All Scripture Is Inspired By God: Medieval Exegesis and the Modern
Christian
At the root of this whole understanding of the "spiritual" meaning
of the Bible which presupposes but excels the literal meaning is
the belief that the Scriptures are inspired, that is, written by
God.
by Mark Holtz
We are told by Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1090- 1141) that the length
of Noah's Ark, 300 cubits, is a sign of the Cross, since the
number 300 is represented in Greek by the letter tau (T), which
has the shape of a cross. Rupert of Deutz (c. 1075-1129) tells us
that Proverbs 19:12, "A king's wrath is like the growling of a
lion," speaks of Christ in his crucifixion, since then the King of
kings roared at the Devil. Guibert of Nogent 11053-1124} claims
that in the darkness which "was upon the face of the deep" in
Genesis is a sign of the darkness of sin and worldliness which
clouds men's minds, and in the grass which sprouts from the earth,
a sign of the fruitfulness of God's word when worldly cares have
been cast away. The Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) explains that the
two stones of onyx on the ephod of the Aaronic priesthood
described in Exodus 28 suggest in their red color the ardor of
charity, or, since they shine like fire surrounded by white bands,
the light of knowledge accompanied by the band of chastity.
In stark contrast, the encyclical <Divino Afflante Spiritu> (1943)
of Pius XII makes a clear statement in favor of the application of
the modern, scientific study, including linguistics, history,
archeology, and the like, to gain as accurate as possible an
understanding of the meaning of the biblical texts and the time of
their composition. With this approval of the historical-critical
approach to the Scriptures came a caution against an overly
"figurative" interpretation. This encyclical and its emphases were
given further approbation and support in the Dogmatic Constitution
on Divine Revelation (<Dei Verbum>, 1965), promulgated by the
Second Vatican Council. It seems all the more perplexing, then,
that the <Catechism of the Catholic Church> should speak so highly
of the "ancient tradition" of spiritual exegesis which, taken
along with historical analysis, "guarantees all its richness to
the living reading of Scripture in the Church" (no. 115).
At first glance, this coupling of the mystical significance of the
decorative gems on Aaron's priestly vestments with modern
linguistic analysis of Ugaritic loan words in Hebrew strikes the
modern Christian as something well beyond the simply comic.
Stepping into the Medieval exegesis of the Bible is rather more
like stepping with Alice through the looking glass into a world
where nothing is what it seems and where anything can happen. It
is a world where the only guarantee is that nothing is ordinary,
nothing behaves as it ought, nothing is reasonable. It sometimes
bears a striking resemblance to the world of an over-zealous
Freudian psychoanalyst for whom, Freud's own objections
notwithstanding, a cigar is never just a cigar. Even for those who
might sympathize with the teachings which Medieval exegetes
professed to be contained in their spiritual reading of the Holy
Scriptures, the notion that there is not one detail in the Bible
so minute or insignificant that it will not yield spiritual truth
is not widely believed today. Schooled as we are in the fruits of
the historical and linguistic studies which have grown since Pius
XII's revolutionary encyclical, whether we find Medieval exegesis
neurotically thorough in its symbol hunting or touchingly naive in
its credulous piety, we are not apt to regard it as serious study
of the sacred text.
Yet, this understanding of Scripture, that the lessons to be
learned from Holy Writ far exceed those available to a reading of
the words and historical circumstances of their composition, was
sustained in a society which was saturated with the Bible. The
great age of Scholasticism in the thirteenth century is often
characterized by its production of theological <summae> which
tried to balance and synthesize the teachings of the Church with
the (pagan) philosophy of Aristotle. Less widely is it known that
the pinnacle of learning in the universities of the high Middle
Ages was not the mastery of Aristotle, which was only the
beginning of the Arts degree, but the authority to teach and
preach on the Bible. The discipline itself was even called not
primarily theology, but <sacra doctrina>, sacred doctrine, or
sometimes simply <sacra pagina>, the sacred page.
Nor was the Medieval preoccupation with the Bible confined to the
<cursus> of university study. The monastic life embodied in the
Rule of St. Benedict was grounded in the weekly recitation of the
Psalter along with biblical canticles in the Daily Office, the
hearing of the Scriptures with their exegesis by the Fathers at
Matins, and the frequent engagement in <lectio divina>, the
private reading of the Holy Scriptures. So vivid were the
narratives of the Bible to their monastic audience, in fact, that
the Rule forbids the reading of the Heptateuch (Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges) or the books
of Kings (1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings) in the evening, lest the
excitement of the text disrupt the listeners' sleep.
