Annotation CCLXXX

”Which things are said by allegory.” — Galatians 4:24

Whether it is lawful to bend the sins of the saints to pious senses.

The author of the commentaries of Jerome [pseudo-Jerome] on Paul, explaining this, taxes those who distort certain vices of the saints of the Old Testament into pious allegories, and by allegorical reasons defend those sins, to signify that the future mysteries of the Church were permitted in the Old Testament. And he writes thus: “THE APOSTLE gave, in this place, a rule of understanding allegorical reasons — namely, that, the truth of the history remaining, we expound the figures of the Old Testament. And he did this same [thing] there, where some honest deeds of the saints are related: not where sins are noted. But to call offenses [sins] mysteries is to accuse God either of impossibility or of ignorance — [as if] he could not otherwise show his sacraments, or certainly [as if he,]

—[nishing], reckoning to himself the sins of certain [men] necessary — let him [rather] first condemn those [sins] generally, but then also, by reproving and vindicating [avenging], let him show that those were not willed to be done for the sake of their mysteries.” Augustine judges that the sins of the saints which are recounted in the Old Testament are to be expounded, according to the allegorical law, of the future mysteries of the Church: because in those saints not only virtues, but also vices, contained a figure and prophecy of things to come — yet so [warns he] that, in treating these [allegorically], allegory must be used [in such a way] that we confess the crimes of the saints to have been truly crimes, not committed by God commanding,¹ but permitted by God not hindering, unto the signification and premonstration of things to come. By this rule Augustine, [in] book 22 against Faustus, drawing several errata [faults] of the ancient fathers to the figure and prediction of the coming Church, among other [things] also expounded allegorically, in this manner, the incest of the daughters of Lot with their father: “IN Lot, when [his] daughters lay with him, something was figured. For he seems to have borne the person of the future law — which indeed those procreated from it, and placed under the law, by [their] ill understanding in a manner intoxicating [it], and by not using [it] lawfully, bring forth the works of infidelity: yet we do not on that account justify this deed either of Lot himself, or of his daughters. Because it signified something, which would foreannounce the future perversity of certain [men]. For those [daughters] intended one thing, that they might do this: God, who permitted this to be done, [intended] another — that thence also he might demonstrate something — right judgment remaining over the sin of the men then present, and his providence watching for the signification of things to come. Therefore that deed, when it is narrated in holy scripture, is prophecy; but when it is considered in the life of those who committed it, is a crime [flagitium].”