Medieval Mystical Allegory

An exploration of Patristic and Medieval allegorical hermeneutics, drawing a distinction between a revelatory approach to the created order, where created things are understood as disclosing God, and the veiling approach to the created order, where created things are seen as concealing God. Although these two approaches appear to contradict one another, it is argued that both are mystically legitimate, and that work needs to be done to recover the allegorical reading of Scripture.

Joseph Milne

In his sermons Meister Eckhart calls us time and again to abandon all images, all conceptions, and withdraw entirely from all created things and abide in ‘nothing’ where alone God may enter the soul. The allegorical tradition, on the other hand, calls us to observe and marvel at the infinite wonders of the Creation, and to contemplate the inexhaustible multiplicity of meanings in the Scriptures. At first glance these two approaches, both deeply rooted in the early Church and sustained throughout the Middle Ages, appear wholly opposite and contrary to one another.

At the heart of the difference between them lie two different stances towards whatever is manifest, whether in Creation or in Scripture, and how the manifest is to be received. On the one side, all that is manifest veils or conceals the divine mystery, or the ineffable, that lies beyond all that is visible or can be manifest. Here the manifest ‘hides’ the unmanifest. On the other side, all that is manifest reveals or discloses the divine mystery, so that the infinite shines brightly in everything finite. Here the manifest is ‘theophanic’. In this second sense, the Creation, like Scripture, is ‘revelatory’, not merely by analogy or likeness, but in divine presence. The world is God’s wisdom disclosed in its infinite fullness, presenting to the human soul divine nourishment and a way home to God. It is the ‘glory’ of God, as spoken of in the Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer.[1]

Having stated their obvious opposition, may these two stances be reconciled? Or may one be subsumed into the other? For a number of reasons I believe we must hesitate from any reconciliation. One reason is that either approach involves its own spiritual disposition towards truth. For example, one is predominantly intellectual, and the other predominantly devotional – one seeks the transcendent truth of God, the other the manifest wisdom, glory and love of God. Eckhart, for example, invokes detachment and points the soul to participate in God’s own self-knowledge, wholly beyond all created things. St Bernard, on the other hand, teaches that all forms of love, including carnal love and self-love, are grounded in the love of God, and that love as such is ultimately nothing else than the love of God. The ‘metaphysical’ way and the ‘affective’ way, as we might distinguish them, each incline to God in completely distinct ways. And this is not the same as the distinction between the ‘apophatic’ and ‘kataphatic’ ways, since both culminate in mystical union.

Another reason for hesitating in reconciling them – and in a way the more important reason – is that our age has in general lost the allegorical way of seeing and of knowing. So when we read of the medieval scheme of four senses of Scripture, it does not resonate with our culture and seems to be an arbitrary way of forcing words to signify things they cannot signify. It has been argued that the allegorical way of reading Scripture was motivated by a wish to overcome its crude or base meanings, or else to reconcile it with empirical branches of knowledge. At the same time there has always been a struggle between those who see Scripture as having many senses, and those who hold that they must have only a single sense which all Christians can agree on.

But also, even within the allegorical tradition itself, there have been struggles between those who follow the tradition of allegorical reading and those who invent new senses – between those who ‘see’ the various meanings, and those who through pride of intellect wish to be originators of some subtle new meaning.

The allegorical tradition of ‘unveiling’ is no more straightforward than the metaphysical tradition of ‘transcending’ that runs alongside it. Nevertheless, until the thirteenth century, and within the monastic life, the allegorical reading of Scripture and of the Creation was the principle approach to their study. The created world teemed with meaning. Every creature signified something sacred. Indeed, the world itself is seen as sacred, for it is God’s work. This is the ‘religious’ way of knowing the world in the Middle Ages. But this approach to Scripture, as Henri de Lubac observes, gets gradually replaced by dialectical ‘questions’ addressed to Scripture, and by ‘summas’ gathering theology into systems. This movement began as early as the mid twelfth century with works such as The Sentences of Peter Lombard.[2]

