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)