THE LITERAL SENSE OF SCRIPTURE .sx ROWAN WILLIAMS .sx I In recent years , British and American theology has shown a good deal of interest in reclaiming the insights of 'pre-critical' exegesis , and in challenging what has been seen as the unproductive dominance of scholarly concern with original forms of a scriptural text , with questions about the community background of this or that strand of tradition , or with the redactional concerns of an editor or a series of editors .sx In short , there has been a widespread dissatisfaction with all the modern conventions of textual study - source , form and redaction criticism - and a reaction towards alternative modes of reading .sx We have seen pleas for a return to allegory , a sophisticated deployment of modern literary theory to question any remaining obsession with authorial intentions , and the various forms of canonical criticism , insisting that we read scriptural texts in the context of their present and deliberate positioning in relation to each other as constituting a single book , settled once and for all in a community's history .sx With all this in mind , though , it has become difficult to see how what is also a central aspect of traditional and 'pre-critical' hermeneutics , the belief in the primacy of the 'literal' sense of Scripture , can now be understood .sx If we have become suspicious of a hermeneutic that looks for authorial meanings and treats them as normative , if - in literary theory in general - we have been taught a certain uneasiness about the whole notion of normative meaning , how are we to talk about a 'primary' or authoritative level of reading that is bound to history , in the way traditional exegesis conceived the sensus litteralis to be ?sx One way of seeing how the relation between literal and non-literal senses of Scripture has been worked out in doctrinal history is to see it as a tension between what I shall call 'diachronic' and 'synchronic' styles of reading .sx I can read a text in a more or less 'dramatic' way , by following it through in a single time-continuum , reading it as a sequence of changes , a pattern of transformations ; or I can read it as a 'field' of linguistic material , of signs that refer backwards and forwards to each other in a system of interaction more like the surface of a picture than a performance of drama or music .sx There is a reading - we could say - where the unity of what is read is worked out in time , and a reading where the unity is worked out in something more like space .sx The former , the diachronic reading is not by any means a naive strategy :sx it can operate at several different levels .sx I may begin by simply following the movement of the text as it stands ; but that will alert me to deeper movements or rhythms within it , relations between whole blocks of material , all the ways in which a text can display subversions and tensions within its own progression - the ways in which it can put itself in question .sx I may become aware of a 'strategy' in the text itself ; and that awareness may compel a recognition of the narrative context of the act of writing , of the world of the writer and of his or her goals as they are enacted in the text .sx If diachronic reading is a reading which can show me something of a text's intentionality ( in the widest sense - its internal direction and its consciously envisaged audience ) , it will put to me questions about the writer's world , questions about history , even if only the history of the process of composing .sx And such questions are not necessarily a way of disregarding the specificity of the writing as it presents itself , to the extent that they genuinely arise from the act of reading with attention and patience .sx To take an example :sx T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets can be read most simply as a sequence of more or less interrelated meditations on time and eternity , or on the presence of meaning within the apparent blind contingency of the world .sx Closer reading , however , brings to light contradictions and cross - currents :sx one section will be seen as making a proposal that will be undermined or rejected , or at least forced into a new light , by a subsequent development ; a good second reading will display the movement of earlier stages in a significantly different light from that in which they were first understood .sx We learn to see ironies or even falsities not visible in our initial movement through the text .sx In Eliot's own words , there is a " new and shocking valuation " within the movement of the poems .sx The whole work appears as an exercise in the conscious putting into question of the poet's own symbolic idiom ; and we grasp this more adequately insofar as we are aware of the pull towards symbolist self-reference , a self-contained world of poetic discourse , in the rest of Eliot's work up to the time of the Quartets , and aware too of the poetic voices - Dante , Baudelaire , Mallarm e , Yeats - that were for Eliot both a formative influence and a seduction , a danger .sx Eliot's quarrel with his own preferred poetic voice is part of a larger world of relating and conflicting poetic idioms .sx To say , as I should want to claim , that all this belongs with a 'literal' reading of the text may seem an odd use of the term ; but all the levels of reading I have described are unified by the fact that they are generated out of the experience of reading the text 'diachronically' , as a movement in time .sx One level of movement appears as reflecting or opening the door to another , and the reading never wholly escapes from the primary fact the reader has taken time in following the progression of the text as it stands .sx A mature reading capable of discerning at an early stage meanings which in fact depend upon later moments remains in this sense diachronic , because the possibility of such a reading would still be consciously dependent upon the prior fact of a lectio continua in which the reader had to experience the temporal formation and emergence of meanings .sx It is , of course , possible to do what