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ern interpretive theories of deconstruction, pulsional interpretive drift, misprision, libidinal reading, free jouissance.
The Scriptures had potentially every possible meaning, but their reading had to be governed by a code, and that is why the Fathers proposed the theory of the allegorical senses. In the beginning the senses were three (literal, moral, mystic or pneumatic); then they became four (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical).
The theory of the four senses provided a sort of guarantee for the correct decoding of the Books. The patristic and Scholastic mind could never avoid the feeling of inexhaustible profundity of the Scriptures, frequently compared to an infinita sensuum sylva (Jerome Ep. 64.21), an oceanum mysteriosum Dei, ut sic loquar, labyrinthum (Jerome In Gen. 9.1), a latissima sylva (Origenes In Ez. 4), or of a sea where, if we enter with a small boat, our minds are caught by fear and we are submerged by its whirls (Origenes In Gen. 9.1).
Once again we feel here something which recalls the modern fascination of an open textual reading, and even the hermeneutic idea that a text magnetizes on it, so to speak, the whole of the readings it has elicited in the course of history (Gadamer 1960). But the patristic and medieval problem was how to reconcile the infinity of interpretation with the univocality of the message. The main question was how to read the Books by discovering in them, not new things, but the same everlasting truth rephrased in ever new ways: non nova sed nove.
Scriptural hermeneutics provided the modern sensitivity with a model of "open" reading, but in its own terms escaped such a temptation. This is why at that time symbol and allegory were indistinguishable from each other. In order to consider them as two different procedures, Western civilization had to elaborate a different notion of truth.
There is, however, a point where Christian tradition offered to modern symbolism an interpretive model. It was the way of deciding when, in a text, one can recognize an instance of symbolic mode. Augustine (De Doctrina Christiana 3) was the first to put forth a list of rules for ascertaining whether and when a fact told by the Scriptures had to be taken, not literally, but figuratively. Augustine knew that verbal tropes such as a metaphor can be easily detected because, if we take them literally, the text would look mendacious. But what to do with the report of events that makes sense literally but, notwithstanding, could be interpreted symbolically? Augustine says that one is entitled to smell a figurative sense every time the Scriptures say things that are literally understandable but contradict the principles of faith and morals. Jesus

 
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