Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) is traditionally considered the last of the four Latin "fathers" of the Church (the first three are Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine). The son of a Roman official, Gregory as a layman had serves in the civil administration of Rome, eventually filling its highest office, that of prefect. He then sought to retire into a monastery, but was summoned back into the world to aid in the government of the Roman church. As deacon, he administered the church's extensive properties, and led an embassy to Constantinople to negotiate with the Eastern emperor. Elected pope in 590, he took an active interest in the feeding and defense of Rome, and through negotiations tried to ward off the threat mounted against the city by the Lombards (a Germanic tribe or people who were expanding their control of the Italian peninsula during the sixth and seventh centuries). Gregory warmly supported Benedictine monasticism, and in 597 sent Augustine and a company of monks to begin the conversion of the English people. The vigorous leadership he exerted in both secular and spiritual affairs makes him the dominant figure among the popes of the early Middle Ages.
Gregory's writings are diverse: sermons, saints lives, interpretation of scripture (or exegesis) and letters, a guide for priests and bishops exercising "Pastoral Care." They have enjoyed a great and lasting popularity, and were among the most read and quoted texts during the entire Middle Ages. His writings he is not so much concerned with speculative questions regarding such things as the nature of Christ or the Trinity, but was primarily concerned with providing models and instructions for how monks, priests and lay people can live a life of integrity and community that embodied the spririt and intentions of the gospel message. In his Pastoral Care, Gregory instructed priests on the duties of their ministry, composing a kind of Benedictine rule for the secular clergy (i.e. those living in the world). In his Dialogues, he recounted the lives of the holy men of Italy, including St. Benedict. He also wrote an extensive commentary on the Book of Job, called the Moralia in Job (see following selection). Here we see how thoroughly symbolic Gregory's approach to the Bible was, a mental disposition which determined not only how he read the Bible, but how he read the whole world. Words and things were for Gregory primarily important insofar as they pointed to other, supernatural, ideas and meanings.
Gregory's world view and imagination was profoundly symbolic or allegorical, in the sense that he was always looking for the "other meaning" or the non-literal meaning of events, words and things. Allegory means to say one thing and mean another. The term allegory derives from the Greek words alles (other) and agoreuein (to speak publically or openly, and refers to ordinary language and our ordinary use of language to communicate with the obvious and literal meanings of words). Allegory is another way of speaking and another way of meaning. For Gregory God spoke allegorically, using the concrete words of the Bible or the ordinary events and objects of our material existence to communicate another level of meaning beyond the literal and concrete. Any word or passage in the Bible might then have several levels of meaning, and it was up to the reader to decipher these. For example, to say "Christ entered Jerusalem," could mean just that, AND could mean the soul enters the spiritual realm. Gregory was most interested in the non-literal meaning of texts and events.
In a dedicatory letter prefixed in the Moralia, Gregory explained his methods of Biblical interpretation. He distinguished three kinds of meaning which could be sought and, often, had to be sought from Scripture. These were the literal, the allegorical and the moral. The moral level referred to what a given passage might indicate that we should do, or how we should live. To Gregory the allegorical meaning included reference to spiritual truth or experience, to the Kingdom of God, to heaven, to eschatology or the final end of all things, to Christ or to all things concerning the life of church communities. Other Biblical readers and commentators broke Gregory's category of the allegorical into two separate levels: 1) the "anagogical," which meant the mystical or prophetic or eschatological and 2) the allegorical which referred to Christ and the "body of Christ" (understood as all believers, the life of all churches), to christological and ecclesiastical doctrine. Those who assigned four levels of meaning to the Bible (eg. John Cassian ca. 360-435) were simply making an additional distinction within Gregory's category of the allegorical level of meaning or reference.
Gregory was indebted for his methods primarily to St. Augustine and to the great Greek theologian and exegete Origen. We read, for example, how Augustine in Book 6, chapter IV of the Confessions, credits Ambrose for helping to show him how to discover the life-giving meaning or "spirit" behind the literal meaning or "letter" of Biblical, especially Old Testament texts: "And [Ambrose] would go on to draw aside the veil of mystery and lay open the spiritual meaning of things which taken literally would have seemed to teach falsehood." Augustine then understood that everything in the Bible was there for our edification and that when one encountered a text that on the literal level seemed unedifying, absurd or not to support Christian teaching, the job of the reader or interpreter was to find a way to make them useful to faith by figurative or allegorical interpretation. The Bible communicated the truth: the reader's job was then to figure out in what sense or at what level of meaning a given text was true. Augustine puts forth his interpretive or hermenutical principles in his works On Christian Doctrine and On the Spirit and the Letter. Gregory the developed and demonstrated, with a great and tireless imagination, Augustine's principles of allegorical interpretation in his Moralia. The Moralia was intensively studied in the Middle Ages as a model of interpretation and thinking. A rhyme survives from the Middle Ages that seems to have been designed to help monks, preachers and students remember the four level of meaning outlined by Cassian, Augustine and Gregory:
Litera gesta docet,
Quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas,
Quo tendas anagogia.
