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—Rela-
tions— Christianity. I. Title.
bs511.3 .d39 2001
220.64 — dc21 2001027338
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-
free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ansi /niso z39.48-
1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).  
For Ellen, Aaron, and Abigail
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
part 1. figural reading and the body
1. Body against Spirit: Daniel Boyarin 19
2. Allegory and Embodiment: Boyarin and Origen 47
3. Spiritual Bodies: Origen 65
part 2. figural reading and history
4. The Figure in the Fulfillment: Erich Auerbach 83
5. The Preservation of Historical Reality: Auerbach and Origen 114
6. The Present Occurrence of Past Events: Origen 127
part 3. figural reading and identity
7. The Literal Sense and Personal Identity: Hans Frei 141
8. Moses Veiled and Unveiled: Frei and Origen 186
9. Identity and Transformation: Origen 194
Conclusion 207

Abbreviations 219
Notes 221
Works Cited 275
General Index 283
Index Locorum 297
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 dur-
ing 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 De-
partment—Anne McGuire, Michael Sells, Naomi Koltun-Fromm, Tracey
Hucks, and Ken Koltun-Fromm—gave up valuable time to give me excel-
lent advice on the manuscript-in-progress. My thanks also to Julia Epstein,
Kathryn Tanner, and Lewis Ayres for casting sharp eyes over the manu-
script at various moments along the way. My debt to Rusty Reno is enor-
mous, both for help with this book and even more for ongoing intellectual
stimulation of the highest order. Thanks also to Kim Benston of Haver-
ford’s English Department, director of the Haverford Humanities Seminar,
who along with seminar members generated a site of intellectual reinvigo-
ration 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
x / Acknowledgments

up yet another pleasant summer Saturday to pick apart one of my manu-

scripts 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 Con-
stance and Robert MacCrate Professorship in Social Responsibility, en-
titled “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 proj-
ect, 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 out-
side readers for the University of California Press for right-on-target criti-
cal 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 con-
temporary 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 alle-
gorical interpretation as it has been classically derided simply blocks un-
derstanding of what Christian interpretation of Hebrew Scripture (or . . .
maybe . . . the Old Testament) is all about. This book is an initial and pro-
visional 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 Tes-
tament and Their Fulfillment in Christianity,” by observing that “already
in the year 1899, on the occasion of an anti-Semitic demonstration at Ham-
burg,” “a demand was raised for the total separation of Judaism from
Christianity, and for the complete elimination from Christianity of all Jew-
ish 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 alto-
gether. 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 Scrip-
ture 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 visi-
tation. 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

1
2 / Introduction

Understood as a symbol of the annulment of God’s covenant with Israel,

the rent veil renders the term “Israel” inapplicable to Christians. Only pre-
Christian Judaism, as “the vehicle of Divine Revelation,” has any Christian
significance for Faulhaber. As for post-Christian Judaism—implicitly pre-
sented as a religion of the Talmud rather than the Old Testament—noth-
ing 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 Ju-
daism. 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 dis-
paragement of the Old Testament, highlights the radical difference be-
tween guaranteeing the continued existence of Jews and defending the con-
tinued Christian validity of the Old Testament: to save the text, some are
prepared to sacrifice the people. Hence, Faulhaber does not plead for Chris-
tians 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 ob-
jection whatever to racial research and race culture. Nor is there any objec-
tion 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 em-
phasis upon the common ties of blood which unite them.” 8 Perhaps Faul-
haber 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 Faulha-
ber reversed the traditional Christian understanding of the enduring sig-
nificance 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
 Introduction / 3

of Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah. Represented by the patriarchs and proph-

ets who proclaimed Christ’s coming through types and figures, this true Is-
rael 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 Mes-
siah, and the broken branches are grafted back onto the trunk of the true
Israel (Rom. 11:17 –24). Although Faulhaber acknowledges Paul’s confi-
dence 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 su-
persessionist 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 ge-
nealogy 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 redefini-
tion of Israel through reinterpreting Israel’s Scripture differs from Faulha-
ber’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 Is-
rael seems central to classic Christian self-identification.
In the pages that follow, I ask whether there is a kind of Christian read-
ing of the Old Testament that might express Christianity’s relation to Ju-
4 / Introduction

daism while respecting the independent religious identity of Jews, and,

more broadly, the diverse identities of all human beings. I look for the pos-
sibility 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 read-
ers 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 under-
standing the title “Old Testament” as recording the consequence of a pow-
erful 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 phenom-
enon of literary revisionism, does not even begin to reckon with the far
odder and more provocative claim that Christian figural readers have tradi-
tionally 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 herme-
neutical 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 Tes-
tament is in fact an “acknowledgment”; their figural reading registers their
discernment of the texts’ own prophetic character as both record and enact-
ment 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 pre-
sumed 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 theologi-
cally 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 re-
ports 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
 Introduction / 5

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 in-
terpreter. 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 dis-

covered 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 in-
troduced the term “meaning,” a term that will prove to be at least as prob-
lematic as the designation “Old Testament,” although perhaps just as in-
escapable. 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 contempo-
rary literary theorists concerned with textual meaning. Such theorists,
6 / Introduction

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 mean-
ing, literary theorists have more recently, with the help of the now-old
poststructuralists, learned that even the meaning once thought to be in-
trinsically 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 pe-
culiarly modernist and postmodernist assumptions we contemporary read-
ers 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 re-
ferred in some oblique fashion to the person of Jesus who had not yet ap-
peared in history and, in so doing, sought to render intelligible a certain di-
vine 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 ab-
sence of meaning, rather than a matter of rendering God’s historical per-
formances intelligible, is doomed to theological irrelevance, however much
contemporary theoretical sense it might make.
Not only does uncritical recourse to modernist and postmodernist con-
ceptions of meaning cause Christian theologians to misunderstand what
figural reading is about, it also opens the practice to the charge of superses-
sionism. This charge, along with its supporting assumptions about mean-
ing, 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 deter-
minate 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
 Introduction / 7

historical ethnic group but a universal community in which all persons

may participate because they are already implicitly members. Boyarin ar-
gues 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 con-
ceptual 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 Bo-
yarin’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 in-
tent, if not to the social-historical consequences of his interpretative per-
formance, 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 persua-
sive 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 cher-
ishing 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
8 / Introduction

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 per-
versely 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 com-
plaint 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 me-
dieval allegorical tradition. So it is no surprise that Boyarin points out that
Paul shares the allegorical hermeneutic of his Hellenistic Jewish contem-
porary Philo of Alexandria, or that the Pauline-Philonic allegorical tradi-
tion is extended by Origen and Augustine. Origen, of course, represents
the Alexandrian allegorical hermeneutic at its most developed and influen-
tial. And it is well known that Augustine received his formative exposure
to allegorical reading from those, like Ambrose of Milan, who were pass-
ing along the Philonic-Clementine-Origenist allegorical tradition to the
West at just the moment when Augustine was searching for a mode of in-
terpretation that might deliver him (and the Old Testament) from the lit-
eralist 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 unaccept-
able for different reasons. Origenist allegory is unacceptable to Boyarin be-
cause it undermines concrete biblical textuality and thereby erases the em-
bodied 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 Da-
niélou, 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 pas-
sage 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 de-
stroyed, 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-
 Introduction / 9

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 the-

ologians can effectively praise Christianity precisely for its supersessionist
features. Indeed, like many others, Daniélou links these features to the piv-
otal 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 ex-
presses the refusal of the figure to accept destruction. Origen puts it in
exceptionally forcible terms. “The figure,” he says, “wants to go on ex-
isting, and so it tries to prevent the truth from appearing.” It thus be-
comes 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 Chris-
tian 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 articulat-
ing the core of classic Christian belief. To Daniélou, Origen simply repre-
sents 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 su-
perseded 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 never-
ceasing work of a divine Spirit intent on “making all things new.” 21 Part of
why Christian theologians who do not wish to be Faulhaberian superses-
sionists cannot wholly accept Boyarin’s criticism of Paul is that Christian-
10 / Introduction

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 comfort-
able authorities, about calling into question the taken-for-granted secu-
rities of an achieved religious identity that turns so closely on the repudi-
ation of various constructed Others—such are the deep and enduring
anxieties that have driven so many in the Christian tradition to reject Ori-
gen 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 be-
cause 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 allegori-
cal 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 fer-
vor) of Boyarin’s condemnation and Origen’s celebration of allegorical read-
ing 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
 Introduction / 11

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 tex-
tual 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 allego-
rist 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 Ori-
gen, 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 contempo-
raries will foster a relationship with the text that will desensitize readers to
their ethical obligations toward fellow human beings, especially Jews. Ori-
gen worries that a de-historicizing reading (i.e., a reading that treats past
divine actions as unrelated to present divine actions) will desensitize read-
ers to the need for their own ongoing ethical availability for spiritual trans-
formation. 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 func-
tional similarity of Origen’s and Auerbach’s common insistence that the
history that matters is the history to which the reader relates in ways
12 / Introduction

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 ex-
pected. Drawing on Auerbach’s conception of figura, but rejecting its Hege-
lian undercurrents even more vigorously than Auerbach did, the Christian
theologian Hans Frei develops a conception of figural reading as an exten-
sion of what he calls the gospel’s “literal sense.” With this emphasis on lit-
eral sense, Frei echoes— even as he tries to distance himself from—some
of the shibboleths of the Protestant exegetical tradition and the twentieth-
century 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 “ren-
ders” to readers the identity of Jesus.23 Frei argues that the narrative of Je-
sus’ identity figurally extended Old Testament narratives as their fitting
fulfillment without undermining their own narrative integrity. Frei’s con-
ception 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 read-
ing was not designed to supplant Jewish identity by Christian identity (Ju-
daism 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 construct-
ing 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 Orig-
enist allegory (as Boyarin and Auerbach argue) takes a semiological ap-
proach that undermines textual narrative with free-floating, signified
meanings. But by placing allegorical reading on a spectrum with typology,
 Introduction / 13

rather than casting allegory and typology as simple binary oppositions,

Frei admits that figural reading is, in effect, a kind of allegorical read-
ing, 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 Auer-
bach—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. Ac-
cordingly, 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, espe-
cially 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 contrast-
ing directions. Frei aligns Jesus with the Father in order to protect the dis-
tinctive 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 di-
rectly 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 command-
ments 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
14 / Introduction

of allegory, the defense of the literal sense, and the marginalization of Ori-
gen. By contrast, Origen’s concern was, we might say, more Arian (follow-
ing 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 read-
ing as a mode of the reader’s own spiritual transformation—a transforma-
tion in which the literal sense, and hence who and what the reader pres-
ently 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 re-
specting 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 theo-
logical tradition. Although they do not use this terminology, Auerbach and
Frei argue, in effect, that the first and fatal misstep was to construe Scrip-
ture 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 pat-
terns, retain their literal meanings.28 Tropes replace literal meaning with
nonliteral meaning, while figures preserve literal meaning in their genera-
tion of figurativeness.
Origenist allegorical reading, as Boyarin, Auerbach, and Frei criticize it,
construes the text as a set of tropes, replacing literal with nonliteral mean-
ing. 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 collec-
tion of tropes, allegorical readers such as Origen (or Boyarin’s Paul) fail to
preserve literal meaning, either by “spiriting away” the historical char-
acter of the persons and events they interpret or by producing a “free-
 Introduction / 15

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 figurative-
ness 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 oblitera-
tion 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 hermeneu-
tic Boyarin rightly deplores.30
Auerbach and Frei mount a strong challenge to the claim that allegori-
cal interpretation and Christianity are fit companions for each other, per-
haps even intrinsically related. A weak challenge, one that Boyarin’s analy-
sis 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 “non-
literal 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” de-
fined 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 effec-
tively finds between Christianity and Judaism.31 Boyarin argues that alle-
gorical 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-
16 / Introduction

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 out-
set 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, Chris-
tian 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 mean-
ing preserves literal meaning. The figurative dimension does not automati-
cally assume a status independent of literal meaning although it always
threatens to do so.
Frei makes a similar point, and, perhaps not surprisingly, regards mid-
rash 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 Auer-
bach 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 fig-
ural 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 inten-
sification 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 equat-
ing 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 Is-
rael. Whether this last claim can ever escape all possible connotations of su-
persessionism is a difficult but unavoidable question, to which I shall return
in conclusion.
Part 1

figural reading
and the body
Chapter 1 Body against Spirit:
Daniel Boyarin

A ccording 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 Is-
rael. 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 Is-
rael is a direct consequence of his allegorical reading, which replaces Scrip-
ture’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 read-
ing of Hebrew Scripture has obliterated the literal depictions of the distinc-
tive 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 dis-
continuity (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
20 / Figural Reading and the Body

Jewish identity. By consistently restating Pauline accounts of divine perfor-

mances in history as claims about meanings in texts, Boyarin transforms
complex Pauline formulations of discontinuity amid continuity into mutu-
ally 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 Bo-
yarin’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 con-
sequence, 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 reli-
gious 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 Is-
rael. These chapters depict a mysterious coalescence of continuity and dis-
continuity that lies hidden in God’s unanticipated transformation of Israel
 Body against Spirit / 21

through the inclusion of believing gentiles. But Boyarin treats Paul’s de-
scriptions 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, accord-
ing to Boyarin, is preoccupied in these chapters with discerning the mean-
ing 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 be-
come 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 mes-
siahship 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 ac-

knowledge 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 supersession-
ism—the claim that God has simply cut off the Jews from the olive tree of
22 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 none-
theless preserving its identity as Israel, is constituted by Jewish Christians:
“Ultimately, what we must remember as we read these verses, clearly in-
tended 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 him-
self. Gentiles who accept Christ are grafted in, as will be those Jews, previ-
ously lopped off, who also come to accept Christ. But to Boyarin, this en-
tire 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 them-
selves, they thereby set aside (“cut off”) the historical, physical commu-
nity of Jews. Consequently, Paul’s interpretation, which paradoxically ex-
cludes Jews through the inclusion of gentiles, is supersessionist despite
itself: 6 “We thus see the peculiar logic of supersession at work here. Be-
cause Israel has not been superseded, therefore most Jews have been su-
perseded [ . . . . ] The issue is not whether ethnic Jews have been displaced
from significance within the Christian community but whether a commu-
nity of faith (  grace) has replaced a community of flesh (  genealogy
and circumcision) as Israel.” 7 The emphasis in the last sentence of this pas-
sage falls on the concluding phrase, “as Israel,” for Paul’s critical move, ac-
cording to Boyarin, is to separate Israel from fleshly genealogy. One should
not misread Boyarin at this point. He has no quarrel with a Pauline Chris-
tian community that deems Jewish ethnic identity irrelevant to Christian-
ity, 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. Bo-
yarin acknowledges that Paul himself would claim that “Israel has not been
 Body against Spirit / 23

superseded,” but nonetheless “because Israel has not been superseded,

therefore most Jews have been superseded.” Boyarin’s reading of Paul de-
mands a choice that Paul himself refuses to make: Israel is either a com-
munity 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 su-
perseded 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 unsuper-
seded 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 super-
seded 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 pos-
sibility 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 Mes-
siah, 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, re-
places transformation as the key to Paul’s understanding of Israel, accord-
ing to Boyarin? Boyarin’s reading recasts Paul’s account of what transpired
24 / Figural Reading and the Body

between God and Israel (transformation) into a manifestation of what tran-

spires between Paul and the text that he is reading allegorically (replace-
ment). Boyarin initiates this reading by taking Paul’s passive voice con-
structions 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 ex-
ample, 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 trans-
formative agency, become Christians, Boyarin’s Paul first turns ancient Is-
raelites into a signifier (“Israel”) and then replaces one meaning of that sig-
nifier 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 alle-
gory for which the referent is the new community of the faithful Chris-
tians, 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 physi-
cal, historical community. This possibility is effectively removed when Bo-
yarin interprets Paul’s account of God’s interaction with the embodied com-
munity 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 lan-
guage about textual meaning also governs his analysis of Paul’s under-
standing 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 interpreta-
tive means by which erasure of difference is to be accomplished.” 12 In this
case, erasure centers around “promise” rather than “Israel.” While “prom-
ise” might describe the pledge of an agent to perform a future action, in Bo-
 Body against Spirit / 25

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 alle-
gorical meaning. For they are two covenants: one from Mt. Sinai, giv-
ing 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 chil-
dren 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 interpre-
tation 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 allegori-
cally” (a{tinav ejstin ajllevgorouvmena) in verse 24 as “these things have an
allegorical meaning.” The logic of the resulting interpretation can be sum-
marized 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 “accord-

ing to the spirit” becomes the key by which the performative category of
26 / Figural Reading and the Body

promise is turned into the semiotic category of meaning—“the allegorical

meaning of the physical sign.” This shift has the rather momentous conse-
quence 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 mean-
ing— 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 formula-
tion 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, under-
stood as its meaning or significance. But to reduce a promise to what I to-
day can discern about its meaning, rather than understanding it as the ac-
tive 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 refer-
ring to the performance of a promise, especially one once made to Abra-
ham 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 cate-
gory of promise as a divine performance would be to reintroduce a notion
of Israel, recipient of that promise, as the category of continuity that en-
ables 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 transforma-
tion 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 sin-
gle covenantal relation between God and Israel. Boyarin’s reading of Paul as
allegorical supersessionist can accommodate neither of these notions, ex-
 Body against Spirit / 27

cept insofar as they have been transformed from matters of human and di-
vine interaction into matters of textual meaning.
Boyarin’s exegesis of these passages from Romans and Galatians dem-
onstrates that Paul’s performative categories can indeed be read semioti-
cally 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 self-
identification repeats Paul’s unconventional characterization of Israel. To
say further that this characterization is a repudiation of genealogy alto-
gether 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 inter-
preter 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 inform-
ing a transformative divine action into tevlo~ as the law’s “true meaning.”
I begin this discussion with the Exodus account of Moses receiving the To-
rah 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 com-
ing 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
28 / Figural Reading and the Body

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, behold-
ing (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 Testa-
ment, 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 in-
terpretation). His decision to translate katargoumevnou as “what was fad-
ing” 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
 Body against Spirit / 29

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 re-
sponse 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 opposi-
tional 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 deci-
sions 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 life-
giving Spirit, just as 2 Cor. 3:6 suggests that it should.
The nuances of Boyarin’s self-identified Jewish reading of the entire sec-
ond 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 Let-
ters 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 no-
tion 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 be-
coming incarnated in the body of a text, but about the Spirit becoming
embodied in the human beings who comprise the new Christian commu-
nity. Incarnation is a hermeneutical category for Boyarin, an ecclesiologi-
cal 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-
30 / Figural Reading and the Body

tological community of the new covenant, scribes and professors will be

useless, because texts will no longer be needful. Scripture will have be-
come a “self-consuming artifact”; the power of the word will have sub-
sumed itself into the life of the community, embodied itself without
remainder.22

Boyarin acknowledges the way Hays’s perspective reverses standard as-

sumptions 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 hu-
man 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 em-
bodied 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 embod-
ied, 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 embodi-
ments 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 re-
jecting 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 em-
bodiment of the script.
 Body against Spirit / 31

But from Boyarin’s point of view, Paul cannot plausibly speak of em-
bodying 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 min-
istry 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 let-
tre, as it were, predicts or enacts the coming into being of the New Tes-
tament, 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 superses-
sionist movement of Paul’s text is ultimately not convincing. The su-
persessionism 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
32 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 lit-
eral text or the literal meaning. Aside from the question of what it means
to “abolish” a meaning (besides no longer entertaining it), this opposi-
tion 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 po-
litical 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, Bo-
yarin 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 per-
sons. Boyarin’s construal of Paul’s language always leaves one with an ab-
solute contrast between texts, history, and bodies on the one side and ab-
stract 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
 Body against Spirit / 33

an especially rewarding debating partner because Hays shares a binary op-

position 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 met-
aphor 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 re-
moved 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’ eva-
siveness and Israel’s timid incomprehension. Suddenly the story has
become a parable of grace, promising that Moses’ turning and unveil-
ing 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 hermeneu-

tical transformation that occurs in readers of Paul’s letter. This transforma-
tion is, however, a divine act of grace, rather than an independent herme-
neutical 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
34 / Figural Reading and the Body

