Fifth Sermon for Lent: St Gregory the Great on understanding scripture
(Vatican Radio) Below please find the complete text of the fifth sermon for Lent
delievered by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFMCAP, Preacher to the Papal Household delivered
Friday April 11, 2014:
In our attempt to place ourselves under the teaching
of the Fathers to give a new impetus and depth to our faith, we cannot omit a reflection
on their way of reading the Word of God. It will be Pope St. Gregory the Great who
will guide us to the “spiritual understanding” of the Scriptures and a renewed love
for them. The same thing happened to Scripture in the modern world that happened
to the person of Jesus. The quest for the exclusively historical and literal sense
of the Bible, based on the same presuppositions that dominated during the last two
centuries, led to results similar to those in the quest for a historical Jesus opposed
to the Christ of faith. Jesus was reduced to being an extraordinary man, a great religious
reformer, but nothing more. Similarly, Scripture is reduced to being an excellent
book, and perhaps even the most interesting book in the world, but it is just a book
like any other that needs to be studied with the same methods used for all the great
works from antiquity. Today things are going even farther than that. A kind of maximalist,
militant atheism, which is anti-Jewish and anti-Christian, considers the Bible (and
the Old Testament in particular) to be a book “full of wickedness” that should be
removed from bookshelves today. The Church counters this assault on the Scriptures
through her doctrine and experience. In Dei Verbum the Second Vatican Council reasserted
the perennial validity of the Scriptures as the Word of God to all humanity. The Church’s
liturgy reserves a place of honor for Scripture in each of her celebrations. Many
scholars, who are more up-to-date on appropriate critical methods, now bring to their
work a faith that is even more convinced of the transcendent value of the inspired
word. Perhaps the most convincing proof, however, is that of experience. The argument,
as we have seen, that led to the affirmation of the divinity of Christ at Nicea in
325 and of the Holy Spirit at Constantinople in 381 can be fully applied to Scripture
as well. We experience the presence of the Holy Spirit in Scripture; Christ still
speaks to us through it; its effect on us is different from that of any other word.
Therefore, Scripture cannot be simply a human word. 1. The Old Becomes New The
goal of our reflection is to see how the Fathers can help us to rediscover a “virginity”
of listening, that freshness and freedom in approaching the Bible that allows us to
experience the divine power that flows from it. The Father and Doctor of the Church
that we are choosing as a guide, as I said, is St. Gregory the Great, but to understand
his importance in this area, we need to go back to the springs of the river he entered
into and to trace its course, at least briefly, before it reached him. In their
reading of the Bible, the Fathers were following the path initiated by Jesus and the
apostles, so that fact itself should already make us cautious in our judgment of them.
A radical rejection of the exegesis of the Fathers would signify a rejection of the
exegesis of Jesus himself and of the apostles. Jesus, when he was with the disciples
at Emmaus, explains everything that referred to him in the Scriptures. He asserts
that the Scriptures are speaking about him (Jn 5:39) and that Abraham saw Jesus’ day
(Jn 8:56); many of Jesus’ actions and words occur “so that the Scriptures might be
fulfilled.” His first two disciples initially say about him, “We have found him of
whom Moses and the law and also the prophets wrote” (Jn 1:45). But these were
only partial correspondences. The complete transference has not yet happened. That
is accomplished on the cross and is contained in the words of a dying Jesus: “It is
finished.” Even within the Old Testament, there were new events that had been foreshadowed
by earlier events, new beginnings, and transpositions: for example, the return from
Babylon was seen as a renewal of the miracle of the Exodus. These were partial re-interpretations;
now a global re-interpretation occurs. Personages, events, institutions, laws, the
temple, sacrifices, the priesthood—everything suddenly appears in another light. It
is similar to a room being illumined by the light of candle when a powerful neon light
is suddenly turned on. Christ who is “the light of the world” is also the light of
the Scriptures. When we read that the risen Jesus “opened their minds to understand
the Scriptures” (Lk 24:45), it means that he opened the minds of the disciples at
Emmaus to this new understanding brought about by the Holy Spirit. The Lamb breaks
the seals, and the book of sacred history can finally be opened and read (see Rev
5: 1ff.). Everything from before is still there, but nothing is as it was before.
This is the moment that unites—and at the same time distinguishes—the two testaments
and the two covenants. “There, vivid and colored red [in the missal], is the great
page that separates the two Testaments. . . . All the doors open up simultaneously,
all oppositions fade away, all contradictions are resolved.”15 The clearest example
to help us understand what happens in that moment is the consecration in the Mass,
which is in fact a memorial of that event. Nothing apparently seems changed in the
bread and wine on the altar, yet we know that after consecration they are completely
other than what they were, and we treat them quite differently than we did before. The
apostles continue to do this kind of reading, applying it to the Church as well as
to the life of Jesus. All that is written about the Exodus was written for the Church
(see 1 Cor 10); the rock that followed the Jews in the desert and quenched their thirst
foreshadowed Christ, and the manna foreshadowed the bread that came down from heaven.
