When one mentions Basil of Caesarea, chances are they are not talking about allegory, or at least not the application of it. Indeed, if historical textbooks bother to mention Basil’s use of allegory at all, they often mistakenly claim that he did not like the use of it. Basil says this in his ninth homily of the Hexameron;
I know the laws of allegory, although I did not invent them of myself, but have met them in the works of others. Those who do not admit the common meaning of the Scriptures say that water is not water, but some other nature… just like the dream interpreters, who interpret for their own ends the appearances seen in their dreams. When I hear ‘grass’ I think of grass, and in the same manner I understand everything as it is said.
In the past several decades, this quote has become the subject of much discussion. In 1990, Richard Lim wrote an article entitled The Politics of Interpretation in Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron. Within it, he argued that Basil used allegory in the Psalms, and not within the Hexameron, because he was writing to a different audience, a less knowledgeable one. In addition, Basil was older when he wrote about the Psalms and was therefore more cautious about using allegory in interpretation.
In 2007, Stephen Hildebrand in The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea rebuffed this argument by claiming that it was not the audience that had changed, but rather the type of genre that was different. Hildebrand did an excellent job showing this thesis to be true. However, there were some areas in which he could have been a bit more thorough. I wish to add to Hildebrand’s argument by showing that there were at least three different uses of allegory found within Basil’s Homilies on the Psalms: cross-referenced allegories, limited allegories, and sermon allegories. My thesis is that these three uses, particularly the first two, show that Basil used allegory because of the type of genre found in the Psalms. I will prove this by analyzing the portions of the Psalms that Hildebrand did not focus on, particularly Psalms 1, 28, and 59. I will show that Basil, rather than hating allegory, saw it as a needed tool to understand certain parts of scripture.