There are many who speak about literalism, particularly when they talk about the Scriptures, but see it where it doesn’t exist. The trees of modern theories and habits hide the forest of ancient understanding and the use of texts. It’s necessary to back away from details and look at a larger context to see what we are actually seeing. In cultural terms, it is possible to say that no one was a “literalist,” that is, as we mean the term today, until our modern period.

In the early Church, the use of what they called “allegory” was quite popular. St. Paul in fact uses the word and without apology. It was a common literary understanding that was shared by Christian, Jew and pagan. It wasn’t just a Christian thing; it was a technique of reading a text used by Christians, Jews, and pagans. Greek civilization had its own sacred texts. For instance, the writings of Homer were particularly held in great regard. However, they were generally ignored as history, or questioned somewhat as history, and if you’ve ever read them, you might have such questions yourself. Educated Greeks would have been embarrassed by a literal treatment of the stories involving the gods. The god misbehaved—they would have blushed. They assumed that the stories, though, had a meaning. And so they thought that wisdom was required to see or understand that meaning, and that meaning was accessed by using allegory as a tool for extracting it.

St. Paul’s use of allegory, which is in Galatians 4:22-25, would have come as no surprise to his readers. It holds a very prominent place in the letter to the Hebrews as well. Some of the most popular works within the early Church were highly allegorical. The epistle of Barnabas, which is perhaps the best example, was widely read. It was not included in the writings of the New Testament, but not because of its allegory. Apocalyptic literature, such as Revelation, depends completely on allegorical assumptions.

It’s worth thinking for a moment about what they meant by the term “allegory.” Essentially, the word in Greek has the meaning of another word; that is, we would say, “in other words,” but whether it takes the form of typology, symbolism, or other kinds of manners of speech, the Fathers used the term “allegory” to contain all such forms of speech. Today when we say “allegory,” we mean a particular kind of figure of speech, but they used it to contain all of these examples of meaning that were somehow deeper than or other than the other word, other than what was precisely said in the text.

Allegory—that whole method of reading—assumes that there is “another word” under or within the word that one is seeing or hearing. A prominent example would be St. Paul’s treatment of Adam and Christ. Paul says that Christ is a Second Adam. This also means that Christ is somehow present within the First Adam. In that manner, the Fathers will read of God taking Eve from the side of Adam as he slept and see the Church being birthed from the side of Christ as he “slept” on the Cross in death. Christ is the “other word” within the word “Adam.” He’s the Second Adam inside the First Adam. When you read about the First Adam in the text, you have to remember, as a Christian, the hidden Adam, the other-word Adam, the allegory Adam, within it. The figure of Melchizedek in the Old Testament gets treated in a similar manner in Hebrews 7.

This presence of “another word” beneath or within a text extends to the world itself in our Orthodox Christian understanding. The sacramental understanding of the world is, at its heart, an allegorical treatment of reality, reality itself. There is something beneath and within everything that we see. There is a deeper mystery at work in the things that we see. One good example is our entire example is our belief in providence, that God is working in all things for our good. That is frequently “another word.” We can’t simply look at what literally happens and immediately see this other word, this other working, the mystery of the providence of God.

You think of the example of the character of Joseph, the patriarch in the Old Testament. His brothers sell him as a slave to the Egyptians, which is always a wrong thing to do, selling your brother as a slave, but when they are later reunited and Joseph has gone through all of his difficulties and trials and sufferings in Egypt only to wind up as the right-hand man of pharaoh and is saving the world through his famine-relief plans, he is able to save his whole extended family—his brothers, his father, all of their families. He says to his brothers, “You meant it to me for evil,” if you will—that’s the literal reading: “You meant it to me for evil,” he said, “but the Lord meant it to me for good.” That is the “other word,” the hidden word. Joseph is able to hear the hidden word, and because of that can keep faith.

If Joseph had only heard the plain word, “You meant it to me for evil,” he simply would have sat in jail and stewed with anger and even if he had saved them, he would have eventually had them all killed because they had it coming to them. That’s where sometimes sticking to the literal can get you. We as Christians, as Orthodox Christians, should be taught to see the other word, the inner meaning, that which is hidden. St. Paul says that he has made known the mystery that was hidden through the ages. If it had been able to be known simply by reading the literal word or the words on the literal level, then anyone would have known it. Instead, Paul says he’s making known the mystery. Even Jesus intentionally speaks in parables so that the true meaning is beneath the word, not on the literal level of the word.

There are levels of realism within this allegorical treatment of the world. For instance, in the case of the Eucharist, the “other word” is utterly real. That which is made present, which can be known and perceived by faith, is the very truth of the thing itself. “This is my body,” we say in the Eucharist. In the case of an icon, we say that what is pictured is hypostatically present—sorry for the technical term, but there it is: hypostatically present, a somewhat weaker treatment than the language we use with sacraments. Or, for example, that all trees somehow participate in the wood of the Cross is yet a different thing, yet it’s true. If you will, hidden within every tree, in some sense, is the “other word,” that is, the Cross.

And a Christian should see this! We should see it there. We should also see when we encounter other human beings. We oftentimes run into people and they’re being very difficult, and if we stay on the surface of things, we get caught up and trapped in their difficulty, when in fact we’re called to see the hidden man of the heart and so do for them what they might not expect, which is to love them.

