PART III: The Structure of Christ-Truth and the Structure of Hermeneutics

3.1. The fourfold structure of Christ-Truth

The uniqueness of Jesus Christ lies in his being both God and man: uniqueness, therefore, which is a totality. In the superemely unified person of Jesus Christ lies the totality of being as in its centre. That is why his person-event is of ultimate hermeneutical significance. This coincidence of uniqueness and totality in a historically finite, concrete subject is the essence of the mystery of Christ. The scandal is perhaps only slightly alleviated by considering that the sense of mystery is also at the heart of all the "human sciences" insofar as they aim at comprehending the irreducible unique concrete existence, and not only the general and the abstract (33).

As we have seen already, in John's gospel Jesus presents himself as the truth, that is, as the absolute revelation of God to man and of man to man in the light of God. This is the same as claiming that his person and his event are the ultimate ground of meaning. I think I am justified, therefore, in analysing the structure of hermeneutics in terms of the structure of Christ-Truth.

In this part I am following very closely the insights of 1. de La Potterie (34). The person-event of Christ-Truth reveals a fourfold structure, in which the coordinates of God and man, of time and eternity meet.

a. Christ-Truth is historical: he is a true member of our history. (Cf. 1 John 4:2-3).

b. Christ-Truth is transcendent: in him is hidden and revealed the mystery of God. (Cf. John 1:18: 20:31).

c. Christ-Truth is personal: the "locus" of his actualization is primarily the human person. (Cf. John 17:26).

d. Christ-Truth is eschatological: his total significance is realized only at the end of history. (Cf. John 16:13)

Through this fourfold structure Christ-Truth fulfills and redeems all the human searches for meaning, liberating the truth that is in them. and denouncing the falsity that all too often is mixed with the best intuitions. This is a big statement and so I would like to specify it a little, first with reference to the Western tradition of thought and then. tentatively, with reference also to oriental tradition as represented especially by Chinese philosophers.

a. Christ-Truth as historical fulfills and redeems historicism: Christ is a fully historical person-event, truly immersed in the flow of human history. but not reducible to history.

b. Christ-Truth as transcendent fulfills and redeems Platonism: Christ is a transcendent mystery which relativizes history, and yet he is rooted in history and does not escape from history, but on the contrary assumes history into his own mystery.

c. Christ-Truth as personal fulfills and redeems existentiatistic personalism: the revelation given by Jesus realizes itself in a supreme way in the self-transcending human person, and yet it is greater than all human persons in their individuality as well as in their totality.

d. Christ-Truth as eschatological fulfills and redeems Hegelianism: Jesus Christ as Truth shall be totally fulfilled only at the end of history when God wilt be "all in all", "everything to every one" (cf. 1 Cor 15:28b). However, this "delay" is not due to any inadequacy on his part but is due to God's will of making us all sharers in his fullness.

Applying this specification to the oriental context. I would attempt this confrontation between Christ-Truth and Oriental thought:

a. Christ-Truth as historical redeems and fulfills the positivistic Confucianism of Hsun Tzu and many modern Chinese thinkers.b. Christ-Truth as transcendent fulfills and redeems Hinduism. Buddhism, Taoism. with their acute sense of the contingency of material and historical reality.c. Christ-Truth as personal redeems and fulfills the great traditions of Confucianism. Moism. Neo-Confucianism, with their stress of personal cultivation.

d. Christ-Truth as eschatological fulfills and redeems the dynamic idealism of Wang Yang Ming and the "Da Tong" ideal that has inspired so many modern Chinese revolutionaries.

Partially, and sometimes distortedly, this fourfold structure of Jesus-Truth can be seen reflected in the multiplicity of human attempts at grasping the totality of meaning. Now I would like to show that this fourfold structure has always been present to Christian consciousness from its birth to this day.

St. Paul was perhaps the first to give it expression, even though in a figurative and implicit way. in Eph 3:18, staling that the mystery of Christ has the dimensions of (historical) breadth, (eschatological) length, (transcendent) height, and (personal) depth.

