Book. Lamberton. 1986. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonic Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition

I see this book praised regularly and cited as a key study for understanding allegorical readings of Homer, but to me this praise seems odd because the book is narrowly invested in outdated concerns. Its coverage of the topic of Neoplatonic allegorical reading is hampered by its intellectual history approach (the ‘growth of the epic tradition’ part of the title). To learn about Neoplatonic allegorical reading practices, it would be better to read the ancient authors directly, especially Numenius, Porphyry, and Proclus. Lamberton’s book is not anyway about allegorical reading practices in general, but about the specific example of written interpretations of Homer that explain Homer explicitly as allegory for Neoplatonic metaphysics. Reading Lamberton does not produce anything like a full picture of allegorical exegesis in antiquity, even of allegorical exegesis of Homer, even of “Neoplatonic allegorical reading” (per the title).

The books primary interest to us, then, is in how it demonstrates the limitations of the intellectual history approach with regards to allegorical interpretation (or analogical or metaphorical). What I mean by this is that Lamberton traces a ‘development’ of allegorical reading by positing that each piece of evidence of written allegorical exegesis depends on chronologically prior written allegorical exegeses. Lamberton can thereby ‘trace’ the ‘history’ and ‘development’ of allegorical reading practices and argue that these reading practices in turn produced explicitly allegorical literature.

Lamberton does not treat allegorical reading and interpretation as a mode of reading and interpretation, but instead as only a form of writing (i.e. exegesis). Allegorical reading is only possible in Lamberton’s study after encountering allegorical exegesis. He does not consider that allegorical reading is a mode of reading that is possible to the mind. Our response and position is that allegorical (or analogical or metaphorical) reading is characteristic of the loose-cognition, mystic, altered state of consciousness. The mind exposed to loose-cognition inevitably develops such a mode of interpretation, not only of words, but of images, sounds, and other representations (ultimately of mental constructs of sense perceptions). The history of allegorical reading is not limited to treatises that explicitly claim to offer an allegorical exegesis.

Lamberton writes as an outsider to allegorical reading, with constant asides about its absurdity ‘to us’. There is an ‘obvious’ and ‘natural’ meaning to Homer’s poetry that is non-allegorical. He writes as if the literalist, historicist reading and interpretation is the natural, to-be-assumed position. Yet he writes about non-literalist, non-historicist interpretors. This incongruence produces an odd book, at odds with its subject-matter. Throughout allegorical exegetes are assumed to be desperately looking for evidence of philosophical theories in texts that obviously do not contain that evidence, as if it were impossible that they simply saw evidence for those theories because they thought them to be the truth and thus inherent in the nature of reality and words.

Understanding that allegorical interpretation is in fact a normal aspect of altered state experiencing would produce a completely different book on Neoplatonic exegesis of Homer. It would focus more on Neoplatonic exegesis as a particular twist on allegorical interpretation, and not as if the exegeses we have determine what allegorical reading was and is. It would be able to describe more clearly why Neoplatonists wrote about the allegorical meaning of Homer in the way they did (because allegorical reading was not a rare, deviant, far-fetched thing to do). Its attempt to trace ‘influence’ and ‘development’ would have to be totally revamped because any evidence of allegorical exegesis should not be taken as evidence of influence by the Neoplatonists or as determined by Neoplatonic exegesis. Allegorical (or analogical or metaphorical) interpretation, after all, does not depend for its existence on the texts of Neoplatonist authors, but on the mind’s immersion in the loose-cognition state.

Our understanding of interpretation is so different that we are not left with much use for Lamberton’s book.