Anagogy

In his History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen , de Lubac highlights the centrality of anagogy in Christian interpretation: “It will not be enough to ‘allegorize’ . . . the events and persons of the Old Testament so as to see in them figures of the New if we continue to see in them only other events, other persons. Israel is the figure of spiritual things. In its turn, then, in order to be understood as it must be, in its newness, which is to say, in its spirit, in order to merit its name as New Testament, the content of this second Scripture must give way to a perpetual movement of transcendence. The spirit is discovered only through anagogy .”

I agree entirely with the thrust of this. The newness of the New must be preserved; eschatology transforms allegory and gives a fixed “end” to the story of Israel. But I am not enamored of the way that de Lubac says this. In other places, he describes the shift from Old to New as a shift from history to spirit. But the New is as historical, bodily, earthy as the Old; the new is as historical, bodily, earthy as a man mangled on a cross and an actual body rising from the tomb. It’s Pauline to say that the new covenant is a spiritual one, but in Paul that means a covenant in which the fullness of the Spirit has come. To say that the new “spirit” elevates the new beyond history is confusing and confused.