Quadruple sense of writing

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With a fourfold sense of Scripture (lat. Quatuor sensus scripturae ) is the predominant approach of the Christian Bible - interpretation of the early church to the late Middle Ages called. Bible passages can therefore not only be understood literally as concrete historical statements, but can also be read as allegorical statements about the reality of faith, morally as instructions for the believer or anagogically as an expression of hope . Luther and other reformers in the early modern period turned away from this view.

history

The allegorical textual interpretation, which was first used on the Christian side by Paul ( Gal 4,24  EU ) and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, was a method of exegesis widespread in antiquity . Philo of Alexandria used it extensively for the Jewish exegesis of the Torah , and it was also popular in the secular area, for example in the interpretation of Homeric epics . In early church times it was developed as a possible multiple sense of writing, especially by Origen (about 185-254) in the 3rd century, although it has been contested since then (as early as by Basil the Great , John Chrysostom and the Antiochene school , which the literary-historical sense of the Bible texts emphasized).

According to the classical philological school in Alexandria, Origen set up the theory of the "multiple sense of writing" for the Bible. The church fathers developed the doctrine of the "fourfold sense of scripture". As a result, a purely literary-philological analysis of the text was not enough. This historical sense was sufficient for the simple believer, but Bible exegesis should also elevate the spiritual sense for the more skilled and the spiritual-spiritual sense should be established for the perfect.

This three-step somatic - psychic - pneumatic exegesis was then expanded by Johannes Cassianus in the 5th century to the theory of the fourfold sense of writing, which was formative for the entire Middle Ages. Similar to the Jewish tradition of biblical interpretation (see PaRDeS ), there is now a three-step step to historical-literal exegesis, which is based on the scheme of faith-love-hope .

  • Literal sense = literal, historical interpretation
  • Typological sense (interpretation “in faith”) = dogmatic-theological interpretation
  • Tropological sense (interpretation “in love”) = moral level of meaning, present reality of an individual soul
  • Anagogical sense (interpretation “in hope”) = eschatological interpretation of the end of time

Cassian gives four meanings of Jerusalem as an example of the fourfold sense of writing . So Jerusalem stands for

The doctrine of the fourfold sense of writing, which is represented today again in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (109–119), is summarized in a medieval distich (the first two lines form a hexameter , the second pair of lines a pentameter ):

Littera gesta docet; The letter teaches the events
quid credas, allegoria; what you have to believe, the allegory,
moralis, quid agas; the moral of what you have to do
quo tendas, anagogia. where you should strive, the anagogue (guide up).

See also

literature

  • Christoph Bellot: On the theory and tradition of allegory in the Middle Ages, Diss. Phil. Cologne 1996.
  • Ernst von Dobschütz : On the fourfold sense of writing. The story of a theory . In: Harnack Honor. Contributions to church history to her teacher Adolf von Harnack on his seventieth birthday (May 7, 1921) made by a number of his students . Hinrichs, Leipzig 1921, pp. 1-13.
  • Henri de Lubac : Typology, Allegory, Spiritual Sense - Studies on the History of Christian Interpretation of Scripture, Theologia Romanica 23, Freiburg 1999.
  • Friedrich Ohly : On the spiritual sense of the word in the Middle Ages . in: Journal for German Antiquity and German Literature 89, 1958/59, ISSN  0044-2518 , pp. 1–23, (Also: Special edition: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1966, ( Libelli 218, ZDB -ID 846543-5 )).
  • Henning Graf Reventlow : Epochs of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 2: From Late Antiquity to the End of the Middle Ages, Munich 1994.
  • Meinolf Schumacher : Introduction to the German literature of the Middle Ages . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2010, ISBN 978-3-534-19603-6 , pp. 35–39: From the multiple sense of writing .
  • Hans-Jörg Spitz: The metaphor of the spiritual sense of writing - A contribution to the allegorical interpretation of the Bible of the first Christian millennium, Munich 1972.
  • Mathias Feldges: Grimmelshausen's «Landstörtzerin Courasche». An interpretation according to the method of the fourfold sense of writing , Bern 1969.
  • Mathias Feldges: An example for the survival of medieval thought structures in the Baroque period , in: Wirkendes Wort 20, 1970, pp. 258–71.

Individual evidence

  1. See Strecker, Georg / Schnelle Udo: Introduction to New Testament Exegesis, Göttingen 1983, p. 125.
  2. Cf. Cassianus, coll. 14,8 (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 13, p. 404). The German translation of the decisive passage in the library of the church fathers, 1st series, vol. 59, Kempten 1879, p. 105, reads: “But contemplation is divided into two parts, namely (sic) into historical interpretation and into spiritual understanding . [...] But the types of spiritual knowledge are: the tropology, the allegory, the anagogue. ” Cassianus, collationes in the BKL .
  3. See Peter Walter, "Schriftsinne", in: Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, Vol. 9, Herder, reviewed edition of the 3rd edition Freiburg. et al. 2009, col. 268-269.
  4. ^ Catechism of the Catholic Church n.118 - www.vatican.va