Having looked briefly at the origins of our Bible, it is time to begin our survey of the history of its interpretation. That survey begins with a very long stretch of history, one that embraces what is customarily described as the age of the church fathers (the patristic age: ca. 200–750 A.D.) and the medieval period (ca. 750–1500). In most fields of study it would be foolhardy to try to discuss so long a period, which embraces so many changes in European society and thought. In the late medieval period, for instance, the focus of European cultural life shifted from the countryside with its villages and monasteries, to the newly emerging cities with their commerce and their universities. This social change went hand-in-hand with an intellectual Renaissance that involved the rediscovery of many philosophical and scientific texts from the ancient world. This in turn prepared the way for the cultural Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that contained the seeds of both the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth.
All of these changes are important, and I will return to them shortly for they have their impact on biblical interpretation. When it comes to the understanding of the Bible, however, this long period of history has a certain unity, for virtually all Christian interpreters throughout these centuries accepted a basic set of assumptions. These are all the more important because they are assumptions that later centuries were to call into question. The first assumption was that of a harmony between the message of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament. The second was that of a harmony between the message of the Bible and that of the church. The third assumption was that of a harmony between sacred and secular knowledge. The first two of these assumptions require little explanation and will be discussed only briefly. The third will require a slightly more extended treatment.
With regard to the harmony of the Old and the New Testaments, patristic and medieval thought was dominated by the idea of the divine inspiration of the Bible. The Bible may have had a diversity of human authors. These authors may have lived at different times and written for different audiences using a variety of literary genres. Its authors may have been Jewish rather than Christian. But insofar as patristic and medieval thinkers recognized these facts at all, they regarded them as insignificant when set alongside the divine inspiration of Scripture. The Bible may have a number of human authors, but it had one divine author whose voice could be heard throughout.
This meant that Scripture could contain messages about which its human authors were only dimly aware. For instance, the author of Isaiah 7:14 (“. . . the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel”) may have lived in the eighth century B.C. In the normal course of affairs, one would not expect an author of that date to know about the birth of Jesus occurring some seven hundred years later. But this expectation has no force when it comes to a work inspired by God. Even if Isaiah did not know about the birth of Jesus, God surely did.
Those who believed in the divine authorship of Scripture could quite naturally take this verse as a reference to Jesus. It was not just isolated verses that were interpreted in this way: the patristic and medieval interpretation of the Old Testament was thoroughly Christocentric (“Christ-centered”). If Jesus was indeed the eternal Word of God made flesh (John 1:14), then one would expect the entire Scripture to speak of him even if only in veiled and mysterious ways. As we will see, this assumption was to endure until the rise of historical criticism in the seventeenth century with its all-but-exclusive focus on the human authors of Scripture.
With regard to the harmony between the message of the Bible and that of the church, patristic and medieval Christians did not just believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture; they also believed in the divine establishment of the church. The same God who was the author of the Bible had also founded an enduring institution on earth, an institution that spoke with divine authority. Nor was this institution some loose-knit and intangible community of believers; it was a very tangible and historically concrete body. It was nothing other than the Catholic Church founded on the apostles and governed by their successors the bishops, under the guidance of the successor of the Apostle Peter, the Bishop of Rome.
The same Spirit of God who had inspired the biblical writers guided the leaders of that church and kept them from error, particularly when they were called upon to define some central Christian doctrine. The teachings of the earliest church fathers, of church councils, and of individual popes provided the taken-for-granted interpretive lens through which patristic and medieval commentators viewed the biblical text. As we will see, this assumption was to endure until the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, and it would be reaffirmed in the Catholic response to that Reformation.
The third assumption, that of harmony between sacred and secular knowledge, is a more complex affair. We may begin by noting that for patristic and medieval Christians, the distinction between what we would call sacred and secular knowledge was not primarily a distinction between two fields of knowledge. We might be tempted to think that secular and religious knowledge—science and religion, to use our modern distinction—are distinct because they deal with two quite different objects. We might argue, for instance, that science deals with the structure and mechanism of the world, while religion deals with the relationship of that world to God. But for patristic and medieval thinkers, the distinction lay elsewhere.
Sacred and secular knowledge were distinguished not so much by their contents (which could overlap) as by their source. Sacred knowledge was knowledge derived from divine revelation. It included matters inaccessible to human reason, such as the mystery of the Trinitarian nature of God, but it also included matters that we would regard as the province of science, such as the origin of the world. Secular knowledge, on the other hand, was knowledge obtained not from revelation but by the exercise of human reason. It dealt primarily with this-worldly matters, but it was not restricted to some non-religious realm. Patristic and medieval thinkers believed that human reason could also attain to some knowledge of God by reflection on the world God created. It follows that for the church fathers and for medieval thinkers, sacred knowledge included knowledge of the structure of the world, while secular knowledge could include knowledge of God.
