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On this Jewish substratum was imposed Greek thought; they adopted the Alexandrian allegorizing interpretation of the Scriptures, and Philo includes them in that group of persons who found it desirable to withdraw from the common life of men in order to cultivate philosophical and ethical thought. Six days they lived each by himself; on the seventh day they came together for a religious service.
In such allegorizing way, then, the early priests set forth their doctrines respecting God, nature, and humanity, a refined monotheism and theological philosophy, and to this purpose the earliest myths were turned. But another class of myths, more popular and more captivating, grew up under the hands of the poets myths purely epical, and descriptive of real or supposed past events.
During the long period when the European peoples were assimilating the ideas of Christianity the study of myths remained in abeyance. After the classical revival there was a return to the allegorizing method, the fondness for which has not yet completely died out.
Yet on a recent rereading of James's biography, it seemed to me not so unsympathetic as I had remembered it; but, in effect, cordially appreciative. He touches, however, on this same point, of the effect on Hawthorne's genius of his allegorizing habit. "Hawthorne," says Mr. James, "was not in the least a realist he was not, to my mind, enough of one."
Most of these stories have lived on the lips of the common people; and illiterate persons are not in the habit of allegorizing in the style of mediaeval monks or rabbinical commentators.
Mivart claims the shelter of his authority. In the tenth and eleventh chapters of the first book of this treatise, Suarez inquires in what sense the word "day," as employed in the first chapter of Genesis, is to be taken. He discusses the views of Philo and of Augustin on this question, and rejects them. He suggests that the approval of their allegorizing interpretations by St.
But the same rule is not applicable to the bounding of fields, and to the obedience of faith, which ought to be ready to "forget her own people and her father's house." But if they are so fond of allegorizing, why do they not explain the apostles, rather than any others, to be those fathers, whose appointed landmarks it is so unlawful to remove?
The yoke of the law of Moses, sanctifying the life, had been broken; the fiat of popes and the decrees of synods were the saving beliefs which ensured the Kingdom of Heaven! Was it to this that the allegorizing of the law, the search for the spirit beneath the letter, the reinterpretation of the holy law of Moses in the light of philosophical reason, had brought Judaism?
The allegorizing method, it should be observed, though it appears with greater or less influence, is not employed with any exclusiveness, but takes its place with other resources of his art. In "The Great Carbuncle," however, and in "The Man of Adamant," the allegory is predominant and absorbs the tale.
These were concessions to a ruling mode, concessions the more readily made, owing to their being in complete harmony with the strong subtilizing and allegorizing tendencies of Dante's own mind. Still, so far as he adopts the modes of his predecessors in this first book of his, Dante surpasses them all in their own way.
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