Extraordinary Discourse 345
Talking Point-illism The second-third century Christian writer, Origen of Alexandria, had a bit of trouble with a pagan critic who did not understand this poetic point about as-structures. Celsus had criticized Origen's allegorical readings of the Bible as being fanciful and not attending enough to the literal and the historical. Origen responded that he examined each word for its plenitude of meanings, for its world of images, for its pleroma of signification. Then he read the text all of the ways. It was he, not Celsus, Origen argued, that took seriously the letterals of the words, the literal. The so-called literal, historical reading of Celsus was only one of the meanings possible, and his narrowing of the text in fact is giving a fanciful interpretation, i.e., the fundamentalist fancy of the reader. It is the literalist who violates the text by not seeing its poetry, that which it fingers, that to which is points; whereas the poetic reading is in fact the one that has re...