The Old Testament, including its prophetic books, has a core of historical record focusing on the trials of the tribes of Israel. In their own view an elect nation, the Israelites believe their history spells out a providential design. The Prophets understand the earliest texts, Genesis and Exodus, in terms of this providential scheme. Hebraic texts are interpreted as typological: that is, they view serious myth as a theoretical history in which all events are types—portents, foreshadowing the destiny of the chosen people. Christian exegesis (the critical interpretation of Scripture) inherits the same approach.

Typological allegory looks for hidden meaning in the lives of actual men who, as types or figures of later historical persons, serve a prophetic function by prefiguring those later persons. Adam, for example (regarded as a historical person), is thought to prefigure Christ in his human aspect, Joshua to prefigure the victorious militant Christ. This critical approach to Scripture is helped by the fact of monotheism, which makes it easier to detect the workings of a divine plan. The splendours of nature hymned in the Psalms provide a gloss upon the “glory of God.” The Law (the Torah) structures the social aspect of sacred history and, as reformulated by Christ, provides the chief link between Old and New Testaments. Christ appeals to the authority of “the Law and the Prophets” but assumes the ultimate prophetic role himself, creating the New Law and the New Covenant—or Testament—with the same one God of old.

The Greeks

Hellenic tradition after Homer stands in sharp contrast to this concentration on the fulfilling of a divine plan. The analytic, essentially scientific histories of Herodotus and Thucydides precluded much confident belief in visionary providence. The Greeks rather believed history to be structured in cycles, as distinct from the more purposive linearity of Hebraic historicism.

Nevertheless, allegory did find a place in the Hellenic world. Its main arena was in philosophic speculation, centring on the interpretation of Homer. Some philosophers attacked and others defended the Homeric mythology. A pious defense argued that the stories—about the monstrous love affairs of the supreme god Zeus, quarrels of the other Olympian gods, scurrility of the heroes, and the like—implied something beyond their literal sense. The defense sometimes took a scientific, physical form; in this case, Homeric turmoil was seen as reflecting the conflict between the elements. Or Homer was moralized; the goddess Pallas Athene, for example, who in physical allegory stood for the ether, in moral allegory was taken to represent reflective wisdom because she was born out of the forehead of her father, Zeus. Moral and physical interpretation is often intermingled.

Plato, the Idealist philosopher, occupies a central position with regard to Greek allegory. His own myths imply that our world is a mere shadow of the ideal and eternal world of forms (the Platonic ideas), which has real, independent existence, and that the true philosopher must therefore be an allegorist in reverse. He must regard phenomena—things and events—as a text to be interpreted upward, giving them final value only insofar as they reveal, however obscurely, their ideal reality in the world of forms. Using this inverted allegorical mode, Plato attacked Homeric narrative, whose beauty beguiles men into looking away from the truly philosophic life. Plato went further. He attacked other fashionable philosophic allegorists because they did not lead up to the reality but limited speculation to the sphere of moral and physical necessity. Platonic allegory envisaged the system of the universe as an ascending ladder of forms, a Great Chain of Being, and was summed up in terms of myth in his Timaeus. Plato and Platonic thought became, through the influence of this and other texts on Plotinus (died 269/270) and through him on Porphyry (died c. 304), a pagan mainstay of later Christian allegory. Medieval translations of Dionysius the Areopagite (before 6th century ad) were equally influential descendants of Platonic vision.

A second and equally influential Hellenic tradition of allegory was created by the Stoic philosophers, who held that the local gods of the Mediterranean peoples were signs of a divinely ordered natural destiny. Stoic allegory thus emphasized the role of fate, which, because all men were subject to it, could become a common bond between peoples of different nations. A later aspect of moral exegesis in the Stoic manner was the notion that myths of the gods really represent, in elevated form, the actions of great men. In the 2nd century bc, under Stoic influence, the Sicilian writer Euhemerus argued that theology had an earthly source. His allegory of history was the converse of Hebraic typology—which found the origin of the divine in the omnipotence of the one God—for Euhemerus found the origin of mythological gods in human kings and heroes, divinized by their peoples. His theories enjoyed at least an aesthetic revival during the Renaissance.