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. Con-
sequently, the transformation of the community is not only the presuppo-
sition 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 look-
ing 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 te-
los, 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 commu-
nity, Hays’s interpretation highlights Boyarin’s poststructuralist accent on
Paul’s spiritual (i.e., allegorical) displacement of Jewish blindness by Chris-
tian insight.
There are, however, a number of difficulties with Hays’s reading that re-
veal 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 pre-
cisely 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
 Body against Spirit / 35

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 Is-
raelites as readers of Moses-as-text (vs. 14). Hays’s use of “instead” pro-
duces 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 in-
scription 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 su-
perior 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 Bo-
yarin 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 necessar-
ily 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 commu-
nity’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
36 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 sub-
ject 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 transpar-
ency,” 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 trans-
parency—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 typol-
ogy 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. Accord-
ing 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 lan-
guage 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
 Body against Spirit / 37

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 abo-
lition of the literal meaning for its extraction,40 or to describe Paul’s herme-
neutic as one in which “literal Israel, literal history, literal circumcision,
and literal genealogy are superseded by their allegorical, spiritual signi-
fieds.” 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 unsuccess-
ful, because we are also told that the true aim, unlike what was abrogated,
is in principle essentially unrelated to textuality. As Hays remarks, echo-
ing Stanley Fish, Scripture according to Paul’s reading becomes a “self-
consuming 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 mean-
ing in his presentation of Paul’s biblical hermeneutic. In this example, Bo-
yarin 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 let-
ter 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 spirit-
letter 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 say-
ing that A is opposed to B. There is a difference between “difference,” even
38 / Figural Reading and the Body

mutually exclusive difference, and “opposition.” When does mutually ex-

clusive 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 ex-
cuse 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 com-
ments on the Pauline passage as follows:
The aim of . . . [Paul’s] argument [in Rom. 2:12 –15] is clearly to punc-
ture 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 evi-
dence 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 im-
port 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 circumci-
sion about which without the Law one would not even know? Only be-
cause the true interpretation of circumcision is the allegorical one, the
one available to all, men and women, Jews and Greeks, not an inscrip-
tion of the flesh, savrx, rSb, penis, but an inscription in the spirit, fig-
ured as a writing on the heart.49

This characterization of Paul’s argument begs a number of important ques-

tions, 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
 Body against Spirit / 39

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 as-
sert 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 exclu-
sively 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 un-
dermines the force of Paul’s usage by introducing the notion of interpreta-
tion—“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 circum-
cision 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 quali-
fiers are not there in the Greek. Paul is arguing that a Jew is defined by cir-
cumcision 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 circumci-
sion. 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) in-
terpretation 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-
40 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 con-
cept of literality with midrash, allegory’s hermeneutical (or rather, anti-
hermeneutical) 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 “herme-
neutical” at all (as Boyarin uses the term), for it enacts a literalism that
gains solidity precisely insofar as “meaning,” in an inverted Hegelian tra-
jectory 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 hu-
man 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 ethi-
cal 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 Juda-
ism 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 pos-
sibility of a transformation over time of Jews and Christians as members
of a single community. As we have already noted, any such transforma-
tion, perhaps forged with the category of “Jewish Christianity,” is funda-
mentally at odds with what Boyarin sees as Paul’s quest for a “single hu-
man 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 fuv-
sei ta; tou` novmou poiw`s in,
 Body against Spirit / 41

(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 ar-
ticle, 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 si-
multaneously 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 in-
dicating 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
42 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 them-
selves is simply unintelligible. And if it is not unintelligible, they must re-
ally be embracing the first option.
Stephen Westerholm argues that the second option is in fact the cor-
rect 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, be-
lieving that literal circumcision was a prerequisite for a Gentile’s admis-
sion 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 (physi-
cal) 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 perspec-
tive— of this sentence, which simply repeats the oddity of Paul’s for-
mulation 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, vis-
à-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
 Body against Spirit / 43

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 circum-
cision and law will necessarily be oxymoronic and incoherent. For in Boya-
rin’s own view, the “real law” (“the Law”) entails circumcision as a physi-
cal 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 in-
terpretation. Furthermore, the written is particular, the spiritual uni-
versal in Paul’s scheme of things.

Boyarin continues with an example:

One of the best examples of Paul’s allegorical readings of the command-

ments—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 wicked-
ness.” Paul’s reading here is very similar indeed to that of Philo in the
Special Laws, where leaven is also interpreted as pride. . . . The histori-
cal 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 Bo-
yarin from the challenge of examining the character of the relation Paul as-
serts by allowing him to dispense with the possibility of relationship alto-
gether.59 In addition, it is by no means obvious that Paul regards pride, vice,
and wickedness as “ahistorical” and “abstract.” Indeed, even a casual read-
ing of the Pauline corpus will turn up detailed descriptions of highly par-
ticular 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
44 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 of-
fers 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 dual-
istic hermeneutic. Just as Paul’s understanding of his Jewish tradition is,
according to Boyarin, in the service of a nonliteral, generically human es-
sence, 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, Bo-
yarin 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 circumci-
sion in a physical, external form. . . . Physical circumcision is con-
trasted 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 cir-
cumcision which is physical and one which is an inner reality is in its very
essence a ‘particular interpretation of circumcision’! What else can it pos-
sibly 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 writ-
ten 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 partic-
ular 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 cir-
cumcision.” But he does not come to grips with the deeper import of West-
erholm’s quite provocative formulation. In effect, Westerholm is saying
that circumcision for Paul is a spiritual reality that may or may not assume
 Body against Spirit / 45

“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 physi-
cal 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 Bo-
yarin himself takes a hermeneutical approach to Westerholm’s formulation
by saying that what Westerholm describes is an interpretation of circumci-
sion. 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 analyti-
cal 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 cir-
cumcisions 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 re-
minded 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 fun-
damentally unrelated? One cannot have it both ways: one cannot say that
Pauline allegory does not embrace the concrete particularity of what is al-
legorized and at the same time argue that it concretely transforms or phys-
ically 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 gen-
eration of abstract meanings concretely or physically transforms the con-
crete particulars themselves, then the nonintrinsic relation of meanings to
particulars is called into question.
Boyarin argues that the strange allegorical paradox he discovers in
46 / Figural Reading and the Body

Paul—that allegorical meaning effaces that to which it is essentially unre-

lated—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 era-
sure of text or the reader’s body but their spiritual transformation. Rather
than pitting spirit against text—and thereby against body— Origen’s al-
legorical 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, Bo-
yarin found in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs a telling exam-
ple of the way post-Pauline Christian allegorical reading perpetuated the
disembodying consequences of Pauline allegory. After first outlining Bo-
yarin’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 under-
stands it, leads the reader toward fuller, richer embodiment by illuminat-
ing 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 alle-
gorical reading requires it to be. When considered apart from a prior pre-
sumption 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 textual-
ization) of a preexisting, nontextual, independent meaning. Meaning is a
changeless and immaterial substance, or “ontological being,” existing in-
dependently in its own right. As a previously and inherently disembodied
47
48 / Figural Reading and the Body

“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 opposi-
tion” in which spirit and body, meaning and text, are diametrically opposed
categories: having one requires the elimination of the other.2 Such allegori-
cal compositions invite corresponding allegorical readings in which the in-
terpreter 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 alle-
gory replicates in its theoretical structure Husserl’s theory of meaning as de-
scribed (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 phe-
nomenological account of meaning is well recognized. According to Bo-
yarin, allegorical reading provides Paul with the means to resolve the deep
but contradictory attractions of Jewish particularism and Platonic univer-
salism by favoring the latter. Paul’s “yearning for univocity,” his “desire
for the One,” leads him to erase textual particularity through allegory.4 Al-
legorical reading is the hermeneutical means by which Paul the Platoniz-
ing 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 Abra-
ham according to the flesh), history (having the Law), or maintaining the
cultural/religious practices of the historical Jewish community (circumci-
sion).” 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 de-
priving 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 ca-
pacity to read Jewish Scriptures allegorically, Jewish Scripture and Judaism
find themselves superseded by the Christian Old Testament and Christian-
ity. Boyarin argues that Paul’s allegorical reading is inherently superses-
sionist just because it is allegorical, for allegorical reading always replaces
 Allegory and Embodiment / 49

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 fam-
ily 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 herme-
neutical 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 To-
gether, Paul and Philo inaugurate the long tradition of Platonizing allegori-
cal 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 Platonic-
Pauline theory of correspondence between the visible things of this world
and the invisible things of God.” 9 We have already seen that Boyarin un-
derstands this “correspondence” as a “binary opposition,” created by mean-
ing’s existence as wholly “disembodied substance . . . prior to its incarna-
tion in language.” This notion of incarnation generates “a dualistic system
in which spirit precedes and is primary over body.” 10 Allegorical read-
ing 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 si-
multaneously 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 per-
sons, 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 read-
ing 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, visible-
invisible, body-soul dichotomies of allegorical reading.” The sharp contrast
50 / Figural Reading and the Body

between allegory and midrash informs Boyarin’s analysis of Origen’s al-

legorical interpretation in his Commentary on the Song of Songs: “[W]e
must clearly distinguish the midrashic reading of the Song from that of al-
legorists 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 prac-
tices 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 materi-
ality 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 mis-
leading in the extreme to saddle an ancient Christian Platonist with mod-
ernist Cartesian dichotomies. Origen strives to articulate the links of con-
tinuity between body and spirit while admittedly privileging novelty, for
the spirit that makes all things new does not recreate text and body ex ni-
hilo, 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 interrelation-
ship 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 it-
self, fashioned in this wise as it is, can be understood through the di-
vine wisdom, which from actual things and copies teaches us things un-
 Allegory and Embodiment / 51

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 hap-
penings 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 es-
tablished 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 perfect-
ing 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 uni-
verse” 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 read-
ing 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.” More-
over, as [R. P.] Lawson has pointed out, “If the Logos in His Incarna-
tion 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 shibbo-

leths to characterize Origen’s views. Although Origen draws on the Pauline
language of inner and outer in his commentary, Boyarin introduces the dis-
tinction 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
52 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 bibli-
cal interpretation is precisely the question at issue. Perhaps even more de-
batable 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 ap-
peal 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 “car-

ried over” from one to the other, Origen does not refer to the superses-
sion 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,
 Allegory and Embodiment / 53

manifest /hidden, earthly/heavenly. Origen does not suggest that these

contrasts are absolute polarities or binary oppositions, but that each mem-
ber 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 grasp-
ing the most fundamental thing that Origen intends to say. Boyarin as-
sumes that such seemingly opposed pairs could not have intrinsic relations
with one another. But this says more about Boyarin’s postmodernist con-
struction of Platonist metaphysics than it does about what Origen, under-
stood 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 in-
corporeal realities” to which it is related (in lines that follow immediately
upon the passage from the Commentary that Boyarin quotes). Origen pro-
ceeds 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 spe-
cific 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 theologi-
cal 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 com-
pared 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 “in-
corporeal” realities lies at the heart of the larger goal of allegorical reading
that Origen advances throughout his commentary: to show how the spiri-
tual 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
54 / Figural Reading and the Body

criticisms of the Alexandrian hermeneutical tradition. In the modern pe-

riod, 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 Ori-
genist allegory is the polar opposite of Daniélou’s characteristically Catho-
lic celebration, argues that Origen made the allegorical meaning of Scrip-
ture equivalent to the Greek “erōs motif,” thereby compromising the
authentic teaching of Christian love as self-giving agapē by combining it
with pagan conceptions of love as acquisitive desire. Nygren’s entire ap-
proach rests, as many critics have now pointed out, on a one-sided concep-
tion of Platonic erōs. 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 erōs so exclusively to the meanings
of Origen’s allegorical readings, he fails to examine the process of allegori-
cal reading as itself an act of erōs. Platonic erōs 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 Pla-
tonic erōs 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 al-
legorical reading can be seen as the striving of a reader confronted with in-
complete 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 identi-
ties. Rather than requiring the simple repudiation of the body, Origen’s al-
legorical 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 cul-
ture. But the equally necessary reliance of the allegorical story on the lit-
eral 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
 Allegory and Embodiment / 55

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 “marriage-
song”): 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 com-
ings and goings of various characters, presented “one by one in their own
order,” the “whole body” of the work also “consists of mystical utter-
ances.” 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 produc-
tively 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 mis-
directed erōs and living “only after the flesh,” will “twist the whole man-
ner 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 Di-
vine 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 re-
frain both from reading the work and from hearing its interpretation, this
cannot mean that the properly passionate reader must extinguish the fire
of erōs.30 Instead, this reader enjoys a redirected eroticism, giving constant
heed to that particular mode of erōs 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 read-
ing 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
56 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 im-
petus to, and reward of, allegorical reading, while not carnal, must also not
be disembodied. Achieving a spiritual love that is neither carnal nor dis-
embodied is the experiential accompaniment to discerning an allegorical
meaning that is neither “literalistic” nor “anti-literal” but figural. Is it pos-
sible to relate Origen’s contrast between the two modes of erōs to his dis-
tinction 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” erōs
Song as written drama  literal sense  “vulgar” erōs

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 erōs.
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 conse-
quentiamque 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 meta-
narrative the syntax represented at the level of the immediate story. In
other words, the task of the allegorical reader is to understand and be fash-
ioned by the spiritual import of the scriptural stories according to the man-
ner in which they were written.
 Allegory and Embodiment / 57

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 be-
ings 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 “un-
derstanding 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 sen-
sible 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 Be-
cause of the intrinsic relation of matter to spirit, spiritual perception can
assume sensible form, and sensible impressions can convey spiritual reali-
ties.37 Hence, just as prophetic writings depict strikingly physical theopha-
nies and revelatory moments, so even the seemingly physical, sensible ac-
tivities 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 reve-
lation and inspiration, have translated their spiritual perceptions into sen-
sible 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 Prin-
ciples. 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
58 / Figural Reading and the Body

“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 seek-
ers 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 fi-
nally cohere as a single, harmonious, integrated reading by a single com-
munity. “The most wonderful thing” about the Spirit’s composition of the
Bible is that it enabled just those often unappealing surface accounts of nar-
ratives 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 in-
appropriate or unedifying narratives and laws “have been recorded in a se-
ries [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 appropri-
ate, 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 at-
tractiveness of the language” of the text.46 If one attends only to the sur-
face narrative, there are two likely outcomes: either one will find the nar-
rative 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
 Allegory and Embodiment / 59

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 con-
ception of reality consisting of two deeply interpenetrating realms: a non-
sensible realm of spiritual realities (ta; nohtav) and a sensible realm of mate-
rial 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 ref-
erents of Scripture are ordered in a sequence (ajkolouqiva), each item inti-
mately related to the next by virtue of an inner connection (ei{rmo~). The el-
ements 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, im-
possibilities, 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 non-
sensible realm, which consists of the ordered interrelationship of spiritual
realities. The Spirit’s compositional task was to bring the accounts of tem-
poral, 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 hap-
pened 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 metanar-
rative (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 inten-
tionally disrupted scriptural narrative coherence. For if the surface narra-
60 / Figural Reading and the Body

tives of Scripture displayed an immediate and obvious connection and se-

quence, 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 unreal-
ized 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 in-
serted 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 meta-
narrative are represented by portions of Scripture that the composing spirit
has added to the text, which, when understood literally, are untrue, irra-
tional, 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 ac-
count of what is literally impossible with the parts that are not impos-
sible but are historically true, these being interpreted allegorically to-
gether with the parts which, so far as the letter goes, did not happen at
 Allegory and Embodiment / 61

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 ig-
nores 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 read-
er’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 inter-
prets 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 under-
mining 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 mean-
ings 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
62 / Figural Reading and the Body

is the opposite of incorruption: “The same terms, then, are used through-
out for either man; but the essential character of the things is kept distinct,
and corruptible things are offered to that which is corruptible, while in-
corruptible 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 incorrupt-
ible 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 respec-
tively, and being deceived by this identity of nomenclature, have ap-
plied 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 scrip-
tural 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 in-
corruptible soul or with respect to the age of the corruptible body. Soul and
body contrast absolutely with respect to corruptibility, but there is similar-
ity 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
 Allegory and Embodiment / 63

borne by their bodily nature.” The preceding example of how the homo-
nym “child” preserves temporal development even as it drops corruption
illustrates the sort of thing Origen seems to mean by discovering the spir-
itual 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 ig-
nore the body because of one’s love for God. Even so, there is a vital distinc-
tion 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 attach-
ment.” 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-
64 / Figural Reading and the Body

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. Trans-
forming 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 perfor-
mance, and in doing so he takes pains to show that his celebration of al-
legorical transformation of identity is a spiritualization, not a rejection, of
the body. Texts, rituals and bodies are admittedly different when trans-
formed, but to Origen their fullest significance can be appreciated only
when they are understood in their transformed state. When Origen’s in-
terpretative practice is viewed from this perspective, Boyarin’s characteri-
zation 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 identity-
forming 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
66 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 king-
dom 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 Ter-
tullian here follows the line of interpretation marked out by Melito of Sar-
dis, Apollinaris of Hierapolis, and Origen’s Roman contemporary Hippoly-
tus. 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 (Pass-
over), 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 He-
brew 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 pas-
sage.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, his-
torical 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 Exo-
dus 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 sim-
ply to a Passover (Exod. 12:43). In no case does God refer to “your Pass-
over” 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,
 Spiritual Bodies / 67

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, speak-
ing 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 hu-
man feast by saying that the Passover “of the Jews” was near. In charac-
teristic 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 Pass-
over 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 Pass-
over supplanting the Old Testament Passover, or a future Passover sup-
planting 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 Ex-
odus, 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 be-
comes a purely human Passover, which God will refer to as “your Pass-
over” (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 mid-
dle state, between the Passover of the Exodus and its eschatological fulfill-
ment in the heavenly Jerusalem:
It is the task, however, of the wisdom which has been hidden in a mys-
tery to make manifest in what manner we, who were formerly guided
under the true law by guardians and stewards until the fullness of time
68 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 ce-
lestial 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 concern-
ing 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 Chris-
tian’s present celebration of the sacrifice of Christ reflected the heavenly el-
evation without cancellation of specific earthly rites concerning “the sac-
rifices 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 ce-
lestial Passover “is in accordance with the character borne by . . . [the] bod-
ily 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 con-
sider 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:
 Spiritual Bodies / 69

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 coher-
ence—the way the successive verses formed a sequence (ajkolouqiva) of co-
herent 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 ex-
tending 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 fulfill-
ment and the bodily character of the type.18 Origen’s treatise On the Pass-
over 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—be-

ing cut off, being protected from destruction. But given that any set of his-
torical events has a multitude of aspects, how can one decide which aspects
70 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 ex-
amined 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 addi-
tion, 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 ques-
tion: “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 par-
ticular description of the Passover sacrifice in the Old Testament. I have
highlighted the specific features of the Old Testament type to which Ori-
gen 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-
 Spiritual Bodies / 71

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 Scrip-
tures?” 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 be-
cause 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
72 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 “con-
form 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 door-
posts 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 Exo-
dus 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 Scrip-
ture, 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 alle-
gorical 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 mean-
ings” 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
 Spiritual Bodies / 73

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 ex-
ample, 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 burn-
ing 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 ap-
proach 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 un-
til 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 pre-
serve 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 sig-
nificant 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 pre-
serve 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 Ori-
gen, 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-
74 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 pre-
serving the bodily character of new rituals. Instead, one preserves the tex-
tual 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 re-
lated 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 be-
ing 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 bro-
ken Origen’s fundamental rule of figural interpretation by making the ful-
fillment 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 Pass-
over 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 transform-
ing 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 circumci-
sion of the flesh. He contends that Paul’s notion of bodily resurrection val-
 Spiritual Bodies / 75

