Table Of ContentAllegorical Readers
and Cultural Revision
in Ancient Alexandria
David Dawson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
Oxford, England
© 1992 by
The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dawson, David, 1957-
Allegorical readers and cultural revision in ancient Alexandria,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-07102-6 (alk. paper)
1. Allegory. 2. Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc.—History.
3. Bible. O.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc., Jewish. 4. Bible—
Criticism, interpretation, etc.—History—Early church, ca.
30-600. 5. Philo, of Alexandria. 6. Valentinus, 2nd cent.
7. Clement, of Alexandria, Saint, ca. 150-ca. 215. 8. Alexandria
(Egypt)—Religion. 9. Gnosticism.
BS500.D36 1992
121' .68'0932—dc20 91 -2851
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. @
To My Parents, John and Norma Dawson
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / ix
INTRODUCTION / 1
one. Pagan Etymology and Allegory / 23
Ancient Myth and Stoic Etymology / 24
Reading Homer as an Allegorical Poet / 38
Opposition to Etymology and Allegory / 52
tw o. Philo: T he Reinscription of Reality / 73
Jewish Allegory and Hellenism / 74
Representation and Textualization / 83
The World within the Text / 113
three. Valentinus: T he Apocalypse of the Mind / 127
Allegorical Interpretation as Composition / 129
Mystical Vision and Allegorical Revision / 145
Christian Initiation and the History Within / 170
four. Clement: T he New Song of the Logos / 183
Logos Theology as Allegorical Hermeneutic / 186
The Antecedent Voice of Cultural Classics / 199
Sectarianism and Domesticated Gnosis / 219
AFTERWORD / 235
notes / 241
BIBLIOGRAPHY / 297
GENERAL INDEX / 319
SCRIPTURE PASSAGES CITED / 333
ANCIENT PASSAGES CITED / 335
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began as my doctoral dissertation (Yale University, 1988), and I
am deeply grateful to my adviser, Bentley Layton, for his generous and
vigorous critical responses to early drafts, as well as for his ongoing
friendship and professional support. Among the many other persons
who helped in some way in the early stages of the project, I must single
out Susan Garrett, Dale Martin, Wayne Meeks, Alan Scott, and Kathryn
Tanner. Each responded helpfully to various drafts and ideas and pro
vided much needed encouragement. I completed the initial version of the
manuscript while a Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale; I
would like to thank the former Director of the Center, Peter Brooks,
along with the rest of the Fellows, for their interdisciplinary stimulation
and warm collegiality.
Further research and writing took place at Haverford College, another
center of interdisciplinary vitality. I wish to thank in particular the mem
bers of the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Committee on Interpretation for many
invigorating conversations, and my colleagues in the Religion Depart
ment, from whom I have received a great deal of concrete aid in the fi
nal stages of writing and revision. The entire manuscript has benefited
greatly from Richard Luman’s learned suggestions for changes in style
and substance. Anne McGuire offered a very generous, insightful, and
tremendously helpful critical reading of the introduction and chapter 3,
sharing with me her expertise in Gnosticism and Coptic philology. Mi
chael Sells provided a number of thoughtful suggestions for revising the
introduction and chapter 1, as did Deborah Roberts of the Haverford
Classics Department. I am fortunate to have colleagues who have such
patience and are willing to share so much of their time and energy.
The two anonymous readers for the University of California Press gave
ix
X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
the entire manuscript deeply informed readings and offered marvelously
detailed recommendations for revision. I am also grateful to Anthony
Long, Editorial Board Presenter for the Press, whose response stimulated
an important reconceptualization of material in the first chapter. Classics
editor Mary Lamprech’s wise judgment was evident from the outset in the
selection of readers, and every subsequent stage of the publication pro
cess has benefited from her meticulous, crisp, professional guidance.
Manuscript editor Marian Shotwell improved the text with every correc
tion and suggestion. All my readers have helped make this a better book
and saved me from many errors; I am responsible for those that still
remain.
