Yesterday, we looked at the tendency to garble the meaning of “literal” when discussing religious texts (above all, Scripture). So I thought it a good time to introduce (or refresh) my readers on how the Catholic tradition understand that sense of Scripture it calls the Literal Sense.
What follows over the next few days is an excerpt from my book MAKING SENSES OUT OF SCRIPTURE: READING THE BIBLE AS THE FIRST CHRISTIANS DID. The book looks at what the Church calls the Four Senses of Scripture (Literal, Allegorical, Moral, and Anagogical).
The Literal Sense, which we will focus on here is the basis of all the other senses of Scripture, but not the sole sense. It pertains, as we shall see, to what the human author intends to assert, the way he is trying to assert it, and what is incidental to what he is asserting.
The Allegorical Sense pertains to what is hidden in the text concerning Christ.
The Moral Sense pertains to how we are to obey Christ in our moral lives.
The Anagogical Sense pertains to our destiny in Christ (that is, Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell).
If you want to learn more about the other senses (and about where the Church gets this notion of the Four Senses in the first place), see MAKING SENSES OUT OF SCRIPTURE.
Meanwhile, here is the first bit of the chapter on the Literal Sense of Scripture:
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The Literal Sense of Scripture
I meant what I said and I said what I meant .… An elephant’s faithful one hundred per cent!
– Dr. Seuss
What is the literal sense of Scripture? The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 116) describes it this way:
The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.”[1]
In other words, the literal sense of Scripture is that meaning which was intended by the human author and which his words convey when he “meant what he said and said what he meant.” Thus, when Matthew tells us “Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king” (Matthew 2:1) his literal meaning, in Greek, and allowing for idiom, peculiarities of Hebraic expression, cultural differences, wind shear, curvature of the earth and expansion of the universe is, “Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king.” Similarly, when Luke records Jesus saying, “Love your enemies” he may mean a great number of things, but one thing we can be most sure he means is, “Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies.'”
As the passage from the Catechism above indicates, it is absolutely vital, before all else, to know the literal sense of a given passage of Scripture for the same reason that it is absolutely vital that a well-constructed house have a solid foundation. All the other senses of Scripture depend upon understanding the literal sense first. Given that, Pope Pius XII says:
It is the duty of the exegete to lay hold, so to speak, with the greatest care and reverence of the very least expressions which, under the inspiration of the Divine Spirit, have flowed from the pen of the sacred writer, so as to arrive at a deeper and fuller knowledge of his meaning.”[2]
Likewise, the Catechism (no. 109) tells us:
In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.
All this is smooth sailing and seems fairly obvious. Nonetheless, we must keep in mind that the literal sense of Scripture is often much trickier to discern than we might realize. The reasons for this are numerous. Sometimes, for instance, the problem may lie with a text that is obscure even in the original language. Other times, the problem may lie in the difficulty of translating an idea from Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek into another language. Still other times, the problem lies with us as readers being unable to cope with some difficulty, slang term, alien mode of expression, cultural difference, or theological concept which is foreign to our own time and culture. (Recall, for instance, the story we discussed in Chapter 3 of Abraham “cutting a covenant” with God. Without some background as to the meaning of that strange ritual, many modern readers would simply be at sea when they read that text.) Misunderstandings of the literal sense of Scripture therefore can and do abound. The task of the serious student of Scripture is to reduce those misunderstandings as much as possible and to come to a serious and humble encounter with what Scripture is actually saying.
To do this, it is well for the student of Scripture to be forearmed against the common fallacies that can hinder the study of the Bible. Perhaps the most mysterious and widespread of those fallacies is the great, fat, well-swilled, nonsensical superstition that Scripture ought always to be “simple.” To be sure, there are passages in Scripture that are clear and lucid and speak directly to the heart and soul. One does not need to be a rocket scientist to derive benefit from Psalm 23 or to appreciate the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25. Jesus himself spent little time in the company of scribes and scholars (except to give them a well-deserved kick in the pants when they deluded themselves that they were Something Special because of their knowledge [Matthew 23]). But the mere fact that Jesus rebuked intellectuals for being prideful about their learning is not an especially good argument for becoming prideful about our ignorance.
