Cur Deus Verba 9781621644217, 9781642291612, 2020946493

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CUR DEUS VERBA

JEREMY HOLMES

Cur Deus Verba Why the Word Became Words IGNATIUS PRESS     SAN FRANCISCO

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition) copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved worldwide. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of papal and council documents have been taken from the Vatican website. Cover art:

Salvatore Benedicente (c. 1207)

Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Sutri, Italy

© Scala / Art Resource, New York Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum © 2021 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-62164-421-7 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-64229-161-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number 2020946493

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS Preface 1. Why God Created: The Trinity      A. The Goodness of God      B. The Son      C. The Holy Spirit      D. Creation’s Reflection of the Trinity 2. The Incarnation      A. The Incarnation      B. God Creates in Order to Give Himself      C. God Wants His Creatures to Be True Causes      D. Creation Comes from God as a Reflection of Him      E. The Father’s Impulse of Love toward the Son      F. The Creature’s Return to God      G. Christ the Head of Creation      H. Christ the Perfect Man      I. Conclusion 3. What Scripture Is For      A. Society      B. What Scripture Is      C. Conclusion: The Rules of Faith and Charity 4. The Authors of Scripture      A. True Causes of Revelation

     B. Inspiration      C. God’s Causation      D. Re-Imagining the Human Authors 5. Israel’s Participation in Christ      A. Participation      B. Christ the Cause of Israel      C. Shadow, Image, Substance      D. Three Kinds of Participation      E. Participation and the Authors of Scripture 6. The Spiritual Sense      A. Distinguishing Literal from Spiritual      B. Further Precision      C. Conclusion: The Integrity of the Old Testament 7. Divisions of the Spiritual Sense      A. Recapitulation      B. Rising Conflict      C. Relation of Spiritual and Literal Senses      D. Divisions of the Spiritual Sense      E. Conclusion: The Use of the Spiritual Sense 8. The Literal Sense      A. Time and Eternity      B. Memory and Event      C. Event and Narrative      D. Storytellers      E. The Literal Sense of Scripture      F. Conclusion

9. Literary Forms      A. The Four Gospels      B. Genesis 1-11      C. Bringing Together Antiquity and Modernity 10. Difficulties in Scripture      A. Why There Are Difficulties in Scripture      B. How God Writes the Difficult Passages      C. Examples of Difficult Passages      D. Dangers in the Difficulties      E. Allegorization of Difficult Passages 11. The Reader      A. The Problem of Subjectivity      B. The Enduring Tradition of Subjectivity      C. Scripture’s Invitation to Subjectivity      D. The Value of Subjectivity      E. Degrees and Limits of Subjectivity 12. Where Is the Bible?      A. The Old Testament and the Heart of Jesus      B. The New Testament and the Heart of Jesus Bibliography More from Ignatius Press Notes

PREFACE When the Nestorian heresy threatened to undermine the truth of the Incarnation, Cyril of Alexandria grounded the orthodox faith with one simple argument, borrowed from Athanasius: the purpose of the Incarnation was our salvation, and no mere man could save us. Christ had to be true God and true man. When Eutyches took Cyril’s more difficult teachings too far and proposed a single nature in Christ, Pope Saint Leo the Great returned to Cyril’s central point: the purpose of the Incarnation was our salvation, and the savior had to be a true member of our race. In different centuries, and in response to different errors, the Church has repeatedly asked the question Saint Anselm would phrase so memorably: Cur Deus homo? Why did God become man? The Church’s faith about the Incarnate Word parallels her faith that Scripture is both truly the words of men and truly the words of God. In a vivid poem, the prophet Baruch describes God’s wisdom as desperately needed by men but as dwelling far from them. The giants of old perished for lack of her; no one has gone up into heaven and taken her or gone over the sea and found her. But God found the whole way to wisdom, Baruch says, and “afterward she appeared upon earth and lived among men” (Bar 3:37). The Christian draws in a sudden breath—could this be the Incarnation of God’s Word and Wisdom, drawn out in plain terms in the Old Testament? But Baruch continues: “She is the book of the commandments of God” (Bar 4:1). The closest the Old Testament comes to saying that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14) is a panegyric on Scripture. The parallel has not been lost on the Christian tradition.1 Ignatius of Antioch says that “We must go to Scripture as to the flesh of Christ.” Origen says similarly, “Just as this spoken word cannot according to its own nature be touched or seen, but when written in a book and, so to speak, become bodily, then indeed is seen and

touched, so too is it with the fleshless and bodiless Word of God; according to its divinity it is neither seen nor written, but when it becomes flesh, it is seen and written.” Quoting John Chrysostom, Vatican II’s Dei Verbum makes the same point: While preserving always God’s truth and holiness, in Sacred Scripture there is manifested the marvelous condescension of eternal Wisdom, “that we may learn God’s inexpressible kindness, and how greatly he has adapted his speech out of concern for and foresight regarding our nature.” For God’s word, expressed in human languages, has been made like to human speech, as of old the Eternal Word of the Father was made like to men, taking on our flesh with its human weakness.2

All of this suggests that the guiding question for a theology of Scripture should be that of purpose: Cur Deus verba? Why did God’s Word become words? Saint Augustine, in his seminal work on biblical interpretation, takes this approach: Book 1 of De doctrina christiana argues that the key to understanding Scripture is to see that it was given to us for the purpose of increasing our charity.3 However, no one can answer this guiding question well unless he thinks, not only about God, but also about words. Here again we have a likeness to the mystery of the Incarnation: explaining why God became man required closer attention to what man is. For example, the Apollinarian heresy, which said Jesus has no human soul but rather has the divine Word in place of a soul, arose in part from a Platonic inattention to what makes the human soul different from other spirits. Along similar lines, to explain why God’s Word became words one has to think carefully about the written word: what it is, what it is for, how it relates to human nature. Saint Augustine made a beginning on this front as well by considering how signs work in general and how words work in particular. The first three chapters of this book mirror the first book of De doctrina christiana. The immediate context of Scripture is the Church, while the context for understanding the Church is the Incarnation, and the context for understanding the Incarnation is the Trinity. So, as a preparation for asking why God made Scripture, chapter 1 asks why God created anything at all and delves into the mystery of the Trinity to answer the question. Chapter 2 considers

that point where we see God’s purpose in creation most clearly and fully achieved, namely, the Incarnation. Finally, chapter 3 asks directly about the purpose of Scripture and offers an account in terms of the nature of the Church. Chapters 1 through 3 together form the first part of the present work, and they culminate in a definition of Scripture. Having set out a definition of Scripture, the rest of this book unpacks what the definition implies. All language begins with things that are described by words, and those words are then received by a hearer—or reader, in the case of the written word. Things, words, reader: these three are inseparably present wherever we find writing. The second part of this book deals with the things of Scripture; part three, the words of Scripture; and part four, the reader. The discussion of the “things” of Scripture moves from considering the things as such to considering the things as a kind of sign. Chapter 4 investigates the authors of Scripture, who lived among the “things” of Scripture as part of the same history and fabric so that they are themselves biblical realities along with the Temple and the Exodus and all the rest. Chapter 5 widens in scope to consider the history of Israel as a whole insofar as Israel had an anticipatory share in the mystery of Christ. Chapter 6 then considers how the realities of Scripture were themselves signs, what tradition has called the “spiritual sense” of Scripture, and chapter 7 rounds out the presentation with a closer look at the relationship of the spiritual and literal senses and an explanation of the traditional division of the spiritual sense into allegorical, moral, and tropological. When we turn to the words of Scripture, we are dealing with the “bookness” of the Bible. Chapter 8 asks why the literal sense of Scripture is important, with a focus on the narrative portions of the Bible. Chapter 9 considers the subdivisions of the literal sense, asking why it is helpful to have different literary forms and the variety of ways they convey meaning. As a closely related issue, and because difficulties in Scripture arise chiefly in connection with the literal sense, chapter 10 examines the fact that difficulties do occur in Scripture and asks how, in general, we should think about that fact.

The final part of the book turns to the reader or hearer, in whom Scripture exists as more than blots on a page. Previous chapters have looked at the reader in his relationship to things and in his relationship to words, but this final part examines the reader precisely in his subjectivity. Chapter 11 asks whether the reader’s subjectivity contributes to the accomplishment of Scripture’s purpose, and chapter 12 concludes by arguing that the heart of Jesus is the place where Scripture has its definitive existence. Given the “top-down” approach I have taken, there are many good things this book could have been but is not. It is not primarily a commentary on Scripture, although every chapter does interpret Scripture. It is not a practical guide to understanding Scripture, although I address a few of the more universal rules of exegesis. Least of all does the present work delve into the historical development of biblical texts or the history of interpretations, although certain broad outlines of that development are presumed.4 My hope has been to compose a work of theology, in the narrow sense of a reflection that takes God as its subject and everything else in relation to God. Too often Scripture is divided into its divine and human elements: we consider the inerrancy of Scripture as related to divine authorship and the literary forms of Scripture as relating to human authorship; we think of the unity of Scripture as coming from God and the distinctive notes in each book as coming from the human author. I want to treat every aspect of Scripture, including the human elements, as finally to be understood in relation to God, much as the Church Fathers speak of the one “theandric energy” of Christ.5 To work “top down” in this way without violating our practical experience of Scripture requires a philosophy in which the world is open to the divine.6 At each step along the way, I present and appeal to a philosophy based on participation and the analogy of being, guided especially by Saint Thomas Aquinas.7 Defending this decision is beyond the scope of this project, but others have made the case that biblical studies must find their bearings again in the perennial philosophy.8 For my part, I hope that I can contribute to

that conclusion by taking it as a premise and showing at least something of how it opens up the question: Cur Deus verba?

1

Why God Created: The Trinity When we look at the purpose for which something exists, we are looking at a good to be obtained. So when we ask why God created the world, we are asking about the good for the sake of which the world exists. I begin, therefore, with a reflection on the meanings of the word “good”. A. The Goodness of God If the Old Testament had a “thesis statement”, it might be something like this: All things are obliged to give all glory to the one true God who made them. The argument is long and has many stages, beginning with a commandment that Israel serve this God in preference to all others, proceeding through the disasters consequent on disobeying that command, and culminating in the realization that, in fact, no other God exists. Only one God created all things, and all were created for his glory. Saint Paul captures this Old Testament “thesis statement” in his Letter to the Romans: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory for ever. Amen” (Rom 11:36). At the same time, Genesis punctuates its account of the stages of creation with the statement that God “saw that it was good”, and in fact “very good”.1 The placement of this phrase at the end of various stages of creation seems to suggest that God created things for their goodness, because the world would be a very good thing to have made. The Psalms and the Wisdom literature love to detail the glories of creation—all to the praise of God, of course, but the reader is always left with the impression that creation is very good, a worthy thing for God to have brought into being. If the “thesis statement” of the Old Testament is that all things were created for the glory of God, a subordinate claim seems to be that the world was made because it is a good thing.

To understand why God created anything at all, one must somehow bring these two claims into a single account of the purpose of creation. Was the world created for God or for its own sake? Did God act egoistically or altruistically? The only way out of the bind is to distinguish between a “private good” and a “common good”. By a “common good”, I mean a good that can be shared among many persons without in any way being diminished or divided. This definition contains a great deal in a few words, so I will tease out some of its implications over the next few pages.2 Common Good A cake is not a common good; it is a private good. My cake can only be shared by breaking it into parts so that I get less cake at the end of the deal. And upon examination, it turns out that cake is not really sharable: the part another gets is a part I cannot have, and the part I keep is a part another will never eat. What I really do when I cut my cake up is make a bunch of smaller things, and then I keep one of them and I give others away. So I can give cake away, but I cannot share it. Upon even closer examination, it turns out that I cannot fully share my cake because I cannot fully possess it. I can keep a piece of cake in a container, hold it in my hands, and place it in my mouth, but in the moment of enjoying it, I destroy it. By the time I have drawn it fully to myself, it has been digested and disintegrated into nutrients that will be reconstructed into my own flesh. In the very moment of full possession, the cake vanishes. Contrast this with a good such as friendship. Friendship is a common good. Not only can I share my friendship with a friend, but I cannot actually have friendship without sharing it. My portion of friendship is not diminished when another’s is increased; instead, my portion is increased by sharing it more. The fact that I can truly share friendship is related to the fact that I can truly possess it: a friendship seeps deeply into me, reshaping and improving me without ceasing to be itself. Of course, the kind of friendship we usually have in mind when we use the word “friend” is not a perfectly common good: a person can

have only a few very close friends, and even though friendship is perfectly shared between them, there is a limit to how many people can share in it. But this is to be expected. Goods come in different kinds, and they fall on a spectrum from the purely private to the most common and everywhere in between. Any time we find a common good, we will find that even though it is common, it has its limits. It will be more or less sharable, and more or less diminished when it is shared. The common good of the United States of America, for example, even though it is a great good and much more “sharable without diminution” than my personal friendships, can only extend to its people; the good folks in Argentina are excluded. The reason goods range from purely private to most common is simply that they fall on a spectrum from less good to most good. A good that is better is, so to speak, more powerfully good. As a hotter fire not only heats a person up more but also heats up more people, so a better good is not only better for a person but is a good for more people: it is more common. Friendship is not only better for me than a cake but good for more people simultaneously. So goods that are more common are better goods, and the better the good, the more common it will be: as Aquinas says, “quanto bonum est communius, tanto est divinius” (the more common a good is, the more divine it is).3 The only absolutely common good is the good that is goodness itself: God. Every creature in the entire universe has God as its good, each in a way proportioned to what it is; in fact, every conceivable creature in every conceivable universe would have God as its good, because his goodness is never used up, so to speak, by what he has created. God is in a special way the good of every person, and he is not only every person’s good, but he is more intimately the good of each person than that person’s best friends. God can be not only the friend but even the lover of every person in creation, and yet this love never dilutes, the way human friendship is diluted when spread too far. Trinity

But revelation tells us there is even more. Although reason rightly tells us that there is only one God, one being that is the source of every being and one good that is the good of every good, nonetheless, revelation tells us that three Persons are this one being. The word “share” explodes at this point, because the three Persons are each identical with the Divine Being rather than sharing in it, but something happens that is more “sharing” than sharing itself. Rather than three friends who each have a share in the group’s friendship, or rather than three citizens who each have a share in the country’s peace, there are three Persons who are each identical with the Divine Goodness without being identical to each other. Fallen creatures that we are, this is the opposite of what we expect. We tend to listen to the voice of the serpent, who whispers to us that God clings jealously to his divinity, that he wants no one but himself to be like God. But when the second Person of the Trinity offered his definitive response to the serpent, he did not think equality with God something to be grasped at, to be clutched to himself as a merely private good: rather, he emptied himself, and took the form of a servant.4 The Incarnation of the Word revealed the Word’s eternal way of being as the unimaginably best and therefore inconceivably communicable good. Our reason cannot grasp it, and our sinful inclinations run counter to it, but the revelation of the Trinity tells us clearly: Goodness is even better than we thought. Creation The fact that God is goodness itself, a goodness that exceeds our grasp of the word “goodness”, means two things for creation. First, it means that God could not possibly have created the world out of any need for its goodness or out of any boredom or dissatisfaction with his own lot. The one whose life is identical with unbounded goodness could not look for a better life. So he must have created simply out of generosity, in order to give something away, as we say that someone did something, not because he had to, but out of the goodness of his heart.

Second, it means that God himself must be the goal of creation. If God did not create in order to receive something, then he must have created in order to give something, and the only thing he has to give is himself, his own goodness.5 So it is true that God does everything for his own sake, but he does not love himself as a private good, which would mean doing everything for his own utility, his own gain. No, he loves himself as a common good, which means that he does everything out of a joy in the beauty of what he is. He is like a man who is so enamored of Mozart’s symphonies that he cannot rest until all his friends love Mozart’s symphonies, too. God exists as a gift, and everything he does is for the sake of giving it. If God creates to give his own goodness, the consequence is that creatures are truly good. If God had created out of need, for his own utility, then creatures might have been mere tools, not good in themselves, but only desirable as means. There would have been a gigantic but hollow universe with a single, lonely good standing at its center. But because God created out of generosity, to give his goodness to others, his creatures have goodness in them—that is to say, they are good in themselves. Just as a painting of a beautiful woman is itself beautiful and worthy of admiration, and just as an echo of a beautiful voice is itself beautiful and worthy of enjoyment, so the creatures who reflect God’s goodness are themselves good and worthy of love. As God is the supreme good of all creation, so in a lesser way one creature can be a good for another. The universe is thick, stocked with many goods that are good for one another. To put this conclusion in other words, creatures are also generous.6 Just as God acted to give his own goodness, so his creatures act to give their own goodness to others. Every creature’s goodness is limited, and so is the extent to which it can be a good for others, but to the degree that it shares in God’s goodness, to that degree it can be a good for others. The stone heated by divine fire can warm the night for cold, grateful feet. Even though only God is the Creator, the reflections he has made of himself are and must be true causes themselves. This conclusion is necessarily true of all that God creates, whether it be the natural world, the realm of grace, or the final resolution of history.7

We see this borne out in revelation. Scripture presents a world in which God is the author of all history and yet human choice has real consequences, a world in which God is the supreme Creator and yet the weather is a true factor in the story. Scripture is even more specific about how God shares the goodness of his own life, but to elaborate that requires that we say more about God himself. B. The Son God has told us more about his interior life than simply that he exists as three Persons in one Being. He has also told us how each Person —the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—is the Divine Being in his own way and that each Person’s unique way of being is a relation to the other Persons. Of course, this knowledge is precious simply because it is knowledge about God, but it is also important for our inquiry into creation because God, in giving us a share in his own goodness, has given us a share in the Trinitarian life. We begin our exploration of this mystery by looking at what God has revealed about his Son. Old Testament Speaking in the person of wisdom, the Book of Proverbs recounts that, before the world existed, before there were mountains or oceans or fields, “the Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old” (Prov 8:22). Wisdom goes on to narrate how at every stage of God’s creating act, “I was beside him, like a master workman” (Prov 8:30). The author of the Book of Wisdom expands on wisdom’s role as master workman by saying she is “the fashioner of all things” (Wis 7:22). He says that “she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty”, and explains, “For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness” (Wis 7:25-26). It is easy to see how these meditations from Israel’s wisdom literature expand on what I have said about God creating in order to share his goodness. When God creates, he does so according to a wisdom he possessed before anything was created, and this wisdom

is the pattern for creation because it reflects God himself like a mirror. It is “an image of his goodness”. Outside of these clearly monotheistic reflections on creation, however, it may be difficult to see how Israel’s wisdom literature is especially theological. A commonplace in Old Testament studies is that the wisdom literature is “international” in character.8 While the Lord appears in some seventy of the proverbs, there are no references to Israel’s sacred history, to the covenants, to prophecies, or, indeed, to revelations of any kind. None of the famous names of Scripture appear there other than Solomon, to whom some number of proverbs are attributed. Instead, the proverbs are concerned with secular matters: dealings in the marketplace, etiquette at the palace, relationships within the home, and so on. While Israel’s Scriptures tower over the literature of surrounding nations when it comes to the creation account or the prophetic oracles, the wisdom literature of Babylon and Egypt is almost identical in character with the Book of Proverbs.9 In many cases, the maxims of foreign wise men are so similar to those of Israel that one might mistake them for something in Scripture. The same themes occur: injustice leads to disaster in the end; looking to another’s wife is playing with fire; the wise man lives in peace while the fool comes to misery. One noticeable difference, however, is that the literature of the surrounding cultures did not personify God’s wisdom, either as a woman or as a man.10 In Proverbs, Wisdom calls out at the corners of busy streets, pleads with the elders in the gate, and threatens that she will laugh when their refusal to hear ends in punishment; no such image appears outside of Israel. This personification of Wisdom is one of Proverbs’ most striking features, and it is picked up again in the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach. This is more than an artistic innovation passed down within an Israelite literary tradition: the personification of Wisdom is a striking metaphysical claim that sets all of Israelite wisdom literature, even the most profane, apart from any other. The fundamental divide between Israel and other cultures was the belief that one God created all things, so that the order of the world

