Felix Ó Murchadha
Hermeneutics is centrally concerned with the mediation between different domains of meaning and with the possibilities of both understanding and misunderstanding which arise therein. It originates in the mediation of meaningful utterances understood as arising from a suprahuman, divine domain and communities of those whose mode of life and form of existence were understood to be in some way instituted by this divine source (cf. Ricoeur 1995, 48) In that sense, hermeneutics has its origins in the interpretation of the divine. While the etymological connection with the god Hermes may be doubtful, clearly in conceptual terms hermeneutics bears the mark of this interpretive effort of understanding enigmatic, apparently inscrutable, divine communications. That which requires interpretation in this way can be oral or written, but it has a text-like quality in the sense of being preserved as meaningful beyond the situation of its utterance. Crucial here is the relation between tradition and experience, mediating between a past event of divine communication expressed in written form and the present experience of those reading and applying that text.
The religious origins of hermeneutics can be traced back at least to Plato. It is centrally connected with the history of Christianity both in the Patristic period, ending with St. Augustine, and in the modern era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. While a general hermeneutics began to emerge in the eighteenth century and divided itself from the specific question of religious and, in particular, biblical interpretation, the influence of biblical hermeneutics on general hermeneutics and that of general hermeneutics on biblical hermeneutics remains. The hermeneutics of religion since the nineteenth century is characterized by historicism and the hermeneutics of suspicion and the reactions to both. In this chapter, I will chart both facets of hermeneutics before ending with the relation of hermeneutics to the phenomenology of the sacred.
In the pseudo-Platonic Epinomis, hermeneutical skill is linked to manic utterance through the art of divination (Grondin 1995, 24). The hermeneutical task is to uncover the meaning of the utterance; but the truth remains a separate and philosophical issue. In the Ion, Plato names the poets the “hermetes of the gods” (534e). While hermeneutike seems not to occur in Greek religion, philosophical reflection on the practice of divination makes clear the requirement of both finding meaning and finding the truth.
While the distinction of meaning and truth re-emerges in the history of hermeneutics, a more pressing distinction within Judeo-Christianity became one which began from the presumption of truth, namely, that between figurative/allegorical and literal meaning. This was already to the forefront of Philo of Alexandria’s attempt to defend the Hebrew scriptures in the Hellenic world. For Philo, those passages which did not seem to make literal sense must be understood allegorically. What this suggests is that there are layers of meaning in the text, the surface meaning, which is clear to everyone, and the deeper meaning, which requires esoteric knowledge. Philo, however, had little influence on his contemporary Jewish scriptural tradition (see Grondin 1994, 26–28). His influence was much more immediately felt within Christianity, where the question of interpreting scripture was complicated by a number of factors. In Luke’s gospel, an account is given of a meeting of the resurrected Christ with some of his disciples on the road to Emmaus, where “[Jesus] interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24: 28). However, many of the texts of the Hebrew scriptures depict a very different Messiah from the one Jesus represented. Origen responded to this difficulty by building on Philo’s layered reading and developed a three-layered interpretation of scriptures. According to such an understanding, scripture has three layers of meanings, the carnal, the pneumonic, and the spiritual (Origen 1966, On First Principles, IV, 2.4, 276–285). Each reading depends on the level of spiritual development of the reader, and scripture discloses itself differently depending on the extent to which the reader has freed himself from his carnal nature.
The relation here between interpretation and life was already to be found in Paul, who continually exhorts his addressees to interpret their own existence in light of the death and resurrection of Christ. Ricoeur refers to this as a “hermeneutical circle … between the meaning of Christ and the meaning of existence which mutually decipher each other” (Ricoeur 1980, 380). This mutual deciphering is a continual theme throughout the history of hermeneutics. The fundamental insight is that interpretation is only possible if the text first speaks to the reader and in doing so shows itself to be true for the reader in terms of his or her own existence.
Early Christian understanding of scripture was deeply influenced by Gnostic ideas, in particular, the Gnostic distinction between esoteric and exoteric knowledge. If, as Gnostic thinkers argued, the true meaning of things is mysterious and only accessible through esoteric knowledge, the scriptures—and, in particular, the gospels—must have “spiritual” meanings—hidden to most—that can be deciphered only through a spiritual reading. The reaction against Gnosticism did lead many church fathers to maintain an emphasis on the literal sense of the text.
