"But I have often declared that I greatly abhor allegories and condemn the fondness for them. For the examples and the footsteps of the fathers frighten me. By means of their allegories they obscure doctrine and the edification of love, patience, and hope in God when by those speculations of their allegories they divert us from the doctrine and genuine meaning of the words. Jerome and Origen are especially devoted to this. Indeed, Augustine, too, would have been brought to do so had he not been withdrawn from it by his controversies and disputes with the heretics. But because I admired these men as very great theologians, I followed the same course at the outset. When I read the Bible, I did not follow the literal sense; but according to their example, I turned everything into allegories.
Accordingly, I urge students of theology to shun this kind of interpretation in the Holy Scriptures. For allegory is pernicious when it does not agree with the history, but especially when it takes the place of the history, from which the church is more correctly instructed about the wonderful administration of God in all stations of life, in the management of a household, in the state, and in the church. Inasmuch as such interpreters overlook these things in the histories, they necessarily transform everything into allegories and a different meaning. Thus in this example, because they do not see the counsels of God and His governance, which is hidden under this ordinary outward appearance of household management and marriage, they attach to it a foreign meaning concerning the contemplative and active life"
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