In fact, not only the monastic Office, but also Medieval worship
as a whole was steeped in the texts and imagery of Holy Writ. In
the Latin West, most of the music of the Church was composed by
setting the texts of the Bible, usually the Psalms, giving glory
to God through the words of his own inspiration. The Introit for
the feast of the Holy Innocents, for example, was taken from Psalm
8, "By the mouth of babes and infants, thou hast perfected praise,
because of thy foes." The East shared this same devotion to the
Scriptures in its celebration of the Divine Liturgy. So, for
example, the Hymn to the Theotokos (Mother of God) on Pascha
(Easter) weaves phrases from Luke, Philippians, and Isaiah
together to form one, eloquent praise of the risen Son through the
invocation of his Mother.
The angel cried to the Lady Full of Grace:
Rejoice, O pure Virgin! Again I say: Rejoice! Your Son is risen
from His three days in the tomb!
With Himself He has raised all the dead! Rejoice, all ye people!
Shine! Shine! O New Jerusalem! The Glory of the Lord has shone on
you! Exult now and be glad, O Zion! Be radiant, O Pure Theotokos,
in the Resurrection of your Son!
Even the illiterate faithful, by far the majority of Medieval
Christians, had access at least to the stories of the Bible, if
not the texts themselves. While preaching had declined in the West
since the age of the Fathers and was not seriously revived until
the spread of the Franciscan and Dominican preachers in the
thirteenth century, tales from the Old and New Testaments were
given visual proclamation in the icons, sculptures, stained glass,
tapestries, and even vestments and holy vessels used in churches
for divine worship. The fairs held on the feast days of the saints
would often be accompanied by processions with biblical <tableaux>
and miracle plays which recounted key narratives from the Bible,
such as the Fall, Cain and Abel, the Nativity, and the Passion and
Resurrection of Christ. For a society as unlettered as Medieval
Europe, there was no lack of access to the substance of the
biblical narrative.
If it was not a lack of familiarity with the Bible, what was it
that allowed the Medieval reader to discover so much in text of
the Scriptures, this plenitude of meaning which we cannot but eye
with suspicion? Central to the Medieval understanding of the Bible
was the conviction that there are two basic levels of meaning in
Scripture: literal and spiritual. In this regard, Medieval
exegetes were following in the tradition of the Fathers, and in
the West that of Augustine in particular, especially his work <On
Christian Doctrine>. Words, Augustine notes, are such because they
are signs of something else, of things. The word "dog,, points to
an actual animal, but the word itself is a human convention.
However, he notes that sometimes things are themselves signs of
other things, as smoke may be a sign of fire. God, he argues, as
the Creator, the Author, of all things, and as the providential
Lord, can speak not only through words, but through the natures of
things (such as the purity of snow or the ferocity of a lion), or
even through the events of history (such as the Exodus or the
Babylonian Captivity). This sort of signification, in which things
are signs of other things, is not conventional like language but
part of the very nature of things as God has created them.
Given this understanding of God's way of speaking, through words
and through things, Patristic exegetes and their Medieval
inheritors distinguished the literal meaning of the Bible, the
level at which words refer to things, from the spiritual level,
wherein things themselves are signs of other things. The literal
level was understood to include not only the ordinary use of
language, so that the word "hand" points to a physical member of
the body, but also idiomatic or metaphorical language, where "the
right hand of God" is taken to mean God's power. Both of these
represent the literal meaning because they relate the <litterae>,
the "letters," to the thing itself. Within the limits of Medieval
linguistic study, this involved the attempt to understand the
meaning of obscure words and phrases, along with the attempt to
interpret and categorize modes of expression typical of Hebrew and
Biblical Greek, but foreign to the Latin of the West and, to a
lesser extent, the Byzantine Greek of the East.
From the Medieval point of view, God's willingness to be described
in accord with human modes of expression, that is, with metaphor,
as if he had a right hand or an arm, or breathed through his
nostrils, was a sign of the divine mercy, God's condescension to
human limitations. Thomas Aquinas understood this well in his
explanation of the use of metaphor in Scripture.
"It is befitting Holy Writ to put forward divine and spiritual
truths by means of comparisons with material things. For God
provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature.
Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through
sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense.
Hence in Holy Writ spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the
likeness of material things" (ST I 1, 9, resp.).
Such is God's power and skill that these metaphors do not diminish
the truth which they convey, but rather lift the human creature
out of his creaturely limitations into the contemplation of Truth.
Yet, lest the truth be entirely hidden, "those things which are
taught metaphorically in one part of Scripture, in other parts are
taught more openly" (ST I 1, 9, ad 2).
Also understood as part of the level of the literal exposition of
a text was the searching out of the historical circumstances of
its composition. Usually this took the form of debates over the
authorship of a given book, such as the Letter to the Hebrews, a
text whose authorship has been debated since the time of Origen
(c. 185-c. 254). While their level of analysis might be considered
crude or naive today, they did show, within the limits of their
knowledge, a keen interest in the different styles of the various
books, noting how the variety of original audiences called for
various forms of discourse, the "many and various ways God spoke
of old to our fathers by the prophets" (Hebrews 1:1).
