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The hermeneutic task
Fiachra Long
The process of defining hermeneutics is fundamentally complicated. Taken as a general rule of thumb, hermeneutics is “the science of interpretation” but this definition is already ambiguous because hermeneuein alternately means “to mean” and “to interpret”. Who means? Who interprets? Who understands? Who explains? These are processes naming a common event. It is difficult even to arrange them in chronological order. Does meaning come before interpretation, does understanding come before explanation, or vice versa? Is there an initial baseline, as it were, and something built on top of it? Our initial guess about a meaning-making event implies a circle, a hermeneutic circle, by which is meant that relevant witnesses to such an event (e.g. the audience at a reading, a performance, a dance, a song) are invited into this meaning-making circle and play an ill-defined role in the maintenance of meaning itself. Participants in this circle are encouraged to regenerate the meaning that is invoked by means of this event. It might be possible to break down this process, to present it in a more linear geometrical form, pointing to the evidence of the transfer of a message from here to there, for instance, from prophet to listeners, but this would be to analyze the event in over-simplified terms.
For this reason, the Homeric model must be rejected. The Greek god, Hermes, who may have been fleet of foot and hugely competent in his essential work of communicating the wishes of Zeus to humankind, is not a very good model to explain the more ambiguous context of human meaning-making – not to mention the more complicated process of reading and re-reading the scriptures. Homer models his idea of message transfer on a linear logic, invoking a general asymmetry between the gods and humankind where the message, originating in a separate domain (Mount Olympus), is then communicated without distortion to a messenger (Hermes), before being translated by means of Hermes’s consummate skill into the mind of a human recipient. It is logical then for the whispers of the gods to translate into ideas for action much as the Muse is thought to inspire the poet. Human ideas, both creative and destructive, can then be understood as having literally “crossed a border” – namely, the border separating the spheres of the divine from the human, the Muse from the artist; a prior superior source of understanding from an order of being that not only needs this instruction but also needs it to be delivered in a transparent manner. How wonderful then to benefit from the work of a skilled (even divine) interpreter! In such a case, the translation is doubly certain, untouched by human misunderstanding on two counts, it being perfectly clear in itself and, second, perfectly translated. The listener, as a result, has no desire to do anything else but to be patently enlightened by the message handed over.
Human interpreters, however, are not favoured by such a set of circumstances. Human interpreters are not so polished in the skills required. This is because they themselves are creators of meaning, and if they are required to enact the text or perform the dance or recital so that a translation happens between originator and receiver, the result can be dramatic, inspirational, even if the original meaning is clearly out of reach. Humans have always been implicated as deceptive as well as revelatory players when they engage in the meaning-making circle. The upshot of this is that when a text gives something over to be understood, it does so with more hope than certainty and without any clear formula for analysing the elements of the event itself. Even if we perform an exegesis on whatever materials are presented and use a refined Auslegungskunst, or “art of laying something out”, even if this requires of us a learning preparation of many years, involving “preaching, interpreting other languages, explaining and explicating texts” (Gadamer 2006, p. 29), it is clear that no human interpreter can ever be as efficient as Hermes but is just as likely to be the active originator of content, the creator of a new layer of text, a deceiver as well as a reporter. In the attempt to bring a text or ritual alive so that its meaning can once again be seen, this human interpreter is always likely to be a distorter of the original. Lost in a babbling world and without the gift of transparency, human understanding has been either enhanced or dulled, and the double certainty that made the Greek model so easy to understand no longer applies.
In sum, to embrace the hermeneutic task means to acknowledge the realities of a babbling culture. The interpreter can only understand what along with other humans comes to be understood within an active linguistic community, whether sympathetic or hostile to the text or event under consideration. He or she will make the rough paths smooth, and what may once have been revealed as a puzzle or a question to be pondered can be taken as a solution and an answer to be savoured. And vice versa. The clarities can be muddled as well as the muddles clarified. We are now two steps removed from Hermes’s fortunate position due to the imperfection both of the message itself and the means of communicating it. To add to our difficulties, our receivers are not only technically imperfect listeners but are often prejudiced and closed to the message communicated because of their own learning. Learning is often the bane of philosophers because what we know can sometimes prevent us from learning anything new. Closed learning confirms us in our ignorance. For this reason we can easily interpret a text in a manner that is quite at variance with the one originally intended. Indeed most listeners/readers are already compromised by the social operation of language itself and the many cultural codes and ideologically inspired mind frames that have taught them to resist learning a different set of coordinates. Following Gadamer, it seems important not to link learning to a process of simple revelation or the ability to convey something by means of simple intuitive tricks but to link it to the more confusion-filled engagement in a conversation that tries to allow “the object to come into words” (Gadamer 2004, p. 390). This form of listening/reading is synonymous with coming to an understanding of what is said but not necessarily with the reception of its message.
