THE PROBLEM OF ALEGORY
The nature of allegory continues to be a source of debate among parable scholars today (as it was among ancient Greek and Latin authors), in part because allegory in itself, even apart from its relation to the category of parable, is a vast topic resistant to neat definitions.1 The understanding of the nature and value of allegory has changed over the centuries, and one would be hard pressed to find a definition or description of allegory that would satisfy every critic today.2 Here I will simply sketch in broad strokes the understanding that governs my treatment of allegory, while avoiding the detailed technical debates in which academics engage over allegory’s precise definition and function. In a wide sense, allegory is a particular way of thinking, speaking, writing, and creating art, a way that involves extensive and (when it is well done) coherent use of symbols and/or metaphors to communicate a message via analogy. One reason why I start with this general description of allegory is that allegory is not limited to literature; paintings, sculpture, musical compositions (e.g., Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde), and other works of art can also be allegorical.3 When the term is applied to literature, allegory is not to be reduced to one particular literary genre; hence it is not to be set alongside or opposed to the literary genre of parable. Rather, allegory is a rhetorical mode or technique of speaking and writing that can be found in many different literary genres (e.g., narrative poetry, lyric poetry, parables, artful and polemical retellings of history, and whole novels). Popularly, allegory is often thought of as a symbolic story in which every significant actor, action, name, object, or place in one sphere of reality corresponds to another actor, action, name, object, or place in another sphere of reality. Understood in this limited sense, allegory is not just one extended metaphor but a whole string of metaphors. The individual metaphors may be skillfully tied together to form a coherent whole, or they may be loosely and artificially strung together, with the meaning that the author wishes to inculcate dictating the awkward or somewhat unnatural relations and interactions among the metaphors. While highly artificial and heavy-handed allegories can frequently be found in literature (e.g., John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress), such specimens hardly reflect the full range of allegory, which has a remarkably elastic and flexible nature.4 One way of thinking of a well-executed allegory is to imagine a narrative that is not simply a string of related metaphors but more importantly one grand metaphor extending throughout and suffusing the entire narrative. In such a case, the extent to which individual elements in the narrative realm refer point by point to elements in the corresponding realm of reality can vary greatly from one allegorical narrative to another.5
To illustrate this understanding of allegory, while avoiding too narrow a conception of allegory that might result from fixating solely on the material in the Synoptic Gospels or even on religion in general, let us first examine a modern secular example of an allegorical narrative. Quite different from The Pilgrim’s Progress is George Orwell’s Animal Farm (written in 1943–44 and published in 1945), which can be viewed as one grand allegory from start to finish, a satirical novel symbolizing and illuminating the betrayal of the ideals behind the Russian Revolution by Stalin’s institution of a totalitarian system in the Soviet Union. Animal Farm is especially instructive in that, technically speaking, its literary genre is that of an animal fable.6 This underscores the point that allegory is something other than a single literary genre or a rhetorical technique confined to a single genre. Within Orwell’s overarching allegory there are indeed many individual correspondences: the pig Old Major is Marx and/or Lenin; Napoleon, the pig who seizes tyrannical power over the farm, is Stalin; Snowball, the more vivacious and eloquent pig leader, is Trotsky; the Raven is the Russian Orthodox Church, and so forth. But the allegory that is the whole novel is much more than a series of clever equations between discrete metaphors and discrete realities. The master allegory is more than the sum of its parts. All this results in a complex hermeneutical piece of literary art, and one appreciates how the allegory can work on different levels for different readers of different time periods.
