Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity 9780520925984

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Figural Reading and the Body
1. Body against Spirit: Daniel Boyarin
2. Allegory and Embodiment: Boyarin and Origen
3. Spiritual Bodies: Origen
Part 2. Figural Reading and History
4. The Figure in the Fulfillment: Erich Auerbach
5. The Preservation of Historical Reality: Auerbach and Origen
6. The Present Occurrence of Past Events: Origen
Part 3. Figural Reading and Identity
7. The Literal Sense and Personal Identity: Hans Frei
8. Moses Veiled and Unveiled: Frei and Origen
9. Identity and Transformation: Origen
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Works Cited
General Index
Index Locorum

Citation preview

Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity

The Joan Palevsky

Imprint in Classical Literature

In honor of beloved Virgil— “O degli altri poeti onore e lume . . .” —Dante, Inferno

Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity john david dawson

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by Joan Palevsky.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2001 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dawson, John David, 1957 – Christian figural reading and the fashioning of identity / John David Dawson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-22630-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Bible— Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible—Reading. 3. Christianity and other religions—Judaism. 4. Judaism—Relations— Christianity. I. Title. bs511.3 .d39 2001 220.6⬘4 — dc21

2001027338

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 10

09 08 07 9 8 7 6

06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorinefree (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ansi /niso z39.48⬁ 1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). 䊊

For Ellen, Aaron, and Abigail

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

part 1. 1. 2. 3.

Body against Spirit: Daniel Boyarin Allegory and Embodiment: Boyarin and Origen Spiritual Bodies: Origen

part 2. 4. 5. 6.

19 47 65

figural reading and history

The Figure in the Fulfillment: Erich Auerbach The Preservation of Historical Reality: Auerbach and Origen The Present Occurrence of Past Events: Origen

part 3. 7. 8. 9.

figural reading and the body

83 114 127

figural reading and identity

The Literal Sense and Personal Identity: Hans Frei Moses Veiled and Unveiled: Frei and Origen Identity and Transformation: Origen

141 186 194

Conclusion

207

Abbreviations

219

Notes

221

Works Cited

275

General Index

283

Index Locorum

297

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Acknowledgments

It is a delight to recall friends and colleagues, as well as institutions, who have helped me complete this book. My writing and research began during a productive sabbatical year spent at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey. I am grateful to Dan Hardy for his confidence in my project, and for many stimulating conversations with other members of the Center, especially Jim Buckley, Timothy McDermott, Victor Nuovo, and Avi Zakai. Once again, my colleagues in the Haverford Religion Department—Anne McGuire, Michael Sells, Naomi Koltun-Fromm, Tracey Hucks, and Ken Koltun-Fromm—gave up valuable time to give me excellent advice on the manuscript-in-progress. My thanks also to Julia Epstein, Kathryn Tanner, and Lewis Ayres for casting sharp eyes over the manuscript at various moments along the way. My debt to Rusty Reno is enormous, both for help with this book and even more for ongoing intellectual stimulation of the highest order. Thanks also to Kim Benston of Haverford’s English Department, director of the Haverford Humanities Seminar, who along with seminar members generated a site of intellectual reinvigoration at just the right moment. I was also fortunate to have been afforded several quite different and enormously helpful opportunities to present portions of this manuscript for collegial discussion and debate. My deepest thanks to Jon Whitman for soliciting my presentation of “Allegorical Reading and Cultural Revision: Philo and Origen” for the Colloquia on Allegory and Cultural Change, held at the Center for Literary Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1994. I am also grateful to the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins for inviting me to speak at the University of Pennsylvania on “Origen on Body, History and Narrative” in 1997. And I am again indebted to my friends and colleagues in the Yale-Washington Theology Group, who gave ix

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up yet another pleasant summer Saturday to pick apart one of my manuscripts in excruciating detail. It is a form of attention for which all writers yearn, but few receive, and I remain deeply grateful. This book first took public shape as the Inaugural Lecture for the Constance and Robert MacCrate Professorship in Social Responsibility, entitled “The Letter in the Spirit.” I would like to express my appreciation to Bob and Connie MacCrate for their generous support of Haverford College and for their confidence in my work. I am quite certain that entering into this project with an eye to the mandates of social responsibility led me to address more directly than I otherwise would have the ethical contours and consequences of the forms of interpretation I describe. Haverford College once again enabled me to try out ideas for this book in my Religion and Comparative Literature classes, and I am grateful to all the students who worked with me on various portions of this project over the past few years. The college also supplied me with generous leave time to devote to the project, and the National Endowment for the Humanities once again helped fund my research with a timely summer stipend. Thanks to Janet Bundy for help with checking sources, and to the outside readers for the University of California Press for right-on-target critical responses. I am also indebted to Kate Toll, classics editor, David Gill, project editor, and Peter Dreyer, copy editor, for serenely shepherding the manuscript along the way. I am perhaps most indebted to Daniel Boyarin, for awakening me from my own modest anti-dogmatic slumber, during which, bewitched by contemporary critical method, I too quickly painted all figural reading with the broad brush of allegory. At the level of purely formal method, I still think it makes sense to do this (as does Boyarin). But at the level of substantive Christian theological reflection, the conflation of figural reading with allegorical interpretation as it has been classically derided simply blocks understanding of what Christian interpretation of Hebrew Scripture (or . . . maybe . . . the Old Testament) is all about. This book is an initial and provisional effort at such understanding.

Introduction

In December 1933, less than a month before Hitler formally assumed the chancellorship of Germany, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, delivered a series of Advent sermons in St. Michael’s Cathedral. Faulhaber opened his first sermon, “The Religious Values of the Old Testament and Their Fulfillment in Christianity,” by observing that “already in the year 1899, on the occasion of an anti-Semitic demonstration at Hamburg,” “a demand was raised for the total separation of Judaism from Christianity, and for the complete elimination from Christianity of all Jewish elements.” 1 Even more alarming to Faulhaber, though, was that now, in 1933, the “single voices” of 1899 aimed at Judaism had “swelled together into a chorus: Away with the Old Testament!” 2 To criticize Judaism was one thing, but to criticize the Old Testament was something else altogether. And to allow criticism of the Old Testament to escalate into an attack on German Christianity was intolerable. It simply is not true, insists Faulhaber, that “a Christianity which still clings to the Old Testament is a Jewish religion, irreconcilable with the spirit of the German people.” 3 “When antagonism to the Jews of the present day is extended to the sacred books of the Old Testament, and Christianity is condemned because it has relations of origin with pre-Christian Judaism,” then, declares Faulhaber, “the bishop cannot remain silent.” 4 The cardinal archbishop, who was also professor of Old Testament Scripture at the University of Strasbourg, asked his congregation to reconsider the significance of Christ’s death for the identity of Israel. For Faulhaber, only the Israel that existed before the crucifixion matters for Christians: Before the death of Christ during the period between the calling of Abraham and the fullness of time, the people of Israel were the vehicle of Divine Revelation. . . . After the death of Christ Israel was dismissed from the service of Revelation. She had not known the time of her visitation. She had repudiated and rejected the Lord’s Anointed, had driven Him out of the city and nailed Him to the Cross. Then the veil of the Temple was rent, and with it the covenant between the Lord and His people.5

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Understood as a symbol of the annulment of God’s covenant with Israel, the rent veil renders the term “Israel” inapplicable to Christians. Only preChristian Judaism, as “the vehicle of Divine Revelation,” has any Christian significance for Faulhaber. As for post-Christian Judaism—implicitly presented as a religion of the Talmud rather than the Old Testament—nothing more need be said. And there is certainly no ongoing Israel in which both Jews and Christians might continue to have a stake. Faulhaber did not intend to attack Judaism or Israel but to defend the validity of the Old Testament as part of the Christian Bible. But in order to preserve the Christian significance of this text, he disconnects it from Judaism. Although “among all the nations of antiquity,” pre-Christian Israel “exhibited the noblest religious values,” it “did not produce those values of itself” but was instead “enlightened” by “the Spirit of the Lord.” The books of the Old Testament, Faulhaber concludes, “were not composed by Jews” but “inspired by the Holy Ghost.” 6 His dispute with anti-Semitic “German Christians,” fueled not by their anti-Semitism but by their disparagement of the Old Testament, highlights the radical difference between guaranteeing the continued existence of Jews and defending the continued Christian validity of the Old Testament: to save the text, some are prepared to sacrifice the people. Hence, Faulhaber does not plead for Christians to stop antagonizing their Jewish neighbors. Instead, he urges that “antagonism to the Jews of to-day must not be extended to the books of pre-Christian Judaism.” 7 The Old Testament can retain a purely Christian significance only when Judaism has been eliminated from it. Once Judaism has been completely displaced from the Christian Bible, what place would Jews have in a Christian nation? Faulhaber’s perspective opens up the ominous possibility of a Christian nation of loyal Germans without Jews: “From the Church’s point of view,” he writes, “there is no objection whatever to racial research and race culture. Nor is there any objection to the endeavor to keep the national characteristics of a people as far as possible pure and unadulterated, and to foster their national spirit by emphasis upon the common ties of blood which unite them.” 8 Perhaps Faulhaber could not see that when spirit becomes blood, communality becomes sameness—and sameness has no tolerance, let alone respect, for difference. When he conceived of Christianity without Judaism, Cardinal Faulhaber reversed the traditional Christian understanding of the enduring significance of Israel as expressed by the apostle Paul. In chapters 9 –11 of his Letter to the Romans, Paul traces the genealogy of what he regards as the true or spiritual Israel, which begins with Abraham and continues down to those Jews of Paul’s own day who, like Paul himself, have become followers

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of Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah. Represented by the patriarchs and prophets who proclaimed Christ’s coming through types and figures, this true Israel is the trunk of an olive tree from which the branches of so-called “hardened” Israel (Jews who do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah) have been broken off and onto which gentile believers in Christ have recently been grafted. Paul proclaims that God’s final purpose will be fulfilled when, in some indefinite future, hardened Israel comes to accept Jesus as the Messiah, and the broken branches are grafted back onto the trunk of the true Israel (Rom. 11:17 –24). Although Faulhaber acknowledges Paul’s confidence in the future conversion of the Jews—“one day, at the end of time, for them too the hour of grace will strike (Rom. xi, 26)”—Israel no longer has any meaning for the interim. Faulhaber has dropped altogether Paul’s metaphor of the engrafting of gentile Christians onto the single trunk of a true Israel continued by Jewish and gentile believers in Jesus as Messiah.9 Most contemporary Christian theologians would reject Faulhaber’s supersessionist account of Christianity’s relation to Judaism. Yet many would probably endorse Paul’s conception of an Israel redefined and expanded to include believing Jews and Gentiles. Just how much of a difference is there, then, between Faulhaber and Paul? Not as much as Christian theologians might like to think, according to a provocative study of Pauline biblical interpretation by the Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin.10 Boyarin highlights Paul’s radical redefinition of the requirements for membership in Israel. Entry into Paul’s Israel requires Jews to continue to read their Scripture but to regard as religiously (and finally, humanly) irrelevant the physical genealogy and embodied practices that formerly identified them as Jews. As Paul himself confidently announced: “In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything: the only thing that counts is faith working through love.” 11 Boyarin does not mention Faulhaber, but any reader of the cardinal’s Advent sermons is bound to ask how Paul’s redefinition of Israel through reinterpreting Israel’s Scripture differs from Faulhaber’s effort to separate the Old Testament from the Jewish people. One may even be led to ask, more ominously, whether Paul’s biblical hermeneutic lays the essential groundwork for Faulhaber’s later willingness to overlook the plight of the people so long as the text is saved. The very plausibility of any such direct line from Paul to Faulhaber should disturb Christians, to say the least. Yet something very much like the Pauline conception of Christian identity as the God-ordained transformative continuation of Israel seems central to classic Christian self-identification. In the pages that follow, I ask whether there is a kind of Christian reading of the Old Testament that might express Christianity’s relation to Ju-

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daism while respecting the independent religious identity of Jews, and, more broadly, the diverse identities of all human beings. I look for the possibility of this kind of biblical interpretation in the writings of Jewish and Christian thinkers, both ancient and modern, who have reflected on the form of traditional Christian biblical interpretation known as “typological” or “figural” reading. Yet, even as I begin to articulate the aim of this book, I immediately begin to beg central questions by using the rubric “Old Testament.” From a point of view that at least some of this book’s readers might find especially congenial, it is only in light of Christian figural reading that the collection of texts placed before the New Testament in the Christian Bible can be called the “Old Testament.” 12 Those sufficiently schooled in postmodernist constructivism will have little difficulty understanding the title “Old Testament” as recording the consequence of a powerful hermeneutical act by which Christians turned the Scriptures of Israel into—as the literary critic Harold Bloom pointedly observes—“their Old Testament.” 13 But this contemporary way of thinking about figural reading, which characterizes it as a regional instance of the more general phenomenon of literary revisionism, does not even begin to reckon with the far odder and more provocative claim that Christian figural readers have traditionally made. Such readers have not regarded the rubric “Old Testament” as a mere consequence of their own acts of interpretation. They would never agree to the charge that they have simply had their own hermeneutical way with the text in order to advance their own ideological ends.14 In their view, what others would call a “construal” of these texts as Old Testament is in fact an “acknowledgment”; their figural reading registers their discernment of the texts’ own prophetic character as both record and enactment of God’s transformative engagement with human beings in history. Although my use of the designation “Old Testament” may be felt by some to presume too much, had I written instead that what Christians have been reading figurally is “Hebrew Scripture,” others would say I had presumed too little. For then I might have been understood to imply that, from the point of view of the Christian figural reader, the text in question, prior to a Christian reading, could be imagined to have been a text whose own character rightly grasped would not have pointed its readers toward Jesus as Messiah.15 This approach would have put me precisely in the theologically uneasy place in which the Gospel of Luke puts the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13 –27). In response to their incapacity to make sense of recent events in Jerusalem (the death of Jesus and the dubious reports of an empty tomb), the stranger they have met on their way (the risen Jesus) chastises them for their failure to grasp the inner trajectory

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of their own Scriptures: “‘O how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:25–27). Elsewhere, Luke gives a specific illustration of just such a proper understanding of the prophets, this time with the apostle Philip in the role of authoritative interpreter. A eunuch from Ethiopia is reading the prophet Isaiah, and Philip, overhearing, asks: “Do you understand what you are reading?” “How can I,” the Ethiopian responds, “unless someone guides me?” Luke continues: Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth” [Isa. 53:7 – 8]. The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. (Acts 8:32 –35)

The prophetic meaning of the Old Testament is thereby presented as discovered rather than imposed. The prophet Isaiah speaks about someone, and it is the figural reader’s task to discover who it might be. I (rather than the author of Luke’s gospel or the prophet Isaiah) just introduced the term “meaning,” a term that will prove to be at least as problematic as the designation “Old Testament,” although perhaps just as inescapable. We are told that the Ethiopian is reading the prophet Isaiah, and Philip asks whether the Ethiopian understands what he reads. Philip does not ask him whether he understands the meaning of a text. As presented in this story, Isaiah is not a text but a prophet, and neither he nor the text that records his prophecy offers a “meaning.” Instead, the prophet speaks about, that is, refers to, a person, either himself or someone else.16 The prophet’s utterance is unquestionably accepted as referential by both Philip and the Ethiopian, and the key interpretative question concerns the proper identification of that referent: there is someone like this lamb, someone to whom justice was denied, someone whose life is taken up from the earth— who is it? The question ultimately concerns the intelligibility of a divine performance: God is doing something by means of an obscure person to whom the prophet refers. Who is this person? What is God doing? The Ethiopian does not raise the sort of question debated by contemporary literary theorists concerned with textual meaning. Such theorists,

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unlike Wittgenstein, do not ask about the intelligibility of an embodied performance, but rather, like Derrida, about the presence or absence of meaning in texts.17 Having once, with the aid of the now-old New Critics, been instructed to disregard a text’s referent in favor of its intrinsic meaning, literary theorists have more recently, with the help of the now-old poststructuralists, learned that even the meaning once thought to be intrinsically present is absent, endlessly distanced and deferred. What often remains unexamined in such purely formalist approaches is the larger point, purpose, or meaningfulness of a literary or hermeneutical practice. I belabor this point a bit because I want to de-privilege at the outset the peculiarly modernist and postmodernist assumptions we contemporary readers are apt to bring to any account of Christian figural reading. Whether we still think naively that texts “have” their meanings, the way capitalists own their property, or—with more sophistication or readerly effort—that textual meaning is forever distanced and deferred—we still instinctively bring to Christian figural reading the assumption that, whatever else it may be about, it must concern texts and meanings. The question about the intelligibility of a divine performance is something we would rather not consider, for the idea that the prophet Isaiah had, in his own right and not only as a consequence of some later reader’s strange interpretation, once referred in some oblique fashion to the person of Jesus who had not yet appeared in history and, in so doing, sought to render intelligible a certain divine performance, is, for most of us, historiographically absurd; it is, in fact, the height of unintelligibility. Yet any effort to understand Christian figural reading as fundamentally a matter of texts and the presence or absence of meaning, rather than a matter of rendering God’s historical performances intelligible, is doomed to theological irrelevance, however much contemporary theoretical sense it might make. Not only does uncritical recourse to modernist and postmodernist conceptions of meaning cause Christian theologians to misunderstand what figural reading is about, it also opens the practice to the charge of supersessionism. This charge, along with its supporting assumptions about meaning, lies at the center of Boyarin’s presentation of Paul as an “allegorical” reader of Scripture. Put simply, Boyarin claims that Paul takes certain words in the Septuagint that have specific, historically and socially determinate meanings (e.g., “circumcision” or “Israel”) and then replaces those meanings with new meanings that are generic and universalizing. Thus “circumcision” no longer denotes an incision on the bodies of Jewish males but rather an inner, spiritual state available to everyone, Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. Similarly, “Israel” no longer signifies a particular

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historical ethnic group but a universal community in which all persons may participate because they are already implicitly members. Boyarin argues that Paul thereby erases the former Jewish meanings of such terms, replacing them with new Christian meanings, and that doing so is the dark hermeneutical heart of Christianity’s supersession of Judaism. In Part One of this book, “Figural Reading and the Body,” I begin an analysis of Boyarin’s criticism of Pauline interpretation by showing how Boyarin’s postmodernist reading usefully makes explicit the kinds of conceptual decisions Christian readers must avoid if figural reading is not to become supersessionist in the way Boyarin describes. My primary goal in the opening chapter is not to defend Paul’s reading of Scripture against Boyarin’s charge of supersession, as though a more authentic or historically accurate depiction of Paul could counter such a vast sociopolitical (and not just hermeneutical) charge. If it is the case that Paul’s biblical hermeneutic is supersessionist in the way Boyarin claims, then so much the worse for Paul. Rather than defend Paul, I accept Boyarin’s poststructuralist construal of Paul’s figural reading as just that—a construal—and then highlight what it is about that construal that allows Paul to succumb so easily to the charge of supersessionism. But in order to do this, I find it helpful to read Paul against the grain of Boyarin’s perspective, in a way that seeks to test the adequacy of his construal of Paul’s hermeneutic as supersessionist. Paul may indeed be supersessionist precisely to the extent that his hermeneutic concerns texts and meanings. But if, on the other hand, Paul is concerned with a divine, transformative performance in history (as my alternative reading suggests), then perhaps, at least with respect to his theological intent, if not to the social-historical consequences of his interpretative performance, Paul emerges as less supersessionist than Boyarin thinks, and thus looks less like Faulhaber than he might initially seem to be. But once again, whether or not Boyarin’s Paul is “the real” Paul, Christian figural readers must avoid Boyarin’s Paul as a hermeneutical model if they wish to escape the kind of supersessionism Boyarin rightly condemns. Whether or not poststructuralism, with its concern for texts and meanings, is a persuasive or rewarding lens through which to understand Paul’s hermeneutical practice, Boyarin’s reading shows us that it is precisely not the lens through which to discern the kind of Christian figural reading that can remain true to its vocation of fashioning Christian identity while simultaneously cherishing human diversity. The Paul that Boyarin presents is hardly new. We have seen him before, above all in the work of nineteenth-century liberal Christian theologians like Ferdinand Christian Baur.18 Boyarin simply highlights the negative

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ethical implications of the universalism of Pauline hermeneutics praised by nineteenth-century idealists. Where they saw the creative dissolution of antiquated difference for the sake of religious innovation, Boyarin sees the erasure of Jewish embodied identity for the sake of a new religion that perversely insists on calling itself Israel. Boyarin labels as “allegorical” the kind of interpretation by which Paul accomplishes all of this. His complaint about allegorical reading is also not new. Within Christianity, the complaint begins at least as early as the fourth-century Antiochene criticism of Alexandrian interpretation and reaches perhaps its highest pitch during the Protestant Reformation, when Protestant exegetes sought in the name of something they called the sensus literalis to distance themselves from the multiple nonliteral senses (tropical, allegorical, and anagogical) of the medieval allegorical tradition. So it is no surprise that Boyarin points out that Paul shares the allegorical hermeneutic of his Hellenistic Jewish contemporary Philo of Alexandria, or that the Pauline-Philonic allegorical tradition is extended by Origen and Augustine. Origen, of course, represents the Alexandrian allegorical hermeneutic at its most developed and influential. And it is well known that Augustine received his formative exposure to allegorical reading from those, like Ambrose of Milan, who were passing along the Philonic-Clementine-Origenist allegorical tradition to the West at just the moment when Augustine was searching for a mode of interpretation that might deliver him (and the Old Testament) from the literalist grip of the Old Testament–hating Manicheans. Boyarin’s overall criticism of Origenist allegorical reading is echoed by many distinguished Christian scholars, although they deem it unacceptable for different reasons. Origenist allegory is unacceptable to Boyarin because it undermines concrete biblical textuality and thereby erases the embodied identity of Jews. It is unacceptable to many Christian theologians simply because it undermines the text—never mind the Jews. Does this seem too uncharitable? We have already heard from Cardinal Faulhaber, but let us listen to the modern Christian Origen scholar Cardinal Jean Daniélou, reacting to a passage from Origen’s homilies on Joshua—bearing in mind that these are not Origen’s remarks but rather the response that a passage of Origen elicited from a modern Christian scholar and theologian writing in 1948: As Christians see it, history is symbolical. . . . But there can be no progress in history without the destruction of what went before. In so far as the old order has an individual existence of its own it must be destroyed, if the new order is ever to come into being. Judaism had to be destroyed before the Church could come into being. The problem of suf-

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fering can be seen emerging even in the Old Testament, as God began to detach his people from the carnal economy they had lived under at first. If man was to reach his full spiritual stature, he would have to make up his mind to leave his childhood behind him. We have just seen how Origen explains this with reference to the unwillingness of the Jews to give up the letter of the Law which had once been their authorized teacher. His picture of the Jews standing before the Wailing Wall is a picture of the human race refusing to let go of its childhood and enter on maturity. Such is the mystery of growth and the renunciation it entails.19

Daniélou’s comment is thoroughly representative of the way Christian theologians can effectively praise Christianity precisely for its supersessionist features. Indeed, like many others, Daniélou links these features to the pivotal moment in the Christian economy of redemption: [Jesus’] death destroyed the figure as such by bringing into being the reality the figure had foreshadowed. The Jews’ hostility to Christ also takes on its full significance when it is considered in this light: it expresses the refusal of the figure to accept destruction. Origen puts it in exceptionally forcible terms. “The figure,” he says, “wants to go on existing, and so it tries to prevent the truth from appearing.” It thus becomes perfectly clear what the enmity of the Jews felt towards Christ really meant: it was the visible embodiment of the refusal of the figure to accept its own dissolution.20

Like Faulhaber, Daniélou seems unperturbed by the sacrifice required to save the text: “Judaism had to be destroyed.” Judaism’s resistance to Christian allegorical reading—its tenacious clinging to “the Letter of the Law” —was simply the “visible embodiment of the refusal of the figure to accept its own dissolution.” Daniélou’s Origen is, of course, virtually the same as Boyarin’s; the difference is that Daniélou admires his Origen for articulating the core of classic Christian belief. To Daniélou, Origen simply represents one particular historical site of a more general, perhaps universal or cosmic, struggle between those who embrace the newness of the Spirit and those who self-defensively insist on clinging to the security of a justly superseded past. I would like to be able to say that this view of Origen is totally false, but it is not. It is, however, disastrously one-sided. There is no question that Origenist allegory does represent a strong commitment to the neverceasing work of a divine Spirit intent on “making all things new.” 21 Part of why Christian theologians who do not wish to be Faulhaberian supersessionists cannot wholly accept Boyarin’s criticism of Paul is that Christian-

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ity does have much to say about newness and transformation, about leaving things behind and struggling for what lies ahead.22 Anxiety about newness and transformation, about the unsettling of rigid hierarchies and comfortable authorities, about calling into question the taken-for-granted securities of an achieved religious identity that turns so closely on the repudiation of various constructed Others—such are the deep and enduring anxieties that have driven so many in the Christian tradition to reject Origen and his allegorical hermeneutic. Yet in doing so, they have failed to read Origen closely enough to see that he has not simply given up on the question of the continuity of individual or communal identity. Likewise, in contrast to the usual view of the matter, being a disciple of the Spirit’s transformative fashioning of identity necessarily made Origen a devotee, not a repudiator, of the body. Origen did not become a rigorous ascetic because he deemed his body to be inessential to his fundamental identity. On the contrary, he understood quite well that the body is the inescapable site of identity—it is exactly where all the important things take place. As the concluding chapter of Part One argues, Origen’s celebration of the allegorical transformation of identity comes about through the body’s genuine, hard-won transformation, rather than its simple rejection. Having established the stark conceptual contrast (and shared ethical fervor) of Boyarin’s condemnation and Origen’s celebration of allegorical reading in the first part of the book, I go on to put Origen into dialogue with two other twentieth-century thinkers who vigorously resist his allegorical hermeneutic—Erich Auerbach, a Jewish philologist of Romance languages, and Hans Frei, a Protestant theologian of Jewish descent. Auerbach shares many of Boyarin’s reservations about Origen. If Boyarin worries that Christian allegorical reading will damage the bodies of those whom the text represents and who continue to appeal to the texts for self-identification, Auerbach worries that allegory will dissolve the text’s “historicity.” In Part Two, “Figural Reading and History,” I examine Auerbach’s account of a kind of Christian figural tradition that he claimed preserved rather than dissolved the text’s historicity. The meaning of historicity, or the historical reality of those things represented by the text, is by no means self-evident. For Auerbach, these terms do not designate the occurrence-character of events—the fact that they “take place.” Rather, by historical reality or historicity, he refers, as does Boyarin, to the concrete, material reality of persons and events in the past. And like so many in the Christian tradition, Auerbach argues that Christian figural reading preserves the reality of these historical figures and events, in contrast to an allegorical reading that

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would annihilate their historicity. He is able to distinguish between figural and allegorical reading, a distinction that Boyarin flatly repudiates, by presenting ancient Christian figural reading without drawing on—indeed, by consciously rejecting—the modernist construction of textual meaning that Boyarin presupposes. As Auerbach understands it, figural reading is a method of discerning the intelligibility of a divine performance in history without relying on a conception of meaning as a concept signified by a textual signifier. The intelligibility of biblical narrative for the figural reader lies in the perception of divinely constructed figural relationships between persons and events in the world, not in the reader’s perception of merely semiotic relations between sensible images and abstract concepts. Like Boyarin, Auerbach presents Origen as the preeminent allegorist who undermines the figural imagination, in this case by dissolving the historical reality of the text’s representations. I take issue with Auerbach’s characterization of Origen’s engagement with history, arguing instead that Origen has as strong an interest in history as does Auerbach. But for Origen, the history that one should worry about preserving is the history of divine interactions with human beings, especially interactions that can continue to take place in the present. Any history worth preserving deals with occurrences that are not simply over and done with but are instead part of a larger performance that is potentially ongoing. As it turns out, this kind of concern for historicity is not so different from Auerbach’s, for he too finds the final import of the past to lie in how it affects present-day readers of the text: preserving historicity means reading in such a way as to allow the text to have an appropriate ethical impact on the present-day reader. Auerbach worries that a de-historicizing reading (i.e., a reading that treats real persons and events as conceptual abstractions) by his contemporaries will foster a relationship with the text that will desensitize readers to their ethical obligations toward fellow human beings, especially Jews. Origen worries that a de-historicizing reading (i.e., a reading that treats past divine actions as unrelated to present divine actions) will desensitize readers to the need for their own ongoing ethical availability for spiritual transformation. Auerbach labels the de-historicizing reading “allegory,” and Origen calls his version “literalism,” but we should not be misled by this largely verbal contrast. By the time the reader reaches the end of Part Two, it should be more difficult to repeat the canard that Origenist allegorical reading is anti-historical. Instead, one should be able to perceive the functional similarity of Origen’s and Auerbach’s common insistence that the history that matters is the history to which the reader relates in ways

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that affect his or her stance toward self and others in the present. For both thinkers, the preservation of historicity, like the protection of the body, is a contemporary ethical imperative. In Part Three, “Figural Reading and Identity,” I consider a third modern proponent of figural reading in relation to the Origen he rejects. And as in the preceding cases, here too I present Origen in a different guise than expected. Drawing on Auerbach’s conception of figura, but rejecting its Hegelian undercurrents even more vigorously than Auerbach did, the Christian theologian Hans Frei develops a conception of figural reading as an extension of what he calls the gospel’s “literal sense.” With this emphasis on literal sense, Frei echoes— even as he tries to distance himself from—some of the shibboleths of the Protestant exegetical tradition and the twentiethcentury tradition of New Criticism. In contrast to Boyarin, but following Auerbach, Frei draws a strong distinction between allegorical and figural reading. Allegorical reading is said to betray and undermine the literal sense, figural reading to honor and extend it. The literal sense is a kind of reading of the New Testament gospels that Frei believes adequately “renders” to readers the identity of Jesus.23 Frei argues that the narrative of Jesus’ identity figurally extended Old Testament narratives as their fitting fulfillment without undermining their own narrative integrity. Frei’s conception of figural reading as an extension of the gospel’s literal sense to the whole of the Christian Bible was, following Karl Barth, framed in such a way as to make Jesus the giver of identity to all others. Hence, figural reading was not designed to supplant Jewish identity by Christian identity (Judaism was not “to be destroyed to make room for the Church”); rather, relationship with Christ was to make possible all other identities, which, in their own unsubstitutable othernesss, would remain utterly distinct from Christ’s own identity. However, the christological hegemony created by this perspective goes largely unexamined and uncriticized by Frei, as was also the case with Karl Barth, and there may be more supersessionist tendencies in the Barth-Frei formulations than either of these theologians recognized.24 Frei criticizes Origen’s allegorical hermeneutic because he believes it does not render but rather undermines the text’s literal sense by constructing meanings that are not intrinsically related to the narratively rendered individual identity of Jesus. For Frei, figural reading properly expounds the intelligibility of the divine performance depicted by Scripture, while Origenist allegory (as Boyarin and Auerbach argue) takes a semiological approach that undermines textual narrative with free-floating, signified meanings. But by placing allegorical reading on a spectrum with typology,

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rather than casting allegory and typology as simple binary oppositions, Frei admits that figural reading is, in effect, a kind of allegorical reading, one properly governed by allegiance to the gospel’s literal sense. Frei thereby opens the door to Origen ever so slightly, to a degree that Auerbach—and certainly Boyarin— do not.25 Leaving the door ajar is wise, for the Origen dismissed by Frei turns out, upon an examination closer than any Frei attempted, to have as much interest in narrative, identity and the literal sense as Frei himself does— although Origen’s interests take a different form, are differently balanced, and are fundamentally oriented to the future rather than to the past. Accordingly, the later chapters in Part Three return to view an Origen that Frei might have read with more theological sympathy, although not (as Frei perhaps recognized?) without some theological risk to his Barthian commitments. I focus particular attention on Origen’s Christology, especially his understanding of the trinitarian relations between Father and Son. Origen is concerned, as is Frei, to work out the precise relation of the Son to the Father in order to understand rightly the Son’s relation to all of his followers. But their christological reflections ultimately go in contrasting directions. Frei aligns Jesus with the Father in order to protect the distinctive identity of Jesus and thereby militate against any conflation of Jesus’ identity with that of his human disciples. Origen stresses Jesus’ knowledge of the Father in order to show just how it is that Jesus can model the divine transformation of his disciples that he himself effects. Frei’s Christology preserves a gap or distance between God and human beings, while Origen’s emphasizes God’s transformative power and presence directly in human lives. This difference is crystallized in how each thinker reflects on the veil Moses wore when speaking to the Israelites after receiving the commandments on Mount Sinai (Exod. 34). To Frei, putting on the veil is what is most significant about this text: the veil represents the enduring distance between God and humanity, between the risen Christ who now “lives to God” and his human disciples, who follow him devotedly, but always at a “distance.” In contrast, Origen’s imagination is captured by Moses’ ability to see God without a veil and by Moses’ transformation in body no less than in spirit by virtue of his direct knowledge of the divine. There is little doubt that Origen shares far more with Frei than the latter was willing to admit. But Frei’s impulse was, we might say, distinctively Athanasian: only a Jesus who remains who he alone really is can save us as we alone really are. Hence, every effort must be made to ensure that Jesus’ identity is never confused with our own—and for Frei that required the repudiation

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of allegory, the defense of the literal sense, and the marginalization of Origen. By contrast, Origen’s concern was, we might say, more Arian (following the recovery of the soteriological aims of Arius and his followers): only a Jesus who himself undergoes spiritual transformation can be a fitting means of our own divine transformation.26 Hence every effort must be made to show our similarity to Jesus. For Origen, that demanded allegorical reading as a mode of the reader’s own spiritual transformation—a transformation in which the literal sense, and hence who and what the reader presently is, must change. For Frei, born a Jew but baptized a Christian, change was a biographical given. The theological challenge was to discern abiding identity, a task he resolutely brought to the understanding of the biblically rendered Jesus rather than to his own biography. For Origen, born into a Christian family but convinced that Christianity required more than birth or baptism could provide, initial Christian identity was given at least a head start by biography. His challenge was to bring about in himself the changes he believed were required to fully realize that identity in his own life. Earlier I said that the aim of this book was to describe an understanding of Christian figural reading that could fashion Christian identity while respecting the identities of others, especially Jews. It would be useful in such a search to be able to specify the conceptual error that Boyarin claims to have found in Paul, Origen, Augustine, and in much of the Christian theological tradition. Although they do not use this terminology, Auerbach and Frei argue, in effect, that the first and fatal misstep was to construe Scripture as a collection of tropes rather than a collection of figures. The contrast between tropes and rhetorical figures received an early and influential statement in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.27 Tropes, said Quintilian, were figures of speech in which words undergo a change in meaning; by contrast, the words in rhetorical figures, although they change their patterns, retain their literal meanings.28 Tropes replace literal meaning with nonliteral meaning, while figures preserve literal meaning in their generation of figurativeness. Origenist allegorical reading, as Boyarin, Auerbach, and Frei criticize it, construes the text as a set of tropes, replacing literal with nonliteral meaning. Although Auerbach and Frei characterize “the literal” in somewhat different ways (Auerbach typically invokes historicity, while Frei refers to the realistic features of certain narratives), both highlight the essentially tropic character of allegorical interpretation. Regarding the text as a collection of tropes, allegorical readers such as Origen (or Boyarin’s Paul) fail to preserve literal meaning, either by “spiriting away” the historical character of the persons and events they interpret or by producing a “free-

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floating meaning pattern” that is no longer intrinsically connected to the literary features of the story. Auerbach and Frei present their formulations of allegorical reading in direct opposition to their presentation of Christian figural reading. Both argue that figural reading preserves and extends the literal meaning of the text.29 Throughout this book, I contrast the term “figural” with the term “figurative.” Figurative interpretation is based on a conception of language as a series of tropes in which nonliteral meanings replace literal meanings; in contrast, figural reading generates a figurativeness that is not nonliteral. I argue that Christian interpretation of the Old Testament, as Auerbach, Frei, and Origen conceive of it, is figural—that is, rather than predicated on an anti-literalism, Scripture’s figurativeness is not nonliteral; its figurative character is an extension rather than obliteration of the literal sense of texts. This seemingly paradoxical conception of figurative meaning that is not nonliteral is the basis for a conception of Christian figural reading that, consistent with a performative rather than semiotic construal of Scripture, might avoid the supersessionist hermeneutic Boyarin rightly deplores.30 Auerbach and Frei mount a strong challenge to the claim that allegorical interpretation and Christianity are fit companions for each other, perhaps even intrinsically related. A weak challenge, one that Boyarin’s analysis rightly reveals to be ineffectual, is to counter charges of nonliterality with claims of literalism. This weak response fails because it simply inverts the operative categories of the relevant binary opposition. Despite their protests, many typologists—as Boyarin insists—are thereby exposed as allegorists in disguise. But Auerbach and Frei firmly reject the idea that the figurativeness of figural language is a matter of something called “nonliteral meaning.” The strong challenge that they construct (and Frei’s is stronger than Auerbach’s), is based on a refusal to use the term “literal” defined as one side of the binary opposition between literal and nonliteral. Only in this way can they then claim that figural language is an extension rather than a supersession of literal language. How do Auerbach and Frei justify the distinction between allegory and typology that Boyarin rejects? The short answer is that they discern within the Christian hermeneutical tradition the opposition that Boyarin effectively finds between Christianity and Judaism.31 Boyarin argues that allegorical reading “is founded on a binary opposition in which the meaning as a disembodied substance exists prior to its incarnation in language—that is, in a dualistic system in which spirit precedes and is primary over body.” He argues that midrash, on the other hand, “seems precisely to refuse that dualism, eschewing the inner-outer, visible-invisible, body-soul dichoto-

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mies of allegorical reading.” 32 That refusal of dualism means that midrash, because it inherently resists the status of literal meaning as the obvious, expected meaning, does not trade on the “diachronic relationship” between the literal and the allegorical.33 Midrash therefore resists at the very outset the binary opposition between the literal and the nonliteral that makes allegorical reading such as Origen’s possible. What Boyarin finds in Jewish midrash, Auerbach discovers in Christian figural interpretation. While the reading Auerbach labels allegorical indeed replaces literal, concrete entities with nonliteral, abstract meanings, Christian figural reading refuses from the outset the dualism that opens up such a contrast between concrete and abstract, literal and nonliteral. Auerbach argues that Christian figural interpretation, in contrast to the allegorical, embraces a tension between figurative and figural meaning. Although the figurative meaning tempts readers in the direction of nonliterality, in the most influential instances of Christian figural interpretation, figural meaning preserves literal meaning. The figurative dimension does not automatically assume a status independent of literal meaning although it always threatens to do so. Frei makes a similar point, and, perhaps not surprisingly, regards midrash as the mode of Jewish interpretation most congruent with Christian figural reading as he understands it. Frei’s use of Auerbach, as well as his own hermeneutical project, involves reconceiving the tension that Auerbach describes between figurative and figural aspects in Christian figural interpretation and intensifying Auerbach’s subordination of the figurative to the figural. Frei accepts much of Auerbach’s description of Christian figural interpretation, but he cannot accept the alternatives that Auerbach’s own account of the history of figura presents. In Auerbach’s account, the figural aspect wins over the figurative, issuing in a secular realism, turning aside the temptation of a figurative, otherworldly, and anti-realistic theism. Frei’s restatement of the tension between these two impulses and his intensification of Auerbach’s subordination of figurative to figural involves an additional purging of the idealism remaining in Auerbach’s own residually Hegelian formulations. In sum, whereas Boyarin comes close to equating Christianity with the allegorical impulse, Auerbach and Frei discern another, countervailing tendency within Christian interpretation, one that aims to respect the integrity of Jewish identity while, at least in Frei’s case, not flinching at Christianity’s provocative claim to be a continuation of Israel. Whether this last claim can ever escape all possible connotations of supersessionism is a difficult but unavoidable question, to which I shall return in conclusion.

Part 1

figural reading and the body

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Chapter 1 Body against Spirit: Daniel Boyarin

According to the apostle Paul, the Christian who circumcises his or her “heart” is an “inward Jew.” Circumcised in the heart rather than the flesh, Christians regard themselves as adopted members of the community of Israel. In his recent provocative study of Paul, Daniel Boyarin argues that Paul’s inclusion of Christians in the community of Israel is fundamentally contradictory, for a Judaism devoid of its most central self-identifying physical practice is simply not Judaism, no matter how often it might call itself the “new” or “true” Israel.1 Paul’s idiosyncratic representation of Israel is a direct consequence of his allegorical reading, which replaces Scripture’s literal account of embodied Jews and their physical practices with nonliteral meanings. Paul’s allegorical reading erases the specific, concrete differences that identify what is being read allegorically, and the loss of actual embodied identity accompanies the erasure of textual specificity. In Boyarin’s estimation, Paul can declare to the Galatian Christians that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile” only because his allegorical reading of Hebrew Scripture has obliterated the literal depictions of the distinctive physical practices that serve to fashion the uniquely embodied identity of Jews. With single-minded intensity, Boyarin thereby sketches out the side of Paul’s thinking in which the apostle records the radical discontinuity between his past life as a Pharisaic Jew and his present life as an apostle of the risen Christ. In this chapter, I examine four key Pauline texts on which Boyarin constructs his claim that Paul’s allegorical reading creates this discontinuity (Rom. 11:16 –24; Gal. 4:22 –31; 2 Cor. 3:7 –18; Rom. 2:29). In each case, I argue that Boyarin’s poststructuralist assumptions lead him to dramatically underrepresent the side of Paul’s thought that expresses the continuity of his new commitment to the risen Jesus with his abiding identity as a Jew. Boyarin’s reliance on poststructuralist conceptions of text and meaning, according to which the Pauline distinction between “letter” (gravmma) and “spirit” (pneu`ma) is cast as an irreconcilable conflict between what is literal and what is nonliteral, obscures Paul’s efforts to preserve his 19

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Jewish identity. By consistently restating Pauline accounts of divine performances in history as claims about meanings in texts, Boyarin transforms complex Pauline formulations of discontinuity amid continuity into mutually canceling binary oppositions.2 Apart from its contestable poststructuralist presuppositions, Boyarin’s self-identified Jewish strategy of reading Paul poses a significant challenge for any Christian interpreter who might wish to suggest that it fails to respond adequately to Paul’s deepest intentions. Any Christian claim that Boyarin has misconstrued Paul’s intention runs the considerable risk of simply repeating Paul’s indictment against his own Jewish contemporaries —that they cannot understand Paul because they refuse to entertain as a real possibility the very conclusion that his argument advances. In the counterreadings I offer in order to highlight the presuppositions of Boyarin’s reading, I point out ways in which Boyarin’s approach to Paul does systematically deny one possible conclusion to Paul’s argument. As a consequence, by reading Paul at his theoretically most accessible, Boyarin fails to read him at his theologically strongest.3 But whatever the shortcomings of Boyarin’s characterization of Pauline figural reading as an account of Paul’s hermeneutical intention, my primary goal in what follows is, not to defend Paul against Boyarin’s criticisms, but to delineate, precisely for the purpose of avoiding, the kind of figural reading that is the rightful object of Boyarin’s critique. This kind of reading should be avoided not only because it has been and continues to be practically pernicious but also because it is deficient from a Christian theological point of view. Boyarin’s attack on Pauline allegorical reading is important for Christian theology because it exposes precisely the assumptions about textual meaning that Christians must avoid if they are to be true to their vocation of fashioning their religious identity while respecting human diversity, including the independent integrity of Jewish identity. If Christian theological reading of the Bible is not to trade on or foster the kind of obliteration of human diversity that Boyarin describes, there must be some important respect in which either Paul’s biblical hermeneutic, or Boyarin’s characterization of it, is wrong.

israel as signifier: romans 11 : 16 – 24 Christians often point to Rom. 9 –11 as the place where Paul most directly confronts the tensions and paradoxes produced by his insistence that, as a follower of the risen Jesus, he nonetheless remains a faithful member of Israel. These chapters depict a mysterious coalescence of continuity and discontinuity that lies hidden in God’s unanticipated transformation of Israel

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through the inclusion of believing gentiles. But Boyarin treats Paul’s descriptions in Romans of God’s transformative action in human history as manifestations of Paul’s own interpretative practice, which replaces concrete textual signifiers with immaterial meanings. Rather than pondering God’s mysterious dealings with the embodied community of Israel, Paul, according to Boyarin, is preoccupied in these chapters with discerning the meaning of “Israel” as a textual signifier. Boyarin’s semiological approach leaves Paul the believer in Jesus as Messiah with a stark choice: either he must become an ever more “radical Jew” or else he must become a Christian whose new Christian identity is fundamentally unrelated to his former Jewish identity. Paul cannot have it both ways at once, and his continued claim to membership in “Israel” is disingenuous because, although he keeps the name, he replaces the specific community properly denoted by that name with a universal, generically human community. Boyarin’s reading denies to Paul the possibility that God has expanded Israel by including gentiles in a way that preserves the continuity of that community’s identity with the Israel made up of Jews who practiced Jewish law without belief in the messiahship of Jesus. That God has done so is, however, precisely Paul’s claim. Boyarin quotes Paul’s metaphorical discussion of Israel’s identity in Rom. 11:16 –24: [16] If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is the whole lump, and if the root is holy so are the branches. [17] But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, [18] do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. . . . [24] For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these branches be grafted back into their own olive tree.4

According to Boyarin’s summary of Paul’s argument, Jews who do not acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah are branches that have been cut off (for the foreseeable future) from the trunk of the cultivated olive tree of Israel. Those remaining in the trunk who acknowledge Jesus’ messiahship become Jewish Christians, and they are then joined by the “wild olive branches” of gentiles, who, upon accepting Jesus as the Messiah, are “grafted into” the trunk. Embracing (a few) Jewish Christians and (many) gentile Christians, that trunk of Israel is defined not by “the flesh” (the bodily practices of Jewish law) but by the Spirit (the free gift of grace). Boyarin grants that by means of this argument, Paul has avoided a crude form of supersessionism—the claim that God has simply cut off the Jews from the olive tree of

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salvation, leaving behind only gentile Christians. But he finds in Paul’s own position another, even more insidious, form of supersessionism, based on Paul’s allegorical interpretation of the signifier “Israel.” Boyarin asserts that the continuity represented in Paul’s argument by the “trunk” of Israel, as it passes from carnal to spiritual Israel while nonetheless preserving its identity as Israel, is constituted by Jewish Christians: “Ultimately, what we must remember as we read these verses, clearly intended as a stirring call to gentile Christians not to despise Jews, is that the Jewish root which supports them has been continued solely in the Jewish Christians.” 5 But with the phrase “Jewish root,” Boyarin begs the question whether the root should be identified with the term “Jewish” or the term “Israel.” For Paul, the trunk is Israel, yet an Israel that has never existed apart from Christ. “Jewish Christians” are precisely those branches that are not lopped off at all; they remain attached to the trunk because they are (and have always been) the trunk’s natural outgrowth. In this respect, Abraham must be regarded as a “Jewish Christian” no less than Paul himself. Gentiles who accept Christ are grafted in, as will be those Jews, previously lopped off, who also come to accept Christ. But to Boyarin, this entire line of argument simply shows that Paul has given the signifier “Israel” a new meaning. Instead of denoting the historical, fleshly descendants of Abraham, Israel now means “Christians.” Christians may retain the term “Israel,” but by giving it a new, allegorical meaning referring to themselves, they thereby set aside (“cut off”) the historical, physical community of Jews. Consequently, Paul’s interpretation, which paradoxically excludes Jews through the inclusion of gentiles, is supersessionist despite itself: 6 “We thus see the peculiar logic of supersession at work here. Because Israel has not been superseded, therefore most Jews have been superseded [ . . . . ] The issue is not whether ethnic Jews have been displaced from significance within the Christian community but whether a community of faith ( ⫽ grace) has replaced a community of flesh ( ⫽ genealogy and circumcision) as Israel.” 7 The emphasis in the last sentence of this passage falls on the concluding phrase, “as Israel,” for Paul’s critical move, according to Boyarin, is to separate Israel from fleshly genealogy. One should not misread Boyarin at this point. He has no quarrel with a Pauline Christian community that deems Jewish ethnic identity irrelevant to Christianity, for that would simply mean that Paul had created a new religion. But he does object when Paul calls his new community of faith and grace Israel, for Israel can only be a specific historical community of flesh and blood. Boyarin acknowledges that Paul himself would claim that “Israel has not been

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superseded,” but nonetheless “because Israel has not been superseded, therefore most Jews have been superseded.” Boyarin’s reading of Paul demands a choice that Paul himself refuses to make: Israel is either a community of physical genealogy or a community of faith. The issue is not whether the two communities are different but whether the first has been replaced by the second. What makes this a replacement in Boyarin’s view is Paul’s insistence that the true referent of Israel has remained the same: it is the single community elected by God from among the Israelites, continued by those Jews (like Paul himself) who believe that Jesus is the Messiah and expanded by God through the subsequent “grafting in” of gentiles who also embrace this messianic faith. Boyarin’s remark that Paul’s supersessionist logic leaves “most” Jews superseded is curious and worth pondering further. Just who are those (few) Jews who have not been superseded—and why haven’t they been? Those few must be Jews who, like Paul, profess faith in Jesus as Messiah, but who, unlike Paul, continue to practice Jewish law and claim membership in the fleshly family of Abraham. Paul himself could not be among this unsuperseded group, for in defining Christian faith apart from the observation of Jewish law, Paul has, in effect, stepped out of his own skin and superseded himself. Jews who become Pauline Christians, Boyarin implicitly argues, thereby abandon membership in the Israel of flesh while continuing to claim membership in Israel. Jews who become Christians but continue to practice Jewish law, on the other hand, cannot be said to have been superseded by Christianity: either they have given up their Jewish identity or they have never left it. Boyarin’s conception of Paul’s “peculiar logic of supersession” structurally blocks any possibility that Jewish identity and Pauline Christian identity could display the continuity implied by Paul’s provocative use of the term “Israel.” In sum, Boyarin’s characterization of Paul’s allegorical reading of the signifier “Israel” simply excludes the possibility that Paul as a Jew was radically transformed into a Christian as a fulfillment rather than repudiation of his Jewish identity. In contrast to Boyarin’s interpretation, many Christians believe that the heart of Paul’s argument in Rom. 9 –11 lies precisely in the transformation of Israel through the conversion of Jews and gentiles to Jesus as the Messiah, perhaps most clearly evident in Rom. 11:23, which Boyarin does not quote: “And even the others, if they do not persist in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again.” What, then, replaces transformation as the key to Paul’s understanding of Israel, according to Boyarin? Boyarin’s reading recasts Paul’s account of what transpired

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between God and Israel (transformation) into a manifestation of what transpires between Paul and the text that he is reading allegorically (replacement). Boyarin initiates this reading by taking Paul’s passive voice constructions denoting God’s agency and regarding them as Paul’s active voice accounts of his own allegorical reading practice. In Rom. 11:16 –24, for example, Paul writes of branches that “were broken off,” of wild shoots that “were grafted in,” and of broken branches that “will be grafted back.” But in Boyarin’s reading, these passive constructions denoting divine agency become evidence of Paul’s own allegorical effacement of the text’s concrete elements. Instead of describing Jews who, through God’s mysterious transformative agency, become Christians, Boyarin’s Paul first turns ancient Israelites into a signifier (“Israel”) and then replaces one meaning of that signifier with another. Paul’s attitude toward the textual signifier “Israel” both reflects and enacts his attitude toward the Jewish people: Precisely because the signifier Israel is and remains central for Paul, it has been transformed in its signification into another meaning, an allegory for which the referent is the new community of the faithful Christians, including both those faithful Jews (as a privileged part) and the faithful gentiles but excluding the Jews who do not accept Christ. . . . the historical understanding of Israel has been entirely superseded in the new, allegorical interpretation.8

Although Boyarin declares that Paul’s defense of Jewish Christianity is against “one version of supersessionism,” he insists that “from a Jewish perspective, his theology is nevertheless supersessionist.” 9 On Boyarin’s reading, then, Jewish Christianity can never assume the form of a physical, historical community. This possibility is effectively removed when Boyarin interprets Paul’s account of God’s interaction with the embodied community of Israel as the result of Paul’s interpretation of a signifier.

promise as meaning: galatians 4 : 22 – 31 Boyarin’s strategy of recasting accounts of divine performance into language about textual meaning also governs his analysis of Paul’s understanding of Sarah and Hagar in Gal. 4:22 –31. Here, in a passage that not only is “the climax of the entire argument and preaching of the letter,” 10 but “the hermeneutical key to Paul,” 11 the apostle “exposes the interpretative means by which erasure of difference is to be accomplished.” 12 In this case, erasure centers around “promise” rather than “Israel.” While “promise” might describe the pledge of an agent to perform a future action, in Bo-

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yarin’s reading, it becomes a term used to denote the abstract meaning of a textual signifier. Boyarin translates the relevant passage as follows: [22] For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one from the slave woman and one from the free woman. [23] The one from the slave woman was born “according to the flesh,” however, while the one from the free woman “through the promise.” [24] These things have an allegorical meaning. For they are two covenants: one from Mt. Sinai, giving birth into slavery—this is Hagar. [25] Now Hagar is Mt. Sinai in Arabia, but it also corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she lives in slavery together with her children. [26] By contrast, the Jerusalem above is free—this is our mother. [27] For it is written, “Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear: break forth and shout, you who are not in travail; for the children of the desolate one are more than the children of the one who has a husband.” [28] But you, my brothers, are children of promise, like Isaac. [29] And just as in those days the one born “according to [the] flesh” persecuted the one “according to [the] spirit,” so it is today.13

Central to Boyarin’s reading of this passage is his claim that “‘according to the promise’ (v. 23) is equivalent to ‘according to the spirit’” (v. 29).14 By itself, this claim simply draws attention to the parallel structure of the two verses. But Boyarin highlights their equivalence because of an interpretation he has already established for the phrase “according to the spirit”: “Since . . . ‘according to the spirit’ is equivalent to the allegorical meaning of the physical sign, it follows that being born according to the spirit is the true meaning of descent from Abraham, of which being born according to the flesh is only the signifier.” 15 Indeed, Boyarin slips the word “meaning” into his translation, rendering Paul’s phrase “These things are said allegorically” (a{tinav ejstin ajllevgorouvmena) in verse 24 as “these things have an allegorical meaning.” The logic of the resulting interpretation can be summarized as follows: 1. “Through the promise” is the same as “according to [the] spirit.” 2. “According to [the] spirit” is the same as the allegorical meaning of a physical sign. 3. The physical sign (“descent from Abraham”) is physical genealogy; the allegorical meaning of the sign is spiritual genealogy. 4. Therefore, the true meaning of physical genealogy is spiritual genealogy. Once cast as the equivalent of “allegorical meaning,” Paul’s phrase “according to the spirit” becomes the key by which the performative category of

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promise is turned into the semiotic category of meaning—“the allegorical meaning of the physical sign.” This shift has the rather momentous consequence of ensuring that, whatever Paul might wish to achieve by using the signifier “promise,” what he cannot seriously intend is the one thing to which we ordinarily take that word to refer—the present act by which an agent pledges to perform a future act. So God is not pledging to transform Israel; indeed, “promise” is simply the allegorical meaning of the signifier “descent from Abraham.” Although Paul’s allegorical reading of “promise” is, writes Boyarin, “precipitated” by the “historical event” of Christ’s coming, crucifixion, and resurrection, that “historical event is itself not history but an event that signifies the end—telos, both the finish and the revelation of the meaning— of history.” 16 Of course, an event that “is not history” is not an event in any ordinary sense of the word, and any event that does not happen but only signifies is not an event at all but just a signifier. Boyarin’s formulation is significant, not because it eviscerates the “historical eventness” of Christ’s career, but because it obliterates the notion of the arrival of Christ as the fulfillment of a promise by characterizing the occurrence of that arrival solely on the basis of an assessment of what it brings about, understood as its meaning or significance. But to reduce a promise to what I today can discern about its meaning, rather than understanding it as the active pledge to bring about something I said I would do, is not to speak of a promise as promise at all. It is useful for Boyarin’s larger argument that Paul not really be referring to the performance of a promise, especially one once made to Abraham and now fulfilled in those who, although in some cases Abraham’s physical heirs, discover their more fundamental genealogy to lie in their common allegiance to Jesus as Messiah. For seriously to entertain the category of promise as a divine performance would be to reintroduce a notion of Israel, recipient of that promise, as the category of continuity that enables a Jewish conversion to Christianity without a capitulation of identity as Israel. The continuity of Israel as Paul imagines it is directly related to the category of a fulfilled promise and to the singular and self-identical God who makes such a promise. It is evident, then, that Boyarin’s transformation of promise into meaning is fully compatible with his transformation of conversion into allegorical interpretation. For if conversion pointed to the possibility of the continuing self-identity of the Jew who became a Christian, fulfillment of a divine promise suggests the persistence of a single covenantal relation between God and Israel. Boyarin’s reading of Paul as allegorical supersessionist can accommodate neither of these notions, ex-

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cept insofar as they have been transformed from matters of human and divine interaction into matters of textual meaning. Boyarin’s exegesis of these passages from Romans and Galatians demonstrates that Paul’s performative categories can indeed be read semiotically with surprising consistency. Whether Paul himself intended them to be taken that way seems to me unlikely. Independent of Paul’s intention, though, is the question of whether Christian theology should pursue such an interpretation. The opposition of genealogy to promise may not exhaust Paul’s options if he desires to reinterpret rather than repudiate genealogy (assuming, for the moment, that reinterpretation without repudiation is a possibility). To claim, as Boyarin does, that Paul’s conception of Israel is a repudiation of a genealogy of ethnicity as a salient feature of Christian selfidentification repeats Paul’s unconventional characterization of Israel. To say further that this characterization is a repudiation of genealogy altogether begs a question that Christian theologians must address if they wish to continue to embrace Paul’s understanding of Israel without equivocation.

unveiled faces and lost identities: 2 corinthians 3 : 7 – 18 Paul offers some reflections on his own self-understanding as an interpreter of Scripture in 2 Cor. 3:7 –18. Analyzing this passage, Boyarin once again recasts representations of divine performance into language about meaning-producing acts of interpretation. In particular, Boyarin recasts Paul’s category of the tevlo~ of the law as the overriding intention informing a transformative divine action into tevlo~ as the law’s “true meaning.” I begin this discussion with the Exodus account of Moses receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai: [A]s Moses came down from the mountain bearing the two tablets of the Pact, Moses was not aware that the skin of his face was radiant, since he had spoken with Him. [30] Aaron and all the Israelites saw that the skin of Moses’ face was radiant; and they shrank from coming near him. [31] But Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the chieftains in the assembly returned to him, and Moses spoke to them. [32] Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he instructed them concerning all that the Lord had imparted to him on Mount Sinai. [33] And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face. [34] Whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with Him, he would leave the veil off until he came out; and when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, [35] the Israelites

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would see how radiant the skin of Moses’ face was. Moses would then put the veil back over his face until he went in to speak with Him.17

Boyarin translates Paul’s reflections on this passage as follows: [7] Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letter on stone, took place with such glory that the Israelites could not bear to gaze at Moses’s face, even though it was fading, [8] will not the ministry of the Spirit be with greater glory? [9] For if there is glory with the ministry of condemnation, how much more does the ministry of righteousness abound with glory. [10] Indeed, what has had glory has not had glory, in this case, because of the glory which so far surpasses it. [11] For if what was fading (to; katargouvmenon) was with such glory, how much more the glory of that which endures! [12] Having, therefore, such a hope, we act with much boldness, [13] and not like Moses when he used to put a veil over his face so the Israelites could not gaze at the end ( ⫽ true meaning) of what was fading (katargoumevnou). [14] But their minds were hardened. Right up to the present day that same veil remains at the public reading of the old covenant—unlifted, because it is in Christ that it is fading (katargei`tai). [15] Indeed, to the present, whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. [16] Whenever anyone turns to the Lord the veil is removed. [17] Now “the Lord” is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, is freedom. [18] And we all, with unveiled face, beholding (as in a mirror) the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image, from glory to glory, as from the Lord, the Spirit.18

According to Boyarin’s translation, Paul writes that Moses put the veil over his face so that the Israelites could not gaze at “the end” or “true meaning” of “what was fading” (in his parenthetical gloss to verse 13, Boyarin once again inserts the word “meaning” where Paul’s Greek does not require it). He contends that “what was fading” was the lesser glory of the Old Testament, and that it was fading because of the greater glory of the Spirit (which is Christ), which Paul regards as the true meaning of the Old Testament. Boyarin’s decision to translate tevlo~ as “the end” and to regard that word as indicating a “true meaning” lies at the heart of his semiological construal of this passage (having first inserted “meaning” parenthetically as a gloss in his translation, Boyarin fully embraces it in his subsequent interpretation). His decision to translate katargoumevnou as “what was fading” links semiology to supersessionism: when the true meaning of what was fading appears, what was fading is then fully replaced. Hence Boyarin’s commentary on Moses’ veil provides an especially good illustration of the way Pauline “meaning” opposes and successfully undermines that of which it is the meaning. Indeed, Boyarin underscores the oppositional

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character of the Pauline passage at the very outset of his discussion: “A key support for the hermeneutical nature—that is, its essential life as a response to the problem of language and interpretation— of Paul’s binary opposition is the places where Paul draws a contrast between ‘spiritual’ (ejn pneuvmati) and ‘literal’ (ejn gravmmati).” 19 In addition to his translations of tevlo~ and katargoumevnou, Boyarin makes some further hermeneutical decisions that intensify the oppositional character of Paul’s reading of the Exodus story. He identifies the veil with “the letter itself,” and he insists (in a mid-sentence correction) that the veil does not become transparent but is removed. Taken together with the translations of tevlo~ and katargoumevnou, these interpretative decisions make it clear that when Paul says that Moses takes off the veil, he means that the text of the Old Testament is being superseded, and when he says that Moses puts the veil back on, he means that Moses is sheltering the Israelites from the greater glory of the very Spirit (Christ) by which that text is being superseded. In short, the story of Moses and his veil provides a concrete illustration of the deadly letter giving way to the lifegiving Spirit, just as 2 Cor. 3:6 suggests that it should. The nuances of Boyarin’s self-identified Jewish reading of the entire second Corinthians passage can be further explicated by considering closely the Christian reading Boyarin finds most engaging, that offered by the New Testament scholar Richard B. Hays in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul.20 At the root of their divergent approaches to Paul’s argument in 2 Corinthians are very different notions about Paul’s use of the idea of incarnation. As we have already seen, Boyarin thinks that the idea of Christian incarnation both presupposes and fails to overcome the strictly dualistic, Platonic categories out of which it is constructed: “The very notion of language as abstract and disembodied—that is, the very notion of the necessity for the word to become flesh, as it were—is already, in itself, an allegorical conception of language, paralleling the platonistic notions of noncorporeal Godhead which the Incarnation presupposes.” 21 In contrast, Hays argues that Pauline incarnation is not about spiritual meaning becoming incarnated in the body of a text, but about the Spirit becoming embodied in the human beings who comprise the new Christian community. Incarnation is a hermeneutical category for Boyarin, an ecclesiological category for Hays. “In the new covenant,” declares Hays, “incarnation eclipses inscription,” elaborating as follows: By incarnation I mean not the incarnation of the divine Son of God as a human being, but the enfleshment of the message of Jesus Christ in the community of Paul’s brothers and sisters at Corinth. . . . In this escha-

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tological community of the new covenant, scribes and professors will be useless, because texts will no longer be needful. Scripture will have become a “self-consuming artifact”; the power of the word will have subsumed itself into the life of the community, embodied itself without remainder.22

Boyarin acknowledges the way Hays’s perspective reverses standard assumptions about the sharp contrast between spirit and letter in Paul’s thought, and in the Christian tradition more broadly conceived.23 He quotes a passage from Hays that highlights Paul’s radical inversion of the expected contrast of spirit against letter: Thus, the Christian tradition’s reading of the letter-spirit dichotomy as an antithesis between the outward and the inward, the manifest and the latent, the body and the soul, turns out to be a dramatic misreading, indeed a complete inversion. For Paul, the Spirit is—scandalously— identified precisely with the outward and palpable, the particular human community of the new covenant, putatively transformed by God’s power so as to make Christ’s message visible to all. The script, however, remains abstract and dead because it is not embodied.24

To this celebratory conclusion, though, Boyarin offers the following acidic response: “This formulation, however, discounts one very important fact: The script had not remained abstract and dead, because it was already embodied in the living practice of Jewish communities.” 25 Since Boyarin rightly observes that Hays’s conclusion seems to fly in the face of historical reality, perhaps Hays is making a different sort of claim.26 In order to make sense of Hays’s remark about the script not being embodied, we may need to think along the following lines. Hays seems to say that for Paul, the Jewish embodiment of the script (i.e., Jewish enactment of the prescriptions of the Torah), however much Jews think of themselves as thereby embodying the script, is not really an embodiment of the script at all. In other words, Paul is arguing that there are two competing embodiments of the script, each purporting to be the one that God intends. Paul endorses his community’s embodiment by associating it with the term “Spirit.” So perhaps Hays’s formulation does not simply fly in the face of the obviously continuing existence of the embodied Jewish community that enacts the script in living practice. Rather, Hays presents Paul as rejecting that community’s claim actually to have embodied the script in that particular set of practices. Indeed, Paul deems the principal practice of that community— circumcision—as especially irrelevant to appropriate embodiment of the script.

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But from Boyarin’s point of view, Paul cannot plausibly speak of embodying the script once the script (letter) has been replaced by the spirit. Boyarin offers a lengthy set of conclusions. First, he argues that “the very ministry chiseled in stone signifies and is replaced in history by the ministry of the Spirit, which has been revealed in the New Covenant, which is not, of course, for Paul a text, a gravmma, but it is an interpretation of a text.” 27 Based on the insertion into Paul’s thought of the category of “interpretation,” Boyarin’s suggestion that Paul’s new covenant is not a gravmma or text but “an interpretation of a text” begs a key question. While it is true that Hays argues that the Pauline new covenant is not a text but the activity of the Spirit in forming a community, it seems odd to construe community formation as “an interpretation of a text.” There is no need to replace an action with an interpretation, even though Paul, like other Christians, was quick to discern in the text of the Bible descriptions of just such divine, community-forming activity. But, as already noted, Boyarin consistently replaces performative with semiotic categories, as he does here in displacing an activity with a meaning. Boyarin continues: When Paul refers to the Old Covenant, he means both the historical covenant with the Jews and also their text. He thus implies avant la lettre, as it were, predicts or enacts the coming into being of the New Testament, and the relation of these two is figured as that of “letter which kills” to the “Spirit which gives life.” Thus, the move of the modern readers of Paul, such as Hays, who deny the allegorical and supersessionist movement of Paul’s text is ultimately not convincing. The supersessionism cannot be denied, because there already and still was an enfleshed community living out the “Old” Covenant. It certainly had not remained an affair of mere words on stone.28

When Boyarin insists that the old covenant has “not remained an affair of mere words on stone,” but is found in “an enfleshed community” living it out through practice, he rightly resists any Faulhaberian effort to play off text against people. It simply is not the case that when one looks at the communities of Jews and Christians, one sees texts on the one hand and groups of people on the other; instead, one finds different peoples with their texts. Boyarin’s criticism of Hays shows, then, that Christians cannot simply invoke the category of incarnation to distinguish Christians from Jews. Boyarin then makes an additional point: “Since the glory of the spirit hidden within the text is what Moses’ veil conceals, and that hidden glory is the life of the Christian community, the Pauline structure is profoundly allegorical after all. He cannot mean, of course, that the text of the Torah

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has been abolished, so, therefore, he must mean that the literal meaning is what will be abolished.” 29 Once again, Boyarin builds into his paraphrase of Paul at least some of the allegorical dualism he purports to find there. Here he does so with the spatial phrase “hidden within”: a spirit hidden within the text, like a kernel in its husk, is clearly not intrinsically related to that text. Likewise, to call the “glory” of that spirit “the life of the Christian community” already presupposes that it is not the life of the pre-Christian Israelite community, even though Paul asserts that Moses and the Israelites see that glory, and Moses himself is transformed by it. Finally, Boyarin offers a third dualism, forcing a choice between the literal text or the literal meaning. Aside from the question of what it means to “abolish” a meaning (besides no longer entertaining it), this opposition hides its status as a theoretical assumption on Boyarin’s part— or rather, nearly hides it, since the rhetorical structure “he cannot mean x, so, therefore, he must mean y” already displays the constraint of a binary opposition. The heart of Boyarin’s own claim lies in the next lines: A hermeneutic theory such as Paul’s, by which the literal Israel, literal history, literal circumcision, and literal genealogy are superseded by their allegorical, spiritual signifieds is not necessarily anti-Semitic or even anti-Judaic. From the perspective of the first century, the contest between a Pauline allegorical Israel and a rabbinic hermeneutics of the concrete Israel is simply a legitimate cultural, hermeneutical, and political contestation. The denotation of “Israel” was to a certain extent up for grabs.30

It is important to see how this formulation differs from Hays’s notion of two communities each claiming to “embody the script” in their practices. Rather than speaking of two communities, each claiming to be Israel, Boyarin speaks of two “denotations” of Israel. This subtle difference between the sociohistorical location of Israel and the allegorical meaning of Israel once again reflects the semiological slant of Boyarin’s reading. Supersession occurs when meanings are preferred over texts, history, and embodied persons. Boyarin’s construal of Paul’s language always leaves one with an absolute contrast between texts, history, and bodies on the one side and abstract meanings on the other. His semiological perspective undermines from the outset the possibility of two embodied communities with their own, partially shared sets of texts and histories, along with their sets of meanings for them. Boyarin’s semiological approach can be clarified further by looking more closely at some of the nuances of Hays’s interpretation. Boyarin finds Hays

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an especially rewarding debating partner because Hays shares a binary opposition with him—although they defend the opposing sides of it. Boyarin defends the text against the assaults of the Spirit, while Hays celebrates the Spirit against the constraints of the text. The heart of Hays’s interpretation is found in his account of Paul’s transformation of the image of Moses, from a metaphor for a person whose understanding of Scripture is veiled, into a metaphor for the enlightened Christian reader of the text. 2 Cor. 3:12 and 13 present Moses as a metaphor for the unenlightened person: “[12] Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, [13] not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the tevlo~ of that which was transitory.” Then Paul begins to transform Moses, first fusing together in verse 14 Moses as metaphor of the veiled reader and Moses as metaphor for the text that the veiled reader cannot understand: “But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away.” By verse 15, the transformation from person to text is complete. “Moses” now refers to the Pentateuch: “Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds.” Then, suddenly, in verse 16, the metaphor reverses again, and Paul returns to Moses as a reader—but this time Moses is a metaphor for the Christian reader: “but when a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed.” Observing that verse 16 is a free quotation of Exod. 34:34: “But whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he removed the veil [until he went out],” Hays argues that Paul’s restatement of this verse results in a startling reversal: Exodus 34 is troped: no longer is it only an account of Moses’ evasiveness and Israel’s timid incomprehension. Suddenly the story has become a parable of grace, promising that Moses’ turning and unveiling to see the glory of God can be read as a prefiguration of the truth to which the gospel also points. The rhetorical effect of 2 Cor. 3:16 is exquisite because it enacts an unveiling commensurate with the unveiling of which it speaks. The text performs its trope in the reader no less than in the story. And— the final elegant touch—the trope is performed precisely through a citation of Moses.31

Hays argues that this unveiling symbolically encompasses the hermeneutical transformation that occurs in readers of Paul’s letter. This transformation is, however, a divine act of grace, rather than an independent hermeneutical achievement on the reader’s part.32 Unlike Boyarin’s notion of meaning as abstract signified or concept, Hays’s notion of the “meaning” of Scripture is finally performative: “Paul finds the real subject matter of

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Scripture to be God’s gracious action of gathering a redeemed people”; “The meaning of Scripture is enacted in the Christian community, and only those who participate in the enactment can understand the text. Consequently, the transformation of the community is not only the presupposition but also the result and proof of true interpretation.” 33 Hays offers the following summary of 2 Cor. 3:12 –18: The veil on Moses’ face hid from Israel the glory of God, which Moses beheld at Sinai, a glory that transfigured him. Israel could not bear looking at the transfigured person and concentrated instead on the script that he gave them. That text, too, bears witness (in a more indirect or filtered manner) to the glory, to the person transfigured in the image of God, who is the true aim of the old covenant. For those who are fixated on the text as an end in itself, however, the text remains veiled. But those who turn to the Lord are enabled to see through the text to its telos, its true aim. For them, the veil is removed, so that they, like Moses, are transfigured by the glory of God into the image of Jesus Christ, to whom Moses and the Law had always, in veiled fashion, pointed.34

By virtue of its focus on the power of the spirit to transform the community, Hays’s interpretation highlights Boyarin’s poststructuralist accent on Paul’s spiritual (i.e., allegorical) displacement of Jewish blindness by Christian insight. There are, however, a number of difficulties with Hays’s reading that reveal the dualistic assumptions he shares with Boyarin. If Boyarin makes too much of categories such as signifieds and signifiers, Hays makes too much of the contrast between writing and nonwriting. It is not quite the case, as Hays suggests at first, that the veil ever “hid from Israel the glory of God.” On the contrary, the Israelites shrink away from the glory precisely because they see it (Exod. 34:30), and when Moses calls to them, they come close anyway (Exod. 34:32). Only then does Moses put on the veil. He takes the veil off when he goes to talk with the Lord, and he puts it on after the Israelites see how radiant his face is (Exod. 34:35). So it would be less misleading to say that, according to the Exodus account, Moses puts the veil on, not to hide God’s glory from the Israelites, but to protect them from its full or sustained impact, which is, in effect, what Hays suggests in his second sentence when he says that Israel “could not bear looking” at the glorified Moses. Although Hays is right to say Israel could not bear looking at the glory of Moses’ face—at least not for long—when he adds that they turned to the text instead, he goes beyond what either Exodus or Paul says. Hays

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makes this remark in order to fill in a logical gap between 2 Cor. 3:13 and 3:14, between Moses as the person who sees God’s glory (v. 13) and the Israelites as readers of Moses-as-text (vs. 14). Hays’s use of “instead” produces the claim that when Israelites turn to the text of the Old Testament rather than to Moses, they are deliberately choosing to look at a text rather than at a transfigured person. But there is no warrant for this in Paul, who never says that the Israelites prefer a text authored by Moses over Moses the person. Yet this idea is absolutely central to Hays’s basic thesis that inscription is eclipsed by incarnation. Those who prefer texts to persons make the text, properly valued only as a means to an end, into an end in itself. Here, I suggest, Hays lets his own belief that the work of the Spirit is superior to mere texts overdetermine his reading of Paul, much as we have seen Boyarin allow the opposite assumption to govern his reading. There is, finally, an important notion in Paul’s text that Hays and Boyarin disregard because it works against both sides of the binary opposition they share: Paul’s claim that the Corinthian community is a letter inscribed by the Spirit on the heart (2 Cor. 3:3). Clearly, inscription is not necessarily a negative metaphor in Paul’s thought, despite his statement that the gravmma kills while the pneu`ma gives life. For here Paul also insists that the Spirit can give life only by means of its “inscription.” Gravmma literally means “that which has been inscribed,” and Paul says that the hearts of the Corinthian Christians have “been inscribed.” Consequently, the heart is itself a gravmma. Contrary to what Boyarin and Hays both suggest, this metaphor does not force a choice between anthropology (Paul is really just concerned about human hearts) or textuality (Paul is really just concerned about writing). The important Pauline distinction lies not in the contrast of inscription versus inspiration, but rather in whether or not the inscription has been by means of God’s Spirit and whether or not the human heart has been inscribed. With regard to these central questions, the issue of writing as such (on which Hays focuses) is no more pertinent than the question of anything else as such, that is, independently of the Spirit’s transformation of the human heart. Paul’s underlying questions are, after all, religiously central. Is this community fashioned by God or not? Is that fashioning merely theoretical, or is it intrinsic to the deepest identity of the community’s members? There is, then, a telling convergence between Boyarin’s complaint that Paul obliterates signifiers in favor of the meanings they signify and Hays’s counterinsistence that Paul rejects the spiritual efficacy of written texts precisely insofar as they are written. In describing Paul’s movement from

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verse 13 to verse 15, from Moses the person to Moses the text, Hays says that “Moses the metaphor is both man and text, and the narrative of the man’s self-veiling is at the same time a story about the veiling of the text. The single phrase to auto kalymma [“the same veil”] clinches and requires a hermeneutical reading of the passage.” 35 Verse 13 does say that Moses veils his face, and verse 15 makes it clear that the Israelites veil their minds. It is indeed the same veil that is at issue, but it has been moved; in verse 13, it covers Moses’ face, but in verses 14 –15, it covers the Israelites’ minds. But nowhere, contrary to Hays’s reading, is it said to cover the text. The force of both Boyarin’s and Hays’s readings is, finally, to make the tevlo~ of the gravmma oppose the gravmma itself. There is little doubt that Hays wants to have it otherwise, insisting that “those who turn to the Lord are enabled to see through the text to its telos, its true aim.” 36 For Hays, the veil is not the letter of the text but the state of the reader’s mind. When that mind is improperly disposed, the text remains veiled. When that mind is properly disposed, one sees through the veil (i.e., one is no longer subject to one’s misperception) to the text’s true aim. But Boyarin shows that Hays’s reading does not finally make the tevlo~ of the text an extension rather than an opposition to the text. Paul’s “hermeneutics of transparency,” as described by Hays, is not a hermeneutic of figural extension. By presenting the work of the Spirit as forming community independently of the text (ideally, without the aid of any texts at all), Hays’s notion of transparency—seeing through the text—falls short of figural meaning as an extension of the text. Boyarin is not off target, therefore, in seeing little practical import in Hays’s invocation of the classic contrast between typology and allegory. If for Hays one can get to the tevlo~ of the text by going through the text (a text that will one day be dispensable), Boyarin makes tevlo~ the text’s true meaning that can fully exist only in the text’s absence. According to Boyarin, Paul’s conception of meaning is highly spatialized (meaning “lies behind,” on one “level” as opposed to another). The tevlo~ or “true meaning of the text” is precisely “the glory, the spirit that transfigured Moses.” 37 That word tevlo~, he writes, “is meant to point to the Spirit which lies behind it [the Law] (and always did), but the Jews remain at the level of the literal—literally, at the level of the letter, the concrete language which, of course, epitomizes midrash, and this is the gramma which kills.” 38 With an oppositional notion of tevlo~ or Spirit as “true meaning” opposed to the gravmma, a semiological reading is once again put into play. It then becomes natural to say that “the very ministry chiseled in stone

