ABSTRACT

St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) famously said that he knew what ‘time’ was until someone asked him about it. For then, on enquiry, the meaning of time slipped away, its nature becoming ever more perplexing and unreal.1 Augustine admitted to such ignorance in his Confessions of 397-98, and his subsequent meditation on temporality occurs in the course of reflecting on the story of the world’s beginning in the book of Genesis. ‘Let me hear and understand’ – he beseeches God – ‘the meaning of the words: In the beginning you made heaven and earth.’2 He implores to know their meaning – not their literal meaning, but just their meaning. If Moses were still around, Augustine would ‘lay hold of him … and beg and beseech him to explain those words’. We might have given up thinking that Moses wrote Genesis, and we might suppose that the meaning of the text is its ‘literal sense’. But we might also have to admit, as does Augustine of time, that we know what the literal sense means until someone asks us to explain it. The word ‘literal’ means according to the letter, from the Latin for the latter, lit-

tera. So to read for the literal sense is to follow the letter of the text, the way the words go; and following the words is literal reading, which surely is just what reading is. For what else do we do when we read, if not follow the letters on the page or the screen, on whatever it is we are reading? We always begin with the literal sense. It is the foundation of reading. It is the base on which the sense of the text is built, and the idea of this – as it were – literal foundation was also an assumption of those ancient and medieval Christian writers who long pondered the senses of Scripture, and with whom much of this chapter is concerned. Origen, in the second century, was one of the first to offer this view of the literal

as foundational, and the foundational as the record of history. ‘Let us see the reports that are related about [the ark], … so that, when we have laid such foundations, we may be able to rise from the text of the history to the … sense of spiritual understanding.’3 This image of the literal-historical as the foundation for all other meanings in Scripture became foundational in the tradition, a constant and uninterrupted usage in ancient and medieval authors. And from the first, the historical was the meaning of the literal. But history is another seemingly straightforward but on

inspection puzzling category, and it too, like literality, has a history. But before further considering this puzzling category we should briefly outline the other, spiritual senses that Origen supposed resting upon the foundation of history.4