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 posi-
tive 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 insuf-
ficiently 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 over-
come 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, Chris-
tian 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 allegori-
cal 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 elabo-
rates 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 per-
fect. . . . 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
76 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 sec-
ond, more comprehensive use of the term “soul” suggests how we are to
understand Origen’s injunction to “portray the meaning of the sacred writ-
ings 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 Val-
entinians had done), Origen describes three modes of reading, each corre-
sponding 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 deep-
est 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 an-
other 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 “im-
pressing” upon it the character of the bodily natures of those things read
allegorically. For the inscription or fashioning of the soul through alle-
gorical 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 bod-
ily. As the preceding discussion has shown, all passages of Scripture (pre-
sumably including those that have no bodily meaning) are parts of the sin-
gle 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. Ori-
gen’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
 Spiritual Bodies / 77

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 be-
ing 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 doc-
trine of the bodily resurrection of the dead.54 At first, Origen seems to sug-
gest 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 indi-
cated 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 God-
human 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 lu-
minous, 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 Jere-
miah 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 allegori-
cal reading demands or fosters a repudiation of the body. But we have al-
78 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 re-
quired 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 assimi-
lates into itself from without certain things for nourishment and, cor-
responding 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 bod-
ies 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 child-
hood 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 corpo-
real 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,
 Spiritual Bodies / 79

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 char-
acterizing 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, ma-
terial 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 disap-
pear, 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 in-
ner lovgo~ or principle of an individual, which, in the case of human beings,
is precisely what personal identity means. Second, and even more strik-
ingly, Origen makes this ei`do~ a principle that, precisely as material, is su-
perior 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 pre-
viously encountered. The category of corporeal form or ei`do~ allows Ori-
gen to do justice to the bodily dimension of personal identity without ty-
ing bodily identity to corruptible flesh. Caroline Walker Bynum comments
that “Origen’s theory of the body could answer the problem of chain con-
sumption 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
80 / Figural Reading and the Body

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 Me-
thodius of Olympus’s defense of the essential role of physicality, material-
ity, 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 al-
low for identity’s persistence over time. That persistence is certified by flesh
for Boyarin (and Methodius), but undermined by flesh for Origen. Incor-
ruptibility 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 Bo-
yarin, 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 ex-
haust 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 wit-
ness 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 opposi-
tion 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
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 his-
tory 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 fig-
ures. Auerbach describes how figural interpreters drew on a relational con-
ception of meaning that enabled them to withstand the threats of an alle-
gorical meaning that might free itself from, and ultimately turn against,
the historical persons and events depicted by the text. Auerbach’s preser-
vation 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 sub-
verted the historical reality of figural persons or events, because spiritual-
ity was ultimately a matter of the impact of the historical Jesus on histori-
cal 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 mod-
ern, secular instrument of literary realism. In the work of modernist writ-
ers 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 ser-
mons, into exile in Istanbul, Auerbach published his seminal essay “Fi-
gura” 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
84 / Figural Reading and History

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 Eu-
ropean 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 em-
ployed 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, Mon-
signor Angelo Roncalli. Like Faulhaber, Roncalli would soon become a car-
dinal. Later on, he would be better known as Pope John XXIII.4 What Auer-
bach believed he had discovered in the pages of the San Pietro di Galata
Patrologia was something not in evidence in Faulhaber’s 1933 Advent ser-
mons: 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 dis-
tinctive 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:
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 85

“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 to-
gether 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 de-
scribing 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? Auer-
bach 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 philoso-
phers of history have recently argued, past persons and events are not sig-
nificant in themselves but only as a consequence of the historian’s deliber-
ate, 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 them-
selves 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 fulfill-
ment of Joshua, that is because both Joshua and Jesus help enact a single
divine performative intention. Discerning that intention in oddly congru-
ent 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 incongru-
ent historical events bears witness to the singularity of the divine identity
and purpose that permeates them.
86 / Figural Reading and History

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 de-
scription of that relationship to replace the graphic character of the rep-
resentations 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 de-
scribe 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 in-
dependent 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 (ei-
ther between them as events, or as signifiers in the text of the Bible). A fig-
urative account of their relation depends on the correlation of the meaning
of Exodus with baptism, in which baptism becomes the meaning of the Ex-
odus, a meaning that is logically independent of the Exodus itself. Logical
independence means that one can state the meaning apart from the repre-
sentation without loss; the representation is, at best, a useful but dispens-
able 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 figura-
tive language is constituted by the difference inhering in the binary oppo-
sition 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 fulfill-
ment are concrete, historically real persons or events, related in ways that
are fundamentally figural rather than figurative. Christian figural inter-
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 87

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 his-
torically real entities. The obvious contrast between these two points of
view is not as strong as it appears, however. Auerbach argues that the fig-
ure 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 exe-
cuting a divine plan for human life. So one may speak of the figure “an-
nouncing” 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 read-
ing do not distinguish things and meanings in this way, but instead de-
scribe 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 an-
other. Auerbach underscores the reality of figure and fulfillment as entities
in the world of space and time, and by “meaning” he refers to the interre-
lationship of such real things, rather than some strange mental “thing”
with an existence all its own apart from that relationship. Auerbach is sus-
picious 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];
88 / Figural Reading and History

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 conse-
crated 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 lit-
eral and what is nonliteral. However, Tertullian’s description of the analo-
gies between the two journeys invites just such a distinction, tempting one
to infer that the wilderness of “this world” is the nonliteral meaning sig-
nified by the literal wilderness of the Judaean desert, that eternal life is the
nonliteral meaning of the promised land, that spiritual sweetness is the non-
literal 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 in-
stances of figurative language, in which what is literally written has non-
literal meaning.
But Auerbach regards Tertullian’s comparisons as structural similarities
rather than figurative expressions, as various aspects of two related pat-
terns of events. Tertullian’s figural reading proposes that the two patterns
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 89

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 utter-
ance). So although Tertullian introduces comparisons that could be under-
stood 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 mys-
tery, qui in huius sacramenti imagines parabatur, was introduced un-
der 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 an-
nunciation” 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, Auer-
bach describes the relation between them as one “revealed by an accord or
similarity,” supplying another brief example from Tertullian without fur-
ther 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 similar-
ity might call forth a compensatory hermeneutical ingenuity. The phrase
“one had to be determined” suggests that interpreters might “discover” re-
lations 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 ren-
der 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? Auer-
bach 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
90 / Figural Reading and History

figural reading in the Church’s mission to the gentiles carried with it a par-
ticular 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 re-
moved 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 oc-
currence and toward its meaning. This implied the danger that the vi-
sual element of the occurrences might succumb under the dense tex-
ture of meanings.14

In order to illustrate just how this capitulation of occurrence to mean-

ing 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 pri-
mordial 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 per-
ceived 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 simi-
larities, 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
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 91

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 struc-
tural 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 Greco-
Roman 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 lim-
ited in their conception of historical movement, nevertheless perfectly
integrated in their sensory substance. They do not know the antago-
nism 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 appear-
ance by its very presence. As Auerbach describes it, Christian figural read-
ing 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.
92 / Figural Reading and History

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 indepen-
dent 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 under-
standing 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 abstrac-
tion, 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 spiri-
tualis, 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 relation-
ship 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 fulfill-
ment, 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-
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 93

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 veri-
tas (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 fulfill-
ment, is no abstract idea, but also a historical reality. Real historical fig-
ures 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 under-
standing 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 previ-
ous discussion.
Now to the question that troubles Auerbach: Do the terms shadow or
image (umbra or imago) and truth (veritas) abstract from the sensible ap-
pearance 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 per-
son devoid of figural import: “Shadow and truth are abstract only in refer-
ence to the meaning first concealed, then revealed; they are concrete in ref-
erence 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
94 / Figural Reading and History

concealed, then revealed.” What this clearly does not denote is the histori-
cally real events or persons who are figures or fulfillments. The fulfillment,
Auerbach insists, is “carnal, hence historical” because “the truth has be-
come history or flesh.” In contrast, “the meaning first concealed, then re-
vealed” 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 fig-
urally related to the other. As a statement about a relation (the figural re-
lation between concrete, historically real entities), meaning is itself not
concrete but necessarily abstract. But in the case of figures and their ful-
fillments, such a statement can never be about the relationship without si-
multaneously 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 fulfill-
ment. 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 Auer-
bach’s relational conception of the category of meaning does not allow this
to happen. Abstract meaning becomes one point of view about a relation-
ship; 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 understand-
ing. Expanding on a definition we have already considered, Auerbach fo-
cuses 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 inter-
pretation itself, Auerbach characteristically turns instead to the events or
persons being interpreted: “The two poles of the figure are temporally dis-
tinct, 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 fulfill-
ment 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”
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 95

and consequently they “lie within time,” and their interpretation as figure
and fulfillment does not remove them from the flow of time, from “histori-
cal life.” Auerbach’s key point is that although figural reading relates per-
sons and events that occupy distinct historical moments, thereby recogniz-
ing 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 exist-
ing at discrete moments in history. And yet even though figure and fulfill-
ment 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 cat-
egory of interpretation only as a mode of recognition: “only the under-
standing, 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 nonethe-
less “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 com-
ing.” 25 When Auerbach offers a second concession to the spiritual dimen-
sion 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 fulfill-
ment, 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 fulfill-
ment 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, alle-
gorical 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 ‘allegori-
cal’ in the widest sense” (as the presence of “purely spiritual elements” in
figural interpretation would suggest, given Auerbach’s earlier linking of al-
96 / Figural Reading and History

legorical interpretation with meanings that are purely spiritual). In quali-

fying this concession, Auerbach once again dismisses the threat of abstrac-
tion and returns to his opening insistence on the historical reality of bib-
lical 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 fig-
ural 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 what-
ever “concrete reality” they might initially possess. Consequently, the dis-
tinction between historical reality and its textual representation, which fig-
ural 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 col-
lections 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 his-
torical 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 ab-
stracts 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 sys-
tem, 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-
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 97

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 occur-
rence pales before the power of the figural meaning.” Auerbach’s distinc-
tion between shadow/truth as abstract only with reference to meaning, but
concrete with reference to figure and fulfillment is, in effect, a plea for read-
ers to resist the power of meaning to dominate, and ultimately supplant,
that of which it is the meaning. In Mimesis, Auerbach suggests that mean-
ing’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 inde-
pendent meaning arise? Auerbach locates the origin of meaning’s indepen-
dence 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, Auer-
bach 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 re-
ality that do not reduce the complexity of human history to the static, for-
mal categories of ancient ethics or rhetoric, but instead do justice to the
deep “historical forces” that underlie the lives of ordinary people and gen-
erate significant social and cultural transformation. On this score, Petro-
nius and Tacitus are found wanting. Despite their attention to concrete de-
tail, 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. Auer-
bach’s counterexample is found in the gospel account of Peter’s denial, a vi-
gnette he thinks illustrates especially well the essential character and im-
port 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 represent-
ing—because generated by—a particular kind of historical movement.
The movement and its early literary representation originated in the
98 / Figural Reading and History

emotional crisis precipitated by the figure of Jesus of Nazareth in those

around him. Auerbach’s interest lies in the literary character of the gos-
pel narrative, and while Jesus, as the incarnation of God, is the stimulus
for that representation, Peter (and other early Christians who react to Je-
sus 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 de-
nial).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 anti-
classicist 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 condi-
tions, and through his Passion which, judged by earthly standards, was ig-
nominious; 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 summa-
rizes the story of Jesus as the self-humiliation of God through the pro-
gression from incarnation to crucifixion. Any reader of the New Testament
will ask at once: What happened to the resurrection? Why doesn’t Auer-
bach 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 Je-
sus. The answer is that, for Auerbach, the resurrection ascribed by the gos-
pels to Jesus is best understood as part of Peter’s story.37 In the gospels, Pe-
ter, 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’ resurrec-
tion becomes a feature of Peter’s own story, a story about the sharp oscilla-
tion of his own emotions, the “swing of the pendulum.” 39
Peter is a thoroughly ordinary person called by Jesus to “a most tremen-
dous role.” He becomes a leading disciple of the one whom he is first to rec-
ognize 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 in-
spired 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-
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 99

site direction and far stronger.40 Despair and remorse following his des-
perate 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 high-
est force, which we too might share. But like Peter, we discover such
strength-in-weakness only when, turning away from purely personal con-
cerns, we discern how we have become parts of larger historical forces that
embrace our otherwise insignificant destinies. Why does the scene of Pe-
ter’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 occur-
rences of contemporary life, which thus assumes an importance it could
never have assumed in antique literature. What we witness is the awak-
ening of “a new heart and a new spirit.” All this applies not only to Pe-
ter’s denial but also to every other occurrence which is related in the
New Testament. Every one of them is concerned with the same ques-
tion, the same conflict with which every human being is basically con-
fronted and which therefore remains infinite and eternally pending.44

What is the question or conflict that is eternally pending for every hu-
man 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
100 / Figural Reading and History

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 oth-
ers 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 move-
ment 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 per-
sonality of Jesus” is a matter of “profound seriousness.” 47 When the move-
ment 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 ob-
stacles. For a time the language as well as the religious and social prem-
ises of the message restricted it to Jewish circles. Yet the negative reac-
tion 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 Dias-
pora, 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 incompa-
rably 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 in-
terpretation 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 “mes-
sage” to the gentiles.
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 101

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 con-
creteness 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 de-
scriptions of how the underlying “historical forces” of the new spiritual
movement impinged on the lives of ordinary but nonetheless specific indi-
viduals. 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 interpreta-
tion 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 Bo-
yarin’s construal of Paul’s contrast of letter and spirit, here too “the spiri-
tual” 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 per-
son who suffered and died. Auerbach’s characterization of Christian iden-
tity 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 im-
portant 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 be-
coming a human being. In terms of the gospel story, it would mean that
102 / Figural Reading and History

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 iden-
tified 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 with-
drawal of the philosopher from his destiny, his endeavor for release from
the chain of earthly happening, his determination to remain at least in-
wardly 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 “incar-
nated” 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 pre-
sents 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 re-
move all otherworldly aspects of the Christian account of things. But just
as meaning (spirit divorced from flesh) becomes antagonistic to sensory oc-
currence, 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 some-
where 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-
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 103

urrected from the dead. But Christian figural interpretation, as an elabora-

tion 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 his-
torical realm. As his remarks about Stoics and Epicureans indicate, Auer-
bach sees in this otherworldly telos a Christianity at odds with itself, one
more reflection of the antagonism between this world and the next inher-
ent 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 antagonis-
tic or subversive. On the other hand, the side of figura that resists figura-
tive 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 read-
ing as “a method rooted in Jewish tradition” to a method applied by Chris-
tians “with incomparably greater boldness.” 56 It is not figural reading as
such, but rather specifically Christian (indeed, specifically Pauline Chris-
tian) 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 rela-
tion 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 kenōsis or “emptying out” of meaning into fully realized, con-
crete imagery. But this will be the achievement not of interpretation but of
poetic art. Figural reading constantly threatens to render meaning non-
incarnate. Auerbach’s Mimesis describes how figural art, beginning deci-
sively with Dante, reversed this process, but at the cost of its own Phoenix-
like death and reconstitution as the Western tradition of secular literary
realism.
104 / Figural Reading and History

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 cer-
tain manner of representation than about the nature of a deity: “The con-
cept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their man-
ner of comprehending and representing things.” 58 As a form of literary
composition, figural art is different from the figural interpretation of an ex-
isting 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 after-
life. Auerbach claims that both figural procedures preserve rather than un-
dermine 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 trans-
formed 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, paradoxi-
cally 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 eter-
nal 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
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 105

nonhistorical fulfillment, but rather in poetically representing Virgil’s non-

historical 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 Vir-
gil 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 rep-
resentation. Dante had rendered the extrahistorical fulfillment of his char-
acters 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 Di-
vine 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 sec-
ular 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 (Je-
sus) 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
106 / Figural Reading and History

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 re-
versal, 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 al-
lowed 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 interpre-
tation 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 fun-
damental 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, history-
preserving 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 phenom-
enal 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
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 107

is quite striking in light of its opening sentence: “The strangely new mean-
ing 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 be-
tween 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 in-
terpretations primarily by appealing to certain passages in the Pauline epis-
tles.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 incor-
porate “the interpretations thus arrived at into the tradition.” 71
108 / Figural Reading and History

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 tradi-
tion) 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 at-
tacks 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 ty-
pos; observance of it has become useless and even harmful since Christ
made his sacrifice”; “in its Jewish and Judaistic legal sense the Old Testa-
ment is the letter that kills”; its “most important and sacred events, sacra-
ments 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. . . . ac-
cording 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 his-
torical facts.76

Unlike Tertullian’s, Paul’s prophecy was not “phenomenal” because it sac-

rificed the phenomena: it annulled the figura precisely by “fulfilling” it (re-
call Boyarin’s characterization of Pauline supersessionism as “inclusion by
exclusion”). Having marked off Paul as a exceptional interlude in the de-
velopment of figura from Judaeo-Christianity to Tertullian and beyond,
Auerbach further separates Paul’s hermeneutic from a specifically Chris-
tian 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-
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 109

siah into a system of figural prophecy, in which the risen one simultane-
ously fulfills and annuls the work of his precursor [das Werk des Vorläu-
fers 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 Chris-
tian culture.78 Auerbach is able to tell the story of increasing European cul-
tural 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 re-
visionary 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 Tes-
tament 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 bibli-
cal figures.
Auerbach argues that this form of fulfillment provided Europe with a
conception of religion and history no less universal than a Pauline ful-
fillment 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 fig-
ural interpretation had made it. But—and here Auerbach introduces a cru-
cial qualification—this insight into the practical missionary usefulness of
a universally available Old Testament “from which Jewish history and na-
tional 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 late-
ness of this insight is crucial to Auerbach’s argument, for he is suggest-
ing 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-
110 / Figural Reading and History

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 thou-
sand 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 Inte-
gral to Christianity at its outset (in Judeo-Christianity, and, more surpris-
ingly, in the non-Pauline mission to the gentiles), and especially recogniz-
able 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 re-
ality, 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 Tes-
tament 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,
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 111

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 occa-
sion 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 exte-
rior 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 oc-
casion 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 contin-
ued 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 light-
house and the actual trip many years later remains unexpressed, enig-
matic, only dimly to be conjectured, as does the content of Lily Bris-
coe’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 Flau-
bert’s Emma and Charles at table, which Auerbach had discussed in an ear-
lier 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 as-
sumes a figural character, as present occurrence bodies forth fulfillment in
the form of what constitutes genuinely human reality: “Aspects of the oc-
currence 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
112 / Figural Reading and History

text is “fraught with background,” with depths in which further signifi-

cance 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 re-
ality 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 pos-
sibility 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 con-
tinuity of action but in itself. And in the process something new and el-
emental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of
life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without preju-
dice. 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 dis-
cussions firmly to the characterizations of Christian figural sensibility in
the opening chapters of Mimesis. These links emerge in a passage in Auer-
bach’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 kenōsis: Deity subjects itself to earthly des-
 The Figure in the Fulfillment / 113

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 re-
alism that figural readers had struggled to preserve. Despite all its permu-
tations, that commitment to realism has carried through to the pages of To
the Lighthouse, whose characters continue to reenact that prototypical in-
carnation by surrendering themselves without reserve to their own earthly
destinies.
Chapter 5 The Preservation
of Historical Reality:
Auerbach and Origen

Erich 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 ful-
fillments, Origenist allegorical reading dissolved history in favor of spiri-
tual 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, trans-
formative 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 his-
tory 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 “pre-
serving 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 inter-
preted allegorically or on occasion somewhat figurally. The spiritualist-

114
 The Preservation of Historical Reality / 115

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 inter-
pretation strips away “concrete reality.” But how can a particular mode of
reading jeopardize the historical reality of what the text represents? Un-
derstanding 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 follow-
ing 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 Auer-

bach believes—unless one uncritically accepts Auerbach’s particular con-
ception 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 his-
torical 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 qual-
ity 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 ethi-
cal impact of the reading process on contemporary readers, a concern for
116 / Figural Reading and History