It is in such a context that Augustine’s hermeneutical practice must be understood. In Book 3 of On Christian Doctrine, Augustine outlines the rules for interpreting scripture. The fundamental rule is that all ambiguous passages should be read in accordance with the “rule of faith,” which the reader has already “gathered from the plainer passages of Scripture, and from the authority of the Church” (Augustine 1952, On Christian Doctrine, III, 2, 657). Read in such a way, the meaning of the text should be clear, but if there are still multiple possible readings, Augustine counsels referring to the context of the passage. Yet, such alone is not sufficient as is clear from Augustine’s emphasis on knowledge of the original language of the text. While these form the basic rules for guidance, much of Augustine’s discussion in this book concerns the difference between figurative and literal meaning. Echoing Origen, Augustine parallels the literal to the carnal and the figurative to the spiritual and does so in the context of bondage and liberation. He quotes Paul: “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6, quoted in On Christian Doctrine III, 5, 659–660), and goes on to say that “it is surely a miserable slavery of the soul to take signs for things and to be unable to lift the eye of the mind above what is corporeal” (On Christian Doctrine III, 5, 660). Interpretation offers the possibility of liberation or falls prey to enslavement. As such, there is a clear correlation between the state of heart of the interpreter and the veracity of his interpretations.
Through the medieval period, Augustine’s rule of faith was authoritative, and Origen’s three-layered reading was developed further. As Aquinas discusses it, the reading of scripture has a bodily and a spiritual component. Each level of meaning was intended by God, and good discernment allows the reader to move between them. Spiritual reading is itself divided into three levels, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical (Aquinas 1948, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 1, Art. 10). There is ambiguity in some medieval writers as to whether these three levels of meaning can be found in all biblical passages. The main point here though is that the scriptures should be read in terms of their literal and spiritual senses and in terms of the latter these indicate a figurative sense, an instruction in terms of behavior and an indication of an eternal meaning.
Central to Martin Luther’s rejection of the church’s interpretative authority was his refusal of allegorical interpretations of the Bible. Although he does on occasion resort to allegorical interpretation, Luther defends the literal sense of the Bible. In doing so, however, he appeals to a distinction between the letter and the spirit beloved of Augustine and Paul (Luther 1966, Lectures on Romans, 197). While this principle justified allegorical readings in Scholasticism, for Luther it rather concerns the relation of the reader to the text. To read the Bible through the spirit is to read its literal sense through the gift of God’s grace; without that grace, it becomes a dead letter. What this seems to suggest is that the Bible, although having a literal sense, is dependent on the state of mind of the reader for that sense to emerge. This can lead, as Barth has pointed out (Barth 1967, 82–83), to a subjectivist position, where the meaning of the text depends on the reader. Luther’s main argument, however, was subjectivist in another sense. In proclaiming the principles of sola scriptura and sola fides, Luther placed the faith of the reader above the mediating function of tradition.
Many of the basic oppositions of hermeneutics between meaning and truth, tradition and experience, the familiar and the alien are already implicit in what we have seen to this point. Yet, with the possible exception of Augustine, a clearly developed theory of interpretation had not yet developed. The modern re-engagement with ancient texts generalized the problem of interpretation beyond scripture, and the Counter-Reformation attacks on Protestantism provoked reflection on the problem of interpretation as such. In this context, the possibility of misunderstanding became a fundamental concern. It is to this concern that Schleiermacher responded.
