Tagged: historia
Origen Levels the Playing Field
As I sketched in my last post, the categories of historia, muthos, and plasma hold significant promise as a theoretical lens through which to approach late antique exegesis—perhaps more promise than the more recent categories of allegory and typology, Alexandrian and Antiochene, literal and figurative.
In the next three posts, I examine three ancient exegetes who have traditionally been considered to embody the very essence of our understanding of exegesis: Origen is the hopeless allegorist, Theodore of Mopsuestia is the perfect example of historical, sober exegesis, and Porphyry is a typical pagan exegete, spinning fanciful interpretations from a seemingly insignificant passage in Homer.
My aim is to abandon these well worn approaches and adopt a different, albeit older one, and see what we can find in these writers when we use the ancient a categories of historia, muthos, and plasma to try to understand their works.
Let’s begin with the poster child for allegory, Origen.
Christian Fact and Pagan Fiction: Historia, Muthos, and Plasma
In a previous set of posts, I argued that contemporary understandings of typology and its relation to allegory are not based on ancient practice and that the classification of Alexandrian and Antiochene exegetes according to these categories is misleading. I suggested instead that the present-day usages of typology, allegory, Alexandria, and Antioch are the outgrowth of two nineteenth-century projects: to unite the Old and New Testaments into a single semantic field (Fairbairn) and to judge and classify sound and unsound exegesis in the Judeo-Christian tradition (Farrar).
In the next series of posts, I compare three late-antique exegetes without using the categories of typology and allegory, choosing instead terms that Robert Grant has identified as fundamental to ancient literary criticism: historia, muthos, and plasma.[1] Furthermore, I use these terms to compare authors (Origen and Theodore of Mopsuestia) who are commonly considered the representatives of each side of the geographical and exegetical dichotomies I’ve critiqued (Alexandria-Antioch and allegory-typology).[2] My aim is to show that the historian of exegesis can operate fruitfully without having recourse to these dominant paradigms, even when approaching the very authors who have been used to prove the validity of these paradigms.
Trembling on the verge of allegory 