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 read-
ing 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 dif-
ference in the reader’s own present-day social and ethical stance toward
other persons. Behind their difference over whether the hallmark of real-
ity is best grasped as body or spirit, Auerbach and Origen agree that inter-
pretation 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. De-
spite 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 open-
ing chapter of Mimesis), “mystical and moral considerations seem defi-
nitely to overshadow the strictly historical element.” 2 Yet, as we shall see,
Origen has a conception of the strictly historical no less firm than Auer-
bach’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 histori-
cal 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:
Figure (type) Fulfillment (antitype)
Auerbach: real, historical real, historical
(wirklich, geschichtliche)
Origen: bodily (ta; swmavtika) spiritual
historical (ta; iJstovrika) intelligible
 The Preservation of Historical Reality / 117

Since the Latin figura (“figure”), as used by ancient Christian biblical in-
terpreters, translates the Greek tuvpo~ (“type”), Origen and Auerbach can
be viewed as giving different answers to the following question: Do the ful-
fillments (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 them-
selves, we should appreciate that both Auerbach and Origen are insist-
ing, not first of all on the definitions of their terms (which they take for
granted), but rather on either the similarity or dissimilarity between fig-
ures and their fulfillments: Auerbach stresses continuity and abiding iden-
tity, Origen discontinuity and transformation. Second, Origen’s formula-
tion seems to resist Auerbach’s charge of anti-historicity. For although
Origen’s fulfillments are decidedly not historical, the very force of the con-
trast 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 “some-
thing real, historical,” etwas Wirkliches, Geschichtliches; Origen’s tuvpoi
are either “historical events” or “bodily things,” ta; iJstovrika or ta; swmav-
tika. 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 bod-
ily. What is historical is not so much what has taken place; rather, “histori-
cal” designates that whatever has taken place was something bodily.6 In
contrast, Origen, by means of a disjunctive syntax that separates “histor-
ical events” from “bodily things,” suggests that history as such is not
118 / Figural Reading and History

essential to his understanding of tuvpo~. Types may be either historical

events or bodily things, but their antitypes are neither historical nor bod-
ily. Historicity, for Origen, in Auerbach’s sense of what is bodily, is a pos-
sible, but not a necessary, feature of biblical types.
We can probe Auerbach’s and Origen’s different understandings of his-
torical reality more closely by looking further at their use of the term “spir-
itual.” While Origen distinguishes the spiritual from the bodily, Auerbach
contrasts the spiritual with the historical. In the following passage, Auer-
bach 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” (innerge-

schichtlich) 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, en-
tirely, spiritual can no longer be intrinsically historical; complete spiritual-
ity “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, Auer-
bach 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 en-
tail 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,”
 The Preservation of Historical Reality / 119

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 with-
out obliterating it. The problem with the “vulgar spiritualism” of the “ab-
struse art of allegorical exegesis” is that it led to a denigration of the “ac-
tual” 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 mean-
ing of “fulfill” may not be what one first suspects. Elsewhere, when Auer-
bach uses “encompass” (einschliessen) as a synonym for fulfill, the result-
ing 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 fol-
lowing remarks on the Old Testament depiction of David show. Here Auer-
bach 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 con-
tains history and not legend. In Absalom’s rebellion, for example, or in
the scenes from David’s last days, the contradictions and crossing of
120 / Figural Reading and History

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 con-
cept 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, his-
torical 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 ten-
dency to a smoothing down and harmonizing of events, to a simplifica-
tion of motives, to a static definition of characters which avoids conflict,
vacillation, and development, such as are natural to legendary struc-
ture, does not predominate in the Old Testament world of legend. Abra-
ham, Jacob, or even Moses produces a more concrete, direct, and histor-
ical 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 psycho-
logical 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 per-
sons 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 rela-
tion 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 mem-
ory. 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 scrip-
tural 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
 The Preservation of Historical Reality / 121

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 an-
nouncing later fulfillments, he can sometimes appeal to the sense-
perceptions 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 predom-
inates. 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 pe-
culiarly 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 spiri-
tualist 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
122 / Figural Reading and History

In effect, Auerbach understands ancient figural readers of Scripture to be

denying any absolute difference between event and text: “Figural interpre-
tation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of
which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encom-
passes or fulfills the first.” 21
The key point is that the figure, in addition to signifying a future per-
son 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 “in-
terpretation of history” is “by nature a textual interpretation.” 22 Conse-
quently 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 percep-
tion 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 cre-
ate the odd situation in which a formerly historical reality failed to pre-
serve its own historicity—and, Auerbach suggests, its very reality. On the
face of it, this suggests that a reader’s relationship to a textual representa-
tion 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 historic-
ity 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. . . . Of-
ten vague similarities in the structure of events or in their attendant cir-
 The Preservation of Historical Reality / 123

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 “es-
tablishes [herstellen] a connection between two events or persons.” 25 But
Auerbach recognizes that ancient Christian interpreters, in their deter-
mination “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 mis-
reading its textual representation might be understood as a failure to pre-
serve something of the actual historical reality of that event.
But this objectivist conception of the figural character of past events, al-
though it might account for the special relevance of certain kinds of textual
representation (e.g., realistic narrative), still does not explain what Auer-
bach 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 represen-
tations of past persons and events and its present readers. Auerbach sug-
gests 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 per-
sons 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 repre-
sentations 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 indi-
rect 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 trans-
formed to our manner of viewing current conditions.” 27 Although Auer-
bach describes the reader’s altered relationship to the historical event as an
124 / Figural Reading and History

alteration of the historical event itself, as the event’s loss of its own histori-
cal 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 al-
lows one to simplify complex motives and thereby give propaganda a foot-
hold. In the passage that follows, which echoes the terms of the earlier
passage on King David, Auerbach contrasts “the historical” with “the leg-
endary.” The historical is characterized by confusing, contradictory ma-
terials, events, twists and turns (all of which legend irons out and sim-
plifies). Auerbach first contrasts the simplistic legends of the martyrs
(stiff-necked and fanatical persecutors versus stiff-necked and fanatical vic-
tims) with the “so complicated—that is to say, so real and historical situa-
tion” [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 crud-
est simplification—with the result that friend and foe alike can often
employ the same ones. To write history is so difficult that most histori-
ans 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, em-
bodied persons and for the possibility of their continued community de-
spite the circumstances only obliquely described in the preceding passage:

With this I have said all that I thought the reader would wish me to ex-
plain. 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-
 The Preservation of Historical Reality / 125

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 elabora-
tion in R. P. C. Hanson’s 1959 study of Origen’s biblical interpretation.32 Al-
though 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 re-
duces 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 histori-
cal 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 mislead-

ing. 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 unaccept-
ably blurs the line between the actions of historical persons and the spiri-
tual experiences of contemporary readers. Rejecting Henri de Lubac’s plea
that Origen’s allegorical reading was simply the way Origen discovered
126 / Figural Reading and History

meaning in the otherwise incoherent jumble of past events, Hanson coun-

ters 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 anti-
historical 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 dan-
gerously externalized.36

By externalization, Hanson has in mind “Origen’s habit of resolving inci-

dents and details in both Old and New Testaments into the religious expe-
rience 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 al-
legory, 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 Ori-
gen’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 Her-
acleon, 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 re-
garded as over and done with, but that they remain relevant—indeed, nec-
essary—for the spiritual advancement of his contemporaries by continuing
to occur in the present and future. In thus accentuating the occurrence-
character 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 incar-
nation 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 Fa-
ther. 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 paren-
theses 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
128 / Figural Reading and History

as Origen does, that the Baptist’s first “witness” (verse 7 has already indi-
cated that “bearing witness” is the main purpose of the Baptist’s appear-
ance) ran from verse 15 all the way to verse 18.2 Unhindered by the pres-
ence 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 judg-
ment, 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 possibil-
ity, 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 king-
dom 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, re-
sponds that even the Baptist’s very capacity to discern the distinction be-
tween 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 rep-
resents an even more select group of prophets (“those who had been per-
 The Present Occurrence of Past Events / 129

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? Ori-
gen’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 Abra-
ham, 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 re-
ceived what is correct and true and have understood” the knowledge ex-
pressed 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 un-
derstanding of the typical character of their own lives.15
If prophets and apostles share the same knowledge, and even the same
130 / Figural Reading and History

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 as-
sertion, 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 reve-
lation 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 mys-
tery 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 be-
fore 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
 The Present Occurrence of Past Events / 131

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 Ori-
gen then begins to contrast prophets and apostles on the basis of this dis-
tinction. 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 “fel-
low 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 under-
stood 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 under-
stand the mysteries and perceive their realization through the com-
pleted 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 pa-
triarchs and prophets), the prophets do not see it actually revealed; there-
fore, 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
132 / Figural Reading and History

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 ref-
erence 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 pres-
ent to them. So Origen offers a second characterization of gospel, con-
sidered 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 an-
nounces 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 pres-
ence 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 gos-
pels 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 an-
nounces that something is present. Once one takes into consideration the
stance of the patriarchs and prophets as living prior to the arrival of Christ,
 The Present Occurrence of Past Events / 133

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 gos-
pel [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 preced-
ing 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 as-
sumptions about historical contingency that Origen does not share. First,
our conclusion assumes that the appearance of Christ is a radically contin-
gent event; it might not have occurred. Second, we assume that the types
that prefigured that arrival were also radically contingent. Finally, we as-
sume 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 sec-
ond. 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 be-
ginning, 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 pos-
sessed by what had preceded. It is precisely trinitarian thought that main-
134 / Figural Reading and History

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 Fa-
ther) and commonality (the Son is generated eternally; the Son and the Fa-
ther are divine). The important implication here is that the possibility of
supersessionism arises from the failure of trinitarianism. When, follow-
ing Hegel, one collapses Father and Son, making the category of Spirit pri-
mary, the tension between sequence and simultaneity gives way to simul-
taneity, 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 contin-
gency, 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 de-
pended 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 Tes-
tament, 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 “first-
fruit” (ajparch;n) and “firstlings” (prwtogevnnhma) —a contrast based on
terms from the Septuagint but developed largely according to Origen’s own
 The Present Occurrence of Past Events / 135

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 ge-
nealogy 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 an-
ticipation 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 con-
tains 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 mys-
teries 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 per-
son, however, who not only has [not] thoroughly understood and per-
136 / Figural Reading and History

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 re-
mains 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 “incorpo-
real 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 pos-
sible 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 his-
torical things are types of historical things,” writes Origen.46 But histori-
cal 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 Evan-
gelist’s gospel as the gospel of an occurrence, one must assume John’s posi-
tion. How can this be done? John leaned on Jesus’ breast, and Jesus in-
structed 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 ob-
serves that Scripture clearly indicates that Mary had only one son. Conse-
quently, 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
 The Present Occurrence of Past Events / 137

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, Ori-
gen 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 interpret-
er’s soul of what is prefigured—the coming of Christ—is sufficient to pre-
serve the historical reality of the type. Indeed, the type’s truly historical re-
ality, 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 pre-
cisely 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 dehistori-
cizing mode of reading, a strong convergence between the two on the ethi-
cal 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 pres-
ent, although its character is a function of the present reader’s stance to-
ward 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 concep-
tions of what counts as “historical,” both Auerbach and Origen are anxious
to “preserve” it, insofar as both of them are concerned about the contem-
porary reader’s ongoing ethical self-disposition.
Part 3

figural reading
and identity
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 bibli-
cal 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 non-
literal 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 nar-
ratively extends rather than effaces the Bible’s realistic, literal sense. Frei ar-
gues that figural extension of the Bible’s literal meaning, as the hermeneu-
tical 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 fig-
ural reading. He enhances Auerbach’s relational or nonsubstantial concep-
tion 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 under-
standing discerns the mysterious interrelationship of figure and fulfill-
ment, 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 histor-
ical 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 ca-
pacity to render the identity of Christ and, hence, the identity of God.
One way Frei resists the subversive possibilities that a perspective such
141
142 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 self-
assured 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 pres-
ent. 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 fig-
ure’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 resurrec-
tion by the New Testament gospels. By focusing on the reactions to Jesus,
Auerbach separates spirit from Jesus’ bodily identity, allowing spirit to be-
come 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 inter-
relating 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 dis-
placed 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 conse-
quence, 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
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 143

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 hu-
man equality fostered by such fulfillment is not an equality of sameness.
Indeed, it is by virtue of his disengagement from the identifying descrip-
tions 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 re-
ligion, 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 tra-
dition 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 read-
ing 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 de-
picted that historical world by means of a single story that stretched from
Genesis to Revelation. By means of the device of figural (typological) read-
ing, 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 writ-
ings, 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-
144 / Figural Reading and Identity

tive. Given the very nature of these narratives as texts, readers simply can-
not 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 in-
sisted that poetic meanings were so textually imbedded that paraphrase was
impossible, but it is more profoundly related to the way Christian theo-
logians, following the Creed of Chalcedon, insist that Jesus’ divine and hu-
man natures cohere inseparably yet unconfusedly in a single person.
Frei argues that since the Eighteenth Century, figural reading had in-
creasingly given way to figurative or nonliteral interpretations that sepa-
rated meaning from the narrative shape of biblical stories. For example, by
separating the Bible’s literal sense from its historical referents, modern his-
torical criticism undermined the possibility of understanding figural rela-
tions as extensions of the literal sense. Historical critics sought to distin-
guish 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 his-
torical events, it had increasingly come to be regarded as logically inde-
pendent 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 willing-
ness 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 per-
son or event had predicted a later one was not credible according to the non-
divine causality governing modern historiography. On the other hand, it
no longer made literary or logical sense. Divorced from history, the literal
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 145

biblical narrative now came to be viewed according to the prevailing mod-

ern definition of a literal proposition as a statement having only one mean-
ing. This meant one of two things for figural reading. Either texts once re-
garded 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 non-
literal. 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 di-
rectly at odds with the literal sense.4
The binary opposition between literal and nonliteral meaning that gov-
erns Boyarin’s postmodern approach to interpretation is only the latest per-
mutation of the modern reversal of interpretation that Frei describes and
rejects. Once figural import came to be characterized as not merely differ-
ent 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 con-
ception, 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 fi-
gura, but figura, from its point of view, can never be the mirror-image of
allegory, because figural reading refuses at the outset the absolute opposi-
tion 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 re-
quired 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
146 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 Chris-
tian figural reading would lead one to expect. Frei thereby subtly con-
nects the distinctive features of Calvin’s figural hermeneutic to those as-
pects 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 temp-
tation of Eve): “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and be-
tween 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 re-
fer 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 undis-
turbed 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 overarch-
ing 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 mean-
ing of Isa. 7:14. Likewise, the christological meaning of Isa. 7:14 is not un-
related to the literal meaning of Gen. 3:15. Calvin is able to regard figural
meaning (in this instance, christological) as extending rather than conflict-
ing with the literal sense because there is, writes Frei, a “natural coher-
ence,” “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-
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 147

ferent members of a family resemble one another—not because some sin-

gle trait or essence is shared by all members but because the members share
clusters of overlapping features.10 Frei argues that such “family resem-
blance” 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 cer-
tain feature of the text that differs from, but does not contradict, the fea-
ture 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 with-
out 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 lit-
eral 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 descrip-
tive” and does not lose its “independent or self-contained status.” 12 Con-
sequently, 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 suc-
cessfully 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 be-
tween the literal depiction and the reality depicted supported figural exten-
sion, and then noting that when literal depiction and reference separated,
literal and figural reading clashed, Frei quotes Auerbach’s description of fig-
ural 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
148 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 connec-
tion 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 essen-

tial features of figural reading that ensure against figurative distortion: “a
delicate balance between the temporally separated occasions, a firm con-
nection with literal or realistic procedure, and a clear rooting in the or-
der 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
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 149

its meaning): “The total content of the sacred writings was placed in an ex-
egetic 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 sen-
sory 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 tempo-
rally 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 some-
times 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 Auer-
bach’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 termi-
nology 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
150 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 de-
sirable because it has already begun to allow the figural to become figura-
tive. The figural meaning of manna as the redeeming activity of Christ en-
tails 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 Is-
raelites). The allegory remains Christian only because the connection of
the figural with the literal has not been entirely severed. Although disen-
gaged from the literal depiction of the Old Testament narrative, the mean-
ing 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 half-
way 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. Cal-
vin’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 oc-
casion 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
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 151

what is to come.” 20 Insofar as this is an instance of figural rather than alle-

gorical reading, we should be able to specify its difference from Frei’s ex-
ample 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 figur-
ally 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 ques-
tion 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 “ve-
hicles of meaning.” Frei thereby works to minimize the figurative conno-
tations 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 shadow-
substance relation, the first kind of figuration was that of an earthly,
historical promise and occasion anticipating and prefiguring a later his-
torical as well as eternal state of affairs. The family resemblance be-
tween the two kinds of figural interpretation is evident.22

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

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 mean-
ing, 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 ex-
tended by being confirmed and ratified through Christ.
So far, Frei has claimed (with help from Auerbach and Calvin) that fig-
ural 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, tempo-
rally 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 un-
dermine the close unity of meaning and narrative depiction at the level
of the individual stories? Frei addresses this threat in light of the interpre-
tative 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 behold-
ing” 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 con-
tained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the com-
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 153

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 spir-
itual. Just as figural meaning for Auerbach is a purely relational category,
spiritual understanding as the discernment of that relation is also rela-
tional. Like meaning, spirit denotes a divinely enacted relation between
two persons or events, a relation altogether different from the causal con-
nections 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 un-
derstanding simply comprehends the interdependence of figure and fulfill-
ment, then if one is going to express that interdependence as a larger pat-
tern 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 de-
piction. One should note the exceedingly apophatic quality of Frei’s char-
acterization of spiritual understanding, which underscores the way his con-
ception 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 Ori-
gen’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 inter-
preter 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
154 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 interdepen-
dence involves no material contribution by the interpreter. Furthermore, by
raising the specter of hermeneutical arbitrariness, Frei turns Auerbach’s re-
striction 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 inter-
preters is equally true about interpretative traditions. Calvin rejects the
notion that such traditions could substitute for an individual’s actual read-
ing 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 fig-
ural 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 exter-
nal form they could discern examples of spiritual things.’” Calvin distin-
guishes his own perspective from this supersessionist view:
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 155

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 interpreta-
tion 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 inter-
pretive stance.32
There is no question that, in some sense, Christian figural interpreters do
“read backward,” from the standpoint of the fulfillment prefigured by ear-
lier 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 back-
ward perspective upon it, i.e. of history and interpretation joined as two
logically independent factors.” 33 We have already seen that Frei, like Auer-
bach, insists on the “intrinsic connection” between meaning (here, inter-
pretation) and narrative depiction (here, history). Frei introduced the no-
tion 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 fi-
nal 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 Auer-
bach’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
156 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 spir-
itual 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 bibli-
cal 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 direc-
tion 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 an-
cient figure to subsequent fulfillment, just as though he or she were an an-
cient 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 in-
serting 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 per-
spective 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, mean-
ing. Coming on the heels of his insistence that Christian readers must rein-
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 157

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, Chris-
tian 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 be-
tween literal and figural meaning. For Boyarin, Pauline allegorical inter-
pretation intensified that opposition in ways that essentially undermined
Jewish identity for the sake of Christian identity. Calvin’s Christian oppo-
nents did precisely that by claiming that Jews were granted a distinct iden-
tity 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 fig-
ural 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 twentieth-
century 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 lo-
cates the heart of Christian identity in the concluding portions of the New
Testament gospels, which tell the story of Jesus’ suffering, death, and res-
urrection. 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.
158 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 con-
sistency 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 gos-
pel story. Frei insists that the gospel story, especially the Passion narrative
that concludes all four New Testament gospels, is a story about Jesus be-
fore 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 power-
lessness.39

