16Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The Saviour's words about speaking in parables “lest they turn and be forgiven” seem to deny free choice, and also show the heretics that the Gospels too need interpretation, like the Old Testament.
On First Principles 4.2.1Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Misreading Scripture by the letter led the Jews to reject Christ, the heretics to divide the just Creator from the good God, and some simple believers to think unworthily of God.
On First Principles 4.2.2Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Errors arise from reading Scripture by the letter; all agree that Scripture holds hidden mysteries, as in the stories of Lot, Abraham and Jacob and the tabernacle, which those who seek piously may find.
On First Principles 4.2.3Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Hidden meanings are found not only in the prophets but in the Gospels, the Revelation and the Epistles; the “key of knowledge” held by the lawyers shows that truth was with those who had the law.
On First Principles 4.2.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Scripture, like a human being, has body, soul and spirit, edifying the simple, the progressing and the perfect, as Origen illustrates from the two little books in the Shepherd of Hermas.
On First Principles 4.2.5Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Some passages of Scripture have no literal sense, only a soul or spirit, as the six water jars holding two or three measures signify.
On First Principles 4.2.6Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Paul gives examples of the soul of Scripture (the muzzled ox) and of its spirit (the law as a shadow, the rock that was Christ, the allegory of Abraham's two sons), extending even to the histories of Kingdoms.
On First Principles 4.2.7Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The Spirit revealed to the prophets and apostles the mysteries of God, of the incarnation, of rational creatures, of the world and of evil, and they wrote them down figuratively for those who seek with discipline.
On First Principles 4.2.8Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · For those unwilling or unable to labour, the Spirit veiled the mysteries in histories of creation, of the righteous and the wicked, of battles, and in the law; this garment of the letter is the body of Scripture.
On First Principles 4.2.9Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The Spirit placed stumbling-blocks, things impossible or incongruous, in the history and the law, and likewise in the Gospels and the apostles, to turn readers from the letter to a sense worthy of God.
On First Principles 4.3.1Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The days of creation without a sun, God planting trees and walking in paradise, Cain leaving God's face, and the devil showing Jesus all kingdoms from one mountain cannot be taken literally.
On First Principles 4.3.2Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Precepts of the law, such as cutting off the uncircumcised infant, eating the tragelaphus, forbidding the griffin, and sitting still on the Sabbath, are impossible to keep by the letter and lead to Jewish and Samaritan fables.
On First Principles 4.3.3Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Gospel and apostolic precepts too, such as greeting no one on the way, owning no shoes in winter, offering the left cheek, plucking out the right eye, and not drawing on a foreskin, cannot all be taken literally.
On First Principles 4.3.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Origen does not deny that most of Scripture's history happened or that most precepts are to be kept literally; the patriarchs' tomb, Jerusalem, the Decalogue and Christ's commands stand as written.
On First Principles 4.3.8Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Israel is a race of souls “seeing God” and Jerusalem the heavenly city, so the prophecies about Judea and Jerusalem, and the cities promised in the parable, refer to the heavenly land.
On First Principles 4.3.9Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Prophecies about Egypt, Babylon, Tyre and Sidon, such as those on Pharaoh, the prince of Tyre and Lucifer, do not fit earthly kingdoms, so they refer to places and souls near the heavenly Jerusalem, from which some fall into captivity.
On First Principles 4.3.11Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · These meanings are hidden like treasure in a field beneath the letter; God alone breaks open the gates to the mysteries of the souls' descent into Egypt, where the seventy became as the stars and as the sand.
On First Principles 4.3.12Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The exodus, the tabernacle, the purifications, the census of men fit for war, the deaths in the desert, the tribes beyond the Jordan and Deuteronomy's second law all figure the progress of souls toward Christ's perfect law.
On First Principles 4.3.15Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Meaning matters more than words: the Greeks' “incorporeal” is Scripture's “invisible,” and the Trinity is wholly incorporeal; Scripture must be judged by the Spirit who inspired it, not by its humble language.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 283Origen · ca. 220-254 · A wicked heart is called hardened, strengthened, and heavy in different senses; Moses' wonders are not magic; the Passover lamb is Christ, its blood is faith, and leaven is vice.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 285Origen · ca. 220-254 · Leaven is the old vice to be cast out; the blood on the doorposts guards the soul's three parts; the Passover law on foreigners read of doctrines; the Passover is eaten in one house, the church.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 293Origen · ca. 220-254 · To be left unpunished is God's abandonment; pray to be punished here; the kinds of law distinguished; the seventh-year release signifies freedom in Christ; the feasts cannot be kept literally by all.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 295Origen · ca. 220-254 · The three feasts cannot be kept literally by builders and weavers; the month of new things means becoming new in Christ; to appear “not empty” is to be filled with God; the “male” are deeds of the Spirit.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 395Origen · ca. 220-254 · Notes on Leviticus 1: the book's name; the sacrifices are worthy of God when the law is read spiritually; “gifts” and “sacrifices”; God allowed sacrifices to wean Israel from idolatry.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 399Origen · ca. 220-254 · Notes on Leviticus 10–13: priests must be cleansed first; clean animals read of the pious life; uncleanness trains the soul; leprosy and scars as wounds of sin that must not be hidden.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 401Origen · ca. 220-254 · The leper's cleansing read of Christ: water and blood, the wood of the cross, scarlet for his blood, hyssop for the Spirit; the leprous house is the synagogue, for which the prophets plead.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 803Origen · ca. 220-254 · Notes on Deuteronomy 3–8: the righteous wait for the promise; the visible voice at Sinai; Moses' hidden tomb; Egypt the house of slavery; the manna as the Word, fine, white, and seed-like.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 805Origen · ca. 220-254 · The manna and the good land read of Christ and his gifts: bread, vine, oil, pomegranates, fig, honey, stones, and bronze; then the literal sense of the land's goodness, and warnings against forgetting God and against child sacrifice.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 807Origen · ca. 220-254 · Notes on Deuteronomy 12–19: sin by excess and by defect; clean animals read of conduct and meditation on Scripture; feasts and assemblies distinguished; boundaries; the law of retaliation and Christ's teaching.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 809Origen · ca. 220-254 · Notes on Deuteronomy 20–24: the fearful man; the rebellious son; mixed sowing and yoking read of the soul; sowing by every water as baptism; Moab's exclusion; the two millstones as the two covenants.
Fragments on Genesis, column 87Origen · ca. 220-254 · After the quotation from Clement, Origen asks why Gen 1:16–17 says first “for the rules of the day” and then “to rule the day,” using the logicians' distinction of appellative and predicate.
Fragments on Genesis, column 89Origen · ca. 220-254 · Logic is needed to read Scripture: those who missed that “world” is homonymous misread 1 John 5:19 and blasphemed the Creator.
Fragments on Genesis, column 101Origen · ca. 220-254 · The garments of skin are neither literal hides nor simply bodies; the cherubim guard the way to the tree of life; Cain's words to Abel are not in the Hebrew; Cain's sins listed.
Fragments on Proverbs, column 155Origen · ca. 220-254 · Steering from God brings the soul safely to harbour; the fear of the Lord, as reverent love rather than dread of punishment, is the beginning of wisdom.
Fragments on Proverbs, column 219Origen · ca. 220-254 · Christ is the good shepherd and the rod from Jesse's root; the devil is the lion and the deep pit; Scripture's teaching is threefold, ethical, natural and theological, matching Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song.
Fragments on Proverbs, column 227Origen · ca. 220-254 · God repays according to the quality of deeds; the honey and honeycomb are the plain and the hidden meaning of Scripture; we must not exult over a fallen enemy; the sword of the Spirit crushes sinners for repentance.
PG 12:1077 (Ps 1 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · Scripture is shut and sealed, as the Apocalypse and Isaiah show, and the Savior rebuked the lawyers who took away the key of knowledge; Origen addresses his patron Ambrose.
PG 12:1079 (Ps 1 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · Origen tells Ambrose of his reluctance to write on Scripture, asks for his prayers, and gives the Hebrew teacher’s parable of the locked rooms and scattered keys.
PG 12:1089 (Ps 1 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · Christ, the tree of life transplanted to paradise, gives his fruit in season according to the fitness of those who receive it; fruits and leaves are the primary and the secondary things of creation, of Scripture, and of the blessed man’s life.
PG 12:1117 (Ps 2–3 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · The end of Psalm 2 (God’s quickly kindled anger and the blessedness of trust) and the beginning of Psalm 3: the psalm cannot be read wholly as history of David’s flight from Absalom, for in Scripture David often stands for Christ.
PG 12:1119 (Ps 3 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · David in Scripture often stands for Christ the judge; on Ps 3:1–2, those who afflict and rise up against David are Absalom’s followers in the history, those who opposed Christ in the passion, and, in a higher sense, the teachers of false doctrine, their disciples, and unbelievers.
PG 12:1125 (Ps 3 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · The Word, who is Wisdom, always cries out; on Ps 3:5 Origen gives a literal reading (David blaming his own lack of watchfulness) and a higher one, in the person of Christ, distinguishing “lying down” from “sleep.”
PG 12:1155 (Ps 4 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · The case for bodily and external goods from the Gospels’ healings and from eternal punishment; Origen answers with the prophets who kept the law yet lived in poverty and suffering — Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist — so that the promises need a higher sense.
PG 12:1183 (Ps 8 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · The winepresses in Scripture (Noah, Judah, Issachar, the righteous man’s wife) are rational natures receiving the fruit of the spiritual vine; on Ps 8:2 the infants of Matthew 21 teach an allegorical reading; the enemy is the devil, overthrown through simple fishermen; the heavens, the works of God’s fingers, and the moon and stars.
PG 12:1257 (Ps 21 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · Notes on Ps 21 LXX (22):15–27: the scattered bones of the Word, the dust of death, the divided garments, and the sword of temptation.
PG 12:1449 (Ps 49–50 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · End of Ps 49 LXX (50):21–23 and beginning of Ps 50 LXX (51): an excerpt on the story of David and Uriah, defending allegory, since the letter alone charges David with cruelty and leads the heterodox to invent another God.
PG 12:1583 (Ps 118 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · Notes on Psalm 119:1–4 (LXX 118): why each letter is repeated eight times, the eighth day of Christ's resurrection, and the ways of God as contemplations.
Refutation of All Heresies 6.55.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus will not repeat their allegorical number-readings of Scripture, which Irenaeus already refuted, and says they took them from Pythagoreans and astrologers.
Fragment 18 on John 1:31Origen · ca. 226-254 · On John 1:31–33: John knew Christ only by revelation; his seeing the Spirit descend as a dove and the heavens open was an intellectual, not sensible, vision; the Spirit remained on Jesus alone because he alone was sinless; and divine things must be understood spiritually.
Fragment 61 on John 9:6Origen · ca. 226-254 · On John 9:6–7: Christ's spittle mixed with earth figures the divine meaning of Scripture clothed in historical letter; the blind must be anointed with the letter and wash in Siloam, the Sent One, to see; the distance to the pool made the miracle widely known.
Commentary on John 1.24Origen · ca. 230–248 · Understanding the Gospel's hidden meaning requires the mind of Christ.
Commentary on John 1.34Origen · ca. 230–248 · Like leaven, Christ's coming revealed the true, spiritual meaning of the law and the histories.
Commentary on John 1.39Origen · ca. 230–248 · As the law was a shadow of good things to come, the gospel read literally is a shadow of Christ's mysteries.
Commentary on John 1.45Origen · ca. 230–248 · The task of the commentary is to draw the spiritual gospel out of the literal one.
Commentary on John 1.279Origen · ca. 230–248 · In Scripture “horse” often stands for the voice that carries God's teaching.
Commentary on John 5.6Origen · ca. 230–248 · All Scripture that speaks of Christ is one “book,” like the scroll in Revelation, with a plain sense in front and a spiritual sense behind.
Commentary on John 6.227Origen · ca. 230–248 · Paul interprets the Red Sea crossing spiritually, as a baptism into Moses.
Commentary on John 6.228Origen · ca. 230–248 · So also the Jordan crossing under Joshua should be read as a baptism into Jesus.
Commentary on John 6.243Origen · ca. 230–248 · Naaman was sent to wash in the Jordan and was angry, not seeing that the Jordan, not the prophet, heals.
Commentary on John 6.265Origen · ca. 230–248 · To understand the sacrifices spiritually, one must ask what heavenly things they foreshadow, especially the lamb.
Commentary on John 6.266Origen · ca. 230–248 · Hebrews teaches that the sacrifices are copies and shadows of heavenly realities.
Commentary on John 6.267Origen · ca. 230–248 · Only the mature can uncover the spiritual truth of the law brought by Jesus Christ.
Commentary on John 10.10Origen · ca. 230–248 · Apparent contradictions between the Gospels must be resolved spiritually, or people lose faith; John's chronology leaves no room for the forty days of temptation.
Commentary on John 10.14Origen · ca. 230–248 · Faced with the Gospels' discrepancies, one must either pick one Gospel arbitrarily or hold that their truth lies beyond the literal level.
Commentary on John 10.18Origen · ca. 230–248 · So the evangelists, being wise, sometimes expressed spiritual truths in the form of historical narrative.
Commentary on John 10.19Origen · ca. 230–248 · Origen accepts that the evangelists sometimes changed place, time, or details for the sake of spiritual meaning.
Commentary on John 10.20Origen · ca. 230–248 · Where literal and spiritual truth could not both be kept, the evangelists preferred the spiritual, as Jacob spoke spiritual truth in saying “I am Esau.”
Commentary on John 10.27Origen · ca. 230–248 · The spiritual interpretation reconciles the Gospels' apparent discords.
Commentary on John 10.103Origen · ca. 230–248 · Eating the lamb raw is reading Scripture only literally, like beasts.
Commentary on John 10.104Origen · ca. 230–248 · Boiling the lamb is watering Scripture down into lax, comfortable interpretations.
Commentary on John 10.107Origen · ca. 230–248 · Scripture must be taken whole, inner meanings included, without breaking its unity, as heretics do.
Commentary on John 10.110Origen · ca. 230–248 · The Passover signifies Christ; historical things are types of spiritual realities.
Commentary on John 10.143Origen · ca. 230–248 · The clean animals are used because the story must be historically plausible; unclean animals could not be in the temple.
Commentary on John 10.174Origen · ca. 230–248 · Spiritually, the Word enters the soul riding the Old Testament, untied by two interpreters: one applying it to the soul, one to the realities to come.
Commentary on John 10.178Origen · ca. 230–248 · The donkey is a burden-bearer, like the heavy letter of Scripture, especially of the Old Testament.
Commentary on John 10.273Origen · ca. 230–248 · Origen now presses literalists to seek a spiritual meaning worthy of Scripture.
Commentary on John 10.300Origen · ca. 230–248 · Truly believing Scripture means grasping the Spirit's meaning, which fleshly readers never glimpse.
Commentary on John 13.130Origen · ca. 230–248 · We must either accept absurdities about God or interpret these words spiritually.
Commentary on John 13.131Origen · ca. 230–248 · As we read God's bodily features figuratively, so we must read “spirit,” “fire,” and “light.”
Commentary on John 13.250Origen · ca. 230–248 · Literal readers of “four months to harvest” face difficulties that show Jesus often spoke of purely spiritual things.
Commentary on John 13.260Origen · ca. 230–248 · So we must seek the spiritual meaning of “four months” and “white for harvest,” as with the waters.
Commentary on John 13.261Origen · ca. 230–248 · “White for harvest” is plainly spiritual, so the disciples' “four months” must be too.
Commentary on John 13.264Origen · ca. 230–248 · “Months” fits the image of harvest, veiling the mystery from literal-minded hearers,
Commentary on John 13.269Origen · ca. 230–248 · He must mean one harvest throughout; the literal reading makes no sense.
Commentary on John 13.270Origen · ca. 230–248 · It is inconsistent to read the second half spiritually but not the first.
Commentary on John 13.361Origen · ca. 230–248 · Those who cling to Scripture's letter are at home in its “body”; those who grasp its spiritual sense are at home with the Lord.
Commentary on John 13.379Origen · ca. 230–248 · Building the prophets' tombs means honoring only the letter of Scripture and neglecting its life-giving spirit.
Commentary on John 32.7Origen · ca. 230–248 · Or breakfast is the Old Testament's sense, supper the New Testament's mysteries.
Commentary on John 32.11Origen · ca. 230–248 · John deliberately places the washing after supper to point to its spiritual meaning.
Commentary on John 32.43Origen · ca. 230–248 · Why did he need to take off his garments to wash their feet? The letter points to a spiritual sense.
Commentary on John 32.97Origen · ca. 230–248 · Literal interpreters cannot explain why refusing a mere foot-washing would cost Peter his part with Christ.
Commentary on John 32.98Origen · ca. 230–248 · The threat makes sense only if the washing means more than washing bodily feet.
Commentary on John 32.133Origen · ca. 230–248 · Taken literally, the command would require bishops, masters, and parents to wash the feet of all, which is scarcely ever done.
Commentary on John 32.137Origen · ca. 230–248 · If the command is kept literally, must we also literally tell those who refuse our washing that they have no part with us?
Commentary on John 32.140Origen · ca. 230–248 · If the command were literal, nearly everyone would be in breach of it; then follows the Gospel text John 13:16–18.
Commentary on John 32.141Origen · ca. 230–248 · The blessing on those who “do these things” refers to the foot-washing and supports a figurative reading.
On Prayer 13.4Origen · ca. 233–234 · The deliverances in Scripture are types of spiritual gifts; Christians should pray not for earthly things but for fruitfulness of soul and deliverance from spiritual enemies.
On Prayer 23.3Origen · ca. 233–234 · To think God is in a bodily place implies he is a body, divisible and corruptible; so passages like God walking in paradise must not be taken literally.
On Prayer 27.13Origen · ca. 233–234 · Origen prefers his derivation of “daily” from “being” to one from “the coming day,” and explains that in Scripture “today” can mean this whole age and “yesterday” the past age.
Homily on Luke 16Origen · ca. 233–250 · Simeon’s “fall and rising” answers those who reject the Creator as cruel, for the same is said of Christ; in each believer the evil must fall so that the good may rise.
Homily on Luke 19Origen · ca. 233–250 · The child Jesus, filled with wisdom before twelve, shows a divine presence in a sinless human soul; his parents’ sorrowful search signifies the search for the hidden meaning of Scripture, and he is found in the temple, questioning the teachers in order to teach them.
Homily on Luke 31Origen · ca. 233–250 · The devil quotes Ps 91 against Christ, as heretics misuse Scripture, though the psalm speaks of the saints, not of Christ, and its next verse promises that the righteous will trample the devil.
Homily on Luke 33Origen · ca. 233–250 · Nazareth, which rejected Jesus, stands for the Jews and Capernaum for the Gentiles; the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian prefigure the Gentile church and its cleansing in baptism.
Homily on Luke 34Origen · ca. 233–250 · The parable of the Good Samaritan, following an earlier presbyter’s allegory, shows Christ the true “guardian” caring for wounded humanity, bringing it into the church and entrusting it to the church’s angel; and it calls us to imitate him.
Homily on Isaiah 2Origen · ca. 235–250 · Origen interprets the sign of Isa 7 as Christ, who descended and ascended, discusses the reading “you shall call” against Matthew's “he shall be called,” and reads the butter and honey as the good words and works Christ eats with us.
Homily on Isaiah 9Origen · ca. 235–250 · Origen returns to Isaiah's commission, reports a Hebrew teacher's view that the prophet grew reluctant after hearing his grim message, and explains the fat heart as one choked by worldly cares; the homily breaks off unfinished.
Address of Thanksgiving 15Gregory Thaumaturgus · ca. 238–245 · Origen taught them to heed God and the prophets above all men, and by the Spirit interpreted the dark places of Scripture; his school was a paradise.
Homily on 1 Samuel 1.9Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Since Hannah’s “prayer” mostly does not address God, Origen argues that every righteous act done according to God counts as prayer, so that the righteous pray without ceasing, and reads the lifting of hands as lifting one’s deeds.
Homilies on Exodus 1.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Origen compares every word of Scripture to a seed that grows into a tree when it is cultivated spiritually, and asks his hearers' prayers before expounding the opening of Exodus.
Homilies on Exodus 2.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Since the midwives' disobedience makes no sense literally, Pharaoh's killing of the males and sparing of the females is read as the devil's war on the rational spirit while he fosters the life of the flesh.
Homilies on Exodus 4.6Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Moses is the law, the ten plagues the ten commandments, and the rod the cross of Christ; the first six plagues correct the errors of philosophers, poets, dialecticians, Cynics, idol-worshippers, and the vices of malice, pride, and anger.
Homilies on Exodus 5.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Paul's reading of the crossing of the sea, the cloud, the manna, and the rock as baptism, the Spirit, spiritual food, and Christ gives the Church a rule for understanding the law spiritually.
Homilies on Exodus 7.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The order of the journey, Marah before Elim, is the order of faith: from the letter of the law, sweetened by the cross, to the twelve springs of the apostles and the seventy palms of the seventy disciples.
Homilies on Exodus 9.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Only one who has passed spiritually through the whole exodus can understand the tabernacle; Paul, in Hebrews, opens a little of its meaning, reading the veil as Christ's flesh and the holies as heaven.
Homilies on Exodus 9.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · David's longing for the “wonderful tabernacle,” the wickedness of priests who served in the earthly one, and Christ's “eternal tabernacles” show that the tabernacle of Exodus is a figure of heavenly things.
Homilies on Exodus 10.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Taken literally, the law of the struck pregnant woman, like the law of the false witness in Deuteronomy, raises questions that cannot be settled, so both must be understood spiritually.
Homilies on Exodus 10.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Spiritually, the quarrelling men are disputing teachers whose contention makes a newly believing soul miscarry the word before it is formed, and such a teacher suffers loss.
Homilies on Exodus 10.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The loss is paid as the soul's teacher imposes it, but one who destroys a soul in which the word is already formed pays life for life; eye for eye and tooth for tooth are read spiritually.
Homilies on Exodus 12.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Moses' veiled, glorified face figures the hidden glory of the law, whose veil, Paul says, is taken away only when one turns to the Lord.
