Tropological reading or "moral sense" is a Christian tradition, theory, and practice of interpreting the figurative meaning of the Bible.
According to doctrine developed by the Church Fathers, the literal sense, or God-intended meaning of the words of the Bible, may also have a tropological sense: it is read figuratively as a moral reading for one's personal life.
[2] In the conception of the Church Fathers, the definitions of "allegory" and "tropology" were very close, until Middle Ages where the Church made a clearer distinction between allegorical spiritual meaning, tropological moral meaning and styles of interpretation.
[3] The Ancient Greek word τρόπος (tropos) meant 'turn, way, manner, style'.
[4] The Greek word τρόπος had already been borrowed into Classical Latin as tropus, meaning 'figure of speech', and the Latinised form of τροπολογία, tropologia, is found already in the fourth-century writing of Jerome in the sense 'figurative language', and by the fifth century in sense 'moral interpretation'.