Yet, while the literal level was considered foundational to all
spiritual understanding, for Medieval exegetes the historical
situation of the original composition of the text was not of great
importance. Gregory the Great 1c. 540-604) scoffed at those who
would waste time debating the human authorship of Job, noting that
one would not ask who held the pen when an important man dictated
a letter. While less dismissive of human cooperation with divine
inspiration, even Thomas Aquinas could note without hesitation
that "the literal sense is that which the author intends" but that
"the author of Holy Writ is God" (ST I 1, 10, resp.).
As noted, the Medieval exegete saw the spiritual meaning, through
which the things described at the literal level were themselves
signs of spiritual truths, as built upon the foundation of the
literal meaning. Only when it is known what the words themselves
mean can the significance of the things to which the words point
be understood. While there were many strategies of subdividing the
different types of spiritual meaning to be found in the
Scriptures, one of the most enduring was that known to the
Scholastics. They divided the spiritual meaning of Scripture into
three senses: allegorical, tropological or moral, and anagogical.
The allegorical meaning was that which related things and events
of the Old Testament to those of the New. The (near) sacrifice of
Isaac by Abraham, for example, was understood allegorically as the
Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, Joseph's rejection by his
brothers as the rejection of Christ by the Jews, and so on. This
sort of spiritual meaning is probably the most familiar even to
modern Christians who still accept, to one degree or another, that
Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Law, and that in him is
perfected all which was done or promised imperfectly in the people
of Israel.
The tropological meaning linked the things contained in Scripture
with the moral life. While the Beatitudes or the Decalogue speak
at the literal, plain level of moral duties, according to the
tropological sense, moral lessons can be learned from things in
themselves. Thus, the beauty of Rachel is said to be a sign of the
contemplative life, while the ugliness of Leah is a sign of a life
marred by vice. The physical appearance of these matriarchs,
without reference to their actions, is itself understood as a sign
of the moral life.
The anagogical level, from the Greek <anagoge>, a "leading up,"
joins the things of Scripture to eternal glory. Where allegory
speaks of what has been accomplished in Christ in his earthly
ministry in the past and his continuing ministry in the Church,
and where tropology gives moral instruction for the present, the
anagogical meaning is oriented to the things beyond this world and
the future glory promised in Christ. The historical city of
Jerusalem, for example, is anagogically the heavenly Jerusalem,
the abode of the blessed in the New Creation.
According to this way of reading the Bible, any one thing in
Scripture could be understood according to all four senses. The
Passover and Exodus of Israel from Egypt, literally a narrative of
historical events, allegorically speaks both of the Sacrifice of
Christ and his victory over death and sin as well as the
sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, tropologically tells of
the conversion from sin and carnality to virtue, and anagogically
tells of the leaving behind the trials of this world for the
glories of heaven.
Yet, if the Scriptures have so many meanings, what is to keep the
reader from forcing the Scriptures to say anything he likes? How
is the spiritual sense to be distinguished from idle musing and
fanciful absurdities? The Fathers and Scholastics were not unaware
of this objection and spoke to it directly. Augustine argued that
all spiritual interpretation must be based on the literal sense.
Furthermore, all readings of the Bible must be governed by the law
of charity, so that any reading which is not conducive to love of
God and neighbor is to be rejected as incorrect. Hugh of St.
Victor chided those who would race to engage in spiritual exegesis
before they had mastered the literal understanding, comparing them
to those who would try to read before they had mastered the
alphabet. Thomas Aquinas, agreeing with Augustine that all
Scriptural interpretation is to be drawn from the literal level,
adds that "nothing necessary to faith is contained under the
spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the
Scripture in its literal sense" (ST I 1, 10, ad 1).
Furthermore, the relationship between things and spiritual truth
was understood in the Middle Ages to be real, part of the very
nature of Creation, and not something imposed by cultural norms.
The strength, courage, and nobility of the lion are real
attributes which God placed in it to be a sign, however imperfect,
of the strength, courage, and nobility of the Lion of Judah, seen
imperfectly in David, but brought to perfect expression in God's
only Son. The whiteness of snow was not, for Medieval exegetes, a
convenient but arbitrary sign of moral purity. It is part of God's
providential ordering of the universe that snow, along with
plants, animals, stones, numbers, in fact, the whole of the
created order, proclaims the Truth who is God. Even a coincidence
of language, like that between <stauros>, the Greek word for
"cross", and <restaurare>, the Latin verb "to restore," was
understood to be filled with meaning and significance. In the
final analysis, no relationship between the world of things and
spiritual truth is ever the result of human institution or
meaningless coincidence.