Homilies on Exodus 12.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · “The Lord is the Spirit” calls hearers to turn to the Word as spirit, so that the veil over the law is taken away, and true freedom comes only from the Son.
Homilies on Ezekiel 2.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · False prophets today are teachers, heretics or even churchmen, who read their own ideas into Scripture; Origen asks his hearers to judge his own preaching like expert money-changers.
Homilies on Ezekiel 3.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · Taken literally, sewing pillows and veils is no sin, so Scripture itself compels a search for the spiritual meaning.
Homilies on Ezekiel 6.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · Jerusalem’s uncut navel signifies a soul not cut off from sin, the navel being where the devil’s power lies against women; the Septuagint’s “unbound breasts” signify a loose and unstable mind.
Homilies on Ezekiel 7.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · The temple vessels melted into male images signify the words of Scripture twisted into false meanings.
Homilies on Ezekiel 7.10Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · Moral teaching is milk for beginners and the mysteries of Scripture are solid food; Jerusalem’s “threefold” immorality is sin in flesh, soul, and spirit.
Homilies on Ezekiel 11.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · As exercise strengthens the body, the study of Scripture’s riddles trains the soul for eternal life; Ezekiel’s parable of the eagles is such a riddle.
Homilies on Ezekiel 11.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · Origen retells the parable of the two eagles and the vine and explains its literal sense: Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem’s king and people to Babylon, and their turning to Pharaoh brought worse ruin.
Homilies on Ezekiel 11.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · The eagle, though unclean in the law, is used in Scripture in both bad and good senses; the cherubim and the peace of Isa 11 show unclean creatures cleansed in Christ.
Homilies on Ezekiel 14.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · The shut eastern gate of Ezekiel’s temple, through which only the Lord and the prince pass, cannot be taken literally of a material gate.
Homilies on Ezekiel 14.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · The shut gate signifies the hidden meanings of Scripture, opened only by Christ, who holds the key of knowledge; some mysteries are known to Christ alone, the prince who eats the bread within.
Homilies on Joshua 2.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Moses’ death signifies the end of the temple cult and the reign of Jesus in the church, as a non-canonical book’s image of two Moseses, one dead and one living, also shows.
Homilies on Joshua 2.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The “places” we tread are reached by rising from the letter of the law to its spiritual sense, up to Christ at God’s right hand.
Homilies on Joshua 8.7Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The command to leave none of Ai alive is read as the war against sin and the demons, which the righteous must wage without sparing any vice; the Old Testament’s wars of slaughter are to be understood in this way.
Homilies on Joshua 9.8Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Jesus reads the whole law to his people when he reveals its spiritual sense, so that the catholic church receives the law of Moses as read by Christ.
Homilies on Joshua 13.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The names Libnah (“whiteness”), Lachish (“way”), and Hebron (“joining”) can signify both the evil state of the soul and its good state after conquest by Christ.
Homilies on Joshua 14.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Christ teaches peace through the reading of wars, arming Christians against the sins of the heart; the great alliance of kings at the waters of Merom figures the swarms of demons stirred up against the growing people of God.
Homilies on Joshua 15.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The apostles gave the church the books of Israel’s wars to read only because they figure the spiritual wars Christians wage against the powers that try to make them sin.
Homilies on Joshua 15.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The command to hamstring the horses of enemies who had all been killed makes no sense literally, since Israel elsewhere kept the enemy’s animals for its own use.
Homilies on Joshua 15.6Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Each victory of the saints over a spirit of sin removes that demon, as the legion and the crushing of Satan show, and the “sword” that must not be withheld from blood is the word of God turned against the hostile powers.
Homilies on Joshua 19.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · On Judah’s eastern side lie the salt sea, the spring and city of the sun, and the city of letters: the believer crosses the sea of this life to reach Christ, the Sun of righteousness, and the city of letters is won by study of Scripture.
Homilies on Joshua 20.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Like a medicine whose effect is felt only later, Scripture benefits the hearer even when not understood, since it has a power of its own even without explanation.
Homilies on Joshua 20.6Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Othniel, “answer of God,” who takes the City of Letters and marries Caleb’s daughter, is the Gentile church, which destroys the killing letter, receives from the law the knowledge of God, and gains blessings for this life and the next.
Homilies on Joshua 23.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The division of the land by lot foreshadows the heavenly inheritance: the earthly Jerusalem given to Benjamin is a figure of the heavenly city, and the names of places, like the names of angels and patriarchs, are not chance; these mysteries were seen by Paul but are not uttered.
Homilies on Judges 8.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The enemies camp in the valley of Jezreel ("seed of God") to snatch the word from those who understand it in a low, literal way, but cannot reach those on the heights of spiritual understanding.
Homilies on Leviticus 1.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · As the Word was clothed in flesh, so Scripture is clothed in the letter; the spiritual sense of Leviticus must be sought, or the church would be bound to offer animal sacrifices.
Homilies on Leviticus 1.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Flaying and dividing the calf signify removing the veil of the letter and distributing teaching suited to beginners, the progressing, and the perfect; the washing of entrails and feet signifies baptism.
Homilies on Leviticus 2.5Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The soul 'from the people of the land' that does a commandment 'which shall not be done' is the one that keeps the sacrificial law literally, since God gave such commands to signify Christ, not to be done.
Homilies on Leviticus 3.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Touching the unclean signifies contact with sin (desire, greed) and following those dead in sin, whether 'men', 'clean animals' of the church, or those seized by the devil; literal corpse-impurity is rejected.
Homilies on Leviticus 4.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Since the Lord and God are spirit and Christ's words are 'spirit and life', the words God spoke through Moses must also be heard spiritually.
Homilies on Leviticus 4.7Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The law that whoever touches the holy sacrifice is sanctified cannot be true literally (a murderer touching it would be sanctified), so it must be understood through the Gospel, which removes the veil from Moses.
Homilies on Leviticus 4.10Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The high priest's daily offering, half morning and half evening, is the law in its letter and its spirit, the latter given at the Saviour's coming; the law is 'eternal' only spiritually, and Christ's own word, like a whole burnt offering, is not to be revised.
Homilies on Leviticus 5.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Read literally, the laws of sacrifice would hinder Christianity; read spiritually, they make the hearer a Jew inwardly, and the heretics who reject them fail to see that Scripture, like the world, has body, soul, and spirit.
Homilies on Leviticus 5.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Some victims belong to God alone, some to priests, some also to the people; but the inward Jew must seek these victims within his own soul, a world in miniature containing all that the world contains.
Homilies on Leviticus 5.5Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The oven, frying pan, and griddle signify the three levels of Scripture (hidden, discoverable by study, and plain), corresponding to its mystical, moral, and historical senses, as do the basket of three loaves and the three loaves of the parable.
Homilies on Leviticus 5.8Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The peace offering must be eaten the same day because the priest's 'flesh', the word of God taught in church, must always be fresh and spiritual, not stale and literal; the old will be a blessing only in the age to come.
Homilies on Leviticus 7.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Paul's calling the law's food and drink 'spiritual' and 'a shadow', and Peter's vision at Joppa, interpreted by him as meaning that no human being is common or unclean, show that the clean and unclean animals signify people.
Homilies on Leviticus 7.5Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Christ's parable of the net shows that the clean and unclean fish are people; each person gives others clean or unclean 'food' in conversation, and even the Gospel's letter, such as eating Christ's flesh, kills unless taken spiritually.
Homilies on Leviticus 7.6Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The clean animal chews the cud (meditates on Scripture spiritually) and divides the hoof (lives with the age to come in view); the captive woman of Deut 21 signifies pagan learning, to be purified of everything dead before it is taken up.
Homilies on Leviticus 7.7Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Fish with fins and scales are those who rise from the mud of this life toward the spirit and shed the old garments; unclean carrion birds are people who prey on the dead or whose learning is betrayed by dead works.
Homilies on Leviticus 8.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Christ the heavenly physician heals the sick in his church, such as the woman unclean from childbirth and the leper, not with herbs but with the medicines of Scripture's words, whose power lies beneath the rough surface.
Homilies on Leviticus 8.5Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The six kinds of leprosy signify kinds of sin, some curable and some not, in this life and after it, judged by Christ the high priest; the scar is the trace sin leaves even in a healed soul, and leprosy reappears when old sin breaks out again after conversion.
Homilies on Leviticus 9.8Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The altar's fire purges the saints, while sinners face the fire of their own kindling; Christ fills his hands with the 'fine compounded incense' of virtues and spiritual understanding offered by believers.
Homilies on Leviticus 10.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The law's rites were like a sculptor's clay model, needed only until Christ, the true temple, high priest, and Lamb, brought the finished work; therefore God let the temple be destroyed.
Homilies on Leviticus 13.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The perfect learn the meaning of the festivals directly from God, others through teachers; Origen introduces the laws of the lamp and the loaves of presentation.
Homilies on Leviticus 13.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The loaves of presentation point to Christ, the bread from heaven, and to the eucharistic memorial; spiritually they distinguish deep teaching ('fine flour', as Abraham's loaves) from ordinary moral exhortation ('meal', as Lot's).
Homilies on Leviticus 13.6Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · As the loaves are 'holy of holies', so the deeper meaning of God's word is reserved for the pure in heart, while others receive it in parables.
Homilies on Leviticus 14.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The blasphemer of mixed descent figures the heretic who keeps the letter of Scripture but rejects its spiritual sense and so curses the Creator; slander against God or neighbour excludes from the kingdom.
Homilies on Leviticus 15.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The priest's and Levite's house, always redeemable, is the perfect soul which, like David, repents at once; the sins of the patriarchs are redeemed by figurative interpretation.
Homilies on Leviticus 16.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The blessings at the end of Leviticus, like prizes in the games, reward keeping God's law; since the law is spiritual, its blessings are spiritual and open to all who share the virtues of those first blessed.
Homilies on Leviticus 16.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The promised rain is not the common rain given to just and unjust but the word of God, which must be given 'in its season', suited to each hearer's capacity.
Homilies on Leviticus 16.5Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Threshing, vintage, sowing, bread, safe dwelling, and peace promised in Lev 26 signify the testing and teaching of Scripture, Christ the living bread, firmness in faith, and the peace of God.
Homilies on Numbers 1.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Origen explains that only those who have grown to spiritual maturity and strength are counted in God's number, as only grown Israelite men were counted in Numbers.
Homilies on Numbers 4.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The 22,000 Levites and the 273 extra firstborn are read as numbers of creation and of human gestation, and the four divisions of Levite duties are described.
Homilies on Numbers 4.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The Kohathites, counted from twenty-five to fifty, carry the holy objects only after the priests have covered all seven of them.
Homilies on Numbers 5.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · As the priests covered the holy things before the Kohathites carried them, the church's teachers hand on mysteries whose meaning most believers practice without understanding, such as kneeling, praying toward the east, the Eucharist, and the rites of baptism.
Homilies on Numbers 5.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The Levites' “works of works” are works with a hidden meaning, and their ages, twenty-five and fifty, signify perfected senses and the remission figured by the jubilee.
Homilies on Numbers 7.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · God's praise of Moses as one to whom he speaks face to face points to the law understood spiritually in the church, and preachers who fail to expound the law spiritually give occasion for despising it.
Homilies on Numbers 9.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The censers of Korah's rebels, hammered into plates for the altar, teach that scriptural truths found in heretics' words are not to be discarded, and that heresy, set beside the church's faith, makes the truth shine more clearly.
Homilies on Numbers 9.7Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Aaron's rod bearing nuts figures Christ's cross and the threefold sense of Scripture (the bitter letter, the protective moral teaching, and the nourishing hidden mystery), and God, who promised only that the rod would sprout, gave more than he promised.
Homilies on Numbers 11.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Distinguishing “law” from commandments, ordinances, testimonies, and judgments, Origen argues that some precepts are only shadows, some (like the Ten Commandments) are kept literally, and some (like the joining of husband and wife) are kept literally and also bear an allegorical sense.
Homilies on Numbers 11.7Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · God accepts firstfruits only from those sanctified by faith, not the self-credited virtues of pagans, and the “eternal ordinance” points to invisible, spiritual realities given to Christ and his apostles.
Homilies on Numbers 12.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The command to gather the people at the well points to a spiritual meaning: the Scriptures speak of many wells and springs, culminating in the living water Christ gives to believers.
Homilies on Numbers 13.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The “riddle-speakers” of Numbers are the law, the prophets, and the church's spiritual interpreters, who tear down pagan error in a person's thoughts and rebuild them with truth and piety.
Homilies on Numbers 16.9Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Because drinking blood cannot be meant literally, Origen reads it of drinking Christ’s blood in the sacraments and in his words and those of his wounded apostles.
Homilies on Numbers 17.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The praise of Balaam as “the man who truly sees” fits the people whose veil is removed; Origen distinguishes the better eyes from the eyes of the flesh opened by the serpent’s counsel, which Christ closes.
Homilies on Numbers 17.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The good houses of Jacob and tents of Israel signify the completion of good works and the endless advance in wisdom, the law and the prophets read spiritually, or body and soul; the faithful must build their own tents after the heavenly pattern, as Paul did.
Homilies on Numbers 22.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · God’s answer to the daughters of Zelophehad gave lasting laws of inheritance; spiritually, the five daughters are good works done through the five senses, by which even simple believers without deep understanding (“shadow in his mouth”) inherit with the people of God.
Homilies on Numbers 23.5Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The new moon, hidden when joined to the sun, figures the church or soul joined wholly to Christ, the sun of righteousness, renewed and hidden from human sight.
Homilies on Numbers 25.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The five Midianite kings, whose names mean beastliness, emptiness, provocation, and the like, are vices reigning through the five senses, which the soldier of God must slay, as Christ commanded cutting off the eye or hand that causes stumbling; the spoils and their purification are then summarized.
Homilies on Numbers 26.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Since the narrator of the Pentateuch is the Holy Spirit, the account of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh settling east of the Jordan must hold a meaning worthy of him that helps the reader escape the rich man’s torments; Origen asks his hearers to pray for its unveiling.
Homilies on Numbers 26.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The exodus figures both conversion leading to baptism and the soul’s passage after death; the firstborn tribes who settled east of the Jordan because of their cattle signify the former people, which received its inheritance through Moses and not, through Jesus, in the land of promise of faith in Christ.
Homilies on Numbers 27.1Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · As bodies need different foods, so souls need different parts of Scripture: beginners prefer the plain books and shun Leviticus or Numbers, but nothing written by the Holy Spirit is superfluous, and we must ask God for understanding.
Homilies on Numbers 27.12Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Origen runs through the remaining stations, reading each name as a stage of the soul’s advance (health, labours, praise of judgment, the law, the burial of cravings, blessedness, vision, temptation, and so on) down to the plains by the Jordan, and defends this method by comparing the graded stages of a school.
Homilies on Psalms 36-38 1.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The wicked wither like grass and herbs: earthly glory, even an emperor’s, passes, while the word of God remains; the soul should be a vineyard of spiritual understanding, not a garden of fleshly herbs as Ahab wanted.
Homilies on Psalms 36-38 4.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Since the righteous often suffer hunger and want, “young” and “old” refer to the ages of the inner man, “forsaken” to spiritual abandonment, and the righteous man’s “seed” to his disciples, begotten by the word of God; the “seed of the ungodly” is their false teaching.
Homilies on Jeremiah 1.6Origen · ca. 240 · Some apply Jeremiah's call to Christ, but parts fit Christ poorly and parts fit Jeremiah poorly; Origen refuses to split one passage between them.
Homilies on Jeremiah 1.7Origen · ca. 240 · The nations and kingdoms to be rooted out are sins ruling in souls; and with Scripture as witness, even “I am too young” can be applied to Christ, who emptied himself and grew as a child.
Homilies on Jeremiah 5.8Origen · ca. 240 · The veil over the heart that keeps sinners from understanding Scripture is their own shame and dishonor; like Moses, we remove it ourselves when we turn to the Lord.
Homilies on Jeremiah 12.1Origen · ca. 240 · “Every wineskin will be filled with wine” is false literally, but true spiritually: every person is filled with wine, the good with the wine of Wisdom, the wicked with the wine of Sodom.
Homilies on Jeremiah 12.7Origen · ca. 240 · “Hear” refers to receiving Scripture's hidden meanings into the mind, “give ear” to its plain lessons; and both must be followed by humility, since pride is a common sin even over good things.
Homilies on Jeremiah 12.12Origen · ca. 240 · The bright mountains are the angels and saints, the dark ones the devil and his powers; to “listen secretly” is to grasp the hidden spiritual sense of Scripture, which is why Christians who keep Jewish feasts and fasts literally are rebuked, and the church must fear being crushed as Israel was.
Homilies on Jeremiah 17.1Origen · ca. 240 · Natural history describes the partridge as deceitful and unclean, so the partridge of Jeremiah should be taken to mean the devil, not the Savior.
Homilies on Jeremiah 18.4Origen · ca. 240 · Scripture is a spring to simple readers and a well to deeper ones; some interpret the potter who remakes the fallen vessel as God raising our bodies in the resurrection.
On the Trinity 6Novatian · ca. 240–250 · Scripture speaks of God's eyes, hands, and feet to suit the people's understanding; these describe his workings, for God is Spirit, simple, everywhere, and needs no members.
On the Trinity 19Novatian · ca. 240–250 · Scripture calls the one who spoke to Jacob both Angel and God, and the man who wrestled with Jacob both man and God; these figures point to Christ, who is God and not only man or angel.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 0.61Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · Origen introduces the Song of Songs as a wedding song in dramatic form, sung by the bride (the soul or the church) to the bridegroom, the Word of God.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 0.64Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · Paul confirms the two men, inner and outer, and scripture uses the same names, such as boy, youth and father, for both.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 0.65Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · Scripture speaks of the soul's ages and of its members (eyes, ears, hands, feet, belly, throat, tongue, teeth, arm) with the names of the body's.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 1.106Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · The fragrance of Christ gives life to some and death to others, as this spiritual exposition does; believers who mock it are to be persuaded from other scriptures that speak of spiritual senses.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 2.160Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · The 'likenesses of gold' are the law and its tabernacle, figures and shadows of heavenly realities, which the angels and prophets made for the church to stir her desire for the true gold.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 2.161Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · The 'studs of silver' are the rare places where the prophets themselves explained their figures; at Christ's passion the torn veil showed that hidden meanings are now opened, in true gold and solid silver.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.204Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · Christ leaps over the mountains as the gospel swiftly spread through the kingdoms, and as he springs out of the law and the prophets once the veil is removed.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.208Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · Visible creatures bear likenesses of heavenly realities, as the mustard seed images the kingdom and faith, so that the soul may rise from the visible to the invisible.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.212Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · Scripture, like creation, is written so that visible events carry hidden meanings; the stags perfected by God's voice are spiritual persons who bring Christ to birth.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.220Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · In the body the soul sees wisdom only through images; applied to Christ and the Church, Christ stood behind the wall of the Old Testament and calls the Church from the letter to the spirit.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.229Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · The literal scene (the outer wall, the veiled Bride) yields no benefit or coherence, so it must be read spiritually: the soul's winter is the time of passions, when it must withdraw and simply avoid sin.
On the Singleness of Clerics 23Anonymous · 3rd cent. (disputed) · Those who appeal to the saints should rather fear the example of the adulterous elders of Susanna; misusing the stories of Scripture to excuse sin defames the saints.
On the Computation of Easter 10Anonymous · 243 · Abraham's story prefigures Christ: Isaac carrying the wood, and Abraham's 318 servants, whose number signifies the cross (T = 300) and the name of Jesus (ιη = 18).
On the Computation of Easter 12Anonymous · 243 · The fall of Jerusalem in the 1006th year after the exodus is read as a figure of Adam's fall: 1,006 minus Abraham's 75 years plus one (the lamb) leaves 930, Adam's lifespan.
Against Celsus 1.17Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus attacks allegorical reading of Moses though Greek myths about the gods are far more shameful; like Plato's Thrasymachus, he forbids his opponents their true answer.
Against Celsus 1.42Origen · ca. 248 · Almost no history can be strictly proved, and even true stories may contain things to be read figuratively; the Gospels must be read with care and discernment.
Against Celsus 2.2Origen · ca. 248 · The "many things" Jesus could not yet tell his Jewish disciples were the spiritual meaning of the law, which the Spirit later taught, as in Peter's vision.
Against Celsus 2.3Origen · ca. 248 · Jewish Christians like Paul constantly appeal to the law, reading it spiritually; Celsus, writing as an enemy, did not trouble to distinguish the different groups.
Against Celsus 2.4Origen · ca. 248 · Christians begin from the Jewish Scriptures and honor them more by uncovering their deeper meaning; the gospel's roots in the law, as Jesus and Mark say, do not bind believers to its letter.
Against Celsus 2.69Origen · ca. 248 · Origen explains that Jesus' death and burial carry symbolic meaning for believers, who die and are buried with him in baptism, that his new rock-hewn tomb signifies his purity, and that vanishing from the cross would only have drawn other objections.
Against Celsus 3.45Origen · ca. 248 · Origen shows from the Old Testament, from David, Solomon, Hosea, Daniel, and Ezekiel, that God's word wants believers to be wise.
Against Celsus 4.12Origen · ca. 248 · The flood and the coming conflagration are caused by overflowing wickedness, not by star cycles; and when Scripture says God “comes down,” it speaks figuratively of his condescension to human affairs.
Against Celsus 4.37Origen · ca. 248 · Genesis never speaks of God's “hands” in creating man; such expressions, like God's wings, are figurative, and God's “breathing” into Adam means sharing his incorruptible Spirit.
Against Celsus 4.38Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus mocks the creation of Eve from Adam's rib but admires Hesiod's myth of Pandora as allegory; Origen quotes Hesiod at length to show which story is more laughable read literally, and asks why only the Jews may not speak in allegory.
Against Celsus 4.39Origen · ca. 248 · Origen sets the story of paradise and the serpent beside Plato's myth of Eros born of Poros and Penia in the garden of Zeus, arguing that both must be read for their hidden meaning, and suggests Plato may have learned from Jewish teaching in Egypt.
Against Celsus 4.43Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus sneers at Genesis's family stories and at Jacob's flocks, but these events happened as types written for Christians; Jacob's marked flocks signify believers from the nations.
