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Concept
Four senses of Scripture
Summary
The four senses of Scripture is a four-level method of interpreting the Bible. This method originated in Judaism and was taken up in Christianity by the Church Fathers.
In Kabbalah the four meanings of the biblical texts are literal, allusive, allegorical, and mystical. In Christianity, the four senses are literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical.
In Judaism, bible hermeneutics notably uses midrash, a Jewish method of interpreting the Hebrew Bible and the rules which structure the Jewish laws.
The early allegorizing trait in the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible figures prominently in the massive oeuvre of a prominent Hellenized Jew of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus (c. 20 BC – c. 50 AD), whose allegorical reading of the Septuagint synthesized the traditional Jewish narratives with Platonism. Philo's allegorizing, in which he continued an earlier tradition, had little effect on later Jewish thought, in part because the Jewish culture of Alexandria dispersed by the fourth century.
In the 3rd century, the theologian Origen, a graduate of Catechetical School of Alexandria, formulated the principle of the three senses of Scripture (literal, moral, and spiritual) from the Jewish method of interpretation used by Paul of Tarsus in Epistle to the Galatians chapter 4. In the 4th century, the theologian Augustine of Hippo developed this doctrine which became the four senses of Scripture.
Prudentius wrote the first surviving Christian purely allegorical freestanding work, Psychomachia ("Soul-War"), about AD 400. The plot consists of the personified "good" virtues of Hope, Sobriety, Chastity, Humility, etc. fighting the personified "evil" vices of Pride, Wrath, Paganism, Avarice, etc. The personifications are women, because in Latin words for abstract concepts have feminine grammatical gender; an uninformed reader of the work might take the story literally as a tale of many angry women fighting one another because Prudentius provides no context or explanation of the allegory.
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