(avg. read time: 4–8 mins.)
The medieval propensity to preserve extended as well to hermeneutical methods for reading Scripture, which medieval scholarship passed on from the patristic era. One of the defining characteristics for much of biblical interpretation in the medieval era was the use of the so-called Quadriga, wherein Scripture was interpreted according to four senses: literal, allegorical/spiritual, tropological/moral, and anagogical. This fourfold typology was initially articulated by John Cassian (Conference 14.8), one of the late patristic authors. The literal sense concerned both the historical context and the literal meaning of words and texts in their literary context. The allegorical sense (meaning something different from what one reads, the thing signified being markedly different in a certain way from the sign) concerns the deeper sense revealed to and about the faithful, usually pertaining to the Trinity, Christ specifically, or the gospel in some fashion (including what interpreters today distinguish as typology). The tropological sense concerns how one should behave in light of the Scripture. And the anagogical/mystical sense concerns that which is learned mystically and things that are heavenly and eschatological. This is not to say that all medieval expositors followed this full fourfold model, but this broadly represents the programmatic form of exposition from which they drew.
With so much built atop the literal sense, the common impression is that the literal sense was of comparatively little importance. However, such an impression is misleading. The Victorines in the twelfth century were particularly known for emphasizing the literal sense as what everyone must start with in interpreting Scripture, which was buttressed by their contact with the Jewish school of Rashi. One embodiment of this emphasis in the medieval era is Hugh of St Victor’s work, including his influential Didascalion, and his De Sacramentis, which treated history itself as sacramental and presented his conviction that to exposit the sacraments is to exposit their place in salvation history. Furthermore, in comparison to the heretical Cathari, as Smalley observes, “the Catholic exegetes of the middle ages have been frowned on because they made so much use of the allegorical or mystical interpretation; but they accepted the Scriptures as historical and only wanted to find a symbolic value in history. The Cathari would dispose of events in Scripture by moving them from the earth to a spirit world.” (xix; also note the extreme example of Joachim of Flora described on 287–92) There was thus an insistence on keeping Scripture grounded and founded in the literal sense. Peter Abelard, Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, Stephen Langton, and Nicholas of Lyra all voiced objections to any allegorical interpretation that appeared to devalue or dismiss the literal sense. The Venerable Bede was also known for his extensive grammatical exposition of the text to provide grounding for allegory. Nicholas in particular, working from the assumption of continuity of reason and revelation or nature and grace, emphasized the importance of beginning with the literal sense as that which was accessible to reason, even for non-Christians, and then explore the other senses that are in continuity (they cannot contradict the literal sense even as they add to it).
Why then were all of these other senses involved in biblical interpretation? To be sure, philosophical beliefs, especially the profound influence of Platonism (e.g., Peter Abelard’s Theologia Christiana), helped to both initiate and perpetuate the perceived necessity of such ideas. As Smalley describes the issue,
Claudius of Turin sums up the patristic tradition as it had reached the scholars of Charlemagne’s day. The Word is incarnate in Scripture, which like man has a body and soul. The body is the words of the sacred text, the ‘letter’, and the literal meaning; the soul is the spiritual sense….The letter is a garment for the spirit, with a suggestion of cloak or concealment, which the commentator must penetrate. It is necessary to the spirit, as the body is necessary to the soul in this mortal life. The spiritually minded commentator will accept the letter, but treat it ascetically, as the good religious treats his flesh, in order to devote himself to the spirit.We then discover that what we should now call exegesis, which is based on the study of the text and of biblical history, in its widest sense, belongs to the ‘literal exposition’. The ‘spiritual exposition’ generally consists of pious meditations or religious teaching for which the text is used merely as a convenient starting-point. It follows that so long as this conception of Bible studies holds good, we shall have many commentaries containing little exegesis. (1, 2)
This was another way in which medieval scholarship passed on what they received from the patristic authors, especially from Alexandria (where Philo was especially influential). But as the writings of those patristic authors show, as influential as Platonic philosophy was, it was also preferred because it was considered to be helpful for articulating beliefs Christians had arrived at by other means. For example, for as much as Origen and Philo had in common, Philo applied rules to allegory primarily in terms of number symbolism and etymology to attest mainly to some timeless reality, whereas for Origen, “both the sign and the thing signified are conceived as historical and would have no significance if they were not.” (Smalley 7) This oversimplifies the point about Origen, but it still properly conveys that there is a historical grounding, including in terms of eschatology, in the work of Origen and other early Christians that is generally lacking in works like Philo’s.
