In the West, the conventions of parable were largely established by the teachings of Christ. The New Testament records a sufficient number of his parables, with their occasions, to show that to some extent his disciples were chosen as his initiates and followers beause they "had ears to hear" the true meaning of his parables. (It has already been noted that the parable can be fully understood only by an elite, made up of those who can decipher its inner core of truth.) Despite a bias toward simplicity and away from rhetorical elaboration, the parable loses little in the way of allegorical richness: the speaker can exploit an enigmatic brevity that is akin to the style of presenting a complex riddle.

Parable is thus an immensely useful preaching device: while theologians in the period of the early Christian Church were devel¬oping glosses on Christ's enigmatic stories, preachers were inventing their own to drive home straightforward lessons in good Christian conduct. For centuries, therefore, the model of parable that had been laid down by Christ flourished on Sundays in churches all over the Western world. Pious tales were collected in handbooks: the Gesta Romanorum, the Alphabet of Thales, the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, and many more. Infinitely varied in subject matter, these exemplary tales used a plain but lively style, presenting stories of magicians, necromancers, prophets, chivalrous knights and ladies, great emperors— a combination bound to appeal to congregations, if not to theologians. An important offshoot of the parable and exemplary tale was the saint's life. Here, too, massive compilations were possible; the most celebrated was The Golden Legend of the 15th century, which included approximately 200 stories of saintly virtue and martyrdom.

As long as preaching remained a major religious activity, the tradition of parable preserved its strong didactic strain. Its more paradoxical aspect gained renewed lustre in theological and literary spheres when the 19th-century Danish philosopher Suren Kierkegaard began to use parables in his treatises on Christian faith and action. In Fear and Trembling he retold the story of Abraham and Isaac; in Repetition he treated episodes in his own life in the manner of parable. Such usage led to strange new literary forms of discourse, and his writing influenced, among others, the Austro-Czech novelist Franz Kafka and the French "absurdist" philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus. Kafka's parables, full of doubt and anxiety, mediate on the infinite chasm between man and God and on the intermediate role played by the law. His vision, powerfully expressed in parables of novel length {The Castle, The Trial, Amerika), is one of the most enigmatic inmodern literature. Allegory. The early history of Western allegory is intricate and encompasses an interplay between the two prevailing world views—the Hellenic and the Hebraic-Christian—as theologians and philosophers attempted to extract a higher meaning from these two bodies of traditional myth.

In terms of allegory, the Greco-Roman and Hebraic-Christian cultures both have a common starting point: a creation myth. The Old Testament's book of Genesis roughly parallels the story of the creation as told by the Greek poet Hesiod in his Theogony (and the later Roman version of the same event given in Ovid's Metamorphoses). The two traditions thus start with an adequate source of cosmic imagery, and both envisage a universe full of mysterious signs and symbolic strata. But thereafter the two cultures diverge. This is most apparent in the way that the style of the body of poetry attributed to Homer—the ancient Greek "Bible"—differs from the Old Testament narrative. The Greek poet presented his heroes against an articulated narrative scene, a context full enough for the listener (and, later, the reader) to ignore secondary levels of significance. By contrast, the Jewish authors of the Old Testament generally emptied the narrative foreground, leaving the reader to fill the scenic vacuum with a deepening, thickening allegorical interpretation.

Old Testament. The Old Testament, including its prophetic books, has a core of historical record focussing on the trials of the tribes of Israel. In their own view an elect nation, the Israelites believe their history spells out a providential design. The prophets understand the earliest texts, Genesis and Exodus, in terms of this providential s scheme. Hebraic texts are interpreted as typological: that* is, they view serious myth as a theoretical history in which all events are types—gprtents, foreshadowing the destiny of the chosen people. Christian exegesis (the critical interpretation of Scripture) inherits the same approach.

