From the statistical point of view, the number of the Fathers’ texts with hermeneia of the Holy Scripture, exceeds other genres of Patristic writings. The Fathers were in first place exegetes and in second place polemicists, canonists, historians and other. Moreover, hermeneutics, probably together with hymnography, are the only genres of the Church literature that emerged to edify Christian communities in a positive sense, and not to face either internal or external challenges. If imagine an ideal world without challenges for the Church, such as heresies, schisms, quarrels etc, then the Fathers, in such a world, would be occupied mostly with composing hymns and commenting on the Holy Scripture. Exegesis would be an ideal occupation in an ideal world without heresies and other challenges. Still, it was the most widespread occupation in the real world with all its problems. In this world, the Fathers exercised exegesis not only to edify, but also to safeguard their flock and to face emerging challenges. They applied exegesis to all the genres of Christian literature. Regardless of the reasons that urged the Fathers to write, they always based themselves on the Holy Scripture. They did not necessarily quote the Bible, as theologians in our days do. They preferred to write in a way of paraphrasis, making allusions and using the language of the Scripture. Nowadays, theology uses a multiplicity of languages, most of which have philosophical and not biblical origins. Therefore, when one wants make a reference to the Scripture, one needs to quote it. The Fathers used the very language of the Scripture, in all its linguistic, historical and semantic fullness. They used the Scripture as a fibre, from which they wove the fabric of their own texts. They breathed the Scripture.

When in the modern time Fathers started to be studied in a systematic way, their writings were classified as dogmatic, polemical, pastoral, ascetic, exegetical etc. Being categorized and studied in this way, the Fathers’ texts in some sense lost their intrinsic relation to the Scripture. A narrow range of the Patristic works, so-called ‘exegetical,’ was defined as dealing with the Scripture. Classification is good, but sometimes it truncates the things. This is exactly what happened to the Fathers’ texts, which for a long period of time were treated separately from the Bible. In fact, however, Patristic writings are a continuation of the Scripture, like a halo around the sun. In other words, Patristic texts rely on the Scripture and are in their essence hermeneutical, even when they do not directly comment on the Bible.

At the same time, the Scripture as such is not an ultimate destination of the Fathers’ thought. They regarded the Scripture as a bridge between two worlds: created and uncreated. We have just said that Fathers’ writings were always hermeneutical. In my opinion, they adopted their hermeneutical approach to the Scripture from the Scripture itself. They regarded the Scripture per se to be hermeneutical. Now we will try to answer the question: hermeneutical of what? The most direct answer to this question is: of the eternal Truth revealed through the letter of the Scripture. The Scripture, for the Fathers, is not a self-sufficient truth, but indicative of the Truth which is beyond or above the Scripture. Scripture is just a Truth’s body or a Truth’s language. St Ephraim the Syrian in his Hymns on Paradise describes the words of the Scripture as clothes worn by God:

By means of what belongs

to us did He draw close to us:

He clothed Himself in our language, so that He might

clothe us in His mode of life.

Scripture is a guide to God, as the same Father poetically describes:

I read the opening of this book (Genesis)

and was filled with joy,

for its verses and lines

spread out their arms to welcome me;

the first rushed out and kissed me,

and led me on to its companion;

and when I reached that verse

wherein is written the story of Paradise,

it lifted me up and transported me from the bosom of the book

to the very bosom of Paradise.

The eye and the mind

travelled over the lines as over a bridge, and entered together

the story of Paradise. The eye as it read

transported the mind; in return the mind, too,

gave the eye rest from its reading,

for when the book had been read the eye had rest

but the mind was engaged.

Both the bridge and the gate

of Paradise did I find in this book.

I crossed over and entered;

my eye remained outside

but my mind entered within.

So, according to Ephraim, when one reads the Scripture, one’s eye remains at the threshold of the divine Truth and only the mind is allowed to enter. This is a common belief of all the Fathers, irrespective of what hermeneutical schools and theological trends they belonged to.

Many of you may have heard of two major schools of exegesis in the early Christian world, the Alexandrian and the Antiochean. Scholarship until recently had a tendency to emphasise, or even to overemphasise the differences between the two schools. According to this tendency, in the Alexandrian school a so-called allegorical method of exegesis was widely applied, while the Antiochean exegetes preferred a historical method. So the Alexandrian exegetes sometimes disregarded the literal meaning and the historical context of the scriptural word being focused on its ultimately spiritual meaning. They regarded biblical words and images as symbols of the upper reality, which has very a little to do with the tangible world. On the contrary, the Antiocheans paid most attention to the historicity of what is told in the Scripture and the literal interpretation of the biblical texts. Nowadays the scholarship started realizing how much the two schools had in common. It is even possible to say that there were far more things that brought Alexandria and Antioch together than separated them. Probably the most important common thing that puts both schools and exegetical methods on the same scale is that neither of them regarded the Scripture as a self-sufficient truth, but as an indication of the Truth, which is far beyond the words of the Scripture. Both schools distinguished between the spirit, πνεῦμα, and the letter, γράμμα, of the Scripture. In this sense, both schools were allegorical, because they shared the view that there is some profound reality under the letter of the Bible, and the task of exegesis is to unfold that reality. The difference between the two schools was in what they regarded to be the symbols of the hidden reality. The Alexandrians preferred words and images, while the Antiocheans, sentences and stories.