around us is due to the wisdom of a single artisan. While Gentile theologies may have had a dominant god whose victory determined the basic structure of things, their world was inevitably a result of conflict between the gods. At best, Marduk slays his enemy the sea and uses her carcass to fashion the world; he does not make the sea. The gods are within the world and interact with it as a given. The wise man could learn from experience and tradition how to conduct himself in the world, and part of his wisdom was that one must take the gods into account as agents of justice, but his business of understanding the world was something apart from understanding the gods themselves. By contrast, the Israelite saw the world as entirely from the Lord. Because the Lord stands, not within the world as an agent, but outside of the world as its maker, the order found in the world is from the order conceived in the Lord’s mind. As a result, my understanding of the world is not something other than my pursuit of God, but is itself a partial grasp of the Lord’s wisdom. His wisdom, the world’s order, and my grasp of the world’s order are all different levels of the same reality. This is what makes the personification of Wisdom possible. Lady Wisdom has bewilderingly different roles in Proverbs: she belongs to God before anything else is created (3:19, 8:22-31); she is everywhere, speaking to men even during their most everyday activities (1:20-21); she comes into the hearts of men (2:10 and many others). If we say that Wisdom represents an order found in the world, how is Wisdom something found in men and in God? If we say that Wisdom is knowledge, how is she found out and about in the world? If she is something of God, how does she speak to men in the gates of the city? The answer is that the order found in the world and man’s partial grasp of that order are both partial shares in God’s understanding. By personifying Wisdom as an individual responsible for all these roles, the Israelite sage asserted the unity of Wisdom. Likewise, by the fact that Wisdom comes from God, abides in the world, and from there enters the heart of man, the sage intimates that Wisdom is found most perfectly in God, less perfectly in the world, and least perfectly in the mind of man. Put in the terms

of philosophy, Lady Wisdom asserts the participatory structure both of creation and of knowledge. The Books of Proverbs and Wisdom only personify wisdom in any sustained way in their introductory chapters: to complete the claim made by this personification, both books go on to repeat the wisdom common to mankind at the time. The claim is not that Israel’s wisdom is something apart from that of the nations, but that all wisdom, even that of the Babylonians and the Egyptians, is a partial share in Israel’s God. The other nations may have wisdom, but they do not understand what they have. By restating the old maxims in a new context, Proverbs reclaims this wisdom for its source. In modern times, the testimony of the wisdom literature helps us understand the amazing and unexpected success of the physical sciences. Why should it be the case that the universe can be investigated by reason? Being rational ourselves, we just assume that the world is also rational, but it is by no means self-evident that it should be so. According to Scripture, mathematics and the methods of science can probe the ways of the world because both our minds and the physical world share in the one wisdom of God.11 New Testament The New Testament takes the personification of wisdom still farther by asserting that God’s wisdom is in fact a person, not as a literary device but in reality. One can easily see how New Testament texts apply the insights of Proverbs and Wisdom to the Son of God: “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the ages. He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power” (Heb 1:1-3). According to the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, God created the world through his Son, who reflects God’s glory and bears the stamp of his nature. What is more, everything created was created as the Son’s inheritance. Paul speaks in a similar vein in his Letter to the Colossians: “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on

earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:15-17). Paul explains that the Son of God existed before all things as an “image” of God, and that all things were created through this image. And again, Paul says that all things were created for the Son’s sake. The Gospel of John opens with a similar statement about the Son: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (Jn 1:1-3). The first phrase, “in the beginning”, alludes to the creation story in Genesis 1, where we read that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”12 But instead of speaking right away about what God created, John first speaks of what existed even before creation: the Word, or Logos, who existed in relation to God and was himself God. Logos can refer not only to an exterior word but also to an interior thought or to reason itself, so here again the Son of God is presented as the wisdom by which God created all things. The Church Fathers saw the connection between all these texts and the wisdom literature so clearly that the Book of Proverbs became a key text in the Arian dispute over the divinity of the Son of God. Writing before this dispute broke out, Origen interprets Proverbs and Wisdom as teaching that the Son of God is “God’s wisdom hypostatically existing”, that is, as a person.13 The Old Testament already made clear that the world is rational because it shares in God’s own wisdom. But the New Testament goes even farther and reveals that the rationality of the world around us as it comes from the Creator has a share in the way the second Person of the Trinity, the Word and Wisdom of God, comes from the Father. A small child might ask: What does God do all day? Part of the answer would be: The Father knows himself by looking to the Son, and the Son comes from the Father as his Word. Because the Son is the mirror of the Father, and because the Father looks to this

mirror for the pattern of creation, everything God creates bears a likeness to the Son. We should stop a moment to emphasize how all-encompassing this conclusion really is. Absolutely everything that God creates—the universe, the realm of grace, the Church, everything—shares in God’s interior life by bearing a likeness to the Son. Previously, I said that creatures truly share in God’s goodness, as rocks heated by a fire are themselves hot. Now I can say that all creatures share in the Son’s reflection of the Father by reflecting in their own natures the rational being of God. As the Son proceeds eternally from the Father, so creatures continually depend on God for their being; as the Son is the reflection of the Father’s glory, so creatures bear a likeness to God’s own essence. This is true of rocks, which have a nature that scientists can explore. It is true of plants and animals, whose nature is even more understandable than that of rocks because there is more being in them to be known. But it is most of all true of human beings, whose souls are immaterial like God and whose nature is continually supplemented by immaterial ideas acquired through reason. The more God has given of his goodness, the more we will find a likeness to the Son. There is more to say about how creatures stand in the posture of a son, but to get there we have to see how the Son’s life as wisdom is bound up with the Person of the Holy Spirit. As we will see, that is a harder subject. C. The Holy Spirit The eternal life of the Son of God is a mystery to us; it blinds the mind’s eye like sunlight overwhelming a bat’s vision. But compared to what he has told us about the Holy Spirit, what God has told us concerning the Son of God seems fairly clear. “Son” is a word we use all the time, and its everyday use illuminates its meaning in theology. The Son became a man like us and is the main character of the Gospels, and the New Testament features lengthy and carefully written passages directly about the mystery of the Incarnation, such as the prologue to the Gospel of John or the hymn

in Philippians 2. The procession of the Son is a mystery we can never unravel, but God has given us quite a lot to work with. The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, is mysterious from beginning to end. Even the word “spirit” is less than clear: What are we supposed to make of the “breath of God”? Everyone knows that a son is a person; what do we do with a hypostatic wind? What is more, the biblical witness concerning the Spirit is scattered over many books of the Old and New Testament, with no one passage simply opening the mystery in an overt way. One is left to gather the pieces together as best as one can. All that said, one cannot simply leave the Holy Spirit aside because he is hard. God has told us about the Spirit’s unique way of being because we need to know it, and certainly no account of Scripture would be adequate without considering the Holy Spirit. The result of our efforts will inevitably be less than satisfying, because we know so little to begin with, but in what follows I would like to offer the fruits of my own meditation on Scripture and its interpretation by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. It seems to me that what Scripture says about the Holy Spirit can be grouped under two headings, leading to two basic conclusions. Two Groups of Texts about the Holy Spirit The first heading has to do with how God brings things into being. Genesis tells us that God’s creation of heaven and earth began with the Spirit of God—his breath, his wind—moving over the face of the primordial waters (Gen 1:2). Then God speaks his Word, and creation happens. One imagines the wind as an invisible force that moves and reshapes, splitting the waters of creation as the east wind would later split the Red Sea for the children of Israel to cross. In Genesis 1, the division of the waters brings reason and order to chaos, shaping the world according to God’s wise command. This, I think, is the most important theme we see in biblical testimony concerning the Spirit: he is an impulse toward God’s Word and Wisdom. One can see the same idea in other contexts. When the Spirit descends on the prophets, they receive God’s Word and proclaim it;

when the Spirit descends on the judges, they spring into action and bring history into conformity with God’s plan. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit descends on Mary, and a human nature is created in personal unity with the Word of God (Lk 2, Jn 1); the Holy Spirit descends on Christ’s disciples, and they are brought into a mystical unity with the Incarnate Word and adopted as sons of God (Rom 8). In every case, the Spirit is an impulse toward God’s Word and Wisdom, bringing the Word as a speaker’s breath brings articulate sound or as the wind brings shape to the waters of chaos. Everything under the first heading has to do with how God brings things into some share in his Word. But once God has already brought things to a share in his Wisdom through the Spirit, we find that other texts about the Holy Spirit fall under a second heading. Genesis 2 portrays God giving life to the first man by breathing into him a breath of life, suggesting that the life of the man is a share in God’s own breath. The word for “breath” there is not the same word in Hebrew as the word for “spirit” in Genesis 1:2, but one could surmise a connection. Psalm 104 is more explicit: the Psalmist says of created, living things, “When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their spirit, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your Spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the earth” (Ps 104:29-30). Here the word for breath or spirit is ruah both times, and the connection is clear: God sends forth his breath and renews the breath of life in animals and men. The first set of “Spirit texts” had to do with the act of creation, in which creatures have no share: God brings them into being on the pattern of his Wisdom through his Spirit without any prior contribution on their part. But once creatures exist as a share in the life of the Son, they also have a share in the life of the Spirit. As God has a “breath” within him, so creatures have a “breath” or impulse within them through which they move and act. And so we find a second set of “Spirit texts” in which creatures are said to have something in them that resembles the procession of the Holy Spirit. Paul speaks of something like this in his First Letter to the Corinthians, asking, “For what person knows a man’s thoughts

except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor 2:11). Paul takes for granted a parallel between “God’s Spirit” and “the spirit of the man which is in him”. While the Spirit’s impulse brings a man into existence on the pattern of the Son, even on the natural level, on that same natural level a man also has in him an impulse and a life that is like the Holy Spirit. In a parallel way, while reception of the grace of the Holy Spirit conforms one to the Incarnate Word, so the indwelling of the Spirit causes one to live and act as he did (see, for example, Roman 8, especially verses 9 through 11). The Spirit in the Life of the Trinity Despite the scarcity and vagueness of texts about the Holy Spirit, these two conclusions seem clear from Scripture: when we look at how God creates the world, we see him driving things toward the pattern of his Son as though by a mighty wind; when we look at creatures already living in the world, we see that their own interior impulse toward their fulfillment—and, ultimately, toward the glory of God—is a likeness of the Holy Spirit. To go farther than this is admittedly difficult. When God tells us of his Word and Wisdom, he is saying something right away about his interior life, even though his Wisdom obviously also has to do with creation. But the texts about how God’s Spirit acts in the world are not so self-evidently statements about God’s interior life. To go from these texts to an insight concerning the Trinity requires a leap of some kind, a moment where one must decide what it all means. It seems to me that the leap should be made in this way. The first insight, that the Holy Spirit shows us God driving things toward his Wisdom, indicates that God’s interior life involves an impulse of the Father toward the Son. The second insight, that creatures already patterned on the Son have a “spirit” within them by which they pursue fulfillment in God, indicates that God’s interior life involves an impulse of the Son toward the Father. The first verse of John’s Gospel tells us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”; although usually translated

“with”, the Greek word pros more literally means “toward”. Because the Son comes from the Father as his perfect reflection, he also reflects the Father’s love by living toward the Father. Or as the Church’s developed theological language puts it, the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, because the Father gives everything— including his breathing forth of the Spirit—to the Son. D. Creation’s Reflection of the Trinity These conclusions about the inner life of God lead to conclusions about how creation reflects the life of the Trinity. First, as the Father looks to the Son for the pattern of creation, so he creates out of an impulse of love toward the Son, and, as a result, everything he creates comes into being through the Holy Spirit. Second, as the Son turns toward the Father in an impulse of love, so the creature patterned on the Son returns to its Creator by an impulse of love. These two conclusions apply to everything God creates, without exception, whether it be the natural world, the realm of grace, the Church, or anything else. God always creates by turning toward the pattern of his Son, and everything patterned on the Son exists toward God. The second conclusion in particular highlights that the Son’s life as Son includes his breathing forth of the Spirit. Wherever we find likeness to the Son, we will find not only something like proceeding from and reflecting the Father but also something like returning to the Father in love. To borrow the terms of Scholastic theology, even a rock is dependent on an efficient cause, possesses a formal cause, and pursues a final cause.14 As I said before, the more God gives of his goodness, the more we will see a likeness to the Son: a human being has a more excellent dependence on God, a closer resemblance to his immaterial wisdom, and loves God, not by blind instinct, but by rational love. To this point I have focused on how God shares his goodness and interior life through creation. But to praise him adequately for his gifts, we have to look beyond creation to the order of grace and, first of all, to the wellspring of all grace, the Incarnation of the Word.

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The Incarnation Whatever else one says about Origen, his work was bold and pioneering. He brought system and order to the scattered efforts of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and all theology since has gone back to Origen for inspiration. But when he came to expound the Church’s faith concerning the Incarnation, he hesitated: The human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled, and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder knows not which way to turn, what to hold to, or whither to betake itself. . . . To utter these things in human ears and to explain them by words far exceeds the powers we possess either in our moral worth or in mind and speech. I think indeed that it transcends the capacity even of the holy apostles; nay more, perhaps the explanation of this mystery lies beyond the reach of the whole creation of heavenly beings. It is then in no spirit of rashness, but solely in response to the demands of our inquiry at this stage, that we shall state in the fewest possible words [what] we may term the content of our faith concerning him rather than anything which needs to be proved by arguments of human reason, bringing before you our suppositions rather than any clear affirmations.1

With a similar hesitation, I find that “the demands of our inquiry at this stage” force me to take up a mystery that no doubt exceeds my “moral worth” and the powers of my “mind and speech”. If I were to remain silent about the Incarnation, everything I have said about God’s gift of himself in creation would be marred, because that gift reaches its pinnacle in the life of Jesus Christ. And as we will see, one cannot pry very far into the nature of Scripture without running into this mystery of the God made man. A. The Incarnation In the previous chapter, I drew a number of conclusions based on what God has told us about his Trinitarian goodness. The very fact that three Persons are identical with the one Divine Being tells us

something about God’s goodness, which in turn leads us to see (1) that God creates in order to give himself and (2) that he wants his creatures to be both good in themselves and causes of goodness in others. When God tells us about his Son, he reveals (3) that he has placed the created world in the position of a son, inasmuch as it comes from God as a reflection of his being. Finally, what God has told us about the Spirit leads to two conclusions: (4) that the Father’s creation of the world comes from his impulse of love toward the Son and (5) that the creature’s return to God reflects the Son’s impulse of love toward the Father. All of these conclusions tell us about God’s purpose in creating, and in this chapter I will argue that every one of them demonstrates how God achieves his purpose above all in Jesus Christ. B. God Creates in Order to Give Himself As we have seen, the very idea of creation is that God gives a share in his goodness so that something else can be partially what he is fully: if God is a fire, creatures are like stones heated by the fire so they can be hot themselves. If the processions of the Son and the Spirit are like God’s family life, then creation is like a family photo that bears some partial likeness to what the family really and fully is. And the more God gives his goodness, the greater the likeness we see to the Trinity. Yet God could go on increasing this kind of share in God’s life forever without ever equaling the gift of the Incarnation of the Word. That gift is different in kind from anything before it. The result of the Incarnation is not that a man is partially what the Son of God is fully; it is not that a man bears some likeness to what the Son of God really is. The result of the Incarnation is that a man is himself the Son of God, so that if someone pinches this man, then he is pinching the Word of God. The person who is this man is the same person who is the Word. Comparing this gift with everything before it, one could say that God had “shared” himself many times before, but in the Incarnation he “gave” himself for the first time. Rather than saying that this man “shares in” or “participates in” the life of the Trinity, one could say that this man is “included” in the life of the Trinity: the personhood of this man is not just a likeness of the

procession of the Word, but it extends that procession into time and space. When a man is made in the image of God, he is like a little boy who plays with Lego policemen and firemen; when a man is conceived as the Word Incarnate, he is like the man who joined the police force. One is participation and likeness, the other inclusion and identity. The classical Christological heresies approached the Incarnation in terms of participation rather than inclusion. For example, Eutyches tried to explain how a creature could have a greater share in the Divine Goodness than any creature ever had, and he ended up saying that the creature must have had a far more exalted nature than other creatures. Essentially, he appealed to the category of “sharing” as it would apply to a natural, created thing, like an angel. Before him, Nestorius, wanting to avoid changing Christ’s nature to something other than that of a man, tried to explain how a man could have a greater share in the Divine Goodness in the order of grace. There is more truth in Nestorius’ approach than in Eutyches’, but both failed to see that Christ did not simply have a greater share in the Divinity—something that is always partial—but was actually included in the life of the Trinity. Their failure was understandable, because the Incarnation is a kind of gift that no creature is able to make. We have no model for it in our experience. If I were to make a chair, the chair would reflect something about me but would not be me; if I were to make a painting of myself, the painting would not only reflect my artistic ability and perception but would even reflect my features, and yet the painting would not be me; if I were to beget a child exactly like me in every respect, the child would nonetheless be someone else. There is nothing I can make that simply is me, in such a way that if you touch it, then you are touching me, because my personhood is finite and exhausted in my own nature. I relate to other things as a being to other beings. However, God relates to things as Being itself to beings. The Son’s infinite personhood can not only cause things to be but can even ground another nature in his own subsistence.2 To see the Incarnation correctly is to see that God’s purpose in creating, namely, to give of himself, not only climaxes in the

Incarnation but could not be greater. C. God Wants His Creatures to Be True Causes We have seen that God, by giving creatures a share in his own goodness, made them truly good themselves and causes of good in others, as a stone heated by the fire is both hot itself and able to warm cold feet. But God introduced a paradox by calling men and angels to grace and glory, a goal beyond their own nature. He wants his creatures to be true causes of their own progress, and yet he calls them to a goal that is beyond their nature; he wants men to be true teachers and causes of salvation, but the knowledge and salvation he wants for them is more than human nature can attain by its own powers. God’s “policy” regarding creation seems to conflict with the magnitude of the gift he wants to give men and angels. But because the Incarnation is an inclusion in the life of the Trinity, the Incarnation reconciles creation with grace. Christ is both God and man, and consequently to contemplate Christ is both to learn from God and to learn from a man: revelation comes from God, and yet a man is truly the teacher. For the same reason, Christ’s saving death on the Cross is simultaneously a gratuitous gift from above and mankind’s own action as the true cause of salvation. Later I will say more about how this reconciliation works out before and after the Incarnation and in other men besides Jesus Christ. For the moment, I only need to point out that God’s policy of making creatures to be true causes reaches its zenith in the Incarnate Word. In Jesus Christ, man becomes a cause in the supernatural order. D. Creation Comes from God as a Reflection of Him One can see something of God in any creature: a rock reflects his solid and substantial being, a sunset something of his glory. But because the Incarnation includes a man in the life of the Trinity, extending the procession of the Word into time, the man Jesus Christ exists wholly as a reflection of the Father. His very personhood is defined as a being from. The Gospel of John makes this a major theme. Jesus’ opponents deny him on the basis of where he is from: “Yet we know where this

man comes from; and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from” (7:27). Jesus responds that his opponents do not know God, but “I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me” (7:29). Jesus tells the disciples that “the Father himself loves you” and gives as the reason “because you have loved me and have believed that I came from the Father” (16:27). But to his opponents, Jesus testifies, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me” (8:42). As this last citation indicates, the fact that Jesus is “from” the Father relates to the fact that the Father “sent” him. This, too, is described as the fundamental point to believe about Jesus: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (6:29). And again, “He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (5:23). And still again, “He who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me” (12:44). Perhaps most importantly, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (17:3). Jesus is “from” the Father and “sent” by the Father to such a degree that he has nothing from himself. He does nothing of himself: “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise” (5:19). He decides nothing of himself: “I can do nothing on my own authority; as I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (5:30). He says nothing of himself: “He who does not love me does not keep my words; and the word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me” (14:24). And again, “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me” (7:16). This is so true that Jesus is, so to speak, transparent. Those who hear him hear the Father: “The word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me” (14:24). Those who see him see the Father: “And he who sees me sees him who sent me” (12:45). Jesus chides his friend who asked to see the Father, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (14:9)

