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Cosmos Hermeneutics Science and Religion Scripture Song of Songs Theological Hermeneutics

Gregory of Nyssa on the Trees in the Garden

I’m auditing a patristics class at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.  This week we’re reading some of Gregory of Nyssa’s writings. Gregory was Bishop of Nyssa in the Fourth Century, and is one of the great Fathers of the Church.

Among other things, we read the Prologue from Gregory’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, in which he defends his allegorical method of interpreting the Song.  Biblical scholars and theologians today will not be entirely comfortable with allegorizing, but I think Gregory’s general comments are helpful in our age of polarization between rigid literalism and “scientific” critical exegesis:

“[w]e must pass to a spiritual and intelligent investigation of scripture so that considerations of the merely human element might be changed into something perceived by the mind once the more fleshly sense of the words has been shaken off like dust.”

It’s possible to misread this statement to suggest that the literal sense doesn’t matter.  But I don’t think that’s what Gregory means.  He’s saying, rather, that interpretation can’t stop at the literal sense, because at that level the text is merely human.

Gregory presents a number of examples in which scripture’s “literal” sense would in fact render it unintelligible. Such examples, he says, “should serve to remind us of the necessity of searching the divine words, of reading them, and of tracing in every way possible how something more sublime might be found which leads us to that which is divine and incorporeal instead of the literal sense.”

Again, the phrase “instead of” here seems jarring.  Yet it is not that the literal sense is irrelevant.  It is that careful study of the literal sense yields insights into the spiritual sense.

The most interesting of Gregory’s examples is his discussion of the two trees in the Garden of Eden:

[H]ow is it possible that there are two trees in the middle of paradise, one of salvation and the other of destruction[?]  For the exact center as in the drawing of a circle has only one point.  However, if another center is somehow placed beside or added to that first one, it is necessary that another circle be added for that center so that the former one is no longer in the middle.

He continues,

There was only one paradise.  How, then, does that text say that each tree is to be considered separately while both are in the middle?  And the text, which reveals that all of God’s works are exceedingly beautiful, implies the deadly tree is different from God’s.  How is this so?  Unless a person contemplates that truth through philosophy, what the text says here will be either inconsistent or a fable.  (Emphasis added.)

Note that Gregory lived long before the our scientific age, and long before historical-critical investigation of the Biblical texts.  We live after both the natural sciences and Biblical scholarship have demonstrated that texts such as Genesis 2 cannot be read simply as “literal” history or science.  But this is no more a problem for us than it was for Gregory, if we understand, as he did, that taking in the text’s literal sense is only the very start of interpretation.

Yet, a note to be fair:  not all ancient interpreters agreed.  Indeed, disagreements were often sharp.  Then, as now, there were arguments between allegorizers and literalists.  Here, for example, is another excerpt we were assigned to read, from Theodore of Mopsuestia, Bishop of Mopsuestia in the Fourth Century, in his Commentary on Galatians:

Those people [the allegorizers], however, turn it all into the contrary, as if the entire historical account of divine Scripture differed in no way from dreams in the night.  When they start expounding divine Scripture ‘spiritually’ — ‘spiritual interpretation’ is the name they like to give to their folly — they claim that Adam is not Adam, paradise is not paradise, the serpent is not the serpent.  I should like to tell them this:  If they make history serve their own ends, they will have no history left.

Everything old is new again!  And we were also given an interpretive article by Margaret Mitchell of the University of Chicago, which notes that the “Alexandrine” allegorizers and “Antiochene” literalists were not so neatly polarized as some might think:  she notes that both Alexandrine and Antiochene exegesis often “was a tool for enacting particular ecclesiastical, theological, and social agendas.”  Yes, everything old is new again!

So what might we learn?  Perhaps that there are many ways of reading, and the interpretive task never ends.

(Image credit:  Wikimedia Commons)

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Hermeneutics Historical Theology Song of Songs Spirituality Theological Hermeneutics

A Prayer for Study of Song of Songs: William of St. Thierry

Here is a wonderful prayer from William of St. Thierry, which is a prelude to his study of the Song of Songs.  This is from The Church’s Bible Commentary.

As we approach the epithalamium, the marriage song, the song of the Bridegroom and the Bride, to read and weigh your work, we call upon you, O Spirit of holiness. We want you to fill us with your love, O love, so that we may understand love’s song — so that we too may be made in some degree participants in the dialogue of the holy Bridegroom and the Bride; and so that what we read about may come to pass within us.  For where it is a question of the soul’s affections, one does not easily understand what is said unless one is touched by similar feelings.  Turn us then to yourself, O holy Spirit, holy Paraclete, holy Comforter; comfort the poverty of our solitude, which seeks no solace apart from you; illumine and enliven the desire of the suppliant, that it may become delight.  Come, that we may love in truth, that whatever we think or say may proceed out of the fount of your love.  Let the Song of your love be so read by us that it may set fire to love itself within us; and let love itself be for us the interpreter of your Song.

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Hermeneutics Historical Theology Song of Songs Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Gregory the Great: On Scripture (Song of Songs)

Here’s a wonderful quote from Gregory the Great on the nature of scripture.  He is commenting on the Song of Songs — a text I’m studying for some small group settings and adult classes I’m leading.  This was reproduced in the wonderful The Church’s Bible Commentary on Song of Songs.  Notice that, for Gregory — as for all the Church Fathers —  discerning the meaning of scripture was a spiritual exercise that involved drawing out the divine meaning from the human words.

For it is the same with the words and meanings of sacred Scripture as it is with the colors and subjects of a painting; and anyone who is so intent upon the colors in the painting that he ignores the real things it portrays is immeasurably silly.  For if we embrace the words, which are spoken externally, and disregard their meanings, as if knowing nothing of things that are portrayed, we are clinging to mere colors.  “The letter kills,” it is writte, “but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6).  For the letter covers the spirit in the same way that the husk conceals the grain.  The husks, however, are food for beasts of burden; it is the grain that feeds human beings.  Whoever, then, makes use of human reason casts away the husks that belong to beasts of burden and hastens to consume the grain of the spirit.

To be sure, it serves a good purpose for mysteries to be hidden by the cloak of the letter, seeing that wisdom that has been sought after and pursued is savored the more for that….

Hence when we attend to words that are employed in human intercourse, we ought to stand as it were outside our humanity, lest, if we take in what is said on the human level, we detect nothing of the divinity that belongs to the things we are meant to hear….

For Scripture is a sort of sacred mountian from which the Lord comes within our hearts to creat understanding.  This is the mountian of which the prophet says, “God shall come from Lebanon, and the holy one from the dense and overclouded mountain” (Hab. 3:3).  The mountain is dense with the thoughts it contains and “overclouded” with allegories.  One must be aware, however, that we are instructed, when the voice of the Lord sounds on the mountain, to wash our clothing and be purified of every fleshly pollution, if we are hurrying to come to the mountain.  Indeed, it is written that if a wild beast should touch the mountain, it would be stoned (Heb. 12:20).  Now a beast touches the mountain when people given over to irrational urges hasten toward the height of sacred Scripture do not understand it as they ought, but irrationally bend their understanding of it to the service of their own pleasure.