What the first exegetes understood was that, at that point, the Scrip-tures were in the position of saying everything, and everything was too much, for any exegesis looks for a translatable Truth. The Church is the divine institution supposed to explain the truth, to make it understand-able, even to the illiterate. The symbolic nature of the Books had thus to be tamed and reduced, in the same way in which the mystic vision of the detonator has to be tamed by its elaborator.
The symbolic mode had to be transformed into the allegorical one. The Scriptures potentially had every possible meaning, but in fact their reading was susceptible to being governed by a code, and the senses of the text had to be reduced to a manageable format. That is why the first Fathers proposed the theory of the allegorical senses. In the beginning the senses were three: literal, moral or psychic, mystic or pneumatic.
According to Origenes, the moral sense held also for the unfaithful and was thus immediately dependent on the literal one. Later, the senses became four (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical). As Dante explained in the Epistula XIII (but the theory is already fully elaborated by Bede in the seventh century), given a verse such as in exitu Israel de Aegypto, “if we look at the letter it means the exodus of the sons of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if we look to the allegory it means our redemption through Christ; if we look at the moral sense it means the conversion of the soul from the misery of sin to the state of grace; if we look at the mystical sense it means the departure of the sanctified spirit from the servitude of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory.”
With this further elaboration, the moral sense can be understood only through the mediation of the allegorical one, and is attainable only by the faithful ones. The whole medieval tradition was elaborating upon this theme, which can be summarized through the line of Nicholas of Lyra: Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia. (But the same formulation appears in many other authors; for an impressive survey of all these theories, see De Lubac 1959.)
The theory of the four senses provided a sort of guarantee for the correct decoding of the Books. But the Patristic and Scholastic mind could never avoid the feeling of the inexhaustible profundity of the Scriptures, frequently compared to a forest or to an ocean. According to Saint Jerome they are an infinita sensuum sylva (Ep. 64.21) and an “oceanum mysteriosum Dei, ut sic loquar labyrinthum” (In Gen. 9.1). Origenes speaks of a “latissima sylva” (In Ez. 4) or of a sea where, if we enter with a small boat, our mind is caught by fear and we are sub-merged by its whirls (In Gen. 9.1).
Gilbert of Stanford tries to show how many senses can be found in the rapids of the divine discourse:
Scriptura Sacra, morem rapidissimi fluminis tenens, sic humanarum men-tium profunda replet, ut semper exundet; sic haurientes satiat, ut in-hexausta permaneat. Profluunt ex ea spiritualium sensuum gurgites abun-dantes, et transeuntibus aliis, alia surgunt: immo, non transeuntibus, quia sapientia immortalis est; sed, emergentibus et decorem suum ostendentibus aliis, alii non deficientibus succedunt sed manentes subsequuntur; ut unus-quisque pro modo capacitatis suae in ea reperiat unde se copiose reficiat et aliis unde se fortiter exercent derelinquat. (In Cant. 20.225)
Which is to say that, even though the senses of the Scriptures are infi-nite, none of them annuls the others, each increasingly enriching this immense storage of meanings, where everybody can find what he is able to find according to his interpretive capabilities.
The metaphor of the ocean or of the forest alluded to the symbolic structure of the Books, and this symbolic structure was the continual challenge to their allegorical interpretability.
Either the Books had infi-nite readings (therefore they were ambiguous expression correlated to the content nebula of all possible archetypes) or they had only the four canonical ones. But, if the four senses were coded, there was no further possibility of interpreting the Books, therefore of exploiting their admir-able profundity. The problem was how to reconcile these two trends, so that it was possible to read them, continually discovering in their pages, if not new things, at least the same and everlasting truth rephrased in ever new ways: non nova sed nove, no new things but the same things increasingly retold in a new way.