To know this is the mark of the disciple: “Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you” (17:7). Knowing this “transparency” or wholly-fromness of Jesus stands behind John’s claim as a disciple: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son from the Father” (1:14). The creature’s status as a reflection of God comes to its climax in the “transparency” of Jesus Christ. The creature’s general posture as a “son” reaches its zenith in the Son. E. The Father’s Impulse of Love toward the Son If the Holy Spirit comes from the Father as an impulse of love toward the Son, then one would expect the Holy Spirit to be very much on display, so to speak, when the Father grounds a human nature in the Person of his Son. And, of course, this is what we see. The Holy Spirit descends on Mary to bring about the Incarnation (Lk 1:35), establishing the union of a human nature with the Word. The nature thus assumed also needs to be adequately equipped to serve the Son worthily in his temporal life, so the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus at his Baptism to empower him for his ministry (Lk 3:22). When “the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove”, a voice spoke from heaven as though to put words on the meaning of the event: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” This Baptism established Jesus as a man possessed, so to speak, by the clean Spirit (see especially Mk 1:12). John makes explicit the connection between Spirit, love, and Incarnation: “For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for it is not by measure that he gives the Spirit; the Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand” (Jn 3:34-35). As a result, the fact that God’s creation of the world comes from his impulse of love toward the Son culminates in the Incarnation of the Word. Jesus is the definitive “Christ”, the “anointed one”, in whom is found the fullness of all grace. F. The Creature’s Return to God

As I said in the previous chapter, the Father’s breathing forth the Spirit in his love for the Son is inseparable from the Son’s breathing forth the Spirit in love for the Father, because the Son is the Father’s perfect reflection. So the fact that the Father’s love for the Son is extended into time in his sending the Spirit on Christ should mean that Christ also sends the Spirit in some unique way. When we look to the New Testament, this is exactly what we see. All the Gospels testify that Christ sends the Spirit. In John, we find John the Baptist saying, “He who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit’  ” (1:33). Parallel texts can be found in Matthew 3:11, Mark 1:8, and Luke 3:16. Again in John’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples about “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name” (14:26), and he refers moments later to the “Counselor.  .  . whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father” (15:26). This is the meaning of the “living water” that Jesus claims he can give the Samaritan woman (4:10). But Jesus does not send the Spirit during his earthly ministry. John tells us that “the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive. . . had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (7:39). Of course, in John’s Gospel the hour of glory is the time of Jesus’ Passion, when Jesus says to the disciples, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (16:7). Perhaps John hints that Jesus breathed forth the Spirit to the Father at the moment of his death, when “he bowed his head and gave up his spirit”—or is it “Spirit” (19:30)? At any rate, John presents Jesus explicitly as sending the Spirit on the disciples after the Resurrection: “And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ ” (20:22). Luke presents Jesus’ glorification in terms of his Ascension to the Father, his physical departure out of the world, and he has Jesus say as he leaves, “I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high” (Lk 24:49). This of course was a reference to Pentecost, as Peter later confirms: “Being therefore exalted at the

right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear” (Acts 2:33). Both John and Luke connect the sending of the Spirit with Jesus’ departure to the Father. In John’s Gospel especially, the hour of Jesus’ departure to the Father is the hour of glory: “I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father” (16:28); “I shall be with you a little longer, and then I go to him who sent me” (7:33); “But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’  ” (16:5). But Jesus’ entire life has led up to this moment when he goes to the Father; just as his entire life was redemptive even though his redemption climaxed on the Cross, so his entire life was a movement to the Father, even though the time of his leaving this world was most especially the time of his return to the one who sent him. Because Jesus lived wholly from the Father, he also lived wholly to the Father: “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God” (Jn 13:3). One could picture Jesus’ earthly life as the flight of an arrow, with the Incarnation being the moment the bowstring is released, and his glorification the arrow’s lodging in the target, while the Father is both archer and target. The connection between Christ’s return to the Father and his sending of the Spirit is that his love for man is a force that drives men to the Father. He does not love the Father with one love and his brothers with another, but loves his brothers by pulling them into his return to the Father. To put it another way, when Christ returns to his Father, the whole Christ must return, not only the head but also the members. Consequently, his movement of love toward the Father is manifest not only in his own departure from the world but also in his sending of the Spirit, who will draw all men in his wake. When the Word-made-man draws mankind into his return to the Father, he extends his “inclusion” in the life of the Trinity to his entire Mystical Body. G. Christ the Head of Creation

All of the foregoing leads to one conclusion: Jesus Christ is the head of the created world. This is true in three ways. First, everything that God wants creation to be, Jesus is most of all; he sums up the entire cosmos in himself. This is true, not just because Jesus is the best thing that happens to exist in this contingent universe, but because everything that God could want in any possible universe is contained in the most perfect possible way in the life of the Incarnate Word. He is the “head” of creation in the sense that he stands at the top, as Paul says in describing God’s plan “that in everything he might be pre-eminent” (Col 1:18). Second, because Jesus is the most causal thing in the created world, most of all the recipient of the Spirit, and the one who together with the Father sends the Spirit, Jesus is also the fountain of all grace for rational creatures. As John says, “From his fulness have we all received, grace upon grace” (Jn 1:16). Jesus is the “head” of creation in the sense that he is the source of strength and light for everyone else. Lastly, because he stands preeminent over all creation and because he is the source of strength and light, Jesus also governs the whole world: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”, he tells his disciples (Mt 28:18). He is the “head” of creation in the sense of ruling over it. H. Christ the Perfect Man Christ’s identity as the Son of God not only makes him the creature par excellence but also and in a more particular way the perfect man. The first chapter of Genesis presents man as created especially in God’s image and consequently as having authority over the material world (1:26). In the order of creation, man stands in between everything created in the first six days and the sacred “rest” of the seventh day, indicating that man is meant to bring the world to God in worship as a cosmic priest. The first three verses of Genesis 5 tie all these things to sonship by suggesting that man’s bearing the image of God constitutes man as in some sense a son of God: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them,

and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.” Luke picks up on this last point in his genealogy of Jesus. Having already said by the mouth of the angel Gabriel that Jesus will be the “son of God” because conceived through the Holy Spirit, Luke begins his genealogy suggestively by saying that “Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph” (Lk 3:23). He then traces Jesus’ human ancestry back through Joseph to the beginning of the human race, concluding with “the son of Adam, the son of God” (Lk 3:38). The fact that he begins and ends his genealogy this way makes clear that Luke wants us to compare Jesus, the definitive Son of God, with Adam, who was also but in a lesser way a “son of God”. Adam was made in God’s image, but Jesus exists eternally as God’s perfect reflection. Because of his perfect sonship, Jesus excels Adam in every other way. As we have seen, Jesus is the perfect ruler of the world; he is also the perfect priest, who brings all creation to the Father through his sending of the Spirit. Jesus is a man, and more than “a” man: he is more “man” than ever man was before. Everything man was created to be, Jesus is unsurpassably. Consequently, as Paul says, the Father has placed Jesus “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:21-23). I. Conclusion Although I have appealed to Scripture throughout these first two chapters, I have nowhere yet spoken about Scripture as such. But our rapid overview of Trinity, creation, and Incarnation has yielded principles to which we will return again and again in the chapters to come:

     ■ The better a good is, the more it is a common good rather than a private good.           ■   To be a creature means to participate in God’s nature and goodness.      ■ God is the goal of every creature.           ■   God causes creatures in a unique way, not as one being causing another, but as Being causing a being.      ■ God wants creatures to be real causes.      ■ Every creature bears a likeness to the Son by reflecting God.      ■ Every creature is created through God’s Holy Spirit, that is, his love for the Son.      ■ Every creature returns to God in a likeness of the Holy Spirit, that is, the Son’s love for the Father.           ■   The Incarnation is the “inclusion” of a man in the life of the Trinity.           ■   The Incarnation intensifies nature without destroying it; the Incarnation takes nature beyond itself, but in its own line. One cannot think rightly about Scripture without these principles. But we have yet one more mystery to explore before we apply them, because Scripture was not given for the sake of the Trinity or for the sake of creation in general or for the sake of the Incarnation considered by itself: Scripture was given to the Mystical Body of Christ. In the next chapter, we will see how the Church offers the immediate context needed for defining the Bible.

3

What Scripture Is For The question driving our investigation so far has been, “What is Scripture for?” If I know that a book is for reading, then I can understand why it requires paper and ink and why some fonts are better than others. If I know that a pencil is for writing, then I know why it is sharp and pointy at one end but soft and rubbery at the other. If I know that a car is for driving, then I know why it needs clear glass in its upper half and hard metal in its lower half. But if I do not know that a book is for reading, a pencil for writing, or a car for driving, then I will hardly understand anything about these everyday things. Why is a thing shaped this way rather than that? Why is it made of this rather than of that? Look to its purpose. However, this master question—What is it for?—conceals within itself another question: Whom is it for? Books and pencils and cars are all for human beings; a doghouse only makes sense when one sees that it is for dogs. Bird feeders are a puzzle if seen only as “feeders”, but the mystery vanishes once we know they are bird feeders. So a fuller form of the master question is this: What good does this do and for whom? Regarding our subject, Scripture, we have laid a careful foundation for answering the first half of the question, namely, what good it does. But we have not yet looked closely at the second half, about the recipient of Scripture. To whom was Scripture given? This second half of the question is more difficult than it appears at first glance. One is tempted to answer quickly that of course Scripture is like other books: it is for people. But over the past few centuries, there has been a shift in how we think about the simple acts of writing and reading and, consequently, how we think about books—and Scripture is not just any book.1 Prior to the printing press, books were exceedingly expensive and tended to belong

either to rich people or to communities; a complete library like the Bible might be found at a great cathedral or monastery, but certainly not on a farmer’s mantelpiece. This scarcity of books also meant that only a minority could learn to read with any proficiency, because reading requires books to learn from. So most Christians for most of the Church’s history accessed the Bible as a communal possession mediated to them by others, whether by reading aloud or in some other way. After the printing press, this all changed. For the first time in history, it became possible for the great mass of Christians to think in terms of “my” Bible, and it became possible for the normal experience of Scripture to happen alone and in private. Our instincts about Scripture changed, along with our instincts about the written word itself.2 The question of Scripture’s recipient does have a brief answer: Scripture was given to the Church. But to understand why this is so and what its implications may be, we will have to work slowly through several mental reorientations regarding the written word. I will take these up in three stages: first, I will look at society; then, I will consider tradition; finally, I will examine the written word itself. A. Society A foundation for understanding society was laid in the previous chapter, in connection with the mystery of the Trinity. The root of all existence is a communion of persons, existing in a communion so that it is more than unified and the persons more than share the Divine Goodness. All creatures are patterned to a greater or lesser degree on this divine root: the closer a creature resembles its God, the more it lives in communion. A Hierarchy of Communion It is very difficult to see how rocks have any kind of communion among themselves; even when the force of gravitation draws them together, they simply bump surfaces.3 It is the whole nature of a rock to establish its own integrity and identity by keeping others out. A plant is easier to see as somehow communal, taking nutrients into itself and developing symbiotic relationships with other living things. But when Genesis presents the first three days of creation as

preparing containers or environments for the creatures of the latter three days, plants get lumped in with rocks as mere environment for the animals; moreover, the divine prohibition on taking life does not apply to plants, which are given to animals for food.4 A biblical chasm stands between vegetables and animals. Animals, as they have more of an interior life than plants, live in a much greater world. Having more of an interior life means a greater ability to take in the world around them, which in turn means that their “world” extends as far as they can feel, taste, smell, hear, and see. So, on the one hand, an animal can bond with another animal more closely because it can take another animal more deeply into itself, and, on the other hand, an animal can live in community with a large group because it can encompass the whole group within its broader world. Although some animals are solitary, others run in herds, flocks, shoals, and so on. Nonetheless, Genesis 1 presents a tremendous divide between animals and human beings. Although all life is presented as sacred, mankind is created “in the image of God” (Gen 1:27) and is told as a race to “fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion” over all living things (1:28). As God is master of all creation, so mankind in his image rules over everything on the earth. The picture offered to the imagination is not that human beings should spread out over the ground and each seize his own piece of soil, but that a community should spring from the fruitfulness of the man and the woman and that the community should fill the earth and as a community rule over it. Human beings have even more of an interior life than the highest of animals, and correspondingly they can take the world even more deeply into themselves. Interiorly, one human being can form a more intimate communion with another, uniting interior to interior, sharing thoughts and aspirations. Correspondingly, a human being can live in a world that goes far beyond and far deeper than what he can see or hear or smell or taste or feel. Is this greater capacity for communion and extension hinted at when God says, “Let us make man in our image” (Gen 1:26)? A Christian instinct replies in the affirmative.

Altogether, the story of Genesis 1 presents a hierarchy of life. Plants cling to their soil or their rock; animals live in flocks or herds and roam sea and land; human beings fill the earth and cooperate as a worldwide community; God fills all of creation, the heavens and the earth and the seas, with his creative presence. In the ladder of being that mounts toward God’s perfect life of communion, mankind stands ahead of everything else in the material world. More than any other creature, he is built for life in a society. Society Naturally Good The fact that man does live in society is plain to see, but the fact is often explained as a necessary evil. The ideal, some say, would be for each person to live in complete self-determination, autonomously, self-sufficiently; our experience of inner freedom demands it. But practically we find that one person cannot grow food, make shoes and clothing, discover everything there is to know about architecture, and so on and so forth, so we end up having to trade part of our freedom away in return for the things we need. What is more, the theory goes, everyone else is out to steal my shoes, eat my food, and take my life, so I need to trade away some of my personal dignity and freedom for the sake of self-protection. Society, on this account, is a compromise necessitated by evils.5 The vision presented by Scripture and the Christian tradition is very different. The same interior life that gives us radical personal freedom makes it possible to live in deeper and wider communion with others. The dynamic toward self-determination is also a dynamic toward self-gift and toward society. Consequently, as God observes in Genesis 2:18, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The fact that we get hungry prompts us to do what is truly good for us, namely, eat; the fact that we get thirsty prompts us to do what is truly good for us, namely, drink; and the fact that we experience the need of others’ help prompts us to do what is truly good for us, namely, live in society. Human beings are so built for life in communion that Adam’s sin loses paradise and immortality not just for himself but for the entire race descended from him.

It is true that living in community places an authority over individuals. Just living in a family or in a friendship makes demands on one’s individual autonomy, but life in a broader society requires some people whose whole task is to care for the common good. As Saint Thomas Aquinas puts it, “There cannot be a social life of the many unless someone presides; for the many as such concerns itself with many things, while the one concerns itself with the one.”6 Had Adam not fallen but lived forever, with permanent access to the tree of life, perhaps he would have been the great patriarch of the entire human family, passing on nature and grace together to all his descendants and uniting in himself all political and religious authority.7 But Adam did fall, and governments take on different forms according to historical circumstances and needs. However, the distinction between common and private goods clarifies that governmental authority is not an evil. It would be an almost intolerable evil if all goods were private goods: when an authority directs a man with a view to its own private good, it is tyranny. But a rightly constituted authority has care for the common good, which is the truest good of the individual himself. This means that the authority natural to a society is a servant to the people, not its overlord. This view of natural human society, grounded in a Christian understanding of creation, holds true in the realm of grace as well. We have seen already that Christ, as the Incarnate Word, pulls together and elevates in himself all that is human: the grace of the Incarnation does not diminish his human nature but intensifies it, making him the new Adam and head of the human race. If man is social, Christ is perfectly social, his entire life spent in a universal love embracing every human being. The same holds for the society that Christ founded as an extension of his Incarnation: what it is to be a society is both preserved and intensified in Christ’s Church. While a natural society shares a common good and in a broad sense a “common life”, all the members of the Church live by the self-same Holy Spirit dwelling in them and forming Christ in them. While a natural society has a ruling authority that imposes laws for the common good, Christ rules over

his Church, not just exteriorly through the apostles and their successors, but even interiorly by his gifts of grace. While even the pre-Christian philosophers spoke of the human race in terms of the metaphor of a body, Saint Paul can go even farther in speaking of Christ’s Mystical Body as united in one life, under one head, and constituted of diverse organs for the good of the whole.8 And while the members of a natural society are made more human and more free by membership in the society, Christ promises the members of his Mystical Body a divine sonship patterned on his own and a freedom exceeding what the world can offer (Jn 1:12; Rom 8:15-16; Jn 8:36; 2 Cor 3:17). Tradition Naturally Good From the fact that man is naturally social, it follows that tradition is good for man as man.9 Just as many today say that society is not good for man but a compromise of human dignity, so many say that tradition is an unfortunate necessity: no one can think of everything all by himself; no one can grow to full intellectual maturity without teachers, and yet it would be better for the individual if he thought everything out for himself without trusting a tradition.10 In the biblical view, however, tradition is not opposed to human dignity, but called for by it. The reason man is by nature tradition-dependent is that “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen 2:18). As we saw before, God made the human race to live in families, and families to live in societies. For man and woman to be together is good; for parents and children to be together is good; for man to live in society is good. Just as God created hunger and thirst so we would pursue the goods of food and drink, so he has made man and woman each lacking, and parents and children each needy in their own way, and the different members of society dependent on one another, precisely to drive them to pursue their good. And just as man’s bodily needs for food, clothing, and shelter cannot be conveniently met without the good of life together, so man’s more important needs—the needs of the mind—cannot be met without intellectual society.11 It is good for

man as man to have tradition, that collective interior wealth of a society that holds it together and gives it identity and continuity. The faculty of speech encapsulates this close relation between reason and tradition. Human beings who never learn to speak are never capable of reasoning, either: speech brings with it the inner life of the mind. And yet speech is learned for the sake of communication, and it has as its proper goal the creation of society. So the innermost life of the individual emerges on the way, so to speak, to society; the two are inherently related. Moreover, the language one learns is a patrimony of the ages, shaped by great authors of ages past and by countless unknown men and women who left their way of perceiving the world—their inner mental life— embodied in the speech they passed on to their children. For ancient man, the traditional mindset was an instinctive way to experience the flow of time. Words we can associate with this mindset are “ancestor” and “tradition”, both Latin derivatives: “ancestor” comes from antecessor, which means foregoer, forerunner, the one who goes before; “tradition” comes from traditio, a delivering, derived from the verb trado, to give, to give over, to deliver. In this mode of experiencing time, the ancestors have gone before; they have run the path on which we are now running; they are ahead of us on that path; they have given to us or delivered to us something, perhaps trail markers, instructions on how to walk, how to run, how to climb, what to avoid, where the dangers lie, equipment for the journey, instruction on what lies at the end of the path, and so forth. We are coming behind. We receive what they have given to us, and in turn we deliver it to those coming behind us. It is something like a relay race. We have some responsibility to run the race properly and to deliver to those behind us what was delivered to us by those ahead. This way of experiencing time is captured by the Hebrew word qdm. The first meaning of qdm is simply what is in front of one. Because we face the sun when we try to find our bearings, qdm also comes to mean “east”; implicit in this derived meaning is the notion of orientation. Finally, qdm means the past: for a Hebrew, what is qdm, what is “in front” of us and what orients us, is the past.12

But this mentality does not imply an inert passivity in receiving the past. What we receive from the antecessores is not an object like a baton in a relay race, which can be grasped in an external way with no change to the hand that takes it. Our inheritance from the past includes the personality, the character, the customs, the way of life of our ancestors, and so it requires an interior change and maturation to grow into what is ours by right.13 Similarly, what we hand on to our descendants is not an object to be unilaterally imposed but something of our personality, character, customs, way of life, and it is not identical to what we received. What we deliver has some but not all of what we received, and it is mixed with something of ourselves that we have added. This traditional mindset is not a necessary evil but a good in itself. It is common today to hold that complete intellectual independence is man’s true good while dependence on tradition is a necessary evil forced on him by the brevity of life, but the biblical view of man says just the opposite: to be in a tradition is good for man, and to break with tradition is sometimes a necessary result of evil.14 Of course, no society is perfect, and many societies are evil—fathers are abusive, mothers manipulative, families dysfunctional—and as society goes, so goes tradition.15 Sometimes it is even necessary to break family ties completely and abandon the old traditions. But the point is that to break with tradition, however necessary, is not a good in itself but an unfortunate result of evil. Of course, it would in fact be better to know independently of tradition, inasmuch as God’s way of knowing is better than man’s way of knowing. The problem with the common opposition to tradition is that it understands independent rationality as a simple negation, namely, rationality without tradition. To take a parallel case, the philosophical tradition of the Church Fathers holds that to be immobile rather than mobile is better, in the way that God is immobile, but one must think of immobility positively, as a description of pure act. Simply to be immobile, as a pure negation—to be frozen —would be an evil. It is better to be pure act than to be mobile, but it is better to be mobile than to be simply immobile.

