Medieval Exegesis and the Origin of Hermeneutics

Abstract

Dilthey, in his famous essay, ‘Die Enstehung der Hermeneutik’, first published in 1900, taught us that Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the mid sixteenth-century Lutheran theologian, was the author of the first significant treatise on hermeneutics. Conceding a classic Protestant opinion once articulated by Flacius, he consigned medieval interpretation to what must have seemed a justified oblivion: he simply ignored the period between Origen and John Calvin. Calvin, Flacius, and especially Friedrich Schleiermacher were the main contributors to the rediscovery of the interpretive force of history and language, which Dilthey surely felt was best appreciated by his own philosophy of culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer later tried to show that Dilthey himself was weak on language and misinformed about history, falling prey to the movement that Gadamer opprobriously called ‘historicism’. Gadamer's own view of the development of hermeneutics—with its subjection of historical knowledge to ‘our own present horizon of understanding’, its accent on language, and its debt to Martin Heidegger—shifted the chronology of hermeneutics even closer to the present According to Gadamer, the ‘hermeneutic problem’ was specifically created by the alienation of exegesis and understanding from ‘application’, the importance of which was discovered only by Romantic philosophy and best redressed with the help of a language-obsessed philosophy of being. But as was the case for Dilthey, the crucial moment in the development of hermeneutics remained the discovery of the role of language in ‘meaning’, in the broadest sense, so that texts could only be understood in the grand context of a philosophy of life or, in Gadamerian terms, in the context of a philosophy that functioned as present interpretation.