Another significant difference between modern writers and ancient reciters/writers is the use of rhetoric. Where modern writers use their own rhetorical powers to communicate with an imagined audience, modern readers learn to decode these rhetorical devices in order to establish the original authored meaning. How texts perform on listeners (their illocutionary effect) (Austin 1976) is of considerable interest to modern writers. However, scriptural writings are layered affairs as a general rule and are not written to persuade but to express, and so the rhetorical concern of a single author does not apply to the layered texts of the scriptures whose authors are often deliberately obscure and generally irrelevant, even in their own eyes. The effect of the final (canonical) text is a complex pattern of interwoven pieces.
The upshot of this consideration is that worthy texts in the ancient world demand a more complex hermeneutic than the rhetorical decoding of modern texts. A historical vulnerability seems to be built into this process of engagement between creator and receiver. There is one serious obstacle, however. In oral cultures, once a text, sacred or otherwise, is taken to be the very words of God then the hermeneutic task has assumed the contours of Homer’s Hermes and a different set of reading conditions are invoked. Hence, to cast hermeneutics as a kind of re-presentation of an original verbal utterance opens a line of inquiry that is different from the one I am familiar with. I prefer to grapple with the dynamic features of a live reading, performance or presentation, its essential confusions and ambiguities. The hermeneutic task, as I understand it, has to confront inevitable historical inconsistencies, due partly to the imprecisions of language, the vagaries of memory, the personal inhibitions of speakers and readers, and a whole range of further confusions relating to translation.
The functions of the scriptures
Jean Grondin (1994, p. 1) has identified three aspects that might be considered as functions applying to all scriptures. First, they have a philosophical aspect which, contrary to what might appear at a cursory glance, enables a cultural group to critique its own cultural assumptions. This means that scriptural documents are not simply cultural identity documents but contain a definite twist that induces reflection on this identity. Second, they offer a vision or a prospect of a higher meaning in such a way that we can glimpse this meaning rather than grasp it firmly; and last, they offer a legal account that expresses the identity of a group; an identity marked often by rules of behaviour and sometimes even by codes of dress that manifest the way a group forms around an oral or written tradition. These aspects of scriptural texts are further deepened through debates about the orthopraxis of ritual, the appropriate presentation of oral texts, rules concerning the manipulation and maintenance of physical documents with the hands, or the orthodoxy of texts themselves, their inclusion or exclusion from a canon. These three aspects (critique, vision and legal identity) provide the basic framework within which the hermeneutic task is set. They reflect a historical essence by means of the events, leaders, prophets, political upheavals, as well as moves from oral to written culture and the development of artefacts relating to this change. They apply equally pointedly to Christendom’s divisions, particularly the development of philosophical, theological and legal concerns; but they also apply with equal energy to Judaism and Islam and to many of the other world religions. The problem is to know what function any particular text might fulfil.
Reading layered texts
It must be remembered that for ancient readers, hidden meanings were often considered necessary to show the importance of a text. If we need to understand anything from the start, then it is that these texts were not teaching documents, designed to communicate a clear message to the uninitiated: they were rather documents held in reverence by a group and designed to be hidden from the uninitiated. A worthy text demanded subtlety of mind and a proper disposition towards that depth would be necessary in order to reveal what otherwise remained hidden. The hermeneutic task therefore had to focus on unlocking the underlying meaning of a text, which almost by definition had to be kept secret and thus sacred to the identity and well-being of the group. In the west, as in the east, young monastic clerics would be weaned on such conventions. For them the underlying or hidden meaning pointed beyond itself to a richness that did not reflect the privilege of the literate world but rather the sacredness of the text itself, its centrality and importance in terms of the identity of a group, and, in some cases, the separate sphere of the divine. Ancient readers were therefore less likely to accept straight-talking text as deep because, as Frederick Ahl (1984, p. 176) suggests, “emphasis” in the ancient world meant almost the opposite of its contemporary definition where it means the “force or firmness of expression” (Chambers Study Dictionary, p. 244). Instead Quintilian (35–c.100 CE) defined emphasis as “the process of digging out some lurking meaning from something said” (Institutio Oratoria 9.2.64) suggesting almost the inverse and intellectually challenging art of searching for what is hidden. Only on condition that something is hidden is there any need for emphasis.