The force of this comparison lies in the fact that truth is a common good. As such, the nature of truth is most clearly seen when it is possessed by many in common, that is, when a society forms around it. When modernity declares that I must discover things by my own reason, it means that I must grasp truth as an individual rather than as a member of a society: truth must be my private good. While it is true that to be God is better than to be man, and so to be the common good is better than to participate in the common good, it is equally true that to participate in the common good is better than not to participate in it. It is better to be Truth than to participate in a tradition, but it is better to participate in a tradition than to be a human intellectual island cut off from the mainland. It is not good for man to be alone; it is not good for man to think alone.16 The argument can be put very briefly. The truth that “man is social” applies to man through and through, and most especially to the inner man where thought and affection unfold. It does not apply to man only inasmuch as he is less human, but applies to man most of all precisely where he is most human—where, in fact, he is most divine. But to say that man’s mental life is naturally social is to say that man’s mental life is constituted by tradition, the process whereby a society hands down its interior wealth to the next generation. We have seen already that, as the grace of the Incarnation elevated Christ’s humanity, so the grace of Christ’s redemption intensified the Church’s society. The same pattern holds for tradition. Since every society by nature has its tradition, by which it hands on its innermost life to the next generation, and since grace does not destroy nature but elevates it, the Church must also have a tradition. But she must have a tradition commensurate with what she is: since she is a supernatural society, the Mystical Body of Christ, she must have a supernatural Tradition by which she hands on to the next generation her interior wealth, namely, the very mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16); since she is an eternal society, she must have an incorruptible Tradition; since her members are bound to one another by the Holy Spirit as though by a single soul, her Tradition must be guided and developed by the Spirit. Here at last, in the Tradition founded by Truth itself, mankind finds a tradition one need never abandon, a

society one need never leave. Outgrowths may need trimming, and human elements purged, but the necessity of a break with Tradition, inevitable in merely human contexts, will never arise here. Canon in a Way Natural The third mental reorientation we need to make has to do with the written word: because tradition is natural to man, a literary canon is also in a way natural to man. If every human society is held together by a common intellectual patrimony, and if this tradition is naturally expressed in language, it follows that when a society begins to write down its language, then it creates a set of texts that embody and transmit the tradition. This is what I mean by a canon. This second basic intuition is borne out in the most ancient literate cultures, which used a set of normative texts, not as ends in themselves, as though the production of texts were good in itself, but as instruments for inscribing their traditions word-for-word on the minds of the next generation.17 An individualistic view of humanity obscures how natural and inevitable such a canon is. Lacking a view of man as naturally social, it is still easy to see that writing and reading bring specifically human advantages that seem almost natural: writing is artificial, but when a person has interiorized writing, it improves his linear, logical thinking, allows for sustained mental efforts with cumulative effects, and even intensifies the sense of being oneself.18 All of this benefits the individual writer or reader. But the individualistic view, which cuts the individual off from tradition and urges him to reason everything out for himself, makes it hard to see the obvious connection between writing and tradition. It disparages memorization as a slavish task. On this view, true freedom lies not in memory but in imagination, in the ability to create our own world free from every other human being and even from nature; since the text is someone else’s creation, to memorize it is to submit oneself to someone else’s private good, which is servile.19 But in antiquity, to memorize the text was to participate in the common good, in the tradition, and so to become a full member of society and, consequently, a completed human being. The ancestors

were the antecessores, the ones who have gone before us, and by following them we enter into our inheritance and make it our own with them.20 In this traditional mindset, reading the text might be compared to living in the old family mansion. It is not a museum, with everything cordoned off, immovable and untouchable, but one’s own family house, so one has to move in and live in it, which might require moving the couch. On the other hand, it is a family possession, not simply one’s private thing, so one would not bulldoze it and build a new structure. Similarly, the ancient scribes felt free even to modify a text for new circumstances, but they did not see themselves as fundamentally altering the thing.21 When the scribe composed his own work and quoted the normative texts, he did so from memory and rather inexactly; this was not at all from lack of respect for the text, but because the text had moved beyond being an external object of thought to become an interior medium in which he thought, communicated, and expressed himself.22 This is a strength of the traditional mindset. A great work of literature sitting on one’s shelf is merely a source of impressive quotations to be sprinkled into one’s prose, and used this way it is like an axe, a tool that one can use by applying thought to it. A great work of literature embedded in the scribe’s memory becomes, not an object of thought, but the background of it. It constantly interacts with his other memories and experiences even when he is not aware of it. In this way, the memorized text is more like a hand than an axe; it is not what is grasped, but that by which one grasps. Such a text is very powerful, formative of the scribe’s thought in even more ways than he is aware. The assembly of texts that have this status within a culture constitute the cultural canon. But even while the ancient scribe expressed his own thoughts through the medium of the canon, he knew that his writing had meaning, not alone, but only in relation to the antecessores, the scribes and sages before him. Just as their work was not theirs individually but common and therefore his, so his work was not his individually but a common possession.23 T. S. Eliot described the

poet and his work within a literary tradition this way: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”24 If we want to understand Scripture as it originally came into being and as it continues to serve the Church, we have to recover this key aspect of the ancient mentality. We need to see that the written text is like language in general: it benefits the individual enormously, but it comes into being on the way to community and is essentially a common good. This does not make it less the individual’s good, but more. At this point, it may be helpful to review what has been said. So far, I have followed a single thread across three basic mental orientations. First, because man as a rational creature shares in a common good, he is by nature social; because grace intensifies nature, when Christ saved mankind he founded a society. Second, because man is naturally social, human reason is by nature dependent on society’s communal intellectual wealth, which is tradition; because grace intensifies nature, the Church, a supernatural society, necessarily has a supernatural tradition. Third, because human reason is by nature tradition-dependent, a literate society naturally creates a canon, namely, a set of writings that embody and transmit the tradition. Because a canon is the means of passing on a society’s innermost life, the life of the mind, it also serves as a medium for that life as members of the society think via the canon, speak via the canon, and interpret the world via the canon. At this point we can finally begin to answer our question, “What is Scripture for, and for whom?” And we have to repeat once more that grace intensifies nature: just as the Church needs a tradition commensurate with what she is, so she needs a canon commensurate with herself and her Tradition. Scripture is the supernatural canon of the supernatural society, by which the Mystical Body of Christ passes on her inner life to the next generation, and a medium in which she lives that inner life of thought and speech.

We will return to this idea many times: Church, Tradition, and Scripture are intertwined, each defined by the other. As Dei Verbum says, “It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God’s most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others.”25 One cannot adequately think about one without the other two. Scripture is a guide rail for Tradition, while Tradition gives the Church continuity and identity; the Church’s inner life is the content of Tradition, which finds in Scripture a mirror in which to examine itself. The supernatural society hands down its supernatural interior life through its supernatural canon. Of course, it would be misleading to suggest that Scripture is the extent of the Church’s literary canon. Just as she has both traditions with a small “t” and Tradition with a big “T”, so she has both a literary canon with a small “c” and a literary Canon with a big “C”, so to speak, and this distinction between “big letter” and “small letter” is true of Tradition and canon for the same reason. The same dynamic that led to Tradition and to the embodiment of tradition in the Canon leads to new traditions and writings; the newer, lesser traditions are inspired by and, so to speak, ensouled by the Tradition itself, and in the same way the newer, lesser writings draw life from Scripture, interpreting it and receiving their meaning from it simultaneously. One thinks not only of the Church’s Magisterium and the writings of the Fathers and Doctors and mystics, but of Dante and Shakespeare and the whole constellation of authors whose works have formed the culture of the Church. Scripture, as the Canon at the heart of the canon, not only has the power to inspire and sustain these new works but even draws into its ambit the writings of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Virgil, just as the Catholic faith took over the insights of pagan antiquity. The process of tradition, writing, and rereading that gave birth to Scripture itself continues with Scripture and Tradition as its life principle. Hence just as Christ is the man who is more “man” than any man and so draws all men to himself, so Scripture is the book that is more “book” than any book and pulls all literary treasures into ranks around itself.

Scripture’s unique purpose as the heart of the Canon makes it distinct from every other possible writing. A writing that must do what no other writing could do must be in itself different from every other writing around; as a Scholastic would say, a unique final cause requires a unique formal cause. What is it about Scripture that makes it so different? We turn to that now. B. What Scripture Is The author of the Letter to the Hebrews begins his extensive reflection on the Old Testament with this observation: “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the ages.” This brief introductory statement reflects the apostolic attitude toward the Old Testament: in Scripture, despite the “many and various” kinds of text, God himself speaks.26 The formation of the New Testament canon had largely to do with bringing this same attitude to bear on the writings of the apostolic age itself. The Book of Baruch, speaking about God’s wisdom, expresses this view of Scripture in a striking way (3:29-4:1): Who has gone up into heaven, and taken her, and brought her down from the clouds? Who has gone over the sea, and found her, and will buy her for pure gold? No one knows the way to her, or is concerned about the path to her. But he who knows all things knows her, he found her by his understanding. . . . He found the whole way to knowledge, and gave her to Jacob his servant and to Israel whom he loved. Afterward she appeared upon earth and lived among men. She is the book of the commandments of God, and the law that endures for ever.

In a wonderful figure of speech, divine wisdom is presented not only as a person, as in the other Wisdom books, but as appearing in bodily form as a book, the book of the Law. As was noted in the preface, Christian tradition has often made an even bolder claim, comparing the Incarnation of God’s Word to the expression of God’s words in the human words of Scripture.27 Such is the traditional account of what Scripture is: it is the Word of God spoken through men. Does our account of the purpose of

Scripture shed light on this traditional view? I have argued that Scripture is meant to impress the interior life of the Church on each generation; put another way, it is meant to impress Christ the Head on the members of the Mystical Body. In addition, Scripture is supposed to act as a medium in which the Church can live her interior life, thinking with Scripture and praying with Scripture. Does this explain or illuminate the traditional belief that Scripture is the Word of God? A general connection is easy to discern. If the Church’s interior life is as Saint Paul describes it, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20)—Christ, the Word of God—and if Scripture is to be a mirror in which the Church can see and discover herself, then Scripture needs in some way to be the Word of God. If what the Church hands down to each new generation is “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16), and if Scripture is to be a guide rail to ensure the handing down, then Scripture needs in some way to be Christ. But we need to be more specific. Impressing Christ on the believer is not a mechanical operation, like imposing the shape of a seal on a blob of wax. Christ does not take possession of the soul the way one would purchase a car, by an exterior transaction. Christ and the believer are persons, and so the sharing of Christ’s life with the believer is a union of persons, a marriage of the bride to the bridegroom. As Cardinal Ratzinger says, referencing Galatians 2:20, it is even a “death-event”, in which the “I” yields itself more and more to the “Thou” who comes to take it.28 Consequently, the writing of Christ on the Church’s heart requires that one person be present to another. If Scripture is the instrument for this process, then the reader of Scripture must have Christ present here before him.29 In the previous chapter, when considering what makes the Incarnation unique, I observed that human beings cannot make things in which their person is present: if I make a chair, I am not present in the chair. Even if I make a photograph of myself, my likeness is in the photograph and we may say metaphorically that I gaze out from the picture, but I do not literally gaze out from the picture; I am not personally present in it. But words are very nearly an exception to this rule. When I hear someone speaking or get a

note from a person, that person addresses my person. I not only see evidence of that person’s interior thoughts and desires, as I might glean clues from looking at his life’s work or his home decor, but that person’s interior thoughts and desires are actually addressed to mine. It would be too much to say that the human person becomes incarnate in his words; I do not touch that person by touching the note he has written. And yet words are things human beings can make that do convey personal presence. Here, then, the door of nature is open to the entry of grace. Human words can bring one into the presence of God if—and only if —the words spoken by men are also words spoken by God. That is to say, Scripture can do what it needs to do if the words crafted by men to convey their minds are also words crafted by God to convey his mind. It is not enough that men who have been in God’s presence speak their own mind through words, because that would only bring the believer into the presence of holy men. It would be as though one related to a spouse by receiving letters from the spouse’s friend: it would be an occasion for knowing and loving the spouse better, but it would not offer the contact needed for a union of persons.30 Of course, God is present everywhere by his effects. Every existing thing is held in being by his touch, and so we can “see” him everywhere the way we “see” the wind in moving leaves and swaying trees. But leaves and trees are not the wind, and God’s creatures are not God. This is what makes the Incarnation unique in all the world, namely, that in the man Jesus Christ—whose humanity is created—God is present in person and not simply in his effects. And something similar makes Scripture unique, namely, that in Scripture one encounters, not simply a witness to God, not simply evidence of God, not simply an effect of God, but God himself in person addressing the heart of the believer.31 In Scripture, the Father speaks his Word to the Church. This is the unique shape of Scripture. How does it come about that Scripture is the Word of God? Our next chapter will look into the authorship of Scripture more carefully, but for the moment it is enough to recall that the Father brings a

creature to the Son through his impulse of love toward the Son, that is, through the Holy Spirit. If the Word can be described as the form of Scripture, the motive cause of Scripture can be said to be the Holy Spirit. Finally, the place where Scripture resides is the soul of the believing Church. Because of Scripture’s unique power to mediate God’s presence, it is a unique school in which we learn how to relate to God. We come into the Divine Presence, we stand before the Father and hear his Word—and how should we respond? Hearing Scripture is like other loving relationships, but more so: we trust our human friends in the qualified way that one can trust a fallen and fallible human being, but we respond to the Father with unqualified trust, with a total giving over of our minds to what he has spoken. Hearing Scripture is like hearing other words, but more so: speech is naturally aimed at the communion of persons through the sharing of thought, but here the speaker’s thought is in fact itself a person, the Word, one to whom we can give ourselves in love. So our response to Scripture can be described as submission to the Father through marriage with Christ. As we saw before when considering creation in general, any time the Word becomes present in the world, the Holy Spirit comes before and after him. The Father’s impulse of love toward the Son catches up creatures and remolds them into the likeness of the Word, and the creature thus remolded returns to God in a likeness of the Son’s love for his Father. When the Father comes to the believer by speaking his Word and the believer accepts and embraces that Word, then the believer returns to the Father by an impulse of love that mirrors the Son’s own love. If the believer does not respond in love, then he is not truly living with the life of Christ the Son. But when we speak of where Scripture resides, we cannot forget that Scripture is a physical book. It is the believer, not the written text of Scripture, that returns to God in love, and yet the physical text of Scripture—the ink blots on wood pulp or shadows on a computer screen—is needed as an external guide rail in the process of handing on the tradition. Scripture could not perform its role unless it were something exterior to the believer that could pull him out of his

self-absorption; even though I see myself in the mirror, it cannot be a mirror unless it stands outside of me.32 And yet like any text, Scripture does not exist as a text until it is taken up into a human heart. In between the thinking author and the thinking reader, a book by itself sits lifeless and unintelligent, a mere inanimate object. If there were not even a possible reader, the book would not be a book, even if it had all the same shapes on its pages. So the place where Scripture resides is twofold: the material, physical text is less important than the Church’s heart, but the Church’s heart needs to submit to that material, physical text. If we pull together our conclusions, we can offer a rich account of Scripture. What motive cause brought Scripture into being? The Father is the first motive cause, and by the action of the Holy Spirit he makes men also to be true causes of Scripture’s coming to be. What defining shape does Scripture have as a result? The books of Scripture are words of men that express the mind of God. Where do these words reside? They reside in a material and instrumental way in physical books, and they reside in an immaterial and principal way in the human heart. To what purpose was Scripture given? The Father gave Scripture as an external guide rail and as a medium for the Church’s process of handing down and embracing the Word and responding to the Father in love. C. Conclusion: The Rules of Faith and Charity Unpacking the implications of this account of Scripture will take up the remainder of this book. But there are three conclusions that follow so directly from what has been said, and that have such universal application, that I want to set them down here almost as part of the definition of Scripture. First, Scripture has whatever it needs to accomplish its purpose. When we consider that its author is “God, the Father almighty”, and we realize that his purposes can never be defeated, we see that any interpretation of Scripture that runs contrary to his goal in giving Scripture cannot be a right interpretation. Human authors not only intend to say unfortunate things but often fail even to say what they intend. Such cannot be the case with Scripture.

Second, Scripture cannot contradict the faith of the Church. When we consider that the form of Scripture is the Son, the Word of God, and we understand that the Church’s faith is nothing other than this same Word impressed on the believer’s heart, we see that any interpretation contradicting the faith of the Church would run counter to God’s purpose in giving Scripture. Scripture, in fact, is the guide rail for faith. Third, when we recall the Holy Spirit’s role in Scripture, we see that Scripture cannot militate against love of God and neighbor. When we recall that God’s purpose in giving Scripture was that the believer, remade in the image of the Son, should return to the Father in the Spirit of love, we are forced to conclude that any interpretation failing to promote the love of God and neighbor is a wrong interpretation. The rules of faith and charity are the most general rules of all for biblical interpretation because they follow immediately from what Scripture is. To go farther, we will need to say more about each of the causes of Scripture: how God and man together are the motive cause of Scripture, how the Word is the defining shape of Scripture, how the believer’s soul is the principal place where Scripture resides. We begin with the motive cause and the human authors of the sacred text.

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The Authors of Scripture As we read any book, whether we realize it or not, we form an imaginary picture of the author, what literary critics call the “implied author”.1 For example, I almost unconsciously think of John Milton as an older man with a stern, moralistic view of the world, symbolized in my imagination by his tall, perfectly starched collar. I picture Thomas Aquinas as a serene and serious person who is never aggressive but, on the other hand, never backs down, his eyes penetrating but kind. And when a student turns in a paper with multitudinous grammatical and spelling errors, I cannot help but picture the author more or less as a monkey at a typewriter. This happens even when we do not realize it. And yet the way we imagine the author greatly influences how we read his book. This is all the more true of Scripture because the authors of Scripture were supernaturally inspired, which makes us imagine them in a very unusual way. Religious art offers abundant examples: the prophet in an overwhelming ecstasy, barely able to hold on to his parchment; the Evangelist hunched over a scroll, a little white bird whispering in his ear; the apostle, pen poised over his work, looking up to get the next sentence from a dictating angel. We need to examine our imagination of the authors of Scripture to make sure our reason agrees with it. A. True Causes of Revelation To begin, I need to return to the fact that God wants his creatures to be true causes. As I said in chapter 1, God created in order to share himself, his being and goodness, to give a likeness of himself to creatures. One very important way he wanted his creatures to resemble him is that he wanted them to be real causes, as he is the supreme cause. In fact, to be and to be a cause are so closely

related that it is difficult to conceive of God wanting to share his being without considering that he wanted to share his causality. That God wants his creatures to be real causes is clear in nature, where so much can be explained by natural causes that some people begin to think we do not even need God to explain things— this the reward for his generosity! But I want to focus on the human history of how Scripture was made, which means looking closely at what is often called “salvation history”.2 In this context, God’s desire to make his creatures to be real causes means that God wants man himself, so far as it is possible, to be the teacher and savior of mankind. He wants revelation to come from man, and he wants redemption to come from man. As we saw in chapter 2, this “policy” of God is clearest in the Incarnation, in which God gives himself most fully to his creatures by personally becoming one of his creatures. Because of the Incarnation, Christ has a human nature in which to die and a divinity that makes his death efficacious for us. Because of the Incarnation, Christ is both tangible because he is a man and a supernatural object because he is God. Consequently, the man Jesus Christ is the supreme teacher and savior of the world. But this same desire to make man the teacher and savior is also clear in what followed the Incarnation. God chose men as apostles, the apostles contemplated Jesus Christ, and then they handed on to others the fruits of their contemplation, as the apostle John explains: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 Jn 1:1-3)

In his encyclical letter Satis cognitum, Leo XIII ties both the Incarnation and the apostle’s ministry explicitly to the fact that God wants human beings to be true causes:

Although God can do by His own power all that is effected by created natures, nevertheless in the counsels of His loving Providence He has preferred to help men by the instrumentality of men. And, as in the natural order He does not usually give full perfection except by means of man’s work and action, so also He makes use of human aid for that which lies beyond the limits of nature, that is to say, for the sanctification and salvation of souls. But it is obvious that nothing can be communicated amongst men save by means of external things which the senses can perceive. For this reason the Son of God assumed human nature—“who being in the form of God.  .  . emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of man” (Phil 2:6-7)—and thus living on earth He taught His doctrine and gave His laws, conversing with men. . . . The Apostles received a mission to teach by visible and audible signs, and they discharged their mission only by words and acts which certainly appealed to the senses.3

