RSS

p. 14 The Development of Exegesis in the Middle Ages

The early Middle Ages extends, for our purposes, from the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century to the rise of the cathedral schools at the beginning of the eleventh century.

During this time of political and cultural upheaval the monasteries provided almost the only setting for the serious pursuit of the spiritual life, which was understood as a common life of prayer, study, and work.

Study consisted primarily in the prayerful interpretation of Scripture under the guidance of the patristic writings collected in the caternae.

The powerful study of Scripture and the fathers, to which the monastics devoted several hours of each day, was known as lectio divina, and it was understood by this method of “fourfold interpretation” which John Cassian (ca. 360-435) introduced into Western monasticism in his Conferences of the Fathers (Collationes).

This method, which corresponds better to Origen’s actual exegetical practice than the three-senses theory he propounded, dominated exegesis until the high Middle Ages and is aptly summarized in a famous medieval couplet of uncertain authorship:

Litera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria;
Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.*

*the letter teaches what happened; the allegorical sense what to believe, the moral sense what we are to do; the anagogical sense whither we go.”

Thus, the literal sense refers to the events and realities of Jewish history.

The other three are spiritual senses: the allegorical, which reveals the Christian or theological meaning of the next; the moral or tropological, which applies the text to the individual Christian’s practice; and the anagogical, which points toward eschatological fulfillment.

The classic example of fourfold interpretation is the understanding of Jerusalem
* as the Jewish city (literal),
* the church (allegorical),
* the soul (tropological),
*and the heavenly city (anagogical) (see Cassian Conferences 14.8).

Gregory the Great (540-604), who became pope in 590, and the English monk Bede the Venerable (672-735), whose compilations heavily influenced later medieval scholarship, is classic proponents of this type of exegesis.

The interest in a more literal type of exegesis never completely disappeared during the early Middle Ages. It appears in the wok of the Spaniard Isidore of Seville( ca 560-636) and among the Irish monks. However, the dominance of the fourfold interpretation, that is, of spiritual exegesis was never in question.

In the eleventh century the foundation of the cathedral schools in centers such as Paris, Laon, and Utrecht ushered in a new era of scholarship, during which systematic theology and biblical studies gradually became two quite distinct disciplines, until by the thirteenth century the separation of functions was virtually complete.

This development took place in many centers, not least the famous Abbey of Saint-Victor of Paris (founded 1110) in which monastic lectio divina and the dialectical methods of the universities met and mutually enriched each other.

The spiritual sense of the Scriptures retained its importance, but intense interest in the Hebrew language and in Jewish exegesis revived a serious concern with the literal sense of the text.

Scripture came to function quite differently in the lecture hall, where its literal sense was exploited in relation to doctrine and in the liturgical and contemplative contexts where its spiritual sense nurtured faith.