Hermeneutics

History of the Term

Long before the term hermeneutics was widely used, interpretive practices developed rules and conventions in various ancient school traditions of orality and literacy. Among the earliest and most significant are the extraordinary exegetical traditions of Hebrew scriptures. The Gemara, for instance, was a transcription of interpretive dialogues between rabbi and congregation over the meaning of the Mishnah (itself an interpretation of scripture), and these exegetical exercises became in turn a part of scriptural law. Canons of interpretive practice were embedded in Roman rhetorical teaching from Cicero and Quintilian to the Church Fathers, most famously in Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana. It was in this rhetorical environment that the principle of the hermeneutic circle gained prominence—the idea that textual meaning has a mutually reciprocal relation to its context. Initially this meant that one could understand a textual passage by relating it to the context of the larger work. Later this relation would be expanded to a work and the life of the author and then to any textual expression and its cultural-historical context.

Hermeneutics per se gained an independent disciplinary standing after the Protestant Reformation. The issue of interpretative method as a special study came to the fore with the rise of a culture of vernacular reading; the requirement for biblical exegesis, or interpretation, in Protestantism; the expanding interest in classical texts with the concomitant development of philology, or the study of human speech, literature, and language as a field that sheds light on cultural history; and a burgeoning jurisprudential interest in legal codes. These various disciplinary initiatives were carried on by many scholars. Philip Melanchthon was both a humanist and an aid to Luther's Reformation; he modified the Renaissance rhetoric curriculum to teach his Protestant students how to read as well as speak (bene dicendi, bene scribendi). Martin Luther himself was a significant influence in hermeneutics, establishing the scriptural text as the authoritative key for interpretative practice (sola scriptura). Matthias Flacius, a follower of Luther, attempted to develop comprehensive linguistic and grammatical principles for deciphering obscure passages of scripture. The theologian Johann Dannhauer early on suggested the universality of hermeneutic understanding, anticipating both Romantic and 20th-century hermeneutics. The theologian and historian Johann Chladenius developed hermeneutics as a humanist alternative to Cartesian epistemology and famously transformed the rhetorical concept of scopus (point of view) into a powerful hermeneutic tool of psychological perception. These are only a few of the many Protestant scholars who contributed to the development of early hermeneutics. It should be noted that this early tradition was in the main a German phenomenon, and remained so through Heidegger.

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