Well, this allegorical treatment of texts—and of reality itself—suggests that the world we encounter is larger and deeper than it might appear at first. Think of a pot on a stove. On its surface—its literal level—we can see a pot. We can describe its color, its shape, even consider what material was used in its construction, but we do not reach out and pick up a pot by its sides rather than its handle. The heat that might be present does not always appear. So we approach the pot with respect. In the same manner, we should approach the world as sacrament, mindful of the “other word” that dwells in each and every thing.

And this brings us back to the text and to literalism. Modern literalism does not accept allegory in any meaning other than a mental trick. The connection between Christ and Adam, between Christ and Melchizedek, between Bread and Body are therefore thought to be purely mental. They exist only in the mind. To examples of allegory, we are likely to respond, “Yes, but what is it really?”

“Literal” is, in our modern world, the only reality. It is in this sense that it is possible to say that no one was a literalist until the modern period. In our modern period, debates set about, particularly starting in the 17-, 1800s, about the historical reliability of the biblical text. Some began, particularly in Germany, raising questions about the historical nature of certain events. Early scientific explorations were beginning to raise questions about certain things, and so debates began. And with that, there arose a reaction in which the Scriptures become, if you will, literal—to be read in literal historical ways, and any questioning of that was seen as an assault on their authority. And what was lost in this was this ancient approach that saw the Scripture in a far more sacramental manner, not arguing on just the surface of things, but on their deeper meanings.

The Orthodox use of Scripture does this all the time. That is, it works with these deeper meanings. For instance, we’ll read the book of Jonah, almost in its entirety, on Holy Saturday, not because we’re trying to defend a story about a large fish and a prophet on a boat. We read it on Holy Saturday because on that day Christ is in the tomb; Christ has descended into Hades, and in the middle of the book of Jonah, when Jonah is in the belly of the whale, he offers this great poetic prayer in which, instead of talking about whale bellies, Jonah starts a prayer about being in Hades and calling out and God delivering him. It’s because the story of the book, allegorically, in this ancient sense, in its “other word,” is an image and figure of Christ descending into Hades and defeating death by death. Christ himself refers to Jonah as a prophetic book that looks forward to his death and resurrection.

That use of the text that the Church does makes no sense if allegory is not true, and in fact it’s the primary use of the book of Jonah. So in that sense, when—and Christians out there do this: they’ll get caught up in arguing over: Was that a historical event? Was there a big fish? We don’t even know what century Jonah lived in; the book doesn’t tell us. And there’s some who say the book is really more like a rabbinical fable than being an historical book. After a fashion, it doesn’t matter, because that’s not how we use the text. We don’t use the text to tell us something about a particular historical figure in a particular historical situation; we read it for it to tell us about Christ. And it is authoritative—but it is not always authoritative in the way modern people want things to be authoritative.

The plain sense is what was talked about in the ancient world, if they used the word “literal.” What they meant was: What does the text actually say? If the text is talking about a tree, the ancients would say a literal reading is to say it’s about a tree, that it means tree, that when it says “tree” it doesn’t mean cross, or when it [says] “tree” it doesn’t mean the virtues—it means tree. And that literal reading was seen to have a certain value, but that value was only set beside this value of the deeper meaning. It wasn’t considered the best reading, it wasn’t considered the only reading: it was considered one of the readings, and that’s important to understand when we approach the Scriptures.

Years ago, when I was first received into Orthodoxy, my late Archbishop (Dmitri of Dallas, of blessed memory), insisted that in beginning our mission, he told me that I was to wear my cassock and be addressed as “Father.” Now mind you, I had been an Episcopal priest up until a week before I was received into the Orthodox Church, but I wasn’t any more. I had renounced that, and it was going to be another 13 months before I was ordained to the Orthodox priesthood. Nonetheless, Archbishop Dmitri, in that unusual situation where I was starting a new mission and heading it up as a lay pastor, I was blessed by the bishop to lead reader’s services and to preach and to do pastoral care. But, he insisted that I should wear the cassock and be addressed the title of the “Father.” And he said to me, “Priests are born; ordination simply reveals them.”

It was a staggering revelation. I never heard anybody say something that way. I would not use that as a technical way of talking about the working of the sacrament of ordination, but I thought it was insightful of the archbishop as a way of saying, “Literally, Stephen, you are in between. You have renounced your Anglican orders and you’ve not been ordained in Orthodoxy, and yet, there’s something about you, something beneath the surface, and so we’re going to put a cassock on it and call you ‘Father’ and wait till we get it completed, finished, and officially stamped in 13 months when we reveal it.”

When we approach the Fathers, and the Scriptures themselves, we must remember that these are thorough-going sacramentalists and allegorists. The level and amount of allegorical or figurative treatment will vary from time to time and person to person among the ancients. But even the fiercest example of the Antiochian School, so called, which was a school of thought in the ancient world, was often contrasted with the famously allegorical practices of Alexandria—but even the fiercest example of those were still allegorists. The world they inhabit is an allegorical, sacramental world.

And to this number belong all of the writers of the New Testament as well as Christ himself. Indeed, Christ is the chief allegorist, having given us a world whose reality is always more than meets the eye. He puts himself forward as the “other word,” that is, within every word of the Old Testament, he says of them in John 5, “these,” that is, the Old Testament, “these are they that testify of me.” That is, Jesus is the Other Word reflected and made present in every created thing. He is the meaning and the word beneath every word of the Old Testament, and if you read the Old Testament and you’re not seeing Christ, then you haven’t dug deep enough. He has given us creation that we might know him, but to know him, we have to go beneath, into the depths, into the mystery, hidden from all the ages, now made known to us in his Church. Glory to God!