The shift towards dialectical questions produced its own great riches – in Thomas Aquinas for example. With the discovery of the works of Aristotle, this also involved a shift towards ‘metaphysics’, or an attempt to reconcile revelation with philosophy and metaphysics. This manner of thinking gives no fertile ground for allegorical reading of Creation or Scripture. The four senses of Scripture tend to be merely repeated as formulas and meanings rattled off superficially. Beneath this, however, one senses a shift in the very idea of the meaning of allegory itself. Instead of it being a disclosure of a deeper meaning than the outer appearance, allegory is now conceived as a sign standing for something else. This is evident, for example, in the rise of the secular romances, such as the Romance of the Rose in about 1230. Although presented as a spiritual journey of love, in courtly fashion, the allegorical sense is not conveyed through literal things, but rather literal things are presented as standing for other things, especially psychological states of the lover and beloved. Natural phenomena are likewise presented as representing or signifying other things. In short, allegory has gradually transformed or declined into metaphor. There is no longer any real connection between ‘things’ and their innate meaning. Rather, meanings are attributed to things merely by convention.

This new tradition of allegory, rich and beautiful as it is, indicates a break with the ancient tradition which did not see allegory as ‘one thing standing for another’ but rather as the ‘inner sense’ embodied in and revealed through the visible sense. Or, to use the expression of Dionysius, the visible was a ‘veil’ through which the invisible could be discerned. The words of Scripture radiated with infinite meaning, depth upon depth, even as Creation itself did, which was also the Book of God, or a ‘second Scripture’. The allegorical tradition is grounded in an understanding that all things are full of meaning and that there is an art in searching out this meaning, an art which involves a spiritual transformation of the soul. It was this understanding of allegory – and therefore of the world – that receded in the late Middle Ages, and which, as Paul Ricoeur has shown in his Thinking Biblically and his hermeneutics in general, is lost in our age. The symbolic sense is no longer part of modern culture, and so the great stories of Scripture, as also the myths of ancient Greece, no longer communicate their meaning to us. We have lost what Ricoeur calls the ‘first naivety’ of understanding which directly grasps the symbolic and the theophanic. Our modern critical and empirical engagement with reality has overwhelmed our original grasp of the symbolic narrative that once held Western culture together.

More than this, anything but the literal meaning of words has been banished from our thinking, as we read in John Locke. The very idea of ‘multiple’ levels of meaning in the Creation has been relegated either to ‘subjectivity’ or else to superstition. Our relation to the world is no longer as participants in its meaning or purpose. Rather it has become a mere object, knowable only through theoretical explanation. The Cartesian self, locked in its solitary self-knowing, cannot be part of the sacred unfolding of the universe. This situation accounts not only for the loss of the allegorical meaning of things, but also for the metaphysical. Our range of speech is narrowed to the propositional, and such modes of speech belonging to taking vows, of performing rituals, or offering prayer, so profuse still in Shakespeare, have become strange to us. Our culture no longer speaks with the universe or has any real dialogue with reality. We now merely talk ‘about things’, not with them or to them or in response to them.

My point is not to censure our times, but rather to explain how our enquiry into mystical allegory is obscured by our contemporary comportment towards reality, which passes over any meaning it expresses. Meaning has become something the human being attributes to or projects upon things which are held to have no inherent meaning in themselves. This is as much a problem for scholars of literature as it is for theologians. Nevertheless, I would suggest that our ‘symbolic sense’, even our ‘sacred sense’, of reality is primordially grounded in consciousness as such and is open to realms of meaning that our analytical or critical faculties cannot penetrate. That is to say, human consciousness is by nature ordered toward reality in a manner that first apprehends its presence symbolically and as a totality, and this in turn leads us to grant that human nature is essentially ‘religious’, insofar as we are compelled to call that apprehension ‘sacred’.

In more philosophical terms it is what Aristotle describes in the opening of his Metaphysics as the initial orientation of the mind towards truth, because truth attracts the consciousness. The ancient understanding of ‘mind’, or soul, is that it is already grounded in an apprehension of things that draws it towards deeper understanding. There is no isolated cogito closed in on itself. Mind is essentially open. And rather than Anthropos being the questioning master over things, it is sacred reality itself that calls for piety and for each soul to give account of itself before the truth of things. Religiously speaking, it is truth that reaches out to humankind. Thus its quality is revelatory or disclosive and comes as a gift, even as being itself is a gift.

To put that another way, the early Christian contemplation of Scripture begins in ‘piety’, in a reverence awakened by truth itself. Without piety, so Origen and St Augustine tell us repeatedly, the doors of the Scriptures will not open to us. Only the pure and pious soul can approach the threshold of Scripture.[3] This is the first sense in which its meaning is ‘veiled’. This initial veiling is its protection. In the Phaedrus Socrates says that any true writing, written with knowledge of the nature of the soul, will defend itself even though it is fixed and one cannot debate with it. We should not be astonished that this view should have been adopted by the Church Fathers in their approach to the Scriptures.

