Abstract

In Origen there is a well-known image of the difficulties one may encounter in reading and seeking to understand Holy Writ. In his comment on the first Psalm, Origen compares the Bible to a wondrous, grandiose building, with an endless number of stairways and rooms. Each room has a door, and in each door there is a key, but it is not necessarily the key that fits that particular door. The keys have been distributed at random throughout the building. Origen had drawn this image from his rabbinical authors, the ones who also taught that every Scriptural word has seventy meanings. Ultimately he saw Scripture as a labyrinth, wherein the interpreter’s task was to wield all the tools of reason and sacred rhetoric to find the right bearings. Of course, in so doing, the interpreter assumed considerable interpretative freedom, and his decoding often led him to find things in the text that a literal interpretation would not readily have supposed. For this reason as well there was no small risk of misunderstanding. This danger was seen as especially relevant when it came to dealing with the Epistles of Saint Paul, to the point where not only the Patristic texts but Saint Peter himself straightforwardly asserted that in those letters “are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction”.