Allegorizing Away the Anger of God

An Overview of Allegorizing, with God Being Angered as a Case Study

“But in God may be no wrath, as to my sight.” –Julian of Norwich

“Each person according to his capacity understands the Scriptures. One takes the sense from them more superficially, as if from the surface level of a spring. Another draws up more deeply as from a well, and both can be helped since the same thing to one is a spring, but to the other is a well.” –Origen

It is a fact indisputable that the fathers allegorized every scriptural proposition God being angered (in all the different modes of saying this in Hebrew or Greek). For their resolute minds, although holy Scripture frequently and frankly says that God is angered, him being so is not true. Accordingly and even remarkably, the fathers interpret God being angered as almost anything else except him being such. So committed are they to allegorize anger of God, that they identify everything from Satan himself to God’s own love as what the interpretation must be.

The Practice of Allegorizing: Understanding Otherwise

But what exactly is allegorizing?

It is the disciplined practice of understanding otherwise than the letter says–as the word ἀλληγορία itself implies. Spelling this out, when the proposition is that A is B, allegorizing (1) assumes that A indeed is not B (the precondition for this practice–more below), and then (2) understands e.g., that A is C, or that D is B, or that E is F, etc. When something was said, something altogether else was understood.

Putting aside holy Scripture and considering this in everyday context, when someone knows that a certain proposition was ἀλληγορία, an allegory, this means that he knows that the proposition was otherwise than the speaker’s judgment and/or reality itself. The hearer must thus respond in turn and interpret the proposition otherwise. However, he must face the difficult fact that the judgment itself is not derivable from the proposition, by definition. To deal with this, the hearer must identify many possible judgments as the more or less probable interpretations of the proposition at hand–entailing that allegorical interpretations are often uncertain, and/or at least cannot be certified by the proposition in question. The “solution” for this situation is that the allegorist (1) must come prepared with a set of relevant judgments, and also (2) he must learn how to identify which one of these judgments is more probable than another as an interpretation. Let us consider each of these more thoroughly.