The allegorical method
Once the distinction between the hidden and the surface meaning of a text is generally accepted, then in what sense can the deep meaning be constant across variations? When the pseudo Heraclitus defined allegoria as the possibility of saying one thing and meaning another (Grondin 1994, p. 25), this traditional presentation left open the question of the constancy of the text. While the surface could remain the same, the underlying deep meaning could change and vice versa. If everything changed, both surface and depth, the task would become extremely complex, if not impossible. In scriptural hermeneutics, allegory presents a method that explains away surface contradictions, repetitions, juxtaposed versions of the same event, alternative endings and many other repetitive features evident in the text. Historically, one key example of the value of the allegorical method was the way it enabled new religions to benefit from older scriptures. Indeed Frances Young, reflecting on the Christian reception of the Hebrew Scriptures, notes how “in the Hellenistic world, the prophetic books of the Jewish scriptures were treated as collections of oracles. The riddles were to be interpreted in order to understand the reference and discover the prophetic prediction” (2002, p. 204). Allegory then opened the theme of sacramentality announced by Gregory the Great (540–604CE) and formulated in the later middle ages by Peter Lombard (1096–1164) who spoke of the Hebrew Law announcing “in a veiled manner the sacraments of Christ and the Church”. Hence typology or figurative allegory (seeing Christ prefigured in the Hebrew Scriptures) allowed Christians to look backwards, as it were, from Christ to the Hebrew Law, so that, in the words of Gregory, the Church could learn the Law “through the holy Gospel, not the Gospel through the Law”. This renaming of the Hebrew Scriptures as well as its reordering, while annoying Jews, enabled Christians to avoid Marcion’s heretical attempt to split Christianity from Judaism entirely, to maintain respect and indeed reverence for the Torah, and to claim direct lineage from it to the Beatitudes. Reflecting on later debates, De Lubac noted a tension between the reading “which consists in the history of the letter” (favoured by Marcion) and the other reading “which is more generally named spiritual, or allegorical, or mystical”.
Already John Cassian in the fourth century had organized the cenobitic life around three functions, namely, proper conversion to Christ through mortification and self-denial; the engagement in moral works in a manner that imitated the life of Jesus (tropological); and finally mystical (anagogical) engagement, which would be evidenced through long periods spent in quiet prayer. Indeed the Scriptures by this stage had been asked to perform all these functions even though it was the saints who particularly seemed able to use the Scriptures in the latter ultimately mystical sense. Merging with views of superiority and inferiority enshrined in feudal structures, it was frequently assumed that those who had reached the highest rank were best placed to read and interpret the Scriptures well and hence, in a sense, the higher you were on the scale of temporal authority, the more likely you were to have insight into God’s mind. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century finally listed these allegorical functions as “special allegory, tropological allegory, and special anagogical allegory” (see De Lubac 2000, p. 38).
It stands to reason that because of the predominance in the western Judeo-Christian tradition of an allegorical and sometimes strictly typological reading, Moses or Abel turned up all too readily in medieval mystery plays as Christ figures (Woolf 1957), thus becoming dramatic enactments of this same sacramentum, an exteriority standing in relation to an interiority through which the arcanum or core of God’s own self-revelation through Christ could play itself out. In a move that would later be taken up by Calvin, Christian orthodox interpretation thus linked Hebrew Scriptures to the Christian experience and to the reality of Christ. Allegory could then enable a scriptural text to maintain its authority despite radical meaning changes. This approach is also compatible with a view common across traditions that only those holy enough could be trusted to understand the depth meaning of the Scriptures. Most of the world religions could use allegory to link an older tradition to an emergent one, or to link a current prophet or leader to earlier prophets or leaders. This happened as a matter of course within Christendom and between Christianity and Judaism, but it also occurred in the Islamic claim that fundamentally we are all Moslems and in the Baha’i belief in the cumulation of scriptures; while in the east, first Hinduism and then Buddhism have continually incorporated earlier texts and whole traditions within their own organic compass. Allegory, therefore, can be viewed as a method that even encouraged the subsequent layering of texts, as each tradition drew sustenance from earlier traditions. The western and middle-eastern tradition would have posited a relation between the human community and God as another reason for the ongoing relevance of their scriptures, qualifying them as sacred and mystical as a result of this association. The eastern traditions would have presented an immanent path to human enlightenment and well-being as their recurrent leitmotif, most notably evidenced in monastic practices of service and humility.
A further aspect is evident when the liturgical rituals expressing this relation/journey offer communities an important means of physical or mystical healing. Where religious systems could develop based on the notion of one deity, the importance of a place or an action could be reinterpreted using this transcendent scheme. Similarly, the Kami or local spirits of springs or forest areas in Shinto, just like the springs, holy wells and wooded areas of Celtic religion, could link local geographical features to spiritual atmospheres and offer pilgrims the promise of healing and long life. Such religious systems by means of translation processes managed to redefine the meaning of ...