An initial step, then, into understanding the ancient meaning of allegorical apprehension, is to grant to things their own disclosive power. This precedes Scripture and applies to Creation. All natural phenomena may then be seen as hierophanic. As Ricoeur remarks in his essay ‘Manifestation and Proclamation’:

That a stone or a tree may manifest the sacred means that this profane reality becomes something other than itself while still remaining itself. It is transformed into something supernatural.[4]

And later he writes:

In the sacred universe there are not a few living beings here and there, but life is a total and diffuse sacrality that may be seen in the cosmic rhythms, in the return of vegetation, and in the alternation of life and death. The symbol of the tree of life – or of knowledge, or immortality, or youth – in this respect is the highest figure of this fundamental sacrality of life.[5]

It is out of this sacred vision of the cosmos that the ancient myths are born, revealing an order and drama of existence that the ‘profane’ vision of reality veils. It is only when the cosmos, the sun, moon and stars, the animals and plants, the rivers and mountains, become hierophanies that the divine order of truth becomes visible. This hierophanic vision of reality runs through Greek philosophy and Stoicism like a golden thread. The universe is a living intelligence. When that vison is lost, Plato argues in Book X of the Laws, and inert matter is claimed to be the cause and origin of things, then the city, which is to say ‘society’, will fall through impiety.

Just as the cosmos is a living intelligence, so likewise, Origen argues, are the Scriptures:

Since, therefore, Scripture itself consists, as it were, of a body that is perceived, of a soul which is understood and conceived to be in the body, and of a spirit according to the shadow of the heavenly things, come, then, let us invoke him who made the body, soul, and spirit of Scripture, a body for those who have preceded us, a soul for us, and a spirit for those who are destined to possess eternal life in a future age and to arrive at the heavenly truth of the law. At this time, let us investigate the soul, not the letter. If we can do this much, let us make our ascent to the spirit, in the manner of the sacrifices that we have just been reading about.[6]

Here Scripture is taken not only as a living being, with body, soul, and spirit, but this threefold hierarchy of being also indicates the threefold order of meaning of Scripture. It is clear that this threefold sense is derived from the ‘letter’, which is the body, the ‘meaning’, which is the soul, and the mystical or moral sense, which is the ‘spirit’. Origen likens this threefold order to that of the human being, consisting of body, soul, and spirit. That later in the Middle Ages the Scriptures were given a fourfold sense – the literal, allegorical, moral, and mystical – is slightly anomalous because the ‘allegorical’ sense originally meant all the meanings beyond the literal sense.[7]

The important point here is that Scripture is regarded as a living being corresponding with human nature. And Origen is bold enough to imply that Scripture is Christ incarnate. That is to say, the Scripture corresponds in every respect with the Incarnation of Christ, and that those who contemplate Scripture reverently receive from Christ the wisdom, consolation or instruction suited to their spiritual need. Christ works through the Scriptures according to the spiritual condition of each individual soul. This ‘work’ is performed by God, and so the disposition of piety in the reader mentioned earlier is essential for the soul’s receptivity to this divine transformative work.

Here it is worth recalling that there are different orders of language, and that the mode of speech in Scripture belongs to a primordial language where nature speaks in her own vocabulary, in which ‘objects’ are themselves ‘words’.

In The Great Code Northrop Frye argues that there are three orders of language, or historical phases of language. The most ancient is the ‘poetic’, where no strong distinction exists between subject and object, and where physical things express divine things or inner states directly. The second mode of language Frye calls ‘hieratic’, meaning religious or priestly language, which is mainly allegorical. The third mode of language he calls ‘demotic’, meaning simply descriptive or factual language, such as the language of historians or of science.