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signifies and is replaced in history by the ministry of the Spirit, which has been revealed in the New Covenant, which is not, of course, for Paul a text, a gravmma, but it is an interpretation of a text,” 39 or to speak of the tevlo~/ spirit /glory as a meaning “hidden within the text” that demands the abolition of the literal meaning for its extraction,40 or to describe Paul’s hermeneutic as one in which “literal Israel, literal history, literal circumcision, and literal genealogy are superseded by their allegorical, spiritual signifieds.” 41 The crucial move underlying the semiological categories of literal meaning and signifieds and the supersessionist consequences of their oppositional character is reflected in Boyarin’s decision to translate tevlo~ as “true meaning” and katargoumevnou as “what was fading.” Yet, at least from the perspective of Boyarin’s concern to protect the body by protecting textuality, Hays’s effort to resist this outcome by translating tevlo~ as “true aim” and katargoumevnou as “what has been abrogated” is unsuccessful, because we are also told that the true aim, unlike what was abrogated, is in principle essentially unrelated to textuality. As Hays remarks, echoing Stanley Fish, Scripture according to Paul’s reading becomes a “selfconsuming artifact.” 42 Boyarin is likely to agree.

circumcision of the heart: romans 2 : 29 We turn to one final instance of Boyarin’s shift from performance to meaning in his presentation of Paul’s biblical hermeneutic. In this example, Boyarin recasts Paul’s language about circumcision into language about the meaning or interpretation of circumcision. He argues that the explicitly hermeneutical character of Paul’s binary opposition between spirit and letter is especially evident in his characterization of circumcision in Romans 2:29: “He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and (real) circumcision is a matter of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter [ajll j oJ ejn tw`/ kruptw`/ ∆Ioudai`o~, kai; peritomh; kardiva~ ejn pneuvmati ouj gravmmati].” 43 Boyarin makes two claims about this verse. First, “the semantic opposition between ‘in the spirit’ and ‘in the letter’ . . . suggests strongly that ‘in the spirit’ is a hermeneutical term.” Second, “in the spirit” means “in the spirit of the language, as opposed to its letter.” 44 But even if Paul’s use of the spiritletter contrast is hermeneutical, the contrast need not be understood in such a radically dualistic manner. Rom. 2:29 does not say that letter is opposed to spirit, but only that the Jew in question is circumcised in one way rather than another.45 To say that one has A rather than B is not the same as saying that A is opposed to B. There is a difference between “difference,” even

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mutually exclusive difference, and “opposition.” When does mutually exclusive difference become opposition? Only when those differences seek to occupy the same conceptual space at the same time. For Boyarin, that space and time is denoted by the term “Law.” He takes up Rom. 2:29 in light of the verses preceding it, in which Paul discusses the meaning of “law”: [12] All who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. [13] For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. [14] When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. [15] They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them [16] on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.46

Boyarin then quotes the New Testament scholar James Dunn, who comments on the Pauline passage as follows: The aim of . . . [Paul’s] argument [in Rom. 2:12 –15] is clearly to puncture a Jewish assurance falsely based on the fact of having the law, of being the chosen people of God. His argument is that this assurance must be false simply because there are Gentiles who show more evidence in themselves of what the law points to than many Jews . . . who keep the law at one level (circumcision) but who are not properly to be described as real Jews, as “doers of the law.” 47

Boyarin observes that Dunn’s reference to “what the law points to” and of “levels of understanding” signals his own unconscious recognition of the allegorical character of Paul’s hermeneutic.48 Boyarin then explains the import of this allegorical perspective for Paul’s understanding of the law in Rom. 2:12 –15: It is possible to do what the Law requires without having the Law at all. How can this be so, since the Law requires such practices as circumcision about which without the Law one would not even know? Only because the true interpretation of circumcision is the allegorical one, the one available to all, men and women, Jews and Greeks, not an inscription of the flesh, savrx, rSb, penis, but an inscription in the spirit, figured as a writing on the heart.49

This characterization of Paul’s argument begs a number of important questions, however. Boyarin writes that Paul asserts that one can “do what the Law requires without having the Law at all.” Yet Paul clearly says that the

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gentiles, in doing what the law requires, show that, in some new sense, they do “have the Law” because they “are a law unto themselves.” Given that claim, the question becomes: Who gets to define what the Law is and what “having it” consists of? In light of Paul’s claim, Boyarin cannot simply assert that “the Law” requires practices such as circumcision because Paul has already contested the meaning of the term “law,” and capitalization will not by itself decide the contest. Boyarin can use the term “Law” to refer exclusively to Jewish law as understood by the rabbis, but doing so only begs the question posed by Paul’s new use of the term. Finally, Boyarin further undermines the force of Paul’s usage by introducing the notion of interpretation—“the true interpretation of circumcision is the allegorical one.” But surely this cannot be right, for Paul is simply not advancing a claim about true versus false interpretations of circumcision but rather about circumcision as such. Paul does not announce the meaning of circumcision but rather specifies where it is to be found: peritomh; kardiva~—“circumcision is of the heart.” In construing Paul’s description of circumcision as an interpretation of circumcision, Boyarin again attributes his own hermeneutical assumptions to Paul, thereby disregarding his own quite appropriate warning to readers: “Although translations of the text customarily add silently the adjectives ‘true’ or ‘real’ before ‘Jew’ and ‘circumcision’ in the passage, these qualifiers are not there in the Greek. Paul is arguing that a Jew is defined by circumcision of the heart and nothing else.” 50 But when joined with “of the heart,” Boyarin’s “nothing else” still takes the edge off Paul’s sharper claim. Paul is claiming that a Jew is defined by circumcision—and nothing else. For Paul, there is one circumcision, which just happens to be circumcision of the heart. Circumcision that is not of the heart is simply not circumcision. Boyarin’s reading of Paul assumes before it begins that circumcision as a physical act is real or true circumcision, and that circumcision as a “matter of the heart” is not circumcision at all, but only an (optional) interpretation of physical circumcision. But to assume that circumcision of the flesh, unlike circumcision of the heart, is not itself an interpretation of circumcision is not to engage Paul’s claim so much as to dismiss it outright. Whether flesh or spirit is the “site” of true circumcision is precisely the point at issue. Boyarin reinforces his own assumption that circumcision is a literal, physical act by recasting Paul’s hermeneutical contrast between letter and spirit as a contrast between literalism and nonliteralism. As a physical act, circumcision gains all of the solidity and indubitability suggested by the notion of literalism, leaving spiritual circumcision with only the airy, ab-

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stracted quality of body’s binary opposite. Although Boyarin laments Paul’s nonliteral hermeneutic, Boyarin’s own conception of circumcision gains an ever-more-solid literality in opposition to it. Boyarin links that concept of literality with midrash, allegory’s hermeneutical (or rather, antihermeneutical) binary opposite: “Midrash, the way the Jews read Moses, is a hermeneutics of opacity, while Paul’s allegorical/typological reading is a hermeneutics of transparency.” 51 In effect, midrash is finally not “hermeneutical” at all (as Boyarin uses the term), for it enacts a literalism that gains solidity precisely insofar as “meaning,” in an inverted Hegelian trajectory of the Spirit, is aufgehoben into letter. Boyarin links this analysis of Paul’s treatment of circumcision with his earlier characterization of Paul’s Hellenistic-Platonic quest for univocity: Paul introduces his major concern throughout his ministry: producing a new, single human essence, one of “true Jews” whose “circumcision” does not mark off their bodies as ethnically distinct from any other human bodies. Paul has been hinting that this is his theme throughout the chapter. Twice he has told us that judgment and reward will come to “the Jew first and then to the Greek.” He has, moreover, informed us that the gentiles, even though they do not have the Law, nevertheless have a law written on their hearts, to which the evidence of their ethical debates and attacks of conscience attest.52

The inverted quotation marks around “true Jews” and “circumcision” show that Boyarin has indeed concluded that Paul is not speaking of Judaism or circumcision but precisely of their proper interpretations. Likewise, Boyarin’s inattention to the sequence of Paul’s phrasing—“the Jew first, and then the Greek”—is fully consistent with his rejection of the very possibility of a transformation over time of Jews and Christians as members of a single community. As we have already noted, any such transformation, perhaps forged with the category of “Jewish Christianity,” is fundamentally at odds with what Boyarin sees as Paul’s quest for a “single human essence.” Finally, although Paul does indeed contrast law as the Jews have it with law as the gentiles have it (“written on their hearts”), he does not make Boyarin’s emphatic contrast of “the Law” with “a law.” To see that this is so, we need to return to Rom. 2:14. The verse, to which I have appended a wooden, word-for-word translation, can be divided into two clauses: (a) For when (the) Gentiles who do not have the things of (the/a) law do by nature the things of the law, o{tan ga;r e[qnh ta; mh; novmon e[conta fuvsei ta; tou` novmou poiw`s in,

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(b) they not having (the/a) law are (the/a) law (for/to) themselves, ou|toi novmon mh; e[conte~ eJautoi`~ eijs in novmo~. In only one instance does “law” appear in Rom. 2:14 with the definite article, emphasized above in (a). There is no disagreement regarding the proper translation of clause (a): the Revised Standard Version and Boyarin agree in using the article both times, even though the Greek requires it only in the second instance: RSV: When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires Boyarin: For when Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires 53 Clause (b) neither requires nor prohibits the use of the article. The two translations diverge as follows: RSV: They are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law Boyarin: They not having the law are the law for themselves 54 Although, as we have already seen, Boyarin makes a distinction between “the Law” and “a law” in his interpretation of the verse, he does not do so in his translation. Nonetheless, his translation achieves the same result by departing from the RSV and using the definite article twice. The RSV simultaneously distinguishes the mode of law that is available to the Jews (the law) from the mode of law available to the gentiles (a law), while indicating that what both groups have available to them is in fact “law.” In contrast, by using the definite article twice in his translation of clause (b), Boyarin implies that although the gentiles do not have “the law,” they nonetheless become “the law” for themselves. In other words, what the gentiles do not have, they presumptuously claim to be for themselves. So according to Boyarin, Paul does not claim that Jews and gentiles partake of one law in two different ways (as the RSV translation suggests); rather, Boyarin’s translation makes Paul claim that the gentiles are providing for themselves precisely “the law”—the law as practiced by the Jews—that they themselves do not practice. As a result, when Boyarin later interprets Paul as saying that the gentiles, while lacking “the Law,” nevertheless have “a law,” the following dilemma emerges. Either (option 1) the gentile’s law really is “a law” and not “the Law”—and therefore the RSV is wrong and “law” is really being used equivocally (this is, I think, Boyarin’s view: despite what Paul says, Paul’s law is no longer “the Law,” any more than

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Paul’s circumcision of the heart is actually circumcision). Or (option 2) (if one insists on sticking with Paul’s own words), the gentiles’ law really is “the Law,” but (as Boyarin’s translation of those words makes clear), this is “the law” that the gentiles do not in fact have. Insofar as the gentiles do not physically circumcise themselves, their claim to be “the law” for themselves is simply unintelligible. And if it is not unintelligible, they must really be embracing the first option. Stephen Westerholm argues that the second option is in fact the correct reading and that it is not unintelligible. Boyarin quotes Westerholm as follows: When in v. 26, Paul writes that the “uncircumcision” of a Gentile who keeps the law will be counted as circumcision, his argument is admittedly one which most Jews of this time would have rejected, believing that literal circumcision was a prerequisite for a Gentile’s admission to the people of God. Still, Paul evidently feels that he is simply pressing the logic of the situation to its conclusion: just as the (physical) circumcision of the Jew will be disregarded if he transgresses the law, so the (physical) uncircumcision of the Gentile will be disregarded if he keeps it.55

Boyarin comments: Perhaps it takes a rabbinic Jew to sense the oddity—from our perspective— of this sentence, which simply repeats the oddity of Paul’s formulation itself. Everything makes sense until the very last clause, but keeping the Law while being uncircumcised is simply an oxymoron from the perspective of rabbinic Judaism, because being circumcised is part of the Law! 56

Boyarin observes, then, that the issue between Paul and other Jews is that “there is a fundamental gap in the definition of the Law”: For prophet or Pharisee, it is possible to preach: “What good is keeping this ceremonial part of the Law, if you do not keep that ethical part of the Law?” For Paul alone is it possible to generalize the one part as the Law tout court. For Paul, Law has come to mean something new, visà-vis Pharisaic Judaism; it has come to mean “the law of faith working through love,” in which “circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing.” 57

But now comes the characteristic shift in Boyarin’s approach to Paul. After rightly identifying the real issue at hand—Paul and the rabbis disagree about what the law most fundamentally is—Boyarin invokes his concept

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of allegory to turn away from that dispute, effectively redescribing Paul’s claim in a way that ensures from the outset that his definitions of circumcision and law will necessarily be oxymoronic and incoherent. For in Boyarin’s own view, the “real law” (“the Law”) entails circumcision as a physical act: Now whether . . . [Paul] has crossed the line or not into true allegory, and I believe he has, in any case, once this new law of faith is defined as being that which is “in the spirit; not in the written,” ejn pneuvmati ouj gravmmati, we already have a hermeneutical moment, a moment of interpretation. Furthermore, the written is particular, the spiritual universal in Paul’s scheme of things.

Boyarin continues with an example: One of the best examples of Paul’s allegorical readings of the commandments—in addition, of course, to his reading of circumcision—is found in 1 Corinthians 5:6 – 8, where the commandment to purge the house of leaven for Passover is reinterpreted ecclesiologically to mean that one must purge the Christian communities of the old leaven of the puffing up of pride (verse 2), as well as the leaven of “vice and wickedness.” Paul’s reading here is very similar indeed to that of Philo in the Special Laws, where leaven is also interpreted as pride. . . . The historical rite of a particular tribe has been transformed into an ahistorical, abstract, and universal human “truth,” the very essence of allegory.58

But to say that the rite is that “of a particular tribe,” if it means that Paul’s community (surely consisting of embodied, historical, particular persons) bears no relation to that tribe, is once again to beg the question. Labeling as “allegorical” Paul’s effort to discern a relation between that particular tribe and the later community does not decide whether the two groups bear a relation to each other (although it may shed light on how that relation is being understood). But the framework of binary opposition relieves Boyarin from the challenge of examining the character of the relation Paul asserts by allowing him to dispense with the possibility of relationship altogether.59 In addition, it is by no means obvious that Paul regards pride, vice, and wickedness as “ahistorical” and “abstract.” Indeed, even a casual reading of the Pauline corpus will turn up detailed descriptions of highly particular vices fully embodied in the practices of Pauline congregations. It simply begs the question to imply, as Boyarin’s formulation does, that the specific vices of the Pauline Christian communities are generic human “truths,” ahistorical and abstract.60

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Boyarin’s own understanding of Paul’s view of circumcision presupposes the same literal versus nonliteral opposition he attributes to Paul. Boyarin’s claim that Paul verges on “true allegory” is just like the claim that Paul offers a “true interpretation” of circumcision. For Boyarin—and not just for Boyarin’s Paul—things simply are what they literally are, and then there are more or less literal interpretations of those things. Apart from whether Paul’s language is hermeneutical in the dualistic fashion Boyarin describes, Boyarin’s own analytical language is deeply indebted to just such a dualistic hermeneutic. Just as Paul’s understanding of his Jewish tradition is, according to Boyarin, in the service of a nonliteral, generically human essence, so too are Boyarin’s own hermeneutical categories in the service of literal particularity understood as fundamentally nonhermeneutical. It is no surprise, then, that in order to counter Westerholm’s reading of Paul against the grain of the dualistic hermeneutic Boyarin criticizes, Boyarin must expose the residual hermeneutical assumptions that underlie Westerholm’s interpretation. Boyarin quotes Westerholm as follows: Similarly, circumcision which is (ejn) gravmmati in v. 29 does not refer to a particular interpretation of circumcision, but simply to circumcision in a physical, external form. . . . Physical circumcision is contrasted with circumcision ejn pneuvmati, which may or may not be meant to refer to the mark of the new age. In any case, it speaks of an inner reality which is not content with external forms, whatever limited legitimacy the latter may possess.61

Boyarin then remarks that “this very opposition, however, between a circumcision which is physical and one which is an inner reality is in its very essence a ‘particular interpretation of circumcision’! What else can it possibly be, especially if Paul argues that this inner reality is more important than and supersedes the physical observance?” 62 Earlier, Boyarin had observed that Westerholm argues, with reference to verse 27, that “letter” does not refer to a particular interpretation of Old Testament law but simply to the possession of the commandments in written form.63 In verse 29, when the notion of a circumcision “in the letter” is introduced, Westerholm says that, here too, Paul refers not to some particular interpretation of circumcision but just to circumcision as a physical act. Boyarin responds that to compare the physical act of circumcision with a circumcision “in the spirit” is to invoke a “particular interpretation of circumcision.” But he does not come to grips with the deeper import of Westerholm’s quite provocative formulation. In effect, Westerholm is saying that circumcision for Paul is a spiritual reality that may or may not assume

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“external,” physical forms, forms that are, in their physicality as such, clearly regarded as nonessential to the nature of circumcision. This point of view introduces the counterintuitive possibility that physical circumcision is itself a particular (and dispensable) interpretation of real (i.e., spiritual) circumcision. Although Boyarin might regard Westerholm’s reading as Platonic or even Gnostic, he is not interested in rejecting it as an interpretation of Paul (since, once properly understood, it agrees with his own) but only in demonstrating its “hermeneutical” character. But Boyarin himself takes a hermeneutical approach to Westerholm’s formulation by saying that what Westerholm describes is an interpretation of circumcision. That “of circumcision” is the unobtrusive evidence that Boyarin has already adopted the very hermeneutical perspective that Westerholm and Paul are said to employ; he merely focuses exclusive attention on the other pole of the binary opposition on which it trades. According to Boyarin, midrash refuses to enter into such binary oppositions, but his own analytical approach to Paul depends on them. If Westerholm tacitly assumes that there is a real circumcision that is spiritual (of which all other so-called circumcisions are interpretations), Boyarin is no less confident that there is a real circumcision that is physical (of which all other so-called circumcisions are interpretations). In this dispute between Westerholm and Boyarin, the logics of idealism and materialism, when regarded as directly opposed forms of realism, turn out to be strikingly identical. We are once again reminded that those who conduct direct assaults on idealism rarely escape the grip of its defining oppositions. There is, however, an even deeper conceptual incoherence in Boyarin’s argument. Boyarin claims that Paul’s allegorical reading attributes abstract meanings to specific textual signifiers to which those meanings bear no intrinsic relation. Yet, at the same time, Boyarin asserts that those same specific signifiers are “effaced” by the attribution to them of the general meanings. But how can meaning efface or obliterate that to which it is fundamentally unrelated? One cannot have it both ways: one cannot say that Pauline allegory does not embrace the concrete particularity of what is allegorized and at the same time argue that it concretely transforms or physically alters it. Boyarin’s case for the abstract character of Paul’s allegorical reading depends on a nonintrinsic relation between concrete particulars and the abstract meanings supposedly derived from them. But if the generation of abstract meanings concretely or physically transforms the concrete particulars themselves, then the nonintrinsic relation of meanings to particulars is called into question. Boyarin argues that the strange allegorical paradox he discovers in

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Paul—that allegorical meaning effaces that to which it is essentially unrelated—is continued in the allegorical exegesis of Origen of Alexandria. In the next chapter, I dispute that claim, arguing that Origen’s allegorical meanings are intrinsically and inescapably related to the signifiers of the scriptural text, and that discovering those meanings involves not an erasure of text or the reader’s body but their spiritual transformation. Rather than pitting spirit against text—and thereby against body— Origen’s allegorical reading manifests and enacts the text’s and the body’s spiritual transformation.

Chapter 2 Allegory and Embodiment: Boyarin and Origen

In A Radical Jew, Boyarin more than once explicitly associates Paul with Origen of Alexandria, whom he identifies as one of Paul’s most influential heirs.1 In an earlier work, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, Boyarin found in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs a telling example of the way post-Pauline Christian allegorical reading perpetuated the disembodying consequences of Pauline allegory. After first outlining Boyarin’s comments on a key passage from Origen’s commentary, I shall offer an alternative analysis of the passage in the context of Origen’s allegorical reading of the Song that highlights its valorization of embodiment through its appeal to the spiritual “senses.” Allegorical reading, as Origen understands it, leads the reader toward fuller, richer embodiment by illuminating the body’s irreducible spiritual dimension. My claim is that Origen’s approach to texts, no less than Boyarin’s, seeks not to evade but to enhance embodied human life. Nonetheless, the comparison of Boyarin and Origen shows that the precise character of the body as such is a matter for debate. Origen’s conception of the body as body is simply not as self-evidently antithetical to the category of spirit as Boyarin’s critique of Origenist allegorical reading requires it to be. When considered apart from a prior presumption of body’s binary opposition to spirit, Origen’s category of body appears as a complex and rich psychosomatic medium of a person’s divine transformation.

meaning and the body of the text Boyarin’s understanding of Pauline allegorical reading goes hand in hand with his conception of allegorical composition, according to which the text to be read allegorically is regarded as the “incarnation” (i.e., a textualization) of a preexisting, nontextual, independent meaning. Meaning is a changeless and immaterial substance, or “ontological being,” existing independently in its own right. As a previously and inherently disembodied 47

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“spirit,” meaning only subsequently comes to be embraced by the “body” of the text. The relation between independent meaning or spirit and the text in which it is imagined to reside takes the form of a “binary opposition” in which spirit and body, meaning and text, are diametrically opposed categories: having one requires the elimination of the other.2 Such allegorical compositions invite corresponding allegorical readings in which the interpreter reverses the process of composition-as-incarnation. The spiritual meaning then replaces or supersedes the body of the text, with which it was, in any case, only contingently associated. Although formulated from a poststructuralist and postmodernist point of view for the purpose of critique, Boyarin’s characterization of allegorical composition and reading is distinctively modernist. Paul’s Platonizing allegory replicates in its theoretical structure Husserl’s theory of meaning as described (and deconstructed) by Jacques Derrida.3 The modernist character of Paul’s allegory notwithstanding, Boyarin believes he has identified the proper ancient historical and intellectual context for the Pauline tendencies I have associated with Husserl, namely, Paul’s Platonist inclinations, drawn from his Hellenistic milieu. And, indeed, the Platonic cast of Husserl’s phenomenological account of meaning is well recognized. According to Boyarin, allegorical reading provides Paul with the means to resolve the deep but contradictory attractions of Jewish particularism and Platonic universalism by favoring the latter. Paul’s “yearning for univocity,” his “desire for the One,” leads him to erase textual particularity through allegory.4 Allegorical reading is the hermeneutical means by which Paul the Platonizing philosopher embarks on a metaphysical quest for ontological oneness. Secured via allegorical reading, Paul’s “true Jewishness” consequently “ends up having nothing to do with family connection (descent from Abraham according to the flesh), history (having the Law), or maintaining the cultural/religious practices of the historical Jewish community (circumcision).” Instead, true Jewishness “paradoxically consists of participating in a universalism, an allegory that dissolves those essences and meanings entirely.” 5 As a consequence, Pauline allegory “has had the effect of depriving continued Jewish existence of any reality or significance in the Christian economies of history.” 6 And once Christians come to claim for themselves (and deny to Jews who will not convert to Christianity) the capacity to read Jewish Scriptures allegorically, Jewish Scripture and Judaism find themselves superseded by the Christian Old Testament and Christianity. Boyarin argues that Paul’s allegorical reading is inherently supersessionist just because it is allegorical, for allegorical reading always replaces

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specific signifiers with general meanings, and that is what happens when Israel “according to the flesh” is set aside in favor of an Israel “according to the spirit.” Paul’s allegorical reading has replaced Israel as the fleshly family of Abraham with a universal spiritual community of faith whose very universality paradoxically and perversely excludes Jews. Represented by his contemporary Philo and continued in his historically influential hermeneutical heirs, Origen and Augustine, Paul’s allegorizing impulse has had far-reaching historical consequences: “[T]his dissolution of Jewish identity by spiritualizing and allegorizing it,” observes Boyarin, “is a familiar move of European culture until today.” 7 Paul’s Hellenistic Jewish contemporary Philo of Alexandria was also an enthusiastic allegorical reader of Scripture. Boyarin traces their reliance on allegorical interpretation to their common background in “the eclectic middle-platonism of Greek-speaking Judaism in the first century.” 8 Together, Paul and Philo inaugurate the long tradition of Platonizing allegorical interpretation of Scripture that reaches its most historically influential Christian form in the exegetical work of Origen of Alexandria. Origen’s allegorical reading, writes Boyarin, “is explicitly founded on a PlatonicPauline theory of correspondence between the visible things of this world and the invisible things of God.” 9 We have already seen that Boyarin understands this “correspondence” as a “binary opposition,” created by meaning’s existence as wholly “disembodied substance . . . prior to its incarnation in language.” This notion of incarnation generates “a dualistic system in which spirit precedes and is primary over body.” 10 Allegorical reading exacerbates the dualism on which it is based when the allegorical reader interprets “the concrete elements of a narrative as signs of a changeless, wholly immaterial ontological being.” 11 Boyarin argues that by dissolving narrative concreteness into abstract meaning, allegorical interpretation simultaneously dissolves human embodiment. Just how the reading of a text alters the embodied character of persons is not clear, but the basic idea seems to be that when persons closely associate the concrete aspects of a narrative with their own self-understanding as concrete, embodied persons, then when the concreteness of the narrative is undermined, so too is their own integrity as embodied individuals. For Boyarin, allegorical reading is, then, much more than a way of reading texts; allegory and midrash are “alternate techniques of the body.” 12 But midrash, at least as Boyarin presents it, refuses to enter into the dualism on which allegory thrives, “eschewing the inner-outer, visibleinvisible, body-soul dichotomies of allegorical reading.” The sharp contrast

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between allegory and midrash informs Boyarin’s analysis of Origen’s allegorical interpretation in his Commentary on the Song of Songs: “[W]e must clearly distinguish the midrashic reading of the Song from that of allegorists such as Origen. Aphoristically, we might say that the direction of Origen’s reading is from the concrete to the abstract, while the direction of midrash is from abstract to concrete.” 13 With this judgment, Boyarin joins the long-standing Western criticism of Origenist allegorical reading for continuing what he regards as Paul’s and Philo’s betrayal of “the body” of the biblical text, which correspondingly undermines the embodied practices and identities of Jews.14 Boyarin argues that Origen’s allegorical reading allows abstraction to supersede concreteness, but I would suggest that Origen is concerned, not with the difference between concreteness and abstraction, but rather with the distinction between material and spiritual reality. Origen associates spirituality not with abstraction but with transformation. Moreover, while it is clear that spiritual transformation does entail a change from a materiality devoid of spirit to an increasingly spiritualized materiality, the goal of Origen’s allegorical reading is to show the connection between these two qualities of personhood, not to allow one to annihilate the other. It is misleading in the extreme to saddle an ancient Christian Platonist with modernist Cartesian dichotomies. Origen strives to articulate the links of continuity between body and spirit while admittedly privileging novelty, for the spirit that makes all things new does not recreate text and body ex nihilo, but radically transforms them. Origen tightly links specific textual details to their spiritual import, and those links reinforce his belief that allegorical reading, like the ascetic practices of spiritual self-discipline, is indeed a “technique of the body.” But the goal of the technique is not the body’s annihilation but its transformation.

spiritual senses in the song of songs In his Commentary on the Song of Songs, Origen describes the connection between his way of interpreting Scripture and the cosmic interrelationship of spiritual and material realities. Boyarin reproduces the passage as follows: So, as we said at the beginning, all the things in the visible category can be related to the invisible, the corporeal to the incorporeal, and the manifest to those that are hidden; so that the creation of the world itself, fashioned in this wise as it is, can be understood through the divine wisdom, which from actual things and copies teaches us things un-

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seen by means of those that are seen, and carries us over from earthly things to heavenly. But this relationship does not obtain only with creatures; the Divine Scripture itself is written with wisdom of a rather similar sort. Because of certain mystical and hidden things the people is visibly led forth from the terrestrial Egypt and journeys through the desert, where there was a biting serpent, and a scorpion, and thirst, and where all the other happenings took place that are recorded. All these events, as we have said, have the aspects and likenesses of certain hidden things. And you will find this correspondence not only in the Old Testament Scriptures, but also in the actions of Our Lord and Savior that are related in the Gospels. If, therefore, in accordance with the principles that we have now established all things that are in the open stand in some sort of relations to others that are hidden, it undoubtedly follows that the visible hart and roe mentioned in the Song of Songs are related to some patterns of incorporeal realities, in accordance with the character borne by their bodily nature. And this must be in such wise that we ought to be able to furnish a fitting interpretation of what is said about the Lord perfecting the harts, by reference to those harts that are unseen and hidden.15

According to Boyarin, this passage shows that Origen, like Philo before him, grounds his allegorical reading metaphysically “in a Platonic universe” in which there is “a perfect correspondence between the ontology of the world and that of the text.” The cosmological relation of inner and outer provides the basis for the textual duality on which allegorical reading relies. Like the cosmos, Scripture also has its “inner meaning” hidden behind its “outer shell,” which the allegorical reader seeks out. Boyarin adds that it is no accident that for Origen, the Song of Songs has three meanings, a corporeal one, a pneumatic one, and a psychic one, for we have here the “Platonic tripartite man—body-soul-spirit—applied to the Word of God, in which Origen sees an incarnation of the Holy Spirit.” Moreover, as [R. P.] Lawson has pointed out, “If the Logos in His Incarnation is God-Man, so, too, in the mind of Origen the incarnation of the Pneuma in Holy Scripture is divine-human.” 16

With these remarks, Boyarin readily draws on a series of Platonic shibboleths to characterize Origen’s views. Although Origen draws on the Pauline language of inner and outer in his commentary, Boyarin introduces the distinction into this passage and amplifies the implied inferiority of what is “outer” with his own word, “shell.” 17 When he then asserts that Origen’s allegorical method is grounded in a metaphysical view or “founded in” a

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Platonic universe, he begs a crucial question underlying any assessment of Origen’s hermeneutic. For while there is no question about the Platonic character of Origen’s thinking, the extent to which an “unchristianized” Platonic metaphysics grounds, founds, or otherwise determines his biblical interpretation is precisely the question at issue. Perhaps even more debatable is the precise characterization of the kind of Platonism that informs Origen’s thinking. The complex emerging Neoplatonic features of Origen’s Platonism certainly cannot be captured adequately by the rigid tripartite conception of the soul found in Plato’s own works.18 In a similar vein, when Boyarin observes that Origen’s tripartite anthropology has scriptural sources as well as Greek philosophical ones, quoting Lawson to emphasize its “Platonic” character once again begs the question.19 So, too, does the appeal to Lawson’s analogy of incarnation, for it is not at all obvious just what view of incarnation, or its analog, textual inspiration, Origen in fact holds. In short, Boyarin too quickly applies to this passage a preexisting set of assumptions about the “dualistic” character of Platonism, and he assumes that Origen’s distinctions ought to be understood accordingly. As we shall see, there are good reasons not to do so. Nonetheless, some passages in Origen’s Song of Songs commentary do seem to support Boyarin’s dualist reading: When Christ was coming, therefore, He stood awhile behind the wall of the house of the Old Testament. He was standing behind the wall, in that He was not yet showing Himself to the people. But when the time is come, and He begins to appear to the Church who sits inside the house, that is, within the letter of the Law, and to show Himself to her through the windows of the Law and the prophets, that is, through the things that had been foretold concerning Him, then He calls to her to come forth and come outside to Him. For, unless she comes out, unless she comes forth and advances from the letter to the spirit, she cannot be united with her Bridegroom, nor share the company of Christ. He calls her, therefore, and invites her to come out from carnal things to spiritual, from visible to invisible, from the Law to the Gospel. And therefore He says to her: “Arise, come, my neighbour, my fair one, my dove.” 20

By referring to “coming out” from “visible to invisible” or to being “carried over” from one to the other, Origen does not refer to the supersession of what is concrete by what is abstract. These formulations permit but do not require the radically dualistic reading that Boyarin applies to the passage’s opening distinctions of visible/invisible, corporeal/incorporeal,

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manifest /hidden, earthly/heavenly. Origen does not suggest that these contrasts are absolute polarities or binary oppositions, but that each member of the pair is intrinsically “related to” the other. If, following Boyarin, we do not accept Origen’s claim of relationship long enough to examine it closely, but simply supply Cartesian-inspired caricatures of Platonism that rule relationship out in principle, then we shall have little hope of grasping the most fundamental thing that Origen intends to say. Boyarin assumes that such seemingly opposed pairs could not have intrinsic relations with one another. But this says more about Boyarin’s postmodernist construction of Platonist metaphysics than it does about what Origen, understood on his own terms and in his own intellectual context, is up to in this passage. Origen undermines any suggestion of radical separation of inner from outer by emphasizing the relation of a visible roe to the “patterns of incorporeal realities” to which it is related (in lines that follow immediately upon the passage from the Commentary that Boyarin quotes). Origen proceeds to draw out the details of the analogy to support his overall claim of intrinsic relationship: There is a similarity between the function of a specific visceral fluid in a deer or roe that improves eyesight and the vision that Christ both has and affords. Although a Platonic worldview is a congenial context for such an analogy, there is nothing specifically Platonic about its details. Indeed, at the root of the analogy is specifically Christian theological reflection on the Son’s capacity to know the Father and afford knowledge of the Father to others.21 The spiritual meaning that Origen attributes to the roe is intrinsically related to the alleged physical capacity of the roe both to see acutely and to generate a physical substance that enhances the vision of others: “For those who are skilled in medicine assert that there is a certain fluid in the viscera of this animal which dispels dimness from the eyes and stimulates defective vision. Deservedly, therefore, is Christ compared to a roe or fallow deer, since He not only sees the Father Himself, but also causes Him to be seen by those whose power of vision He Himself has healed.” 22 This explicit forging of a bodily link between “visible” and “incorporeal” realities lies at the heart of the larger goal of allegorical reading that Origen advances throughout his commentary: to show how the spiritual dimension of things is “in accordance with the character borne by their bodily nature.” 23 Boyarin’s charge that Origen replaces authentic scriptural meanings with alien Platonic abstractions is not novel but long-standing, going back at least to the Protestant Reformation, if not to fourth-century Antiochene

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criticisms of the Alexandrian hermeneutical tradition. In the modern period, one can see the characteristically Protestant charge put in play once again in the Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren’s influential 1953 work Agape and Eros.24 Nygren, whose typically Protestant criticism of Origenist allegory is the polar opposite of Daniélou’s characteristically Catholic celebration, argues that Origen made the allegorical meaning of Scripture equivalent to the Greek “ero¯s motif,” thereby compromising the authentic teaching of Christian love as self-giving agape¯ by combining it with pagan conceptions of love as acquisitive desire. Nygren’s entire approach rests, as many critics have now pointed out, on a one-sided conception of Platonic ero¯s. But his approach is useful nonetheless because it rightly links Origen’s allegorical reading to the spiritual transformation of the reader. Yet despite making this connection, Nygren fails to follow through on his own insight. By linking ero¯s so exclusively to the meanings of Origen’s allegorical readings, he fails to examine the process of allegorical reading as itself an act of ero¯s. Platonic ero¯s is the very desire to see the world of particulars as it really is by seeing its “otherworldly” dimension as the fulfillment or completion of its altogether worldly being. Just as Platonic ero¯s can be understood as the striving of the world of particulars for the forms of the Good and the Beautiful that would complete them, so allegorical reading can be seen as the striving of a reader confronted with incomplete or “thin” literal meanings for the fuller or deeper meanings that would extend and complete them.25 Origen argues that allegorical readers should look for the spiritual (which is to say, the real) import of the letter, rather than a meaning in place of the letter. Discerning the spiritual aspect of bodies requires a method of reading that involves the reader’s own bodily disposition. In order to unlock the physically transformative power of the text, the reader must bring both body and soul to the text, motivated by the emotion of love. Reading with the proper eroticism, readers discern intrinsic connections between textual signifiers and allegorical meanings that refashion their embodied identities. Rather than requiring the simple repudiation of the body, Origen’s allegorical reading of the “letter” of Scripture reflects his double evaluation of the embodiment of the reader’s soul. The allegorical reader’s necessary departure from Scripture’s literal sense parallels her resistance to the fall of her soul away from contemplation of the logos into body, history, and culture. But the equally necessary reliance of the allegorical story on the literal sense parallels that reader’s salvific use of her soul’s embodiment (by virtue of the prior, enabling self-embodiment of the divine logos). In short, by reading allegorically, the reader lives through her embodiment as both

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penalty and therapy, fall and redemption.26 Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs is a record of this sanctification of the body through reading. At the outset of the commentary, Origen makes a distinction between what Solomon wrote (a “little book”) and what he had sung (a “marriagesong”): Solomon wrote the song that he “sang under the figure of the Bride” in “the form of a drama.” 27 Origen highlights the dramatic form of the song by pointing out how the various speakers (Bride, Bridegroom, and the friends of both) interact with each other. But along with the comings and goings of various characters, presented “one by one in their own order,” the “whole body” of the work also “consists of mystical utterances.” 28 Central to Origen’s approach to the work is his conception of its dual character as sequential narrative (“drama”) and as a “whole body” composed of mystical utterances (“song”). The Song of Solomon combines what is visible in the world and text with what is invisible. Because Solomon’s song is a work about love, to read the text productively is to read it fueled by love’s passion. If the reader, like a prepubescent child, is unaffected by this passion, he or she will “derive neither profit nor much harm, either from reading the text itself, or from going through the necessary explanations.” Such a passionless reader will be unable “to grasp the meaning of these sayings.” But a passionate reader may be of two very different kinds. An improperly passionate reader, suffering from misdirected ero¯s and living “only after the flesh,” will “twist the whole manner of his hearing” of the text “away from the inner spiritual man and on to the outward and carnal; and he will be turned away from the spirit to the flesh, and will foster carnal desires in himself, and it will seem to be the Divine Scriptures that are thus urging and egging him on to fleshly lust!” 29 Instead, the song calls for a properly passionate reader. What makes this reader’s passion “proper”? Clearly not the suppression of passion; although Origen warns that one who is “not yet rid of the vexations of flesh and blood and has not ceased to feel the passion of his bodily nature” should refrain both from reading the work and from hearing its interpretation, this cannot mean that the properly passionate reader must extinguish the fire of ero¯s.30 Instead, this reader enjoys a redirected eroticism, giving constant heed to that particular mode of ero¯s that directs him or her toward spiritual reality. Such a person will be able “to hear love’s language in purity and with chaste ears,” not because he or she cannot love, but precisely because his or her love has been purified.31 But how does one read the text with a purified love, when the reading itself is what promises purification? Origen wants to describe a way to read a text about physical love so that it becomes a text about a spiritual

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love that can be understood only through a form of reading that is itself an enactment of that spiritual love. And yet the spiritual love that is both impetus to, and reward of, allegorical reading, while not carnal, must also not be disembodied. Achieving a spiritual love that is neither carnal nor disembodied is the experiential accompaniment to discerning an allegorical meaning that is neither “literalistic” nor “anti-literal” but figural. Is it possible to relate Origen’s contrast between the two modes of ero¯s to his distinction between dramatic narrative and mystical utterance? The great temptation, to which Nygren succumbs, is to line them up in this fashion: Song as mystical utterance ⫽ allegorical sense ⫽ “heavenly” ero¯s Song as written drama ⫽ literal sense ⫽ “vulgar” ero¯s

But such a dualistic and hierarchical scheme that pits spirit against letter and sublimated against unsublimated love misses Origen’s essential point about the unity of the text and the unity of the reader’s ero¯s. The kind of relationship that Origen finds between biblical stories and the allegorical stories told by the Spirit through them is the same sort of relationship that an allegorical reader of the Song of Songs seeks to achieve by transcending “carnal love” without simply repudiating love’s bodily senses. In the Commentary, Origen points to this need to interrelate the “order and sequence” of spiritual and textual realities in the act of reading allegorically: For he [the allegorical reader] will add to the others [i.e., other songs in the Bible] the fifteen Gradual Songs and, by assessing the virtue of each song separately and collecting from them the grades of the soul’s advance, and putting together the order and sequence of things with spiritual understanding [spiritali intelligentia ordinem rerum consequentiamque componens], he will be able to show with what stately steps the Bride, as she makes her entrance, attains by way of all these to the nuptial chamber of the Bridegroom, passing “into the place of the wonderful tabernacle, even to the House of God with the voice of joy and praise, the noise of one feasting.” So she comes, as we said, even to the Bridegroom’s chamber, that she may hear and speak all these things that are contained in the Song of Songs.32

The allegorical reader is obligated to understand spiritually the sequence of the textual narrative, discerning at the level of spiritual reality or metanarrative the syntax represented at the level of the immediate story. In other words, the task of the allegorical reader is to understand and be fashioned by the spiritual import of the scriptural stories according to the manner in which they were written.

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theory of allegorical interpretation Understanding how these various “levels” of the biblical narrative are related to one another requires one to grasp just how Origen conceives of the composition of Scripture, and what sort of interpretative approach its composition invites. Scripture was composed by exceptional human beings who expressed their special knowledge of spiritual realities in written form.33 They did not derive their knowledge of spiritual matters through their five senses; rather, a biblical author such as Moses “sees” God by “understanding him with the vision of the heart and the perception of the mind.” 34 This “divine sense” (qeivan ai[sqhsin), a “sense which was not sensible” (aijsqhvsei oujk aijsqhth`Û) comprises a spiritual correlate for each of the five ordinary senses. One can speak, therefore, of a spiritual tasting or touching.35 Although spiritual vision does not derive from ordinary sense perception, the knowledge it supplies can nonetheless assume a sensible appearance, for there is an intrinsic connection between the visible and the invisible. The logos that “comes to” the prophets “enlightens them with the light of knowledge, causing them to see things which they had not perceived before his coming as if they saw them before their eyes.” 36 Because of the intrinsic relation of matter to spirit, spiritual perception can assume sensible form, and sensible impressions can convey spiritual realities.37 Hence, just as prophetic writings depict strikingly physical theophanies and revelatory moments, so even the seemingly physical, sensible activities of Jesus bear witness to other, spiritual realities. Ezekiel is said to have eaten the roll of the book given to him and Israel to have “smelled the scent of his son’s spiritual garments”: “In the same way as in these instances Jesus touched the leper spiritually rather than sensibly [Matt. 8.3], to heal him, as I think, in two ways, delivering him not only, as the multitude take it, from sensible leprosy by sensible touch, but also from another leprosy by his truly divine touch.” 38 Human scriptural composition and allegorical reading are, then, two sides of a single process. Human authors, via revelation and inspiration, have translated their spiritual perceptions into sensible representations, and subsequent allegorical readers derive spiritual benefits from interpreting those sensible representations allegorically.39 Origen presents his most detailed account of allegorical reading from the perspective of its composition by the Spirit in book 4 of On First Principles. The Spirit has produced the text of Scripture in order to enlighten the souls of the prophets and apostles with mysteries concerning human souls so that a reader “who is capable of being taught” can discover these mysteries, and to hide these mysteries in surface narratives so that readers

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“unable to endure the burden” of seeking out the deeper meaning might nonetheless be edified.40 The Spirit, then, has written a single text for two different audiences: the small elite group of intellectual Christian seekers of gnw`s i~ (e.g., people like Origen and his patron Ambrose, a former Valentinian), and the larger “multitude” of simple believers. But the Spirit did not wish to risk dividing the community into two distinct readerships by producing a single text susceptible of two utterly different readings. Rather, the Spirit made possible two readings of a single text that could finally cohere as a single, harmonious, integrated reading by a single community. “The most wonderful thing” about the Spirit’s composition of the Bible is that it enabled just those often unappealing surface accounts of narratives and laws simultaneously to provide “secret truths” to the elite and moral profit to the multitude.41 While in principle there need be no essential relationship between elite and common meanings, Origen claims that there is. As we have already seen in the roe example from the Song of Songs, he argues explicitly that there is an inner principle or logic that relates the bodily dimension of the text to its spiritual meaning.42 He frequently draws on two terms from Stoic logic—ajkolouqiva (“following” or “sequence”) and ei{rmo~ (“series” or “connection”)—to refer to this coherence.43 In Scripture, seemingly inappropriate or unedifying narratives and laws “have been recorded in a series [ei{rmw/ ajnagegrammevnwn] with a power which is truly appropriate to the wisdom of God.” 44 Origen links the notion of the wise power of the text’s divine author with the idea of a textual or narrative series. There is a logic that shows how the seemingly inappropriate text is in fact appropriate, and its appropriateness is a function of the power of divine authorship. There is an “order” or “coherence” to the text that embraces and makes compatible these two dimensions of meaning. However, the common reader does not perceive this deeper relationship between apparent and nonapparent scriptural meanings. In many cases, this is not a problem, for “it is possible to derive benefit from the first, and to this extent helpful meaning,” as do “multitudes of sincere and simple believers.” 45 But the potential for danger remains, lying in “the sheer attractiveness of the language” of the text.46 If one attends only to the surface narrative, there are two likely outcomes: either one will find the narrative satisfying as it stands and learn nothing truly divine, or one will find the narrative repellent and learn nothing worthy of God.47 In either case, the transformative promise of Christianity will be lost. Simple-minded Christians (and Jewish readers) are the typical victims of the first sort of

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literalism, gnostics of the second. One communal threat of literalism is also clear: simple Christian literalists are prime candidates for conversion by gnostic exegetes able to show that literal scriptural accounts of God are morally repugnant.48 Origen’s conception of Scripture’s contents and structure is based, not on the shell-kernel ontology described by Boyarin, but rather on a larger conception of reality consisting of two deeply interpenetrating realms: a nonsensible realm of spiritual realities (ta; nohtav) and a sensible realm of material realities (ta; aijsqhtav). Included in the sensible realm are the scriptural text itself as well as all historical events and natural phenomena to which the text refers. The spiritual realities that constitute the deepest allegorical referents of Scripture are ordered in a sequence (ajkolouqiva), each item intimately related to the next by virtue of an inner connection (ei{rmo~). The elements in the text of Scripture may be words, sentences, complete stories, or images. At certain points, Scripture may also contain textual items that the divine spirit has led the human authors of Scripture to insert into the text. If taken as representing sensible realities, these items are falsehoods, impossibilities, or improbabilities (i.e., no true, possible or probable referents for them can be found in nature or history). But when read allegorically, these items can be seen both to complete the sequence of Scripture and to represent important elements in the sequence of the nonsensible realm. Contrary to Boyarin’s characterization of allegory’s radical dualism, Origen argues that discerning the deep coherence or interrelationship of the sensible with the nonsensible aspects of scriptural narratives and laws is precisely the allegorical reader’s task. Whether or not these different dimensions of reality cohere is, however, determined solely by the nonsensible realm, which consists of the ordered interrelationship of spiritual realities. The Spirit’s compositional task was to bring the accounts of temporal, sensible realities into alignment with this spiritual metanarrative: “The principal aim [of the divine author] was to announce the connexion [ei{rmon] that exists among spiritual events, those that have already happened and those that are yet to come to pass.” 49 The allegorical reader then reads the narrative of Scripture in order to discern this spiritual metanarrative (which is the deepest “meaning” of the text) and its inner coherence: “For how can one be said to believe the Scripture in the proper sense, when he does not perceive the meaning of the Holy Spirit in it, which God wants to be believed rather than the intent of the letter.” 50 The reader is alerted to the need for a deeper, allegorical reading by the Spirit, who has intentionally disrupted scriptural narrative coherence. For if the surface narra-

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tives of Scripture displayed an immediate and obvious connection and sequence, or if the usefulness of scriptural laws were everywhere apparent, readers would be tempted to embrace the obvious reading. To counter such a naive reading, the divine author has inserted “certain stumbling-blocks” (skavndala) into the text, alerting readers that something “beyond the meaning at hand [para; to; provceiron] is hidden there.” 51 As for the rest of the scriptural narrative and the concrete (i.e., natural or historical) realities to which it refers, the Spirit made use of both text and realities in so far as they could be brought into relation with the authoritative sequence of the spiritual metanarrative. If it was possible to harmonize historical events reported in Scripture with the sequence of that metanarrative of “mystical events,” the Spirit did so. In other cases, the Spirit was happily presented with narratives already composed by human authors, not in order to report historical events, but to express mystical meanings. But if those narratives “did not correspond with the sequence [ajkolouqiva~] of the intellectual truths,” the divine author then “wove into the story something which did not happen, occasionally something which could not happen, and occasionally something which might have happened but in fact did not.” 52 All of these falsehoods, impossibilities, and unrealized possibilities, which are meaningless and false on an empirical level, are true on the level of the spiritual metanarrative—indeed, they are vital to the inner coherence of the narrative. How much of Scripture contains such interpolations varies with the text at hand: “Sometimes a few words are inserted which in the bodily sense are not true, and at other times a greater number.” 53 The metanarrative consists, then, of spiritual truths connected in their own precise series or sequence. A number of elements in the metanarrative are represented by portions of Scripture that the composing spirit has added to the text, which, when understood literally, are untrue, irrational, or impossible. The allegorical reader’s task is to read the text so that the added material coheres perfectly with the metanarrative of which it is part, producing a single reading of all portions of the biblical text: When, therefore, as will be clear to those who read, the passage as a connected whole [ei{rmo~] is literally impossible, whereas the principal part of it is not impossible but even true, the reader must endeavor to grasp the entire meaning, connecting by an intellectual process the account of what is literally impossible with the parts that are not impossible but are historically true, these being interpreted allegorically together with the parts which, so far as the letter goes, did not happen at

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all. For our contention with regard to the whole of divine scripture is, that it all has a spiritual meaning, but not all a bodily meaning; for the bodily meaning is often proved to be an impossibility.54

An allegorical reading is, then, both a linguistic and philosophical process that connects literal impossibilities, historical realities, and literal fictions, producing a single coherent narrative. These elements can be interrelated when one “interprets them allegorically together,” that is, when one ignores those literal aspects of the story that fail to contribute to the spiritual metanarrative. When read allegorically, the biblical text reveals a surprising and total isomorphism with the very structure of spiritual reality. To read this text properly is not, as Boyarin claims, to replace one thing (shell) with another (kernel), but to be brought into direct relation with the way reality, in its fullest sense, is. When Scripture is read allegorically, the Scripture reader’s soul “makes room” for the reception of the powerful knowledge of spiritual realities needed for the transformative fashioning of his or her soul. This powerful result of reading comes to those with the power to read the text properly. The process is, of course, finally circular: A divine rhetorician produces words that are powerful, and those able to read them properly are “empowered” to do so because they have been inspired by the same spirit that animates the very words they seek to understand. Origen would echo the point made in the Gospel of Luke: the risen Christ interprets to the Ethiopian Eunuch those things in the prophet Isaiah that refer to himself—such is the hermeneutical circle of Christian figural reading of Scripture. But how does one move from text to deeper meaning without undermining the literal text in the process? At one point in the Song of Songs commentary, Origen offers a biblical rationale for the distinction between the sensible and nonsensible orders of reality, invoking the double account of creation in Genesis, as well as Paul’s distinction between the inner and outer man. He observes that biblical terms like “child,” “adult,” “womb,” and “eye,” if they denote spiritual as well as bodily meanings, must be homonyms: “It is perfectly clear that in these passages the names of the members can in no way be applied to the visible body, but must be referred to the parts and powers of the invisible soul. The members have the same names, yes; but the names plainly and without any ambiguity carry meanings proper to the inner, not the outer man.” 55 Origen indicates that the two meanings of a biblical homonym must be kept distinct, for corruption

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is the opposite of incorruption: “The same terms, then, are used throughout for either man; but the essential character of the things is kept distinct, and corruptible things are offered to that which is corruptible, while incorruptible things are set before that which cannot be corrupted.” 56 It is the hallmark of a nonallegorical, literalistic reading that it fails to see that the term is a homonym and that the second meaning concerns incorruptible realities: It happens in consequence that certain people of the simpler sort, not knowing how to distinguish and differentiate between the things ascribed in the Divine Scriptures to the inner and outer man respectively, and being deceived by this identity of nomenclature, have applied themselves to certain absurd fables and silly tales. Thus they even believe that after the resurrection bodily food and drink will be used and taken—food, that is, not only from that True Vine who lives for ever, but also from the vines and fruits of the trees about us.57

At this point, the contrast between literal and nonliteral meanings seems as absolute as any binary opposition Boyarin might present. But the scriptural homonyms, although denoting meanings that contrast absolutely in one respect (corruption vs. noncorruption), do not contrast in all respects. For example, one can be a “child” either with respect to the age of the incorruptible soul or with respect to the age of the corruptible body. Soul and body contrast absolutely with respect to corruptibility, but there is similarity with respect to age, since the childlike soul will progress in time toward the “perfect man,” just as the actual child will grow into an adult. Hence the contrasting meanings of the homonym rule out corruption without ruling out temporal progression: the soul, though incorruptible, will really develop in time. And, as we shall see, to develop in this way, the soul will require a body—although not a corruptible one. In contrast to Boyarin’s efforts to highlight the opposition of meaning to text, Origen is clearly concerned to preserve specific links between the double meanings of biblical homonyms so that spiritual meaning will not be entirely separated from all bodily reference. As we saw in the passage that Boyarin examines, Origen underscores the relationship between text and meaning in several ways, by writing that “all these events . . . have the aspects and likenesses of certain hidden things,” that “all things that are in the open stand in some sort of relation to others that are hidden,” and that “the visible hart and roe mentioned in the Song of Songs are related to some patterns of incorporeal realities, in accordance with the character

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borne by their bodily nature.” The preceding example of how the homonym “child” preserves temporal development even as it drops corruption illustrates the sort of thing Origen seems to mean by discovering the spiritual meanings of things that are “in accordance with the character borne by their bodily nature.” 58 We see, then, that Origen is not suggesting that one should reject or ignore the body because of one’s love for God. Even so, there is a vital distinction to be made between love for God and love for all that is not God. On the one hand, the faculty of love has been “implanted in the human soul by the Creator’s kindness” and therefore “it is impossible for human nature not to be always feeling the passion of love for something.” On the other hand, one can “pervert” this divinely given capacity for love, debasing it by directing it toward earthly and perishable objects. The result is that the “love that is of God” should not “be esteemed to be in our every attachment.” 59 Although the bodily realm always informs one’s love for God, it should not become the object of that love. The bodily realm has its proper role because it is divinely created. The soul that loves spiritually is able to behold the Word of God clearly, falling deeply in love with the Word’s beauty and receiving in turn from the Word “a certain dart and wound of love.” 60 How does one perceive the Word’s beauty? Where is it found? The Word is the image of the God who creates, and for Origen, it is to the creation’s beauty—the realm of matter and the body—that one must look to discern the beauty of the Word: For this Word “is the image” and splendour “of the invisible God, the Firstborn of all creation, in whom were all things created that are in heaven and on earth, seen and unseen alike.” If, then, a man can so extend his thinking as to ponder and consider the beauty and the grace of all the things that have been created in the Word, the very charm of them will so smite him, the grandeur of their brightness will so pierce him as with a “chosen dart”—as says the prophet—that he will suffer from the dart Himself a saving wound, and will be kindled with the blessed fire of His love.61

The bodily realm in Origen’s system is often displayed as the penalty/ consequence of that “cooling off” (becoming “ensouled”) of the mind’s (or spirit’s) ardor that constitutes its fall away from contemplation of the Word. But Origen’s concept of creation through the Word revalues the bodily realm because it makes the body the soteriologically necessary site of the soul’s recovery of its former status as mind or spirit.62 That recovery can-

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not bypass but rather must work through or more deeply into the body’s inner depths, seeking the body’s most authentic dimension in its former purely spiritual state from which it congealed into its present embodied state. The soul, then, is not radically “other” than the body or “trapped” in the body; bodies are what cooled and congealed souls have become, and souls are what bodies will one day be.

Chapter 3 Spiritual Bodies: Origen

In Origen’s view, salvation requires a radical transformation of body, but it cannot entail its replacement, even as an allegorical reading requires deepening and extending, but not replacing, the text’s literal sense. Transforming the body through reading the literal sense can be compared to transforming the body through ingesting food. To read allegorically is to consume and digest “the body of the text.” Hence Origen can represent the allegorical interpretation of Scripture as a mode of eucharistic performance, and in doing so he takes pains to show that his celebration of allegorical transformation of identity is a spiritualization, not a rejection, of the body. Texts, rituals and bodies are admittedly different when transformed, but to Origen their fullest significance can be appreciated only when they are understood in their transformed state. When Origen’s interpretative practice is viewed from this perspective, Boyarin’s characterization of Origen as perpetuating an allegorical erasure of texts, body and Judaism is misleadingly one-sided at best. Despite what Daniel Boyarin himself suggests, he and Origen are equally committed to the identityforming power of the body and the text; for both of them, the text’s “literal sense,” like the reader’s physical body, is the vital site at which identity is fashioned or undermined. Where they differ—and differ they do—is over just what must happen at the site of the body and just what the body must undergo for identity to be preserved and enhanced. These two thinkers represent such compelling alternative visions because they share so much, not least of which is making the question of reading Scripture an intensely ethical matter, full of significance for the actual practice of embodied life in the world.

consuming the body of the text “Behold,” said John the Baptist, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). How did this lamb take away the world’s sin? By fulfilling, says Tertullian, “the figure of his saving blood”—the figure or type of the lambs slain at “the Lord’s Passover” prior to the Exodus.1 The 65

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Israelites were instructed by God to place the blood of the lambs on their doorposts and lintels. “When I see the blood,” the Lord assures them, “I will pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt” (Exod. 12:13). To his disciples gathered around him at his last Passover meal, Jesus, according to Luke, remarks: “‘I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you I shall not eat it [or, shall never eat it again] until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God’” (Luke 22:15–16). What, then, is this Passover about— eating a meal or suffering? For Tertullian, there is no question that the Passover refers to the passion or suffering of Christ: Jesus knows “at what season that one must needs suffer, whose passion the law prefigures. For out of all those Jewish feasts, he has chosen the day of the Passover.” 2 Tertullian here follows the line of interpretation marked out by Melito of Sardis, Apollinaris of Hierapolis, and Origen’s Roman contemporary Hippolytus. For all of them, Jesus’ Passover celebration is not about eating a meal but about suffering, as Hippolytus put it in his treatise on the Passover: Christ “did not eat, but suffered, the Passover” (to; de; pavsca oujk e[fagen ajlla; e[paqen). Etymology helps Hippolytus make the point: pavsca (Passover), he observes, comes from pavscein (“to suffer”).3 In his own Treatise on the Passover, Origen turns from Greek to Hebrew to find a different etymology to support a different interpretation. The Hebrew word pesach, he points out, does not mean passion but “passage” or “passing over,” diavbasi~ or uJpevrbasi~. To Origen, Jesus’ celebration of the Passover represents his “passing over” from the world of human beings to the realm of the divine Father; his suffering is the medium of his passage.4 The sacrifice of Passover lambs at the time of the Exodus is indeed a type, but it cannot be a type of Christ’s passion. For, as Origen insists, historical events are not types of historical events, and bodily things are not types of bodily things—and Christ’s passion is both historical and bodily.5 In his Commentary on John’s Gospel, Origen begins his interpretation of John 2:13, “And the Passover of the Jews was near,” by wondering about the “precision of the most wise John.” Why has the evangelist redundantly added “of the Jews,” when he could have simply referred to “the Passover”? For after all, Origen asks, “what other nation has a feast of the Passover?” 6 He begins his interpretation by presenting four quotations from the Exodus account of the Passover celebration, noting that in three places the text refers to a Passover “of the Lord” (Exod. 12:11, 27, 48), in one place simply to a Passover (Exod. 12:43). In no case does God refer to “your Passover” when speaking to the Israelites.7 When God does use “your,” it is in order to level sharp criticism at Jewish practices. Isa. 1:13 –14, for example,

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has God reject “your new moons and sabbaths and your great day,” “your fasting and abstention and your new moons and feasts.” 8 But Origen observes that Isaiah’s prophetic criticism of Israelite practice gives only one side of the story, for elsewhere God praises just these practices (Exod. 16:23, 25) and even commands Moses to offer “my gifts, my offerings, my fruit-offerings for a pleasing odor in my feasts” (Num. 28:1–3).9 What, then, determines whether or not the practices are “the Lord’s”? Origen finds the answer by pairing Exod. 8:16 –19 with Exod. 32:7: When the people do not sin, God speaks of them as “my people,” whose feasts are “the Lord’s.” But when the people turn away from God and sin, God, speaking to Moses, calls them “your people,” and the feasts of these people are properly regarded as human rather than divine.10 Consequently, Origen argues that John intends to refer to a merely human feast by saying that the Passover “of the Jews” was near. In characteristic fashion, he immediately considers a plausible objection to the interpretation he has been developing. Paul himself writes in 1 Cor. 5:7, “For also Christ our Passover is sacrificed,” rather than “Christ the Passover of the Lord is sacrificed.” Does this mean that Paul refers to a human, rather than divine, Passover? No; the “our” means only that Christ is sacrificed “because of us.” Moreover, if one attends to the “also” along with the “our,” one will recognize that Paul is suggesting that the Lord’s Passover, sacrificed because of us, will also be celebrated “in the coming age and in heaven.” 11 As it turns out, rather than the New Testament Passover supplanting the Old Testament Passover, or a future Passover supplanting that of the New Testament, there is really only one Passover of the Lord, which occurs on at least three specific occasions: at the time of the Exodus, at the time of Christ’s sacrifice, and at the time of Christ’s second coming. Whenever any of these Passovers is celebrated by sinners, it becomes a purely human Passover, which God will refer to as “your Passover” (or as the Passover “of the Jews,” given that the celebrants happen to be Jews). The fullest import of the Passover is realized in its third, most complete celestial performance.12 Origen’s task as an allegorical reader of various scriptural Passovers is to discover how to celebrate the celestial Passover right now, in his own time, while he and his readers are in the present middle state, between the Passover of the Exodus and its eschatological fulfillment in the heavenly Jerusalem: It is the task, however, of the wisdom which has been hidden in a mystery to make manifest in what manner we, who were formerly guided under the true law by guardians and stewards until the fullness of time

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should be present and we should receive the perfection of the Son of God, shall keep festival in the heavenly places of which there was a shadow among the corporeal Jews. It is also the task of this wisdom to contemplate the things established by law concerning foods, which are symbols of the things which will maintain and strengthen our souls there.13

Christians even at the present moment need to celebrate the third or celestial Passover in a manner congruent with the Old Testament liturgical regulations that are their shadows and symbols. To explain how this can happen, Origen must show just how “the service in a place” (hJ kata; tovpon latreiva), that is, in this present earthly place, is “an example and shadow of heavenly service.” 14 There is a twofold challenge here: he must explain what it means to “raise our thoughts from the earthly teachings concerning the law,” and he must also describe how those elevated thoughts constitute an identifiable version of the earthly practice, rather than its replacement. Anticipating Boyarin, Origen remarks that some will find fault even with the apostle Paul for failing to address this second challenge adequately: Now it is likely that someone who has a mental image of the sea of such great thoughts, and who wishes to consider how the service in a place is an example and shadow of heavenly services, and who wishes to reflect on the sacrifices and the sheep, has taken offense even at the apostle who, on the one hand, wished to raise our thoughts from the earthly teachings concerning the law, but, on the other hand, did not at all indicate how these things will be.15

Origen does not mean only that Paul failed to describe the details of the heavenly Passover. He also means that Paul did not show just how a Christian’s present celebration of the sacrifice of Christ reflected the heavenly elevation without cancellation of specific earthly rites concerning “the sacrifices and the sheep.” In other words, to borrow the phrase from the Song of Songs commentary, Paul does not show how the celebration of the celestial Passover “is in accordance with the character borne by . . . [the] bodily nature [of the earthly ritual].” And yet, if “the feasts . . . are referred anagogically to the age to come, this is even more reason why we must consider how ‘Christ our pasch is sacrificed’ now, and later will be sacrificed.” 16 We have already examined Origen’s general hermeneutical effort to demonstrate such connections. In On First Principles, book 4, where that theory is expounded, we find a specific illustration concerning the figural interpretation of the tabernacle in the Old Testament:

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But when the passage about the equipment of the tabernacle is read, believing that the things described therein are types, they [the more enlightened Christians who are countering the crude views of Christian literalists] seek for ideas which they can attach to each detail that is mentioned in connexion with the tabernacle. Now so far as concerns their belief that the tabernacle is a type of something they are not wrong; but in rightly attaching the word of scripture to the particular idea of which the tabernacle is a type, here they sometimes fall into error. And they declare that all narratives that are supposed to speak about marriage or the begetting of children or wars or any other stories whatever that may be accepted among the multitude are types; but when we ask, of what, then sometimes owing to the lack of thorough training, sometimes owing to rashness, and occasionally, even when one is well trained and of sound judgment, owing to man’s exceedingly great difficulty in discovering these things, the interpretation of every detail is not altogether clear.17

Earlier in this chapter we examined how Origen’s conception of Scripture sought to preserve what he regarded as Scripture’s own internal coherence—the way the successive verses formed a sequence (ajkolouqiva) of coherent thought, the way one verse seemed to lead inevitably to the next. His concern, we might say, was for the logical sequence of the literal sense of the text. Here, in his remarks on the tabernacle as type, Origen is extending that idea of logical sequence to the canon as a whole. He is now looking for a larger kind of coherence, one produced by the congruence of a type with its antitype or fulfillment. He is seeking out “the conformity” (akolouvqw~) of the Christian Passover “with the type” (tw/` tuvpw/) of the Exodus Passover, a conformity consisting in an accord between the fulfillment and the bodily character of the type.18 Origen’s treatise On the Passover offers a good example of the basic procedure: Let us now see whether what was said by the Savior [in John 6:53: “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you”] follows [ajkolouqei`] what was written in the law of the passover. For just as it is written there that whoever does not eat the passover shall be cut off from his people (Num. 9.13), now the true Lamb says that whoever does not eat his flesh does not have life (cf. John 6.53). Just as the destroyer then was not able to touch those who ate of the lamb (cf. Exod. 12.33; Heb. 11.28), so now whoever eats of the true lamb escapes the destroyer.19

Here the “accord” is a certain set of analogies or symmetrical actions—being cut off, being protected from destruction. But given that any set of historical events has a multitude of aspects, how can one decide which aspects

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are salient for discerning the relation of type to fulfillment? In the passage from the Commentary on John with which we began, Origen comments on the apparent incongruity of Old Testament types with their Christian fulfillments, as well as their own highly particular content: In the first place, when the apostle says, “Christ our pasch is sacrificed,” someone will raise the following objections. If the sheep sacrificed by the Jews is a type of sacrifice of Christ, it is necessary either that they sacrifice one, and not many, sheep just as there is one Christ, or since many sheep are sacrificed, we must seek many Christs, as it were, who are sacrificed in conformity with the type.20

Origen at once raises another problem with the “conformity of types”: “How does the sheep which is sacrificed contain an image of Christ, when the sheep is sacrificed by those who are observing the law, but Christ is killed by those who are transgressing it?” 21 Origen also sets this question aside. He points out that there are “ten thousand other matters” that could be examined concerning the Passover “in relation to the text of the apostle” (i.e., 1 Cor. 5:7), but he reserves them for another project—they require some other “general, voluminous work.” 22 He decides to limit himself at this point to the question raised by John’s remark in 2 :13, “Now the Passover of the Jews was near.” What is the Passover that is not “of the Jews”? In addition, because Exod. 12:5 says, with reference to the Passover not of the Jews but of the Lord, that “You shall partake of the lambs and the kids,” and John 1:29 says “This is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” the question “What is the Passover that is not of the Jews?” turns into the question: “How does the present Christian celebration of the sacrifice of Christ the lamb ‘conform to’ the former divine Passover sacrifice that is its type?” Addressing this question requires Origen to reckon with the highly particular description of the Passover sacrifice in the Old Testament. I have highlighted the specific features of the Old Testament type to which Origen feels its fulfillment must conform: [We must ask] how, in the case of Christ, “shall they eat the flesh that night roasted with fire, and eat the unleavened bread with bitter herbs” (Ex. 12.8)? We must also interpret the command, “You shall not eat thereof anything raw or boiled in water, but only roasted with fire. You shall eat the head with the feet and the entrails. You shall not leave any of them until morning, and you shall not break a bone of them; but you shall burn that which is left from them until morning.” 23

These verses from Exodus provoke several questions. How is consuming Christ the lamb to be understood as itself a proleptic celebration of the es-

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chatological Passover typified by the Exodus Passover? How is the precise manner of eating the Passover lamb preserved in the Christian eating of the lamb? Behind these questions lies another: just where is Christ the lamb to be found and how does one go about eating it? By consuming the Eucharist, perhaps? Indeed, Origen will argue that Scripture is itself a sacrament like the Eucharist. Christ the lamb is still the Word, that Word is found in Scripture, and eating the Word refers to the interpretation of Scripture. In his Treatise on the Passover, he writes: “If the lamb is Christ and Christ is the Logos, what is the flesh of the divine words if not the divine Scriptures?” 24 Origen works out this Christ /Scripture parallel a bit further: His flesh and blood . . . are the divine Scriptures, eating which, we have [e[comen] Christ; the words become his bones, the flesh becoming the meaning from the text, following which meaning, as it were, we see in a mirror dimly (1 Cor. 12.12) the things which are to come, and the blood being faith in the gospel of the new covenant (cf. 1 Cor. 11.25; Luke 22.20).25

The ancient Passover continues to be celebrated, then, in the allegorical reading of Scripture, which is not a disembodiment through interpretation but instead a consumption of a body through reading. Obtaining meaning from the text is like removing flesh from bones, a process Origen describes in one of his homilies on Jeremiah: The pronunciation of the words in the holy Scriptures is more powerful than any incantation. . . . Conceive, please, that though our conscious selves receive no profit the powers that work with the soul and the mind and our whole person are fed by the reasonable food that comes from the holy Scriptures and those words. . . . Believe the same thing about the holy Scripture, that, even if the mind does not perceive the result of the aid that comes from the Scriptures, yet your soul is aided by means of the bare reading itself. . . . For you must accept one of two conclusions about these Scriptures, either that they are not inspired because they have no good effect, as the unbeliever would suppose; or, as the believer would, you must accept that since they are inspired they have a good effect.26

Elsewhere, Origen writes that “we see in a human way the Word of God on earth, since he became a human being, for the Word has continually been becoming flesh in the Scriptures in order that he might tabernacle with us.” 27 Exod. 12:5 says that the Passover involves a sacrifice of “lambs,” and Origen observes that John 1:29 calls Christ a “lamb.” To read Exod. 12:5 figurally is to eat the flesh of Scripture, which is to consume the Passover

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lamb, who is Christ. But figural reading requires that Christ the lamb be consumed in a way congruent with the Old Testament depiction of the Passover lamb. In what respect, then, will the later lamb of Christ “conform to the type” of the earlier lambs? Origen begins to forge a link between past and present lambs, not with abstract meanings but by way of the specific terms “flesh” and “blood.” Using John 1:14 and 6:53 –56 to identify Christ with “flesh” and “blood,” Origen suggests that this Christ is referred to in both the ancient Israelite and the contemporary Christian Passover: Christ is both the flesh of the lamb who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29) and the blood that must be put on the lintels and doorposts of the houses in which the Passover is consumed (Exod. 12:7).28 Christ the lamb is consumed “at night,” which is “the time of the world.” Origen insists that the flesh of the lamb must be “roasted with fire,” but defers interpretation of that phrase since it appears further on in the Exodus passage. If Christ is flesh and blood, he is also “bread” (John 6:48) that comes from heaven and is to be consumed (John 6:50 –51). As John 6:51 indicates, Christ is both flesh and bread, and as such, Christ is the Passover lamb according to the specific vocabulary of Exod. 12:8. Origen then turns to the remaining phrases in the Exodus verses that describe the manner in which the Passover lamb is to be consumed. He identifies the consuming of the lamb with the allegorical reading of Scripture, which is contrasted with various deficient modes of reading, all of which have their subjective, experiential aspects. One eats the flesh and the bread “with bitter herbs either by being grieved with a godly grief because of repentances for our sins, a grief which produces in us a repentance unto salvation which brings no regret, or, by seeking and being nurtured from the visions of the truth which we discover because of our trials.” 29 Origen finds in the remaining verses descriptions of three modes of interpretation: literalists eat the text “raw,” the way nonrational animals eat their meat. Here Origen forges the link between eating actual raw meat and reading literally by way of the contrast between irrational animals and rational human beings.30 He is not content simply to assert that “raw” arbitrarily means “according to the literal meaning”; instead, he builds a conceptual bridge (via “irrationality”) that can display the conformity of his allegorical meaning with its type. One can boil meat to get rid of its rawness, but doing so runs the risk of turning it into something “flaccid, watery, and limp,” which is what those readers do who turn “anagogical meanings” back toward “the carelessness and wateriness of their manner of life.” 31 Clearly, the best readers are those who “roast” the meat of the lamb (Exod. 12:9a), that is, read the Word in Scripture “with fire.” To read with

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fire means that the Word, through the reading of the text, becomes a speaker in the reader, and the reader receives the Word as the voice of God. For example, Jeremiah received the words of God, who says, “Behold I have placed my words in your mouth as fire,” and those who receive the lamb through reading “say, as Christ speaks in them (2 Cor. 13:3), ‘Our heart was burning in the way as he opened the Scriptures to us.’” 32 Origen finds in the instructions to start with the head and work down to the feet, while not omitting entrails (Exod. 12:9b), an injunction to approach all of Scripture as “one body,” a unity in the spirit: one must “not break or cut through the most vigorous and firm bonds in the harmony of its total composition.” 33 Reading the text as eating the lamb in this manner will suffice as long as we are in the “night of darkness” of this life; we must consume all of that lamb until the “dawn” that signals the things after this life.34 When that new day arrives, one will use unleavened bread only until the manna arrives—the food of angels rather than of human beings.35 Origen has now brought his interpretation of the Passover nearly to a close. One consumes the Passover lamb by eating the Word (Christ) through the allegorical reading of Scripture. He has worked hard to preserve rather than supplant the significance of the details of the original Passover rite in the new “rite of reading”: “Even now they stand in the temple seeking Jesus, relying thus on the sacred Scriptures”; 36 “And such people indeed will seek Jesus as they stand in the temple of the Scriptures and question one another if Jesus will come to the feast.” 37 Hence it is significant that, at the end of his exposition, Origen does not say that he has made it possible to discern the spiritual meaning of bodily rites, but rather that he has characterized the act of spiritual reading in a sufficiently bodily way so that deficient modes of reading can be regarded as failures to preserve ritual: “Let the sheep, therefore, be sacrificed for each of us in every house of our fathers. And let it be possible that one man transgresses by not sacrificing the sheep, and another observes all the law by sacrificing, and by boiling it thoroughly, and not breaking a bone of it.” 38 Boyarin insists that allegorical reading, whether by Paul, Philo, or Origen, undermines the embodied reality of persons and events described in the Hebrew Bible. But Origen never suggests that the Exodus or the death of Christ is not a bodily reality. In his Treatise on the Passover, he turns to the details of the Exodus account “in order that the meaning contained in the historical events might be more clearly demonstrated to the mind.” 39 But in order for the meanings in question to really be the meanings of the actions of embodied agents, those agents and actions must be more than bodily, more than merely material or physical. The preservation of the tex-

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tual details that turns the act of spiritual reading into concrete ritual is not the preservation of the bodily character of old ritual for the sake of preserving the bodily character of new rituals. Instead, one preserves the textual details of rituals, past and present, because those details point through themselves toward that which is beyond, although not essentially against, themselves. Showing just how “pointing beyond” must be intrinsically related to “pointing through” is what the demonstration of the “conformity of types” is all about. But pointing through themselves toward what is spiritual is not the same as pointing to themselves as mere bodily things.40 This error was made by Heracleon when he claimed that the Passover was a type of the Passion. According to Origen, Heracleon wrote as follows concerning the Passover: “This is the great feast, for it was a type of the Savior’s passion, when the sheep was not only killed, but also provided rest when it was being eaten. In being sacrificed, it signified the passion of the Savior in the world, but in being eaten it signified the rest at the wedding.” 41 Origen does not conceal his contempt for Heracleon’s interpretation: “We have quoted his text that we might despise him when we see how frivolously and feebly, with no proof beyond himself, the man behaves with such great themes.” 42 Origen’s complaint may seem excessive, but Heracleon has broken Origen’s fundamental rule of figural interpretation by making the fulfillment of the type of the Passover into a bodily event, namely, Jesus’ physical death. One might have expected Origen to seize on the other side of Heracleon’s reading as more congenial—his notion of eating the Passover as a type finding its fulfillment in spiritual reunion with the divine. But from Origen’s point of view, when Heracleon gives the Old Testament type a merely bodily meaning, he once again denigrates that text by taking away its spiritual significance. Like Boyarin, Origen is utterly committed to the literal character of the text, but for a different reason. For Origen, the letter, like the body, is the unsubstitutable site of the Spirit’s transforming power.43

the identity of the spiritual body Origen’s view of allegorical reading as the way the Spirit transforms rather than repudiates the body raises questions about the relation of one’s body to one’s identity. Are our identities rooted in our bodies? Must our bodies be fleshly if they are to be bodies at all? Boyarin’s approach makes fleshly embodiment necessary for identity: male Jewish identity entails circumcision of the flesh. He contends that Paul’s notion of bodily resurrection val-