Two Haverford religion majors, Kenneth Fromm and Robert Flynn,
served with special distinction as my research assistants. Their help, along
with that of fellow majors Ajantha Subramanian and Branavan Ganesan,
was made possible by a generous Faculty Research Grant from Haverford
College. My research and writing was also supported by a Summer Sti
pend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Throughout
the project, I received consistently excellent help from the staffs of the
Classics, Divinity, and Sterling Memorial libraries of Yale University, as
well as from Haverford College’s Magill Library and Bryn Mawr College’s
Canaday Library.
Finally, I am indebted beyond measure to my wife, Ellen Dawson, who
helped and sustained me in countless vital ways at every stage of thinking,
research, writing, and revision.
A NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND CITATION
Generally speaking, I have made use of existing English translations; I
have frequently made minor alterations in these without comment in
light of the original ancient languages: such changes include moderniza
tion of diction and syntax and other adjustments in both for the sake of
greater accuracy, literalism, or consistency of technical terminology. In
those few places where I take issue with, or offer alternatives to, com
monly accepted translations, I have explained myself in the notes. In
cases where English translations were not available or were unacceptable
for one reason or another, I have made my own. In all cases, regardless of
the source of the translation, I have worked directly from standard critical
editions of texts in their ancient languages, and my interpretations are
based on those editions. Quotations in ancient languages have been trans
literated. In general, single verbs are given in the present infinitive; single
nouns and participles, as well as noun phrases, in the nominative. Verbal
phrases and complete sentences are transliterated directly without alter
ation. Translations from scripture, except when based on the Septuagint,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
are taken from the Revised Standard Version, with occasional modifica
tion.
I have used the following symbols for interpolations in quoted mate
rial: [ ] = my own interpolations (whether exegetical comments, refer
ences, or words and phrases from the ancient language of the original
text); () = interpolations by another editor or translator; {} = restorations
of passages by another editor or translator. In some cases, my use of these
symbols has required the alteration of the textual apparatus of the edi
tions of the primary texts from which I am quoting. I have alerted readers
to such adjustments in the notes.
Introduction
This book describes how some ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian
interpreters used allegory to endorse, revise, and subvert competing
world views and forms of life. It departs from most standard discussions
of the topic because it insists that ancient allegory is best understood not
only as a way of reading texts, but also as a way of using that reading to
reinterpret culture and society. After an opening discussion of various
pagan etymologists, allegorists, and their opponents, I focus attention on
three Hellenistic religious writers who represent different models of alle
gorical interpretation: the Jewish exegete Philo, the Christian Gnostic
Valentinus, and the Christian Platonist Clement of Alexandria. These
three authors claimed authoritative originality for their allegorical read
ings and compositions, which they used as a means of enabling certain
privileged perspectives, variously construed as written text (Philo), mysti
cal vision (Valentinus), and hermeneutical voice (Clement), to challenge
cultural and religious precursors and contemporaries and to promote
alternative ways of being in the world.
My approach to the interpretative practice of these writers stands in
some contrast with three other influential views of allegory that, for
convenience, might be labeled traditional, late modern, and postmod
ern.1 Traditional approaches may be secular or sacred, though the re
ligious version is prior and fundamental for later secular adaptations.2
Traditional religious and theological commentators on allegory view it
as a way of plumbing and expressing the spiritual depths of religious
texts, especially the Bible.3 On this view, allegorical readers discover the
“deeper” or “more spiritual” meaning hidden beneath “the letter” of
scripture, expressing their hermeneutical insights in the form of allegori
cal compositions, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, or allegorical commen-
1
2 ALLEGORICAL READERS AND CULTURAL REVISION
taries, such as those on the Song of Songs.4 The commentators on alle
gory that I call late modernist, echoing Wallace Stevens’s bittersweet
praise of “supreme fictions,” are typically skeptical of the traditionalist
confidence in the presence of allegorical meaning. For such theorists,
allegory represents an eternally frustrated effort to attain a meaning that,
while real and near, remains just out of reach. Those who follow the
beckoning mystery of this literary mode “to the end” discover that there is
no end, that complete hermeneutical initiation consists in the knowledge