The prophets spoke of Christ (see 1 Pet 1:10ff); what was said about the Suffering
Servant in Isaiah is fulfilled in him, etc. Moving from the New Testament to the
time of the Church, we note two different uses of this new understanding of the Scriptures:
one is apologetic and the other is theological and spiritual. The first is used in
dialogues with those outside the Church and the second for the edification of the
community. For the Jews and heretics with whom they share the Scriptures in common,
they compose the so-called “testimonies,” collections of biblical verses or passages
that produce evidence for faith in Christ. This approach, for example, is found in
St. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew, and in many other works. The theological
and ecclesial use of a spiritual reading begins with Origen, who is rightly considered
to be the founder of Christian exegesis. The richness and beauty of his insights into
the spiritual sense of the Scriptures and of their practical applications is inexhaustible.
His approach will gain followers in the East as well as in the West once it begins
to be known during Ambrose’s time. Together with its richness and genius, however,
Origen’s exegesis also injects a negative element into the Church’s exegetical tradition
that is due to his enthusiasm for a Platonic kind of spiritualism. We can take his
following statement as a description of his methodology: We must not suppose that
historical things are types of historical things, and corporeal of corporeal. Quite
the contrary; corporeal things are types of spiritual things, and historical of intellectual
things.16 In Origen’s approach, the horizontal and historical correspondence—by
which a personage, an event, or a saying from the Old Testament is seen as a prophecy
and a figure (typos) of something that is fulfilled in the New Testament by Christ
or by the Church—is replaced by a vertical Platonic perspective in which an historical,
visible event (either in the Old Testament or the New) becomes a symbol of a universal
and eternal idea. The relationship between prophecy and its fulfillment tends to be
transformed into the relationship between history and spirit.17 2. The Scriptures:
Four-sided Stones Through Ambrose and others who translated his works into Latin,
Origen’s methodology and content fully enter into the veins of Latin Christianity
and will continue to flow through them during all of the Middle Ages. So what, then,
was the contribution of the Latin Fathers to explaining the Scriptures? The answer
can be given in one word, a word that best expresses their genius: organization! It
is true that there is a contribution by another genius who is no less creative and
bold than Origen, namely, Augustine, who enriched the reading of the Bible with new
insights and applications. However, the most important contribution of the Latin Fathers
is not along the line of discovering new and hidden meanings in the Word of God so
much as it is in their systematizing the immense amount of exegetical material that
was accumulating in the Church. They marked out a kind map by which to use that material. This
organizing effort, begun by Augustine, was brought into its definitive form by Gregory
the Great and consisted in the doctrine of the fourfold sense of Scripture. In this
area he is considered “one of the principal initiators and one of the greatest patrons
of the medieval doctrine of the fourfold sense,”18 to the point that we can speak
of the Middle Ages as being “the Gregorian age.”19 The doctrine of the four senses
of Scripture is a like a grid, a way of organizing the explanations of a biblical
text or of a reality in salvation history and categorizing it into four different
areas or levels of application: 1) the literal, historical level; 2) the allegorical
level (often referred to today as typological),which relates to faith in Christ; 3)
the moral level, which relates to the behavior of a Christian; and 4) the eschatological
(or anagogical) level, which relates to final fulfillment in heaven. Gregory writes, The
words of Scripture are four-sided stones. . . . In regard to every past event the
words recount [the literal sense], in regard to every future thing they announce [the
anagogical sense], in regard to every moral duty they preach [moral sense], in regard
to every spiritual reality they proclaim [allegorical or christological sense]—on
every level the words of Scripture stand and are beyond reproach.20 There was
a famous couplet in the Middle Ages that summarized this doctrine: “Littera gesta
docet, quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia”: “The letter
teaches events, allegory what you should believe. / Morality teaches what you should
do, anagogy what mark you should be aiming for.”21 Perhaps the clearest application
of this approach can be seen in regard to Passover. According to the letter or history,
the Passover is the rite that the Jews performed in Egypt. According to allegory,
which relates to faith, Passover indicates the sacrifice of Christ, the true Passover
lamb. According to the moral sense, it indicates moving from vice to virtue, from
sin to holiness. According to anagogy or eschatology, it indicates the passage from
the things here below to the things above, or to the eternal Passover that will be
celebrated in heaven. This is not a rigid or mechanical system; it is flexible
and open to infinite variations, starting from the order in which the various senses
are listed. In the following text from Gregory, we see how freely he uses the system
of the fourfold senses and how he is able to derive a variety of corresponding meanings
from the Scripture through it. Commenting on the image in Ezekiel 2:10 of the scroll
with writing “on the front and on the back” (Vulgate: intus et foris), he says, The
book of the Bible is written on the inside through allegory and the outside through
history; on the inside through a spiritual understanding, on the outside through a
mere literal sense suited to those who are still weak; on the inside because it promises
things which cannot be seen, on the outside because it lays down visible things through
its upright precepts; on the inside, because it promises heavenly things, on the outside
because it orders in which way earthly things are worthy of contempt, whether we put
them to use or flee from desiring them.22 3. Why We Still Need the Fathers in Reading
the Bible What can we still retain from such a bold and open-ended way of putting
oneself before the Word of God? Even an admirer of patristic and medieval exegesis
like Father Henri de Lubac admits that we can neither return to it nor mechanically
imitate it today.23 It would be an artificial procedure doomed to fail because we
no longer share the presuppositions the Fathers began with and the spiritual universe
in which they moved. Gregory the Great and the Fathers were generally right about
the fundamental point of reading the Scriptures in reference to Christ and the Church.