The principle Leo lays out does not cease to function with the death of the apostles, but continues through the present day. As I mentioned before, the way in which the visible Church passes on the revelation of Jesus Christ is not the way one would hand on a baton, as an extrinsic object externally handed off without any change in the hand itself. Each generation of Christians must themselves contemplate Christ and, so to speak, discover him for themselves; then they pass on the fruits of their reflection to others as something truly from themselves. This is why, for example, we have development in doctrine. As Dei Verbum says, There is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts (see Luke, 2:19, 51) through a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received through Episcopal succession the sure gift of truth. (DV 8)

This is the closest that mere men can come to being themselves the revealers of supernatural truth, true causes of revelation: (a) God supplies a supernatural, revelatory object, namely, Christ, and (b) by contemplating this object under the influence of faith, men are able to discover supernatural truth through their own powers and announce it to others. Notice that we are not yet speaking of the

authors of Scripture specifically, but of believers in general, in any age. If Christians after the Incarnation are able to “reveal” supernatural truths by contemplating Christ, what did God want from men before the Incarnation, in the time of the Old Testament? Clearly, he chose Israel as his vehicle of revelation, but what did he want from the men of Israel? The answer has to do with what is said in the Letter to the Hebrews: “The law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities” (Heb 10:1). Paul puts it this way: “These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col 2:17). For those of us who live after the Incarnation, contemplation of Christ is the key. To prepare for Christ, God made Israel to be a foreshadowing of him; that is, God gave Israel a partial share in what Christ is fully, and by possessing this partial share, Israel was able to be a sign of Christ. Because Christ is the only-begotten Son of God, God can warn Pharaoh that Israel is his first-born son (Ex 4:22); because Christ is the bodily temple of the Godhead, Moses can plead to God that it is God’s presence in the midst of Israel that makes Israel distinct from all other nations (Deut 34); because Christ is the great high priest who offered sacrifice once for all, God can tell Israel that they are a kingdom of priests (Ex 19:6). Everything that Christ is fully, Israel is in a partial manner. Here we have the Israelite’s path to revealing supernatural truth. The Word is not yet Incarnate, so the pious Israelite cannot contemplate Christ directly as would the apostles and priests of the New Testament. But God made the nation of Israel itself, in its history and its institutions, to be a reflection of Christ so that the prophets could contemplate their nation and their history and announce to others the results of their contemplation. In other words, God (a) made a supernatural, revelatory object for man to see, namely, the history and institutions of Israel, and (b) gave certain men a supernatural light of insight into this object. This supernatural light related to natural insight as faith relates to reason, that is, it was beyond reason but perfective of it in its own line. Now man could by

the exercise of his own powers discover and announce to others the revelation of God. B. Inspiration To this point I have discussed in a general way how it is possible for mere men to be in some way true causes of revelation. At this general level, it is not a difficult subject: God proposes a supernatural object for contemplation, and then he offers men grace to enhance their own powers as they contemplate it. It seems straightforward. But when we turn our attention to the human authors of Scripture in particular, the imagination begins to introduce strange and difficult pictures, because these are men we believe to have been “inspired”. God intends men in general to have a true causality in revelation, but he intended only a few men to be the authors of his sacred text. What does this word “inspired” mean, and how should it affect the way we imagine the human authors? Like almost every word in every language, the word “inspiration” has multiple analogous meanings. We use it in a broad and secular way to speak of someone’s idea as inspired, or to describe an artist or entrepreneur as seeking inspiration. We sometimes use the word in a more restricted sense as having to do with the Holy Spirit, as when we say that a saint was inspired to do a charitable work and we mean that this person was moved by the Holy Spirit. Or we might say that the Spirit inspires the leaders of the Church to do this or teach that, meaning in a general way that the Spirit enters into and moves them. But there is a restricted sense of the word “inspired” that we apply only to the biblical text or the biblical authors and to nothing else. In this restricted sense, we call an author or text inspired only if the words of the text are God’s words, that is, crafted by God to express his mind. If the text is God’s Word, then we say it is inspired, no matter what else may be the case; if the text is not God’s Word, then we will not say it is inspired, no matter what else may be the case. In this sense of the word, “inspiration” means nothing more or less than the divine factor that makes a text to be God’s Word.

Despite everything our imaginations tell us, the divine factor that makes a text to be God’s Word is not a created being, either in the human author or in the text conceived in his mind or in the text committed to exterior writing. The reason is that whether a text is God’s Word depends simply on whether God has attached his voice to it, his own person. God could illuminate an author’s mind, envelop his will in graces, and lavish assistance on every step of the writing process, and yet not intend to attach his own voice to the resulting words. God could cause a text to say true things, to say those things in a marvelous way, and to exhibit every sign of excellence, and yet not intend to attach his own voice to the words. On the other hand, a text could be exceedingly plain in its speech and simple in its insight, and yet God could intend those words to sound with his voice. An author could labor painfully over a text, even experiencing a sense of desolation as he writes, and yet God could intend the resulting words to express his own mind. Nothing in the text or in the author is the final deciding point: the determining factor is God’s intention of attaching his voice to the text. In this regard, the inspiration of Scripture is very much like the Incarnation of the Word. There is no extra form or nature in Christ’s humanity that makes it to be the humanity of the second Person of the Trinity. There is no created being above and beyond Christ’s humanity that is what Saint Thomas would call the “grace of union” in the strict sense, the grace of the Incarnation itself.4 One could examine Christ with microscopes and chemical tests and scientific instruments of every kind and never find anything but a human nature. What makes Christ to be the Son of God is not some created being in addition to his human nature but the simple fact that this human nature is grounded in the Person of the Word. Similarly, there is no special feature of Scripture by which one could prove that it is more than a human text; there is no grammatical or rhetorical analysis by which to discover a divine element. The only necessary difference between this text and any other is that it is attached to the divine voice. Along similar lines, if we think about the “descent of the Holy Spirit” on Mary at the event of the Incarnation, we find that the

descent of the Holy Spirit was not a created being in Mary apart from the child created in her. She was filled with faith, of course, and she was on fire with divine love, and she was disposed in every possible way to be the Mother of God worthily, and all of these things are rightly described as the effects of the Holy Spirit, but none of these dispositions in her is “the descent of the Holy Spirit” in the sense of being the decisive explanation of why her child is the Son of God. Nor did the grace of the Incarnation go from God to the child through space and time, traveling as some kind of created being that was neither God nor man. When we look past everything that was merely dispository, there was no created cause of the Incarnation standing intermediate in between God and the resulting child. God intended to create a man whose human nature would be possessed by the Divine Person, and he did so directly. Consequently, the descent of the Holy Spirit on Mary was not another being besides the Holy Spirit himself proceeding eternally as the Father’s impulse of love toward his Divine Son together with the reality of the child in her womb. Similarly, the inspiration of the sacred authors taken in its strict sense was nothing other than the Holy Spirit himself in his eternal and uncreated procession together with the reality of their act of composition. Of course, given that the humanity of this child was attached to a Divine Person, it was appropriate and even necessary that God should give Mary abundant gifts of created grace to fit her to her role. It was appropriate and even necessary that the child should be conceived virginally. It was appropriate and even necessary that God should give the child a superabundance of all the created graces that other men receive: more supernatural life, more love, and more illumination than any other creature. In an extended sense of the word, one could call these things part of the grace of union.5 But all of these appropriate graces together do not amount to the Incarnation, as the Nestorian dispute made clear. Similarly, since God has attached his own voice to a human text, it may be entirely appropriate that he also endow the human author with unusual graces and that the text have a certain beauty and depth. It is even necessary to call these unusual graces “inspiration” in an extended sense of the word. But this “inspiration” in the extended sense is on

a continuum with what God gives the rest of men in their role as true causes of revelation; it is a further likeness to or participation in God the revealer. The heart of inspiration, God’s will to attach his voice to a particular text, is on a different plane: it is inclusion in the divine voice itself. C. God’s Causation The account I have given of inspiration may seem unsatisfying, even if well-reasoned. This is because, just as we unconsciously imagine the author of a book and then read through the lens of what we have imagined, so when God writes a book, we unconsciously imagine God’s authorial activity and then take this unexamined imagination as our guide for understanding. We know that somehow inspiration has to do with God causing men to write something. And we know that the words of a book can only be God’s words if they are the exact words that God wanted written, nothing more and nothing less, and yet they can only be the words of men if they are the exact words the men wanted, nothing more and nothing less. These two things seem hard to reconcile. If God makes it certain that the human authors write only what he wants, it seems that he must override their free will and consequently their true authorship. But if God leaves the human authors’ free will and exercise of true authorship to follow their own inclinations, it seems that he cannot make sure they write only what he wants. Consequently, theories of inspiration tend to fall into two camps. Either they incline to some kind of divine dictation, privileging God’s authorship at the expense of human authorship, or they incline to softening the claim that the text is the Word of God, privileging human authorship over God’s authorship. Both camps see “inspiration” as a created being in the author or the text, because both camps see “inspiration” as the special means God uses above and beyond his usual influence to make the text be or be more like what he wants. People think this way about inspiration because we as human beings think badly about God’s causation in general. No matter how carefully we think about it or how well educated we may be, we

cannot help but think of God’s causation as though it were like our own causation, when the reality is that God’s causation is unlike anything we experience. In fact, because action follows form, really to understand how God causes things one would need to grasp the divine essence, a task beyond any created mind. Any sound view of inspiration needs to begin by stressing that God’s way of acting on creatures is unlike our own. Our causation is limited in surprising ways. When I act on a rock or a chair or anything else to move it, I act on it from the outside with a kind of coercive violence. I cannot make a rock do anything natural, like fall: I can remove obstacles to its falling or move it to a position from which it could fall, but its actual falling is something entirely beyond my power. Even if I throw the rock downward, I am superimposing an external, violent force over its own inclination to drop. Similarly, I cannot make plants grow or animals run or people love, although I can arrange circumstances so that the plants will grow or the animals run of their own accord, and I can try to persuade people to love of their own free will. If I try to make plants grow or people love by my own direct action, it turns out to be an external act of violence.6 This is closely related to the fact that I cannot make anything be. I can move wood and pound nails and cause a house to come to be, but once the house is built, then it continues to be without me its builder. I can shape metal and move parts around and turn screws and make a car come to be, but once the car is built, then its being is its own and not from me. No matter what scenario one imagines, it always turns out that we are causes of coming-to-be and never causes of being. We always make things out of preexisting materials, and the things once made continue to exist because of the materials we started with.7 With God, the situation is quite different because he is being itself. Everything that is not God exists by reflecting God’s being, like rocks that are hot because they are heated by the fire. Without God’s presence, the creature would vanish, as a rock loses its heat if withdrawn from the fire or as a mirror loses its likeness to a man if

the man steps away. God not only brings things into being but makes them be.8 Because a creature’s inmost being and nature exist from moment to moment only by receiving God in a partial way, God does not act on a creature as another creature would, from the outside. He does not relate to a rock or a plant or a man as a being to a being, but as Being to a being. Just as the rock receives its inmost being and nature from God, so it receives its natural motion from God, from within. The plant that grows by its own natural principles receives its growth from God, the continual source of its natural principles. God can do what no creature can do: he can make a rock fall and a plant grow.9 To put the point briefly, because God as Being itself causes things to be, he also acts on things from within and with no violence. If we think of God as one being among other beings, then we incline toward mechanistic deism: we suppose that God made a universe that now stands on its own without him; we imagine that God intervenes in this free-standing universe only occasionally, and we assume that when he does intervene, it is from the outside, like a car mechanic working on an engine. We limit God to the spectacular, like miracles, and we divorce him from everyday things like rocks falling, plants growing, and people riding bicycles. We suppose that a rock flying up would be God’s action while a rock falling down would just be the rock’s action. Our tendency to limit God to the spectacular is intensified when we think about the human heart. If I want someone to do something, I can either coerce the person and take away his freedom, in which case I know the person will do what I want; or I can persuade the person and respect his freedom, in which case I cannot be sure the person will choose to do what I want. And I tend to assume that God has the same limitations: he can act in me with an overwhelming grace that takes away or almost takes away my freedom, or he can act through subtle whispers and suggestions that leave me more or less on my own. On this view, my decision to eat fried eggs rather than scrambled eggs this morning is entirely mine and not at all from God.

But this view is based on my own limited way of acting, not on God’s way. I work from the outside, so I cannot make a person freely choose fried eggs any more than I can cause a rock to fall. God, on the other hand, is Being itself: the heart of every person exists from moment to moment as a reflection of God’s utter interiority, and so when God acts on a person’s heart, he does so from within, not violently. This is why Saint Augustine described God as “more inward than my most inward part”.10 Consequently, even everyday, natural human acts are a gift from God. When we get up in the morning, that is God acting in us; when we love our spouses, that is God acting in us; when we choose to eat cereal instead of eggs, that is God acting in us. Nothing in life is divorced from God’s causation. Even when God raises our natural actions to a supernatural level through grace, he does so from within and with no violence, as Leo XIII beautifully expresses: Not that the divine assistance hinders in any way the free movement of our will; just the contrary, for grace works inwardly in man and in harmony with his natural inclinations, since it flows from the very Creator of his mind and will, by whom all things are moved in conformity with their nature. As the Angelic Doctor points out, it is because divine grace comes from the Author of nature that it is so admirably adapted to be the safeguard of all natures, and to maintain the character, efficiency, and operations of each.11

So when we imagine that Scripture differs from other books because God caused the authors of Scripture to write, we are mistaken: in this respect, Scripture is like every other book ever written. It is a mistake to suppose that “inspiration” is the means God uses to insure that the human authors write what he wants them to write, because no such means is necessary. There is never a conflict between God’s causation and a human author’s free will, even if the human author is a non-believer writing on secular subjects.12 It is most helpful to consider the case of an author very like the sacred authors. Saint Augustine was a gifted but non-biblical author. It seems beyond doubt that God raised up this great man at the right moment for the Church, and God used Saint Augustine to bring hidden truths to light. Augustine was in the habit of imploring God’s

illumination and assistance for everything he wrote, and clearly God answered his prayers: although Augustine said some things that were not true, and even admitted as much in his Retractions, a great deal of what he taught was both true and timely. It would be easy to find a homily by Saint Augustine that says nothing but true things. In this case, we would have a text written by a man raised up by God for this moment, a man assisted in his word by God’s light and grace, and in the text we would find truths expressed that God wanted to be expressed in that text. Augustine himself would admit that the writing of the text was God’s gift to him, not merely his own doing. What, then, is the difference between Augustine’s homily and the Gospel of Luke, so that one is only the word of Augustine while the other is the word both of Luke and of God? Only this: God intended Augustine’s homily to sound Augustine’s voice alone, but he intended Luke’s Gospel to sound not only Luke’s voice but God’s voice as well. God attached his person to the biblical text and not to Augustine’s. There is no reason to suppose any other difference in how God caused these two men to write their texts. To summarize, a sound view of inspiration emphasizes two things. First, there is no conflict between God’s causation and man’s free exercise of his own natural powers; second, the essential and strictest meaning of “inspiration” is that God intends to attach his own voice to the words of a text. These two points track the contents of Dei Verbum II, as highlighted by the numbers I have supplied in brackets: [1] In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted. [2] Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.13

D. Re-Imagining the Human Authors When we suppose that “inspiration” must be a spectacular occurrence, we are forced to imagine the authors of Scripture as in a category by themselves and undergoing experiences we cannot share. Once we see that the necessary and constant element of “inspiration” is not a spectacular grace in the human author, however, we are free to imagine the human authors in different ways corresponding to the different impressions their texts give. John of Patmos tells us explicitly that his writing is from God (Rev 1:10), and his writing suggests ecstatic experience; Paul’s casual recollection of a cloak he left in Troas shows no awareness of ecstasy but suggests instead a workaday letter-writing experience (2 Tim 4:13). Both impressions are legitimate imaginations of what it was like for that author to be inspired. The sacred author’s experience may be very much like our own experience in writing, sympathetically captured in the closing chapter of 2 Maccabees (15:37-38): “So I too will here end my story. If it is well told and to the point, that is what I myself desired; if it is poorly done and mediocre, that was the best I could do.”14 More radically, freeing the imagination allows us to break past a modern, heroic concept of the lone author achieving artistic expression.15 Casting inspiration as a spectacular grace in the human author plays into a contemporary tendency toward individualism and seeing a text as the independent achievement and private intellectual property of a single person. We are already inclined to see the novelist or the poet as a unique and superior individual expressing his private person through the medium of writing, and we praise those who break with tradition as being more authentic and artistic. Relocating inspiration in God’s intention throws the emphasis onto God’s providential guidance of a process, which is something we tend to associate with a people more than with an individual person taken alone. The way is opened to seeing the human authors’ efforts as contributions to a process, to a tradition, rather than exercises in self-expression. Consequently, we can imagine the subjective experience of inspiration as being as wide as the tradition itself,

including both the exaltation of Isaiah 6 and the humble, workaday efforts of the unknown editor who added the introductory line of Isaiah 1:1. When the Pentateuch is discovered to be the work of many authors and editors, this is no problem for a theology of inspiration. The effect of all of this, paradoxically, is to support the notion that the sacred authors are models for us. If their experience was wholly other from ours, we could not look to them as exemplars for theologians or exegetes, but if their experience was like ours, then our experience can be made like theirs. They are above us inasmuch as we write words about God while they write the words of God, but their pattern is still one we can follow. To see more clearly how they offer us an example, we have to look more closely at what their labor was. To this we turn in the following chapter.

5

Israel’s Participation

in Christ In the previous chapter, we saw that the human biblical authors’ use of their own powers was reconciled with their task of revealing divine truth by the presence of a supernatural object for their contemplation. In the case of the New Testament authors, the supernatural object was Christ, while in the case of the Old Testament authors, the supernatural object was Israel’s history and institutions, created as anticipatory participations in Christ. This general account of how the human authors could use their own powers opens a path to seeing more concretely how their work unfolded. For example, this is why the books of the prophets are concerned primarily with the nation of Israel and say comparatively little about the future. They authoritatively interpret the events of their times, say what God’s intentions are, and explain the real reasons behind things; they comment on kings, famines, invasions, diseases, and economic booms and busts; they open up the true nature of the Temple, of sacrifice, and of the priesthood; and when these things are threatened with destruction, then yes, their attention turns to the future. But the prophet’s role was more to see deeply into the realities of his own day than to peer into distant events. His task was to contemplate the supernatural object in front of him.1 The same principle sheds light on a fact uncovered by modern biblical exegesis, namely, that much of the Old Testament was either written or received its final editing during the period of the Exile. Authors living close to or during the Exile reflected back on Israel’s history and, with new insight based on new experience, pulled together all the traditions dating back to Moses about Israel’s history and presented them in a single, coherent account. They could see the whole trajectory from Abraham through David to the demise of

the kingdom, and the imminent national death of Israel had that clarifying effect which imminent death has for any individual man: the important things stood out; the less important things receded into the background. As a result, these men were in a unique position to bring out the true meaning of Israel’s story. They had to use traditions because they were using their own powers, even though enhanced by grace, and so they could not just make things up out of their heads. But they saw into their national history with a new clarity, and the result was not only the Pentateuch in its final form but also the series of historical books from Joshua through 2 Kings called in Jewish tradition the “Former Prophets”. However, to go very far down the path opened by this general account, we need to say more exactly how Israel’s history and institutions were a supernatural object and just what it means to say that Israel foreshadowed Christ or had a partial share in him. This will be a somewhat technical discussion: the language of “shadow” versus “substance”, used by New Testament authors to explain Israel’s share in Christ, is related to the Greek philosophical tradition, and I will look to Saint Thomas Aquinas for a masterful exposition of this tradition.2 In the end, I will draw our attention back to the authors of Scripture, of both the Old and the New Testaments, but for now we need to look at how Saint Thomas uses the word “participation” to describe Israel’s foreshadowing of Christ. A. Participation What does “participation” mean in the context of philosophy? In several places, Saint Thomas offers a concise definition: “Participare nihil aliud est quam ab alio partialiter accipere” (Participation is nothing other than to receive from another in a partial manner).3 The crux of the matter is in the possibility of receiving something partially. Or, as Saint Thomas puts it elsewhere, “est autem participare quasi partem capere” (“To participate” is, as it were, to take a part of something).4 One might think right away of taking a part of a cake, and yet Saint Thomas would not say that this is a case of participating in the cake. The kind of “part” he has in mind is not a quantitative part, like a third or a half, because this kind of part

leaves the rest of the whole behind: when someone takes a piece of the cake, what he receives in reality is a whole, a thing by itself, even though he knows that a moment ago it was a part of the cake. In other words, someone can take a part of the cake, quantitatively speaking, but he cannot take the whole cake partialiter, in a partial way. Participation does not have to do with the physical parts of a body. Instead, participation has to do with what Aristotle calls form and matter.5 These are like the shape of a statue and the marble out of which the statue is made: one can see that the shape and the marble are two factors making up the one statue, but one cannot physically separate the two factors without destroying one of them. The key here is that the statue receives its shape, so we have a different kind of receiving at work that is not like receiving a piece of cake. In this kind of reception, it is possible to receive partially—not by completely receiving a part but by partially receiving the whole. The marble receives, as much as it can, the whole shape of a man, not part of the shape or the shape of a part; and yet the statue is not thereby given the nature of a man. An early patristic way of speaking about the Old and New Testaments provides helpful analogies.6 Expanding on the language of Hebrews 10:1, the Fathers would say that the Old Testament had the shadow of the good things to come, the New Testament has the image, and the Second Coming of Christ will bring the substance. If we imagine a man standing next to a clear and still lake with his shadow falling on the shore, we can see differing levels of participation. The shadow receives the shape of the man, but only in outline; all the features are blurred out. The crisp reflection on the water’s surface receives not only the outline but also the colors and features, and yet it is entirely flat. The man himself possesses his shape substantially, with its three-dimensionality and its weight and its colors and everything else. He possesses the shape entirely, while the reflection receives the shape partially, and the shadow receives the shape even more partially.

