Book Review: “The Four Senses of Scripture” by Henri de Lubac
Does Scripture have several meanings or a singular one?
Lubac, Henri de. The Four Senses of Scripture. Translated by E. M. Macierowski. Medieval Exegesis, Vol. 2. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
Overview
In this book, Henri de Lubac defines, describes, and provides numerous historic examples of Christian exegetes articulating and demonstrating a hermeneutical approach that perceives four distinct senses of Scripture. This five-chapter book is volume two in the series, so its chapters are numbered six through ten. In chapter six, Lubac describes the fundamentally bifurcated origin of the quadriga or quadripartite division of biblical interpretation – letter and spirit (or historical and mystical). The biblical text used as the springboard for the original division is 2 Corinthians 3:6b, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
From this fundamental distinction (i.e., letter and spirit), Lubac describes three senses which are subsumed under the spiritual or mystical sense – allegory, tropology, and anagogy. Thus, the four senses are as follows:
literal – the historical or intentional meaning of the original author
allegorical – the expansive use of typology to discover meaning
tropological – the application of moral standards or ethics as meaning
anagogical – the contemplative sense that merges meaning with experience
Throughout the book, the historical or literal sense of Scripture remains unchanged. This sense of the letter is described as the essential and real historical facts, those which cannot be abandoned without doing violence to the historical grounding of Christianity. As Lubac says, “redemption has not been accomplished in the imagination, but in time and in factual reality.”[1]
But another paradigm that Lubac uses to describe the three spiritual or mystical senses is that of Jesus Christ’s advents. Indeed, Christ is the central exegetical focus of this hermeneutic, meaning that all of Scripture is interpreted through the lens of Christ’s person and work (historically, eschatologically, and experientially or personally). According to Lubac, Christ’s first advent was His coming to earth to perform the task of redemption. This first coming of Christ is the focus of the allegorical sense. Christ’s second advent is “entirely interior;” it is the coming of Christ to the individual.[2] This is the focus of the tropological sense. And Christ’s third advent is the eschaton, Christ’s return at the end of the age. This is the focus of the anagogical sense, emphasizing that contemplation is the practice through which one may participate to some degree in that beatific vision now.
Analysis
It strikes me that one can appreciate and respect Lubac’s knowledge of ancient sources and his use of philosophical tools to speak so thoroughly on this subject. There is no doubt that Lubac has made a strong case for the use of this hermeneutic, including its rules and methodology as well as its deep historical roots. However, there are what appear to be at least three fatal flaws to this hermeneutic, as Lubac has argued for it.
By what standard?
First, and most critically dangerous, it is not at all clear how the mystical or spiritual sense (including all three of its sub-senses) is to be tethered in any meaningful way to the actual words of Scripture. For example, Lubac wrote of the “liberty of topology” that is “under the safeguard of the analogy of faith.”[3] But Lubac does not clarify what the “analogy of faith” is, nor does he specify just how it would provide any “safeguard” against turning “liberty” into licentious nonsense.
Lubac says something similar about allegory. He writes, “the whole object of allegoria… enables one to discover everywhere the ‘deeper mysteries about Christ and his body.’”[4] The implication is that beneath and between and behind the words of Scripture there is a multitude of deeper mysteries, which the allegorical sense can unveil for the reader. But what of the words of Scripture? How does God’s special revelation prevent imaginative interpretations from completely overstepping the words that the reader is looking beneath and between and behind?
The anagogical sense, as described by Lubac, seems to amplify this liberated interpretive method to its highest volume. He writes, “The just and the saints… would enjoy the Word of God ‘without reading, without letters.’ What need is there to read or to seek truth from without [i.e., on the pages of Scripture], once one has joined up with Wisdom herself, who fills the heart and the mind of those who possess her?”[5] This is a clear affirmation that the contemplation of Christ can somehow be detached from the written word of Christ. But Scripture must itself be the basis and fundamental substance of any experiential knowledge of Christ, or else experience and contemplation become possible competitors to the only revelation (i.e., special revelation) wherein God explicitly tells us what He means (distinct from natural revelation, where there is no clear parameter for interpretative conclusions).
Roman Catholic?
Second, and most repulsive from the perspective of Protestant readers, the four-fold sense of Scripture seems a particularly and necessarily Roman Catholic methodology. Lubac is writing as a Roman Catholic, so this must be taken into consideration when one attempts to distinguish the substance of his hermeneutical method from his particular argument for it. However, he makes strong statements that seem to indicate a requirement of Roman Catholic ecclesiology in order to employ this method. For example, Lubac says, “allegory is not only the sense that one could call apologetic; it is also, the doctrinal sense par excellence… the allegorical sense of Scripture is ‘the Catholic sense.’”[6] And the allegorical sense is the starting point (as well as the necessary foundation) for the tropological and anagogical senses.
Such a connection between allegory (and tropology and anagogy, which progress from it) and the Roman Catholic Church is rooted in the idea that illumination (the Holy Spirit’s work in the believer to bring understanding) and inspiration (the Holy Spirit’s work of speaking through human authors) are synthesized. Lubac writes, “Right now, on earth, with her discipline and her rule of faith, with her magisterium and her apostolic succession, in her precarious and militant condition, the Church of Christ was already ‘the heavenly Church’… which we call the Catholic Church.”[7] And Lubac clarifies that those who are “the preachers of the Truth” are “those who succeed [the apostles] in the Church: the Fathers, the Doctors, and our present-day pastors… ‘The successors of the apostles, the holy preachers.’”[8] Therefore, the sacrament of holy orders and the magisterium (i.e., those authoritatively illumined by the Spirit and the dogma and doctrine which they preach) are the necessary framework for the spiritual sense of Scripture to be rightly known and understood.
Why not logical and practical?
Third, Lubac’s quadriga is an affront to logic and the practical use of interpretive and preaching methodology. The three senses subsumed under the spiritual sense seem a miscategorization of the practices of typology, implication, and application. The mystical sense of analogy does not have to be a meaning we conclude was present in the mind of God or the human author. The discipline of biblical theology provides us with innumerable typological and thematic reverberations within Scripture itself. These are not meaning (in the technical sense), but a literary tool that is recognizable to the attuned reader.
So too, the mystical sense of topology does not have to be a meaning we discover in the text, but rather a variety of appropriate moral implications and pastoral applications from the meaning we do find there. And the mystical sense of anagogy is also an unnecessary category or sense of meaning, but would be better understood as the Christian’s experience with Christ as he or she encounters Him in His word and in the application of it in everyday life.
Conclusion
While there are many good reasons to read the early church preachers and theologians, the desire to return to a Medieval hermeneutic (based on a quadriga of senses or meanings) is not good. The practice and responsibility of everyday pastors is to explain the meaning of a text of Scripture, consider its implications, and help the listener apply both the meaning and the implications to his or her life. There is no good reason to draw the work of pastoral application up into the realm of authoritative biblical meaning. In fact, to equate typology, ethics, and contemplation with grammatical-historical exegesis undermines the authority of Scripture itself.
[1] Lubac, The Four Senses of Scripture. 47.
[2] Lubac, The Four Senses of Scripture. 179.
[3] Lubac, The Four Senses of Scripture. 148.
[4] Lubac, The Four Senses of Scripture. 92.
[5] Lubac, The Four Senses of Scripture. 189.
[6] Lubac, The Four Senses of Scripture. 109.
[7] Lubac, The Four Senses of Scripture. 183-184.
[8] Lubac, The Four Senses of Scripture. 218.