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charity” should be applied to the entire project of scriptural interpretation: the correct
interpretation is the one that leads a person to behave charitably towards his neighbour
and to love God. 96 Others, including Augustine, turned to tradition to interpret
Scripture—using, that is, previous interpretations to guide new ones, such that
interpretation is never carried out alone and in the abstract but rather collectively and in
the context of church life. 97 In fact, von Bormann even suggests that the need for
hermeneutics is only felt in times when tradition breaks down and readers feel alienated
from the text, which becomes erklärungsbedürftig. That a renewed interest in
hermeneutics arose in the aftermath of the Protestant schism would be therefore no
surprise, but rather parallels similar hermeneutic turns, for instance in the development of
allegoresis in classical Greece to interpret Homer, the Midrash to interpret the Torah, or
allegory to interpret the Old Testament. 98
examples is the following interpretation of an image from the Song of Songs: “Your teeth are like a flock of
shorn ewes ascending from the pool, all of which give birth to twins, and there is not a sterile animal
among them” (Song of Songs 4:2). Augustine is delighted by this passage, which to him is neither in praise
of an actual woman nor about actual sheep, but rather a figure for the church: “And it is with the greatest of
pleasure that I visualize the shorn ewe, their worldly burdens set aside like fleeces, ascending from the pool
(baptism) and all giving birth to twins (the two commandments of love), with none of them failing to
produce this holy fruit.” (Augustine, De doctrina, 33.)
96 According to Augustine, the goal Scripture is to convince us to “love the thing which must be enjoyed.”
Hence “anyone who thinks that he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by
his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding
them.” De Doctrina Christiana, 49. Or as he puts it later in the same treatise, in teaching how to decipher
whether the text speaks literally or figuratively: “Therefore in dealing with figurative expressions we will
observe a rule of this kind: the passage being read should be studied with careful consideration until its
interpretation can be connected with the realm of love.” De Doctrina Christiana, 157. See also Beryl
Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964),
23. Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l'écriture (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1993).
97 See also Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300-1500), Vol. IV (New
York: The Crossroads Publishing Company, 2005), 52-53. G. W. H. Lampe, Dom Jean Leclercq, Beryl
Smalley, S. J. P. vam Dijk and Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, "The Exposition and Exegesis of Scripture," in The
Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G. W. H. Lampe, 155-
279 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 176ff.
98 Claus von Bormann, Hermeneutik, Vol. 15, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1986), 113.
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