Reading the Three Books of God
By Doug Talley

The medieval Christian theologian believed that God had written two books, the first book being the volume of His words, which is Scripture, and the second being the volume of His acts, which is the Creation. Words, of course, comprise the first volume.  Each object of the natural world factors into the second, the book of the universe. To the astute reader with sufficient purity of heart, any given word of the first volume, and any natural object of the second, might prove to be a cipher to unlock the mysteries of heaven, a seer stone by which to behold God. All of which begs the same question of both books, how is one to read? How can one gain the greatest illumination from the masterworks of this world, whether written by God, or by mankind under the spirit of divine inspiration?

Years ago at a small informal poetry reading at Brigham Young University, I heard a student comment, with some hint of arrogance, that anyone who could not read Shakespeare could not really read Scripture either. If this were true, one might ask, how in the world did Joseph Smith with his elementary reading skills ever manage to translate the Book of Mormon? The answer, of course, is that the Holy Spirit can always compensate for any shortfall in erudition. And certainly, for any real illumination of mind and heart, that Spirit is absolutely essential.

And yet, the more widely one reads, and the more deeply, the more the Spirit of truth is able to assist understanding. To be learned is good, wrote the prophet Jacob, divulging the all-important key, if [one] hearken[s] to the counsels of God.  The art of reading can be practiced, and skill in reading, with practice, can be magnified. Of many possibilities in the art of reading, three will serve as an adequate starting point, Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, Ezra Pound’s An ABC of Reading, and Dante Alighieri’s letter to Can Grande della Scala. 

A Focus on Content

Harold Bloom opens his book, How to Read and Why, with the following:

Bloom’s stated objective is “to make what is implicit in a book finely explicit.” Accordingly, he focuses primarily on content and subject matter and addresses, for example, the frequently testy, whimsical friendship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Cervantes’ novel or the rich and vast nuances of the several “souls” of Walt Whitman in his poetry. He suggests five basic rules for creative reading:

1. Clear the mind of academic cant.
2. Do not attempt to improve your neighbor by what or how you read: self-improvement is a project ambitious enough for anyone.
3. Scholarship is a candle lit by desire and love of humanity.
4. To read well, one must be an inventor.
5. In reading, a sense of the ironic must be recovered.

A Focus on Technique

As a worthwhile contrast to Bloom’s emphasis on subject matter, Ezra Pound in An ABC of Reading emphasizes primarily poetic technique and the manner by which great writing is composed.  Pound was always, first and foremost, a technician, and so naturally, he focuses on his strength. I had first read the ABC in college, and its earnestness kindled in me a thirst for the best of literature, regardless of the language. Unfortunately, I loaned my copy to a friend, who subsequently lost it, and so I must rely on a memory that is admittedly unreliable. 

Pound introduces in the ABC prime sources for certain techniques of the poetic tradition. He theorizes that various poetic techniques are best examined and understood only by comparison, as a biologist might compare various specimen slides under a microscope. 

Accordingly, he cites Arnaut Daniel and other Provencal poets of the Middle Ages for the finest quality of melody in poetry, what he called melopoeia (literally, “making a lyric”). He proposes Li Po and other Chinese lyric poets as perhaps the greatest example of visual acuity, or vividness, in poetry, what he termed phanopoeia (a coined word, “casting a light” or “making an image”). Although his ideas in this regard have since been questioned, he felt the very nature of Chinese ideograms, where each word is potentially a picture of the concept it depicts, was naturally the best medium for vividness in poetry. And finally, he cites a host of examples for his concept of logopoeia (literally, “making a story”), pointing to Chaucer and Lucretius, among others, as the finest examples of certain kinds of imagination and intellect at play, often, if not always, implicitly ironic.  The book is provocative, and some might say arrogant, but I, for one, am indebted to it for introducing me years ago to the classical canon and for prodding me to learn a foreign language or two in order to examine that canon in the original. 

A Focus on Allegory

The final approach to consider is, for me, potentially the most interesting, because it promises the greatest richness and complexity.  Although authorship is somewhat in question, Dante Alighieri purportedly wrote a letter to Can Grande della Scala, in which he states that his Divine Comedy, like Scripture, may be read in four different modes, of which the literal mode is merely one. 

Unlike Bloom’s work, or Pound’s, Dante’s stated approach to reading was not a treatise, but rather the mere snatch of an idea buried in the middle of a letter. Yet the idea is powerful:

Cabbalists and early Christian scholars originally devised this fourfold method of reading Biblical texts. The various levels of meaning successively revealed by Scripture to the nimble reader were (1) literal, or historical, (2) allegorical, (3) moral, and (4) spiritual, or mystical or anagogical. Jorge Luis Borges noted that while Origen attributed three meanings to the words of the Scriptures — the historical, the moral and the mystical, corresponding to the body, the soul, and the spirit of man — John Scotus Erigena, attributed to them an infinite number of meanings, like the iridescence of a peacock’s feathers. “In every word of Scripture,” states the Zohar, a version of the Cabbala, “there are many lights.” Each light potentially serves as an entrance to the eternal. 

