Omnia in Christo
I
Henri de Lubac and the Four Senses of Scripture
Interpreting Scripture using the four senses is a Catholic method of Bible reading that comes to us from the early Church. Practiced continually for over a millennium, the method underwent many developments, and some significant aberrations, until its eventual erosion around the time of the Reformation and its near-abandonment by the mid-twentieth century. Understanding the theology of the four senses of Scripture permits us to see how this method was the mainspring of so many Patristic commentaries, saints’ homilies, and Medieval theological treatises. Simultaneously historical and devotional, the four senses of Scripture formerly constituted the ground upon which Biblical interpretation, systematic theology, spirituality, and the private prayerful reading of Scripture (lectio divina) were unified. As such, the method is part of the precious patrimony of Catholic culture that tradition offers us as a way to read the Sacred Pages. The French Jesuit scholar, Henri de Lubac, dedicated a major part of his scholarly work to the recovery of the theology of the spiritual senses. From his 1950 work, History and Spirit, to the landmark four-volume Medieval Exegesis, to his final twovolume Spiritual Posterity, de Lubac painstakingly traced the history of the spiritual senses from its Biblical foundations, to its development amongst the Church Fathers, to its Medieval zenith, and its eventual dissolution in the modern period. De Lubac found the near abandonment of the four senses of Scripture in favor of the exclusive use of the historical-critical method a perilous tendency of twentiethcentury Catholic theology. As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you’ve got, ‘till it’s gone.” Moreover, like some well-worn items of Catholic practice, familiarity sometimes breeds contempt, or at least presumptuousness. De Lubac found that eighteenth and nineteenth century usage of the spiritual senses had become impoverished, often perfunctory or vestigial, a hat-tip toward a tradition that had become poorly understood even by its Catholic practitioners, a mere caricature of its former glory. In this light, its abandonment was understandable, but de Lubac believed that ressourcement (a return to the sources of the tradition) could revitalize the method, and by extension, cure many of the aberrant ways of interpreting the Bible that had arisen since the Reformation. For de Lubac, the four senses also proffered the best way to prevent the many good findings of contemporary historical-critical interpretation from remaining spiritually sterile. The four senses of Scripture are the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. The literal sense is foundational to the latter three senses, which together are called the “spiritual senses” of Scripture. I’d like to begin by giving a brief overview of each sense, and how they work together as a whole.
Prof. Eric Jenislawski
The literal sense, sometimes called the historical sense, has seen tremendous development in the past 150 years of Catholic Biblical interpretation. It is perhaps the most complicated sense of the four, but our consolation here is that it is also the most familiar. In reading the literal sense of Scripture, we employ many of the same skills we bring to the reading of other ancient texts. The renewed study of ancient languages has greatly aided our insight into the grammatical meaning of the text. Archeology and comparative religion have advanced our understanding of the historical context of the text and its original audience. Form-criticism, which studies the many genres of Biblical writing, is also essential to avoiding misunderstanding what the text intends to convey. An historical account, a poem, a proverb, and an apostolic epistle cannot all be read in the same way, because their purposes and literary conventions of each genre are different. A good portion of Sacred Scripture consists of historical narrative, therefore, one major job of the literal sense is to exposit for us the narrative meaning of Scripture: what happened, and more importantly, why. No one writes history as an idle exposition of disconnected facts. The selection of what is told, and how it is told, is all part of the author’s attempt to describe the meaning of history: not only what happened but its relevance for the reader as well. The Biblical narrative of history is sometimes called “salvation history:” the record of how God has acted in history to redeem man from the sad legacy of sin and to restore him to an upright state fitting for eternal life with God in heaven. As Christian readers, we find the thesis statement to world history in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Savior of mankind. An important verse of Scripture interpreting Scripture in this regard is the beginning of the Letter to the Hebrews: In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. We find it echoed in many of Paul’s writings, such as Galatians 3 or Colossians 1. The historical sense of Sacred Scripture therefore has a Messianic trajectory: it prepares for the coming of Christ as the central moment of God’s salvation history. The historical sense prepares the way for Christ sometimes by promise, sometimes by prophecy, and sometimes by prefiguration. Some of these preparations are plainer in hindsight, which, as they say, is “20/20.” We may define the allegorical sense as the recognition that one historical event in Scripture prefigures that for which it prepares, such as when we say that David and his kingship prefigures that of Christ.... This excerpt is from a public lecture delivered by Prof. Jenislawski, and summarizes some of the research of his doctoral dissertation, A Comparative Study of the Hermeneutics of Henri de Lubac and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Jenislawski is the Chairman of Christendom’s Theology Department and teaches courses in Sacred Scripture, Revelation, and Christology. He recently completed his dissertation concerning Biblical interpretation at The Catholic University of America. He has earned degrees in Philosophy and Theology at Yale College and Yale Divinity School in New Haven, CT. Summer 2012
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