Now I would like to dwell more on the question, what is exactly the hidden reality that the Scripture reveals? This is a divine reality. More precisely, this is God who has incarnated. All the Fathers of the Church were Christ-centric in their hermeneia of the Scripture. Among them, St Cyril of Alexandria appears to be the most devoted to Christ-centrism. Every verse of the Scripture he sees as speaking of Christ. He refuses to consider any ‘spiritual’ meaning of the Scripture, unless this meaning refers to Christ. The very notion of ‘spiritual’ he connects with Christ. ‘Spiritual’ means for Cyril ‘Christological’. Cyril’s exegetical method is very illustrative of what can be called Christological approach to the Scripture. I would call his exegetical approach ‘incarnational’. It reflects Cyril’s preoccupation with theology of incarnation in his polemics against Arianism and Nestorianism. Or may be, vice versa, his theological preoccupation reflects his exegetical methods? Indeed, if imagine that Cyril did not have to argue against Christological misinterpretations of his time, particularly the Nestorian one, the topic of incarnated Logos would still remain pivotal in his exegesis.

Cyril’s incarnational approach to the Scripture can be seen in an image, which was very dear to him, that of second Adam. This image brings a double message. On the one hand, it means that Christ is like us, except sin. On the other hand, He is a new Adam, in whom the entire humankind is renewed: ‘The divine Scriptures, I quote Cyril’s comments on the Gospel according to St John, call the Saviour the second Adam. For in that first one, the human race proceeds from not being to being; in the second, Christ, it rises up again to a second beginning, reformed to newness of life and returned to incorruption, “for if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature,” as Paul says. Therefore the renewing Spirit, i.e., the Holy Spirit, has been given to us.’ This came about ‘after the resurrection when having burst the bonds of death and showing himself triumphant over all corruption, he came to life again, having our whole nature in him, in that he was man and one from us.’

Fathers’ common belief that there is a reality, which is hidden behind the words of the Scripture, has to do with the question of the nature of word. What is word: does it mean only what it says or its real meaning reaches far beyond its literal meaning? The Fathers’ answer to this question would be that word is just an indication to the truth, not truth itself. This had become especially clear in the course of Fathers’ arguments against Eunomius who believed that Son of God was not consubstantial with the Father, because His name, Begotten, is different from the Father’s name, Unbegotten. Eunomius and his disciples believed that words are identical with their meaning. The words completely express the essence of the things they denote. There is nothing in the meaning of a word that would be hidden or not contained in it. For the Fathers, however, the names Begotten and Unbegotten must not be identified with the essence of the Father and of the Son. These names just denote that they are two different Persons. So, the names of the Trinity and words in general, for the Fathers, imply something different from what they mean. They are not identical with the essence of the things they indicate. This understanding goes as far back as to the pre-Socratics. One of the phrases of Heraclites states that a wise neither tells, nor hides the truth, but denotes it (Fragment 93). Plato would deny that human beings have capacity to express the ultimate truth, which is divine. For Plato, one may find the Creator and Father of all things, but one cannot at all speak of Him (Timaeus 28E). The Fathers would not put it as radical as Plato did. God can be expressed in the words through His activities, though His essence, of course, remains inaccessible by either human experience or human word. Even as divine activities, God’s presence cannot be circumscribed by human words. Words can only indicate common experience that people may have from God. For instance, one cannot explain what God’s love is if one has never experienced it. The statement of Heraclius, therefore, seems to be closer to the Fathers’ understanding of word.

An approach that cares more about the πνεῦμα than the γράμμα of the Scripture seems to be particularly Christian. For in Judaism, for instance, we find quite a different approach, which focuses more on the words as such. The difference between the two approaches can be seen in the ways that the two traditions used to produce their copies of the Scripture. The Christian copyists of the Scripture developed mass production of the Biblical texts copied from dictation. This of course caused many mistakes in the texts, but the Christian communities did not seem to care very much about this, at least not to the extent that the Jewish communities did. The Jewish communities paid much more attention to the correct or canonical wording of the Biblical texts. They never had an industry of producing copies. Instead of mass dictation, they produced single copy from a master-roll, with the copyist eye on the original text. Also, for their copies of the Scripture, Jews used and still use scrolls. Reading scrolls means respecting the words, which unfold as reader proceeds through the scroll. One cannot jump from one passage to another, but one’s reflections on the words are stuck to the flow of the text. Scrolls, thus, preserved sacral character of the biblical texts. As Frances Young puts it, ‘the scrolls, paraded ceremonially in liturgy, almost came to take the ritual place of a pagan image’ (Biblical Exegesis and Formation of Christian Culture, 13). In the Christian communities, from their very beginning, we do not find the same reverend attitude to the biblical texts. Instead of scrolls, the Christians very early started using codices. Codices in that time were used for comments and notes, often by pupils in schools. They were like modern notebooks. The fact that the Christians started producing copies of the Torah and Psalms in codices ‘must have seemed to the Jew, as Roberts states, an act of sacrilege’ (Books in the Greco-Roman World, 61). This change of format for the books of the Holy Scripture means that the Christian community adopted a different approach to the words of the Bible. The text was not regarded as a self-sufficient value, but rather an instrument that helps revealing the hidden truths. The text as sacred object, as it was regarded in the Jewish communities, turned for the Christians into notes that indicated spiritual meaning of the Scripture. Thus, the Scripture, in the Christian context, has become an exegesis of the Truth, which reveals itself through the Holy Spirit in the Church, and which is Christ himself.

What can we conclude for ourselves from what has been said? If we want to read the Holy Scripture like Fathers, we may put aside a scroll of the Bible and take in our hands the Bible as tetragonic book. This will not prevent us, on the one hand, from learning to speak biblical language. On the other hand, it will facilitate us to go beyond sacred words, to the Paradise which is much more spacious than any human word or notion. There, at the destination of our journey, we should be prepared to find not the human words anymore, even though they were put together by the Spirit, but the Word of God himself who has become man.