Sad to say though, some of us Christians are. We fall prey to the idea that there is something meritorious about not wanting to do the hard work of finding out what a biblical author was actually talking about. Some go so far as to treat Scripture as a sort of holy Ouija board, asking it questions about their finances or romances and then sticking their finger on to a page at random and “interpreting” whatever verse pops up as “the word of God to me.” Others, only slightly more sophisticated, take passages wildly out of context or radically misunderstand words and then declare, “This is what the Bible means to me and I have the Holy Spirit too.” As an example of this, one television evangelist I saw, reading the King James Version of the story of the widow at the Temple whom Jesus commended for “giving out of her want” (Luke 21:1-4) emphatically declared that this verse meant she gave in order to get a husband (because that’s what the widow would want, doncha know). The TV evangelist was completely unaware of—and utterly uninterested in—the fact that “want” meant to the King James Version translators what the word “lack” or “poverty” means today. In short, Jesus actually commended the woman for her generosity with the little she had to give, not for attempting to buy favors from God by donating sufficient quantities to religious “ministries” such as the TV evangelist’s. The TV evangelist’s exegesis of the passage was not only wrong, it was destructive.
All this sort of thing, which is nearly always palmed off as “letting the Spirit speak to me directly without the interference of man” is, at best, simple laziness and is particularly liable (as the case of our TV evangelist shows) to the temptation to torture Scripture until it says what we want to hear. The idea “Me ‘n’ My Bible are all I need” is often based on the complete fiction that we are in the exact same circumstances as the simple fisherfolk and villagers Jesus addressed. But the reality is that virtually no one in the modern English-speaking world is in that situation. We are immersed in a vastly different culture from biblical times, replete with a huge stream of information rushing at us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, filled with questions, assumptions, and prejudices which quite simply never entered the heads of the people to whom Jesus spoke. When the Psalmist speaks of the earth being founded on pillars, ancient Israelites did not trouble themselves about whether such language was poetry or science. We do. For we—even the least educated of us—know more about geology and cosmology than they did and that knowledge forces us to ask questions of the text that never occurred to the original readers, even as our ignorance of the way they thought keeps us from reading the text as they did. Similarly, when the original audience read of Joshua slaughtering whole populations of Canaanites to the last man, woman, and child, they were not discomfited by this. We, who live both in the light of Jesus’ command to love enemies are understandably troubled. Likewise, when Matthew records the cry of the mob at Jesus’ trial (“His blood be on us and on our children!” [Matthew 27:25]), we who live in the shadow of centuries of Christian anti-semitism and the Holocaust inevitably ask questions of Scripture which did not occur to the original readers—even as we miss entirely the point that Matthew was actually making. That point is not “The Jews are accursed for all time”[3] (recall that Matthew is himself a Jew and his entire point in writing the gospel is to bring salvation, not damnation, to his fellow Jews). Rather, Matthew records the cry of the mob, much as John records Caiaphas’ remark that it is necessary for one man to die rather than the whole nation to perish (cf. John 11:45-52), in order to make clear that even Jesus’ enemies end up paradoxically speaking the truth about him. For as a Christian who believes Jesus’ word that the Eucharistic chalice is “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28) the evangelist’s prayer for himself and all future generations at each Eucharist he celebrates is “His blood be on us and on our children”. Such divine irony suffuses the gospels, so that what is done in mockery of Christ (asking “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” [Mark 2:7], or crowning him with thorns, or sneering at him as “King of the Jews” [John 19:2; 20:19]) winds up bearing witness to the truth that he can forgive sins, that he is God, and that he is therefore the true divine and Davidic King of the Jews.
More tomorrow…
[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I,1,10, ad I.
[2] Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu, 15.
[3] The historical complexity of Jesus’ trial is apparent in the Gospel accounts. The personal sin of the participants (Judas, the Sanhedrin, Pilate) is known to God alone. Hence we cannot lay responsibility for the trial on the Jews in Jerusalem as a whole, despite the outcry of a manipulated crowd and the global reproaches contained in the apostles’ calls to conversion after Pentecost. Jesus himself, in forgiving them on the cross, and Peter in following suit, both accept “the ignorance” of the Jews of Jerusalem and even of their leaders. Still less can we extend responsibility to other Jews of different times and places, based merely on the crowd’s cry: “His blood be on us and on our children!”, a formula for ratifying a judicial sentence. As the Church declared at the Second Vatican Council:
. . . [N]either all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his Passion. . . [T]he Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy Scripture. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 597)
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