Patristic tradition wavers between a threefold and a fourfold structure of meaning. But the former is mainly due to the fact that the discussion often turned upon the meaning of the text of Scripture, and not on meaning as such. Thus Origen gives a threefold structure (35)Augustine a fourfold (36), but not in the sense intended here. However, when the eye is raised from the text and set on the person-event to which the text testifies, the fourfold structure appears neatly.

In libris autem omnibus sanctis intueri oportet

quae ibi aeterna intimentur,

quae facta narrentur,

quae futura praenuntientur,

quae agenda praecipiantur vel admoneantur (37).

Mediaeval hermeneutics systematized the suggestions of the Fathers, demonstrating that the fourfold structure presented here underlies their twofold, threefold, or even fourfold presentations (38). The result was the famous quatrain:

Littera gesta docet,

Quid credas allegoria,

Moralis quid agas.

Quo tendas anagogia (39).

Once obtained, such a neat systematization incurred the danger of being applied not only to the person-event of Jesus-Truth to which Scripture testifies, but also to the text itself, and to every single text, at that. This, of course, may be seen as an abuse of the fourfold structure, but only insofar as the structure is forced upon a single sentence, without reference to the whole biblical context. So, for example, however charming, it is excessive to see in the word "Jerusalem" the presence of the fourfold structure in each and all of its occurrences (Jerusalem as "urbs historica. Corpus Christi, anima christiana, urbs coelestis"). However, it may well be that, throughout the Bible, Jerusalem appears in one or the other of these meanings.

The mediaeval systematization has been always influential, overtly or silently, in all hermeneuticat probings. Even today, it is probably more alive than may at first sight appear. As Urs von Balthasar has pointed out:

The four senses of Scripture have been secretly brought back to life by the more recent Protestant theology: the ‘literal sense’ is that which results from historico-critical enquiries; the 'spiritual sense' shows up in the kerygmatic meaning; the 'tropological (or moral) sense' corresponds to the existential meaning; the 'anagogical sense' re-lives in the eschatotogical meaning (40).

After all, what is Christian hermeneutics if not simply a function of that "staying in the truth" (cf. John 8:44) which is the Christian life? And what is faith if not a) memory of the historical person-event of Jesus Christ and b) openness to the transcendent mystery revealed in it? What is hope if not the expectation of the eschatological fulfilment? What is charity if not the existential assimilation to, and personal identification with. the person-event of Christ-Truth?

Have we fallen into pan-hermeneuticism? No. As human life has an essentially hermeneutical character, so we have done nothing but underline the essentially hermeneutical character of Christian life. And just as Christian life is under the sign of the cross, so Christian hermeneutics is under the sign of the cross. As Schlier in his commentary on Ephesians has pointed out, breadth, length, height and depth are the dimensions of the cross. In Christian hermeneutics we see transpiring the age-old crucifixion of orthodox faithfulness to the word of God, this titanic effort of the reconciliation of opposites, of the "comprehension" of all dimensions of truth. Needless to say, this effort does not imply violating the principle of non-contradiction. Opposites are not contradictories, and the Holy Spirit is the first great respecter of the principle of non-contradiction (pace all dialectical metaphysicians and theologians).

3.2. The basic duality underlying the fourfold structure of Jesus Truth

The four dimensions of truth can be grouped in two different ways, each of which is of crucial hermeneutical significance:

a) St. Thomas Aquinas classifies "historia" or "gesta" as literal sense, and the other three dimensions (allegoria, moralis, anagogia) as spiritual sense (41). The hermeneutical significance of this grouping (which is widespread also in patristic tradition) is that the binomial symbol-reality is the substratum of the fourfold structure. History is the visible sign of the invisible reality of the other three dimensions (transcendence, personality and eschatology). These three latter dimensions are rooted in history and cannot be uprooted from it without being pulverized, that is. without destroying their reference to Christ-Truth. The historical reality of the person-event of Jesus-Truth cannot be dispensed With. Christian hermeneutics, therefore, welcomes any light that can be thrown on the historical character of the person and the event of Jesus Christ. Hence it values highly the contribution of the historico-critical method. And it uses this method with the pre-comprehension that it is important, and that it is possible, to ground convincingly the historicity of the revelation of Christ-Truth.