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orizes the body without a comparable commitment to flesh: “It is, in this sense, of a body without flesh—that is, a body without sexuality among other matters—that various early Christian thinkers can assert the positive status of ‘the body.’” 44 If Paul protects the body by giving up flesh, Origen, in Boyarin’s estimation, gives up both flesh and body, regarding “the human being” as “a soul trapped or imprisoned in a body,” whose task it is “to liberate itself from the body.” 45 But Boyarin’s judgment is insufficiently nuanced, for Origen does not make the body quite so irrelevant to human identity; in particular, his commitment to bodily resurrection shows that he regards the body as inescapable for identity. Nonetheless, if persons are to be resurrected to eternal life, as the Christian tradition maintains, then bodily corruption must be overcome, and “flesh” is the term typically used to signal corruption or decay. The question for Origen and other Christian believers in the resurrection is this: How can one overcome bodily corruption without dispensing with the body altogether? Is a body that is not (or is no longer) corruptible still a body in anything other than an equivocal sense? Following Pauline precedent in 1 Cor. 15, Christian thinkers addressed this question with the concept of the “spiritual body.” Origen draws on Paul’s notion in order to stress the centrality of embodiedness for a personal identity that persists in the resurrected “spiritual body.” We have already seen that Origen understands allegorical reading as a key to the transfiguration of the reader’s identity. The body’s crucial role in identity-formation makes it the necessary site of this transfiguration. In book 4 of On First Principles, Origen derides excessive literalism in biblical interpretation, which, he argues, leads to disbelief among Jews, false belief among heretics, and reprehensible belief among simpleminded Christians. All three forms of misreading stem from an inability to discern spiritual meaning beyond the “bare letter” of Scripture.46 Origen elaborates the basic contrast between spiritual meaning and the bare letter by positing a tripartite character for both Scripture and human beings that we have already see Boyarin identify: One must therefore portray the meaning of the sacred writings in a threefold way upon one’s own soul, so that the simple man may be edified by what we may call the flesh of the scripture, this name being given to the obvious interpretation; while the man who has made some progress may be edified by its soul, as it were; and the man who is perfect. . . . may be edified by the spiritual law. . . . For just as man consists of body, soul and spirit, so in the same way does the scripture, which has been prepared by God to be given for man’s salvation.47

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In this passage, Origen uses the term “soul” in two ways. Although “soul” represents one of three ways a reader might interpret the text (and this is the meaning Boyarin highlights), it also refers to the site where all three modes of reading have their transformative effect on the reader. This second, more comprehensive use of the term “soul” suggests how we are to understand Origen’s injunction to “portray the meaning of the sacred writings in a threefold way upon one’s own soul.” Rather than suggesting that one should carve up Scripture into different kinds of passages (as Marcion had done), or parcel out readers into separate kinds of persons (as the Valentinians had done), Origen describes three modes of reading, each corresponding to a particular degree of spiritual progress that any single reader might attain. The “threefold” reading reflects the way God has prepared Scripture to transform the whole person—body, soul, and spirit—as that person progresses toward a fuller knowledge of God.48 At the point of deepest spiritual understanding of the text, the divine Spirit announces the meaning in person to those who are wise, “no longer through letters but through living words.” 49 Here Origen echoes Plato’s endorsement in the Phaedrus of “living speech,” but with a strong commitment to the textual character of language’s meaning.50 To “portray the meanings of scripture in a threefold way upon the soul” is not to replace one meaning with another but, (like Plato) to “write in the soul,” but (unlike Plato) to write not by means of dialectic but by reinscribing the soul with the text.51 Such reinscription would mean transforming the character of the soul by “impressing” upon it the character of the bodily natures of those things read allegorically. For the inscription or fashioning of the soul through allegorical reading consists in submission to the spiritual import of the body’s concreteness. The seriousness of Origen’s investment in the body of the text seems to be called in question, however, by his observation that some texts have no bodily meaning at all.52 But this is a highly specified use of the term bodily. As the preceding discussion has shown, all passages of Scripture (presumably including those that have no bodily meaning) are parts of the single body of the text. Correspondingly, although allegorical readers of the one body of the text progress spiritually, they never fail to possess their own bodies in one form or another in the midst of their progression. Origen’s three categories are imprecise points on a continuum in which there is always some “mixture” of body, soul, and spirit. As the allegorical reader progresses spiritually, the body becomes more and more spiritualized, but it is never simply left behind. Origen heaps scorn on nonallegorical readers who think that after their

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resurrection they will continue to eat and drink ordinary food. His scorn makes it look as though he thought that the soul’s return to God demanded its radical disembodiment. But just as understanding Paul’s language of being a child in faith requires dropping the connotations of corruption while retaining a very literal conception of time’s unfolding, so too does a proper grasp of the resurrected life of spiritual bodies require dropping some, but not all, aspects of ordinary embodiment. Referring to the heavenly bodies, Origen observed elsewhere that “it would be exceedingly stupid if anyone were to think that, like statues, it is only their outward appearance which has a human form and not their inner reality.” 53 Soul, to be soul, requires an appropriate body. Origen addresses the question of the abiding necessity for the body in the course of refuting Celsus’s Middle-Platonic attack on the Christian doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead.54 At first, Origen seems to suggest that the highest aspiration of human life will not require a body: “In order to know God we need no body at all. The knowledge of God is not derived from the eye of the body, but from the mind which sees that which is in the image of the Creator and by divine providence has received the power to know God.” 55 We recall as much from our earlier discussion of Origen’s views on the composition of Scripture, in which prophets like Moses “see” God with a wholly spiritual “sense.” If, as Origen has indicated earlier in the text, body is tied to place, and if place is not a relevant category for God, then one needs to read “bodily” descriptions of Godhuman relations allegorically, setting aside the categories of place and body altogether: When the prophet says “Open thou mine eyes that I may comprehend thy wonders out of thy law,” or “The commandment of the Lord is luminous, enlightening the eyes,” or “Enlighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,” no one is so idiotic as to suppose that the wonders of the divine law are comprehended with the eyes of the body, or that the commandment of the Lord enlightens the bodily eyes, or that a sleep which produces death comes upon the physical eyes. . . . If scripture says the word of the Lord was in the hand of Jeremiah the prophet, or of anyone else, or the law in the hand of Moses, or that “I sought the Lord with my hands and was not deceived,” no one is such a blockhead as to fail to grasp that there are some hands which are given that name with an allegorical meaning [tropikw`~ kaloumevna~].56

These comments appear to support those who think that Origen’s allegorical reading demands or fosters a repudiation of the body. But we have al-

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ready seen that body (like soul) has more than one meaning in Origen’s writings, and in the passage above, it refers specifically to existence that is material and therefore subject to decay: This sort of body cannot be required in order to see God after the resurrection. But it would be a mistake to think that this kind of body either constitutes one’s personal identity or provides the basis for metaphorical extension in the notion of “the body of the text.” Origen’s most conceptually refined reflection on personal identity occurs in his Commentary on Psalm 1, fragments of which are preserved by one of his most severe critics, Methodius of Olympus, in his treatise entitled Aglaophon, or, Concerning the Resurrection. In these fragments, Origen describes three dimensions of a human being: a soul, the essence of which is invisible, incorporeal and changeless; a material substratum, which is constantly subject to radical change; and a corporeal form (ei`do~), which “characterizes” the changing physical “stuff” of the substratum by giving it persisting “qualities” composed of “features” (tuvpoi) such as scars and blemishes, which endure throughout the life of an otherwise changing physical body: Because each body is held together by [virtue of] a nature that assimilates into itself from without certain things for nourishment and, corresponding to the things added, excretes other things . . . , the material substratum is never the same. For this reason, river is not a bad name for the body since, strictly speaking, the initial substratum in our bodies is perhaps not the same for even two days. Yet the real Paul or Peter, so to speak, is always the same—[and] not merely in [the] soul, whose substance neither flows through us nor has anything ever added [to it]— even if the nature of the body is in a state of flux, because the form (eidos) characterizing the body is the same, just as the features constituting the corporeal quality of Peter and Paul remain the same. According to this quality, not only scars from childhood remain on the bodies but also certain other peculiarities, [like] skin blemishes and similar things.57

At death, the material substratum, insofar as it consists of material stuff, decays and disappears. But “body” in this sense does not define a person’s identity; rather, one’s identity is always constituted by soul and corporeal form together, and corporeal form constitutes the specifically “bodily” (and not simply “material”) aspect of a person’s identity. Origen argues that, in the resurrection, the divine lovgo~ transforms the person, making the formerly mortal corporeal form, unlike the purely physical stuff of the body, immortal: “the corporeal form [ei`do~] about which we have spoken,

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although mortal by nature . . . is made alive through the life-giving Spirit and, out of the fleshly, becomes spiritual.” 58 In this transformation, the identity of the person—which formerly had been constituted by the characterizing power of corporeal form in the flesh—will now be constituted by the characterizing power of corporeal form in the “spiritual body”— that is, the body that results from the lovgo~’s transformation of dead, material flesh.59 And just as we would . . . need to have gills and other endowment[s] of fish if it were necessary for us to live underwater in the sea, so those who are going to inherit [the] kingdom of heaven and be in superior places must have spiritual bodies. The previous form does not disappear, even if its transition to the more glorious [state] occurs, just as the form of Jesus, Moses and Elijah in the Transfiguration was not [a] different [one] than what it had been. Moreover . . . “it is sown a psychic body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15.44). . . . [A]lthough the form is saved, we are going to put away nearly [every] earthly quality in the resurrection . . . [for] “flesh and blood cannot inherit [the] kingdom . . .” (1 Cor. 15.50). Similarly, for the saint there will indeed be [a body] preserved by him who once endued the flesh with form, but [there will] no longer [be] flesh; yet the very thing which was once being characterized in the flesh will be characterized in the spiritual body.60

Origen’s concept of ei`do~ departs from ancient precedent in two ways. First, while Plato’s ei`do~ is a general form, Origen’s ei`do~ expresses the inner lovgo~ or principle of an individual, which, in the case of human beings, is precisely what personal identity means. Second, and even more strikingly, Origen makes this ei`do~ a principle that, precisely as material, is superior to the material body, distinguishing it (in contrast to Aristotle) from the immaterial soul.61 For Origen, the allegorical reader is committed to the human body no less than to the textuality of Scripture. That body is destined to face its ultimate future in an incorruptible (but not asomatic) existence “in some form,” a form quite unlike any that the reader had previously encountered. The category of corporeal form or ei`do~ allows Origen to do justice to the bodily dimension of personal identity without tying bodily identity to corruptible flesh. Caroline Walker Bynum comments that “Origen’s theory of the body could answer the problem of chain consumption or cannibalism” and “account for our survival not only from birth to old age (with all that digesting and excreting in between) but also into the glory of the end of time.” But, as Bynum adds, Origen’s strategy required a trade-off: “[I]t seemed to sacrifice integrity of bodily structure for the sake of transformation; it seemed to surrender material continuity

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for the sake of identity.” 62 Hence, although we can be sure that we remain ourselves in the resurrected state, we cannot be sure that our flesh remains the same.63 Despite Origen’s insistence that the body is intrinsic to personal identity, his recourse to the category of “form” to distinguish the body from mere materiality-without-identity still leaves hanging the pertinence of flesh or physicality to personal identity. Hence Boyarin’s complaint about Origen’s disembodying hermeneutic is, in fact, an apt modern restatement of Methodius of Olympus’s defense of the essential role of physicality, materiality, or flesh in constituting human identity. What Boyarin and Origen have in common, however, amid their dispute about the importance of flesh for bodily identity, is a shared commitment to conceptions of identity that allow for identity’s persistence over time. That persistence is certified by flesh for Boyarin (and Methodius), but undermined by flesh for Origen. Incorruptibility for Boyarin is the mark of what is timeless and generic, of what effaces specific identity. For Origen, incorruptibility is the sine qua non of an identity sufficiently self-identical to remain itself over time. For Boyarin, identity is anchored in the present by a fleshly reality that is the way it is and no other way; for Origen, identity is anchored in the future, and who persons are now, in their current fleshly configuration, does not exhaust their fullest identities, which will only become realized over time. Perhaps an analogy will give this comparison more force. Remember, if you will, someone who has died. Has the flesh of that person endured? Has his or her identity endured? And if you think that your memory bears witness to the endurance of his or her identity, has that identity endured apart from the flesh, because of the flesh, or despite the flesh? Boyarin’s opposition to Origen, like Origen’s opposition to Methodius, does not resolve such questions but only restates them more urgently.

Part 2

figural reading and history

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Chapter 4 The Figure in the Fulfillment: Erich Auerbach

Questions about the body lead immediately to questions about history, and Origenist allegory has been routinely castigated for denigrating history as much as the body. The Romance philologist and literary historian Erich Auerbach argues that ancient Christian figural readers, in contrast to allegorical readers such as Origen, preserved the historicity of biblical figures. Auerbach describes how figural interpreters drew on a relational conception of meaning that enabled them to withstand the threats of an allegorical meaning that might free itself from, and ultimately turn against, the historical persons and events depicted by the text. Auerbach’s preservation of the historical reality of biblical figures did not come at the expense of the spiritual character of figural reading, however. From his point of view, the spiritual character of figural reading protected rather than subverted the historical reality of figural persons or events, because spirituality was ultimately a matter of the impact of the historical Jesus on historical human beings. But as that impact unfolded in European literary history, its consequences assumed contours that were increasingly secular. Dante played a pivotal role in this transformation of figura from an ancient and medieval device of Christian scriptural interpretation of history to a modern, secular instrument of literary realism. In the work of modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, this literary realism preserved only a slight aura of Christianity’s own figural realism, yet Auerbach continued to search, with increasing disenchantment, for evidence of meaningfulness within a history devoid of the signs of divine providence. Forced out of Germany in 1935, two years after Faulhaber’s Advent sermons, into exile in Istanbul, Auerbach published his seminal essay “Figura” in 1938 and began work on his magisterial book Mimesis in 1942.1 With so much of his own western European world suddenly stripped from him, Auerbach sought to reweave that world textually out of close readings of some classic texts of the Western literary canon. In Mimesis, he charted 83

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the history of western European forms of representing reality from Homer and the Bible to Virginia Woolf in order to paint a picture of a unified European humanistic culture that was already dissolving before his eyes.2 His work was more than a memorialization or monumentalization of the past, however; it was also an exercise in social and cultural criticism.3 Auerbach wrote in order to warn his fellow Europeans that in joining Faulhaber and his opponents they were directly contradicting their identity as Christians, and therefore as Europeans. Auerbach’s argument was subtle and unique: secular European cultural unity was rooted in a uniquely religious mode of representing reality—the Christian tradition of figural interpretation of the Bible. Europe no longer recognized the true character of that tradition, or acknowledged its indebtedness to it. Horrendous betrayal— of the text and of one another—was the consequence. To make his case about the character of Christian figural interpretation, Auerbach needed access to the ancient writings of the Church Fathers. But the scholarly resources of the Turkish State University where he was employed were meager at best. In his “Epilogue to Mimesis,” he relates that he was given permission to use the set of Migne’s Patrologia in the nearby Dominican Monastery, San Pietro di Galata. Special permission to use this collection had been granted to him by the Vatican apostolic delegate, Monsignor Angelo Roncalli. Like Faulhaber, Roncalli would soon become a cardinal. Later on, he would be better known as Pope John XXIII.4 What Auerbach believed he had discovered in the pages of the San Pietro di Galata Patrologia was something not in evidence in Faulhaber’s 1933 Advent sermons: a rich tradition of Christian figural reading of the Old Testament in which the historical reality of ancient Jews had been preserved rather than superseded.

figural relation versus figurative subversion What kind of reading preserves the historical reality of what a text depicts? Auerbach first implores readers not to allow meanings to replace the distinctive graphic character of the words themselves. Consider the following analogy. I look at one of the leaves hanging from a branch on the tree just outside my window. For some reason, I look at it with more than my usual level of attention. I am struck by its various details: streak of red right there, on the bottom of one of the three points; a mottling on the yellow portion above; several small holes near the stem. Soon I am absorbed in contemplation of the utterly unique features of that single leaf. There is not another one like it, I am sure. Then someone calls from across the room:

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“What are you looking at?” “A leaf,” I answer. And now all uniqueness vanishes: I have been looking at “a leaf,” an instance of that general class called “leaves.” Does “a leaf” have three points or four? Is it red or green? In fact, does “a leaf” even exist in the world at all? No—just as there are no trees in general, there are no leaves as such. I had encountered a unique individual, but when asked to convey what I encountered, I handed over a general concept.5 Reading the Old Testament, suggests Auerbach, can so easily be like that. One comes across specific words on the page, and together those words paint a picture or define a character. What, a reader may ask, is the meaning of that picture? What is the author trying to say by describing that character in this way? And immediately, inadvertently, with the best of intentions, one begins to translate the text into something else until, finally, one is no longer reading the text as it is written at all. A form of reading that would preserve the historical reality of those things that a text depicts would need to begin, then, by preserving the graphic character of the words that render them. But how does preserving the graphic character of biblical words help preserve the historical reality of the persons or events they depict? Auerbach begins by blurring any distinction between the textual and historical character of the Bible. The Bible is littera-historia or letter-history, a single text that depicts past persons and events as significant. As some philosophers of history have recently argued, past persons and events are not significant in themselves but only as a consequence of the historian’s deliberate, narrative ordering of them.6 Auerbach observes that, for the Christian figural reader of the biblical text, God is both enactor and interpreter of the events depicted by the text. They have meaning and significance because they are the idiom in which God acts and speaks. Although one may refer to a figure “announcing” its fulfillment, it is ultimately God who does the announcing, for a person or an event is a figura precisely because it begins an extended divine utterance that embraces subsequent persons and events. “Figuralness” denotes the status of things as significant—not in themselves and not in their meanings—but insofar as they are, in all of their concrete reality, the enacted intention of God. If, then, Jesus is the fulfillment of Joshua, that is because both Joshua and Jesus help enact a single divine performative intention. Discerning that intention in oddly congruent literary narratives, the figural reader makes explicit the similarities by which otherwise separate events are related to one another as moments in a single, divine utterance. The similarity discerned in otherwise incongruent historical events bears witness to the singularity of the divine identity and purpose that permeates them.

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As a consequence, the Christian figural reader, according to Auerbach, does not, as Boyarin would have it, correlate linguistic representations with meanings. Instead, he or she observes and describes a relationship between what might otherwise appear to be unrelated entities. Figural “meaning” describes the intelligibility discovered in the relation between two events comprising a single divine performance in history. In order to discern the meaningfulness of the relationship, the figural reader cannot allow the description of that relationship to replace the graphic character of the representations being related. And by preserving the graphic character of the representations, the reader also leaves intact (if only by not calling into question) the historical reality of the persons and events represented by the text. From now on, I shall use the term “figural,” as Auerbach does, to describe this relationship between representations and (implicitly) between those things that are represented. I shall reserve the term “figurative,” on the other hand, for the correlation of a representation and its logically independent conceptual meaning. Take as an example the Exodus as a figure for which Christian baptism is the fulfillment. A figural description of the Exodus and baptism is a description of the relationship between them (either between them as events, or as signifiers in the text of the Bible). A figurative account of their relation depends on the correlation of the meaning of Exodus with baptism, in which baptism becomes the meaning of the Exodus, a meaning that is logically independent of the Exodus itself. Logical independence means that one can state the meaning apart from the representation without loss; the representation is, at best, a useful but dispensable illustration. Hence, once one knows the meaning of the Exodus, one can then dispense with the Exodus. When such a meaning is regarded as the same as the representation, it is “literal” (i.e., when the meaning of the Exodus is just the exodus of Israelites from Egypt). When the meaning is regarded in contrast to the representation, it is “nonliteral” (i.e., when one says that Baptism is the nonliteral meaning of the Exodus—literal dead Egyptians are understood to have the nonliteral meaning of vanquished sins). The upshot of these distinctions is that the very possibility of figurative language is constituted by the difference inhering in the binary opposition between literality and nonliterality; a figural relation, on the other hand, avoids entering into that opposition altogether. According to Auerbach, Christian figural interpretation has three basic features: two persons or events, the relation between them, and the act of interpretation that discerns that relationship. Both the figure and its fulfillment are concrete, historically real persons or events, related in ways that are fundamentally figural rather than figurative. Christian figural inter-

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pretation can be viewed either with respect to the entities related, or with respect to the interpretative act that relates them: “Figura is something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical,” 7 and “figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons.” 8 The first remark describes the strange agency of one historical entity that, apparently on its own, “announces” another. The second remark describes the action of a reader, who, apparently by means of his or her interpretation, “establishes a connection” between such historically real entities. The obvious contrast between these two points of view is not as strong as it appears, however. Auerbach argues that the figure doesn’t simply announce its fulfillment “on its own,” as though one person or an event, simply by existing, could signify another person or event. For figure and fulfillment do not simply exist, but rather exist only as significant. They are persons or events that exist in order to signify something, and they do so because they are the means by which God is executing a divine plan for human life. So one may speak of the figure “announcing” the fulfillment, but it is ultimately God who is announcing the fulfillment, by means of the figure, as though that person or event were a divine utterance. The connection that the figural interpreter “establishes” is not, then, simply invented. To establish the connection, the figural reader discerns a series of similarities between two persons or events. Auerbach’s figural reader need not invoke the term “meaning.” As it is customarily used, meaning implies a doubleness, a distinction between words and their meanings. To ask for the meaning of a word is to ask for something in addition to the word, thereby implying that the existence of the word alone is inadequate. Auerbach’s characterizations of figural reading do not distinguish things and meanings in this way, but instead describe a relationship between things. Although he sometimes uses the term “meaning” to refer to the figural relation between two persons or events, meaning is a relational rather than an independent category. Rather than providing a thing with a meaning, figural readers relate one thing to another. Auerbach underscores the reality of figure and fulfillment as entities in the world of space and time, and by “meaning” he refers to the interrelationship of such real things, rather than some strange mental “thing” with an existence all its own apart from that relationship. Auerbach is suspicious of meaning precisely because it so easily claims for itself a right of independent existence that belongs only to historical persons and events. Auerbach offers a detailed presentation of figural reading in his essay “Figura.” The biblical verse at issue, Num. 13:16, reads as follows: “Those were the names of the men whom Moses sent to scout the land [of Canaan];

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but Moses changed the name of Hoshea son of Nun to Joshua.” Auerbach quotes from the second-century Church father Tertullian, whose figural reading of this event focuses on Hoshea’s new name, Joshua, of which the name Jesus is a contraction: For the first time he [Hoshea] is called Jesus. . . . This . . . was a figure of things to come. For inasmuch as Jesus Christ was to introduce a new people, that is to say us, who are born in the wilderness of this world, into the promised land flowing with milk and honey, that is to say, into the possession of eternal life, than which nothing is sweeter; and that, too, was not to come about through Moses, that is to say, through the discipline of the Law, but through Jesus, that is, through the grace of the gospel, our circumcision being performed by a knife of stone, that is to say, by Christ’s precepts—for Christ is a rock; therefore that great man, who was prepared as a type of this sacrament, was even consecrated in figure with the Lord’s name, and was called Jesus.9

Here one event—the naming of Hoshea as Joshua (Jesus)—announces a second, future event—salvation through Jesus. The figure’s announcement is discerned by Tertullian, who “establishes the connection” between the two events by describing their similarities: Joshua leads the Israelites into the promised land, just as Jesus leads Christians into eternal life. Tertullian adds detail to this basic parallel, explicating the similar nature of the two journeys (both are from a wilderness to a promised land) while contrasting their motivations (law vs. gospel, represented by the contrast of physical and spiritual circumcision). We have seen that Auerbach’s own characterizations of figural reading neither make any mention of meaning nor distinguish between what is literal and what is nonliteral. However, Tertullian’s description of the analogies between the two journeys invites just such a distinction, tempting one to infer that the wilderness of “this world” is the nonliteral meaning signified by the literal wilderness of the Judaean desert, that eternal life is the nonliteral meaning of the promised land, that spiritual sweetness is the nonliteral meaning of honey, that Christ’s precepts are the nonliteral meaning of circumcision, or that Christ himself is the nonliteral meaning of the stone knife. In other words, Tertullian’s exposition offers an opportunity to regard the comparisons on which figural interpretation is based as instances of figurative language, in which what is literally written has nonliteral meaning. But Auerbach regards Tertullian’s comparisons as structural similarities rather than figurative expressions, as various aspects of two related patterns of events. Tertullian’s figural reading proposes that the two patterns

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of events belong together as earlier and later portions of a single sequence of events (which is, from another point of view, one single divine utterance). So although Tertullian introduces comparisons that could be understood figuratively, Auerbach does not pursue their figurative potential: Just as Joshua and not Moses led the people of Israel into the promised land of Palestine, so the grace of Jesus, and not the Jewish law, leads the “second people” into the promised land of eternal beatitude. The man who appeared as the prophetic annunciation of this still hidden mystery, qui in huius sacramenti imagines parabatur, was introduced under the figura of the divine name. Thus the naming of Joshua-Jesus is a phenomenal prophecy or prefiguration of the future Saviour; figura is something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical.10

Auerbach makes his key point in the last sentence: None of the events in question lacks full historical reality. No matter what figurative possibilities might be suggested by the similarities of the two event patterns, figure and fulfillment remain fully real and historical. Although the event of Joshua’s naming is a figure, Tertullian’s representation of Joshua as a “prophetic annunciation” of Jesus does nothing to call into question the reality that Joshua would have possessed as an actual human being in his own right. After emphasizing the historical reality of figure and fulfillment, Auerbach describes the relation between them as one “revealed by an accord or similarity,” supplying another brief example from Tertullian without further comment.11 Elsewhere he supplies a further, qualifying remark that once again reflects his double perspective: “Often vague similarities in the structure of events or in their attendant circumstances suffice to make the figura recognizable; to find it, one had to be determined to interpret in a certain way.” 12 Auerbach suggests that vagueness in structural similarity might call forth a compensatory hermeneutical ingenuity. The phrase “one had to be determined” suggests that interpreters might “discover” relations they had only imagined. Auerbach supplies a brief example from Tertullian without comment, presumably in order to illustrate both vagueness in structural similarities and a corresponding determination on the part of the interpreter to render them less vague. Tertullian writes: “For if Adam provided a figura of Christ, the sleep of Adam was the death of Christ who was to sleep in death, that precisely by the wound in his side should be figured the Church, the mother of all living.” 13 In what way are these comparisons vague? Auerbach does not say here, but he sheds more light on this question when he appeals again to this example in Mimesis, noting how the Christian use of

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figural reading in the Church’s mission to the gentiles carried with it a particular danger connected with the category of “meaning”: The Old Testament was played down as popular history and as the code of the Jewish people and assumed the appearance of a series of “figures,” that is of prophetic announcements and anticipations of the coming of Jesus and the concomitant events. . . . The total content of the sacred writings was placed in an exegetic context which often removed the thing told very far from its sensory base, in that the reader or listener was forced to turn his attention away from the sensory occurrence and toward its meaning. This implied the danger that the visual element of the occurrences might succumb under the dense texture of meanings.14

In order to illustrate just how this capitulation of occurrence to meaning arises, Auerbach takes up once again Tertullian’s figural interpretation of Eve’s creation from Adam’s side: It is a visually dramatic occurrence that God made Eve, the first woman, from Adam’s rib while Adam lay asleep; so too is it that a soldier pierced Jesus’ side, as he hung dead on the cross, so that blood and water flowed out. But when these two occurrences are exegetically interrelated in the doctrine that Adam’s sleep is a figure of Christ’s death-sleep; that, as from the wound in Adam’s side mankind’s primordial mother after the flesh, Eve, was born, so from the wound in Christ’s side was born the mother of all men after the spirit, the Church (blood and water are sacramental symbols)—then the sensory occurrence pales before the power of the figural meaning. What is perceived by the hearer or reader or even, in the plastic and graphic arts, by the spectator, is weak as a sensory impression, and all one’s interest is directed toward the context of meanings.15

Auerbach begins with what the biblical authors regard as two real events: the forming of Eve from Adam’s opened side and the flowing of blood and water from Jesus’ pierced side. Figural readers presumably might simply assert that the formation of Eve from Adam was a prophecy of the flow of blood and water from Jesus on the cross. But to support further this claim about a close relation between the two events, one must describe in more detail their structural similarities. Yet the more one teases out the similarities, the more one downplays the sensible character of the two events in favor of the (nonsensible) meanings that hold them together as figure and fulfillment. Auerbach explains how this supersession of sensible occurrence by

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meaning might come about. On the one hand, there is nothing nonliteral or figurative in the accounts of Eve’s creation in Genesis and the piercing of Jesus’ side in the Gospel of John, taken by themselves: there is sleep, a rib, shaping, a piercing of flesh, water, blood. There is also a broad structural similarity between the two events: in both cases, a physical opening is made in the side of a male human being and something physical comes out of it (in one case, a rib; in the other, blood and water). Discerning this structural similarity, a figural reader might argue that the first physical event is a figural prophecy of the second, which is its fulfillment. But one could also go further and add what Auerbach calls a “doctrine” or “meaning,” namely, that the mother of human beings “after the flesh” (Eve) is a literal figure of the nonliteral mother of human beings “after the spirit” (the Church). The more one becomes interested in this nonliteral meaning, the less attention one will give to the literal, physical character of either figure (Adam/Eve) or fulfillment (Christ).16 Does Christian figural reading inevitably dissolve the sensible character of figure or fulfillment into nonsensible meanings? Auerbach claims that the figurative tension is built into the way Christians understand reality. But unlike Boyarin, he does not regard dissolution as an inevitability but only as an ever-present possibility to which Christianity often succumbed. Auerbach stresses this possibility at the conclusion of his examination of the Adam/Christ typology, when he contrasts it with forms of GrecoRoman representation of reality contemporary with it: In comparison, the Greco-Roman specimens of realistic presentation are, though less serious and fraught with problems and far more limited in their conception of historical movement, nevertheless perfectly integrated in their sensory substance. They do not know the antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning, an antagonism which permeates the early, and indeed the whole, Christian view of reality.17

Christian figural readers establish a relation between two historically real entities apart from the category of meaning, yet when they explicate the comparisons that warrant the claim of interrelationship, they often appeal to the category of meaning (“doctrine”) that undermines sensible appearance by its very presence. As Auerbach describes it, Christian figural reading inherently embraces a basic tension (indeed, more than a tension—an “antagonism”) between structural figural similarities among persons and events and semiotic figurative relations of meaning. Yet Auerbach argues that Christian figural readers typically eased the tension in favor of figural relation rather than figurative subversion.

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spiritual understanding and abstraction Just how were figural readers able to justify similarities between figure and fulfillment without appealing to categories of meaning? The problem for figural readers was that in relating figure to fulfillment, they seemed to require some “third thing” that both shared. That third thing (“meaning”) tended to float free from both figure and fulfillment, becoming an independent object of attention. Auerbach addresses this problem in the remainder of his analysis of Tertullian by advancing two important claims. First, the relation between figure and fulfillment is discerned by an act of understanding that, while itself nonsensible or “spiritual,” does not diminish (by means of abstracting from) the sensible appearance of figure or fulfillment. Second, insofar as the act of spiritual understanding involves any abstraction, that abstraction characterizes meaning; it does not describe an effect to which either the figura or the fulfillment itself succumbs. In defense of the first claim, Auerbach shows that Tertullian insists that both figure and fulfillment must be bodies. Auerbach acknowledges that the act of understanding that grasps the relation between figure and fulfillment is a spiritual act, but its “spirituality” consists entirely in the recognition of the interrelationship of figure and fulfillment. The spiritual character of figural reading does not reside in the subordination of a literal figure to a nonliteral meaning that supersedes or supplants it: “In every case the only spiritual factor [in figural reading] is the understanding, intellectus spiritualis, which recognizes the figure in the fulfillment.” 18 With this remark, Auerbach implies that the figural reader recognizes what is already the case rather than simply imagines it to be the case. His remark also invokes a contained-container image (“the figure in the fulfillment”) that collapses the temporal distance between figure and fulfillment into a spatial relationship that reverses the typical first-second sequence suggested by the notion of fulfillment: rather than looking at the figura (Joshua) and then seeing the fulfillment (Jesus), one looks at the fulfillment (Jesus) and sees in him the figura (Joshua). Later we shall see how this reversal of figure and fulfillment, already built into Auerbach’s understanding of Tertullian’s figural reading, receives its definitive completion in Dante’s figural art.19 Auerbach pursues his second claim concerning abstraction through the examination of a passage in which it seems that Tertullian has ascribed more historical reality to the fulfillment than to the figure. In one passage, Tertullian juxtaposes the law as a whole to Christ as its fulfillment: the law “is transferred from the shadow to the substance, that is, from figures to the reality.” Here, observes Auerbach, “it might seem that . . . the abstrac-

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tion give[s] the figure a lesser force of reality.” 20 Although Auerbach quickly assures his readers that “there is no lack of examples in which the figure has the greater concreteness” and provides several illustrations, the abstract character of Tertullian’s language of umbra (shadow) and veritas (truth) clearly worries him. He returns to the passage several sentences later: The fulfillment is often designated as veritas, as in an example above, and the figure correspondingly as umbra or imago; but both shadow and truth are abstract only in reference to the meaning first concealed, then revealed; they are concrete in reference to the things or persons which appear as vehicles of the meaning. Moses is no less historical and real because he is an umbra or figura of Christ, and Christ, the fulfillment, is no abstract idea, but also a historical reality. Real historical figures are to be interpreted spiritually (spiritaliter interpretari), but the interpretation points to a carnal, hence historical fulfillment (carnaliter adimpleri: De resurrectione, 20) —for the truth has become history or flesh.21

Moses and Christ are two historically real persons from different periods of time. Are they related to one another? Apart from the spiritual understanding that figural reading supplies, one would have to turn to some other method for relating them, such as modern historiography. When Moses and Christ are understood figurally, Moses is understood to be prophesying Christ, and Christ is understood to be the fulfillment of Moses as a prophetic figura. Although Moses and Christ are now figurally related, they are no less real and historical than they were when considered independently of their figural relation. Instead, figural reading has simply made explicit the significance that Moses and Christ possess by virtue of being the speech act of God. All of this is familiar ground from our previous discussion. Now to the question that troubles Auerbach: Do the terms shadow or image (umbra or imago) and truth (veritas) abstract from the sensible appearance of the historically real figure and fulfillment? Auerbach answers “no,” because those terms have no content or force of their own. He regards them as entirely relational; their content is solely a function of whatever they are referred to. So umbra and imago are concrete because they are tied to Moses as figura, rather than to Moses simply as a historically real person devoid of figural import: “Shadow and truth are abstract only in reference to the meaning first concealed, then revealed; they are concrete in reference to the things or persons which appear as vehicles of the meaning.” 22 Of course, one must ask just what Auerbach means by “the meaning first

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concealed, then revealed.” What this clearly does not denote is the historically real events or persons who are figures or fulfillments. The fulfillment, Auerbach insists, is “carnal, hence historical” because “the truth has become history or flesh.” In contrast, “the meaning first concealed, then revealed” is presumably neither fleshly nor historical but something abstract. What, then, is meant by this “meaning”? For Auerbach, the term “meaning” designates the figural relationship between a figure and its fulfillment. Meaning has no relevance to figure and fulfillment considered separately, but only to each insofar as each is figurally related to the other. As a statement about a relation (the figural relation between concrete, historically real entities), meaning is itself not concrete but necessarily abstract. But in the case of figures and their fulfillments, such a statement can never be about the relationship without simultaneously being about the entities related (for the entities exist only as significant, only as figurally related). Consequently, although one can, in principle, view meaning with respect to its abstract dimension, one does not thereby minimize the historical concreteness of figure and fulfillment. Doing so, as in Tertullian’s Adam/Christ typology, would indicate that one was no longer attending to the abstract aspect of figural meaning, because one would no longer be attending to the relation between figure and fulfillment. It is true that the abstract dimension of figural meaning threatens to make figural meaning figurative—to displace a literal meaning in favor of a nonliteral meaning (one that, in this case, would be abstract). But Auerbach’s relational conception of the category of meaning does not allow this to happen. Abstract meaning becomes one point of view about a relationship; it has no independent figurative status of its own. Auerbach’s desire to eliminate free-floating, abstract meaning leads him to carefully circumscribe the “spiritual” character of figural understanding. Expanding on a definition we have already considered, Auerbach focuses first on what figural interpretation accomplishes: it “establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills [einschliesst oder erfüllt] the first.” 23 Rather than consider the act of interpretation itself, Auerbach characteristically turns instead to the events or persons being interpreted: “The two poles of the figure are temporally distinct, but both, being real events or figures, lie within time; they are both, as has already been repeatedly emphasized, contained within the flowing stream that is historical life.” 24 This double description of figure and fulfillment portrays them as they are in light of figural interpretation and as they are—and remain—in their own right. In their own right, they are “real”

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and consequently they “lie within time,” and their interpretation as figure and fulfillment does not remove them from the flow of time, from “historical life.” Auerbach’s key point is that although figural reading relates persons and events that occupy distinct historical moments, thereby recognizing their significance, such a reading does not remove them from time in a way that would diminish their historical reality. There is no question that the “connection” (Zusammenhang) that figural reading discerns must be something more than the ordinary historical temporality that figure and fulfillment share simply by being actual, concrete events or persons existing at discrete moments in history. And yet even though figure and fulfillment are temporally separated, they still lie within time, which is both a principle of distinction and a category of continuity. In contrast to time, which both distinguishes and relates figure and fulfillment, “spirit” is a category of interpretation only as a mode of recognition: “only the understanding, the intellectus spiritalis, is a spiritual act”—what is understood remains material and historical. Every time Auerbach acknowledges the spiritual character of figural interpretation, he offers a careful qualification. So he emphasizes that the spiritual character of figural interpretation does not alter its concern for real, historical entities: As “a spiritual act,” figural interpretation nonetheless “deals with concrete events whether past, present, or future, and not with concepts or abstractions; these are quite secondary, since promise and fulfillment are real and intrinsically historical events, which have either happened in the incarnation of the Word, or will happen in the second coming.” 25 When Auerbach offers a second concession to the spiritual dimension of figural interpretation, he again focuses not on the act itself but its results—in this case, on certain ideas one might come to hold: “Of course purely spiritual elements enter into the conceptions of the ultimate fulfillment, since ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’” 26 Auerbach does not define these spiritual elements but instead turns from the act of interpretation to the entities being interpreted, insisting again that the objects, the fulfillment of which the interpreter conceives as spiritual, are nonetheless real: “yet it will be a real kingdom, not an abstract, immaterial formation; only the figura, not the natura of this world will pass away . . . and the flesh will rise again.” 27 Finally, Auerbach concedes that, in the broadest sense, allegorical interpretation is the genus of which figural reading is one species: “Since in figural interpretation one thing stands for another, since one thing represents and signifies the other, figural interpretation is ‘allegorical’ in the widest sense” (as the presence of “purely spiritual elements” in figural interpretation would suggest, given Auerbach’s earlier linking of al-

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legorical interpretation with meanings that are purely spiritual). In qualifying this concession, Auerbach once again dismisses the threat of abstraction and returns to his opening insistence on the historical reality of biblical figures: figural reading “differs from most of the allegorical forms known to us by the intrinsic historicity [Innergeschichtlichkeit] of the thing that signifies and that which is signified.” 28 The “spiritual” dimension of figural reading, then, does not undermine the historical reality of figure or fulfillment. If it did, figural reading would become allegorical or symbolic. Despite his grudging recognition that figural reading can be seen as a subset of allegory, Auerbach contrasts the two sharply. Like Boyarin, he argues that allegorical reading inherently reduces the objects of its interpretation to abstractions, “stripping” them of whatever “concrete reality” they might initially possess. Consequently, the distinction between historical reality and its textual representation, which figural interpretation preserves by regarding the object of interpretation as at once text and history (littera-historia), makes no ultimate difference to the allegorical reader, for such reading performs its abstraction on texts as collections of signs quite apart from the historical realities that those textual signs represent. In effect, allegorical reading simply disregards the historia of the biblical text as littera-historia. So even though Auerbach mentions allegorical interpretation of “historical events,” 29 he notes that, in this case, the phrase “includes legendary and mythical as well as strictly historical events” and adds that “whether the material to be interpreted is really historical or only passes as such is immaterial for our purpose.” 30 Allegorical reading will turn both historical and history-like literary representations into collections of mere abstractions. Yet because the biblical text links its littera so closely to historia, when allegorical reading abstracts from the letter of the text, it necessarily abstracts from its historical reality as well. For Auerbach, unlike Boyarin, the mystery of figural reading’s preservation of historical reality is matched by the mystery of its betrayal at the hands of allegory. Like figural reading, allegorical interpretation also “transforms the Old Testament; in it too the law and history of Israel lose their national and popular character.” But allegorical reading goes much further than figural interpretation, for in it, the law and history of Israel “are replaced by a mystical or ethical system, and the text loses far more of its concrete history than in the figural system.” 31 With his explication of figural reading, Auerbach has sketched out an ideal situation in which statements of meaning are not allowed to drift apart from those concrete, historical realities whose figural interrelation-

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ship is just what the statements of meaning denote. But we recall that Auerbach’s distinction is designed to ward off the practical danger of the rhetorical “power” of meaning to influence readers: “The sensory occurrence pales before the power of the figural meaning.” Auerbach’s distinction between shadow/truth as abstract only with reference to meaning, but concrete with reference to figure and fulfillment is, in effect, a plea for readers to resist the power of meaning to dominate, and ultimately supplant, that of which it is the meaning. In Mimesis, Auerbach suggests that meaning’s power to undermine the reality of figure and fulfillment is not easy to resist: “What is perceived by the hearer or reader . . . is weak as a sensory impression, and all one’s interest is directed toward the context of meanings.” 32

jesus dies, but peter lives In the Christian account of events, where does the possibility of an independent meaning arise? Auerbach locates the origin of meaning’s independence in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. Here meaning becomes the hermeneutical significance of spirit, and spirit comes to be disengaged from Jesus and transferred to his disciples. In chapter 2 of Mimesis, Auerbach contrasts Peter’s denial of Christ in the Gospel of Mark with scenes from Petronius and Tacitus. Auerbach’s guiding question in the entire chapter is whether one can find in the ancient world representations of reality that do not reduce the complexity of human history to the static, formal categories of ancient ethics or rhetoric, but instead do justice to the deep “historical forces” that underlie the lives of ordinary people and generate significant social and cultural transformation. On this score, Petronius and Tacitus are found wanting. Despite their attention to concrete detail, their writings remain in the grip of ethical and rhetorical categories that flatten out the complexities of social events, and their faithfulness to the classical separation of styles keeps them from taking seriously the tragic lives of the ordinary people who appear in their narratives. Auerbach’s counterexample is found in the gospel account of Peter’s denial, a vignette he thinks illustrates especially well the essential character and import of “every other occurrence which is related in the New Testament.” 33 Auerbach regards the story as a literary representation of reality in which “the deep subsurface layers, which were static for the observers of classical antiquity, began to move.” 34 The gospel story is, then, a story representing—because generated by—a particular kind of historical movement. The movement and its early literary representation originated in the

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emotional crisis precipitated by the figure of Jesus of Nazareth in those around him. Auerbach’s interest lies in the literary character of the gospel narrative, and while Jesus, as the incarnation of God, is the stimulus for that representation, Peter (and other early Christians who react to Jesus and write about their reactions) actually generate it (Peter’s “personal account may be assumed to have been the basis of the story” of his own denial).35 Although he himself is an otherwise insignificant figure, Peter has become caught up in a movement of serious, indeed tragic, import, out of which he generates a literary representation that mingles styles in anticlassicist fashion. Such mingling of styles, typical of “the character of Jewish-Christian literature,” was “graphically and harshly dramatized through God’s incarnation in a human being of the humblest social station, through his existence on earth amid humble everyday people and conditions, and through his Passion which, judged by earthly standards, was ignominious; and it naturally came to have—in view of the wide diffusion and strong effect of that literature in later ages—a most decisive bearing upon man’s conception of the tragic and the sublime.” 36 Auerbach summarizes the story of Jesus as the self-humiliation of God through the progression from incarnation to crucifixion. Any reader of the New Testament will ask at once: What happened to the resurrection? Why doesn’t Auerbach include the resurrection as the conclusion to Jesus’ story? The answer is not simply that Mark’s gospel offers no description of the resurrection beyond the empty tomb. Auerbach notes that he might just as well have used Matthew’s or Luke’s gospel, both of which depict the resurrected Jesus. The answer is that, for Auerbach, the resurrection ascribed by the gospels to Jesus is best understood as part of Peter’s story.37 In the gospels, Peter, we are told, “is no mere accessory figure serving as illustratio, like the soldiers Vibulenus and Percennius, who are represented as mere scoundrels and swindlers. He is the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.” 38 Peter cannot be such a tragic figure unless Jesus’ resurrection becomes a feature of Peter’s own story, a story about the sharp oscillation of his own emotions, the “swing of the pendulum.” 39 Peter is a thoroughly ordinary person called by Jesus to “a most tremendous role.” He becomes a leading disciple of the one whom he is first to recognize as Messiah. And yet, at the crucial moment of Jesus’ arrest, because Peter’s deep faith in the Messiah was “not deep enough,” the worst happened to him that can happen to one whom faith had inspired but a short time before: he trembles for his miserable life. And it is entirely credible that this terrifying inner experience should have brought about another swing of the pendulum—this time in the oppo-

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site direction and far stronger.40 Despair and remorse following his desperate failure prepared him for the visions which contributed decisively to the constitution of Christianity. It is only through this experience that the significance of Christ’s coming and Passion is revealed to him.41

Here Jesus’ resurrection dissolves into Peter’s visions (presumably of the risen Jesus), which provide emotional compensation for the despair arising from his betrayal. The resurrection as a possible event in Jesus’ own life is now identified as an event in Peter’s life, an event that serves to enable Peter to discern the “significance” of Jesus’ life and death. That significance lies in the impact of Jesus’ life and death on those around him, in the form of the strong reactions it provokes. Although Auerbach does not make the point explicit, that impact seems to derive precisely from the way Jesus, as incarnate deity, juxtaposes sublimity with humility, a juxtaposition that can compel the most ordinary follower, through a pendulation or “to and fro of the pendulum,” to become a “tragic figure” like Peter, “a hero of such weakness, who yet derives the highest force from his very weakness.” 42 Why does Auerbach see Peter as a specifically tragic figure? “Why,” he asks, does the portrayal of Peter’s denial “arouse in us the most serious and most significant sympathy?” 43 We gravitate to Peter precisely because of a weakness he shares with us, from which he nevertheless derives the highest force, which we too might share. But like Peter, we discover such strength-in-weakness only when, turning away from purely personal concerns, we discern how we have become parts of larger historical forces that embrace our otherwise insignificant destinies. Why does the scene of Peter’s denial “arouse in us the most serious and most significant sympathy?” Because it portrays something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life, which thus assumes an importance it could never have assumed in antique literature. What we witness is the awakening of “a new heart and a new spirit.” All this applies not only to Peter’s denial but also to every other occurrence which is related in the New Testament. Every one of them is concerned with the same question, the same conflict with which every human being is basically confronted and which therefore remains infinite and eternally pending.44

What is the question or conflict that is eternally pending for every human being? At least part of the answer may lie in Auerbach’s allusion to the Book of Ezekiel: “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of

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anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live.” 45 It is not Jesus, once dead, who lives again; rather, Jesus dies, and it is Peter along with the others in “Israel” who, in reacting to Jesus, choose life over death. Their new hearts and spirits were the consequence of “the impact of Jesus’ teachings, personality and fate,” the absorption of their merely individual or personal conflicts into “a universal movement of the depths.” 46 Auerbach hammers home again and again in this chapter that it is the reaction to this movement prompted by Jesus that is the motive force of the gospel. In the New Testament, ordinary persons “are obliged to react to it”; in its pages, “the reaction of the casually involved person” who is “confronted with the personality of Jesus” is a matter of “profound seriousness.” 47 When the movement takes literary form, one is required to react to the story itself: “The story speaks to everybody; everybody is urged and indeed required to take sides for or against it. Even ignoring it implies taking sides.” 48 Proceeding by way of reactions to it, negative as well as positive, this spiritual movement soon carries the gospel story beyond the bounds of Judaism into the gentile world. In so doing, the story of Jesus, now the story of reactions to Jesus, becomes a larger story, extended through figural reading: To be sure, for a time its effectiveness was hampered by practical obstacles. For a time the language as well as the religious and social premises of the message restricted it to Jewish circles. Yet the negative reaction which it aroused in Jerusalem, both among the Jewish leaders and among the majority of the people, forced the movement to embark upon the tremendous venture of missionary work among the Gentiles, which was characteristically begun by a member of the Jewish Diaspora, the Apostle Paul. With that, an adaptation of the message to the preconceptions of a far wider audience, its detachment from the special preconceptions of the Jewish world, became a necessity and was effected by a method rooted in Jewish tradition but now applied with incomparably greater boldness, the method of revisional interpretation. The Old Testament was played down as popular history and as the code of the Jewish people and assumed the appearance of a series of “figures,” that is of prophetic announcements and anticipations of the coming of Jesus and the concomitant events.49

Here we have Auerbach’s account of the process by which the gospel story comes to be connected with figural interpretation, a process motivated by the various reactions provoked by the story. The key impetus to figural interpretation came by way of the “negative reaction” to the story of Jesus among the Jews of Jerusalem and Paul’s “adaptation” of the story’s “message” to the gentiles.

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To appreciate the nature of this adaptation (which will tell us much about how Auerbach understands the link between the original story and its figural extension), we must return to Auerbach’s discussion of the concreteness of the New Testament depictions of reactions to Jesus. The New Testament writers broke with the classical separation of styles because they sought “to render things concretely.” They sought to provide concrete descriptions of how the underlying “historical forces” of the new spiritual movement impinged on the lives of ordinary but nonetheless specific individuals. In contrast, “in cases where the writer abandons any attempt to make historical forces concrete or feels no need to do so” the classical rule of separation of styles reigns.50 We have seen that Auerbach argues that the Pauline adaptation of such a concrete story by means of figural interpretation often undermined just this concreteness of depiction, an outcome due to “the antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning . . . which permeates . . . the whole, Christian view of reality.” 51 This claim about the antagonism between spirit /meaning and sensory appearance is but the logical outgrowth of Auerbach’s ascription of Jesus’ resurrection to Peter, understood now as Peter’s own emotional experience by which he discerned the significance or meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Insofar as the resurrection might be said to represent the “spiritual” dimension of the person of Jesus, when Auerbach ascribes Jesus’ resurrection to Peter, he removes “the spiritual” as an intrinsic aspect of Jesus’ identity. As with Boyarin’s construal of Paul’s contrast of letter and spirit, here too “the spiritual” becomes a hermeneutical category rather than an essential aspect of an identity description: It denotes the hermeneutical experience by which Peter discerns the meaning of the concrete, sensuous character of the person who suffered and died. Auerbach’s characterization of Christian identity as an antagonism between spirit and flesh begins, then, with a more fundamental judgment that “spirit” is not intrinsic to Jesus’ own identity, but only to his meaning or significance for others. Even though Auerbach separates Jesus from his resurrection, it is important for his entire argument that Jesus be regarded as the incarnation of God. For it is only as God (or, as we shall see, as formerly God) that the humble, earthly, mortal Jesus can provide the kind of stimulus that leads ordinary persons like Peter to rise beyond themselves into heroic and tragic stature. Resurrection as part of Jesus’ human identity would suggest that there exists a realm beyond flesh alone that would be intrinsic to, rather than antagonistic toward, the flesh. In terms of the doctrine of incarnation, this would imply that God does not give up the omnipotence of deity in becoming a human being. In terms of the gospel story, it would mean that

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God plays a continuing and independent role in the movement of historical forces. As for the story, Auerbach says nothing about God as such an agent: The action in question consists of “historical forces,” none of which is identified as divine. And as for the incarnation, a remark in his book on Dante that we have already considered suggests that for Auerbach, the notion of incarnation may get its most powerful meaning from the idea that God gives up everything to flesh and history: “The Stoic or Epicurean withdrawal of the philosopher from his destiny, his endeavor for release from the chain of earthly happening, his determination to remain at least inwardly free from earthly ties—all that is completely un-Christian. For to redeem fallen mankind the incarnated truth had subjected itself without reserve [ohne Vorbehalt] to earthly destiny.” 52 Admittedly, Auerbach’s formulation is ambiguous. Does truth (that is, God) subject itself “without reserve to earthly destiny,” or is this remark limited strictly to the “incarnated” truth? The absence of any recognition in Auerbach of God as an agent who acts in independence of those historical forces that constitute the new spiritual movement of Christianity lends some support to the first reading. In any case, beyond constituting Jesus as the kind of figure capable of provoking a certain sort of response, the incarnation as Auerbach presents it points to no realm distinguishable from flesh and history that might nonetheless be integral to them.53 Although Auerbach removes the logically independent agency of God from the story of Jesus, both from its beginning (incarnation) and its conclusion (resurrection—and, we should add, ascension), he does not remove all otherworldly aspects of the Christian account of things. But just as meaning (spirit divorced from flesh) becomes antagonistic to sensory occurrence, so does the ultimate otherworldly progression of the historical force of Christianity take it beyond (and presumably, as the earlier remarks about Epicureans and Stoics suggest, against) history itself: To be sure, in all this we must not forget that the transformation [the “intrahistorical transformation” unleashed by the historical forces of the Christian movement] is here one whose course progresses to somewhere outside of history, to the end of time or to the coincidence of all times, in other words upward, and does not, like the scientific concepts of evolutionary history, remain on the horizontal plane of historical events.54

Auerbach’s conception of Christianity replaces traditional Christology with eschatology. God’s incarnation in the figure of Jesus leaves us with a human being about whom one must say that he dies but not that he is res-

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urrected from the dead. But Christian figural interpretation, as an elaboration of the literal story of Jesus, reintroduces the notion of spirit that draws attention away from the person of flesh and blood by turning flesh and blood into symbols of a purely spiritual birth. Likewise, the trajectory of the movement Jesus provokes finds its destiny altogether outside the historical realm. As his remarks about Stoics and Epicureans indicate, Auerbach sees in this otherworldly telos a Christianity at odds with itself, one more reflection of the antagonism between this world and the next inherent in Christian identity. Auerbach’s discussion of Peter’s denial helps us understand better the reason for the ambiguous or unstable character of figura. The side of figura that is open to figurative subversion is rooted in Auerbach’s presentation of Jesus’ resurrection as Peter’s interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ life and death.55 Resurrection-as-meaning-for-Peter is something other than the resurrection as an event by which Jesus’ identity is enacted. And as something other, it is now possible for it to become something antagonistic or subversive. On the other hand, the side of figura that resists figurative subversion is rooted in the very concrete, historical life of a Jesus who can actually die on the cross. Put differently, the instability of Auerbach’s conception of figura is created precisely by the transition from figural reading as “a method rooted in Jewish tradition” to a method applied by Christians “with incomparably greater boldness.” 56 It is not figural reading as such, but rather specifically Christian (indeed, specifically Pauline Christian) figural reading, that displays the figure’s instability. That instability is ultimately tied to Auerbach’s fundamental conception of Christian identity, in which Jesus’ resurrection is separated from him, leaving in its wake “the antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning” that “permeates” the entire “Christian view of reality.” 57 This view of the nonintrinsic relation between figural reading and Christianity is, of course, confirmed by Auerbach’s analysis of Dante and his influence: The realism that Christian figural reading preserved (in some sense, despite itself) can endure even as Christianity itself is discarded. Ultimately, Auerbach sees only one way to resist the force of meaning drained of sensory substance: One needs an absolute keno¯sis or “emptying out” of meaning into fully realized, concrete imagery. But this will be the achievement not of interpretation but of poetic art. Figural reading constantly threatens to render meaning nonincarnate. Auerbach’s Mimesis describes how figural art, beginning decisively with Dante, reversed this process, but at the cost of its own Phoenixlike death and reconstitution as the Western tradition of secular literary realism.

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the overwhelming realism of dante’s afterlife According to Auerbach, Christian figural reading was the basis of Dante’s figural art. The transition from a religious mode of representing reality to a purely secular mode of representation was easy for Auerbach to make, for he already thought of Jewish representation as revealing more about a certain manner of representation than about the nature of a deity: “The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things.” 58 As a form of literary composition, figural art is different from the figural interpretation of an existing literary text. For example, in Christian figural interpretation, Joshua points toward his fulfillment in Jesus, while in Dante’s figural art, the Latin poet Virgil becomes the Virgil who is Dante’s appointed guide in the afterlife. Auerbach claims that both figural procedures preserve rather than undermine the historical reality of the figure. Prefiguring the chronologically later Jesus does not undermine the historical reality of Joshua as a person in his own right. And although the Virgil who guides pilgrims is now dead and subject to the judgment of God, he nonetheless remains in his afterlife the Latin poet that he formerly was. Auerbach points to an important shift that occurred when Dante transformed figural interpretation into figural poetry. Whereas biblical figures retain their historical reality despite receiving subsequent fulfillments, the reality of the historical figures who populate the afterlife in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a consequence of their fulfillments. At first glance, the latter conception seems quite odd, because fulfillment appears to supply a reality that the historical figures lacked. Auerbach writes that the Virgil who appears in Dante’s poem “is the historical Virgil himself, but then again he is not; for the historical Virgil is only a figura of the fulfilled truth that the poem reveals, and this fulfillment is more real, more significant than the figura.” 59 There is, then, an asymmetry between biblical and Dantean figures. While the historical Joshua prefigures Jesus but always remains no less than the historical Joshua even after Jesus has arrived, the historical Virgil prefigures the Virgil who guides Dante and, in so doing, paradoxically becomes more himself only by apparently becoming historically less real. Yet Auerbach insists that Virgil, in becoming more himself, actually does become more real: “With Dante, unlike modern poets, the more fully the figure is interpreted and the more closely it is integrated with the eternal plan of salvation, the more real it becomes.” 60 Dante’s genius, proposes Auerbach, did not lie simply in concentrating all of Virgil’s reality in his

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nonhistorical fulfillment, but rather in poetically representing Virgil’s nonhistorical reality—his otherworldly fulfillment—precisely as the reality of Virgil’s historical, true-to-life concreteness. Only because Dante’s Virgil was more than the merely historical Virgil could he be the historical Virgil as he really was, in his fullest reality. Auerbach’s chapter on Dante’s figural realism in Mimesis consequently marks a turning point in that grand account of the history of realistic representation. Dante had rendered the extrahistorical fulfillment of his characters in such compellingly realistic fashion that subsequent prose writers, beginning with Boccaccio, were able to portray fictional but historically realistic figures without the aid of any extrahistorical fulfillment at all.61 Here Auerbach departs most dramatically from Origen as he understands him, faulting him for portraying the extrahistorical dimension of persons and events in a way that undermines (or at least fails to do justice to) their historical reality. If Auerbach’s Origen uses fulfillment to dissolve ordinary history into purely spiritual reality, Auerbach’s Dante uses fulfillment to make possible a wholly secular, nonfigural realism. In the wake of the Divine Comedy, the ordinary and commonplace now become invested with all the grandeur and dignity, but none of the presence, of spiritual life. Thus does the Christian poet Dante become, as the English translation of the title of Auerbach’s first book aptly characterizes him, “poet of the secular world.” 62 Auerbach’s story of the origins of Christian figura in his essay of that title reads somewhat differently when one considers the outcome of the story as recounted in Mimesis. This outcome is decidedly secular: Dante’s self-consuming figura, in which fulfillment dissolves back into the figure to lend it reality, fosters purely secular forms of realistic representation within European literary culture.63 Preserving through literary description the common literary culture of Europe was Auerbach’s guiding concern, and what he says about specifically Christian forms of interpretation, or about Christian relations to Judaism, is framed from that perspective. When Auerbach contemplates the two relations—between the historical Joshua and the Joshua fulfilled (Jesus), and between the historical Virgil and the Virgil fulfilled—he disregards the fact that a fulfilled Joshua (Jesus) seems qualitatively different from a fulfilled Virgil who becomes even more the concrete Virgil known from history. There is, he seems to have concluded, no ethical and political value in that observation for his historical moment. More promising for both present and future cultural imperatives is the intuition that a Virgil who through Christian fulfillment

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can become himself was made possible only by a mode of interpretation in which a Joshua, who, pointing toward, or perhaps proleptically realizing, another person, did not fail throughout the process to remain himself. But Cardinal Faulhaber’s sermons make all too clear how biblical figures could easily be turned in the opposite direction. If one has Jesus as Joshua’s fulfillment, does one have any need of Joshua himself? To resist such a reversal, Auerbach seeks first to explain its very possibility. It is crucial to Auerbach’s cultural task that such a possibility not be discovered to lie within figural reading itself. Instead, that possibility seemed to Auerbach to lie in the conjunction of figura with the specific historical occasion that led the apostle Paul to preach to the gentiles. This is the occasion that allowed figurativeness to infiltrate Christian figural reading. The concluding sentences of “Figura” give an unexpected prominence to the apostle Paul, who has otherwise occupied only a few paragraphs in this lengthy essay: Our purpose was to show how on the basis of its semantic development a word may grow into a historical situation and give rise to structures that will be effective for many centuries. The historical situation that drove St. Paul to preach among the Gentiles developed figural interpretation and prepared it for the influence it was to exert in late antiquity and the Middle Ages.64

The final sentence at once highlights and subordinates Paul. Although prominently positioned in a sentence intended to sum up the entire essay, Paul is effectively reduced to an instrument called forth by a more fundamental weltgeschichtliche Lage,” a “world-historical situation.” 65 Not only is Paul’s mission a consequence of a specific historical situation, that situation then further develops the figural technique, preparing it for its subsequent influence. Auerbach implies that the distinctively Pauline form of figural interpretation would not have made the positive, historypreserving features of figural reading possible. The role played by figural interpretation in the Pauline historical moment does not, it would appear, define its inherent character. Figura comes to play different and more positive roles in other, less Pauline contexts in which Christianity’s break with Judaism was less central than its repudiation of a history-denying Gnosticism. In “Figura,” Auerbach links figures with phenomenal prophecy.66 He does not consider Paul in part 2 of the “Figura” essay, devoted to phenomenal prophecy, but turns to him only in the account in part 3 of the origin and analysis of figural interpretation. Paul’s absence from the second part

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is quite striking in light of its opening sentence: “The strangely new meaning of figura in the Christian world is first to be found in Tertullian, who uses it very frequently.” 67 On the next page, after offering a few examples from Tertullian, Auerbach glances ahead to part 3: “We shall speak later on of how the desire to interpret in this way arose.” 68 Auerbach implies, then, that Paul’s mid-first-century desire to interpret figurally does not issue in figural interpretation in its distinctively Christian form, which first appears in the second-century writer Tertullian. What, then, is the difference between Tertullian and Paul as figural readers? And where can one find the link between phenomenal biblical prophecy and authentic Christian figural reading if one cannot find it in Paul? Auerbach observes that many Church fathers “justify” their figural interpretations primarily by appealing to certain passages in the Pauline epistles.69 The philologist Auerbach chooses his words with customary care: to say that early Christians appealed to Paul for justification does not mean that Paul’s own interpretative practice accurately characterizes their own. After briefly summarizing the relevant Pauline texts, Auerbach abruptly drops Paul, turning instead to the Book of Acts and the figural sensibility of the “Judaeo-Christians.” We have already considered the scene to which Auerbach refers his readers (but does not describe). The Ethiopian eunuch, while reading the prophet Isaiah, invites the apostle Philip into his chariot to aid him in interpreting the text: So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth” [Isa. 53:7 – 8]. The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.70

Auerbach has detected the presence of figura at the very outset of the Christian mission. It would have been “only natural,” he observes, to look for prefigurations in the Old Testament of the Messiah (expected to be a second Moses, whose redemption would be a second Exodus) and to incorporate “the interpretations thus arrived at into the tradition.” 71

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But such a possible incorporation of figura within Jewish tradition is blocked; the “historical situation” intrudes, in the form of Paul’s mission to the gentiles, deflecting for a moment figura’s more natural trajectory. Paul combines originally “Jewish conceptions” of figura and fulfillment (which even in their distinctively Christian form might have been “incorporated” by Jewish Christians “into the tradition,” that is, a Judaeo-Christian tradition) with a “pronounced hostility to the ideas of the Judaeo-Christians” (in particular, to their insistence on keeping the law). Indeed, Paul’s “whole figural interpretation was subordinated to the basic Pauline theme of grace versus law, faith versus works.” Paul’s interpretative response to their attacks was “to strip the Old Testament of its normative character and show that it is merely [blossen] a shadow of things to come.” 72 Auerbach makes unmistakable his judgment about the consequences of Paul’s proof-texting of his doctrine, in phrases every bit as acerbic as Boyarin’s: The “old law is annulled and cast aside [aufgehoben und abgelöst]; 73 it is shadow and typos; observance of it has become useless and even harmful since Christ made his sacrifice”; “in its Jewish and Judaistic legal sense the Old Testament is the letter that kills”; its “most important and sacred events, sacraments and laws are provisional [vorläufige] forms and figurations of Christ and the Gospel.” 74 Here we see the absolute contrast between Paul and Tertullian as figural readers of the Bible’s “phenomenal prophecy” (Realprophetie): 75 Tertullian expressly denied that the literal and historical validity of the Old Testament was diminished by the figural interpretation. . . . according to him, it had real, literal meaning throughout, and even where there was figural prophecy [ figurale Prophetie], the figure had just as much historical reality as what it prophesied. The prophetic figure, he believed, is a concrete historical fact, and it is fulfilled by concrete historical facts.76

Unlike Tertullian’s, Paul’s prophecy was not “phenomenal” because it sacrificed the phenomena: it annulled the figura precisely by “fulfilling” it (recall Boyarin’s characterization of Pauline supersessionism as “inclusion by exclusion”). Having marked off Paul as a exceptional interlude in the development of figura from Judaeo-Christianity to Tertullian and beyond, Auerbach further separates Paul’s hermeneutic from a specifically Christian desire, aligning it instead with politics and poetry: “In this way his thinking, which eminently combined practical politics with creative poetic faith, transformed the Jewish conception of Moses risen again in the Mes-

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siah into a system of figural prophecy, in which the risen one simultaneously fulfills and annuls the work of his precursor [das Werk des Vorläufers zugleich erfüllt und aufhebt].” 77 In separating Paul from the authentic history of figura, which runs from Judaeo-Christian prophecy to Tertullian’s figural reading and beyond, Auerbach anticipates Boyarin’s reading of Paul. But, unlike Boyarin, he has not argued that a Pauline gospel of abstract universalism fueled the transformation of Jewish distinctiveness into a common European Christian culture.78 Auerbach is able to tell the story of increasing European cultural unity in a different way because he thinks the “historical situation” changed after the Pauline era. The Jewish Christians faded from history, and the Church was forced to reckon with new opponents, whose attacks were aimed not at the Christian practice of Jewish law but at Christian revisionary interpretation of a Jewish text—“those who wished either to exclude the Old Testament altogether or to interpret it only abstractly and allegorically.” “In the struggle against those who despised the Old Testament and tried to despoil it of its meaning,” Auerbach proclaims, “the figural method again proved its worth.” 79 Ignoring Pauline innovation, the Church in effect reached back to Jewish-Christian precedent, once again drawing on figural interpretation to preserve the historical reality of biblical figures. Auerbach argues that this form of fulfillment provided Europe with a conception of religion and history no less universal than a Pauline fulfillment that annulled the past.80 The Celts and Germans of northern and western Europe (Auerbach here brings his discussion of figura home, so to speak) could never have accepted the Old Testament as a book of Jewish law and history, but only as part of the universal religion and history that figural interpretation had made it. But—and here Auerbach introduces a crucial qualification—this insight into the practical missionary usefulness of a universally available Old Testament “from which Jewish history and national character had vanished” was “a later insight, far from the thoughts of the first preachers to the Gentiles and of the Church Fathers.” 81 The lateness of this insight is crucial to Auerbach’s argument, for he is suggesting that, Paul notwithstanding, Christianity did not require the effacement of Judaism in order to achieve its global mission in the Greco-Roman world. On the contrary, even the first pagan converts, as a result of having lived among Diaspora Jews, “had long been familiar with Jewish history and religion.” 82 The recognition that Christian figural interpretation helped convert Eu-

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rope because it provided a universal history through an Old Testament with a distinctively Jewish character also comes about only retrospectively: It was not until very late, probably not until after the Reformation, that Europeans began to regard the Old Testament as Jewish history and Jewish law; it first came to the newly converted peoples as figura rerum or phenomenal prophecy, as a prefiguration of Christ, so giving them a basic conception of history, which derived its compelling force from its inseparable bond with the faith, and which for almost a thousand years remained the only accepted view of history.83

As a result of figural interpretation, the text, unlike the nation from which it emerged, was itself no longer inaccessibly “foreign and remote.” 84 But we now realize, Auerbach insists—at least since the Reformation— that the universal acceptance of the Old Testament and the unification of Europe under a single worldview never really escaped the fact that the Old Testament had always contained “Jewish history and Jewish law.” 85 Integral to Christianity at its outset (in Judeo-Christianity, and, more surprisingly, in the non-Pauline mission to the gentiles), and especially recognizable in post-Reformation times, the Jewish character of the text endured, preserved through figural reading. That perseverance of the figure in the fulfillment defined “the attitude embodied in the figural interpretation” which “became one of the essential elements of the Christian picture of reality, history, and the concrete world in general.” 86 Auerbach suggests that his European readers have already accepted this picture and live within it daily. His essay leads those readers, then, to a double recognition: Because they cannot have (indeed, have never had) European Christian cultural unity without a distinctively Jewish text at its heart, to regard the Old Testament as “excessively” Jewish (as did Cardinal Faulhaber and, to an even greater extent, his German Christian opponents) is to fail to grasp the way in which that text, via figural reading, generated the universal religion and history by which they purport to live. Mimesis concludes with a celebrated discussion of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which Auerbach draws the most explicit comparisons with his opening chapter on the Odyssey and his pivotal chapter on Dante, and makes his most self-reflective remarks about his own philological method.87 Auerbach discovers in Virginia Woolf’s literary technique of multiple perspectives an approach to the “real reality” of a character more successful than Flaubert’s “mysticism” of language, which he criticizes in an earlier chapter. Through the intercalations within the episode of the brown stocking, “we are dealing with attempts to fathom a more genuine,

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a deeper, and indeed a more real reality.” 88 Discovery of that deeper reality occurs through a process not unlike the way ancient figures pointed beyond themselves toward their subsequent fulfillments, as extensions rather than inversions of themselves: “The stress is placed entirely on what the occasion releases.” 89 In the brown stocking scene, the important point is that an insignificant exterior occurrence releases ideas and chains of ideas which cut loose from the present of the exterior occurrence and range freely through the depths of time. It is as though an apparently simple text revealed its proper content only in the commentary on it. . . . The stress is placed entirely on what the occasion releases, things which are not seen directly but by reflection, which are not tied to the present of the framing occurrence which releases them.90

What lingers for Auerbach in Woolf’s purely secular novel is the continued life of a figure looking forward to, and obtaining, its fulfillment. The situation has become, to be sure, strained and vague. “We never come to learn,” writes Auerbach, “what Mrs. Ramsay’s situation really is.” 91 Only the sadness, the vanity of her beauty and vital force emerge from the depths of secrecy. Even when we have read the whole novel, the meaning of the relationship between the planned trip to the lighthouse and the actual trip many years later remains unexpressed, enigmatic, only dimly to be conjectured, as does the content of Lily Briscoe’s concluding vision which enables her to finish her painting with one stroke of the brush.92

For a moment it looks as though here we are once again afforded a modern representation of a dreary existence “without issue,” as in the case of Flaubert’s Emma and Charles at table, which Auerbach had discussed in an earlier chapter. But Auerbach’s remarks suddenly turn, with enthusiasm, in a new direction: “Yet what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking!” 93 The text assumes a figural character, as present occurrence bodies forth fulfillment in the form of what constitutes genuinely human reality: “Aspects of the occurrence come to the fore, and links to other occurrences, which, before this time, had hardly been sensed, which had never been clearly seen and attended to, and yet they are determining factors in our real lives.” 94 The texture of life that comes into view by way of the opening up of present occurrence as figura to the depths of the past is the kind of “fulfillment” that Auerbach sees in modern realistic representations such as Woolf’s. As in the Old Testament’s account of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, Woolf’s

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text is “fraught with background,” with depths in which further significance resides.95 The fulfillment doesn’t come from somewhere else; it has always been there, but has hitherto remained unrecognized. To recognize it as the reality that is already one’s life would be to shun Flaubert’s mere representations, in which there is no “common world” and could never be one unless “many should find their way to their own proper reality, the reality which is given to the individual—which then would be also the true common reality.” 96 In novels like Virginia Woolf’s Auerbach sees the possibility of discovering the reality of shared human nature in the measure of reality already accorded each individual: What takes place here in Virginia Woolf’s novel is precisely what was attempted everywhere in works of this kind (although not everywhere with the same insight and mastery)—that is, to put the emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself. And in the process something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice. To be sure, what happens in that moment—be it outer or inner processes— concerns in a very personal way the individuals who live in it, but it also (and for that very reason) concerns the elementary things which men in general have in common.97

In Virginia Woolf’s realism of multiple perspectives, Auerbach finds a truth and a reality obscured by Flaubert’s mysticism of language. Woolf’s realism overcomes Flaubert’s “silly, false world,” in which characters fail to find their common reality because they fail to find “their own proper reality.” 98 In Woolf’s world, characters who surrender themselves to the moments of their own personal daily lives recover themselves as individuals and, for that very reason, discover what they share with one another. The notion of characters surrendering themselves to the moments of life without prejudice reveals a strong link between Auerbach’s reading of Virginia Woolf and his earlier treatment of Dante. It also ties both discussions firmly to the characterizations of Christian figural sensibility in the opening chapters of Mimesis. These links emerge in a passage in Auerbach’s earlier book on Dante: “The Stoic or Epicurean withdrawal of the philosopher from his destiny, his endeavor for release from the chain of earthly happening, his determination to remain at least inwardly free from earthly ties—all that is completely un-Christian. For to redeem fallen mankind the incarnated truth had subjected itself without reserve to earthly destiny.” 99 Auerbach ties Dante’s pivotal role to a conception of Christ’s incarnation as absolute keno¯sis: Deity subjects itself to earthly des-

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tiny “without reserve.” The phrase evokes Virginia Woolf’s characters who discover their own reality by surrendering themselves to the moment “without prejudice.” The early pages of Mimesis told how the incarnation and passion of Christ had produced a Christian commitment to earthly realism that figural readers had struggled to preserve. Despite all its permutations, that commitment to realism has carried through to the pages of To the Lighthouse, whose characters continue to reenact that prototypical incarnation by surrendering themselves without reserve to their own earthly destinies.

