04 - Chapter 04
CHAPTER IV THE PARABLE AS ALLEGORY As the result of nearly nineteen hundred years of parable study, we can now say with confidence that certain popular methods of parable interpretation are definitely wrong, that they lead not to the understanding but to the misunderstanding of the mind of the Master. At one of these we have just looked: the theory, for which Mark is supposed to vouch, that the parables are hidden mysteries, intended to conceal from most the truth that they reveal to a chosen few. We have seen how such an idea could arise: as a key to the interpretation of the parables, it is worse than valueless. The method of parable exegesis which has prevailed longer than any other, and has more than any other blinded Christians to the lessons taught in the parables, is the allegorical method. By the allegorical method we mean the method according to which every person, every object and every incident mentioned in the story has its counterpart in the spiritual world. In an allegory there is no argument, no inference from one sphere to another. The story told need have no significance, even no probability, in itself. The spiritual truth is the only truth, but it is given in enigmatic or symbolic form. A very valuable section of hilicher’s great book on the parables records the history of their interpretation. This section abounds in illustrations of the foolish meanings, sometimes the almost incredibly foolish meanings, found in the parables all down through the ages by distinguished teachers of the Church following the allegorical method. According to Tertullian, the father of the Prodigal represents God, the father’s wealth is the knowledge of God one has by nature, the citizen to whom the prodigal attached himself is the Prince of this world, the swine are demons, the best robe is the position from which Adam by transgression fell, and the Welcome Home supper typifies the Lord’s Supper. In later ages, Erasmus, who really represents the new spirit in parable interpretation, improved on this by teaching that the hired servants were the Jews who kept God’s laws only through fear or through hope of reward. In the Two Debtors (Mat 18:23 ff.) Origen claimed that we must find the counterpart of the king, the slaves, the man who owed ten thousand talents, his wife, his children, his going out, and of the one hundred shillings. In the four classes of seed in the Sower, Hugo of St. Victor (twelfth century) found the angels in the empyrean who fell because they claimed to be like Christ; Adam, who went astray when the sun of the devil’s temptation rose upon him; the Jews in the Holy Land who were corrupted by the infection of the thorns, that is, the heathen, and were scattered throughout the world; and lastly, the Lord himself, planted in the land of the Virgin, in the land of the Cross, and, through the teaching of the apostles, in the hearts of the faithful.
Naturally, the nobler the parable, the more terrible the devastation wrought by interpreters, and no parable has suffered more from the allegorizers than the Good Samaritan. The allegorical misinterpretation is at least as old as Augustine; it was continued by Erasmus, in spite of the fact that hilicher calls him the “ morning star “ of the new principle of parable interpretation. But it was left to Cardinal Wiseman boldly to make the claim that only the Catholic allegorizer can understand the latter part of the parable, which unrolls the history of the world. The oil is the emblem of all consecration or sacramental grace. The story of the wounded man represents the rescue of sinful man from complete destruction. The Saviour, until he returns to bring home his redeemed, has entrusted them to the care of loyal representatives, who have already received part of their reward, and will receive yet higher reward hereafter. On the allegorical interpretation, the Samaritan is Christ, the inn is the Church, the two pence may be (for Protestants) the two sacraments, and the inn-keeper represents the apostles and their successors. One can hardly help paying a tribute to the perverted ecclesiastical ingenuity, one had almost said genius, which has succeeded in divesting of all its meaning the story which, with one exception, is the most beautiful and important ever told. Where numbers occur in the parables, they provide a special field for the joyous exercise of the allegorizer’s talents. In the Labourers in the Vineyard (Mat 20:1-34) the number of hours mentioned (1, 3, 6, 9, 11) makes a total of 30, which, according to the schools of Valentinus and Marcus, provides a striking confirmation of the Gnostic theory of the thirty asons which separated God and his world. For the Valentinians the Five Foolish Virgins represent the five senses. In the Leaven the three measures of flour are the pneumatic, the psychic and the materialistic classes of men, the leaven being the Saviour and the woman Wisdom. In their spiritual interpretation of figures the British Israelites have a long line of predecessors.
We must not suppose that no one before our own age had a glimpse of the beauty or the true meaning of the parables. After the first age of darkness there was progress, though by no means a steady progress, towards the recovery of this priceless treasure. Tertullian, for example, saw that the story in its natural sphere must have a truth of its own before it could be transferred to the spiritual sphere; but he was too much a child of his age to make much use of his recognition of this fact.
