Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

Chapter 24

Hermeneutics

Garrett Green

For provisional purposes, one can define hermeneutics quite simply as the theory of interpretation. Although this straightforward definition may do as a point of entry into a subject notable for its complexity, controversy, and jargon-ridden discourse, it will need to be qualified in a number of ways before it can do justice to the field of hermeneutics as it impinges on the scholarly study of religion today.

Our provisional definition can be expanded, first of all, by identifying hermeneutics as theoretical reflection on the principles and rules of interpretation and understanding. Implicit in this still basic definition is a duality that reflects the disparate origins of modern hermeneutics and helps to account for its complexity. On the one hand are those who would think of hermeneutics primarily in terms of method and practice. Here the emphasis lies on the actual interpretation of texts by scholars, exegetes, or religious teachers. Hermeneutics in this sense articulates and codifies the principles and rules of textual interpretation – an activity that has enjoyed a long history under a variety of names and plays an important role in virtually all of the world’s religions. On the other hand are those for whom the object of hermeneutics is not in the first instance the texts being interpreted so much as the human act of understanding that every interpretation presupposes and instantiates. Hermeneutics in this sense is more like a philosophy than a methodology. Indeed, in the influential modern tradition of hermeneutical speculation reaching from Schleiermacher to Gadamer, hermeneutics becomes the name for a comprehensive philosophy of understanding. When one thinks of hermeneutics as something to be ‘applied,’ one is using the term in the former (methodological) sense; when one uses it to describe a mode of reflection on the nature of human understanding, one is employing it in the latter (philosophical) sense. To make matters more complex, thinkers rarely adopt one or the other of these two types in its ‘pure’ form, so that the polarity represents not two kinds of hermeneutics but rather two tendencies or emphases within the modern hermeneutical discussion – tendencies that can take on endless variations and can be combined in myriads of ways.

Further clarification of hermeneutics requires that we look at the actual historical traditions that have led to our contemporary situation. The reason for this procedure should be plain from what has already been said: we cannot first establish the meaning of the term and then go on to describe the various ways of doing it, because every attempt at a formal definition already involves us in the controversial issues of the content of hermeneutical theory. The shape of the field today results not from the systematic unfolding of its conceptual meaning but rather from the interplay of concrete human personalities, cultures, and religious and philosophical traditions.

412â Key topics in the study of religions

Origins and etymology

No one knows for certain the origins of the Greek verb hermēneuein (‘to interpret’), from which our modern word derives, but most of the tendencies and controversies of later hermeneutical theory are foreshadowed in the ancient conversation about this term and its cognate noun hermēneia, which became a technical term and often appeared in titles

–preeminently in Aristotle’s treatise On Interpretation (Peri Hermēneias). Though the etymological connection is obscure, the most illuminating feature of ancient hermeneutics is its association with Hermes, the messenger of the gods. This connection underscores the fact that hermeneutics, while not a religious term per se, has always had an intrinsic relationship to religion. The archetypal problem of interpretation, one could say, is embodied in the mystery of the divine word that must first be translated (one of the root meanings of hermēneuein) into understandable human terms before it can be heard, obeyed, and appropriated. The most important texts calling forth the art of interpretation have long been religious texts, so that scriptural interpretation is not simply one category in a series of hermeneutical tasks but rather the source or model for all the others. Even in the highly secularized world of the modern academy one can find traces of this heritage in the continuing fascination and controversy aroused by issues of canon: how authoritative texts – pre-eminently the Bible in Western civilization – are to be interpreted.

The link between ancient Greek hermēneia and modern hermeneutical theory is found in the history of interpretation in the Jewish and Christian communities that were the successors to classical Greek and Roman culture and the forerunners of modern European and global culture. The shape of that history is largely determined by the texts whose interpretation was crucial for those communities. In classical culture the need to interpret Homer was the driving force behind hermeneutical thought, since the Iliad and the Odyssey functioned as foundational texts in those societies. The two main alternatives that developed were grammatical interpretation, which sought meaning in the structure and shape of the language in which the stories were told, and allegorical interpretation, in which the meaning of the text was sought in an external symbolic key. The grammatical interpreter looked at the way the text itself is put together, believing that the key to its meaning will be found within the structure of the text itself. Allegorical interpreters, on the other hand, believed that the meaning hidden in the text could only be deciphered with the help of an external key that would unlock its symbolism. First Jewish and then early Christian interpreters adapted and extended these methods for their own use in interpreting the Bible. The most important bridge figure is Philo of Alexandria (roughly a contemporary of Jesus, though the two were surely unaware of one another’s existence), a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who applied allegorical interpretation to the anthropomorphic narratives of the Torah, and whose ideas influenced the Christian thinkers who subsequently flourished in Alexandria. Rabbinic Judaism generally followed a different direction, which included several approaches to scripture, including literalist interpretations, midrashic exegesis, which tried to find meaning beyond the literal sense of the text, and others. Their overarching concern was to fit scripture into a theologically meaningful framework without succumbing to a dead literalism on the one hand or opening the floodgates to spiritualizing excesses on the other

–interpretations which, by encouraging subjective or mystical readings, might endanger the identity and integrity of the community.

The Christian church fathers faced similar issues, compounded by the need to integrate the proclamation of Jesus with the Jewish scriptures. In addition to the kinds of interpretation already mentioned, the Christian fathers advocated the use of typological or figural

Hermeneuticsâ 413â

interpretation, an approach often confused with allegory but in fact quite distinct from it. In this kind of interpretation, an earlier event (typically from the Old Testament) is taken as a figure or type for a later (New Testament) event. Unlike allegory, both figures, type and antitype, are real historical persons and events (e.g. Moses as figura of Jesus), whose meaning is found in the transcendent link between them. Figural interpretation has recently become the subject of renewed hermeneutical interest through the work of Erich Auerbach, whose book Mimesis (1953) describes the ancient practice, and through Hans W. Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974), which applies it to the modern history of theological hermeneutics.

