I have found Thomas’s explanation of the quadriga convincing. He argues that the multiple spiritual senses are not “located” in the words but in the things that the words name. One might say that for Thomas the words have a single, namely literal, sense; but the things they name are themselves signs, the “words” with which God writes history, and these things foreshadow later things.

Barbara Lewalski ( Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric ) raised some questions about this formula:

“As William G. Madsen perceived, there is some literary problem with this Catholic position, in that it involves deriving metaphorical meaning only from the significance of the thing (the tenor), bypassing any real interplay between vehicle and tenor, God’s arm and operative power [‘God’s arm’ is Thomas’s example of figurative language in Scripture]. This disposition to move immediately to the ‘true’ meaning rather than regarding metaphorical language as itself constituting such meaning, is evident in Thomas’s justification of the presence of poetic language in scripture. Since poetry deals with matters unable to be grasped by reason, poetic language ‘leads the reason aside’; it is appropriate to scripture, which is above reason, and it is necessary to aid the simple to grasp intellectual things through sensible objects.”

In sum, for Thomas “the poetic language of scripture does not convey truth directly,” and “the figures in scripture serve chiefly to intimate the disproportion between these formulations and the divine reality,” since “similitudes often obscure truth, leading the reader to look beyond the figures.” Thomas’s view of poetic language is thus rooted in and serves an apophatic thrust to his theology.

Thomas is following Augustine here: “neither assumes that the particular verbal formulations and figures are to be seen as the precisely appropriate vehicles for conveying truth, whether of natural things or of God.” Protestantism, with its emphatic prioritization of the Word, saw figures and tropes as theologically weighted: “the Reformation focus on the literal text led Calvin and his English followers to pay the closest attention to the tropes and figures of scripture as the very vehicle of the Holy Ghost. Tropes are now perceived as God’s chosen formulations of his revealed truth which man must strive to understand rightly, in themselves, and not as a stimulus to a higher vision.” Protestants were more interested in the precise rhetorical strategies of Scripture than were their medieval counterparts.

It’s possible to reconcile Thomas’s view with this Protestant poetics. Tropes and figures in Scripture are among God’s methods for revealing Himself and His intentions for the world, but for Protestants (as Frei emphasized) the text of Scripture gives us direct access to historical persons and events. A figure both tells us what happened, and, by its figurative character, describes the meaning of what happened. The thing that makes “what happened” pregnant with future possibilities is not, strictly, the figure, but the fact that God providentially foreshadows later events in the former. Lewalski has an important corrective to Thomas, though, insofar as he treats poetic language as an “accommodation” and insofar as he encourages us to skip too quickly past the way God has spoken about what He does.

(Thanks to Doug Wilson for pointing me to Lewalski’s very rich book.)