Chapter 5 The Preservation of Historical Reality: Auerbach and Origen

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rich Auerbach couples his praise of early Christian figural reading with a corresponding attack on ancient allegorical reading, especially Origen’s. If figural reading, in the work of a writer such as Tertullian, preserved the historical reality of ancient biblical types even in their corresponding fulfillments, Origenist allegorical reading dissolved history in favor of spiritual or abstract meaning. A careful comparison of Auerbach and Origen will show that both thinkers want to “preserve” historical reality, but whereas for Auerbach, preserving history means allowing the concrete, bodily reality of past persons and events to persist into the present person or event that “fulfills” them, for Origen the past is preserved when past events or occurrences become present possibilities—when a divine, transformative action in the past can continue to transform a present-day reader. There is, however, more similarity here than is evident at first, because like Origen, Auerbach seeks a reading that preserves history for the sake of the present-day reader. Although both thinkers imagine preservation of history differently, both argue that the past’s importance lies in its significance for present-day readers of the text. As we have seen, Auerbach praises Christian figural readers for “preserving the historicity” of ancient biblical figures and condemns ancient allegorical interpreters for “stripping” biblical persons and events “of their concrete reality.” He identifies ancient Alexandria as the central site of this “extrahistorical” allegorical hermeneutic, and Origen as its leading practitioner: This clearly spiritual and extrahistorical form of interpretation enjoyed great influence in late antiquity, in part because it was merely the most respectable manifestation of an immense spiritualist movement centered in Alexandria; not only texts and events, but also natural phenomena, stars, animals, stones, were stripped of their concrete reality and interpreted allegorically or on occasion somewhat figurally. The spiritualist-

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ethical-allegorical method was taken up by the catechetical school of Alexandria and found its outstanding Christian exponent in Origen.1

The exact meaning of Auerbach’s charge that allegorical interpretation is “extrahistorical” is not obvious, although it seems to mean that such interpretation strips away “concrete reality.” But how can a particular mode of reading jeopardize the historical reality of what the text represents? Understanding what Auerbach and other critics of Origen might mean by such a claim requires us to probe the multiple meanings hidden under the single term “historicity.” Without pretending to be exhaustive, the following list includes some possible meanings for the term: What is true (what is the case, as opposed to what is merely apparent) What is real (in the sense of realistic or “true to life”) What is material or bodily What happens (an event that “takes place” or “occurs”) What has occurred in the past What changes or develops over time (as in “one possesses a history”) What exists as itself (in contrast to what exists only as representation of something else) What refers accurately to any of the above (the referential adequacy of a “historical” account of things) Origen’s allegorical hermeneutic is not as antithetical to history as Auerbach believes—unless one uncritically accepts Auerbach’s particular conception of what being “historical” means. For Auerbach, what is historical is what is real, and what is real is what is material or bodily. Real, material things are what they are, and they do not exist merely to signify other things. So when Auerbach says that figural reading preserves historical reality, he means that figural reading does not undermine the physical or bodily reality of what the text represents. Origen also has an interest in preserving the historical character of biblical figures, but to him, their historical character consists in their act of occurring in the real world and their continuing capacity to affect individuals. Origen is no less concerned than Auerbach with the historical as the real, but for Origen, reality is a quality first of all of events that engage the spiritual lives of individuals in the present. This difference between Auerbach and Origen hides a deeper similarity, one that they also share with Daniel Boyarin: a strong interest in the ethical impact of the reading process on contemporary readers, a concern for

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the “stance” the reader assumes toward other persons as a consequence of his or her particular engagement with the text. Auerbach wants to ensure that the reading process preserves history because he believes that a reading that does so is ethically good for contemporary readers. A reader who reads in such a way that historical reality is “preserved” assumes a stance toward the text that differs from the stance of a reader who deems the historical reality of what is read to be inconsequential. The difference in a reader’s stance toward the text and what the text represents produces a difference in the reader’s own present-day social and ethical stance toward other persons. Behind their difference over whether the hallmark of reality is best grasped as body or spirit, Auerbach and Origen agree that interpretation must bring the reader into a stance toward that reality in order to fashion the reader’s social and ethical bearing toward self and others. Despite his fundamental criticism of Origen, Auerbach is too careful a reader not to recognize this feature of Origen’s allegorical interpretation: “Origen, to be sure, is far from being as abstractly allegorical as, for example, Philo; in his writings, the events of the OT seem alive, with a direct bearing on the reader and his real life.” Yet even so, Auerbach judges that in passages such as Origen’s “fine explanation of the three-day-journey in Exodus” (a biblical passage that Auerbach himself comments on in his celebrated opening chapter of Mimesis), “mystical and moral considerations seem definitely to overshadow the strictly historical element.” 2 Yet, as we shall see, Origen has a conception of the strictly historical no less firm than Auerbach’s, and for Origen no less than for Auerbach “the historical” in its most important sense can never be separated from “the ethical.” “Figura,” we recall Auerbach declaring, “is something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical.” 3 At first glance, it seems that Origen came to quite the opposite conclusion. “For we must not suppose, “ he warns, “that historical events are types of historical events, and bodily things are types of bodily things. Quite the contrary: bodily things are types of spiritual things, and historical events are types of intelligible events.” 4 We can organize the terminology of the two thinkers as follows: Auerbach: Origen:

Figure (type) real, historical (wirklich, geschichtliche) bodily (ta; swmavtika) historical (ta; iJstovrika)

Fulfillment (antitype) real, historical spiritual intelligible

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Since the Latin figura (“figure”), as used by ancient Christian biblical interpreters, translates the Greek tuvpo~ (“type”), Origen and Auerbach can be viewed as giving different answers to the following question: Do the fulfillments (or antitypes) of Scripture have the same character as their figures (or types)? Auerbach insists that they do, Origen that they do not. Several initial observations are in order. First, before looking at the terms themselves, we should appreciate that both Auerbach and Origen are insisting, not first of all on the definitions of their terms (which they take for granted), but rather on either the similarity or dissimilarity between figures and their fulfillments: Auerbach stresses continuity and abiding identity, Origen discontinuity and transformation. Second, Origen’s formulation seems to resist Auerbach’s charge of anti-historicity. For although Origen’s fulfillments are decidedly not historical, the very force of the contrast he proposes seems to require that the figures be historical. So at least initially, Origen seems to insist on precisely what Auerbach’s perspective assumes is impossible: that fulfillments could be nonhistorical in such a way as not to undermine the historical reality of their figures. When we turn from the logic of their formulations to the specific content of their language, their asymmetry frustrates any easy or obvious comparison. Origen and Auerbach do not contradict each other directly. Although both thinkers use terms that can be translated as “historical” or “historical events” (Auerbach’s geschichtliche and Origen’s ta; iJstovrika), Auerbach refers in addition to what is “real” (wirklich), and Origen to “bodily things” (ta; swmavtika).5 Auerbach aligns what is historical with what is real, while Origen separates what is historical from what is bodily, saying nothing at this point about reality as such. In addition, the syntax of each remark conveys a distinctive perspective: Auerbach’s figura is “something real, historical,” etwas Wirkliches, Geschichtliches; Origen’s tuvpoi are either “historical events” or “bodily things,” ta; iJstovrika or ta; swmavtika. By putting “real” in apposition to “historical,” Auerbach might be making the term “history” essential to his characterization of figura as real: the reality of figure and fulfillment would, then, not just be any sort of reality (such as, for example, the reality of Platonic Forms), but a reality that is specifically historical. But it would be more accurate to say that Auerbach, like Boyarin, ties his notion of what is historical to what is bodily. What is historical is not so much what has taken place; rather, “historical” designates that whatever has taken place was something bodily.6 In contrast, Origen, by means of a disjunctive syntax that separates “historical events” from “bodily things,” suggests that history as such is not

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essential to his understanding of tuvpo~. Types may be either historical events or bodily things, but their antitypes are neither historical nor bodily. Historicity, for Origen, in Auerbach’s sense of what is bodily, is a possible, but not a necessary, feature of biblical types. We can probe Auerbach’s and Origen’s different understandings of historical reality more closely by looking further at their use of the term “spiritual.” While Origen distinguishes the spiritual from the bodily, Auerbach contrasts the spiritual with the historical. In the following passage, Auerbach points to the dehistoricizing character of spiritual (i.e., allegorical) interpretation: The difference between Tertullian’s more intrinsically historical and realistic method of interpretation [innergeschichtlich-realistischen Deutungsweise] and Origen’s more allegorical and ethical approach reflects a current conflict, known to us from other early Christian sources: one party strove to turn the contents [Inhalt] of the New and still more of the Old Testament into something purely spiritual [ins rein Geistige zu wenden] and to “spirit away” their historical character [ihren geschichtlichen Charakter gleichsam zu verflüchtigen]—while the other wished to preserve it [Scripture’s content] in its full, indeed deep, meaning-fulfilled, intrinsic historicity [bedeutungserfüllten Innergeschichtlichkeit].7

Auerbach sharply contrasts what is “intrinsically historical” (innergeschichtlich) with the anti-historical, “purely spiritual” (rein Geistige). However, the absoluteness of this contrast is created not by the difference between “historical” and “spiritual,” but between what is “intrinsically” historical and what is “purely” spiritual. What becomes purely, that is, entirely, spiritual can no longer be intrinsically historical; complete spirituality “spirits away” the historical, causing it to “evaporate” (verflüchtigen). Auerbach’s point is not confined to scriptural interpretation. Contrasting Dante’s realistic poetry with the verse of the Provençal poet Giraut, Auerbach writes that Giraut’s “argumentation remains very general and vague, none of the ideas is taken firmly in hand, and the connections are uneven; at the end there is a startling digression and the dispute vanishes into thin air [um Schluss verflüchtigt sich der Disput überhaupt].8 Is the converse also true? Does the completely historical necessarily entail the absence of all spirit? Auerbach’s formulation does not require such a reversal. Instead, it invites the inference that the intrinsically historical might, without losing its historicity, also be spiritual (although not, of course, purely spiritual).9 This seems likely given the last sentence, which speaks of the fullness or depth of a historicity that is “meaning-fulfilled,”

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for we have already seen the close relation between spirit and meaning in Auerbach’s treatment of Peter’s interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection, according to which Jesus’ spiritual presence becomes the meaning of his resurrection for Peter. The allegorical “method of producing meaning” (Bedeutungsweise) is said to turn the historical content of the testaments into something purely spiritual, whereas the figural method is said to preserve a content whose depths are comprised of a “meaning-fulfilled” (bedeutungserfüllten) historicity.10 Spirit, it seems, at least in the hands of figural rather than allegorical readers, can render history meaningful without obliterating it. The problem with the “vulgar spiritualism” of the “abstruse art of allegorical exegesis” is that it led to a denigration of the “actual” event in “its independent value” in favor of its “lesson or dogma.” As a consequence, the event “came to mean something other than itself,” and its “concrete reality was lost.” 11 In allegorical interpretation, “every object and event was endowed with a ‘meaning,’ which was unrelated to its actual character but clung to it like a title.” 12 Or perhaps Auerbach is suggesting, in contrast to Boyarin, that there is no necessary connection between meaning and spirit—that some forms of meaning are most appropriately formulated without recourse to the category of spirit. Likewise, the meaning of “fulfill” may not be what one first suspects. Elsewhere, when Auerbach uses “encompass” (einschliessen) as a synonym for fulfill, the resulting image of part within a whole preserves a place for the persistence of the historical reality of the figure in the fulfillment.13 What is at stake here for Auerbach is whether the “content” (Inhalt) of Scripture, a content that he describes as historical, will be kept intact or spirited away. By speaking of Scripture’s historicity, Auerbach is seeking to characterize indirectly what Scripture represents: real persons, such as Moses, who once existed, and real events, such as the Exodus from Egypt, that once occurred. By historicity, Auerbach does not mean the referential adequacy of Scripture—the extent to which Scripture does, or does not, make a valid “historical” reference to past persons and events. Rather than reflecting a judgment about a kind of relationship between text and past realities, Auerbach’s “historicity” registers a judgment about the kind of reality enjoyed by those persons and events that are represented, as the following remarks on the Old Testament depiction of David show. Here Auerbach focuses on the complexity of motives and ambiguity of character that distinguishes historical from merely legendary persons: It is clear that a large part of the life of David as given in the Bible contains history and not legend. In Absalom’s rebellion, for example, or in the scenes from David’s last days, the contradictions and crossing of

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motives both in individuals and in the general action have become so concrete that it is impossible to doubt the historicity of the information conveyed.14 Now the men who composed the historical parts are often the same who edited the older legends too; their peculiar religious concept of man in history, which we have attempted to describe above, in no way led them to a legendary simplification of events; and so it is only natural that, in the legendary passages of the Old Testament, historical structure is frequently discernible— of course, not in the sense that the traditions are examined as to their credibility according to the methods of scientific criticism; but simply to the extent that the tendency to a smoothing down and harmonizing of events, to a simplification of motives, to a static definition of characters which avoids conflict, vacillation, and development, such as are natural to legendary structure, does not predominate in the Old Testament world of legend. Abraham, Jacob, or even Moses produces a more concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures of the Homeric world—not because they are better described in terms of sense (the contrary is the case) but because the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible.15

Yet ancient Christian figural interpreters now encounter those past persons and events only in the form of their present biblical representations. What relation, then, exists between a past reality and a present text that leads Auerbach to use the term “historical” for both? One kind of relation is produced when those who composed the text actually witnessed the events they depict, as Augustine observed: “When a true narrative of the past is related, the memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words conceived from images of them, which they fixed in the mind like imprints as they passed through the senses.” 16 According to such a view, past events exist for us only in the “present of things past,” a presence not of the things themselves, but only of their traces in the memory. By invoking memory, Augustine speaks of events that really were part of our past— events that, through our senses, fixed their images in our minds, which is the only place where they can now be said to exist. One could appeal to an account like Augustine’s in order to explain how scriptural authors might have written their “true narratives,” assuming that they were eyewitnesses of the events they related. But readers of scriptural narratives who were not present for the events themselves, such as the ancient Christian figural interpreters whom Auerbach considers, will have had before them only the images written down by those authors. For such

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later readers, images must stand for (or perhaps “stand in for”) persons and events that they themselves did not perceive.17 When Auerbach reflects on the connection between past persons or events and the Old Testament text that represents them as figures announcing later fulfillments, he can sometimes appeal to the senseperceptions of the text’s original authors: Homer remains within the legendary with all his material, whereas the material of the Old Testament comes closer and closer to history as the narrative proceeds; in the stories of David the historical report predominates. Here too, much that is legendary still remains, as for example the story of David and Goliath; but much—and the most essential— consists in things which the narrators knew from their own experience or from firsthand testimony.18

But his emphasis is not on the reliability of the author’s sense-perception (the concern of modern historians), but on the way those perceptions are directly replicated in the text. He closes the gap between past event and present text by speaking of a single entity, littera-historia, which he calls “the literal sense or the event related.” 19 This integration of event and text is based on a way of depicting “sensuous reality” that had been revived by the “history of Christ”: And in the end that history, in which reality and meaning are so peculiarly one, in which the miraculous is so manifest and close at hand, overcame the spectral vestiges of the Platonic doctrine of two worlds. In the mimetic revival that now took place in the liturgy, imitation is no longer separate from the truth; the sensory appearance is divine and the event is the truth.

This western European attitude is contrasted with its “more purely spiritualist oriental models.” Here we have another kind of spirituality, “the spirituality of the history of Christ,” which encompassed the whole of earthly life at every level. . . . It became a universal and universally present spiritualization of the earthly world which however retained its patent sensuous reality; it gave the great political struggles their meaning and motive force. Human destiny and the history of the world became once more an object of direct and compelling experience, for in the great drama of salvation every man is present, acting and suffering; he is directly involved in everything that has happened and that happens each day. No escape is possible from this thoroughly spiritual and yet real earthly world, from an individual fate that is decisive for all eternity.20

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In effect, Auerbach understands ancient figural readers of Scripture to be denying any absolute difference between event and text: “Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first.” 21 The key point is that the figure, in addition to signifying a future person or event (the fulfillment), also “signifies itself.” What does it mean to say that the figure “signifies itself”? At a minimum, it seems to indicate that those persons or events that are biblical figures are also signs; indeed, they are figures, and not simply persons or events, just because they are also signs. Textual mediation is required for a person or event not simply to be itself but also to signify itself. As Auerbach makes explicit, there can be no concept of “the historical” without such textual mediation: the “interpretation of history” is “by nature a textual interpretation.” 22 Consequently history itself, “with all its concrete force, remains forever a figure, cloaked and needful of interpretation,” and figural reading is just such an interpretation of history, or better yet, figural interpretation is the perception of history as not merely a collection of persons and events but as a significant collection—which is to say, a collection subject to a historical account.23 Auerbach defends figural interpretation as a way of reading Scripture that does not call into question its character as a historical representation. Calling history into question would mean reading in such a way as to create the odd situation in which a formerly historical reality failed to preserve its own historicity—and, Auerbach suggests, its very reality. On the face of it, this suggests that a reader’s relationship to a textual representation of a historical person or event could determine the historical character of that past person or event. This seems to be an impossibility.24 Yet our sense of its impossibility may be a function of modern notions of historicity not shared by ancient Christian interpreters. Unlike them, we are likely to suppose that the persons and events of the past are not in fact signs apart from our interpretations of them. As interpreters of the past, we are the ones who will turn mere persons and events into something more than themselves, into signs. But Auerbach argues that ancient Christian figural interpreters understood their work in a different light, regarding their acts of interpretation as mimetic rather than constructive. They did not turn a past person or event into a figura; instead, they discovered a past person or event to have been a figura: “The relation between the two events [figure and fulfillment] is revealed [erkennbar] by an accord or similarity. . . . Often vague similarities in the structure of events or in their attendant cir-

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cumstances suffice to make the figura recognizable [erkennbar]; to find it, one had to be determined to interpret in a certain way.” One should not overlook the implication of the interpreter’s “determination.” The act of figural interpretation is not merely mimetic: figural interpretation “establishes [herstellen] a connection between two events or persons.” 25 But Auerbach recognizes that ancient Christian interpreters, in their determination “to find” a figure, really believed that it had been found, and not made, by their interpretation; their readings render the figural character of a person or event erkennbar, evident or recognizable. Here Auerbach echoes Origen’s claim that certain things simply “are” types of other things. Given ancient assumptions about the mimetic character of figural interpretation, to fail to discern the sign-character of a past event by misreading its textual representation might be understood as a failure to preserve something of the actual historical reality of that event. But this objectivist conception of the figural character of past events, although it might account for the special relevance of certain kinds of textual representation (e.g., realistic narrative), still does not explain what Auerbach could mean by claiming that a certain kind of reading preserves the historical reality of what is represented. For to dissolve the sign-character of the representation would not be the same as dissolving the sign-character of the past person or event. That claim becomes intelligible, however, once one looks to the relation established by the text between its own representations of past persons and events and its present readers. Auerbach suggests that in the very process of reading in certain ways, the present reader can assume various stances toward the past persons and events that a text represents, and the stances assumed toward the representations of past persons and events are not in principle different from those one might assume toward present persons and events.26 In effect, Auerbach exposes the deeper logic of a perspective like Faulhaber’s: severing one’s relation to the representations of past persons through one’s mode of reading may well support one’s “antagonism” toward similar persons in the present. For Auerbach, speaking about what happens to past persons and events in a reader’s encounter with a text that represents them becomes an indirect way of speaking about something that happens to the reader and the reader’s relation with others, as a consequence of a present act of reading: “Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present. A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transformed to our manner of viewing current conditions.” 27 Although Auerbach describes the reader’s altered relationship to the historical event as an

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alteration of the historical event itself, as the event’s loss of its own historical reality, it is the contemporary reader who is in grave danger of losing his or her own reality.28 Such a reader, whose own being has been reduced, is perhaps more ready to undermine the being of others. Auerbach frames the contrast between history and legend very much with an eye toward contemporary events in Germany and the way nonhistorical thinking allows one to simplify complex motives and thereby give propaganda a foothold. In the passage that follows, which echoes the terms of the earlier passage on King David, Auerbach contrasts “the historical” with “the legendary.” The historical is characterized by confusing, contradictory materials, events, twists and turns (all of which legend irons out and simplifies). Auerbach first contrasts the simplistic legends of the martyrs (stiff-necked and fanatical persecutors versus stiff-necked and fanatical victims) with the “so complicated—that is to say, so real and historical situation” [wirklich geschichtliche Lage] of Pliny’s letter to Trajan.29 But even that is too simple—instead, Let the reader think of the history which we ourselves are witnessing; anyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual peoples and states before and during the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent historical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the historical comprises a great number of contradictory motives in each individual, a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups; only seldom (as in the last war) does a more or less plain situation, comparatively simple to describe, arise, and even such a situation is subject to division below the surface, is indeed almost constantly in danger of losing its simplicity; and the motives of all the interested parties are so complex that the slogans of propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification—with the result that friend and foe alike can often employ the same ones. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.30

In the closing words of Mimesis, Auerbach makes clear that his interest in the perseverance of past figures in their fulfillments was not unrelated to his concern for the perseverance of his contemporary readers as real, embodied persons and for the possibility of their continued community despite the circumstances only obliquely described in the preceding passage: With this I have said all that I thought the reader would wish me to explain. Nothing now remains but to find him—to find the reader, that is. I hope that my study will reach its readers—both my friends of for-

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mer years, if they are still alive, as well as all the others for whom it was intended. And may it contribute to bringing together again those whose love for our western history has serenely persevered.31

Auerbach’s judgment in the 1940s that Origen’s allegorical hermeneutic is dangerously anti-historical received perhaps its fullest scholarly elaboration in R. P. C. Hanson’s 1959 study of Origen’s biblical interpretation.32 Although Hanson argues that Origen does not “reject or abandon history,” as many commentators have claimed, but in fact “defends the historicity of most of the events recorded in the Bible,” he nonetheless “perilously reduces the significance of history.” To Origen, concludes Hanson, “history, if it is to have any significance at all, can be no more than an acted parable, a charade for showing forth eternal truths about God; it is not, as it is in the prophets, the place where through tension and uncertainty and danger and faith men encounter God as active towards them.” 33 Hanson’s key point is that the history that Origen’s allegorical reading dissolves is history as event; history as parabolic charade consists of events to which one pays attention not because they occurred but because they signify eternal (i.e., nonoccurring) truths: It is easy to see therefore that two wrong answers have been for long given to the old question, “Did Origen completely dissolve history into allegory?” It is as inaccurate to say that he had no belief in the historical truth of the narratives of the Old and New Testaments as it is to maintain that he had a deep respect for their historical truth. The fact is that he believed that most of the narratives were accounts of events which did happen (even though it is possible to compile, as we have compiled, a fairly long list of exceptions to this general rule), but he believed that what was significant about these events was not that they happened, but the non-historical truths of which they were parabolic enactments.34

This characterization of Origen’s regard for history is profoundly misleading. Contrary to what Hanson suggests, Origen is explicitly and intensely concerned with history precisely as event. Indeed, it is only as event— especially as ongoing or renewable event—that Origen thinks history is important.35 As it turns out, Hanson himself does not so much reject this point as subject it to theological criticism. His complaint as a historian is that Origen does not give enough significance to history, but his complaint as a theologian is that the significance Origen does find in history unacceptably blurs the line between the actions of historical persons and the spiritual experiences of contemporary readers. Rejecting Henri de Lubac’s plea that Origen’s allegorical reading was simply the way Origen discovered

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meaning in the otherwise incoherent jumble of past events, Hanson counters that one cannot defend allegorical reading with a blanket plea for the necessity of interpretation to render history intelligible: [De Lubac’s defense of Origen’s allegory] is not the same as saying that to history there must be brought an interpretation or it is a mere jumble. It is to say that history is a mere jumble unless there is brought to it this interpretation, this Philonic, allegorical, essentially antihistorical interpretation which dissolves particularity and ignores the possibility of revelation really taking place in event. In this treatment of the event by Origen history is not indeed abrogated, but it is dangerously externalized.36

By externalization, Hanson has in mind “Origen’s habit of resolving incidents and details in both Old and New Testaments into the religious experience of the contemporary Christian believer.” 37 Here lies the real heart of Hanson’s rejection of Origenist allegory: Origen subjectivizes Christian faith and ignores the “otherness” of historical persons and events. These criticisms echo those of Auerbach, who also worried that the allegorical reader’s concern for the transformative possibilities of reading obscured the independent otherness of those past figures to which the text referred. And both Auerbach and Hanson prefigure Hans Frei’s criticism of Origenist allegory, which Frei regards as threatening to dissolve Christ’s identity into the identities of his disciples. But how accurate are Hanson’s criticisms, and which of his charges is more telling—the charge that Origen undermines the historical reality of past persons and events, or the charge that he too closely assimilates their reality to the reader’s own spiritual experience? To address these questions, we turn next to a close reading of portions of Origen’s Commentary on the Gospel of John.

Chapter 6 The Present Occurrence of Past Events: Origen

Origen’s distinctive way of preserving history is evident in his anti-gnostic exegesis of the Gospel of John. Against the gnostic Pauline interpreter Heracleon, who utterly disdains the historical realities represented in the Old Testament, Origen insists that the actions that the Gospel describes taking place before the arrival of Jesus are extended into the post-resurrection life of Christians. Origen is concerned that these past actions not simply be regarded as over and done with, but that they remain relevant—indeed, necessary—for the spiritual advancement of his contemporaries by continuing to occur in the present and future. In thus accentuating the occurrencecharacter of the past preserved for the present by Christian figural reading, Origen introduces a key aspect of Christian reading that Auerbach fails to reckon with adequately—the way in which figural reading does not simply ensure that the reality of the past remains present in future fulfillments, but that this reality is radically transformed by a divine agency at work in the present no less than in the past. At verse 14, the prologue to John’s gospel reaches its climax, the incarnation of the Logos: 14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. 15 (John bore witness to him, and cried, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me.’”) 16 And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.1

Those familiar with this passage are likely to read right through the parentheses of verse 15 without a second thought. The parentheses were not, of course, inserted by the author of the text, but by its modern editors. The marks tell readers that the evangelist, who utters verse 14, interrupts himself in verse 15 to recall what the Baptist once said, and then continues speaking in verses 16 –18. Without the parentheses, one might conclude, 127

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as Origen does, that the Baptist’s first “witness” (verse 7 has already indicated that “bearing witness” is the main purpose of the Baptist’s appearance) ran from verse 15 all the way to verse 18.2 Unhindered by the presence of a parenthesis and motivated by theological concerns, Origen rejects the reading advanced by the Valentinian gnostic Heracleon, who insists that the Baptist speaks only verses 15–17, not verse 18.3 In at least one respect, Heracleon foreshadows those German Christians whom Cardinal Faulhaber assailed in his sermons, for in Origen’s judgment, Heracleon also “truly disdains what is called the Old Testament.” 4 His disdain extends even to the last and greatest prophet, John the Baptist. As one who foretold the coming of the Messiah, pointed him out when he arrived, yet died before his own apostleship could even become a possibility, the Baptist had an ambiguous status in the gospel traditions, expressed by Luke’s Jesus when he declared that “among those born of women none is greater than John,” yet added at once that “he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he” (Luke 7:28). Heracleon is sure that while this greatest of the prophets could have known the difference between the two dispensations of law and grace (verse 17), he could not have received the full knowledge of God available only through the Son.5 Consequently, he could not have uttered verse 18, which expresses a knowledge available only to the most spiritually enlightened Christians. Origen, however, responds that even the Baptist’s very capacity to discern the distinction between the two dispensations of law and grace (verse 17) comes from his sharing in the knowledge afforded by the second dispensation, that second “grace” added to the first (verse 16), the content of which is described in verse 18. When Heracleon refuses to recognize that the knowledge he does attribute to the Baptist (represented by verses 16 –17) necessarily entails the knowledge he denies him (represented by verse 18), the Valentinian exegete proves himself to be a poor reader of texts: he fails to discern the internal coherence (ajkolouqiva) of the verses, the way each verse seems to lead inexorably to the next. In Origen’s view, the unity underneath that coherence lies in a single revelation stretching from the prophets to the apostles.6 When verse 18 speaks of what the Son of God has “made known,” it refers to an ongoing process of instruction that began long before the Son’s “bodily sojourn” as Jesus of Nazareth.7 Abraham is typical of a large group of patriarchs and prophets who, although they lacked vision (what they desired to see only the apostles actually saw), were able to aspire to that vision because they had received the pre-incarnate Word’s direct teaching. But the Baptist represents an even more select group of prophets (“those who had been per-

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fected and who excelled”),8 on whose behalf he speaks in verse 16. Origen contends that the statement, “And of his fullness we have all received,” and the phrase, “grace for grace,” reveal that these superlative prophets “have received the second grace for the former,” for “they too, being led by the Spirit, arrived at the vision of truth after they were initiated in types.” 9 These superlative prophets gained the knowledge of God “in Christ” that verse 18 represents: “Because they saw the image of the invisible God, since he who has seen the Son has seen the Father, they have been recorded to have seen God and to have heard him, in that they have perceived God and heard God’s words in a manner worthy of God.” 10 How similar was the prophets’ knowledge to that of the apostles? Origen’s answer must have appalled his Valentinian readers: “Those who have been perfected in former generations have known no less than the things which were revealed to the apostles by Christ, since the one who also taught the apostles revealed the unspeakable mysteries of religion to them.” 11 Yet if patriarchs and prophets share the same knowledge as the apostles, what difference did the incarnation make? Did the patriarchs and prophets, unlike the apostles, fail to comprehend their own knowledge? Origen resolutely rejects this possibility. Instead, he suggests that Jesus’ critical rejoinder to “the Jews” in John’s gospel, “If you were sons of Abraham, you would do the works of Abraham” (John 8:39) actually makes the positive point (for “those who have ears”) that those who really are the true sons of Abraham naturally do “the works of Abraham,” which for Origen include “the knowledge which was made known to him.” 12 Consequently, the prophets, rightly numbered among Abraham’s true children, “have received what is correct and true and have understood” the knowledge expressed in their own words and actions.13 Origen does not understand the words and deeds of the patriarchs and prophets to be types only insofar as later Christians came to interpret them as such. Rather, later Christian interpretation of the “typical” quality of patriarchs and prophets follows from the way that those persons regarded themselves—as self-conscious “bearers” of their own words and deeds that their own spiritual insight rendered more than their own. Joshua, for example, “understood the true distribution of land which took place after the overthrow of the twenty-nine kings, since he could see better than us that the things accomplished through himself were shadows of certain realities [or “true things— ajlhqw`n].” 14 The initiation in types that led the prophets to their “vision of truth” consisted in just such a progressive understanding of the typical character of their own lives.15 If prophets and apostles share the same knowledge, and even the same

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degree of self-awareness about what they know, is there any distinctively Christian knowledge at all? Or is all knowledge of God, from Genesis to Revelation, distinctively Christian? 16 Origen raises the question while commenting on John 4:35, “See the fields, for they are already white for harvest”: Either no one believed before the bodily sojourn of our Savior, but then neither did any believer become a laborer, which is a very strange assertion, for this would mean that Abraham and Moses and the prophets were neither laborers nor among those who reaped, or, if in fact there have also been workers and an earlier harvest, the Savior will appear to make no new announcement to those who lift up their eyes that they may see the fields “for they are already white for harvest.” 17

Several passages from Paul’s epistles also press this dilemma on Origen. On the one hand, Paul seems to say that the apostles now share the knowledge of the prophets: “For Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans, ‘Now to him who is able to establish you, according to my gospel, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for eternal times, but now has been made manifest both through the writings of the prophets and the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ.’” 18 Origen observes the continuous presence that underlies the change from secrecy to openness: “If the mystery which was kept secret long ago has been made manifest to the apostles through the writings of the prophets,” then “the prophets,” he reasons, “knew the things which have been made manifest to the apostles.” 19 On the other hand, Paul elsewhere suggests that since many of those living before Christ did not receive this knowledge, it was redelivered in a new form through the coming of Christ: “But because it was not revealed to many, Paul says, ‘In other generations it was not made known to the sons of men as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets in the spirit, that the gentiles should be fellow heirs and of the same body.’” 20 The first quotation, from Romans and 2 Timothy, suggests that the apostles knew what the prophets knew because the apostles read what the prophets had written: “The mystery” is “manifested” to the apostles through “writings” of the prophets, in which they expressed their own knowledge. So far we are entirely in the world of revelation as a matter of knowledge conveyed through the reading of texts. But the second passage, from Ephesians, calls into question the idea of a common manifestation of a single, undifferentiated knowledge: Here the author contrasts what “was not made known” earlier with what “has now been revealed.” To resolve the tension between the two quotations, Origen introduces two different

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meanings for the term “revealed”: “A thing is revealed in one way when it is understood; in another way, when it is a prophecy that has occurred and been fulfilled—for it is revealed when its fulfillment is completed.” 21 Origen then begins to contrast prophets and apostles on the basis of this distinction. The content of revelation can be received as a form of knowledge (as an unveiling of what had been covered), and this is what the prophets receive. In contrast, revelation “in the promise of Christ” can be received only as a consequence of “the appearance” of Christ (as the fulfillment or occurrence of what has been promised), and this is what the apostles have witnessed: The prophets knew, therefore, that “the gentiles” were to be “fellow heirs, and of the same body, and participants” in the promise in Christ, insofar as it pertains to their knowledge that “the gentiles” will be “fellow heirs, and of the same body, and participants.” They knew when they will be, and why, and what they will be, and how those who were strangers to the covenant and aliens from the promise were later to be “of the same body and participants.” This much was revealed to the prophets. But the things which will be [ta; ejsovmena] have not been revealed in the same manner to those who understand but do not see what is prophesied accomplished, as to those who see their fulfillment with their own eyes. This happened in the case of the apostles. For in their way, in my opinion, they understood the events no more than the fathers and the prophets. It is true of them, however, that “what in other generations was not revealed as it has now been revealed to the apostles and prophets, that the gentiles should be fellow heirs, and of the same body, and participants in the promise of Christ,”—all of this is true insofar as the apostles understand the mysteries and perceive their realization through the completed event.22

Although the prophets know as much as the apostles do concerning what will be revealed (namely, that the gentiles will become co-heirs with the patriarchs and prophets), the prophets do not see it actually revealed; therefore, they do not grasp it as a fulfilled promise. This is not a deficiency in the prophets but simply a consequence of their historical situation. They cannot grasp the realization of a promise (even though they know what has been promised) because they are not present when that promise is realized. Although they have enjoyed what Augustine called the “present of things future,” they themselves are not present for the occurrence of those future things.23 The key to Origen’s understanding of the historicity that matters is found in his understanding of the reader’s stance toward revelation. In the

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passage we have been discussing, Origen’s characterization of “gospel” is informed by his twofold definition of “revealed.” He begins with the term as it is used in the titles of the New Testament gospels. He first defines gospel as a “report” (ajpaggelivan) that is received by a hearer who benefits from it: The gospel, therefore, is a discourse containing a report [lovgo~ perievcwn ajpaggelivan] of things which, with good reason, make the hearer glad whenever he accepts what is reported [ejpa;n paradevxhtai to; ajpaggellovmenon], because they are beneficial.24

Origen then makes a transition to his second definition of gospel by noting that “such a discourse is no less gospel should it also be examined with reference to the hearer’s stance [th;n scevs in].” 25 By “stance,” Origen seems to mean the place assumed by the hearer in a sequence divided as follows: those who await a promised good, those who witness the arrival of that good, and those who believe in the good that, having appeared, is now present to them. So Origen offers a second characterization of gospel, considered in light of the various stances of its hearers: “The gospel is either a discourse which contains the presence of a good for the believer [lovgo~ perievcwn ajgaqou` tw`/ pisteuvonti parousivan] or a discourse which announces that an awaited good is present [lovgo~ ejpaggellovmeno~ parei`nai ajgaqo;n to; prosdokwvmenon].26 Examples of gospel as a discourse that announces an awaited good are common in the New Testament gospels— in the words of John the Baptist, of the Samaritan woman at the well, of Andrew and Cleophas on the road to Emmaus, and of the disciples Andrew and Philip as they invite their brothers to join them in following the newly arrived Christ.27 When those who, upon hearing the announcement that the awaited Christ has arrived, come to believe that announcement, they have received the gospel as a discourse that contains for them the very presence of Christ. Origen notes that someone might object to his first definition of gospel (a discourse containing a report of things that benefit the hearer when he receives them) because it would apply not only to the New Testament gospels but also to the Law and the Prophets.28 He agrees that the term gospel in this sense, i.e., viewed independently of the stance of its hearers, does indeed apply to the Old Testament no less than the New. But the fullest meaning of gospel includes the distinction that Origen made in his second definition between a discourse that contains a presence and one that announces that something is present. Once one takes into consideration the stance of the patriarchs and prophets as living prior to the arrival of Christ,

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one recognizes that “before the coming of Christ, the Law and the prophets did not contain the proclamation which belongs to the definition of the gospel [oujk ei\con to; ejpavggelma tou` peri; tou` eujaggelivou o{rou] since he who explained the mysteries in them had not yet come.” 29 When the awaited Christ finally arrives, his arrival transforms the earlier events: “But since the Savior has come, and has caused the gospel to be embodied in the gospel, he has made all things gospel, as it were.” 30 As modern readers, we might be tempted to conclude from the preceding remark that if the one who had been awaited had, in fact, never arrived, the Old Testament would never have been gospel, and, correspondingly, that once the promised one did arrive, the Old Testament promises would thereby be rendered superfluous. Such a conclusion might even appear to receive support from Origen when he says that “nothing of the ancients was gospel, then, before that gospel which came into existence because of the coming of Christ.” 31 But our modern conclusion is based on some assumptions about historical contingency that Origen does not share. First, our conclusion assumes that the appearance of Christ is a radically contingent event; it might not have occurred. Second, we assume that the types that prefigured that arrival were also radically contingent. Finally, we assume that there is no causal relation between type and antitype. With this set of assumptions in place, Origen’s insistence that an event that follows after an earlier event makes a difference to the nature of the first event is likely to strike us as unintelligible, or if intelligible, then clearly absurd. The idea that events may alter the character of prior events seems to be related to some of Origen’s remarks concerning the language of temporal sequence. In the Treatise on the Passover, he distinguishes “first” from “beginning.” “First” is the start of an irreversible sequence; nothing can come before what is first and what comes immediately after it must be second. But one can speak of the “beginning” of the second, the “beginning” of the third, and so forth. Consequently, while what is first is always a beginning, not all beginnings are firsts.32 Origen connects “first” with God the Father, before whom there can be nothing; he connects “beginning” with the Son. The Son’s arrival is, on the one hand, part of an irreversible series or sequence: First there is the Father, and then later, there is the Son. Yet Origen’s trinitarianism also holds that although the Son is second to the Father, the Son is also eternally generated by the Father and thus is always present with the Father. Similarly, though the gospel has a beginning in one sense with the arrival of the Son, the Son’s arrival makes all that has preceded into gospel, which is, in a certain respect, a nature already possessed by what had preceded. It is precisely trinitarian thought that main-

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tains the tension between irreversible sequence (the Father is first, the Son is second; the Father generates the Son, the Son does not generate the Father) and commonality (the Son is generated eternally; the Son and the Father are divine). The important implication here is that the possibility of supersessionism arises from the failure of trinitarianism. When, following Hegel, one collapses Father and Son, making the category of Spirit primary, the tension between sequence and simultaneity gives way to simultaneity, which then lets one discard the past as soon as one obtains what is eternally present. For us, the only real causal relations are the result of efficient causes that run only in a forward direction, from past to future, never from future to past.33 The only way we moderns are likely to make sense of Origen’s strange reversal is by regarding it as a hermeneutical procedure. I can, for example, imagine altering a prior event by altering its representation, by deciding to give that representation a different meaning. But just as Origen does not present his view of gospel making previous things gospel in the hypothetical mode required by modern conceptions of historical contingency, so does he also make no recourse to the notion of interpretation. The gospel as the arrival of the Word in the flesh makes former things gospel. By making former things gospel, the gospel as the Word’s arrival does not supply new content but unveils a “gospelness” already present in those former things; former things and events become more of what they already were, although in such a way that this becoming more themselves depended on the occurrence of the later event. As a result, “the gospel, which is a New Testament, made the newness of the Spirit which never grows old shine forth in the light of knowledge. This newness of the Spirit removed us from ‘the antiquity of the letter’ [Rom. 7:6]. It is proper to the New Testament, although it is stored up [ajnakeimevnhn] in all the Scriptures.” 34 Echoing Paul’s language, Origen contends that the gospel as Spirit does not replace the Old Testament as letter, but instead Spirit further illuminates the letter from within by revealing its unexpected “newness.” The arrival of Christ in the flesh, announced in the new letter of the New Testament, made newly visible in the Old Testament what was always present there but hidden (“the Spirit which never grows old”).35 The idea that gospel in its most proper sense is always “later” than the Old Testament, an idea that underscores the significance Origen attributes to the arrival of the Word in the flesh, is reflected in the larger context in which he presents his definitions of gospel: the contrast between “firstfruit” (ajparch;n) and “firstlings” (prwtogevnnhma) —a contrast based on terms from the Septuagint but developed largely according to Origen’s own

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agenda. First-fruits, he says, are always offered after all the other fruits, while firstlings are offered before the fruits. The gospel is therefore the first-fruit of all of Scripture, while the law of Moses is the firstling: “For the perfect [or complete] Word has blossomed forth after all the fruits of the prophets up to the time of the Lord Jesus.” 36 What if someone objects that the Book of Acts and the New Testament epistles come after the gospels? Does this mean Acts and the epistles are gospel and the New Testament gospels are not? Origen responds that the Acts and epistles are lesser works than the directly inspired gospels, yet he also insists that all of the New Testament is gospel, although in somewhat different senses or degrees.37 The Gospel of John is the firstfruit of the gospels because it too is “later,” in the sense that, unlike the synoptics, which begin with genealogies of Jesus and therefore present the beginning of his ministry, John is written from the end—Jesus’ resurrection and the manifestation of his divinity, a point reflected in the absence of any genealogy at its beginning apart from the divine Word’s relation to God. At this point, it may look as if Origen’s contrast between prophetic anticipation and apostolic realization draws a line between Old Testament and New Testament knowledge of God as sharp as any Heracleon might have hoped for, even though Origen differs with Heracleon over the Baptist’s proximity to that line. But readers of the prologue to Origen’s commentary will recall that Origen believes there is also an eternal or spiritual gospel, foreshadowed by the New Testament: “Just as there is a ‘law’ which contains a ‘shadow of the good things to come,’ which have been revealed by the law proclaimed in accordance with truth, so also the gospel, which is thought to be understood by all who read it, teaches a shadow of the mysteries of Christ.” 38 This spiritual gospel presents the mysteries behind Jesus’ words and deeds, and to live in accordance with these mysteries is to live a deeper sort of Christian life: “Just as one is a Jew outwardly and cir[cumcised], there being both an outward and inward cir[cumcision], so it is with a Christian and baptism.” 39 The double character of Christian life replicates the movement from Old Testament type to New Testament fulfillment. As pre-incarnation prophet was to post-incarnation apostle, so is the pre-parousia apostle to the one who will witness Christ’s second coming: Grant that there is some apostle who understands “the unutterable words which man is not permitted to speak” [2 Cor. 12:14]. Although he will not see the second glorious bodily sojourn of Jesus which has been proclaimed by the believers, he desires to see it. Some other person, however, who not only has [not] thoroughly understood and per-

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ceived the same things with the apostle, but also clings to the divine hope much less than he does, happens to experience the second sojourn of our Savior. Let the apostle, in our example, have desired this sojourn of the Savior, but let him not have seen it.40

Even though the apostles see what the prophets could only desire to see, they do not thereby know more than the prophets. Likewise, those who see Christ’s second coming, although they see what the apostles only desired to see, do not know more than the apostles.41 The content of knowledge remains constant. Available to patriarchs and prophets, it has passed on to the apostles, and it will one day be enjoyed by those who witness Christ’s second coming. But that same knowledge is realized differently in each instance, precisely as it is, in fact, realized. The Baptist takes his distinctive position on this ever-ascending scale of progressively realized knowledge. Although he sees Jesus, he does not witness his crucifixion or resurrection and consequently cannot join those who had become “conformed to his [Christ’s] death and, for this reason, also to his resurrection.” 42 Without the benefit of the Passion, the Baptist can make known only the “incorporeal Savior.” 43 “Since the Savior has come, and has caused the gospel to be embodied in the gospel, he has made all things gospel, as it were.” 44 There is a strange retroactive power at work here, in which a present occurrence makes possible the reality of the event that prefigures it just insofar as the event is prefigurative.45 Can one separate an event as such from that same event as prefigurative? Or is the only event whose historicity could in principle be spirited away by a fulfillment the sort of event that was not already, and was never intended to be, prefigurative? “We must not suppose that historical things are types of historical things,” writes Origen.46 But historical events are types of “intelligible events,” which exercise their power just insofar as they actually occur. Origen believes that John the Evangelist saw the career of the Christ occur, but to understand the meaning of the Evangelist’s gospel as the gospel of an occurrence, one must assume John’s position. How can this be done? John leaned on Jesus’ breast, and Jesus instructed him to regard Mary as his mother, notes Origen. Likewise, he adds, any reader who would grasp John’s meaning must also rest upon the breast of Jesus and also receive Mary as his mother. And yet Origen observes that Scripture clearly indicates that Mary had only one son. Consequently, to understand Jesus, John must, in some sense, become Jesus; so too must John’s reader, if he would understand what John has written, for understanding, according to Scripture, requires “the mind of Christ.” 47

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Is, then, everything that was typified by past persons and events finally made real, made historical—made gospel—by virtue of this present event of the interpreter’s understanding? No—understanding is not solely an act of the knower but also of the one known: all those writings are gospel, Origen finally concludes, which “present the sojourn of Christ and prepare for his coming and produce it in the souls of those who are willing to receive the Word of God who stands at the door and knocks and wishes to enter their souls.” 48 For Origen, the actual, present occurrence in the interpreter’s soul of what is prefigured—the coming of Christ—is sufficient to preserve the historical reality of the type. Indeed, the type’s truly historical reality, at least as an actual occurrence, could not be preserved in any other way. For if one does not “preserve the historicity” of an occurrence precisely by enabling its occurrence in the present, one has not preserved its “historicity” at all. There is, then, despite Auerbach’s charge against Origen of a dehistoricizing mode of reading, a strong convergence between the two on the ethical import of figural reading. Auerbach relates the reader’s attitude toward the past text to the reader’s stance toward other people in the reader’s own present. For Auerbach, the ethical moment of figural reading is in the present, although its character is a function of the present reader’s stance toward the material reality of past persons and events represented by the texts. For Origen, what is historical is an occurrence, and the ethical task is to read in a way that allows or enables that occurrence to “happen” again for the present-day reader. The reader’s stance is above all in the present, and it is not the material reality of past persons and events toward which that stance is taken, but rather their dynamic occurrence-character, which can persist in the reader’s own present. Despite their very different conceptions of what counts as “historical,” both Auerbach and Origen are anxious to “preserve” it, insofar as both of them are concerned about the contemporary reader’s ongoing ethical self-disposition.

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Part 3

figural reading and identity

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Chapter 7 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity: Hans Frei

Resisting what he identifies as a distinctively modern tendency to separate biblical narrative from its “meaning” or “subject matter,” the Christian theologian Hans W. Frei insists that the proper Christian reading of biblical narrative does not separate the meaning of the text from its “narrative shape.” As a historian of Christian biblical hermeneutics, Frei offers an account of how the postmodern binary opposition between literal and nonliteral meaning that informs approaches such as Daniel Boyarin’s became possible, and he appeals to Erich Auerbach’s conception of figural reading to explain how contemporary Christian biblical interpreters might resist such modern and postmodern hermeneutical temptations. This chapter examines Frei’s overall claim that Christian figural reading of the Bible narratively extends rather than effaces the Bible’s realistic, literal sense. Frei argues that figural extension of the Bible’s literal meaning, as the hermeneutical display of God’s covenant-making, leads to its intensification rather than its supersession, and enhances rather than effaces the differences that comprise personal identity. To make his case, Frei draws heavily upon Auerbach’s conception of figural reading. He enhances Auerbach’s relational or nonsubstantial conception of spiritual understanding by insisting that spiritual understanding only registers what the text itself offers—it adds no material contribution of its own to the meanings rendered by the text. While spiritual understanding discerns the mysterious interrelationship of figure and fulfillment, it does nothing to generate a meaning other than, or at odds with, that relationship or with the truth and reality of the figure in its own right. However, Frei is less concerned than Auerbach was to preserve the historical reality of figure and fulfillment; instead, his primary goal is to preserve the authority of the Bible to resist the subjective meanings of individual readers or their traditional interpretations, for the sake of preserving its capacity to render the identity of Christ and, hence, the identity of God. One way Frei resists the subversive possibilities that a perspective such 141

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as Boyarin’s affords is by stressing that figural reading is essentially a “reading forward” in anticipation, a reading from figure to fulfillment, rather than a retrospective “reading back” that would apply the selfassured certainty of Christian meaning to otherwise vague and uncertain figures of the Hebrew Bible. Instead, the figural reader aims to subordinate him or herself to the text and to follow the emergence of meaning as the biblical narrative unfolds in its own, inner directionality from past to present. In effect, the Christian figural reader is expected to position him or herself in the place of the ancient Israelites and not to allow subsequent awareness of Christian “fulfillment” to displace the legitimacy of the figure’s own meaning and truth. Although Frei is able to borrow much from Auerbach’s conception of figural reading, he nonetheless rejects Auerbach’s conception of essential Christian identity. Frei locates that identity not in the reactions of disciples to Jesus, but in the narrative rendering of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection by the New Testament gospels. By focusing on the reactions to Jesus, Auerbach separates spirit from Jesus’ bodily identity, allowing spirit to become little more than a symbol of the disciple’s spiritual experience of the risen Jesus. But for Frei, spirit remains fully integral to Jesus’ embodied identity because Jesus’ resurrection remains an event in his own life rather than a symbol for the resurrection experiences of his followers. Figural reading of Scripture takes its point of departure from the way the gospel narratives render Jesus’ identity and then extends that identity in its interrelating of a variety of biblical texts. Frei believes such an extension is warranted by the Christian claim that the identity descriptions of Jesus lead to an identity description of God. When Frei integrates Jesus’ resurrection into the overall story of Jesus’ life, he also rejects conceptions of divine agency independent of the figure of Jesus. Since Jesus, literally rendered by biblical narrative, is the fulfillment of the figures, those figures are not displaced by a meaning less concrete or more abstract than they are, but are instead fulfilled by a person whose own identity is fully embodied. The embodied character of Jesus-as-fulfillment ensures that material figures are not fulfilled by virtue of being emptied by abstractions. As a consequence, the resistance to allegorical subversion that Boyarin locates in midrash, and that Auerbach can find only in secular realism, Frei discovers in the Christian tradition of figural reading as an extension of the gospels’ literal sense. When that tradition is properly understood, it can be seen to resist at the very outset the binary oppositions under which allegorical subversion flourishes. Finally, Frei further insists that the universality of fulfillment does not

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supplant either the identity of Jesus or the identities of those whose lives he completes. He argues that those who follow the fulfilling Christ find their own distinctive identities not only preserved but enhanced. The human equality fostered by such fulfillment is not an equality of sameness. Indeed, it is by virtue of his disengagement from the identifying descriptions of others that Christ can become the one who can bestow and enhance identity without the effacement of difference. Christ’s capacity to have an identity of his own that is unsubstitutable and therefore irreducible to a religion, a culture, or a text, is a consequence solely of his relation to God. Such identity is the basis for the universal fulfillment of persons whose own identities remain uniquely their own. Frei presents the Christian tradition of figural reading as an extension of this fundamental insight to the reading of the Bible as a whole.

the literal sense and narrative shape When Frei claimed that Western Christian reading of the Bible prior to the eighteenth century was “realistic,” he meant several things. Realistic reading was simultaneously literal and historical: What the text said was taken to be a rendering of (though not “evidence for”) what actually occurred in the world. And despite its internal literary complexity, the Bible literally depicted that historical world by means of a single story that stretched from Genesis to Revelation. By means of the device of figural (typological) reading, Christian readers were able to weave together the Bible’s multifarious subnarratives into a single, overarching story comprised of prophetic types and their “anti-typical” fulfillments. Finally, since the real world obviously included the contemporary moment and the experiences of present-day readers, so did the one biblical rendering of that world. In sum, the figural reader sought to understand his or her own world and its history as part of the much larger world depicted by the Bible, which subsumed it all within its grand narrative stretching from creation to consummation.1 Frei’s concept of the Bible’s literal sense, never simple, changed over the course of his career. His usual claim, developed in a number of early writings, was that the Bible’s literal sense is constituted by the way its realistic, true-to-life stories aptly depict the way things are regarded as customarily happening in the world. Late in his career, Frei characterized the literal sense more as a consensus decision by the Christian community about how to read certain texts than as an inherent feature of certain kinds of literary narratives. But the earlier, more typical conception is that the literal sense is “imbedded” in the way certain biblical stories unfold as a realistic narra-

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tive. Given the very nature of these narratives as texts, readers simply cannot rightly gather the sense of the text apart from the literary details of the narrative itself. Meaning and textuality are, therefore, intimately related (although not simply equated) in the literal sense. Frei’s conception of the literal sense bears some resemblance to the way American New Critics insisted that poetic meanings were so textually imbedded that paraphrase was impossible, but it is more profoundly related to the way Christian theologians, following the Creed of Chalcedon, insist that Jesus’ divine and human natures cohere inseparably yet unconfusedly in a single person. Frei argues that since the Eighteenth Century, figural reading had increasingly given way to figurative or nonliteral interpretations that separated meaning from the narrative shape of biblical stories. For example, by separating the Bible’s literal sense from its historical referents, modern historical criticism undermined the possibility of understanding figural relations as extensions of the literal sense. Historical critics sought to distinguish literal narratives from the real world of actual events to which those narratives referred. Such a historical separation of text from history was, Frei argued, only one version of a far more general modern tendency to separate the biblical narrative from its “meaning” or “subject matter.” Whether that subject matter consisted of ideas, inner experiences, or historical events, it had increasingly come to be regarded as logically independent of the stories themselves. Against this modern impulse to separate text and meaning, Frei argues that the narratives of the Bible, at least insofar as they are realistic stories, do not permit a separation of meaning from their “narrative shape.” By narrative shape, Frei means that “what they are about and how they make sense are functions of the depiction or narrative rendering of the events constituting them.” 2 In other words, in a story such as Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, what the story is about is inseparable from the way the story is told, its “simplicity of style,” “life-likeness of depiction,” and “lack of artificiality or heroic elevation in theme.” 3 Implicitly applying the christological rules of the Chalcedonian Creed to the relation of narrative shape to meaning in realistic narrative, Frei insists that meaning and shape are as deeply implicated in each other as they can be without becoming identical. When modern interpreters nonetheless separated meaning from narrative shape, figural interpretation no longer made sense. On the one hand, it no longer made historiographical sense, for the idea that one person or event had predicted a later one was not credible according to the nondivine causality governing modern historiography. On the other hand, it no longer made literary or logical sense. Divorced from history, the literal

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biblical narrative now came to be viewed according to the prevailing modern definition of a literal proposition as a statement having only one meaning. This meant one of two things for figural reading. Either texts once regarded as figural were actually literal, in which case their interpretation should be restricted to their own particular literary context. A literal story about Joshua, for example, can be a story only about Joshua and not a story about Jesus as well. Or if the figural narrative really has more than one meaning, any additional meaning must be nonliteral. If a literal story about Joshua is also about Jesus, then the story about Jesus must be nonliteral. On the other hand, if the story about Jesus is the literal meaning, then the story about Joshua must be nonliteral. The assumption that literal propositions can have only one meaning finally undermines the notion that figural reading can extend literal meaning, for now figural sense seems directly at odds with the literal sense.4 The binary opposition between literal and nonliteral meaning that governs Boyarin’s postmodern approach to interpretation is only the latest permutation of the modern reversal of interpretation that Frei describes and rejects. Once figural import came to be characterized as not merely different from, but opposed to, the literal sense, figural reading quickly gave way to inversions or “mirror-image categories” of itself, such as allegory.5 But allegorical interpretation is the mirror image of figural interpretation only because it is parasitic on a false conception of figural reading. The false conception, which the allegorical reader accepts but the figural reader denies, is that figural meaning is nonliteral. Frei’s image of the mirror is carefully chosen. While it denotes allegorical reading’s self-conception as a simple and direct inversion of the figural, the mirror metaphor’s implied contrast between a real object and its reflection also underscores Frei’s sense of the priority of the figural and the nonreversibility of the relation. Understood from its own point of view, allegory can indeed be the mirror-image of figura, but figura, from its point of view, can never be the mirror-image of allegory, because figural reading refuses at the outset the absolute opposition between literal and figural that makes allegorical reading possible.6

figural extension of the literal sense Fashioning a single story out of the Bible’s heterogeneous components required premodern Christian figural readers to extend the literal sense of individual stories to the Bible as a whole.7 To show how classic Christian figural reading narratively extends rather than subverts the Bible’s literal sense, Frei weaves together features of John Calvin’s biblical interpretation

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and Auerbach’s notion of figura. After establishing the centrality of literal reading for Calvin, Frei attends carefully to the two sides of Auerbach’s formulations that we have already examined: figural reading’s temptation toward figurative nonliterality and its resistance to that temptation. Frei points out that Calvin also considered this double possibility. Although the Platonic features of Calvin’s thought tend toward nonliterality, he typically resists these tendencies in just the way Auerbach’s description of Christian figural reading would lead one to expect. Frei thereby subtly connects the distinctive features of Calvin’s figural hermeneutic to those aspects of traditional figural reading that Auerbach argued resisted figurative subversion. Frei begins his treatment of the unity of literal and figural reading by way of Calvin’s interpretation of the following two Old Testament verses: Genesis 3 : 15 (where God says to the serpent after the serpent’s temptation of Eve): “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Isaiah 7 : 14: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” 8

Although he regards both verses as literal and historical, Calvin argues that the first verse, contrary to much traditional Christian exegesis, does not refer to Christ (as a collective noun, “seed,” argues Calvin, does not refer to any single individual but instead to Eve’s posterity) while the second verse does (“Immanuel,” or “God-with-us,” is not a name that could reasonably be applied to any ordinary mortal). Frei emphasizes that Calvin is undisturbed by the fact that a literal reading of Isa. 7:14 refers to Christ, whereas a literal reading of Gen. 3:15 does not. Calvin is not led by this divergence in reference of the literal meaning of two verses to question his overarching confidence in the christological unity of the Bible because, to his mind, the absence of a christological meaning in the literal sense of Gen. 3:15 does not mean that its literal sense is unrelated to the christological meaning of Isa. 7:14. Likewise, the christological meaning of Isa. 7:14 is not unrelated to the literal meaning of Gen. 3:15. Calvin is able to regard figural meaning (in this instance, christological) as extending rather than conflicting with the literal sense because there is, writes Frei, a “natural coherence,” “mutual enhancement,” or “family resemblance” between the two: “They belong together, though they are on the one hand not identical nor, on the other, a substitute for each other.” 9 Various entities may be members of the same group in the way that dif-

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ferent members of a family resemble one another—not because some single trait or essence is shared by all members but because the members share clusters of overlapping features.10 Frei argues that such “family resemblance” between literal and figural reading “permits a kind of extension of literal into figural interpretation” through “work[ing] out a common meaning among a number of diverse texts” by emphasizing different but not contradictory aspects of narrative.11 In other words, to say that literal meaning extends into figural meaning is to reject the idea that what is figural must be nonliteral, or that in the figural, the literal can no longer be present. Instead, when a narrative is read figurally, the reader stresses a certain feature of the text that differs from, but does not contradict, the feature of the narrative that would be stressed in a literal reading. Because of the intrinsic connection between the reality depicted and the narrative shape of its depiction, one can attend to the depicted reality without fear of drifting away from the narrative itself (in Auerbach’s words, of discovering that the “sensory occurrence pales before the presence of the figural meaning”). Such a shift in attention occurs when literal reading is figurally extended because the figural reader is adjusting two or more literal narratives to fashion a single, more encompassing story, “the one real, temporal sequence involved.” This larger, figurally generated story is itself a literal narrative. And even though figural reading enables the individual stories, by becoming figures of one another, to become ingredient in that one larger narrative, each substory nonetheless remains “literally descriptive” and does not lose its “independent or self-contained status.” 12 Consequently, literalism is preserved in figural extension, both at the level of the one, larger story figurally produced and at the level of the individual stories of which it has been composed. Auerbach helps Frei to characterize the threats to figural extension in a way that shows how Calvin’s conception of literal and figural reading successfully resisted them. The first threat concerns the possible disjunction between the literal depiction (or narrative shape) and the reality depicted; the second concerns the possible separation between literal narratives and the one figural story they comprise. After noting that the close link between the literal depiction and the reality depicted supported figural extension, and then noting that when literal depiction and reference separated, literal and figural reading clashed, Frei quotes Auerbach’s description of figural reading in Mimesis: Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a

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figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act. In this conception, an occurrence on earth signifies not only itself but at the same time another, which it predicts or confirms, without prejudice to the power of its concrete reality here and now. The connection between occurrences is not regarded as primarily a chronological or causal development but as a oneness within the divine plan, of which all occurrences are parts and reflections. Their direct earthly connection is of secondary importance, and often their interpretation can altogether dispense with any knowledge of it.13

Frei quotes Auerbach’s definition precisely because it identifies three essential features of figural reading that ensure against figurative distortion: “a delicate balance between the temporally separated occasions, a firm connection with literal or realistic procedure, and a clear rooting in the order of temporal sequence.” 14 The three features of figural extension can be elaborated as the following three “rules”: 1. A delicate balance between the figure and the fulfillment, such that the figure does not become subordinated to the fulfillment 2. A firm connection between the historical reality of the figure and its figural status, and between the historical reality of the fulfillment and its figural status, such that the figure is not related to the fulfillment only by virtue of that respect in which the figure lacks historical reality (i.e., only by virtue of the figure’s “meaning structure”) 3. A clear rooting of the figure, the fulfillment, and the larger story they tell in the temporal flow of ordinary historical events, a rooting that does not depend on a nonprovidential, scientific-historical understanding of the historical relation between events The second rule is the most important. Its violation usually leads to the subordination of figure by fulfillment that the first rule warned against. In establishing a clear rooting of figure and fulfillment in a temporal sequence, rule three seeks to ensure what the second rule insists upon: an intrinsic connection between concrete depiction and its meaning. Following Auerbach, Frei observes with respect to rule two that “the delicate cohesion between an earlier occasion and its meaning pattern could be easily strained, if not fractured, if this total complex prefigures what comes later only through its meaning structure.” 15 Frei quotes Auerbach directly (on how figural interpretation might give way to allegory if it lacked a “firm connection” between the historical reality of the figure and

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its meaning): “The total content of the sacred writings was placed in an exegetic context which often removed the thing told very far from its sensory base, in that the reader was forced to turn his attention away from the sensory occurrence and toward its meaning. This implied the danger that the visual element of the occurrences might succumb under the dense texture of meanings.” 16 Offered as the term that represents the danger Auerbach warns against, “allegory” is defined by Frei as “the attachment of a temporally free-floating meaning pattern to any temporal occasion whatever, without any intrinsic connection between sensuous time-bound picture and the meaning represented by it.” 17 Frei’s definition of allegory echoes Auerbach’s: both use the term to denote the way that figural reading sometimes threatens to allow a figure’s meaning to separate from the figure’s sense-perceptible reality as a real person or event. However, there are some subtle differences between Frei’s and Auerbach’s formulations. Frei strengthens Auerbach’s association of meaning with its sensory base by referring to its “intrinsic connection.” In addition, whereas Auerbach makes a reference to historical realities, Frei’s terminology is more aesthetic: Auerbach speaks of a sensuous “occurrence” or “thing,” while Frei refers to a sensuous “picture.” Finally, Frei introduces temporality or “time-boundedness” into his formulation, an emphasis somewhat different from Auerbach’s notion of “occurrence.” Auerbach is referring to the occurrence-character of an event as something that takes place or happens in order to underscore its material reality (in contrast to Origen who, as we have seen, privileges occurrence over materiality). At this point in his argument, occurrence is important for Frei not, as with Origen, because something is taking place, nor, as with Auerbach, because of the material reality of what is taking place, but rather because whatever is taking place is specific, unique, and unsubstitutable. In other words, for Auerbach, occurrence underscores a thing’s reality; for Origen, occurrence opens up the possible reappropriation of a past act in the present; and for Frei, occurrence testifies to something’s unique identity.

figural reading and identity The following example of Christian allegorical reading that Frei supplies makes his conception of the link between occurrence and identity clear: The line between allegory and typological or figural interpretation was often very fine, when the temporal reality of an earlier instance was dissolved in favor of its meaning, but the application of that meaning remained riveted to a temporal occurrence. Christ was always the

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specific person he was presented to be; but the meaning of manna in the wilderness could be a symbol under a story representation and not the specific depiction it purports to be; and as that symbol of divine help in time of spiritual starvation it could then be applied allegorically to the redeeming activity of Christ.18

The emphasized phrases show the progression from the idea of a temporal occurrence to the notion of the specific identity of Christ. Of course, Frei presents the preceding example as an instance of Christian allegory, rather than Christian figural reading or non-Christian allegory. From Frei’s own theological point of view, this sort of Christian allegorical reading is not desirable because it has already begun to allow the figural to become figurative. The figural meaning of manna as the redeeming activity of Christ entails the separation of the meaning of manna from “the specific depiction it purports to be” (namely, a literal story about God’s gift of manna to the Israelites). The allegory remains Christian only because the connection of the figural with the literal has not been entirely severed. Although disengaged from the literal depiction of the Old Testament narrative, the meaning nevertheless “remains riveted to” a particular temporal occurrence, the specific (literal) depiction of the person of Christ. Having introduced, with Auerbach’s help, Christian allegory as a halfway stop between Christian figural reading and its complete dissolution, Frei turns back to Calvin, highlighting the reformer’s resistance to his own Platonist allegorical temptation. That temptation arose for Calvin when he tried to account for the differences between Old and New Testaments. Calvin’s resistance to allegory can be seen in the fact that the biblical texts he uses to show the difference between the testaments are the same texts previously examined to establish similarity, although his second reading “changes the emphasis.” 19 This phrase echoes the language of Frei’s earlier account of the shift in emphasis required by figural reading. Calvin’s use of the same texts to establish both continuity and difference between the testaments is a practical illustration of how the figural extends rather than subverts the literal sense. Calvin also resists figurativeness by claiming that promises made to the ancient Israelites were incomplete rather than frustrated. Once again, the logic of figurally extending literal meaning is a logic of intensification rather than supersession. Referring to Institutes 2.11.2, Frei writes that “Calvin does not simply downgrade the truth and reality of the earthly occasion and its blessings in their own place and time (though he does indeed often tend in that direction), but takes them up into another context where they no longer have a meaning in their own right and instead prefigure

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what is to come.” 20 Insofar as this is an instance of figural rather than allegorical reading, we should be able to specify its difference from Frei’s example of the manna. The allegorical reading of the manna story did in fact “downgrade the truth and reality of the earthly occasion and its blessing in their own time and place.” Indeed, that was precisely the force of Frei’s claim that the meaning of the manna became a symbol in contrast to “the specific depiction it purports to be.” 21 Calvin’s practice, as Frei describes it here, is grounded on a literal reading, but it is a literalism that is figurally extended because the meanings of literal depictions (like those of the manna) are taken up “into another context where they no longer have a meaning in their own right and instead prefigure what is to come.” But even though an Old Testament story, understood as a figure, no longer has a meaning in its own right, such figural extension does not call into question in any way the truth and reality, in their own place and time, of the earthly persons or events it depicts. Figural extension of literality means that a real person or event has an additional (and, hence, a new) meaning that does not detract from (but is rather the fuller meaning of) its truth and reality previously open to literal depiction. Just as Auerbach questioned Tertullian’s language of umbra and veritas, so Frei observes that Calvin can use such Platonist language about aspects of the Old Testament, such as the ceremonial law, that were permanently abrogated in the Christian dispensation. And like Auerbach, Frei stresses that the language of shadow and reality, in the hands of Christian figural readers, applies only to meanings, not to what Auerbach called the “vehicles of meaning.” Frei thereby works to minimize the figurative connotations of the shadow/reality terminology in order to align it more clearly with the figural impulse: The figural relation in this respect is between shadow and reality, the evanescent and the permanent, in the meaning of historically grounded symbols and institutions. Specifically, the ceremonial and sacrificial law is a symbol of the confirmation and ratification of the covenant through the blood of Christ. By relative contrast to this pattern of a shadowsubstance relation, the first kind of figuration was that of an earthly, historical promise and occasion anticipating and prefiguring a later historical as well as eternal state of affairs. The family resemblance between the two kinds of figural interpretation is evident.22

Here Frei once again draws on the Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblance to describe the similarity (i.e., an only “relative contrast”) between two kinds of figural reading: a promise-fulfillment pattern and a shadowreality pattern. When shadow gives way to reality, literal meaning has been

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extended figurally, intensified rather than thinned out or replaced. In the example Frei gives, any suggestion that the movement from shadow to reality involves a replacement (“evanescence”) of literality in favor of the nonliteral or figurative, rather than a figural augmentation of literal meaning, is resisted by the category of covenant. What is evanescent is a certain meaning of covenant, not the covenant itself (in opposition, we recall, to Faulhaber’s view, according to which God’s covenant is abrogated upon the death of Christ). God’s original covenant, in all its literal permanence, is extended by being confirmed and ratified through Christ. So far, Frei has claimed (with help from Auerbach and Calvin) that figural reading need not become figurative because figural reading extends a literal-realistic reading that itself intrinsically relates literal depiction to the reality depicted.23 Yet as a reader extends the literal sense figurally, he must necessarily insert individual literal narratives into a larger, temporally organized sequence. Building this larger story requires the reader to describe the larger pattern of meanings to which these individual stories contribute. Here, a second threat to figural extension appears: How can one move to that larger sequence of meanings in a way that does not finally undermine the close unity of meaning and narrative depiction at the level of the individual stories? Frei addresses this threat in light of the interpretative act that discerns figural relations. He had begun his discussion of Calvin with an examination of Calvin’s notion of the “internal testimony” of the Spirit, the Spirit’s “awakening” of the reader to a “faithful beholding” of the biblical narrative.24 Frei argues that Calvin’s formulation means that neither the Holy Spirit nor the reader awakened by the Spirit adds anything to what the text of Scripture already depicted; rather, in bearing witness to the text, the Spirit enables the reader to “discern the written bib-lical word to be God’s own Word.” 25 Discerning the word to be the Word through the aid of the Spirit illustrates the fact that, for Calvin, “spirit and letter cohere fitly and do not contradict each other.” 26 With Calvin’s notion of the testimony of the Spirit in mind, Frei takes up the passage from Auerbach he quoted earlier, focusing this time on Auerbach’s remarks about figural reading as a spiritual act: But it was not only the coherence between explicative sense and real reference that allowed the unity of literal and figural meaning. Equally indispensable was the firm sense which Calvin shared with the large majority of the Western Christian tradition up to his time that (in Auerbach’s words) the two poles of a figure, being real, “both are contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the com-

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prehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act.” 27

Auerbach restricts the scope of the “spiritual” by distinguishing it from the historical reality of figure and fulfillment. There is nothing “spiritual” about these events in and of themselves. Only the mental process by which a figural reader “comprehends” their “interdependence” can be called spiritual. Just as figural meaning for Auerbach is a purely relational category, spiritual understanding as the discernment of that relation is also relational. Like meaning, spirit denotes a divinely enacted relation between two persons or events, a relation altogether different from the causal connections of science or scientific historiography. Frei enhances Auerbach’s relational or nonsubstantial conception of spiritual understanding by restating it as a negative rule. If spiritual understanding simply comprehends the interdependence of figure and fulfillment, then if one is going to express that interdependence as a larger pattern of meaning, one should not state that meaning apart from figure and fulfillment as they are narratively depicted in the Bible: “The pattern of meaning glimpsed in a historical event, or within two or more occasions figurally and thus meaningfully related, cannot be stated apart from the depiction or narration of the occasion(s). The occurrence character and the theme or teleological pattern of a historical or history-like narrative belong together.” 28 Frei’s rule (the pattern of meaning should not be stated apart from the depiction) applies whether one regards biblical narratives as historical or history-like. Things happen in both historical and history-like narratives, and one cannot state the meaning of such occurrences apart from the narrative depiction of their happening. The spiritual dimension of figural reading lies in a reader’s inability to state meaning apart from narrative depiction. One should note the exceedingly apophatic quality of Frei’s characterization of spiritual understanding, which underscores the way his conception is shaped by a Barthian fear of the subject as fear of the arbitrary. In the next chapter, we will see how different this conception is from Origen’s understanding of the text’s transformative power. For Frei, the real force of this rule lies in what it rules out: “Interpretation or the gathering of meaning is in no sense a material contribution on the part of the interpreter or a unique perspective he might represent. Without this conviction to govern the figural reading of a sequence, it becomes a totally arbitrary forcing together of discontinuous events and patterns of meaning.” 29

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With this remark, Frei intensifies and redirects Auerbach’s claim that the only spiritual aspect of figural reading is the reader’s comprehension of the interdependence of figure and fulfillment. Auerbach sought to keep spiritual interpretation from “spiriting away” the historical reality of what was interpreted. Frei has intensified Auerbach’s limitation of the spiritual, for Auerbach himself does not say that the comprehension of interdependence involves no material contribution by the interpreter. Furthermore, by raising the specter of hermeneutical arbitrariness, Frei turns Auerbach’s restriction of the range of the spiritual in a new direction. Frei’s first concern is not to preserve the historical reality of figure and fulfillment (although he does not wish to deny this), but to preserve the authority of the Bible to define its own meaning against the subjective impositions of individual readers or their “traditions” of interpretation. This point emerges when Frei seeks to reinforce Auerbach’s fear of “spiriting away” history with Calvin’s notion of the Spirit’s inner testimony: “Calvin, as we noted, speaks about the internal testimony of the Spirit as enlightening the heart and mind to see what the text says in any case. It does not add a new dimension to the text itself. The meaning, pattern, or theme, whether upon literal or figural reading or, most likely, upon a combination of both, emerges solely as a function of the narrative itself.” 30 What is true about individual interpreters is equally true about interpretative traditions. Calvin rejects the notion that such traditions could substitute for an individual’s actual reading of the narrative text itself. Like the subjective readings of individuals of which they are collections, hermeneutical traditions fail to construe the biblical narrative according to its forward-directed, temporal sequence. Tradition is postbiblical, and those readers informed by it assume a stance from which they can retrospectively read the biblical narrative. But such retrospective reading undermines the extension of literal reading into figural reading because it reverses the interpretative direction suggested by that “into.” Starting from the standpoint of achieved figural meaning and looking backward at prefigural literal meaning, such readers are inclined to regard prefigural literal meaning as irrelevant. The pitfall of retrospective figural reading appears in Calvin’s opposition to certain Christian interpreters who, observing that God provides only temporal rewards and punishments to the Hebrews, conclude that “‘the Jews were separated from other nations, not for their own sakes, but for ours, that the Christian Church might have an image, in whose external form they could discern examples of spiritual things.’” Calvin distinguishes his own perspective from this supersessionist view:

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They maintain that the possession of the land of Canaan was accounted by the Israelites their supreme and ultimate blessedness, but that to us, since the revelation of Christ, it is a figure of the heavenly inheritance. We, on the contrary, contend, that in the earthly possession which they enjoyed, they contemplated, as in a mirror, the future inheritance which they believed to be prepared for them in heaven.31

Frei highlights Calvin’s rejection of purely retrospective figural interpretation as a retrospective view: Did they know what it was they enjoyed? Calvin does not say, and the enjoyment is not necessarily the same thing as the direct knowledge that this is what they were enjoying. The point is not really that the land of Canaan was a figure of the future inheritance at the time if, and only if, “the Israelites” knew it to be such. More important is the fact that they enjoyed the land as a figure of the eternal city, and thus it was a figure at the time. It is not a figure solely in later retrospective interpretive stance.32

There is no question that, in some sense, Christian figural interpreters do “read backward,” from the standpoint of the fulfillment prefigured by earlier persons and events. Even so, the glance backward can only be gained by a prior reading forward, from figure toward fulfillment: “Calvin is clearly contending that figural reading is a reading forward of the sequence. The meaning pattern of reality is inseparable from its forward motion; it is not the product of the wedding of that forward motion with a separate backward perspective upon it, i.e. of history and interpretation joined as two logically independent factors.” 33 We have already seen that Frei, like Auerbach, insists on the “intrinsic connection” between meaning (here, interpretation) and narrative depiction (here, history). Frei introduced the notion of temporal sequence into his restatement of the passage quoted from Auerbach in order to guarantee specificity and uniqueness. Now we see that temporal sequence also introduces the idea of a directionality crucial to figural reading. To reinforce this last point, Frei returns to the Auerbach quotation a final time in order to connect the idea of the spirituality of figural reading as “faithful beholding” (the phrase used earlier to characterize the internal testimony of the Spirit) with this temporal sequence. Focusing on Auerbach’s phrase “the flowing stream which is historical life,” Frei underscores the necessary directionality of figural reading: [T]he meaning of the full sequence emerges in the narration of the sequence, and therefore interpretation for Calvin must be, as Auerbach

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suggests it is for the tradition at large, part of the flowing stream which is historical life. The only spiritual act is that of comprehension—an act of mimesis, following the way things really are—rather than of creation, if it is to be faithful interpretation.34

Because interpretation is part of this flowing stream, meaning emerges only as a sequence is narrated from figure to fulfillment. Likewise, the spiritual understanding of that meaning is a matter of “following the way things really are.” Spiritual comprehension responds to the emergence of meaning from a narrative sequence by following that narrative as it unfolds in its own, inner directionality from past to present. Frei refuses to allow the Christian figural reader to read from the stance of fulfillment as though that stance could be assumed outside the narrative being read. Because the temporal framework of biblical narrative is the temporal framework of reality itself, every person necessarily takes his or her stance within it. If Christians then say, as Calvin’s opponents did, that “the land of Canaan is a figure only to us, since the revelation of Christ,” they make two errors. They deny that the narrative sequence of the biblical text fitly renders the one reality all persons share. And as a consequence of this first denial, they deny that all readers— even Christian readers— must assume their stances as interpreters within the narrative according to its directionality. But this is the stance Frei insists must be assumed: “[T]he interpreter’s situation is that of having to range himself into the same real sequence by participating intellectually in it as a forward motion, a direction it still maintains even though we, unlike those of the Old Testament, know its goal without figuration.” 35 In order to read the Bible figurally, the Christian must reenact in his or her own reading the progression from ancient figure to subsequent fulfillment, just as though he or she were an ancient Israelite attempting to discern the figural dimension of persons and events.36 Knowing what the figure prefigures—knowing the “goal without figuration”— does not, insists Frei, relieve the Christian reader from inserting him- or herself into the story as it unfolds from its beginning. Frei adds: “The task of interpretation is to garner the sense of the narrative, and not interfere with it by uniting historical and/or narrative sequence with a logically distinct meaning that may be either the interpreter’s own perspective or an amalgam of narrative event and interpretation, in which it is impossible to decide how much “meaning” belongs to the event, and how much to the interpretive perspective upon it.” 37 Here Frei goes beyond his earlier claim that the interpreter cannot supply, but only recognize, meaning. Coming on the heels of his insistence that Christian readers must rein-

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sert themselves into the narrative progression from figure to fulfillment, Frei’s rejection of “the interpreter’s own perspective” now also includes the interpreter’s own Christian perspective insofar as it consists of meanings “logically distinct” from the historical/narrative sequence. In sum, Christian meaning is not logically distinct from the sequential unfolding of the narrative; consequently, one simply cannot oppose later to earlier moments within that narrative. Frei therefore rejects the characterization of Christian meaning as a fulfillment essentially opposed to a non-Christian (and literal) meaning that it must subvert for its own existence. To require the Christian figural reader to reinsert him- or herself back into the narrative progression as a precondition for being able to read figurally and to deny to that interpreter a stance outside the narrative is to break down any absolute opposition between literal and figural meaning. For Boyarin, Pauline allegorical interpretation intensified that opposition in ways that essentially undermined Jewish identity for the sake of Christian identity. Calvin’s Christian opponents did precisely that by claiming that Jews were granted a distinct identity not “for their own sakes,” but only “for ours.” With the help of Calvin and Auerbach, Frei thoroughly rejects this view. Through a defense of figural meaning as an extension of the literal sense of biblical narratives, he lays the groundwork for an even larger claim—that Jews and Christians, precisely because the figural extends the literal, share a family resemblance. Frei has, of course, been relying on that family resemblance all along, by harmonizing conceptions of figural reading drawn from a twentiethcentury Jewish philologist and a sixteenth-century Protestant exegete.

the figural extension of jesus’ identity For all their agreement, Auerbach and Frei nonetheless have quite different views about how the literal sense is to be conceived and what it would mean for it to be extended figurally. These differences reflect a basic disagreement over the identity of Christianity. We have already seen that Auerbach locates the heart of Christian identity in the concluding portions of the New Testament gospels, which tell the story of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection. Auerbach also presents figural interpretation as the extension of this story. Frei would agree with both of these decisions. But when Frei considers the conclusion of the gospels, especially as it unfolds from Jesus’ arrest onward, he diverges dramatically from Auerbach over just whom this story is about.

