Improvisation as a theological method, part 2. Gregory the Great.

 

An idea pointing towards a liberating understanding of the Scripture is derived from Gregory the Great’s Homilies on Ezekiel:

"If someone - looking for virtue - should understand some words of God in a sense contrary to that intended by the one who pronounced them, one speaks words of God, as long as one seeks to build up love (even with another interpretation). For throughout Holy Scripture God speaks to us with one purpose only, to draw us to love of himself and our neighbor."(Hom. in Ez. 1.10.14)

Love as the hermeneutical principle sounds like a modern, almost liberal point of view. However, Gregory is not saying that it does not matter how one understands the Scripture, as long as one maintains good relationships with other people, or something like that. There is more than that in the love of God and neighbor. For Gregory, reading the Bible is a passionate endeavor. One needs to struggle with the Holy Writ, read it attentively, and pray for deeper understanding. Gregory champions threefold interpretation of the sacred text: literal, allegorical and moral. These approaches provide him with ample means of understanding the most impenetrable passages of the Scripture. The Bible is, according to the famous summary of Gregory, "a river in which a lamb can walk and an elephant can swim". Therefore the Scripture nourishes the simple ones with its literal meaning and provides challenge to the intelligent ones with its deeper, allegorical explanation. In both ways, its purpose is to awaken love. Interpretation of the Song of Songs is a case in point. The erotic language of this little book has caused trouble for Christian theologians, as it does for Gregory, too. Nevertheless, Gregory reckons that it is especially advantageous to have the divine mysteries wrapped inside the carnal imagery:

"It is written that the letter kills but that the spirit gives life. As the letter cloaks the spirit, so a husk veils corn. But feeding on the husk is the lot of beasts of burden; human beings feed on corn.The one who uses his human reason casts away the husks of the beasts of burden and hastens to eat the corn. For the sake of this endeavor it is surely useful to veil the mysteries with the wrapping of letters, for long-sought wisdom tastes better."(Comm. in Sgs, 4)

From the modern point of view, some of Gregory’s interpretations seem unintelligible and purely arbitrary indeed. Yet his sermons, as severe as they are, exhibit such playfulness and freedom of imagination that can hardly be found in modern exegesis. Occasionally Gregory notices historical faults in the biblical text. These faults eventually testify the spiritual meaning of the biblical narrative. One should not be captive to the literal interpretation. In a sermon Gregory observes that Moses told: “They drew honey from the rock, and oil from a flinty crag.” (Deut. 32:13) Historically this is false, says Gregory. The Bible does not tell that Israelites did ever draw honey or oil from rock. But because Paul says that “the rock was Christ”( 1 Cor 10:4), the verse proves to be true: those who saw the deeds of the Redeemer did draw honey from the rock and those who received the Holy Spirit had oil of ointment from a flinty crag. According to Gregory, the Bible is always right. The difference to modern fundamentalism, however,  is that we do not need to force historical reality to correspond with the biblical narrative. Allegorical interpretation is a realm of spiritual imagination. This kind of approach to the Scriptures is almost totally alien to our era. For example, the word ‘mountain’ has seven different meanings in a passage of Job commented by Gregory: it denotes the incarnate Lord, the holy church, the testament of God, the apostate angel, some kind of a heretic, holy angels in their height and proud secular powers. The fact that the Scripture has more than one meaning is apparently no problem to Gregory: the more the better. The above mentioned idea of theology as a kind of musical improvisation is suitable to Gregory’s exegesis.

Perhaps the most startling possibility of Gregorian exegesis is that sometimes the Holy Writ seems to imply an insuperable discord. Yet this very inconsistency of the Bible reveals the heart of God. Gregory recalls the Old testament law, according to which a man cannot marry a woman that has left him and married another man. God has nevertheless acted precisely thus. He continuously calls us, adulterous souls as we are, to himself. “He says: ‘thou shalt not do that’ - and then does that himself, against all manners! Look! He calls for those he declared unclean - in order to embrace them.”

To sum up the profits of Gregorian hermeneutics for our current situation, Gregory the Great emphasizes love as the key to the understanding of the Bible. Gregory advances the use of imagination for deeper understanding of the biblical narrative. The creative interplay between different explanations is possible and fruitful. There are no meaningless details in the Scripture, but everything points ultimately to the love of God. Thus, we are allotted a vision of Biblical inspiration. Next, we learn how to develop a crucial theological theme in an imaginative manner.

(to be continued...)