Animal Farm is rightly considered an allegory because of (a) the express intention of the original author, (b) an intention that is skillfully embodied in the literary structure and content of the text, and (c) an intention that is clearly communicated to the original audience that the author had in mind.7 As is often the case in allegory, obfuscation and mystification were not the author’s goal. In fact, the all-too-clear message of Orwell’s allegory made it difficult for him to find a publisher in England just as World War II was ending.8 Clearly, then, to recognize and interpret Animal Farm as an allegory satirizing Stalin’s Soviet Union is not to engage in some kind of artificial or contrived allegorical exegesis; the allegorical interpretation intended by the original author and immediately understood by the original audience is the correct and natural (indeed, one might even say the literal) meaning. However, like every good allegory and every great work of art, the value of Animal Farm is not limited to the intention of the original author, the originating situation, and the originally targeted audience. Because of its internal dynamism and the elasticity of its metaphorical world, well-executed allegory can transcend its original matrix and speak to new audiences in quite different circumstances. For example, Animal Farm is still read tōday by 21st-century Americans who fear that certain developments in their own country could lead to either fascist or socialist totalitarianism (notice how partisans of both right and left can read the master allegory for their own purposes). The grand allegory still works, whether or not present-day readers understand all the individual “equations” intended by Orwell. (How may young American readers know or care that the pig Squealer represents Molotov?) Animal Farm will continue to be read and valued as long as there are political movements or systems whose ideals can be betrayed by mendacious, brutal, and self-serving leaders at the top as well as by willfully ignorant, feckless, and fearful followers down below. Such latter-day readers of the novel are hardly doing violence to the allegory at the heart of Animal Farm, even though the allegorical correspondences they would see would not necessarily be the original ones intended by the author or understood by the original audience. Such new allegorical interpretations evoked by problems in the 21st century cannot be judged as artificial or contrived; they stand in living, organic continuity with the original allegorical thrust of the text. In contrast, for both liberal and evangelical Protestants in 21st-century America to use Animal Farm as an allegorical polemic against the alleged theological errors of their ecclesiastical adversaries might produce some clever displays of manipulative and imaginative interpretation of the text; but anyone standing outside the theological boxing ring would readily recognize such interpretation as contrived eisegesis, a case of allegorizing interpretation at its maladroit worst. One could almost hear the atheist Orwell groaning—though, if we may judge from various comments he made elsewhere, he probably would not object to applying the allegory to the Pope, the Jesuits, and the Catholic Church. In brief, allegory properly performed and grasped is a work of art far removed from the Procrustean bed of tit-for-tat corresponding metaphors, the popular understanding of allegory.
Applying these insights to the much narrower question of the Synoptic parables and the place of allegory in them, we can in one respect give Adolf Jülicher his due. He was correct in rejecting the extremely elaborate and artificial allegorizing exegesis employed by many (though not all) patristic and medieval theologians—a type of exegesis still found in popular works and excruciating homilies. The famous exemplar of such ingenious if contrived interpretation is St. Augustine’s reading of Luke 10:30–37, the parable of the Good Samaritan (Quaestiones evangeliorum, 2.19).9 Augustine finds in the parable a summary of the whole of salvation history from the fall of Adam to salvation by Christ and eternal life, with, for example, Jericho symbolizing the changeable moon and therefore signifying our human mortality. Such allegorizing, however entertaining or amusing, is utterly foreign to the intention of the original author addressing his original audience (be that Jesus teaching his disciples or Luke teaching his church). The problem is that, in an extreme modern reaction to extreme patristic distortions, Jülicher declared that the historical Jesus never used allegory in his parables; indeed, allegory was essentially opposed to the simple parables of Jesus with their one point of comparison (the tertium comparationis). Alas, Jülicher’s neat dichotomy runs up against both the dynamic, elastic nature of allegory that we have examined and the complex inventory of Jesus’ variegated parables. The fact of the matter is that the parables ascribed to Jesus, as they stand in the Synoptics, evince a complicated and variable relation to allegory. Let us take a couple of different examples to examine this fluctuating relation between parable and allegory in Jesus’ parables.