It is from the sixteenth century that Julicher traces the new spirit in parable exegesis.
Erasmus was a classical scholar: he knew the light that could be shed on the parables of Jesus from the pages of Pliny, Plutarch and Seneca.
Like Origen he believed that there is one governing thought in every parable. Yet Erasmus is only the morning-star, not the full-orbed sun, of the new system of interpretation. For him, as for his predecessors, the parables are allegories, though he exercised more restraint than some of them in interpreting the details.
Luther was also an allegorizer: for him the woman who lost her piece of silver typified the Church or the bride of Christ; the lamp which illumined her search was the Law or the Word of God. But the new wine of the Reformation was bound to inspire students of the Bible to a new wisdom in this branch of Bible study.
Old traditions had been broken down, ancient prejudices overcome; an historical sense was being developed and languages were being studied. Calvin, for whom the way had been prepared by Butzer, is regarded by Julicher as the greatest parable exegete in the first sixteen centuries. It is true that he sometimes fell back into old allegorical errors. For example he regards the Vineyard of Mat 21:33 as typifying the Church of God; the hedge, winepress and tower as representing the adjuncts to God’s Law, such as sacrifices and other ceremonies, meant to develop the faith of the people. He clearly saw, however, that the material of a parable must be grasped as a whole and the details studied in relation to this whole.
Yet the time was not ripe for this advance; and the Protestant Church speedily sank back into, and for two more centuries remained in, the allegorizing position which the Roman Church had never left. hilicher claims that, in the seventy years before he wrote, the parables had suffered more from perverse interpretation than in the previous seven centuries. This he regards as a reflex effect of the rise of the Higher Criticism of the Gospels and of a rationalising theology. In its zeal to resist the new theology and to preserve the old Gospel, the new orthodoxy felt constrained to find a deep sense in every word of Scripture. The allegorizing, and even the prophetic, method of interpretation, returned in all their old force. It was B. Weiss in Germany, and men like Bruce and Dods in our own country (and earlier, in a measure, Trench) that blazed the trail to a new and better method. (Trench grumbles against Calvin because he will not allow the oil in the vessels of the Wise Virgins to mean anything, nor the vessels themselves, nor the lamps.)
Why is it that we feel so sure that the allegorical interpretation is a complete misunderstanding of the mind of Jesus? For one thing, there is the point which hilicher makes, and with which most will agree, that though this theory has held sway for nearly two thousand years, it has given us no new insight into the meaning of one single parable. Few would now agree with the judgment of Irving and others, with which Trench sympathizes, that the more we empty a parable of allegory, the more its peculiar beauty disappears and the less interest it has for us. But there is more than that. The allegory is not intended to teach. It may give us new insight into truth which is already familiar, but it is not a vehicle for imparting new truth.
Trench, for example, while partly rejecting allegorizing methods, frankly says: ’ The parables may not be made first sources and seats of doctrine. Doctrines otherwise and already established may be illustrated, or indeed confirmed by them; but it is not allowable to constitute doctrine first by their aid.” Now it may be taken as certain that for Jesus the parable was not only a teaching method, but one of his most important teaching methods, for some classes of hearers perhaps the most important. He did not only speak in parables; he taught the people in parables. In the parable he sought to lead them, more effectively than he could in any other way, into the truth about God, about themselves, about the spiritual world.
If Jerusalem represents the state of primal innocence and the descent to Jericho the fall of man, if the robbers are sin, the priest and the Levite the moral and ceremonial law, the Good Samaritan Jesus, if the inn is the Church, the inn-keeper Church officials and the two pence two sacraments, then to the people who first heard the parable it meant nothing at all, and to subsequent generations, when a theology had been developed, it only put in pictorial form, a form moreover which required a key to its interpretation, teaching with which they were already familiar in abstract form. It is unthinkable that Jesus so misused a form of teaching capable of applications so much nobler.
