The ancient mnemonic implicitly places the four senses of Scripture on the same level of authority. The literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical senses are assumed to be there to teach, each in its own way, what the divine Author of Scripture intends the reader to learn from the passage in question. The emphasis, at least from the time of Gregory the Great, who put the four senses decisively into the mediaeval tradition, was upon the divine intention rather than upon any conscious intention of the human author. Any interpretation which could be put upon the text and was in keeping with the faith and edifying, had the warrant of God himself, for no human reader had the ingenuity to find more than God had put there.

The twelfth century attempt to take the literal sense as the foundation saw it not in terms of the old architectural metaphor which made it merely the crude base of rough-cut stones on which the beautiful superstructure of the spiritual senses was erected, but as the most important of the senses, yielding far more to analysis than had hitherto been dreamed of.

It had long seemed that certain passages of the Old Testament demanded allegorical interpretation because their literal sense was unacceptable. There was an attempt in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century to reassess the ceremonial precepts of the Mosaic Law, and to determine whether they were merely ‘foreshadowings’ of the laws by which the righteous must now live, or intended to be fulfilled literally.