Allegorical interpretation of Scripture

Allegorical interpretation of Scripture treats biblical language as a threshold: its surface may recount events or present images, while its deeper meaning concerns spiritual life and the soul’s relation to God. In the account developed around Origen, interpretation is not a choice between accepting every passage literally and dismissing it as meaningless. Even a passage that did not happen as described can, in his approach, communicate spiritual truth. Hildegard of Bingen offers a related but visually distinctive example: she sets out a vision and then explains how its images signify theological and moral realities.

Origen’s layered reading of Scripture

Origen was foremost a Scripture scholar whose commentaries proceeded verse by verse, seeking moral and spiritual meaning rather than treating the text as a record to be read only literally. He argued that some passages resist a straightforward historical reading. The creation account, for example, places evening and morning before the sun and moon have been created; the account of God walking in the garden presents an image that Origen understood as pointing toward mysteries; and the devil’s showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world from a mountaintop did not require him to accept the scene as a literal event. For Origen, such difficulties invited interpretation: beneath the apparent surface lay a deeper significance.

His method gives Scripture a structure analogous to the human person. The common, historical understanding is its body; a broader spiritual understanding is its soul; and the spiritually advanced reader who finds what Paul called the “secret and hidden wisdom of God” reaches its spirit. This is more than a list of alternative meanings. It joins the reader’s progress to the text’s depth: understanding changes as the reader advances spiritually. Origen also read Israel’s history as a pattern of the fall and rise of souls. The movement toward God thus implies a prior descent, an association the book relates to Neoplatonism.

Scripture as a path of spiritual ascent

Origen connected the books attributed to Solomon with three stages of spiritual life. Proverbs teaches moral and virtuous conduct, corresponding to the purgative way, in which a person seeks to remove what obstructs ascent to God. Ecclesiastes concerns the nature of things and their proper use, corresponding to the illuminative way, in which knowledge of God and spiritual truth grows. The Song of Songs belongs to the unitive way: its language awakens desire and love for God. Allegorical reading consequently makes the arrangement of biblical books into a map of spiritual formation, not merely a set of separate texts.

The same account connects this ascent with the distinction between the inner and outer person. Origen associated the human being made in God’s image in Genesis with the inner person, and the human being formed from dust in Genesis with the outer person. The inner nature desires to rise toward God; the bodily, outer nature holds it back. He related this tension to Paul’s descriptions of inward renewal and conflict between the law of God and another law at work in the body. The allegorical method makes these scriptural passages speak to a single spiritual condition: the struggle between a desire for God and the forces that impede it.

The Song of Songs: from the Church to the soul

Origen called his commentary on The Song of Songs a drama of mystical meaning. Its opening request for a lover’s kiss retains the poem’s immediate imagery of desire and intimacy, but Origen interprets the longing as that of the Church for union with Christ. The law and the prophets have disclosed the Son of God and prepared the Church as a bride, revealing his Spirit, works, power, gentleness, and charm. Yet the Church has encountered his ministers without seeing him directly. Prophets and angels cannot satisfy her desire: she longs for Christ himself, for his words and teaching.

Origen then shifts from the Church to the individual soul. The soul seeks union with the Word of God made flesh and fellowship with him, not merely knowledge received from teachers. That distinction shapes his reading of the kiss. When the soul works through what is obscure and untangles what is difficult to understand, it has, in Origen’s interpretation, received Christ’s kiss: an encounter with the Word through understanding. The poem’s desire therefore becomes both a corporate longing for Christ and an individual practice of seeking spiritual insight. When understanding fails, the reader may turn the poem’s plea into prayer, asking Christ to disclose what remains hidden.

Vision, image, and interpretation in Hildegard

Hildegard of Bingen also makes the passage from image to spiritual meaning explicit, though her examples begin in visionary scenes rather than a poem’s erotic language. In the opening vision of Scivias, she sees an iron-colored mountain, a many-eyed image at its foot, a radiant child, and human heads appearing in windows. A voice calls her to speak about the origin of salvation and unlock mysteries for others. Hildegard then interprets the mountain as the strength and stability of God’s kingdom, the many-eyed image as people living in fear of the Lord, and the child as an image of poverty of spirit, simplicity, and sobriety in following Christ. The heads in the windows signify that human acts cannot be hidden from God, while also distinguishing those who perform good works.

A second vision sets bright lamps against a deep pit emitting fiery smoke. Hildegard identifies the pit with hell and interprets its breadth and depth through vice and loss; the scene warns that people who turn away from God may be led into torment through deception. In this context she also turns to instruction about marriage, separation, prohibited unions, and chastity. The movement shows how her vision-based interpretation can open into moral teaching: the images do not remain an enigmatic spectacle but become a framework for admonition about conduct.

Meaning and limits of the method

These examples present allegorical interpretation as a disciplined search for spiritual meaning, not as permission to assign any meaning to any passage. Origen’s readings are anchored in features of the biblical text: its apparent difficulties, its images of desire, and its accounts of human inwardness. His layered model connects those features to moral formation and ascent toward God. Hildegard’s practice similarly makes the interpretive movement visible by setting a described image beside an explanation of what it signifies. In both cases, reading crosses from what is seen or narrated to what it teaches about spiritual life.

The approaches are not identical. Origen develops a theory of scriptural levels and uses The Song of Songs to trace desire from the Church to the individual soul; Hildegard interprets particular visions through images of divine order, human action, salvation, and moral responsibility. Together, they show how allegorical interpretation can make Scripture and vision address both contemplation and conduct. Its central claim is that the surface is not the end of reading: what appears in words or images can disclose a deeper relation between the human soul and God.