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As we saw in chapter 6, there is a remarkable coherence and consistency in Auerbach’s account of Christian identity. Seen from the perspective of Frei’s reflections on the gospel depictions of Jesus, that coherence and consistency follow naturally from Auerbach’s characterization of resurrection as an event in Peter’s life rather than Jesus’. Like Auerbach, Frei also finds the clue to Christian identity in the moment in the gospels when Jesus is crucified. But for Frei, Jesus—not Peter—is the leading figure in the gospel story. Frei insists that the gospel story, especially the Passion narrative that concludes all four New Testament gospels, is a story about Jesus before it is a story about others. Also in contrast to Auerbach, Frei insists that Jesus’ resurrection is an essential event in Jesus’ own life. Read first of all simply as a story, the gospel offers an identity description of Jesus, with the resurrection as its ultimate key.38 The resurrection is so central because, in Frei’s view, in being resurrected, Jesus is the recipient of God’s agency, and Jesus’ identity is constituted by his relation to God. Frei explores the complex relations between God and Jesus in chapter 11 of The Identity of Jesus Christ, a chapter in which he also diverges from Auerbach’s Mimesis in important ways. At the beginning of the chapter, Frei appeals to Auerbach’s concept of “historical forces” in “his remarkable book Mimesis” to describe the powers that, from the arrest onward, work to reduce Jesus to powerlessness: Having observed Jesus’ transition from power to powerlessness, we may now ask, “To whom does the power to initiate action pass, once Jesus submits to arrest?” The immediate answer is that it passes to his accusers and judges, together with all the complicated vested interests they represent, and back of them to a vast mass of humanity. Together they all constitute a wide span of what may be called “historical forces.” The phrase points to the forces of world history that the Gospel writers discern as acting powerfully upon Jesus at the moment of his powerlessness.39

For Frei, historical forces act upon Jesus, rather than, as for Auerbach, comprising the action of Jesus upon others and their reaction to him. Furthermore, whereas Auerbach identifies those reactions to Jesus as constituting Christianity as a spiritual movement or collection of historical forces, Frei distinguishes the movement of historical forces from the action of God: Now, there is in the New Testament, of course, a sharp distinction between these “forces” and the ultimate, divine origin from which all action derives. God and the world (or God and daemonic powers) are never confused in either the Old or the New Testaments. Still, there is a mysterious and fascinating coincidence or “mergence” between di-

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vine action and the “historical forces” at their common point of impact—Jesus’ judgment and death.40

Auerbach had restricted God to two moments in the Christian story, both outside the realm of historical forces—the incarnation, in which God gives himself up, and the end of time, when history will give itself up to God. In the space cleared out between these two moments, the representation of reality attended only to nondivine, historical forces.41 In contrast, in the gospels as Frei reads them, Jesus’ actions as he proceeds from his arrest through his crucifixion to his resurrection cohere in mysterious fashion, not only with the forces of history that press in upon him, but also with the actions of God. The action of Jesus recedes in the passion narrative in favor of the increasing activity of God, and yet, in the midst of this very process, Jesus retains his own identity, while the God whose action has come to the fore remains hidden. Frei calls this theme “supplantation or supersession in unity or identity rather than subordination.” 42 There is an obvious formal similarity between Frei’s insistence that Jesus retains his identity in the course of his supersession by God, and Auerbach’s insistence that a figure preserves its historical reality throughout its subsequent fulfillment. Auerbach had moved from a depiction of Jesus that separated spirit from flesh (by separating resurrection from crucifixion) to a portrayal of Christian figural interpretation that threatened to allow spiritual meaning to supplant the sensory quality of figures. Like Auerbach, Frei also works from the story of Jesus to the question of the character of figural reading of which it is the extension. But in sharp contrast, Frei insists that the story of Jesus includes Jesus’ resurrection as its most important moment. A figural extension of this story on Frei’s reading will, then, by ensuring that from the outset spirit remains as intrinsic to Jesus’ identity as does flesh, presumably withstand the sort of threat that spirit might exercise against sensory depiction. And this requires Frei to explain how Jesus’ identity is in fact a function of his resurrection as well as his crucifixion, as much a matter of God’s agency as of Jesus’ own. The formulation “supersession in identity” embraces two features of the gospel identity description of Jesus. Supersession means that God’s agency increases as Jesus’ agency recedes, climaxing in God’s resurrection of Jesus from the dead.43 Supersession in identity means that although God is wholly active, God remains completely “veiled” and what we see is Jesus. In his absolute passivity, Jesus nonetheless marks the presence of the veiledly acting God: One cannot pit a conception of deity or divine agency

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against the specific identity of Jesus.44 Indeed, Frei is proposing precisely the reverse: if one can properly speak of a “supplantation by identification,” 45 one must also speak of an “increasing identification by supplantation.” 46 Supplantation or supersession is a movement that enhances rather than undermines identity. Frei regards this theme as a conceptual redescription of an obvious and inescapable literary fact that the gospel story of Jesus includes both crucifixion and resurrection as occurrences in his single life. Jesus “holds together his own identity in the transition from death to resurrection.” 47 Because Frei thinks this is simply how the story goes, he would judge Auerbach’s reading of Mark’s gospel deficient for purely literary reasons: “To leave out the climax furnished by the story of the resurrection (and even that of the ascension) would mean doing irreparable violence to the literary unity and integrity of the whole account. It would violate the story at its integrating climax.” 48 This indictment clearly applies to Auerbach, who isolates a single scene (Peter’s denial) from its larger narrative structure and then reads it in light of an ascription of Jesus’ resurrection to Peter in the form of a visionary experience that interprets the meaning of Jesus’ death. Frei speaks to such a construal of Jesus’ resurrection as an interpretation of his life and death: “It would violate the story also to take this climax [the resurrection] to be the ‘meaning’ integrating the previous ‘events.’” Instead, against a reading like Auerbach’s, Frei concludes that “we must insist that the story, as a connected sequence of events (with patterns of meaning embedded in it), comes to a climax in the story of the events of the resurrection and the ascension.” 49 It is now time to say more about the literal sense that figural reading extends. Frei is determined to provide an account of figural reading that resists even better than Auerbach’s the possible subversion by meaning. He does so by anchoring figural reading firmly in what he calls the sensus literalis or literal sense of the gospel story, a sense wholly constituted by its rendering of Jesus’ identity. Frei contends that Jesus’ identity, as the enacted intention of God to save humanity, is adequately rendered by the literal sense of the gospel narratives, and that figural reading extends this literal rendering of Jesus’ identity to the reading of the entire Bible as the identity description of God. According to Frei, the Christian tradition has given priority in biblical interpretation to the literal sense of Scripture, especially to the New Testament stories of Jesus. Despite its echo of New Criticism’s emphasis on the textual features of literature as “verbal icon,” the literal sense, at least as formulated theologically by Frei, does not first of all refer to a particular literary quality of the biblical text as such. In-

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stead, it denotes the character of that text insofar as it bears a particular sort of relation to the figure of Jesus. Like spiritual, literal is a relational rather than substantive category. The literal sense was privileged, writes Frei, because of the closeness of its perceived fit with the person of Jesus: There exists “a strong interconnection (which may even indicate derivation) between this priority of the literal sense and its application to the figure of Jesus Christ.” 50 This strong interconnection bordering on derivation was a consequence of using language to identify Jesus as an “ascriptive subject.” With this technical phrase, Frei points out the way the gospel writers identify Jesus by ascribing to him the “stories told about and in relation to him.” 51 Insofar as the language of the gospels ascribes the resurrection to Jesus rather than to Peter, Auerbach’s reading violates what Frei calls the “basic ascriptive Christological” literal sense of the narrative. Frei understands the character of the ascriptive literal sense of the text to be independent of the question of the text’s reference.52 Whether or not Auerbach believed that Jesus of Nazareth was actually raised from the dead would not change the fact that, from Frei’s point of view, his ascription of resurrection to Peter rather than to Jesus as a character in the gospel story is a failure to grasp the gospel story’s literal sense. Indeed, in Frei’s view, whether or not Jesus actually existed as a historical individual does not by itself change the ascriptive character of the literal narratives concerning him, or his own status as the ascriptive subject of those stories. Frei describes two basic kinds of ascriptive renderings of Jesus’ identity in the gospels: an intention-action description and a subject-manifestation description. Taken together, these two descriptions identify a person as “what he did” and “who he was.” 53 The first kind of description seeks to answer the question: “What is this person like?” by describing the person’s typical state or action through an account of his or her characteristic actions—“what he did”—as the realization of his or her intentions. Such a description tends to focus on the changes a person undergoes over time. The subject- (or self-) manifestation description seeks to answer the question: “Who is he?” Here the emphasis shifts from the intentions a person enacts in various ways over time to the abiding or persisting self, that continuous subject who remains recognizably himself or herself throughout the ongoing changes of a life.54 In the case of the New Testament identity descriptions of Jesus, Frei thinks that the Gospel of Luke favors an intention-action description, the Gospel of John a subject-manifestation description.55 The literal sense of the gospel narratives consists of its twofold identity

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description of Jesus of Nazareth. Because God was incarnate in Jesus, the gospels’ identity descriptions of Jesus are at the same time the identity descriptions of the God whose enacted intentions and self-manifestations pervade the entire Bible. Does this mean, then, that Jesus’ enacted intentions and his manifested selfhood are God’s as well? Yes—but only by way of a complex, dialectical pattern.56 There is unification between Jesus and God insofar as one must say that in raising Jesus from the dead, God enacts an intention in which the identity of Jesus is manifested (an odd intentionmanifestation pattern in which God acts but the identity manifested is that of Jesus). But there is nonetheless a distinction, because the gospel story clearly presents Jesus’ resurrection as an enacted event, not simply a manifestation, and Jesus himself is identified by the intention-action sequence from arrest to crucifixion, and not simply by a manifestation arising from God’s act of resurrection. Frei finds himself driven toward two perspectives that resist integration. On the one hand, it seems as though a Jesus who enacts his own identity should also raise himself if, contra Auerbach, the resurrection is an ingredient of who he is. Yet Jesus is truly dead. Because he cannot raise himself, God must raise him. On the other hand, Frei insists that the strictly logical consequence—“the conclusion that where God is active, Jesus is not, and vice versa, or that where Jesus’ identity is manifest, God’s is not”—although aspects of the story do point in this direction—will not suffice either. His conclusion takes us back to the theme of identification by supplantation: “Whatever further comment we may make on the identification of Jesus in relation to God, it is unlikely that we shall get beyond the pattern of unity in differentiation and increasing identification by supplantation.” 57 The figural extension of literal meaning, by which Jesus identifies God (or rather, is the self-identification of God), will also not get beyond this pattern either: the New Testament narrative “was joined with others to make one temporal sequence that cumulatively rendered the identity of God or his self-identification as an agent in this storied context.” 58 With the phrase “the identity of God or his self-identification,” Frei offers two ways of conceiving such a figural extension as an extension of the sensus literalis, understood as the “fit enactment of the intention to say what comes to be in the text.” If that intention is understood to belong to human writers and their readers, then the literal sense offers their mutual depiction of the “identity of God.” If that intention is understood to be God’s, then God offers a literal “self-identification.” 59 And if one regards that divine self-identifying literal sense under a theory of divine inspiration, then “the ‘literal’ sense may be extended to overlap with the figurative or typo-

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logical sense that may be part of the literal sense for God, though not for the human author.” 60 Frei’s conception of the figural extension of the literal sense, which proceeds from a sensus literalis identity description of Jesus to an identity description of God, eliminates the category of “the nonliteral” from the figural relation. The moment in the gospel story that, as Auerbach’s reading shows us, has the potential to undermine such a formulation—Jesus’ resurrection—has been integrated into the story of Jesus, along with any notion of a divine agency independent of the figure of Jesus. Indeed, at the very point where such independence threatens most— God’s resurrection of Jesus as God’s act alone—Frei insists that the divine action remains veiled, and Jesus’ identity becomes clearest. The implications for figural reading seem clear: the literal figures of the Old Testament are identity descriptions of God (or divine self-identifications) whose fulfillments are found in the equally literal identifying gospel narrative depictions of Jesus—and there is nothing in the identity descriptions of Jesus that is nonliteral (and that might thereby threaten the literality of the figures). The only remaining potential for opposition between figure and fulfillment, especially for the supersession of the former by the latter, would lie in a distinction between Jesus and God. But any such distinction must be understood, as we have seen, as a “supplantation by identification rather than subordination,” or a “unity in differentiation and increasing identification by supplantation.” By ensuring that supersession is identifying rather than subordinating, Frei opens up a view of the relation between figure and fulfillment in which the more one speaks about the supersession of figure by fulfillment, the more one must speak about the irreducible identity of the figure. Or, as Auerbach put it, “the fulfillment serves to bring out the figure in still more impressive relief.” 61 Frei observes that the rules that govern the Christian interpretation of the Bible “can’t be rigid, especially because they have to cover two different, on the face of it, sets of writings: an earlier Jewish scripture which, in the process of being united with the later set we distort from Jewish scripture into something that is called the Old Testament (if it is a distortion!).” 62 Frei’s parenthetical qualification coming on the heels of his use of the word “distort” reveals a double perspective. On the one hand, he understands what many Jewish readers mean when they charge Christian figural readers of Hebrew Scripture with distorting the text’s own meaning. On the other hand, he also knows that, from the classical Christian point of view, such distortion can only be apparent. Indeed, Christians insist that the figural reading of the Old Testament is precisely the reading that ex-

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tends the meaning of Hebrew Scripture when that meaning is adequately grasped. Rather than some sort of misreading, Christian figural reading is actually the reading that aptly discerns the way the Old Testament is “leading as it were by its own thrust to its climactic fulfillment in the New.” 63 Old and New Testaments together tell a single story because the story begins in the Old Testament but remains “incomplete in itself” until the rest of the story is told in the New Testament.64 Frei frames the relation between the two testaments using the comprehensive category of story rather than meaning. The image, appropriate to narrative, is linear rather than vertical: a single story, like a novel in which only the first half is read, appears to be incomplete in itself and calls out of its own incompleteness for the remainder of the storyline (a “sense of an ending”) that would complete it.

the letter in the spirit From Frei’s point of view, theories of figurative language that subvert Christian figural reading, such as that of the contemporary literary critic Frank Kermode, do so by means of an attack on the literal sense itself. According to Frei, Kermode insists that figural reading does not extend but undermines the literal sense by introducing into the conception of the literal its binary opposite, the nonliteral or figurative. Such a literal sense can “extend” itself only by denying itself. Kermode argues that Christians once forced a nonliteral meaning on Jewish texts they otherwise deemed to be merely literal. In the process, they produced their own literal texts, such as Mark’s Gospel, whose literal sense elicits—but also permanently frustrates—attempts by Christian readers to “discover” spiritual meaning beneath the letter. In light of Kermode’s literary analysis of Mark in The Genesis of Secrecy, Christians might appropriately conclude, Frei observes, that they are, and have always been, barred from meaning because—and this is Kermode’s specifically literary point—that is what texts, as texts, always do. The reader’s choice seems to be straightforward: either resign oneself, like Kafka’s man before the door of the Law, to the reality of being unable to attain a meaning one can at best only vaguely sense, or else force oneself upon the text in the hope of bringing home the meaning one (falsely) believes lies hidden within it. The heart of Kermode’s error, writes Frei, lies in his misguided assumption that within Christian discourse the distinction between spirit and letter should be identified with the hidden and manifest sense. When Kermode argues that in the Gospel of Mark the true insider is an outsider who

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stands outside an unfollowable world, he reverses the relation between insider and outsider in the Christian interpretative tradition. For in that tradition, as Frei understands it, the relation between “letter” and “spirit,” whatever it is, is not equivalent to that between manifest and latent sense. The primacy of the sensus literalis is in effect an assertion of the fitness and congruence of the “letter” to be the channel of the spirit. It is the assertion that the text is more nearly perspicuous than not and that, therefore, the dialectic insider/outsider as well as disclosure/concealment must end in the asymptotic subordination of the latter to the former in each pair. Indeed, the tendency is more radical yet. It is that the dialectic of the first pair—though not the second—is in principle dissolved, just as it is for Kermode, but in the opposite direction. For the Protestant Reformers, governance by the sensus literalis in the reading of Scripture as well as its perspicuity entailed that in principle there is no interpretive outsider. We are all insiders, even if that affirmation is made chiefly in hope and with an eschatological edge rather than in present realization.65

Once again, Frei invokes a notion of literal sense that does not depend for its existence on the possibility of the nonliteral, understood as “spirit.” This is not the same as saying that Frei abandons the category of “spirit,” or that the process of reading the literal sense involves no movement that might be understood as the gaining of meaning. It is only to say that the notion of nonliterality plays no part in the categories of spirit or meaning. The consequences of proper reading of the sensus literalis (denoted by the term “spirit” and framed dualistically with the categories insider/outsider) are now restated as a provisional affirmation made by insiders. In other words, Frei resists at the outset the distinction that Kermode would locate first within the text (as letter versus spirit) and then extend to readers (outsiders versus insiders). The text is already a spiritual letter—the letter is in the spirit—and all readers are already insiders. Whether Christians read the text rightly does not depend on the text but on themselves: “Calvin has it that our hearts and minds may need illumination, the text does not. It is plain for all to read.” 66 In resisting Kermode’s oppositional characterization of letter and spirit, Frei does not simply remove every distinction between them. Despite the dangers of a spirit versus letter opposition, Frei holds onto the tension of the Chalcedonian rules that govern his own construal of the biblical text. The text does not deliver God to its reader, as though it were a mere channel through which God might be conveyed. On the contrary, the text that

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renders the identity of Jesus, like (although not identical to) the logos incarnate in Jesus, just is, says Frei, the linguistic presence of God. Frei’s preservation of a letter-spirit distinction-without-opposition is important, because Kermode’s complaint, although the opposite of Boyarin’s, trades on their shared assumption, namely, that Christian meaning is nonliteral. Against Kermode, Frei declares that “we are not barred from truth,” but he adds that “we might well be if the relation between text and truth is of the sort Kermode proposes and then says we do not have.” 67 But if the relation between text and truth is of the sort Kermode proposes and if, as Boyarin suggests Paul claimed, one actually does have it, then one’s plight is precisely the reverse: instead of being barred from truth, one is dissolved into it. Frei’s resistance to Kermode’s perspective simply reverses the strategy by which he would resist a viewpoint such as Boyarin’s Paul—which is why Frei can address the Jewish complaint that Christian readings are forceful distortions by way of addressing Kermode (and Harold Bloom). Kermode turns everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, into outsiders to truth. Boyarin’s Paul tries to identify everyone with the truth as an abstract universal human essence. Frei argues that their common error lies in their shared assumption that the literal sense gains its intelligibility only by way of a necessary contrast with the nonliteral: “But for the Christian interpretive tradition truth is what is written, not something separable and translinguistic that is written ‘about.’” 68 The force of interpretation, Frei declares, flows from the text toward its readers. In an especially uncompromising formulation of his view, he insists that the meaning of biblical narrative remains its own: “The meaning of the text remains the same no matter what the perspectives of succeeding generations of interpreters may be.” 69 In contrast to Auerbach’s decision to delve for the meaning of Christ’s passion in the effect of its literary representation on subsequent readers, Frei argues that “the constancy of the meaning of the text is the text and not the similarity of its effect on the lifeperspectives of succeeding generations.” 70 Such a text, on which we do not try to force our meanings, may nonetheless “force a scramble of our categories of understanding.” 71 As a text with a meaning all its own, the Bible “may force, for example, existential considerations of the most serious kind on us. It wouldn’t be the first text to do so!” 72 In their criticism of Christian interpretation, Kermode and Boyarin share a conception of literality as the polar opposite of nonliterality. In the case of Kermode, the opposition finally collapses into a literality, as new nonliteral readings turn former perspicacious nonliteral readings into opaque literal senses that cut readers off from any meaning. In the case of

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Boyarin’s notion of Christian allegorical reading, the opposition collapses into a pure nonliterality that obliterates every reader’s identity by collapsing literal difference into nonliteral and hence generic meaning. Frei insists that neither of these twin possibilities offers a constructive possibility for proponents of Christian literal reading because neither of them really has anything to do with that kind of reading. It comes as no surprise, then, that Frei sees little relevance in the anti-hermeneutical position advocated by Kermode, especially given Frei’s emphasis on the convergences of Christian literal reading with Judaism and Jewish midrash: For the next-door neighbor to Christianity in all its various forms is Judaism with its own diversity, and they share those parts of a common scripture which Christianity has usurped from Judaism. The most pressing question from this vantage point is not the fate of the literal sense in the event of a new, perhaps more nearly universal, spiritual truth that would also constitute a new literal reading and threaten to reduce the Christian reading of the New Testament to exoteric, carnal status. This is unlikely, for we have noted that religions are specific symbol systems and not a single, high-culture reproduction of symbolneutral eternal “truth.” 73

figural reading and real disagreement Although Frei describes Christian figural reading of the Old Testament as a faithful unfolding rather than forceful distortion of the meaning of the text, he does so in a way that requires one to be able to contest the claim that it unfolds rather than distorts. While one must not replace “what is written” in the text with a nontextual meaning that “is written about,” neither ought one to suggest that the figural extension of the literal sense can be achieved simply through its recitation. Such extension requires conceptual redescriptions that are open to dispute. Hence, even as Frei rules out, on Christian theological grounds, any opposition between letter and spirit, he acknowledges the legitimacy of the Jewish rejection of the Christian way of relating letter and spirit and insists that Christian theology must continually make its own case. This side of Frei’s thinking about the contestable character of figural interpretation emerges when he distinguishes his own view of theology from that of the philosophical theologian D. Z. Phillips, whose perspective—also deeply indebted to Wittgenstein—might otherwise seem similar. Quoting Phillips’s declaration that “‘the criteria of what can sensibly be said of God are to be found within the religious tradition,’” Frei observes that theology in Phillips’s view “is internal to religion, and the distinction between inside

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and outside is, at least at first glance, clear and sharp.” That is, theology operates only within the purview of a given religion, and does not frame questions from the perspectives of those outside it. Frei then observes that Phillips says that “the unreality of God . . . does not occur within a religion but between religions, and he gives a telling example, which may well be assuming a renewed urgency in our day. How did Paul know that the God he worshipped was also the God of Abraham?” 74 Frei does not quote further from Phillips, but it is useful to have Phillips’s remarks before us before looking at Frei’s critical response. Here is what Phillips writes: The possibility of the unreality of God does not occur within any religion, but it might well arise in disputes between religions. A believer of one religion might say that the believers of other religions were not worshipping the same God. The question how he would decide the identity of God is connected in many ways with what it means to talk of divine reality. In a dispute over whether two people are discussing the same person there are ways of removing the doubt, but the identity of a god is not like the identity of a human being. To say that one worships the same God as someone else is not to point to the same object or to be confronted with it. How did Paul, for example, know that the God he worshipped was also the God of Abraham? What enabled him to say this was not anything like an objective method of agreement as in the case of two astronomers who check whether they are talking of the same star. What enabled Paul to say that he worshipped the God of Abraham was the fact that although many changes had taken place in the concept of God, there was nevertheless a common religious tradition in which both he and Abraham stood. To say that a god is not the same as one’s own God involves saying that those who believe in him are in a radically different religious tradition from one’s own. The criteria of what can sensibly be said of God are to be found within the religious tradition.75

To Phillips’s claim that Paul knows that he worships the God of Abraham because both he and Abraham stand within “a common religious tradition,” Frei asks a typically Protestant question: “How do you adjudicate that assertion?” Phillips does not address that question, so Frei proceeds to imagine how Phillips’s own definition of theology as wholly internal to a religion might lead him to address it: Finally, I suspect, Phillips would say, by an appeal to authority, the authority of the book. But in this case, “authority” would probably refer to the “plain” reading of the so-called prophecies in the text or to a generic continuity between plain and figural reading. But “author-

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ity” is not any one isolated case of itself, such as the contexts of half of one half-shared text; it is the tradition at large, much like what a social anthropologist might call a “culture,” or “structures of significance or established codes”—in other words, a specific social language that is ruled by conventions, an informally coherent sign system for which the question of what it is about or what it refers to is an internal matter.76

In effect, Frei is arguing that Phillips’s treatment of the example of Paul’s worship of God begs the essential question. Paul cannot know that he does in fact worship the God of Abraham unless he and Abraham are members of the same religion. Yet on Phillip’s own reasoning, such a question could arise for Paul as a genuine question only on the assumption that he and Abraham were members of utterly different religions. When Paul concludes that he does continue to worship the God of Abraham, he himself makes the judgment that he and Abraham stand within the same religious tradition. But what Phillips’s wholly internal view of theology makes impossible is any assessment of the adequacy of Paul’s judgment on this matter. Put differently, Phillips’s view makes it impossible for someone who stands within Christianity to assess the adequacy of a contemporary Jewish claim that Paul, despite his own claims, worships a God different from Abraham’s. In other words, Phillips’s position rules out the ability of Christian theologians to have a genuine—that is to say, a theological—disagreement with Jewish interpreters such as Boyarin about the character of Paul’s religion: To outside observers, be they philosophers or social scientists, [Phillips contends that] the language [of Christian theology] ought to be about itself—unless, that is, they are confused by philosophical or scientific “methods” that crave universal criteria for meaning and truth, logics that are then prescribed to every language game right across the board. And to Phillips’ sorrow, the number of such confused people is endless, and their mistake is curious: It is the sort of error where one does not say to the person, “Well, we disagree, don’t we?” and like all arguments there’s an end to it somewhere, because no different examples and no further reasons can be adduced. Phillips, rather, seems to be saying, “If you don’t agree with me, you don’t understand what I’m saying, you’re confused.” 77

By making intelligibility solely an internal matter, Phillips reduces the force of apparent disagreement to misconception. But for Frei, Christian theological reflection demands critical self-assessment regarding the community’s identity, even to the point of concluding that the community has

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in fact betrayed its identity. Radical disagreement of the sort Phillips deems to be possible only between religions must be a possibility for Christianity as a single religion. In other words, a Christian theologian must be able, in principle, to conclude that Paul’s conception of God was no longer the conception held by Abraham. The activity of Christian self-criticism is carried out by means of debates about the faithfulness of competing conceptual redescriptions of its identifying narratives. By collapsing theology into the religious tradition, Phillips, in Frei’s view, eliminates from Christian theology its central task: To discriminate within that tradition and say, “This is a better way to express it than that; this is normative and that is peripheral,” and above all, to decide what is more than attitudinal within the communal selfdescription and how, what could be taken to be appropriate conceptual redescriptions of specific beliefs in our day, and how they are authorized within community and tradition—why, for guidance in that kind of task, which is the very modest but also fairly central task of that modest second-order discipline called systematic or dogmatic theology, we’d best look elsewhere than to D. Z. Phillips.78

Without even permission for the use of conceptual redescriptions in Phillips’s view of theology, and therefore without even the possibility of debate about the criteria for adequate and inadequate redescriptions, there is little to do with the literal sense of the gospel narrative beyond repeating it: “The sensus literalis here is logically equivalent to sheer repetition of the same words. That is hardly how it has functioned in the Christian interpretive tradition.” 79 The loss in such a view that sacrifices the possibility of radical disagreement is enormous. It is certainly the case in Frei’s view that those who read the Bible in the Christian tradition “by and large agree with each other enough so that they can disagree—for even that is an important form of agreement.” 80 When serious disagreement is ruled out from the beginning, one may rightly question the seriousness and depth of the agreements that remain. Frei’s appeal to the literal sense is not an appeal simply to recite the text. Proper Christian reading of the gospel’s literal sense entails conceptual redescription, such as the intention-action or subject-manifestation patterns discussed earlier. The key question is: What sorts of conceptual redescriptions will aid the reader in discerning the identity of Christ (and, finally, the identity of God) as it is rendered by the Bible’s literal sense? Frei suggests that traditional Jewish and Christian readers of the Bible do not disagree on the priority of the literal sense, but rather on its proper characterization. For Christians, argues Frei, the literal sense is a literary (i.e., a

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narrative) literal sense; for Jews, the literal sense is understood, especially in midrash, in linguistic or semantic rather than narratological categories.

midrash and the literary literal sense Frei holds that theology is always “religion-specific.” It would be inappropriate, then, to assume that the same set of methods and practices that served as “theology” for one religion did so for another. Frei wonders for example, whether “the sort of reflective energy . . . that went into theology in most Christian groups, went into an equivalent but different activity in Judaism. Is Midrash the theology-equivalent of Judaism? Or, vice-versa, is theology the Midrash-equivalent of Christianity? Suppose that were the case—both the parallel and the difference between the two might be instructive.” 81 Frei proceeds to address such questions by offering a basic characterization of midrash: A puzzle or a kind of gap in a biblical verse is stated; next, reference is made to verbal or semantic parallels in parts of the Bible distant from the original verse. With their help, one returns to the original verse, often with something like an element of surprise connection—hence the temptation of post-structuralists to see Midrash as an instance if not a paradigm of intertextuality—and so covers the hiatus between verse and problem.82

At one level, suggests Frei, there is a strong similarity between the functions of midrash and theology for the Jewish and Christian communities; each technique aids in community formation and self-definition.83 Beyond this similarity in communal function, there is also a shared emphasis in both practices on the literal sense of the text. But within this basic tendency to work with the literary details of the text as they are given, there is a basic and, to Frei’s mind, fundamental difference in the way each religion characterizes the literal sense. Unlike midrash, which focuses on the meanings of individual words, Christian reading of the literal sense is set within a wider frame of interpretation that embraces varieties of nonliteral senses, as well as the explication, application and meditational uses of Scripture. The wider frame of Christian interpretation is an elaboration of the fact that the literal sense in Christian reading is first of all the fit rendering of the story or narrative of Jesus. This irreducibly narrative basis for the literal sense gives it a literary character and makes the literal reading of Scripture, “in a loose and not fully aesthetic sense a literary literal exercise, unlike (for instance) Midrash in Jewish tradition, for which a similar primacy of the literal reading is much more nearly a syntactical and lexicographical

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rather than literary exercise, in which possible options of biblical verbal uses are carefully explored and compared.” 84 The Christian construal of the literal sense embraces “both the grammatical/syntactical sense and the storied sense, ‘literal’ thus meaning both syntactical and literary-literal (in contrast to allegorical) use.” 85 As this remark shows, Frei conceives of the specifically “literary literal sense” in Christian reading as precisely nonallegorical: “For the sensus literalis, however, the descriptive function of language and its conceptual adequacy are shown forth precisely in the kind of story that does not refer beyond itself for its meaning, as allegory does, the kind of story in which the ‘signified,’ the identity of the protagonist, is enacted by the signifier, the narrative sequence itself.” 86 Frei’s comparison of nonallegorical Christian literal reading and Jewish midrash needs to be considered in relation to Boyarin’s claim that Jewish midrash inherently resists the very opposition between literal and nonliteral that allegory relies upon. There is a very strong convergence of interest between Frei and Boyarin at this point. Much of what Boyarin attributes to midrash, Frei attributes to the Christian reading of the literal sense. Most important, both are presented as refusing to enter into the binary oppositions of literality/nonliterality that characterize allegory. The divergence between midrash and Christian reading of the literal sense comes by way of the centrality of narrative for the latter. In the preceding quotation, Frei claims not only that the narrative or literary literal sense escapes a dualism of textual signifiers and signified meanings (the claim Boyarin makes for midrash), but also that the signifiers at issue in the gospels constitute a narrative in which the identity of Jesus is enacted. Frei’s interest in the convergence of Christian literal reading and Jewish midrash lies largely in securing the Christian literal sense against the possibility of allegorical subversion. In Frei’s view, Christian literal reading achieves this end in the same way that Boyarin argues midrash does—by refusing from the beginning to enter into the oppositions that define literality as an inversion of the nonliteral. But the Christian reading of the literal sense has an interest in narrative not typical of the practice of midrash, or, suggests Frei, of the Jewish tradition more broadly considered: The literal sense of the Bible’s narrative portions has “dominated” Christian interpretation of Scripture “in a way not true for the parent religion, Jewish Scripture and its tradition.” 87 With that last remark, Frei makes a judgment not about a relative lack of narrative texts in the Jewish tradition as compared with Christianity, but about the degree and kind of influence that narrative has exercised in each tradition. There was, he suggests, a fundamental divergence of emphasis. A potential inheritor of a complex tradition of halakhah and haggadah

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from its parent religion, Christianity ended up privileging haggadah over halakhah.88 Having drawn a line of development from Jewish haggadah to the literal sense of the narratives of Jesus, Frei makes two important qualifications, both essential to his own view of the priority of the literal sense in rendering the identity of Jesus. The motivation to chose haggadah over halakah was not solely the consequence of Christian anti-legal sentiment, a qualification that makes a place for a positive use of haggadah simply because it was the available literary mode that was most apt for rendering the identity of an agent. In addition, the gospel narratives, in stressing the linear enactment of character through plot in contrast to metaphorical hints of nonobvious meaning, are not identical in literary character with their Jewish prototypes.89 As a specific symbol system, the identity of Christianity can be discerned only by attending to the import of its concrete overlappings with, and distinctions from, another quite specific symbol system, Judaism. To move away from the specificity of this existing interrelation, toward the circumstances that might occur if a new nonliteral reading were to be applied to Christian texts (as is the case, one might argue, in Mormonism’s reading of the New Testament), would be, in Frei’s judgment, to pursue a different issue. That prospect, at any rate, has already been explored— by Lessing (and, Frei might have claimed, by Origen, from whose Commentary on John Lessing borrowed the phrase “eternal gospel”). But in Frei’s view, Lessing thereby changed the subject: “Lessing’s ‘eternal gospel’ is a noble ideal, but his appropriation of a story form for the purpose of advocating historical and religious progress is not a supplanting of one scriptural narrative by a later and better one; it is instead the substitution of a philosophy of history for an intratextual interpretive scheme.” 90 This contrast of supplantation with substitution echoes much earlier formulations from Frei’s book on the identity of Christ. The difference between them marks the fine line Frei wishes to walk between a purely supersessionist relation between Christianity and Judaism (“substitution”) and another sort of relation whose intratextual unity coexists with a forward movement that nonetheless preserves rather than undermines difference (“supplantation”—in “unity and not subordination,” as he put the point in the earlier book). A position like Lessing’s simply drops the unavoidable question of the relation of Christian to Jewish identity—unavoidable because of the historically generated series of textual implications between the two religions—in favor of something else: a philosophy of history. The question of Christian identity, in the way that Frei thinks that question must be posed by Christians, has been dropped.91

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To pursue that question requires Christians to return to the linguistic forms—midrash, peshat —that characterize the biblical reading of that specific symbol system with which they are intrinsically connected: A far more urgent issue for Christian interpretation is the unpredictable consequences of learning the “language” of the Jewish tradition, including the nearest Jewish equivalent to Christian literal reading. To discover Midrash in all its subtlety and breadth of options and to understand peshat (the traditional sense) may well be to begin to repair a series of contacts established and broken time and again in the history of the Church, whenever linguistic and textual Old Testament issues became pressing in intra-Christian debate.92

Frei sees in contemporary insistence on the nonsupersessionist relation between Judaism and Christianity a possibility for the sort of invigoration of the literal sense that Christian reading, at least, requires: Perhaps the future may be better than the past as a result of the intervening period of liberal scholarship and the persuasion that the two religions, even though closely intertwined, are quite distinct, each with its own integrity. The convergence of distinctness and commensurability between them has yet to be discovered, and attention to Midrash and to the literal sense may play a significant part in the discovery.93

From all that has preceded, it is clear that Frei discerns in the exploration of such convergence and divergence the possibility of a rediscovery of Christian literal reading that renders Christian identity descriptions impervious to the sort of rhetorical or figurative dissolution into abstraction on which Christian supersessionism has typically been based. Yet there is no question that Frei also understands that Christian figural extension of the literal sense of Hebrew Scripture (transforming it into the Christian Old Testament) is, from a Jewish point of view, a “misreading” or “usurpation.” But once one eliminates the supersessionist possibility, this is, Frei implies, simply what one should expect. The claim that Christian figural reading is a legitimate or even persuasive extension of the literal sense is a distinctively Christian, theological claim, which non-Christians, preserving to the full their non-Christian identities, might justifiably reject.

particular identities and universal fulfillment The fulfillment toward which the figural extension of the gospel’s literal sense aims is a universal fulfillment, intended for all human beings. Frei insists that the universality of fulfillment does not come at the expense of the particular identity of the one who fulfills, nor of the identities of those who

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give him their allegiance. Such a conception of Christian fulfillment is utterly opposed to the perspective Boyarin attributes to the apostle Paul. As we have seen, Paul’s “Hellenistic desire for the One, which among other things produced an ideal of a universal human essence, beyond difference and hierarchy,” lies at the heart of Boyarin’s complaint about Paul.94 The internal logic of Christian universalism as Boyarin formulates it consists of the following set of deeply interrelated claims: 1. a sharp opposition between flesh and spirit 2. the equation of flesh with signs and spirit with meanings 3. the conflation of Jewish history with the history of Israel according to the flesh 4. the conflation of Christ and the Church 5. the construal of Jewish history / history of Israel as (fleshly) sign 6. the construal of Christ / Church as (spiritual) meaning 7. the equation of equality with sameness (which is necessarily equality at the level of meaning rather than at the level of signs, because signs are irreducibly different) Frei rejects every one of these ideas, especially the initial two oppositions of flesh versus spirit and signifiers versus meanings. He insists that the flesh or letter is not opposed to, but is rather the fit expression of, spirit or meaning. His rejection of the subordination of flesh to spirit and signifiers to meaning does not, however, take the form of simply reversing, even for the sake of neutralizing, their hierarchical relationship. Instead, Frei refuses to enter into the dualistic assumptions that turn such distinctions into irreconcilable oppositions. In this respect, Frei’s resistance to what Boyarin describes as a Pauline nonliteral, allegorizing hermeneutic resembles Boyarin’s own characterization of the way Jewish midrash does not directly contradict Christian allegorical interpretation but instead rejects the assumptions on which the opposition of literal and nonliteral meaning is based. Frei’s rejection of the flesh-spirit opposition, together with his insistence on the particular character of the literal sense that fitly renders Jesus’ identity, leads him to reject any conception of the universal scope of Christian fulfillment that would be based on a concept of “equality as sameness.” He argues that the equality that stands behind the universal import of Christian fulfillment is grounded not in identity as sameness but in an identity that follows upon one’s identification with the other. Christ deigns to identify himself with human beings, who are thereby invited to identify themselves with him. The equality that underlies universality is thereby constituted by a mutual “identifying with,” rather than a “becoming the same

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as.” Those with whom Christ identifies identify themselves with Christ by following him, but always “at a distance”; their individual acts of following in no way undermine the distinctiveness of their own individual identities. To the extent that Boyarin’s criticisms of Paul’s eradication of difference and identity are persuasive interpretations of Paul’s thought, to that extent and in just that respect, Frei’s formulations would have to be regarded as nonPauline. This would not be as striking an outcome as it might seem at first. Although he regards Paul as one of the most important Christian interpreters of the story of Christ, Frei is convinced that the identity of Christ is rendered authoritatively by the gospel story itself rather than by the story’s various subsequent Christian interpreters, not all of whom have read or heard the story in its own right (i.e., as it has been authoritatively rendered by the canonical gospels).95 Christianity proclaims itself as a religion of universal applicability, and Frei seeks to show that Christian identity, no matter how it is viewed by those outside it, does not seek to dissolve individual identities into sameness. The concept of identity need bear no relation to the notion of “the identical” except by leading inexorably to the conclusion that two entities deemed to be identical share the same identity and therefore are not two different entities at all. To be identical or the same is to be one rather than many. Boyarin criticizes Pauline allegorizing because in pursuing the oneness of human nature, it obliterates the differences that constitute the distinctive identities of individuals, religions, and cultures. While its goal of human equality is laudable, its equation of equality with sameness is pernicious, for in such a perspective, Jews gain equality with Christians only by forfeiting their Jewishness. When equality turns on sameness, only one identity can be permitted, and in this case, the identity is Christian. Frei resists the outcome of Boyarin’s argument by refusing to enter into its governing logic. Instead, he proposes a conception of equality that is independent of the dialectic of the different and the same, just as his conception of literal sense is independent of the dialectic of literality and nonliterality. Once disassociated from these dialectics, equality and the literal sense can be seen to be constituted by their relation to the person of Jesus. As we have seen, the literal sense is literal just because it fitly renders the identity of Jesus. That “sense of the text” derives whatever character it has from the person whom it renders, not from some preexisting theoretical notion of literality as contrasted with nonliterality. Likewise, the equality of persons in the Christian scheme is defined by the relation of individuals to the person of Christ, not by notions of difference and sameness according to which one might compare them to one another. The question of the

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Christian identity of persons then becomes a question of the kind of relationship they bear in their own distinctive identities to Jesus in his own distinctive identity. From this point of view, the differences that constitute identity are firmly in place and cannot be altered. Equality before Christ— and therefore vis-à-vis one another— does not require the reduction of the different to the same. Equality means that wholly distinctive individuals align themselves with, or “identify with,” one who has chosen to align himself or “identify himself” with them. The New Testament asks persons “to identify themselves with the identity, not of a universal hero or savior figure, but of the particular person, Jesus of Nazareth, the manifest presence of God in their midst, who has identified himself with them.” 96 By denying that in identifying with Jesus, one identifies with a “universal hero or savior figure,” Frei escapes Boyarin’s central complaint about sameness. Even as one identifies with Jesus, one recognizes that one is by no means identical with him. The Jesus who identifies himself in the gospel narratives “permits us, his poor brothers and sisters, to identify ourselves with him, though we are anything but identical with him, because he identifies himself with us. ‘While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’” 97 These mutual acts of identification between Jesus and (potentially) all persons are made possible by a prior development in Jesus’ own identity. As Frei describes it, the gospels begin by identifying Jesus with the community of Israel. But as the gospel narratives unfold, Jesus begins to recede from the identifying descriptions afforded by Israel and its traditions, becoming ever more singular in his individuality. Even that singular individuality seems finally superseded in the resurrection, in which Jesus the individual becomes completely passive, and only the action of God prevails. Yet as the one resurrected by God, Jesus’ identity is finally manifested in its true unsubstitutability. And it is by virtue of the disengagement of his identity from the identity of the community of Israel and his full identification as the only one manifest when God alone is acting that Jesus can become the bestower of an identity that requires no obliteration of difference. After the resurrection, it is Jesus who bestows his identity on the community of Israel. The turning point comes on the road to Emmaus: “He, Jesus, provides the community and its whole history with his identity.” 98 Jesus offers his identity to the community of Israel—is this not full-blown supersessionism? Only if one does not grant Frei the full force of the term “unsubstitutable” when he insists that Jesus’ identity in his resurrection is “so unsubstitutable now that he can bring it to bear as the identifying clue for the community which becomes focused through him.” 99 Jesus cannot

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identify the community until his identity has been utterly divorced from all communal interpretation (Frei’s echo of the Barthian proclamation of revelation against religion). The logic of this claim demands that Jesus be utterly divorced from the Christian community as well. Like the community of Israel after the resurrection, the Christian community can only receive Jesus’ identity. Neither community can provide Jesus with his identity. If Christianity regards itself as superseding Judaism, it can do so only because it illegitimately claims to have substituted another identity for the identity by which Christ comes to identify the community of Israel. But the only proper identity Christianity has is the unsubstitutable identity by which Christ identifies the community of Israel. Christians go further than this. They insist, says Frei, that the identity Jesus bestows on Israel includes all human beings. In other words, the identity that he bestows on Israel is constituted precisely by his decision to be for—to identify with—all other persons: “[H]is identity as this singular, continuing individual, Jesus of Nazareth, includes humankind in its singularity. . . . To be ‘the first born among many brethren’ (and sisters) is his vocation and his very being. And these ‘many,’ these ‘others’ are all humankind.” 100 His resurrection marks the moment when the one who formerly had been identified by the community becomes the one who bestows his identity on that community. The resurrection marks the rise of faith from unfaith, and that transition can be best accounted for by the miraculous inclusion of us all vicariously in the singular identity of Jesus, the fact that it was his very identity, his being, to give himself efficaciously on our behalf. He enacted his identity on the cross and it was confirmed in his resurrection. He was and is what he did for us. Because we are comprehended in his self-identifying action (“we were there”) and his resurrection includes us, he is the ground of our faith and the source of its arising in us through the New Testament message, as it did in the early Christian community. (cf. Rom. 10:13 – 17; Eph. 2 : 4 – 6).101

“Inclusion, “vicariously,” and “comprehended” are the terms by which Frei maintains his relational rather than essentialist view of Christian identity, which, like all conceptions of personal relationship, demands the preservation of the individual identities of those who are related.102

paul and universalism The logic of Frei’s position will not easily avoid Boyarin’s challenge if the Jesus who identifies Israel is Paul’s Jesus—the one in whose name Paul in-

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sists that practices once central to the community (above all, physical circumcision) are no longer relevant. Does Frei, like Auerbach, also distance himself from Paul? Perhaps the best way to tackle the question is to see what Frei does with the Pauline passage that for Boyarin best captures the essence of Paul’s unfortunate Hellenistic quest for sameness, Gal. 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (RSV). Frei invokes this verse in at least two instances, both of which are instructive. In a hermeneutical move reminiscent of midrash itself, Frei rewrites the Galatians verse in the course of applying it to the capacity of the Christian tradition to appeal to the person of Jesus for purposes of self-critique. The traditions subject to critique are slavery, the patriarchal oppression of women, and capitalism—and Frei invokes Paul in order to explicate the applicability to each of Jesus’ identity as a servant: Traditions do change, and social patterns that religions find peripheral or even compatible in interaction with the surrounding social world in past eras, they later reject as going against the grain of the tradition under changed circumstances. Slavery, the ordination of women, the institutional rigidification of the ownership–wage earner structure of industrial and postindustrial capitalism become, each in its day, issues to confront the ongoing tradition of the appropriate service of a Lord who would be a servant, who is equal and not superior to the least of his brothers and sisters, and in whom—so it was recognized early on by at least some of his followers—there can be neither East nor West, slave nor free, male nor female.103

Frei replaces Judaism and Christianity with Eastern communism and Western capitalism, rewriting Paul’s “neither Jew nor Greek” as “neither East nor West.” Frei simply does not take Paul’s remark about the distinction of Jew and Greek to be a manifestation of the sort of hierarchical domination that would need to be overcome by those who owed their allegiance to the servant Jesus, as suggested by the other two pairs. (Boyarin, by contrast, reads the three distinctions as equal manifestations of the same penchant for binary opposition in favor of sameness over difference).104 But while we learn something about what Frei does not want to say regarding Judaism and Christianity, this midrashic rewriting does not yet tell us just what Frei would make of the words Paul actually wrote. For that we need to turn to another place where Frei quotes Gal. 3:28. He begins by speaking of the gospels as portraits of Jesus: There is something very specific about the original portraits. In all of them he is recognizably and clearly himself and none other, and yet the

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specifics are fragmentary if not at times contradictory, so that they move strangely, if not by constant counterdescription (such as abiding personal power and equally abiding powerlessness), toward an allencompassing universality. Look, the portraits seem to say, he is none other than a person, this person, and yet unlike any other, he is— or is representative of—all persons, humankind as such. Even the abiding contrasts Jew and Greek, bond and free, male and female (Gal. 3:28) are encompassed in the universality of this specific person—yes, this man —though no other person, male or female.105

Frei appeals to the contrasts of Gal. 3:28 as abiding rather than dissolving features of human identity in order to make the connection with the specific identity of Jesus, who is himself included in those contrasts: “Yes,” says Frei, this man.” And this man had also participated in that abiding contrast bond and free in the form of his “abiding personal power and equally abiding powerlessness”; Frei knew it went without saying that Jesus was also a Jew. Here, then, the polarities of Gal. 3:28 that Boyarin presents Paul as systematically dissolving into an equality of sameness are invoked by Frei as abiding distinctions that are ingredients of the very identity of Jesus himself.106 Nonetheless, those abiding distinctions that constitute irreducible human identity (identities as irreducible and unsubstitutable as Jesus’ own) are “encompassed in the universality of this specific person.” Jesus can have this universality only because he has aligned himself with all, so that all may align themselves with him. Frei concludes the passage with remarks that resolutely reject in the most direct way the form of reductive Christian universalism that Boyarin ascribes to Paul: When Christians want to describe human nature, they do not proceed, like philosophers, by abstraction, by generating the universal or the general out of its particular instances. They do not proceed even like historicists who combine the particular and the general by describing the ideal type or unitary cultural consciousness of a specific culture and era—a kind of generalized particular. No, they look to this man, as though true humanity could never be explained, never be generalized about or abstracted from concrete, specific description, but as though the description of this specific man, like all good fictional description, included far more than this person—in fact, the whole race, each one of us in her or his specific and different being, doing, and undergoing.107

It is essential to Frei’s position that Jesus’ universal import be a function of his specific identity. To ensure the distinctiveness of Jesus’ identity as his own, Frei must first conceive it in utter independence from the identity of the community of which Jesus is a member. It is tempting to complement this disengagement by then locating the universal character of Jesus not in

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his person at all, but rather in his teaching, especially in its eschatological dimensions, which bring all of human historical reality into a cosmic context. But just as Frei provisionally disengaged Jesus from the community of Israel on the crucial question of his identification, so he also disengages him from the larger scope of human history. We have seen that Auerbach replaced the person of Jesus himself as one who dies and is resurrected with an emphasis on the divinely enacted beginning (the incarnation of the logos) and the divinely achieved end (the eschatological dissolution of the historical realm into a realm beyond history and time). From Frei’s perspective, Auerbach is able to divorce the character of Jesus from the larger circumstances of incarnation and consummation because he is insufficiently attentive to the storied or narrative character of the gospels. Taking that narrative character more seriously would, he argues, force one to keep Christology and eschatology tightly linked. In many places in his writings, Frei opposes the tendency of modern liberal theology to separate Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God (whether future, present, or only partially realized) from his own unique identity. Frei will not grant an independent significance to the “symbolic” character of Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom. Instead, he argues that the story of Jesus’ identity nonetheless embraces a larger story of his mission as the enacted intention of God, “the triumphant coming of God’s reign.” Because Jesus’ enacted intentions are those of God, Jesus’ story is no selfcontained episode, but instead stretches back to God’s primordial intention to enact human salvation, even as it stretches forward to God’s final achievement of that end. This larger conception of Jesus’ mission has the following consequence for biblical interpretation: This is one way we can say that we have a series of stories (Old Testament, the Gospels, history since then and to the end) among which it is possible to work out one or a variety of literary relationships (e.g., “typology,” “anticipation-fulfillment”). In another way we have to say that what we have is stages in one cumulative story or even a smaller story (the gospel story) set within a larger one. The point is that since Jesus’ story is only in one sense finished and since character and circumstance are always united, there can be no priority choice between Christology and eschatology in understanding the meaning of the smaller story— the Gospels themselves— or the larger story, that of human history.108

Auerbach makes exactly the priority choice Frei wishes to rule out. He first chooses eschatology (in the form of the subsequent impact of Jesus’ death on his followers) over Christology. He then chooses the meaning of the larger story of human history (in the form of the designation of the Chris-

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tian movement as a “historical force”) over the smaller story of the gospels. For Frei, the integration of Christology and eschatology is achieved in the narrative character of the gospels themselves. It is the second of Auerbach’s choices that presents a genuine option even for those who agree about the gospel’s narrative character. For if the story of Jesus is finally integral to the story of history itself, one faces the interpretative question of whether to begin with the narrative of Jesus or with the larger historical framework. Auerbach begins with history. Indeed, Mimesis can be read anachronistically as an effort to respond to Frei’s skepticism about whether history as such has any discernible narrative pattern at all. From Frei’s perspective, the second chapter of Mimesis offers a reading of Mark that, having already inserted Mark into a prevailing conception of history, yields little significance for the gospel story in its own right. Frei, of course, prefers to reverse the procedure, allowing the story of Jesus’ identity to provide clues to meaning of the larger story in which it is ingredient: Why not proceed the way the Church has traditionally done, even if the Gospels are bound to be an incomplete clue to the rest of Scripture, and a necessarily ambiguous clue to the experience of history, both as narrated in the Old Testament and as we, simply as members of the human race, experience it. Incomplete, even ambiguous—yes, but not without meaning, as long as we understand that in the gospels Jesus is nothing other than his story, and that this both is the story of God with him and all mankind, and is included in that story—that the Gospels are not simply the story of a being who is to be served by this story for purposes of the metaphysical definition of his being.109

Yet Frei might also suggest that Auerbach has, despite himself, in fact moved from gospel story to history nonetheless, by attributing to the unfolding of the history of representation his own version of the figural extension of the literal sense. Frei would not complain about the act of extending, but rather that the story Auerbach extends is not the story of Jesus’ identity, but Peter’s.

the figural fulfillment of history Frei suggests that if one corrects Auerbach on the reading of the literal story of the gospel, one can then embrace much of what he says about its figural extension. This strong embrace of Auerbach’s notion of figural reading surfaces in Frei’s celebration of the “Dantesque element in Barth,” for it is Auerbach’s Dante of profound figural sensibility that Frei has in mind. Having just praised Barth’s Dogmatics over his Romans commentary for its “more mimetic or representational” imagination, Frei casts about for a

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comparison and is “invariably drawn to some things Erich Auerbach has said about Dante.” Frei sets the context for his quotation of Auerbach by interpreting his characterization of figura; Auerbach had sharply contrasted figura with allegory and symbol, but Frei gives Auerbach’s distinctions a different emphasis by positioning figura on a spectrum stretching from uninterpreted reality to allegory: In an essay entitled “Figura,” Auerbach makes a distinction between “allegory” and “figure.” Allegory, we know, is the literary personification of abstract qualities, usually personal attributes—virtue, reason, faith, courage. At the opposite end from allegory there is the description of personal, earthly existence, which is just what it is and neither is nor “means” something else. And between them there is “figura,” which is itself and yet points beyond itself to something else that it prefigures. Auerbach suggests that much of the Divine Comedy, including Virgil and Beatrice, is of this sort.110

In construing Auerbach’s figura as a mediation between uninterpreted reality and allegory, Frei aligns figura more closely to allegory than does Auerbach. Much of the preceding analysis of Frei has shown how he intensifies Auerbach’s own inclination to anchor figura securely in the realm of realism and to guard against the way it might otherwise be open to figurative (i.e., allegorical) subversion. But Frei now tips the balance back in the other direction—not all the way to the other pole—but toward a center space of equilibrium: the figura “is itself”— of that there can be no question; and yet, like allegory, “it points beyond itself to something else.” We can only suspect that Frei needs to adjust the emphasis in Auerbach’s conception of figura in order to lay the basis for his comparison with Barth. But first Frei quotes Auerbach at length: Virgil in the Divine Comedy is Virgil himself, but then again he is not; for the historical Virgil is only a figura of the fulfilled truth that the poem reveals, and this fulfillment is more real, more significant than the figura. With Dante, unlike modern poets, the more fully the figure is interpreted and the more closely it is integrated with the eternal plan of salvation, the more real it becomes. And for him, unlike the ancient poets of the underworld, who represented earthly life as real and life after death as a shadow, the other world is the true reality, while this world is only umbra futurorum—though indeed the umbra is the prefiguration of the transcendent reality and must recur fully in it. . . . For Dante the literal meaning or historical reality of a figure stands in no contradiction to its profounder meaning but precisely “figures” it; the historical reality is not annulled, but confirmed and fulfilled by the deeper meaning.111

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The quotation focuses on the figural quality of Virgil, who as a character in the poem is the fulfillment of a figura, the Virgil who lived in history. The historical Virgil gains fulfillment (an increased reality) as he becomes “more closely” “integrated with the eternal plan of salvation,” a process that concludes definitively at his death. Characteristically, Auerbach’s emphasis is on what is retained in that integration. Virgil’s “historical reality,” his (or the text’s) “literal meaning,” is confirmed and fulfilled; the historical Virgil “recurs fully” in his fulfilled or transcendent reality. But while Auerbach is concerned with the figural character of Virgil, Frei is concerned with the figural character of the Bible. So while Auerbach focuses on the person Virgil and what Dante’s poetic representation of Virgil implies about Virgil’s reality as a person, Frei appeals to Virgil and Beatrice solely in their roles within Dante’s poem in order to characterize Barth’s conception of the Bible. For Barth the Bible was, in a manner, Virgil and Beatrice in one. The Guide who took him only to the threshold of Paradise, it was at the same time the figura in writing of that greatest wonder which is the fulfillment of all natural, historical being without detracting from it: The incarnate reconciliation between God and man that is Jesus Christ. He is not the incarnate Lord who, as a separable or added action, performs and undergoes the reconciliation of God and man. He is the reconciliation he enacts.112

Here we begin to see why Frei aligns Auerbach’s conception of figura a bit more closely with allegory than Auerbach would have liked: Frei is moving toward a statement of the universal fulfillment toward which biblical figures point. As a figural text, the Bible embraces the poles of historical reality understood in its own terms (Virgil) as well as in those radically other terms that serve to fulfill it (Beatrice), yet “without detracting from it.” Hence the Bible embraces the two poles while leaving each aside insofar as they are interpreted as binary oppositions. Within the Bible as figura there can be neither uninterpreted history nor anti-historical fulfillment. The movement from Virgil to Beatrice is precisely the understanding of reality as a figura, which is how the Bible understands reality. What, then, is the fulfillment of reality understood as figura? “The incarnate reconciliation between God and man that is Jesus Christ.” We have already seen that, for Frei, the very narrative of the Bible is both the apt rendering and the figural extension of Jesus’ identity. Consequently, the Bible simultaneously presents reality as a figure awaiting fulfillment while offering an identity description of the one who will fulfill it through the enacted intention to fulfill it that is his very identity. Jesus “is the reconciliation he enacts,” and the

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Bible is the rendering of this enactment. The biblical depiction of reconciliation in Christ showed that “each form of the divine-human relation was both itself and at the same time a figure to be fulfilled in the first and second advents of Jesus Christ.” How is it that each form of the divine-human relationship can remain itself—“can recur fully”—in this fulfillment? The answer seems to lie for Frei in Barth’s conviction of “the figural fulfillment of all created reality in the fit unity of God and man in Jesus Christ, uniting figuring and figured reality.” 113 In other words, Christ is not “applied” to individual identities as if to take their places. Instead, to identify with Christ is to be empowered to enact one’s own identity as both “figuring and figured reality.” To say that Christ is the fulfillment of figure is misleading if one thinks that first one has a figure, and then one has a fulfillment, which is Christ. On the contrary, the very distinction of figure and fulfillment is an extrapolation from the identity of Christ as the one who enacts God’s intention to reconcile. The very distinction between figure and fulfillment is a testimony to the as yet ongoing character of that reconciling action. In Frei’s overall characterization of the Bible as figura, we find one more instance of his separation of revelation from culture for the sake of culture’s transformation. Jesus was separated from Israel so that Israel might be identified by him. Jesus was separated from history so that history might be identified by him. Now Jesus has been separated from the Bible, which is only a figura, so that all the reality it figures might be fulfilled, that is to say, identified by him. Does this mean that Jesus’ own identity was not shaped in the most profound ways by Israel, by human culture, or by the Bible? Certainly not. But it does mean that Jesus’ ability to have an identity of his own that is unsubstitutable and therefore not reducible to a religion, a culture, or a text, is a consequence solely of his relation to God. Such identity is the basis for the universal fulfillment of persons whose identities remain uniquely their own.

Chapter 8 Moses Veiled and Unveiled: Hans Frei and Origen

Like Auerbach, Frei also sees in Origen’s allegorical hermeneutic a fundamental threat to the form of figural interpretation he wants to advance. In his estimation, Origen’s allegorical interpretation fails to properly serve the Bible’s “literal sense.” When properly read, that sense renders the identity of Christ to readers. But Frei believes that Origenist allegory subverts the literal sense, allowing the allegorical reader’s own identity to supplant the independent identity of Jesus. In this chapter, I show that Origen also has a stake in the way biblical narrative articulates the identity of Christ. But Origen is especially concerned to work out Christ’s identity in relation to believers, in order to show how the believer is personally transformed by that relation. Origen’s concern for the relation of identity to narrative is no less intense than Frei’s, but the issue that attracts his effort is the opposite of the one to which Frei is most attentive. Frei wants to show how Jesus’ identity is a consequence of his unique relation to God, a relation that human beings cannot share (and therefore cannot usurp). Origen wants to show how reading the text allegorically serves to bind the reader to the Christ whose divine identity transforms the reader, impelling him or her further along the pathway of personal spiritual regeneration. The difference between the two theologians is revealed in their respective remarks on Paul’s use of the veil metaphor in his interpretation of Exod. 34. Frei believes that Christians should avoid allegorical reading to the extent it fails to serve the gospel’s literal sense. In his view, allegorically generated meanings often lack any direct relation to the concrete literary features of biblical narratives. Allegory, Frei declares, is “the attachment of a temporally free-floating meaning pattern to any temporal occasion whatever, without any intrinsic connection between sensuous time-bound picture and the meaning represented by it.” 1 However, in contrast to Boyarin and Auerbach, Frei’s rejection of allegorical reading is not absolute, for he is not willing to reject out of hand the traditional Christian allegorical exegesis of the Bible. Allegorical reading in the Christian tradition, he decides, 186

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was often acceptable because it “tended to be in the service of literal interpretation, with Jesus the center or focus of coherence for such reading”: It was largely by reason of this centrality of the story of Jesus that the Christian interpretive tradition in the West gradually assigned clear primacy to the literal sense in the reading of Scripture, not to be contradicted by other legitimate senses—tropological, allegorical, and anagogical. In the ancient church, some of the parables of Jesus—for example, that of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37)—were interpreted allegorically as referring latently or spiritually to all sorts of types, and more especially to Jesus himself, but this could only be done because the story of Jesus itself was taken to have a literal or plain meaning: He was the Messiah, and the fourfold storied depiction in the gospels, especially of his passion and resurrection, was the enacted form of his identity as Messiah.2

In other words, Christians could discover allegorical “other meanings” in biblical narrative so long as those meanings were linked to, and did not undermine the authority of, the irreducibly literal narrative depiction of Jesus himself as the actual person he was. Frei insists that this sort of allegorical reading that subordinated its interpretative discoveries to the literal gospel narratives “remained legitimate up until the Reformation, even in its supposed rejection by the school of Antioch.” But whenever allegorical reading failed to “serve” the literal sense (and thereby threatened the identity of Christ, which the literal narrative “rendered” to readers), it became unacceptable. According to Frei, such was the case with “the school of Origen, in which the Old Testament received a kind of independent allegorical interpretation.” Even here, Frei shows his reluctance to brand Origen himself an unredeemable allegorizer. But it is nonetheless in Origen’s “school,” for example, that Immanuel Kant learned to produce allegorical readings in which “stages of the narrative are paralleled by similar stages in the real subject matter to which the narrative points, and which we know independently of the narrative.” 3 Meaning that is known independently of the narrative is meaning that lacks any intrinsic connection with the text’s “sensuous time-bound picture.” It is a meaning that one can have without the defining and constraining features of the text—and, therefore, it is a meaning that is in principle sufficiently amorphous so as to become indistinguishable from one’s own all-too-human subjectivity. Behind this Barthian suspicion of Origen and condemnation of his school of allegorizers lies the threat of Feuerbach: allegory is the way readers transform the text’s theology into mere self-aggrandizing anthropol-

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ogy. Frei is convinced that when Origenist allegorical reading separated meaning from the text, it thereby kept readers from encountering the real Christ in his unsubstitutable identity and instead allowed, or perhaps enticed, readers to substitute themselves or their religious traditions for Christ. Frei draws on the biblical metaphor of the veil to block this idolatrous substitution of self for Christ’s own unique identity. As we shall see, Origen appeals to the same metaphor to characterize the self’s necessary transformation by Christ. In his reading of Exod. 34 in Homily XII on Exodus (“On the glorified countenance of Moses and on the veil which he placed on his face”), Origen juxtaposes the glorification of Moses with the glorification of those to whom the knowledge of Jesus has been revealed. But these contrasts are not exactly parallel, as they seem to have been for Paul, for whom Moses and the Jews were on one side, and the disciples and those who see the Lord’s glory with unveiled faces were on the other. Unlike Paul, Origen inserts Luke’s account of the Transfiguration into Paul’s reading of Moses’ veil, which gives Origen’s interpretation a different inflection. Moses and Elijah now stand in glory beholding the unveiled face of the transfigured Jesus, along with those Paul described as having unveiled faces. Origen notes that when Moses’ face was previously glorified (according to Exod. 34), “‘the sons of Israel’ were not able ‘to look at the appearance of his countenance’; the people of the Synagogue were not able ‘to look.’” 4 But Origen shifts at once from the people of the synagogue to the people of the Church (to whom he is delivering this sermon), suggesting that even for them, as for the people of the Synagogue, the Old Testament remains veiled. When the apostle Paul says, “The veil is placed on the reading of the Old Testament,” Origen applies the text to Christians, adding that “even now Moses speaks with glorified countenance, but we are not able to look at the glory which is in his countenance.” 5 Origen’s interpretation of the veiling of Moses is not built, therefore, on a contrast between Jews and Christians, but rather between those who do and those who do not “turn to the Lord.” Rather than a symbol of Jews who do not turn to the Lord, Moses is an example of someone who does make that turn, and Origen discovers in the gospel scene of Moses’ beholding of the transfigured Jesus the completion of a turn that was first inaugurated in the scene recounted in Exodus. Moses’ turning, begun on Mount Sinai, is now completed on Mount Tabor—and many of Origen’s Christian contemporaries, he observes, have failed to make a comparable turn, continuing to read Moses with hardened hearts. In Exodus, Moses’ glorified face is covered with a veil and his hand is snow-white (leprous-like). Origen sug-

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gests that Moses’ face designates the “word of the law,” and his hand, the law’s “works.” By this, one learns that works of the law will not justify or bring one to perfection, and that the glory of Moses’ knowledge is hidden.6 Later, at Jesus’ transfiguration, Moses shows that he has progressed from one whose face alone was glorious to one whose whole being is now entirely glorified, for, Origen observes, Matthew writes not that “his countenance is glorified, but that the whole man ‘appeared in glory’ talking with Jesus.” 7 Like Abraham before him, Moses had longed to see the day of the Lord, saw it, and was glad: “‘He was glad’ necessarily because no longer does he descend from the mountain glorified only in his face, but he ascends from the mountain totally glorified.” 8 Origen then adds that, “when those things which he predicted are clearly fulfilled or when the time arrived that those things which he had concealed might be revealed by the Spirit,” Moses is able to rejoice because “he himself also now, in a sense, puts aside ‘the veil having turned to the Lord.’” 9 Of course, Moses puts aside his veil to turn to the Lord in Exodus, but Origen understands this turn in Paul’s sense (although Paul apparently did not apply this understanding to Moses but only to Christians): Moses puts aside the veil that Paul had argued lies over the hearts of those who read but fail to understand Moses’s writings. In Origen’s account, Moses is now no longer veiled when reading his own writing. At the transfiguration, Moses has in fact encountered the fulfillment of his own earlier prophecy: Moses “was glad” without doubt because of him about whom he had said: “The Lord your God will raise up to you a prophet of your brothers like me. You shall hear him in all things” [Deut. 18.15]. Now he saw that he was present and lent credence to his words. And lest he doubt in anything, he hears the Father’s voice saying, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased, hear him” [Matt. 17.5]. Moses earlier said, “you shall hear him”; now the Father says, “This is my son, hear him,” and he shows that he is present of whom he speaks.10

Origen’s interest in this sermon is clearly not in the contrast Paul draws between Jewish and Christian readers of the Old Testament, but instead in the notion of “turning to the Lord” that is the basis for worthy biblical interpretation. However, having associated Moses with all those who read with unveiled faces, Origen begins his next paragraph with “nevertheless.” He does so, it seems, because even though one can say (unlike Paul) that Moses “puts aside his veil having turned to the Lord” “in a sense,” one must go on to examine what Paul adds next. After writing that “if anyone shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be removed,” Paul immediately adds: “But the Lord is spirit.” Why does Paul abruptly introduce this idea? Has the nature

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of the Lord been at issue in the preceding verses? Who does not know that the Lord is spirit? Have his listeners missed something here? Indeed, they may have, Origen insists, for “if we bring no zeal and learning or understanding, not only are the Scriptures of the Law and prophets but also of the apostles and Gospels covered for us with a great veil.” 11 But zeal alone is insufficient, for what is finally required is that readers pray for the Lord who inspired the writing of the text to enter into their hearts in order to enable them to understand the text: “For it is he who ‘opening the Scriptures’ kindles the hearts of the disciples so that they say, ‘Was not our heart burning within us when he opened to us the Scriptures?’” 12 Origen therefore calls on the Lord to enable him to understand what the Spirit meant when Paul was inspired to write: “But the Lord is a spirit, and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” 13 Origen understands Paul’s basic point to be that “the word of God differs for the sake of the hearers,” accommodating itself to the character of the one whom it must transform.14 Origen elaborates: For although he truly received the substance of flesh from the virgin in which he also endured the cross and initiated the resurrection, nevertheless there is a passage where the Apostle says, “And if we have known Christ according to the flesh; but now we know him so no longer” [2 Cor. 5:16]. Because, therefore, even now his word calls the hearers forth to a more subtle and spiritual understanding and wishes them to perceive nothing carnal in the Law, he says that he who wishes the “veil to be removed” from his heart “may turn to the Lord”; not, as it were, to the Lord as flesh—he is, to be sure, this also because “the Word became flesh”—but, as it were, to the Lord as spirit. For if he turns, as it were, to the Lord as spirit, he will come from fleshly to spiritual things and will pass over from slavery to freedom, for “where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” 15

Origen concludes: “If, therefore, we also pray to the Lord that he see fit to remove the veil from our heart, we can receive spiritual understanding if only we turn to the Lord and seek after freedom of knowledge.” 16 Origen further links his figural interpretation of Joshua’s reading of the law to the Jews (Joshua is the prefiguration of Jesus) with Jesus’ explanation of the law to his disciples on the road to Emmaus: When we hear the books of Moses read, by the Lord’s grace the veil of the letter is lifted and we begin to understand that the Law is something spiritual— e.g., when the Law says that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and the other by a free woman, I understand by the two sons two covenants and two peoples. Well, if we are capable of interpreting the Law like that and realizing that it is something spiritual,

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as St. Paul says, the reason is, so it seems to me, that the person reading the Law to us is the Lord Jesus Himself. He it is who reads it for all the people to hear and orders us not to follow the letter, which inflicts death, but to understand the spirit, which is what brings life [cf. 2 Cor. iii.6]. Thus, Jesus reads us the Law when he reveals to us the secrets of the Law. We do not despise the Law of Moses because we belong to the Catholic Church; we still accept it, provided Jesus reads it to us. If Jesus reads it to us we can take it in its proper sense; when he reads it, we grasp its spiritual meaning. The Disciples who said: “Were not our hearts burning within us as he spoke to us on the road, and when he made the Scriptures plain to us?” [Luke xxiv.32] had understood the spiritual meaning of the Law. You will agree, I think, that it was because Jesus had explained it to them when he read it all to them and made plain to them what had been written about him, from Moses to the prophets.” 17

The Transfiguration suggests to Origen that Moses himself continues to remove his veil and does not cease to remain himself when he does so. And when Christ reads the law to Christians, and they grasp its spiritual meaning, Christ also seems to remain himself. And yet, if the spiritual reader turns not to the Word made flesh but to the Lord as spirit, thereby passing over from slavery to freedom, does the Lord who is known as spirit really remain distinct from the knower? Or are readers who have Jesus read to them so able to attain the “mind of Christ” that they call into question Christ’s own independent and unsubstitutable identity? Origen’s subordinationist Christology keeps the Son’s identity distinct from the Father’s. But if the Son’s identity remains distinct from the Father’s in their mutual acts of glorification, the more the Son (or “Lord as Spirit”) is seen by believers with unveiled minds, the more his unique identity becomes absorbed into the believer’s act of perceiving it.18 This, at least, is the heart of Frei’s real suspicion about hermeneutical approaches such as Origen’s that begin with transforming presence rather than with the One who transforms: If one begins with presence rather than with identity, the question, How is Christ present? is finally answered by the mysterious movement of Christ toward us, coinciding with our movement toward him. The result of this complete coincidence or simultaneity is, in the last analysis, the ultimate dissolution of both our presence and his. His presence is not his own; indeed, he is diffused into humanity by becoming one with it. And we, in turn, find in him the mysterious symbol expressing our own ultimate lack of abiding presence and identity.19

Frei affirms that Christ always retains his identity as uniquely his own by virtue of his unique relation to God, no matter how intimately the believer

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feels he knows Christ, or “has the mind of Christ.” Christ always keeps his identity as his own, writes Frei, because, by virtue of his resurrection, Christ now lives his life “to God” in a way that human beings cannot share. This claim surfaces with clarity and force in Frei’s “Meditation for the Week of Good Friday and Easter” that concludes The Identity of Jesus Christ. This homiletical midrash is, in effect, Frei’s response to Paul’s Second Corinthian midrash on Exod. 34:29 –35. Like Origen, and unlike Paul, Frei sees in Moses a prototypical Christian believer. But when it comes to the question of veils, Frei—in contrast to Paul and Origen—finds Moses’ self-veiling to be a far better metaphor for Christian knowledge of Christ than his unveiling: There is a veil between his life and ours which we can comprehend neither by time span, nor imagination, nor even the Christian life. The life he lives to God is not accessible to us, although it is mirrored in all life. Even his cross, though mirrored in the innumerable crosses of the sons of men, is his own and bids us keep our distance. He died alone, though in the company of others and on behalf of a multitude. He was raised alone, though as the first of a multitude. His cross and his resurrection are a secret place all his own, for they leave behind every common medium, every comparison by which we know things. Living to God He is the Lord of life: He is life. Dying for his brothers and his enemies, he was the Lord of pity. He was pity—pity for the weak, pity for the strong. He is life and pity; he is love. Such knowledge is too high for us, we cannot attain to it. We know pity and being pitied, and Nietzsche’s sound warning against the weak’s tyrannical use of pitifulness in their conquest of the strong. But neither Nietzsche nor any of us know what it is to be pitied by the strong—the Lord of life himself—whose pity of us, in which he himself becomes weak, is not weakness but his strength which he perfects and does not abandon in weakness. Such pity, such love, such life remain the secret of a disposition we do not know. Before this incomparable thing we must ultimately fall silent and be grateful. Here the scale of life, of love, and of pity is perfected and yet breaks down in excess. Our Christian forefathers knew this and, trying to express it in classical idiom, called this disposition a passionless love in contrast to our passionate love. No doubt we must change the idiom, but like them we shall still have to express the perfection of the scale and its being broken, exceeded infinitely. The everlasting veil remains between him and us, but the story we have heard again today is that of a Lordship, a life and a love embracing both sides of the veil.20

