Thus, both Testaments spoke at the same time of their sender, their content, and their referent, and their meaning was a nebula of all possible archetypes. The scriptures were in the position of saying everything. Everything, though, was rather too much for interpreters interested in truth.

The symbolical nature of sacred scripture had therefore to be tamed. Potentially, the scriptures had every possible meaning; so the reading of them had to be governed by a code.

[Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), 145.]