Frye observes that, beginning with Francis Bacon and consolidated by John Locke, demotic language forces out all metaphor and allegory. Indeed, Locke would have metaphor banished, and every word be confined to a single literal sense. According to Frye, it is owing to the fall into demotic language that the language of the Scriptures has become obscure, or is simply dismissed as mythological superstition. Paul Ricoeur likewise sees the purely descriptive mode of speech as presenting the greatest barrier to understanding symbol and metaphor in ancient literature, and therefore especially the Bible. Thus the poetry of Homer, from the standpoint of demotic language, has no ‘truth’ to tell, even though Aristotle argues that drama or poetry tells universal truths which purely descriptive history cannot. The second mode of language, hieratic, the language of ancient ritual and prophecy, can be discounted not merely as fiction, as Homer can, but as plain superstition. This mode of language includes oratorical speech or exhortation, yet without abstraction or logical argument. Its degenerate form is ‘propaganda’, which Josef Pieper associates with sophistry. We forget the kinds of language at our peril.

Having distinguished these three modes of language, Northrop Frye suggests that the Bible does not quite correspond with any of them:

The linguistic idiom of the Bible does not really coincide with any of our three phases of language, important as those phases have been in the history of its influence. It is not metaphorical like poetry, though it is full of metaphor, and is as poetic as it can well be without actually being a work of literature. It does not use the transcendental language of abstraction and analogy, and its use of objective and descriptive language is incidental throughout. It is really a fourth form of expression, for which I adopt the now well-established term kerygma, proclamation. In general usage this term is largely restricted to the Gospels, but there is not enough difference between the Gospels and the rest of the Bible in the use of language to avoid extending it to the entire book.[8]

Frye’s insights into the three modes of language are valuable because they alert us to the different manners in which language may be heard – for it is clear that Origen and the medieval monks following him listened and attended to the Scriptures in a manner that opened the soul to the work of grace through the Word. Many times they invoke us to read Scripture prayerfully. In our modern concern for objectivity, it is easy to forget that language, of itself does and conveys nothing. It is active and at work only when listened to and engaged with, and according to how it is listened to. And we may also suggest that the manner in which a culture comports itself towards language corresponds with its general comportment towards the cosmos and reality as a whole.

The two books of ‘revelation’, Scripture and Creation, call to be brought into concord with one another, which is to say, to be seen as manifestations of the sacred – the hierophanic world Ricoeur reminds us of. This correlation between sacred Scripture and sacred cosmos runs through the Christianity of the middle ages, and is what is all too often unwittingly taken for ‘pre-scientific’ ignorance of the cosmos. The demotic language of the world, that is, purely factual descriptive language, has no religious significance, save that it is devoid of the sacred. With this in mind, here is a passage from Hugh of St Victor’s On Sacred Scripture and its Authors teaching how one ought to attend to Scripture:

The diligent examiner of Sacred Scripture should never neglect the meanings of things. Just as our knowledge of primary things comes through words, so too through the meaning of these things we come to understand what is perceived in a spiritual way and our knowledge of these things is made complete. The philosopher, in other kinds of writings, comes to know only the meaning of words, but in Sacred Scripture the meaning of things is much more excellent than the meaning of words. The first is established by usage, but the second is dictated by nature. The first is the voice of human beings, but the second is the voice of God speaking to human beings. The meaning of words is established by human convention, but the meaning of things is determined by nature; and, by the will of the Creator, certain things are signified by other things. The meaning of things is much more manifold than the meaning of words. Few words have more than two or three meanings, but a thing can mean as many other things as it has visible or invisible properties in common with other things.[9]

We notice straight away that it is the meaning of things that ought to be attended to, not simply the meaning of words. Hugh is understanding language in its most primary sense, as bringing before us the ‘things’ the words refer to or invoke. To dwell merely upon the words is to attend to the ‘sign’ rather than the signified. To attend to the signified is to hear the words of Scripture spiritually. It is ‘the philosopher’ who attends only to the meaning of words, not to ‘things’, and words have few meanings, and these only by convention. This is the ‘voice’ or language of human beings, while the meaning of ‘things’ is the voice or language of God addressing human beings. This meaning of things belongs to them by nature, because nature is itself a type of divine speech. But more than this, the meaning of ‘things’, according to the will of the Creator, is manifold, as things have visible and invisible properties shared in other things. By the ‘philosopher’ I take it that Hugh means the ‘natural philosopher’ who enquires into the nature of things according to human reason alone.

Nature, then, is a living vocabulary and speech addressing human beings. In Scripture this living speech or vocabulary ranges from the simple correlation of the ‘true vine’ with Christ to the vast correspondence of typology whereby the meaning of the Old Testament is revealed, or ‘unveiled’, in the New Testament. And on the eschatological level of meaning, the whole history of Israel is gathered into Christ. This typological meaning of Scripture is unique to the Bible, and this is a further reason why Northrop Frye places the Bible in an order of language on its own. It is kerygmatic, not only in the sense of the spoken word, but in the proclamation of ‘things’ themselves. The rivers and the mountains ‘declare’ the name of the Lord, as we read in the Psalms.

