Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/119

 v] MYSTERIES AND SYMBOUSM 101 equally wonderful interpretation of the twenty-first chapter of Genesis.^ Not many decades later, in the Epistle of Barnabas, the goat cast forth with the sins of the people is a type of Christ ; * so is Moses ; so is the brazen serpent which he set up ; * and the numbers, ten and eight and three hundred, of men circumcised by Abraham show symbolically that the patriarch looked forward to the crucified Messiah.* A Greek philoso- pher Christian like Justin might refrain from alle- gorical interpretation in an apology where there was slight reference to the Hebrew Scriptures ; or might employ it pertinently in arguments with a Jew,* even as the great African-Latin Christian advocate, Tertul- lian, used it against the gnostic Marcion.* But the perfecters of the system, as applied to explain the Old Testament and harmonize it with the New, and thus make it prophetic and prefigurative of Christ, are the Alexandrians Clement and Origen. With them it is also used to correct literal interpretation of the New Testament. The Alexandrian Fathers do not stop with this. Every symbol is symbolical of something which it apparently is not; every allegory veils in its stated facts a deeper meaning. So every allegory may sug- gest that the real and spiritual essence and truth of things is not according to their sensible appearance, but lies in their symbolical analogy with the unseen 1 Qftl. iy. 22 ; V. 1. Cf. Heb. yl-x. •lb., 12. «I«10; H-8; and the cross T- 300.
 * Sp. of Barnabas, Chap. 7.
 * See Dialogue with Trypho, 40, 41, 42, 91, 113, 126. 134, 138.
 * £'9; Contra Marcion, III. IG and IH; also in De Baptitmo,