This verse, with some license, translates:
The letter shows us what God and our ancestors did;
The allegory shows us where our faith his hid;
The moral meaning gives us the rule of daily life;
The anagogy shows us where we end our strife.
(Robert M. Grant, A Short History of Biblical Interpretation, New York, 1963).
More literally, the verse says: The letter instructs about what things were done; Allegory teaches us what we should believe; the moral level shows what to do; the anagogical signals aspects of the (spiritual and future) realm toward which we are directed.
The following selection contains Chapters 3 and 4 of the dedicatory letter to the Moralia in Job. (Gregory's Moralia in Job originated in the monastic collatio or daily conference/seminar) in which the abbot taught or preached.)
The Latin text may be found in the Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1849), LXXV, cols. 5-16. The translation is by D. Herlihy.
(introduction by Prof. Katherine Gill, Boston College)
3. Let it be known that we survey some passages with a literal interpretation. Other passages we examine by means of allegory in a figurative interpretation. Still others we study through the exclusive use of moral comparisons. Finally, some passages we investigate with greater care through the combined use of all three ways. Thus, we first lay a foundation of literal meaning. Then, through the figurative sense, we raise the structure of the mind into a citadel of faith. Finally, through the moral interpretation, we clothe our building with an additional shading.
For surely, what else are the words of truth if not nourishments to refresh the spirit? By interpreting these words in many various ways, we offer a meal to the palate [of the reader]. Thus, we avoid tiring the taste of the invited reader, who is, as it were, our fellow guest at dinner. When he sees many servings offered him, he may take what he considers the more appetizing. Sometimes we neglect to expound literally the clear passages, lest we come too slowly to those which are obscure. Sometimes even, they cannot be understood in a literal meaning, because their sense, superficially considered, engenders error rather than enlightenment among readers. Consider, for example, the words [of Job]: under him they stoop that bear up the world (9.13). Who does not know that this great man never believed in the empty tales of the poets? He never thought that the weight of the world is borne up by the exertions of a giant. Job says elsewhere amid his troubles: I would rather be choked outright; death would be better than these sufferings of mine (7.15).
What person, knowing the truth, would believe that a man of such renown, who, it is certain, received from the Eternal Judge rewards for the virtue of patience, had decided under his blows to end his life by hanging? Sometimes even, if they should be taken in the literal sense the passages are literally contradictory. Thus, Job says: Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said: A man child is conceived (3-3). And a little later he adds: Let darkness cover it, and let it be wrapped up in bitterness (3.5). In cursing the same night he adds: Let that night be solitary (3-7). Certainly, the day of his birth cannot still be in existence, since time is passing. By what manner, therefore, does he want it wrapped up in darkness?
Once having passed, it was no longer in existence. Even if it existed in nature, it could hardly feel bitterness. It is therefore certain, that it was by no means the sensible day, which job wished stricken with bitterness. And if the night of his conception had passed away in union with other nights, how could he wish it to he solitary? Just as it could not be fixed apart from the flow of time, so it could not be separated from its connection with other nights.
He further said: How long wilt thou not spare me, nor suffer me to swallow down my spittle (7.19) ? But he said a little before: The things which before my soul would not touch, now through anguish are my meats (6.7). Who does not know that it is easier to swallow spittle than meat? It is very difficult to see how a man who announces that he is taking meat at the same time denies that he is able to swallow spittle. And he says again: I have sinned. What shall I do to thee, 0 keeper of men (7.20)? He also says clearly: thou wilt consume me for the sins of my youth (13.26). But he adds in another response: my heart doth not reprehend me in all my life (27.6). How can it be that his heart has not reproached him, since he publicly states that he sinned? For guilty deeds and an unreproaching heart never go together. When passages taken literally do not agree, they show that something different is to be sought in them. It is as if they are saying: "since you discern that in our superficial sense we lose all meaning, seek rather the meaning within us which may he found logical and consistent."
4. Sometimes, however, if one neglects to accept the literal meaning, he/she hides the light of truth offered to him/her. While he/she seeks laboriously to find in the passages some other profound meaning, he/she loses that which can be apprehended without difficulty on the surface. For the holy man said: If I have denied to the poor what they desired, and have made the eyes of the widow wait; if I have eaten my morsel alone, and the fatherless has not eaten thereof; if I have despised [a person] that was perishing for want of clothing and the poor man that bad no covering; if his/her sides have not blessed me, and if he/she were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep (31. 16-20). If we force these words violently under an allegorical interpretation, we devoid all his charitable deeds of meaning. For just as the divine word exercises the learned with its mysteries, so it frequently cheers the simple with its clarity. In its obvious sense, it has food to nourish little ones. In its secret meaning, it can command the admiration of the most learned minds. It isÖ almost like a river, both shallow and deep, in which a lamb may walk and an elephant swim. According as the context of each passage requires, I carefully change the order of interpretation. So much the better does one find the sense of the divine word, the more he varies the kinds of interpretation, according to need.