Four Senses of Scripture

Sometime around 1260 a Danish Dominican named Augustine of Denmark condensed several centuries of patristic and monastic reading practice into four short Latin lines, a couplet still quoted in modern discussions of medieval exegesis: the letter teaches what happened, allegory what you should believe, the moral sense what you should do, and the anagogical sense where you are heading. The verse did not invent the four senses so much as give preachers and commentators a portable summary of a method already centuries old, traceable through Origen's allegorical reading and John Cassian's earlier threefold spiritual scheme, gradually fixed into this exact fourfold shape by twelfth century monastic and scholastic writers.

In practice a medieval commentator working through, say, the story of Jerusalem might explain the literal sense as the actual city in Judea, the allegorical sense as the Church, the moral sense as the individual believer's own soul, and the anagogical sense as the heavenly Jerusalem awaiting the blessed, four readings of one word held together rather than four competing guesses. Thomas Aquinas gave the scheme its clearest theological defense, insisting that only the literal sense could ground a theological argument, since the other three senses are always derived FROM the literal sense's account of things and events, never invented independently of it, which kept the method from collapsing into arbitrary allegory.

The Reformation's insistence on the literal sense alone, sola scriptura read narrowly, pushed the other three senses out of mainstream Protestant exegesis, but the scheme never disappeared from Catholic teaching: the Catechism of the Catholic Church still explains all four senses by name in its own account of how scripture is to be read.

The Christian quadriga traces from Origen's allegory and Cassian's threefold scheme to Augustine of Denmark's couplet and Aquinas's defense of it. A structurally similar four level scheme grew up inside a separate textual tradition this atlas also records, PaRDeS, and the resemblance between them is a coincidence of structure rather than a case of one system borrowing from the other.

PaRDeS organizes Jewish scriptural reading into peshat, the plain sense, remez, an implied or allegorical hint, derash, a homiletical or applied sense developed through midrashic reading, and sod, a hidden or mystical sense, the initial letters of the four terms spelling the Hebrew word for orchard. Like the Christian quadriga, it moves from a literal ground floor toward a final sense concerned with ultimate or hidden meaning, and like the quadriga it developed gradually out of older interpretive habits before being fixed into this exact four term shape by later writers rather than appearing whole from the start.

The two schemes never borrowed from each other. Christian exegesis built its four senses out of Origen's allegorical method and the Latin monastic tradition that followed him; PaRDeS grew out of centuries of independent rabbinic and later kabbalistic reading practice, its own third term, derash, naming the specifically midrashic mode of interpretation this atlas records on its own page. Two textual communities reading two different scriptures reached, without contact, the same basic architecture, letter, hint, application, mystery, evidence less of influence than of how many readers independently expect scripture to hold more than one kind of meaning at once.