As for Paul’s view of Moses’ unveiling, Frei elsewhere had this to say: Whenever the Old Testament is seen as “letter” or “carnal shadow,” spiritual and literal reading coincide, and figural and allegorical reading

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are one. “Spiritual reading” in this context is that of those who are in the first place privy to the truth directly rather than “under a veil,” and who know, secondly, that the reality depicted is “heavenly,” spiritual or religious, rather than earthly, empirical, material, or political.21

Like Origen, Frei is anxious to do justice to the way Paul’s formulations capture the novelty of figural reading, the way it gestures toward a transformative future. But he is all too mindful of just where such pursuit of interpretative novelty has led in the history of Christianity: The “Old Testament” could be understood as “mere” letter or shadow, a “carnal” figure in the most derogatory sense, to which the “New Testament” stood in virtual contrast as the corresponding “spiritual” or genuine reality, and the all but directly contrary of its prefigured representation. There is often considerable similarity between orthodox Christian allegorical reading of the Old Testament and its hostile, negative interpretation on the part of Marcion, even though the orthodox, in contrast to Marcion, insisted on retaining the Old Testament as part of Scripture.22

A binary opposition lies at the heart of this threat: an opposition that can resolve itself only by rejecting the literal sense. But Frei will not accept the dissolution of literality that such assimilation to spirituality—unmediated spirituality—implies: “[S]ince it is the story of Jesus taken literally that unveils this higher truth, the ‘literal’ sense is the key to spiritual interpretation of the New Testament.” With this reintroduction of the irreducible centrality of the literal sense, Frei realizes that he is putting himself at odds with the customary understanding of the Pauline text most favorable to those who would transform letter into spirit (“the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life”). Rather than suggest that Christians dispense with Paul (or with Origen), Frei calls for a more discriminating reading: letter and spirit, he concludes, “turn out to be mutually fit or reinforcing in much orthodox Christianity, despite the superficially contrary Pauline declaration (2 Cor. 3.6).” 23

Chapter 9 Identity and Transformation: Origen

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lthough Origen presents discipleship as enabled by an ever-increasing interrelation of Christ and the faithful reader, he is less concerned than Frei is to ward off threats to Christ’s unique identity, and more concerned than Frei is to describe the efficacious reality of Christ’s transformation of the individual believer. If Frei’s conception of personal identity is anchored in narrative depictions that lend stability, definition and, above all, continuity to character, Origen’s conception stresses the ongoing and (as yet) unfinished fashioning of personhood. For Origen, the Christian is challenged to become who he or she is by continuing to change. Radical change does not threaten identity but promises its consummation. This chapter further develops Origen’s understanding of the identity of Christ in his relation both to the divine father and to human believers through an examination of some of his reflections on discipleship. In the closing pages of his massive Commentary on the Gospel of John, Origen turns his attention to the complexities of the Passion narrative, what Frei called the pattern of “supplantation and yet identification.” 1 According to that pattern, even though in the Passion narrative, God’s intentions and actions are superseded by those of Jesus, “Jesus retains his own identity to the very end. He is not merged with God so that no distinction remains between God and Jesus.” 2 Frei observes that this pattern was “articulated in greatest detail in the Fourth Gospel.” 3 He notes that although John’s Gospel emphasizes the Father’s priority to the Son, that priority is presented “in such a way that the Son and the Father are nevertheless one” and “hence both are glorified together in the Son’s glorification.” 4 John 13:31–32 provides Origen with a key text concerning the identity of Jesus in relation to God: When, therefore, he [Judas] went out Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God [oJ qeov~] is glorified in him. If God [qeov~] be glorified in him, God [oJ qeov~] will also glorify him in himself, and he will glorify him immediately.5

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Origen begins by applying to the passage a distinction between oJ qeov~ and qeov~. oJ qeov~, he contends, refers to the Father, while qeov~ refers to the Word. Marking the narrative moment when Judas leaves Jesus and the other disciples, “now” also signals “the beginning of the glorification of the Son of Man,” 6 which is the first step in that “economy” (oijkonomiva) of suffering by which the Son of Man will glorify God the Father.7 Although Jesus’ death produces glory for God, the glorification of God cannot entail death, for God (whether as Father or as Word) cannot die. Hence the glory that resulted from his [Jesus’] death for men did not belong to the only-begotten Word, which by nature does not die, nor to wisdom and truth, nor any of the other titles that are said to belong to the divine aspects in Jesus, but belonged to the man who was also the Son of Man born of the seed of David according to the flesh.8

It is, as the gospel says, the Son of Man, that is, the fully human Jesus of Nazareth, who is glorified by “his death for men”; Jesus “owns” his glory as a glory that arises from his own death on behalf of others. And yet Jesus’ wholly human death is also said to glorify God, who cannot die. In what sense, then, can a mortal’s death glorify an immortal God? Origen begins by introducing the idea of exaltation (i.e., resurrection): “Now I think God also highly exalted this man when he became obedient ‘unto death, and the death of a cross.’ For the Word in the beginning with God, God the Word, was not capable of being highly exalted.” 9 The exaltation of the Jesus who obediently dies is not a divine reward for human obedience; rather, exaltation is the form that glorification through death assumes for an immortal deity. Origen’s formulation is especially striking, not simply because it claims that in exaltation, the humanity of Jesus “returns,” so to speak, to become one with the Word, but because this exaltation or “becoming one” comes about by way of Jesus’ death. Origen makes this complex point three times in the following passage. In the first two sentences, I have highlighted the clause that introduces Jesus’ incarnation or death into the middle of remarks about his exaltation; the phrase emphasized in the third sentence reflects the close association of Jesus’ humanity and divinity that the introduction of the previous clauses effects: 1. But the high exaltation of the Son of Man which occurred when he glorified God in his own death consisted in the fact that he was no longer different from the Word, but was the same with him.10 2. For if “he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit,” so that it is no longer said that “they are two” even in the case of this man and the spirit, might we not much more say that the humanity of Jesus became one

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with the Word when he who did not consider “equality with God” something to be grasped was highly exalted? 11 3. The Word, however, remained in his own grandeur, or was even restored to it, when he was again with God, God the Word being a human being [pavlin h\n pro;~ to;n qeovn, qeo;~ lovgo~ w]n a[nqrwpo~].12

The near simultaneity of human death and the glorification of God, which is suggested by the subordinate clauses, is reinforced at the close of the passage, where Origen writes that the Word either retains, or was restored to, his relation with God as a function of his “being a human being.” I say “near” simultaneity because Origen equivocates between “remaining” and “being restored to”: “the Word, however, remained in his own grandeur, or was even restored to it, when he was again with God.” Observing next that John 13:31 speaks of glorification in the passive voice (“[N]ow is the Son of Man glorified, and God [oJ qeov~] is glorified in him”), Origen acknowledges that readers will rightly want to know who the agents are: Who glorifies the Son, and who glorifies God? 13 This restatement of the dialectic of glorification as a question of agency aligns Origen’s discussion more closely with Frei’s. But before addressing this question, Origen proceeds to lay some groundwork, which will provide him with the equivalent of those patterns that Frei drew on for his own “conceptual redescription” of the gospel’s literal sense. In his book on Christ’s identity, Frei had appealed largely to the patterns of “intention-action” and “subject-manifestation” description, patterns of conceptual redescription that teased into explicitness the narrative means by which the gospel rendered Jesus’ identity in ways that did not separate his identity as an independent “meaning” from the narrative shape of the text. Origen invokes two of his own resources for conceptual redescription: Stoic logic and the inner-biblical use of terms, in this case, forms of the word “glory.” Before he takes up the question of the identity of the agent of the glorifications that John 13:31–32 describes, he first lays out the logical structure of the verses, and then, without further comment, examines the biblical uses of forms of the word “glory,” finally declaring: “Let us return to the statement, ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.’” Origen’s appeal to biblical uses of the term “glory” proves to be decisive for understanding the divergence between Frei and Origen. In using Stoic logic to sort out the logic and truth status of the verses in question, Origen makes sure that Jesus’ action remains distinct from God’s. Origen is most like Frei when he protects the difference between the Son

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and the Father. On the other hand, he diverges from Frei when he interprets glorification allegorically not as a divine act of self-revelation but as a human act of knowing God; consequently, the mutual knowledge by which Father and Son glorify one another blurs into the knowledge by which human beings know the Father and the Son. Origen is most unlike Frei, therefore, when stressing the identification of the human knower with God. The consequence of this convergence and divergence for Origen is that the Son remains distinct from the Father, but intimately associated with the human believer. Insofar as the Son’s distinctive identity as established by his knowledge of the Father is thereby enhanced by his contrast with the Father, that distinctiveness based on knowledge is subsequently called into question by the Son’s association with those human beings who have knowledge of him, and it is this association that Frei, in Barthian resistance to Origen’s modern, liberal theological heirs, opposes.

origen and frei in convergence The convergence between Origen and Frei is evident in Origen’s use of Stoic logic to sort out the logic and truth status of the verses in question. In doing so, Origen preserves a temporal distinction with respect to the gospel narrative that protects the independence of Jesus’ action from that of God’s. Origen draws on Stoic logical distinctions in order to lay out two possible ways of construing the conceptual structure of John 13:31–32. A. Now, for the sake of clarity, let us give careful attention to what is said in the first proposition, “Now is the Son of Man glorified”; and in the second, “And God is glorified in him”; and in the third, which is a conditional proposition as follows, “If God be glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself”; and in the fourth, “And he will glorify him immediately.” 14 B. One might perhaps construe this latter proposition [the fourth] as a conjunctive proposition which is the consequent of the conditional proposition, so that the conditional begins after the proposition, “God is glorified in him,” and concludes with the conjunctive proposition, “And God will glorify him in himself, and he will glorify him immediately.” 15

Each way of construing the passage isolates four propositions. Three propositions are “assertoric,” and one is “conditional.” 16 The three assertoric propositions are as follows:

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Subject P1 The Son of man P2 God P4 He [i.e., God]

Predicate is glorified now. is glorified in him. will glorify him immediately

The two readings differ over how to construe the third proposition, which is a conditional: Version B includes P4 as part of the consequent of the conditional proposition, and version A does not. Condition A. P3 If God be glorified in him B. P3 If God be glorified in him

Consequent God will also glorify him in himself God will also glorify him in himself, and he will glorify him immediately

Origen seems to prefer version B because of the requirement of truth claims in Stoic logic. According to the Stoics, “Dion is walking” is a true proposition only if Dion is in fact walking when the proposition is uttered. Accordingly, one might think that when Jesus says, “God will also glorify him in himself,” the proposition might be false, because God is not yet glorifying Jesus when Jesus utters the proposition (although the verb in John is in the future tense, when Origen refers to the line he uses either the present or past tense). Origen believes he preserves the truth value of Jesus’ utterance by making P4 (“and he will glorify him immediately”) part of the consequent of P3: The entire conjunctive proposition (“God will also glorify him in himself, and he will glorify him immediately”) can then be understood to refer a state of affairs subsequent to the time at which Jesus utters P3.17 What is noteworthy for our purpose of comparing Origen’s conceptual redescription of gospel narrative with Frei’s is that Origen here aligns his conceptual redescription of the gospel with the temporal demands of the gospel’s narrative or plot: When Judas departs, the process of Jesus’ glorification begins, but that process is not complete until his death and resurrection. Origen’s emphasis on the centrality of these events precisely as distinct temporal occurrences is underscored by his use of Stoic ideas about the truth of propositions. His effort to preserve the importance of the distinctive events in Jesus’ path to glory brings him closer to Frei, for whom the identity of Jesus turns in great part on Jesus’ ability to be the unified agent of his own discrete actions. Finally, we should observe that here we have an excellent illustration of Origen’s characteristic effort to integrate

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logical and narrative coherence. Yet despite Origen’s convergence toward Frei’s effort to distinguish Jesus’ identity from the Father’s, Origen’s analysis of glory as an epistemological category gives his reflections a different emphasis.

origen and frei in divergence Origen begins by noting that the Bible does not treat glory as something properly of “indifference” to the sage, as do the Stoics (who disparage glory because it is an external matter of public approval rather than inner virtue). Instead, Origen insists that the Bible means something far more significant by the word and quotes a series of texts, which fall into three categories. The first category comprises the Exodus descriptions of how the glory of the Lord overwhelmed those Israelites who approached it and how Moses’ face was glorified as a consequence of speaking with the Lord.18 The second category consists of Luke’s description of Jesus’ transfigured face and the appearance of Moses and Elijah with him in glory.19 Origen notes that glory has the same meaning in the Lucan passage as it does in Exodus. This is an important point, because regarding the term “glory” as the same in both passages allows one to think about Jesus’ glorified face and Moses’ glorified face under the same category. This is, in fact, what Paul does in the passages that comprise the final category, where he comments on Moses’ glorified (but veiled) face in relation to the glorified (and unveiled) faces of Christians.20 Origen has, then, selected a basic passage dealing with the glorification of Moses’s face and two later New Testament writers (Luke and Paul) who write in relation to it.21 Origen is not concerned to interpret each of these texts individually (“the interpretation of the text of the Gospel [of John] does not demand that we explain each of these statements carefully now”); instead, his use of the texts extends the relationship between them that the New Testament already establishes. It is the Old Testament texts that need to be interpreted, and it is Paul who provides the key to their interpretation. This interpretation, in moving from the “bodily” meaning to the “anagogical,” transforms a divine act of self-revelation into the human act of knowing the divine: So far as the literal sense [more literally, “that according to what is bodily,” “kata; to; swmatiko;n] 22 is concerned, there was a divine epiphany in the tabernacle and in the temple, which were destroyed, and in the face of Moses when he had conversed with the Divine Nature. But so far as the anagogical sense is concerned, the things that are

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accurately known of God might also be referred to as the visible glory of God that is contemplated by that mind which has the aptitude for such contemplation because of its pre-eminent purification, since the mind has been purified and has ascended above all material things, that it may scrupulously contemplate God, is made divine by what it contemplates. We must say that this is what is meant when it is said that the face of the one who contemplated God, conversed with him, and spent time with such a vision, was glorified. Consequently, the figurative meaning [tropikw`~]23 of the glorification of Moses’ face is that his mind was made godlike. It is in this same sense that the Apostle said, “But we all, beholding the glory of the Lord with unveiled face are transformed into the same image.” 24

Origen then proceeds to pick up the revisionary thrust of the Pauline passages: “And just as the brightness of the nocturnal night is obscured when the sun has risen, so the glory of Moses is obscured by that which is in Christ.” 25 But Origen thinks of this superiority of Christ’s glory along the lines of the preceding allegorical interpretation: Christ’s glory is superior to Moses’ glory (now understood as the glory of his soul rather than his face) because Christ’s self-knowledge is superior to Moses’ knowledge of God: “For the superiority in Christ, knowing which he glorified the Father concerning himself, admitted of no comparison with what was known by Moses, and which glorified the face of his soul. This is why the glory of Moses is said to be made void [katargoumevnh] by the surpassing glory in Christ.” 26 With his definition of glorification now in hand, Origen is ready to return to the question of the mutual glorification of Son and Father: mutual glorification is a matter of mutual knowledge. He says that the Son is glorified by the Father by knowing the Father, himself, and the universe. As a result of all of this knowledge, the Father bestows glory on the Son. The Father is glorified by the Son as a consequence of the Father’s selfknowledge and by being “in the Son.” This last idea gives Origen pause: glorification as a consequence of knowledge does not run up against the problem of God’s sharing in the Son’s suffering and death—but the idea that the Father’s glorification is “in the Son” does (meaning the Son of Man, or the human Jesus). Origen begins to address the question by stressing that the Son, unlike anyone or anything else, reflects the entire glory of the Father: In my opinion, the Son is the reflection of the total glory of God [oJ qeov~] himself, according to Paul who said, “Who, being the reflection of his glory” [Heb. 1.3], anticipating, however, a partial reflection on

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the rest of the rational creation from this reflection of the total glory. For I do not think that anyone except his Son can contain the whole reflection of the full glory of God.27

How, then, does the suffering and death of the Son relate to the Father whose glory the Son reflects in its entirety? Now, therefore, when the economy of the suffering of the Son of Man for all occurs, it is not without God [qeov~] [Heb. 2.9], “wherefore God [oJ qeov~] has highly exalted him” [Phil. 2.9]. It does not say “the Son of Man is glorified” alone, for indeed “God [oJ qeov~] is glorified in him.” 28

Origen clearly states that “God” (qeov~), that is, the Word, is involved in some way in the suffering of the human Jesus. This suffering calls forth the Father’s exaltation of the human Jesus and the Father’s glorification. God the Word seems to enter into Origen’s remarks at this point according to the following logic. The Word is God because the Word is “with the Father.” It is only by virtue of being “with the Father” that the Word can be the reflection of the Father’s full glory. By saying that Jesus’ death is “not without” the Word, the Word provides a link between Jesus’ death and Jesus’ capacity to reflect the glory of the Father (i.e., the capacity of the Father to be glorified “in” Jesus). Origen works out these relationships in the following manner. First, he establishes relationships between knowing, revealing, and glorifying. (1) The Father alone knows the Son; others who know the Son do so only because the Father has revealed that knowledge to them.29 (2) Insofar as the world does not know the Son, he has not been glorified in the world. This is the world’s loss, not the Son’s.30 The three themes of knowing, revealing and glorifying are then brought together in the following manner: But when the heavenly Father revealed the knowledge of Jesus to those who were from the world, then the Son of Man was glorified in those who knew him, and by means of the glory with which he was glorified in those who knew him, he brought about a glory for those who knew him. For those who behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled face are transformed into the same image.31

The Father, who alone knows the Son, reveals that knowledge to human beings. The knowledge that human beings then have of the Son glorifies the Son, and the Son in turn glorifies those human beings who now know him (“behold” his glory “with unveiled face”). We shall return shortly to this connection with the glorification of unveiled human beings; for the moment, we need to see how Origen deals with the two opening propositions, “Now is the Son glorified,” and “God

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is glorified in him.” He explains the meaning of each phrase by linking together three things: a remark about “the economy” of suffering (A), the proposition about glorification (B), and a verse about knowledge (C). Origen explains the first proposition, “Now is the Son of Man glorified,” as follows: (A) When, then, he came to the economy (of suffering), beginning with which he was to rise up for the world, and because he was aware that he would be glorified over and above the glory of those glorifying him, (B) he said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified,” and further, (C) “No one has known the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son may reveal him.”[Matt. 11:27] 32

Jesus utters the first proposition in light of the knowledge he has about the final outcome of his “economy”: Jesus knows that the path that begins with suffering and death culminates in resurrection and produces more glory for him than produced by those who have knowledge of him. In Matt. 11:27, Jesus further clarifies his superiority by positioning himself ahead of all other persons in having a privileged knowledge of God. The thrust of the passage so far is really to move quickly past suffering and death itself, focusing instead on the superiority of the Son, which elicits the Father’s glorification. So far, then, the passage does little to address the difficult question of how the Son of Man’s suffering and death glorify the Father. But a response to this question is prepared for in the last phrase above: the Son may reveal knowledge of the Father, says Origen, and with the next sentence suggests that the Son does so precisely by means of suffering and death. Origen once again links the three ideas together, this time in explanation of the proposition “and God is glorified in him”: (A) But the Son was about to reveal the Father by means of the economy (of suffering), (B) wherefore he said, “And God is glorified in him.” Or, you shall compare the words, “And God [oJ qeov~] is glorified in him” (C) with the statement, “He who has seen me has seen the Father who sent me.” For the Father who begot him is contemplated in the Word, since the Word is God [qeov~] and the image of the invisible God [oJ qeov~], and he who beholds the image of the invisible God is able to behold the Father directly, too, for he is the prototype of the image.” 33

Although Origen says that Jesus’ suffering and death is the means by which God is glorified in him, the strict separation of an impassible deity from the mortality announced earlier keeps Origen from stating in any direct manner the link between the dying Jesus and the Father. Instead, he makes two

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suggestions. First, one should put the statement that “God is glorified in him” alongside the statement that he who sees Jesus sees the Father. In this case, glorification provides a transition (or buffer) between a dying Jesus on the one hand, and an impassible Father on the other: because the Father glorifies Jesus in his death, to see the dying Jesus is to see the Father—but not to see the Father dying. Origen then makes a second proposal by shifting his description from the Son of Man (the human being Jesus) to the Son of God (the divine Word). He then says that those who contemplate “the Word” also contemplate “the Father,” for the Word is the image of God. In this instance, to see the Word is to see the Father directly, but of course it is not the Word of God that suffers and dies, but the human Jesus. Origen’s explication is, it seems, a set of rules about how one ought to speak about the mutual glorification of Father and Son in the economy of the Son’s suffering and death. We have already seen Origen appeal to the Exodus description of Moses’ veil, and to Paul’s interpretation of it, by way of showing that “glorification” is an epistemological category. The figurative meaning of Moses’ glorified face was, we recall, that his mind was made godlike through his contemplation of God.34 Origen suggests that Paul made this figurative meaning clear when he wrote of those with unveiled faces who behold the glory of the Lord and are consequently transformed into the same image. He refers a second time to that Pauline verse when he describes how God the Father revealed knowledge of Jesus to those in the world, who in turn were said to behold the glory of the Lord.35

following jesus Having commented on the mutual glorification of Son and Father in John 13:31–32, Origen continues with the following verse: “Little children, yet a little while I am with you; you will seek me, [and] as I said to the Jews, where I am you cannot come, I also say to you now” (John 13:33). These verses are to be understood in the context of three moments: Jesus’ presence with the disciples, soon to come to an end (“yet a little while I am with you”); Jesus’ absence from the disciples (during which time the disciples “will seek me”); and Jesus’ renewed presence with the disciples (“and again a little while [and] you will see me”—John 16:16). We know from our earlier discussion that Jesus’ death is also the moment at which he becomes exalted and one with the divine Word.36 So when Jesus says, “you will seek me,” he means that the disciples, like Peter, will seek him as the Word: “But to seek Jesus is to seek the Word, and wisdom, and justice, and truth, and

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the power of God, all of which Christ is.” 37 And then Jesus says: “[and] as I said to the Jews, where I am you cannot come, I also say to you now.” Origen observes that Jesus here refers to what he had earlier said to the Jews, “I am going away, and you will seek me, and you will die in your sins. Where I am going you cannot come” (John 8:21). Now, writes John, Jesus says the same thing to his disciples. But Origen detects a difference between what Jesus said earlier to the Jews in John 8:21 and what he says to the disciples here in John 13:33. Origen paraphrases as follows: “For as I said this to them, he says, so also I say it to you, but I also say this to you not about a later time.” 38 Jesus’ remark to the Jews in John 8:21 was indeed about a later time—the time after his resurrection. But when Jesus makes the same remark in John 13:33 to his disciples, he is not referring to that postresurrection time at all, but to his own death: For this is how I understand the phrase, “I also say to you now,” which is not the same with, “And I say to you,” without the addition of “now.” For the Jews, whom he foresaw dying in their own sin, were not able to come where Jesus was going after a brief time. The disciples, however, after the little time for which he was no longer to be with them, because of what has been said previously, could not follow the Word when he departed to the economy (of suffering) that was his own.39

Like Frei, Origen insists that Jesus dies his own death, a death his disciples cannot share: his death is uniquely his own. Although the words “where I am going you cannot come” might appear at first to refer to “the departure of Jesus’ soul from life,” that interpretation is ruled out by the introductory phrase, “As I said to the Jews.” For it is clear to Origen that “both the Jews in dying, and Jesus, when he died, were to descend into Hades.” 40 The Jews can and will follow Jesus to Hades. So what does it mean, then, to say that the disciples cannot go where Jesus is going? Origen points out that the proper “sequence of the text” is really as follows: “As I said to the Jews, I also say to you, Where I am going you cannot come now.” Origen here relocates the adverb “now” in order to make it refer not to the time of Jesus’ remark, but to the time when his disciples will be able to join him.41 The disciples cannot go where he is going now because Jesus is now going to his death, as Origen explains: “The Lord now says to the disciples who wish to follow Jesus, not literally as the simple would assume, but in the sense revealed in the statement, ‘Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy to be my disciple’ [Matt. 10:38], ‘Where I am going you cannot come now.’” 42 Being a worthy disciple, following Jesus, means following Jesus’ path to the cross—but this is what the disciples cannot yet do. On the one hand, they cannot fol-

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low Jesus of Nazareth, for Jesus’ death is uniquely his own. On the other hand, they cannot follow the Word, for Jesus’ exaltation to oneness with the Word comes about only in that death. Prior to his exaltation, the disciples cannot follow Jesus as the Word because just insofar as they imagine him to be divine they are “scandalized” by his human suffering and death. Only after his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit will they be enabled to become followers of the Word: Would that they had wanted to follow the Word and confess him, without being scandalized in him. But they could not yet do this, “for as yet the Spirit was not, because Jesus was not yet glorified,” and “no one is able to say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit.” The Word, however, departs on his own courses, and he who follows the Word follows him; but he who is not prepared to walk in his steps persistently cannot follow, since the Word leads those to his Father who do all things that they might be able to follow him, and that they may follow him until they may say to the Christ, “My soul has clung to you [Ps. 62.9].” 43

Origen’s Jesus promises his disciples that one day they will be able to come to where he is going: “Where I am going you cannot come now”—but you will be able to come there eventually. For Origen, the culmination of the Christian life of ever-increasing sanctification demands that disciples follow Jesus not only to the cross, but also to his post-resurrection state of glorification, in which his identity as Logos is fully expressed. Nothing could be further from Frei’s conception of the disciple’s relation to Jesus: “Only Christ’s dying, not his now living to God, is literally in the same time sequence in which we live and die.” 44 And even after our deaths, the distance between ourselves and Christ remains: “The life he lives to God is not accessible to us, although it is mirrored in all life.” 45 For Origen, the veil is removed as the disciple follows Christ, and it is fully removed when the disciple finally (undoubtedly in a future life, after a series of purgations) attains “the fullness of Christ.” But for Frei, there “remains between him and us” an “everlasting veil.” 46 For Origen, the removal of the veil stresses the disciple’s increasing appropriation of Christ’s transforming power, which seems to imply an imitation of Christ bordering on assimilation. For Frei, the veil protects the unique identities of Christ and disciple, and a different metaphorical or rhetorical approach will be needed to include Origen’s point about the personal reception of Christ’s saving influence in a way that does not threaten the protection of identity. Frei sees such an approach in the verses of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet George Herbert. For although the

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veil is “everlasting,” the realms that it eternally separates are nonetheless bridged by the gospel narrative that depicts “a Lordship, a life and a love embracing both sides of the veil.” “George Herbert spoke most appropriately concerning the veil and the story’s embrace of both sides of it. . . . Love is that liquor sweet and most divine Which my God feels as blood, and I as wine.47

The love that embraces dimensions of reality that Origen threatens to collapse is, like Christ himself, a single hypostasis (a liquor sweet and most divine) with two natures (blood and wine). As the Chalcedonian Creed insists, the natures can neither be separated (love is a singular liquor) nor mixed (the liquor that God feels as blood is felt by the believer as wine). Here, in the lines of Herbert’s “metaphysical conceit,” a relationship is affirmed in both its eternal union and the distinction of its component parts, in contrast to the epistemologically grounded descriptions by which Origen characteristically stresses the believer’s acquisition of “the mind of Christ.” The Origenist disciple cannot yet come to where Christ has departed—but will one day do so. But for Frei, the disciple always follows Christ at a “distance.” Both thinkers draw on distinctions provided by space and time in order to present Christ and the disciples as both different yet related. Origen makes time the mark of provisional distinction (the disciple cannot come now) and space the site of ultimate transformation (the disciple will one come to the place to which Jesus has departed). He does not make a further distinction between the place to which Christ arrives and “Christ’s own place,” which only he can occupy (a distinction that the rabbis make with respect to God: “He is the place of the world, but the world is not His place”). However, Frei wishes to make just such a distinction. As for time, “the distance between Jesus Christ and us is not simply that of lengthening time. Even if we could annul the time and have the story present, a distance would still be there.” And as for space, “his cross and his resurrection are a secret place all his own, for they leave behind every common medium, every comparison by which we know things.” 48 Frei thereby protects the identity of Christ from assimilation to humanity. Does he do so by underrepresenting the disciple’s transformation? God feels the liquor as blood and the believer feels it as wine—but the wine does not become blood. But spiritual transformation in the Christian tradition can never be so reductively material, for it is neither blood nor wine that is the “substance” of transformation but love—and love is not a substance but a relation. Yet Origen might still want to insist that Christians are enjoined to become more like the deity whom they love.

Conclusion

Boyarin’s presentation of Paul’s allegorical reading starkly poses the following question to Christian interpreters of Hebrew Scripture as the Old Testament: How will it be possible to read the text in a way that does justice to the novelty of Christianity, preserves Christianity’s intrinsic relation to Judaism, and yet respects Judaism’s own ongoing identity as a separate religion in its own right? The problem posed for Christian biblical interpreters is one found in other religions in which new movements arise and subsequently define themselves both in opposition to, and continuity with, their “parent” traditions. In some cases, the new religion highlights its own autonomous identity vis-à-vis its former tradition. In other cases, the new tradition presents itself as the authentic version of the former religion. The successive and competing versions of Buddhism, Islam’s relation to Judaism and Christianity, and Mormonism’s relation to Christianity illustrate only some of the possibilities. The interpretation of sacred texts is often the principal site of the tension between past and future, the preservation and the refashioning of religious identity. In the case of Christian interpretation, the tension arises most directly in the tradition of figural or allegorical reading of the Old Testament. Christians have traditionally invoked a distinction between figural and allegorical reading in order to distinguish between readings that preserve Christianity’s connection with Judaism or the Hebrew Scriptures and readings that break those connections. Figural reading is said to preserve the history of biblical persons and events or at least the details of their textual representation, while allegorical readings are said to subvert or efface them. This contrast is itself much indebted to the revisionary struggle within Christianity between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, although it had earlier antecedents. In his analysis of Pauline biblical interpretation, Boyarin rejects the distinction between figural and allegorical reading, arguing that Christian readers of the Hebrew Scriptures, in their efforts to find proleptic expressions of distinctively Christian notions, consistently subvert or efface the particular literal meanings of the text in favor of abstract, universalizing nonliteral meanings. In so doing, Christian interpreters display Christian207

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ity’s supersessionist relation to Judaism, and this supersessionist subversion of the literal meaning occurs whether or not the Christian reader defends his or her hermeneutical technique as “figural” rather than “allegorical.” The key concept informing Boyarin’s critique is “binary opposition,” the notion that a nonliteral reading produces its meaning by directly undermining the literal meaning to which it is opposed. Boyarin argues that Paul’s terminology of “letter and spirit” is the distinctively Christian expression of this binary opposition: the letter (literal meaning) kills, while the spirit (nonliteral meaning) gives life. But Boyarin’s characterization of the Pauline contrast of letter and spirit as a binary opposition fails to engage Paul’s larger argument that God is working in history to transform human beings and thereby transform the identity of Israel. Central to Paul’s conception of this divine transformative initiative are categories such as “promise” and “covenant.” When Boyarin recasts Paul’s language of historical transformation into the language of hermeneutical replacement, he sidesteps the central religious thrust of Paul’s claim. In addition to Boyarin’s disregard of the larger claims for divine action in history that Paul advances, there is also a fundamental conceptual incoherence in Boyarin’s argument. Boyarin claims that allegorical reading betrays the particularity of the text by imposing on it meanings that are essentially unrelated to it, but he then insists that in doing so, the allegorical meanings actually do damage, in the real world of material bodies, to the entities signified by the text. In other words, Boyarin’s argument demands that we regard allegorical or figural meanings as unrelated to textual signifiers and, at the same time, as capable of harming the bodies of the realworld referents of those signifiers. But if Paul’s nonliteral meanings really are finally unrelated to the literal meanings they oppose (so that spiritual circumcision bears no relation to bodily circumcision), how is it that such abstract meanings can affect—much less damage—those literal meanings? Perhaps they damage those meanings by presenting themselves as legitimate extensions of them. In other words, precisely by calling an apparently nonbodily spiritual condition a “circumcision,” Paul damages the very notion of fleshly circumcision, implying that it is not “really” circumcision. In any case, while Boyarin does not accept the possibility that a nonliteral meaning can positively extend a literal meaning, his entire critique depends on the converse claim—that a nonliteral meaning can negatively undermine a literal meaning. But Boyarin’s insistence on the negative potential of nonliteral meaning inadvertently introduces and relies on a notion that he is otherwise vigor-

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ously committed to denying—a complex notion of the sign as the essential integration of signifier and signified and a psychosomatic (or rather pneuma-somatic) conception of the embodied person. But those are precisely the notions advanced by Origen with his understanding of the spiritual body and its spiritual senses. Ironically, Origen’s perspective on the relation of spirit and body indirectly supports Boyarin’s claim of allegory’s capacity to damage the world, even while it also challenges his claim that such damage occurs because of the imposition of general meanings that bear no intrinsic relation to textual signifiers. Circumcision of the heart damages the practice of physical circumcision in the world because circumcision of the heart is an abstract meaning bearing no intrinsic relation to physical circumcision. And yet there must be sufficient relation between this meaning and the world if damage in the world is to occur. Hence Boyarin responds to only one side of Origen’s multidimensional hermeneutic—the side that emphasizes the newness of the spirit, its radically innovative power. He disregards the other side of Origen’s interpretation, which stresses spirit’s embodiment and body’s spiritualization as the outworking of a divine process of transformation. Origen thus calls into question the adequacy of Boyarin’s entire approach: either Origen’s perspective questions Boyarin’s critique of arbitrary spiritualization of text and body to the point of evaporation, or it reveals Boyarin’s own unexamined reliance on a quasi-Origenist insistence that spirit and meaning really do bear an intrinsic, transformative relation to the body and the text— despite his efforts to recast the terms of the divine transformative performance into purely semiotic categories. In contrast to Boyarin, Auerbach and Frei do think that Christian figural reading need not undermine the Bible’s literal sense. Both thinkers argue that Christian figural interpretation renders precisely the divine transformative action of God that Paul identified. Unlike Boyarin, Auerbach and Frei make biblical interpretation a part of this divine transformative process—it is not a mere hermeneutical practice independently or subjectively performed by an interpreter on a text apart from the wider context of this practice. When it is performed in independence, it can indeed become allegorical in the pernicious ways Boyarin describes, or so Auerbach and Frei claim. But they also believe that this undesirable outcome can be avoided, although the key elements of their strategies of avoidance differ. For Auerbach, the key strategy for avoiding the figurative temptations of figural reading can be distilled in the phrase “figural relation.” Auerbach claims that figural meaning is always “relational”: meaning is always a description of how the figure is related to its fulfillment. Meaning is not a

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remark about either figure or fulfillment alone, and it is not something whose presence should ever undermine the historical reality of either figure or fulfillment. In order to keep meaning from undermining that reality, one must restrict its range of relevance, allowing it to refer only to the figure-fulfillment relation. If abstraction threatens to arise in the debilitating way Boyarin warns against, Auerbach insists that what has been “abstracted”—what has lost historical reality and become overgeneralized or “thinned out”—is not the figure or the fulfillment (as Boyarin would claim) but simply the meaning of their relation. When figural meaning functions as intended, it draws the reader’s attention to the way the figure relates to fulfillment, and to the way the two together realize the overarching divine intention for the world. But when figural meaning becomes “independent” and captures attention for itself, directing the reader away from figure or fulfillment or their interrelationship, then a subversive, figurative tension gains a foothold, and allegory emerges, ready to undermine the historical reality of the figure. Auerbach’s diagnosis of the figurative (allegorical) possibilities within Christian figural reading anticipates much of Boyarin’s critique. But Auerbach’s account of Christian figural reading highlights the key feature of figural reading ignored by Boyarin—the way in which the biblical figure is regarded as simultaneously bodily reality and textual signifier precisely because the text reflects the intervention of God in historical life, among embodied persons, in order to enact a divine plan for transformation. Hence Auerbach can be seen as recognizing and then minimizing the metaphorical, figurative dimension of figura, as though he were anticipating and seeking to deflect the kind of critique Boyarin will later raise. Nevertheless, Auerbach still grants to the conception of Christian figural reading in its most authentic form the capacity to preserve historical reality. Unlike Boyarin, Auerbach finds that the mystery of history’s betrayal at the hands of figural reading-turned-allegorical is matched by the mystery of figural reading’s preservation of historical reality. However, Auerbach’s celebrated defense of figural reading finally proves unhelpful to Christian readers, because that reading ultimately preserves history only by virtue of its wholly secular features. Figural reading contained from the outset a figurative potential because its nonliterality was the expression of the spiritual influence of Jesus. Because that spiritual influence did not reflect any intrinsic relation between spirit and the historical, bodily identity of Jesus but only reflected the way disciples interpreted the significance of Jesus for themselves, spiritual readings could always

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threaten to depart from the historical, bodily reality of “the letter.” The only way to recover the letter (and hence historical reality) was to dissolve spirit back into history. Following the liberal Christian historical theologian Adolf von Harnack, Auerbach regarded God’s incarnation in Jesus as a metaphor for the disciples’ experience of Jesus, an experience in which their lowest humanity was ennobled by God’s own, complete self-abasement. And for Auerbach, the self-abasement of the divine was truly complete; the dignity of the divine had been fully emptied into, and thereby transferred to, the human. Auerbach argues that Christian figural reading managed to preserve historical realism only by consuming its transcendent features and resolving itself into the secular realism for which it has been the vital but provisional surrogate. Hence Auerbach’s critique of allegorical reading finally echoes Boyarin’s, as both thinkers make “the spirit” a feature of human interpretation rather than divine transformation. Auerbach’s connection of figural reading to the spirit rather than the person of Jesus finally leads to an alternative that Christian theologians such as Frei cannot accept: one can either avoid subversive, figurative potential and preserve history and realism by sacrificing Christian transcendence and embracing secular humanism, or one can remain a Christian nonliteral reader and continue along the trajectory toward the radical allegorical subversion of the historical reality of figures in the triumphant celebration of Christian novelty. Along the way, Auerbach, like Boyarin, uses Origen as a foil for the alternative reading of figura he rejects, a reading in which figura’s meaning or fulfillment points away from, rather than back toward, the world. Origen, says Auerbach, gives up figura’s history in favor of its otherworldly, spiritual meaning. Although this sounds a lot like Boyarin, there is a difference. Whereas Boyarin rejects Origen’s notion of the spiritual body, Auerbach does not grasp Origen’s notion of history as event. This loss of history-as-occurrence is fully consistent with Auerbach’s own reading of the life of Jesus not as an independent event but only as a sign of Peter’s interpretation of the event. As a consequence of his understanding of the gospel narratives, the event of God’s transformative intervention in human history, by which things are radically changed, is cast into a metaphor for the ennoblement of humanity’s everyday life. The irony is that when it comes to his reading of the gospel depictions of the life of Jesus, Auerbach favors precisely the approach he criticizes Origen for taking, and makes Peter’s interpretation rather than God’s incarnation the meaningful “event,” although it too is meaningful because of what it reveals about an enduring human possibility. Peter’s interpretation is meaningful in the same way

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that Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse is meaningful. And what is meaningful is no longer, as the practitioners of figural reading would have insisted, the mysteriously transformative interactions of God in history, but rather the deeply subterranean humanity that all persons share. The Origen who insists that the history of the incarnation is meaningful precisely as a continually relevant or available event or occurrence, to be ever appropriated anew by believers, runs directly against the wholly secular interpretation of history offered in Mimesis. The least important thing about Dante for Auerbach was that he was Christian, or that he thought his poetic vision articulated the ways of God with the world. Hans Frei found in Auerbach’s conception of figura the possibility for continuing the critique of allegorically subversive interpretation (now presented as the dominant, modernist hermeneutic of liberal Christian theology stemming from Kant and Schleiermacher). He also saw in Auerbach’s figura the possibility of explaining the link between figural interpretation and his Barthian conception of the identity of Christ. In Frei’s view, the link can be captured by the phrase “figural extension”: figural reading extends rather than erases literal meaning. When Christian readers interpreted the figures of the Bible and linked them to their fulfillments “in Christ,” they were extending the meaning of the figures by drawing out their fullest implications, but not overturning or undermining them. The key to the capacity to extend rather than undermine lay in the distinctive quality of Christ’s identity, for it was precisely (and only) Christ whose identity was so singular and unsubstitutable that it could, by virtue of the relation it bore to others, enhance their distinctive identities, even as it transformed them by bringing them into fuller relief. Frei’s notion of figural extension also emphasizes the unidirectionality of figural reading: figural reading is not a triumphalist retrospective observation of the extent to which one has superseded a past that has been rightfully repudiated; rather, it is a patient “working through” the spiritual dynamics of the disciple’s movement from his or her state of figure to one of fulfillment, a working forward in light of the assurances of Christ’s first coming but also of the uncertainties of his not-yet-realized second coming. Frei’s characteristic way of stating this progression is not, however, to speak about the disciple’s journey, but about the singularity of Christ’s identity (as the expression of God’s identity), and to describe how figural readings seek out the complex ways in which that identity is rendered by both Old and New Testaments. As a result, although Frei counters the subversive figurative potential that Auerbach notes by firmly removing it from the

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realm of Christian identity properly understood (i.e., by insisting that spirit remains intrinsic to Jesus’ personal identity, and that as the quest to express that identity, spiritual reading cannot therefore undermine “the body of the text”), he—no less than Auerbach or Boyarin— continues to describe the figural process more as a matter of textual interpretation than of historical transformation. While Frei does not deny Boyarin’s insistence on linking text with the body, or Auerbach’s insistence on linking text with history, he sharply reduces the role of body and history in his formulations by recasting them in textual and literary terms. So the issues that Boyarin frames around the body are recast as a matter of a proper “identity description,” and the issues that for Auerbach center around history are recast as a matter of the realistic literal sense’s “history-likeness.” But when Frei textualizes body and history in this way, the reader—with his or her own body and the bodily effects of his or her reading—begins to drop out of sight, as all attention is directed to the way the gospel text renders the identity of Jesus. Frei insists that all who follow Jesus receive their distinctive, unsubstitutable identities as a consequence of Jesus’ own unsubstitutable identity, yet little is said about what this entails for the reader’s own spiritual transformation. In similar fashion, the recourse to “history-likeness” begins to obscure the extent to which the Bible seeks to depict divine action outside the text, amid the lives of historical persons—a divine transformation that might be ongoing, stretching beyond the present into future. The text is said to be history-like in such a way as not to impugn (although also not to assert) the validity of its historical referentiality, but all the emphasis is now on preserving a conception of the text that makes sure disciples do not confuse Jesus’ identity with their own, rather than one that brings the reader into more direct self-awareness of his or her own place within an ongoing process of historical and personal transformation. The literal reader of the text’s realistic, narrative sense gets to encounter Jesus as only Jesus alone is, but the action of Jesus or God impinging upon the embodied, historical life of the reader is a matter left to take care of itself without much comment. Origen, who thinks that such matters are at the center rather than the periphery of theology, poses a threat for Frei’s formulation, for in constructing theology out of personal testimony to the divine transformation of embodied persons in their historical lives, Origen threatens to merge the transforming agent and the transformed disciple. If idolatry is the threat Frei spies lurking in the pages of Origen, perhaps stasis is the threat Origen would see in the pages of Frei—the identifiable past and

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a present conformed to that past, rather than an uncertain future. In contrast, Origen privileges a theology constructed out of the witness of a transformed body and a transformed history. Origen has intervened throughout this book in several guises: as target of all three modern interpreters of figural reading, as critic of the three modern representations of figural reading, and as figural reader and theorist in his own right. I have tried to suggest both that Origen does not succumb so easily to the hostile representation of his work that Boyarin, Auerbach, and Frei offer, and also that, when read sympathetically in light of their various objectives and constructive aims, that he can be seen to appreciate many of the goals and to offer interesting ways of negotiating them. Overall, Origen’s persistent recourse to spiritual transformation as what is fundamentally at stake in Christian interpretation of scripture leads him to resist many of the dichotomies his modern interpreters foist on him. Origen simply rejects at the outset Boyarin’s binary opposition of spirit and letter, as well as the underlying modernist and postmodernist opposition of body and mind that fuels it. For Origen, spirit is the agent of transformation, not abstraction, and allegorical reading is a means and expression of the body’s transformation-through-spiritualization, not its dissolution-through-abstraction. Origen shares more of Boyarin’s interest in the body than Boyarin grants, but Origen takes a different sort of interest in the body. Additionally, with his concept of the disciple’s “stance,” Origen highlights the occurrence-character of “the historical” in a way that Auerbach ignores, and thus ends up sharing much of Auerbach’s ethical concern with the preservation of history as the preservation of past events for the sake of their contemporary significance. Finally, by stressing Christ’s relation with his disciples more than Frei deems theologically prudent, Origen nonetheless does more justice than Frei does to the spiritually transformative features of the Christian life, even as he shares much of Frei’s interest in the identity of Jesus. Where Origen most excels, though, and where each of our three modern thinkers falls short, is in his awareness that classical Christian life is a life of continual transformation of what already is into something different. In their varying but related repudiations of Origenist allegorical reading, Boyarin, Auerbach, and Frei manifest a common fear of “making all things new.” Body, history, and textually rendered identity locate meaning, significance, and authority primarily in what has been or already is. They function as bulwarks against the intrusion of a potentially disrupting, destabilizing novelty. What we feel we can be certain of—this body, this his-

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tory, this narrative, and the identities and ways of life built upon them— must be protected from the onslaughts of allegorical reading, from the intrusion of what is other, from what is coming toward us from the future. And yet we know that human beings have always had the suspicion that they could (and perhaps even should) be more or better than they currently are. They have never felt that identity was simply finished, that there was no more possibility of change or newness, or that the fullness of their human identity was already within their grasp. Origen stands apart from the other thinkers we have examined because of his emphasis on transformation. Boyarin recasts transformation as replacement; Auerbach argues that transformation is the Christian aim but can finally accept it as a positive development only insofar as it transforms itself into secular realism; Frei acknowledges the aim of transformation but focuses on the divine agent who transforms, minimizing the subjective or personal experience of transformation. In all three modern instances, transformation emerges as a threatening possibility because it suggests that something utterly nonnegotiable will have to be given up: the body, or history, or the identity of Jesus. The spirit that makes all things new is threatening unless one can imagine a newness that does not repudiate what is “old” or “former”—a new embodiment that does not simply reject the “old” fleshly body, a new relation to history that is perhaps more but not less than the old relationship, a new identity in which, even though one retains the scars and memories of former years and even though every molecule of one’s body has been replaced, one nonetheless continues to sign one’s name with confidence in the unsubstitutableness of one’s enduring identity. Origen imagined these kinds of newness, and he was sufficiently unencumbered by his relation to his present body, his present history, and his present identity to be able to envision entirely new possibilities. That such possibilities were accompanied by the rhetoric of disparagement for what was former (the letter) is perhaps to be expected, even though the more fundamental aim of the project was to show how former things were spiritually transformed, not rejected. There is no doubt that some of the criticism of Origen by our three modern thinkers registers this disparagement, but to focus on that criticism is to miss what is central to Origen’s vision: personal and historical human possibilities are being realized through transformations in which things increasing become what they are. Paradoxically, becoming what they are means changing the way they are. Today, both within and outside religious traditions, we are perhaps far more like the three modern interpreters than we are like Origen. Our first

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instinct is to see alternatives as mutually exclusive options: the letter kills, the spirit gives life. If we were once one way, and then one day we decide to change, that must mean there was something wrong about the first way, and what we have become then stands as an ongoing repudiation of what we once were. On the other side, if those who are like us change and we don’t, it’s easy to see them as constituting an ongoing judgment against us. The charge of supersessionism is, I think, imbedded, at least in part, in dynamics such as these. One moral of this study is that Christian figural reading is too complex and subtle a practice to be credibly fitted into an eitheror dynamic and then unqualifiedly celebrated or condemned. Figural reading in the Christian tradition seeks to express the dynamic process of spiritual transformation in ways that respect the practitioners’ commitment to both past and future, both old identity and newly refashioned identity. Imbedded in figural practice is all the drama of discerning the point of existence and identifying one’s place in it, figured as a journey from a former mode of existence through various states of transformation toward some ultimate end. There are, of course, other ways of imagining existence and one’s place in it, many of which are profoundly unrelated to the journey motif, or its literary analog, narrative. But the Christian imagination, at least as it expresses itself in the tradition of figural reading, is structured in just that way. The charge of hermeneutical supersessionism, the fear of it, and the defenses against it are all imbedded in this conflicted dynamic of past realities and future possibilities. The overwhelming presumption of classical Christian figural reading, at least as it has been characterized in the writings examined in this book, is that the Christian Bible is read Christianly when it is seen to depict the ongoing historical outworking of a divine intention to transform humanity over the course of time. Moreover, Christian figural readers insist that the history of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth, his immediate followers, and the Church are all somehow ingredients in this overarching divine intention. That intention and its outworking in history are regarded as alternately clear and obscure, reliable and unpredictable. Figural readers turn to the text of the Bible for clues and models useful for unraveling as much as they can of what they think they discern as the mysterious working of God in the lives of people over time. What is always ultimately at stake is the reality and the proper characterization of a divine performance in the material world of space and time, a performance that defines the personal, social, ethical, and political obligations of Christians in the present, as well as their stance toward past and future. There is no reason to think that there will be agreement, even among

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figural readers themselves, on anything as grandiose, complex or presumptuous as the figural interpretation of history. It is not hard to see how the classic figural interpreter renders at least an implicit negative judgment about the significance of some forms of Jewish belief and practice in this overarching, divine plan for transformation. It is also not hard to see why Jews committed to traditional Jewish beliefs and practice would reject that judgment. This is a fundamental disagreement between Judaism and Christianity about the characterization of the meaning and purpose of human history, as that history comes under the working of divine agency as represented in the Bibles of the two religions. Consequently, Christians committed to the traditional practice of figural reading can escape some, but perhaps not every, implication of the term “supersessionism.” They can escape the charge as Boyarin levels it (and as much of the Christian past deserves it), for figural reading requires the Christian to embrace as Christianly significant the concrete bodily and historical practices of Judaism precisely in ways that do not undermine but respect their bodily and historical integrity: the letter must remain in the spirit. I suspect that few contemporary Christians even begin to encounter, respect, and engage Judaism at the level of concreteness to which the figural imagination of the New Testament itself commits them. Nonetheless, one cannot overlook the classical Christian figural reader’s claim that God has chosen to lead human beings into new modes of life, requiring them either to dispense with or regard as no longer consequential certain Jewish beliefs and practices once held or practiced. At the same time, one must also reckon with the claim of such readers that their novel beliefs and practices are intrinsically connected to those traditional beliefs and practices, indeed, that they are the proper and fullest understanding of the ultimate significance of those traditional beliefs and practices. Such is the character of the classical figural claim that novel Christian figural meaning extends without supplanting the former Jewish meanings—that the spirit does not undermine but instead draws out the fullest meaning of the letter; the letter must remain in the spirit because the spirit is the letter fully realized. Such a perspective is clearly not the simple repudiation of letter, law, and Judaism that Boyarin describes (and many Christians have enacted) — and to this extent the charge of supersessionism is unwarranted. But neither is it the easy, liberal laissez-faire stance that modern Christians often hope to assume—and to this extent the charge of supersessionism may still have force. Those familiar with the contours of classical Christianity will recognize (even as they may lament) the consistency of the figural imagi-

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nation with the wider scope of classical Christian belief. Those familiar with a religion that affirms that submission to God’s agency constitutes human freedom, or that Jesus of Nazareth is no less human for being divine, or that divine power is manifested as divine suffering, or that wholly historical action is the realization of a transcendent divine intention, will not be surprised by the equally unexpected claim that fulfillments are more, and yet again are not more, than their figures.

Abbreviations

Cels.

Origen, Contra Celsum. Citations are to the English translation by Henry Chadwick in Origen: Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), occasionally modified in light of the Greek text in Gegen Celsus, ed. Paul Koetschau, Origenes Werke, vols. 1–2 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1899).

Comm. Cant.

Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, in Origen: The Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1956). Citations are to the English translation, occasionally modified in light of the Latin text in Commentarium in canticum Canticorum, ed. W. A. Baehrens, Origenes Werke, vol. 8 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1925).

Comm. Jn.

Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of John. Citations are to the English translation in Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John: Books 1–10 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1989), and Commentary on the Gospel According to John: Books 13 –32 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1993), both trans. Ronald E. Heine, occasionally modified in light of the Greek text in Der Johanneskommentar, ed. Erwin Preuschen, Origenes Werke, vol. 4 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903).

Pasch.

Origen, On the Passover. Citations are to Sur la Pâque, ed. Octave Guéraud and Pierre Nautin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979). English translations are from Treatise on the Passover and Dialogue of Origen with Heraclides and His Fellow Bishops on the Father, the Son and the Soul, trans. Robert J. Daly (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), occasionally modified in light of Guéraud and Nautin’s Greek critical edition.

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Prin.

Origen, On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973). Citations are occasionally modified in light of the Greek and Latin texts in Die Principiis, ed. Paul Koetschau, Origenes Werke, vol. 5 (Leipzig: J C. Hinrichs, 1913).

RSV

The New Revised Standard Version of the Christian Bible.

Notes

introduction 1. Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Judaism, Christianity and Germany, trans. George D. Smith (New York: Macmillan, [1934] 1935), 1. 2. Ibid., 2. 3. Ibid., 2. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Ibid., 4 –5. 6. Ibid., 8. 7. Ibid., 14. 8. Ibid., 107. 9. Ibid., 5. 10. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 11. Gal. 5 : 6. Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural references are to the New Revised Standard Version of the Christian Bible. 12. For an example of a postmodern approach to typological interpretation in such constructivist fashion, see Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), ch. 3, “End of History.” 13. Harold Bloom, “‘Before Moses Was I Am’: The New and Belated Testaments,” in The Bible: Modern Critical Views, ed. id. (New Haven, Conn.: Chelsea House, 1987), 292. 14. Of course, as any hermeneutician of suspicion would object, such is the sort of self-mystification to which everyone in the grip of ideology succumbs. However, the limitation of this sort of explanatory approach is that it can explain everything except what the practitioners understood themselves to be doing. Yet it is just the self-understanding of figural readers that concerns me in this work. 15. Cf. R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Min-

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neapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 179 – 80 n. 32. Soulen prefers “The Scriptures” in place of “Old Testament” (following the usage of Jesus and the first Christians) and “Apostolic Witness” instead of “New Testament” (based on the characteristic that early Christians believed established the authority of those texts as equal to that of the “Scriptures”). This is an elegant and historically sensitive strategy, but it seems to sidestep rather than confront directly the theological issue I am addressing. 16. Francis M. Young emphasizes the referential character of ancient Christian interpretation of biblical prophecy: “To what does prophecy refer? Surely to the event it predicts. Even if the discovery of that prediction implies recognizing the metaphoric nature of the language and unpacking a riddle through recognition of symbols, ambiguities, or hidden meanings which can be discerned only after the event, it is the event to which the prophecy points that gives the prophecy meaning—in other words the future event is that to which it refers.” Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 120 –21. 17. My sharp contrast of these two thinkers may be overstated. See Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). 18. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 11, explicitly draws attention to his indebtedness to Baur: In terms of specific understandings and interpretation, the reading of Paul which I undertake here seems to be closest in spirit (and often in detail) to the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur, produced over a century ago. He also read Paul as primarily moved by a vision of universalism, although where I am generously critical, Baur waxed panegyrical. Moreover, where Baur, the consummate Hegelian, sees Paulinism as the triumph of a new and higher consciousness over Judaism which is a “lower state of religious consciousness,” I can hardly accept such an evaluation.

19. Jean Daniélou, Origen, trans. Walter Mitchell (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1955), 150. He makes these general comments about the content of Christian theology in response to a quotation from Origen’s Homily on Joshua 17.1. Here is the passage from Origen that Daniélou quotes just before his remarks: Those who observed the Law which foreshadowed the true Law . . . possessed a shadow of divine things, a likeness of the things of God. In the same way, those who shared out the land that Juda inherited were imitating and foreshadowing the distribution that will ultimately be made in heaven. Thus the reality was in heaven, the shadow and image of the reality on earth. As long as the shadow was on earth, there was an earthly Jerusalem, a temple, an altar, a visible liturgy, priests and high priests, towns and villages too in Juda, and everything else that you find described in the book. But at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, when truth descended from heaven and was born on earth, and justice looked down from heaven (Ps. lxxxiv.12), shadows and images saw their last. Jerusalem was destroyed and so was the temple; the altar disappeared. Henceforth neither Mount Gerizim nor Jerusalem was the place where God was to be worshipped: his true worshippers were to worship him in spirit and in truth (John iv.23). Thus, in the presence of the truth, the type and the shadows came to an end, and when a temple was built in the Virgin’s womb by the Holy Ghost and the power of the Most High (Luke i.35), the stone-built temple was destroyed. If, then, the Jews go to Jerusalem and find the earthly city in ruins, they ought not to

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weep as they do because they are mere children where understanding is concerned. They ought not to lament. Instead of the earthly city, they should seek the heavenly one. They have only to look up and they will find the Heavenly Jerusalem, which is the mother of us all (Gal. iv.26). Thus by God’s goodness their earthly inheritance has been taken from them to make them seek their inheritance in heaven. (pp. 149 –50)

One measure of the difference between Origen’s text and Daniélou’s comment on it lies in exactly what each says was “destroyed.” Daniélou says that “Judaism was destroyed,” but although Origen says that the earthly temple is destroyed, the heavenly temple (in which the earthly temple’s truth and reality resides) remains, and the Jews are invited to “seek their inheritance” there. To say that Origen thereby announces the destruction of Judaism simply rides roughshod over all of his distinctions. One could just as easily argue that what Origen anounces is the eternal life of Judaism in (what he regards as) Judaism’s essential identity. That Origen’s argument would be repudiated by any Jew whose own conception of essential Jewish identity entailed the practice of ritual in the earthly temple is a rejection of Origen’s notion of essential Judaism—but this differs from the unqualified claim that Origen celebrates “the destruction of Judaism.” 20. Daniélou, Origen, 151. Daniélou quotes from Origen’s Commentary on John 28 : 12. 21. Rev. 21:5: “And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’” 22. See, e.g., the following representative New Testament passages: Mark 1 : 27; 2 : 21–22; 2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15; Col. 3:10; 2 Peter 3 : 13; Rev. 21 : 1. The following Old Testament passages were also central to early Christian proclamation of the newness of the gospel: Isa. 42:9, 10; 43:19; 65:17; Jer. 31:22, 31; Ezek. 11 : 19; 18:31; 36:26. 23. In his earlier work, Frei characterized the literal sense as the realistic narrative sense of the text. In his late writing, Frei began to reformulate his conception of literal sense from an attribute of a certain genre of text to a kind of reading agreed upon by the community of Christian readers; see esp. Frei’s 1983 essay, “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?” in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 36 –77. The “social constructivist” implications of Frei’s later notion of literal sense have been drawn out by Kathryn Tanner, “Theology and the Plain Sense,” in Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. Garrett Green (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 59 –78. 24. See Soulen, God of Israel, ch. 4, for a critique of Barth’s christological exclusiveness and its supersessionary features. 25. Erich Auerbach also admits allegory’s relation to typology. See, e.g., “Figura,” trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, ed. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53 –54. For Boyarin, though, any contrast between allegory and typology is “illusory” (Boyarin, Radical Jew, 34).

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26. See Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh, Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981). 27. Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, vol. 3, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), 8.6, 9.1. 28. Ibid., 8.6.1; 9.14; 9.1.4,7. 29. Cf. Frei, “Literal Reading,” 75: “It [the literal sense] will stretch and not break.” This sentence follows a reference to the Christian reconsideration of midrash and peshat (traditional sense). With the notion of stretching, Frei may be subtly alluding to the fact that “via cognate languages, peshat comes to mean ‘extend’ or ‘stretched out’ in later rabbinic Hebrew’ (noted in Raphael Loewe, “The ‘Plain’ Meaning of the Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis,” in Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies, London, ed. J. G. Weiss (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1964), 1: 155, and pointed out by Charles Scalise, “Origen and the sensus literalis,” in Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy, ed. Charles Kannengiesser and William L. Petersen (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 119 n. 6. 30. The notion that figurative meaning need not be nonliteral is not a Christian or theologically specific idea. Robert J. Fogelin, in his Figuratively Speaking (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), explicates the possibility while defending a comparativist view of many figures of speech (including tropes and rhetorical figures). Opposing what he takes to be the dominant view among philosophers and literary theorists, Fogelin argues that “in most of those figures traditionally called tropes, literal meaning is preserved rather than altered” (30, 105– 6). Figurative language puts forward a literal comparison that strikes a respondent as incongruous. The “figurativeness” of the comparison is not a consequence of a “nonliteral meaning,” but of the incongruity that a respondent perceives between the literal comparison and the larger context in which the comparison is made (2). Fogelin provides an example based on one that Aristotle used. Consider the statement, “Achilles is a lion.” This metaphor (like all metaphors, argues Fogelin) is actually an elliptical simile, “Achilles is like a lion,” but its expression as a metaphor rather than as a simile heightens its incongruity for a respondent, who is perhaps struck more by the dissimilarity than any similarity between Achilles and a lion. Fogelin argues that it is the respondent’s recognition of incongruity between the literal comparison and his or her ordinary context for talking about people and lions that generates the figurativeness of the comparison. Figurativeness thereby becomes a purely formal or relational term; rather than denoting some sort of substantive “meaning,” it refers to a perceived incongruity between a literal remark and the literal circumstances in which that remark is made and received. Hence, as the title of his book suggests, Fogelin wishes to eliminate “the potentially misleading notion of figurative meaning in favor of the safer notion of meaning something figuratively” (31 n. 4). He writes: With figurative comparisons, as with literal comparisons, the point of the comparison lies in the indirect speech act—what I mean rather than simply what my words mean. But the difference between a figurative and a non-figurative comparison does

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not consist in some new kind of meaning being conveyed, figurative meaning rather than literal meaning. Here we would do better to drop the expression “figurative meaning” altogether and speak instead of someone putting forward a claim figuratively rather than literally. With non-figurative comparisons, the speaker seeks a good fit that will facilitate the easy transfer of accurate information. More fully, the speaker offers his comparisons under the restraints of Gricean conversational maxims. With a figurative comparison the speaker flouts, or at least violates, standard conversational rules and thus engages the respondent in the task of making adjustments that will produce a good fit. The difference here is not between two kinds of meaning, but rather between two modes of entertaining and validating a comparison. Speakers speak figuratively, but words do not have figurative meanings. (96)

The perception of incongruity does not change or undermine the literality of the initial comparison; on the contrary, it requires that literality. Without it, there would be no incongruity, and we would simply have a literal remark in the form of a “dead” metaphor (e.g., “the arm of the chair”). 31. I say “effectively” because Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 108, insists (rightly, in my view) that the allegory/midrash distinction is not simply a Christian/Jewish distinction. For a similar qualification in Boyarin’s discussion of Origen, see id., “‘The Eye in the Torah’: Ocular Desire in Midrashic Hermeneutic,” Critical Inquiry 16 (Spring 1990): 549 n. 33: “Denigration of the human body and the body of language are correllated with each other and with the doctrine of the incorporeality of God in Jewish religious history as well. When Judaism accepts the Platonic ontotheology, its reading practices become virtually identical to those of Origen and only the applications differ.” 32. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 14. 33. Ibid., 264 n. 8.

chapter 1 1. The designation of the Church as “new Israel” is not found in Paul’s letters or indeed anywhere in the New Testament. See George A. Lindbeck, “The Gospels’ Uniqueness: Election and Untranslatability,” Modern Theology 13 (October 1997): 423 –50, esp. 435. Soulen, God of Israel, 35, points out that Justin Martyr in Dial. 11 was the first to apply the phrase “true spiritual Israel” to the Christian Church. 2. There is an important difference between Boyarin’s claim that Paul’s distinction between letter and spirit is hermeneutical and his further claim that those terms are appropriately understood under the structuralist /poststructuralist categories of signifiers and signifieds. Although the hermeneutical use of letter and spirit is Paul’s, the structural linguistic interpretation of his use is Boyarin’s. Whether Boyarin’s interpretation does justice to the character of Paul’s use must be demonstrated, and one cannot do so simply by recasting Paul’s letter/spirit distinction in the terminology of signifiers and signified meanings. As Boyarin presents him, Paul is not talking about God’s transformation of a people but is construing a text (comprised of signifiers) in a way

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that has consequences for a people. Yet in reading Paul this way, Boyarin avoids serious reckoning with the possibility that Paul is not talking about a text but about a people, and about the transformative actions of God that have consequences for the historical life of that people. 3. For a similar objection to Harold Bloom’s reading of Paul, see Dawson, Literary Theory, 48 –54. 4. Rom. 11 : 16 –24, quoted in Boyarin, Radical Jew, 201. I have supplied the verse numbering. 5. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 201. 6. Ibid., 205. 7. Ibid., 202. Boyarin’s paring of the equation faith equals grace with the equation flesh equals genealogy and circumcision is oddly asymmetrical. Genealogy is a blood relationship (flesh), but grace is not reducible to a faith relationship: “grace” is a term for a divine action or performance, whereas “faith” is a term denoting trust in God and acceptance of that performance. But neither grace nor faith speaks to the presence or absence of flesh. The Pauline insistence that grace and its reception do not entail certain bodily conditions (e.g., physical descent from Abraham) or certain bodily performances (e.g., circumcision) does not mean that they entail no bodily circumstances or performances at all, as the hortatory portions of the Pauline epistles make abundantly clear. 8. Ibid., 202. What does Boyarin mean by “historical understanding” in this passage? The phrase seems to beg the question of the actual nature of Israel, for it is physical genealogy rather than history that seems to be the issue. At least from his own point of view, Paul seems to display a fully historical understanding of Israel, if historical is a reasonable term with which to characterize claims about God’s transformative interventions over time in the embodied lives of human beings. 9. Ibid., 202. 10. Ibid., 32. 11. Ibid., 22. 12. Ibid., 22. 13. Ibid., 34; emphasis and verse numbering added. 14. Ibid., 33; verse numbering added. 15. Ibid., 33. 16. Ibid., 34 –35. 17. Exod. 34.29 –35, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988). 18. 2 Cor. 3.7 –18, in Boyarin, Radical Jew, 98 –99; verse numbering added. The parenthetical insertions are Boyarin’s. 19. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 86 (with corrected spelling of pneuvmati.) 20. Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). Boyarin identifies his reading as distinctively Jewish in Radical Jew, 204:

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I think that it is here that the moment of a “cultural reading” of the text comes in, that is, a reading informed by a different culturally defined subject position from the one that normally and normatively has read this text, and I am reading from the point of view of a member of that Jewish group that refuses to believe in Jesus and abandon our ancestral practices and commitments.

Commenting on Hay’s claim that Paul is not supersessionist, Boyarin, Radical Jew, 32, writes as follows: I would argue, however (and here, I think, the different hermeneutical perspectives of a self-identified Jew and a self-identified Christian show up): If there has been no rejection of Israel [as Hays claims], there has indeed been a supersession of the historical Israel’s hermeneutic of self-understanding as a community constituted by physical genealogy and observances and the covenantal exclusiveness that such a self-understanding entails. This is a perfect example of cultural reading, the existence of at once irreconcilable readings generated by different subject positions.

Boyarin’s judicious remark nonetheless seems to me to evade the central question. While the historical Jew who converted from Judaism to Christianity as the authentic continuation of Israel exchanged one “hermeneutic of self-understanding” for another, presumably such a person remained a single subject. On the other hand, if this single person assumed different “subject positions” as a consequence of converting, then it seems as though Boyarin’s claim for the irreconciliability of such positions is called into question. The underlying issue is the vexed question of how the self remains self-identical through the process of religious conversion. What Boyarin actually seems to mean is that neither he nor Hays is able to produce an account that the other will accept for himself, as a Jew or as a Christian. 21. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 98. On 288 n. 18, referring to his “‘Eye in the Torah,’” 532 –50, Boyarin notes that “the Rabbis of the talmudic period generally did not believe in a wholly non-corporeal Godhead, so God could be present in the world without an Incarnation.” 22. Hays, Echoes, 129. 23. Ibid.,124, also castigates Origen and the Alexandrian allegorical tradition: The concern to exclude the interpretation of 2 Cor. 3 : 6 as a hermeneutical guideline arises partly as a backlash against certain traditions within Christian theology. At least since the time of Origen, some Christians have appealed to this passage as the definitive warrant for a mode of exegesis that discarded the literal sense of the biblical text in favor of esoteric allegorical readings [with reference to Robert Grant, The Letter and the Spirit]. Where such charismatic readings are practiced, where biblical narratives are construed as coded figurations, the specters of Gnosticism and arbitrariness lurk. . . . Against such a reading of the letter-spirit antithesis, protest is certainly justified.

Paul, however, is not “an apologist for the Alexandrian brand of Platonizing allegory” (Hays, Echoes, 125); instead, he typically presupposes (although he does not argue for) a “typological reading” (ibid., 132). When Paul uses the terms pneu`ma and gravmma, he is not “thinking, like Philo or Origen, about a

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mystical latent sense concealed beneath the text’s external form. . . . Spirit is not an essence or an abstract theological concept. It is the daily experienced mode of God’s powerful presence in the community of faith” (ibid., 150). 24. Hays, Echoes, 131, as quoted in Boyarin, Radical Jew, 98. 25. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 98. 26. Boyarin overlooks a possible ambiguity in Hays’s formulation. Does the script remain abstract and dead because, precisely as script, it can in principle and in practice never be embodied, or because it had not yet found its fully adequate embodiment? 27. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 104. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 105. 31. Hays, Echoes, 147. 32. Note 2 Cor. 4.3 – 4 (ignored by Boyarin), where Paul applies the language of the Exodus account of Moses’ veiling to his own preaching of the gospel, which can also be veiled for those Christian readers not yet sufficiently transformed: “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” 33. Hays, Echoes, 151, 152. 34. Ibid., 137. 35. Ibid., 145. 36. Ibid., 137, quoted in Boyarin, Radical Jew, 99; emphasis added. 37. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 99. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 104. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 105. 42. Hays, Echoes, 129. 43. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 86. Boyarin adds the “real.” He refers to two other explicit instances of the letter-spirit contrast in the Pauline corpus, 2 Cor. 3 : 6 and Rom. 7:6: [O]ur competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not in the letter but in the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (o}~ kai; iJkavnwsen hJma`~ diakovnou~ kainh`~ diaqhvkh~, ouj gravmmato~ ajlla; pneuvmato~: to; ga;r gravmma ajpoktevnnei, to; de; pneu`ma zw/opoiei`) (2 Cor. 3 : 6) But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old letter but in the new life of the Spirit (nuni; de; kathrghvqhmen ajpo; tou` novmou, ajpoqanovnte~ ejn w|/ kateicovmeqa, w{ste douleuvein hJma`~ ejn kainovthti pneuvmato~ kai; ouj palaiovthti gravmmato~) (Rom. 7 : 6)

44. Ibid., 86 – 87. 45. Since Boyarin, Radical Jew, 89, observes that Rom. 2:29 echoes Deut. 10 : 16 (which metaphorically refers to circumcising “the foreskins of

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their hearts”), it is unclear why he regards the “spiritualizing” interpretation of Rom. 2 : 29 as a Pauline innovation. 46. Rom. 2:12 –15, RSV. 47. Boyarin, Radical Jew, p, 90, quoting James D. G. Dunn, Word Biblical Commentary 38a: Romans 1– 8 (Dallas: Word Books, 1988), 107. Boyarin has added the emphasis. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 91. 50. Ibid., 287 – 88 n. 13. Nonetheless, as previously noted, Boyarin, Radical Jew, 86, inserts the word “real” in brackets before “circumcision” in his first quotation of Rom. 2:29. 51. Ibid., 101. 52. Ibid., 94. 53. Ibid., 90; emphasis added. 54. Ibid.; emphasis added. 55. Ibid., 95, quoting Stephen Westerholm, “Letter and Spirit: The Foundation of Pauline Ethics,” New Testament Studies 30 (1984): 235. 56. Ibid., 96. 57. Ibid., quoting 1 Cor. 7:19. 58. Ibid. 59. In a world of many truly different things, these things must be mutually exclusive in some respect but need not therefore be in opposition. One needs violence in order to turn difference into opposition. After listing a set of opposed categories in Paul’s letters, Boyarin, Radical Jew, 269 n. 39, offers an important qualification to the notion of binary opposition as a characterization of Paul’s allegorical hermeneutic: These are not, strictly speaking, binary oppositions for Paul, but rather bi-polar oppositions on a continuum. There is not an absolute opposition of spirit and flesh in Paul, but entities can be more and less spiritual or carnal. Thus the resurrection body can be a spiritualized body. The analogical structure holds up, but with great subtlety and polyvalence, a polyvalence which enabled ultimately the multifarious directions that successors to Paul could take, from gnostic rejection of the material to the wallowing in it of medieval resurrection theory.

This disclaimer—that Paul’s oppositions are “strictly speaking” bipolar points on a continuum rather than binary oppositions—is, as the analysis I offer in this chapter suggests, more true of Paul’s hermeneutic than the interpretation for which Boyarin actually argues. Despite his insightful qualification (which opens the door to precisely the more nuanced understanding of Paul that I am attempting to present), Boyarin represents Paul as thoroughly caught in the grip of irreconcilable oppositions. See, e.g., Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 32, on Paul’s view of the resurrection of the body: Paul considers some kind of a body necessary, in order that the human being not be naked, and he polemicizes here [2 Cor. 5 : 1– 4] against those who deny resurrection in the flesh. It is out of the question, therefore, to regard Paul as a radically anti-

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body dualist on the model of Plotinus, for example. But crucially, Paul maintains an image of the human being as a soul dwelling in or clothed by a body. In the very text in which Paul is valorizing body, arguing against those who deny body, he nevertheless refers to “we who are in this tent.”

In an accompanying note, Boyarin observes (correctly, in my view) that Paul, like many ancient Christians, insists on retaining “body” while jettisoning flesh, and, following Caroline Bynum’s work, he observes the aptness of the “question of whether the ‘platonic’ ideology of the person as soul was ever fully accepted in Christian culture” (Carnal Israel, 33, n. 3). 60. See Stephen E. Fowl’s review of A Radical Jew in Modern Theology 12 (January 1996): 131–33. 61. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 97, quoting Westerholm, “Letter and Spirit,” 236. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid.

chapter 2 1. See Boyarin, Radical Jew, 13. Paul’s biblical heremeneutic is also associated with Philo’s, and Augustine and Origen are presented as heirs of the Pauline-Philonic allegorical tradition. 2. See ibid., 7, 14, 15. 3. For Derrida’s deconstructive presentation of Husserl’s sign theory, see Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 4. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 16. 5. Ibid., 94 –95. 6. Ibid., 32. 7. Ibid., 95. 8. Ibid., 14. 9. Boyarin, Intertextuality, 108, reading “world” for “word.” 10. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 14. 11. Ibid., 15. 12. Ibid., 14. 13. Boyarin, Intertextuality, 108. However, Boyarin sometimes qualifies his criticisms of Origen’s allegorical disembodiment, as he did Paul’s (see ch. 1, n. 59, above). For example, in Carnal Israel, 232 n. 5, in response to the “wise cautions” of John Miles (in personal correspondence [1991]) that “Christianity looks disembodied by comparison with Rabbinic Judaism, but by comparison with Gnosticism it looks pretty corporeal,” Boyarin writes: “Note that I am not claiming that there is a fundamental incompatibility between a literalist reading and Christianity. Even as radical an allegorist as Origen is ambivalent as to the literal meaning of the Gospels and the sacraments, often distinguishing between the letter of the Law which kills and the letter of the Gospel which gives life (Caspary 1979, 50 –55).”

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But Boyarin adds at once: “However, as Caspary points out in the same place, at other moments Origen proclaims that the letter of the Gospel also kills.” Boyarin’s remark should make one wonder just what Origen might mean by a “letter” that can produce such diametrically opposed ends. Such an apparently functional conception of “good literalism” and “bad literalism” cannot be easily accommodated to the sort of unnuanced letter-spirit contrast imagined as an opposition between concreteness and abstraction, as Boyarin would have it. For more nuanced remarks on the letter-spirit distinction in Origen, consider the following from Peter Gorday, Principles of Patristic Exegesis: Romans 9 –11 in Origen, John Chrysostom, and Augustine (New York: Edwin Mellon, 1983): Origen discusses the figurative meanings of circumcision in the Old Testament, notes various objections to the practice, and finally defends it as a part of that “letter” or “carnal” surface through which the Christian must penetrate to reach the spirit. Contrary to the objections of Marcionite detractors, the concrete institutions of Judaism form an indispensable part of that series of outward manifestations by which the course of divine revelation proceeds. . . . (57) . . . The drama of the history of salvation thus continues to unfold for Origen in Rom. 3.1–20. Various Jews, various laws, various circumcisions, all reflecting the timeless dichotomy of letter and spirit, are interacting within the context of the specific history of the movement of salvation from Jews to Gentiles, as well as in the ontogenesis/phylogenesis pattern of human development as Origen understands these. The economy of the unfolding of salvation on the plane of history consists precisely of the interplay of these different agents, as letter gives way to spirit without the loss of those concrete manifestations which remain indispensable to an appropriation of salvation. (60)

Joseph Wilson Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosphy in the ThirdCentury Church (Atlanta: John Knox, 1983), 164 – 65, also criticizes unnuanced readings of Origen based on an oversimplified opposition between Hebrew and Greek (Christian), accompanied by failure to consider fully the implications of Christianity’s polemic against gnosticism for Christian understandings of the body: It has been fashionable for some time to present Platonism and the biblical heritage as radically incompatible, especially in their attitude toward the body. Given the allpervasive asceticism of early Christianity, Origen would have found such a position absurd. This point bears emphasis today. It would have seemed obvious to Origen and his fellow Christians and Platonists that asceticism does not imply hostility to the body. On the contrary, it is the natural outcome of a quite positive view of the body, properly disciplined, as a fitting vehicle during our life on earth for our ascent to God. This acceptance of the body and the sense of wholeness that it provided is precisely what separated Christians and Platonists from the Gnostics.