In Saint Thomas’ thought, defining “participation” as partial reception implies two further things.7 First, participation means receiving from a source, having a relation of dependence. The reflection on the water depends on the man standing on the shore and gets its shape from him. To look at it in terms of Israel’s history and institutions, if something happened to resemble Christ by sharing one of his perfections but did not receive that perfection in some way from Christ, then we could not say that it “participates” in Christ. Participation requires receiving something—some perfection —from a source. Second, we are forced to conclude that the source has the perfection in a total and unrestricted manner. To participate is to receive partially, and so anything that has a perfection partially has that perfection by participation and not as the source of participation. To have a perfection by participation and to have it as the source of participation are mutually exclusive. Saint Thomas gives physical light as an example: “Something is predicated of a subject in two ways: by essence, and by participation. For light is predicated of an illuminated body by way of participation; but if there were a light separated [from any subject], light would be predicated of it by essence.”8 Putting this in terms of Israel’s history and institutions: if we say that Old Testament persons and events “participate” in the mystery of Christ, then Christ himself has the graces and perfections in question in a total and complete manner. As the Gospel of John says, “It is not by measure that he gives the Spirit; the Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand” (Jn 3:34-35); “From his fulness have we all received, grace upon grace” (Jn 1:16).9 To summarize, “participation” is a condensed technical way of expressing three ideas: (1) partial reception (2) with dependence on a source (3) that possesses the perfection in a complete manner. A thing is said to participate when it receives a perfection in a partial manner as dependent on a source that possesses the perfection in a complete manner. So when we say that the persons and events of the Old Testament participate in the mystery of Christ, we are actually saying several things at once. We are saying (1) that Old Testament persons and things have the same qualities as Christ, but

in an imperfect way. We are also saying (2) that Old Testament persons and things in some way receive their qualities from Christ, in dependence on him. Lastly, we are saying (3) that Christ has those same qualities in a complete and definitive way. This whole complex of statements is nicely captured by the traditional formula, “The New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.”10 B. Christ the Cause of Israel To round out this short introduction to participation, I want to look more closely at the relation of dependence: Exactly how do Israelite history and institutions have a Christlike quality as depending on Christ? How is Christ the cause of their having a share in him? When we see the word “cause”, we usually think of the way a hammer causes a nail to sink into the wall, the way of causing that Saint Thomas would call an “efficient cause”. Saint Thomas does say that Christ’s Passion causes our salvation as an instrumental efficient cause,11 but he clarifies farther on that Christ’s Passion was not the efficient cause of anything in the Old Testament. The reason is simple: an efficient cause cannot come into being later in time than its effect; a hammer that does not exist yet cannot drive a nail; a savior who has not yet been conceived cannot be the efficient cause of salvation. For the same reason, Christ in his humanity cannot cause Israel’s Christlike qualities the way a hammer drives a nail. But there are other ways of being a cause. According to Saint Thomas, the only kind of cause that can come into being later than its effect is a final cause, namely, that for the sake of which a thing is done.12 For example, the house a carpenter intends to build does not exist yet, but it really is a cause of the nail being driven into the wall; the house is the reason the nail is driven. Christ is the cause of Israel’s Christlikeness as a kind of final cause, a that-for-the-sake-ofwhich. The analogy of architecture is helpful here. As I said earlier, God made Israel for the sake of prefiguring Christ in his humanity. This resembles the way an architect creates an “artist’s rendering” of a house or town he plans to build, so that people can see beforehand

what the house will look like when it is done.13 The house itself as really to be built is the cause of the drawing’s qualities. C. Shadow, Image, Substance Of course, participation is not limited to the Old Testament, because some of the mysteries of the New Testament are dependent on the more perfect glory of Christ’s Second Coming. That is to say, in some cases the New Testament has something perfect and definitive that the Old Testament shares in partially, but in other cases the Old Testament is the shadow, the New Testament the image, and the perfect substance is only found in the state of final glory. Saint Thomas explains this when he comments on how the ceremonies of the Old Law were figures of things to come: In the state of future blessedness the human intellect will perceive the very divine truth in itself. And therefore exterior worship will not consist in any figure, but only in the praise of God. . . But in the state of this present life, we cannot perceive the divine truth in itself, but the ray of divine truth must shine on us under certain sensible figures, as Dionysius says in the first chapter of The Celestial Hierarchy; yet in different ways corresponding to the different states of human knowledge. For in the Old Law the divine truth in itself was not manifested, nor yet was the way of arriving at it set out, as the Apostle says in Hebrews 9:8. And so it was necessary that the worship of the Old Law be figurative not only of the future truth to be manifested in the [heavenly] fatherland, but also figurative of Christ, who is the way leading to that truth of the fatherland. But in the state of the New Law, this way [namely, Christ] is already revealed. Hence this does not need to be prefigured [in our worship] as something to come, but must be commemorated as something past or present, and only the future truth of glory not yet revealed needs to be prefigured. And this is what the Apostle says in Hebrews 10:1: “The law has the shadow of good things to come, but not the very image of the things”. For a shadow is less than an image, as “image” pertains to the New Law and “shadow” to the Old.14

To paraphrase Saint Thomas, the mysteries of the New Testament that are perfect and definitive are the ones that provide the “way” to heavenly glory: we have the perfect sacrifice, the perfect priest, the perfect king. Christ’s sacrifice is not a participation in some further reality, nor is his priesthood, nor his kingship. But other mysteries of the New Testament are admittedly imperfect: faith will give way to

knowledge; the imperfect exercise of Christ’s kingship we see around us will yield to his absolute and visible dominion over the world; the whole sacramental system of the Church, including the Eucharist, will pass away when the end comes. This is why Thomas says that all of the sacraments signify not only our past redemption and the grace imparted for the present, but also our final consummation.15 Sometimes we find both perfection and imperfection in the same thing, although in different respects. For example, manna in the Old Testament foreshadowed that more perfect waybread, the Eucharist, which feeds not only the body but the soul. As a support for those who are still journeying to the promised land, the Eucharist is perfect. But as a reception of Christ, it is imperfect, a partial share in the face-to-face vision of God the Word that will be ours in the final consummation. The Old Testament sacrifices foreshadowed the perfect sacrifice of Christ, which is continued in the Eucharist. But the liturgy we celebrate now is imperfect, a participation in the heavenly liturgy celebrated by the saints and angels in light. So there is no inconsistency when we see the manna and the Old Testament sacrifices as foreshadowings of or participations in the Eucharist, and yet at the same time see the Eucharist as a foreshadowing of the heavenly banquet. For the same reason, one can say that the same Old Testament reality participates in the mysteries of the New Testament in one respect and yet participates in the mysteries of the end times in another respect. For example, inasmuch as the Passover meal was a sacrifice, it participated in the mystery of Christ’s perfect sacrifice on the Cross; inasmuch as eating of the sacrifice expressed a certain communion with God, it was a participation in the beatific union with God enjoyed by the saints. In this way, the Passover meal foreshadows both the mystery of the Cross (and thus the Mass) and the mystery of the end times; the traditional way of saying this would be that it has both an allegorical meaning and an anagogical meaning. Does this mean that Israel’s history and institutions foreshadow the state of final glory directly and without any relation to the New

Testament? Saint Thomas would say that they do not.16 The Passover meal and the Eucharist both participate in the same final union with God, but the Eucharist does so more perfectly, and the Passover meal was intended to be replaced by the Eucharist in the New Covenant. So even though the Eucharist is not the perfect and definitive communion with God, we can say that the Passover is an anticipation of the Eucharist even in this respect. Saint Thomas describes the Old and New Laws as two parts of a single motion toward the same goal.17 Both have the same end, namely, eternal life, but the New Law is closer to that end and therefore more perfect, the way a pot of water heating on the stove becomes hotter the closer it comes to the boiling point. The warm water of the Old Testament does not aim at the boiling point of heaven without going through the hot water of the New Testament. D. Three Kinds of Participation So far I have outlined what Saint Thomas means by the word “participation”, and I have looked briefly at how the word applies to the Old and New Testaments. But Saint Thomas also emphasizes that the word “participation” has several analogous meanings. Although participation always means “to receive partially from a perfect source”, “to receive” can mean different things in different situations. In his commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, Saint Thomas distinguishes three meanings of “participation” that can be applied to Israel’s history and institutions: Something can participate from another in three ways: in one way, by receiving a property of its nature; in another way, by receiving the thing in the manner of cognitive intention; in still another way, by serving its power in some way. For example, someone can participate the medical art from a doctor either because he receives the medical art into himself, or because he receives knowledge about the medical art, or because he serves the medical art. The first is greater than the second, and the second than the third.18

Saint Thomas distinguishes three ways of participating in a perfection from some source. To illustrate the three kinds of participation, Saint Thomas uses the metaphor of how a student could receive the medical art from a doctor.19 (1) The student could

learn to be a doctor himself and so receive the medical art as his own. (2) The student could study medicine and have a “textbook” knowledge of the art without himself being a doctor. (3) Finally, the student could assist the doctor in his work by preparing the workroom, fetching instruments, or performing simple medical tasks that he does not understand but can carry out with instruction. These correspond to the three kinds of participation: the student has the form of “doctor” as his own, has the form of “doctor” merely as something known, or assists a doctor without really having the form of “doctor” himself at all. Let me describe each of these ways of participation in more detail. (1) Most perfectly, one can receive a partial share of the source’s form as one’s own form. All of the examples we have looked at so far fall under this heading: the reflection of a man in a lake, the imperfect sacrifices of the Old Testament participating in the perfect sacrifice of Christ, and so on. Before I introduced the technical term, I talked about how all living things have varying partial shares in God’s goodness, depending on their natures.20 This is the most perfect and therefore the clearest kind of participation. (2)  Less perfectly, one can receive the source’s form but not as one’s own form, which is to say, one can have knowledge of the source. When I know a tree, I receive the form of “tree” in my mind, but I do not receive it as my own form—that would make me a tree; instead, I receive the form of “tree” as something belonging to another. The form is only in my mind. (3)  The least perfect kind of participation is the most difficult to understand. Something can have the perfect source as a goal without actually receiving the source’s form at all, and we can think of this having-as-a-goal as a “participation” in the power of the source. But this is “participation” that exists in our understanding rather than in the real world. This kind of participation happens whenever an agent uses something or someone else as an instrument. For example, a painter uses a paintbrush to cause his painting, and so the paintbrush can be said to have a share in the power that produces the painting. But when we look closely at what the brush really receives from the artist, it is simply a motion in this

direction and a motion in that direction, going here and then going there. We can pull all the motions together in our memory and see in them a movement toward the painting as a goal; but in the brush itself, outside of our minds, there is only a motion in a particular direction. This third kind of participation, which Saint Thomas compares to a doctor’s assistant, sheds light on the notion of “salvation history”. The journey of Abraham from Ur to Canaan, Joshua’s conquest of the land, and David’s wars against the Philistines all furthered God’s plan of preparation for the Christ. They marked out a land in which Christ would preach and established a people into which he would be born. One could compare these actions to the doctor’s assistant who prepares the room for surgery, assembles the instruments, and sets up the table. Even the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions are claimed by Scripture as serving God’s power and preparing for one who would come to restore Israel. If we look closely at what the Babylonians really received from the mystery of Christ, it is nothing more than a providential direction to go here or do that, but the mind (enlightened by faith) can perceive in the whole sequence of events a movement toward a goal of which the Babylonians themselves were not aware. This kind of participation, the least perfect of the three, applies to events at the “linear-historical” level; it is linear history considered insofar as Christ is its goal.21 Knowledge is a more perfect kind of participation: the prophets participated in Christ by knowing him and something about his life. Their share in the mystery of Christ was much more real than the Babylonians’ because they received an actual form in their minds. However, one must avoid thinking that, because the prophets really knew Christ, therefore they must have known every detail of his life. Traditional exegesis seems at times to have overstated the prophets’ grasp of the Gospel, attributing to them an awareness of even the smallest details of Christ’s life, thinking of the prophets as fortunate visionaries who received high-definition streaming video of Christ’s ministry in Galilee.22 At the other extreme, modern exegesis tends to deny the prophets any knowledge of Christ at all, on the grounds that the prophets were speaking to the Israelites of their day, bringing a

message of judgment or hope relevant to the existential needs of the people at that time.23 Both extremes overlook the most perfect kind of participation, namely, that Israel’s history and institutions received Christ’s form as their own, in a partial but real way. On the one hand, this means that the prophets often knew Christ by contemplating Israel with their own (grace-enhanced) powers rather than by passively receiving a vision. On the other hand, it means that statements about Israel were already in a way statements about Christ, and vice-versa; one cannot cleanly separate “speaking of Israel” from “speaking of Christ”, because Israel’s very nature was to be a participation in Christ. Even writing the history of Israel was a prophetic vocation, as is implied by the Jewish tradition of calling Joshua through Kings the “Former Prophets”. E. Participation and the Authors of Scripture Everything I have said about “participation” takes us back to where we began, to imagining the authors of Scripture. Since the word “participation” applies both to Israel’s history and institutions and to the Church founded by Christ, it sheds light on the authors of both the Old and New Testaments. The authors of Scripture participated in the First and Second Comings of Christ at the linear-historical level, comparable to the medical assistant preparing the surgery room. They belonged to their age, standing in the stream of time and influencing the course of history by their actions and by their writings, persuading kings and comforting believers. At this level, they had a role to play in salvation history. The authors of Scripture also participated in the First and Second Comings of Christ at the level of knowledge, a fact that set them apart from many others who were unwitting agents of providence. The authors of the Old Testament truly knew Christ because they could contemplate him in the history and institutions of their own people; the authors of the New Testament not only knew Christ’s First Coming but knew his Final Coming as well, both because Christ taught them about it and because Christ gave them a partial share in

it. For the authors of both testaments, their knowledge depended on contemplating a supernatural, revelatory object, using their own powers elevated by grace. Consequently, we can also apply the word “participation” in its first and highest meaning directly to the biblical authors: they took on the form of Christ as their own. The Incarnate Word is the perfect and definitive revealer of divine truth, and the authors of Scripture as true causes of knowledge took on his likeness. Merely to see visions is no guarantee of Christlikeness; God can make donkeys see angels.24 But to gaze by contemplation beyond the surface of reality and grasp the divine kernel inside a historic building or event took great faith and committed love. The biblical authors were more than seers: they were saints. For the same reason, they are models for us. They worked under the light of faith to understand what they saw, and we work under the light of faith to understand what they wrote about what they saw. If the sacred authors’ inspiration meant only that they saw visions and heard voices, their example would be edifying but incapable of imitation. But since their inspiration meant that they believed more firmly and loved more deeply and thought more carefully, then we can learn from them how to contemplate the supernatural, revelatory objects God has put before us—including Scripture itself. Their writing of the Word of God offers a pattern for our writing words about God. They are the paradigmatic theologians.25

6

The Spiritual Sense This chapter occupies a bridge position between the second and third parts of the present work. The first part culminated in a general account of what Scripture is; the second part—where we are now— is about the “things” or “realities” of Scripture, what Saint Augustine called the res; and the third part will be about the words or verba of Scripture. While part 2 of the present work is about “things” and part 3 will be about “signs”, this chapter is about things that are signs: signs will occupy us from here forward. So one might divide the present work into two parts, with chapters 1 through 5 treating of Scripture’s nature and formation and chapters 6 to the end dealing with Scripture’s interpretation. To interpret a text is to come to an understanding of it or to find its meaning. Because the Latin word sensus can signify either “understanding” or “meaning”, the various kinds of interpretation of Scripture have traditionally been called the “senses” of Scripture. The literal sense has been contrasted with the spiritual sense, and both the literal and the spiritual senses have been further subdivided. In this chapter, I will examine how the literal and spiritual senses are different, and in the next I will explore the subdivisions of the spiritual sense. The literal sense will take up the remainder of the book. A. Distinguishing Literal from Spiritual When defining a term like “literal”, it is important to keep in mind that practically all words have multiple legitimate meanings. One may be tempted to choose one true meaning of the word “literal” and defend that meaning at all costs, but this always makes for a stalemate in conversation: someone else will choose another true meaning of the word and defend that one at all costs, and since both sides are right, neither will disprove the other. A wiser approach is to admit the

plurality of meanings, gather the various meanings together, and put them into some kind of order. The word “literal” is not restricted to theology. Since its original meaning was simply “pertaining to letters”, anywhere we have texts with letters in them, we find some use of the word “literal”. Everywhere the term is used, it is contrasted with some other meaning that is not literal, so that secular works of literature have a literal meaning and something else, poems have a literal meaning and something else, and of course Scripture has a literal meaning and something else. The thread that runs through all of these contrasts is that the literal is what is more on the surface as opposed to some deeper meaning. Consequently, what “literal” means in a given situation depends on how much depth is included in the literal sense. If we imagine the reader as climbing the mountain of the text, then the literal sense is where he sets up his base camp, and it is contrasted with the height he ascends from there. In general, a reader climbs (1) from the words of a text to the ideas in the mind of the author and (2) from the ideas in the mind of the author to the real things the author wanted to talk about. A reader of a zoology book is led from the word “giraffe” to the thought of a giraffe in the author’s mind, and from the author’s thoughts to the actual giraffe in Africa. One would expect, therefore, to find two meanings of “literal”, depending on whether the reader sets up his base camp in the words of the text or in the thoughts of the author. But due to a peculiarity of the biblical text, we find three general categories of “literal”: (1)  “Literal” can be taken as referring to the first level, simply the words of the text with their usual force. In this case, the literal meaning contrasts with a metaphorical meaning, which requires of the reader some flash of insight beyond what a dictionary would offer to grasp what the author had in mind.1 “Achilles is a lion” requires jumping past the dictionary meaning of “lion” to see what the author had in mind—courage, ferocity, strength, and so on. This meaning of “literal” is where we get the word “literalistic”, and we tend to see

people who are literalistic—stuck reading at this first level of “literal”—as lacking in mental acumen. (2)  “Literal” can be taken to include both the first and second levels, both the usual force of the words and metaphorical meanings of the words. In this case, “literal” is contrasted with what is “in between the lines”, implied but not stated in so many words. Every “deep” literary text has some level of meaning the reader is supposed to infer, something unstated but implied. Because this deeper level includes everything an author says about reality, a text might even “mean” something about its subject that the author did not consciously intend. At this level, ordinary readers are expected to grasp the literal meaning of a text, but we look to readers with especially penetrating minds to bring out the deeper meaning for us.2 (3) If we include as much depth as possible in the literal sense, then “literal” includes the usual force of the words, metaphorical meanings, and everything implied by the text. It includes the word “giraffe”, any metaphorical meaning of the word, and the giraffe itself out there in Africa. At this point, it may seem that we have gone too far. If everything from the word to the real thing is included in the literal meaning, what can possibly remain to be contrasted with the literal? What deeper meaning can there be, when we have included everything in the literal already? But as we saw in the previous chapter, God does use real things in the world to foreshadow other things. The author of a zoology text can use the word “giraffe” to signify a real giraffe, but he cannot use a real giraffe to signify anything because he did not make the giraffe. God who made the real things of the world can use them to signify, and when the text in question is God’s word, then the literal sense can stand in contrast to the meaning God has placed in the real things themselves. At this level, only a very penetrating reader can see the entire literal meaning, and only a reader gifted with supernatural insight can see into the real things themselves and grasp their inner natures. The third is the meaning of “literal” unique to Scripture and inapplicable to any other text: it includes in the literal meaning everything a man could conceivably put into a text, and it stands in

contrast to what God alone can do. But of course all three meanings of “literal” can be and have been applied to Scripture. For the sake of clarity, I will use the terms “literal sense” and “spiritual sense” in the meaning unique to Scripture, which was set out most clearly by Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Author of things is able not only to mold words to signify something, but can even dispose one thing to be a figure of another. In accord with this, the truth is manifested in Sacred Scripture in two ways. In one way, according as things are signified by the words, and in this consists the literal sense. In another way, according as things are figures of other things, and in this consists the spiritual sense.3

Saint Bonaventure defines the literal and spiritual senses similarly, noting that “God is the cause of the soul and of language which is formed by the soul, and also of the things with which language is concerned”, with the consequence that “things themselves have a sense.”4 He further argues that defining the literal and spiritual senses this way is essential to understanding Scripture’s purpose, which includes the restoration of an unfallen vision of the world:5 It is certain that as long as man stood up [i.e., was unfallen], he had the knowledge of created things and through their significance, was carried up to God, to praise, worship, and love Him. This is what creatures are for, and this is how they are led back to God. But when man had fallen, since he had lost knowledge, there was no longer any one to lead creatures back to God. Hence this book, the world, became as dead and deleted. And it was necessary that there be another book through which this one would be lighted up, so that it could receive the symbols of things. Such a book is Scripture which establishes the likenesses, the properties, and the symbolism of things written down in the book of the world. And so, Scripture has the power to restore the whole world toward the knowledge, praise, and love of God.

