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5 From Letter to Spirit All the features of Gregory’s theology of Scripture have hermeneutical implications, which Gregory tends to explain in the Pauline terms of letter and spirit, used by so many early Christian exegetes. To do so means recognizing the pedagogical force of the text by following the movement enacted in Christ and the Spirit from the letter of the text to its spirit. Here the hermeneutical differences between Gregory’s Christ-centered theological historical vision and a modern historical consciousness become most apparent. Letter to Spirit as an Exegetical and Spiritual Activity Oration 2 offers one significant example of a very general description of exegesis in these terms, one that reveals that exegesis for Gregory was an act of spiritual insight contingent on the holiness of the reader. There Gregory describes certain scriptural passages that cloak their mystical beauty, which shows itself to the pure, to those capable of ascending from the letter to the spirit.1 The spirit of Scripture is here configured variously as the soul within the body, the depth behind the surface appearance, and the beautiful body cloaked in poor clothing. In places, this surface or clothing can mislead the inexperienced and morally weak interpreter to their peril. Hence hard work and a shining life are prerequisites of deeper understanding: the spirit of the text unveils itself and shines forth only to those with these qualities. This account, which speaks of the spirit of the text in erotic, personal terms, makes most sense if by the spirit of Scripture Gregory means the incarnate Word present within, who by the Holy Spirit illumines the virtuous reader to apprehend his beauty within the text. In the Preface to his Commentary on the Song of Songs, which may well be Gregory’s source, Origen reports the same tradition and specifies 1. Or. 2.48. 137 the texts in question as the first chapters of Genesis, the beginning and end of Ezekiel, where the Cherubim and the Temple are described, and the Song of Songs. Demoen finds here further evidence for an “allegorical” tendency in Gregory; it is an implicit plea for allegorical interpretation, he claims.2 If we take allegory in its broad, ancient meaning, as denoting discourse in which there is another meaning or sense to the text besides the apparent one, his point is both incontrovertible and uncontroversial.3 As we have seen, however, Demoen has a particular concept of allegory whereby a text ostensibly denoting concrete, visible, historical things signifies abstract, invisible, and intellectual realities. Although other ancient writers do use the figures of surface and depth, body and soul, clothing and body to denote meanings that might fall under Demoen’s definition of allegory, there is no evidence in this passage that Gregory has such a notion in mind. Demoen also appeals to the passage cited above from Oration 4, where Gregory critiques pagan myth and defends Christian Scripture from those same critiques. There Gregory concedes a similarity between pagan classics and some passages in Christian Scripture: both have a double meaning. His language is very similar to that of Oration 2 and presumably has similar scriptural passages in view: in the passages he has in mind, the hidden meaning is “wonderful and elevated and exceeding bright to those who enter into the depth.”4 Here Demoen finds an implicit acknowledgment of the “allegorical” method employed by the pagans because it is not challenged as such, and a telling absence of appeal to historicity to distinguish Christian from pagan Scripture.5 Nazianzen, he claims, here “considers the Bible as a text which has to be deciphered.” Gregory, he adds, does not emphasize the Bible as “historically true.”6 This argument is made from a silence for which other explanations are possible: perhaps Gregory held either that it is reasonable to think fiction might have deeper meanings, which many literary critics would affirm, or that not every text of Scripture concerns historical events, which few modern scholars would dispute. 2. Kristoffel Demoen, Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen: A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1996), 263. 3. See, for example, Quintillian: allegory presents one thing in words, another in sense (Institutes of Oratory 8.6.44), or Cicero: allegory is saying one thing and meaning another (De Oratore III.iii.203, cited in Jeremy Tambling, Allegory [Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010], 21). 4. Or. 4.118, SC 405, p. 282. 5. Demoen, Pagan and Biblical Exempla, 266. 6. Demoen...

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