Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit! It is the inspired and inerrant Word of God. God is the principal author of Scripture; the human authors are also true authors. These sacred authors were free, intelligent, and subordinate instruments of the Holy Spirit. In seventy-three books it gives us the History of God’s plan for salvation, beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the beginnings of the Catholic Church. It is important to remember that Scripture is literature. That means it uses literary forms and techniques to convey its meaning. With this being said, in Sacred Scripture God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words. And to do this, it is imperative that when discerning the meaning of inspired Scripture, one must distinguish between two senses of Scripture.
The Literal and the Spiritual
The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation. The later, the spiritual, is subdivided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its riches to the living reading of Scripture in the Church. All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal. Hence, the allegorical, moral, and anagogical are secondary to the literal.
The literal sense is that which the authors intended to express; historical and linguistic analysis, by shedding light upon the processes which gave rise to the biblical text help to determine this sense which is also intended by God, as principal author of the Scriptures and to determine the direction of thought expressed by the text... there should be no contradiction between the two senses of Scripture.
The allegorical sense one can aquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus, the crossing of the Red Sea (which did take place, i.e. literally), is also a sign or type of Christ’s victory, and also of Christian Baptism. The moral sense deals with the events reported in Scripture (literally actual events) that ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written ‘for our instruction’. And finally, the anagogical sense deals with viewing realities and events that actually happened, in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of heavenly Jerusalem.
***CCC # 109-117 & the Didache Series