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p. 16
and conclusion

Post-critical

The approach to Scripture characteristic of the patristic and medieval periods is strikingly different from that of post-Renaissance or modern times.


The contrast is often summarized somewhat simplistically, as the opposition between “spiritual” and “literal” interpretation, a distinction that is more confusing than enlightening.

The confusion results, in large part, from the different meanings of the two labels in ancient and modern usage as well as from the different contexts of interpretation characteristic of ancient and modern scholarship.

First, the term “literal sense” meant something quite different in the pre-Renaissance period from what it means today.

For the ancient exegete the literal sense was the letter of “body” of the text opposed to its religious meaning or “spirit,” whether or not the latter was intended or even known by the biblical writer. Thus, for example, if this theory were applied to the New Testament, the literal meaning of the account of the crucifixion of Jesus would be restricted to the physical and political facts of the story.

Its salvific significance (which is obviously the primary meaning of the evangelists were trying to convey) would belong to the spiritual meaning. In contrast, for the modern exegete the literal sense is the meaning intended by the human author. Consequently, the meaning of the text would be identical to the historical facts only when the recounting of history is what the author intended.

The literal meaning of a parable, prayer, poem, prophetic oracle, etc. would be determined by the literary genre in which it was written and the literary devices (symbol, metaphor, hyperbole, etc.) employed in it. These latter would belong to the literal sense because they belong to the meaning intended by the author even though they are not historical but literary, not literal buy figurative.

Given the two very different understandings of literal meaning, it is more surprising that the ancient exegete saw it primarily as a door (albeit an important and usually indispensable one) to the true meaning of the text whereas the modern exegete, persuaded that the true meaning of the text is determined by the author, would consider the literal meaning to be identical with the true meaning.

Second, the term “spiritual sense” also had a very different meaning for the ancients from the meaning it holds for post-Renaissance exegetes. For the ancients the spiritual sense was the true meaning of the text, the message God wished to convey through Scripture to the believer.

Consequently, although it might be obscure and never more than tentatively discerned, it was by no means arbitrary, fanciful, or subject to human manipulation. Indeed, for Origen, the same charism of inspiration was at work in the exegete as in the sacred writer, guiding the former to read truly under divine influence what the latter had written truly under divine influence.

The theory of the necessity of divine illumination for the proper understanding of the Scriptures was a constant in the tradition of spiritual exegesis.


The problem for the modern reader in understanding and appreciating the ancient and medieval practice of spiritual exegesis arises from its underlying assumptions about Scripture, some of which appear valid to a modern reader and others of which seem quite doubtful.

1. Scripture was understood as inspired by God, something a modern believing interpreter might also hold. But inspiration was understood in premodern times according to a quasi-dictation model, which is hardly tenable today.

According to this model, every word of Scripture is directly attributable to God and must, therefore, be suffused with meaning worthy of God. This led to the attempt to find serious religious significance in passages we today would easily relativize or even pass over.

The attempt to find deep meaning where none probably exists led to the strained inventiveness of some patristic exegesis that moderns rightly found groundless or even fantastic.


2. The ancients were convinced that Scripture was concerned uniquely with God’s revelation in Christ and that until the interpreter had uncovered the Christological and salvific significance of the text he or she had not reached its true meaning.

This true meaning could be conveyed straightforwardly by the literal meaning of the text, for example, in the Decalogue, but usually it was hidden in the dynamics of promise and fulfillment or the revelatory sacra mentality of mundane realities events. Typology and allegory, as literal vehicles, were not as sharply distinguished by the ancients as they later were by the twentieth-century theorists.

Typology referred to the foreshadowing of later realities by earlier ones, something which was intended by God, who inspired the whole of Scripture, but which could only be discerned by the later reader enlightened by Christian experience.

Allegory referred to all figurative meanings, a range that extended from genuine symbolism and allegorical interpretation overlapped in actual practice, for both were founded on the same basic understanding of the unity of the two Testaments under the single revelatory intent of the divine author.


3. The patristic conception of Scripture not only allowed for but also created the expectation that the word of God had multiple meanings corresponding to the richness of the mystery of the Word made flesh (thus a spiritual and a corporal meaning) and to the complexity of levels and phases in the realization of the Christian mystery (thus ecclesial and individual meanings; historical, contemporary, and eschatological meanings).

In contrast to this rich and theologically well-founded (although not always soberly used) understanding of the spiritual sense is that of post-Renaissance critical scholarship. For the latter, as it became progressively better equipped with philological, archaeological, and historical tools, the ideal of interpretation became the literal sense understood as the meaning intended by the human author, a meaning that seemed within realistic reach of the careful scholar.

The spiritual sense became, in contrast, those meanings that had no real basis in the literal sense, whether such meanings be New Testament inspired Christological interpretations of Old Testament prophecy (interpretations that could not be attributed to the Old Testament author) or deifying modern accommodations erected upon historical texts which had nothing to do with the later situation.

Religiously committed Scripture scholars of the modern period have repeatedly tried to develop interpretive theories that could allow also for a contemporary-that is, relevant-meaning of the text that would be well grounded in the literal sense.

However, these theories-such as modern approaches to typology, the theory of the sensus plenior or fuller sense, or various understandings of “salvation history”-have been characterized by a certain extrinsicism and arbitrariness.

They invariably involve the building of an applied sense as a kind of superstructure on the literal sense, which remains imprisoned in the past, unable to transcend the world of the author.

Finally, a third difference between the patristic and the modern exegete concerns the relationship of each to tradition. For the ancient, the tradition of the faith provided the universally accepted context for all biblical interpretation.

The instinct of faith, the sense of church, accepted theological development, and liturgical participation functioned normatively in the process of interpreting what was frankly acknowledge to be the “church’s book.”

Caught up in the sense of the uninterrupted development of God’s plan of salvation, the ancient interpreters responded aesthetically and religiously to the symbolic connections that guided their interpretation at a level unavailable to the modern exegete relying exclusively upon the tools of critical research.

With the Renaissance were born the quest for objectivity in the modern sense of the word and the profound suspicion of authority that would culminate in the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

The immediacy of participation in an interpretive tradition was shattered. Scientific method became the sole guide of scholarly investigation, and mathematical exactitude and certitude the ideals of all knowledge worthy of the name.

In such an intellectual climate the spiritual exegesis of the patristic and medieval scholars could only appear accidentally insightful at best and frivolously imaginative at worst.

In the late twentieth century, with the discovery of the serious limitations of scientific method in the humanistic sphere, the rediscovery of the power of symbolism and the ubiquity of metaphorical thinking and language, the development of a more adequate understanding of the constitutive function of imagination, and the raising of questions of language and interpretation of every field of investigation, a new appreciation of ancient biblical exegesis is also emerging.

There can be no question of a simple return to the methods or conclusions of the patristic and medieval exegetes (although some of it looks more credible than it did a century ago!) Historical criticism is an indispensable component of any responsible biblical interpretation and precludes the possibility of a scientifically responsible precritical approach to the text.

But post critical interpretation, characterized by what Paul Ricour has called “the second naiveté”, will no doubt involve an aesthetic appreciation and spiritual sensitivity that have long been almost absent from the world of biblical scholarship.

_(em>end of chapter. She adds a Bibliography with sources and studies.