Abstract
Shpet here introduces the theme of his text, which is to understand the role of the “word,” broadly understood to include even whole passages of text. Questions concerning hermeneutics arose historically from attempts to understand interpretation with regard to the practical demands of pedagogy, morality, and even politics. Shpet traces here the development of hermeneutics forward through Origen and Augustine.
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Notes
- 1.
[Shpet here appeals to a conception of “positive philosophy” that can be traced in the Russian tradition back at least to the nineteenth-century philosopher/theologian Pamfil Jurkevich and that is concerned with being rather than the Kantian project.]
- 2.
Plato 1969: 832 (Republic X, 606e).
- 3.
See Blass 1892: 151.
- 4.
See Gomperz 1912: 41ff.
- 5.
See Steinthal 1863: 75 f.: “It was tacitly assumed that words must be created, must be given. The question was only whether they are correct or not.”
- 6.
- 7.
[The Greek title of Aristotle’s work On Interpretation. It forms the second text in his Organon and is better known in the scholarly world by its Latin title De Interpretatione.]
- 8.
Besides Steinthal, see also Michelis 1886: 16 – “We see how Aristotle was born, so to speak, from Plato.”
- 9.
[See Aristotle 1984: 2–3 (De Interpretatione, §2); Plato 1969: 1007–1011 (Sophist, 259e–264b).]
- 10.
- 11.
[Euhemerus – late fourth century BC Greek mythographer, to whom is traditionally attributed the position that mythological personages and events refer to actual persons and events that have over time become exaggerated and altered.]
- 12.
The Anomalists of the Pergamene School are connected with the Stoics through Crates. The most prominent representative of the Alexandrian Analogists is Aristarchus. Apparently, Aristarchus and Crates initiated the unending dispute between the Analogists and the Anomalists. On this dispute, see Steinthal 1863: 347–63, 435–524. See also Immisch 1909: 33ff.
- 13.
Dilthey 1996: 240.
- 14.
However, according to Philo, there are “canons” and “laws” of allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament. Hillel, with his seven rules of hermeneutics, has no connection with these philosophical directions.
- 15.
For a short historical survey, or, rather, a chronological listing of the chief authors and the basic works of Biblical exegesis in both Christian and Jewish literature, see Szlagowski 1908: 250–78. A very detailed survey of the tendencies in hermeneutics, particularly with regard to the New Testament, is found in the textbook of the Utrecht University professor Doedes. (I use the English translation: Doedes 1867.)
- 16.
Of the philosophical schools mentioned above, the Pergamene, apparently, used not only allegorical interpretation widely, but even abused it. Crates, for example, wanted to find all of Stoic philosophy in Homer. See the sketch of the history of philology in Immisch 1909: 29.
- 17.
Dionysius of Alexandria (died 264 or 265 A.D.), a pupil of Origen, apparently was an exception to this general direction of Alexandrian theology.
- 18.
See part 1 of [Shpet’s] investigation History as a Problem of Logic [Shpet 1916].
- 19.
For a general survey, see Doedes 1867: 13–15, 19–50. Doedes distinguishes three periods in the history of New Testament hermeneutics: (1) the period of preparation (before the start of the Reformation); (2) the period of the first attempts (from the start of the Reformation); (3) the period of the rise of scientific interpretation (from the second half of the eighteenth century). In all three periods, he distinguishes three directions in the schools of exegesis (Doedes 1867: 17–18): (1) the unrestrained arbitrary interpretation (the allegorical ones of Origen, Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great, Bonaventure, et al.), but also the common-sense (sana ratio) interpretations of the Socinians, as well as the “philosophical” interpretations of Spinoza, Kant, et al.; (2) the slavishly bound interpretation (for example, that of Alcuin, Albert the Great, St. Thomas, et al.); and (3) the legally free interpretation (Erasmus, Semler, Ernesti, Schleiermacher, et al.). The last direction, being scientific, in Doedes’ opinion, is now on top. The inadequacy of Doedes’ division lies in the fact that it is guided not so much by fundamental principles as by his own evaluations.
- 20.
See Augustine 2002: 116.
- 21.
See Aquinas 1911–1925: 1.10 co.; Aquinas 2.102.2. Following Thomas, Dante in The Convivio, Treatise 1, chapter 1, distinguishes the same four senses in poetic works: (1) the literal (litterale); (2) the allegorical (allegorico), which hides itself under the cover of a tale and is the truth hidden under a lovely lie, (Dante notes that theologians take this sense differently than do the poets); (3) the moral, which the reader should trace in order to derive for oneself usefulness and moral instruction; (4) the anagogical or ‘above the sense,’ which rises to things of eternal glory. The literal sense forms, as it were, the subject matter and material (suggetto e materia) of the others, particularly of the allegorical sense. Without the literal sense, it is impossible to enter into a knowledge of them. In turn, the moral and the anagogical senses are derived from the allegorical. See Dante 1889. Fraticelli quotes Buti’s brief formulation: “Litera gesta refert, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quid speres anagogia.” [“The literal reports facts; the allegorical what you are to believe; the moral what you are to do; the anagogical what you are to hope for.”] See Dante 1889: 53 f. In a letter to Can Grande, Dante also refers to the allegorical sense as “mystical” (mysticus sensus) and considers this designation to be common to all three senses, which are opposed to the literal or historical sense. See Dante 1920: 199.
- 22.
[See Revelation, Chapters 5–8.]
- 23.
See the examples in Doedes 1867.
- 24.
