Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (review)

In Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (1992), Dawson showed that Postmodernism compels a reassessment of ancient allegory. There he argued that three Alexandrians, Philo, Valentinus, and Clement, practiced a valid form of biblical interpretation and used it to reinterpret their society and culture. One might have anticipated, then, that Dawson would move on to the greatest Alexandrian allegorist, Origen, who was demonstrably in-debted to all three. Now, ten years later, Dawson does so by putting Origen into dialogue with three modern thinkers who have used him as a foil to their own hermeneutics, Daniel Boyarin, Erich Auerbach, and Hans Frei. In the process, the author shows a deeper understanding of ancient allegory and makes a stronger case—although it could have been stronger still—for taking allegory seriously.

To Boyarin, Origen's allegory represents a Platonic dualism that privileges a universal and abstract spiritual realm over the specific and concrete bodily realm where, in Judaism, humans encounter God. In so allegorizing Hebrew Scripture, Origen justifies the Christian supersession of Judaism. To Auerbach, Origen represents a figurative interpretation of the Bible that dissolves the connection between historic events and their interpreted meaning. By so doing, Origen departs from and subverts the figural tradition, mediated through Dante, that is the foundation of Western literature. In this tradition a relationship always remains between historic events and what they prefigure so that history can never be discarded. To Frei, who relies to a large extent on Auerbach, Origen's figura-tive interpretation separated meaning from the narrative shape of biblical stories, which Frei seems to identify as the sensus literalis. (Dawson shows how Frei's definition of "literal" became increasingly counterintuitive, a common hazard for those committed to the priority of the literal sense.)

Dawson argues that all three objectors have imposed on Origen a modernist, binary opposition between text and meaning foreign to his thought. The author examines selected passages from Origen's work to demonstrate this. Perhaps the most telling is Origen's interpretation of 2 Cor. 3, itself an interpretation of the veiling of Moses' face in Exodus 34. Here Origen respects the narrative shape of the biblical text better than does Frei; Origen discusses the meaning of Moses' removing the veil when he comes before God whereas, in his interpretation, Frei insists, counter textually, that the veil stays on. To Boyarin's argument that Origen's allegory supersedes Judaism, Dawson points out that, if so, it also supersedes the sacraments of the Catholic Church.

Dawson is no longer concerned with how allegory reinterprets society but with how, in the process of allegorical interpretation, the interpreter undergoes transformation. Already in his article "Figure, Allegory" in Augustine Through the Ages: an Encyclopedia (1999), he had argued that it is anachronistic to apply to Augustine or, by implication, to any of the Fathers a sharp distinction between typology (figura = tupos) and allegory (allegoria). Rather, "the terms describe the biblical text as it is read by persons who are themselves undergoing the process of spiritual transformation that God is using the text to help bring about" (365). Dawson's stress on exegesis as a means of transformation is consistent with the "spiritual dynamism" that five contributors to the recent Origene Dizionario (2000) separately observe in Origen's thought.

Unfortunately, Dawson, who effectively limits himself to works readily avail-able in English, may not influence Origen scholarship as much as his insights warrant. The dialogue with Boyarin, Auerbach, and Frei addresses the principal modern objections to Origen's allegory, but for these critics Origen is little more than a straw man. To be taken more seriously, Dawson would need to grapple with Henri De Lubac's Histoire et esprit (1950), the book that, for good or ill, still frames contemporary understandings of Origen's allegory. He would also have helped his case by using...