The Sermon: an Anagogic Chatechesis
This week has found me in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada for the annual Atlantic Theological Conference. The theme this year has been The Sublime Sermons of Anglican Poet-Priests and I was invited to give a paper, which I entitled: “Was his object all sublime? Reflecting on the ‘beating out of gold’ in the poetry and sermons of John Donne.”
A tradition of the conference is that the discussion of each paper presented is opened by a Respondent. In my case, this task fell to Professor Patricia Robertson of Dalhousie who was extremely gracious and I was most grateful for her thoughts which, I am pleased to say, opened a lively discussion.
One of the wider objectives of the conference was to showcase the thoughts of Robert Crouse, the distinguished Canadian theologian and sometime parishioner of the Advent. (And I hope we shall be able to host a Colloquium later this year that will explore the salience and weight of his theology, which is insufficiently known in the wider Anglican world, as Archbishop Rowan Williams among others of note has pointed out).
All of which cast some significant further light on the role of the sermon theme upon which I embarked last week.
A Crousian Perspective Responding to the Inqietum Cor of Augustine
The perspective of Dr. Crouse, on the nature and role of the sermon, is useful to consider here in relation to John Donne – on whom my paper was focused. There is an important fit – not least in regard to the element of inquietum that was surely lurking underneath so much of Donne’s work.
Crouse held that the sermon is not primarily a vehicle for moral instruction or pastoral encouragement, and still less a mere rhetorical performance; rather, it is ultimately a contemplative act that is an extension of the liturgy itself, and best understood in the wider context the soul’s pilgrimage into God.
This perspective was grounded in his characteristically Augustinian metaphysics and his conviction that piety, philosophy, and liturgy are mutually constitutive. Hence, as Professor Neil G. Robertson (who gave a characteristically powerful paper at the Conference this week) has argued, all should in a sense start with Augustine’s dictum from the opening of the Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
For Crouse, this restlessness of the heart — inquietum cor — defines the human condition as pilgrimage, which is ultimately a pilgrimage of amor; where love is not only that which drives the soul toward God but also the rest and the peace at which it ultimately arrives in God.
The sermon should therefore be best understood through its role participating in this metaphysical drama: it does not merely describe the soul’s pilgrimage; it enacts and advances it by mediating between the scriptural word and the understanding of the hearer in a movement of anagogical, which is to say heavenward, ascent.
The preacher’s task, therefore, becomes one that is not of exhortation in the first instance but rather illumination. The successful sermon allows the images of Holy Scripture, authorised and shaped by the liturgical context, to be “employed by the Holy Spirit in the soul.”
But before going further, it is apposite to say something about a concept of great power for further illumination here, namely that of the anagogic. This word derives from the Greek word ἀναγωγή (anagōgē), which itself derives from the compound verb anagein — ana (“up”) + agein (“to lead”). It carries thus the literal sense of an “upward leading” or “ascent.”
Thus we have here a hermeneutical category that designates the final and highest register of scriptural meaning, which is the eschatological, mystical, or heavenly sense of a text, pointing not to historical events, doctrinal propositions, or moral directives, but to the ultimate destiny of the soul and the consummation of all things.
The Historical Background of the Anagogic Concept
Before its consolidation as a specifically Christian hermeneutical term, anagōgē already carried philosophical freight in the Platonic tradition, where it described the soul’s upward movement from the sensible to the intelligible realm — the very motion depicted in the allegory of the cave. This Platonic usage provided the conceptual substrate on which Christian-Alexandrian exegetes would later build, since anagōgē in its Greek philosophical sense already implied a passage from appearance to reality: from the visible to the invisible.
The Alexandrian school, most notably Origen (c. 185–254 A.D.), furnished the decisive early-Christian framework for multi-level scriptural reading.
Building on a Pauline anthropology of body, soul, and spirit, Origen proposed a threefold sense of Scripture:
- Somatic (literal)
- Psychic (moral)
- Pneumatic (spiritual)
It is in this last, pneumatic register that anagoge is incipient, if not yet named as a distinct fourth level.
John Cassian (c. 360–435 A.D.) was next instrumental in crystallising the mature fourfold scheme (the quadriga) in his Conferences (XIV.8), distinguishing the historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical senses. His famous formula preserved in the medieval schools makes the hierarchy pellucid: Litera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria; moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia – “The letter teaches of deeds, allegory of what is believed; morality of what is done, anagoge of things to come.” Anagoge thus names the eschatological horizon: quo tendas, “whither you are tending.”
The Gazan Ascetics
A further important and sometimes overlooked strand of anagogical thinking appeared in the Gazan monastic tradition of the sixth century.