There are references to objections against Origen from the side of Theodore of Mopsuestia, a representative of the School of Antioch, but his work “De allegoria et historia contra Origenem” has been lost. Among the Alexandrians, St. Dionysius the Great, a disciple of Origen, is mentioned as an opponent of the Allegorists. (Szlagowski 1908: 261.) On the basis of the preserved excerpts, however, this can hardly be categorically affirmed (cf., for example, fragment III of his “De promissionibus”), although in general (as can be seen from these same fragments and from his interpretations of Ecclesiastes and Job) his exegesis is distinguished by great sobriety and restraint. (See Dilthey 1996: 242.)
- 25.
Origen 1895: 341–42.
- 26.
Cf. Origen 1895: 341–42.
- 27.
Origen 1895: 354–56.
- 28.
Cf. Origen 1895: 356.
- 29.
Cf. Origen 1895: 342.
- 30.
- 31.
Cf. Origen 1895: 297.
- 32.
Origen 1895: 297.
- 33.
Origen 1895: 301.
- 34.
Cf. Origen 1895: 303. Such an argument by Origen is very indicative. If the historical order were observed everywhere in Holy Scripture, we would not guess that something even deeper and more inward is contained in it. “For this reason, divine wisdom took care that in the historical sense there are certain omissions and interruptions, thereby introducing into them something impossible and incongruous.” Cf. Origen 1895: 312–13.
- 35.
Cf. Origen 1895: 323–24.
- 36.
P. I – Inventio, P. II – Elocutio: “There are two things on which all interpretation of Scripture depends: the mode of ascertaining the proper meaning, and the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained.” Augustine 1873: 7; 120–21. Books I-III in Augustine’s work are devoted to the first part, the “mode of ascertaining.” Book I is devoted to “things,” Books II and III to “signs,” and Book IV is devoted to the second part. Augustine himself speaks of the relation to rhetoric in the first chapters of Book IV. De doctrina Christiana, apparently, served to a certain extent as a prototype for later hermeneutics (since they serve not so much the aims of knowledge as of apologetics), remaining, by the way, free from the tedious and minute rules that are illustrated by Augustine’s own example: when walking, do not lift one foot until you have put the other foot down. Augustine 1873: 72. On the connection in Roman literature between hermeneutics and rhetoric, see Immisch 1909: 34. On the anti-historical role of rhetoric in this connection, see Immisch 1909: 35.
- 37.
“All instruction is either about things or about signs; but things are learnt by means of signs. I now use the word ‘thing’ in a strict sense, to signify that which is never employed as a sign of anything else: for example, wood, stone, cattle, and other things of that kind. … There are signs of another kind, those which are never employed except as signs: for example, words. … and hence may be understood what I call signs: those things, to wit, which are used to indicate something else. Accordingly, every sign is also a thing; for what is not a thing is nothing at all. Every thing, however, is not also a sign.” Augustine 1873: 8–9.
- 38.
“For a sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself.” Augustine 1873: 34.
- 39.
“And everything of this nature that is there narrated we are to take not only in its historical and literal, but also in its figurative and prophetical sense….” Augustine 1873: 93.
- 40.
Augustine 1873: 43.
- 41.
Augustine 1873: 64–67.
- 42.
Augustine 1873: 68–69.
- 43.
Augustine 1873: 71 [“Again, the science of definition, of division, and of partition….”].
- 44.
Augustine 1873: 73.
- 45.
Augustine 1873: 87.
- 46.
Augustine 1873: 37, 80.
- 47.
- 48.
Characteristically, the criterion that Augustine offers to distinguish in Holy Scripture between figurative and literal language is the inappropriateness of the former. (We saw above that Origen saw in this a special forethought of Divine inspiration.) “Whatever there is in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, you may set down as figurative.” Augustine 1873: 90. (See also Augustine 1873: 95–6.) In regard to this “hermeneutic rule,” Doedes notes that it “necessarily opened the floodgates to the most unlimited caprice” (Doedes 1867: 20). However, Augustine himself accepts great freedom in the transition from literal (historical) interpretation to allegorical (spiritual) interpretation, as is apparent, as it were, from the examples of his attitude toward the interpretation of the building of the Ark, on the one hand, in which he overly defends the historical interpretation (Augustine 2003: 645–48), and the interpretation of the sayings of the prophets concerning Jerusalem, where he asks: “But who refuses to attach a spiritual understanding to them, if one could, or say that they should not be so interpreted by anyone who can?” Cf. Augustine 2003: 715.
- 49.
Augustine 1873: 117–119.
- 50.
It is certainly a matter of the essential connection between a sign and its sense or meaning (of the individualized context); the contingent coincidence – ambiguity – is not a rare phenomenon. Nevertheless, however, homonyms essentially have not only different meanings, but they are also different signs. It does not matter how identical the combinations of sounds may be in words derived from various roots. For example, in Russian the word “tri” (the number “three”) and the word “tri” (the imperative mood of the verb “teret”), or, in German, the words “acht” (the number “eight”), “Acht” (“care”), and “Acht” (“disgrace”), etc.
- 51.
Cf. Augustine 2006: 285. [The translation has been considerably adapted to fit Shpet’s Russian rendering of the passage.]
- 52.
- 53.
Augustine’s theory of the understanding of signs is presented in his work Concerning the Teacher (De magistro), which he wrote 8 years before On Christian Doctrine. See especially Augustine 1938: 39–46.
- 54.
Augustine 1938: 51–54.
- 55.
Cf. Augustine 1938: 47, 48.
- 56.
Augustine 1938: 29–35.
- 57.
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Shpet, G., Nemeth, T. (2019). [Origin of the Idea and of the Methods of Hermeneutics]. In: Nemeth, T. (eds) Hermeneutics and Its Problems. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 98. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98941-9_1
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