Allegory

Saying one thing to mean another

The word comes from the Greek allēgoreō (ἀλληγορέω), to speak of one thing by means of another. Paul uses it of the story of Abraham's two wives.

These things serve as illustrations, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children into slavery: This is Hagar.

Galatians 4:24

John Wesley defines the term in his note on the verse: "An allegory is a figurative speech, wherein one thing is expressed, and another intended" Wesley. Some passages of Scripture are allegorical from the start. God told Ezekiel to "pose a riddle; speak a parable to the house of Israel" (Ezekiel 17:2), and Jesus explained his parable of the sower point by point: the seed is "the message of the kingdom", the path a heart that does not understand it (Matthew 13:19). To read such passages figuratively is simply to read them as their authors meant.

Allegory as a method of interpretation is something else. It looks for hidden spiritual meanings in the details of texts written as story or history. In the Catena, Augustine reads the man who fell among robbers in the parable of the Good Samaritan as Adam, and says that "Jericho is interpreted to be the moon, and signifies our mortality" Augustine. In this reading the Samaritan is Christ, the inn is the church, and the two coins are the two commandments of love.

How the church has used it

In the third century Origen taught that, as a person has body, soul and spirit, so Scripture has a literal, a moral and a spiritual sense, and that passages which make no sense taken literally are signals to look deeper Origen, On First Principles. The tradition of Alexandria loved such reading; the teachers of Antioch insisted that the historical sense come first. The medieval church spoke of four senses, literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical, and Thomas Aquinas drew a limit: every spiritual sense rests on the literal, and arguments may be drawn from the literal sense alone Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae.

The Reformers drew that line more firmly. In his lectures on Galatians Luther said that allegories cannot prove doctrine; at most, like pictures, they adorn what has already been established Luther, Lectures on Galatians. The Westminster Confession declares that the true and full sense of any scripture "is not manifold, but one" Westminster Confession 1.9.

Where Christians differ

The Fathers' allegories hold both lessons and warnings. They believed that the whole of Scripture bears witness to Christ, and on the same parable Chrysostom did not miss its plain demand: "be he Gentile or Jew and need help, dispute not" Chrysostom. Yet the two coins meant different things to different interpreters, and allegory without an anchor in the text easily puts the reader's ideas into it.

The Catholic Church still speaks of a spiritual sense of Scripture alongside the literal, including an allegorical sense; the crossing of the Red Sea, for example, is read as a sign of baptism Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Orthodox continue spiritual reading in the Fathers and the liturgy. Protestants generally seek the one sense of a passage, while receiving the typology the New Testament itself shows and the figures a text itself uses. Meditating on Scripture and applying it to life is precious, they say, but doctrine is not built on it. See also the lesson Interpreting Scripture and Why did Jesus speak in parables?