Intro
“Medieval theologians defended the proposition, so alien to modern biblical studies, that the meaning of Scripture in the mind of the prophet who first uttered it is only one of its possible meanings and may not, in certain circumstances, even be its primary or most important meaning.
The literal sense of Scripture could and usually did nurture the three theological virtues, but when it did not, the exegete could appeal to three additional spiritual senses, each sense corresponding to one of the virtues. The allegorical sense taught about the church and what it should believe, and so it corresponded to the virtue of faith. The tropological sense taught about individuals and what they should do, and so it corresponded to the virtue of love. The anagogical sense pointed to the future and wakened expectation, and so it corresponded to the virtue of hope.”
The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis by David C Steinmetz http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1980/v37-1-article2.htm
Typology
The Church fathers tended to take a typological approach to Jonah, with Jonah taking the role of Jesus’ typological twin, i.e. Jonah as the symbolic precursor to Jesus. This is hardly surprising given that the analogy is directly drawn by Jesus both in Matthew 12 and Luke 11. However, Jonah is an excellent example of how the church fathers at once took very seriously the literal/historical sense of Jonah, as they were often at great pains to argue that the believer must believe a man could survive 3 days in the belly of a whale, whilst believing at the same time that the image was an allegory for Christ in the tomb. Thus St. Cyril of Jerusalem refers to the story of Jonah in his 14th Catechetical Instruction, about 347 A.D.. He is defending the doctrine of the Resurrection of Christ, and with Jewish objections particularly in mind, also makes allusion to this most famous of incidents, the ingorging of the prophet by the ‘great fish’. St. Cyril says:
“To me both alike are worthy of credence. I believe that Jonah was preserved, for all things are possible to God; I believe that Christ also was raised from the dead”.
Similarly St Jerome (4th Century, Bethlehem) distinguishes clearly what belongs to historia, the life and adventures of the prophet, from what belongs to tropologia, this same life as a prefigurement of the Saviour. In commenting on chapter two, he says:
“I am aware that some will be incredulous that a man should be preserved three days and three nights in the belly of a whale, to which the shipwreck had led him; these people are either believers or non-believers: if they are believers, they are obliged to believe much greater things.”
St. Augustine also argues as such. For example, in De Trinitate, he writes ‘This three days…of which he says, As Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights (Mt 12.40), this three days was not in fact full and complete, as scripture bears witness. But the first day is reckoned as a whole one from its last part, and the third as a whole one from its first part.’ (De Trin. IV.10)
Chad Pecknold points out that “In other words, the literal sense can often be inadequate – or rather, it eventuates in overly precise readings of inherently imprecise signs. We misread if we do not attend to the relationships of meaning that the signs hope to establish. Augustine helps us to understand relationships of figural meaning by attending to the nature of signs – by teaching us how to read signs and order their relations in a way that intensifies rather than minimizes their meaningfulness.”
http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/ssr/issues/volume3/number1/ssr03-01-e05.html Chad Pecknold
Alternative Allegories
St. Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses III, 20, 1) discusses the prophet’s life and adventures. St. Irenaeus does not raise the question of the historicity of the events of the book, which he no doubt takes for granted. He notes rather that the story of Jonah is an example of the divine longanimity, and that the prophet’s being swallowed up by the monster represents the original swallowing up of mankind by the ancient serpent.
St. Gregory of Nazianzus (362 A.D.) takes a different approach, arguing that the prophet knew by his prophetic vision that salvation for the pagans would mean the fall of Israel; this, and not literally escaping the divine presence, was the motive behind his flight:
“He saw the fall of Israel, and understood that the grace of prophecy would pass to the nations. This is what leads him to withdraw from preaching and delay the execution of his mission. He abandons the contemplation of joy (which is the meaning of the word Joppe in Hebrew), that is, the high position and dignity which he had possessed formerly, and he throws himself into the sea of sadness. This is what makes him weather the storm, fall asleep, be shipwrecked, … be thrown into the sea and be swallowed by the whale without dying: there he invokes God, and by a wonder, he rises on the third day with Christ… . I willingly admit that he perhaps had some right, for the motive I have expounded, to be forgiven his hesitation in carrying out the office of a prophet.”
Methodius
St Methodius’ “On the History of Jonah” taken from his From the Book of Resurrection offers a vast allegorical sweep across the existence of humanity from creation to the eschaton. So he starts off with, “The history of Jonah contains a great mystery. For it seems that the whale signifies Time, which never stands still, but is always going on, and consumes the things which are made by long and shorter intervals. But Jonah, who fled from the presence of God, is himself the first man who, having transgressed the law, fled from being seen naked of immortality, having lost through sin his confidence in the Deity.”
Jonah is therefore at once Adam and all of humanity, whose disobedience rejecets him from Eden/Dry Land into the life of mortality/The Ship. So it is that “the ship in which he embarked, and which was tempest-tossed, is this brief and hard life in the present time; just as though we had turned and removed from that blessed and secure life, to that which was most tempestuous and unstable, as from solid land to a ship. For what a ship is to the land, that our present life is to that which is immortal. And the storm and the tempests which beat against us are the temptations of this life, which in the world, as in a tempestuous sea, do not permit us to have a fair voyage free from pain, in a calm sea, and one which is free from evils.”
After the human life ends, the sea of mortality swallows us, and for Methodius the casting of Jonah from the ship into the sea, signifies the fall of the first man from life to death, who received that sentence because, through having sinned, he fell from righteousness: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
Then his being swallowed by the whale signifies our inevitable removal by time. “For the belly in which Jonah, when he was swallowed, was concealed, is the all-receiving earth, which receives all things which are consumed by time.”
The delivery up after 3 days in the whale is symbolic of the hope of physical resurrection for the believer after death, exemplified also by Jesus’ 3 days in the tomb.
“Moreover, Jonah having spent three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, was not destroyed by his flesh being dissolved, as is the case with that natural decomposition which takes place in the belly, in the case of those meats which enter into it, on account of the greater heat in the liquids, that it might be shown that these bodies of ours may remain undestroyed.”
So Methodius uses Jonah to represent the origin and ultimate destiny of humanity, concluding with Jesus as the incarnate word ensuring the raising of our physical bodies incorruptible. “Whence also the Word descended into our world, and was incarnate of our body, in order that, having fashioned it to a more divine image, He might raise it incorrupt, although it had been dissolved by time. And, indeed, when we trace out the dispensation which was figuratively set forth by the prophet, we shall find the whole discourse visibly extending to this.” http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/
“The objections to the historicity of the story of Jonah which the Fathers answer are thus most commonly based upon the miracles it relates, and as such, do not stand up to faith in the divine omnipotence. The Fathers seem not to have considered the possibility that the book of Jonah might be a work of fiction intended not, indeed, to deceive, but to edify and instruct. I should venture to suggest that this is because they believed that only real and historical persons were fit to symbolise the Incarnate Word, from Whose disciples, their minds having been opened to an understanding of the Scriptures, the Fathers themselves drew their learning.”
On the Prophet Jonah by Thomas Crean
http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt101.html
Andrew Worthley
