The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul. Eric McLuhan

well as with anagogy. The process that little by little needed to distinguish and specialize these three words was almost entirely contingent. Allegoria was found to have a right of priority, chiefly because of Saint Paul; it therefore designated, prior to every other distinction, the collection of senses added to historia, then, more precisely, the first among them, which in a certain fashion stood at the head of the other two. Anagogy belonged naturally enough to the fourth. All that remained for tropology, then, was the third place; it took it and kept it. It was even more natural that the only figured sense, already designated by this word, would, among the pre-Christian exegetes of the Bible, be found practically to be the moral sense. Then it would be explained as being “a speech turned around toward us, i.e., toward our ways of behaving,” or “a speech turning around, pertaining to the mind’s ways of behaving.”¹³

      The literal sense of Scripture, also called the historical sense, “contains” all of the other senses inasmuch as, without the letters (litterae), there is no Scripture at all, just blank sheets of paper. But that is not the intended meaning of the term. “Literal” refers, first of all, to the written littera, the letter¹⁴ on the page. Letters, words, sentences present the historical narrative: the narrative contains three other senses of Scripture and is the sine qua non of Scripture and interpretation. I would prefer to separate the terms “literal” and “historical” rather than continue to use them interchangeably.

      But to return: Littera gesta docet, runs the old verse. The next line positions the role of allegory: Quid credas allegoria. Then comes the tropological turn:

      Littera gesta docet,

       Quid credas allegoria;

       Moralis quid agas,

       Quo tendis anagogia.

      The first two senses, literal/historical and allegorical, are outward, objective senses; the remaining two are interior, mystical senses. Comments de Lubac:

      [Tropology] occupies the third place in the most frequent and the most logical formulation ofthe four senses and which even those who make no distinct mention of it did not miss relates to the spiritual sense proper to Scripture, not only in fact but also by necessity. It contributes to the elaboration of this sense which characterizes Scripture only. It does not precede “the spiritual edifice,” but it “adds to it,” or rather it exerts itself within it to complete it. It is within allegory. It constitutes an integral part of the mystery. Coming after the objective aspect of which it is the allegory, it constitutes its subjective aspect. It is, if one can say so, its intussusception, its interiorization; it appropriates it for us. Tropology draws its exempla from this mysterium. It is this “mystic sense of morality,” the letter¹⁵ this “understanding of spiritual life,” that a practiced eye detects everywhere in the two Testaments. If allegory, starting from the facts of history, envisions the mystical body in its head or in its totality, tropology envisions it in each of its members.¹⁶

      “Everything,” de Lubac points out, “is consummated in the inner man.” He insists over and over that the interiorized experience of the Scriptures is not illusion but real experience, experience minus the bodily senses, that is, unmediated by the body; thus it is direct experience, which is also mystical experience, direct contact. How this is achieved remains to be seen, infra. “No more,” he insists, is it

      A question of gratifying oneself intellectually in a knowledge of the mysteries of allegory that would remain completely objective, leaving the heart unchanged. This would be an illusory knowledge; for in these sorts of things understanding comprehends nothing if experience is absent:¹⁷ the mystery interiorizes itself within the heart, where it becomes experience¹⁸–though always passing over in itself “the limits of experience” as well as those of reason. The “virtus mysteriorum,” their proper energy, acts within the one who contemplates them in faith.¹⁹

      The moral sense and the anagogic sense are in continuity with each other; the object they aim at is of the same structure:²⁰ anagogy is the extension of mystical tropology.²¹ Garnier of Rochefort, a disciple of both Origen and of Dionysus, as well as of St. Gregory and of John Scotus, describes anagogy in terms that are at the same time a description of ecstasy:

      ...Climbing to the heights by the steps of sure contemplation, the human mind also contemplates anagogically the heavenly secrets by the holy gaze of divine eloquence; and thus starting from two kinds of visions it ascends to all the perfection that had been infused in the minds of theologians and prophets through the grace of divine revelation; in Greek they call this (first) kind of revelation theophanies, i.e., divine manifestations; the other, whereby it strives to contemplate the most heavenly one as he is by the mind’s climbing up and going out in nakedness and purity and without covering,²² is the kind that is called anagogic.

      But in this last kind of vision the human so trembles and shudders that, dizzied by the darkness of its own ignorance, it cannot go forth toward that brightness and glow of truth unless it be directed; but, as it were, blind and guided by hand, it advances whither it does not see and begins to be melted through the vision and the visitation of the Beloved, so that it neither conceives what it ought or wants to about God nor is able to utter what it conceives, when it strives to investigate that bit of the heavenly kingdom beyond still surrounded by veils and the yet uncircumscribed dimension of the divine glow, and, though still investigating, fails. Thunderstruck, the mind clings fast in contemplation; it becomes numb with agitation; speaking, it is rendered utterly silent; and the copiousness that poverty had made copious returns the poverty; in advancing it falls short in wondrous way, and then advances the more once it has reached its shortfall.²³

      De Lubac comments on the unity of the fourfold senses:

      It is in traditional eschatology that the doctrine of the four senses is achieved and finds its unity. For Christianity is a fulfillment, but in this very fulfillment it is a promised hope. Mystical or doctrinal, taught or lived, true anagogy is therefore always eschatological. It stirs up the desire for eternity in us. This is also why the fourth sense is forced to be the last. No more than it could really lack the three others could it be followed by a fifth. neither is hope ever lacking nor, in our earthly condition, is it ever surpassed even if it already encroaches upon its term.²⁴

      The exterior historical sense contains the other senses inasmuch as without the narrative there is nothing; the anagogic and tropological senses contain the others in an organic unity of interiorized experience. Together they are the sensus communis of the intellectual human soul. And that interiorized experience is characterized by incompleteness; it needs, it demands, human participation to complete it:

      Mysterium Christi. Only this unique mystery possesses infinite depths, and the mind of each of the faithful has varying capacities for comprehending it. From this there results for every spiritual understanding, as we have seen more especially for anagogy, an incurable character of incompleteness. But, as the Gregorian term volatus for anagogy has already indicated, this fatal incompleteness is to be considered above all in its positive and dynamic aspect. The Word of God does not cease to create and to hollow out within the one who readies himself for it the capacity to receive it, with the result that the faithful understanding can increase indefinitely. By allegory the old text can always let more novelty shine through;²⁵ the new mystery can always be more interiorized and introduce eternity more deeply into the heart.²⁶

      The poet Ezra Pound charmingly characterizes the process of meaning as “the dance of the intellect among the words.” The mysterious accomplishment of that mystical interiorization and completion comes about via the sensus communis of the body and has been practiced for millennia by the poets. The common sense that Aquinas discusses, the sensus communis, is itself an interior sense, the interior aspect of the sense of touch, of which all of the other bodily senses are extensions or articulations.²⁷ The common sense is as it were the etymology of each and every one of the exterior bodily senses, just as anagogy is as it were the etymology of each and every one of the other Scriptural senses. St. Thomas makes the same observation: “The interior sense is called ‘common’ not by predication, as if it were a genus; but as the common root and principle of the exterior senses.”²⁸