The literal sense of Christian scripture: Redefinition and revolution

The conventional assumption of early Christian interpreters that the Bible is a cryptic document, the true sense of which lies deep beneath its surface, generated intensive investigations into the relationship between the “literal” and “spiritual” senses of the sacred text. This dichotomy has been a commonplace in Christian hermeneutical thinking from late antiquity well into the modern period. Yet, as outlined in the current chapter, this apparent continuity belies critical changes that occurred from the medieval period onward in the ways that the literal sense was defined in relation to the spiritual sense. This shift precipitated an increasing valuation of the literal sense that became more pronounced in the Reformation and eventually had a substantial impact on literary theory and interpretation at large. [Ed.] In the movement of a civilization sometimes there are revolutions that are not clearly registered in the official records. They are not dramatically announced in elaborate manifestos, nor are they widely recognized in conventional histories. They operate not by directly overturning the institutions of a civilization but by subtly changing its idioms, transfiguring them from the inside, so that the civilization that they transform comes to speak an altered language almost without realizing it. The historical and conceptual change discussed in this chapter is a revolution of that kind. It is a revolution in the way Christian civilization defines the primal sense of its foundational text. The revolution acquires its first systematic expression in the late medieval period. But in both its intellectual origins and its eventual consequences, it extends far beyond the Christian Middle Ages. In the end, it helps to shape the development of modern approaches to textual signification at large. The revolution referred to here is an extended attempt to reconceive the “literal” sense of Christian scripture. This change is a complex process, which has yet to receive adequate clarification in contemporary scholarship. This chapter will examine the critical medieval turn itself while situating it in changing approaches to the literal sense from antiquity to the modern era. The discussion of this process here remains only a partial sketch, concentrating on certain theoretical expressions of the change at formative stages of its development. At the close of this chapter a few thoughts will be offered about some of the provocative implications of the change outside the treatment of Christian scripture.