Eco on Aquinas on Origen

Umberto Eco, in his Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, points out that Origen's original motivation for proposing his allegorical hermeneutics was a defense of the Old Testament. Since the OT was attacked as being nothing but Jewish fables and traditions, Origen set out to show that the OT was the letter of which Christ was the Spirit. The New Testament was the unveiling of what the OT had always been about. Eco says that the real problem with Origen's system was its "nebula of all possible archetypes." For Origen, the Scirptures "were in the position of saying everything." It was the reduction of this "everything" by the descendants of Origen to three and then four senses of meaning that sought to give more rigid guidelines to faithful Scriptural interpretation. The four-fold sense of Scripture, far from being the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants interpretation of the un-enlightened medievals was an attempt to discipline and codify the basic hermeneutical committment of Origen that the Scriptures are all about Christ (cf. Lk. 24).