It has been remarked more than once that the chief deficiency in academic discussions of allegory is their failure to define the literal sense. As Ward remarks, the coinherence of the literal and figurative and the consequent difficulty of separating them has been acknowledged in twenty-first century scholarship on Origen. I would add that students of Origen since De Lubac have anticipated Ward in pointing out that our own terms ‘allegory’ and ‘typology’, though not foreign to ancient usage, are not the ones that commend themselves most frequently to early Christian writers when they differentiate the senses of Scripture (p. 31). As Ward observes, the hermeneutics of Clement have commanded less attention and have not been favoured in any modern language with a study such as Neuschäfer's Origenes als Philologe (p. 15); his intention in this monograph is not only to illustrate Clement's use of the tools provided by the ancient grammarians to excavate the literal sense of the Scriptures but to show how the application of the same tools generates readings that we would describe as allegorical. Ward himself prefers the locution ‘creative exegesis’, which he defines in the course of the book by repeated increments until he arrives at the formulation of it as ‘the task of clarifying textual obscurity by employing the literary-critical tools of the grammarians to discover the text immanent intention of an author’ (p. 104). As he demonstrates in his second chapter, the obscurities that a grammarian (or for that matter, the philosophical reader) needs to resolve in a mythological or Homeric text may include apparent redundancy, superficial contradiction, purposely arcane utterance, the use of two appellatives for the same deity (a problem for Philo as well as for pagan exegetes) and doubtful etymology. In all these cases the text itself supplies the warrant for readings which we now consider far-fetched because we no longer assume (except in the study of poetry) that every word in a classic text must carry the highest possible density of signification. Here it would reinforce Ward's thesis to note that allêgoria in ancient practice is typically a sense extrinsic to the text, ‘another’ reading than etymology or casuistry could derive from its words alone.

In chapter iii Ward argues that, while Clement ‘teases’ his readers (p. 72) by hinting at an analogy between the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the elucidation of the biblical text, his justification for positing a meaning below the surface is the proclamation of ‘hidden treasures of wisdom’ at Isaiah xlv.3 (pp. 63–8), while the key to his search is the revelation in Jesus Christ of the mystery of God. While this does not pre-empt the task of inquiry, it entails that not all possible outcomes will be equally true. In chapter iv Clement's rebuttal of the claims of the Valentinians is shown to rest on a threefold appeal to ‘the authorship, narrative and thematic content’ of Scripture (p. 85), which rules out any knowledge of the Father which is not mediated by knowledge of the Son. In chapter v, taking up an observation in Robert Grant's perspicacious but often neglected The spirit and the letter, he argues that Clement is following ancient practice in seeking the dianoia, or true intent, of the text from the scrutiny of its elements (pp. 86–9). At the same time, he denies that the dianoia is usually a hidden meaning (for which the more precise word would be huponoia), noting that Clement frequently adopts the usual method of interpreting the obscure through the more perspicuous and invoking the akolouthia, or continuity, of the Scriptures as a constraint on our liberty of exegesis (pp. 96–8). While all this is true, it is possible that Ward makes too little on p. 99 of Clement's frequent citation of the parables of Jesus as evidence of the enigmatic character of the Gospel and the consequent necessity of an imaginative leap beyond the text.

Proceeding in chapter vi to ‘Scripture and the art of memory’, Ward observes that the cultivation of the memory was a recognised perquisite in antiquity for literary invention (the very word ‘inventio’ denoting in Latin not so much creation as discovery). Clement's praise of his tutor Pantaenus as a Sicilian bee is itself such an act of inventio, alluding to the use of this image by Seneca Quinitilian (I would add, perhaps Theocritus) to represent the gathering of knowledge from many repositories (pp. 109–10, 114–15), while his understanding of ‘chewing the cud’ in Leviticus as a symbol for meditation has its origins in Philo (pp. 110–12, 115–17). In chapter vii we read that the metaphor of building on Christ at 1 Corinthians iii.11–17 is, in the words of Mary Carruthers, a ‘trope for invention’ (p. 125), which Clement combines not only with the image of rumination but with Paul's desire at 1 Corinthians iii.1–3 to wean his neophytes from milk to meat. After assembling a ‘constellation’ of passages in chapter viii which show that Clement held Christ to be the one Logos who expresses the mind of the Father and gives unity to the biblical revelation, Ward argues in chapter ix that the exhortation at Ephesians iv.13 to grow into the stature of a perfect man is the primary text in the light of which Clement's handling of 1 Corinthians iii.1–3 should be construed (pp. 160–9). Apparent inconsistencies in his exposition can be explained by distinguishing the senselessness of the ignorant from the simplicity of faith (pp. 165–6), In chapter x a similar distinction, in conjunction with another ‘constellation’ of texts, allows us to grasp the role of pious fear in the attainment of the unshakeable tranquillity of wisdom. In these later chapters the technicalities of ancient grammar appear to lose significance; Ward has none the less completed a satisfying account of Clement's pedagogical method as an exegete, which is grounded in a voluminous knowledge of Scripture and a profoundly Christian theory of the nature and purpose of God.