Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/81

73] is very slight chance that the far-fetched and intricate mode of solution employed by the interpreter will be the one which the writer had in mind. In most cases, however, after due allowance has been made for figures of speech and play of poetical imagination, it is an erroneous and absurd assumption to suppose that an author did not mean what his language indicates and no more. Therefore the believer in allegorical interpretation would seem to be accepting something quite like a magical doctrine. Indeed, allegorical interpretation is liable to lead one into a belief that words, besides possessing a mystical significance with which the thought of their writer had endowed them, have in and of themselves great power. It borders upon the occult reveries of the Cabalists and upon that magic power of words which we have seen upheld by Roger Bacon, John Reuchlin and Henry Cornelius Agrippa.

This allegorical interpretation of literature has played a great part in human history. It was rife in the age of the Roman Empire, when Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (approximate date, 30 to 54 ) was perhaps its greatest exponent, as he was also the chief member of the Jewish-Alexandrian school of philosophy.

Philo carried allegorical interpretation to an absurd extreme even if he did not go quite so far as Reuchlin and Agrippa. Not only did he make such assertions as that by Hagar was typified "encyclical education," that Ishmael was her "sophist son," and that Sarah stood for "the ruling virtue," but in general he tried to read into the Old