And the ‘manifold’ meanings of things in the Old Testament correlate with the events and meanings in the New Testament. For example, ‘stone’, ‘water’, and ‘wine’ have symbolic meanings that resonate throughout the Bible, stone signifying the ‘law’, water signifying ‘purification’, and wine the ‘living water of eternal life’. Thus stone is equated with the old law, water with baptism, and wine with the new law.

This correlation of senses is evident in the first miracle of Jesus in the Gospel of John, where the six stone jars filled with water are turned into wine. The medieval reader acquainted with the typology of Scripture would instantly see this connection, and how all the references to stone, water and wine in the Old Testament are now disclosed in Jesus revealing himself in this first miracle, or first ‘sign’, as it is more strictly called in the Gospel of John. His coming into the world is what the Old Testament signified through these things. And so we might say that all visible things of Creation ultimately signify Christ, through whom they came into being. This is really the basis of the Bible concordances we used to consult years ago in our Bible studies. The correspondences between objects, places and actions across the Bible opens up the special or unique holy vocabulary of the Scriptures. Every leaf, fruit, herb, river, valley, city, is, as it were, the ‘voice of God’ addressing human beings, as Hugh of St Victor says.

With these observations in mind we may look at the commentary On The Apocalypse of John by Richard of St Victor, where he describes the “four modes of vision, two of which are internal and two external”.[10] The first mode is bodily sense, in which we perceive the external visibility of things. This mode is limited, seeing neither what is large or far off, or small and close. Because it does not penetrate things it “does not contain anything of mystic significance”, he says. For the second bodily sense Richard writes:

The other bodily mode occurs when an appearance or action is shown outwardly to the sense of sight, but contains within a great power of deeper, mystical meaning. Such was Moses’ vision of the burning bush, which appeared to him visibly and externally, but was filled with figurative significance. For what do we understand in the flame if not the grace of the Holy Spirit. What by the bush – a small tree that is rough, green, and flowering – if not the blessed Virgin Mary, humble in her self-contempt, rough against weakness by practicing virtues, green through her faith, and flowering in her chastity? When the Lord appeared in the bush, the flame did not damage it, and when the Son of God took on the flesh in the Virgin, when the grace of the Holy Spirit overwhelmed her, her virginal chastity remained inviolate. This second mode of vision is, therefore, by far more sublime and more excellent than the first, for the first lacked all mystery, while the second overflows with virtue and heavenly mysteries.[11]

In this passage we see what Hugh of St Victor meant when he spoke of the meaning of ‘things’, where here, for Richard, a simple, small, green and flowering tree is “filled with figurative significance” by the appearance of the flame that did not consume it. The bodily sense here grasps the ‘meaning’ of the bush, what it signified by way of a miracle. But then Richard goes further and interprets the passage typologically, seeing in it the virgin birth of Christ in the New Testament. As Richard says, “And it was indeed a great vision, which all at once presented the miracle then taking place and also denoted the Incarnation of the Word and the perpetual chastity of the Virgin Mother”.[12] Here we may also observe that a ‘miracle’ is not merely an intrusion into the laws of nature, but a sign of a meaning embodied in the appearance of things by an act of grace.

Richard next describes the third and fourth modes of vision. His description is brief and succinct, and therefore worth quoting:

The third mode of vision does not concern the eyes of the flesh, but rather the eyes of the heart – when, that is, the soul, illumined by the Holy Spirit, is led to an understanding of invisible things by the formal similitudes of visible things, and by the images presented as though by figures or signs. The fourth mode of vision is when the human spirit, touched subtly and sweetly by internal inspirations, with no mediating figures or qualities of visible things, is raised spiritually to the contemplation of heavenly things.[13]

The third mode of vision is a mode of understanding of the heart, in which ‘invisible things’ are seen through the ‘formal similitudes of visible things’. These are ‘understandings’ rather than things seen. The fourth mode of vision, unaided by any ‘mediating figures or qualities’ is “raised spiritually to the contemplation of heavenly things”, which is to say, purely spiritual or mystical meditation with no ‘object’ of perception at all.