Against Celsus 4.44Origen · ca. 248 · The patriarchs' wells, marriages, and unions with maidservants carry spiritual meaning, as Paul himself allegorized Sarah and Hagar in Galatians, though the wells were also real.
Against Celsus 4.45Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus calls Lot and his daughters worse than Thyestes; Origen, noting that Scripture neither praises nor blames them, observes that the Stoics defend such an act in a hypothetical end of the world, which Lot's daughters believed had come.
Against Celsus 4.48Origen · ca. 248 · If any stories deserve shame, it is the Greek myths of gods castrating and devouring one another, which even Chrysippus allegorized obscenely; Christians therefore refuse to call God “Zeus” or give the sun and moon divine names.
Against Celsus 4.49Origen · ca. 248 · The biblical writers themselves read their histories figuratively: Paul allegorizes the ox, marriage, the Red Sea, the manna, and the rock, and the psalmist calls Israel's history parables and riddles.
Against Celsus 4.50Origen · ca. 248 · The psalmist's prayer to see the wonders of God's law and the strange images of the prophets, like Ezekiel's dragon of Egypt, show that Scripture has hidden meanings; the Greek myths, by contrast, are silly and impious.
Against Celsus 4.51Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus evidently never read the Jewish allegorists Philo and Aristobulus, whose work would impress Greek philosophers; even the Pythagorean Numenius quoted and allegorized Moses, the prophets, and a story about Jesus.
Against Celsus 4.71Origen · ca. 248 · As we speak simply to small children, God's Word in Scripture speaks of God in human terms for the weak, while the spiritual find a deeper sense in the same words.
Against Celsus 4.72Origen · ca. 248 · God's 'wrath' is not a passion but a figure for his stern discipline of sinners, as comparison of Scripture shows, just as his 'sleep' is not literal.
Against Celsus 4.87Origen · ca. 248 · Animals' fixed instincts show nature, not reason, at work; even Solomon's praise of the wise ants in Proverbs is a riddle with a hidden sense, as Jesus spoke in 'proverbs.'
Against Celsus 5.30Origen · ca. 248 · Origen reads Babel as a hidden account of souls that leave the 'east' of divine light, build pridefully with material things, and are handed over, according to their guilt, to angels who assign them languages and lands.
Against Celsus 5.31Origen · ca. 248 · Continuing the allegory, Israel is the people that stayed in the 'east' under the Lord's own care; their growing sins led to exile among other nations, after which their Lord in turn drew people from the nations to himself.
Against Celsus 5.36Origen · ca. 248 · Ammon's ban on eating cows is arbitrary, unlike the Jewish laws about animals, which carry a deeper meaning; and Celsus's principle would excuse Scythian cannibalism and Indians who eat their fathers.
Against Celsus 5.60Origen · ca. 248 · Christians and Jews agree the Scriptures are inspired but differ in interpretation: for Christians the literal law is veiled until one turns to the Lord, who is the Spirit, and sees its hidden glory.
Against Celsus 6.16Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus claims Jesus garbled Plato's saying about the rich, but Origen finds it absurd that the unlettered Jesus read Plato, and hints at the deeper meaning of the camel and the needle.
Against Celsus 6.49Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus dismisses the Genesis creation story as silly without argument; Origen points to his own commentaries on Genesis and insists that Moses wrote with deep meaning, not as a comic poet.
Against Celsus 6.50Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus calls the creation account nonsense without argument; Origen notes that Moses himself shows the six “days” are not ordinary days, since light and the sun came after the first day.
Against Celsus 6.60Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus again mocks the six days of creation, and Origen again answers that the Father made the world through the Word and that the “days” are not literal periods of time.
Against Celsus 6.61Origen · ca. 248 · God's “rest” on the seventh day does not mean he was tired; it points to the eternal sabbath of the blessed, and God's “hands” and “commands” are figurative expressions.
Against Celsus 6.62Origen · ca. 248 · God has no literal mouth or voice; his “voice” is perceived spiritually, and none of our categories fit him, for, as the prophets say, God does not change.
Against Celsus 6.70Origen · ca. 248 · God's Spirit is not a body but is shared with the worthy; Scripture calls God fire and spirit figuratively, and Jesus taught worship in spirit and truth rather than through bodily rites.
Against Celsus 6.77Origen · ca. 248 · Jesus appeared differently to different people according to what they could bear, and this points to the Word of God and the Scriptures, which seem plain to the many but are transfigured in glory for those who climb higher.
Against Celsus 7.10Origen · ca. 248 · The prophets spoke plainly what was needed for moral reform, and veiled their deeper teaching in riddles and parables for diligent seekers; Celsus calls them madmen because he did not understand them.
Against Celsus 7.11Origen · ca. 248 · Origen has explained the obscure prophecies in his commentaries; the prophets can be understood by those wise in Christ, and Celsus's claim to have heard and exposed such prophets himself is unsupported.
Against Celsus 7.19Origen · ca. 248 · The law's promises of rule and the slaughter of enemies cannot be meant literally, as a Psalm about killing all sinners every morning shows.
Against Celsus 7.20Origen · ca. 248 · The law is twofold, the letter and the spiritual meaning; as Ezekiel and Paul show, the letter kills but the spiritual sense gives life, and so the law is both “not good” and “holy.”
Against Celsus 7.22Origen · ca. 248 · The commands to kill enemies are to be read spiritually: the righteous destroy sinful thoughts, and the “infants of Babylon” dashed on the rock are the first stirrings of sin crushed against Christ.
Against Celsus 7.24Origen · ca. 248 · Scripture's warnings against seeking glory and its promises that the righteous will be fed do not contradict Jesus' teaching on not worrying about food and clothing, since the promised food is nourishment of the soul.
Against Celsus 7.34Origen · ca. 248 · Christians do not expect to see, hear, or touch God with bodily senses; Scripture speaks of spiritual eyes, ears, and hands, and of a “divine sense.”
Against Celsus 7.60Origen · ca. 248 · The prophets and apostles, like Plato learning a foreign tongue to help foreigners, spoke plainly so as to reach the multitudes, while their words still hold deeper meanings for those who study them.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 4Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · All the law and the prophets, even their obscure parts, hang on love of God and neighbour, which opens their meaning; Paul's hymn to love and his confidence in Romans 8 illustrate it.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 7Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · The “sitting at the right hand” of Psalm 110 must be understood figuratively of the Son's kingdom, since a bodily reading leads to absurdities.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 9Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · Origen distinguishes Christ's disciples from the crowds, explains the “seat of Moses” and its counterpart in the Church, warns church leaders who demand titles or impose unbearable burdens, and reads the law's commands about Passover, phylacteries, and fringes spiritually.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 15Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · Teachers who open the deeper sense of Scripture open the kingdom; those who reject allegorical interpretation and keep to the letter take away the key of knowledge.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 20Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · “Scribes” and “Pharisees” figuratively are literalists and the self-righteous; the small observances of piety are seasonings of the weightier matters, and true cleanness begins within.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 22Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · The cup and dish are the words and narratives of Scripture and of teaching, whose inner sense matters more than outward eloquence.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 23Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · The law and prophets are cups and dishes whose inner, spiritual sense Christ's disciples seek, while the scribes and Pharisees keep to the outward sense.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 26Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · Jesus named Zechariah, not John, because the Pharisees did not kill John; God punishes a nation only when its sins reach full measure; figuratively, the prophets' tombs are the letter of Scripture, whose spiritual sense literalists and heretics kill.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 30Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · Figuratively, the saints intercede for the human temple; the sinner is a temple destroyed little by little; and the Old Testament's letter is a temple to be rebuilt more spiritually, while heresies sit in it like Antichrist.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 42Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · Spiritually, the holy place is Scripture, in which the false word of heresy stands as the abomination of desolation; the reader must flee from the letter to the mountains of spiritual sense and not turn back to what he has left.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 48Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · On the literal sense, Origen reports views of how the heavenly lights will fail at the end, whether by fire or by exhaustion, and of the sign of the cross appearing in heaven, with parallels from Isaiah, Joel, and Zechariah.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 49Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · Figuratively, the darkened sun is the devil, the moon the church of heretics, and the falling stars false teachers and fallen Christians; the mourning tribes of Zechariah are grades of sinners among laity, teachers, and clergy.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 52Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · The great trumpet of the angels is illuminated by the silver trumpets of Numbers that gathered and moved Israel's camps from the four quarters, a shadow of the word's great voice and of the last trumpet in Paul.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 66Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · The talents are the measures of understanding of Scripture given to Christ's servants, from the letter to its higher sense; one who can build up souls but hides his gift and will not teach is the servant who buried his talent, and the long delay explains why the apostles lived to old age.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 77Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · Origen argues that the Gospels tell of three different women who anointed Jesus, not one, and reads their differences as degrees among the faithful: penitents anoint the Lord's feet with works that serve others, while the perfect pour precious ointment on his head with works done for God's glory alone.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 126Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · John says Jesus carried his own cross, the others that Simon of Cyrene carried it; Origen weighs how both may be true, interprets Simon as obedience, and reports the tradition that Adam was buried at Golgotha, the place of the Skull, so that the head of the human race might rise with Christ.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 139Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · The earthquake signifies all flesh shaken by the new covenant; the split rocks are the prophets, whose hidden mysteries are opened in Christ; the opened tombs are bodies of souls dead to God, raised to faith after Christ's resurrection; these wonders happen daily in the soul, and seeing them spiritually is greater than seeing them bodily.
Commentary on Matthew 10.1Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen explains that Jesus explains the parable only to the disciples who come to him in his house, and that the Gospel's plain letters hide deeper meanings.
Commentary on Matthew 10.6Origen · ca. 246–248 · The finder hides the treasure because the secret meanings of Scripture are not to be disclosed to all, and buys the field by giving up all his former wickedness.
Commentary on Matthew 10.14Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen discusses how the unlettered disciples can be called scribes, and explains the scribe made a disciple of the kingdom as one who rises from the letter of Scripture to its spiritual meaning.
Commentary on Matthew 10.15Origen · ca. 246–248 · The scribe of the kingdom brings out old and new, holding law and prophets together with the Gospel, against those who divide the Godhead; the householder he imitates is Jesus.
Commentary on Matthew 11.2Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen reads the five loaves as the sense-perceptible words of Scripture and the two fish as the spoken and inward word, or the word about Father and Son, multiplied by Jesus’ blessing, with twelve baskets of deeper teaching left for the disciples.
Commentary on Matthew 11.3Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen reads the men, women, and children at the feeding as grades of spiritual maturity, the grass as the flesh put underfoot, the hundreds and fifties as sacred numbers, and the twelve baskets as belonging to the twelve apostles who judge the tribes.
Commentary on Matthew 11.13Origen · ca. 246–248 · The Pharisees, offended at Jesus’ teaching on food, are not the Father’s planting and are blind guides of the blind, while Jesus calls the crowd away from the literal sense of the law.
Commentary on Matthew 11.16Origen · ca. 246–248 · Jesus withdraws to the districts of Tyre (“constraint”) and Sidon (“hunters”), standing for the Gentiles, and the Canaanite woman (“prepared for humiliation”) comes out of those regions by faith, as the sinner who turns to virtue leaves the regions of evil.
Commentary on Matthew 12.6Origen · ca. 246–248 · Leaven in Scripture signifies teaching; Jesus’ knowledge of the disciples’ thoughts shows his divinity, and all faith in this life is “little faith” compared with what is perfect.
Commentary on Matthew 12.31Origen · ca. 246–248 · Some refer the promise that some would not taste death to the three apostles who saw the Transfiguration; Origen calls this a reading fit for beginners, “milk,” while the mature seek the solid food of Scripture.
Commentary on Matthew 13.4Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen interprets the moonstruck boy figuratively as souls that seem healthy but are periodically seized by passions, falling into the fire of lust or the water of worldly life.
Commentary on Matthew 14.6Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen states the plain moral of the parable of the unforgiving servant, that God's forgiveness can be revoked if we do not forgive others, and lists the questions a higher, mystical interpretation would have to answer.
Commentary on Matthew 14.12Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen explains why the evangelists left the parables unexplained and places the king's reckoning at the final judgment, comparing the parables of the talents and of the minas.
Commentary on Matthew 15.1Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen sets out two mistaken readings of the three kinds of eunuch in Matt 19:12: that all three are bodily (which led some to castrate themselves), and that only the third is figurative.
Commentary on Matthew 15.2Origen · ca. 246–248 · Other sayings of Jesus taken literally (buying a sword, greeting no one on the road, cutting off a hand or eye) show that the letter of the New Testament too can kill.
Commentary on Matthew 15.3Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen rejects literal self-castration, answering Sextus and Philo with the Law and with Paul, warning of its bodily harms, and arguing that Marcion’s refusal of allegory leaves him no consistent position.
Commentary on Matthew 15.5Origen · ca. 246–248 · Taking the three kinds of eunuch spiritually, Origen contrasts Pharaoh’s eunuchs with Nehemiah, the eunuch who rebuilt Jerusalem, and Daniel and his companions, barren toward Babylon but fruitful in the Spirit.
Commentary on Matthew 15.18Origen · ca. 246–248 · A figurative reading: the rich man’s possessions are the vices and evil spirits he has acquired, which he must “sell” back to the evil powers, the true “poor,” in order to become perfect and have treasure in heaven.
Commentary on Matthew 16.4Origen · ca. 246–248 · The request of the sons of Zebedee, taken literally, seems slight; gathering the biblical texts on God’s and Christ’s sitting and enthronement, Origen argues that such sitting, right and left, is spiritual, not bodily.
Commentary on Matthew 16.11Origen · ca. 246–248 · Christ stops and calls the blind who ask for sight; so readers blind to Scripture’s meaning should ask him to open their eyes, that they may follow him and see God with a pure heart.
Commentary on Matthew 16.12Origen · ca. 246–248 · Literally, the blind men in Matthew, Mark, and Luke may be different healings; figuratively, Bartimaeus is the Israelite remnant, and the Ebionite who believes Jesus a son of Joseph is rebuked by Gentile believers in the virgin birth, yet is healed when he calls him Rabbouni.
Commentary on Matthew 16.13Origen · ca. 246–248 · Luke places the healing as Jesus approaches Jericho, Mark as he enters and leaves, Matthew as he leaves; mystically these are stages, and Luke’s blind man, who must be brought to Jesus, is the least advanced.
Commentary on Matthew 17.7Origen · ca. 246–248 · Comparing the parable with Isaiah’s song of the vineyard, Origen argues that in the Gospel the vineyard is not the people but the kingdom of God, that is, the Scriptures, with the hedge, winepress, and tower as levels of their meaning.
Commentary on Matthew 17.31Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen allegorizes levirate marriage: the soul is married first to the letter of the law, which bears no children, and then to its brother, the spiritual law, whose offspring are good works that still bear the name of the law of God.
Commentary on Matthew 17.32Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen gives three readings of the brother who refuses the levirate duty: a doctrine that despises the law’s letter, the heresies that separate the law from the Gospel, and a disciple who will not carry on a wise man’s teaching.
Commentary on Matthew 17.34Origen · ca. 246–248 · Jesus says the Sadducees do not know the Scriptures because the Old Testament teaches the absence of marriage in the resurrection only figuratively; its marriage laws, like Paul’s reading of Abraham’s wives and of Genesis 2:24, point to Christ and the church.
Commentary on Matthew 17.35Origen · ca. 246–248 · Since the Old Testament teaches the absence of marriage in the resurrection only figuratively, reading it literally leads to absurdities; Jesus proved the resurrection to the Sadducees from God’s words at the bush, for he is God of the living, and the patriarchs live to him.
Commentary on Romans 1.10Origen · ca. 244–246 (Rufinus's translation ca. 405–406) · God and his saints bear witness to each other; Paul serves God in his spirit, the best part of man, and the spirit of the law over its letter, as did the patriarchs and prophets.
Commentary on Romans 2.11Origen · ca. 244–246 (Rufinus's translation ca. 405–406) · Origen notes that Paul, like the prophets, shifts the speaking and addressed persons; he applies Rom 2:17–24 first to the one who is a Jew only in name, then to church leaders whose lives contradict their teaching, and finally to heretics who steal the meaning of Scripture.
Commentary on Romans 6.7Origen · ca. 244–246 (Rufinus's translation ca. 405–406) · Origen explains Paul’s marriage analogy in Romans 7: the law according to the letter is the dead first husband, and the soul is now free to be joined to Christ, the risen second husband, serving in the newness of the Spirit.
Commentary on Romans 8.8Origen · ca. 244–246 (Rufinus's translation ca. 405–406) · God's giving the rest of Israel eyes that do not see is a retribution and even a remedy, since it is better not to be wise than to be wise wrongly; Israel's 'table' is the Old Testament, which becomes a snare to those who will not understand it spiritually, and Christians must not come to Wisdom's table defiled.
Commentary on Romans 9.36Origen · ca. 244–246 (Rufinus's translation ca. 405–406) · Read spiritually, eating all things means the perfect who can receive every kind of teaching, and 'vegetables' the simpler word that sustains the weak; neither the advanced may despise the simple, nor the simple judge the advanced, for God can make even the fallen stand.
Commentary on Romans 10.6Origen · ca. 244–246 (Rufinus's translation ca. 405–406) · The strong must bear the weaknesses of the weak rather than expel them, as Christ bears ours; we are to please our neighbor for his edification, not to win praise or by betraying the faith, as Christ bore reproaches to save sinners; and the Scriptures, read spiritually, were written to give comfort and hope to those who understand.
To Quirinus 1.4Cyprian of Carthage · ca. 248–250 (book 3 perhaps later) · The Scriptures were sealed to Israel but would be opened in the last times after Christ came, as he himself opened them to the disciples.
To Quirinus 1.20Cyprian of Carthage · ca. 248–250 (book 3 perhaps later) · The barren women of Scripture who bore late, Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah, prefigure the church, which bears more children from the nations than the synagogue, symbolized by the number seven.
To Quirinus 2.16Cyprian of Carthage · ca. 248–250 (book 3 perhaps later) · Christ is the stone of Scripture: the cornerstone of Isaiah and the Psalms, and the stone of Jacob's pillow, Moses' seat, the ark's resting place, David's sling, and Samuel's Ebenezer.
Letter 63.3Cyprian of Carthage · 249/250–258 · Noah's drinking of wine and his nakedness prefigure the Lord's passion.
Letter 63.4Cyprian of Carthage · 249/250–258 · Melchizedek's offering of bread and wine prefigured Christ, priest after his order, who offered bread and the cup mixed with wine, his body and blood; the blessing of Abraham passes to all who believe.
Letter 63.6Cyprian of Carthage · 249/250–258 · Jacob's blessing of Judah, washing his robe in the blood of the grape, and Isaiah's red garments from the winepress, both point to the Lord's blood in the wine of the cup.
Letter 63.8Cyprian of Carthage · 249/250–258 · Where Scripture names water alone it signifies baptism, received once; the cup of the Lord, drunk continually in the church, is another thing.
Letter 63.12Cyprian of Carthage · 249/250–258 · Christ turned water into wine at Cana, signifying the nations joining Christ; to turn the cup's wine into water reverses his sign. Waters signify peoples, as Revelation says.
On Jewish Foods 2Novatian · ca. 250–258 · Novatian argues that the food laws must be read spiritually, since God declared all creatures very good and preserved even the unclean ones in the ark, and he outlines the history of human food from fruit to grain to flesh.
On Jewish Foods 3Novatian · ca. 250–258 · Novatian interprets the clean and unclean animals as pictures of human virtues and vices: chewing the cud means meditating on God's commands, a divided hoof a firm walk in virtue, and each forbidden animal a particular vice.
Symposium 3.1Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd century · Thalia, speaking third, argues that Paul reads the union of Adam and Eve as a figure of Christ and the church, not only of procreation.
Symposium 3.2Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd century · Paul's varied style moves from plain to lofty; the literal sense of Genesis stands, but its higher sense about Christ and the church must also be given.
Symposium 5.2Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd century · One must dedicate oneself wholly; Abraham's three three-year-old animals and the three night watches of Luke 12 stand for keeping chaste through childhood, prime, and old age.
Symposium 9.1Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd century · Tysiane, the ninth speaker, reads the feast of Tabernacles as a figure of the resurrection in the seventh millennium, when the faithful will rejoice with God in the new creation.
Symposium 9.3Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd century · The “beautiful fruit” of Tabernacles is not the citron but Christ, the tree of life, and faith in him; without it one cannot share the first resurrection.
Symposium 10.2Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd century · Jotham's fable of the trees choosing a king foretells four stages of God's law: the fig for paradise, the vine for Noah, the olive for Moses, and the bramble for the apostles' teaching of chastity.
Commentary on the Apocalypse 11.5Victorinus of Pettau · late 3rd century · The witnesses rise on the fourth day, not the third, and Revelation must be read by its sense, since the Spirit repeats and reorders events.
Letter of the six bishops to Paul 5Anonymous · ca. 264–269 · The bishops show from Exodus and Deuteronomy that the one who appeared to Moses in the bush and in glory was the Son of God.
Cib. 7Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · God gave the food laws not because foods defile but to train Israel by small commands, as teachers start children with strokes; the Law is a shadow, the gospel an image, of the good things to come.
Cib. 8Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The food laws are shadows: the divided hoof means an active life and chewing the cud means understanding Scripture, and the psalm's ivory palace means resurrection bodies, not elephant bone.
Cib. 11Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The red heifer is Christ's flesh; its burning with cedar, hyssop, and scarlet images the Trinity, and its ashes signify his real death and burial, into which believers are baptized.
Creat. 1Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Methodius rejects Xenon's reading of the pearls and swine as mystical teaching withheld from unbelievers, since the apostles preached to unbelievers; the pearls are the virtues, which must not be given over to pleasures.
Lepr. 1Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The dialogue opens: Sistelius invites Eubulius to explain the Law's rules on leprosy allegorically.
Lepr. 4Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The Law's words on leprosy are coverings and shadows; those who understand Scripture only outwardly see bare walls, while spiritual understanding enters the holy of holies.
Lepr. 9Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · In the law of leprous garments the warp is the mind, the woof the soul, and the skin the body; a sin that persists after repentance and confession to the bishop is a lasting leprosy that leads to Gehenna.
