Hermeneutic Circling

 This notion of the hermeneutical circle is recent, but its roots go back to antiquity and ancient rhetoric. This is especially true of the “circle” or interplay of the whole and its parts, which was at first a requirement for the composition and writing of texts and later became one for understanding them properly. Plato already states in his Phaedrus (264 c) that every speech is constituted like a living being, with a head, feet, a center and members woven together so that they form an organic unity, an idea that Aristotle would take up in his Poetics (23, 1459 a 20). Plato expresses here a requirement that was to become an important component of ancient rhetoric: the parts of a text or speech must be conceived with a view to its whole that has to form an organic body (compare, e. g., Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, 7.10). It naturally became a hermeneutic requirement for the understanding of these texts: the parts of a text should be understood out of the whole (which can be the entirety of a text, its purpose, scopus, or the intention, intentio, of the author).  -- The Hermeneutical Circle, by Jean Grondin.  

In our time of focus on epistemology and subjective understanding, it is not surprising that hermeneutics -- the study of interpretation -- has become a focus of philosophers.    I first read of the hermeneutical circle -- or spiral, as it is sometimes called--  in a book by Fr Ormond Rush called "Still Interpreting Vatican II":  Some Hermeneutical Principles (2004).   He reflects on the hermeneutics of the texts, the authors, and the receivers.  

The rest of this post will be some notes I wrote back when I read Fr Rush's book in 2022.    The point I want to make here is not new -- Ratzinger, Rush, John O'Malley and others have written about it.    Hermeneutics matter, because language matters, and because the author, the text itself, and the reader or receiver are all involved in the language project.  

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Still Interpreting Vatican II:  Some Hermeneutical Principles.   

This book is by Ormond Rush, an Australian, who dedicates the book to his uncle, Archbishop Francis Rush, who apparently attended the Council as a young man and "made the Council the lodestar of his episcopal ministry."   

I came upon the book in an odd way.  I was searching for Vatican II "hermeneutics" and found a website discussing the various hermeneutical approaches.   The site is run by Catholics whose stated aim is "to defend the teachings of Vatican II as a legitimate expression of the deposit of faith".   They have a page devoted to book reviews and I looked through it.   One of the books, which they said they had used extensively as a reference, was Rush's Vision of Vatican II.    When I looked at archive.org, I found the book linked to above, which was published in 2004.     It is relatively short, less than 90 pages of the text proper, with 50 plus pages devoted to extensive notes section that is like a Vatican II bibliography in itself. 

The book is divided into these sections:

• Introduction
• A Hermeneutic of the Authors
• A Hermeneutic of the Texts
• A Hermeneutics of the Receiver
• A New Pentecost: A New Pneumatology
• Notes

The Introduction was a summary of the approach he intends to take in the rest of the book.   He seems to be writing to the educated layman or perhaps student, since his language is not overly technical and he explains the terminology he uses.

First, he introduces philosophical hermeneutics:

.... the hermeneutical triad of understanding, interpretation and application.   These three are inextricably linked but can be distinguished for the sake of methodological clarity.   Briefly:  we only come to understanding because we have a framework of interpretation out of which we comprehend the meaning of some text or event or person; the new or unfamiliar is understood in terms of the old and familiar. (p x)

(He cites Jean Grondin and Gadamer, Truth and Method, and adds in the notes that this approach is also called "general hermeneutics" and can be applied in different fields of specialization because it deals with the way people understand things) 

He goes on to say that this mental process is described as a circle or sometimes as a spiral:

Briefly:  understanding, interpretation, and application take place through a circular movement from the "whole" to the "part" and back to the "whole" again, in an ongoing circle of understanding.  ... This back and forth process of questioning .... is the rhythm of the hermeneutical circle or spiral.  (p xi)

It's described as a spiral to point out that it's an upward process as knowledge increases.   As a teacher with a background in literature I am inclined to accept this general description of how learning occurs.  Something very like this is described by ED Hirsch.    

So that is the general or philosophical hermeneutical triad, but for the purposes of framing his approach to Vatican II he wants to use the hermeneutics of the communicative event, which we know from literary analysis and rhetoric, though it's also used for historical events, he says.  This would be:

1. the original speaker or writer or author
2. text:  what is spoken or written or communicated
3. the addressee, who listens or reads or receives the communication.

The first three chapters of his book will deal with each of these in turn.   

Using the category of "reception", the reception hermeneutics outlined in this essay attempts to give equal weight to all three elements when interpreting Vatican II and its documents:  the original event and the original authors, the documents themselves, and the people who after the event and the promulgation of the documents attempt to understand, interpret and apply them from the context of diverse cultures and contexts  down through history after the event.

This brings us to the fourth chapter, in which he talks about the sensus fidelium and the Holy Spirit.    His argument is for a "reception pneumatology" which 

....demands that we conceive a new way of modelling how the enabling of the Spirit actually works.   A new Pentecost requires a new pneumatology and could appropriately be called a "pneumatology from below."  I will call it a "reception pneumatology".

He asks whether a category of "reception" can provide a structuring principle for an integrated christology, pneumatology, and Trinitarian theology, and therefore ecclesiology"

The rest of this last chapter will be devoted to pursuing this point.  He points out that he can only sketch some outlines of the case he is making.   He thinks the laity and their "sensus fidelium" will be important in the post-Vatican II church.   

There, that's it for a basic summary.   I plan to write another post going more into the details.   Basically, I think his invocation of the reception process and the three aspects of a communicative act are quite applicable to Vatican II, which seems explicitly intended to be a communications event from everything I read about how it was convoked and how it proceeded.  

The last chapter seems vaguer.   Perhaps that is because he is trying to delineate an ongoing process -- certainly the Church still seems to be "receiving" the Council, even almost two decades after his book was published.    Plus, as he mentions, the role of the laity has not been extensively dealt with in Catholic theology.  And since he is also discussing the workings of the Holy Spirit, perhaps there is not much more to be expected than that he would raise some questions and thoughts for future consideration.

More of Ormond Rush's writing can be found here:

• Plenary Council Participation and Reception: Synodality and Discerning the Sensus Fidelium – PART ONE   It's a five part series but there's no easy way I could find to link to the whole series.   Part Five links to Part Four, etc, if you want to go backwards that way.  
• Sensus Fidelium:  Making Sense of Revelation (PDF)

More recently, Fr Rush commented on the synod synthesis document.  He has a very positive view of synodality, as one would expect, since in some ways his work on Vatican II and hermeneutics actually anticipated some of the synodal project and the documents which have followed from them  

• https://melbournecatholic.org/news/its-not-majority-rules-fr-ormond-rush-talks-synodality
• https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-10/synod-fr-ormon-rush-theological-input-on-synthesis-report-a.html
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00405639231205008