Richard supports the third and fourth modes of vision by referring to The Celestial Hierarchies of Dionysius the Areopagite. He observes that spiritual things “have been revealed to us symbolically and analogically”. He remarks that a “symbol is an assemblage of visible forms bespeaking invisible things. Analogy is the ascent or elevation of the mind to the contemplation of heavenly things”. He says that invisible things are “demonstrated by signs similar to sensible things”, which the Greeks called theophanies.[14]

Here we may observe a shift in how Richard presents the way things disclose spiritual truth from that which we discussed earlier following Origen. With Dionysius the Areopagite comes a Platonizing influence, where reality is divided into ‘real’ and ‘less real’ ontological levels, or where the manifest, temporal realm is regarded as a mere shadow to be displaced by the truly real. This dualistic way of interpreting reality is foreign to early Christian exegesis, which does not dispose of the manifest forms of things in perceiving their meaning. As Paul Ricoeur observes, Scripture does not imply two ontological levels, but rather two historical economies – that of temporal and sacred time. Thus the ‘sacred’ meaning requires the reality of ‘temporal’, “without any reduction of it to appearance or illusion, at least if the “type” is really to function as the basis of meaning. Hence the spiritual sense is not substituted for the carnal sense”.[15]

Here we perhaps should recall that Plato’s division of reality into two distinct ontological levels is itself a symbolic way of speaking of reality and ought not to be understood literally. It stands in contrast with the biblical ‘concrete’ vocabulary and its conveyance of spiritual truth as ‘events’ and ‘signs’ rather than as ‘metaphysical orders’. It is primarily through events that the visible realm of nature and place disclose their significance, as for example with the episode of Moses and the burning bush. Meaning – here typological meaning – bursts forth from the bush, yet the fire does not destroy the bush. The spiritual does not consume the carnal. Richard of St Victor recalls that “nothing that exists is wholly deprived of participation in goodness, as Scripture attests: God saw all the things he had made, and they were very good”.[16]

From what we have said so far it follows that there is a correspondence between the ways the manifest world is seen and the kinds of language spoken of it. The reductionist perception of the world corresponds with a ‘demotic’ use of language. The kinds of language are not merely theories of language but types of orientation towards existence. It would be more correct to say that the type of language arises from the orientation towards existence than that any language is something in itself. By this I mean that our hearing and speaking are the activities where we live in language. We cannot make language an object of external investigation as though there were no listeners or speakers. This activity of ‘being in language’ is raised to the greatest intensity with biblical language, which as Northrop Frye and Ricoeur both suggest is best described as kerygmatic. It is divine speech addressed to the essence of the soul, calling it home to God. But such speech can only be heard through a corresponding openness of the soul to divine things. For Meister Eckhart this is the birth of Christ in the soul, where God speaks Himself. We should never overlook that, for all Eckhart’s insistence on noughting the Creation in the soul, ultimately his mysticism is incarnational.

Yet every word of Scripture refers to the created world and its events. But the world and its events are now presented as embodying and disclosing divine things, even uncreated things. Events now disclose a ‘sacred history’ within or illuminating the temporal history. The ultimate meaning of things is disclosed – of time, of place, of mountain, of stream and ocean. For the medieval tradition of biblical interpretation it is this ultimate meaning of things that is the allegorical sense, the ‘other’ meaning besides the plain or literal meaning. Yet the literal sense is not discarded. The eternal is manifest in the temporal, the timeless in time, and the infinite in the finite. Thus the dignity and sanctity of the created is affirmed. Seen in this way, as the Psalmist puts it, everything declares the name of God. In this sense the world is the second book of revelation. And, although this is the sacred or religious way of seeing the created world, it must surely inform the vision of true poets too.

There is an aspect of all this which we should say more. Exegesis involves a transformation in the soul of the contemplator. It is a spiritual exercise. To illustrate this, here are two passage from Origen on the threefold meaning of Scripture. The first says:

We have often pointed out that there is a threefold mode of understanding in the Holy Scripture: a historical, a moral and a mystical. We understand from this that there is in scripture a body, a soul and a spirit.