Lepr. 12Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Sistelius recalls a learned woman in Lycia who taught that the seeker of Scripture's meaning must persevere, rising like Elijah through wind, earthquake, and fire to the still voice of the Spirit.
Res. 1.23Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Origen, still quoted, argues that the risen body keeps the bodily form but not its matter, and reads Ezekiel's dry bones, the gnashing of teeth and Paul's seed analogy in that light.
Res. 1.27Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The narrator, shaken by Proclus's speech, calls Auxentius to his aid and attacks the opponents' rhetoric and the presumption of those who interpret Scripture to win applause rather than to live rightly.
Res. 1.54Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The narrator rejects the reading of Psalm 66 as souls falling from heaven into bodies, argues from Paul's two raptures that paradise is on earth, and reads the psalm as the thanksgiving of the martyrs tested by fire.
Res. 2.16Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The speaker shows from 2 Corinthians 4-5 that Paul expects the life of Jesus to appear in this mortal flesh, and from Paul's and Moses' usage that 'flesh and blood' in 1 Corinthians 15:50 means a fleshly way of life.
Res. 3.8Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Against Origen's spiritual reading of the 'gnashing of teeth', the narrator argues that Scripture speaks sometimes literally and sometimes spiritually, as its uses of 'garments' show, so bodily teeth are meant here.
Res. 3.9Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The return from Babylon did not fulfil Ezekiel's promise, since Jerusalem was repeatedly captured afterwards, as Josephus records.
Sang. 1Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Methodius explains that Proverbs speaks in parables, as Jotham's fable of the trees in Judges shows, and prays for understanding.
Sang. 3Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The leech of Proverbs 30, which hides in drinking water and is never satisfied, signifies the insatiable hostile power that lives in spiritual waters.
Church History 1.7.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · To resolve the apparent conflict between Matthew's and Luke's genealogies, Eusebius cites Africanus's Letter to Aristides.
Church History 2.17.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Philo (quoted): from dawn to dusk they study Scripture, interpreting it allegorically.
Church History 2.17.20Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Philo (quoted): they read the law allegorically, as a body (the letter) with a soul (the hidden sense).
Church History 6.2.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Not content with the plain sense, the boy Origen pressed his father about Scripture's deeper meaning.
Church History 6.19.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Even Porphyry, attacking Scripture, could only slander its interpreters, especially Origen.
Church History 6.19.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Porphyry: Christians rescue the Jewish Scriptures by turning their plain sense into allegorical mysteries.
Church History 6.19.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Porphyry: Origen read Plato and the Pythagoreans and borrowed Stoic allegory for the Jewish Scriptures.
Acta Archelai (Latin) 49Hegemonius · early to mid 4th century (Greek original) · Archelaus explains the "ministry of death" and the veil of Moses: the lesser glory of Moses is not rejected, as a lamp is not despised at sunrise, and the veil lies over the hearts of those who read Moses without turning to Christ.
Acta Archelai (Latin) 50Hegemonius · early to mid 4th century (Greek original) · Archelaus interprets the veil as the prophecy of Gen 49:10 and Deut 18:15, fulfilled in Christ, and then lists parallels between Moses and Jesus; the letter to Diodorus closes.
Homilies 19.3Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Peter refuses to speculate beyond Scripture about the devil's origin, but Simon insists that reasoning can settle whether the evil one was originated or unoriginated.
Recognitions 10.42Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Peter warns that Scripture, like the myths, can be twisted by clever readers, so its sense must be learned from those who keep the tradition received from their elders, with liberal learning used only in support of the truth.
Prophetic Extracts 3.6Eusebius of Caesarea · before 325 (probably ca. 310–320) · Eusebius explains that the Song of Songs, read beyond its literal sense, speaks of Christ and his bride the church, and refers to the commentaries of the most industrious interpreter of Scripture.
Divine Institutes 4.17.18Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The ban on pork signifies abstaining from sin.
Divine Institutes 4.17.21Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · All the Jewish law's precepts are figures of spiritual justice.
Apology for Origen 5.6Pamphilus of Caesarea · ca. 308–310 (Rufinus's Latin about 397) · The sixth charge: that Origen denied the historical events narrated in Scripture.
Apology for Origen 6.1Pamphilus of Caesarea · ca. 308–310 (Rufinus's Latin about 397) · After Origen's words on Christ as mediator before the incarnation, Pamphilus defends Christ's human soul from Scripture and answers the sixth charge with Origen's insistence that most of Scripture's history and commandments are to be taken literally.
Preparation for the Gospel 8.10.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Scripture's descriptions of God must be understood fittingly, not mythically.
Preparation for the Gospel 8.10.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Moses often expresses deep truths through visible images.
Preparation for the Gospel 8.10.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Literalists miss Moses' greatness.
Preparation for the Gospel 8.10.18Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Jews are divided into the many, who keep the letter, and philosophers, who contemplate its meaning.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.5.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The deuterotai interpreted the hidden meanings of Scripture.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.1.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Beginners receive Scripture simply in faith; the mature probe its meaning.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.4.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Hebrews teach the simple the stories and the trained the deeper meaning.
Demonstration of the Gospel 2.1.22Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Understood spiritually, Zechariah’s prophecy concerns the calling of the nations; next heading: Isaiah.
Demonstration of the Gospel 2.3.34Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · All nations, even Egypt, are called to keep the spiritual feast of tabernacles in the true Jerusalem.
Demonstration of the Gospel 2.3.55Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Paul interprets the remnant prophecy in Romans.
Demonstration of the Gospel 2.3.90Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · The man who rears a heifer and two sheep is the believing remnant, understood mystically of the apostles.
Demonstration of the Gospel 2.3.94Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Since the passage must be read spiritually, its sequel must be read so too.
Demonstration of the Gospel 2.3.125Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · The reader should interpret the rest spiritually; Eusebius must move on.
Demonstration of the Gospel 4.15.11Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · God told Moses to make everything according to the heavenly pattern, so the anointing was a type of higher things.
Demonstration of the Gospel 4.15.17Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Moses, having seen heavenly realities, was told to establish symbols of them on earth as preparation.
Demonstration of the Gospel 4.15.45Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Moses himself says he built the earthly worship after a heavenly pattern.
Demonstration of the Gospel 4.15.46Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Moses’ high priest was likewise a copy of the heavenly Christ and high priest.
Demonstration of the Gospel 7.1.53Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · The following verses (flies, bees, shaving, a heifer and two sheep) show the passage must be read figuratively.
Demonstration of the Gospel 7.1.113Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Christians show the prophecy fulfilled in Christ, literally and figuratively.
Demonstration of the Gospel 7.1.121Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Prophecies must be read sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively.
Demonstration of the Gospel 9.1.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Scripture teaches mystical truths while its literal sense also holds, so the star prophecy was fulfilled literally.
Demonstration of the Gospel 9.2.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Figuratively, Egypt is the whole world, the light cloud is Christ’s human nature, and the idols are those of all nations.
Demonstration of the Gospel 9.4.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Hosea cannot blame and praise the same people at once; “Israel” here, as elsewhere, is Christ.
On the Witch of Endor 16Eustathius of Antioch · ca. 324–337 · Eustathius quotes Origen's rhetorical questions and his warning that to deny the story's truth leads to unbelief, and replies that Scripture records the medium's words and the devil's boasts without endorsing them.
On the Witch of Endor 21Eustathius of Antioch · ca. 324–337 · Eustathius charges Origen with inconsistency: he allegorizes paradise, Abraham's wells, Rebecca's jewellery, Job's daughters, Lazarus and the stoning of Jesus, yet insists on the literal truth of the medium's words, and he misreads John on the stoning.
On the Witch of Endor 22Eustathius of Antioch · ca. 324–337 · Eustathius criticizes Origen's allegories built on names, since the righteous and wicked often share names, refers to Methodius's refutation of Origen's view of the resurrection, and notes that Origen alone refused to allegorize the medium's words.
Letter to Marcellinus 9Athanasius of Alexandria · uncertain, after 335 · The one Spirit inspires every book, so prophecy, law, history, and song appear in all of them; the Psalter in turn legislates, narrates, and prophesies.
Demonstration 4.6Aphrahat · 337-345 · Jacob's vision, his crossing of the Jordan with a staff, the stone on the well, and his two companies are read as mysteries of Christ, baptism, and the church of Jews and Gentiles.
Demonstration 6.13Aphrahat · 337-345
Demonstration 12.9Aphrahat · 337-345 · Each Passover rule is a mystery fulfilled in the church: one house is the church, outsiders are heretics, the unbroken bone is Christ's, and the circumcised slave is the baptized penitent who receives the Eucharist.
Demonstration 21.10Aphrahat · 337-345
Demonstration 21.18Aphrahat · 337-345
Demonstration 21.20Aphrahat · 337-345
Demonstration 22.26Aphrahat · 337-345
On Ecclesiastical Theology 1.18.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 337–339 · From his premise of a human-like word Marcellus proceeds to misinterpret Scripture.
Oration I Against the Arians 54Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · Athanasius lays down a rule of interpretation: to read Scripture rightly one must consider the time, the person, and the matter, and heresies arise from neglecting them.
Oration II Against the Arians 3Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · Words follow natures, not the reverse: Scripture calls sons “servants” and servants “children” without changing what they are, as with Solomon.
Oration II Against the Arians 4Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · Scripture regularly speaks of natural children as “made,” “acquired,” or “come to be,” so such words applied to the Son do not make him a work.
Oration II Against the Arians 6Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · A “work” is judged, but the Son is the judge; and “faithful” in Heb 3:2 means trustworthy, as it does of God, not believing, as it does of human beings.
Oration II Against the Arians 11Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · Words like “made,” “created,” “servant,” or “brother” describe the Word's humanity; Scripture never says God made himself a Son or created a Word.
Oration II Against the Arians 12Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · In Acts 2:36 “made” refers to the crucified humanity and means “displayed,” as Acts 2:22 shows; so too the Son “made himself equal to God” by displaying it in his works.
Oration II Against the Arians 44Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · Prov 8:22 is a proverb and must be interpreted by asking who speaks; Wisdom, the creator, speaks of the “house” she built, the body the Word took.
Oration II Against the Arians 46Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · Scripture often uses “create” for renewal (a clean heart, the new man, a new people), so “the Lord created me” refers to the humanity of the Word, not his substance.
Oration II Against the Arians 60Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · The “but” joining Prov 8:22 and 8:25 shows that the begetting before all things precedes and differs from the creating as “beginning of ways,” which refers to the incarnation.
Oration II Against the Arians 77Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · Like an architect who provides for repairs before building, God founded our renewal in Christ before creation; Athanasius then introduces a further sense of Prov 8:22.
Oration II Against the Arians 80Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · As Christ said “Why are you persecuting me?” of his church, so Wisdom speaks of her created impress as herself; the words “before all the hills he begets me” guard her uncreated nature.
Oration III Against the Arians 18Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 339–346 · If the Word differed from us only in time, he would share our name and nature; Scripture uses natural things, like animals, as examples for human conduct, not as statements of nature.
Historical Fragments 2.2.11.3Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 343–367 · Hilary explains Col 1:15–17: the Son is "firstborn" because all creation was founded in him, not as the first creature.
Catechetical Lecture 6.7Cyril of Jerusalem · ca. 350 · It is enough to know that God is one, eternal, unchanging, and perfect in every respect; images of God with wings or seven eyes misread Scripture; God is beyond comprehension.
Catechetical Lecture 17.9Cyril of Jerusalem · ca. 350 · Noah's dove, returning at evening with an olive leaf, prefigures the Spirit descending on Christ, the true Noah.
Catechetical Lecture 19.2Cyril of Jerusalem · ca. 350 · The renunciation of Satan in the vestibule of the baptistery is foreshadowed by Israel's deliverance from Pharaoh.
Catechetical Lecture 19.3Cyril of Jerusalem · ca. 350 · Moses and the lamb's blood are types of Christ and his blood; as Pharaoh drowned in the sea, the devil vanishes in the waters of baptism.
Catechetical Lecture 22.7Cyril of Jerusalem · ca. 350 · Psalm 23's table, anointing, and cup are read as the Eucharist and the chrism, opposed to the demons' table.
Catechetical Lecture 22.8Cyril of Jerusalem · ca. 350 · Ecclesiastes' bread, wine, oil, and white garments are read as the Eucharist, the chrism, and the spiritual purity of the baptized.
Homily on the Paralytic 6Cyril of Jerusalem · ca. 350-387 · Christ heals by his word; the litter of the Song of Songs is read as a figure of the cross and passion, and the Song is to be heard chastely.
On the Decrees of Nicaea 10Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 350–356 · If the Son were Son only by adoption he would differ from us only in degree; but he is Son by nature, though not with a human, bodily kind of generation.
On the Decrees of Nicaea 21Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 350–356 · The council’s terms are not in Scripture word for word but express its sense: the Son is from the Father, as Scripture itself teaches.
On the Trinity 4.14Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 356–360 · God must be known from his own testimony; Hilary will interpret each Arian proof text from its context.
On the Trinity 5.17Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 356–360 · The appearances of God in human form to the patriarchs foreshadowed the incarnation; the one seen as a man was true God.
On the Trinity 12.44Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 356–360 · The context of Prov 8 shows that "created for the beginning of his ways" belongs to the things "from the age" Wisdom promised to recount: a dispensation in time, not her birth.
Letters to Serapion 1.3Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 357–360 · The opponents base their view on Amos 4:13, “who creates spirit,” but the text says simply “spirit,” not the Holy Spirit, and they interpret Prov 8:22 more carefully.
Letters to Serapion 1.8Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 357–360 · “Spirit” can also mean the spiritual sense of Scripture or a person’s disposition, as with Caleb; a created “spirit” is better taken as one of these or as wind.
Letter 260Basil of Caesarea · ca. 357–378 · Basil answers Optimus's questions on Gen 4:15 (the seven vengeances on Cain, interpreted both as seven sins and seven punishments), on Lamech's seventy-sevenfold vengeance, and on Simeon's words to Mary in Luke 2:34–35, including the sword that will pierce her soul.
On the Words of Scripture 7Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · The author argues from the creation of man and the seventh day of rest that each day began with morning, the morning after the sixth evening being the seventh day, since no seventh evening is mentioned.
On the Synods 85Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 358–359 · If misuse by heretics disqualified a word, much of Scripture itself would have to be discarded.
Homilies on the Psalms 7.1Basil of Caesarea · ca. 360-378 · Basil explains the title of Psalm 7: Hushai, called “son of Archi” in Kingdoms, is here “son of Jemini” (son of the right hand) because his counsel made him David's right hand, as Scripture names people from their deeds.
On the Holy Spirit 14Didymus the Blind · Greek ca. 360-390; Latin 387-391 · The opponents' proof-text "I create spirit" (Amos 4:13) refers in context to the wind, among thunder, dawn and mist, not to the Holy Spirit.
On the Holy Spirit 33Didymus the Blind · Greek ca. 360-390; Latin 387-391 · Christ left much untaught because the disciples could not bear it before the Spirit was given; the Spirit leads from the letter of the law to the truth of Scripture.
On the Holy Spirit 50Didymus the Blind · Greek ca. 360-390; Latin 387-391 · Whoever despises the Spirit given for sanctification despises God; the Spirit brings God's words, and "Moses" in Isaiah may mean either the man or the law.
On the Holy Spirit 57Didymus the Blind · Greek ca. 360-390; Latin 387-391 · "Spirit" also means a person's will and, above all, the higher spiritual sense of Scripture as opposed to the letter.
On the Orthodox Faith against the Arians 6Gregory of Elvira · ca. 360-392 · The author argues that God cannot be defined or compared, and explains the many Scriptural names of the Son (Word, Wisdom, rock, lamb, lion, way, and others) as pointing to his works, not defining his majesty.
Letter 189Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 360–390 · Gregory explains that “the Word became flesh” names the whole man by a part, as Scripture often does, and means that Christ took up our condition, as he is said to have become sin and a curse.
Letter 197Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 360–390 · Gregory shows how the Apollinarians misread “the mind of Christ”, “he became man” and “in the likeness of men”, at times making Christ's flesh gross and carnal, at times a mere appearance.
To Constantius 9.1Hilary of Poitiers · 360 · Every heretic claims Scripture: Marcellus, Photinus, and Sabellius misread it.
To Constantius 9.2Hilary of Poitiers · 360 · Montanists, Manichaeans, and Marcionites likewise use Scripture without its sense.
Treatise on the Mysteries 1.1.1Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–366 · The fragmentary opening contrasts superficial resemblance with a full typological comparison.
Treatise on the Mysteries 1.1.4Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–366 · Hilary states his plan: to show Christ and the church prefigured in Scripture from Adam onward.
Treatise on the Mysteries 2.11.1Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–366 · Scripture must be read with discernment between literal and typological meaning, though nothing in it is empty.
Tractates on the Psalms 0.5Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The psalms are to be read with reference to Christ's coming, passion, kingdom, and our resurrection; prophecy is sealed to worldly wisdom, and those who deny Christ have taken away the key of knowledge.
Tractates on the Psalms 0.6Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Christ holds the key of David and alone opens the sealed book; the seven seals are the mysteries of his body, passion, death, resurrection, glory, kingdom, and judgment, which the psalms prophesy.
Tractates on the Psalms 1.1Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The first key to the psalms is to discern the speaker; Psalm 1 is spoken neither by the Father nor by the Son but by the prophet about the blessed man.
Tractates on the Psalms 1.2Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Many have taken the blessed man of Psalm 1 to be Christ, but without good reason; when prophecy refers to him must be discerned with care.
Tractates on the Psalms 2.2Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The Seventy, heirs of a secret Mosaic teaching, translated Hebrew ambiguities correctly, whereas later translators went astray; bereshith is an example.
Tractates on the Psalms 54.9Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Hilary does not deny the literal sense but adds the Christological one, since David's sufferings were fulfilled in Christ.
Tractates on the Psalms 56.5Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Bodily images in Scripture describe the mind: the teeth and tongue of the enemies signify persecution and slander.
Tractates on the Psalms 58.1Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Saul's guarding David's house to kill him prefigures the Lord shut in at Jerusalem for death; the psalm can be read both literally and of Christ.
Tractates on the Psalms 59.1Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The title of Psalm 59 (60) records David's victory, yet the psalm is sorrowful; the historical note gives the time of writing, not the subject, and the Septuagint's "valley of Salt" carries spiritual meaning.
Tractates on the Psalms 67.9Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The Exodus wonders prefigured the gospel: God, who gave manna at Sinai, now passes to the desert of the nations and gives the bread from heaven.
Tractates on the Psalms 118.0.5Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Hilary explains the eight verses for each letter by the holiness of the number eight in circumcision, sacrifice, Christ's presentation, and the flood.
Tractates on the Psalms 118.1.5Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The law, as distinct from the other terms, is the shadow of things to come and must be read spiritually, as Paul reads it.
Tractates on the Psalms 118.3.4Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The law's uncleanness from touching the dead is a figure, not a bodily rule, as Moses, Elisha, and Christ show; it signifies that we are made clean only in the resurrection.
Tractates on the Psalms 118.3.7Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The psalmist asks to see the spiritual realities behind the law's Sabbath, Passover, jubilee, and priesthood, which are prefigured in its bodily observances.
Tractates on the Psalms 118.17.1Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · God's testimonies are wonderful before they are searched, because the law's sacrifices and Passover point to future goods; so the psalmist searches them with his whole soul.
Tractates on the Psalms 123.5Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Waters in Scripture signify peoples; the waters that would engulf us are the dark, earthly peoples roused by the devil against the faithful.
Tractates on the Psalms 134.1Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The psalm's account of the Exodus must be read like a skilled herbalist reads a field: its events, rightly understood, offer spiritual healing.
Tractates on the Psalms 134.12Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Taken literally, the verse about clouds, lightning, and winds makes little sense, which points to a deeper meaning.
Tractates on the Psalms 134.20Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Through their names, Sihon (fruitless tree), the Amorites (embitterers), Og (wall), Bashan (shame), and Canaan (motion) signify the vices and powers Christ destroys in us.
Tractates on the Psalms 136.2Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The events of Israel's history, as Psalm 78 and Paul teach, were figures of the future, written for our instruction.
Tractates on the Psalms 136.6Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · A literal reading raises absurdities; spiritually, the rivers are the fleeting pleasures of the world, beside which the exiled soul weeps for Zion.
Tractates on the Psalms 136.12Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The 'sons of Edom' ('earthly') are bodily vices that seek to empty the soul down to its foundation, Christ; the psalmist prays God to remember them.
Tractates on the Psalms 136.13Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The 'daughter of Babylon' is the flesh, born of confusion; blessed is he who repays her by subjecting her to the spirit and killing her vices.
Tractates on the Psalms 143.1Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The Septuagint title 'against Goliath' does not fit the psalm's content; the Seventy added it to signal that David's fight with Goliath prefigures Christ's war with Satan.
Tractates on the Psalms 145.5Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The food God gives the hungry is his word, which looses the fetters of vice and gives wisdom to the spiritually blind.
Tractates on the Psalms 146.9Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Allegorically, the rain is God's word; the mountains are patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, who provide food for 'cattle', those still ignorant of God.
Tractates on the Psalms 146.11Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The literal reading of ravens calling on God and being fed carrion is absurd and irreligious; a spiritual meaning is required.
Against the Manichees, Greek continuation of book 3, Lagarde p. 94Titus of Bostra · ca. 360s · The Father’s voice at Christ’s baptism echoes Ps 2:7, and Paul everywhere interprets the Old Testament; the apostles join Law and Gospel, while the heretics, false apostles, try to divide them.
Commentary on Galatians 1.12Marius Victorinus · ca. 360–363 · Because Paul received his gospel by revelation from Christ, which is sight of the realities themselves, it must be understood spiritually, while the Galatians’ additions come from men who read Moses’ law in a fleshly way.
Commentary on Galatians 2.19Marius Victorinus · ca. 360–363 · Paul died to the law through the law, either through Christ’s law to Moses’ law or, as Victorinus prefers to explain, through the law understood spiritually to the same law understood in a fleshly way, and so his old man is crucified with Christ.
