Research project and scientific committee

The words of Scripture are spirit and life (Jn 6,63), the knowledge that flows from Scripture is “the Spirit’s teaching” (en didaktois pneumatos), it is knowledge by revelation (Mt 11,25–27) and is the fruit of spiritual interpretation. Scripture itself refers the reader to the Holy Spirit as its proper hermeneutical principle. “It is in [Scripture] that the Spirit is understood,” writes Maximus the Confessor; Scripture is the principle of transfiguration, of divinization (On theology, I.97). “It is the oil of the divine Spirit, which anoints the soul and renders it soft and humble” (Nicetas Stethatos, Physical chapters, 90).

We can, then, understand the other great hermeneutical principle of the fathers, for whom Scripture is “the interpreter of itself” (Gregory the Great), a principle that remains constant in the whole of tradition. “Whoever seeks the end of Scripture has for his teacher, as the great Basil and Saint John Chrysostom say, Scripture itself” (Pete Damascene). As a monk of the West who had drunk of the Eastern founts, William of Saint-Thierry (ca. 1075–1148), writes, “it is necessary to read the Scriptures with the same Spirit with which they were written and it is also necessary to understand them with the same Spirit” (Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei, I.10.31).

The gift of the Spirit confers on the disciples understanding of the words of Scripture and of Jesus himself: the Comforter, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you every thing and will remind you of all that I have told you (Jn 14,26). At the other extreme of tradition, the Russian bishop Mixail (Gribanovskij, †1898), in commenting on this verse of the fourth Gospel, writes: “The events narrated by the Gospels are transmitted to the reader’s spirit in a living manner, that is, by the same Holy Spirit. Thus we can understand the Gospel’s living divine action on the souls of those who read. In the Gospel accounts there lives the same divine force of the Holy Spirit who presided over the events of the Lord’s early life: in them there speaks a creative power that saves us” (Nad Evangeliem, 116).