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.