Commentary on Galatians 4.24Marius Victorinus · ca. 360–363 · Paul’s allegory makes Hagar and Mount Sinai stand for the old covenant and the earthly Jerusalem, which bear children into slavery.
Commentary on Galatians 4.27Marius Victorinus · ca. 360–363 · Isaiah’s barren woman who rejoices over many children is Sarah, who bore Isaac by God’s promise rather than by the flesh, and so a type of the church, which bears many spiritual children with joy, unlike the law and the synagogue.
Oration 2.38Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · A long stretch of the oration: right teaching on the Trinity, the difficulty of teaching mixed congregations, the presumption of untrained teachers, Paul as the model pastor, the prophets' warnings against bad shepherds, the greatness of the priesthood, and the strife that disgraces the church.
Oration 2.41Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory explains his return: love for his people, duty to his aged parents, and above all fear of disobedience learned from Jonah and the ancient examples; he submits and asks his father's blessing.
Oration 41.4Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory gathers further instances of seven in Scripture, from Enoch and Abraham to Jericho, Elijah, Elisha, the return from exile and the feeding of the four thousand, and explains that Christians, like the Hebrews, honour Pentecost.
Oration 43.58Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory praises Basil's writings (the Hexaemeron, the books against Eunomius, On the Holy Spirit, his homilies), defends his reserve in calling the Spirit God, compares him with the great figures of the Old and New Testaments, describes those who imitated his outward manner, and comes to his death.
Oration 45.13Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · The whole law was a shadow of what was to come; God revealed himself on Sinai in measure to each, and gave the law as a gentle remedy, allowing sacrifices for a time to lead people gradually from idols to the Gospel.
Oration 45.15Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory reads the Passover night, the flight from Egypt, the blood on the doorposts, the removal of leaven, the roasting and eating of the lamb, and the girded loins as figures of the Christian's deliverance from sin and the stricter demands of the Gospel.
Tractates 2.13.1Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno interprets Jacob's dream: Jacob and the stone are Christ, and the ladder is the two Testaments, like the two-edged sword and Isaiah's tongs.
Tractates 2.13.2Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno compares the two Testaments to the split pen and the two coins in the fish's mouth, which is Christ risen from the dead.
Tractates 2.13.3Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno interprets the ladder's wood as the two Testaments pointing to the cross, linking them with the householder's old and new treasures and the Good Samaritan's two denarii.
Tractates 2.13.5Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno sums up: the two Testaments are one in Christ, the ladder's steps are the virtues, and the ladder itself is the cross.
Tractates 2.14.3Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno interprets Onan as the Jewish people, who failed to raise up seed for the nations and spilled the word of God on idols.
Tractates 2.14.4Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno allegorises the story of Tamar: Shelah is the Gentile people, Tamar the church, and Judah's pledges the law, the cross and the seal of faith, by which the church is justified.
Tractates 2.15.2Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno draws a point-by-point comparison between Job and Christ.
Tractates 2.17.3Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno allegorises Jonah: the ship is the synagogue, Jonah's sleep Christ's passion, the whale the underworld, and Nineveh the church of the nations, whose repentance Christians should imitate.
Tractates 2.22.2Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno interprets 'heaven' in Isaiah 1:2 as the apostles and 'earth' as the Gentiles, who would hear Christ when the Jews did not.
Tractates 2.27.3Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno allegorises the vine's cultivation as baptism, the Christian life and martyrdom, the persecutors sometimes coming to believe.
Tractates 2.54.1Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno, on the Easter reading of the Exodus, interprets the crossing of the Red Sea as baptism and Miriam as the church.
Against Eunomius 1.14Basil of Caesarea · ca. 364 · Basil argues that God's essence is known only to the Son and the Spirit, that we know God from his activities, and that reading the biblical images of God literally leads to absurd notions of his essence.
Against Eunomius 1.25Basil of Caesarea · ca. 364 · Basil argues that 'the Father is greater' in John 14:28 refers to the Father as cause and origin of the Son, not to a difference in power, dignity, size, or essence.
Against Eunomius 2.2Basil of Caesarea · ca. 364 · Basil denies that any saint called the Son a 'thing made,' and argues that Acts 2:36 ('God made him Lord and Christ') speaks of the incarnate Christ's authority, not of his coming into being.
Against Eunomius 2.6Basil of Caesarea · ca. 364 · Basil exposes Eunomius's selective concern about bodily notions of begetting, and argues that 'offspring' is a name never given to the Son in Scripture, which uses 'Son', as the Septuagint translators kept even Hebrew names untranslated out of reverence.
Against Eunomius 2.8Basil of Caesarea · ca. 364 · Basil argues that Scripture calls the Lord 'Son' but never 'offspring,' a word used of unformed miscarriages, crops, and the 'offspring of vipers.'
Against Eunomius 2.20Basil of Caesarea · ca. 364 · Basil rejects Eunomius's redefinition of 'Only-Begotten' as 'begotten and created by the only one,' briefly treats Prov 8:22 ('The Lord created me,' rendered by other translators 'acquired me'), and shows the absurd consequences of calling the Son a mere minister.
Against Eunomius 2.24Basil of Caesarea · ca. 364 · Basil argues that even if 'Father' were taken figuratively, Scripture's language of begetting points to kinship of nature, not passion; the manner of the begetting is ineffable but must be believed; and Eunomius contradicts himself about names and essences.
Hexaemeron 3.9Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · Basil rejects the allegory that the waters above and below the firmament are good and evil powers: water means water, and all creation, even the abyss, praises God.
Hexaemeron 9.1Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · Basil rejects allegorizing the creation narrative and defends Moses' silence about scientific questions: "when I hear grass, I understand grass."
Homilies 12.1Basil of Caesarea · ca. 363-378 · Basil explains the three books of Solomon, the meaning of “proverb,” why the author's name and kingship are given, and what wisdom is, divine and human, beginning with the fear of the Lord.
Homilies 13.2Basil of Caesarea · ca. 363-378 · Opening of section 2: the goodness of the Lord must be tasted to be known.
Against Parmenian the Donatist 4.9Optatus of Milevis · ca. 366–385 · Jeremiah's complaint of the forsaken fountain and broken cisterns concerns Israel's idolatry, not the Catholics' baptism; Parmenian has misapplied the prophets.
Commentary on Galatians 4:23–24Ambrosiaster · ca. 366–384 · Ishmael, born naturally, stands for the Jews and slaves of sin; Isaac, born by promise and a type of Christ, for Christians freed by forgiveness; Hagar is the covenant of Sinai.
Commentary on Romans 2:22Ambrosiaster · ca. 366–384 · Ambrosiaster interprets stealing, adultery and sacrilege spiritually as distorting the law and denying Christ, who appeared to the patriarchs as God and was not recognized.
Commentary on Romans 9:10Ambrosiaster · ca. 366–384 · Isaac prefigures Christ, while Jacob and Esau represent believers and unbelievers, a matter of faith, not descent, as the faithful Job, a descendant of Esau, shows.
Question 9, section 1Ambrosiaster · ca. 370–384 · Words have several meanings, as “common” and “not from faith” show, so they must be read in context.
Question 107, section 7Ambrosiaster · ca. 370–384 · Spiritually understood, light is prior to darkness, which is only the fading of light, as earth is the settling of water.
On Virginity 18Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 370–371 · The mind must order every power of the soul to its proper use (desire for God, anger against sin, grief for repentance), for true self-control is that harmony; freedom from marriage is not enough without purity in all of life, as Israel passed dry through the sea while Egypt sank.
Letter 20.5Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome concludes that hosanna combines "save" with an interjection of entreaty, meaning "save, I beseech you".
Letter 21.1Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome restates Damasus's questions about the parable of the prodigal son, especially how the elder brother can represent either the Jews or the righteous.
Letter 29.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome explains teraphim as figured or embroidered works, linked with the ephod as signs of priesthood, with evidence from 1 Samuel and Hosea.
Letter 34.4Jerome · ca. 370–419 · From the Hebrew and Greek versions Jerome shows that "sons of the shaken-out" means "sons of youth", strong young people compared to arrows.
Letter 36.16Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome quotes Hippolytus's allegory of Isaac's blessing, in which Jacob represents Christ and the church and Esau the former people.
Letter 46.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · They answer the objection from Rev 11:8, which calls the city of the crucifixion "Sodom and Egypt", by showing that Revelation elsewhere calls Jerusalem holy and must be read spiritually.
Letter 46.7Jerome · ca. 370–419 · They argue that "the great city", Sodom, and Egypt in Scripture signify the world, and that Jerusalem remains the holy city.
Letter 49.17Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome explains that his remark 'it is better to marry because it is worse to burn' only interprets 1 Corinthians 7:8–9, and that a commentator must say what his author means.
Letter 49.19Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome defends his interpretation that the omission of 'God saw that it was good' on the second day of creation, and the pairs of unclean animals in the ark, show that the even number is inferior.
Letter 51.4Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Epiphanius lists Origen's teachings that the Son cannot see the Father, that souls are fallen angels imprisoned in bodies, and his allegorical proof texts.
Letter 51.5Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Epiphanius attacks Origen's teachings on the devil's restoration, the coats of skins as bodies, a heavenly paradise, and the waters above the firmament.
Letter 52.3Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets Abishag as the wisdom that grows in old age, supporting this from Proverbs, from long-lived sages and poets, and from the meaning of her name.
Letter 52.10Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome criticizes lavish church decoration while ministers are chosen carelessly, arguing that the gold of the temple belongs to the figures of the old law.
Letter 53.5Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome shows from the sealed book of the Apocalypse and the Ethiopian eunuch that Scripture needs a teacher.
Letter 53.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome argues that every art and craft needs a teacher, and so does Scripture.
Letter 53.7Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome complains that everyone thinks himself an interpreter of Scripture, and mocks forcing texts to fit one's meaning, as in Christian centos made from Virgil.
Letter 53.8Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome surveys the books of the Old Testament one by one, pointing to the spiritual meanings hidden in each.
Letter 55.1Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome explains Matthew 6:34 ('sufficient for the day is its own evil') as forbidding anxiety about the future, discussing the Greek word for 'evil'.
Letter 57.10Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome points to discrepancies between Stephen's speech in Acts and Genesis, and to additions in the Septuagint of Psalm 22, to show that the sense matters more than the words.
Letter 61.2Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome lists Origen's errors, which he condemns, but defends translating his good exegesis, as Hilary and Eusebius of Vercelli did.
Letter 64.7Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome applies the high priest's marriage rules spiritually to the soul, which must be a pure virgin betrothed to Christ.
Letter 64.18Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome reports the Jewish interpretation of the high priest's vestments as a figure of the universe and its elements, and relates it to Ezekiel's vision.
Letter 65.19Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets 'all the glory of the king's daughter is within' of the inner beauty of the church and of the hidden meanings of Scripture.
Letter 73.4Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome summarizes Hebrews 7: Melchizedek's being 'without genealogy' means his origins are not recorded, and he prefigures Christ's eternal priesthood.
Letter 78.1Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome opens his treatise for Fabiola on Israel's stations in the wilderness by showing from Scripture that the exodus is to be read spiritually as well as historically.
Letter 78.7Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets the Red Sea crossing and Marah ('bitterness'), whose waters were sweetened, as the bitter letter made sweet by the cross.
Letter 78.13Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets the eleventh station, Rephidim, with the water from the rock and the victory over Amalek through Moses' uplifted hands.
Letter 78.15Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets the thirteenth station, the graves of craving, where Israel, longing for Egypt's meat, was struck down, as a warning against returning to worldly wisdom.
Letter 78.17Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets the fifteenth station, Rithmah ('juniper' or 'sound'), and lists the events of the long stay in the wilderness of Paran.
Letter 78.35Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets the thirty-third station, Zin-Kadesh ('command', 'changed'), where Miriam died and Moses and Aaron were barred from Canaan, as the end of the law's power to bring the people into the promised land.
Letter 78.36Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets the thirty-fourth station, Mount Hor, where Aaron died, and the defeat and later victory at Hormah, as encouragement not to despair after a fall.
Letter 78.37Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth stations, Zalmonah ('little image') and Punon ('little mouth'), with the bronze serpent as a type of Christ's cross.
Letter 78.40Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome interprets the thirty-ninth station, Dibon-gad, and the intervening places of Numbers 21 (the well, Mattanah, Pisgah) as stages of spiritual ascent that must end in humility.
Letter 84.2Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome explains that he praised Origen only as an interpreter of Scripture, never his doctrines, as Cyprian valued Tertullian without following his Montanism.
Letter 108.11Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Paula travelled the Gaza road recalling the Ethiopian eunuch, visited Eshcol, Mamre, and Hebron, and looked out over the land of Sodom, drawing spiritual lessons from each place.
Letter 108.12Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Returning by Jerusalem, Paula visited the Mount of Olives, Bethany, and Bethphage, went down the Jericho road recalling the Good Samaritan and Zacchaeus, and reached Gilgal and the Jordan, whose events Jerome interprets as figures of Christ and baptism.
Letter 120.12Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome explains 1 Thess 5:23: the 'spirit' kept whole is the Spirit's gifts in us, the whole body is the church, and he adds a reading based on the threefold sense of Scripture.
Letter 121.2Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome compares Matthew's citation of Isa 42:1-4 with the Septuagint and the Hebrew, and interprets the bruised reed as Israel and the smoking flax as the Gentiles.
Letter 121.4Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome notes the literal reading of Matt 24:19-20 (the Antichrist, or the Roman siege of Jerusalem) and gives a spiritual one: souls newly pregnant with faith are endangered by heresy in the church.
Letter 123.12Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome answers the objection from the patriarchs’ many wives: the command to multiply belonged to an earlier time, and these Old Testament marriages are types of the synagogue and the church.
Letter 129.1Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Answering Dardanus, Jerome argues that the true land of promise is the “land of the living” of the Psalms and the Beatitudes, not the land of Judaea that David already ruled.
Letter 140.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · On Ps 90:2 Jerome rejects a punctuation used to support the pre-existence of souls, and notes that Prov 8:22 in Hebrew speaks of Wisdom (Christ) as 'possessed', not 'created'.
Letter 149.5Jerome · ca. 370–419 · The writer interprets the autumn feasts of trumpets, atonement and tabernacles as pointing to gospel preaching, Christ's blood and the reward of the persecuted.
Letter 149.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · The writer interprets the new moons and the sacrificial animals spiritually and closes by warning against schism.
Book of Rules 0Tyconius · ca. 380 · Tyconius introduces his seven rules for interpreting Scripture, calling them keys and lamps for its hidden meaning, and lists them.
Book of Rules 1Tyconius · ca. 380 · Tyconius’s first rule: Scripture often passes without notice from Christ the head to the church his body, and reason (and grace) must discern which is meant; the coming of the Son of Man, for example, includes the continual coming of his body.
Book of Rules 2Tyconius · ca. 380 · Tyconius’s second rule: the Lord’s body is twofold, containing both true and false members, so that Scripture addresses the one body now as blessed and now as condemned; he illustrates this from Isaiah, the Song of Songs, the Apocalypse, and Romans.
Book of Rules 4Tyconius · ca. 380 · Tyconius’s fourth rule: Scripture speaks of a species (a particular city or person, such as Jerusalem, Solomon, Nineveh, Egypt, Tyre, Babylon) while meaning the genus (the whole church, good and bad), passing back and forth between them; he illustrates this at length from the prophets.
Book of Rules 5Tyconius · ca. 380 · Tyconius’s fifth rule: numbers and times in Scripture are often figurative, by synecdoche (part for whole) or by “legitimate” numbers such as seven, ten, and twelve, which signify perfection or the whole time from Christ’s passion to the end; he applies this to the sojourn in Egypt, the three days of the burial, the Sabbath, and the flood.
Book of Rules 6Tyconius · ca. 380 · Tyconius’s sixth rule: Scripture often recapitulates, telling of the same whole time again in parts, or describing a present event as the likeness of a future one; and he warns that the Antichrist is recognized by works, not words, since denying Christ in the flesh means hating his members.
On the Holy Spirit 14.31Basil of Caesarea · ca. 374–375 · Baptism "into Moses" in the cloud and sea was only a type of Christian baptism, which it foreshadowed.
On the Holy Spirit 14.33Basil of Caesarea · ca. 374–375 · Moses was a type of Christ, not of the Spirit; God trained his people through shadows and types before showing them the full light.
On the Holy Spirit 21.52Basil of Caesarea · ca. 374–375 · Scripture calls the Spirit "Lord": in Paul's prayers for the Thessalonians and in "the Lord is the Spirit," which Basil explains by the veil over the letter of the law.
Ancoratus 20.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Scripture uses “know” in two senses: by action and by awareness.
Ancoratus 22.5Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · The Spirit opens the letter of Scripture.
Ancoratus 42.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Proverbs 8:22 is proverbial speech, not literal.
Ancoratus 42.2Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Parables do not correspond literally to their subject.
Ancoratus 42.3Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · The mustard seed parable is not literal.
Ancoratus 42.4Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Proverbial language is not to be taken literally.
Ancoratus 42.5Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Other parables are likewise figurative.
Ancoratus 42.7Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Scripture uses “wisdom” in many senses.
Ancoratus 45.4Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Scripture uses many figurative names for Christ.
Ancoratus 53.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Opponents allegorize the literal and literalize the figurative.
Ancoratus 54.2Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Origen allegorized paradise.
Ancoratus 55.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · If paradise is allegory, all of Genesis would be.
Ancoratus 62.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Origen allegorized the garments of skin.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 33.5.2Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The symbolic law was transferred by the Saviour to the spiritual level.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 33.5.9Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The symbols were abolished outwardly but kept spiritually.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 33.11.12Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Paul confirms the Law's things were types for us.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 34.15.2Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · They read their system into Genesis 1:1.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 34.16.3Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Every fourfold thing in Scripture is referred to their tetrad.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 37.7.4Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The bronze serpent prefigured the cross.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 51.30.9Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The wedding at Cana symbolizes the church.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 51.30.10Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Cana on the third day prefigures the resurrection and Christ's marriage to the church.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 51.30.11Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Cana means 'she who acquired', the church as heiress.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 51.31.10Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The Law prefigured what the gospel fulfilled.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 51.32.7Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Revelation's trumpets are to be read spiritually.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.4.11Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · He allegorized paradise and the waters.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.6.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Origen: Scripture is shut and sealed.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.6.7Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Origen: all Scripture is full of enigmas.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.15.6Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · “Bones” in Scripture are often figurative.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.15.7Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The dry bones speak, so they are figurative.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.19.6Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Everyone now interprets Scripture with conceit.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.31.3Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Allegorizing Adam’s flesh is rejected.
On Paradise 58Ambrose · ca. 375-378 · As a catechumen must test what heretical teachers such as Photinus, Arius and Sabellius read to him, so Scripture must be handled carefully; Adam and Eve should first have examined the tree.
Apostolic Constitutions 2.5.4Anonymous · ca. 380 · A bishop must study Scripture and interpret the Gospel and the Law and Prophets in harmony.
On the Christian Faith 2.1Ambrose · ca. 378–380 · Ambrose answers the Arian use of Mark 10:18 (“No one is good but one, God”): Christ spoke as man to one who did not believe him God, and goodness belongs to the one divine nature, which includes the Son.
On the Christian Faith 3.5Ambrose · ca. 378–380 · Ambrose shows that “made” in Scripture often means “became” by grace, not creation, as in 1 Cor 1:30, where Christ was made wisdom for us through the cross; he warns against following the bare letter.
On the Christian Faith 3.6Ambrose · ca. 378–380 · Ambrose answers the Arian use of John 1:3–4 (“what was made in him”) by discussing its punctuation and showing that things are said to be “made in God” without belonging to his substance.
On the Christian Faith 3.10Ambrose · ca. 378–380 · Ambrose explains John 1:30 (“a man who was made before me”) of Christ’s incarnation and honor, not his divinity, and reads the loosing of the shoe in Ruth and in the commands to Moses and Joshua as signs that Christ alone is the bridegroom of the Church.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 79Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · As owners know their own broken vessels, the soul knows its body’s remains. Gregory raises the rich man and Lazarus; Macrina argues that the story’s bodily details (eyes, tongue, finger, chasm) cannot be literal for incorporeal souls and must be read spiritually.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 131Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina finds the resurrection in Ps 104:29–30 (the Spirit’s return renews the dead) and in Ps 118:27, where the feast of Tabernacles “with thick branches” prefigures the rebuilding of the body’s tent; the temple’s graded courts introduce her next point.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 133Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · The graded courts of the temple image the ranks of rational beings, with humanity shut out by vice; at the resurrection the barriers will fall and all, even those now outside, will share one feast within the sanctuary.
Homily 7Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–394 · On Eccl 3:5–7 Gregory reads the stones thrown and gathered as scriptural words used against evil reasonings (rejecting a literal reading of the Sabbath-breaker’s stoning), the embracing of Zion and wisdom, seeking God throughout life and losing vices, keeping what is found, tearing from evil and sewing on to God and the church, and silence about God’s essence but speech about his works.
On the Making of Man 19Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · The food of paradise was spiritual: the “every tree” is the Good itself, the tree of life, while the forbidden tree bore a mixed fruit of good and evil that the serpent made attractive.
On the Trinity 1Faustinus · ca. 380–384 · Faustinus sets out the Arian position and refutes it from John 1, Philippians 2, Colossians 1, Genesis 1, and 'I and the Father are one,' arguing that the Son is eternal, equal, and of one substance and will with the Father.
Theological Oration 4 (Or. 30), On the Son 2Gregory of Nazianzus · 380 · Prov 8:22, “The Lord created me,” refers to Christ’s humanity, which has a cause, our salvation; “he begets me” refers to his uncaused Godhead.
Theological Oration 4 (Or. 30), On the Son 10Gregory of Nazianzus · 380 · Gregory distinguishes the many senses of “cannot” in Scripture before explaining John 5:19.
Theological Oration 5 (Or. 31), On the Holy Spirit 22Gregory of Nazianzus · 380 · Scripture speaks of God sleeping, being angry, walking, and sitting enthroned, figures drawn from human life for things that are not literally so.
Theological Oration 5 (Or. 31), On the Holy Spirit 23Gregory of Nazianzus · 380 · The Eunomians’ own key terms, “unbegotten” and “without beginning,” are not in Scripture by name but are inferred from it, as is the Spirit’s Godhead.