Typological allegory looks for hidden meaning in the lives of actual men who, as types or figures of later his¬torical persons, serve a prophetic function by prefiguring those later persons. Adam, for example (regarded as a historical person), is thought to prefigure Christ in his human aspect, kirillhua to prefigure the victorious militant Christ. This critical approach to Scripture is helped by the fact of monotheism, which makes it easier to detect the workings of a divine plan. The splendours of nature hymned in the Psalms provide a gloss upon the "glory of God." The Law (the Torah) structures the social aspect of sacred history arid, as reformulated by Christ, provides the chief link between Old and New Testaments. Christ appeals to the authority of "the Law and the Prophets" but assumes the ultimate prophetic role himself, creating the New Law and the New Covenant—or Testament— with the same one God of old.

The Greeks. Hellenic tradition after Homer stands in sharp contrast to this concentration on the fulfilling of a divine plan. The analytic, essentially scientific histories of Herodotus and Thucydides precluded much confident belief in visionary providence. The Greeks rather believed history to be structured in cycles, as distinct from the more purposive linearity of Hebraic historicism.

Nevertheless, allegory did find a place in the Hellenic world. Its main arena was in philosophic speculation, cen¬tring on the interpretation of Homer. Some philosophers attacked and others defended the Homeric mythology. A pious defense argued that the stories—about the monstrous love affairs of the supreme god Zeus, quarrels of the other Olympian gods, scurrility of the heroes, and the like—implied something beyond their literal sense. The defense sometimes took a scientific, physical form; in this case, Homeric turmoil was seen as reflecting the conflict between the elements. Or Homer was moralized; the goddess Pallas Athene, for example, who in physical allegory stood for the ether, in moral allegory was taken to represent reflective wisdom because she was born out of the forehead of her father, Zeus. Moral and physical interpretation is often intermingled.

Plato, the Idealist philosopher, occupies a central position with regard to Greek allegory. His own myths imply that our world is a mere shadow of the ideal and eternal world of forms (the Platonic ideas), which has real, independent existence, and that the true philosopher must therefore be an allegorist in reverse. He must regard phenomena— things and events—as a text to be interpreted upward, giv¬ing them final value only insofar as they reveal, however obscurely, their ideal reality in the world of forms. Using this inverted allegorical mode, Plato attacked Homeric narrative, whose beauty beguiles men into looking away from the truly philosophic life. Plato went further. He attacked other fashionable philosophic allegorists because they did not lead up to the reality but limited speculation to the sphere of moral and physical necessity. Platonic allegory envisaged the system of the universe as an ascending ladder of forms, a "Great Chain of Being," and was summed up in terms of myth in his Timaeus. Plato and Platonic thought became, through the influence of this and other texts on Plotinus (died 269/270) and through him on Porphyry (died с 304), a pagan mainstay of later Christian allegory. Medieval translations of Dionysius the Areopagite (before 6th century AD) were equally influen¬tial descendants of Platonic vision.

A second and equally influential Hellenic tradition of allegory was created by the Stoic philosophers, who held 1паГ the local gods of the Mediterranean: peopled were Igjgns of a divinely ordered natural destiny. Stoic allegory  emphasized the role of fate, which, because all men 4vere subject to it, could become a common bond between Peoples of different nations. A later aspect of moral exe¬gesis in the Stoic manner was the notion that myths of the gods really represent, in elevated form, the actions of great men. In the 2nd century вс, under Stoic influence,the Sicilian writer Euhemerus argued that theology had an earthly source. His allegory of history was the converse of Hebraic typology—which found the origin of the di¬vine in the omnipotence of the One God—for Euhemerus found the origin of mythological gods in human kings and heroes, divinized by their peoples. His theories enjoyed at least an aesthetic revival during the Renaissance.

Blending of rival systems: the Middle Ages. At the time of the birth of Christ, ideological conditions within the Mediterranean world accelerated the mingling of Hellenic and Hebraic traditions. Philo Judaeus laid the ground¬work; Clement of Alexandria and Origen followed him. The craft of allegorical syncretism—that is, making rival systems accommodate one another through the transfor¬mation of their disparate elements — was already a de¬velopedmt by the time St. Paul and the author of the Gospel According to St. John wove the complex strands of the Hebraic-Christian synthesis. Over centuries of quar¬relling, vthe timeless philosophy of the Greek allegorists Was accommodated to the time-laden typology of the Hebrew prophets and their Christian successors and at length achieved a hybrid unity that permitted great allegories of Western Christendom to be written.

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