226 FROM THE ART OF BUILDING TO THE ART OF THINKINGgeographical and historical meaning. As for all interpretation of scrip-
ture, it required in accordance with the methodology of Church schol-
ars the perception of its allegorical, tropological, and anogogical
meanings. In the allegorical sense, Jerusalem was the militant Church;
in the tropological sense, it was the Christian soul; and in the anagogi-
cal sense it was the celestial Jerusalem, the land above announced by
Saint John in the Apocalypse.
With respect to Kings David and Solomon, both of whom were
extremely popular, they were regarded, curious as this might appear
today, as signs or portents of Jesus Christ. The same was true of Hiram,
the founder of the Pillars of the Temple, and Adoniran, Solomon's high
official and head of the conscripted labor. Hic et Christus, said the
Venerable Bede in the eighth century, meaning that it is Christ who
guides the workers of the Temple and provides the measures of the con-
struction. This was repeated in Walafrid Strabo's Ordinary Gloss,
which, from the ninth to the sixteenth century, accompanied all editions
of the Bible.* Emile Male describes this book as one of the most valu-
able to come down to us from the Middle Ages.
This view of the figures of the Hebrew Scriptures as those who her-
alded the coming of Christ was traditional among the Fathers of the
Church. The same perspective held true for Adam and Noah; for the
patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph; for Melchizadek, the
pontiff king; and for the prophets Moses, Ezra, Aggee, and Zerubbabel.
As disorienting as this may appear to our modern logic, the people of
the Middle Ages did not understand the Hebrew Scriptures in solely
their literal sense, as the record of a historical and chronological process
(which would be too narrow and anti-Christian). Truth for them was
intemporal, not merely a question of historical contribution. Truth was
what was primarily and clearly expressed in the New Law as taught by
Jesus, the Verb Incarnate.
For the Church Fathers, the literal sense of the Hebrew Scriptures
was clearly sacred in nature. According to the symbolic exegesis, the
- W. Strabo in Kings III, 7, 13 for Hiram and Kings III, 5, 28 for Adoniram (Kings I in
modern editions of the Bible, in which the former Kings I and Kings II have become the
Book of Samuel). This reference comes from the Latin Bible of Froben (Basel, 1498;
Bibliotheque National, Res. A 807.) See also Emile Male, L'Art religieux du IIIieme Ste-
cle en France, vol. 1, 23 ff.