On the other hand. the Christian interpreter is aware that what can be obtained with the historico-critical method is only half of the picture. And it would be to mortify the inner dynamism of even this half, not to let it develop into its other dimensions.

b) There is a second way of grouping the four dimensions of Christ-Truth: historical character and transcendence are attritutes of Christ-Truth in himself, while personal interiority and eschatotogical fulfilment are attributes of Christ-Truth-for-us-and-in-us:

The hermeneutical significance of this second grouping is even more far-reaching than the first. In it we come close to realizing what hermeneutics essentially is. In fact, we have the encounter of two persons: the person-event of Jesus Christ becomes hermeneutically relevant (and therefore Truth) when it meets another person-event, when it meets us. Truth is the revelation of a person to another person.

For Jesus-Truth this means that his person-event has no other raison d'etre than his relationship to us. Christ-Truth is a reality totally oriented to the other, a reality graciously but wholly determined by the search for the encounter with the other. Jesus Christ is what he is, not because he needs us, but because we need him. That is what we mean, I think, when we say that Christ is the revealer and the redeemer.

For us, this means that the person-event of Jesus Christ in his historical and transcendent reality is a constitutive element of our own meaning as' human persons. Human fulfilment is grounded in the relationship of the human person with the person of Jesus Christ. On this vantage point, one thinks of the many persons who have no controllable relationship to Christ. It is immediately apparent that this relationship goes well beyond the boundaries of empirical controllable facts.

Let us return to the hermeneutical significance of this underlying duality in itself: it is the duality of personal encounter. Why, then. should it grow into a fourfold structure? Because, of these two persons who meet, the first is both transcending history and rooted in history (in the image of man), while the second is both a person in the making and is gifted with personal inferiority and depth (in the image of God). In other words, we could say that the duality becomes fourfold because vertically, it involves both a human-divine reality (being the encounter of God and man), and horizontally, a process from beginning to end (being an encounter that takes place in history).

Moreover, the two persons involved in the encounter are looked upon in this duality from the point of view of their hermeneutical significance, and therefore differently, since Christ and we have a different hermeneutical import. In the dimensions of history and transcendence. the person-event of Jesus Christ is seen its uniqueness as human symbol of the mystery of God. In the dimensions of personaljty and eschatology. instead, man is seen in his universal nature as man-in-history, and therefore man-in-the-making, fulfilled only at the end; as well as in his universal nature as self-transcending person in the mystery of his interior depths. Speaking more simply, it can be said that Jesus Christ is seen in his unique role as authoritative giver of meaning, while we are seen in our general capacity of receivers of meaning.

We have tried to characterize this basic duality, with the danger of losing sight of the fact that the duality itself is actually situated in the perfectly unified person of Jesus-Truth. The perfect unity in plurality of the two or four dimensions must be emphasized. This, in fact, is the "unicum Christianum". the peculiarly Christian feature of it all. In the "totum corpus, caput et membra" (the whole body. head and members) unity reigns. Thanks to his historical character, Jesus is God made in the image of man; thanks to his self transcending dynamism, man is made in the image of God. In Christ-Truth. God and man are reconciled in one.

That is why I would refrain from describing the basic duality of the hermeneutical encounter in terms of subject and object (42), the object being the person-event of Jesus-Truth encountered by me, the subject. This seems to me a most inadequate expression of what actually happens in the hermeneutical face-to-face. This is always a meeting of two persons, even if before our eyes there is only a piece of paper with a few signs in ink. This piece of paper is truly an object, but an object which points beyond itself to a subject, to a person. As an object, the paper or the book (even the book of Scripture) has only :a mediating function. The end term of the encounter is the person-event revealed by the meaning of the text.

In an unfathomable way this founding encounter has happened between the "subject" of man and the "subject" of God in the incarnation of the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ. Ultimately, the incarnation with its duality in perfect unity is the true ground of every hermeneutical encounter. This is what I have been trying to express throughout by using the perhaps awkward expression Christ-Truth or Jesus-Truth. Jesus Christ, the "verbum abbreviatum" is the first and last theological and hermeneutical model for the interpretation of Scripture (43). In the last analysis, he is the model of all interpretation as such.

