ALLEGORY, is a figure in discourse which we are then said to use when we make the terms which are peculiar to one thing to signify another. It is a Metaphor continued and pursued: For example, when the Prophets represent the Jews under the Allegory of a Vine, planted, cultivated and watered by the hand of God, and which instead of producing good fruit, brings forth verjuice or sour grapes; and so of others.
Allegories1 are very frequent in Scripture, as well as Metaphors, Parables, Similitudes, and Comparisons. The Jews, says St. Jerom2, and in general the People of Syria and Palestine, were fond of this sort of figurative discourse, and made use of it in almost every thing they said. One principal business of a Commentator is, to distinguish between the allegorical and literal meaning of any passage, and to reduce the allegorical to the literal sense. The antient Jews, as the Therapeutæ3, the author of the book of Wisdom4, Josephus5, and Philo a, and in imitation of them, the generality of the old Fathers, turned even the historical passages of the Scripture into Allegories, and such places where the literal sense is most clear. These allegorical explanations may edify indeed, but they are good for little else: They cannot regularly be produced as proofs of any thing, unless where Jesus Christ or his Apostles have made use of them as such. See hereafter this title, the Sense of Scripture.
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Footnotes
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Translators’ note. The old Philosophers and Poets were used to explain things generally in an al- legorical way: Pythagoras instructed his Disciples in this symbolical manner, believing it to be the most proper method of explaining Religion, and that it was an help to Memory. Euclid of Megara did indeed forbid the use of Allegories and Emblems, as fit only to render things obscure: And Socrates taught in a manner the most natural and simple, ex- cepting those Ironies which he sometimes interspersed in his Discourses. But the Philosophers for the most part were excessively fond of Allegories and mystical Theology, and the Christian Writers of the most early Ages in this particu- lar too much resemble them. ↩
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Hieronym. in Matth. xviii. ↩
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Philo de vita contemplativa, p. 901. ↩
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Wisd. xviii. 24. & alibi ↩
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Joseph. Proœmio in lib. Antiquit. ad finem. ↩