The first glimpse of the letter is bitter enough: it prescribes the circumcision of the flesh; it gives the laws of sacrifice and all the rest that is designated by the letter that kills (cf. 2 Cor 3:6). Cast all this aside like the bitter rind of a nut. You then, secondly, come to the protective covering of the shell in which the moral doctrine or counsel of continence is designated. These are of course necessary to protect what is contained inside, but they too are doubtless to be smashed and broken through. We would say, for example, that abstinence from food and chastisement of the body is necessary as long as we are in this body, corruptible as it is and susceptible to passion. But when it is broken and dissolved and, in the time of its resurrection, gone over from corruption into incorruption and from animal to spiritual, then it will be dominated no longer by the labor of affliction or the punishment of abstinence, but rather by its own quality and not by any bodily corruption. This is why abstinence seems necessary now and afterwards will have no point. Thirdly you will find hidden and concealed in these the sense of the mysteries of the wisdom and knowledge of God (cf. Col 2:3) in which the souls of the saints are nourished and fed not only in the present life but also in the future. This then is that priestly fruit about which the promise is given to those “who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Mt 5:6). In this way, therefore, the gradation of this threefold mystery runs through all the scripture.[17]

The second passage says:

Therefore just as “the seen and the unseen” (cf. 2 Cor 4:18), earth and heaven, soul and flesh, body and spirit are related to each other, and this world is made up of these relationships, so too must it be believed that holy scripture is made up of seen and unseen things. It consists of a body, namely, the visible letter, and of a soul which is the meaning found within it, and of a spirit by which it also has something of the heavenly in it, as the Apostle says: “They serve as a copy and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary” (Heb 8:5). Since this is so, calling upon God who made the soul and the body and the spirit of scripture — the body for those who came before us, the soul for us, and the spirit for those who “in the age to come will receive the inheritance of eternal life” (Lk 18:18, 31) by which they will come to the heavenly things and the truth of the law —let us seek out not the letter but the soul. . . . If we can do this, we will also ascend to the spirit.[18]

Can we recover something of this way of reading Scripture? That is certainly the question de Lubac raises in his seminal study Medieval Exegesis. Yet if something of this is to be restored, it must involve a restoration of the religious or mystical way of seeing the world. In this regard perhaps modern theologians are seeking a way forward. So I close with a passage seeking this end from David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite:

This also means that the things of the senses cannot of themselves distract from God. All things of the earth, in being very good, declare God. And it is only by the mediation of their boundless display that the declaration of God may be heard and seen. In themselves they have no essence apart from the divine delight that crafts them: they are an array or proportions, and ordering or felicitous parataxis of semeia, and so have nothing in themselves by which they might divert attention from the God who gives them, no specific gravity, no weight apart from the weight of glory. Only a corrupt desire that longs to possess the things of the world as inert property, for violent or egoistic ends, so disorders the sensible world as to draw it away from God that sensible reality properly declares; such a desire has not fallen prey to a lesser or impure beauty, but has rather lost sight of corporeal, material, and temporal beauty as beauty, and so placed it in bondage.[19]

Bibliography

Boersma, Hans. Scripture as Real Presence. Baker Academic, 2017

Bentley Hart, David. The Beauty of the Infinite. William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004

De Lubac, Henri. Medieval Exegesis. William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000

Frye, Northrop. The Great Code. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983

Interpretation of Scripture, edited and translated by Franklin Harkins and Frans van Lier. New City Press, New York, 2013

Origen, Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D. C., 1984

Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1955

Ricoeur, Paul, and LaCocque, André. Thinking Biblically. The University of Chicago Press, 1998

Schnabel, Eckhard J. Law and Wisdom. Wipf and Stock Publishers, Oregon, 1985

Notes

[1] See for example Eckhard J. Schnabel, Law and Wisdom, p. 16 – 20

[2] See Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis Volume 2.

[3] For an excellent discussion of the place of piety and virtue in Patristic hermeneutic theory see Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence.

[4] Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, p. 49

[5] Ibid. p. 52

[6] Quoted from Origen by Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Volume. 1. p. 143

[7] For a full discussion of the three or fourfold senses of Scripture see De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis Vol. 1, p. 90 ff.

[8] Northrop Frye, The Great Code (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) p. 29

[9] Interpretation of Scripture, edited and translated by Franklin Harkins and Frans van Lier, p. 225

[10] Ibid. p. 344

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid. 345

[15] Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, p. 283

[16] Interpretation of Scripture, edited and translated by Franklin Harkins and Frans van Lier, p. 346

[17] Origen, Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D. C., 1984, p. 103

[18] Ibid. p. 105

[19] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004 p. 255