While this way of defining the literal and spiritual senses is easy to grasp in an initial way, unpacking it fully will take some effort. B. Further Precision Saint Thomas says that, whereas the literal sense of Scripture is everything the words convey about things, the spiritual sense is founded on the fact that the things themselves point to other things.

Even with this brief definition, one can see that the spiritual sense is not the same as metaphor: in metaphor, an imaginary thing in the author or reader’s mind (e.g., a lion) signifies some real thing (e.g., Achilles); in the spiritual sense, a real thing (e.g., David) signifies another real thing (e.g., Christ). Saint Thomas gives the example of the goat in Daniel 8:5, which signifies the king of the Greeks: there is no real goat that signifies the king, only an imaginary goat conjured up in the reader’s mind by the text.6 This is a particular instance of a more general point Saint Thomas makes: “The spiritual sense of Scripture is taken from the fact that things pursuing their own course signify something else.”7 His phrase about things “pursuing their own course” points to the fact that the real things that carry the spiritual sense of Scripture have integrity as historical persons, objects, or events. The imaginary things used in metaphor, to the extent that they exist, have no existence except as signs, no role in history apart from their sign value: “Poetical fictions are not ordered to anything else but to signifying; hence such a signification does not pass beyond the mode of the literal sense.”8 Signs that are only signs do not offer the spiritual sense. This fact leads to reading the Old Testament as a whole as having its own historical integrity. Saint Thomas offers a good example of this in his commentary on the ceremonies of the Old Law:9 “As the ceremonial precepts prefigure Christ, so also the histories of the Old Testament, for it says in 1 Cor 10:11 that ‘everything happened to them in a figure.’ But in the histories of the Old Testament, besides the mystical or figural understanding there is also a literal understanding. Therefore the ceremonial precepts also have literal causes in addition to figural causes.” Saint Thomas means that one can understand Scripture at the literal level as well as at the spiritual level: what is recounted at the literal level has its own intelligibility. He interprets the ceremonies of the Old Testament as pointing to Christ, to be sure, but he first seeks to understand how they made sense in terms of their historical situation and then builds his understanding of the spiritual sense on that. Because a thing is understood through what causes it, Saint Thomas coins the term

“literal causes” as a useful way to name those linear-historical links that establish Old Testament things as historical realities with their own integrity and function. A hypothetical example may clarify the point. Suppose that the Old Testament described a billboard on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem on which were inscribed the words, “The Messiah is coming.” In this case, the words of the biblical text signify a reality, namely, a billboard, and the billboard in turn signifies a further reality, namely, the coming of the Messiah. Is this a case of the spiritual sense as Saint Thomas defines it? It is not, because the billboard as such has being only as a sign; to describe the billboard and to state its signification are the same thing. The “things” that signify further things in the spiritual sense are things with their own integrity as beings in the world; one can give some account of what they are and how they connect to things around them without stating their signification. Saint Thomas offers a similar example. One might think that ceremonies of the Old Law commemorating God’s benefits would signify those benefits by way of the spiritual sense. After all, the words of the Old Testament signify the ceremony, and the historical ceremony itself signified a further thing. For example, the Passover celebration was not a word of Scripture but a thing, and it signified the Exodus from Egypt. But Saint Thomas maintains that “the significations of ceremonial laws that are commemorative of the benefits of God on account of which they were instituted. . . do not go beyond the order of literal causes.”10 A ceremony such as the Passover has its entire reason for being in its signification; it does not have its own integrity as a linear-historical event apart from signifying something; the “literal cause” linking it to other historical realities is precisely its signification. Properly understood, Saint Thomas’ definition of the spiritual sense does not apply to this case. Although Saint Thomas insists that the Old Testament thing has its own historical integrity, he does not divorce what it was historically from what it signified spiritually. Instead, once Saint Thomas has identified the “literal causes” of an Old Testament thing, he builds his understanding of the spiritual sense directly on that literal account.

His treatment of Old Testament ceremonies such as sacrifice is again a good example.11 The very nature of sacrifice, Saint Thomas says, is that man offers something to God from his own possessions as though to acknowledge that he has all his possessions and, indeed, his very self from God and that everything he has and is must be directed to God. This is the most important “literal cause” of the Old Testament sacrifice, namely, the need to represent and bring about a right disposition of the mind toward God. But the greatest gift that God could possibly give to mankind is the gift of his own Son in the Incarnation. Therefore, the sacrifice of his own Son was the most perfect of all sacrifices: “And for this reason all the other sacrifices were offered in the Old Law in order to figure this one unique and foremost sacrifice, as the perfect [is signified] by the imperfect.”12 The very fact that made sense of the Old Testament sacrifices in their own time and context, namely, that they really were sacrifices, grounds their signification of Christ’s perfect sacrifice. Of course, sometimes the divinely intended resemblance between one thing and another can be quite superficial. One reason God intended the liberation from Egypt to take place by a passage through water could be for the sake of an external resemblance to baptism. But in general, the spiritual sense is grounded in the natures of things rather than in their surface features. The Exodus prefigured baptism by its nature as a liberation from bondage to the enemies of God more than by the surface features of water and cloud. Let me summarize what has been said to this point. The literal and spiritual senses are two different ways of signifying: the literal sense uses signs that are only signs, whose whole purpose for being is to signify, while the spiritual sense uses signs that also have their own historical integrity and proper functions as things. Since only God, “the Author of things”, can use things in their historical integrity as signs, we end up with three necessary elements of a spiritual sense: (1) one real thing must bear a likeness to another; (2) the thing that is a sign must be connected to its historical context in other ways than simply by being a sign; (3) the likeness of the one reality to the other must be ordained by the divine will to signifying the other.

C. Conclusion: The Integrity of the Old Testament One strength of Saint Thomas’ account of the spiritual sense is that it avoids emptying the Old Testament of intrinsic theological worth.13 A comparison may clarify what I mean. In his treatise on beatitude, Saint Thomas asks whether man’s beatitude can consist in pondering the speculative sciences. As one would expect, Saint Thomas says that man’s beatitude is in heaven, in face-to-face communion with the triune God, but he does not resort to an either/or approach: “As was said above, man’s beatitude is of two kinds, one perfect, and the other imperfect. Now one must understand perfect beatitude as that which attains to the true notion of beatitude, and imperfect beatitude as that which does not so attain, but participates a certain particular likeness of beatitude.”14 Saint Thomas does not simply deny that man’s beatitude consists in thinking on the speculative sciences, but he calls that activity an imperfect beatitude, a participation in true beatitude. It does not have the full form of beatitude, but it does have the form of beatitude in a partial manner. In the same context, an objector argues that the final beatitude of man must consist in that which all men desire for its own sake; Aristotle says that “all men desire to know” and that the speculative sciences are sought for their own sakes; therefore, it would seem that the speculative sciences are man’s final end.15 Again, Saint Thomas does not respond by saying that only God is to be desired for his own sake, denying any truth to the objector’s position, but instead he responds in the language of participation: “Man naturally desires not only perfect beatitude, but also any kind of likeness or participation in it.”16 Saint Thomas freely grants that the speculative sciences are desired for their own sake, that is to say, for the goodness that is in them. They are not desired as means to a further end, to some goodness outside of them. But the goodness in them is an imperfect form of a greater goodness, and so love for the imperfect goodness of the speculative sciences is in fact an implicit love for the perfect goodness of true beatitude. Saint Thomas can say both that we should love the sciences for their own sake and that we should direct all our love to God.

His account of the spiritual sense of Scripture in terms of participation in Christ has the same effect. Using the same argument, we have to say that the rituals of the Old Testament were more than empty gestures pointing to a future of “real” worship. They pointed to Christ’s supreme sacrifice precisely because they were themselves real worship. Precisely because they were participations in the Paschal Mystery, they were good in themselves and intrinsically worthy of reverence.17 To take another example, when David was afraid because he had laid his hand upon the Lord’s anointed (1 Sam 24:5-6), he reverenced Saul in himself, because the Lord’s anointing was on him; but the essence of the anointing on Saul was a participation in the fullness of Jesus the Christ, and so David’s reverence was in fact a reverence for Christ.18 Because he sees the spiritual sense as Israel’s real participation in Christ, Saint Thomas insists on the robustness and integrity of the Old Testament realities themselves.

7

Divisions of the Spiritual Sense In chapters 5 and 6, we saw that the spiritual sense of Scripture arises from the general character of Scripture’s story. To unpack the traditional divisions of the spiritual sense into allegorical, moral, and anagogical, along with the even earlier notion of “recapitulation”, we have to dig farther into the story. If we trace the biblical story’s central conflict, its opening, its complication, and its eventual resolution, then the divisions of the spiritual sense will emerge of themselves. In retrospect, one can find compelling philosophical distinctions between these various kinds of spiritual sense, but unless the story comes first, the distinctions will seem contrived. We will begin by revisiting the story’s central conflict and resolution before looking into its complication and tension rising toward the climax. Finally, we will delve into Aquinas’ helpful philosophical distinctions. A. Recapitulation In its most basic form, the story of Scripture can be outlined in terms of the opening scene, the conflict, and the resolution. The opening scene or setting is God’s creation of mankind in his image and for the sake of union with him, a union suggested by the seventh day of rest (Gen 1:1-2:4). The fact that mankind is created last of all creatures and just before the day of rest and the fact of his dominion over the world suggest that he is an intermediary or priestly figure between the world and its goal; he must bring all creation back to God through worship. Mankind lives in close relationship with God even before entering the final rest, a relationship symbolized by the gift of the sacred garden where God’s presence is found (Gen 2). Mankind enjoys the gift of perpetual life, signified by the tree of life. The conflict enters when the first couple seeks to break out of their human limitations by grasping at likeness to God on their own

initiative instead of waiting for it as a gift (Gen 3). Their loss of closeness to God is signified by their expulsion from the sacred garden of his presence (note the reason behind Cain’s complaint in Genesis 4:14 about being driven away from the garden’s border), and their consequent inability to take from the tree of life shows that they are doomed to death. With the cosmic priest separated from God, the entire created world fails to achieve its purpose of returning to God through worship. It appears as though God’s plan in creating has been frustrated. The final resolution to the conflict, if we leap to the end, is the Incarnation and life of the Son of God. As we saw in chapter 2, the Incarnate Word is most of all the cosmic priest, most of all the union of God and man, and he brings the gift of eternal life. The cosmos, with mankind its ruler, participates in God’s perfection; that is to say, the cosmos has a partial share of God’s absolute perfection due to God’s act of creation. Because the Incarnation is the continuation into time of the procession of that Wisdom by which God made the cosmos, the created humanity of Christ brings the perfection of God into creation in a singular and unsurpassable manner. All the blessings lost in the beginning are returned and intensified. Based on this skeleton outline of Scripture’s story, one can describe the resolution by saying that Christ recapitulates the entire cosmos, especially mankind its ruler.1 “Recapitulate” is a term coined originally to describe something we do when we write: a capitulus (“little head”) is the heading or description at the beginning of a chapter, so recapitulate means “to go over the main points again”. After a long discourse, it is helpful to state again briefly the essential points so that the whole work, as it were, stands before the audience. Similarly, Christ carries out in his brief earthly life and small human nature the essential contents of the whole of cosmic and human history. But there is a difference: in a book or lecture, recapitulation condenses the whole by leaving out a great deal, that is, by having less perfection than the book or lecture, whereas Christ condenses the whole by containing it all in a more perfect and simpler manner. The mystery of the New Testament is both new and old, both unprecedented and a summing up of the original creation.

The mystery of the Old Testament involves recapitulation as well. As I have said before, God prepared for Christ’s resolution of the conflict by creating Israel as an anticipatory participation in Christ. That is to say, the history and institutions of Israel had a partial share in the form of Christ, in dependence on Christ as its exemplar. God did this so that men and women living before Christ could both know him contemplatively and ready his way practically. But when we combine this fact about Israel with the fact that Christ recapitulates creation, we see that Israel also recapitulated the whole of creation. Its likeness to the one who sums up mankind and the cosmos means that Israel, in a less perfect way, also sums up mankind and the cosmos. Just as Christ is the cosmic priest, so Israel is a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex 19:6), created to mediate between God and the nations; just as Christ’s body is the place where God and man live in the closest possible union, so Israel has a sacred land reminiscent of the Garden of Eden where God’s presence can be found (Ex 33:16); just as Christ brings eternal life, so Israel brought material prosperity and abundance of offspring. Wherever Christ recapitulates mankind, Israel echoes his recapitulation. Israel therefore occupies a middle place between cosmos and Christ, looking back to the one and anticipating the other. By looking forward, Israel also looked back; by participation in Christ, Israel also recapitulated creation. However, it often happens that we learn to see secondary things before we see primary realities. Because creation was all around while Christ was yet to come, the human authors of the Old Testament could see Israel’s recapitulation of creation more clearly and sooner than they could see its anticipation of Christ, and in fact they came to see Israel as anticipating Christ through seeing Israel’s recapitulation of creation. That is to say, they realized that their own history was pointing forward to something of cosmic significance because they already saw their history as pointing back to something of cosmic significance. As a result, the Old Testament’s backward glances toward creation are often striking and clear. For example, when Israel crosses the Red Sea and wins definitive independence from Egypt, the wind blowing over the water and the

parting of the waters to reveal dry land evoke the creation account in Genesis 1. Another example can be found in the Book of Exodus, when God gives Moses instructions for building the Temple: the text uses the phrase “the Lord said to Moses” to divide the instructions into seven parts, with the seventh being a sudden command concerning the Sabbath rest; it is easy to see a parallel with God’s command “Let there be” on the seven days of creation, with the seventh day being God’s day of rest.2 Or again, commentators have seen the parallels between the fall of Adam and the sin of the Golden Calf.3 Such examples could be multiplied, but suffice it to say that the Old Testament authors are clearly aware of Israel as a new Adam, a new mankind, a recapitulation of the original creation. When we read the Old Testament, we have to look not only for the spiritual sense, how Israel looked forward, but also for the backward-looking meaning captured by the term “recapitulation”. Incidentally, this is how God enabled Israel to be the true teacher and revealer even concerning something so remote and inaccessible as the creation of the world. By gazing into its own history under the light of faith, Israel could arrive at the notion that man in the beginning had a close relationship with God as well as a law and that by breaking God’s law he was expelled from a holy land. But this reminds us that there were many complications of the original conflict before its final resolution in Christ. To penetrate more deeply into the spiritual sense of Scripture, we have to trace the rising conflict on its way to crisis. B. Rising Conflict In their broad outlines, the complications of conflict in Scripture’s story show a recurring pattern: in waves of increasing intensity, God gives back the lost blessings, and they are lost again. The first wave is when he gives the blessings in promise to Abraham, swearing to him a sacred land, continued life through abundant descendants, and a blessing to all the nations, that is, an undoing of the original curse. These promises seem to be lost when Abraham’s children end up not only in a different land but enslaved and with all their

sons doomed to death. The people do not seem to wonder at all about their condition; the impression one gets is of apathy. The second wave comes with the Exodus, when God creates Israel as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex 19:6), gives them freedom from slavery and death under their enemies, and brings them to a sacred land where his presence will reside in the Tabernacle. This time the blessings are given not just in promise but tangibly, in a reality that one can see and feel. But by the end of the period of the Judges, the blessings appear to be either lost or wobbling: the people, incapable of fidelity to God, live in nearconstant subjection to their enemies, and the Ark of the Covenant itself has been captured and only returned by God’s direct intervention, and even then it returned only to dwell apart by itself because the people could not stand before their God.4 The people by this point have a serious question: Should we not have a visible king? The third wave comes with the anointing of David as king over Israel. God promises David a perpetual monarchic line and accepts Jerusalem as his sacred city, even going so far as to consecrate the Temple—and implicitly the soil it stands on—as a stable place of his presence, the clearest analogue yet to the Garden of Eden. Israel’s task of spreading the blessings of God far and wide is realized more than ever as first David and then Solomon expand the nation’s borders and bring Israel into contact and commerce with far distant peoples. But starting with Solomon and continuing with kings in both the north and the south, Israel’s monarchs throw the blessings away. In the end, Israel loses the monarchy, loses the land, loses the Temple, loses the ability to carry out the law, loses its very existence as a nation, and finds itself at its lowest point since Abraham’s descendants were enslaved in Egypt. There by the waters of Babylon Israel underwent a time of intense reflection on God’s purposes. It had seemed as though God’s covenant with Abraham was about land, prosperity, and Temple worship, and it had seemed as though his covenant with David was about kingship and power over the nations. But when Israel pursued these goods with enthusiasm, to the point of sacrificing justice for the

poor and the truth about the one true God, its master punished it to the point of taking away all these goods. Clearly, God’s blessings had something more important in view than the land of Israel, the monarchical power of David, and the Temple of Solomon. But what? What did God have in mind? And if these things were not what God really wanted, why did he give them as blessings to Israel? The faithful among the exiles began to understand that God had something much bigger in mind than they had previously assumed. God’s kingdom ultimately could not be limited to one small territory at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea; it had to be worldwide, all-encompassing. God’s elected king had to be something more than any king had ever been, a man who could fill the earth with peace by means of justice, one to whom all the nations would look as their rescuer from violence and oppression. God’s worship could not simply be the slaughtering of cattle and sheep; it had to be something at once more powerful and more interior. The land, the kingship, and the Temple had all been merely foretastes of something greater. These same faithful carefully gathered up Israel’s sacred writings and organized them in light of this new clarity. To the best of their ability, they brought out the provisional nature of all that had gone before and pointed to the definitive reality to come. The Prophets speak most clearly about what is to come, but even the historical books—the “Former Prophets”—testify to the prophetic perspective. Thus was born an awareness of the spiritual sense of Scripture. C. Relation of Spiritual and Literal Senses Our brief review of Scripture’s storyline further clarifies how the literal sense and the spiritual sense relate to one another. Briefly put, they are mutually dependent: the spiritual sense is always based on a literal interpretation of the text, and yet a full understanding of the literal sense requires an understanding of the spiritual sense. The first half of this dependence we have seen already. If the literal sense is the meaning of the words of the text while the spiritual sense is the meaning of the things described by the words, then clearly one can only know the things by understanding the words.