For Frei, historical forces act upon Jesus, rather than, as for Auerbach, com-
prising the action of Jesus upon others and their reaction to him. Further-
more, 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-
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 159

vine action and the “historical forces” at their common point of im-
pact—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 in-
creasing activity of God, and yet, in the midst of this very process, Jesus re-
tains his own identity, while the God whose action has come to the fore re-
mains hidden. Frei calls this theme “supplantation or supersession in unity
or identity rather than subordination.” 42 There is an obvious formal simi-
larity between Frei’s insistence that Jesus retains his identity in the course
of his supersession by God, and Auerbach’s insistence that a figure pre-
serves its historical reality throughout its subsequent fulfillment. Auer-
bach 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 sup-
plant 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 fig-
ural 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 Je-
sus. In his absolute passivity, Jesus nonetheless marks the presence of the
veiledly acting God: One cannot pit a conception of deity or divine agency
160 / Figural Reading and Identity

against the specific identity of Jesus.44 Indeed, Frei is proposing precisely

the reverse: if one can properly speak of a “supplantation by identifica-
tion,” 45 one must also speak of an “increasing identification by supplanta-
tion.” 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 cru-
cifixion 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 struc-
ture 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 in-
terpretation 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 pat-
terns 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 ex-
tends. Frei is determined to provide an account of figural reading that re-
sists even better than Auerbach’s the possible subversion by meaning. He
does so by anchoring figural reading firmly in what he calls the sensus li-
teralis or literal sense of the gospel story, a sense wholly constituted by its
rendering of Jesus’ identity. Frei contends that Jesus’ identity, as the en-
acted intention of God to save humanity, is adequately rendered by the lit-
eral 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-
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 161

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, be-
cause of the closeness of its perceived fit with the person of Jesus: There
exists “a strong interconnection (which may even indicate derivation) be-
tween 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 Inso-
far as the language of the gospels ascribes the resurrection to Jesus rather
than to Peter, Auerbach’s reading violates what Frei calls the “basic ascrip-
tive 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 as-
criptive character of the literal narratives concerning him, or his own sta-
tus 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 ac-
tions—“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 ques-
tion: “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 through-
out 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
162 / Figural Reading and Identity

description of Jesus of Nazareth. Because God was incarnate in Jesus, the

gospels’ identity descriptions of Jesus are at the same time the identity de-
scriptions of the God whose enacted intentions and self-manifestations
pervade the entire Bible. Does this mean, then, that Jesus’ enacted inten-
tions 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 intention-
manifestation 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 mani-
festation, 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 ingre-
dient 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 logi-
cal 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”—al-
though aspects of the story do point in this direction—will not suffice ei-
ther. His conclusion takes us back to the theme of identification by supplan-
tation: “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 depic-
tion 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 di-
vine self-identifying literal sense under a theory of divine inspiration, then
“the ‘literal’ sense may be extended to overlap with the figurative or typo-
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 163

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 pro-
ceeds from a sensus literalis identity description of Jesus to an identity de-
scription of God, eliminates the category of “the nonliteral” from the fig-
ural relation. The moment in the gospel story that, as Auerbach’s reading
shows us, has the potential to undermine such a formulation—Jesus’ res-
urrection—has been integrated into the story of Jesus, along with any no-
tion 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 Je-
sus—and there is nothing in the identity descriptions of Jesus that is non-
literal (and that might thereby threaten the literality of the figures). The
only remaining potential for opposition between figure and fulfillment, es-
pecially for the supersession of the former by the latter, would lie in a dis-
tinction between Jesus and God. But any such distinction must be under-
stood, 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 ful-
fillment 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 fig-
ure 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 differ-
ent, 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 scrip-
ture into something that is called the Old Testament (if it is a distor-
tion!).” 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 un-
derstands what many Jewish readers mean when they charge Christian fig-
ural 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-
164 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 “lead-
ing 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 be-
tween 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 com-
plete 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. Ac-
cording to Frei, Kermode insists that figural reading does not extend but
undermines the literal sense by introducing into the conception of the lit-
eral 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 frus-
trates—attempts by Christian readers to “discover” spiritual meaning be-
neath the letter. In light of Kermode’s literary analysis of Mark in The Gen-
esis 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 be-
ing 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 assump-
tion that within Christian discourse the distinction between spirit and let-
ter should be identified with the hidden and manifest sense. When Ker-
mode argues that in the Gospel of Mark the true insider is an outsider who
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 165

stands outside an unfollowable world, he reverses the relation between in-

sider and outsider in the Christian interpretative tradition. For in that tra-
dition, 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. In-
deed, 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 Re-
formers, governance by the sensus literalis in the reading of Scripture
as well as its perspicuity entailed that in principle there is no inter-
pretive 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 (out-
siders 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 chan-
nel through which God might be conveyed. On the contrary, the text that
166 / Figural Reading and Identity

renders the identity of Jesus, like (although not identical to) the logos in-
carnate 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 pre-
cisely 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 uni-
versal 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 interpre-
tive tradition truth is what is written, not something separable and trans-
linguistic 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 in-
sists 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 rep-
resentation 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 life-
perspectives of succeeding generations.” 70 Such a text, on which we do not
try to force our meanings, may nonetheless “force a scramble of our cate-
gories 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
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 167

Boyarin’s notion of Christian allegorical reading, the opposition collapses

into a pure nonliterality that obliterates every reader’s identity by collaps-
ing 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 com-
mon 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 symbol-
neutral 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,” nei-
ther ought one to suggest that the figural extension of the literal sense can
be achieved simply through its recitation. Such extension requires concep-
tual 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 con-
tinually make its own case.
This side of Frei’s thinking about the contestable character of figural in-
terpretation 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
168 / Figural Reading and Identity

and outside is, at least at first glance, clear and sharp.” That is, theology op-
erates 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 fur-
ther from Phillips, but it is useful to have Phillips’s remarks before us be-
fore looking at Frei’s critical response. Here is what Phillips writes:

The possibility of the unreality of God does not occur within any reli-
gion, 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 con-
fronted with it. How did Paul, for example, know that the God he wor-
shipped 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 con-
cept 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 reli-
gious tradition.75

To Phillips’s claim that Paul knows that he worships the God of Abraham be-
cause both he and Abraham stand within “a common religious tradition,”
Frei asks a typically Protestant question: “How do you adjudicate that as-
sertion?” Phillips does not address that question, so Frei proceeds to imag-
ine how Phillips’s own definition of theology as wholly internal to a reli-
gion 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-
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 169

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 signifi-
cance 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 inter-
nal 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 con-
cludes 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 im-
possible is any assessment of the adequacy of Paul’s judgment on this mat-
ter. Put differently, Phillips’s view makes it impossible for someone who
stands within Christianity to assess the adequacy of a contemporary Jew-
ish 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 Chris-
tian theologians to have a genuine—that is to say, a theological—disagree-
ment 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 com-
munity’s identity, even to the point of concluding that the community has
170 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 con-
ception held by Abraham. The activity of Christian self-criticism is carried
out by means of debates about the faithfulness of competing conceptual re-
descriptions of its identifying narratives. By collapsing theology into the
religious tradition, Phillips, in Frei’s view, eliminates from Christian theol-
ogy 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 self-
description and how, what could be taken to be appropriate conceptual
redescriptions of specific beliefs in our day, and how they are autho-
rized 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 the-
ology, we’d best look elsewhere than to D. Z. Phillips.78

Without even permission for the use of conceptual redescriptions in Phil-

lips’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 re-
description, such as the intention-action or subject-manifestation patterns
discussed earlier. The key question is: What sorts of conceptual redescrip-
tions 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 sug-
gests that traditional Jewish and Christian readers of the Bible do not dis-
agree on the priority of the literal sense, but rather on its proper charac-
terization. For Christians, argues Frei, the literal sense is a literary (i.e., a
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 171

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 inappro-
priate, 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 func-
tions 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 ba-
sic and, to Frei’s mind, fundamental difference in the way each religion
characterizes the literal sense. Unlike midrash, which focuses on the mean-
ings 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
172 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 nonal-
legorical: “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 nonlit-
eral that allegory relies upon. There is a very strong convergence of inter-
est between Frei and Boyarin at this point. Much of what Boyarin attrib-
utes to midrash, Frei attributes to the Christian reading of the literal sense.
Most important, both are presented as refusing to enter into the binary op-
positions of literality/nonliterality that characterize allegory. The diver-
gence 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 du-
alism 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 con-
vergence of Christian literal reading and Jewish midrash lies largely in se-
curing the Christian literal sense against the possibility of allegorical sub-
version. 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 non-
literal. But the Christian reading of the literal sense has an interest in nar-
rative 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
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 173

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 qual-
ifications, 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 be-
cause 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 lin-
ear 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 dis-
cerned 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 ap-
plied 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 Com-
mentary 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 ad-
vocating historical and religious progress is not a supplanting of one scrip-
tural narrative by a later and better one; it is instead the substitution of a
philosophy of history for an intratextual interpretive scheme.” 90 This con-
trast 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 re-
lation 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 (“supplanta-
tion”—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 re-
ligions—in favor of something else: a philosophy of history. The ques-
tion of Christian identity, in the way that Frei thinks that question must be
posed by Christians, has been dropped.91
174 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 unpredict-
able 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 un-
derstand 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 be-

tween 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 inter-
vening period of liberal scholarship and the persuasion that the two re-
ligions, even though closely intertwined, are quite distinct, each with
its own integrity. The convergence of distinctness and commensurabil-
ity 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 Chris-
tian 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 ques-
tion that Frei also understands that Christian figural extension of the lit-
eral sense of Hebrew Scripture (transforming it into the Christian Old Tes-
tament) 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 distinc-
tively 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 in-
sists 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
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 175

give him their allegiance. Such a conception of Christian fulfillment is ut-

terly 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 equal-
ity 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 signi-
fiers to meaning does not, however, take the form of simply reversing, even
for the sake of neutralizing, their hierarchical relationship. Instead, Frei re-
fuses 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 Boya-
rin’s own characterization of the way Jewish midrash does not directly con-
tradict Christian allegorical interpretation but instead rejects the assump-
tions 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’ iden-
tity, 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 Chris-
tian fulfillment is grounded not in identity as sameness but in an identity
that follows upon one’s identification with the other. Christ deigns to iden-
tify himself with human beings, who are thereby invited to identify them-
selves with him. The equality that underlies universality is thereby consti-
tuted by a mutual “identifying with,” rather than a “becoming the same
176 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 non-
Pauline. 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 interpret-
ers 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 sto-
ry’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 ren-
dered 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 same-
ness. 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 one-
ness of human nature, it obliterates the differences that constitute the dis-
tinctive identities of individuals, religions, and cultures. While its goal of
human equality is laudable, its equation of equality with sameness is per-
nicious, 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 in-
dependent of the dialectic of the different and the same, just as his concep-
tion of literal sense is independent of the dialectic of literality and nonlit-
erality. 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 accord-
ing to which one might compare them to one another. The question of the
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 177

Christian identity of persons then becomes a question of the kind of rela-

tionship they bear in their own distinctive identities to Jesus in his own dis-
tinctive 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 them-
selves 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 identi-
fying 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 any-
thing 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 commu-
nity of Israel. But as the gospel narratives unfold, Jesus begins to recede
from the identifying descriptions afforded by Israel and its traditions, be-
coming ever more singular in his individuality. Even that singular individ-
uality seems finally superseded in the resurrection, in which Jesus the in-
dividual 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 identifi-
cation as the only one manifest when God alone is acting that Jesus can be-
come the bestower of an identity that requires no obliteration of difference.
After the resurrection, it is Jesus who bestows his identity on the commu-
nity 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 su-
persessionism? 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
178 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 commu-
nity of Israel after the resurrection, the Christian community can only re-
ceive Jesus’ identity. Neither community can provide Jesus with his iden-
tity. 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 iden-
tity 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 sin-
gularity. . . . To be ‘the first born among many brethren’ (and sisters) is
his vocation and his very being. And these ‘many,’ these ‘others’ are all hu-
mankind.” 100 His resurrection marks the moment when the one who for-
merly 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 him-
self 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 iden-
tity, which, like all conceptions of personal relationship, demands the pres-
ervation 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-
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 179

sists that practices once central to the community (above all, physical cir-
cumcision) 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 nei-
ther male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (RSV). Frei in-
vokes this verse in at least two instances, both of which are instructive. In
a hermeneutical move reminiscent of midrash itself, Frei rewrites the Gala-
tians verse in the course of applying it to the capacity of the Christian tra-
dition to appeal to the person of Jesus for purposes of self-critique. The tra-
ditions subject to critique are slavery, the patriarchal oppression of women,
and capitalism—and Frei invokes Paul in order to explicate the applicabil-
ity 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 West-
ern 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 re-
garding 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
180 / Figural Reading and Identity

specifics are fragmentary if not at times contradictory, so that they

move strangely, if not by constant counterdescription (such as abid-
ing personal power and equally abiding powerlessness), toward an all-
encompassing 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 spe-
cific 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 unsub-
stitutable as Jesus’ own) are “encompassed in the universality of this spe-
cific 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
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 181

his person at all, but rather in his teaching, especially in its eschatological
dimensions, which bring all of human historical reality into a cosmic con-
text. 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 lo-
gos) and the divinely achieved end (the eschatological dissolution of the
historical realm into a realm beyond history and time). From Frei’s per-
spective, Auerbach is able to divorce the character of Jesus from the larger
circumstances of incarnation and consummation because he is insuffi-
ciently 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 self-
contained episode, but instead stretches back to God’s primordial inten-
tion 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 Testa-
ment, 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., “ty-
pology,” “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-
182 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 anachronis-
tically 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 sig-
nificance for the gospel story in its own right. Frei, of course, prefers to re-
verse 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 Gos-
pels 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 un-
folding of the history of representation his own version of the figural ex-
tension of the literal sense. Frei would not complain about the act of ex-
tending, 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 read-
ing 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
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 183

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 un-
interpreted reality to allegory:
In an essay entitled “Figura,” Auerbach makes a distinction between
“allegory” and “figure.” Allegory, we know, is the literary personifica-
tion of abstract qualities, usually personal attributes—virtue, reason,
faith, courage. At the opposite end from allegory there is the descrip-
tion 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 pre-
figures. 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 inten-
sifies 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 figura-
tive (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 ques-
tion; 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 con-
ception 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 pre-
figuration 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
184 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 em-
phasis is on what is retained in that integration. Virgil’s “historical reality,”
his (or the text’s) “literal meaning,” is confirmed and fulfilled; the histori-
cal 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 Vir-
gil implies about Virgil’s reality as a person, Frei appeals to Virgil and Be-
atrice 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 fulfill-
ment of all natural, historical being without detracting from it: The in-
carnate 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 reconcilia-
tion 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 fig-
ures point. As a figural text, the Bible embraces the poles of historical real-
ity 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 pre-
sents reality as a figure awaiting fulfillment while offering an identity de-
scription of the one who will fulfill it through the enacted intention to ful-
fill it that is his very identity. Jesus “is the reconciliation he enacts,” and the
 The Literal Sense and Personal Identity / 185

Bible is the rendering of this enactment. The biblical depiction of reconcil-

iation 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 sec-
ond 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, unit-
ing 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 mislead-
ing 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 fulfill-
ment is an extrapolation from the identity of Christ as the one who enacts
God’s intention to reconcile. The very distinction between figure and ful-
fillment 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 iden-
tity of his own that is unsubstitutable and therefore not reducible to a re-
ligion, 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 funda-

mental 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 hu-
man 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 differ-
ence 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 ex-
tent it fails to serve the gospel’s literal sense. In his view, allegorically gen-
erated meanings often lack any direct relation to the concrete literary fea-
tures of biblical narratives. Allegory, Frei declares, is “the attachment of a
temporally free-floating meaning pattern to any temporal occasion what-
ever, without any intrinsic connection between sensuous time-bound pic-
ture 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 exe-
gesis of the Bible. Allegorical reading in the Christian tradition, he decides,
186
 Moses Veiled and Unveiled / 187

was often acceptable because it “tended to be in the service of literal inter-

pretation, 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 con-
tradicted by other legitimate senses—tropological, allegorical, and ana-
gogical. In the ancient church, some of the parables of Jesus—for ex-
ample, 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, es-
pecially 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 un-
dermine 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 sup-
posed rejection by the school of Antioch.” But whenever allegorical read-
ing failed to “serve” the literal sense (and thereby threatened the identity
of Christ, which the literal narrative “rendered” to readers), it became un-
acceptable. According to Frei, such was the case with “the school of Origen,
in which the Old Testament received a kind of independent allegorical in-
terpretation.” Even here, Frei shows his reluctance to brand Origen him-
self 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 in-
dependently 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 indis-
tinguishable 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 read-
ers transform the text’s theology into mere self-aggrandizing anthropol-
188 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 idola-
trous 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”), Ori-
gen 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 con-
temporaries, he observes, have failed to make a comparable turn, continu-
ing 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-
 Moses Veiled and Unveiled / 189

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 en-
tirely glorified, for, Origen observes, Matthew writes not that “his counte-
nance 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 as-
cends from the mountain totally glorified.” 8 Origen then adds that, “when
those things which he predicted are clearly fulfilled or when the time ar-
rived 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, Mo-
ses 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 broth-
ers 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 be-
tween 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 inter-
pretation. 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
190 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 under-
standing, 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 Scrip-
tures’ 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, never-
theless 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 some-
thing 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 inter-
preting the Law like that and realizing that it is something spiritual,
 Moses Veiled and Unveiled / 191

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 burn-
ing 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 mean-
ing, 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 move-
ment 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 becom-
ing 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
192 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 Sec-
ond 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 nei-
ther 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 me-
dium, 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 Nietz-
sche’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 passion-
less 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
 Moses Veiled and Unveiled / 193

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 trans-
formative future. But he is all too mindful of just where such pursuit of in-
terpretative 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 Tes-
tament” stood in virtual contrast as the corresponding “spiritual” or
genuine reality, and the all but directly contrary of its prefigured rep-
resentation. There is often considerable similarity between orthodox
Christian allegorical reading of the Old Testament and its hostile, nega-
tive 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 interpre-
tation 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 declara-
tion (2 Cor. 3.6).” 23
Chapter 9 Identity and
Transformation: Origen

A 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) unfin-
ished 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 Ac-
cording to that pattern, even though in the Passion narrative, God’s inten-
tions 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 “ar-
ticulated 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 glori-
fied in him, God [oJ qeov~] will also glorify him in himself, and he will
glorify him immediately.5

194
 Identity and Transformation / 195

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 suf-
fering 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 di-
vine 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 can-
not 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 exalta-
tion of the Jesus who obediently dies is not a divine reward for human obe-
dience; rather, exaltation is the form that glorification through death as-
sumes for an immortal deity. Origen’s formulation is especially striking,
not simply because it claims that in exaltation, the humanity of Jesus “re-
turns,” so to speak, to become one with the Word, but because this exalta-
tion 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 em-
phasized in the third sentence reflects the close association of Jesus’ hu-
manity 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
196 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 re-
stored to it, when he was again with God, God the Word being a hu-
man 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 re-
statement of the dialectic of glorification as a question of agency aligns Ori-
gen’s discussion more closely with Frei’s. But before addressing this ques-
tion, Origen proceeds to lay some groundwork, which will provide him
with the equivalent of those patterns that Frei drew on for his own “con-
ceptual 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 ren-
dered Jesus’ identity in ways that did not separate his identity as an inde-
pendent “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 logi-
cal structure of the verses, and then, without further comment, examines
the biblical uses of forms of the word “glory,” finally declaring: “Let us re-
turn to the statement, ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glori-
fied 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 ques-
tion, Origen makes sure that Jesus’ action remains distinct from God’s.
Origen is most like Frei when he protects the difference between the Son
 Identity and Transformation / 197

and the Father. On the other hand, he diverges from Frei when he inter-
prets 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 estab-
lished 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 re-
sistance 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 ques-
tion. 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 condi-
tional proposition, so that the conditional begins after the proposi-
tion, “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 propo-
sitions are “assertoric,” and one is “conditional.” 16 The three assertoric
propositions are as follows:
198 / Figural Reading and Identity

Subject Predicate
P1 The Son of man is glorified now.
P2 God is glorified in him.
P4 He [i.e., God] 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 con-
ditional 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 glo-
rifying 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 Je-
sus’ 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’ glorifi-
cation begins, but that process is not complete until his death and resurrec-
tion. Origen’s emphasis on the centrality of these events precisely as dis-
tinct temporal occurrences is underscored by his use of Stoic ideas about
the truth of propositions. His effort to preserve the importance of the dis-
tinctive 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
 Identity and Transformation / 199

logical and narrative coherence. Yet despite Origen’s convergence toward

Frei’s effort to distinguish Jesus’ identity from the Father’s, Origen’s analy-
sis 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 ap-
pearance 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 Chris-
tians.20 Origen has, then, selected a basic passage dealing with the glorifi-
cation 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 inter-
preted, and it is Paul who provides the key to their interpretation. This in-
terpretation, 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 Na-
ture. But so far as the anagogical sense is concerned, the things that are
200 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 pas-
sages: “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: mu-
tual 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 self-
knowledge 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 stress-
ing 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
 Identity and Transformation / 201