The most important link between the hermeneutics of the early Christian church and the medieval period in Europe is the thought of Augustine of Hippo (354–430), whose importance for virtually every aspect of later Western thought can scarcely be exaggerated. Inheriting from the earlier church fathers the polarity between ‘literal’ and ‘spiritual’ senses of the scriptural text, he attempts to synthesize the legitimate concerns of both methods by investigating the role of signs (thereby becoming the precursor of the modern theory of signs, or semiotics). He sees the scriptures not as identical with the things to which they refer but rather as signifiers pointing to God. The upshot of this approach is a new stress on praxis – the living faith that is the goal of Christian teaching – as the proper context for interpretation of scripture. No mere theory can provide the conditions for right interpretation but only the faithful practice of reading the Bible in the context of the ongoing Christian community. In this way, scripture and tradition are linked in a dialectical relationship.

Of the many thinkers and schools of interpretation that might be mentioned in the long history of medieval interpretation of scripture, perhaps the most important for the later development of hermeneutics is the doctrine of the fourfold meaning of scripture. Earlier thinkers – following St Paul’s admonition that ‘the letter kills but the spirit gives life’ (2 Cor. 3: 6) – had distinguished between two senses of the text, the literal and the spiritual. In medieval hermeneutics the spiritual came to be distinguished into three distinct senses: the allegorical, seen as the key to the content of faith; the tropological, which concerned the moral significance of the text; and the anagogical, which dealt with the relation between the text and the future hope of believers. The effect of this doctrine of the fourfold meaning of scripture was increasingly to separate the various theological disciplines – biblical studies, moral theology, eschatology, etc. – both from one another and from the practical life of faith. A shift in hermeneutical emphasis occurred after the rediscovery of Aristotle in the twelfth century and the founding of the first universities. In the Scholasticism that followed, theology became an academic discipline, and theologians took pains to give their speculations a scientific basis. The greatest of the medieval thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, formally retained the theory of the fourfold meaning of scripture while in fact de-emphasizing allegorical interpretation in favor of increased attention to the literal meaning of the text. The upshot of these developments was that theology (what Thomas called sacred doctrine) became an academic enterprise that concentrated on the literal text, while the spiritual meaning of the text became by default largely the concern of popular piety and spirituality.

Questions about the single or multiple meanings of texts, and about the relationships among the different senses, came to a head in the Protestant Reformation, with its insistence on the sole authority of scripture. It is no accident that the one who first galvanized the discontent of sixteenth-century Christians into the movement we know as the Protestant Reformation – Martin Luther (1483–1546) – was a professor of Bible, whose new theological

Hermeneuticsâ 415â

of modern culture, and its most distinctive and influential line of development has taken place in the context of Continental European philosophy over the past two centuries.

The thinker generally credited with being the founder of modern hermeneutical theory

– Dilthey dubbed him the ‘Kant of hermeneutics’ – was the German theologian and Plato scholar F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834). As a major figure in the early Romantic movement, he articulated a hermeneutics in accordance with the notion of creativity, in which the work is understood as an expression of the creative genius of the author. Rejecting the traditional distinction between sacred and profane interpretation, he insisted that scripture can be understood in the same way as other texts. He argued that what is needed in both cases is a hermeneutics defined as the ‘art of understanding’ (Kunstlehre des Verstehens), thereby shifting attention away from the nature of the text itself to the nature of the understanding by which the text is read and interpreted. By focusing on the concept of understanding, Schleiermacher effectively re-conceives hermeneutics as an independent philosophical enterprise (though he insists upon calling it an ‘art’) rather than the handmaid of theology or literature studies. Though a theologian himself, he sought to minimize the distinction between general rules of textual interpretation and those rules appropriate to scriptural exegesis, insisting that the latter must remain subject to the former. Even the claim that the Bible is divinely inspired, therefore, cannot be invoked on behalf of a special theological hermeneutics. The theologian interprets texts according to the same general principles that apply in all situations of understanding. This move not only has significant consequences for the task of theology but also represents a major step in the direction of a disciplined study of religion distinct from the theology of Christianity or any other of the ‘positive’ religions. This contribution to the emerging field of religious studies is important in the light of another significant step taken by Schleiermacher: he, a Protestant clergyman and professor, was the first thinker in the European tradition to write a book on religion, understood as a phenomenon distinct from Christianity – his 1799 book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.

Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical ‘art of understanding’ has a bipolar structure, in which he distinguishes a grammatical (objective) dimension from a psychological or technical (subjective) aspect in the act of understanding. The former task requires that the interpreter be grounded in the linguistic and cultural modes of expression in which the author lived, while the technical-psychological aspect requires the interpreter to grasp the unique subjectivity of the author as expressed through the unified whole of the work. This latter task involves what Schleiermacher calls divination, a term that has provoked considerable controversy and misunderstanding. His intent is not to make understanding into a mysterious means of entry into the mind of the author, but he does believe that interpretation – though it entails an intuitive risk – can lead to understanding the mind of the author better than the author knows himself. The goal, like that of his fellow Romantics, is to grasp the universal in the individual, to do justice both to the uniqueness of particular expressions and to the general spirit of which they are incarnations. Schleiermacher’s influence on his contemporaries was modest, especially in view of the immense influence his ideas eventually came to have on the development of hermeneutical theory. What made the difference was the subsequent discovery of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics by a man born the year before Schleiermacher’s death.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) became the main link between the Romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century and the leading figures in the remarkable explosion of philosophical hermeneutics in the twentieth. Unlike Schleiermacher, Dilthey