some critics of the Quartets have done , and regard each section , even each line , as enunciating a single vision , identical from beginning to end of the sequence , so that early lines are made to bear a freight of deliberate positive meaning in a quite undialectical way .sx This may or may not be a fruitful reading ( I find it for the most part decidedly not ) ; but it should at least be clear that it could not exist at all without the experience of first working through the whole complex over time , with all that that implies of provisionality and 're-visioning' .sx Thus , to attend to a 'literal' sense in this sort of context is to insist upon there being some controlling force in the fact that meaning comes to light in a process of learning to perceive ; it is to challenge the idea that there could be an adequate reading of the text which ignored the time of the text itself , its own movement , with the time of the writer and the writer's world opened up to us through the movement of the text .sx It is to protest against any reading which elided or softened or simply ignored the tensions realised and worked through in the time of the text , its movement as something that can bear continuous reading .sx Concern with the literal , the diachronic , is a way of resisting the premature unities and harmonies of a non-literal reading ( whether allegorical , existentialist , structuralist or deconstructionist ) , in which the time that matters is only the present of the reader faced with the 'spatial' expanse of a text cut off from its own inner processes and the history of its production .sx Something like this seems to be at work in Thomas Aquinas' insistence on the priority of the literal sense .sx He takes the literal sense to be that which refers to the intention of the author - who , in the case of Scripture , is God ; and this intention is primarily manifest in events , not in the text itself , for God can communicate through the material processes of the world's history , while human beings can only organise words to convey their meanings .sx What Scripture has to tell us can be apprehended only through awareness of a reference to the lives and actions of " those persons through whom God's revelation reaches us " ; the narrative of Scripture displays the " authority " of these figures , their status as enacting or communicating the purposes of God , and that authority is the basis of the normative significance of " Scripture or teaching " ( sacra scriptura vel doctrina ) .sx All readings of Scripture are finally answerable to this , so that nothing in doctrina can be established solely on the basis of a non-literal reading .sx As Thomas makes clear , the literal sense is not dependent on a belief that all scriptural propositions uncomplicatedly depict real states of affairs detail by detail ; it can and does include metaphor within the literary movement that leads us into the movement of God within the time of human biography .sx In this way , Thomas sketches an understanding of the literal that allows for a plurality of genres within it ; it is the failure to see and to develop this insight that has led to those narrow and sterile definitions of the literal sense against which recent hermeneutics has so sharply reacted .sx Paradoxically , it was the development of a more sophisticated literary hermeneutic , by way of historical and comparative criticism , that led to the effective redefinition - and the disastrous shrinkage - of the literal sense that we associate with fundamentalism .sx Correctly identifying 'literal' with 'historical' , in sound traditional fashion , fundamentalism assumed that 'historical' could be applied only to a univocally descriptive and exact representation of particular sequences of 'fact' .sx Against the potential totalitarianism of this , and the equally stagnant prospects of a formal and archaeological historical criticism , the retrieval of non-literal or 'pre-critical' modes is entirely intelligible .sx But this in its turn has its dangers .sx Of the problems of post-structuralist exegesis I shall say more shortly ; but at least some forms of 'canonical' criticism risk just that elision of conflict that has characterised other styles of non-literal exegesis .sx An uncritical canonical criticism threatens to prohibit or ignore any questions about meaning that arise from the refusal to take the homogeneity of the canon for granted .sx If this reaction against the literal were to prevail , it would point either to a new totalitarianism of canonical context , understood without reference to history , or to an arbitrary pluralism , in which the idea of a given textual content capable of effectively challenging or changing the reader would be hard to sustain .sx To guard intelligently against this , we need to re-examine and re-state the case for the primacy of the literal ; this essay is an attempt to begin that task .sx II It is in fact very difficult to make sense of the idea of a total triumph for synchronic , non-literal or 'spatial' reading .sx " We love stories because our lives are stories " says one recent contributor to this discussion ; that is to say that we are aware in our own lives of the process of learning and producing meanings , and naturally look , in our reading , for comparable processes of production .sx The meanings in our reading are like the meanings in the rest of our experience , they are to be discovered , unfolded :sx the reading of narrative in particular has an open future and a gradually accumulating past .sx So long as our humanity remains unintelligible except as a life of material change , irreversible movement , it is unlikely - to say the least - that we could establish non-diachronic modes of reading as primary .sx It is quite true that works which set out to operate in a linear temporal mode of the simplest kind escape from this constraint in all kinds of ways ; but I have already suggested that this , so far from leading us directly to synchronic interpretation , has the effect of opening us up to more than one 'time' in the text , more than one story .sx