Another example of Scripture to which this fourfold method of interpretation readily applies is the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus relates a story of a man beaten by thieves and rescued by a neighbor. Its literal meaning is conveyed in simplicity — a random act of violence and the subsequent human reaction. Its allegorical meaning is understood in an interpretation of the story as emblematic of the plan of salvation — man comes down from heaven (Jerusalem) to earth (Jericho) and there is ravaged and left spiritually dead by sin and the minions of Satan (the thieves), but is rescued through the mercies of Christ (the Samaritan) and is led to his Church (the inn) where he is then cared for by the priesthood (the innkeeper) until the Second Coming (the return of the Samaritan). The moral meaning is conveyed, on the one hand, in the indifference and contempt of the priest and Levite, who shunned the victim, and on the other hand, in the compassion of the Samaritan who ministered to him, the three men each serving as figurative types of behavior. The spiritual (or mystical or anagogical) meaning is manifest in the parable by its representation of the continuous spiritual warfare between right and wrong, the daily inner battle to overcome a natural instinct to seek only our own self-interest and not the interest of a neighbor. 

A Seer Stone to the Heavenly

It should be noted that Dante was not enslaved to a precise fourfold meaning for every scriptural passage or verse of the Commedia. He acknowledged the four medieval interpretations — literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical — but concluded that besides the literal, the other modes might conceivably be gathered into one:

Perhaps it is enough if any literary work has a double meaning, the literal and the allegorical — the earthly and the heavenly — the patterns in this life being symbolic of patterns in heaven.  If the symbolic meaning is rich enough, it will naturally lead to allegorical, moral, spiritual, mystical, or anagogical interpretations, that is, multiple interpretations under whatever various names the reader might wish to use. 

After years of reading and writing, I am convinced that any metaphor of quality lends itself to this method of multiple interpretations — the earthly and the physical being a type or symbol of the heavenly and the spiritual. I return to another statement of Ezra Pound, that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Whether reading a book of literature, or the book of the created world, the natural object and the word that depicts it can serve as a seer stone to lead us to God. Or rather, it is perhaps the apt metaphor that is the seer stone, the means by which an object of the natural world is made, through a word, the adequate symbol of the divine and eternal. The natural object remains mute until some spirit of truth transforms it into a metaphor that reveals its hidden relationship to the heavenly. Just so, by metaphor six birds perched in a bare winter tree become the six words of a mournful song, the Kyrie.  The crescent moon becomes that ancient ark sailing dark waters toward heaven. The language of the spirit is, perhaps, entirely a language of symbol.

The Third Book of God

Reflecting on this principle, it occurs to me that God has written a third book, which is the book of the Temple. This is a unique genre, a hybrid book of the first two, of God’s words and creations both, of His knowledge and His gestures, in which the physical unites with the spiritual and the temporal with the eternal.  Viewed in this light, the endowment ceremony of the Temple is perhaps one vast poem, a poem of gesture as well as word, a poem at once both lyric and epic, full of striking formal repetitions like the refrain of a song, and yet also full of grand narrative and dramatic sequences. And Dante’s fourfold method of interpretation applies no less to the book of the Temple than it does to Scripture and to Nature. Every gesture and every statement in the Temple is a metaphor, a seer stone by which the heavens may be opened. 

Any doubt on this point might be answered by referring to the Revelation of John. The message of Christ to the early saints in chapters 2 and 3 of Revelation is filled with allusions to the endowment ceremony, suggesting that some of them, at least, were acquainted with it. These passages, like the ceremony they refer to, are subject to multiple interpretations literal and symbolic, physical and spiritual, temporal and eternal: 

“To him that overcometh will I give … a white stone and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it”

“He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment”

“Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God”

“I counsel thee to … anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see”

“I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him”

“To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne”

One might also refer to the gestures of baptism, whether in the Temple or in a chapel. When baptizing an initiate into the Church of Jesus Christ, a priesthood holder lifts his arm to the square, which gesture is one of the symbols of creativity and design, a symbol to signify the beginning of a divine creation — the building of a temple — which is the creation of a fully-realized child of God, a house of flesh where the spirit of God may dwell and increase. Know ye not, asks the Apostle, that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? 

Whatever is cleansed by truth — be it child, temple, or book — is by that truth rendered unique and singular and full of mystery, a symbol of the divine and all that attends it. All things are written by the Father, said Christ, and therefore, the entire world stands ready to be read. In our sacred reflection upon the Father’s three great books, always the question to be posed is that of a certain lawyer, who one day asked of Christ, “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And always the answer is the same, as though inscribed in stone, “What is written ... How readest thou?”