Theological Oration 5 (Or. 31), On the Holy Spirit 24Gregory of Nazianzus · 380 · Scripture implies truths it does not state in so many words; Gregory will now explain why the Spirit’s Godhead was revealed gradually.
To the Greeks, on common notions, part 3Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 380–394 · Scripture calls God one and never three, while it speaks of "three men" by condescension to human habit, as it speaks of God's eyes and ears; Gregory then states the opponents' argument that "God differs from God only as such a God" and begins to expose it as a sophism by distinguishing essence from hypostasis.
To Theodosius on the Witch of Endor, part 2Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 380–394 · The "gods" the woman saw were demons, and the "Samuel" was a demon imitating the prophet, as its words "Tomorrow you will be with me" betray; Scripture often names what seems for what is, as with Balaam's "god"; Gregory then answers Theodosius's other questions briefly (Elijah at the brook and the ravens, Moses' veil, the sacrifices, the fallen archangel) and postpones the question of the Spirit before baptism.
Eleven Tractates 1.8Priscillian · ca. 380–385 · The beasts of Revelation and Daniel are written so that, once understood, they may be shunned.
Eleven Tractates 1.9Priscillian · ca. 380–385 · Those who misread the beasts fall into idolatry; Christians, interpreting prophecy through Christ, reject all such covenants with beasts.
Eleven Tractates 5.90Priscillian · ca. 380–385 · The days of creation are applied to the soul: light of knowledge, the firmament of the commandments, fruitfulness, and the perfect week of the church.
Eleven Tractates 6.92Priscillian · ca. 380–385 · A homily on the Passover of Exodus 12: Scripture must be interpreted, and it has a threefold sense, the first of which disciplines the flesh.
Eleven Tractates 6.93Priscillian · ca. 380–385 · Scripture's second sense forms the soul, the third shows God in man; the law's offerings of days, animals, and fruits signify the purification of body and spirit.
Pilgrimage (Itinerarium) 46.2Egeria · ca. 381-395 · The bishop expounds all Scripture, literally and spiritually, during Lent.
Against Helvidius 6Jerome · ca. 383 · Jerome shows from Scripture that "until" often does not imply a change after the point named.
Against Helvidius 7Jerome · ca. 383 · Two Old Testament examples of "up to this day" show that such phrases do not imply a later change.
Apology of the Prophet David 11Ambrose · ca. 384-390 · Many Old Testament events are figures, as Paul shows with the bronze serpent and Abraham’s two sons; so too Jacob’s two wives and Judah’s twins.
On the Life of Moses 303Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · Gregory answers the objection that no one now can share the circumstances of the ancients, proposes Moses as the example, and begins the narrative of his birth and rescue from the Nile.
On the Life of Moses 331Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · Moses’ fights figure the inner struggle of virtue against vice and of truth against heresy; his retreat to Midian signifies withdrawal into a peaceful life, after which the truth, which is God, shines as from the bush — a figure of the Incarnation and of the Virgin’s birth.
On the Life of Moses 333Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · Loosing the sandals means putting off the “garments of skin” given after the fall; then one learns that only God truly is and all else exists by participation. Such a one can free others, as Moses did with the changed hand and the staff, which figure the Incarnation.
On the Life of Moses 339Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · Each person chooses between the guardian angel and the demon; when he turns to the good, the angel, his “brother,” meets him. Gregory explains his method: not every detail of the history must fit the spiritual sense, as the objection about Aaron shows.
On the Life of Moses 355Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · The spiritual reading fits the history, since it is the Egyptian offspring that must die; the Passover meal, eaten in haste with girded loins, sandals, and staff, without breaking the bones, must signify more than a way of eating.
On the Life of Moses 357Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · The traveller’s dress signifies life as a passage: sandals are self-control against the thorns of sin, the belt restrains enjoyment, the staff is hope; the roasted lamb is faith, of which we take what is plain and leave the hidden mysteries, the “bones,” to the Spirit, the fire.
On the Life of Moses 399Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · Gregory asks why Moses, who already spoke with God face to face, asks to see him; the request to see God and the answer about the rock and God’s back cannot be taken literally, since a God with front and back would be a body and so corruptible.
Exposition of Psalm 118 12.2.1Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Scripture must be read spiritually, without mixing earthly notions into God’s pure words.
Exposition of Psalm 118 12.4.1Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Understanding is our treasure; Christ, in whom wisdom is hidden, opens the closed meaning of Scripture.
Exposition of Psalm 118 13.23.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Scripture’s mystical sense is strong bread; its moral sense is sweet honey that comforts the penitent.
Exposition of Psalm 118 13.26.3Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Reading Scripture without its spiritual sense leaves the reader ignorant of its pasture and dangers.
Exposition of Psalm 118 18.36.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · The law read spiritually is true; the killing letter without the Spirit is false.
Letter 28.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine objects to Jerome's commentary on Galatians, which explains the clash between Paul and Peter as a staged pretence, arguing that admitting any lie in Scripture would destroy its authority.
Letter 40.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine objects that Jerome's view of Gal 2, that Paul's rebuke of Peter was a dutiful pretence, would destroy the authority of Scripture.
Letter 55.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine explains that figurative expressions kindle love more than plain statements, because the mind is quickened by passing from images to spiritual realities.
Letter 55.22Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine explains that of the Ten Commandments only the sabbath is to be kept figuratively, as spiritual rest, while the others are kept literally.
Letter 55.31Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine interprets the 153 fish of John 21 as the triangular number of seventeen, the law's ten plus the Spirit's seven, signifying the saints at rest in the end.
Letter 75.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Jerome answers that his view of Peter and Paul at Antioch (Gal 2) was taken from Origen and other Greek commentators and left to the reader’s judgment.
Letter 75.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Jerome turns Augustine’s dilemma about the Septuagint against Augustine’s own commentary on the Psalms and defends his translation from the Hebrew.
Letter 102.33Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · One may ask what Jonah's story signifies, but first believe it happened; God speaks by deeds as well as words.
Letter 102.35Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine reads Jonah under the gourd as carnal Israel, the gourd as the Old Testament promises, and the worm that withered it as Christ.
Letter 120.14Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine urges Consentius to pray for understanding and shows from Isaiah's conflicting images that Scripture's bodily language about God must be understood spiritually.
Letter 121.13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Paulinus asks Augustine to explain Colossians 2:21–23, which seems to attribute wisdom and humility to superstition and to join “not sparing the body” with “satisfaction of the flesh.”
Letter 121.18Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Paulinus suggests that the sword of Simeon's prophecy is the word of God, and asks how it relates to the revealing of the thoughts of many hearts.
Letter 130.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Christ's sayings on asking, seeking, and knocking are interpreted allegorically: fish, egg, and bread signify faith, hope, and love.
Letter 140.36Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine expounds Psalm 22:12–14 of the passion: the bulls are the rulers, the scattered bones the apostles, and the melting heart either the fear and grief of Christ's weak members or the opening of the Scriptures.
Letter 140.77Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · The virgins signify continence and the five senses, the lamps good works, and the oil the inner intention of loving God; the foolish lack it because they ascribe their good works to themselves and delight in praise.
Letter 143.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine illustrates with Ecclesiastes 12:7 how a traducianist could read 'dust to earth, spirit to God who gave it' as implying that souls, like flesh, descend from Adam.
Letter 149.34Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine closes, noting that Scripture's obscurities allow varied interpretations consistent with sound faith, and sends greetings, including to a young Paulinus recently arrived after a storm.
Letter 164.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · The "spirits in prison" may be souls in the darkness of ignorance in Noah's day, like unbelievers today; the flood signifies both baptism and judgment.
Letter 190.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Gen 46:26 does not prove traducianism, since 'soul' can stand for the body by metonymy and the masculine 'who came out' refers to the persons.
Letter 196.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · In Paul's allegory of Sarah and Hagar, Christians belong spiritually to Sarah and the free Jerusalem, while carnal Israel belongs to Hagar.
Letter 199.45Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine proposes that much of the Gospels' language about Christ's coming may refer to his continual coming in the Church, except for passages like Matthew 25 that clearly describe the final judgment.
Homilies on Matthew 2.3John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · Joshua is a type of Jesus; Matthew calls his book 'the book of the generation' because the incarnation is the sum of the dispensation; he names David before Abraham because David was better known; Mary's Davidic descent is shown from Luke 1:27.
Homilies on Matthew 3.3John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · The birth of Perez and Zerah (Gen 38:27–30) is a riddle: Zerah's withdrawn hand figures the church's way of life, shown in Abraham's time, withdrawn under the law, and then revealed whole; the law is the 'fence'.
Homilies on Matthew 5.3John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · Scripture uses 'young woman' for virgins, and a sign must be extraordinary; Joseph obeys; 'until' in Matt 1:25 does not imply later relations, for Mary remained a virgin; the 'brothers' of Jesus were so called as Joseph was called husband; James's later sanctity proves the resurrection.
Homilies on Matthew 10.3John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · John came from the wilderness as Isaiah foretold, preparing the way rather than giving remission; Luke's fuller quotation of Isa 40 figures the humbling of the proud, the ease of grace, and salvation for all flesh; Matthew adds the detail of John's dress.
Homilies on Matthew 47.1John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · Christ spoke to the crowds only in parables, as the psalm foretold, to rouse them to ask; the disciples ask privately about the tares, and he explains it as the end of the age, when the angels will gather the wicked out of his kingdom.
Commentary on Ephesians 5:31Jerome · ca. 386 · Jerome notes how Paul quotes Gen 2:24 freely, warns against seeking such quotations in the apocrypha, and explains the union of Adam and Eve as a figure of Christ and the church, against Marcion.
Commentary on Ephesians 5:32Jerome · ca. 386 · Jerome holds that only Gen 2:24, not the whole story of Adam and Eve, is a prophecy of Christ and the church, and reports Gregory of Nazianzus's view of Paul's humility in interpreting it.
On Fleeing the World 13Ambrose · ca. 387-391 · The high priest whose death frees the slayer is the Word of God, who never dies but “dies” to us when separated from our soul.
Hexameron (Exameron) 2.17Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Allegories of the heavens and waters as spiritual powers are allowed, but Ambrose takes the waters above as real.
Hexameron (Exameron) 6.4Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Ambrose quotes Gen 1:24–26 and declares he will take the animals literally, not as allegories of vices.
Hexameron (Exameron) 6.6Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Like Elisha's barley loaves, Ambrose's plain words will suffice; Scripture's plain words should be understood plainly.
On the Mysteries 3Ambrose · ca. 387–391 · The font is no mere water: the Spirit’s presence there is prefigured in creation, the flood, the Red Sea, Marah, and Naaman’s cleansing.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 36.1.1Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Scripture is natural, mystical or moral, as Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and Solomon's three books show.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 36.80.1Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Another such ungodly man is the scribe who reads Scripture only by the letter.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 36.80.2Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Passing to the spiritual sense, the literalist is found to be nothing.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 36.80.3Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · The letter kills; the literalist would not let himself be found and converted.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 43.56.1Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Israel’s history is a parable and figure for the believing nations, which the Jews did not understand.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 43.57.1Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Paul solved the parable of Abraham’s two sons: Hagar and Sarah are two covenants, Sinai meaning the measure of the law.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 43.57.3Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · The unbelieving people, born according to the flesh, reads Scripture by the letter; the believing people is born through promise.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 43.66.1Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · The scribes follow the killing letter, and the Pharisees, whose name means “division”, are divided from the truth.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 43.66.2Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · The scribes lay the heavy burdens of a bodily reading on their hearers and will not move toward the spiritual sense.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 43.68.1Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · The gentiles “shook their heads” to read the law spiritually; the letter brings a curse, the Spirit a blessing.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 1.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine explains that formless matter is called “heaven and earth,” “invisible earth,” “abyss” and “water” because of what would be made from it, as a seed is named by the tree it will become.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 1.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine answers the objection that “God saw that it was good” implies ignorance: like a craftsman approving a finished work, God's approval shows the work pleased him, and Scripture speaks to our weakness.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 1.11Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine tentatively suggests that the waters above and below the firmament signify invisible and visible matter, while warning against rash assertion.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 1.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine reads man's dominion over animals also spiritually, as reason ruling the soul's animal-like impulses, and notes that plants given as food to carnivores show the passage is not meant only literally.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 1.22Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine answers the mockery of God's rest on the seventh day: by a common figure of speech God is said to rest because he will give rest to us after our good works, which are themselves his gift.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 1.23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine compares the six days of creation with six ages of world history, from Adam to Noah, Abraham, David, the exile, Christ, and the present age, each with its morning and evening, to be followed by the seventh day of rest without evening.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine introduces the second account of man, which he says is told figuratively, and quotes Genesis 2:4–3:24 in full.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine states his method: a literal reading is welcome if it is consistent with the faith, but where that is impossible the passage must be read figuratively, as the apostles read the Old Testament.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine interprets the “day” of Gen 2:4 as all time, and “the green thing of the field” as the invisible creation, the soul, before it sinned and became earthly.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine reads the rain from the clouds as the teaching of Scripture needed by fallen man, whereas before sin God watered the soul from within like an inner spring.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Paradise signifies the happy life: its trees are spiritual joys, the tree of life is the wisdom by which the soul keeps its middle place under God and over bodies, and eating from the forbidden tree is the proud turning to self that is learned by its punishment.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · The four rivers of paradise signify the four virtues: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice, which orders the other three.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Adam's sleep signifies the inward contemplation by which one sees that reason must rule the lower part of the soul; the making of Eve from his rib, whether only said or also done figuratively, is a mystery to be read according to sound faith.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Adam's words over Eve signify fortitude and temperance, the Hebrew wordplay on 'woman' is lost in Latin, and Gen 2:24 is wholly a prophecy of Christ and the Church, as Paul shows against the Manichees.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · The woman's pains in childbirth figure the pain of breaking a bad habit, from which a good habit is born, and her turning to her husband figures the lower soul's readier obedience to reason; the apparent curses are commandments.
Tractates on Matthew 4.3Chromatius of Aquileia · ca. 388–407 · Chromatius interprets Elisha's healing of the waters of Jericho with salt in a new vessel as the Wisdom of God taking a body to heal the nations.
Tractates on Matthew 5.4Chromatius of Aquileia · ca. 388–407 · Chromatius identifies the lamp with God's commandment and grace, to be set in the church like the golden lampstand of Zechariah and the tabernacle, a type of the Holy Spirit.
On True Religion 50Augustine of Hippo · ca. 389–391 · God in his mercy has given humanity visible signs, Scriptures, and allegories as steps to the truth, and Augustine lists the questions about history, allegory, and biblical language that must be settled to read them rightly.
Homily 0Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 390–394 · Gregory tells Olympias why he has written up his Lenten homilies on the Song of Songs and defends reading Scripture for a meaning beyond its surface sense.
Homily 1Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 390–394 · Gregory warns that only those freed from fleshly thoughts should hear the Song, explains how Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song lead the soul by stages to union with God, and expounds Song 1:2–4 on the kiss, the breasts, the ointment and the maidens.
Sermon 2.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Before the figurative sense is explained, the story must be believed as history; but Abraham's life is both event and prophecy of Christ.
Sermon 4.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The Old Testament's land, Jerusalem, circumcision, sabbath and sacrifices were temporal promises with spiritual meanings; those who take them only carnally belong to Esau.
Sermon 4.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 shows that the events of the exodus were figures for Christians, which the fathers experienced bodily without understanding.
Sermon 4.13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Rebecca, the Church, counsels Jacob to obtain the blessing meant for Esau: the blessing promised in Old Testament figures to the Jews comes spiritually to Christians.
Sermon 4.22Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · "Deceit" here is a figure, as Christ is called rock, lion and lamb without being them literally.
Sermon 4.23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Jacob's "deceit" was a figure, not a lie: having bought the birthright, he truly was the firstborn, and Isaac confirmed the blessing.
Sermon 7.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Two orthodox views exist on who spoke to Moses; the first is that it was Christ, called "Angel of great counsel" because he was sent with a message.
Sermon 8.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The rod that becomes a serpent and swallows the magicians' serpents signifies God's people made mortal and the nations absorbed into Christ's body; the first plague, water to blood, opposes the first commandment, as idolatry changes God's glory into a human image.
Sermon 10.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Augustine reads the story of Solomon's judgment between the two harlots and asks what the two women signify.
Sermon 19.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · God no longer wants animal sacrifices, which all prefigured Christ (ram, lamb, bull, goat), the same faith being held by the fathers; the sacrifice he now wants is a contrite heart, crushed so that a clean one may be created.
Sermon 23.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Scripture is always spiritual, yet like a mother or nurse it speaks to the carnal as if carnally so that they may grow.
Sermon 24.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Augustine raises the puzzle that the psalm asks God “not to be gentle” while Christ says he is gentle, and begins to resolve it from Christ’s call in Matt 11.
Sermon 32.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · A rule for allegory: a figure such as a mountain, stone, lion, or river does not always mean the same thing, just as the letter D begins both Deus and Diabolus; its sense depends on its place.
Sermon 32.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Here the river signifies the old people that let the Law be passed over like stones in a stream; taking the stones into the milk vessel signifies the Law brought into grace by Christ.
Sermon 46.36Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The Donatists misdivide Song 1:7–8: “at noon” belongs to the bride’s question, and the bridegroom’s answer, “Unless you know yourself, go out and feed your kids,” warns against the heretics, former table-companions who set up altar against altar.
Sermon 46.38Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · “Noon” can be read in many senses, but even taken as Africa it does not favor the Donatists; nor does Habakkuk’s “God will come from Africus,” since Christ came from Jerusalem and filled the world with the Gospel.
Sermon 46.40Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Habakkuk’s “from Africus” means from Jerusalem, which Joshua places to the south, and the “shady mountain” is the Mount of Olives, from which Christ ascended and sent the Gospel to all nations.
Sermon 47.27Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The sheep who hear the shepherd will not be devoured by the heretics who twist Scripture; God plants peace in a Church spread through the world, while the Donatists starve beside the food of Scripture.
Sermon 51.15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Jechoniah, at the turning point of the exile, is like a cornerstone where two walls meet, and so is counted twice, prefiguring Christ the cornerstone between Jews and Gentiles.
Sermon 51.31Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Matthew’s genealogy centers on forty, the number of our pilgrim life of fasting and continence; the one extra generation either does not matter or marks Christ, who alone is both man and God.
Sermon 51.34Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Seventy-seven is eleven, the number of transgression beyond the ten of justice, multiplied by seven, the number of the creature, soul and body; so it signifies all sins.
Sermon 71.13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Mark and Luke express the same saying in other words; the evangelists differ in wording so that we may seek the speaker’s intention, not the words.
Sermon 73.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · In Scripture’s figures one thing can have many names: the poor soils of the sower parable are the weeds, bad Christians, who are urged to repent while there is time.
Sermon 74.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The old things of Scripture are not discarded but understood through the new when one turns to Christ and the veil is removed.
Sermon 82.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Proverbs and Paul command open rebuke while Christ commands private rebuke; there is no contradiction between the Testaments, for Christ speaks in both.
Sermon 89.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Since it was not the season for figs and a tree cannot sin, the cursing of the fig tree must be a prophetic sign, not merely a miracle.
Sermon 89.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Christ’s seeking fruit was a figurative pretense like his “pretending to go farther” at Emmaus; in Scripture words and deeds may be proper, figurative, or both.
Sermon 89.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Jacob’s anointing of the stone is a figurative deed signifying Christ; Christ’s words to Nathanael recall Jacob’s ladder, for the Son of Man is both above as head and below in his members.
Sermon 89.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Some events are both real and figurative, like Abraham’s two sons; figurative fiction, like the parable of the sower or Christ seeking fruit, signifies truth and is not a lie.
Sermon 95.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Christ is the bridegroom both fairest in the form of God and disfigured in the form of a servant, as the two prophets agree; the guest without a wedding garment shows that lacking it is a grave fault.
Sermon 98.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Christ’s miracles were done to signify spiritual truths, like letters to be read and not only admired; the cursing of the fig tree, out of season, signified the Jews who had the words of the law without its deeds.
Sermon 101.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · “Greet no one on the way” cannot mean refusing greetings; one sense is an exaggeration urging haste, like “Capernaum, exalted to heaven.”
Sermon 122.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, who willingly let himself be overcome and then blessed him, figures Christ; Jacob, blessed and lamed, stands for the Jewish people, blessed in those who believed and lame in those who did not.
Sermon 130.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The feeding of the five thousand is a sign: the five barley loaves are the five books of Moses, in which Christ is hidden, and they grow when they are broken open in explanation.
Sermon 149.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The clean animals with divided hoof and cud-chewing signify sound conduct and meditation on God’s word; those lacking either do not belong to the fellowship of the saints.
Sermon 152.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The law of the Spirit is the law of grace that takes sin away; the Law of Moses shows sin but cannot remove it; the two correspond to the two Testaments, Hagar and the free Jerusalem above.
Sermon 153.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · “In the flesh” means trusting in oneself, as “flesh” often means man in Scripture; for those who so trust, the Law only increased sin and made them transgressors bound for death.
Sermon 171.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The Good Samaritan is Christ, near to us by mercy though far by nature; the name means “guardian,” and when called a Samaritan and demon-possessed he denied only the demon.
Sermon 214.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Christ rose in true flesh and ascended after forty days; “sitting at the right hand” means dwelling in the height of honor and blessedness, as Scripture uses “sit” for “dwell.”
Sermon 236.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The disciples, having lost hope at Christ's death, called him only a prophet; on the road he showed them from the Scriptures that the Christ had to die.
Sermon 252.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The catch after the resurrection, compared with the earlier one in Luke 5, must be questioned for its inner meaning, since Christ, the Word, speaks by deeds as well as words.
Sermon 252.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The nets are the word of God and the sea this world, as the parable of the dragnet shows; the first catch figures the present Church, the second the Church after the resurrection.
Sermon 252.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Forty, the days of the risen Lord on earth and of the great fasts, signifies wisdom dispensed in time; ten, the fullness of wisdom (seven for creature, three for the Trinity), times four, the number of temporal things, makes forty.