(1) A large majority of exegetes judge the allegorical interpretation of the parable of the Sower (Mark 4:14–20 vis-à-vis 4:3–8) to be a secondary addition of the early Christian tradition, a creation either of Mark or of some pre-Marcan author.10 Both the vocabulary of the allegorical interpretation and some of the problems addressed therein seem to reflect the situation of early Christian preaching rather than that of the historical Jesus. Yet, while secondary in the chronological and ideological sense, Mark’s allegorical interpretation is not as foreign and artificially connected to the parable of the Sower as is Augustine’s salvation-historical interpretation to the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the case of Mark, it is true that his allegorical interpretation of the fourfold fate of the seed goes beyond the original thrust of the parable by focusing on the subjective dispositions of the various hearers of the word as they respond to diverse external pressures. Yet the very presence in the original parable of the four different soils that determine the four different fates of the seed, in addition to the traditional meaning of symbols like rocks, weeds, thorns, and abundant harvests in stories involving agriculture, creates a certain metaphorical dynamism in the basic structure and thrust of the parable that in turn could easily call forth the type of allegorical interpretation supplied by Mark. Admittedly, Mark’s allegorical interpretation is a later development, neither intrinsic nor necessary to the original text; but it is not without some organic connection to the text that helped generate it.
(2) The case of Matthew’s parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (Matt 13:24–30, to be treated at length in Chapter 38) is more complicated. Even apart from Matthew’s allegorical interpretation (13:37–43), in the parable proper the series of stock figures (the master of the estate, his slaves, sowing and harvesting, good and bad plants, destruction by fire as a final event as opposed to the ingathering of the harvest) constitutes a string of metaphors that were well known in Jewish prophecy and apocalyptic. Thus, the basic allegorical thrust of the parable proper is already intimated, even though a precise catalogue identifying the meaning of each metaphor has not yet been supplied to the audience. Indeed, one is prompted to ask: is Matthew’s allegorical interpretation of the parable really secondary, a later allegorization tacked on to a text that suggested and invited but did not specify any given allegorical interpretation? Many exegetes would answer yes. But it is also possible that both parable and allegorical interpretation are the work of Matthew, fashioning the two at the same time. That the allegorical interpretation shifts the emphasis of the parable somewhat would not in itself be an argument against such a possibility, since such shifts are seen in some OT and rabbinic allegories. If it be the case that Matthew created both parable and allegorical interpretation at the same time as part of one coherent composition, then not only would the parable be a full-fledged allegory but also the allegorical interpretation would be in no sense artificial, secondary, or distorting. In fact, we would be close to Orwell’s Animal Farm: the full-fledged allegory would be embedded in the narrative itself and would be the original intent of the author. The difference, of course, is that Orwell neither supplied nor desired a separate catalogue of equivalences.
(3) Still more intriguing is Mark’s parable of the Evil Tenants of the Vineyard (Mark 12:1–11, likewise treated in Chapter 38). Here, unlike our two previous examples, there is no separate allegorical explanation or catalogue of equivalences (in this sense, we are brought even closer to Orwell’s Animal Farm). If there is any allegory present in Mark 12:1–11, it must be embodied in and communicated by the parable itself. As a matter of fact, anyone knowledgeable of the Jewish Scriptures in general and of Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard (Isa 5:1–7) in particular—and this would include knowledgeable Jews listening to Jesus telling the parable ca. a.d. 30—would easily recognize the vineyard as Israel, the owner of the vineyard as God, the servants sent by the owner as the prophets, and those who reject and kill the servants as the evil leaders of Israel (or, more specifically, of Jerusalem). In addition, early Christian hearers of the Marcan form of the parable would immediately recognize the only son as Jesus, his violent death as his crucifixion, the punishment of the tenants as the destruction of Jerusalem, and the citation of LXX Psalm 117:22–23 as the announcement of Jesus’ vindication by way of his resurrection. One would have to be totally ignorant of both Jewish and early Jewish-Christian traditions not to grasp most if not all of the allegory inherent in and throughout the parable. Far from some adventitious contrivance, this allegory lies at the very core of the parable and is inextricably bound up with it. In the Evil Tenants of the Vineyard, so much is the parable allegory and the allegory parable that a separate allegorical interpretation à la Mark 4:14–20 would be both superfluous and tiresome. And yet this inextricable union does not mean that the allegory loses its dynamism and flexibility. Precisely because of those qualities, the allegory remains open to further interpretation and adaptation, as is witnessed in the versions of Matthew, Luke, and Thomas. In sum, an important conclusion to be drawn from this brief examination of allegory and parable is that one must come to each Synoptic parable with an open mind rather than a rigid grid. The various possible relationships between parable and allegory must be worked out and evaluated in the exegesis of the individual case.11
1. The reader will remember that in Chapter 37, the question of allegory arose in the context of treating Ezekiel’s use of allegorical parables. So as not to disturb the flow of the main argument, the treatment of the problem of allegory was postponed to this Excursus.