One of the main objections to allegorical interpretations is that there can never be any finality about them. Exegesis becomes purely arbitrary and one teacher has as much right to his opinion as another, while all will find in the parables the meaning which they wish to find. The number of possible applications becomes literally infinite. Over two hundred years ago Vitringa suggested that the three loaves of Luk 11:5 represent the three parts of Scripture (Law, Prophets, Psalms) which gave a prophetic picture of the petitioner, Jesus, who therefore needed them; but he made the further suggestion that they represented the three parts of the then known world, since the heathen of these parts (typified by the friend arriving at midnight), if they were to be converted, would need the grace of Christ as the bread of life. If the five foolish virgins are the five senses, the five wise virgins may be the five books of the Pentateuch. If the swine are demons, the fatted calf may be Mahommedanism. We are, in short, in a world in which anything may mean anything.
If we do not feel that the parables of Jesus have a significance of their own and shine in their own light, we shall never understand the teaching of Jesus at all.
If the parables are not allegories, how did the idea arise and so long prevail that they were allegories? hilicher has argued powerfully that, so long as a parable is intelligible and selfconsistent, it must in the first place be understood as meaning what it says. To ignore the obvious meaning of the stories and to transfer each character and incident to the spiritual sphere is to take a wrong path which can end only in a complete misunderstanding of the lesson of the parables. For the most part the parables of Jesus, even in the form in which we have them, are so vivid and so satisfying as stories, that it is in the highest degree unnatural to regard them as series of algebraic formulae for truths in another and higher sphere. Yet this unnatural idea not only arose, but was for centuries the conception that governed the interpretation of the parables, a conception which can hardly be said to be entirely abandoned even in our day. How did the idea arise? In part the explanation is to be found in the theory that the parables were hidden mysteries; but the main part of the answer lies in the interpretations of the Sower, the Darnel among the Wheat, and (in a less degree) the Draw-net, ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels. These interpretations are all allegorical; they suggest that the stories had no significance in themselves, that there are no lessons to be drawn from the parable regarded as a whole, and that they become intelligible only when the hearer grasps the hidden spiritual meaning behind each character and incident. In the Sower Jesus is represented as giving the key to the seed, the birds, the rock, the sun, the thorns, the good soil and the harvest. (As has been pointed out, Jesus, who loved the birds, is here supposed to make them stand for the devil. We note also that the seed which fell on the hard road would have borne no crop even if the birds had not picked it up.) Most mechanical of all is the explanation of the Darnel among the Wheat ascribed to Jesus, in which he appears as giving the counterpart of the sower, the field, the good seed, the darnel, the enemy, the harvest, the reapers, the gathering and burning of the darnel.
(We note also that the Son of Man is at once the earthly Jesus in Mat 13:37 and the exalted Son of Man who sends forth his angels at the end of the world in Mat 5:41.) In the Draw-net we are given the clue to the fishermen, the good fish, the bad fish, the separation, and the throwing away of the inedible fish. This raises the question whether Jesus ever gave these interpretations. The critical question has been discussed so often that perhaps there is little new to be said about it; and in the end the attitude of most readers will depend on the extent to which they accept the results of the literary criticism of the Gospels. One or two points are obvious. In all three Synoptists, the explanation of the Sower comes after the very difficult section in which it seems to be suggested that the object of the parable method was to puzzle the hearers, all except a favoured few. In Matthew the interpretation of the Darnel among the Wheat is separated from the parable itself by the Mustard Seed, the Leaven, and another short section about the use of the parable method. These facts may suggest that the interpretations do not belong to the same strain of Gospel tradition as the parables themselves. To say nothing of the distressingly mechanical nature of the interpretation of the Darnel parable, for all its fullness it misses what seems to be the whole point: the suggestion of the farmer’s men that they should weed out the darnel, and his reply that no separation must be effected till the harvest is ripe. With regard to the Draw-net, we note only that the interpretation given is the same as in the case of the Darnel, partly even in the same words, though in this case the furnace of fire explains nothing in the parable itself.
It was natural that great importance should be attached to the three allegorical parable interpretations ascribed to Jesus. In Mark the Sower is the first parable recorded. In Matthew the three parables allegorized are in his first great parable collection. Both in Matthew and in Mark Jesus is represented as on this occasion adopting in the parable a new kind of teaching which called for an explanation.