Blending of rival systems: the Middle Ages

At the time of the birth of Christ, ideological conditions within the Mediterranean world accelerated the mingling of Hellenic and Hebraic traditions. Philo Judaeus laid the groundwork; Clement of Alexandria and Origen followed him. The craft of allegorical syncretism—that is, making rival systems accommodate one another through the transformation of their disparate elements—was already a developed art by the time St. Paul and the author of The Gospel According to John wove the complex strands of the Hebraic-Christian synthesis. Over centuries of quarrelling, the timeless philosophy of the Greek allegorists was accommodated to the time-laden typology of the Hebrew Prophets and their Christian successors and at length achieved a hybrid unity that permitted great allegories of Western Christendom to be written.

As a hybrid method, allegory could draw on two archetypal story lines: the war and the quest of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which was paralleled by the struggles and wanderings of the children of Israel. Throughout the Middle Ages the figure of the wandering Aeneas (who, in the second half of Virgil’s Latin epic, Aeneid, fought bloody battles) was seen as a type in a system of hidden Christianity. Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, a prophetic vision of the birth of a child who would usher in the “golden age,” was read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Seen by many Christian commentators as the ideal allegorist, Virgil himself was hailed as a proto-Christian prophet. The blending of rival systems of allegory from widely assorted cultures became the rule for later allegory. Adapting the Latin writer Apuleius’s fable of Cupid and Psyche, Edmund Spenser combined its elements with ancient Middle Eastern lore, Egyptian wisdom, and dashes of Old Testament critical interpretation to convert the enclosed garden of the biblical Song of Solomon into the gardens of Adonis in The Faerie Queene, Book III. The pagan gods survived unharmed throughout the Middle Ages if wearing Christian costumes, because Christians were taught that pagan worthies could be read as figures of Christian rulers. The labours of Hercules, for instance, stood for the wanderings and trials of all Christian men; the Hellenic theme of heroic warfare took a Christianized form, available to allegory, when in the 4th century the poet and hymn writer Prudentius internalized war as the inner struggle of Christian man, suspended between virtue and vice. For complete triumph in explaining the significance of the world, Christianity needed one further element: a world-historical theory large enough to contain all other theories of meaning. This it found in the belief that God was the author of the world. His creation wrote the world. The world, read as a text, provided a platform for transforming the piecemeal, post-Classical syncretism into some semblance of order. Firmly established in the West, Christianity, for all its strains of discord, slowly achieved a measure of coherence. St. Thomas Aquinas could write its Summa. Theocentric, authoritarian, spiritualist, and word-oriented, the medieval model of allegory lent itself to the creation of the most wonderful of all allegorical poems, Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed shortly before his death in 1321.

Before this could happen, however, the Christian worldview was subjected to an important pressure during the 12th century. It may be called the pressure to externalize. Alain de Lille, Bernard of Sylvestris, John of Salisbury, and other forerunners of the movement known as European humanism “discovered” nature. Delighting in the wonders of God’s cosmic text, they brought theological speculation down to earth. Romances of love and chivalry placed heroes and heroines against the freshness of spring. Everywhere nature shone, sparkling with the beauty of earthly life. The externalization and naturalizing of Christian belief flowers most obviously in The Romance of the Rose, begun in the 13th century by Guillaume de Lorris and completed, in vastly complicated form, by Jean de Meun. The Romance personifies the experiences of courtly love, recounting the pursuit of an ideal lady by an ideal knight, set in an enclosed garden and castle, which permits Guillaume to dwell on the beauty of nature. With Jean de Meun the interest in nature is made explicit, and the poem ends in a series of lengthy digressive discourses, several of them spoken by Dame Nature herself. In medieval English poetry this same love of spring and seasonal pleasures is apparent everywhere—certainly in the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, who, besides creating several allegories of his own, translated The Romance of the Rose into English.

Dante’s Divine Comedy has physical immediacy and contains an immense amount of historical detail. He anchors his poem in a real world, accepting Christian typology as historical fact and adopting an ordered system of cosmology (based on the number three, proceeding from the Trinity). Dante’s passion for numerology does not, however, block a closeness to nature that had perhaps not been equalled in poetry since Homer. He enfolds Classical thought into his epic by making Virgil one of its main protagonists—again to prefigure Christian heroism. Perhaps only William Langland, the author of The Vision of Piers Plowman, could be said to rival Dante’s cosmic range. Piers Plowman is a simpler apocalyptic vision than the Comedy, but it has an existential immediacy, arising from its concern for the poor, which gives it great natural power.