Jesus and the apostles, as we have seen, were already reading it that way before them.
The weakness in the Fathers’ exegesis was in their belief that they could apply this
approach to every single saying in the Bible, often in an improbable way, pushing
symbolism (for example, the symbolism of numbers) to excesses that sometimes make
us smile today. We can be certain, however, as de Lubac notes, that if they were
alive today, they would be the exegetes who were the most enthusiastic about using
the critical resources at our disposal for the advancement of research. In this regard,
Origen carried out a herculean task in his time, procuring the various available Greek
translations of the Bible and comparing them with the Hebrew text (the Hexapla), and
Augustine did not hesitate to correct some of his explanations in light of the new
translation of the Bible that Jerome was in the process of doing.24 So what is
still valid, then, in the legacy from the Fathers in the field of biblical interpretation?
Perhaps here more than anywhere else, they have a decisive word to deliver to the
Church today that we must try to discover. Apart from their ingenious allegories,
their bold applications, and the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture, what characterizes
the Fathers’ reading of the Bible? It is that—from beginning to end, and at each step
of the way—it is a reading done in faith; it started from faith and led to faith.
All their distinctions between the historical, allegorical, moral, and eschatological
readings can be narrowed down to a single distinction today: reading Scripture with
faith or reading it without faith, or at least without a certain quality of faith. Let
us leave aside the Bible scholars who are non-believers whom I spoke about at the
beginning because for them the Bible is an interesting but merely human book. The
distinction I want to highlight here is more subtle and applies to believers. It is
the distinction between a personal reading and an impersonal reading of the Word of
God. I will try to explain what I mean. The Fathers approached the Word of God with
a recurring question: What is it saying here and now to the Church and to me personally?
They were persuaded that Scripture—in addition to the historical events that it
attests, the truths of faith that it presents to all to believe, the obligations that
it points out, and the things to hope for (the famous four senses of Scripture)—always
has new light to shed and new tasks to point out for everyone personally. “All
Scripture is inspired by God” (1 Tim 3:16). The phrase that is translated “inspired
by God” or “divinely inspired” is a unique word in the original language, theopneustos,
which combines two words, God (Theos) and Spirit (Pneuma). This word has two fundamental
meanings. The most familiar is the passive one, which is used in all modern translations:
Scripture is “inspired by God.” Another passage in the New Testament explains that
concept this way: “Men moved by the Holy Spirit [prophets] spoke from God” (2 Pet
1:21). This is, in a word, the classical doctrine of the divine inspiration of Scripture
that we proclaim as an article of faith in the Credo when we say that the Holy Spirit
is the one who “has spoken through the prophets.” The aspect of biblical inspiration
that generally gets attention is biblical inerrancy, the fact that the Bible contains
no errors, if we correctly understand by “error” the absence of a truth that was humanly
knowable by the writer in his particular cultural context. However, biblical inspiration
is the basis for far more than the mere inerrancy of the Word of God (which is its
negative aspect, something Scripture does not have). On the positive side it establishes
Scripture’s inexhaustibility, its divine power and vitality. Scripture, said Ambrose,
is theopneustos, not only because it is “inspired by God” but also because it is “breathing
forth God,” it breathes out God!25 God is now being breathed forth from it. St. Gregory
writes, To what can we compare the word of Sacred Scripture if not to a rock in
which fire is hidden? It is cold if you just hold it in your hand, but when it is
struck by iron it gives off sparks and shoots out fire.26 Scripture contains not
only God’s thinking fixed once and forever, it also contains God’s heart and his on-going
will that indicates to you what he wants from you at a certain moment, and perhaps
from only you. The conciliar constitution Dei Verbum also takes up this line of tradition
when it says, Since they [the Scriptures] are inspired by God [passive inspiration]
and committed to writing once and for all time, they present God’s own word in an
unalterable form, and they make the voice of the holy Spirit [active inspiration!]