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 reflec-
tion 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’ capac-
ity 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 fol-
lowing 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 un-
veiled human beings; for the moment, we need to see how Origen deals
with the two opening propositions, “Now is the Son glorified,” and “God
202 / Figural Reading and Identity

is glorified in him.” He explains the meaning of each phrase by linking to-

gether three things: a remark about “the economy” of suffering (A), the
proposition about glorification (B), and a verse about knowledge (C). Ori-
gen 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, fo-
cusing instead on the superiority of the Son, which elicits the Father’s glo-
rification. So far, then, the passage does little to address the difficult ques-
tion 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 expla-
nation 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 com-
pare 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 Fa-
ther 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 man-
ner the link between the dying Jesus and the Father. Instead, he makes two
 Identity and Transformation / 203

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 shift-
ing 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 suf-
fering 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 contempla-
tion 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 re-
vealed 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’ pres-
ence 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 ear-
lier discussion that Jesus’ death is also the moment at which he becomes ex-
alted 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
204 / Figural Reading and Identity

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.” Ori-
gen 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 dis-
ciples 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 post-
resurrection 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, be-
cause 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 Je-
sus is going? Origen points out that the proper “sequence of the text” is re-
ally 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 go-
ing 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 wor-
thy 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-
 Identity and Transformation / 205

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 disci-
ples 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, with-
out 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 fol-
low Jesus not only to the cross, but also to his post-resurrection state of glo-
rification, 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 se-
quence 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 ac-
cessible 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 per-
sonal 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
206 / Figural Reading and Identity

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 appropri-
ately 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 col-
lapse is, like Christ himself, a single hypostasis (a liquor sweet and most di-
vine) 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 con-
trast to the epistemologically grounded descriptions by which Origen char-
acteristically 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 lengthen-
ing time. Even if we could annul the time and have the story present, a dis-
tance 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 under-
representing 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 reduc-
tively 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 follow-

ing question to Christian interpreters of Hebrew Scripture as the Old Tes-
tament: 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 Ju-
daism, and yet respects Judaism’s own ongoing identity as a separate reli-
gion in its own right? The problem posed for Christian biblical interpreters
is one found in other religions in which new movements arise and subse-
quently 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 interpreta-
tion, the tension arises most directly in the tradition of figural or allegori-
cal 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 expres-
sions 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 Christian-

207
208 / Conclusion

ity’s supersessionist relation to Judaism, and this supersessionist subver-

sion of the literal meaning occurs whether or not the Christian reader de-
fends his or her hermeneutical technique as “figural” rather than “allegori-
cal.” The key concept informing Boyarin’s critique is “binary opposition,”
the notion that a nonliteral reading produces its meaning by directly un-
dermining the literal meaning to which it is opposed. Boyarin argues that
Paul’s terminology of “letter and spirit” is the distinctively Christian ex-
pression 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 transforma-
tive initiative are categories such as “promise” and “covenant.” When Bo-
yarin 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 inco-
herence in Boyarin’s argument. Boyarin claims that allegorical reading be-
trays the particularity of the text by imposing on it meanings that are es-
sentially 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 sig-
nifiers and, at the same time, as capable of harming the bodies of the real-
world 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 mean-
ings? Perhaps they damage those meanings by presenting themselves as le-
gitimate extensions of them. In other words, precisely by calling an appar-
ently nonbodily spiritual condition a “circumcision,” Paul damages the
very notion of fleshly circumcision, implying that it is not “really” circum-
cision. In any case, while Boyarin does not accept the possibility that a non-
literal 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-
 Conclusion / 209

ously committed to denying—a complex notion of the sign as the essen-

tial integration of signifier and signified and a psychosomatic (or rather
pneuma-somatic) conception of the embodied person. But those are pre-
cisely the notions advanced by Origen with his understanding of the spir-
itual 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 circum-
cision 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 Bo-
yarin responds to only one side of Origen’s multidimensional hermeneu-
tic—the side that emphasizes the newness of the spirit, its radically inno-
vative 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 ques-
tions 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 intrin-
sic, 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 transfor-
mative action of God that Paul identified. Unlike Boyarin, Auerbach and
Frei make biblical interpretation a part of this divine transformative pro-
cess—it is not a mere hermeneutical practice independently or subjec-
tively performed by an interpreter on a text apart from the wider context
of this practice. When it is performed in independence, it can indeed be-
come 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
210 / Conclusion

remark about either figure or fulfillment alone, and it is not something

whose presence should ever undermine the historical reality of either fig-
ure or fulfillment. In order to keep meaning from undermining that real-
ity, one must restrict its range of relevance, allowing it to refer only to the
figure-fulfillment relation. If abstraction threatens to arise in the debilitat-
ing way Boyarin warns against, Auerbach insists that what has been “ab-
stracted”—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 overarch-
ing divine intention for the world. But when figural meaning becomes “in-
dependent” and captures attention for itself, directing the reader away
from figure or fulfillment or their interrelationship, then a subversive, fig-
urative 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 Auer-
bach’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 metaphori-
cal, figurative dimension of figura, as though he were anticipating and seek-
ing 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 con-
tained from the outset a figurative potential because its nonliterality was
the expression of the spiritual influence of Jesus. Because that spiritual in-
fluence did not reflect any intrinsic relation between spirit and the histori-
cal, bodily identity of Jesus but only reflected the way disciples interpreted
the significance of Jesus for themselves, spiritual readings could always
 Conclusion / 211

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 met-
aphor 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 hu-
man interpretation rather than divine transformation. Auerbach’s connec-
tion 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 histori-
cal reality of figures in the triumphant celebration of Christian novelty.
Along the way, Auerbach, like Boyarin, uses Origen as a foil for the al-
ternative reading of figura he rejects, a reading in which figura’s meaning
or fulfillment points away from, rather than back toward, the world. Ori-
gen, 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 Pe-
ter’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
212 / Conclusion

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 pre-
cisely as a continually relevant or available event or occurrence, to be ever
appropriated anew by believers, runs directly against the wholly secular in-
terpretation of history offered in Mimesis. The least important thing about
Dante for Auerbach was that he was Christian, or that he thought his po-
etic 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 pre-
sented as the dominant, modernist hermeneutic of liberal Christian theol-
ogy 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 obser-
vation of the extent to which one has superseded a past that has been right-
fully repudiated; rather, it is a patient “working through” the spiritual dy-
namics 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
 Conclusion / 213

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 re-
duces 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 is-
sues 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 bod-
ily effects of his or her reading—begins to drop out of sight, as all atten-
tion is directed to the way the gospel text renders the identity of Jesus.
Frei insists that all who follow Jesus receive their distinctive, unsubstitut-
able identities as a consequence of Jesus’ own unsubstitutable identity, yet
little is said about what this entails for the reader’s own spiritual transfor-
mation. 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 on-
going 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, his-
torical 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 transfor-
mation 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
214 / Conclusion

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 theo-
rist in his own right. I have tried to suggest both that Origen does not suc-
cumb so easily to the hostile representation of his work that Boyarin, Auer-
bach, and Frei offer, and also that, when read sympathetically in light of
their various objectives and constructive aims, that he can be seen to ap-
preciate 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 inter-
est 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 eth-
ical 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 pru-
dent, 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 mod-
ern thinkers falls short, is in his awareness that classical Christian life is a
life of continual transformation of what already is into something differ-
ent. In their varying but related repudiations of Origenist allegorical read-
ing, 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, de-
stabilizing novelty. What we feel we can be certain of—this body, this his-
 Conclusion / 215

tory, this narrative, and the identities and ways of life built upon them—
must be protected from the onslaughts of allegorical reading, from the in-
trusion 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 hu-
man identity was already within their grasp. Origen stands apart from the
other thinkers we have examined because of his emphasis on transforma-
tion. Boyarin recasts transformation as replacement; Auerbach argues that
transformation is the Christian aim but can finally accept it as a positive de-
velopment only insofar as it transforms itself into secular realism; Frei ac-
knowledges the aim of transformation but focuses on the divine agent who
transforms, minimizing the subjective or personal experience of transfor-
mation. In all three modern instances, transformation emerges as a threat-
ening 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 imag-
ine 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 rela-
tion 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 accom-
panied by the rhetoric of disparagement for what was former (the letter) is
perhaps to be expected, even though the more fundamental aim of the proj-
ect was to show how former things were spiritually transformed, not re-
jected. There is no doubt that some of the criticism of Origen by our three
modern thinkers registers this disparagement, but to focus on that criti-
cism 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
216 / Conclusion

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 dy-
namics such as these. One moral of this study is that Christian figural read-
ing is too complex and subtle a practice to be credibly fitted into an either-
or 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’ commit-
ment 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 to-
ward some ultimate end. There are, of course, other ways of imagining ex-
istence and one’s place in it, many of which are profoundly unrelated to the
journey motif, or its literary analog, narrative. But the Christian imagina-
tion, at least as it expresses itself in the tradition of figural reading, is struc-
tured in just that way.
The charge of hermeneutical supersessionism, the fear of it, and the de-
fenses against it are all imbedded in this conflicted dynamic of past realities
and future possibilities. The overwhelming presumption of classical Chris-
tian figural reading, at least as it has been characterized in the writings ex-
amined 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 work-
ing 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 per-
sonal, 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
 Conclusion / 217

figural readers themselves, on anything as grandiose, complex or presump-

tuous as the figural interpretation of history. It is not hard to see how
the classic figural interpreter renders at least an implicit negative judg-
ment 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 hu-
man 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 Chris-
tianly significant the concrete bodily and historical practices of Judaism
precisely in ways that do not undermine but respect their bodily and his-
torical integrity: the letter must remain in the spirit. I suspect that few con-
temporary Christians even begin to encounter, respect, and engage Juda-
ism 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, re-
quiring 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 let-
ter 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 nei-
ther 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-
218 / Conclusion

nation with the wider scope of classical Christian belief. Those familiar
with a religion that affirms that submission to God’s agency constitutes hu-
man 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 his-
torical 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 trans-

lation by Henry Chadwick in Origen: Contra Celsum (Cam-
bridge: 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. Hin-
richs, 1899).
Comm. Cant. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, in Origen: The
Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Law-
son (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 Gos-
pel According to John: Books 1–10 (Washington, D.C.: Cath-
olic 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.

219
220 / Abbreviations

Prin. Origen, On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth

(Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973). Citations are occa-
sionally modified in light of the Greek and Latin texts in Die
Principiis, ed. Paul Koetschau, Origenes Werke, vol. 5 (Leip-
zig: 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 (Berke-
ley 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 interpre-
tation in such constructivist fashion, see Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmod-
ern 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 Tes-
taments,” 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 ex-
plain everything except what the practitioners understood themselves to be do-
ing. 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-

221
222 / Notes to Pages 5 –9

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 Chris-
tians) 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 Chris-
tian interpretation of biblical prophecy: “To what does prophecy refer? Surely
to the event it predicts. Even if the discovery of that prediction implies recog-
nizing the metaphoric nature of the language and unpacking a riddle through
recognition of symbols, ambiguities, or hidden meanings which can be dis-
cerned 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 Fer-
dinand 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 Paulin-
ism 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 Chris-
tian 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 distri-
bution 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
 Notes to Pages 9 –13 / 223

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 com-
ment 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 real-
ity 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 rit-
ual in the earthly temple is a rejection of Origen’s notion of essential Juda-
ism—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 procla-
mation 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 Tradi-
tion: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?” in The Bible and the Narrative Tradi-
tion, 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 (Phila-
delphia: 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 Lit-
erature, 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).
224 / Notes to Pages 14 –15

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 Chris-
tian or theologically specific idea. Robert J. Fogelin, in his Figuratively Speak-
ing (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 compari-
son that strikes a respondent as incongruous. The “figurativeness” of the com-
parison is not a consequence of a “nonliteral meaning,” but of the incongruity
that a respondent perceives between the literal comparison and the larger con-
text 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 sim-
ile heightens its incongruity for a respondent, who is perhaps struck more by
the dissimilarity than any similarity between Achilles and a lion. Fogelin ar-
gues 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 re-
mark 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 po-
tentially 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 compari-
son 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
 Notes to Pages 15 –20 / 225

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 figura-
tively 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 max-
ims. With a figurative comparison the speaker flouts, or at least violates, standard
conversational rules and thus engages the respondent in the task of making adjust-
ments 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 sim-
ply a Christian/Jewish distinction. For a similar qualification in Boyarin’s dis-
cussion 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 be-
come 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 let-
ters 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 Is-
rael” to the Christian Church.
2. There is an important difference between Boyarin’s claim that Paul’s dis-
tinction between letter and spirit is hermeneutical and his further claim that
those terms are appropriately understood under the structuralist /poststruc-
turalist 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 transfor-
mation of a people but is construing a text (comprised of signifiers) in a way
226 / Notes to Pages 20 –29

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 conse-
quences 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. Ge-
nealogy is a blood relationship (flesh), but grace is not reducible to a faith rela-
tionship: “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., physi-
cal 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 Is-
rael, 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 un-
derstanding of Israel, if historical is a reasonable term with which to charac-
terize claims about God’s transformative interventions over time in the em-
bodied 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 Transla-
tion According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publica-
tion 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 distinc-
tively Jewish in Radical Jew, 204:
 Notes to Pages 29 –30 / 227

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, Radi-
cal 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 his-
torical 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 exis-
tence 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 Chris-
tianity 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 gener-
ally did not believe in a wholly non-corporeal Godhead, so God could be pres-
ent 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 bibli-
cal 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 arbi-
trariness 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
228 / Notes to Pages 30 –37

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 ad-
equate 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 lan-
guage of the Exodus account of Moses’ veiling to his own preaching of the gos-
pel, 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 per-
ishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbe-
lievers, 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; kathr-
ghvqhmen 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
 Notes to Pages 38 – 43 / 229

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 Foun-
dation 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 mutu-
ally 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 op-
positions 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 wal-
lowing 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 of-
fer in this chapter suggests, more true of Paul’s hermeneutic than the interpre-
tation 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: Read-
ing Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor-
nia 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 resurrec-
tion in the flesh. It is out of the question, therefore, to regard Paul as a radically anti-
230 / Notes to Pages 43 –50

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 neverthe-
less 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 jettison-
ing 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 asso-
ciated 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 The-
ory 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 read-
ing and Christianity. Even as radical an allegorist as Origen is ambivalent as to
the literal meaning of the Gospels and the sacraments, often distinguishing be-
tween the letter of the Law which kills and the letter of the Gospel which gives
life (Caspary 1979, 50 –55).”
 Notes to Page 50 / 231

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.” Bo-
yarin’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 eas-
ily 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: Ro-
mans 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 “let-
ter” 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 spe-
cific history of the movement of salvation from Jews to Gentiles, as well as in the on-
togenesis/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 Third-
Century 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 all-
pervasive 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 Bo-
yarin, 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
232 / Notes to Page 50

indirectly through Clement of Alexandria, was considerable. Philo’s influence

was sometimes productive of sound fruit but it also contained the seeds of se-
rious deviation from the truth.” It is easy to force Origen’s language to super-
sessionist 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 fu-
ture 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 Christian-
ity, for example, the sacraments: “And just as in the case of public worship Ori-
gen’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 concep-
tion 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 “under-
estimation”), not in others (Judaism, for which there is “no further use”).
 Notes to Page 51 / 233

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. Bo-
yarin’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 visi-
ble 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 incarna-
tion 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); lan-
guage 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 es-
tablish 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 al-
legorical 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 alle-
gorical 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 Him-
self, 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, Commen-
tary on the Song of Songs, prologue 2, in The Song of Songs Commentary and
Homilies trans. R. P. Lawson (Westminster, Md. : Newman Press, 1956), here-
after cited as Comm. Cant. Citations are to the English translation, occasion-
ally modified in light of the Latin text in Commentarium in canticum Canti-
corum, 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 vig-
orous defenders can use these same dualistic metaphors. Consider, for example,
Daniélou, Origen, 139: “But the literal explanation of the text was only a pre-
liminary 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.”
234 / Notes to Pages 52 –53

18. Polytheist Platonists of Origen’s era do not display the standard “Pla-
tonic” 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 Tra-
dition (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 Fa-
ther 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 Fa-
therhood of God from Origen to Athanasius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994),
18 –19, on Origen’s insistence that the biblical term “invisible” (ajorv ato~) in
Col. 1 : 15 (also implied by John 1:18 “No one has ever seen God”) is synony-
mous with the Greek philosophical (but nonbiblical) term “incorporeal” (ajswv-
mato~). Referring to On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Glouces-
ter, 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 incor-
poreal (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 Incorporeal-
ity 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,
 Notes to Pages 54 –55 / 235

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; Chi-
cago: 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 To-
ronto 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 Cath-
erine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philoso-
phy (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 oth-
erworldliness and total withdrawal from physicality, for the philosophic ascent
does not result in a “loss” of love for particular beautiful things, since the par-
ticular 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 dis-
tinction 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, occa-
sionally 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.
236 / Notes to Pages 55 –58

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 Ori-
gen, 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 Koet-
schau, 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 iden-
tity 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 vir-
tue 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 dicta-
tion. 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 na-
tions 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 com-
positional 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):
 Notes to Pages 58 – 63 / 237

The wisdom of God has permeated the whole of Scripture even to the individual let-
ter. 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 crea-
tures 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 be-
ing. 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 wis-
dom by means of the Scriptures, he has, so to speak, sowed traces of wisdom as sav-
ing 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 alle-
gorical 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 Bo-
yarin attributes to allegorical reading. Origen worries that the sensible features
of a text will detract from its meaning, whereas Boyarin worries that nonsen-
sible 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 or-
gans 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).
238 / Notes to Pages 65 –70

chapter 3
1. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 4.40, ed. Ernest Evans (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1972), 493.
2. Ibid., 491.
3. Hippolytus, Treatise on the Passover, from Pierre Nautin, Homélies pas-
chales (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 Je-
rusalem 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 let-
ter 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 regard-
ing 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 Leviti-
cus], 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.
 Notes to Pages 71–73 / 239

24. Pasch. 26.5– 8. See also Pasch. 36.34 for the man who “eats the pass-
over” (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 nu-
merous 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 trea-
tise 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 Signifi-
cance 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 interpre-
tation for it all. I should be able to shed the light of superior knowledge on the mys-
tery 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 Han-
son 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 exhort-
ing 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
240 / Notes to Pages 73 –74

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 circumci-
sion, 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 em-
phasizes 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 mys-
teries 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 unnu-
anced 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 bod-
ies; 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 heav-
enly 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, speak-
ing 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
 Notes to Pages 74 –76 / 241

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 shad-
ows 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 be-
hold 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 apos-
tle 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 bota-
nists. They gather all the letters they find in the Scriptures, even the iotas; they as-
certain 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 Sex-
ual 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 re-
placement of narrative with mathematical syntax, see Eric A. Havelock, Pref-
ace 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.
242 / Notes to Pages 76 –79

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 reani-
mation 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 an-
gelic life in heaven from Matthew 22.29 –33, and the suggestion in 2 Corinthi-
ans 5.4 that we are tents or tabernacles that must take on a covering of incor-
ruption, 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 trea-
tise 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 Ori-
gen (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1988), 373 –74, as quoted in By-
num, Resurrection of the Body, 64.
58. Meth. Res. 1.24.4.
59. Cf. Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Con-
struction 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 ex-
tent 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”: physi-
ology itself conspires to support the claims of social constructivists. Yet if, as Ori-
genists 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 ecclésias-
tique 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
 Notes to Pages 79 – 83 / 243

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 con-
tinuity in return for philosophical consistency. Identity, it appears, was not fi-
nally 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 cen-
tury, 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: Univer-
sity 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 (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1953).Citations are to the English transla-
tions, occasionally modified in light of the original German texts.
For a brief overview of Auerbach’s life and works, see Jan Ziolkowski, “For-
word,” in Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin An-
tiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton 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 Ger-
man academic post and subsequent career in exile, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,
“‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress’: Erich Auerbach’s Everydays,” in Literary
244 / Notes to Pages 84 –91

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 pos-
sibilities 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 yes-
terday and will no longer be conceivable tomorrow. European civilization is ap-
proaching 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 com-
prehensive 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 Lan-
guage, x n. 1. For Roncalli’s own conceptions of history, mimesis and Chris-
tianity, which differed from Auerbach’s, see Karl F[rederick] Morrison, The
Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity 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
 Notes to Pages 91–97 / 245

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 be-
comes. 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, Auer-
bach 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 Tim-
othy 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 Ori-
gen might call a “merely carnal reading.” Against Husserl, Derrida (like Bo-
yarin 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:
246 / Notes to Pages 97–99

“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 ac-
counts 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 com-
ments 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 Schleier-
macher 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 interpreta-
tion 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 Verklärungs-
geschichte Jesu, der Bericht des Paulus (I Cor. 15:3 ff.) und die beiden Chris-
tusvisionen des Petrus,” Sitzungsbericht der Preussischen Akademie der Wis-
senschaften, Phil.-Hist. Klasse, 1922):
Harnack called Peter’s denial of Christ “that terrible leftward swing of the pendu-
lum” 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 vio-
lent 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 malig-
nant 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. Auerbach, Mimesis, 42.