Sermon 252.11Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Forty years in the desert signify this life; the denarius of the parable of the vineyard (ten) added to forty makes fifty, the Church to come; fifty times three, plus the three of the Trinity, makes 153.
Sermon 263.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Christ fasted forty days before his death and ate forty days after his resurrection, signifying the present contest of abstinence and the hope of peace; forty is the ten commandments times the four quarters of the world.
Sermon 293.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · John stands at the boundary of the two Testaments: born of the old, a prophet in the womb; Zechariah’s silence is hidden prophecy, opened when the voice is born, as the veil was torn at the cross.
Sermon 300.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · To a Jewish objection that the Maccabees did not confess Christ, Augustine answers that Christ was then veiled in the Old Testament, a veil removed only in Christ, who fulfills the law; the cross is the key.
Sermon 313.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · God's arms are not bodily: his sword is both the word by which Christ cut his martyrs free from earthly affections and, as the Psalm says, the soul of the righteous in God's hand.
Sermon 315.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Unlike Christ, who kept silence as the lamb before its shearer, Stephen preached from the housetop by treading down his flesh; he recounted Israel's history and showed in Moses, rejected yet a deliverer, a figure of Christ, who will one day free the Jews who rejected him.
On the Profit of Believing 5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Augustine sets out four ways of expounding the Old Testament: history, aetiology, analogy, and allegory.
On the Profit of Believing 6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Christ used history (David and the loaves) and aetiology (Moses’ permission of divorce given for hardness of heart).
On the Profit of Believing 8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Christ and Paul used allegory of the Old Testament: the sign of Jonah, the Exodus as a figure of the church, and Hagar and Sarah as the two testaments.
On the Profit of Believing 9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Augustine grants that the law was a temporary slavery for those not ruled by reason, but argues that grace removes not the Old Testament but the veil over its meaning.
On the Profit of Believing 17Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Augustine rebukes those who judge the Scriptures without a teacher, noting that even pagan poets are read with guides and their offensive passages interpreted.
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 393 · Augustine lists four ways of interpreting Scripture: history, allegory, analogy, and aetiology.
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 393 · Augustine explains that “one day” here includes night, and suggests that God, who “created all things at once,” did not need time, the six days being a narrative order for weaker minds.
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 393 · Augustine notes the differing order of “God saw that it was good” on the first and second days and takes it as a sign that God's working involves no intervals of time.
Against Jovinianus 1.21Jerome · 393 · Jerome reads Joshua's crossing of the Jordan, the circumcision at Gilgal, and the conquest as figures of the Gospel's victory over marriage and the senses.
Against Jovinianus 1.30Jerome · 393 · Jerome reads the Song of Songs as celebrating virginity, the chaste turtledove, and the bride's purity.
Against Jovinianus 2.26Jerome · 393 · Jerome refutes Jovinian's claim that the Gospels promise "sevenfold" and defends the threefold yield as degrees of reward.
Against Jovinianus 2.34Jerome · 393 · Jerome argues from the division of the land, the temple, the Psalms of Ascents, and the orders of priesthood that there are ranks in the Church and in heaven.
Against Adimantus, a Disciple of Mani 10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 394 · Against the claim that God's tabernacle contradicts Christ's words that heaven is God's throne, Augustine sets Isaiah 66:1 against Christ's cleansing of the temple to show that both Testaments say the same.
Against Adimantus, a Disciple of Mani 15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 394 · Augustine shows that Adimantus's use of Matt 15:11 against the food laws of Leviticus refutes the Manichaeans' own abstinence from meat, since Christ told the disciples privately that no food defiles, while the food laws were figures of the Church.
Against Adimantus, a Disciple of Mani 24Augustine of Hippo · ca. 394 · Augustine reads the ant of Proverbs 6 spiritually, as gathering God's word in peaceful times against tribulation, and shows that “do not think about tomorrow” forbids anxiety, not provision.
Against Adimantus, a Disciple of Mani 25Augustine of Hippo · ca. 394 · Augustine reads Hosea's curse of barren wombs figuratively, applying it to false teachers who bear no fruit, and shows that the reward of eunuchs is promised in Isaiah as well as in the gospel.
On Lying 7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 395 · Lies in the Old Testament are answered as figurative (and so not lies) or, like the midwives', approved only as progress relative to worse conduct.
On Lying 26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 395 · Since Old Testament deeds may be figurative, the deeds of the saints in the New Testament should be used to show how the commands of Scripture are to be understood.
On the Faith against the Manichaeans 38Evodius of Uzalis · ca. 400-424 · The Manichees allow figurative reading of the New Testament but not the Old, yet accept the Acts of Leucius, with its story of Maximilla deceiving her husband.
Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental 23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 396–397 · Simple Catholics who picture God in human form think better of him than the Manichaeans, and can grow in the Church to understand Scripture’s bodily language spiritually; the Manichaeans claim Mani spoke without figures and so cannot reinterpret his picture.
On Christian Doctrine 1.0Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Augustine defends the usefulness of giving rules for interpreting Scripture against those who will not understand them, those who cannot apply them, and those who claim to need only a divine gift.
On Christian Doctrine 1.1Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · The work has two parts, discovering the meaning of Scripture and expressing it, and Augustine trusts God to multiply what he shares as he multiplied the loaves.
On Christian Doctrine 1.36Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Whoever does not draw love of God and neighbor from Scripture has not understood it; one who misreads the author but builds up love errs harmlessly, yet should be corrected.
On Christian Doctrine 1.37Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Rash misreadings can lead one to oppose Scripture itself, undermining faith and so love; faith, hope, and love are what all knowledge serves.
On Christian Doctrine 2.5Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Scripture began in one language and spread through translations; its readers seek the thoughts of its writers and through them the will of God.
On Christian Doctrine 2.6Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Scripture's obscurities were provided by God to humble pride and make discovery delightful, as the figurative reading of Song 4:2 shows; nearly everything obscure is stated plainly elsewhere.
On Christian Doctrine 2.9Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · The student should first know the books, then master what is plainly taught about faith and life, and then use clear passages to explain obscure ones.
On Christian Doctrine 2.10Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Scripture is not understood when its signs are unknown or ambiguous; signs may be literal or figurative.
On Christian Doctrine 2.11Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Knowledge of Hebrew and Greek is the remedy for unknown literal signs, especially because of the many varying Latin translations.
On Christian Doctrine 2.12Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Comparing Latin translations can clarify difficult passages, as with Isa 58:7 and 7:9, and can expose mistranslations arising from ambiguous Greek words.
On Christian Doctrine 2.14Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Unknown words and idioms are learned from speakers, study of languages, comparison of translations, and wide reading, after first correcting the manuscripts.
On Christian Doctrine 2.16Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Figurative signs require knowledge of languages (such as the meaning of Hebrew names) and of things, including the natures of animals, stones, and plants, and of numbers and music.
On Christian Doctrine 3.2Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Ambiguities of punctuation are resolved by the rule of faith, then by the context, and where neither decides, the reader may choose, as examples from John 1:1, Phil 1:22–24, and 2 Cor 7:1–2 show.
On Christian Doctrine 3.3Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Ambiguities of pronunciation are resolved in the same way, as examples from Rom 8:33–34, Rom 9:30, John 1:46, Ps 139:15, and Gal 5:21 show.
On Christian Doctrine 3.4Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Other ambiguities in literal words are resolved by the context, comparison of translations, or the original language, as with 1 Thess 3:7 and 1 Cor 15:31.
On Christian Doctrine 3.5Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Taking figurative expressions literally, such as “Sabbath” or “sacrifice,” is a carnal slavery of the soul that mistakes signs for things.
On Christian Doctrine 3.10Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Whatever in Scripture cannot literally refer to good conduct or true faith is figurative; Scripture commands only love and condemns only desire, and readers must not judge it by their own customs.
On Christian Doctrine 3.12Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Seemingly shameful acts of holy persons in Scripture are figurative or must be judged by the customs of their time, such as the patriarchs' polygamy for the sake of offspring; what matters is not the thing used but the lust of the user.
On Christian Doctrine 3.15Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Figurative passages should be studied until their interpretation leads to the reign of love; passages that already do so literally are not figurative.
On Christian Doctrine 3.16Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · A precept that seems to command wrongdoing or forbid kindness is figurative, as with eating Christ's flesh, heaping coals of fire, and losing one's life.
On Christian Doctrine 3.18Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Practices blameless in Old Testament times, such as polygamy, may not be adopted now; what matters is love or lust in the user, and the patriarchs used marriage only for procreation.
On Christian Doctrine 3.22Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Old Testament deeds foreign to Christian practice, though praised, should be understood figuratively and not imitated.
On Christian Doctrine 3.24Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · The first task is to determine whether an expression is literal or figurative, using the rules already given.
On Christian Doctrine 3.25Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · The same thing may signify contrary or different things in different passages, as leaven, the lion, the serpent, bread, and water show.
On Christian Doctrine 3.26Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Obscure figures are explained by plainer passages, though the same image may carry several meanings, as with the shield.
On Christian Doctrine 3.27Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · When a passage admits several meanings, each confirmed by other Scriptures and agreeing with the faith, there is no danger, for the Holy Spirit foresaw and provided them, though the reader should seek the author's intention.
On Christian Doctrine 3.28Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Meanings supported only by reason, not by other Scripture, are dangerous; it is safer to settle disputed interpretations by Scripture itself.
On Christian Doctrine 3.29Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · The biblical writers used all the rhetorical tropes, such as metaphor, catachresis, and irony, which even ordinary speech uses; knowing them helps resolve passages that would be absurd if taken literally.
On Christian Doctrine 3.30Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Augustine introduces the seven rules of Tyconius, a Donatist, as useful but not all-sufficient keys to Scripture, to be read with caution.
On Christian Doctrine 3.31Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Tyconius's first rule: Scripture sometimes speaks of Christ and the Church as one person, passing between head and body.
On Christian Doctrine 3.32Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Tyconius's second rule concerns the mixed Church of true members and hypocrites, about whom Scripture sometimes speaks as one body.
On Christian Doctrine 3.34Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Tyconius's fourth rule, on species and genus: Scripture passes from a part to the whole, as Ezekiel's prophecy to Israel passes to the spiritual Israel of all nations, the Church.
On Christian Doctrine 3.35Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Tyconius's fifth rule, on times, works by synecdoche (as with the six or eight days before the Transfiguration and Christ's three days in the tomb) and by symbolic numbers.
On Christian Doctrine 3.36Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Tyconius's sixth rule, recapitulation: Scripture sometimes returns to earlier events, as in the planting of paradise, the dispersion of nations before Babel, and Christ's warning about Lot's wife.
On Christian Doctrine 3.37Augustine of Hippo · Books 1–3 ca. 396–397; completed 426–427 · Tyconius's seventh rule concerns the devil and his body; all the rules but one concern figurative expression, and students of Scripture must above all pray for understanding.
Confessions 5.24Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Through Ambrose's spiritual interpretation of the Old Testament, Augustine came to see that the catholic faith could be defended, though he did not yet think it proven.
Confessions 6.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Through Ambrose's spiritual exegesis, based on the rule that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life, Augustine no longer found the Old Testament absurd, but he still withheld assent, wanting mathematical certainty.
Confessions 12.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Genesis mentions no day for the first creation because it means the timeless heaven of heaven and formless matter.
Confessions 12.27Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · If a reader finds a true meaning in Scripture that the author did not intend, no harm is done, as long as it is true and serves love.
Confessions 12.30Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Five interpretations of Gen 1:2, "the earth was invisible and unformed."
Confessions 12.32Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Disagreements are either about the truth of things or about the author's intention; Augustine seeks God's intention through Moses'.
Confessions 12.34Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Those who insist that only their reading is Moses' meaning love their own opinion, not the truth, which belongs to all.
Confessions 12.35Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Both readers see the truth in God, not in each other's minds; quarrels over Moses' intention offend the love for which he wrote.
Confessions 12.36Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Augustine would have wished, as author of Genesis, to write so that every true meaning could be found in his words; he credits Moses with this gift.
Confessions 12.37Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Genesis is like a small spring feeding many streams; simple readers are nourished by its plain sense as chicks in a nest.
Confessions 12.41Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Augustine does not know which true meaning Moses intended, but asks that all who see the truth love one another and honor Moses.
Confessions 12.42Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Why not grant that Moses meant every true sense, since God tempered Scripture for many readers?
Confessions 13.37Augustine of Hippo · ca. 397–401 · Taken figuratively, the blessing means the power to express one truth in many signs and to understand one text in many ways.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 3.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine replies that learned readers saw the difference between the genealogies but, trusting Scripture’s authority, sought and found its explanation.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 6.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine distinguishes moral precepts from precepts that signified future things, and argues from Paul that the latter were figures, to be read but no longer observed.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 6.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine explains that Old Testament sacrifices signified the one sacrifice of Christ, and contrasts them with the Manichaean belief that the elect’s food consists of living souls.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 6.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine explains that the Old Testament called some animals unclean by signification, not by nature, illustrating with the pig that does not chew the cud as a figure of those who do not ponder wisdom.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 6.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine explains each ceremonial law Faustus mocked as a figure once binding and now fulfilled in a spiritual meaning, and charges Faustus with a docetic Christ who deceived.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 8.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine answers that catholics read the Old Testament in freedom as testimony, and turns the parable of the new patch against Manichaean fasting and myth.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads the six days of creation as the six ages of the world, and Adam and Eve as figures of Christ and the church formed from his side.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads Cain and Abel as a figure: Abel’s accepted sacrifice as the faith of the New Testament, and Cain, who killed his brother, as the unbelieving Jewish people who rejected Christ.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads God’s protection of Cain as meaning that the Jewish people would not be destroyed but would survive, scattered, through all time as a witness.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.14Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads Enoch and Noah’s ark, its timbers, dimensions, and pitch, as figures of Christ, baptism, and the church.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads the dates and numbers of the flood (27, 7, 15, 150) as figures of the Trinity in the soul, of the saints’ rest and resurrection, and of baptism.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads Jacob’s wrestling, the anointed stone, and the ladder as figures of Christ, citing Christ’s own words to Nathanael, with the angels as preachers who ascend to his divinity and descend to his humanity.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.29Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Following Paul, Augustine reads the exodus, the cloud, the sea, the manna, and the rock as figures of Christ and baptism.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.30Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads the wilderness journey, the bitter waters, the springs and palms, Moses’ raised hands, the bronze serpent, the passover, and the giving of the law as figures of Christ, the cross, and the Spirit.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.36Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads the exile in Babylon, Jeremiah’s letter, the return after seventy years, and the high priest Joshua in Zechariah as figures of the church among the nations and its return to the heavenly Jerusalem.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.37Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine defends figurative reading of the Old Testament on Paul’s authority, comparing its details to writing whose meaning one recognizes even before one can read it.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.38Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine argues that details in the Genesis narratives that serve no practical necessity show that they were written to signify something.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.39Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine contrasts Philo’s allegory of the ark as the human body, which failed at the door in its side, with the Christian reading of the door as the sacraments flowing from Christ’s side.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 12.40Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine notes that pagans, who allegorize their own myths, cannot object to Christian figurative reading of Scripture.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 13.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads Jeremiah's partridge that gathers what it did not hatch as a prophecy of heretics who draw away Christians born of the church's gospel.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 15.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine replies that Paul himself joins the gospel to the prophets, that the new and old wine signify two hopes, not two testaments, and that the Old Testament rightly understood prophesies the New.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 15.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine contrasts the Trinity with the Manichaeans' many gods, explains that biblical images of delight are figures, and mocks the Manichaean claim that Mani spoke plainly while they believe in fantastic deities.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 16.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine replies that everything Moses wrote concerns Christ, and turns Faustus's image of fish and sea water against Manichaean food laws.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 16.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine answers that temple, altar, priest and sacrifice appear in the New Testament too, as figures fulfilled in Christ and the church, while the Manichaeans' worship of the sun and moon is the true likeness to paganism.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 16.17Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reads Moses' doubt at the rock as a figure of the people under the law who doubted Christ crucified, and his death on the mountain as the death of fleshly unbelief in the exalted Christ.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 16.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine argues that Moses' successor Joshua, whose name Moses changed to “Jesus” and of whom God said “my name is in him,” was a figure of Christ, the prophet foretold by Moses.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.25Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine compares critics of the prophets to schoolboys who fault Virgil's licences, and warns that no one may excuse adultery by Abraham's union with Hagar.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.46Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine defends Isaac's calling Rebecca his sister like Abraham's case, and interprets his playing with her, by which Abimelech recognized them as married, as a figure of Christ's condescension to the church.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.52Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine interprets Leah as the laborious active life and Rachel as the contemplation of truth, explaining why Jacob had to take Leah first and serve seven more years for Rachel.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.56Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine reports having examined mandrakes himself and interprets Reuben's mandrakes as the good public reputation that those engaged in active church work win for the contemplative life.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.77Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine notes that Christ himself changed his commands about purse and sword, showing that God's precepts differ according to the times without inconsistency.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.83Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine prefaces his reading of Judah and Tamar by arguing that evil deeds narrated in prophetic Scripture can signify good things, as Caiaphas unknowingly prophesied Christ's death.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.84Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine interprets Tamar as the Jewish people, Judah's sons Er and Onan as harmful and useless kings, and Shelah as the time when no king came from Judah, under the foreign Herods.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.87Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine interprets David's sin with Bathsheba as a figure of Christ loving the church, washed in baptism, and killing the devil, her former husband, while still condemning David's sin.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 22.94Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine concludes that all of Scripture speaks of Christ and his church, comparing passages without prophetic meaning to the frame of a lyre that holds the sounding strings.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 32.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine explains that the Old Testament itself foretold a new covenant, and that its rites, as shadows of things to come, are fulfilled rather than condemned.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 32.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine interprets the levirate law of Deuteronomy as a figure of preachers who beget children for Christ, their dead brother, and of the shame of refusing that ministry.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 32.14Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine states his principle that all the Old Testament is true and useful, its unobserved commands being fitting signs for their time, as a physician changes his prescriptions.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 33.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine argues that differences between the Gospels are like those between historians, one summarizing and another detailing, and that Matthew’s centurion “came” to Jesus through intermediaries, as common speech allows.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 33.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine explains that the centurion “came” to Christ by faith more truly than his messengers, as the woman touched him while the crowd pressed, and that any honest narrator telling a story twice varies without contradiction.
Tractates 1Gaudentius of Brescia · ca. 397-410 · Easter vigil sermon: Christ rose in spring, the season of creation, and Easter may fall in April by the lunar reckoning; the Exodus month as the 'beginning of months' signifies baptism, the return of penitents, and the final light of the resurrection.
Tractates 2Gaudentius of Brescia · ca. 397-410 · To the newly baptized: the Passover lamb was a figure of Christ, whose body and blood are given in the bread and wine; the rules for eating the lamb teach how to read Scripture and how to receive the Eucharist in faith.
Tractates 5Gaudentius of Brescia · ca. 397-410 · The shoes and staffs of the Passover meal: shoes are the commandments of Scripture that protect the soul's steps in this world's Egypt, to be loosed only in the holy land; the staff is the rod of correction that the apostolic pastor needs only for the unruly.
On Catechizing the Uninstructed 3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–405 · A full narration runs from creation to the present Church, selecting the striking points and relating everything to love, since all Scripture before Christ foretold him and his body the Church, as Jacob's hand preceded his head at birth.
On Catechizing the Uninstructed 9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–405 · Candidates from the schools of grammar and rhetoric must learn humility, value truth above eloquence, learn that Scripture's hidden meanings reward study, and not mock clergy whose Latin is faulty.
On Catechizing the Uninstructed 26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–405 · After the address the candidate is asked whether he believes, is signed with the cross and given the sacrament of salt, and is taught to read Scripture by the rule of love; Augustine then begins a shorter model address.
Against Secundinus the Manichaean 23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399 · Augustine answers Secundinus's ridicule of Abraham's oath, Noah's ark, Jacob's wrestling, and Abraham's deception about Sarah, reading each as prophetic and contrasting it with the Manichaean god captured and torn by darkness.
On the Trinity 1.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Augustine describes three kinds of error about God (thinking of him as a body, as a created spirit, or as something found nowhere at all) and explains why Scripture uses lowly images and why the mind must be cleansed to see God.
On the Trinity 1.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Augustine gives his rule for reading Scripture about Christ: in the form of God the Son is equal to the Father, in the form of a servant he is less, as Philippians 2 teaches, without either nature being changed into the other.
On the Trinity 2.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Augustine adds a third rule for reading Scripture about the Son: some texts show neither inequality nor equality but only that the Son is from the Father, so that they express his birth, not his inferiority.
On the Trinity 15.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · An enigma is an obscure allegory, so seeing “in an enigma” means seeing God through a likeness that is hard to make out, as our own thought is both seen and not seen.
The Harmony of the Gospels 2.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · Matthew's three fourteens make forty-one, not forty-two, because Jechoniah is counted twice at the turn to Babylon, a figure of Christ the cornerstone of Jews and Gentiles.
The Harmony of the Gospels 2.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · Each evangelist joins what he tells so that it seems continuous, leaping over what he omits; so the flight to Egypt fits after the presentation in the temple.
The Harmony of the Gospels 2.29Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · Whether John said 'carry' or 'untie' the sandals, he may have said both, or each evangelist conveyed his one intention of humility; what counts is the speaker's meaning.
The Harmony of the Gospels 2.31Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · The variations in the words of the heavenly voice at the baptism convey one sense; the reading 'today I have begotten you' in some copies of Luke, if genuine, means both were spoken.
The Harmony of the Gospels 2.72Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · Many words have more than one sense, as Paul's 'burden' in Galatians 6 and 'rod' show, and so does the staff of the mission charge.
The Harmony of the Gospels 2.99Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · Christ walking on the water 'wished to pass by' the disciples so as to draw out their cry, which he then answered.
Against the Letter of Parmenian 2.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 400 · The Scripture texts the Donatists hurl at Catholics rebound on them: Isaiah’s woe on those who call good evil fits those who call the unity of brothers evil.
