Four senses of Scripture

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Noah and the "baptismal flood" of the Old Testament (top panel) is "typologically linked" with (it prefigures) the baptism of Jesus in the New Testament (bottom panel).

The four senses of Scripture is a four-level method of interpreting the Bible.

In Christianity, the four senses are literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical.

In Kabbalah the four meanings of the biblical texts are literal, allusive, allegorical, and mystical.

History

Judaism

In

Jewish laws.[1]

Late Antiquity

The early allegorizing trait in the interpretation of the

Philo Judaeus (c. 20 BC – c. 50 AD), whose allegorical reading of the Septuagint synthesized the traditional Jewish narratives with Platonism. Philo's allegorizing, in which he continued an earlier tradition, had little effect on later Jewish thought, in part because the Jewish culture of Alexandria dispersed by the fourth century.[2]

In the 3rd century, the theologian

Paul of Tarsus in Epistle to the Galatians chapter 4.[3] In the 4th century, the theologian Augustine of Hippo developed this doctrine which became the four senses of Scripture.[4]

Prudentius wrote the first surviving Christian purely allegorical freestanding work, Psychomachia ("Soul-War"), about AD 400.[5] The plot consists of the personified "good" virtues of Hope, Sobriety, Chastity, Humility, etc. fighting the personified "evil" vices of Pride, Wrath, Paganism, Avarice, etc. The personifications are women, because in Latin words for abstract concepts have feminine grammatical gender; an uninformed reader of the work might take the story literally as a tale of many angry women fighting one another because Prudentius provides no context or explanation of the allegory.[5]

In this same period of the early 5th century, three other authors of importance to the history of allegory emerged: Claudian, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella. Little is known of these authors, even if they were "truly" Christian or not. Still, we know they handed down the inclination to express learned material in allegorical form, mainly through personification, which later became a standard part of medieval schooling methods.[6]

Claudian's first work In Rufinum attacked the ruthless

cosmological allegories.[6]

rhetorical, philosophical and religious devise in reading Ancient mythology, Homer,[8] and Plato.[7]

Macrobius wrote Commentary of the Dream of Scipio, providing the Middle Ages with the tradition of a favorite topic, the allegorical treatment of dreams.[6]

Lastly, Martianus Capella wrote De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii ("Marriage of Philology and Mercury"), the title referring to the allegorical union of intelligent learning with the love of letters. It contained short treatises on the "

seven liberal arts" (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music) and thus became a standard textbook, greatly influencing educators and students throughout the Middle Ages.[6]

Consolation of Philosophy to the personified Lady Philosophy, the source of innumerable later personified figures (such as Lady Luck, Lady Fortune, etc.)[6]

Early Middle Ages

After Boethius, there exists no known work of allegorical literature until the 12th century. Although allegorical thinking, elements, and artwork abound during this period, it was not until the rise of the medieval university in the High Middle Ages that sustained allegorical literature appeared again.[6]

High and Late Middle Ages

The earliest works were by

Alanus ab Insulis
(Plaint of Nature, 1170, and Anticlaudianus) who pioneered the use of allegory (mainly personification) for abstract speculation on metaphysics and scientific questions.

The High and Late Middle Ages saw many allegorical works and techniques. There were four great works from this period.[6]

  • The Four Great Medieval Allegories
    • Le Roman de la Rose
      . A major allegorical work, it had many lasting influences on western literature, creating entire new genres and developing vernacular languages.
    • The Divine Comedy
      . Ranked amongst the greatest medieval works, both allegorically and as a work of literature; was (and remains) hugely popular.
    • Piers Plowman. An encyclopedic array of allegorical devices. Dream-vision; pilgrimage; personification; satire; typological story structure (the dreamer's progress mirrors the progress of biblical history from the Fall of Adam to the Apocalypse).
    • anagogical
      , allegory; a dreamer is introduced to heavenly Jerusalem. Focus on the meaning of death. A religious response to Consolation of Philosophy.

Four types of interpretation

For most medieval thinkers there were four categories of interpretation (or meaning) used in the Middle Ages, which had originated with the Bible commentators of the early Christian era.[6][9]

  1. The first is simply the literal interpretation of the events of the story for historical purposes with no underlying meaning.
  2. The second is called typological: it connects the events of the Old Testament with the New Testament; in particular drawing allegorical connections between the events of Christ's life with the stories of the Old Testament.
  3. The third is
    tropological
    ), which is how one should act in the present, the "moral of the story".
  4. The fourth type of interpretation is
    anagogical
    , dealing with the future events of Christian history, heaven, hell, the last judgment; it deals with prophecies.

