Religio-web, Origen's metaphors

I'm responding to a few blogs at one go -- taking Dave's post about personification in Lamentations and Origen, and Imitaz 's metaphor about religion as a chain...

I like the idea that religion throughout time is like a chain, where one link depends on all previous links, but I'd like to complicate it a little. Each individual religion doesn't just stand alone once it emerges, adding links to its chain in isolation. Religions are influenced in a number of ways:

• By coming into contact with other religions, and 'taking' things, either by converting individuals who find it hard to put earlier ideas out of their worldview, (For example, turning Hindu deities into Buddhist bodhisattvas) or by filling in a theological gap with someone else's plausible answer


• By coming into contact with past religions, and incorporating them (for example ancient Greek philosophy influencing Christian theology)


• By changes in society, environment, and technology changing a group's priorities (Modern physicians don't use Leviticus to diagnose diseases)

(This would make Imitaz's 'chain' something more like a "web", but anyway.

Assuming most people throughout time saw their own religion (and others) as not being influenced in these ways, but instead being like a chain, the 'aftereffects' of these changes would have been hard to deal with. Here is where I come to Origen. Because he was not looking at (and didn't have the information about) the changes that went on to Judaism and Christianity, throughout their histories, since Lamentations was written, he had to go at the text with the assumptions he was already equipped with: that Scripture was divinely inspired and full of interpretable meaning, and that the Gospels/Christ story can be used to retroactively inform and explain the Old Testament/Torah. ("Someone might investigate why, since the title of the book, "Lamentations" is in the plural, it says "this lamentation" in the singular in the prologue." p 75 The simplest answer seems to be "typo" -- Origin is obviously looking very hard for deeper meaning.)

Because the historical sack of Jerusalem was not important to Origen, (and a historical interpretation alone would not square with the idea of Scripture as a divinely-inspired guidebook for the Christian) he had to make something useful out of what was there.

But that much we talked about in class.

Right at the beginning of the commentary, (p 74-75, section III) Origen states that "The Hebrews say that the books of the Old Testament have the same number as the letters of the alphabet because they are an introduction to all knowledge of God, just as the letters of the alphabet are the introduction to all wisdom for those who learn." This itself could be a metaphor, -- maybe the books just happened to have the same number, or no one wrote more because 22 seemed like an 'even' number, maybe later the correspondence was given mystical meaning... Origen attempts to add on to this, saying a division by four is meaningful, (according to things HE found meaningful) because of the four elements or four humors.

Basically, I don't feel like metaphorical reinterpretations ONLY happened in 'official' and formal documents like Origen's exegesis, but also happened/happens every day as people try to square texts with their assumptions about those texts.