So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification.
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I q.1 a.10.
In college I took a class on ancient and medieval philosophy. The professor, who was not herself a Catholic, nevertheless went to great lengths to explain to us the nuanced way in which those strange old medievals thought about fundamental concepts, such as the interpretation of Scripture. She explained it something like this: “For them, the words signified things … but the things themselves also signified something.”
To help explain this concept, she took us to the university’s rare books library, where she had asked the librarian to put on display a massive medieval copy of the Book of Genesis. One page looked something like the image below.
If you can’t tell, this page contains the creation story found at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. Notice the seven medallions in the left margin. Read from top to bottom, they correspond to seven Scriptural propositions:
- Then God said, Let there be light; and the light began.
- God said said, too, Let a solid vault arise amid the waters, to keep these waters apart from those…
- Let the earth, he said, yield grasses that grow and seed; fruit-trees too, each giving fruit of its own kind…
- Next, God said, Let there be luminaries in the vault of the sky, to divide the spheres of day and night…
- After this, God said, Let the waters produce moving things that have life in them, and winged things that fly above the earth under the sky’s vault…
- And God said, Let us make man, wearing our own image and likeness … So God made man in his own image, made him in the image of God. Man and woman both, he created them.
- By the seventh day, God had come to an end of making, and rested on the seventh day, with his whole task accomplished.
In today’s day and age, if an artist were to be tasked with illustrating these seven lines, chances are he would not come up with the images above. Notice that in all seven of these medallions, it is Jesus Christ who is creating everything. And yet, this is an illustration of the beginning of all time, before God became man, so that this would appear to be a grossly anachronistic error by the artist.
The fact that illustrations like these strike us as odd shows how far we have drifted from the Christian frame of mind: the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. When we read of the seven days of creation, and when the words of Genesis bring to mind certain images—earth and water, plants and animals, man and woman—we have only traveled half-way to the true meaning of the text. We have only grasped the basics, that words signify things. We have yet to ask what the things themselves signify. For the words themselves only partially render what God is trying to say to us. The things signified by the words are also God’s words, and it is in the things of the Bible, or in the language of created history itself, that we are trying to discern what God is telling his people.
It was the illuminator’s great task to demonstrate this interpretive method by inventing images that are in a sense both image and word, visual syntheses of form and meaning. It would not suffice to contrive a mere symbol, like a lion symbolizes courage or a flower symbolizes innocence. The image must show that a created thing, and not an imaginary thing, is itself describing a deeper spiritual reality. Within this framework, we can see what a marvelous job the artist has done on the page above.
Gregory says (Moral. xx, 1): Holy Writ by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery.
St Thomas Aquinas, Ibid.
To use a bit of jargon, when the things of Scipture are interpreted, they are interpreted according to the spiritual sense, which presupposes that they have already been interpreted according to the literal sense. Said differently, when words signify things, they signify literally. When things signify things, they signify spiritually, because they describe a spiritual reality.
It is characteristic of the New Testament to be much clearer in this regard, because it is the Testament of Christ, the one who is himself the fullness of God’s Revelation. When Scripture tells us that Christ stilled a storm and gave sight to the blind by his command alone, it is obvious that these events are signs of a much higher spiritual reality: namely, that God has absolute power over creation, and that Jesus of Nazareth wields that power.
But notice how much trickier the job is in the Old Testament. Jesus Christ has not yet arrived on the stage of human history in visible form. And yet the old Christian artist knows that it is Jesus Christ that the things of the Old books are describing, for he has it by supernatural faith that Jesus Christ is the fullness of truth itself. In other words, in the final analysis, the spiritual sense of Scripture in the Old Testament is often describing the Son of God, but before he actually arrived in the flesh.
The illuminator of the page above has shown this in a masterful way. Because it was elementary knowledge for a Christian that the Lord would arrive much later in 0 A.D., there was no danger in misunderstanding his meaning. The illuminator was trying to show that in each of the days of creation, all things were being created through the Word of God, and it was the same Word who would one day become incarnated as Jesus Christ. He shows how the spiritual reality of the New Testament, that was once hidden in the events of the Old Testament, has now become clear in the new light, namely:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
In illustrating the presence of Christ amid the very first things of creation, the illuminator showed the spiritual meaning of the text: the language of creation has its source in the Son of God, because everything was created through him at the beginning of time.
Like many of the fruits of this bygone Christian culture, we can see its seeds scattered in many of the products of our own modern civilization. It is employed more or less consciously, however, and therefore used with varying degrees of effect. I would like to propose that modern-day Christians should pick this up again, but to start at the beginning. We need to learn how to read the Scriptures like our ancestors might have read them, so that we can learn to produce our own illuminators.
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