What this book does not claim

This book has read a very old story as a description of one person's inside. It should say plainly what it is not claiming by doing that, because a book that quietly implies antiquity has cheated, and the implication is easy to make without ever stating it.

The reading in these pages is not the ancient one.

The two classical texts that are always credited with reading this story allegorically do not say what this book says. In both of them the captive is not the individual soul at all — she is the Lord's own creative power, the force by which the world is made, which is close to the opposite of a prisoner. Their real subject is a theological puzzle rather than a psychological one: how something perfect can appear to grieve.

The reading this book uses — the captive as the individual soul, the island as the condition of the person, the ally as a guide — belongs to a much more recent tradition with named authors, running from the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth. In its best-known form it comes from a note of a conversation rather than from anything its author sat down and wrote. The counting of the heads against the senses is traceable to the 1880s, reported at second hand about a scholar nobody now reads, and became widespread through one prolific twentieth-century teacher who gave it in at least four versions that contradict each other.

None of that makes it wrong. Ideas are not true because they are old, and this one is tested the way the eleventh chapter says: in eight weeks, by somebody who sees you regularly noticing something. It does mean the book has no business dressing it up as antiquity, and so it has not. Where the chapters reach for an old reading they say some of the older accounts and leave it there.

Two smaller things, for exactness.

The garden's name. The fifth chapter makes something of the fact that the place of captivity had a name meaning without sorrow. The name is genuine and the play on it is genuinely there in the oldest telling — but it is a stock figure of speech in that literature rather than anything invented for this story, and no early commentator on record turns it into the argument the fifth chapter makes. The chapter's use of it is the chapter's own.

The double. The ninth chapter's claim that the one who entered the fire was a substitute is a real feature of some of the older accounts, and it is also, demonstrably, not how the scene is usually told. The chapter says so where it uses it.

And where any of this is wrong, the fault is the author's. He is a man who went looking, not a scholar, and the people who actually know these texts would put several things here more carefully.