The threefold sense: is allegorical reading discovery or invention?

Origen, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Discovery. Scripture has body, soul and spirit as a person does, and the difficulties in the letter are placed there so that a reader stopped by them will look for the sense that is meant.12345

Sources

  1. In the first words of this excursus Origen has us invoke God the Father 'to the intent that we may utter not the things that the ear of the flesh perceives, but those that are con¬ tained within the Spirit's will' (p. 218). Referring to the occulta et manifesta of Wisd.
    The Song of Songs, Commentary and Homilies, pp. 9–10
  2. For this is what the Lord said, "Woe to you, teachers of the Law, for you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who wanted to enter" (Lk 1152), 4.
    54. Adopting Oulton's conjectural emendation of anthropinon instead of anthropous, p. 182
  3. FROM THE GREEK. 11. The way, then, as it appears to us, in which we ought to deal with the Scriptures, and extract from them their meaning, is the following, which has been ascertained from the Scriptures themselves.
    The Writings of Origen Vol 1
  4. FROM THE LATIN. 12. This point, indeed, is not to be passed by without notice, viz. that there are certain passages of Scripture where this "body," as we termed it, i.e. this inferential historical sense, is not always found, as we shall prove to be the case in the following pages, but where that which we termed "soul" or "spirit" can only be understood.
    The Writings of Origen Vol 1
  5. "Thon shalt write two books, and give one to Clement and one to Grapte. And Grapte shall admonish the widows and orphans, Cleinent shall send to the cities abroad, and thou shalt read to the elders of the Chureh." Grapté, who admonishes the widows and orphans, is the bare Jetter of Scripture; 16 admonishes those readers whose souls are in the stage of childhood, and who eannot 1 Luke xi. 52. 2 Prov. xxit.
    The Philocalia of Origen

Where the argument is made

  • On First Principles IV, on the interpretation of Scripture
  • the Philocalia extracts made by Basil and Gregory Nazianzen
  • the Homilies on Leviticus and on Joshua, where the method is at its most extended

How the argument was received

The engine of the whole exegetical corpus and the thing modern scholarship least accepts.