3.3. The threefold structure of biblical hermeneutics

If Christ-Truth has four or, more fundamentally, two dimensions does it mean that also the structure of hermeneutics is twofold or fourfold? No. The structure of hermeneutics is threefold. In fact, the I encounter between the two persons of which we have been speaking, does not take place without a "tertium quid", without an intermediary. The encounter itself is of an interpretative nature just because it is a mediated encounter. In general, this function of mediation is performed by language, understood in the sense usual today of anything that allows a communication to take place (words, gestures, symbols, events, etc.). In our case this mediator is the language event of the biblical text. The text mediates the encounter between Jesus Christ and us. It is important to realize that the text is a mediator and only a mediator. Its function is essentially that of bearing witness. It "presents" the revelational event and the person of the revealer. It does so in at least two different ways: a) by making the revelational person-event present to ever new audiences in new spatial and temporal situations; b) by allowing for the ever renewed discovery of the deep sense of the revelational person-event (44).

Hence the tripartite structure of hermeneutics

Person A Language/Text Person B

In this formulation the different function of the two subjects or persons involved in the encounter mediated by the text is not sufficiently highlighted. This difference is, instead, apparent in many of the formulations that I have found in discussions about hermeneutical problems. I shall list them here, without altering their own specific perspective.

Already in the New Testament we can find, in germ, as it were, the awareness of this tripartite structure of interpretation. The prologue of Luke is a good example, or the first conclusion of John's gospel. A sketch will make this clear.

My own formulation of the hermeneutical structure of the sciptures would be as follows:

It remains clear that both Subject A and Subject B subtend the same complexity we have examined in dealing with the fourfold structure of truth. That is: Subject A retains its composite structure of historicity and transcendence. Subject B that of inferiority and temporality. A consequence of this is that the text must function in all these four directions, if it is to undergo an integral hermeneutical treatment. Concretely, it means that the exegete, who does not want to be hermeneutically irrelevant, will bring to bear upon the text all these four hermeneutical instruments: the historico-critical investigation (historical dimension), theological reflection (transcendent dimension), personal faith experience (personal dimension), confrontation with Church tradition and world development (temporal-eschatological dimension).

Under the name historico-critical investigation I intend to include also all other possible methods of explicitating the "bodiliness" of the text in all its superficial and deeper levels. The more the concrete reality of the text is understood, the more it can fulfill its symbolic function of pointing to the other dimensions. If it can be discussed whether the exegete's first concern should be with this first dimension, I think that on the other hand it is essential that the exegete be concerned also with the other three dimensions, because only thus will he open up the text to them. It must never be forgotten that the text we are dealing with is the word of God. Without a certain amount of theological reflection, the meaning of the text will be lost by at least half. Without a certain reference to personal and communal experience, no help will be offered for the interiorization of the word. And without acquaintance with the development of the historical appropriation of the Word, it will be impossible to do justice to its eschatological dimension. And by eschaton I mean the fulfilment of God's project for man, a fulfilment which is gradually being brought about by the commitment of every man and woman in response to God's offer in truth and love: the interiorization and consummation of the mystery of Christ in the personal and communal history of man.

3.4. The mediator is not a dead but a living word

It may be useful now to consider for a moment this question: what kind of word or text is this which claims to be able to mediate between Christ-Truth and us? The answer to this question will enable us to summarise much that has been said up to here.

Is this word-text a fossil of what the person-event of Jesus-Truth was? Or is it more like a living organism, alone capable of bearing witness to a truth that is at the same time life? The answer is clear aid fundamental: the apparently dead letter of Sacred Scripture reaches us carried by the living stream of tradition, which is constituted by the Spirit-filled perennial life of the Church, social and mystical body of Christ-Truth. The context in which this text reaches me is not the dead context of a dusty library, but the very human and very much alive ecclesiat faith experience of Jesus Christ as truth and as life.