42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 42 – 43.
 Notes to Pages 100 –103 / 247

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. Cita-
tions are to the English translation, occasionally modified in light of the Ger-
man 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 de-
scribed 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 func-
tion of legislation (i.e., common sense or the human capacity to reach social de-
cisions in relation to each other). From the presence of immanent transcen-
dence, one can infer the existence of the transcendent providence. Pompa
writes as follows:
The operations of immanent providence are not therefore the necessary conse-
quences of the nature of a transcendent and necessary God. . . . immanent provi-
dence 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 be-
liefs 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 im-
manent and transcendent senses represent an attempt to present what is basi-
cally 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 Mime-
sis: 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 can-
not 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 ex-
ample, Auerbach insists that ancient Christian figural readers claimed that the
248 / Notes to Pages 103 –105

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, histori-
cally 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 sug-
gests, 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 real-
ity 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 for-
mulation 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 Auer-
bach’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 inter-
pretation of Auerbach’s notion of figura denies that the truth has become his-
tory 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 de-
construction). On the relation between de Manian deconstruction and anti-
incarnationalism, 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
 Notes to Pages 105 –107 / 249

open up literary foreground and background and thus fails to achieve the real-
ism 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 immedi-
ately following the Dante chapter). See Auerbach, Mimesis, 224: “Without
Dante such a wealth of nuances and perspectives would hardly have been pos-
sible. 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 Phenome-
nal 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 an-
tecedents 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 Tes-
tament and its history of salvation.” He thereby implies that one might be mo-
tivated by different, even incompatible, desires to show such prefigurations.
69. Ibid., 49.
70. Acts 8 : 30 –35.
71. Auerbach, “Figura,” 50.
250 / Notes to Pages 108 –109

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 tran-
scendent fulfillment (“Figura,” 71).
73. Ibid., 50 –51 (German, 44). Manheim translates aufgehoben und ab-
gelöst as simply “annulled.” In one respect, this translation is accurate: Auer-
bach does not seem to use aufheben with its double meaning of “cancel” and
“preserve,” as does Hegel; rather, aufheben always seems to mean just “can-
cel,” 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 his-
torical reality of the figure in Dante’s art is “not annulled, but confirmed and
fulfilled [nicht aufgehoben, sondern bestätigt und erfüllt] by the deeper mean-
ing.” 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 dis-
pleasure 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” ear-
lier, so here the paradox of a fulfillment that cancels is stressed by adding er-
füllt: 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 liter-
ary and philosophical point of view, without considering his complex response
to different moments (such as the Pauline) within the Christian tradition, mis-
take 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 “un-
veil[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-
 Notes to Page 109 / 251

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 in-
terpretation, 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: Au-
gustine “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 sacra-
ments, “were celebrating figures of a reality to come in the future,” but Auer-
bach 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 empha-
sizes 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 cove-
nant 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 Tes-
tament 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 ide-
alism 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 (per-
son, 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 cer-
tain 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.
252 / Notes to Pages 109 –117

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 Il-
iad, 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. Mime-
sis, 552, where Auerbach observes that in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Light-
house and works like it, the achievement is “to put the emphasis on the ran-
dom 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: noth-
ing 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 kenōsis: 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: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1994), 7 – 8:
 Notes to Pages 117–118 / 253

For Herodotus the word iJstoriva could mean a serious investigation or piece of re-
search, 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 his-
tory in this sense could therefore be highly disturbing, breaking the familiar pat-
terns 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 tra-
dition has been seriously contaminated in his view by the appearance of ficti-
tious stories [Cels. 1.42],” then adds: “In saying this he [Origen] reflects a gen-
eral 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 es-
sential characteristics of which would seem to be its possessing a history, its chang-
ing 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 exis-
tence.” (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).
254 / Notes to Pages 118 –122

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 the-
ory 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 im-
mediate 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: Ox-
ford University Press, 1991).
17. The distinction between events and words lies at the root of the long-
standing 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 Interpreta-
tion 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 bibli-
schem 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 an-
cient 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-
 Notes to Pages 122 –124 / 255

torical growth which no antique author observed” (Mimesis, 39). Auerbach

concludes that “the ethical and [the] rhetorical approach [of ancient historiog-
raphy] 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 criti-
cize 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 Lo-
gos.” 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 signifi-
cance 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 “fig-
ure” 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 per-
son 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 prom-
ise can be deduced retrospectively from a fulfillment, but a fulfillment cannot be in-
ferred prospectively from the making of a promise.
And so it is with the relationships between the kinds of events we wish to call “his-
torical,” 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 aes-
thetic 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 re-
main 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
256 / Notes to Pages 124 –126

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” interpreta-
tions 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 knowl-
edge; 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, Han-
son, 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 un-
derstand 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 “wit-
nesses”) given by John the Baptist. The six testimonies are first outlined in
 Notes to Page 128 / 257

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 per-
spectives 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 re-
corded 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 refut-
ing and endorsing his views, but unlike Origen’s Contra Celsum, his commen-
tary on John does not play off against the arguments of his opponent: Origen
writes his commentary from an independent standpoint and considers Hera-
cleon’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
258 / Notes to Pages 128 –129

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 vi-
sions 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 keep-
ing 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 him-
self 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 com-
ment on this verse that it is obvious that Abraham did not seek to kill Christ, for Je-
sus 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
 Notes to Pages 129 –131 / 259

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 Ori-
gen, 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 dis-
tinction 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 han-
dling 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 expres-
sion 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 be-
comes 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 inter-
rogated 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
260 / Notes to Pages 132 –133

the incarnation of the Son of God effected [oijkonomouvmenon], and his descent
to accomplish the plan [th;n oijkonomivan] of his suffering which brings salva-
tion 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 Eliza-
beth 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 concern-
ing 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 intel-
lectual 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 proposi-
tions apprehended by the enlightened, instead of enacted on the stage of his-
tory 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 re-
mark 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 gos-
pel 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 Testa-
ment 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:
 Notes to Pages 133 –136 / 261

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 swmatopoi-
hqh`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’in-
carnation 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 ex-
ample, ‘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 tele-
ology 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 relation-
ship 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 ar-
gument 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.
262 / Notes to Pages 136 –137

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 distinc-
tion: “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 lan-
guage 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 identifi-
able 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 si-
multaneous present, so that—as Augustine once put it—he does not possess fore-
knowledge 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. Natu-
rally, 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 compre-
hension—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 uni-
versal 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
 Notes to Pages 143 –145 / 263

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 re-
ceive God.”

chapter 7
1. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth-
and 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 al-
legory 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 Allegori-

cal 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 bibli-
cal stories, figuration or typology was a natural extension of literal interpreta-
tion. It was literalism at the level of the whole biblical story and thus of the de-
piction 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 pre-
critical Protestant interpretation. Indeed, a basic typological pattern of interpretation
had furnished the scheme for the crucial claim that the Bible, particularly both testa-
ments, forms a unity. The typological scheme had been conceived as based on a lit-
264 / Notes to Pages 146 –155

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. Fo-
gelin, 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 quota-
tion 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.: Har-
vard University Press, 1969), for sharper contrast between shadow/reality and
promise/fulfillment patterns, and the discussion of Preus in relation to Jakob-
son 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 mean-
ing together, the pattern being dependent on the reality of the unitary temporal se-
quence which allows all the single narrations within it to become parts of a single
narration.

24. Frei, Eclipse, 21.

25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 23.
27. Ibid., 34, quoting from Auerbach, Mimesis, 73.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 34 –35.
31. Ibid., 35, quoting Calvin, Institutes 2.11.1.
 Notes to Pages 155 –159 / 265

32. Ibid., 35–36.

33. Ibid., 36.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Although this makes the reader’s own spiritual transformation an in-
gredient 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 transcenden-
tal ground. After Herder and Goethe and in Ranke especially, “history” itself be-
comes foundational and the meaning of human events established by purely “in-
trahistorical” reference. Auerbach locates the earliest statements of this world-
view 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 ‘Hid-
den’(?) Theory of History,” in Literary History, ed. Lehrer, 43, on the “omni-
temporality” 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 re-
lationship 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 ques-
tion 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-
266 / Notes to Page 159

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 defini-
tiveness and alleged fullness, the very qualities that enabled it to serve as typol-
ogy’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 representa-
tional husk. The end of time is, after all, the evaporation (perhaps by vaporiz-
ing) 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 concep-
tion of incarnation by positing an irreduceable dualism in Christianity. In Lux-
on’s case, this unnecessarily dualistic perspective is based on a dubious read-
ing 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 Gno-
sis,” Modern Theology 10, 1 [January 1994]: 1–26, and id., “Figure, Allegory,”
in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan D. Fitz-
gerald, 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.
 Notes to Pages 159 –168 / 267

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 res-
urrection. 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 Hun-
singer 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. Ibid., 59.

65. Frei, Theology and Narrative, 108.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 32.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 41.
73. Frei, “Literal Reading,” 73.
74. Frei, Types, 49.
268 / Notes to Pages 168 –173

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 theologi-
cal 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 argu-
ments 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 centu-
ries—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 be-
tween Jewish and Christian hermeneutics this way:
 Notes to Pages 173 –180 / 269

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 univer-
salism “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 perni-
cious 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 cul-
tural 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 particu-
lar 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 Jew-
ish 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 pre-
cisely 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?
270 / Notes to Pages 180 –190

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 mem-
bers 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 Narra-
tive, 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 glori-
ous 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
 Notes to Page 191 / 271

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 en-
joy 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 be-
come 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 contem-
plate 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 ster-
cora [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 gradu-
ally master them; he must hold them, too, in high esteem. He will not, of course, re-
main 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 writ-
ten 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 rec-
ognize 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, epis-
temology 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.
272 / Notes to Pages 191–199

19. Frei, Identity, 86. For another instance of Frei’s worry about the sup-
pression of identity by presence, see his reservations about his use of the cate-
gory 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 re-
ligion 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 Gos-
pel 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.
 Notes to Pages 200 –206 / 273

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, 258n12; 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 her-
meneutic of, 114 –15, 227n23; An-
tiochene 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, 255n24,
263 n6; Calvin’s resistance to, 150 –
51; consumption of body through,
71–73; as deconstruction, 248n55;
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; post-
Pauline, 47; Protestantism’s assault
on, 234n24; reality and, 86, 183; in
Scripture, 46, 71–73; text in, 65;
tropic character of, 14; and typol-
ogy, 12 –13, 36, 254n17, 256n32,
263n6. See also Hermeneutics
Ambrose, Saint, 58, 257n3
Antioch, school of: criticism of Alex-
andrian 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; dehistoriciz-
ing 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-
283
284 / General Index
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 Ori-
gen, 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, 223 n25
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, 222n18
Bible: authorship of, 239 n27; figural
reading of, 4, 183 – 84; as letter-
history, 85; unity of, 146 – 47,
263 n7. See also Gospels; New Tes-
tament; 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 un-
derstanding of, 231n13; consump-
tion through reading, 71–72; cor-
ruptibility of, 62, 75; gender of,
269 n104; opposition of spirit
to, 175; Origen on, 75, 80, 117,
240 n40, 243 n63; Platonism’s atti-
tude 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,
230n59; on circumcision, 37 – 40,
226n7, 269n104; on divine perfor-
mance, 24 –27; on dualism, 32, 34 –
35, 52 –53, 208, 248n55; on identity
of Israel, 20 –24; on incarnation,
29, 31, 227n21, 233n16, 248n55,
266n41; indebtedness to Baur,
222n17; Intertextuality and the
Reading of Midrash, 47, 225n31; on
literality, 166; on midrash, 15–16,
36, 40, 47, 49, 142, 172, 225n31,
245n32; on Origen, 50 –56, 65,
225n31, 230n13; on Paul’s herme-
neutics, 6 – 8, 9, 37 – 46, 157, 175,
176, 207, 272n22; postmodern-
ism of, 6 –7, 53, 145, 246n32; post-
structuralism 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,
230n59, 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; resis-
tance to allegory, 150 –51
Canaan, figural interpretation of, 154,
156
Capitalism, 179
Caspary, Gerald E., 231n13
Causality, in historiography, 144
Celsus, on resurrection, 77

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 Ju-
daism, 3 – 4, 40, 207; supersession-
ism in, 9, 173 –74, 208; as symbol
system, 173; transformative fea-
tures of, 214. See also Community,
Christian; Identity, Christian
Christology: Barth’s, 223 n24; of Chal-
cedonian Creed, 144; and eschatol-
ogy, 181– 82; Origen’s, 13; subor-
dinationist, 191
Church: conflation of Christ with,
175; as new Israel, 19, 225n1; 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 iden-
tity, 19, 74; and law, 42 – 43; Origen
on, 231n13, 240 nn32,40; Paul on,
30, 32, 37 – 46, 208
Clement of Alexandria, 232n14
Community, Christian: consensus as
readers, 143 – 44; Israel as, 22; re-
ception of Jesus’ identity, 178; vices
of, 43. See also Church; Israel, com-
munity of
Community, self-definition of, 171
Covenant: with Israel, 2, 26; meaning
of, 152; Pauline, 31, 37
Crouzel, Henri, 240 n38
Curtius, Ernst Robert, 244n2
Daniélou, Cardinal Jean, 8 –9, 222n19,
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
General Index / 285
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; intel-
ligibility 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
Erōs, 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; repre-
sentation of reality in, 84, 244n2
Eve, figural reading of, 90 –91
Existentialism, 266n41
Exodus: figural description of, 86; his-
torical, 119
286 / General Index
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 read-
ing, 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, 254n26
Figural readers: ancient Christian,
122 –23, 145, 247 n55; awakening by
Spirit, 152; of biblical subnarratives,
143 – 45; construction of relation-
ships, 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 read-
ing, 12, 95, 148 – 49, 207, 263n6;
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; Chris-
tian tradition of, 84; of Church Fa-
thers, 84; contestable character of,
167; directionality of, 155–56, 212;
disagreement in, 167 –71; family re-
semblances in, 146 – 47, 151, 264n7;
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; in-
fluence in Europe, 109 –10; and lit-
eral reading, 146 – 47, 164, 264n23;
meaning in, 6, 86, 88 –90, 94, 208;
midrash and, 16; of the Old Tes-
tament, 4 –5, 15, 90, 100, 109 –
10, 163 – 64, 249n68; of past oc-
currences, 127; Pauline, 106 – 8,
251n78; postmodern perspective on,
6; preservation of reality, 210; ret-
rospective, 154; self-subversion of,
247n55; spiritual character of, 83,
92 –97, 152 –53, 155; as subversive,
210; supersessionism in, 217; tem-
porality in, 148; undermining of lit-
eral 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,
254n26; Auerbach on, 116 –17,
122 –23, 209, 250n77; balance be-
tween, 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; Bib-
lical, historical reality of, 96, 114,
119 –20; Dante’s use of, 83, 104 –
13; historical reality of, 148, 159,
211, 248n55; as historical signs,
248n55; relationships in, 87; self-
signification of, 122; sensory qual-
ity of, 159; spiritual understanding
of, 92 –97; subordination by fulfill-
ment, 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 Ori-
gen, 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

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, 268n82; on
midrash, 16, 171–74, 268n82; on
Moses’ veil, 192 –93; on Origen,
12 –14, 126, 186, 214; on Paul’s
universalism, 179; and super-
sessionism, 12; on transformation,
215; on typology, 263 n7
Fulfillment: historical reality of, 148;
in New Testament, 135; of Old Tes-
tament, 121, 267 n63; Pauline no-
tion 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 mis-
sion 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 Alex-
andrian tradition, 251n79; Chris-
tianity’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; glorifi-
cation 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 pres-
ence of, 166; self-manifestations of,
162, 197; as spirit, 271n18; super-
session of Christ, 159, 266n42; un-
reality of, 168
General Index / 287
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 Scrip-
ture in the Letters of Paul, 29 –37,
226n20, 227n32
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 134,
250nn73,77; Lectures on Aesthet-
ics, 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; Pau-
line, 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; Ori-
gen’s, 11–12, 114, 118, 125–26,
288 / General Index
Historicity (continued)
131–33, 136 –37, 211, 212; of Scrip-
ture, 119, 122; and spiritualism,
118 –19
Historiography: ancient and modern,
254 n23; causality in, 144; difficulty
of representation in, 124
History: ancient meaning of, 252n5;
as event, 211; figural character of,
123, 217, 265 n41; figural fulfillment
of, 182 – 85; non-metaphysical con-
ception 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, 245n32
Identity: allegorical transformation
of, 10; bodily, 75, 79 – 80; Christ’s
enhancement of, 143, 157; commu-
nity, 169 –70; difference in, 177; and
divine agency, 248 n60; effect of su-
persession on, 160; figural reading
and, 141, 149 –57; of God, 168 – 69,
170; irreducible, 180; loss of, 27 –
37; of readers, 75; relation to narra-
tive, 186; religious, 207; role of lit-
eral sense in, 65; as sameness, 175;
sensible occurrences and, 149; of
spiritual body, 74 – 80; spiritual
transformation of, 232 n14; super-
session by presence, 272 n19; sup-
plantation of, 162, 163; textual,
236 n37; and universal fulfillment,
174 –78, 185; unsubstitutableness
of, 215. See also Jesus Christ, iden-
tity of
Identity, Christian: Auerbach on,
157 –58; effect of figural reading
on, 14; Frei on, 157, 178; and hu-
man 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,
227n20; Christian interpretation
of, 16; circumcision in, 19, 74; de-
struction of, 12, 157; ethnic, 22;
Paul’s repudiation of, 23; relation
to Christian identity, 173; transfor-
mation of, 24. See also Israel, iden-
tity of
Identity descriptions, 161– 62, 184,
213
Incarnation: Auerbach on, 102 –3,
112, 159, 211; Boyarin on, 29, 31,
227n21, 233n16, 248n55, 266n41;
doctrine of, 101; dualism in, 49;
as kenōsis, 112; Origen on, 212,
233n16, 239n32, 260n23; as tex-
tualization, 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; Chris-
tian understanding of, 1–3; conti-
nuity of, 26; embodiment of, 30;
figural reading of, 6 –7; genealogy
of, 227n20; God’s covenant with, 2,
26; Jesus and, 177, 178, 181; Paul
on, 2 –3, 21–24, 32, 226n8; spiri-
tual, 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 ascrip-
tive subject, 161; conflation with
the Church, 175; descent into Hades,
204; disciples of, 129 –31, 136, 203 –
6, 214, 258n6; distance from hu-

manity, 205– 6; economy of suffer-
ing, 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; hu-
manity of, 195–96; identification
with, 177; independence of action,
197; individuality of, 177 –78; in-
tentionality of, 266 n42; knowledge
of God, 202; as lovgo~, 239n32; 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; power-
lessness of, 158; prefiguration by
Joshua, 88 – 89, 92, 104, 105, 106,
190; on the prophets, 259n23; reac-
tion to, 100 –101; as reconciliation,
184 – 85; relation of individuals to,
176 –77; relation of readers to, 194;
relations with disciples, 214; rela-
tion to God the Father, 13, 133 –34,
186, 195–97, 234 n21; as sacrificial
lamb, 70 –71, 238 n19, 239n32;
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 con-
cept 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
General Index / 289
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; un-
substitutability 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; lit-
eral reading of, 145; and Moses,
87 – 88, 89; prefiguration of Jesus,
88 – 89, 92, 104, 105, 106, 190; vi-
sion 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
Kenōsis, 103, 112, 252n99
Kermode, Frank: The Genesis of Se-
crecy, 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,
290 / General Index
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’ explana-
tion 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, 225n2,
227 n23, 228 n43; in Song of Songs,
56. See also Spirit
Literalism: in biblical interpretation,
75; Calvin’s, 151; in figural read-
ing, 147, 151; “good” versus “bad,”
231n13; Origen’s, 11, 272 n22; ty-
pology 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 narra-
tive 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; self-
identifying, 162; subversion
of, 164, 207 – 8
lovgo~ (Logos): Christ as, 239 n32;
Origen on, 78 –79, 127; of scrip-
tural 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,
272n22
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; Chris-
tian 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; nonsensi-
ble, 237n46; opposition to text, 48;
Paul’s conception of, 21, 36; in post-
structuralism, 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; spiri-
tual, 271n18; subversion by, 160;
and temporal occurrence, 149 –50,
157; in texts, 5– 6, 47 –50, 144 – 45,
268n82; transformation by, 45; uni-
versal criteria for, 169
Melito of Sardis, 66
Memory, Augustine on, 120
Messiah: Jesus as, 3, 21, 254n10; pre-
figurations 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; Chris-
tian thought on, 224n29, 268n83;
and figural reading, 16; Frei on, 16,