Thus the four types of interpretation (or meaning) deal with past events (literal), the connection of past events with the present (typology), present events (moral), and the future (anagogical).[6]

For example, with the Sermon on the Mount[10][11]

  • the literal interpretation is the narrative that Jesus went to a hill and preached;
  • the allegorical/typological interpretation is that Jesus is a new Moses the Lawgiver, delivering commandments from a mountain;
  • the tropological interpretation is that people should be seekers who go out of their way to listen to Christ, then be peacemakers etc.;
  • the anagogical interpretation is that Christ was prophesying his own death, setting its interpretation (persecuted, with mourners, but peacemaking, etc) with the promise of eventual blessing at the
    eschaton
    .

Dante describes interpreting through a "four-fold method" (or "allegory of the theologians") in his epistle to Can Grande Della Scala
. He says the "senses" of his work are not simple, but:

Rather, it may be called "polysemous", that is, of many senses. A first sense derives from the letters themselves, and a second from the things signified by the letters. We call the first sense "literal" sense, the second the "allegorical", or "moral" or "anagogical". To clarify this method of treatment, consider this verse: When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people: Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion (Psalm 113). Now if we examine the letters alone, the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is signified; in the allegory, our redemption is accomplished through Christ; in the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace; in the anagogical sense, the exodus of the holy soul from slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory.. they can all be called symbolic.

The classic summary of fourfold exegesis is the following Latin doggerel verse, a widely known mnemonic device in medieval schools:[12]

Old and New Testaments

Medieval allegory began as a Christian method for synthesizing the discrepancies between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

kosher laws.[5] The Old Testament was therefore seen in relation to how it would predict the events of the New Testament, in particular how the events of the Old Testament related to the events of Christ's life. The events of the Old Testament were seen as part of the story, with the events of Christ's life bringing these stories to a full conclusion. The technical name for seeing the New Testament in the Old is called typology
.

Christ rises from the tomb, alongside Jonah spit onto the beach, a typological allegory. From a 15th-century Biblia pauperum.

One example of typology is the story of Jonah and the whale from the Old Testament.[5] Medieval allegorical interpretation of this story is that it prefigures Christ's burial, with the stomach of the whale as Christ's tomb. Jonah was eventually freed from the whale after three days, so did Christ rise from his tomb after three days. Thus, whenever one finds an allusion to Jonah in Medieval art or literature, it is usually an allegory for the burial and resurrection of Christ.

Another common typological allegory is with the four major Old Testament prophets

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
. There was no end to the number of analogies that commentators could find between stories of the Old Testament and the New.

There also existed a tradition in the Middle Ages of

Metamorphoses
were standard textbooks throughout the Middle Ages, and each had a long tradition of allegorical interpretation.

"An illustrative example can be found in Siena in a painting of Christ on the cross (Sano di Pietro's Crucifix, 15th c). At the top of the cross can be seen a bird pecking its own breast, blood pouring forth from the wound and feeding its waiting chicks below. This is the pelican whose "story" was told by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder. Thus by analogy to a "pagan" source, Christ feeds his own children with his own blood."

Medieval philosophers also saw allegory in the natural world, interpreting animals, plants, and even non-living things in books called

stags with people devoted to the Church, because (according to medieval zoology) they leave their pastures for other (heavenly) pastures, and when they come to broad rivers (sin) they form in line and each rests its head on the haunches of the next (supporting each other by example and good works), speeding across the waters together.[13]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Norman Solomon, Historical Dictionary of Judaism, Rowman & Littlefield, USA, 2015, p. 313
  2. ^ Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, 1993:40.
  3. ^ Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, Baker Academic, USA, 2005, p. 283-284
  4. ^ Chad Brand, Eric Mitchell, Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, B&H Publishing Group, USA, 2015, p. 206-207
  5. ^
    ISBN 1-56585-701-1
  6. ^
    ISBN 0-684-16760-3
  7. ^ a b Florin Calian (2013).“Clarifications” of Obscurity: Conditions for Proclus’s Allegorical Reading of Plato’s Parmenides Obscurity in Medieval Texts (Krems: Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit)
  8. ^ Robert Lamberton (1989). Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (London: University of California Press).
  9. ^ Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, John Wiley & Sons, USA, 2011, p. 132
  10. ^ Boyle, John F. "Aquinas & Sacred Scripture". www3.nd.edu. Notre Dame University. Retrieved 20 December 2023.
  11. ^ Pearlman, Barry. Treasure in Heaven: A Study of the Sermon on the Mount Using the Four Senses of Scripture. Angelico Press.
  12. ^ Stephany, William (Summer 2010). "Typology". University of Vermont. Archived from the original on 15 April 2021.
  13. ^ The Book of Beasts, trans. T. H. White

References

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