Too bad Augustine broughti nto the Church that spiritualizing view on prophecy!
It is better to say that Origen, or even Clement brought this hermeneutic into the Church. Augustine made it more orthodox, since he recovered the Church from Origen's heresies (like Universalism, for example). This makes him look more orthodox. Augustine wasn't too concerned with reforming the Church's eschatology, though, and the allegorical or nonliteral method, which is almost fully linked with Origen's amillennialism, was not reformed. Roman Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity also left the Church with a question of how it was to operate regally and this must have been a driving factor in Augustine's neglect of reforming this doctrine, replacing the Jewish promised kingdom with the (Christian) Holy Roman Empire.
"The Jewish hermeneutic of a literal, futurist interpretation was followed by the Jewish writers of the New Testament, and Jewish views of the Antimessiah influenced both early Jewish-Christian interpretation and the interpretation of the many of the early (ante-Nicene) church fathers. For example, Iranaeus (c. A.D. 185) wrote: 'But when this Antichrist shall have devastated all things in this world, he will reign for three years and six months, and sit in the temple at Jerusalem; and then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds, in the glory of the Father, sending this man and those who follow him into the lake of fire; but bringing in for the righteous the times of the kingdom.' [Amillennial, very late father] Eusebius also mentions (scornfully) a Jewish-Christian writer named Jude (dated to A.D. 202-203) whose treatise on Daniel's seventy-weeks prophecy held out an imminent expectation of the advent of Antichrist in his generation (Ecclesiastical History 6:6).
By contrast, the nonliteral interpretation, also seen in later rabbinic Judaism, does not fully appear until the third centry A.D. with Origen and Augustine, who were influenced by the allegorical interpretations of the Hellenistic idealist school of the Jewish philosopher Philo. While in reality both amillennial and premillennial interpretations had been influenced from Jewish sources, during the chiliast controversy the amillennial charge against millenarianism was that it was 'Jewish.' While apocryphal elements in Jewish eschatology are to be rejected, premillennialists should find support from the Jewish roots of their interpretation which attest to its proper biblical context" (Mal Couch, Dictionary of Premillennial Theology, pp. 49-50).
"The school of Alexandria was influenced by the Jewish exegete Philo, who used and popularized the allegorical method to explain away the anthropomorphic portrayals of God in the Hebrew Scriptures so objectionable to Platonic philosophers. Clement of Alexandria, the founder of the school of Alexandria, adopted Philo's allegorical approach as an apologetic device to explain away elements in Scripture that were objectinoable to Greek detractors of Christianity (anthropomorphic portrayals of God, earthy Hebrew expressions that offended Greek sensibilites, low level of morality of many Israelites, and the annihilation of the Canaanites) and to demonstrate that Christian theology, the true philosophy, was compatible with Greek philosophy (e.g., Clement allegorized the two fish in the feeding of the five thousand as the merging of Greek philosophy with Christian theology). Clement believed that God intentionally placed stumbling blocks to the reader in the literal meaning to awaken people's minds to find the hidden truths buried beneath the surface of the text. Unfortunately, by using the allegorical method for his apologetical agenda, he distorted the meaning of Scripture.
Origen (d. 254), the most influential teacher of the Alexandrian school, was drawn to the allegorical method of Philo because it allowed him to reconcile Scripture with Platonism, the foundational presupposition behind all of his thinking. Just as Philo used the allegorical method to reconcile the Hebrew Scriptures with Platonic philosophy, Origen used the allegorical method to reconcile the New Testament with Platonic philosophy.
While Origen believed that spiritual truth was self-consistent and accurate, he argued that the historical accounts were sometimes inconsistent and inaccurate (e.g., Genesis describes days before the creation of the sun; Satan showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth from atop a mountain; the Gospels disagreed among themselves about the order of the events of the life of Jesus). From a modern hermeneutical perspective, these issues seem rather naive; however, to Origen, they were unresolvable with the literal method. Origen attempted to resolve these alleged inconsistencies and other historical-exegetical dilemmas through the allegorical method: the stories do not mean what they say; their real meaning lay in the allegorical level [yet, the very definition of an allegory is that the basis of the metaphor is a real tangible story that happened]. According to Origen, the difficulties of Scripture suggest the existence of a deeper meaning: 'Wherever in the narrative [of Scripture] the accomplishment of some particular deeds did not correspond with the sequence of the intellectual truths, the Scripture wove into the story something which did not happen, occasionally something which could not happen, and occasionally something which might have happened but in fact did not' (First Principles 4.2.9).
Origen was the first to set forth a systematic method of biblical interpretation and hermeneutical theory utilizing the allegorical method (First Principles 4). ...According to Origen, the Bible must be interpreted in a special way because it was divinely inspired. Inspiration did not mean that the words recorded and the events recounted in Scripture were the true message from God; rather, inspiration meant that behind the words and hidden in the details of the text was a deeper meaning that was the true Word of God" (ibid., pp. 144-5).
The distinction between Origen and Clement is that Origen reconciled the
New Testament with Platonic philosophy. Clement's Greek (Christian) audience was concerned with
Hebrew (Old Testament) irreconciliations with Greek sensibilites. Both adopted the (Greek) nonliteral hermeneutic, though.
It is also worth pointing out that Philo adopted his nonliteral hermeneutic from Greek origins. Greek scholars in his day used allegory and non-literalism to apologize for irreconciliations in Homer's texts, like poor behaviour of the (Greek) gods (
Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 1).
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