Against the Letter of Parmenian 2.22Augustine of Hippo · ca. 400 · The sacraments harm those who handle them unworthily but profit worthy recipients; Augustine offers other readings of the Donatists’ texts: the broken cisterns and lying water are carnal people, the dead are pagan gods, the sinner’s oil is flattery, and the flies are crowds of careless converts.
On the Work of Monks 3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 400–401 · The monks' figurative reading of Paul could as easily be turned against their literal reading of the gospel; Paul's other letters make plain that he meant bodily work.
On the Work of Monks 27Augustine of Hippo · ca. 400–401 · The monks who cite the birds of the sky keep storehouses, grind, cook, and draw water, which birds do not do, and expect others to serve them as no one serves birds.
Questions and Answers to the Orthodox 6–12Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Several questions: why the risen will be impassible though they feel joy or pain (their state is fixed and unchanging); why comparing rest and punishment changes nothing in the age to come; why God is not the author of evil (free choice, not knowledge, makes us good or bad); how biblical anthropomorphism differs from pagan myth; and why God, who contains all things, is greater than all and preserves no evil by nature.
Questions and Answers to the Orthodox 63–64Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Psalm 19's “tent in the sun” means the heavens are the sun's tent, as the Syriac rendering and Psalm 104 show; and Jonah's three days in the fish are a type of Christ's three days in the tomb, not of his death, since the reality must exceed the type.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine sets out the questions raised by Genesis 1:1–2 when it is read as a record of events and not only figuratively.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine explains that formless matter is prior to formed things in origin, not in time; Scripture narrates in sequence what God made at once.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.17Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine proposes that the first light may be the spiritual creation enlightened by Wisdom, sets aside an allegorical reading of evening and morning, and explains them as the end of one work and the sign of the next.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.18Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine reports a Syriac reading of Genesis 1:2 (“brooded over”) and warns against headlong assertion in obscure questions where the faith allows several opinions.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine sets out how to weigh rival readings against certain knowledge and warns that Christians who speak ignorantly about nature, claiming Scripture’s support, bring Scripture into contempt with unbelievers.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine explains why he has offered several interpretations and rebukes both learned critics of Scripture and weak believers who are overawed by them.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine states his rule: what is demonstrated about nature is not contrary to Scripture, what contradicts the faith is false, and the reader should seek first the author’s own meaning, then a meaning consistent with the context and with sound faith.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 2.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · On the second day, Augustine sets out the natural-philosophical objection to waters above the heavens and warns against using Psalm 136:6 against what is known of the weights of the elements.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 2.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine praises one writer’s explanation of the waters above the firmament as clouds above the air and adds that infinitely divisible water could also rest as vapour above the highest heaven.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 2.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine says the biblical authors knew the truth about the shape of the heaven but the Spirit did not teach such matters, and he shows how “skin” and “vault” can be reconciled with a spherical heaven.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 3.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine interprets 2 Peter’s statement that the heavens perished in the flood as referring to the lower air, and explains why water creatures and birds come first.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 3.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine explains that birds come from the waters because the air they fly in is moist, and that they fly “along” the firmament, not in it.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 3.23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine argues that “and so it was done” on the sixth day refers to man’s knowledge of the gift of food, not to the fulfilment of “increase and multiply.”
Literal Commentary on Genesis 4.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Rather than contradict Scripture, Augustine prefers to admit ignorance of how the first light made day and night, and holds that the seventh day is the seventh repetition of the day God made.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 4.28Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine argues that his account of evening and morning as angelic knowledge is a proper, not merely allegorical, sense, while leaving room for a better interpretation.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 5.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The unusual wording of Genesis 2:4 brings all creation back to one day, confirming from the neighboring page that God made all things at once, while Scripture walks slowly with the weak.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 8.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine adopts the view that paradise was both a real bodily place and figurative, and argues that Genesis is historical narrative, not figurative speech like the Song of Songs.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 8.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine recalls that his early books against the Manichees interpreted Genesis figuratively, quotes his earlier hope for a literal reading, and now attempts it.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 8.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The tree of life was a real tree and also a sacrament signifying Wisdom, as the rock was real and signified Christ; such events differ from parables, which need not have happened.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 8.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The four rivers of paradise are real rivers (Augustine identifies Geon with the Nile and Phison with the Ganges), which shows that the account of paradise is to be taken first literally.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 9.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The bringing of the animals to Adam really happened, but for a prophetic signification; Augustine's aim is to defend the literal history, not to expound the figures.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 11.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine quotes Genesis 2:25–3:24, restates his rule of defending the literal narrative, and explains why the first couple's nakedness caused no shame before sin.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 11.31Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · “Their eyes were opened” does not mean they had been blind, but that after sin they noticed their members with a new desire; the phrase is a transferred word in a literal narrative, as at Emmaus.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 11.36Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The curse on the serpent is figurative, describing the devil as tempter of the human race; only the fact that it was spoken must be taken literally.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.27Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Moses desired to see God not through a bodily appearance but in his very substance; Numbers 12 shows that he was granted to see God “mouth to mouth,” which no one does while living in the bodily senses.
Apology against Rufinus 1.16Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome explains that a commentary reports many interpreters' views for the reader to judge, as the classical commentators did, so it cannot be charged with all the views it reports.
Apology against Rufinus 1.19Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome defends rendering Ps 2:12 as "Worship the Son" in his commentary and "Worship purely" in his translation, since Hebrew bar can mean both "son" and "pure."
Apology against Rufinus 1.28Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome quotes the passage of Origen's commentary on Eph 5:28–29 which he had reported, including the words about wives turned into men and bodies into souls that Rufinus attacked.
Apology against Rufinus 2.34Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome argues that Christ and the apostles quoted the Hebrew where it differed from the Septuagint, and challenges Rufinus to find a New Testament quotation from the Septuagint not in the Hebrew.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 2.14Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Those born of God are not born 'of bloods' or the will of the flesh or of a man; Augustine defends the translator's plural 'bloods' and reads 'flesh' as wife and 'spirit' as husband.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 7.23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Jacob's anointed stone signified Christ, and the angels ascending and descending are preachers like Paul, who ascended to the third heaven and descended to give milk to little ones, as a parent stoops to a child's speech.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 9.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Christ turned the water itself into wine, rather than pouring it out, to show that the Old Testament is from him but has its savor only when he is understood in it, as on the road to Emmaus.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 9.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The first jar is the age of Adam: as Eve was formed from the side of the sleeping Adam, so the Church was formed from the sacraments flowing from the side of the dead Christ, who left his Father by taking the form of a servant and his mother, the synagogue, to cling to the Church.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 11.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · As Israel ate manna only after crossing the Red Sea, so catechumens must pass through baptism, red with Christ's blood, before receiving the true bread from heaven.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 11.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Nicodemus, like the disciples who were offended by Christ's words about eating his flesh, understood carnally what was meant spiritually; Christ needs no one, but all need him.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 11.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The births from free and slave women among the three patriarchs prefigure four kinds of Christians: good or bad born through good or bad ministers of baptism.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 12.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Augustine rejects the view that John 3:8 speaks of the wind and takes the “earthly things” to be Christ's word about raising the temple of his body.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 12.11Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The bronze serpent lifted up in the desert figures Christ's death on the cross, by which those who look in faith are healed from sin for eternal life.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 15.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The woman's five husbands may be the five books of Moses, but Augustine prefers to read them as the five senses that rule the soul before reason, after which the understanding should rule.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 18.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · John received the gift of speaking deep things of the Son that exercise mature minds; what is not yet understood must be held in faith, since heresies arise from misreading good Scriptures rashly.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 24.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Christ's miracles, deeds of the Word, are like writing: one must not only admire them but read and understand what they say.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 25.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The ship of the church makes headway amid storms; the twenty-five and thirty stadia signify the Law (five times five) fulfilled by the gospel (five times six), to whom Jesus comes treading the waves.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 27.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · “The flesh profits nothing” means flesh alone, understood as dead meat; quickened by the Spirit, as knowledge by love, Christ's flesh profits greatly.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 28.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The Feast of Tabernacles foreshadowed the Church, brought out of Egypt through baptism and now sojourning in the world's desert, where Christ lies hidden.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 30.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Circumcision on the eighth day signified Christ, the stone knife, whose resurrection on the eighth day strips us of the fault of birth and of our sins.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 36.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Lowly sayings of Christ refer to the form of a servant, lofty ones to the form of God; against heretics who deny either, the Catholic faith confesses him both God and man.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 36.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Christ's judgment is true because the Father is with him; John is the eagle among the four living creatures, which figure the four evangelists, soaring to Christ's divinity.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 63.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Judas's departure, leaving only the clean with Christ, prefigures Christ's glorification when the wicked will be separated from the righteous.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 86.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Christ says he has made all things known because he speaks of the future fullness of knowledge as already done, as Scripture speaks of salvation already received in hope.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 124.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The closing words of John's Gospel, that the world could not contain the books, are a hyperbole, a figure found elsewhere in Scripture.
Homilies on the First Epistle of John 9.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 407 · The 'chaste fear' that endures for ever is fear of losing God, which differs from the servile fear of punishment that love casts out; the two Scriptures, inspired by one Spirit, agree.
On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 2.57Augustine of Hippo · 411–412 · Only Christ was without sin; believers must swerve neither to the right, by claiming sinlessness, nor to the left, by careless sinning, like the Israelites of twenty years who entered the promised land.
City of God 6.8Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine rejects the claim that allegorical 'natural' interpretations excuse the civil rites, since the same method would excuse the poets' fables that the pagans themselves condemn.
City of God 11.19Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · God's dividing of light from darkness on the first day may signify his separation of the holy from the fallen angels, whose fall he foreknew.
City of God 11.30Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The six days signify perfection, since six is the first number equal to the sum of its divisors.
City of God 12.14Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine rejects the philosophers' doctrine of eternal recurrence, which denies the soul true happiness and misreads Ecclesiastes, since Christ died once and the saints will be with the Lord forever.
City of God 13.21Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Paradise may be read spiritually, of virtues or of the church and Christ, but only while its literal history as a real place is also believed, as with Hagar and Sarah or the rock that was Christ.
City of God 14.2Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · In Scripture “flesh” often means the whole man, so living according to the flesh includes vices of the mind, such as idolatry, enmity, and heresy, as well as bodily pleasures; Stoics as well as Epicureans live according to the flesh.
City of God 14.21Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The blessing “Increase and multiply” was given before sin, so procreation belongs to the glory of marriage, not to sin's punishment; it would not have needed lust, whatever some interpreters hold.
City of God 15.2Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Using Paul's allegory of Hagar and Sarah, Augustine explains that part of the earthly city served as an image of the heavenly city.
City of God 15.25Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · God's 'anger' and 'repentance' in Scripture are figures of speech for his unchanging judgment, used to reach all kinds of readers.
City of God 15.27Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine insists that the flood narrative is both true history and a figure of the Church, answering objections about Mount Olympus, the ark's capacity, and the animals' food.
City of God 16.2Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine reads Noah's drunkenness and nakedness as a figure of Christ's passion: Shem and Japheth (Jews and Gentiles in the Church) honor it, while Ham figures heretics and bad Christians.
City of God 16.37Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Jacob's obtaining Isaac's blessing was not fraud but a mystery: the blessing proclaims Christ among the nations, Isaac figuring the law and prophets.
City of God 17.3Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Prophecies refer to the earthly Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem, or both; Augustine rejects both purely literal and wholly allegorical reading.
City of God 18.44Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine explains the Hebrew “forty days” and the Septuagint “three days” of Jonah's warning to Nineveh as both pointing to Christ's resurrection and ascension, and resolves to use both the Hebrew and the Septuagint as authoritative.
City of God 20.29Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Elijah, who is still living, will come before the judgment and, by expounding the law spiritually, will bring the Jews to believe in Christ.
On Faith and Works 22Augustine of Hippo · ca. 413 · 2 Peter warns that some twisted Paul's hard sayings to neglect good living, and urges holy conduct in view of the new heavens and earth.
Commentary on Jeremiah 3.18Jerome · ca. 414-419 · The prophet weeps for the captive flock; those who read Scripture only literally miss its hidden sense and will weep for their pride.
Commentary on Jeremiah 3.55Jerome · ca. 414-419 · Jerome explains the textual variants of “iron and bronze from the north” by the ambiguity of the Hebrew and offers several senses: hard Judah cannot love the prophet nor ally with hard Babylon.
Commentary on Jeremiah 3.81Jerome · ca. 414-419 · Jerome gives the whole sabbath oracle and expounds it spiritually: keeping the sabbath means laying down the burdens of sin and sanctifying all of life; those who reject this figurative reading must either become Jews or fault Christ.
Commentary on Jeremiah 5.2Jerome · ca. 414-419 · Book 5 opens with the two baskets of figs: Jerome rejects allegories that oppose the law to the gospel and reads them historically of Jeconiah's exiles (good) and Zedekiah's party (bad), with a secondary application to believers and unbelievers at Christ's coming; then the oracle of Jehoiakim's fourth year begins (Jer 24:1–25:1).
Commentary on Jeremiah 5.27Jerome · ca. 414-419 · Sheshach is Babel written in the reversed alphabet (atbash), a concealment Jerome compares to Paul's veiled reference to the Roman empire as the restrainer of the Antichrist; he rejects the allegorists' reading (Jer 25:26).
Commentary on Jeremiah 5.31Jerome · ca. 414-419 · The Lord roars in judgment over all nations, each judged by its deserts; the slain will lie unburied across the earth; shepherds and rich 'rams' will howl, with no escape for the unrepentant. Jerome rejects allegorists who turn these threats into good (Jer 25:30–35).
Commentary on Jeremiah 5.46Jerome · ca. 414-419 · Jeremiah sends yokes to the neighboring kings, with the same message to Zedekiah; Jerome rejects Origen's reading about souls descending into bodies, and identifies God's 'strength' and 'arm' with Christ (Jer 27:2–5).
Seven Books of History against the Pagans 6.20.7Orosius · ca. 417–418 · Orosius's allegory of the spring of oil.
Seven Books of History against the Pagans 7.27.2Orosius · ca. 417–418 · The Exodus as a figure of the church.
Seven Books of History against the Pagans 7.27.3Orosius · ca. 417–418 · Israel and the church, Egypt and Rome, compared.
On Adulterous Marriages 1.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–421 · The exception clause of Matt 19:9, spoken to the Pharisees, must be read in the light of Mark and Luke: everyone who dismisses his wife and remarries commits adultery.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.18Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Isaiah’s “breath” and “spirit” may be parallelism referring to the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost.
On the Soul and Its Origin 2.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Texts naming a part (blood, flesh) or the whole (man, woman) cut both ways by synecdoche; unambiguous testimonies are needed.
The Institutes 5.34John Cassian · ca. 419–426 · Theodore taught that the Scriptures are understood not through commentaries but by purifying the heart, which removes the veil of the passions.
The Institutes 8.4John Cassian · ca. 419–426 · Scripture's language of God's limbs and anger is figurative; God's "anger" means his just judgment, which the guilty experience as wrath.
Against Lying 24Augustine of Hippo · ca. 420 · Jacob's deception of Isaac was not a lie but a prophetic figure, just as metaphors, antiphrasis, and parables are not lies, since what they signify is true.
Against Lying 26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 420 · The supposed scriptural examples of lying come from the prophetic books, where deeds are figures; no apostle is shown lying, for Peter's pretense at Antioch was rebuked and Paul's becoming all things to all was compassion, not deceit.
Against Lying 28Augustine of Hippo · ca. 420 · Christ's making as though to go farther at Emmaus was a figure of his ascension, not a lie, just as parables, the fables of Horace and Aesop, and Jotham's fable of the trees are not lies.
Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 1.22Augustine of Hippo · ca. 420–421 · Augustine admits that he once read Romans 7 as describing a man under the law, but explains why he changed his mind.
Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 3.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 420–421 · Augustine distinguishes the common sense of 'Old Testament' (the Hebrew Scriptures) from Paul's sense (the covenant of slavery), and concludes that the ancient righteous belong to the New Covenant.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 0Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · Eucherius explains to his son Veranius that Scripture has literal, moral and anagogical senses and promises a list of its figures.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 1Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The first chapter of figures explains the bodily members and weapons ascribed to God in Scripture.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 2Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The second chapter explains heavenly and weather figures (heavens, clouds, sun, moon, winds, seasons, times of day).
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 3Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The third chapter explains earthly figures: land, mountains, crops, vines, plants, waters and the sea.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 4Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The fourth chapter explains the figures of birds, beasts, cattle and reptiles in Scripture.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 5Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The fifth chapter explains names of persons and relationships (man, woman, bride, child, rich, poor, living, dead) as figures.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 6Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The sixth chapter explains the parts and clothing of the body as figures of the inner man.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 7Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The seventh chapter explains figures of food, drink, household objects, tools and metals, with examples of words having many meanings.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 8Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The eighth chapter explains verbs and terms of movement, posture and health as figures.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 9Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The ninth chapter explains Jerusalem, the tabernacle, sacrifices, feasts, the city, music, and their opposites as figures, ending with the crown.
Formulae of Spiritual Understanding 10Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 420-430 · The tenth chapter explains the symbolic meaning of sacred numbers in Scripture, from one to a hundred.
Retractations 1.17Augustine of Hippo · 426-427 · Augustine explains that he left his first literal commentary on Genesis unfinished, kept it as a record of his beginnings, and refers readers to his later twelve books On Genesis according to the Letter.
Retractations 2.24Augustine of Hippo · 426-427 · Reviewing On Genesis according to the Letter, Augustine admits that more was sought than found, and corrects his reading of Gal 3:19, his statement that Adam lost the image of God, and his treatment of the underworld.
The Conferences 1.20John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · Like skilled money-changers, monks must test every thought and teaching for its true metal, its lawful stamp, and its weight, since the devil disguises harmful projects, even pious ones, as good.
The Conferences 4.11John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · In Gal 5:17 “flesh” and “spirit” mean contrary desires within one person, each pulling to an extreme: the flesh to comfort and pleasure, the spirit to limitless austerity.
The Conferences 8.3John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · Scripture is like a field: some passages nourish plainly by the letter, some must be “cooked” by allegory, some serve in both senses, and the simple historical narrative feeds the simple; literal crosses carried by some monks show the danger of misreading.
The Conferences 12.1John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · Chaeremon takes up whether the fire of desire can be wholly extinguished, explaining that the “members” Paul tells us to put to death are not bodily limbs but the members of the body of sin.
The Conferences 14.8John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · Contemplative knowledge divides into historical and spiritual understanding, the latter threefold, tropology, allegory, and anagogy, so that Jerusalem can mean the Jewish city, the church, the heavenly city, or the soul; Nesteros links these to Paul’s revelation, knowledge, prophecy, and teaching.
The Conferences 14.17John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · The mysteries of Scripture should not be thrown before the impure or taught for vainglory, but given to penitents who are weighed down by sorrow; teaching for human praise is lending the Lord’s money at usury.
The Conferences 22.15John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · Germanus raises the common view that Paul in Romans 7 speaks in the person of sinners, since it cannot fit the perfect apostle.
The Conferences 23.2John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · To understand Paul one must share his disposition; though he had every virtue, these are like gems compared with the one pearl he still lacked.
The Conferences 23.13John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · Because of Adam’s curse even the saints are drawn from contemplation to earthly thoughts, yet they are not condemned, since Christ’s daily grace frees them; so Romans 7 speaks of the perfect.
The Conferences 23.16John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · The “body of death” is what drags the perfect from contemplation to earthly thoughts even in prayer, and Paul’s “I myself” shows he speaks of his own experience.
In Praise of the Desert 15Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 427-428 · Israel's desert wonders are figures of Christian mysteries, yet they really happened, and they foreshadow the life to come.
Instructions 2.1Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 428-434 · A list of Hebrew and other names with their traditional meanings, ending with the point that names in Scripture fit their bearers.
Part 2Eutherius of Tyana · ca. 431-440 · The author defends the study of Scripture against those who would forbid it, and then, in a new chapter, argues that 'the Word became flesh' means union with flesh, not change into flesh, so that two natures must be confessed.
Part 9Eutherius of Tyana · ca. 431-440 · The author rejects the demand to accept scriptural words without examining their meaning, citing Paul's call to trained discernment and comparing such hearers to animals that do not chew the cud.
Part 16Eutherius of Tyana · ca. 431-440 · The author argues against blind acceptance of words, showing that apparently contrary texts about Christ (only-begotten and firstborn, eternal and recent, without genealogy and with one) agree only when referred to his two natures.
Commonitory 2Vincent of Lérins · 434 · Vincent's rule: the faith is guarded by Scripture and by the church's tradition, holding what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.
Commonitory 17Vincent of Lérins · 434 · Origen, with all his genius, learning, holiness and influence, became the greatest test of the church when he interpreted Scripture in new ways.
Commonitory 22Vincent of Lérins · 434 · Vincent expounds 'guard the deposit': the faith is something received and to be handed on unchanged, though it may be explained more clearly.
Commonitory 25Vincent of Lérins · 434 · Heretics use Scripture constantly, as wolves in sheep's clothing, and are revealed by their new interpretations, as Paul says of false apostles disguised as true.
Commonitory 26Vincent of Lérins · 434 · The devil quoted Scripture to tempt Christ, and heretics do the same, promising a special grace to their followers.
Commonitory 27Vincent of Lérins · 434 · Catholics distinguish truth from error in Scripture by interpreting it according to the church's tradition: universality, antiquity, and consent.
Part 1, chapter 7Quodvultdeus of Carthage · ca. 445-450 · The ark prefigures the Church and the cross: its measures, built from the numbers five and six, stand for hope, love, and patience, its three decks for faith, hope, and love, and its one cubit for unity and perfection.
Part 1, chapter 12Quodvultdeus of Carthage · ca. 445-450 · Abraham’s threefold sacrifice of heifer, goat, and ram figures the three times before the law, under the law, and under grace, culminating in Christ; the divided carcasses signify schisms, the undivided birds the chaste and simple.
Part 1, chapter 21Quodvultdeus of Carthage · ca. 445-450 · Jacob’s winning of Isaac’s blessing in Esau’s clothing figures Christ in the likeness of sinful flesh and the Christian people who receive the blessing and the pure sacrifice in place of the Jews.