Secular Hermeneutics
The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science
by Peter Harrison
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998
(313 pages; $64.95, cloth)
reviewed by James Altena
As a whole, Peter Harrison’s The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science will likely attract only a few academic specialists among Touchstone readers. However, its central thesis and specific insights are of much more general interest because of their implications for current controversies involving science and religion, such as the critique of evolution by proponents of Intelligent Design featured in the July/August 1999 issue.
As Harrison emphasizes, his book is a study in the history of biblical hermeneutics, not the history of science. Inverting commonly received academic wisdom, he argues that the rise of modern science did not lead to new critical methods of scriptural interpretation, but the reverse. Instead, new methods of reading Scripture, advocated by the Protestant Reformers, implicitly entailed a novel approach to the interpretation of natural phenomena, which in turn made possible and facilitated the development of modern science. While the new hermeneutic did not create that science, it exercised a critical formative influence in defining and shaping scientific methodology.
Harrison’s study falls broadly into two sections of three chapters each. The first explains how methods of textual interpretation applied by Christians to the Scriptures shaped their conceptions of the natural order, and how changes in hermeneutical methodologies altered these conceptions; the second shows how these altered conceptions found expression and application by particular Protestant writers to specific topics.
Patristic & Medieval Exegesis: Referential Words & Signifying Objects
Patristic and early medieval Christianity originally adhered to a primarily analogical (allegorical) and symbolical method of reading texts and viewing objects, in which words initially refer to objects, and the objects in turn are signs that refer to and have essential, intrinsic relations with other objects. This process establishes a unitary, interconnected network of multi-layered references, significations, and cross-referential meanings. The entire universe is thus not just a set of autonomous objects, but a spiritually, morally, and teleologically oriented system of mystical relations. Origen initially developed a three-fold system of biblical interpretation, with literal, moral, and allegorical levels of meaning, which Augustine modified into the fourfold method of literal/historical, moral/tropological, allegorical/analogical, and etiological/anagogical exegesis adopted and elaborated by the medieval Scholastics.
This hermeneutical methodology had three important results. First, the ability to read a text simultaneously at several levels of meaning allowed sense to be made of texts that would otherwise appear to be nonsensical or offensive, and also prevented them from being refuted or falsified in any straightforward fashion.
Second, Augustine’s other shift away from Origen—a restriction of the referential function of words but not objects, that made words univocal in reference and objects rather than words the bearers of multiple meanings—established a middle ground in biblical interpretation between rigid literalism and unchecked allegorization. It made the spiritual sense of Scripture superior to the literal sense, but also restricted proper symbolical interpretation of natural objects to analogies suggested by Scripture and thus protected the importance of the literal sense as well. In contrast to modern science, however, this method directed attention primarily toward the ultimate meaning and spiritual significance of objects, not to the objects themselves.
Third, such an approach was at best indifferent to modern scientific methods of systematic observation and experimentation, and may even have inhibited their development, by regarding them as overly literal ways of “reading” natural objects conducive to idolatry—a “literalism” also at the heart of the Eastern iconoclastic controversies.
However, beginning with the twelfth-century renaissance and recovery of the Aristotelian literary corpus, medieval exegesis made a major shift away from the patristic approach. By investing the natural world with patterns of order between natural objects themselves, rather than only between natural objects and higher spiritual verities, “horizontal” relations were added to existing “vertical” ones.
James A. Altena is the associate editor of Fanfare magazine, a comprehensive bimonthly periodical for reviews of classical music recordings. He is a member of All Saints Episcopal Church in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
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