The Fourfold Sense and How Medieval Readers Unpacked a Single Verse

For most of the Christian Middle Ages, exegesis meant reading a passage of scripture for four senses at once rather than one. The method is often called the Quadriga, after the four horse chariot, and it distinguishes the literal sense, what the text actually says happened, from three further senses layered on top of it. The allegorical sense reads the passage as a statement about Christ or the church. The tropological or moral sense reads it as instruction for how a reader should live. The anagogical sense reads it as a statement about the final things, the destiny of the soul and the world to come.

A frequently cited medieval mnemonic verse, attributed to the thirteenth century Dominican Augustine of Dacia, states the method directly: the letter teaches events, allegory what you should believe, morality what you should do, anagogy where you are heading. Jerusalem supplied the standard worked example. Read literally it names a city in Judea. Read allegorically it signifies the church. Read morally it signifies the individual soul working toward virtue. Read anagogically it signifies the heavenly city awaiting the faithful. The method fell out of general use after the Reformation's turn toward the literal and historical sense, but the literal sense it started from, the discipline's baseline requirement to establish what a text actually says in its own language and setting, remains exegesis's working definition today.