sound again and again in the words of the prophets and apostles.27 This means
not only reading the Word of God but also our being read by it, not only probing the
Scriptures but also letting ourselves be probed by them. It means not approaching
the Scriptures the way firefighters used to when they would go into a fire wearing
asbestos suits that allowed them to pass untouched through the flames. Taking up
an image from St. James, many Fathers, including Gregory the Great, compare Scripture
to a mirror.28 What do we think about a man who spends all his time examining the
mirror’s shape and its materials, the time period it belongs to, and many other details
about it but does not ever look at himself in it? This is precisely what people do
when they spend their time resolving all the critical issues that Scripture presents,
its sources, its literary genres, and so on, but never look in the mirror, or worse
yet, do not allow the mirror to gaze at them and probe them in depth to the point
at which joints and marrow are divided. The most important thing about Scripture is
not to resolve its most obscure points but to put into practice the points that are
clear! Our Gregory, says, “we understand it when putting it into practice.”29 A
strong faith in the Word of God is indispensable not only for a Christian’s spiritual
life but also for every form of evangelization. There are two ways to prepare a sermon
or any proclamation of faith, whether it is oral or written. I can first sit at my
desk and choose, on my own, the word to proclaim and the theme to develop based on
my understanding, my preferences, etc. Then once the sermon is ready, I can kneel
down and hastily ask God to bless what I have written and to make my words effective.
This is acceptable, but it is not the prophetic way. It is necessary to reverse the
order for that: first on my knees and then to my desk. In every circumstance one
needs to begin with the certainty of faith that the risen Lord has a word in his heart
that he wants his people to hear. He does not fail to reveal it to his minister who
humbly and insistently asks him for it. At the beginning there is a nearly imperceptible
movement in your heart. A small light goes on in your mind, a word from the Bible
that begins to draw attention to itself and shed light on a situation. At first it
is “the smallest of seeds,” but afterwards you realize that everything was contained
inside it; in it there was a thunderous roar that could shake the cedars of Lebanon.
After that, you go to your desk, you open your books, you look through your notes,
you consult the Church Fathers, experts, poets. . . . At this point it has already
become something altogether different. It is no longer the Word of God in service
to your knowledge but your knowledge in service to the Word of God. Origen accurately
describes the process that leads to this discovery. Before finding nourishment in
Scripture, he says, we need to undergo a kind of “poverty of the senses; the soul
is surrounded by darkness on every side, and it comes upon paths that have no exit.
Then suddenly, after a difficult search and prayer, the voice of the Word resonates
and all at once something is illuminated. The One your soul was seeking comes ‘leaping
upon the mountains, bounding over the hills’ [Songs 2:8], that is, opening up your
mind to receive his powerful word full of light.”30 Great joy accompanies this moment.
It made Jeremiah say, “Your words were found, and I ate them, / and your words became
to me a joy / and the delight of my heart” (Jer 15:16). Usually God’s answer comes
in the form of a word from Scripture that reveals its extraordinary relevance at that
moment for the situation or the problem that needs to be addressed, as if it were
written precisely for it. The minister then speaks as “one speaking the very words
of God” (see 1 Pet 4:11). This method is valid in all instances—as much for great
documents as for a teacher’s lesson to his or her novices, as much for the scholarly
conference as for the humble Sunday homily. We have all had the experience of how
much effect a single word from God can have when it is profoundly believed and lived
by the person who says it to us, sometimes without that person even knowing it. It
must be acknowledged that often this is the word, among so many other words, that
touched hearts and led more than one listener to the confessional. Human experience,
images, our past history—none of this is excluded from gospel preaching, but it all
needs be submitted to the Word of God, which must stand out above everything else.
Pope Francis has reminded us of this in the pages of Evangelii gaudium dedicated to
the homily, and it is almost presumptuous on my part to think I can add anything to
it. I would like to conclude this meditation with an expression of gratitude to
our Jewish brethren and a wish for them on the occasion of the Holy Father’s upcoming
visit to Israel. If our interpretation of the Scriptures separates us from them, we
are united in our shared love for the Scriptures. In a museum in Tel Aviv, there is
a painting by Reuben Rubin in which rabbis are clasping scrolls of the Word of God
to their chests or to their cheeks, and they are kissing them the way a man would
kiss his wife. With our Jewish brothers and sisters we can—in a way that is analogous
to the spiritual ecumenism occurring among Christians—share together what unites us
in an atmosphere of dialogue and mutual respect, without ignoring or covering up the
things that separate us. We cannot forget that it is from the Jews that we received
the two most precious things we have in life: Jesus and the Scriptures. Once again
this year, the Jewish Passover falls on the same week as the Christian one. Let us
wish ourselves and them a holy and happy Passover.