Barsanuphius, John the Prophet, and Dorotheus of Gaza held that Scripture is anagogical in its very essence — not a moral handbook capable of paraphrase, but a text whose pedagogical power consists entirely in its capacity to lead the reader upward to Christ. This is a more radical claim than the later scholastic classification of anagoge, as one sense among four: here anagogical orientation is the condition of all genuine scriptural understanding.
Medieval Synthesis
The quadriga reached its systematic apex in the high medieval period.
Hugh of Saint Victor (De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris, twelfth century) offered a careful philosophical distinction: where simple allegory signifies an invisible reality by means of a visible one, anagoge properly so called is a sursum ductio — a “reasoning upwards” (sursum ductio), in which the invisible is not merely signified but disclosed or revealed through the visible.
Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica (I, Q.1, art. 10), gave the concept its canonical scholastic formulation, defining the anagogical sense as:
“That by which “eternal glory” is signified — the New Jerusalem, the Sabbath rest, the heavenly Canaan.”
In the modern, which is to say post Vatican II Roman Church, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§117–118) preserves this Thomistic definition in its account of the spiritual senses, illustrating it with the example of Jerusalem as respectively: a literal city of Judah, an allegorical figure of the Church, a tropological image of the purified soul, and anagogically as the heavenly Jerusalem – towards which all history tends.
Dante and the Literary Tradition
We have then yet another illuminating perspective in the work of Dante Alighieri, who gave anagoge its perhaps most celebrated literary application.
In his Letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante explains the Commedia as susceptible to four readings, with the anagogical meaning of the Exodus narrative (Psalm 114) being “the departure of the sanctified soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory.”
In the Convivio, he further specifies the anagogical sense as “beyond the senses” and concerned with “higher matters belonging to eternal glory.” This literary deployment confirmed anagoge‘s expansive cultural reach that goes beyond strictly ecclesiastical exegesis and later much influenced the subsequent Western poetic tradition.
Abbot Suger and Anagogical Aesthetics
This latter aspect can be seen for example in the visual and architectural sphere, Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (1081–1151) extended anagoge from textual to aesthetic experience.
The noted commentator Erwin Panofsky analysed (in his 1944 essay), Suger believed that the beauty of his newly built Gothic abbey church could transport the viewer to the invisible world anagogico more — “in an anagogic manner.”
Drawing on Pseudo-Dionysian theology, Suger forged a theology of sacred art in which the material and sensible become vehicles of genuine ascent to the divine, making anagoge the foundational rationale for Gothic architecture itself.
Reformation and Post-Reformation Reception
The Reformation’s commitment to the sensus literalis as the sole normative sense of Scripture, needless to say, put the quadriga under pressure.
Lutheran and Reformed exegetes largely rejected the fourfold scheme as a medieval imposition that licensed doctrinal arbitrariness. Francis Turretin, for example, acknowledged the traditional classification but insisted that allegory, anagogy, and tropology were not strictly independent senses but rather applications of the single literal meaning.
The Anglican tradition later occupied a characteristically mediating position: the homiletical exploitation of anagogical registers survived in Anglican preaching long after the Reformation, even when the scholastic vocabulary fell away, particularly in the eschatologically charged sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne – as I had occasion to discuss at more length in my paper to the conference, but will leave to another occasion to set out more than is appropriate here.
Modern Recovery
The twentieth century witnessed a substantial scholarly rehabilitation of anagoge, as we see not only in Crouse but rather earlier in the century, in particular through Henri de Lubac’s Exégèse médiévale (4 vols., 1959–64), which argued that the quadriga was not an artificial medieval construction but the organic expression of a genuinely theological, Christocentric, and eschatological hermeneutic.
For de Lubac, anagoge holds the decisive position within the fourfold scheme because it articulates Scripture’s ultimate horizon: the telos toward which history, typology, and moral transformation alike are ordered. In literary criticism, Northrop Frye further appropriated anagogy as the culminating phase of symbolism — the mode in which literary meaning gestures toward a total, undivided human vision — extending the concept far beyond its original theological context.
And – as I have sketched – we have in the work of Fr. Crouse an especially interesting Anglican presentation, of a perspective rooted in a powerful strand of Christian thought that stretches all the way back to the earliest patristic period and draws on even earlier insights going back to ancient philosophical roots.
The concept of anagoge thus traces an arc from Platonic philosophy through Patristic exegesis, medieval scholasticism, Gothic aesthetics, and Dante’s poetry, to modern theological and literary theory.
Its persistent core remains constant: the conviction that texts, images, and history do not merely describe or prescribe but elevate — leading the reader or viewer upward toward an eschatological reality that no purely literal or historical reading can exhaust.