Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

Main points from Adams's Introduction:

• Beginning of Christian hermeneutics in methods of Philo Judaeus (1st c. AD), adopted by Origen, Clement, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory
• fourfold interpretive system, origins in 5th c. AD, world as "symbol subject to interpretation as the work of God"
• Aquinas claimed system applicable only to Scripture (Dante extends it to secular writings in his letter to Can Grande della Scala)
• "spiritual truths are properly and naturally taught by figures taken from corporeal things"
• veiling of truth as "beneficial exercise for the mind" (cf. contrary opinion of Boethius
• two fold system" historical-literal and spiritual levels of meaning
• division of the spiritual into allegorical, moral, and anagogical
• possibility of discovering multiple meanings in literary works
• influence on Romantic critics (Coleridge, Carlyle), Nortrhop Frye (p. 116)

• Ninth and Tenth articles of inquiry: Issues of use of metaphors and similes and of multiple meanings in sacred doctrine
• "I have multiplied visions, and have used similitudes by the ministry of the prophets" (Osee 11:10); equating of similitudes and metaphors, hence scriptural support for use of metaphors; "it is befitting Holy Scripture to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things"
• man acquires knowledge through the senses; "we cannot be enlightened by the divine rays except they be hidden within the covering of many sacred veils" (pseudo-Dionysus, Of the Celestial Hierarchy, I.2, 4th or 5th c. AD)
• making spiritual truths accessible even to the "simple"; "it is natural to man to be pleased with representations" [cf Aristotle, "pleasure felt in things imitated," pleasure from learning through imitative representations, Poetics IV.2-5, p.51]
• metaphors necessary and useful in sacred doctrine [cf. Horace, Art of Poetry, ll. 333-347, p. 72]; sensible imagery raises minds to "knowledge of intelligible truths" (p. 117); "the very hiding of truth in figures is useful for the exercise of thoughtful minds"
• "give not that which is holy to dogs" (Matthew 7:6), way of hiding divine truths from the unworthy; use of less noble vehicles for communication of higher truths as means of emphasizing the problems of literalistic understanding and attachment to physical things;
• indirect way of approaching knowledge of God, "for what he is not is clearer to us than what he is"
• Augustine: fourfold division of Old Testament: history, etiology, analogy, allegory (Of the Value of Belief III)
• Gregory: "Holy Spirit by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery" (Precepts/Moralia, XX.1)
• "the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification"; first level of signification: historical or literal, "words signify things"
• "that signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense"; threefold division of spiritual sense;
• Old Testament as figure for the New (St. Paul, Hebrews 10:1); pseudo-Dionysus "the New Law itself is a figure of future glory" (Of Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, V.2); "so far as the things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law, there is allegorical sense";
• moral sense: "signs of what we ought to do"
• anagogical sense: "what relates to eternal glory"
• God as author of holy scripture, in one act comprehends all things, hence multiplicity of meanings in intended literal sense (p. 118); history (simple account of events), etiology (assignment of causes) and analogy (correspondence of truth of different scriptures) belong to the literal sense, allegory to the spiritual
• Hugh of St. Victor: three senses (historical, allegorical and tropological (Of the Sacraments I.4 and Of Scriptures and Sacred Writers, 3) (the anagogical included in the allegorical); parabolical sense is part of literal, intended meaning, "nor is the figure itself, but that which is figured, the literal sense"; "nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense of Holy Scripture" (p. 119)