Of course, later medieval work relied not so much on this mix of Christian theology and Platonic philosophy as on the mix of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy. Through engagement particularly with the Muslim philosophers who found Aristotle a valuable source for articulating their theology, Maimonides of the Jews and Thomas Aquinas of the Christians likewise brought Aristotle’s philosophy to bear on biblical hermeneutics. As Smalley summarizes, using the same anthropological metaphor as above, “The Aristotelian held that substance could only be known through its sensible manifestations. In adapting Aristotle to Christianity, St. Thomas united soul and body much more closely than the Augustinians had done. The soul is the form of the body, present in all its parts, acquiring knowledge through the senses, not through innate ideas. Its dependence on body ceases to be a penance or hard necessity, and becomes ‘proper’ to it.” (292–93) Aquinas, in particular, took the old distinction of sign and thing signified, or word and thing, and argued, “God is the principal author of Holy Scripture. Human writers express their meaning by words; but God can also express his meaning by ‘things’, that is by historical happenings. The literal sense of Scripture, therefore, is what the human author expressed by the events which the human author related. Since the Bible is the only book which has both a divine and a human authorship, only the Bible can have both a literal and a spiritual sense.” (Smalley 300)
At the base of the articulations of these beliefs about Scripture and its levels of meaning laid a fundamental hermeneutical impulse: the desire to explore the vast and multifarious riches of all Scripture as unified revelation and to see how it was God’s word directly to the reader and the audience. If one were to stick strictly to the literal sense, some texts could become historically bound in such a way that they lose their apparent relevance, their apparent directness, after enough time goes by. In the case of non-messianic prophecies that come to pass, what word do they retain for later audiences? Do they remain only as a testimony to what God has done, or can there be more that is going on when we are talking about Scripture as God’s word?
In other cases, the literal sense alone can appear insufficient for other reasons. To select one example that was especially popular in the medieval era, consider the Song of Songs. On the literal level, it speaks of love and desire between a man and a woman, with other characters chiming in on occasion. But is that all there is to it? If so, why is it in Scripture? Out of questions like these, and surely due in part to influence from Jews, many concluded that there must be another level (or two or three) at which the text speaks of God’s relationship with his Church.
These other senses were thus seen as crucial to the work of Scripture as the God-breathed word, useful for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, that the saints may be equipped (2 Tim 3:16–17). Indeed, one of Augustine’s statements summarizes well this approach to reading: “whatever there is in the word of God that cannot when taken literally be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine you may set down as figurative” (On Christian Doctrine 10.14). Smalley further explains, “The spiritual exposition, however much it was practised in the pulpit and in the schools, derived its vitality from religious experience in the cloister. It drew its sap through the roots of lectio divina from the soil of the old monastic tradition, the Conlationes, the Moralia in Iob, the Sermones in Cantica of St. Bernard.” (281)
When attending to the literal sense, medieval scholars would address matters of historical context, at least as they were able to with the information they had available. If words clearly had figurative meaning in their literary context, that too belonged to the literal sense. Indeed, Hugh of St. Victor agreed with the later stated principle from Thomas Aquinas that, “the clue to prophecy and metaphor is the writer’s intention; the literal sense includes everything which the sacred writer meant to say.” (Smalley 101) But ultimately interpretation of Scripture was understanding it as God’s word for which God is the common author. Bede is an exemplar of this mindset, as his commentaries show the many connections he made between all parts of Scripture, rather than simply operating on the view that the NT fulfilled the OT. Rather, any part of Scripture could illuminate any other part in equal fashion.