2. On this, see the historically ordered essays in Jon Whitman (ed.), Interpretation and Allegory. Antiquity to the Modern Period (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 101; Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 2000); Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck, The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University, 2010).
3. On this point, see the various essays in Marlies Kronegger and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (eds.), Allegory Old and New in Literature, the Fine Arts, Music and Theatre, and Its Continuity in Culture (Analecta Husserliana 42; Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic, 1994).
4. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Norton Critical Edition; ed. Cynthia Wall; New York/London: Norton, 2009; originally published in 1678). For considerations of Bunyan’s use of allegory, see the selected observations by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (pp. 379–80) and J. Paul Hunter (pp. 407–11) in the Norton Critical Edition; see also James F. Forrest, “Allegory as Sacred Sport: Manipulation of the Reader in Spenser and Bunyan,” Bunyan in Our Time (ed. Robert G. Collmer; Kent, OH/London, UK: Kent State University, 1989) 93–112; Barbara A. Johnson, “Falling into Allegory: The ‘Apology’ to The Pilgrim’s Progress and Bunyan’s Scriptural Methodology,” ibid., 113–37; Roger Pooley, “The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Line of Allegory,” The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (ed. Anne Dunan-Page; Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University, 2010) 80–94.
5. For further discussion on these insights, see Madeleine Boucher, The Mysterious Parable (CBQMS 6; Washington, DC: CBA, 1977) 20–22.
6. See Laraine Fergenson, “George Orwell’s Animal Farm: A Twentieth-Century Beast Fable,” George Orwell’s Animal Farm (Modern Critical Interpretations; ed. Harold Bloom; Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999) 109–18.
7. This intention is made clear in his prefaces to the novel; see Animal Farm. A Fairy Story (The Complete Works of George Orwell 8; ed. Peter Davison; London: Secker & Warburg, 1987) 97–114.
8. On this, see Bernard Crick, “The Making of Animal Farm,” George Orwell’s Animal Farm, 29–43.
9. For the Latin text, see Sancti Aurelii Augustini. Quaestiones evangeliorum (C Series Latina 44B; Turnhout [Belgium]: Brepols, 1980) 62–63.
10. See, e.g., Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, 77–79; Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, 14–15; Crossan, In Parables, 41–42; Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus, 189–90; Scott, Hear Then the Parable, 343–62. Snodgrass (Stories with Intent, 164–66) represents the relatively few scholars arguing for origin from Jesus.
11. For further reading on the question of allegory, see Hans-Josef Klauck, Allegorie und Allegorese in synoptischen Gleichnistexten (NTAbh 13; Münster: Aschendorff, 1978; 2d ed. with appendix, 1986) 4–147; Hans Weder, Die Gleichnisse Jesu als Metaphern (FRLANT 120; Göttingen-Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978; 4th ed. 1990) 69–75; Charles E. Carlston, “Parable and Allegory Revisited: An Interpretive Review,” CBQ 43 (1981) 228–42; Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus, 12–14; Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 15–17; David E. Aune, “Allegory,” The Westminster Dictionary of New Testament and Early Christian Literature and Rhetoric (Louisville/London: Westminster/John Knox, 2003) 30–32; Simon Brittan, Poetry, Symbol, and Allegory. Interpreting Metaphorical Language from Plato to the Present (Charlottesville, VA/London, UK: University of Virginia, 2003); the various essays in Part II (“Allegory”) in G. R. Boys-Stones (ed.), Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition (Oxford/New York: Oxford University, 2003) 151–256; Jeremy Tambling, Allegory (The New Critical Idiom; London/New York: Routledge, 2010).