14. Daniélou, Origen, 179, is representative of Western Christian criticism of Origen’s allegorical reading, even by those who largely defend it. Like Boyarin, Daniélou traces Origen’s errors back to Philo but, unlike Boyarin, he does not also associate them with Paul: “Origen’s debt to him [Philo], whether directly through the study of his writings (which we know was the case) or

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indirectly through Clement of Alexandria, was considerable. Philo’s influence was sometimes productive of sound fruit but it also contained the seeds of serious deviation from the truth.” It is easy to force Origen’s language to supersessionist extremes. Boyarin’s emphasis is echoed by Christian scholars who are not as concerned as Boyarin is with the supersessionary character of the Origen they present. Consider, for example, the following remarks by Origen, as quoted by Daniélou: We who belong to the Church accept Moses, and with good reason. We read his works because we think that he was a prophet and that God revealed Himself to him. We believe that he described the mysteries to come, but with symbols and in figures and allegories, whereas before we ourselves began to teach men about the mysteries, they had already taken place, at the time appointed for them. It does not matter whether you are a Jew or one of us; you cannot maintain that Moses was a prophet at all unless you take him in this sense. How can you prove that he was a prophet if you say that his works are quite ordinary, that they imply no knowledge of the future and have no mystery hidden in them? The Law, then, and everything in the Law, being inspired, as the Apostle says, until the time of amendment, is like those people whose job it is to make statues and cast them in metal. Before they tackle the statue itself, the one they are going to cast in bronze, silver or gold, they first make a clay model to show what they are aiming at. The model is a necessity, but only until the real statue is finished. The model is made for the sake of the statue, and when the statue is ready the sculptor has no further use for the model. Well, it is rather like that with the Law and the prophets. The things written in the Law and the prophets were meant as types or figures of things to come. But now the Artist himself has come, the Author of it all, and he has cast the Law aside, because it contained only the shadow of the good things to come [Hebr. x.I], whereas he brought the things themselves. (Origen, Hom. Lev. 10.1, quoted in Daniélou, Origen, 144 – 45, with reference to Heb. 10.1 inserted by Daniélou; emphasis added)

There seems to be an inconsistency in Daniélou’s response to passages such as this. On the one hand, he is not bothered by Origen’s remarks that seem to make Christianity supersede Judaism. On the other hand, he protects Origen from the charge that he supersedes the concrete practices of Catholic Christianity, for example, the sacraments: “And just as in the case of public worship Origen’s leaning towards the spiritual implies not rejection of external rites but only underestimation of their value, so in this case it implies no denial of the typology of the sacraments. Only, he does not dwell on it; he is always in a hurry to discover any meaning his text may have for the spiritual life, always anxious to find food for the soul” (164). Origen, it seems, can be presented in a way that allows him to subvert some literalisms but not others (those that the scholar decides must be protected?). I think that it is more accurate to say that because Origen does not operate with simple oppositions or dualisms, he can protect and subvert literalism at the same time. This simultaneity and scope lie at the very heart of his conception of spiritual transformation that enhances rather than undermines identity. Daniélou preserves more of that transformative impulse than does Boyarin, but only in certain favored areas (the sacraments, subject to Origen’s “underestimation”), not in others (Judaism, for which there is “no further use”).

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15. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.12, quoted in Boyarin, Intertextuality, 108 –9. 16. Boyarin, Intertextuality, 109. The imbedded quotation is from R. P. Lawson, the translator of Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs. Boyarin’s remarks in Intertextuality distill more extensive comments appearing in his earlier article, “‘Eye in the Torah,’” esp. 548 – 49: Allegoresis is thus explicitly founded in a Platonic universe. This Platonic universe is exactly the one in which God is incorporeal, cannot be seen with the eyes of flesh, and can only be rendered in language in figures that make Him seem visible to the “eyes of the mind.” In that ontotheology, in order for God to become visible to man He must be transformed, incarnated in flesh. The text, too, is an incarnation in visible language of the invisible things of the world. As R. Lawson has pointed out, “If the Logos in His Incarnation is God-Man, so, too, in the mind of Origen the incarnation of the Pneuma in Holy Scripture is divine-human” (S. of S., 9). Hermeneutics, then, in this tradition, is an attempt to get behind the visible text to its invisible meaning. In Rabbinic religion, on the other hand, as we have seen, there is no invisible God manifested in an Incarnation. God Himself is visible (and therefore, corporeal); language is also not divided into a carnal and a spiritual being. Accordingly, there can be no allegory. As we have seen, when the Rabbis read the Song of Songs, they do not translate its “carnal” meaning into one or more “spiritual” senses; rather, they establish a concrete, historical moment in which to contextualize it. If the impulse of Origen is to spiritualize and allegorize physical love quite out of existence in the allegorical reading of the Song, the move of the midrash is to understand the love of God and Israel as an exquisite version of precisely that human erotic love. Reading the Song of Songs as a love dialogue between God and Israel is then no more allegorical than reading it as a love dialogue between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The Song is not connected with an invisible meaning but with the text of the Torah and thus with concrete moments of historical memory. Meaning does not always show itself, just as God does not always show Himself, and, indeed, there are circumstances in which it is dangerous to see meaning just as it is dangerous to see God, but both God and meaning are in principle visible. Hermeneutics is a practice of the recovery of vision. That is, it is ideally a practice in which the original moments of the unmediated vision of God’s presence can be recovered.

17. For Origen’s use of the inner-outer distinction, see Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue 2, in The Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies trans. R. P. Lawson (Westminster, Md. : Newman Press, 1956), hereafter cited as Comm. Cant. Citations are to the English translation, occasionally modified in light of the Latin text in Commentarium in canticum Canticorum, ed. W. A. Baehrens, Origenes Werke, vol. 8 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1925). In fairness to Boyarin, it should be noted that even Origen’s most vigorous defenders can use these same dualistic metaphors. Consider, for example, Daniélou, Origen, 139: “But the literal explanation of the text was only a preliminary stage in exegesis. Scripture was essentially spiritual, and the exegete’s specific function was to peel off the husk of the letter so as to get at the spirit and transmit it to others. The essential thing, as Origen saw it, was to discover the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures.”

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18. Polytheist Platonists of Origen’s era do not display the standard “Platonic” dichotomies. On the complexities of Platonist thought in the period, see Robert M. Berchman, From Philo to Origen: Middle Platonism in Transition (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984). See also Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). On Plotinus, see Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 19. Boyarin, Intertextuality, 154 n. 14. 20. Comm. Cant 3.13. 21. Origen’s subordinationist understanding of the Son’s relation to the Father always lies behind his comments on the capacity of the Son to “see” the Father, or rather to know the Father and to make the Father known to others. The exact meaning of the idea of “seeing” the Father is, of course, complicated by the Father’s radically incorporeal nature. See Peter Widdicombe, The Fatherhood of God from Origen to Athanasius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 18 –19, on Origen’s insistence that the biblical term “invisible” (ajovrato~) in Col. 1 : 15 (also implied by John 1:18 “No one has ever seen God”) is synonymous with the Greek philosophical (but nonbiblical) term “incorporeal” (ajswvmato~). Referring to On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973),1.1.8, Widdicombe observes that Origen argues that the Son does not “see” but rather “knows” the Father. That God is incorporeal (ajswvmato~) is fundamental to Origen’s theology—see esp. Prin. 1.1; Comm. Jn. 13.20.5; Cels. 6.69 –72. See also Guy Stroumsa, “The Incorporeality of God: Context and Implications of Origen’s Position,” Religion 13 (1983): 45–58, which connects Origen’s commitment to God’s incorporeality to his allegorical hermeneutic. Widdicombe, 16, observes that the Platonist Origen could not “conceive of a non-material body” and that for him, “the attribution of corporeality to God entails also the unacceptable attribution of materiality, corruptibility, and divisibility,” referring to On Prayer 22.3: [It is necessary] to remove a mean conception of God held by those who consider that he is locally “in heaven,” and to prevent anyone from saying that God is in a place after the manner of a body (from which it follows that he is a body)—a tenet which leads to the most impious opinions, namely, to suppose that he is divisible, material, corruptible. For every body is divisible, material, corruptible.

22. Comm. Cant. 3.12. 23. Cf. Trigg, Origen (New York: Routledge, 1998), 41, commenting on Origen’s Dialogue with Heraclides: The Dialogue ends with Origen explaining his theological anthropology in response to a question “Is the soul the blood?” In this discussion Origen identifies the inner and outer human beings spoken of by Paul in 2 Corinthians 4 : 16 and Romans 7 : 22 with the two creation narratives in Genesis. Genesis 1 : 26, where human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, narrates the creation of the inner human being, and Genesis 2 : 7, where God formed the first man from the dust of the earth,

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the creation of the outer human being. Of these the first, by virtue of being in God’s image, is “immaterial, superior to all bodily existence.” Therefore, in answer to the original question, Origen sets forth the principle of homonymy: Just as the outer human being has the same name as the inner, so also do the parts of his body, with the result that each part of the outer human being has a name corresponding to a part of the inner human being. [Dia. Her. 16] This inner human being also has spiritual senses corresponding to the senses of the outer human being and may undergo a spiritual death corresponding to but more serious than the death of the outer human being.

24. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (1953; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See esp. pt. 1, ch. 1, sec. 6, pp. 349 – 92: “The Eros Type in Alexandrian Theology.” See also John M. Rist, Eros and Psyche: Studies in Plato, Plotinus, and Origen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964); Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ann E. Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Patricia Cox Miller, “Pleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure: Eros and Language in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54 (1986): 241– 53. On the polemic against allegorical reading by Protestant reformers and their followers, and the way the assault on allegory has been expressed in an ongoing polemic between Protestants and Roman Catholics, see Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianity and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 25. See L. A. Kosman, “Platonic Love,” in Facets of Plato’s Philosophy, ed. W. H. Werkmeister (Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1976): 53 – 69. See also Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 14: “As well as demonstrating that Plato did not wish to drive a wedge between form and appearance, the strongly positive view of methexis (participation) in the Phaedrus frees him from the charge of otherworldliness and total withdrawal from physicality, for the philosophic ascent does not result in a “loss” of love for particular beautiful things, since the particular participates in beauty itself.” Cf. also Pickstock, 15: “Although the good remains other from all being, including the other forms themselves, and is seen in distinction from all mere onta, yet it is within everything, and is seen in distinction from each single being only insofar as it shines out from within them.” 26. See Origen Prin.1.8.4 on the place of the body in the preexistence, fall, and return of souls. Citations are to Butterworth’s English translation, occasionally modified in light of the Greek and Latin texts in Die Principiis, ed. Paul Koetschau, Origenes Werke, vol. 5 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913). 27. Comm. Cant., prologue 1. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid.

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31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., prologue 4. Quotations from the Song of Songs are italicized in Lawson’s translation. 33. Origen, Comm. Jn. 2.10. Citations are to the English translation in Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John: Books 1–10 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1989) and Commentary on the Gospel According to John: Books 13 –32 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1993), both trans. Ronald E. Heine, occasionally modified in light of the Greek text in Der Johanneskommentar, ed. Erwin Preuschen, Origenes Werke, vol. 4 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903). 34. Prin. 2.4.3. 35. Origen, Cels. 1.48. Citations are to the English translation by Henry Chadwick in Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), occasionally modified in light of the Greek text in Gegen Celsus, ed. Paul Koetschau, Origenes Werke, vols. 1–2 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1899). 36. Comm. Jn. 2.10. 37. Cf. Prin. 1.1.9 on the “pure in heart” seeing God. Here Origen explains his idea of spiritual senses corresponding to physical senses. If historical identity becomes a matter of textual identity (conformity of types) for Origen, that textual identity is made real by borrowing from the body, in the form of spiritual senses: “For the names of the organs of sense are often applied to the soul,” and we speak of the soul “as using all the other bodily organs, which are transferred from their corporeal significance and applied to the faculties of the soul.” 38. Cels. 1.48. 39. Although written by inspired writers like Moses, Scripture is, by virtue of that inspiration, more fundamentally authored by God. This does not mean that the human author is simply a passive vehicle for the Spirit’s dictation. Rather, the Spirit transforms the would-be author, granting him special knowledge of the divine (the prophets who “tasted and smelt, so to speak, with a sense which was not sensible,” were able to do so because “they touched the Word by faith so that an emanation came from him to them which healed them” [Cels. 1.48]). So Moses can be called a “distinguished orator” because he writes a text with morally useful legislation for the multitude of Israelites, but it also conceals a deeper meaning for those “few who are able to read with more understanding” (Cels. 1.18). For example, Moses’ account of the division of nations in Genesis is for the masses, but the educated few will understand it as an account of how souls become embodied (Cels. 5.29). Yet the divine Spirit is nonetheless a more “distinguished orator” than Moses, for in writing in such a rhetorically sophisticated way, Moses simply executes the Spirit’s own compositional intention. 40. Prin. 4.2.7 – 8. 41. Ibid., 4.2.8. 42. Cf. Origen, Commentary on Psalms 1–25, 4 (from Trigg, Origen, 71):

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The wisdom of God has permeated the whole of Scripture even to the individual letter. This is indeed why the Savior said: “Not one iota or one stroke will pass away from the law, until everything comes to be” (Mt. 5 : 18). For just as the divine skill in the fabrication of the world appears not only in sky, sun, moon, and stars—all of these being bodies through which it courses—but it has acted on earth in the same way even in the meanest material object, since even the bodies of the tiniest creatures are not despised by the Artisan, and even less the souls present in them, each of which receives in itself a particular property, a saving principle in an irrational being. Nor does the Artisan despise the earth’s plants, since he is present in each of them with respect to their roots, leaves, possible fruits, and different qualities. So with regard to everything recorded by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit we accept that, since divine providence has endowed the human race with a superhuman wisdom by means of the Scriptures, he has, so to speak, sowed traces of wisdom as saving oracles, in so far as possible, in each letter.

43. See Jean Daniélou, “∆Akolouqiva chez Grégoire de Nysse,” Revue des Sciences religieuses 27 (1953): 219 – 49. For Gregory’s use of the term in allegorical exegesis in ways much like Origen’s, see Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 1.39, 42, 51. 44. Prin. 4.2.8. 45. Ibid., 4.2.6. 46. Ibid., Prin. 4.2.9. This is the opposite seduction from that which Boyarin attributes to allegorical reading. Origen worries that the sensible features of a text will detract from its meaning, whereas Boyarin worries that nonsensible meaning will detract from the sensible features of the text. 47. Ibid., 4.2.9. 48. See Cels. 4.48. 49. Prin. 4.2.9. 50. Comm. Jn. 10.300. 51. Prin. 4.2.9. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 4.3.5. 55. Comm. Cant., prologue 2. See also Prin. 1.1.9: “The names of the organs of sense are often applied to the soul.” 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid.,3.12. 59. Comm. Cant., prologue 2. Widdicombe, Fatherhood of God, 27, notes that Origen “makes a contrast between the goodness found in the Trinity and that found in other entities” (Prin. 1.2.13). 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Prin. 2.8.3. Origen derives yuchv (soul) from yucevsqai (to become cold).

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chapter 3 1. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 4.40, ed. Ernest Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 493. 2. Ibid., 491. 3. Hippolytus, Treatise on the Passover, from Pierre Nautin, Homélies paschales (Paris: Cerf, 1950), 1: “Une homélie inspirée du Traité sur la Pâque d’Hippolyte,” quoted in Origen, Treatise on the Passover and Dialogue of Origen with Heraclides and his Fellow Bishops on the Father, the Son and the Soul, trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 87 n. 16. 4. Comm. Jn. 28.237. 5. Ibid., 10.110. 6. Ibid., 10.67. See parallel discussion of John 11.55–56 in Comm. Jn. 28.224 ff. Modern biblical scholars would identify the phrase “of the Jews” as one among many instances in which the evangelist has given expression to the increasing conflict between church and synagogue at the time the gospel was composed. The evangelist has Jesus refer anachronistically to “the Jews” throughout this gospel. 7. Ibid., 10.69 –73. 8. Ibid., 10.73; emphasis added. 9. Ibid., 10.75–76; emphasis added. 10. Ibid., 10.77 – 80. 11. Ibid., 10.83. 12. Cf. Daniélou, Origen, 152: “Thus, the killing of Christ in the earthly Jerusalem by the leading men of the earthly city is represented as the essential condition for the building of the Heavenly Jerusalem and the glorification of Christ by its leaders and scribes. The transition (diavbasi~ ⫽ Pasch, Passover) from the earthly city to the heavenly, from Israel to the Church, from the letter to the spirit, is seen to hinge on the drama of the Passion.” 13. Comm. Jn. 10.85. 14. Ibid., 10.86. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 10.87. 17. Prin. 4.2.2; emphasis added. 18. Comm. Jn. 10.92. 19. Origen, Pasch. 13.35–14.13. See Comm. Jn. 6.271 for remarks regarding Christ as the lamb of God in John 1:29 in relation to Lev. 5 : 6 –7, 18: “But if someone should ask what the saint will do between dawn and evening [the time during which the two lambs are sacrificed on the altar according to Leviticus], let him infer the principle from those matters related to the cult, and then follow [ajkolouqeivtw] it in these matters too” (see also Comm. Jn. 6.272). 20. Comm. Jn. 10.92. 21. Ibid., 10.93. 22. Ibid., 10.96. 23. Ibid., 10.93, quoting Exod. 12:9 –10.

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24. Pasch. 26.5– 8. See also Pasch. 36.34 for the man who “eats the passover” (to; pavsca trwvgwn), on which Daly, Treatise on the Passover, 100 n. 40, comments as follows: “To pascha trogon—‘chewing’ the passover” (because it uses the same verb as in Jn. 6.54 –58) suggests an intentional reference to the sacramental Eucharist. This does not exclude the possible, indeed likely, simultaneous validity of a spiritualized meaning for the words. But the converse would also seem to be true: in those numerous places in the Treatise on the Passover where Origen speaks in a spiritualized sense of eating the flesh of the Lamb, it would be rash to exclude from his fertile mind the possibility, and even intention, of a sacramental meaning. One must keep in mind that he never directly excluded the eucharistic meaning, and that in a treatise in which he often did exclude possible meanings.

25. Pasch. 33.20 –32. 26. Origen, Homily on Jeremiah 20, in Philocalia 12.1 and 2, quoted in R. P. C. Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1959), 190. Cf. Origen on “touching the flesh of the Word” through scriptural interpretation: Touching the flesh of the Word means separating his interiora one from another and expounding their dark mysteries. If I had a mind capable of doing that, I should be able to get at the heart of everything written in the Law and find a spiritual interpretation for it all. I should be able to shed the light of superior knowledge on the mystery hidden in every word. If I could teach the Church like that and leave the text free from obscurity and ambiguity, then perhaps I could be said to have touched the flesh of the Word. (Origen, Hom. Lev. 4.8, quoted in Daniélou, Origen, 182)

27. Origen, Philocalia 15.19, attributed to Contra Celsum and quoted by Hanson, Allegory and Event, 193. Cf. also Origen, Comm. Matt. 15.3: The Word “is as it were incarnate in the Bible,” quoted by Hanson, 194, where Hanson remarks: “Nothing could assure us more eloquently of Origen’s conviction of the divine status and authorship of the Bible than this startling doctrine of the Bible as the extension of the Incarnation.” 28. See Comm. Jn. 10.99. 29. Ibid., 10. 102. 30. Ibid., 10.103. 31. Ibid., 10.104. 32. Cf. Pasch. 26.5–27.5: If the lamb is Christ and Christ is the Logos [Word], what is the flesh of the divine words if not the divine Scriptures? This is what is to be eaten neither raw nor cooked with water. Should, therefore, some cling just to the words themselves, they would eat the flesh of the Savior raw, and in partaking of this raw flesh would merit death and not life—it is after the manner of beasts and not humans that they are eating his flesh—since the Apostle teaches us that the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (2 Cor. 3.6). If the Spirit is given us from God and God is a devouring fire (Deut. 4.24; Heb. 12.29), the Spirit is also fire, which is what the Apostle is aware of in exhorting us to be aglow with the Spirit (Rom. 12.11). Therefore the Holy Spirit is rightly called fire, which it is necessary for us to receive in order to have converse with the

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flesh of Christ, I mean the divine Scriptures, so that, when we have roasted them with this divine fire, we may eat them roasted with fire. For the words are changed by such fire, and we will see that they are sweet and nourishing.

See also Pasch. 28.-3 –29.9: “For the Jews partake of them [the words of Scripture] raw when they rely on just the letter of the Scriptures. But if through the Spirit they see the true circumcision, if there really is a circumcision, and the true Sabbath, and work while it is day before the night comes, when no one can work (John 9.4), they are already eating the word cooked with the Spirit.” 33. Comm. Jn. 10.107. See also Pasch. 30.-15–32.13, in which Origen emphasizes the way that the body of Christ (i.e., Scripture) meets the spiritual needs of many different readers, depending on what part of the body is eaten. But he also concludes the passage on a note of unity or harmony of the parts with the whole. 34. Ibid., 10.108. See also Origen, Pasch. 32.20 –28: Just as the mysteries of the passover which are celebrated in the Old Testament are superseded [sublata sunt] by the truth of the New Testament, so too will the mysteries of the New Testament, which we must now celebrate in the same way, not be necessary in the resurrection, a time which is signified by the morning in which nothing will be left, and what does remain of it will be burned with fire.

35. Ibid., 10.109. 36. Ibid., 28.241. 37. Ibid., 28.243. 38. Ibid., 10.109. This sort of statement reveals the inadequacy of unnuanced formulations like those of Henri Crouzel, Origen, trans. A. S. Worrall (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 107: As far as the Old Testament is concerned, its literal message is out of date, its letter “kills.” The ceremonial and legal precepts have been abolished. The sack of Jerusalem by Titus marked the end. The old cult was a pattern that lost its usefulness when the new cult was instituted. Jerusalem and its temple, the pattern, were destroyed so that nothing should destract from what they prefigured, the Church.

39. Pasch. 3.27 –30. 40. Prin. 1.6.4: “And if anyone thinks that in this ‘end’ material or bodily nature will utterly perish, he can provide no answer whatever to my difficulty, how beings so numerous and mighty can exist and live their life without bodies; since we believe that to exist without material substance and apart from any association with a bodily element is a thing that belongs only to the nature of God, that is, of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Perhaps somebody else will say that we must think of it as being like the ether, as it were of a heavenly purity and clearness. But exactly how it will be is known to God alone, and to those who through Christ and the Holy Spirit are the ‘friends’ of God.” Cf. Prin. 2.6.7 on “shadow” related to 2 Cor. 5.16: “The apostle also, speaking in regard to the law, says that they who hold to the circumcision of the flesh ‘serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things’ [Heb. 8.5]. . . . If then both

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the law which is on earth is a ‘shadow,’ and we are to live among the nations in the ‘shadow of Christ,’ we must consider whether the truth of all these shadows will not be learned in that revelation when, no longer ‘through a mirror and in a riddle’ but ‘face to face,’ all the saints shall be counted worthy to behold the glory of God and the causes and truth of things. And seeing that a pledge of this truth has already been received through the Holy Spirit the apostle said, ‘Even if we have formerly known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth we know him so no more.’” 41. Comm. Jn. 10.117. 42. Ibid., 10.118. 43. Cf. Origen, Homily on Jeremiah 39, quoted by Daniélou, Origen, 183 – 84: Every plant is useful for some particular purpose, some for the health of the body, others for other ends. Yet not everyone knows what a given plant is useful for; the only people who do are those who have acquired special knowledge about plants. Botanists can tell what plant to take, whereabouts on the body to apply it and how to prepare it so as to make it serviceable to those using it. Saints are like spiritual botanists. They gather all the letters they find in the Scriptures, even the iotas; they ascertain the special virtue of each and the use it is good for, and they see that nothing in Scripture is unnecessary. If you want another illustration of the same thing, here is a further comparison. Every limb in our bodies was given a particular function by God, the Creator, but not everyone can tell what this special virtue and use is in every single case. Those who have studied anatomy under a doctor can see what purpose every limb, down to the smallest, was created for by Providence. Think of Scripture, then, as the sum-total of all the plants in existence or as one single body, the perfect body of the Logos. If you are not a botanist expert on the flora of the Scriptures or an anatomist competent to dissect the writings of the prophets, do not for that reason think that there is anything unnecessary in the Scriptures. Blame yourself for not finding the meaning of the text; do not blame the Holy Scriptures.

44. Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 32 n. 3. On the status of the body in ancient Christianity, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 45. Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 33 n. 4. 46. Prin. 4.2.1–2. 47. Ibid., 4.2.4. 48. See Karen Jo Torjesen, “‘Body,’ ‘Soul,’ and ‘Spirit’ in Origen’s Theory of Exegesis,” Anglican Theological Review 67, 1 (1985): 17 –30. 49. Prin. 4.2.4. 50. Plato, Phaedrus 276A. 51. Origen, Prin. 4.2.4. For the reduction of writing to dialectic, and the replacement of narrative with mathematical syntax, see Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), and Dawson, “Plato’s Soul and the Body of the Text in Philo and Origen,” in Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, ed. Jon Whitman (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 89 –107.

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52. Prin. 4.2.5. 53. Origen, On Prayer 31.3, quoted in Henry Chadwick, “Origen, Celsus, and the Resurrection of the Body,” Harvard Theological Review 41, 2 (April 1948): 96. 54. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200 –1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 64, concludes, along with a number of Origen scholars, that “Origen saw himself treading a middle way between, on the one hand, Jews, millenarian Christians, and pagans who (he thought) understood bodily resurrection as the reanimation of dead flesh and, on the other hand, Gnostics and Hellenists who (he thought) denied any kind of ultimate reality either to resurrection or to body. Using the seed metaphor from 1 Corinthians 15, the reference to our angelic life in heaven from Matthew 22.29 –33, and the suggestion in 2 Corinthians 5.4 that we are tents or tabernacles that must take on a covering of incorruption, Origen argued that we will have a body in heaven but a spiritual and luminous one.” 55. Cels. 7.33. 56. Ibid., 7.34. 57. Origen, Fragment on Psalm 1.5, in Methodius, De resurrectione 1.22 – 23, in Methodius, ed. G. Nathanael Bonwetsch (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1917), 244 – 48 (Bonwetsch translates an old Slavonic translation of Methodius’s treatise and includes Greek fragments) and Epiphanius, Haereses 2.1.64. 14 –15, PG 41 (Paris, 1858), cols. 1089 –92; translated by Jon F. Dechow, in Dogma and Mysticism in Early Christianity: Epiphanius of Cyprus and the Legacy of Origen (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1988), 373 –74, as quoted in Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 64. 58. Meth. Res. 1.24.4. 59. Cf. Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 4, on the contemporary resonances of this formulation: As advocates of the “social construction” of the body, Origenists explored the extent of the body’s transformability both here and in the hereafter, an exploration that linked ascetic practice with theories of the afterlife. More radically, Origen’s view of the body’s constant flux suggested that there is no such thing as “the body”: physiology itself conspires to support the claims of social constructivists. Yet if, as Origenists believed, the origin and final destiny of the rational creature was bodiless, in what does the truth of the “self” lie?

60. Origen, Fragment on Psalm 1.5, quoted in Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 65– 66. Bynum, 66, comments as follows: “Origen’s body is, as [Henri] Crouzel has argued, a substratum whose identity is guaranteed by a corporeal eidos. This eidos is a combination of Platonic form, or plan, with Stoic seminal reason (an internal principle of growth or development)” (referring to Crouzel, “La doctrine origénienne du corps ressuscité,” Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 31 [1980]: 175–200, 241– 66). A pattern that organizes the flux of matter and yet has its own inherent capacity for growth, it is (although I introduce the

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modern analogy with extreme hesitation) a bit like a genetic code.” See further Henri Crouzel, “Les critiques adressées par Méthode et ses contemporains à la doctrine origénienne du corps ressuscité,” Gregorianum 53 (1972): 679 –714, esp. pp 691– 692. 61. Crouzel, Origen, 255; see also Dechow, Dogma and Mysticism, pp. 318, 382. For a discussion of Origen’s use of the catgeory of eidos in relation to earlier Stoic and Aristotelian efforts to distinguish between the enduring and transient features of substances, see Alain Le Boulluec, “De la croissance selon les Stoïciens à la Résurrection selon Origène,” Revue des études grecques 88 (1975): 143 –55. 62. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 68. 63. Ibid.: “Origen’s heady sense of the potency and dynamism of body remained enormously attractive, particularly to Eastern theologians, over the next 150 years. Some (such as Gregory of Nyssa) spoke with positive disdain about the survival of certain of our organs in heaven but used startlingly naturalistic images for the resurrection. Nonetheless, something very deep in third- and fourth-century assumptions was unwilling to jettison material continuity in return for philosophical consistency. Identity, it appears, was not finally the question, for that question Origen could answer. The question was physicality: how will every particle of our bodies be saved? When Methodius of Olympus launched a massive attack on Origen’s theory in the later third century, even the way in which he misunderstood the position he refuted indicates how far Origen’s corporeal eidos was, for him, an answer to the wrong issue.” See ibid., 68 –71, for an account of Methodius’s own position. See also Crouzel, “Critiques.” For Epiphanius’s use of Methodius’s (distorted) understanding of Origen’s views for later fourth-century controversial purposes, see Clark, Origenist Controversy, 92 –94.

chapter 4 1. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” Istanbuler Schriften 5, Neue Dantestudien (1944): 11–71, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, ed. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–76; id., Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der Abendländischen Literatur (Bern: A. Francke, 1946), trans. Willard R. Trask as Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).Citations are to the English translations, occasionally modified in light of the original German texts. For a brief overview of Auerbach’s life and works, see Jan Ziolkowski, “Forword,” in Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), ix–xxxii; also the list of works cited on xxxiii– xxxix, and the chronology, 393 – 457. For Auerbach’s dismissal from his German academic post and subsequent career in exile, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress’: Erich Auerbach’s Everydays,” in Literary

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History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lehrer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996): 13 –35. 2. Auerbach, Literary Language, 6: “The ensuing fragments—like my work as a whole—spring from the same presuppositions as theirs [the work of Karl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Leo Spitzer]. My work, however, shows a much clearer awareness of the European crisis. At an early date, and from then on with increasing urgency, I ceased to look upon the European possibilities of Romance philology as mere possibilities and came to regard them as a task specific to our time—a task which could not have been envisaged yesterday and will no longer be conceivable tomorrow. European civilization is approaching the term of its existence; its history as a distinct entity would seem to be at an end, for already it is beginning to be engulfed in another, more comprehensive unity. Today, however, European civilization is still a living reality within the range of our perception. Consequently—so it seemed to me when I wrote these articles and so I still believe—we must today attempt to form a lucid and coherent picture of this civilization and its unity.” See further Claus Uhlig, “Auerbach’s ‘Hidden’(?) Theory of History,” in Literary History, ed. Lehrer, 36 – 49 (esp. 42 – 43). 3. See Michael Holquist, “The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 371–91. 4. Erich Auerbach, “Epilegomena zu Mimesis,” 10 n. 12, in Romanische Forschungen 65 (1954), referred to by Ziolkowski in Auerbach, Literary Language, x n. 1. For Roncalli’s own conceptions of history, mimesis and Christianity, which differed from Auerbach’s, see Karl F[rederick] Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 411–12. 5. I am restating Nietzsche’s well-known illustration of the formation of concepts in his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 83. 6. See, e.g., Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); id., Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 7. Auerbach, “Figura,” 29. 8. Ibid., 53. 9. Ibid., 28 –29. 10. Ibid., 29. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 30, quoting Tertullian, De anima 43. 14. Auerbach, Mimesis, 48; emphasis added. 15. Ibid., 48 – 49; emphasis added. 16. What remains odd in this formulation is Auerbach’s assumption that

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ecclesiological meaning (the Church as spiritual mother) is somehow less concrete (i.e., “nonliteral”) than the christological meaning (Jesus’ death on the cross). Boyarin also displays a similar tendency to regard the Church more as an idea than a community of embodied persons. 17. Auerbach, Mimesis, 49; emphasis added. 18. Auerbach, “Figura,” 32. 19. Cf. ibid., 71: With Dante, unlike modern poets, the more fully the figure is interpreted and the more closely it is integrated with the eternal plan of salvation, the more real it becomes. And for him, unlike the ancient poets of the underworld, who represented earthly life as real and the life after death as shadow, for him the other world is the true reality, while this world is only umbra futurorum—though indeed the umbra is the prefiguration of the transcendent reality and must recur fully in it.

20. Ibid., 33, quoting Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 5.19. 21. Ibid., 34. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 53. 24. Ibid., retranslated. 25. Ibid., translation slightly altered. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., translation slightly altered. With the mention of natura, Auerbach refers to his earlier discussion (“Figura,” 37) of the following passage from Augustine (City of God 20:14): When the judgment shall be finished, then this heaven and this earth shall cease to be, and a new heaven and a new earth shall begin. But this world will not be utterly consumed; it will only undergo a change; and therefore the Apostle says [in 1 Cor. 7:31]: The fashion (figura) of this world passeth away, and I would have you to be without care. The fashion (figura) goes away, not the nature.

Auerbach combines reflections on Christian eschatology with certain ideas from Vico, whose works he studied and translated early in his career. See Timothy Bahti, “Vico, Auerbach and Literary History,” Philological Quarterly 60, 2 (Spring 1981): 252 n. 7. On Auerbach and Vico, see also Uhlig in Literary History, ed. Lehrer, 37 – 40. 28. Auerbach, “Figura,” 54, retranslated. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 234 n. 37. 31. Ibid., 55; emphasis added. 32. Auerbach, Mimesis, 49. Cf. Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida, 44 – 45, on Husserl. Like Origen, Husserl is worried that the sensuous character of the sign will thwart its ability to convey its “meaning-intention.” This is what Origen might call a “merely carnal reading.” Against Husserl, Derrida (like Boyarin in Boyarin’s appeal to the nonhermeneutical character of midrash) tries to “wrest the concept of meaning away from the moment of intuition in order to attach it essentially to the moment of signification” (47). Derrida thus asks:

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“What is the essence of signification as such, thought short of its teleological determination as aimed at objective fulfillment?” (47). Derrida seeks to treat language “apart from fulfillment in knowledge” (48). Auerbach’s worry about abstract meaning anticipates Boyarin’s postmodern resistance to Husserlian accounts of meaning as essentially uncontaminated by the sensible features of language. 33. Auerbach, Mimesis, 43. 34. Ibid., 45. 35. Ibid., 41. 36. Ibid. 37. Auerbach’s interpretation is recognizably Bultmannian. For Auerbach’s relation to Bultmann, see Morrison, Mimetic Tradition, 409 –10, who comments that Auerbach’s “long friendship with the theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, of which Auerbach was justifiably proud, had a strong intellectual content” (Morrison, 410 n. 21, referring to Romanische Forschungen 65 (1954): 10 n. 13). Morrison, 410, continues: “One thing divided Auerbach from Schleiermacher and Bultmann. He practices Geistesgeschichte, one reviewer observed, but he had lost faith in Geist.” My thanks to Jim Buckley for pointing out this reference. 38. Auerbach, Mimesis, 41. 39. Ibid., 42. 40. Auerbach, Mimesis, 42, remarks in passing that “Harnack in discussing the denial scene once used the term Pendelausschlag.” Auerbach’s interpretation of Peter agrees with Adolf von Harnack’s, as Auerbach himself observes in Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 12 –13; Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1929). Auerbach quotes Harnack from “Die Verklärungsgeschichte Jesu, der Bericht des Paulus (I Cor. 15:3 ff.) und die beiden Christusvisionen des Petrus,” Sitzungsbericht der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Klasse, 1922): Harnack called Peter’s denial of Christ “that terrible leftward swing of the pendulum” and believed that in conjunction with the memory of the transfiguration (Mark 8:27 –29), it provided the psychological basis for the vision of St. Peter on which the Church was founded, for it may, he says, “have resulted in an equally violent swing to the right.” But the denial and vision of Peter, this evident paradox, are only the most conspicuous example of the contradictory character that dominates the story of Jesus from the beginning. From the very first it moves between malignant scoffers and boundless believers, in an atmosphere strangely compounded of the sublime and the ridiculous; the admiration and emulation of his disciples do not prevent them from misunderstanding him frequently, and their relations with him are marked by constant unrest and tension.

41. 42. 43. 44.

Auerbach, Mimesis, 42. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 42 – 43.

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45. Ezek. 18:31–32. 46. Auerbach, Mimesis, 43. 47. Ibid., 44. 48. Ibid., 48. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 44. 51. Ibid., 49. 52. Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, 14; emphasis added. Citations are to the English translation, occasionally modified in light of the German text in Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt. 53. See Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the “New Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 57 –58, on Vico’s notion of providence, which informs Auerbach’s thinking about Christian eschatology. Vico described a transcendent providence, which equals a “divine, legislative mind” with the aim of preserving life on earth, as well as an immanent providence, which equals certain features of the social structure, especially the social function of legislation (i.e., common sense or the human capacity to reach social decisions in relation to each other). From the presence of immanent transcendence, one can infer the existence of the transcendent providence. Pompa writes as follows: The operations of immanent providence are not therefore the necessary consequences of the nature of a transcendent and necessary God. . . . immanent providence is a fundamental category in the Scienza Nuova and . . . its workings are largely to be identified with those of common sense. But the common sense referred to here is the sequence of communal decisions men reach in the light of their normative beliefs as affected by their historical, social and institutional situations. It is not an a priori sequence, governed by some kind of metaphysical necessity. (58)

Pompa, 60, adds that “Vico’s remarks about the rôle of providence in its immanent and transcendent senses represent an attempt to present what is basically a naturalistic theory in a religious light.” 54. Auerbach, Mimesis, 45. 55. For a recent analysis of Auerbach that argues for the thoroughgoing figurative and unintentionally self-subverting character of Auerbach’s figura, see Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ch. 5, “Auerbach’s Mimesis: Figural Structure and Historical Narrative,” 137 –55. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature, ed. Gregory Jay and David Miller (University of Alabama Press, 1985), 124 – 45. Bahti argues that Auerbach’s conception of figural reading cannot avoid the triumph of the figurative over the figural because Auerbach’s own sense of ancient Christian figura is in fact built upon a conventional literary notion of figurative language. In my view, Bahti can sustain this argument only by building into Auerbach’s characterizations of early Christian figural reading an internal self-subversion that Auerbach himself suggests is avoidable. For example, Auerbach insists that ancient Christian figural readers claimed that the

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fulfillment of a figure is truth. However, Bahti redescribes this claim, arguing that Auerbach regards the fulfillment as “the truth of the figure.” Auerbach’s point is that for Christian figural readers, the fulfillment—the second, historically real person or event—is the truth because for them the truth has become history or flesh. As truth, the fulfillment is therefore not simply, as Bahti suggests, a “vehicle” of something else (e.g., meaning) that is “situated in” it, but rather remains carnal and historical. But Bahti argues that the historical reality of the figure is subordinated to the fulfillment because the fulfillment is “the truth” that makes the figure “less than true.” When Bahti thereby transforms Auerbach’s claim that the fulfillment is the truth into the very different notion that the truth is the truth of the figura, he posits a fundamental “opposition between the figura as historical sign and the later figural truth (veritas) that ‘fulfills’ it, or that reveals the ‘true’ figurative meaning of that first figure” (Bahti, Allegories of History, 144). But this formulation reverses the clear intent of Auerbach’s claim that the event is a figura precisely in reference to the fulfillment cloaked within it. The fulfillment is not the truth of a figure that is itself thereby “less than true.” On the contrary, amazingly enough, the figure already possesses the truth, a truth that has not even “arrived” in its own historical reality, independent of the historical reality of the figure. Given the distinction Quintilian makes between tropes (words that substitute one meaning for another) and figures (indirect meaning expressed through the direct literal use of language), Bahti construes Auerbach’s notion of figural reading as though it were fundamentally a matter of tropes, while Auerbach himself aligns the procedure with Quintilian’s notion of figures. By insisting on the figurative subversion of figural relations, Bahti’s interpretation of Auerbach’s notion of figura denies that the truth has become history or flesh. Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 6 n. 12, shares that denial, insisting that “the incarnation of God constitutes not an affirmation of corporeality but rather a hypostatization of dualism.” Bahti’s anti-incarnational stance echoes that of his mentor Paul de Man (see Bahti’s own opening remark on allegory in Allegories of History, 8, where he aligns his conception of allegory with deconstruction). On the relation between de Manian deconstruction and antiincarnationalism, see Dawson, Literary Theory, ch. 2. 56. Auerbach, Mimesis, 48. 57. Ibid., 49. 58. Ibid., 8. 59. Auerbach, “Figura,” 71. 60. Ibid. This concept is central to Christian notions of how divine agency founds and enhances human freedom and identity. For a consideration of this Christian perspective in light of Bhaktin’s conception of literary authorship, see Dawson, Literary Theory, ch. 3. 61. This point links the “Figura” essay to Mimesis; cf. Auerbach on “the figure in the fulfillment” (“Figura,” 32) with his judgment that Homer fails to

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open up literary foreground and background and thus fails to achieve the realism of biblical narrative that depicts a “present lying open to the depths of the past” (Mimesis, 7) . 62. See Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, 178: With Dante the historical individual was reborn in his manifest unity of body and spirit; he was both old and new, rising from long oblivion with greater power and scope than ever before. And although the Christian eschatology that had given birth to this new vision of man was to lose its unity and vitality, the European mind was so permeated with the ideas of human destiny that even in very un-Christian artists it preserved the Christian force and tension which were Dante’s gift to posterity. . . . The perception of history and immanent reality arrived at in the Comedy through an eschatological vision, flowed back into real history, filling [erfüllte] it with the blood of authentic truth, for an awareness had been born that a man’s concrete earthly life is encompassed in his ultimate fate and that the event in its authentic, concrete, complete uniqueness is important for the part it plays in God’s judgment. From that center man’s earthly, historical reality derived new life and value, and even the Comedy where, not without difficulty, the turbulent new forces were confined within an eschatological frame, gives us an intimation of how quickly and violently they would break loose. With Petrarch and Boccaccio the historical world acquired a fully immanent autonomy, and this sense of the self-sufficiency of earthly life spread like a fructifying stream to the rest of Europe—seemingly quite estranged from its eschatological origin and yet secretly linked with it through man’s irrevocable bond with his concrete historical fate.

63. Boccaccio is the first example Auerbach treats (in the chapter immediately following the Dante chapter). See Auerbach, Mimesis, 224: “Without Dante such a wealth of nuances and perspectives would hardly have been possible. But of the figural-Christian conception which pervaded Dante’s imitation of the earthly and human world and which gave it power and depth, no trace is to be found in Boccaccio’s book. Boccaccio’s characters live on earth and only on earth.” 64. Auerbach, “Figura,” 76. 65. See also Mimesis, 48 – 49. 66. Auerbach, “Figura,” 28: The title of part 2 is “Figura in the Phenomenal Prophecy of the Church Fathers.” 67. Ibid. Auerbach undoubtedly has more interest in Tertullian as a Latin author than in the Greek-writing Paul because of his interest in the Latin antecedents to European Romance languages. 68. Ibid., 30. Auerbach at once distinguishes the “desire to interpret in this way” from the “aim of this sort of interpretation,” which “was to show that the persons and events of the Old Testament were prefigurations of the New Testament and its history of salvation.” He thereby implies that one might be motivated by different, even incompatible, desires to show such prefigurations. 69. Ibid., 49. 70. Acts 8 :30 –35. 71. Auerbach, “Figura,” 50.

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72. Ibid. Compare this Pauline notion of prefiguration as “mere” shadow to Dante’s use of figura, in which the prefiguration “recur[s]” fully in its transcendent fulfillment (“Figura,” 71). 73. Ibid., 50 –51 (German, 44). Manheim translates aufgehoben und abgelöst as simply “annulled.” In one respect, this translation is accurate: Auerbach does not seem to use aufheben with its double meaning of “cancel” and “preserve,” as does Hegel; rather, aufheben always seems to mean just “cancel,” and Auerbach tends to add terms, as he does here with ablössen, to make that meaning clear. Auerbach’s usage of aufheben as “cancel” or “annul” is clearest later in the essay, 73 (German, 68), where he comments that the historical reality of the figure in Dante’s art is “not annulled, but confirmed and fulfilled [nicht aufgehoben, sondern bestätigt und erfüllt] by the deeper meaning.” Here it seems clear that aufheben has no connotation of preservation. By distinguishing aufheben from ablössen with different English translations, Manheim may be minimizing the particular quality of Auerbach’s clear displeasure with Pauline interpretation. Paul’s notion of fulfillment results not only in “annulment”; there is a further connotation: the law is “set aside,” or “detached.” Auerbach’s phrase suggests that Paul not only renders the law without further import but that he sets it aside from his own concerns. 74. Ibid., 50 –51. 75. See Auerbach, “Figura,” 28, translation slightly altered, for the title of part 2: “Figura as Phenomenal Prophecy of the Church Fathers” (“figura als Realprophetie bei den Kirchenvätern,” [German ed., 27]). 76. Auerbach, “Figura,” 30. 77. Ibid., 51, translation slightly altered, emphasis added. Auerbach’s meaning depends on the force one gives to zugleich. Manheim translates it as “both,” but this misses (or at least refuses to make a decision about) what I take Auerbach’s key point to be—namely, that it is just the peculiar character of Pauline fulfillment to result in annulment; “simultaneously” is intended to open up this reading as a likely possibility while not making it definitive. Just as abgelöst was used to intensify the meaning of aufgehoben as “annul” earlier, so here the paradox of a fulfillment that cancels is stressed by adding erfüllt: Pauline interpretation fulfills and thereby cancels the law (compare this to Boyarin’s point about Pauline exclusion by inclusion). Commentators who treat Auerbach’s remarks on figura from a purely literary and philosophical point of view, without considering his complex response to different moments (such as the Pauline) within the Christian tradition, mistake Auerbach’s precise distinctions for inconsistency. Bahti, for example, is so intent on relating Auerbach’s notion of fulfillment to the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung (which combines cancellation and preservation) that he presents Auerbach’s remark in “Figura,” 51 about Pauline interpretation (it “fulfills and annuls” (erfüllt und aufhebt) as though it stood in tension with a later remark about non-Pauline Christian figural interpretation (in which the figure is “unveil[ed] and preserv[ed]—enthüllend und bewahrend—“Figura,” 72 (quoted by Bahti, in Jay and Miller, 132.) But there is no tension between these two for-

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mulations: it is precisely the effect of Paul’s interpretation that fulfillment serves to annul what it fulfills; the opposite is consistently the case in non-Pauline interpretation, as Auerbach describes it. 78. This is not to say that Paul’s conception of figura did not persist in the tradition. Indeed, Augustine preserves much of Paul’s point of view, although in Auerbach’s view, Augustine manages overall to remain more fundamentally aligned with the figural precedent set by Tertullian. Auerbach, “Figura,” 39 – 40, regards Augustine as continuing features of Pauline figural reading: Augustine “laid more stress than others on certain passages in the Pauline epistles of which we shall have more to say later on” (39). Auerbach quotes Augustine as insisting that “the Jews of the Old Testament,” in the practice of their sacraments, “were celebrating figures of a reality to come in the future,” but Auerbach adds that Augustine also declared that “the latter-day Jews . . . refused in their obdurate blindness” to recognize the figural character of their sacrificial performances. “And here,” remarks Auerbach, 40, ominously, with an eye on contemporary events in Germany, Augustine “strikes a theme which was to run through all subsequent polemics against the Jews” (40), a point he emphasizes in a note in which he quotes from a sixteenth-century Shrovetide play: “Hear, Jew, take note and understand that the whole history of the old covenant and all the sayings of the Prophets are only a figure for the new covenant” (“Figura,” 233 n. 28; emphasis added). Although Augustine “laid more stress than others on certain passages in the Pauline epistles,” he nonetheless “took the view—which had long ago become part of the tradition—that the Old Testament was pure phenomenal prophecy” (“Figura,” 39). Insofar as Augustine departs from the figural model provided by Tertullian, he does so not because of his Paulinism but because of his Platonism: “Even though Augustine rejects abstract allegorical spiritualism and develops his whole interpretation of the Old Testament from the concrete historical reality, he nevertheless has an idealism which removes the concrete event, completely preserved as it is, from time and transposes it into a perspective of eternity” (“Figura,” 42; emphasis added). But Augustine’s Platonism does not overturn the essential hallmark of his phenomenal prophecy: the endurance of the figura in its historical integrity. 79. Auerbach, “Figura,” 52. Auerbach probably has Marcion in mind as representative of the first impulse; he clearly associates the Gnostics and the Alexandrian Christian tradition with the second. The shift of concern that Auerbach highlights here—from behavior (the keeping of Jewish law) to text (the defense of the Old Testament)—is important. In Auerbach’s discussion of figura, as we shall see later, there is a considerable conflation of history (person, event, behavior) and text. This is to be expected, since Auerbach is using an argument about how a text is treated as a way of arguing about how a certain people should be treated. His rooting of Christian figural interpretation in “Judeo-Christianity” rather than in Paul suggests a point at which history and text are united without being merged into a single entity. One marker of the conflation is his repeated use of the phrase “literal sense or historical event.” 80. Ibid., 52 –53.

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81. Ibid., 52. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 53. See Mimesis, 16, for an important discussion of this theme. 84. Auerbach, “Figura,” 52. 85. Ibid., 53. 86. Ibid. 87. See Auerbach, Mimesis, 538 –39 (on the Odyssey), 547 (on Dante), and 548 (on philology). 88. Auerbach, Mimesis, 540. 89. Ibid., 541. 90. Ibid., 540 – 41. 91. Ibid., 551. 92. Ibid., 551–52. 93. Ibid., 552. 94. Ibid.; emphasis added. 95. For the phrase, applied to the Old Testament in distinction from the Iliad, see Auerbach, Mimesis, 12. 96. Auerbach, Mimesis, 489. 97. Ibid., 552; emphasis added. 98. Ibid., 489. 99. Auerbach, Dante, 14. “Denn die inkarnierte Wahrheit hat sich, um die gefallene Menschheit zu erlösen, selbst dem Erdenschicksal ohne Vorbehalt unterworfen” (Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, 21). Cf. Mimesis, 552, where Auerbach observes that in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse and works like it, the achievement is “to put the emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself. And in the process something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice [ jeden Augenblicks, dem man sich absichtslos hingibt (German ed., 493)].” Absichtslos means “unintentional or unpremeditated”; hingeben means to “give up,” “surrender,” or “relinquish.” Auerbach suggests that works like that of Woolf teach us to live by modeling ourselves on Christ’s absolute keno¯sis: as Christ gave himself over to destiny without reserve, so we give ourselves over to the random moment without forethought or motive.

chapter 5 1. Auerbach, “Figura,” 55. 2. Ibid., 36; emphasis added. 3. Ibid., 29. 4. Comm. Jn. 10.110; translation altered slightly. 5. For the meanings of iJstovrika or iJstoriva in the ancient world, see G. W. Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 7 – 8:

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For Herodotus the word iJstoriva could mean a serious investigation or piece of research, but for the later Greeks and all the residents of the Roman empire, the word generally meant the story as it was known and told—the plot. Disruptions of history in this sense could therefore be highly disturbing, breaking the familiar patterns that linked past with present, and, at the same time, signalling changes for the future. The violation of history as plot or the rewriting of it constituted a rupture in the cultural tradition.

Bowersock, 9, seems misguided, however, when he quotes Origen as saying “‘Everyone believes . . . that the Trojan War really took place,’” but “the tradition has been seriously contaminated in his view by the appearance of fictitious stories [Cels. 1.42],” then adds: “In saying this he [Origen] reflects a general indifference to the distinction between history and myth.” Surely Origen’s remarks reveal precisely his concern for just this distinction. 6. For evidence that “occurrence” or temporal change is not central to his notion of historical reality, see Auerbach, Mimesis, 191, for remarks on Dante’s exemplary realism. Auerbach argues that Dante draws a connection between reality and history as temporal change, although in such a way as to suggest that all the benefits of the connection can continue even after the temporality has been removed: Here we face the astounding paradox of what is called Dante’s realism. Imitation of reality is imitation of the sensory experience of life on earth—among the most essential characteristics of which would seem to be its possessing a history, its changing and developing. Whatever degree of freedom the imitating artist may be granted in his work, he cannot be allowed to deprive reality of this characteristic, which is its very essence. But Dante’s inhabitants of the three realms lead a “changeless existence.” (Hegel uses this expression in his Lectures on Aesthetics in one of the most beautiful passages ever written on Dante.) Yet into this changeless existence Dante “plunges the living world of human action and endurance and more especially of individual deeds and destinies.”

Auerbach goes on to identify the heart of the paradox in the Cavalcante and Farinata episode: “The existence of the two tomb-dwellers and the scene of it are certainly final and eternal, but they are not devoid of history.” The history of which they are eternally not devoid is history as the real, not history as the temporal (at least with respect to temporality as we typically understand it, i.e., as the unfolding succession of events). 7. Auerbach, “Figura,” 36; translation altered. 8. Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, 40. See also 48 – 49, where Auerbach, commenting on the “vulgar spiritualist tendency to subordinate sensuous reality to a rational interpretation,” argues that such poets “favored a purely formal development of conceptual relations and intricate rhymes at the expense, not of feeling, which remained the substance of their poems, but of the reality of the underlying experience. Thus their rationality is spurious, capricious, and fantastic; their purpose is not to give form to a concrete reality but to devise a game of contrasts and obscure metaphors” (48). In contrast, Dante’s language appeals to a rhetoric that “does not suppress reality but forms it and holds it fast” (49).

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9. See ibid. for the use of “pure” in the characterization of Plato’s thought: Plato’s conception of “a strict, pure utopia” (4); the “pure perfection of his theory of ideas” (5). But Auerbach goes on to qualify this account: Plato overcame his own dualism, for his “love of the particular was his way to wisdom, the way described in Diotima’s monologue” (5). 10. Cf. ibid. 12: “Jesus, on the other hand, unleashed a movement which by its very nature could not remain purely spiritual [nicht rein geistig bleiben konnte]; his followers, who recognized him as the Messiah, expected the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God on earth.” 11. Ibid., 18. 12. Ibid., 19. 13. Auerbach, “Figura,” 53. 14. Note that “concreteness” is the measure of “historicity.” By the end of the passage, “concreteness” has been further specified as the psychological complexity and the indeterminacy of motive and event that are the hallmarks of “true history.” 15. Auerbach, Mimesis, 20. 16. Augustine, Confessions 11.18.23, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 17. The distinction between events and words lies at the root of the longstanding desire to contrast typology with allegory: typology has typically been defended as an account of events, while allegory is presented as a matter of (mere) words. See, e.g., Leonhard Goppelt, Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New, trans. Donald H. Madvig (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982), 6 –7: “The fundamental difference between allegory and typology is well expressed in J[ohann] Gerhard’s definition: ‘Typology consists in the comparison of facts. Allegory is not concerned with the facts but with the words from which it draws out useful and hidden doctrine.’” (Goppelt is quoting from Gerhard’s Loci theologici 1.69, as quoted in A. T. Hartmann, Die enge Verbindung des Alten Testaments mit dem Neuen: Aus rein biblischem Standpunkte [Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1831], 632). This contrast derives its force from the implication that the words with which allegory is concerned bear no intrinsic relation to the events (or “facts”) of which they are (or purport to be) the images. 18. Auerbach, Mimesis, 18 –19. 19. Auerbach, “Figura,” 47. 20. Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, 19 –20. 21. Auerbach, “Figura,” 53. 22. Ibid., 57. 23. Ibid., 58. Auerbach appeals to the category of “force” in contrasting ancient and modern modes of historiography. Ancient historiography “does not see forces, it sees vices and virtues, successes and mistakes”; it is reluctant “to become involved with growth processes in the depths” (Mimesis, 38). Modern historiography, on the other hand, “reaches back behind any foreground movements and seeks the changes of significance to them in processes of his-

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torical growth which no antique author observed” (Mimesis, 39). Auerbach concludes that “the ethical and [the] rhetorical approach [of ancient historiography] are incompatible with a conception in which reality is a development of forces” (Mimesis, 40). 24. Yet as we have already observed in discussing Boyarin, those who criticize allegory typically insist on just this point. See, e.g., Goppelt, Typos, 145: “The historicity of the rock is destroyed by Philo’s allegorical interpretation [in Legum allegoriarum 2.21] in which he relates the rock to wisdom and the Logos.” What can “destroyed” mean here as a remark about a real rock? What seems clear is that the material reality of the rock remains unchanged. What has changed is the relationship the interpreter has with that rock, the significance of that rock as an item “in the life” of the interpreter. One “destroys” not the historicity of the rock but the character of one’s own relation to it. 25. Auerbach, “Figura,” 53. 26. See Hayden White, “Auerbach’s Literary History: Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism,” in Literary History, ed. Lehrer, 126: The “fulfillment” of a figure over the course of a given period of time or narrative diachrony is not predictable on the basis of whatever might be known about the “figure” itself apart from its fulfilled form. No more could one predict that a promise will necessarily be fulfilled on the basis of whatever might be known about the person who made the promise. For while it is true that a promise could not be fulfilled unless it had first been made, the making of a promise itself is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the fulfillment thereof. This is why the making of a promise can be deduced retrospectively from a fulfillment, but a fulfillment cannot be inferred prospectively from the making of a promise. And so it is with the relationships between the kinds of events we wish to call “historical,” as against, say, “natural” events. A given historical event can be viewed as the fulfillment of an earlier and apparently utterly unconnected event when the agents responsible for the occurrence of the later event link it “genealogically” to the earlier one. The linkage between historical events of this kind is neither causal nor genetic.

White, 128, draws a contrast between this theological model of figuralism and the aesthetic model of figuralism on which Auerbach’s literary history is based: The Christian interpreters view the relation between the earlier and the later events as “genetic” and “causal,” as willed by God and therefore “providential.” The aesthetic conception of the relation places the principal weight of meaning on the act of retrospective appropriation of an earlier event by the treatment of it as a “figure” of a later one. It is not a matter of “factuality”: the “facts” of the earlier event remain the same even after appropriation. What has changed is the relationship which agents of a later time retrospectively establish with the earlier event as an element in their own “past”—a past on the basis of which a specific present is defined.

27. Cf. Auerbach, Mimesis, 443. See also 404 on the “searchlight” device. 28. See Van Austin Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1966). Harvey raises the issue of the “morality” of historical knowledge—how what we say about the character of a text and the events that it purports to describe

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says something about our own ethical stance. But Harvey’s concern differs from Auerbach’s. For Harvey, the morality of historical knowledge concerns our intellectual integrity— our unwillingness to deceive ourselves or mystify ourselves when we know better. The issue for Auerbach is what it would do to us—and to our relationships with others—if we failed to continue to say that certain events that really occured were in fact historically real. An example might make the difference clearer. One might reject “revisionist” interpretations of the Holocaust that claim the event never occurred because to accept such a claim would fly in the face of one’s deep commitments to the canons of modern historical argument and evidence. But one might also reject the claim because if one regarded that historically real event as less than historically real, one would become a kind of person that one could no longer respect, and one’s relation to others who bear a relation to that event would be impaired. In both cases, the objectors regard the event in question as historically real. But in the first case, the objection preserves one’s relation to a canon of scientific knowledge; in the second, it preserves one’s relation to those other persons who are related to the subjects of one’s historical point of view. 29. Auerbach, Mimesis, 19. 30. Ibid., 19 –20. 31. Ibid., 557. 32. Like every writer who dislikes Origen’s allegorical interpretation, Hanson, Allegory and Event, 7, distinguishes allegory from typology, employing the following definitions: Typology is the interpreting of an event belonging to the present or the recent past as the fulfilment of a similar situation recorded or prophesied in Scripture. Allegory is the interpretation of an object or person or a number of objects or persons as in reality meaning some object or person of a later time, with no attempt made to trace a relationship of “similar situation” between them.

33. Hanson, Allegory and Event, 364. 34. Ibid., 277. 35. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses 2.119, might be speaking for Origen on this point, as he does on so many others: “What we hear from the history [i.e., the literal events as recorded in Scripture] to have happened, then, we understand from contemplation of the Word always to happen.” 36. Hanson, Allegory and Event, 280, referring to Henri de Lubac, Histoire et esprit: L’intelligence de l’Écriture d’après Origène (Paris: Aubier, 1950), 104 –13, esp. 110. 37. Ibid.

chapter 6 1. John 1 : 14 –18 RSV. 2. Origen devotes the first pages of book 6 of his Commentary on John (Comm. Jn.) to the interpretation of the first of six “testimonies” (or “witnesses”) given by John the Baptist. The six testimonies are first outlined in

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Comm. Jn. 2.212 –18. Verse 19, which begins “And this is the testimony of John,” signals the beginning of the second testimony. Attributing verses to the correct speakers is a key feature of Origen’s exegetical method: “The one who will read Scripture accurately must pay attention everywhere, to observe, when necessary, who is speaking and when it is spoken, that we may discover that words are appropriately matched with characters throughout the holy books” (Comm. Jn. 6.53). This concern also reflects Origen’s larger effort to contextualize the reports of various texts that seem to be offering multiple perspectives on the same events, as a way of working out the total coherence of Scripture: “Do not suppose, however, that our comparison of the materials from the other Gospels was untimely in the course of our examination of the words of those of the Pharisees who were sent to John and who questioned him. For if we have accurately referred the question of the Pharisees, which is recorded by John the disciple, to their baptism which occurs in Matthew, it was the natural consequence [ajkovlouqon] to examine the words in their passages and to compare the observations which were found” (Comm. Jn. 6.135); see also 6.147 on the “natural sequence” (hJ ajkolouqiva) of things, and 6.136 on a description “from his [Luke’s] own personal viewpoint” (ajpo; ijdivou proswvpou). 3. Heracleon’s Commentary on John is the earliest extant commentary on a canonical gospel. Ambrose (Origen’s patron and a former Valentinian), clearly expected Origen to grapple with Heracleon’s commentary in Origen’s own commentary on John, for which Ambrose provided financial and other support. Origen quotes extensively from Heracleon’s commentary, both refuting and endorsing his views, but unlike Origen’s Contra Celsum, his commentary on John does not play off against the arguments of his opponent: Origen writes his commentary from an independent standpoint and considers Heracleon’s readings only when they directly relate to his own. 4. Comm. Jn. 6.117. For a reconstruction and exposition of Heracleon’s own views, considered in independence from the criticisms of Origen and others, see Elaine H. Pagels, The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis: Heracleon’s Commentary on John (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1973). 5. Origen, Comm. Jn. 6.116, says that Heracleon takes Jesus’ statement, “Among those born of women, no one is greater than John,” to mean that John is the greatest—“greater than Elias and all the prophets.” But Origen will not permit Heracleon to read the verse first as an absolute denial of a comparative (none is greater), and then turn it into its absolute opposite—the assertion of a superlative (John is the greatest). Origen, Comm. Jn. 6.116, finds the biblical verse ambiguous and wants to preserve the truth of both sides of the ambiguity: They [Heracleon and “all the heterodox”] do not see that the statement, “Among those born of women, no one is greater than John,” is true in two ways. It is true not only in his being greater than all, but also in some being equal to him. For it is true that although many prophets are equal to him, no one is greater than he in relation to the grace which has been given to him.

6. Cf. Crouzel, Origen, 77: “Origen defends, sometimes protesting too much, the old covenant against the contempt in which the Marcionites held

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it: he seems anxious to equate the knowledge its saints enjoyed with that of the apostles, for example in Book VI of the Commmentary on John, though Book XIII restores the balance” (Crouzel refers to 6.3 – 6, 15–31; 13.48, 314 – 19). But Origen’s conclusion in 13.319 does not seem to overturn the claims for basic equality of revelation made earlier in chapter 6. Although there is one sense in which the apostles go beyond Moses and the prophets “to attain visions of the truth that are far greater,” nonetheless it was not as though the prophets and Moses were inferior from the beginning and [did not see] as many things as the apostles did at the times of Jesus’ sojourn. It was rather a matter of waiting for the fullness of time when it was fitting, in keeping with the special character of the sojourn of Jesus Christ, that special things also, beyond anything that had ever been spoken or written in the world, be revealed by the one who did not consider “being equal to God” robbery, but who emptied himself and took the “form of a servant.” (Comm. Jn. 13.319; brackets in original)

7. Comm. Jn. 6.17. 8. Ibid., 6.16 . 9. Ibid., 6.15. 10. Ibid., 6.19. Note Origen’s implicit interpretation of anthropomorphic language of the prophets—they “saw” and “heard,” but “in a manner worthy of God” (qeoprepw`~). The Baptist and others of this select group “perceived the mysteries of divinity, because the Word of God was teaching them even before he became flesh (for he was always working, being an imitator of his Father of whom he says, ‘My Father works until now’)” (John 5:17) (Comm. Jn. 6.17). 11. Ibid., 6.24. 12. Ibid., 6.20. Hanson, Allegory and Event, 203, comments that Origen reaches his most daring and most shocking point of extravagance on this theme [the prophetic understanding of Christian truth] in a comment on the words, “But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I heard from God: this did not Abraham” (John 8.40). Some people, say [sic] Origen, would make the comment on this verse that it is obvious that Abraham did not seek to kill Christ, for Jesus did not live in Abraham’s time; but they would be wrong. Christ, as “a man that hath told you the truth which I have heard from God,” did live in Abraham’s time. Indeed in a spiritual sense as “a man understood allegorically” (tropikw`~ noouvmeno~ a[nqrwpo~) Christ could be crucified in Abraham’s day, even before the Incarnation, and in the same sense Moses and the prophets could say, “I no longer live, but Christ liveth in me,” and similarly these men could have been crucified with Christ and have risen with him, but “not at all according to the bodily burial of Jesus or his bodily resurrection.”

Note that Origen drops the polemical conclusion of the statement in John’s gospel: “but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God.” As he will do in several places in the discussion, Origen takes remarks of Jesus from the eighth chapter of John that, in the context of the gospel, are sharp criticisms of contemporary Judaism, and turns them into arguments for the significance of pre-Christian prophetic knowledge. Only because the Word that was “before Abraham was” had taught something of

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himself to Abraham, could Abraham come to rejoice that he might see the day of the Word (John 8:58, 56). But see Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 131–37 (“The ‘Two People’ in the Old Testament”). Origen’s approach isolates a positive stream of prophetic insight within Hebrew Scripture, but it does not mitigate the force of Jesus’ attack on Judaism in John’s Gospel. Indeed, Ruether would argue that the positive strand is the typical concommitant of polemic against the Jews, as Christian interpreters pit one portion of Jewish Scripture against another. But this criticism doesn’t seem quite to apply to Origen, who does not make the contrast here for the sake of criticizing Judaism, but rather for establishing the continuity of the New Testament with the Old against Heracleon’s divisive hermeneutic. 13. Comm. Jn. 6.21. 14. Ibid., 6.22. 15. Ibid., 6.15. 16. Hanson, Allegory and Event, 202, comments: “So extreme is Origen’s account of the relation of Old Testament to New Testament that the reader is constantly tempted to conclude that for him there is no fundamental distinction between the revelation given in the Old Testament and that given in the New.” 17. Comm. Jn. 13.295. 18. Ibid., 6.25, with Rom. 16:25–26 combined with 2 Tim. 1:10. Cf. the use of Rom. 16 : 25–26 in Prin. 4.1.7. 19. Ibid. See Gorday, Principles of Patristic Exegesis, 49, on Origen’s handling of the Peter-Paul incident (Gal. 2) in his Commentary on Romans: The upshot of the incident was that Gentile Christianity, with its non-observance of Jewish customs, was a valid obedience to the Law and not at all the apostasy that the Jewish Christian or, for that matter, the Jew, might claim it to be. In this way Origen claimed in effect that Paul’s gospel was genuinely Jewish, i.e. a real expression of what Judaism past and present is finally all about and not a novelty or an aberration. This perspective governs his exposition of Romans.

20. Ibid., 6.26, quoting Eph. 3:5– 6. 21. Ibid.; my translation. And here is where John the Baptist’s position becomes extremely relevant: for it would seem that he is distinctive as a prophet because he is a prophet to whom Christ has “appeared” in the flesh. 22. Ibid., 6.27 –28, translation altered and emphasis added. Cf. Comm. Jn. 6.104 for the contrast between understanding and seeing: “Let us see what the good way is, and follow it just as the apostles stood and asked the patriarchs and the prophets for the ancient paths of the Lord. Later, after they had interrogated their writings and had come to understand them, they saw the good way, Jesus Christ, who said, ‘I am the way,’ and they walked in it.” 23. According to Origen, Comm. Jn. 6.29, Jesus makes this point as well in Matt. 13 : 17: “Many prophets and just men desired to see the things that you see, and did not see them, and to hear the things that you hear and did not hear them”; Jesus speaks, says Origen, “as if those too desired to see the mystery of

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the incarnation of the Son of God effected [oijkonomouvmenon], and his descent to accomplish the plan [th;n oijkonomivan] of his suffering which brings salvation to so many.” John the Baptist, although he sees the present Christ, does not see the crucifixion and resurrection and hence does not see “the plan of his suffering” accomplished. Note Comm. Jn. 2.195: the Baptist makes known “the incorporeal Savior”; cf. Comm. Jn 2.198: “John was born as a ‘gift’ from God indeed [Zachariah is interpreted etymologically to mean “memory” and Elizabeth to mean “oath of my God” or “Sabbath of my God”—Comm. Jn. 2.197], from the ‘memory’ concerning God related to the ‘oath’ of our God concerning the Fathers, to prepare ‘for the Lord a prepared people,’ to bring about the completion of the old covenant which is the end of the Sabbath observance. For this reason he could not have been born from the ‘Sabbath of’ our ‘god,’ since our Savior created the rest after the Sabbath in accordance with his rest [cf. Comm. Jn. 1.77] in those who have become conformed to his death and, for this reason, also to his resurrection.” Hanson, Allegory and Event, 204, is therefore profoundly wrong when he asserts that Origen’s understanding of the relation of Old Testament and New Testament was one that “consists in turning the Old Testament into an intellectual dress rehersal for the New, not in the sense that in the Old Testament are found conceptions of God which achieve at once their focus and their embodiment in the New, but in such a way that the Old Testament contains the whole gospel contained in the New— Christology, Ministry, Sacraments, everything— only presented in the Old as a number of intellectual propositions apprehended by the enlightened, instead of enacted on the stage of history and associated with an historical figure, as in the New Testament.” 24. Comm. Jn. 1.27. 25. Ibid.; translation altered. 26. Ibid. These two definitions of gospel are reflected in the following remark about the New Testament: On the other hand, all the New Testament is gospel, not only because it declares alike with the beginnning of the Gospel, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” [⫽ gospel as a discourse announcing that an awaited good is present], but also because it contains [perievcousa] various ascriptions of praise and teachings of him on account of whom the gospel is gospel [⫽ gospel as a discourse that contains the presence of a good]. (Comm. Jn. 1.17)

27. Ibid., 1.29 –31. 28. Ibid., 1.32. 29. Ibid., 1.33. Cf. Comm. Jn. 1.17: “We must note in addition that the Old Testament is not gospel since it does not make known ‘him who is to come,’ but proclaims him in advance.” While Origen uses perievcein to refer to the gospel as “containing” the presence of a good for believers, here, in reference to the Old Testament, he divides that Greek term, claiming that the Old Testament did not “contain” (ei\con) the announcement that “belongs to” (periv) the definition of the gospel. This would provide an interesting parallel to the three positions assumed by the hearers of the gospel:

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1.

Those who await the promised good (they did not “have” [ei\con] the announcement that “belongs to” [periv] the gospel) 2. Those who hear the gospel as an announcement of the arrival of the promised good 3. Those who believe and thereby enjoy a discourse that “contains” (perievcein) the presence of the good that has been announced

This interpretation is rather speculative, and I would not want to make too much of it, although it seems consistent with the exposition I have offered. 30. Ibid., 1.33. oJ de; swth;r ejpidhmhvsa~ kai; to; eujaggevlion swmatopoihqh`nai poihvsa~ tw`/ eujaggelivw/ pavnta wJsei; eujaggevlion pepoivhken. Cecile Blanc offers this translation: “Parce qu’il est venu et parce qu’il a réalisé l’incarnation de l’Évangile, le Sauveur a, par l’Évangile, fait de tout comme un évangile” (1: 79). Origen adds: “And I would not be off target to use the example, ‘A little leaven leavens the whole lump’” (Gal. 5:9) (Comm. Jn. 1.34). 31. Ibid., 1.36. 32. Cf. Pasch. 7.15–11.36; cf. Pasch. 42.1 ff. 33. See Hayden White, “Auerbach’s Literary History,” in Literary History, ed. Lehrer, 133: [The Christian figural scheme provided Auerbach] with a way of characterizing the peculiar combination of novelty and continuity which distinguished historical from natural existence. This combination was a mystery for both Aristotelian teleology and Newtonian physical science, both of which could conceive of causation as going in one direction only, from a cause to its effect and from an earlier to a later moment. The truth contained latently in the idea of God’s purpose being revealed in the schema of figure and fulfillment was that the meaning of events happening in present history is contained precisely in what they reveal about certain earlier events to which they may bear no causal or genetic relationship whatsoever. Their relationship is “genealogical” precisely insofar as the agents responsible for the occurrence of the later event will have “chosen” the earlier event as an element of the later event’s “genealogy.”

34. Comm. Jn. 1.36. Cf. Comm. Jn. 1.47: “Jesus . . . preaches the things stored up [ajpokeivmena] for the saints.” 35. Cf. Gorday, Principles of Patristic Exegesis, 56: “In dealing with the argument of [Rom] 2.25–29 Origen is convinced that ‘keeping’ the Law refers to an essentially spiritual act of discernment, by which an individual sees through to the ultimate truth intended by God, i.e. the christological truth.” 36. Comm. Jn. 1.14. 37. See Comm. Jn. 1.17; 1.20. 38. Comm. Jn. 1.39. 39. Ibid., 1.40. Brackets in original indicate textual uncertainties. 40. Ibid., 6.29, brackets in original. Cf. Comm. Jn. 1.37 –38: We must not fail to remark, however, that Christ came spiritually even before he came in a body. He came to the more perfect and to those who were not still infants or under pedagogues and tutors, in whom the spiritual “fullness of the time” was present, as, for example, the patriarchs, and Moses the servant, and the prophets who contemplated the glory of Christ.

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But just as Christ visited the perfect before his sojourn which was visible and bodily, so also he has not yet visited those who are still infants after his coming which has been proclaimed, since they are “under tutors and governors” and have not yet arrived at “the fullness of the time.” The forerunners of Christ have visited them—words with good reason called “pedagogues” because they are suited to souls which are children—but the Son himself, who glorified himself as the Word who is God, has not yet visited them, because he awaits the preparation which must take place in men of God who are about to receive his divinity.

41. See Comm. Jn. 6.30. 42. Ibid., 2.198. 43. Ibid., 2.195. But how does this square with Comm. Jn. 20.89 ff, esp. 20.94: “The spiritual economy related to Jesus has always been present with the saints,” or 20.92: “But consider if the saying, ‘I have been crucified with Christ,’ can be applied not only to the saints after his coming, but also to those previous saints, so that we may not say that the saints after his coming surpass Moses and the patriarchs”? Yet Comm. Jn. 20.93 still makes a distinction: “I note also in relation to the Savior’s saying, ‘The God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, but he is not the God of the dead but of the living,’ that perhaps Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are living because they, too, were buried with Christ and arose with him, but by no means at the time of Jesus’ physical burial or his physical Resurrection.” Cf. also Comm. Jn. 20.90: “For does not the one who sins now, after his illumination and God’s other benefits to him, crucify the Son of God again by his own sins to which he has returned, although he does nothing that in the common literal use of language could be said to be a crucifixion of the Son of God?” 44. Comm. Jn. 1.33. 45. Cf. Auerbach, Mimesis, 157 –58, regarding the Mystère d’Adam, in which Adam knows the grace that will be fulfilled: That grace—albeit a thing of the future, and even of a specific historically identifiable part of the future—is nevertheless included in the present knowledge of any and all times. For in God there is no distinction of times since for him everything is a simultaneous present, so that—as Augustine once put it—he does not possess foreknowledge but simply knowledge. One must, then, be very much on one’s guard against taking such violations of chronology, where the future seems to reach back into the present, as nothing more than evidence of a kind of medieval naïveté. Naturally, such an interpretation is not wrong, for what these violations of chronology afford is in fact an extremely simplified overall view adapted to the simplest comprehension—but this simultaneous overall view is at the same time the expression of a unique, exalted, and hidden truth, the very truth of the figural structure of universal history.