To many modern believers this view seems deeply problematic. Many Christians today argue that the objects of sacred and secular knowledge are distinct: sacred and secular knowledge are distinguished not so much by their source as by their content. This position betrays a very modern anxiety. It is driven by the fear that if science and religion did have the same object, if their content did overlap, the result would be conflict. This anxiety is a legacy of our modern debates about religion and science; it is foreign to the world of the patristic and medieval writers.
Even ancient Christian authors do not simply identify what we would call religion and science; they recognize that revelation and natural philosophy have different aims. But they also assume that their conclusions may overlap. For the church fathers this idea was relatively unproblematic. They take it for granted that there can be no irresolvable conflict between sacred and secular knowledge. Truth was ultimately one, whether that truth came directly from God or from the results of rational enquiry. If your interpretation of Scripture brought you into conflict with the assured results of rational enquiry, it could be assumed you were misunderstanding the meaning of Scripture. If, on the other hand, the results of rational enquiry were not assured and they seemed to contradict Scripture, it could be assumed that one’s rational enquiry had gone astray.
Under the guidance of these assumptions the church fathers and medieval theologians interpreted particular biblical passages. I say “medieval theologians” because up until about the thirteenth century, the interpretation of Scripture stood at the very heart of the theological enterprise. Our modern faculties of theology and divinity schools customarily make a distinction between biblical studies and systematic theology. This modern distinction would have been foreign to a patristic or early medieval theologian; it has its roots in developments that occurred only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the growth of the universities. For the patristic or early medieval theologian, theology was the study of the sacra pagina, the sacred page.
When we examine the particular methods of exegesis adopted by patristic and medieval scholars, what is most striking is their flexibility. Where a modern interpreter might seek to discover the meaning of a biblical passage, patristic and medieval interpreters regularly offer several differing interpretations of the same passage without any sense that these are in conflict. There seem to be two factors at work here to produce what to us is a remarkable result.
The first is that patristic and medieval writers did not judge the correctness of an interpretation by reference to textual features alone. Rather, the most important mark of an acceptable interpretation was the conformity of its content to the regula fidei, the rule of faith. If two differing interpretations both conformed to the rule of faith, they were both (in principle) acceptable. There was no need to choose between them. The second factor is a strong sense that the biblical text, as an inspired text, could have several levels of meaning. This belief in the multileveled character of the Bible encouraged patristic and medieval interpreters to understand each biblical passage in several different ways. Both these features of ancient and medieval biblical interpretation deserve closer scrutiny.
The modern biblical interpreter is inclined to judge the correctness of an interpretation by the method through which it is achieved. In other words, the rules of interpretation are methodological: if one observes certain safeguards in dealing with the text, then one can be confident about one’s result. The church fathers and medieval scholars, on the other hand, enjoyed a great freedom when it came to methods of interpretation. Even these were not entirely arbitrary—there were rules of interpretation that the fathers followed—but at the end of the day an interpretation was judged acceptable primarily on the basis of its content. St. Augustine, for instance, can accept the possibility of many legitimate interpretations, but only if they are all “in harmony with our faith.” Similarly, he will dismiss an interpretation that he regards as unacceptable with the simple judgment: “This is against our Catholic faith.”
This body of belief against which interpretations were measured was often described as the rule of faith (regula fidei), a phrase that first seems to have been used by Christian writers of the second century. St. Augustine suggests that the content of this rule of faith can be derived from the clearer passages of Scripture and from the teachings of the church. It follows that those writers who employ the rule of faith as a mark of correct biblical interpretation are merely reflecting the second assumption named above. They are affirming a unity between what is taught by the Bible and what is taught by the church.
A second feature of patristic and medieval exegesis is its readiness to offer spiritual interpretations of biblical texts. (These are often described as “allegorical interpretations,” but the phrase “spiritual interpretation” better expresses the understanding of the fathers.) The church fathers believed that just as the human being is composed of body and soul, so the Scriptures have both a bodily and a spiritual meaning. Spiritual interpretation involved finding new levels of meaning in the biblical text, hidden (as it were) beneath its surface or literal sense. Even if they were perhaps not entirely clear to the human author of the text in question, these meanings were placed in the text by the divine author of Scripture.
This approach to the Bible may be illustrated by the story of Jesus’ miraculous feeding of five thousand people (Mark 6:35-45). On a spiritual interpretation, such as that followed by St. Augustine in his sermons, the five loaves might be understood to represent the five books of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Similarly, the boy who carried the loaves to Jesus could be seen to represent the Jewish people who carried the loaves without being able to break them open. Jesus’ breaking of the loaves represented his explanation of the true sense of the Old Testament. This example also highlights a dark side of such spiritual interpretations: the fact that it often reinforced traditional Christian stereotypes about Jews.