While as Grondin (1994, 63–64) points out, Schleiermacher can only claim that “hermeneutics as the art of understanding does not yet exist in a general manner” (Schleiermacher 1998, 5) because the work of earlier generations, such as Dannhauser and Chladenius, had been largely forgotten, nevertheless his work does mark the decisive step forward in the development of a general hermeneutics. Hermeneutics begins, for Schleiermacher, with the recognition of something as both foreign and comprehensible. All understanding functions between the extreme possibilities of absolute transparency and absolute opaqueness, between what is the common and general and the individual and unique. As such, the hermeneutical problem already arises face to face with a conversation partner. In understanding any utterance, whether oral or written, the interpreter is faced within the text not alone with aspects of generality and of individuality, but also with two distinct though related aspects of the object of interpretation: the grammatical structure of the text and the psychology of the author. Each text expresses the individuality of its author, but does so in terms which aim toward understanding and as such are rooted in what is common between author and reader. This process is always only partial. As Ben Vedder states: “A text is understood [according to Schleiermacher] if its irreducible (or insuperable) individuality … its partial incomprehensibility is recognized” (Vedder 1994, 100). Schleiermacher outlines a general theory of interpretation, while resisting any claims to special status of biblical hermeneutics. He denies that the presumed source of scripture in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit negates the individuality of the New Testament writers (Schleiermacher 1998, 52). Nevertheless, the concern with biblical and religious themes is never absent from Schleiermacher’s work, and he understands the “religious interest” as being at the origins of hermeneutics: “if the universal religious interest were to die the hermeneutic interest would also be lost” (Schleiermacher 1998, 157). It is important here to recognize that, for Schleiermacher, the failure to achieve complete knowledge demonstrates not only the finitude, but also the dependency of the interpreter. The human relation to things in thinking can never transcend relations of strangeness and commonality, the general and the individual, but this is rooted in two conflicting tendencies in the human being: toward individuality and separation on the one hand, and toward absorption and surrender to the whole on the other. As Vedder explains, “in the religious attitude, one sees revelation of the whole universe in every particular thing. … Religion means grasping the separate individual as part of the whole” (Vedder 1994, 102). Such a ‘grasping’ does not occur in thinking which in its aim for grounds always falls short, but rather in feeling in which the soul “is dissolved in the immediate feeling of the Infinite and Eternal” (Schleiermacher 1998, 16).
Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann respond in different ways to Schleiermacher’s legacy. Schleiermacher begins with a general hermeneutic of human expression (including religious expression) and bases the specific task of interpreting particular religious expressions, in particular, the Bible, on an account of religion as a universal human phenomenon. This project lay at the heart of the liberal theology of the nineteenth century. With his The Epistle to the Romans (first published in 1918 and then in a heavily revised second edition in 1921; English translation 1968), Barth sought to reverse this approach. For Barth, scripture should be understood not in relation to the human construct of religion but rather as that word which comes from God and seeks to grasp and transform the human being. As he puts it in a later text: “When God’s word is heard and proclaimed something takes place that for all our hermeneutical skill cannot be brought about by hermeneutical skill” (Barth 1969, 148). The goal of interpretation is that “the Word ought to be exposed in the words” (Barth 1968, 8). In reading St. Paul, he begins with the assumption that “he [Paul] is confronted with the same unmistakable and unmeasurable significance of that relation [of time and eternity] as I myself am confronted with, and that it is this situation which moulds his thought and its expression” (ibid., 10). Far from this being possible through general hermeneutical rules, such that the Bible should be read like any other book, the Bible gives us the guide for reading all books (ibid., 12). The hermeneutical principle here is that all texts should be read as witnesses to their subject matter, which “in order to be understood by us … wants not to be mastered by us but to lay hold of us” (Barth 1963, 471, see Vanhoozer 2006, 12).
Rudolph Bultmann in addressing the same issue states: “Interpretation of biblical writing is not subject to different conditions of understanding from those applying to any other literature” (Bultmann 1987, 153). The Bible is not a special case, but rather is itself subject to the interpretative rules which apply generally. Crucially, the interpreting of texts concerns to a greater or lesser extent the self-understanding of the reader. As Bultmann understands it, Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein supplies the conceptuality necessary to articulate such self-understanding. Interpretation is always existential because, in letting the text speak, the reader is allowing it to address her in her fundamental existential concerns. The “most ‘subjective’ interpretation is the ‘most objective,’ because the only person who is able to hear the claim of the text is the person who is moved by the question of his or her own existence” (ibid.). The interpretation of scripture aims at human existence as it is brought to expression in scripture. Scripture speaks directly to existence, but, like the mode in which any other literature speaks to existence, it can only be understood if there is a bond between the text and the interpreter. This requires presuppositions; if scripture is to be understood as the act of God, then the interpreter must bring with him presuppositions about God. “Unless our existence were moved (consciously or unconsciously) by the question about God … we would not be able to recognize God as God in any revelation (ibid., 154). The hermeneutical circle here precludes any account which begins—as Barth’s attempts to do—without religious presupposition.