46. Comm. Jn. 10.110. 47. Prin. 4.2.3. Cf. Prin. 4.2.3: “Or if we come to the gospels, the accurate interpretation even of these, since it is an interpretation of the mind of Christ, demands that grace that was given to him who said, ‘We have the mind of Christ.’” 48. Comm. Jn. 1.26; emphasis added. Cf. Prin. 1.3.8: it is the particular

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work of the Holy Spirit to sanctify the individual, making it possible for him to receive God—to “lead them on to perfection, by the strengthening and unceasing sanctification of the Holy Spirit, through which alone they can receive God.”

chapter 7 1. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 2 –3. 2. Ibid., 13. 3. Ibid., 10. 4. Ibid., 6 –7. 5. Ibid., 6. 6. One could read the following remarks by Kierkegaard as being about allegory as Frei understands it: But this difference [i.e., that which is absolutely different from humanity] cannot be grasped securely. Every time this happens, it is basically an arbitrariness, and at the very bottom of devoutness there madly lurks the capricious arbitrariness that knows it itself has produced the god. If the difference cannot be grasped securely because there is no distinguishing mark, then, as with all such dialectical opposites [cf. binary oppositions], so it is with the difference and the likeness—they are identical. (Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments; Johannes Climacus, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985], 45)

My own earlier discussion of the typology/allegory distinction in Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), in which I present typology as a subset of allegory (16), is framed from allegory’s own point of view, so to speak, not from the perspective of Christian theology. That is why my formal conception of allegory proves so appealing to Boyarin (see Radical Jew, 264 n. 8). From a Christian figural reader’s point of view, however (the point of view from which the present book is written), the conflation of figural reading (typology) with allegory makes sense only to those who have already failed to grasp and preserve the nonreversability of typlogy with allegory that the Christian theological conception of typology entails. 7. Frei, Eclipse, 2: “Far from being in conflict with the literal sense of biblical stories, figuration or typology was a natural extension of literal interpretation. It was literalism at the level of the whole biblical story and thus of the depiction of the whole of historical reality.” Note Frei’s use of “natural” in the preceding passage in light of a later passage in Eclipse, 252 –53, on Ernesti’s hermeneutics: We recall that a typological (not spiritual) reading had been the main stream of precritical Protestant interpretation. Indeed, a basic typological pattern of interpretation had furnished the scheme for the crucial claim that the Bible, particularly both testaments, forms a unity. The typological scheme had been conceived as based on a lit-

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eral and historical-factual, rather than either mystical or allegorical, understanding of the text. Far from contradicting such an understanding or adding another meaning to the text, typology was thought by the classical Protestant theologians to connect into a significant sequence pattern a series of two or more events, at once literally describable and affirmed as factual occurrences.

8. Ibid., 25–26. 9. Ibid., 27. 10. For an account of the notion of family resemblance, see Robert J. Fogelin, Wittgenstein (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 117 –20. 11. Frei, Eclipse, 27. 12. Ibid., 28. 13. Ibid., 28 –29. Frei’s note indicates that the first paragraph of the quotation is from Auerbach, Mimesis, 73 and the second paragraph from Mimesis, 555. The passage Frei quotes from page 73 of Mimesis is itself presented there by Auerbach as a quotation from his own earlier article “Figura.” 14. Ibid., 29; emphasis added. 15. Ibid. 16. Auerbach, Mimesis, 48, quoted by Frei, Eclipse, 29; emphasis added. 17. Frei, Eclipse, 29; emphasis added. 18. Ibid., 29 –30; emphasis added. 19. Ibid., 32. 20. Ibid., 33. 21. Ibid., 30. 22. Ibid., 33. See Samuel Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), for sharper contrast between shadow/reality and promise/fulfillment patterns, and the discussion of Preus in relation to Jakobson in Dawson, Literary Theory, 24 –29. 23. Frei, Eclipse, 34, explains the difference between figural reading and literal-realistic reading as follows: Literal, realistic interpretation tends to set forth the sense of single stories within the Bible, naturally holding in one their explicative meaning and, where appropriate, their real reference. Figural interpretation, on the other hand, still holding together explication and reference, is a grasp of a common pattern of occurrence and meaning together, the pattern being dependent on the reality of the unitary temporal sequence which allows all the single narrations within it to become parts of a single narration.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Frei, Eclipse, 21. Ibid. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 34, quoting from Auerbach, Mimesis, 73. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 34 –35. Ibid., 35, quoting Calvin, Institutes 2.11.1.

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32. Ibid., 35–36. 33. Ibid., 36. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Although this makes the reader’s own spiritual transformation an ingredient in the act of reading, as with Origen, Frei seems to withdraw from this possibility. 37. Frei, Eclipse, 36 –37. 38. It should be evident from our preceding analysis that Auerbach does not read the gospel as a continuous narrative at all; instead, he approaches all his texts in Mimesis by way of scenes or vignettes that provide a limited basis for stylistic analysis. 39. Hans W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 116. 40. Ibid. 41. Auerbach thereby charts out the space of Historismus (“historicism,” translated as “historism” in the English version of Mimesis). See Hayden White, “Auerbach’s Literary History,” in Literary History, ed. Lehrer, 278 n. 3: By “Historismus,” Auerbach, following Meinecke, intended that worldview which identified “reality” with “history,” rather than with a theological or metaphysical, noumenal “reality.” Prior to the end of the eighteenth century, Meinecke argued, the meaning of history had always been referred to some extratemporal or transcendental ground. After Herder and Goethe and in Ranke especially, “history” itself becomes foundational and the meaning of human events established by purely “intrahistorical” reference. Auerbach locates the earliest statements of this worldview in the work of G. B. Vico, which, as Auerbach puts it, proceeds on the basis of the “identity” of “human nature” and “human history.”

See further Erich Auerbach, “Vico and Aesthetic Historism,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, ed. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 183 –98, esp. 198. For Auerbach’s fascination with “everdayness” and “reality” as part of a late-nineteenth-century epistemological shift away from the search for absolute truths or the metaphysical meaning of history, see Gumbrecht, “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress,’” in Literary History, ed. Lehrer, 25–27. But some scholars see Auerbach’s recourse to a figural conception of history to be an undermining of Historismus itself. See, e.g., Uhlig, “Auerbach’s ‘Hidden’(?) Theory of History,” in Literary History, ed. Lehrer, 43, on the “omnitemporality” of divine providence: The concept was devised to point up the transcendental fulfillment of a historical and concrete figure’s earthly existence in an eternally present beyond—a situation which at the same time constitutes this figure’s ultimate reality. By making this vertical relationship possible at any moment of time in history—provided, that is to say, one does not lack Christian belief in the first place—the panchronistic concept in question tends to destroy history as a process and to reduce its subjects to the level of mere existence. Mingling the realms of profane and sacred history, Dante, not unlike God Himself, may well be able to pass judgment on all history, but when Auerbach, cen-

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turies later, with evident sympathy shares this view of the world, he, as an earthly human being who certainly does not occupy the seat of umpire Providence, appears to be much closer to the tenets of an unhistorical existentialism than to those of a theoretically sound historicism.

A similar verdict on Auerbach’s “dishistoricizing” treatment of figural reading informs Thomas H. Luxon’s Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Luxon, 51–52, reads Auerbach’s claim that “history, with all its concrete force, remains forever a figure, cloaked and needful of interpretation” as the sign that for Auerbach, “even history’s much-vaunted concreteness, its definitiveness and alleged fullness, the very qualities that enabled it to serve as typology’s distinguishing feature, do not save it from being rendered by the ‘figural view of reality’ as actually inactual, really unreal, and definitively indefinite— fully unfulfilled and unfulfilling sign that, unless grounded in a radically other reality, a reality one is both forbidden and obliged to conceptualize, mean and are nothing at all.” Because, like Boyarin, Luxon, 54, argues that Christianity regards that “radically other reality” as, in Boyarin’s words, “always already in place” or timeless, its reality is finally the binary opposite of historical reality: “The event promised by historical figurae is, in one important sense, precisely the throwing away of history as real reality’s finally unnecessary representational husk. The end of time is, after all, the evaporation (perhaps by vaporizing) of what we have gotten used to calling ‘concrete’ history.” Luxon’s analysis of Auerbach is framed theoretically along the lines shared by Boyarin; both Luxon and Boyarin deny from the outset the leading conception of incarnation by positing an irreduceable dualism in Christianity. In Luxon’s case, this unnecessarily dualistic perspective is based on a dubious reading of Augustine’s theory of signs in De doctrina Christiana. I have sought to counter this kind of dualistic misreading of Augustinian hermeneutics (see Dawson, “Transcendence as Embodiment: Augustine’s Domestication of Gnosis,” Modern Theology 10, 1 [January 1994]: 1–26, and id., “Figure, Allegory,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A. [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999], 365– 68), as well as to describe the peculiarly postmodern (and specifically de Manian) roots of such a refusal to engage classic Christian thinking regarding the incarnation (see Dawson, “Against the Divine Ventriloquist: Coleridge and de Man on Symbol, Allegory and Scripture,” Journal of Literature and Theology 4 [November 1990], 293 –310, and id., Literary Theory, esp. 55–56). 42. Frei, Identity, 119. See further 118: [E]ven though Jesus’ intentions and actions are superseded by those of God, Jesus retains his own identity to the very end. . . . On the cross the intention and action of Jesus are fully superseded by God’s, and what emerges is a motif of supplantation and yet identification. This motif is unlike a simple subordination of Jesus to God, for in such a case Jesus’ intentions and actions, and hence identity, would bear no weight of their own. Instead, we see in the story a crucified human savior, who is obedient to God’s intention and to his action.

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43. Ibid., 120, writes that “the authors’ increasing stress on the dominance of God’s activity over that of Jesus, starting with Gethsemane and Jesus’ arrest, reaches its climax, not in the account of Jesus’ death, but in that of his resurrection. It is here— even more than in the crucifixion—that God and God alone is active.” 44. Ibid., 121: “It is Jesus, and Jesus alone, who appears just at this point, when God’s supplantation of him is complete.” 45. Ibid., 123. 46. Ibid., 125. 47. Ibid., 122. 48. Ibid., 123. 49. Ibid. 50. Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 5. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Hans W. Frei, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 73. 54. Frei, Identity, 91. 55. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 85. 56. Frei, Identity, 124. 57. Ibid., 125. 58. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 103. 59. Ibid., 102. 60. Ibid. 61. Auerbach, Mimesis, 200. 62. Frei, Types, 14. 63. Ibid., 59; emphasis added. In sentences on Kant that follow, Frei reveals just how far his assessment of Paul differs from Boyarin’s: Kant is traditional enough to accept the framework first provided by the apostle Paul of reading Jewish scriptures as an Old Testament incomplete in itself and leading as it were by its own thrust to its climactic fulfillment in the New. In other words, he reads the whole Bible as one story. To the Jewish reader this would be a piece of what Harold Bloom has so powerfully analyzed as a “strong misreading of the precursor.”

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Ibid., 59. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 108. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 32. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 41. Frei, “Literal Reading,” 73. Frei, Types, 49.

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75. D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), 3 – 4, with question mark deleted after “same star.” 76. Frei, Types, 49. 77. Ibid., 49 –50. 78. Ibid., 54. 79. Ibid., 55. 80. Ibid., 56. 81. Ibid., 123. The larger context of this remark is interesting: If I may recall an impression of my own: Because of early Jewish-Christian theological arguments, like that of Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, it did not occur to me for years that not only was the Jew in that interchange a straw man (that was easy enough to see), but the very mode of conversation, description of and arguments for and against conflicting truth claims in the two traditions, was far more characteristic of Christianity than of Jewish religion. Jewish writers were more apt to develop theological concerns when they were in strong contact, friendly or hostile, with other cultures and religions—for example, in the twelfth and nineteenth centuries—than at times when Judaism was more inwardly focused.

82. Ibid., 123. See also Frei, Types, 17: Then there are those in our own day who suggest that both ways of looking at the principles of interpretation are utterly wrong-headed. These people say we ought not even raise the question of “use,” and that to use the very term meaning is already to be engaged in a kind of unintelligible global speculation. In saying this, they suggest a very curious thing: namely, that the way to understand a text is not by principles of interpretation but by a kind of thick tradition of reading, very much like that of Midrash; that it is not that the text fits into a contextual, nontextual world in which it “means” or does not “mean,” or that it is a text that can be used within such a world, but rather that the world, any “world,” should be understood on the model of “text,” and that reading therefore constitutes a more profound and genuine use of language than speaking in dialogue or communicating in a common world. The best-known proponent of this view is Jacques Derrida.

83. See Frei, Types, 124: Midrash is unlike Christian theology but may well fill a similar function: showing the community how to use its sacred text, and doing so through the instrument of a kind of instruction that has continuity of form. In each case, the ultimate recipient of instruction is the community, and it is equally true that in each case the instructional activity is itself communally sanctioned. The method of instruction is in each case one of defining the elements of that religion as a semiotic system, and we might say after Max Weber that rabbis and theologians are ideal types. The mode of instruction employed in each case is in the service of the tradition.

84. Frei, Types, 141. 85. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 111. 86. Ibid., 112. 87. Ibid., 102. 88. Ibid., 105. 89. Ibid., 110 –11. Frei, “Literal Reading,” 39, summarizes the contrast between Jewish and Christian hermeneutics this way:

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In contrast to Hebrew Scripture and the Rabbinic tradition, in which cultic and moral regulations tend to be at once associated with and yet relatively autonomous from narrative biblical texts, Christian tradition tends to derive the meaning of such regulations—for example, the sacraments, the place of the “law” in Christian life, the love commandment— directly from (or refer them directly to) its sacred story, the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. This narrative thus has a unifying force and a prescriptive character in both the New Testament and the Christian community that, despite the importance of the Exodus accounts, neither narrative generally nor any specific narrative has in Jewish Scripture and the Jewish community.

90. Frei, “Literal Reading,” 73. 91. In similar fashion, Boyarin drops the question in favor of a theory of meaning. 92. Frei, “Literal Reading,” 73 –74. 93. Ibid., 74. 94. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 7. Boyarin adds, 8, that Paul’s desire for universalism “both enabled and motivated” his “move toward a spiritualizing and allegorizing interpretation of Israel’s Scripture and Law,” in which the “letter of the Law is abrogated,” while “its spirit is fulfilled” (7). At the heart of Paul’s laudable desire for human liberation and equality, Boyarin detects the pernicious equation of equality with sameness, which renders Paul’s social thought “deeply flawed” ( 9). Paul, writes Boyarin, “deprives difference of the right to be different, dissolving all others into a single essence in which matters of cultural practice are irrelevant and only faith in Christ is significant” (9). 95. Paul, of course, lived too early to read the canonical gospels, at least in their present form. But he did encounter some stories of Jesus in oral form. Frei’s reaction to Paul suggests that one cannot simply assume that the particular oral stories Paul heard accurately rendered for him Jesus’ identity (as Frei implicitly assumes the later canonical gospels did for others). 96. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 86. 97. Frei, Types, 143. 98. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 82. 99. Ibid., 86. 100. Ibid., 204 –5, quoting Rom. 8:29; 11:32. 101. Ibid., 205. 102. Cf. Col. 3:4: “When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” 103. Frei, Types, 126 –27; emphasis added. 104. See, e.g., Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 10: “Some Christians (whether Jewish or Gentile) could declare that there is no Greek or Jew, no male or female. No rabbinic Jew could do so, because people are bodies, not spirits, and precisely bodies are marked as male or female, and also marked, through bodily practices and techniques such as circumcision and food taboos, as Jew or Greek as well” (emphasis added). 105. Ibid., 135. 106. Does Boyarin ever read Gal. 3:27 –29 in relation to 1 Cor. 12:12 –30?

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While 1 Cor 12 : 12 –13 reiterates much of the Galatians passage (“For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free— and we were all made to drink of one Spirit”), nevertheless the many do not thereby become one: “Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many” (1 Cor. 12 : 14), and “you are the body of Christ and individually members of it “ (1 Cor. 12:27). Cf. Phil. 3:8 –9: Paul seeks to “gain Christ and be found in him.” 107. Frei, Types, 135. 108. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 42. 109. Ibid., 43. 110. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 168. 111. Auerbach, “Figura,” 71, 73, as quoted by Frei, Theology and Narrative, 169. 112. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 169. 113. Ibid.

chapter 8 1. Frei, Eclipse, 29; emphasis added. 2. Frei, “Literal Reading,” 39 – 40. 3. Frei, Eclipse, 264; emphasis added. 4. Origen, “On the glorified countenance of Moses and on the veil which he placed on his face,” Homily 12 in Origen: Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1981), 1. 5. Ibid.; emphasis added. 6. Ibid., 3. 7. Ibid.; see Matt. 17:1–3. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., quoting 2 Cor. 3:16. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Ibid., quoting Luke 24:32. 13. Ibid., quoting 2 Cor. 3:17. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. Cf. Origen, Comm. Matt. 10.1–10 on Moses’ veil, quoted by Daniélou, Origen, 145– 46: Lamps are useful as long as people are in the dark; they cease to be a help when the sun rises. The glory on the face of Moses is of use to us, and so, it seems to me, is the glory on prophets’ faces: it is beautiful to look at and it helps us to see how glorious Christ is. We needed to see their glory before we could see his. But their glory paled before the greater glory of Christ. In the same way, there has to be partial knowledge first, and later, when perfect knowledge is acquired, it will be discarded. In spiritual affairs, everyone who has reached the age of childhood and set out on the

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road to perfection needs a tutor and guardians and trustees until the appointed time comes [cf. Gal. iv.]. Although at this stage he has no more liberty than one of his servants, he will eventually obtain possession of the whole estate. He will cease to be under the care of the tutor, the guardians and the trustees and will be able to enjoy his father’s property. That property is the pearl of great price [Matt. xiii.46], like the perfection of knowledge. When a man obtains perfect knowledge—knowledge of Christ—he sweeps away his partial knowledge, because by frequenting these lesser forms of gnosis, which are, so to say, surpassed by the gnosis of Christ, he has become capable of receiving Christ’s teaching, a thing so much more excellent than his former knowledge. But the majority of people do not see the beauty of the many pearls in the Law and the gnosis (partial though it is) of the prophetical books. They imagine that although they have not thoroughly plumbed and fathomed the depths of these works, they will yet be able to find the one pearl of great cost and contemplate the supremely excellent gnosis, which is the knowledge of Christ. Yet this form of gnosis is so superior to the others that in comparison with it they seem like stercora [excrement], though they are not stercora by nature . . . Thus all things have their appointed time. There is a time for gathering fine pearls and, when those pearls are gathered, a time for seeking the one pearl of great cost, a time when it will be wise to sally forth and sell everything to buy that pearl. And anyone who wants to become learned in the words of truth must first be taught the rudiments and gradually master them; he must hold them, too, in high esteem. He will not, of course, remain all the time at this elementary level; he will be like a man who thought highly of the rudiments at first and, now that he has advanced beyond them to perfection, is still grateful to them for their introductory work and their former services. In the same way, when the things that are written in the Law and the prophets are fully understood, they become the rudiments on which perfect understanding of the Gospels and all spiritual knowledge of Christ’s words and deeds are based.

17. Origen, Hom. Josh. 9.8, with reference to the Emmaus scene, quoted in Daniélou, Origen, 157, on lifting the veil. 18. Cf. Widdicombe, Fatherhood of God, 17 –18, on Origen’s insistence that the verse “God is spirit” does not indicate that God is corporeal. Origen argues that the Bible often contrasts spirit and body, drawing on 2 Cor. 3:6 “the written code kills but the Spirit gives life.” Widdicombe observes that: The verse is of importance for his approach to scriptural interpretation, as well as for his argument for the incorporeality of God. The word “letter” means that which is corporeal and “spirit” that which is intellectual. In the reading of Scripture, it is the spiritual or intellectual meaning for which one must aim. Only then will knowledge be revealed, a knowledge which is spiritual because it reveals God, the one who is truly spiritual. Commenting on 2 Corinthians 3 : 15–17, and introducing the Holy Spirit into his argument for God’s incorporeality, he remarks: ‘But if we turn to the Lord, where also the Word of God is, and where the Holy Spirit reveals spiritual knowledge, the veil will be taken away, and we shall then with unveiled face behold in the holy Scriptures the glory of the Lord” [Prin. 1.1.2]. It is as we turn to God who is incorporeal that we are given the intellectual perception necessary to be able to read the Scriptures properly for their spiritual meaning. Thus we are able to recognize that the biblical descriptions of God as spirit and fire testify not to a God who is corporeal, but to a God who is incorporeal. In Origen’s Platonist philosophy, epistemology is dependent on ontology: the inspired Scriptures are the vehicle through which one comes to a knowledge of the highest realities, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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Notes to Pages 191–199

19. Frei, Identity, 86. For another instance of Frei’s worry about the suppression of identity by presence, see his reservations about his use of the category of “presence” in Identity of Jesus Christ, vii: “I would not now put nearly the same stress on ‘presence’ as a category. It is, among other things, deeply implicated in the twin dangers of a mystification and of loss of morality to religion which result from making personal acquaintance or personal knowledge the model for what transpires between God and man in religion or Christian faith.” 20. Ibid., 172 –73. 21. Frei, “Literal Reading,” 40 – 41. 22. Ibid., 40, emphasis added. Boyarin’s reading of Pauline allegory might be viewed as an illustration of Frei’s point about the convergence of orthodox and Marcionite hermeneutics of the Old Testament. 23. Ibid., 41.

chapter 9 1. Frei, Identity, 118. 2. Ibid., 118. 3. Ibid., 119, referring to John 10:30; 13:31–32; 17:1, 4 –5. 4. Ibid. 5. Comm. Jn. 13:31–32. 6. Ibid., 32.318. 7. Ibid., 32.320. 8. Ibid., 32.322. 9. Ibid., 32.324. 10. Ibid., 32.325; emphasis added. 11. Ibid., 32.326; emphasis added. 12. Ibid.; emphasis added, translation slightly altered. 13. Ibid., 32.328. 14. Ibid., 32.329. 15. Ibid., 32.330. 16. I am reproducing here the fine analysis of Ronald E. Heine, “Stoic Logic as Handmaid to Exegesis and Theology in Origen’s Commentary on the Gospel of John,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., 44, 1 (April 1993): 90 –117, esp. 111 ff. 17. Heine, “Stoic Logic,” 116 –17. 18. Exod. 40 : 34 –35; 1 Kings 8:10 –11; Exod. 34:29 –30. 19. Luke 9 : 29 –30. 20. 2 Cor. 3 : 7 –11, 18; 4:3 – 4, 6. 21. The quotations from Exod. 40 and 1 Kings simply add context for the central passage from Exod. 34. 22. Note how the translator Heine replaces Origen’s link of reading to the body with the altogether different concept of literalism.

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23. Note how the translator Heine inserts the term “meaning” even though Origen’s adverb “tropically” does not require it. 24. Origen, Comm. Jn. 32.338 – 40; emphasis added. 25. Ibid., 32.341. 26. Ibid., 32.342 – 43. 27. Ibid., 32.353. 28. Ibid., 32.354; translation slightly altered. 29. Ibid., 32.355. 30. Ibid., 32.356. 31. Ibid., 32.357. 32. Ibid., 32.359; emphasis added. 33. Ibid., 32.359; emphasis added. 34. Ibid., 32.339. 35. Ibid., 32.357. 36. See Origen, Comm. Jn. 32.322 –26. 37. Origen, Comm. Jn. 32.387. 38. Ibid., 32.390; emphasis added. 39. Ibid., 32.391; emphasis added. 40. Ibid., 32.392. 41. Heine, Origen: Commentary on the Gospel of John Books 13 –32, 415 n. 364. 42. Origen, Comm. Jn 32.398. 43. Ibid., 32.399 – 400. 44. Frei, Identity, 172. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 173. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 172.

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General Index

Abraham, the patriarch: descent from, 226 n7; Origen on, 258 n12; Paul on, 25; sacrifice of Isaac, 111, 144 Abstraction: in meaning, 94, 210; and spiritual understanding, 92 –97; supersession of concrete by, 52 Adam: as figura of Christ, 89, 90, 91; knowledge of grace, 262 n45 Alexandria, school of: allegorical hermeneutic of, 114 –15, 227 n23; Antiochene criticism of, 8, 53 –54, 187; Gnosticism and, 251 n79 Allegorical readers, 54 –56, 59 – 61; and historical reality, 86; of history, 126; Origen’s idea of, 79; spiritual progress of, 76. See also Readers Allegory: Alexandrian, 8, 53 –54, 114 – 15, 187, 227 n23; Auerbach on, 15, 148, 149, 211; Boyarin on, 10, 47 –50, 73, 167, 237 n46, 255 n24, 263 n6; Calvin’s resistance to, 150 – 51; consumption of body through, 71–73; as deconstruction, 248 n55; dualism of, 15, 59, 172, 175; and figural reading, 12, 148 – 49, 207, 263 n6; figures and, 145, 183 – 84; Frei on, 15, 183, 186; and literal sense, 172, 187; meaning in, 48 – 49; medieval, 8; and midrash, 49 –50, 142; Origen’s, 8 –10, 16, 46, 51–52, 57 – 65, 114 –15, 125–26, 186, 214,

227n23; Platonic, 233n16; postPauline, 47; Protestantism’s assault on, 234n24; reality and, 86, 183; in Scripture, 46, 71–73; text in, 65; tropic character of, 14; and typology, 12 –13, 36, 254n17, 256n32, 263n6. See also Hermeneutics Ambrose, Saint, 58, 257n3 Antioch, school of: criticism of Alexandrian hermeneutics, 8, 53 –54, 287 Anti-Semitism, 1, 2 Apollinaris of Hierapolis, 66 Apostles, spiritual knowledge of, 129 – 31, 136, 258n6 Arianism, 14 Aristotle, 79, 224n30 Auerbach, Erich: on Adam, 262n45; on allegorical reading, 15, 148, 149, 211; on Augustine, 245n27; and Bultmann, 246n37; on Dante, 102, 103, 110, 112, 182 – 83; dehistoricizing by, 266n41; on eschatology, 181, 245n32, 247n53, 249n62; exile of, 83, 243n1; “Figura,” 83, 87 – 89, 106, 183 – 84, 248n61; on figural reading, 10 –11, 16, 137, 141, 142, 146 – 48, 152 –53, 209 –10, 247n55, 261n33; on figure and fulfillment, 116 –17, 122 –23, 209, 250n77; on historical forces, 158, 159; on his-

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Auerbach, Erich (continued) toricism, 265 n41; on incarnation, 102 –3, 112, 159, 211; interpretation of gospels, 265 n38; Mimesis, 83 – 84, 89 –91, 103, 105, 110 –13, 124 – 25, 147 – 48, 182, 248 n61; on Origen, 10 –12, 114 –26, 214; on Paul, 108 –9; on Peter, 97, 246 n40; on the resurrection, 102 –3, 181; on spiritual understanding, 92 –97; on tevlo~, 103; on Tertullian, 107, 249 n67; on transformation, 215; on typology, 223n25 Augustine, Saint, 131; Auerbach on, 245 n27; on memory, 120; Philo’s influence on, 230 n1; Platonism of, 251n78; theory of signs, 266 n41; use of Pauline tradition, 8, 49, 251n78 Authorship, of Scripture, 57 – 60, 77, 121, 236 n39, 239 n27 Bahti, Timothy, 247 n55, 250 n77 Baptism, figural reading of, 86 Barth, Karl, 12; christology of, 223 n24; conception of the Bible, 184; Dogmatics, 182 – 83; on figural fulfillment, 185 Bauer, Ferdinand Christian, 7, 222 n18 Bible: authorship of, 239 n27; figural reading of, 4, 183 – 84; as letterhistory, 85; unity of, 146 – 47, 263 n7. See also Gospels; New Testament; Old Testament; Scripture Biblical narratives. See Scripture Blanc, Cecile, 261n30 Bloom, Harold, 226 n3, 267 n63 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 105, 249 nn62 – 63 Body: in ancient Christianity, 241n44; Boyarin on, 230 n59; Christian understanding of, 231n13; consumption through reading, 71–72; corruptibility of, 62, 75; gender of, 269 n104; opposition of spirit to, 175; Origen on, 75, 80, 117, 240 n40, 243 n63; Platonism’s attitude toward, 231n13; and ritual, 73,

73; sanctification through reading, 55; social construction of, 242n59; spiritual, 74 – 80, 209; spiritual transformation of, 46, 74, 242n59 Body and spirit, 47, 249n59; Origen on, 47, 62 – 64, 74 – 80, 209, 211 Bowersock, G. W., 253n5 Boyarin, Daniel: on allegory, 10, 47 – 50, 73, 167, 237n46, 255n24, 263n6; on bodily identity, 80; on the body, 230 n59; on circumcision, 37 – 40, 226 n7, 269n104; on divine performance, 24 –27; on dualism, 32, 34 – 35, 52 –53, 208, 248n55; on identity of Israel, 20 –24; on incarnation, 29, 31, 227n21, 233n16, 248n55, 266 n41; indebtedness to Baur, 222 n17; Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 47, 225n31; on literality, 166; on midrash, 15–16, 36, 40, 47, 49, 142, 172, 225n31, 245 n32; on Origen, 50 –56, 65, 225 n31, 230n13; on Paul’s hermeneutics, 6 – 8, 9, 37 – 46, 157, 175, 176, 207, 272n22; postmodernism of, 6 –7, 53, 145, 246n32; poststructuralism of, 7, 19, 20, 34, 48; A Radical Jew, 3, 47; semiology of, 31–33; on supersessionism, 15, 31, 217; on tevlo~, 28 –29, 36 –37 Buddhism, 207 Bultmann, Rudolf, 246n37 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 79 – 80, 230 n59, 242n54 Calvin, John: biblical interpretations of, 145– 47; on figural reading, 154 – 55; on internal testimony of the Spirit, 152, 154; literalism of, 151, 165; Platonism of, 150, 151; resistance to allegory, 150 –51 Canaan, figural interpretation of, 154, 156 Capitalism, 179 Caspary, Gerald E., 231n13 Causality, in historiography, 144 Celsus, on resurrection, 77

General Index Chalcedonian Creed, 144, 165 Christianity: Auerbach’s conception of, 102 –3; body in, 241n44; break with Judaism, 106; dualism in, 266n41; economy of redemption in, 9; figural realism of, 83, 84; and Gnosticism, 231n13; relation to Judaism, 3 – 4, 40, 207; supersessionism in, 9, 173 –74, 208; as symbol system, 173; transformative features of, 214. See also Community, Christian; Identity, Christian Christology: Barth’s, 223 n24; of Chalcedonian Creed, 144; and eschatology, 181– 82; Origen’s, 13; subordinationist, 191 Church: conflation of Christ with, 175; as new Israel, 19, 225 n1; as spiritual mother, 245 n16. See also Community, Christian Church fathers, figural reading of, 84 Circumcision: Boyarin on, 37 – 40, 226 n7, 269 n104; of the heart, 19, 37 – 46, 209, 228 n45; in Jewish identity, 19, 74; and law, 42 – 43; Origen on, 231n13, 240 nn32,40; Paul on, 30, 32, 37 – 46, 208 Clement of Alexandria, 232 n14 Community, Christian: consensus as readers, 143 – 44; Israel as, 22; reception of Jesus’ identity, 178; vices of, 43. See also Church; Israel, community of Community, self-definition of, 171 Covenant: with Israel, 2, 26; meaning of, 152; Pauline, 31, 37 Crouzel, Henri, 240 n38 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 244 n2 Daniélou, Cardinal Jean, 8 –9, 222 n19, 231n14 Dante: Auerbach on, 102, 103, 110, 112, 182 – 83; eschatology of, 249 n62; realism of, 104 –13, 253 n6; use of figura, 83, 92, 183, 245 n19 David, king of Israel, 124

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De Man, Paul, 248n55, 266n41 Derrida, Jacques, 48, 230n3, 245n32; on language, 268n82 Dialectic, reduction of writing to, 76, 241n51 Difference: erasure of, 24; Kierkegaard on, 263n6; and opposition, 38 Disciples: Christ’s relations with, 214; Origen on, 194, 203 – 6 Divine agency, 85, 102, 218; of God over Christ, 267n43; and human freedom, 248n60 Divine performance: Boyarin on, 24 – 27, 31, 37; figures in, 85– 86; intelligibility of, 5– 6, 11; Paul on, 20; promise as, 26; reality of, 216; transformative, 7, 33, 209 Dualism: of allegory, 15, 59, 172, 175; Boyarin on, 32, 34 –35, 52 –53, 208, 248n55; in Christianity, 266n41; in incarnation, 49; Origen and, 51, 232n14, 233n17; Paul’s, 229n59; Plato’s, 254n9; of textual signifiers, 172 Dunn, James, 38 ei`do~, Origen on, 78 –79, 242n60, 243nn61,63 Emmaus, Road to, 132, 177, 190 –91, 271n17 Epicureans, 102, 103 Epiphanius, 243n63 Equality, 143; before Christ, 177; and literal sense, 176; and sameness, 175, 180, 269n94 Ero¯s, 54 –56 Eschatology: Auerbach on, 181, 245n32, 247n53, 249n62; and Christology, 181– 82; Dante’s, 249n62; of Passover, 70 –71 Europe: influence of figura in, 109 – 10; literary culture of, 105; representation of reality in, 84, 244n2 Eve, figural reading of, 90 –91 Existentialism, 266n41 Exodus: figural description of, 86; historical, 119

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Exodus, Book of: account of Passover, 66, 67, 70 –73; Origen on, 116, 188 Ezekiel, 57 Ezekiel, Book of, 99 –100 Faith: and grace: 226 n7; Origen on, 128 –29 Family resemblances, in figural reading, 146 – 47, 151, 157, 264 n7 Faulhaber, Cardinal Michael von, 88 – 89, 92, 123; Advent sermons of, 1, 2, 83, 84, 106, 128; and Boyarin, 7; on the Old Testament, 1–2, 110; supersessionism of, 9 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 187 – 88 Figural composition: aesthetic model of, 254 n26; versus figural reading, 104; theological model of, 254 n26 Figural readers: ancient Christian, 122 –23, 145, 247 n55; awakening by Spirit, 152; of biblical subnarratives, 143 – 45; construction of relationships, 87; distortion of Scripture, 163, 207; and divine intention, 85; meaning for, 86; reenactment by, 156; self-understanding of, 221n14; subordination of self to text, 142. See also Readers Figural reading: and allegorical reading, 12, 95, 148 – 49, 207, 263 n6; Auerbach on, 10 –11, 16, 137, 141, 142, 146 – 48, 152 –53, 209 –10, 247 n55, 261n33; basic features of, 86 – 87; Calvin on, 154 –55; Christian tradition of, 84; of Church Fathers, 84; contestable character of, 167; directionality of, 155–56, 212; disagreement in, 167 –71; family resemblances in, 146 – 47, 151, 264 n7; versus figural composition, 104; and figurative nonliterality, 146; Frei on, 141– 42, 145– 49, 209, 212; of historical reality, 10 –11, 83, 95–96, 120 –21; and identity, 149 –57; influence in Europe, 109 –10; and literal reading, 146 – 47, 164, 264 n23; meaning in, 6, 86, 88 –90, 94, 208;

midrash and, 16; of the Old Testament, 4 –5, 15, 90, 100, 109 – 10, 163 – 64, 249n68; of past occurrences, 127; Pauline, 106 – 8, 251n78; postmodern perspective on, 6; preservation of reality, 210; retrospective, 154; self-subversion of, 247 n55; spiritual character of, 83, 92 –97, 152 –53, 155; as subversive, 210; supersessionism in, 217; temporality in, 148; undermining of literal sense, 164 Figural relations: extension of literal sense, 141, 144 – 49, 157, 162 – 63, 174, 182, 208, 212, 217; and figural subversion, 84 –91, 248n55 Figure and fulfillment, 92 –97, 254 n26; Auerbach on, 116 –17, 122 –23, 209, 250n77; balance between, 148; Frei on, 141; historical reality of, 89, 153, 210; and identity of Christ, 185; interdependence of, 154; Origen on, 116 –17; relation to meaning, 210; sensible character of, 91; sequence in, 156; in Virginia Woolf, 111. See also Fulfillment Figures: and allegory, 183 – 84; Biblical, historical reality of, 96, 114, 119 –20; Dante’s use of, 83, 104 – 13; historical reality of, 148, 159, 211, 248n55; as historical signs, 248 n55; relationships in, 87; selfsignification of, 122; sensory quality of, 159; spiritual understanding of, 92 –97; subordination by fulfillment, 148; Tertullian’s use of, 92, 107, 118, 251n78 Fish, Stanley, 37 Flaubert, Gustave, 110, 111, 112, 113 Fogelin, Robert J., 224n30 Frei, Hans, 10; agreement with Origen, 197 –99; on Calvin, 150 –51; on Christian identity, 157; on Christ’s Passion, 158; divergence from Origen, 199 –203; on figural reading, 141– 42, 145– 49, 209, 212; on historical forces, 158 –59; The

General Index Identity of Jesus Christ, 158 –59; on Kant, 267 n63; on literal sense, 12, 14, 141, 143 – 45, 160 – 61, 171–74, 223 n23; on meaning, 268 n82; on midrash, 16, 171–74, 268 n82; on Moses’ veil, 192 –93; on Origen, 12 –14, 126, 186, 214; on Paul’s universalism, 179; and supersessionism, 12; on transformation, 215; on typology, 263 n7 Fulfillment: historical reality of, 148; in New Testament, 135; of Old Testament, 121, 267 n63; Pauline notion of, 250 nn73,77; of Scripture, 117; as truth, 248 n55; universality of, 142 – 43, 174 –78, 185. See also Figure and fulfillment Genealogy: as flesh, 226 n7; physical versus spiritual, 26 –27, 32, 37 Gentiles: and law, 40 – 43; Paul’s mission to, 108; prophets on, 131 Gerhard, Johann, 254 n17 Giraut de Borneil, 118 Glorification: dialectic of, 196 –97; of God, 195, 196 –203; Origen on, 199 –203; of unveiled humans, 201 gnw`s i~, 58 Gnosticism, 106 –7, 230 n3; and Alexandrian tradition, 251n79; Christianity’s polemic against, 231n13 God: agency of, 85, 102, 159 – 60, 218, 248 n60, 267 n43; Christ’s relation to, 13, 133 –34, 186, 195–97, 234 n21; covenant-making of, 141; covenant with Israel, 2, 26; glorification of, 195, 196 –203; identity description of, 142, 162; identity of, 168 – 69, 170; incorporeality of, 234 n21, 271n18; intention of, 85, 218; intervention of, 210, 211–12, 226 n8; knowledge of, 129 –31, 168 – 70, 199, 200, 202; linguistic presence of, 166; self-manifestations of, 162, 197; as spirit, 271n18; supersession of Christ, 159, 266 n42; unreality of, 168

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Good Samaritan, parable of, 187 Gospels: Auerbach’s analysis of, 265n38; first-fruit of, 135; Jesus’ identity in, 142, 176, 211; literal sense of, 160 – 62, 173, 230n13; Origen on, 127, 132, 257n2; Paul’s adaptation of, 100 –101; as portraits of Jesus, 179 – 80; reaction to, 100; redescription of, 198; stances of hearers, 132; as Word’s arrival, 134. See also New Testament; Scripture Grace: and faith, 226n7; Origen on, 128 –29 gravmma. See Letter and spirit; Texts Gregory of Nyssa, 237n42, 243n63, 256n35 Hagar, 119; Paul on, 24 –25 Haggadah, 172 –73 Halakhah, 172 –73 Hanson, R. P. C., 125, 126, 256n32, 258n12 Harnack, Adolf von, 211, 246n40 Hays, Richard B.: Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 29 –37, 226n20, 227n32 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 134, 250nn73,77; Lectures on Aesthetics, 253n6 Heine, Ronald E., 272nn16,22, 273n23 Heracleon, 74; Gnosticism of, 127; on John the Baptist, 128, 257nn3 –5 Herbert, George, 205– 6 Hermeneutics: Alexandrian, 114 – 15, 227n23; Jewish and Christian, 268n89; Marcionites, 272n22; Pauline, 6 – 8, 9, 37 – 46, 48 – 49, 157, 175, 176, 207, 229n59; Philo’s, 8, 116; supersessionist, 216. See also Allegorical Reading; Figural Reading Herodotus, 253n5 Historicity: Auerbach on, 115, 137, 265n41; of biblical figures, 96, 114, 119 –20; concreteness of, 254n14; figural reading and, 10 –11, 83; Origen’s, 11–12, 114, 118, 125–26,

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Historicity (continued) 131–33, 136 –37, 211, 212; of Scripture, 119, 122; and spiritualism, 118 –19 Historiography: ancient and modern, 254 n23; causality in, 144; difficulty of representation in, 124 History: ancient meaning of, 252 n5; as event, 211; figural character of, 123, 217, 265 n41; figural fulfillment of, 182 – 85; non-metaphysical conception of, 265 n41; as occurrence, 211, 214; Origen’s engagement with, 11–12, 114, 118, 125–26, 131–33, 136 –37, 211, 212; purpose of, 217; relation to texts, 96, 144, 251n79; as temporal change, 253 n6 Holocaust, revisionist interpretations of, 256 n28 Holy Spirit, 263 n48, 271n18. See also Spirit Homer: Odyssey, 110; realism of, 84, 248 n61 Homonyms, biblical, 61– 63 Husserl, Edmund, 48, 230 n1, 245 n32 Identity: allegorical transformation of, 10; bodily, 75, 79 – 80; Christ’s enhancement of, 143, 157; community, 169 –70; difference in, 177; and divine agency, 248 n60; effect of supersession on, 160; figural reading and, 141, 149 –57; of God, 168 – 69, 170; irreducible, 180; loss of, 27 – 37; of readers, 75; relation to narrative, 186; religious, 207; role of literal sense in, 65; as sameness, 175; sensible occurrences and, 149; of spiritual body, 74 – 80; spiritual transformation of, 232 n14; supersession by presence, 272 n19; supplantation of, 162, 163; textual, 236 n37; and universal fulfillment, 174 –78, 185; unsubstitutableness of, 215. See also Jesus Christ, identity of Identity, Christian: Auerbach on,

157 –58; effect of figural reading on, 14; Frei on, 157, 178; and human diversity, 20; and individual identity, 176; and Jewish law, 23; Origen on, 14; Paul’s concept of, 3; relation to Jewish identity, 173 Identity, Jewish, 207; Boyarin on, 227 n20; Christian interpretation of, 16; circumcision in, 19, 74; destruction of, 12, 157; ethnic, 22; Paul’s repudiation of, 23; relation to Christian identity, 173; transformation of, 24. See also Israel, identity of Identity descriptions, 161– 62, 184, 213 Incarnation: Auerbach on, 102 –3, 112, 159, 211; Boyarin on, 29, 31, 227 n21, 233n16, 248n55, 266n41; doctrine of, 101; dualism in, 49; as keno¯sis, 112; Origen on, 212, 233 n16, 239n32, 260n23; as textualization, 47 Incorruptibility: Origen on, 80; of the soul, 62 Intention-action patterns, 161– 62, 170, 196 Isaiah, figural reading of, 5 Islam, relation to Judaism, 207 Israel, community of: Boyarin on, 19; as Christian community, 22; Christian understanding of, 1–3; continuity of, 26; embodiment of, 30; figural reading of, 6 –7; genealogy of, 227 n20; God’s covenant with, 2, 26; Jesus and, 177, 178, 181; Paul on, 2 –3, 21–24, 32, 226n8; spiritual, 49; as textual signifier, 20 –24; transformation of, 20 –21, 24 Jeremiah, 73; Origen’s homilies on, 71 Jesus Christ: Adam as type of, 89, 90, 91; agency of, 159, 198; as ascriptive subject, 161; conflation with the Church, 175; descent into Hades, 204; disciples of, 129 –31, 136, 203 – 6, 214, 258n6; distance from hu-

General Index manity, 205– 6; economy of suffering, 195, 202 –3; effect of historical forces on, 158; equality before, 177; exaltation of, 195, 205; explanation of law, 190 –91; as fulfillment of figura, 142; glorification of, 196, 197 –203, 205; historical, 83; humanity of, 195–96; identification with, 177; independence of action, 197; individuality of, 177 –78; intentionality of, 266 n42; knowledge of God, 202; as lovgo~, 239 n32; as Messiah, 3, 21, 254 n10; Moses as figure of, 93, 108 –9; parables of, 187; Passion of, 66, 98, 158, 194 – 95, 198, 202 –3, 238 n12; Peter’s interpretation of, 211–12; powerlessness of, 158; prefiguration by Joshua, 88 – 89, 92, 104, 105, 106, 190; on the prophets, 259 n23; reaction to, 100 –101; as reconciliation, 184 – 85; relation of individuals to, 176 –77; relation of readers to, 194; relations with disciples, 214; relation to God the Father, 13, 133 –34, 186, 195–97, 234 n21; as sacrificial lamb, 70 –71, 238 n19, 239 n32; self-knowledge of, 200; spiritual influence of, 210; supersession by God, 159, 266 n42; transfiguration of, 188, 189, 191, 199; transforming power of, 205; universality of, 180; as Word, 205 Jesus Christ, identity of: ascriptive renderings of, 161; Barthian concept of, 212; believers and, 186; bodily, 210; divine, 186; enacted, 172; figural extension of, 157 – 64; figure and fulfillment in, 185; as function of resurrection, 159 – 60, 192; gospel narrative of, 142, 176, 179 – 80, 211; historical framework of, 182; human, 101; inclusion in, 178; intention-action description of, 161– 62, 196; literal rendering of, 160, 170, 176; Origen on, 186; Paul on, 269 n95; reception by Christian

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community, 178; in relation to God, 191–92, 194, 199; role of agency in, 198; as servant, 179; singularity of, 212; specific, 150; spirit in, 213; subject-manifestation of, 161– 62, 196; universal import of, 180; unsubstitutability of, 177 –78, 185, 188, 213. See also Resurrection John, Gospel of: Origen’s commentary on, 66 – 67, 70, 126, 127 –33 John XXIII, Pope, 84, 244n4 John the Baptist, 132; as gift of God, 260n23; Heracleon on, 128, 257nn3 –5; knowledge of Christ, 136; Origen on, 127 –29, 136 –37, 256n2, 258n10; as prophet, 259n21; testimonies of, 256n2 Joshua: historical, 104, 105, 106; literal reading of, 145; and Moses, 87 – 88, 89; prefiguration of Jesus, 88 – 89, 92, 104, 105, 106, 190; vision of, 129 Judaism: break with Christianity, 106; destruction of, 8 –9, 109, 223n19; historical practices of, 217; inward focus of, 268n81; middle-Platonism of, 49; pre-Christian, 1, 2; relation to Christianity, 3 – 4, 207; relation to Islam, 207; as symbol system, 173 –74. See also Identity, Jewish; Israel; Supersessionism Justin Martyr, 268n81 Kant, Immanuel, 187, 212; Frei on, 267n63 Keno¯sis, 103, 112, 252n99 Kermode, Frank: The Genesis of Secrecy, 164 – 67 Kierkegaard, Søren, 263n6 Knowledge: of Christ, 271n16; of God, 129 –31, 168 –70, 199, 200 202, 258n6; historical, 255n27; spiritual, 129 –31, 136, 271n18 Lambs, Passover, 65– 66, 68, 70 –73, 238n19 Language: allegorical conception of,

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Language (continued) 29; Derrida on, 268 n82; descriptive function of, 172 Law, Jewish, 40 – 42; and Christian identity, 23; gentiles and, 40 – 43; halakhah, 172 –73; Jesus’ explanation of, 190 –91; Origen on, 128, 132 –33, 261n35; Paul on, 38 – 43; symbolism of, 151; tevlo~ of, 27 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 173 Letter and spirit, 134; dualism in, 214; Frei on, 164 – 67; Origen on, 75, 231n13; Paul on, 19 –20, 30 – 32, 35, 37, 39 – 40, 101, 208, 225 n2, 227 n23, 228 n43; in Song of Songs, 56. See also Spirit Literalism: in biblical interpretation, 75; Calvin’s, 151; in figural reading, 147, 151; “good” versus “bad,” 231n13; Origen’s, 11, 272 n22; typology as extension of, 263 n6 Literal sense, 8; and allegory, 172, 187; ascriptive, 161; Auerbach on, 14; Christian reading of, 171–72; equality and, 176; fashioning of identity, 65; figural extension of, 141, 144 – 49, 157, 162 – 63, 174, 182, 208, 212, 217; Frei on, 12, 14, 141, 143 – 45, 160 – 61, 171–74, 223 n23; of gospel, 160 – 62, 173, 230 n13; irreducible character of, 193; literary character of, 171–74; as literary narrative, 170 –71; in midrash, 167, 171–74; and narrative shape, 143 – 45; of the Old Testament, 121; Origen on, 13, 186; and peshat, 224 n29; primacy of, 165, 187; redescription of, 170; as regulatory category, 161; in Scripture, 143 – 45, 160; selfidentifying, 162; subversion of, 164, 207 – 8 lovgo~ (Logos): Christ as, 239 n32; Origen on, 78 –79, 127; of scriptural writers, 57; transformative power of, 79. See also Word Lubac, Henri de, 125–26

Luke, Gospel of, 4 –5, 61 Luxon, Thomas H., 266n41 Manheim, Ralph, 250nn73,77 Manicheans, 8 Manna, figural meaning of, 150, 151 Marcion, 76, 193, 251n79 Marcionites, 257n6; hermeneutics of, 272 n22 Mark, Gospel of, 160, 164 – 65; Peter in, 97; resurrection in, 98 –101 Meaning: abolition of, 32; abstract, 94, 210; in allegorical reading, 48 – 49; and body of the text, 47 –50; Christian tradition of, 269n89; constancy of, 166; dependence on narrative, 153; doubleness in, 87; in figural reading, 6, 16, 86, 88 –90, 94, 208; figurative, 16, 224n30; free-floating patterns of, 149; Frei on, 268n82; interpreters of, 156 –57; literal and nonliteral, 141, 166 – 67; nonsensible, 237n46; opposition to text, 48; Paul’s conception of, 21, 36; in poststructuralism, 7; promise as, 24 – 27; and representation, 86 – 87; and sensible occurrence, 90 –91, 101; sensory base of, 149; signifiers of, 35, 45; spirit as, 36, 48, 175; spiritual, 271n18; subversion by, 160; and temporal occurrence, 149 –50, 157; in texts, 5– 6, 47 –50, 144 – 45, 268 n82; transformation by, 45; universal criteria for, 169 Melito of Sardis, 66 Memory, Augustine on, 120 Messiah: Jesus as, 3, 21, 254n10; prefigurations of, 107, 108 –9 Metaphor, 224n30 Methodius of Olympus, 243n63; De resurrectione, 78, 80 Middle ages, allegorical tradition of, 8 Midrash: and allegory, 49 –50, 142; Boyarin on, 15–16, 36, 40, 49, 142, 172, 225n31, 245n32; Christian thought on, 224n29, 268n83; and figural reading, 16; Frei on, 16,

General Index 171–74, 268 n82; and literal reading, 167, 171–74; and theology, 171 Migne, Jacques Paul: Patrologia, 84 Miles, John, 230 n3 Modernism, conception of meaning in, 6 Mormonism, 173 Moses: as author, 236 n39; as Christian reader, 33; as figure of Christ, 93, 108 –9; glorified countenance of, 188 – 89, 199 –200, 270 n4; historical, 119; and Joshua, 87 – 88, 89; knowledge of God, 200; as text, 35, 36 Moses, veil of, 13; Frei on, 192 –93; Origen on, 188 – 89, 270 n16; Paul on, 27 –37, 188, 189 –93, 199, 203, 228 n32; as veil over Old Testament, 188 New Covenant, Pauline, 31, 37 New Criticism, 6, 12, 160 New Testament: Christ’s identity in, 212; fulfillment in, 135; historical, 125; Origen’s commentaries on, 126; Spirit in, 134; as spiritual reality, 193; unity with Old Testament, 164, 259 nn12,16, 260 nn23,29. See also Gospels Nietzsche, Friedrich, 192, 244 n5 Nonliterality, figurative, 15, 146, 224 n30 Nygren, Anders: Agape and Eros, 54, 56 Old Testament: attacks on, 1; Christian reading of, 3 – 4; Christ’s identity in, 212; Faulhaber on, 1–2, 3; figural reading of, 4 –5, 15, 90, 100, 109 –10, 163 – 64, 249 n68; fulfillments of, 121, 267 n63; historical structure of, 120, 125; literal sense of, 121; Origen’s commentaries on, 126; as shadow, 192 –93; supersession of, 29; unity with New Testament, 164, 259nn12,16,29, 260 nn23,29; as universal history,

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110; veiling of, 188. See also Exodus; Joshua; Moses Ontotheology, 233n16 Origen of Alexandria: allegorical reading of, 8 –10, 46, 51–52, 57 – 65, 114 –15, 125–26, 186, 214, 227n23; allegory of Christ, 53; Auerbach on, 10 –12, 114 –26, 214; on body and spirit, 47, 62 – 64, 77 – 80, 209, 211; Boyarin on, 50 –56, 65, 225n31, 230n13; on Christian identity, 14; Christology of, 13, 191; on circumcision, 231n13, 240nn32,40; on destruction of Judaism, 223n19; on discipleship, 194; divergence from Frei, 199 –203; and dualism, 51, 232n14, 233n17; on ei`do~, 78 –79, 242n60, 243nn61,63; exegetical method of, 257n2; as figural reader, 214; Frei on, 12 –14, 126, 197 –99, 214; gnw`s i~ of, 58; on Heracleon, 257nn3 –5; on historical identity, 236n37; homilies on Joshua, 8, 222n19; on incarnation, 212, 233n16, 239n32, 260n23; innerouter distinction in, 51, 233n17, 234n23; on Jesus’ disciples, 203 – 6; on law, 128, 132 –33, 261n35; on letter and spirit, 75, 231n13; literalism of, 11, 272n22; on literal sense, 13, 186; on Old and New Testaments, 260nn23,29; and Paul, 47; Philo’s influence on, 230n1, 231n14; Platonism of, 51–52, 53 – 54, 271n18; Protestant criticism of, 53 –54; on the resurrection, 77, 78, 242n54, 262n43; on the soul, 75– 76, 237n62; on transformation, 215; trinitarianism of, 133 –34; use of Pauline tradition, 8, 48; on veil of Moses, 188 – 89, 270n16. Works: Commentary on the Gospel of John, 66 – 67, 70, 126, 127 –33, 173, 194 –95, 256n2, 258n10; Commentary on Psalm 1, 78; Commentary on Romans, 259n19; Commentary on the Song of Songs, 47, 50 –56;

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General Index

Origen of Alexandria (continued) Contra Celsum, 257 n3; Dialogue with Heraclides, 234 n21; Homily XII on Exodus, 188; Treatise on the Passover, 66 –74, 133, 239 n24, 240 n34 Particularism, Jewish, 48 Passion, of Christ, 66, 98, 202 –3, 238 n12; Origen on, 194 –95; Peter’s experience of, 99; temporal occurrences in, 198 Passover: as bodily event, 74; celestial, 67 – 68; Christian, 69; eschatalogical, 70 –71; in Exodus, 66, 67, 70 – 73; Origen’s treatise on, 66 –74, 133, 239 n24, 240 n34; Paul on, 67, 68 Patriarchs, 132; knowledge of God, 129 Paul, the apostle: adaptation of gospels, 100 –101; and Alexandrian allegory, 227 n23; allegorical hermeneutics of, 6 – 8, 45, 48 – 49, 157, 175, 207, 229 n59; Auerbach on, 108 –9; Augustine’s use of, 8, 49, 251n78; Boyarin on, 6 – 8, 9, 37 – 46, 157, 175, 176, 207, 272 n22; on circumcision, 30, 32, 37 – 46, 208; conception of meaning, 21, 36; construction of signifiers, 225 n2; dualism of, 229 n59; Epistle to the Galatians, 179 – 80, 270 n106; Epistle to the Romans, 2 –3, 20 –24, 37 – 46; as figural reader, 108; interpretation of Israel, 2 –3, 22 –24, 32, 226 n8; on Jesus’ identity, 269 n95; Jewish identity of, 19 –20, 23, 48; on knowledge of God, 130, 168 –70; on letter and spirit, 19 –20, 30 –32, 35, 37, 39 – 40, 101, 208, 225 n2, 227 n23, 228 n43; mission to the gentiles, 108; notion of fulfillment, 250 nn73,77; and Origen, 47; on Passover, 67, 68; and Philo, 43, 49, 230 n1; Platonism of, 48; on resurrection, 74 –75, 229 n59; social thought of, 269 n94; supersessionism of, 7, 21–27, 108, 227 n20;

2 Corinthians, 27 –37; universalism of, 7 – 8, 109, 175, 178 – 82, 222n18, 269 n94; on veil of Moses, 27 –37, 188, 189 –93, 199, 203, 228n32 Percennius (soldier), 98 Peshat, 224n29 Peter, the apostle: Auerbach on, 97, 246 n40; denial of Christ, 97 –100, 160, 246n40; interpretation of Jesus’ life, 211–12; and the resurrection, 98 –99, 101, 119, 158, 161; seeking of Jesus, 203; as tragic figure, 99 Petrarch, 249n62 Petronius, 97 Philip, the apostle, 5, 107 Phillips, D. Z., 167 –71 Philo of Alexandria: hermeneutics of, 8, 116; influence on Origen, 230n1, 231n14; and Paul, 43, 49, 230n1; Platonism of, 51 Plato: dualism of, 254n9; ei`do~ of, 79; Phaedrus, 76, 234n25; reduction of writing to dialectic by, 76, 241n51 Platonism: allegoresis in, 233n16; Augustine’s, 251n78; and the body, 231n13; Calvin’s, 150, 151; doctrine of two worlds, 121; middle, 49, 234 n18; Origen’s, 53 –54, 271n18; Paul’s, 48; Philo’s, 51 Pliny, the Younger, 124 Plotinus, 230n59 pneu`ma. See Spirit Pompa, Leon, 247n53 Postmodernism: Boyarin’s, 6 –7, 53, 145, 246n32; conception of meaning in, 6 Poststructuralism, 6; Boyarin’s, 7, 19, 20, 34, 48; meaning in, 7 Prefiguration: of Christ by Joshua, 88 – 89, 92, 104, 105, 106, 190; of the Messiah, 107, 108 –9; Pauline notion of, 250n72 Preus, Samuel, 264n22 Promise, as meaning, 24 –27 Prophecies: ancient Christian interpretation of, 222n16; fulfillment of, 131

General Index Prophets: anthropomorphic language of, 258 n10; Christ on, 259 n23; spiritual knowledge of, 129 –31, 136, 258 n6 Protestantism: assault on allegory, 234 n24; criticism of Origen, 53 – 54; exegetical tradition of, 12; use of typology, 263 n7 Protestant Reformation, 8, 53 –54 Providence, transcendent, 247 n53 Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria, 14 Readers: Christ’s relationship to, 194; of history, 116, 123 –24; identity of, 75; interpretative traditions of, 154; relationship to text, 122, 137; spiritual transformation of, 265 n36. See also Allegorical readers; Figural readers; Fulfillment Reading: Calvin on, 146, 147; ethical impact of, 115–16; literal, 146 – 47, 166 – 67, 172; as present act, 123; transformative effect of, 75–76, 126. See also Allegorical reading; Figural reading; Literal sense Realism: in biblical narrative, 249 n61; Dante’s, 104 –13; figural, 83, 84; Homer’s, 84, 248 n61; literary, 83, 103; Virginia Woolf’s, 112, 113 Reality: and allegory, 86, 183; Christian view of, 100 –101; of divine performance, 216; European representation of, 84, 244 n2; as figura, 184; figural fulfillment of, 185, 210; of figures, 148; Greco-Roman representation of, 91; incorporeal, 53; literary representation of, 97; Origen’s view of, 115; sensuous, 253 n8; and shadow, 264 n22; spiritual versus sensible, 59 – 62; textual mediation of, 122 Reality, historical: and figural reading, 95–96; of figures, 148, 159, 211, 248 n55; loss of, 124; temporal change in, 253n6; textual representation of, 84 – 85, 96

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293

Redescription: of gospel narrative, 198; of literal sense, 170 Religions: disagreement between, 169 – 70; as semiotic systems, 268n83 Resurrection: Auerbach on, 102 –3, 181; centrality of, 158; as enacted event, 162; in Gospel of Mark, 98; meaning for Christian community, 178; Origen on, 77, 78, 242n54, 262n45; Paul on, 74 –75, 229n59; Peter’s interpretation of, 98 –99, 101, 119, 158, 161; role in Christ’s identity, 159 – 60, 192; time following, 204 Ritual: bodily character of, 73, 74; reading as, 73 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 259n12 Salvation, Origen on, 65 Sameness: equality and, 175, 180, 269n94; Hellenistic quest for, 179 Sarah, wife of Abraham, 24 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 212 Scripture: allegorical meaning in, 46, 71–73; authorship of, 57 – 60, 77, 121, 236n39, 239n27; distortion by figural readers, 163, 207; dualism of, 59; first-fruit of, 135; fulfillments of, 117; historical events in, 60, 83, 119, 153, 256n35; historical representation of, 122; inner directionality of, 142; Jewish embodiment of, 30 –32; literal sense in, 143 – 45, 160; literary relationships in, 181; meditational uses of, 171; metanarrative in, 60; Origen’s conception of, 59, 69, 77; performative meaning of, 33 –34; as sacrament, 71; sensory base of, 149; spiritual meaning of, 271n18; temporal sequence in, 154 –57; threefold reading of, 75–76; transformative power of, 61. See also Bible; Gospels; New Testament; Old Testament Secular humanism, 211 Senses: base of scripture in, 149; physical versus spiritual, 236n37

294

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General Index

Sensible occurrences: figural reading of, 97; and identity, 149; and materiality, 149; and meaning, 101; versus spiritual, 59 – 62; supersession of, 90 –91 Sensus literalis. See Literal sense Shadow: and reality, 264 n22; Tertullian on, 93, 151; and truth, 151–52 Signifiers: Derrida on, 245 n32; of meaning, 35, 45; Paul’s construction of, 225 n2; and signified, 209; textual, 20 –24, 172, 208 Signs: Augustine’s theory of, 266 n41; figures as, 248 n55; flesh as, 175; sensuous character of, 245 n32 Similes, 224 n30 Slavery, 179 Social constructivism, 223 n23 Song of Songs: dualism in, 56; Rabbinic reading of, 233 n16; readers of, 54 –55; spiritual senses in, 50 –51 Soul: incorruptibility of, 62; Origen on, 75–76, 237 n62 Soulen, R. Kendall, 222 n15 Spirit: as author, 236 n39; awakening of readers by, 152; body transformed by, 74; as divinely enacted relation, 153; embodiment of, 29, 209; in formation of community, 36; God as, 191, 271n18; heart inscribed by, 35; human interpretation of, 211; internal testimony of, 152, 154; Jesus’ identity in, 213; as meaning, 36, 48, 175; in the New Testament, 134; opposition of flesh to, 175; Origen on, 190. See also Holy Spirit Spiritualism: and historicity, 118 –19; vulgar, 119 Spirituality: Auerbach on, 153 –54; of figural reading, 83, 92 –97, 155; of history of Christ, 121; unmediated, 193 Spitzer, Leo, 244 n2 Stoics, 102, 103 Stoic logic, 196 –98

Subject-manifestation patterns, 161– 62, 170, 196 Supersession: of Christ by God, 159, 266 n42; of concrete by abstract, 52; of identity by presence, 272n19; of Old Testament, 29; of sensible occurrences, 90 –91 Supersessionism: Barth’s, 223n24; Boyarin on, 15, 31, 217; in Christianity, 9, 173 –74, 208; in figural reading, 16, 217; Frei on, 173; hermeneutical, 216; Paul’s, 7, 21–27, 108, 227n20; in scriptural reading, 7; and trinitarianism, 134 ta; aijsqhtav, 59. See also Reality Tabernacle, figural interpretation of, 68 – 69, 242n54 Tacitus, 97 ta; nohtav, 59. See also Reality tevlo~, 33; Auerbach on, 103; Boyarin on, 28 –29, 36 –37; of law, 27. See also Meaning Temporality: in figural reading, 95, 148; and God’s knowledge, 262n45; and historical reality, 253n6; meaning in, 149 –50, 157; in Passion of Christ, 198; in Scripture, 154 –57 Tertullian, 66; Auerbach on, 107, 249 n67; as figural reader, 108; on Joshua, 88 – 89; on shadow and truth, 93, 151; use of figura, 92, 107, 118, 251n78 Texts: bodily dimension of, 53, 58, 65–74, 76; Calvin on, 165; historical reality of, 84 – 85, 96; in Jewish tradition, 172; meaning in, 5– 6, 47 –50, 144 – 45, 268n82; mediation of historical reality, 122; Moses as, 35, 36; particularity of, 208; Paul on, 31; readers’ relationship to, 122, 137; referents in, 5, 6; relation to history, 96, 144, 251n79; sensible features of, 237n46; subordination of self to, 142; transformative power of, 54, 153; and truth, 166

General Index qeov~, and oJ qeov~, 195, 196 Trajan, emperor of Rome, 124 Transformation: bodily, 242 n59; Christian view of, 10; divine, 209, 210, 213, 226 n8; by meaning, 45; Moses’, 33; Origen on, 215; spiritual, 14, 214, 216, 232 n14, 265 n36 Trigg, Joseph Wilson, 231n13 Trinitarianism, 133; failure of, 134 Trope, Scripture as, 14 Types: and antitypes, 133, 143; conformity of, 74; historical reality of, 137; Origen’s, 117 –18, 123. See also Figures Typological reading. See Figural reading Typology: and allegory, 12 –13, 36, 254 n17, 256 n32, 263 n6; Auerbach on, 223 n25; as extension of literalism, 263 n6; postmodern approach to, 221n12; Protestant use of, 263 n7 Uncircumcision, 42 Universalism: Christian, 180; internal logic of, 175; Pauline, 7 – 8, 109, 175, 178 – 82, 222 n18, 269 n94; Platonic, 48

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Vibulenus (soldier), 98 Vico, Giovanni Batista, 245n32, 265n41; on providence, 247n53 Virgil: as figura, 104 – 6, 183 – 84; historical, 105, 184 Vossler, Karl, 244n2 Weber, Max, 268n83 Westerholm, Stephen, 42, 44 – 45 White, Hayden, 254n26 Widdicombe, Peter, 234n21, 271n18 Wilderness, figural reading of, 88, 150 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 167 Women, patriarchal oppression of, 179 Woolf, Virginia, 83, 84; To the Lighthouse, 110 –13, 212, 252n99; realism of, 112, 113 Word: flesh of, 239n26; as image of God, 63; incarnation of, 95; Jesus as, 205; pre-incarnate, 128. See also lovgo~ (Logos) Writing, reduction to dialectic, 76, 241n51 Young, Francis M., 222n16 Zachariah, 260n23

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Index Locorum

scriptural passages Genesis 1.26 2.7 3.15 Exodus 8.16 –19 12.5 12.7 12.8 12.9a 12.9b 12.9 –10 12.11, 27, 48 12.13 12.33 12.43 16.23, 25 32.7 34 34.29 –30 34.29 –35 34.30 34.32 34.34 34.35 40.34 –35 Leviticus 5.6 –7, 18

234 n23 234 n23 146 67 70, 71 72 70, 72 72 73 70, 238 n23 66 66 69 66 67 67 13, 33, 186, 188, 272 n21 199, 272 n18 28, 192, 226 n17 34 34 33 34 199, 272 n18 238 n19

Numbers 9.13 13.16 28.1–3

69 87 67

Deuteronomy 4.24 10.16 18.15

239n32 228n45 189

1 Kings 8.10 –11

199, 272n18

Psalms 62.9 84.1

205 222n19

Isaiah 1.13 –14 7.14 42.9, 10 43.19 53.7 – 8 65.17

66 146 223n22 223n22 5, 107 223n22

Jeremiah 31.22 31.31

223n22 223n22

Ezekiel 11.19 18.31 18.31–32 36.26

223n22 223n22 100, 247n45 223n22

297

298

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Index Locorum

Matthew 5.18 8.3 10.38 11.27 13.17 13.46 17.1–3 17.5 22.29 –33

237 n42 57 204 202 259 n23 271n16 270 n7 189 242 n54

Mark 1.27 2.21–22 8.27 –29

223 n22 223 n22 246 n40

Luke 1.35 7.28 9.29 –30 10.25–37 22.15–16 22.20 24.13 –27 24.25–27 24.32

222 n19 128 199, 272 n19 187 66 71 4 5 190, 191, 270 n12

John 1.7 1.14 1.14 –18 1.16 1.18 1.19 1.29 2.13 4.23 4.35 5.17 6.48 6.50 –51 6.51 6.53 6.53 –56 6.54 –58 8.21

127, 128 72 127, 256 n1 129 129, 234 n21 257 n2 65, 70, 71, 72, 238 n19 66, 70 222 n19 130 258 n10 72 72 72 69 72 239 n24 204

8.39 8.40 8.58, 56 9.4 10.30 11.55–56 13.31 13.31–32 13.33 16.16 17.1, 4 –5

129 258n12 259n12 240n32 194, 272n3 238n6 196 194, 196, 197, 203, 272n3 203, 204 203 194, 272n3

8.30 –35 8.32 –35

107, 249n70 5

Acts

Romans 2.12 –15 2.14 2.25–29 2.26 2.27 2.29 3.1–20 7.6 7.22 8.29 9 –11 10.13 –17 11.16 –24 11.17 –24 11.23 11.26 11.32 12.11 16.25–26 1 Corinthians 5.2 5.6 –7 5.7 7.19 7.31 11.25 12.12

38, 229n46 40, 41 261n35 42 44 19, 37, 38, 44, 228n45, 229n45 231n13 134, 228n43 234n23 178, 269n100 2, 20, 23 178 19, 20, 21, 24, 226n4 3 23 3 178, 269n100 239n32 130, 259n18 43 43 67, 70 42, 229n57 245n27 71 71

Index Locorum 12.12 –13 12.12 –30 12.14 12.27 15 15.44 15.50 2 Corinthians 3.3 3.6

3.7 –11, 18 3.7 –18 3.12 –16 3.12 –18 3.13 –14 3.13 –15 3.15–17 3.16 3.17 4.3 – 4 4.3 – 4, 6 4.16 5.1– 4 5.4 5.16 5.17 12.14 13.3

270 n106 269 n106 270 n106 270 n106 75, 242 n54 79 79 35 29, 191, 193, 227 n23, 228 n43, 239 n32, 271n18 199, 272 n20 19, 27, 28, 226 n18 33 34 35 36 271n18 189, 270 n9 190, 270 n13 228 n32 199, 272 n20 234 n23 229 n59 242 n54 190, 240 n40 223 n22 135 73

Galatians 2 3.27 –29 3.28 4 4.22 –29 4.22 –31 4.26 5.6 5.9 6.15

259 n19 269 n106 179, 180 271n16 25, 226 n13 19, 24, 25 223 n19 3, 221n11 261n30 223 n22

Ephesians 2.4 – 6 3.5– 6

178 130, 259 n20

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Philippeans 2.9 3.8 –9

201 270n106

Colossians 1.15 3.4 3.10

234n21 269n102 223n22

2 Timothy 1.10

130, 259n18

Hebrews 1.3 2.9 8.5 10.1 11.28 12.29

200 201 240n40 232n14 69 239n32

2 Peter 3.13

223n22

Revelation 21.1 21.5

223n22 9, 223n21

ancient passages Augustine Confessions 11.18.23 The City of God 20.14

120, 254n16 245n27

Gregory of Nyssa The Life of Moses 1.39, 42, 51 237n43 2.119 256n35 Hippolytus Treatise on the Passover 1 66, 238n3 Origen Contra Celsum 1.18 1.42 1.48

236n39 253n5 57, 236n35, 38, 39

299

300

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Index Locorum

Origen (continued) 4.48 237 n48 5.29 236 n39 6.69 –72 234 n21 7.33 77, 242 n55 7.34 77, 242 n56 Commentary on the Song of Songs Prologue 1 55, 235 n27 – 30, 236 n31 Prologue 2 61, 62, 63, 233 n17, 237 n55– 57, 59 – 61 Prologue 4 56, 236 n32 3.12 51, 53, 63, 233 n15, 234 n22, 237 n58 3.13 52, 234 n20 9 233 n16 Commentary on the Gospel of John 1.14 135, 261n36 1.17 135, 260 n26, 29, 261n37 1.20 135, 261n37 1.26 137, 262 n48 1.27 132, 260 n24 –26 1.29 –31 132, 260 n27 1.32 132, 260 n28 1.33 131, 133, 135, 260 n29, 261n30, 262 n44 1.34 261n30 1.36 133, 134, 261n31, 261n34 1.37 –38 261n40 1.39 135, 261n38 1.40 135, 261n39 1.47 261n34 1.77 260 n23 2.10 57, 236 n33, 36 2.195 136, 260 n23, 262 n43 2.197 260 n23 2.198 136, 260 n23, 262 n42 2.212 –18 257 n2 6.3 – 6, 15–31 258 n6

6.15 6.16 6.17 6.19 6.20 6.21 6.22 6.24 6.25 6.26 6.27 –28 6.29 6.30 6.53 6.104 6.116 6.117 6.135 6.136 6.147 6.271 6.272 10.67 10.69 –73 10.73 10.75–76 10.77 – 80 10.83 10.85 10.86 10.87 10.92 10.93 10.96 10.99 10.102 10.103 10.104 10.107 10.108 10.109 10.110

129, 258n9, 259n15 129, 258n8 128, 258n7, 258n10 129, 258n10 129, 258n12 129, 259n13 129, 259n14 129, 258n11 130, 259n18 –19 130, 131, 259n20 –21 131, 259n22 136, 259n23, 261n40 136, 262n41 257n2 259n22 128, 257n5 128, 257n4 257n2 257n2 257n2 238n19 238n19 66, 238n6 66, 238n7 67, 238n8 67, 238n9 67, 238n10 67, 238n11 68, 238n13 68, 238n14 –15 68, 238n16 69, 70, 238n18, 20 70, 238n21,23 70, 238n22 72, 239n28 72, 239n29 72, 239n30 72, 239n31 73, 240n33 73, 240n34 73, 240n35, 38 66, 116, 136,

Index Locorum

10.117 10.118 10.300 13.20 13.31–32 13.48, 314 –19 13.295 13.319 20.89ff 20.90 20.92 20.93 20.94 28.12 28.224ff 28.237 28.241 28.243 32.318 32.320 32.322 32.322 –26 32.324 32.325 32.326 32.328 32.329 32.330 32.338 – 40 32.339 32.341 32.342 – 43 32.353 32. 354 32.355 32.356 32.357 32. 359 32.390 32.391 32.392 32.398 32.399 – 400

238 n5, 252 n4, 262 n46 74, 241n41 74, 241n42 59, 237 n50 234 n21 194, 272 n5 258 n6 130, 259 n17 258 n6 262 n43 262 n43 262 n43 262 n43 262 n43 9, 223 n20 238 n6 66, 238 n4 73, 240 n36 73, 240 n37 195, 272 n6 195, 272 n7 195, 272 n8 203, 204, 273 n36 –37 195, 272 n9 195, 272 n10 196, 272 n11–12 196, 272 n13 197, 272 n14 197, 272 n15 200, 273 n24 203, 273 n34 200, 273 n25 200, 273 n26 201, 273n27 201, 273 n28 201, 273 n29 201, 273 n30 201, 203, 273 n31, 35 202, 273 n32 –33 204, 273 n38 204, 273 n39 204, 273 n40 204, 273 n42 205, 273 n43

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301

Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 10.1–10 270n16 15.3 239n27 Commentary on the Psalms (in Methodius, De resurrectione) 1.5 78, 79, 242n57 – 58, 60 Dialogue with Heraclides 16 235n23 Homily 12 on Exodus 1 188, 270n4 –5 3 189, 270n6 –10 4 190, 270n11–16 Homily on Jeremiah 20 71, 239n26 39 241n43 Homily on Joshua 9.8 191, 271n17 17.1 222n19 Homily on Leviticus 4.8 239n26 10.1 232n14 On First Principles 1.1. 234n21 1.1.2 271n18 1.1.8 234n21 1.1.9 236n37, 237n55 1.2.13 237n59 1.3.8 262n48 1.6.4 74, 240n40 1.8.4 235n26 2.4.3 57, 236n34 2.6.7 241n40 2.8.3 63, 237n62 4.1.7 259n18 4.2.1–2 75, 241n46 4.2.2 69, 238n17 4.2.3 136, 262n47 4.2.4 75, 76, 241n47, 49, 51 4.2.5 76, 242n52 4.2.6 58, 237n45 4.2.7 – 8 58, 236n40 4.2.8 58, 236n41, 237n44 4.2.9 58, 59, 60,

302

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Index Locorum

Origen (continued)

4.3.5 On Prayer 22.3 31.3 On the Passover 3.27 –30 7.15–11.36 13.35–14.13 26.5– 8 26.5–27.5 28.–3 –29.9 30.–15–32.13 32.20 –28 33.20 –32 36.34 42.1ff Philocalia 15.19

237 n46 – 47, 49, 51–53 61, 237 n54 234 n21 77, 242 n53 73, 240 n39 261n32 69, 238 n19 71, 239 n24 239 n32 240 n32 240 n33 240 n34 71, 239 n25 239 n24 261n32 71, 239 n27

Plato Phaedrus 276A

76, 241n50

Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 8.6 9.1 9.1.4, 7 9.14

14, 224n27 –28 12, 14, 224n27 14, 224n28 14, 224n28

Tertullian De Anima 43 89, 244n13 Adversus Marcionem 4.40 65, 66, 238n1–2 5.19 93, 245n20 On the Resurrection 20 93