this modern term reifies something that was for the Fathers more a habit of thought than a method or doctrine. The Fathers called it, in the East most commonly, theoria, contemplation, looking more deeply into the meaning of Scripture, while the Latin fathers came to use the term for the rhetorical figure that expresses one thing through another: allegoria, allegory. This practice of making the text of Scripture shine like a beam of light, as it were, through the prism of faith in Christ, in whom