For all the nobility and beauty of this view of the world and of
God's way of speaking to and through it, what motivation do we, as
Christians in the modern era, have to accept this view as our own?
Why does the Church recommend drawing from all four senses of
Scripture in her Catechism? What is to be gained by embodying an
understanding God and his Creation that seems so steeped in
archaic modes of thought, that seems so contrary to the scientific
approach to the Bible that the Church herself, in this century,
has authorized and promoted?
The simplest and most direct answer to these questions is that the
New Testament is itself filled with an allegorical reading of the
Old. In Peter's first sermon after the descent of the Holy Spirit
recorded in Acts 2:14-36, he unashamedly proclaimed that the words
of the prophet Joel and of Psalms 16 and 110 were fulfilled in the
miracle of tongues at Pentecost, the Resurrection, and the
Ascension. Likewise, Paul did not hesitate to read the events of
the Old Testament as proclamations of the New. The people of
Israel, he says in 1 Corinthians 10, were baptized "in the cloud
and in the sea" and "all ate the same supernatural food and all
drank the same supernatural drink" and that the Rock which
followed them was Christ. In Galatians4:21-31, he writes that the
sons of Abraham and their mothers, Hagar and Sarah, were
allegories of the two covenants. Hagar "corresponds to the present
Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children" while "the
Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother" so we, "like
Isaac, are children of promise." He also reminds us of God's
proclamation through created things in Romans 1:20, "Ever since
the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his
eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things
that have been made." These are merely samplings. The Gospels and
the Epistles are filled with the affirmation that the writings,
things, and events of the Old Covenant all proclaim the New.
Furthermore, if the assertions of Peter, Paul, and the evangelists
are not enough to persuade those who might hesitate to believe
that the spiritual meaning of the Bible is not subjective fancy,
then there is the witness of Jesus himself. In the parable of the
tenant of the vineyard who kill the servants and finally the son
of the landowner, Jesus applies to himself the text of Psalm
118:22, "The very stone which the builders rejected has become the
head of the corner." He teaches in John 3:14 that the lifting up
of the bronze serpent by Moses in Numbers 21:9 to heal those who
were afflicted by the poisonous snakes was a figure of the lifting
up of the Son of Man on the Cross. Even the prophecy of the coming
of Elijah foretold in Malachi 4:5 Jesus proclaims to be fulfilled
in the person of John the Baptist (Matthew 9: 11). Finally, before
he ascended into heaven, he spoke with the two disciples on the
road to Emmaus and, "beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he
interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning
himself" (Luke 24:27). Confronted with the authority of Christ
himself, even the most hardened of skeptics must take pause.
At the root of this whole understanding of the "spiritual" meaning
of the Bible which presupposes but excels the literal meaning is
the belief that the Scriptures are inspired, that is, written by
God. This does not mean that we should ignore the human authors,
or even the human means by which these texts were transmitted and
edited over the centuries of their composition. Indeed, modern
historical and linguistic study of the Bible, its authors and
composition, represents an extension of the same principles, if
not the same assumptions and conclusions, which governed the
Medieval understanding of literal exegesis.
The spiritual reading of the Bible, in other words, is not a
challenge to, or challenged by, the historical-critical approach
so dominant in modern Scripture study. Rather, it stems from the
confidence that God is the Lord of history, and that, however
unplanned and haphazard the composition and transmission of the
Bible may seem to historical analysis, we have received it
precisely as God designed. We may read the Bible with the
assurance that it is free from error since, whatever else may be
said of its human authors, it has meaning for the Church precisely
since it has God as its principal author. We need not shy away
from reading one book of Scripture in light of another, even if
the two books were written centuries apart. We may, in short,
proclaim in the words of Paul in 2 Timothy 3:16: "All scripture is
inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for
correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God
may be complete, equipped for every good work."
Mark Holtz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Medieval Institute of the
University of Notre Dame. He is presently finishing a dissertation
on the Sacred Blood of Christ in the Middle Ages.
This article was taken from the Mar-Apr. 1996 issue of "Catholic
Dossier". Catholic Dossier is published bi-monthly for $24.95 a
year by Ignatius Press. For subscriptions: P.O. Box 1639,
Snohomish, WA 98291-1639, 1-800-651-1531.
-------------------------------------------------------
Provided courtesy of:
Eternal Word Television Network
PO Box 3610
Manassas, VA 22110
Voice: 703-791-2576
Fax: 703-791-4250
Data: 703-791-4336
Web:
http://www.ewtn.com
FTP: ewtn.com
Telnet: ewtn.com
Email address: sysop@ ewtn.com
EWTN provides a Catholic online
information and service system.
-------------------------------------------------------