Christians were by no means the first to use spiritual interpretation. This approach to texts had both Jewish and Greek roots. (The fact that it has Jewish roots is deeply ironic, given the way in which Christians often used the technique against Judaism.) Greek commentators on classical works had long employed allegory to offer morally uplifting interpretations of what were sometimes rather brutal stories. In the Jewish world, Philo of Alexandria (ca. 15 B.C.–A.D. 50) had used allegory to discover philosophical wisdom in the biblical narratives. But it was Christians who developed spiritual interpretation to a fine art in their attempts to bridge the gap between the Old and New Testaments, to avoid scandalous interpretations, and to find contemporary meanings in ancient texts.
As early as the fifth century, the idea that biblical passages could possess a spiritual meaning had developed into the doctrine of the “four senses.” In this doctrine, each biblical text could be read literally, according to its historical meaning. But it could also be read spiritually, and there existed three levels of spiritual interpretation. The allegorical sense spoke of the mysteries of faith. The moral sense spoke of how one was to live. The anagogical sense, as it was called, spoke of the hoped-for homeland of heaven. In the thirteenth century, this doctrine was encapsulated in a famous Latin verse:
| Littera gesta docet, | The letter teaches what was done, |
| quid credas allegoria, | allegory what you are to believe, |
| moralis quid agas, | the moral sense what you are to do, |
| quo tendas anagogia. | the anagogical sense where you are to go. |
If a psalm, for instance, spoke of a love for Jerusalem, then the literal meaning of this verse would refer to the Palestinian city of that name. Allegorically, Jerusalem could be understood to refer to the church. Morally, it could be understood as the human soul. Anagogically, it could be seen as a reference to the heavenly Jerusalem. While this doctrine of the four senses of Scripture was widely accepted in principle, it was rarely employed in practice. When patristic and medieval commentators came to study particular biblical passages, they tended to speak of just two senses: a literal and a spiritual. The latter could be an allegorical, a moral, or an anagogical meaning, depending on the passage being interpreted and the aim of the interpreter.
Biblical commentators of the late Middle Ages continued to speak of the spiritual sense of Scripture but laid increasing emphasis on the literal meaning. The great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274), for instance, insisted on the priority of the literal sense, that sense intended by the human author of the Bible. All other interpretations of Scripture, he insisted, were to be related to this literal or historical sense, and only the literal sense may be appealed to in theological debate. Nothing was lost by such restrictions, since every important Christian doctrine was somewhere contained in the literal meaning of the text.
In Thomas’ view, the literal sense refers to certain historical realities. By controlling history, God has arranged that these historical realities can carry new levels of meaning. It is these new levels of meaning—in the events of history rather than in the text itself—that are the spiritual interpreter’s task to discern. In effect, Thomas’ teaching picks up and brings to a compromise solution some debates of the patristic period, when exponents of the spiritual sense (associated with the city of Alexandria) had competed with defenders of the literal sense (often associated with the city of Antioch).
However untenable it may seem to us, this patristic and medieval doctrine of the spiritual senses of Scripture has great religious power. Indeed it is hard to see how certain texts, such as some of the psalms, could be used in prayer in any other way. Not only does spiritual interpretation enable Christians to avoid otherwise insoluble difficulties in biblical interpretation (such as passages in which God appears to be acting in brutal ways), it also enables believers to read the Old Testament as Christian Scripture that speaks (in veiled terms) of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Finally, spiritual interpretation frees the interpreter from the tyranny of history. For spiritual interpretation not only links the Old and New Testaments, but the patterns of divine activity and human response found in the Bible can be projected forward (as types) into the reader’s own time. In this way even the biblical history that on the face of it has little to do with our own time can offer a pattern by which our own lives can be understood.
The power of this method of interpretation is easily illustrated by reference to the Old Testament story of the Exodus. The biblical story speaks not only of the escape of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery under Moses but also of the wandering in the wilderness of Sinai and the conquest of the land of Canaan. On the first level, that of a literal interpretation, the story can be read as a historical account of the origins of God’s people: the events by which they became a nation, received the Law of Moses, and inherited the promised land.
Read spiritually, however, the same events could be projected forward to our own time to provide an explanation of contemporary events. (This was the way in which the Exodus story was read by nineteenth-century African-American slaves.) On a more personal level the events of the Exodus could represent the individual’s journey of faith: from baptism (a release from the slavery of sin), through the desert wandering of this present life, across the Jordan River (that is, death), and into the promised land of eternal life. In all these different ways, spiritual interpretation provided a means of bridging the gap between past and present. It provided a way of incorporating later events, including the reader’s own life, into the biblical framework. The collapse of this imaginative method of interpretation, at least among theologians and biblical scholars, would be one of the most significant developments of the modern period.