The Senses of Scripture

The medieval commentators of Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text:  one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called analogical, which had to do with the Divine Life and our participation in it ... a kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation. 

~ Flannery O'Connor
Mystery and Manners

The four levels of listening to the same passage ....

Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, Robert Royal

Each sense opens up many avenues of thought, inviting us to explore more and more deeply the divine plan and the response to which we are called.  Thomas Aquinas:  “Where the mind leaves off, the heart goes beyond.”

The Literal Sense  —   The first duty is to discover the literal meaning of the Scriptures -- the historical message and example of Jesus.  This is the historical sense:  These writers were men of their time; they expressed themselves precisely as men of their time.  Hence, to understand them, we need to know the mores of those times and the meaning of words in that context.  We must remember that words are historically defined.  It is important that we seek to understand what literary form the inspired writer is using to convey the divine teaching:  Is it history, prose, poetry, myth, etc.

The Moral (tropological) Sense —  Augustine writes that we understand more by doing what it says than by how much of it we read:  when we begin to make the faith walk and talk the same and live by the Scriptures.  ... tells us what the Text calls us to do ....  The moral sense conveys how specifically some of the liberation from sin occurs.

The Allegorical  (spiritual) Sense —  It slowly dawns on us that the gospel is about us; that our own life is mirrored in its pages.  Able to identify our own personal spiritual journey with the events in the Old Testament.  We are now listening to the voice of Christ speaking through the readings we hear in the liturgy, savor in Lectio Divina, and recognize in the events of our own lives.  When you begin to experience this, you listen to the Scriptures in a very different way. They are not historical documents anymore, but stories about your own experience of the spiritual journey. The unloading of the unconscious or purification. Purification occurs when, because of the trust  and honesty that develops toward God as a result of a lively identification with the texts of Scripture.  We are able to confront the dark side of our personality.  We begin to experience the biblical desert.  The biblical desert is not a place, but a state in which we experience inwardly what the passage of the Isaelites through the desert and other similar texts symbolize outwardly.  It involves the emptying of the junk in the unconscious — the emotional damage that has been done to us from the moment we were conceived until now ... the spontaneous evacuation of all that emotional garbage.    In the allegorical sense, seeing in physical liberation a corresponding spiritual liberation.  Christ’s redemption of all human beings from the bondage of sin includes both the internal liberation from wrongs committed by others.

The Unitive Sense (anagogical) — takes place when you are so immersed in the word of God that the word is coming out of you as a kind of continuing revelation .... what lies ahead.   The most purely mystical meaning in that is shows how God leads our souls to eternal beatitude.

A simple example of all four senses:  We read for Jerusalem. Literally, Jerusalem is a city in the Holy Land. Allegorically, Jerusalem can be understood as the Church which gathers together all the People of God; Morally, this calls us to a certain allegiance to the Church, a certain way of acting as living stones placed upon the foundation of the apostles with Christ as our cornerstone. Anagogically, Jesus is the spotless bride descending from the heavens.  Each sense opens up many avenues of thought, inviting us to explore more and more deeply the divine plan and the response to which we are called.