that everyone is an outsider to textual meaning and truth.5 Such a per
spective comes very close to that of postmodern deconstructionists, who
positively celebrate what late modernists fear most, identifying allegory as
the trope par excellence of the semantic void, the figure that bears witness
neither to the available presence of hidden meaning nor to the intimation
of near, but ever-elusive, meaning, but to the absence of any meaning
whatsoever.6
In this book, I largely set aside these decidedly formalist perspectives in
favor of an approach that is more attentive to the historically specific ways
allegory’s essential conflict of meanings actually engaged social and cul
tural practice in the ancient world. Ancient allegorical compositions and
interpretations constituted fields on which struggles between compet
ing proposals for thought and action took place. The very tensions be
tween literal and nonliteral readings that characterized ancient allegory
stemmed from efforts by readers to secure for themselves and their
communities social and cultural identity, authority, and power. But al
though this sociologically and historically oriented approach differs from
the three views of allegory sketched above, it also acknowledges and
draws upon important insights characteristic of each of them. The tradi
tional claim that allegory discovers a deeper, hidden meaning is under
stood in this book as a particular strategy by which readers claimed
authoritative originality for their interpretations. For example, in one
form, the traditional view of allegory holds that a divine logos underwrites
a text’s deeper meaning.7 In my approach, such reliance on the logos is
understood as a particular way of exercising hermeneutical authority,
based on a claim to have obtained access to the primordial source of
authentic meaning and truth. The late modernist position, in which the
aura of meaning is tantalizingly near but always elusive, captures some
thing of the apophatic reserve that tempers the mystical claims of Philo
and Clement. While each of these authors has sufficient hermeneutical
confidence to challenge and overturn precursors, each refrains from
professing absolute meaning and truth, even while insisting that such
knowledge (represented preeminently by the deity itself) is real and near
(Valentinus’s mystical confidence is somewhat less circumspect). Finally,
the close connection between much ancient religious allegory and ap-
INTRODUCTION 3
ophatic or “negative” theological sensibilities provides a partial parallel to
the deconstructionist claim that allegory expresses an absence of mean
ing. But the parallel remains partial; for the ancient interpreters I will be
examining (in contrast to postmodern readers), apophatic assumptions
are not hermeneutical (or rather, antihermeneutical) ends in themselves,
designed to foster an unending thrill of indeterminate interpretation.8
Instead of reveling in the absence of meaning, these ancient allegorists
tended to use apophatic claims rhetorically, as a way of justifying their
own application of allegorical readings that were designed to show what
the real meanings were. In effect, they combined an apophatic sensibility
with the claim for hermeneutical originality: on the one hand, their
recognition of apophatic limitations allowed them to declare the literal
meaning of precursor texts to be mimetically inadequate (thus justifying
their own application of allegory); on the other hand, their claim for
originality enabled them to announce that their own new, nonliteral
meanings successfully evaded the apophatic constraints that bound more
ordinary discourse. Given these similarities and differences, then, I have
drawn freely from all three approaches, combining their insights in eclec
tic fashion whenever they proved appropriate and illuminating, but al
ways keeping in view the social and cultural functions of allegory.
The remainder of this introduction will be devoted to a more detailed
description of the specific conception of allegory that informs this study. I
begin by comparing and contrasting my notion of allegory with the
related conceptions of metaphor, personification, and etymology. I then
discuss allegory’s possible roles in cultural accommodation and criticism. I
go on to situate my approach to allegory with respect to ongoing debates
about allegory’s apologetic function and its relation to “symbol” and
“typology.” The introduction concludes with a brief overview of the orga
nization and development of the specific claims that will occupy the
following chapters.
I
My understanding of the basic literary character of ancient allegory is
similar to classical rhetorical definitions of the procedure, which are based
on the etymology of the Greek term itself. Derived from alios (“other”)
and agoreuein (“to speak in the agora,” i.e., “publicly”), allēgoria means
most simply “to say something other than what one seems to say.”9 Two
special features of my use of the term “allegory” need emphasis. First,
although the focus of this study is on allegorical reading or interpretation,
“allegory” will be used as a generic term to refer to both allegorical in
terpretations and allegorical compositions. Second, interpretations and
compositions designated as “allegorical” must have a narrative dimen
