THE NOTION OF LITERAL SENSE

Abstract

n its 1993 document, The interpretation of the Bible in the Church, the Pontifical Biblical Comission recovers the classical concept of “literal sense”. This concept, ab-sent in Dei Verbum, had been used a year before in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
This article intends to show the debate about literal sense that took place at the end of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaissance. In this way it expects to make manifest up to which point in the aformentioned document, the Pontifical Biblical Comission conforms to the understandig of the literal sense that the authors of such periods had, and up to which point it innovates or modifies that understand-ing.