Now, this context corresponds perfectly to the very nature of the text, which claims to be both a report and a witness. As a report it claims to be able to ground the historical solidity of facts and words. As a witness, it claims to be able to ground the perception of the mystery of which these historical facts and words are signs.

Only now perhaps does the hermeneutical value of tradition become unmistakably evident as well as the soundness of the hermeneutical reflections outlined in this paper. Tradition makes the difference between a living and a dead word (51).

By going through the history of exegesis of any Biblical text, it would be possible to provide a kind of experimental confirmation of the essential hermeneutical function of tradition, conceived as the Spirit-inspired progressive explicitation of the word on the way to the eschatological fulfilment.

Tradition guided by the Spirit is the bridge that allows the text to speak to us as a living witness. This bridge is not made of stones nor of books, but of the faith experience of people like you and me, of people like our fathers and our mothers, who before you and before me have comprehended the person-event of Jesus-Truth and have borne witness to him.

The text of Scripture, therefore, can claim to be able to mediate the encounter between us and Jesus-Truth, not because it is a text, but because it is a text produced and interpreted by a living witness. More important than the fact that it is written, is the fact that it bears witness. This witness is still alive today. And from the very beginning this witness has been borne often even unto death.

We ourselves, called to be witnesses, how do we fulfill our responsibility toward future generations?

34. Cf. especially his Course and class notes. La nozione biblica di verita, etc.

35. Cf. Bibliography, no.1.

36. Cf. Bibliography, no. 2. Augustine is property dealing here with the problem of the Christian reading of the OT.

37. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram Libri Duodecim, (ed. J. Zycha, CSEL, Pragae Vindobonae Lipsiae, 1894. "In all the sacred books, we must be able to perceive intimations of eternity, narrations of (historical) events, predictions of the future, precepts or admonitions for (personal) behaviour".

38. Cf. Bibliography, no. 3.

39. It is cited three times by Nicholas de Lyra in his Prologus to the Glossa Ordinaria (PL 113. 25-68). Henri de Lubac, in his Exegese Medievale (Paris) 1, p.23, affirms its real author to have been a certain Augustine de Dacie in his Rotulus pugillus, written around the year 1260. "The letter teaches what has happened, allegory what you must believe, morality what you ought to do, anagogy where you must arrive".

40. H. Urs von Balthasar. Con occhi semplici. Verso una nuova coscienza cristiana (Brescia 1970), p.19. De La Potterie quotes it, correcting the Italian translation in his article "Esegesi storico-critica e interpretazione cristiana: 'L'esegesi cattolica oggi'". Parola e Spirito (Studi in onore de S. Cipriani, ed. C.C. Marcheselli, Brescia 1982).

41. Cf. Bibliography, no. 3. The basic distinction literal-spiritual or, equivalently, historical-mystical, runs through the whole of Patristic exegesis. See. for example, the phrase that Augustine tirelessly repeats in his Tractatus in loannem: "Factum audivimus, mysterium requiramus": "We have heard the fact, let us probe into the mystery". Cf. also Greogory the Great and his Moralia in job, e.g. 35, 15-41 (PL 76. 779).

42. Cf. Pareyson's same concern, but applied to truth in general, in Modica, pp. 101-105.

43. Cf. de La Potterie. La nozione, p. 106.

44. Cf. de La Potterie, ibid., p.96, and Gadamer, II problema, p.49.

45. Weimar ed., Dr Martin Luthers Werke, (Tischreden, Vol. 1-6. 1912-1921) V. 26 (September 1540). Quoted by de La Potterie, Course.

46. Cf. Gazelles, pp.24. 27-28.

47. Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, First Part, Sections I and II; Second Part. Section II.

48. This is the very title of his book (cf. Bibliography, no. 7).

49. Cf. Lapointe, pp.57-71. 147-150.

50. Cf. P. Grech. Corso di Ermeneutica: Ispirazione ed Ermeneutica. Spring term. Academic Year 1982-83, at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome, (class notes).

51. See Appendix for a sketch of the hermeneutical theory here propounded.