While Barth sees general hermeneutics as deriving from the one text, the Bible, and Bultmann understands biblical scholarship in terms of generalizable hermeneutical rules, Gadamer seeks to specify the conditions for biblical interpretation. The context is the retrieval of the Pietist account of application as the third element of hermeneutics (along with understanding and interpretation) (see Gadamer 1990, 307). If a text is to be interpreted properly, Gadamer argues, it “must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way” (Gadamer 1990, 309). The paradigm cases here are legal and theological hermeneutics, so much so that Gadamer sets himself the task of “redefining the hermeneutics of the human sciences in terms of legal and theological hermeneutics” (Gadamer 1990, 310–311). In terms reminiscent of Barth, Gadamer speaks here of hermeneutics as service and as “subordinating ourselves to the text’s claim to dominate our minds” (ibid., 311). Gadamer, however, then seems to make the Bible into a special case. The presupposition of which Bultmann speaks, is one of faith, which is not universally valid, and is a regional presupposition immune from dialogical correction (Gadamer 1990, 331–332). In fact, theological hermeneutics is supplanted by legal hermeneutics as paradigmatic for application: while the judge’s capacity to supplement the law is understood as illustrating what occurs in all interpretation (ibid., 340), the preacher does not add anything new to the gospels (ibid. 330). This is based on a view of the Bible which ironically mirrors that of Barth, namely, as sovereign over all interpretations, and leads Gadamer to exclude the Bible from hermeneutics altogether (see Vanhoozer 2006, 16–17).
The problem of historical distance has not been at the forefront of this discussion to this point. In large part, this is due to the assumption that the Bible was supernaturally inspired, and the distance to the divine made any reference to historical distance insignificant. This is the case also for Schleiermacher, for whom the individuality of the writer was one which we encounter with our nearest conversation partner; the foreignness of historically or culturally distant authors was a matter of degree. Benedict de Spinoza in his Politico-theological Treatise argued that the biblical texts were not divinely inspired, but were rather a collection of documents written at different times and by different people (Spinoza 2007). He thereby laid the seeds for what would eventually become historical criticism of the Bible, which became dominant in the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, where the project of uncovering the “historical Jesus” was pursued by Strauss and Von Harnack. With respect to our question, I wish to highlight two different responses to this question, namely, those of Kierkegaard and Bultmann.
Kierkegaard raises in fundamental form the question of historical distance, and he does so in the context of the relation to Christ. The historicist assumption is that the testimony of those at first hand, the scriptures, namely, can be critically used as a source to reconstruct the past world in which the contemporaries of Christ witnessed historical events. The “disciple at second hand” then needs to overcome this historical distance through a process of reconstruction, in order to understand the scriptures. In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard argues that such a historical approach neglects the paradox of the incarnation, namely, that the eternal intersects with the temporal (Kierkegaard 1962, 59). This paradox is not itself subject to temporal distance. As such, while for the contemporary the “occasion” of revelation is the encounter with Christ and for the disciple at second hand is the testimony of contemporary witnesses, the same leap of faith is necessary (Kierkegaard 1962, 43). Essentially, this implies that the interpreter is confronted with “invisible letters behind every word in Holy Scripture … [reading]: go and do likewise” (Kierkegaard 1962a, 60). “Doing likewise” means loving your neighbor, and it is through following this rule of love that the interpreter can understand scripture correctly. There is a circle here whereby “scripture … everywhere speaks the love of God, and it is only by God’s love that one can thus rightly read it” (Polk 1997, 33). The circularity of love is a radical one because the love in question is the commanded love proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount and taught only by the scriptures themselves. As such, the leap of faith into the scriptures is fundamental.