Almost from the beginning these considerations seem to have obscured from view the very important point that they are by no means the only parables of which interpretations are given in the Gospels; sometimes ascribed to Jesus, sometimes from the pen of the evangelist himself. So recent a writer as Mr. Balmforth says of the Sower*: “ In St. Luke’s Gospel it is the only parable which has appended to it an explanation of its meaning.” Apparently he means it is the only parable which has an allegorical explanation appended. In fact, it is the rule rather than the exception that a parable should be accompanied by some kind of interpretation; and in no case, except the three mentioned, is that interpretation of an allegorical nature. The point is so important and has been so persistently overlooked that it is only with great reluctance that, owing to considerations of space, one omits to elaborate it. Any reader can verify for himself the fact that in the case of many parables an interpretation is given, either ascribed to Jesus, or coming frankly from the pen of the evangelist, or both; that, except in the three parables mentioned, the lesson is always confined to a single point, briefly and * Saint Luke in the Clarendon Bible p. 175. pithily expressed; and that in every case it is of the same kind as an intelligent reader would draw to-day. It is particularly noticeable that in the case of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which has suffered as much at the hands of the allegorizers as the traveller did at the hands of the robbers, the violence that has been done to the story is in direct contradiction to Luke’s own account of it. He tells us that Jesus gave this parable as a reply to the question: “ Who is my neighbour? “ and that he himself pointed the moral: ’ Go and do thou likewise ’ (Luk 10:37).
We are not suggesting that all the interpretations of the parables ascribed to Jesus by the Synoptists necessarily came from his mouth; nor is it necessary to assume that in every case the lesson drawn from a parable, whether ascribed to Jesus or coming frankly from the pen of the evangelist, is the lesson that Jesus intended to be drawn. Even if the parables in Luk 15:1-32 were called forth by the mission to the taxcollectors and outcasts, the Church has rightly given them a far wider interpretation. ’ The last shall be first and the first last “ (Mat 20:16) is hardly a lesson one can draw from the Labourers in the Vineyard. The point of the story is not any reversal of their original position, but the equality of treatment of workers whose contribution, on a superficial view, seemed very unequal. The saying: ’ To him that has shall be given,” etc. (Mat 25:29) points the lesson of the fate of the man with the one talent and the man with the ten talents; and emphasizes, what may indeed have been the intention of Jesus, that the man with the one talent is the central figure of the story. Yet it is difficult to believe that this lesson exhausts, or comes anywhere near exhausting, the significance of the parable. The moral drawn from the Ten Bridesmaids: “ Be on the watch “ or “ Remain awake ’ ’ (Mat 25:13) is not one that would naturally follow from the story. All the bridesmaids fell asleep, nor were they reproved for doing so. The point was that some made their preparations before they fell asleep: others did not.
However this may be, it is now abundantly clear that the allegorical explanations of the Sower, the Darnel and the Draw-net given in the Gospels, far from being typical of the parable exegesis of the early Church, were entirely exceptional. In some cases no explanation is offered, apparently because it was felt that none was needed. Of the large number of interpretations given, only in the three just mentioned is there any hint of allegory. In every other case the parable is an illustrative argument.
Whether it is Jesus himself or the evangelist that draws the moral, the parable is treated as a story, natural and intelligible in itself, that leads up to some outstanding lesson which follows from it simply, naturally, convincingly. The point is so obvious, the evidence for it so abundant, it is amazing that for so many centuries the allegorical and the “ mystery ’ conceptions dominated the interpretation of the parable, and were supposed to represent the mind of Jesus. To the rule that the parables are not allegories there is one exception: the Wicked Vinedressers recorded by all three Synoptists (Mat 21:33-46, Mark 12:1-12, Luk 20:9-19). This parable is hardly intelligible except on the supposition that it is an allegory. We know what the vineyard was and what was the fruit expected; we know who were typified by the owner, the tenants, the messengers, the Son, the new tenants. We know the spiritual counterpart of the fate of the Son and of the doom of the vinedressers. If this is a genuine parable of Jesus, and there seems no serious reason to doubt it, it shows that our Lord had no bias against allegory when it suited his purpose. As a rule he avoided it, because he found the story, complete in itself but with a spiritual lesson involved in it, a more effective teaching method. But he treated figurative language with the same freedom with which he treated the Law of Moses.
If he spoke even one allegory, we need not be surprised if we find that we sometimes know whom he meant by a character in a parable, or what he meant by some incident in a parable.
Unless we know at whom or what the parable was aimed, it would be unintelligible; but that does not turn the parable into an allegory. In any case, what we are arguing against is the idea that allegory provides the key to the interpretation of the parables. This idea is destructive of any possibility of finding their real meaning.