The early Christian theology had then to find a way of controlling (by an allegorical code) the free interpretation of the (symbolic and uncoded) nature of the Books. A rather oxymoric situation, indeed. At this point the topological model able to represent this situation should be even more complex (perhaps a Moebius’ Ring), since the only authority that could establish the right way of interpreting the Books was the Church, founded upon the Tradition; but the Tradition was represented exactly by the series of the ‘good’ interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. In other words, the Tradition draws its right to control the interpretation of the Books from the interpretation of the Books. Quis custodiet custodes? How can the authority legitimate the interpretation, since the authority itself is legitimated by the interpretation?
This question had no answer; no theory of types or of metalanguage was elaborated to legitimate the circle of hermeneutic legitimation (no theory of hermeneutic legitimation can be indeed legitimate if not by the very process of hermeneutic reading). At the origins of the hermeneutic practice, there is a circle; it does not matter how holy or how vicious.
The only possible answer to this question was a practical one: the rules for good interpretation were provided by the gatekeepers of the orthodoxy, and the gatekeepers of the orthodoxy were the winners (in terms of political and cultural power) of the struggle to impose their own interpretation. Such a rule also holds for a more secular hermeneutics: the text will tell the truth insofar as the reader has the rhetorical power to make it speak. And the reader will be sure to have seen right insofar as he has seen —in the text —his own image. The same, albeit less secu-lar, procedure held for the interpretive practice in the Jewish mysticism: “The literal meaning is preserved, but merely as the gate through which the mystic passes, a gate, however, which he opens up to himself over and over again. The Zohar expresses this attitude of the mystic very succinctly when, in a memorable exegesis of Genesis 12:12., God’s words to Abraham, Lekh lekha, are taken not only in their literal meaning, ‘Get thee out’, that is, they are not interpreted as referring only to God’s command to Abraham to go out into the world, but are also read with mystical literalness as ‘Go to thee’, that is, to thine own self” (Scholem i960; Eng. tr., p. 15). We feel here, preechoed, the Freudian maxim, as reread by Lacan: Wo Es war, soil Ich werden.
The whole history of medieval exegesis is the story of the establishing and, at the same time, of the fair challenging of exegetical auctoritates. First of all, and from the time of Augustine, it was discovered that, if the Books always tell something Other, they do it not only by the words they use but also through the facts they tell about. The allegory is not only in verbis but also in factis. The problem was how to assign an allegorical value to facts, that is, to the furniture of the existing world, to animals, to plants, to stones, to actions, to gestures, and so on. In De Doctrina Christiana Augustine decides that, in order to understand the Scriptures, the exegete must know physics, geography, botany, mineralogy. Thus the new Christian civilization accepts and introduces (by further and further reelaborations) into the interpretive circle, that is, into its own growing encyclopedia, all the knowledge of classic civilization, as it was inherited by the late Roman culture, under the form of a syncretistic encyclopedia. This is the origin of the acceptance of the Hellenistic Physiologus and of the successive production of herbaries, bestiaries, lapidaries, Imagines, and Specula Mundi.
The main characteristics of these texts are the following:
(a) Since every visible entity has an allegorical meaning, the world creatures are not described according to their empirical properties, but according to those properties that display some analogy with the content they are supposed to represent. So the lion is described as an animal which cancels with its tail the traces of its passage in order to deceive its hunters simply because he must possess this property to function as the image of Christ deleting the traces of human sin by His incarnation,
(b) Whether because of the growth of a hallucinatory imagination or because of a symbolic temptation challenging the rights of the allegorical coding, the properties of these creatures are frequently contradictory, so that every item of the medieval encyclopedia can acquire alternative meanings: the lion is at the same time the figure of Christ and the figure of the Devil because of its hideous jaws.
How can an interpreter be sure that in a given context the lion stands for Christ and not for the Devil? The al-. legorical code is open, so as to become a symbolic matrix where the meanings are, if not nebulous, at least manifold. The medieval solution is that a preceding auctoritas should have already established the ‘good’ contextual selections: once again the vicious hermeneutic circle. The, medieval interpreter looks continually for good authorities, knowing at the same time