Bultmann’s project of demythologization marks a radical response to historicism. Myth, for Bultmann, “talks about reality, but in an inadequate way” (Bultmann 2006, 248). “Reality” here needs to be understood in a double sense. In the first sense, it refers to that which is “perceived through objective representation” (ibid.). Such reality—most clearly articulated in natural science—demythologizes through its refusal of the working of supernatural powers. But the human being cannot without loss understand himself in the same manner. If he does, he “reduces his authentic, specific reality to the reality of the world” (ibid., 249). It is precisely this reduction which we find in historicism, for Bultmann. Understood in her existential reality, the human being is historical to the extent to which her decisions derive from, express, and fulfill her own self-understanding. An “existential interpretation” of history functions in terms of self-understanding (ibid., 250). For Bultmann both aspects of reality can be understood in terms of the distinction—taken from Heidegger—between authentic and inauthentic existence: while the latter reduces the human being to an object, and her actions into facts, the former understands the human in terms of her responsibility for her own self-understanding. The historian has to proceed in an objectifying manner and “cannot acknowledge that the context of an event is disrupted by the intervention of supernatural powers” (ibid., 252). Nonetheless, when faced with such accounts, in the Bible, for example, the historian must interpret them in relation to the human project of self-understanding. As he puts it, “demythologizing endeavours to bring forth the authentic intention of myth; namely the intention to speak of the authentic reality of man” (ibid., 253). In effect, Bultmann is claiming that mythological thinking objectifies that which needs to be spoken of in terms of faith. Critical historical study of the Bible is both necessary and limited: necessary in order to gain a greater understanding of the historical situation in which the books of the scriptures arose, limited in the sense that the objectively demonstrable events gain their meaning precisely where demonstration ends, namely, in being “affected by God’s activity” (ibid., 254).
The reductionism of historicist exegesis attempted to reconstruct meaning in texts without taking them at face value. The basic suspicion underlying such a procedure comes to fruition in the “three masters of suspicion” (Ricoeur): Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Although each of these thinkers had ambiguous relationships with historicism, they shared with it the view that claims to revealed truth could not be simply read on a surface level. All three masters of suspicion practice a depth hermeneutic, where the surface meaning of the text is understood in terms of a motivation, which is distorted in that text.
The masters of suspicion understood religion as a cultural phenomenon, and one which masks a deeper reality. In doing so, Nietzsche and Freud, in particular, developed a “reductive hermeneutic” combining a kind of philology and a kind of genealogy (Ricoeur 2004, 438): Their approach is philological in the sense that the text as it appears is understood as a palimpsest under the surface of which is written another text; this endeavor is also genealogical in re-ducing the written text back to an empty space from which it emerged. The supernatural is an empty space, which is related negatively to the real. That empty space is the space of the dead god, the god, which Ricoeur terms the onto-theological god, understood as the origin of all values. After the masters of suspicion, it is impossible to innocently submit to that god (ibid., 441–442). But it is precisely here that Ricoeur perceives a religious significance in atheism (ibid., 443–462). This significance consists in the destruction of the god of accusation, which is also the god of providential protection (ibid., 450–451), leaving a “tragic faith” of Job against the archaic law of retribution declared by Job’s friends (ibid., 459–460).
Ricoeur speaks here of a “post-critical faith” and in doing so retrieves a position very close to Bultmann’s. The hermeneutical task is to go through the process of suspicion and in doing so to unmask the ways in which the texts of the religious tradition disguise deeper fears, anxieties, and traumas. But the text is never exhausted by such a procedure, because it also, indeed essentially, has sense (sens). The French term sens means both sense and direction, and Ricoeur understands the sense of the text as its directedness toward a world which it opens up (Ricoeur 1981, 149). A post-critical faith is one which follows the direction pointed to by the text toward the world of the text (Ricoeur 1977, 28–32). In this Ricoeur is guided—no less than the masters of suspicion—by a project of emancipation, but one which he sees religious texts and symbols pointing toward meaning, rather than dissimulating it, in their eschatological promises. Only faith will follow such a promise, but it is a faith which has been demythologized and critiqued. For Ricoeur, this is not simply an option, but necessary if the hermeneutical task of interpretation is to be completed. As such, he sees the fundamental hermeneutical circle to be that of belief and understanding: “Believe in order to understand, understand in order to believe” (Ricoeur 1977, p. 28).