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 Chris-
tian reader, 33; as figure of Christ,
93, 108 –9; glorified countenance of,
188 – 89, 199 –200, 270n4; histori-
cal, 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, 270n16; 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 real-
ity, 193; unity with Old Testament,
164, 259 nn12,16, 260 nn23,29. See
also Gospels
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 192, 244n5
Nonliterality, figurative, 15, 146,
224 n30
Nygren, Anders: Agape and Eros,
54, 56
Old Testament: attacks on, 1; Chris-
tian reading of, 3 – 4; Christ’s iden-
tity in, 212; Faulhaber on, 1–2, 3;
figural reading of, 4 –5, 15, 90, 100,
109 –10, 163 – 64, 249 n68; fulfill-
ments of, 121, 267 n63; historical
structure of, 120, 125; literal sense
of, 121; Origen’s commentaries on,
126; as shadow, 192 –93; superses-
sion of, 29; unity with New Tes-
tament, 164, 259nn12,16,29,
260 nn23,29; as universal history,
General Index / 291
110; veiling of, 188. See also Exo-
dus; Joshua; Moses
Ontotheology, 233n16
Origen of Alexandria: allegorical read-
ing 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 circum-
cision, 231n13, 240nn32,40; on de-
struction 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; inner-
outer distinction in, 51, 233n17,
234n23; on Jesus’ disciples, 203 –
6; on law, 128, 132 –33, 261n35; on
letter and spirit, 75, 231n13; literal-
ism of, 11, 272n22; on literal sense,
13, 186; on Old and New Testa-
ments, 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; Commen-
tary on Psalm 1, 78; Commentary
on Romans, 259n19; Commentary
on the Song of Songs, 47, 50 –56;
292 / General Index
Origen of Alexandria (continued)
Contra Celsum, 257 n3; Dialogue
with Heraclides, 234 n21; Hom-
ily XII on Exodus, 188; Treatise on
the Passover, 66 –74, 133, 239n24,
240 n34
Particularism, Jewish, 48
Passion, of Christ, 66, 98, 202 –3,
238 n12; Origen on, 194 –95; Peter’s
experience of, 99; temporal occur-
rences in, 198
Passover: as bodily event, 74; celestial,
67 – 68; Christian, 69; eschatalogi-
cal, 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 gos-
pels, 100 –101; and Alexandrian al-
legory, 227 n23; allegorical herme-
neutics 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; con-
struction of signifiers, 225 n2; dual-
ism of, 229 n59; Epistle to the Gala-
tians, 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, 226n8;
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, 225n2,
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 resur-
rection, 74 –75, 229 n59; social
thought of, 269 n94; supersession-
ism of, 7, 21–27, 108, 227 n20;
2 Corinthians, 27 –37; universalism
of, 7 – 8, 109, 175, 178 – 82, 222n18,
269n94; on veil of Moses, 27 –37,
188, 189 –93, 199, 203, 228n32
Percennius (soldier), 98
Peshat, 224n29
Peter, the apostle: Auerbach on, 97,
246n40; 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; doc-
trine of two worlds, 121; middle, 49,
234n18; 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 mean-
ing 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 inter-
pretation of, 222n16; fulfillment of,
131

Prophets: anthropomorphic language
of, 258 n10; Christ on, 259n23; spir-
itual 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, 247n53
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; spiri-
tual transformation of, 265n36. 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, 249n61;
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; Chris-
tian view of, 100 –101; of divine
performance, 216; European repre-
sentation of, 84, 244 n2; as figura,
184; figural fulfillment of, 185, 210;
of figures, 148; Greco-Roman rep-
resentation of, 91; incorporeal, 53;
literary representation of, 97; Ori-
gen’s view of, 115; sensuous, 253n8;
and shadow, 264 n22; spiritual ver-
sus sensible, 59 – 62; textual media-
tion of, 122
Reality, historical: and figural read-
ing, 95–96; of figures, 148, 159,
211, 248 n55; loss of, 124; temporal
change in, 253n6; textual represen-
tation of, 84 – 85, 96
General Index / 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 follow-
ing, 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; fulfill-
ments of, 117; historical events in,
60, 83, 119, 153, 256n35; historical
representation of, 122; inner direc-
tionality of, 142; Jewish embodi-
ment of, 30 –32; literal sense in,
143 – 45, 160; literary relationships
in, 181; meditational uses of, 171;
metanarrative in, 60; Origen’s con-
ception of, 59, 69, 77; performative
meaning of, 33 –34; as sacrament,
71; sensory base of, 149; spiritual
meaning of, 271n18; temporal se-
quence in, 154 –57; threefold read-
ing 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 / General Index
Sensible occurrences: figural reading
of, 97; and identity, 149; and mate-
riality, 149; and meaning, 101; ver-
sus spiritual, 59 – 62; supersession
of, 90 –91
Sensus literalis. See Literal sense
Shadow: and reality, 264 n22; Tertul-
lian on, 93, 151; and truth, 151–52
Signifiers: Derrida on, 245 n32; of
meaning, 35, 45; Paul’s construc-
tion of, 225 n2; and signified, 209;
textual, 20 –24, 172, 208
Signs: Augustine’s theory of, 266n41;
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; Rab-
binic 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; awaken-
ing of readers by, 152; body trans-
formed by, 74; as divinely enacted
relation, 153; embodiment of, 29,
209; in formation of community,
36; God as, 191, 271n18; heart in-
scribed by, 35; human interpreta-
tion 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,
266n42; of concrete by abstract, 52;
of identity by presence, 272n19; of
Old Testament, 29; of sensible oc-
currences, 90 –91
Supersessionism: Barth’s, 223n24;
Boyarin on, 15, 31, 217; in Chris-
tianity, 9, 173 –74, 208; in figural
reading, 16, 217; Frei on, 173; her-
meneutical, 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; mean-
ing in, 149 –50, 157; in Passion of
Christ, 198; in Scripture, 154 –57
Tertullian, 66; Auerbach on, 107,
249n67; 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; histori-
cal 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; subordina-
tion of self to, 142; transformative
power of, 54, 153; and truth, 166

qeov~, and oJ qeov~, 195, 196
Trajan, emperor of Rome, 124
Transformation: bodily, 242n59;
Christian view of, 10; divine, 209,
210, 213, 226 n8; by meaning, 45;
Moses’, 33; Origen on, 215; spiri-
tual, 14, 214, 216, 232 n14, 265n36
Trigg, Joseph Wilson, 231n13
Trinitarianism, 133; failure of, 134
Trope, Scripture as, 14
Types: and antitypes, 133, 143; con-
formity 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 literal-
ism, 263 n6; postmodern approach
to, 221n12; Protestant use of, 263n7
Uncircumcision, 42
Universalism: Christian, 180; inter-
nal logic of, 175; Pauline, 7 – 8, 109,
175, 178 – 82, 222 n18, 269n94; Pla-
tonic, 48
General Index / 295
Vibulenus (soldier), 98
Vico, Giovanni Batista, 245n32,
265n41; on providence, 247n53
Virgil: as figura, 104 – 6, 183 – 84; his-
torical, 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 Light-
house, 110 –13, 212, 252n99; real-
ism 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
Index Locorum

scriptural passages Numbers

9.13 69
Genesis 13.16 87
1.26 234n23 28.1–3 67
2.7 234n23
3.15 146 Deuteronomy
4.24 239n32
Exodus 10.16 228n45
8.16 –19 67 18.15 189
12.5 70, 71
12.7 72 1 Kings
12.8 70, 72 8.10 –11 199, 272n18
12.9a 72
Psalms
12.9b 73
62.9 205
12.9 –10 70, 238n23
84.1 222n19
12.11, 27, 48 66
12.13 66 Isaiah
12.33 69 1.13 –14 66
12.43 66 7.14 146
16.23, 25 67 42.9, 10 223n22
32.7 67 43.19 223n22
34 13, 33, 186, 188, 53.7 – 8 5, 107
272n21 65.17 223n22
34.29 –30 199, 272n18
34.29 –35 28, 192, 226n17 Jeremiah
34.30 34 31.22 223n22
34.32 34 31.31 223n22
34.34 33
Ezekiel
34.35 34
11.19 223n22
40.34 –35 199, 272n18
18.31 223n22
Leviticus 18.31–32 100, 247n45
5.6 –7, 18 238n19 36.26 223n22

297
298 / Index Locorum

Matthew 8.39 129

5.18 237 n42 8.40 258n12
8.3 57 8.58, 56 259n12
10.38 204 9.4 240n32
11.27 202 10.30 194, 272n3
13.17 259 n23 11.55–56 238n6
13.46 271n16 13.31 196
17.1–3 270 n7 13.31–32 194, 196, 197,
17.5 189 203, 272n3
22.29 –33 242 n54 13.33 203, 204
16.16 203
Mark 17.1, 4 –5 194, 272n3
1.27 223 n22
2.21–22 223 n22 Acts
8.27 –29 246 n40 8.30 –35 107, 249n70
8.32 –35 5
Luke
1.35 222 n19 Romans
7.28 128 2.12 –15 38, 229n46
9.29 –30 199, 272n19 2.14 40, 41
10.25–37 187 2.25–29 261n35
22.15–16 66 2.26 42
22.20 71 2.27 44
24.13 –27 4 2.29 19, 37, 38, 44,
24.25–27 5 228n45, 229n45
24.32 190, 191, 3.1–20 231n13
270 n12 7.6 134, 228n43
7.22 234n23
John 8.29 178, 269n100
1.7 127, 128 9 –11 2, 20, 23
1.14 72 10.13 –17 178
1.14 –18 127, 256n1 11.16 –24 19, 20, 21, 24,
1.16 129 226n4
1.18 129, 234n21 11.17 –24 3
1.19 257 n2 11.23 23
1.29 65, 70, 71, 72, 11.26 3
238 n19 11.32 178, 269n100
2.13 66, 70 12.11 239n32
4.23 222 n19 16.25–26 130, 259n18
4.35 130
5.17 258 n10 1 Corinthians
6.48 72 5.2 43
6.50 –51 72 5.6 –7 43
6.51 72 5.7 67, 70
6.53 69 7.19 42, 229n57
6.53 –56 72 7.31 245n27
6.54 –58 239 n24 11.25 71
8.21 204 12.12 71
 Index Locorum / 299

12.12 –13 270n106 Philippeans

12.12 –30 269n106 2.9 201
12.14 270n106 3.8 –9 270n106
12.27 270n106
15 75, 242n54 Colossians
15.44 79 1.15 234n21
15.50 79 3.4 269n102
3.10 223n22
2 Corinthians
2 Timothy
3.3 35
1.10 130, 259n18
3.6 29, 191, 193,
227n23, 228n43, Hebrews
239n32, 271n18 1.3 200
3.7 –11, 18 199, 272n20 2.9 201
3.7 –18 19, 27, 28, 8.5 240n40
226n18 10.1 232n14
3.12 –16 33 11.28 69
3.12 –18 34 12.29 239n32
3.13 –14 35
3.13 –15 36 2 Peter
3.15–17 271n18 3.13 223n22
3.16 189, 270n9 Revelation
3.17 190, 270n13 21.1 223n22
4.3 – 4 228n32 21.5 9, 223n21
4.3 – 4, 6 199, 272n20
4.16 234n23
5.1– 4 229n59 ancient passages
5.4 242n54
Augustine
5.16 190, 240n40
Confessions
5.17 223n22
11.18.23 120, 254n16
12.14 135
The City of God
13.3 73
20.14 245n27
Galatians
Gregory of Nyssa
2 259n19
The Life of Moses
3.27 –29 269n106
1.39, 42, 51 237n43
3.28 179, 180
2.119 256n35
4 271n16
4.22 –29 25, 226n13 Hippolytus
4.22 –31 19, 24, 25 Treatise on the Passover
4.26 223n19 1 66, 238n3
5.6 3, 221n11
5.9 261n30 Origen
6.15 223n22 Contra Celsum
1.18 236n39
Ephesians 1.42 253n5
2.4 – 6 178 1.48 57, 236n35,
3.5– 6 130, 259n20 38, 39
300 / Index Locorum

Origen (continued) 6.15 129, 258n9,

4.48 237 n48 259n15
5.29 236 n39 6.16 129, 258n8
6.69 –72 234 n21 6.17 128, 258n7,
7.33 77, 242 n55 258n10
7.34 77, 242 n56 6.19 129, 258n10
Commentary on the Song of Songs 6.20 129, 258n12
Prologue 1 55, 235 n27 – 30, 6.21 129, 259n13
236 n31 6.22 129, 259n14
Prologue 2 61, 62, 63, 6.24 129, 258n11
233 n17, 6.25 130, 259n18 –19
237 n55– 57, 6.26 130, 131,
59 – 61 259n20 –21
Prologue 4 56, 236 n32 6.27 –28 131, 259n22
3.12 51, 53, 63, 6.29 136, 259n23,
233 n15, 234n22, 261n40
237 n58 6.30 136, 262n41
3.13 52, 234 n20 6.53 257n2
9 233 n16 6.104 259n22
Commentary on the Gospel of John 6.116 128, 257n5
1.14 135, 261n36 6.117 128, 257n4
1.17 135, 260n26, 29, 6.135 257n2
261n37 6.136 257n2
1.20 135, 261n37 6.147 257n2
1.26 137, 262n48 6.271 238n19
1.27 132, 260n24 –26 6.272 238n19
1.29 –31 132, 260n27 10.67 66, 238n6
1.32 132, 260n28 10.69 –73 66, 238n7
1.33 131, 133, 135, 10.73 67, 238n8
260 n29, 261n30, 10.75–76 67, 238n9
262 n44 10.77 – 80 67, 238n10
1.34 261n30 10.83 67, 238n11
1.36 133, 134, 10.85 68, 238n13
261n31, 261n34 10.86 68, 238n14 –15
1.37 –38 261n40 10.87 68, 238n16
1.39 135, 261n38 10.92 69, 70, 238n18,
1.40 135, 261n39 20
1.47 261n34 10.93 70, 238n21,23
1.77 260 n23 10.96 70, 238n22
2.10 57, 236 n33, 36 10.99 72, 239n28
2.195 136, 260n23, 10.102 72, 239n29
262 n43 10.103 72, 239n30
2.197 260 n23 10.104 72, 239n31
2.198 136, 260n23, 10.107 73, 240n33
262 n42 10.108 73, 240n34
2.212 –18 257 n2 10.109 73, 240n35, 38
6.3 – 6, 15–31 258 n6 10.110 66, 116, 136,
 Index Locorum / 301

238n5, 252n4, Commentary on the Gospel

262n46 of Matthew
10.117 74, 241n41 10.1–10 270n16
10.118 74, 241n42 15.3 239n27
10.300 59, 237n50 Commentary on the Psalms
13.20 234n21 (in Methodius, De resurrectione)
13.31–32 194, 272n5 1.5 78, 79, 242n57 –
13.48, 314 –19 258n6 58, 60
13.295 130, 259n17 Dialogue with Heraclides
13.319 258n6 16 235n23
20.89ff 262n43 Homily 12 on Exodus
20.90 262n43 1 188, 270n4 –5
20.92 262n43 3 189, 270n6 –10
20.93 262n43 4 190, 270n11–16
20.94 262n43 Homily on Jeremiah
28.12 9, 223n20 20 71, 239n26
28.224ff 238n6 39 241n43
28.237 66, 238n4 Homily on Joshua
28.241 73, 240n36 9.8 191, 271n17
28.243 73, 240n37 17.1 222n19
32.318 195, 272n6 Homily on Leviticus
32.320 195, 272n7 4.8 239n26
32.322 195, 272n8 10.1 232n14
32.322 –26 203, 204, On First Principles
273n36 –37 1.1. 234n21
32.324 195, 272n9 1.1.2 271n18
32.325 195, 272n10 1.1.8 234n21
32.326 196, 272n11–12 1.1.9 236n37, 237n55
32.328 196, 272n13 1.2.13 237n59
32.329 197, 272n14 1.3.8 262n48
32.330 197, 272n15 1.6.4 74, 240n40
32.338 – 40 200, 273n24 1.8.4 235n26
32.339 203, 273n34 2.4.3 57, 236n34
32.341 200, 273n25 2.6.7 241n40
32.342 – 43 200, 273n26 2.8.3 63, 237n62
32.353 201, 273n27 4.1.7 259n18
32. 354 201, 273n28 4.2.1–2 75, 241n46
32.355 201, 273n29 4.2.2 69, 238n17
32.356 201, 273n30 4.2.3 136, 262n47
32.357 201, 203, 4.2.4 75, 76, 241n47,
273n31, 35 49, 51
32. 359 202, 273n32 –33 4.2.5 76, 242n52
32.390 204, 273n38 4.2.6 58, 237n45
32.391 204, 273n39 4.2.7 – 8 58, 236n40
32.392 204, 273n40 4.2.8 58, 236n41,
32.398 204, 273n42 237n44
32.399 – 400 205, 273n43 4.2.9 58, 59, 60,
302 / Index Locorum

Origen (continued) Plato

237 n46 – 47, 49, Phaedrus
51–53 276A 76, 241n50
4.3.5 61, 237 n54
On Prayer Quintilian
22.3 234 n21 Institutio Oratoria
31.3 77, 242 n53 8.6 14, 224n27 –28
On the Passover 9.1 12, 14, 224n27
3.27 –30 73, 240 n39 9.1.4, 7 14, 224n28
7.15–11.36 261n32 9.14 14, 224n28
13.35–14.13 69, 238 n19 Tertullian
26.5– 8 71, 239 n24 De Anima
26.5–27.5 239 n32 43 89, 244n13
28.–3 –29.9 240 n32 Adversus Marcionem
30.–15–32.13 240 n33 4.40 65, 66, 238n1–2
32.20 –28 240 n34 5.19 93, 245n20
33.20 –32 71, 239 n25 On the Resurrection
36.34 239 n24 20 93
42.1ff 261n32
Philocalia
15.19 71, 239 n27
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