Since Origen, at least, the hermeneutical experience has been understood as an interplay of the event of meaning and the state of being of the interpreter. But while up to this point we have concentrated mostly on the meaning of texts, religious experience clearly has a wider scope. Ricoeur proposes a dialectical structure of religious experience around two poles, those of manifestation and proclamation (Ricoeur 1995). The distinction here is between a hermeneutics of language, centered around the word of God proclaimed paradigmatically in the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian Bible, and the Koran, and a phenomenology of the sacred, with its traits of overwhelming power, hierophany, ritual, and natural symbolism (ibid., 49–55). At the core of this opposition of proclamation and manifestation is a difference in the understanding of the relation of divine and world, whereby the divine calls for a separation from the world, such that the world appears as a secular domain over against the Word, or the cosmos appears as manifesting the sacred over against the profane world of the ordinary (see Tracy 1981, 202–218). A number of complex issues are pointed to here, in particular, the tension between a hermeneutics and a phenomenology of religion and the relation of religion to the secular.
Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (first published in 1917) emphasized the nonrational and preverbal experience of the sacred, what he terms the “numinous.” Otto’s account centers around the “wholly other” as manifest in the sacred; the way in which the numinous breaks with the ordinary but does so not through the proclamation of the Word, but through the appearance of a power which is neither predictable nor controllable through rational means (Otto 1950, 25–30). Despite this emphasis, Otto makes clear that rational and ethical categories are necessary to understand the sacred; his concern is to show that the sacred manifests itself in ways which transcend such rational categories. In our present context, we might say that the sacred transcends the hermeneutical, that is, that it surpasses that which can be articulated in verbal terms. It is precisely such nonverbal, or perhaps better preverbal nature of the sacred that Eliade emphasizes in distinguishing between the sacred and the profane. According to Eliade, anything can become sacred; sacredness is a new dimension which separates the sacred thing from itself: “The thing that becomes sacred is still separated in regard to itself, for it only becomes a hierophany at the moment of stopping to be a mere profane something at the moment of acquiring a new ‘dimension’ of sacredness” (Eliade 1958, 13). Hierophanies are apparent only in being interpreted as sacred. This is a complex mode of interpretation as that which appears as sacred also has a profane character: “the sacred manifest[s] itself in something profane” (ibid., 29). Furthermore, the sacred is itself ambivalent, meaning both holy and accursed (ibid., 15).
David Tracy points to the dialectical tension between such an account of manifestation of the sacred as hierophany and the hermeneutics of divine proclamation. He understands this tension in relation to degrees of participation: “When the dialectic of intensification of particularity releasing itself to a radical sense of participation predominates, the religious expression will be named ‘manifestation’; when the dialectic of intensification of particularity releasing itself to a sense of radical non-participation dominates, the religious expression will be named ‘proclamation’” (Tracy 1981, 203). Manifestation calls forth an experience of immersion in a sacred cosmos radically split from the ordinary, mundane, objects of everyday life, while proclamation is in the form of address, immediately setting up a relation of distance between the faithful recipient of that address and the divine. Tracy charts the dangers in each tendency when carried through in exclusion from the other. The tendency to stress proclamation leads to desacralization of the world, where the only connection to the divine becomes the “liberating word” which reveals a hidden God (ibid., 213), leading to “a Christianity that has lost its roots in the human experience of God’s manifesting a revealing presence in all creation” (ibid., 215). The tendency to stress manifestation risks losing the ethical and historical sense of a message directed not toward a mystical-aesthetic absorption in the whole, but an ethical call to responsibility (ibid., 208–209).
The hermeneutics of religion continues to be a fundamental philosophical and theological concern. Tracy (1981) and Jeanrond (1988; 1994) argue that theology is fundamentally a hermeneutical pursuit. Kearney (2001; 2010) has in recent years developed a hermeneutical approach to the question of god and religion in what he terms an anatheism—a “return to god after god”. Vattimo (1997) argues for a weak hermeneutics rooted in a kenotic interpretation of Christianity. In each case, a hermeneutics and religious phenomena inform each other in the development of a hermeneutics of religion and an exploration of the religious origins of hermeneutics.