One cannot know the spiritual meaning of the Temple without first discerning that the words describe the Temple. Moreover, the spiritual sense is not grounded in a quick and facile reading of the text: recall how Saint Thomas finds the spiritual sense by looking at real things with their historical integrity, whose linear-historical links to their own place and time include more than their function as signs. Recall further how Saint Thomas grounds his spiritual interpretation of those realities precisely in their historical function. The spiritual sense requires a deep and meditative literal reading of the text, so that one penetrates to what sacrifice really was, to what monarchy really was, to what the land truly was. The spiritual sense is not a leap up from the literal sense but a penetration deeper and deeper into it until one has passed beyond what the words contain. At the same time, a full grasp of the literal sense requires some understanding of the spiritual sense. Our review of Scripture’s storyline brought out that the simple, literal narrative of the Old Testament is in part a story of how God brought Israel to understand the deeper meaning of its own history and institutions. That is to say, the literal sense itself is a story about discovering the spiritual sense. Failure to see the existence and at least something of the content of the spiritual sense means failure to grasp one of the major outcomes of the story at a literal level. Moreover, one reason God wanted Israelites to grasp the spiritual meaning of their own history and institutions was so that they could write it down. The spiritual sense does not leap out of Scripture regardless of the human author’s own depth of understanding. God employed the authors of Scripture as true authors, and so defects in the human authors made a real difference in how they wrote. For example, an author whose command of the Greek language is imperfect will write God’s truth ungrammatically, as we find sometimes in the New Testament. An author who does not know the physical structure of the universe will not assert false things about the structure of the universe, because God is using him to write his own word; but, on the other hand, neither will this author write with clarity and penetration about the structure of the universe. So with regard to the deep meaning of Israel’s history and institutions, an

author who has seen that deep meaning will bring it out much more clearly in his text than someone who has not. Consequently, we discover the spiritual sense of Scripture much more readily and confidently when the same signification is included in the human author’s literal meaning, at least at the level of implication or reading-between-the-lines. Because the human creators of the Deuteronomistic History already understood that the Temple pointed to something beyond itself, readers of that history are more likely to see how the Temple does that. Understandably, the authors of the Old Testament did not always grasp the meaning of the realities they spoke about, and they never grasped the full meaning of what they wrote about. This is one reason that the spiritual sense is not always clear. For example, it is not at all clear what the spiritual meaning would be of the two bronze pillars beside the door of Solomon’s Temple, one named Jachin and the other named Boaz. I will say more later about what we can do with such things, but for now the point is simply this: the human authors of Scripture were meant by God to see the meaning of things and consciously to include that meaning in their text, and so one cannot fully grasp the literal sense without seeing something of the spiritual. As my argument implies, the literal and spiritual senses can overlap in content. This is because the literal sense does not differ from the spiritual sense by signifying something different but by signifying in a different way. For example, Christ’s death on the Cross is the spiritual sense of Exodus 12 (the Passover) and the literal sense of Matthew 25. The difference between the spiritual and literal senses in this case is not what is signified—Christ’s death— but the fact that Matthew signifies it through words and Exodus through things. Sometimes the literal sense and the spiritual sense overlap even within the same text. The reason is that, while a human author cannot cause real things to signify, he can do something remarkably like it. For example, a clever author can write an allegorical story in which some characters are signs of other characters and some events signs of other events.5 A very clever author can even write a story about real events in such a way that George Washington, for

example, is a sign of a future president of the United States. But when human authors do this, the characters who are signs are only mental people, not real people, and the events are only mental events, not real events. Even in the case of the very clever author, the George Washington who is a sign of a future president is not the George Washington of history but the imaginary George Washington in the minds of the author and the reader. If we define the literal sense as Saint Thomas does, to include even what is implied between the lines of an author’s text, then George Washington’s significance in our example is a case of the literal sense. But for the reader, the experience of discovering this sense is very like the experience of discovering a true spiritual sense. Now suppose that our very clever author is an inspired author writing a story about King David of Israel. Suppose that he has grasped something of the spiritual meaning of the historical David and he has tried to build that meaning into his narrative. In this case, the imaginary David in the author’s mind signifies Christ, and the real, historical David outside of the author’s mind also signifies Christ. The imaginary David’s meaning falls within the literal sense, while the real David’s meaning falls outside of the literal sense, and yet they signify at least in part the same thing. In a case like this, the literal and spiritual senses are so close they might be said to kiss. But my example of a very clever author writing about King David raises a serious question. There are many, many non-biblical texts in the world that describe King David, some of them written by very clever authors, and in every case the text uses words to describe a thing that in turn has its own signification. Does this mean that all of these non-biblical texts have a spiritual sense? Is the spiritual sense of Scripture detachable, so to speak, from the words of Scripture, in such a way that it could be attached to any text that has the needed literal meaning? A non-inspired text describing David does not have a spiritual sense, because the human who authored the words did not author David: David’s meaning remains the meaning of the real man David and not the meaning of a book. The spiritual sense of Scripture is a sense of Scripture, of a book, because the primary author of

Scripture’s words also authors the historical realities described by those words. God thinks things into being. A human author can imagine George Washington this way or that way, but God by thinking about George Washington causes him really to be. Consequently, the real people and events of history stand in God’s book analogously to the imaginary people and events in a human book. Just as the meaning of George Washington in a clever human author’s book would be a meaning of the text, so the meaning of the real Temple is a meaning of God’s book, even though the Temple itself is something that stands outside the text. God’s book is as unified as any author’s book; the difference is simply that his thought is more powerful. D. Divisions of the Spiritual Sense I have said that Israel was intended to grasp the deeper meaning of its own history and institutions, at least partially. But a lot was left unclear. The Davidic king to come would be the conqueror and judge of the world as well as the suffering servant; his coming would be in humility and unrecognized by his contemporaries as well as terrifying to all the kings of the earth. All who wished to be saved would have to take part in his saving work, but how this participation would play out was portrayed in various ways. The Old Testament’s explicit portrait of the coming salvation is like a three-dimensional drawing in which everything seems strange and out of proportion until one finds the exact place to stand and view it—and no one had found that place. When Jesus finally came, it became clear why no one had found the right viewpoint before. To begin with, his very existence was a mystery of God’s personal invasion of time and space, which no one could have predicted any more than they could understand it after it had happened. But on top of that, it turned out that, just as before Christ’s coming, so also after Christ’s coming, God’s plan of salvation was to unfold in multiple waves. First Jesus came in humility as the suffering servant, unrecognized by the rulers of his day, but this coming was itself a preparation for his future coming as the conqueror and judge visible to all the world. In between his coming in humility and his coming in glory, his disciples are to go out

to all the world and spread the Good News about his humble coming and warn everyone about his coming as judge. Those who receive the news and believe it become members of Jesus’ Mystical Body, the Church, and follow in his path of suffering in order to be glorified with him.6 These three comings are clear in the writings of Luke. He identifies Jesus as the longed-for Christ (Lk 1:32-33); he asserts that in the Church Christ comes for a second time; and he teaches that Christ will come a final time at the end of the world, “as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other” (Lk 17:24).7 I have led many groups through a reading of Luke and Acts, and I have asked them, “According to these books, where is the kingdom of God?” Without prompting or guidance, every group has responded that the kingdom is present in Jesus himself during his earthly ministry (Lk 8:1; 10:9; 11:20; 17:20), the kingdom is present in the Church after his Ascension (note the parallel between the twelve apostles and the twelve tribes [Lk 22:30]), and the kingdom will finally come at the end of the age (Lk 19:11; 21:31). This threefold coming of Christ determines Scripture’s threefold spiritual sense. If the Old Testament foreshadowed Christ’s coming, but Christ’s coming is threefold, then the Old Testament’s foreshadowing is threefold. The traditional names for the senses of Scripture simply put names on this obvious narrative fact: when a person or event from Israel’s history offers a foreshadowing of the mystery of Christ’s coming in humility, that is called the allegorical sense; when the humble coming thus foreshadowed is itself a foretaste of the mystery of Christ’s coming in glory, that is called the anagogical sense; finally, when the foreshadowed coming of Christ reveals something about his coming in the Church, namely, our union with the mysteries of his life, this is called the moral sense.8 Because it is the structure of Scripture’s story, the threefold coming is also experienced as a natural sequence of thought in meditating on Scripture. Reading something in the Old Testament leads me to ponder how it foreshadows Christ; thinking of this aspect of Christ’s life leads to wondering how it plays out in my life as a

member of Christ’s Mystical Body; seeing my life in Christ as a share in his crucifixion, and seeing how weakly I live it out, I look forward with desire to the fulfillment of all things in Christ’s Final Coming and the resurrection of the dead. Meandering thought finds many other paths through the wilderness of Scripture, but this particular sequence of thoughts offers itself as a path of least resistance and, therefore, a clear and well-worn trail. The tradition of the three senses of Scripture is not only a classification of meanings but a map for prayerful reading.9 The distinctions made in the previous chapter demonstrate that allegory, moral sense, and anagogy differ formally rather than materially. They are not just ways of naming texts about Christology, texts about morality, and texts about eschatology but truly different ways biblical texts can signify. Israel’s history and institutions point to Christ’s First Coming in two ways: Inasmuch as Christ brought the perfect way to God—the perfect sacrifice, the perfect king, and so on —Israel participated in the First Coming, signifying it as the imperfect signifies the perfect. But inasmuch as Christ brought something provisional—an imperfect union with God through faith and sacraments, a life in which physical death is still necessary, and so on—Israel pointed to the First Coming by anticipating it, the way lukewarm water in a kettle points to hot water. Together, these are the allegorical sense of the Old Testament. The moral sense is built on the allegorical sense. By pointing to Christ in his First Coming, Israel points to what we should do in our lives, because our lives on this earth are a participation in Christ’s earthly life. Note the difference between allegory and the moral sense: Israel signifies Christ because Israel is imperfectly what he is perfectly or more perfectly; Christ in turn signifies us because he is perfectly what we are imperfectly, because the head is over the members. Lastly, the anagogical sense is built on that part of the allegorical sense where Israel points to Christ’s First Coming by anticipation. That is to say, Israel points to the Final Coming of Christ by pointing to the provisional aspects of his First Coming, as lukewarm water in

the kettle points to boiling water precisely by tending toward hot water. This division seems to be what Saint Thomas has in mind in his most mature treatment of the senses of Scripture:10 “According therefore as the things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law there is the allegorical sense; but according as those things done in Christ or in things that signify Christ are signs of the things we should do, there is the moral sense, and insofar as they signify the things that are in eternal glory, there is the anagogical sense.” E. Conclusion: The Use of the Spiritual Sense I have pointed out how the existence of the spiritual sense is a consequence of God’s intention for Israelites: as we learn by contemplating Christ, so they learned by contemplating Christ in Israel. But once Christ has come, what good is the spiritual sense to us? Paradoxically, it might seem that once the full clarity of the spiritual sense has arrived with the Incarnation of the Word, its usefulness has ended. Such is not the case. The very fact that Christ recapitulates all of Israel in himself means that we need Israel to understand Christ; the very fact that Christ brings full clarity to Israel’s history and institutions means that we need that history and those institutions to comprehend him. One might say that Christ is like white light, while the various events of Israel’s history and institutions of Israel’s government and religion shared in various aspects of Christ’s light: here we have the red light of the sacrifices, there the golden light of the kingship, here the blue light of the Ark of the Covenant, there the orange of the Exodus. In Christ, priest, sacrifice, victim, and altar are all the same; how would we understand him if we had only encountered all of these things in a single, white beam? In Christ, God, mediator, and king are all one; how would we talk about Christ if we did not have these functions unpacked for us in something less than the blinding light of final revelation? One thinks of how the author of the Letter to the Hebrews develops his Christology and soteriology by appealing to the categories of the Mosaic Law.

The revelation of God is not like so many bits of information, so that Christ contains all the bits of information and relegates everything before him to the revelatory dustbin. To grasp revelation is not to accumulate facts but to see a vision, and our eyes only slowly adjust to the full light of the vision Christ offers. Like a man who has walked out of the night into a brightly lit house, our eyes need to seek the shadows at first to help us adjust. The spiritual sense of the Old Testament allows us to approach the ocean by little streams. Moreover, what the Gospel brings immediately to fulfillment is the allegorical sense of the Old Testament. The Gospel realities themselves point on to the moral and anagogical senses as yet to be probed, and they do so in ways aided by the Old Testament. The Church as “the people of God”, for example, would not be clear unless we read the New Testament through the lens of the Old. The portrayal of each believer as a “temple of the Holy Spirit” would be difficult to grasp without the lens of the Old Testament story. But these are not the only reasons a Christian still needs the Old Testament. The literal sense is also inherently valuable to Christians, as we will see in the next chapter.

8

The Literal Sense If sheer quantity is any measure, God’s favorite biblical books are those that tell a story: by an enormous margin, stories make up the biggest part of Scripture, and the remaining books are mostly commentary on the stories. When the tradition distinguishes between the literal and spiritual senses, the “literal sense” is usually assumed to be a story—even though, technically speaking, every text of Scripture has a literal sense.1 Despite all this, it is hard to find in the tradition a clear account of why story should be important for the Bible.2 Origen allows as how there are good things for simple minds in the literal sense, because it offers examples of good morals; Saint Thomas Aquinas trots out this same argument for the importance of history in Scripture.3 But the fact that we can pick through the story of Scripture to find some good examples for use in preaching hardly explains the dominance of story in the canon. Saint Thomas argues that one cannot bypass the literal sense because it is the only way of getting to the spiritual;4 but this is rather like arguing that walnut shells are important because one can only get to the walnut through the shell. Remember chaff: it surrounds the wheat! Saint Thomas privileges the literal sense when he says that only the literal sense offers a basis for theological argument; this is not entirely true, but even if it were true, it would not answer our question about the importance of story. It would only mean that one can translate story into another form of speech, namely, argument.5 In the present chapter, I will attempt to use the resources provided by the tradition, especially Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas, to fill in what I see as a gap in their explicit account of why the literal sense is important. My thesis is, first, that story is important in itself for human beings, not just as a gateway to other things; and,

second, that the story of Scripture takes story and its importance to the limit. As Jesus is more “man” than men, so Scripture is more “story” than stories. To make this case, I will need to say more about how the literal sense works and how it relates to human fulfillment. This is a tall order, because with reference to Scripture, the literal sense includes the usual force of the words, metaphorical meanings, and everything implied by the text—whatever an author could convey through words.6 Consequently, to ask “How does the literal sense work?” amounts to asking “How do texts mean?” An answer would need a lifetime to work it out and a bookshelf to hold it, and the question is even more complex because our assumptions about and experiences of texts have shifted over the past several centuries.7 Given the scope of this book, I will not try to say even close to everything about how the literal sense works; instead, I will focus on how story fits into the human scene. To locate story in the human scene, I will have to discuss what stories are about, namely, events and sequences of events. How we understand events will depend on how we think about time, the way that events unfold themselves. But when we think about “time” and “event”, we are right in the area where a shift took place in the modern age, namely, when “time” began to be considered apart from its counterpart, “eternity”. So ultimately, in order to probe the literal sense of Scripture, I will have to begin with the primary author of Scripture, God. A. Time and Eternity In a previous chapter, I noted that the wisdom literature of the Old Testament points to a three-tiered structure of participation: wisdom exists in God, in the world, and in the mind of man, and yet the personification of wisdom as a woman asserts that wisdom is in a way the same reality in all three contexts.8 Both the material world and the mind of man participate in God. To situate narrative texts within the human scene, I need to return to these three tiers and explore each one from a new point of view, namely, “self-presence”.9

God’s self-presence is utter, absolute, a fact we usually express by saying he is “eternal”. Saint Thomas Aquinas, following Saint Boethius, says that God’s eternity is “the simultaneously whole and perfect possession of endless life”.10 One can approach an understanding of this definition by a series of contrasts with a creature: My life is spread out over days and years. What I was as a child is not what I was as a teenager, and neither of those is what I am now, and what I am now is not what I will be when I am older. The things I did as a child are not the things I did as a teenager or things I do as an adult, and even the things I do on a given day are separated from one another, one at this time, another at that time, and another later in the day. In short, I do not possess my life all at once. What would it be like to do all the things I have ever done or ever will do, but to do them all at once? What would it be like to have my childhood, my teenage years, my adult life, and my days of old age all present to me at once? But my life on this earth is a fairly brief one, which Scripture compares to the grass of the field. All the things I have ever done or ever will do would stop far short of all the things ever done by the entire human race, and yet even the history of the entire human race spans only so many years. What would it be like to possess and do simultaneously all the things that were ever done or would be done or could be done in an endless life? And yet even this falls short of eternity. God’s simultaneous and whole possession of unending life is not a doing of many things at once, because even that would involve some lack of self-presence, a spreading of himself in many directions. Instead, God’s eternity is a single act containing within itself all the perfections conceivable in a multitude. His life is absolutely one, without extension or duration; he is utterly present to himself. While God’s utter self-presence is described as “eternity”, the material creature’s fragmentary and partial self-presence is summed up in the word “time”. For a human being or for any other material creature, what has been done is past and no longer exists while

what is still to be done is the future and does not exist yet; the only time that exists is the present moment. If we look closely at a paintbrush that produces a masterwork, we discover that the paintbrush itself has nothing more than a motion here or a motion there; the unity of the various motions is not in the paintbrush but in the painter’s mind, which holds together all the motions and their relation to the master-work. Similarly, the material world has only a moment and a moment and a moment; the unity of all moments in a single sweep of time is not in the world but in the eternity of God, from which time receives its existence. In itself, the world would be utterly fragmented; in its dependence on God’s eternity, it reflects the unity of his life and wisdom. Human memory reflects God’s eternity. As Saint Bonaventure says, “In its first activity, the actual retention of all things in time— past, present, and future—the memory is an image of eternity, whose indivisible present extends itself to all times.”11 As God’s eternity unifies time in an objective way so that history really is one, so human memory unifies time in a subjective way, gathering up the disparate moments into a single, coherent stream so that men can experience time as one despite its ephemerality. The world as it exists in the human mind stands in between the world as it is in itself and the world as it exists in God: in itself, the world has a fragmented career; in God its source, the world’s history is absolutely one; in the human mind, the world has an imperfectly but really unified development. Without memory, human life would be as fragmented as the career of a rock or a chemical element. The human person would have no subjective identity, no realization that the same thing acting now is the same thing that has acted previously; with no memory at all, there would not even be a realization that the person is acting now, because “acting” takes place over time. We live in our memories as a fish in water, and as a result we tend to overlook the degree to which our cognitive life is an exercise of memory. So far I have linked eternity to time. Now I want to link time to memory, and memory to event.

B. Memory and Event Our everyday experience of “events” is closely tied to the fact that memory images eternity. To see this, we have to understand that memory is a power of knowing and that every power of knowing enhances or enriches its object in fruitful ways. Both as a passive power and as a kind of active power, memory enriches the material world to produce the event.12 Memory as a passive power is a way of receiving the indivisible moments of the world’s unfolding. By its nature, knowing is a way of receiving, and, as the Scholastic dictum has it, everything received is received in the mode of the receiver. That is to say, every act of knowing must involve a marriage of the knower and the known, because the object to be known must be drawn into the knower and so endowed with the knower’s way of being.13 For example, sensation happens when the sense organ receives the object sensed, and as a result the object sensed comes to be present somehow in the sense organ. Through sight, the rocks “out there” in the world are received into a human person, although because they are received in the person they lose their material way of being and take on a new way of being; if they did not, everyone who saw rocks would have rocks in his head. Similarly, intellectual understanding requires that a sensible object be received into the immaterial soul. Of course, the immaterial soul cannot receive anything in a material way, so when the sensible object is drawn into the immaterial soul, it takes on a spiritual way of being and so acquires a universality it did not have by itself. The general truth that the known takes on the knower’s way of being does not mean that knowing betrays the object known; rather, it means that knowing really does bring subject and object together in a fruitful union. The memory, as a knowing power, also follows this rule. It receives the fragmented “now” and “now” and “now” into itself and by doing so gives them its own more stable way of being. The result is that we perceive time as a continuous quantity, like a line or a surface. The very ephemerality of the present moment, the way even its indivisible moment of existence is a moment of yielding to the next moment,

provides a real foundation for understanding all moments together as something continuous. The reality of motion, each moment of which is a moment of causing something further, offers a precursor to continuity even before the memory goes to work. So by enriching the object, the memory carries the object farther in its own line rather than introducing something foreign. Nonetheless, the stability of time, the simultaneous existence of segments of time, is a perception arising from the union of memory and its object. Consequently, when we speak of an “event”, we are already thinking about something as it exists in the human memory. Because the memory is really a power of knowing, the event is something objective and true, and yet it is as much a fusion of memory and object as color is a fusion of material thing and sense organ. Color is real and in the world, but the experience of red is not; action really takes place in the world, but our experience of a unified “event” is already something in the memory. In the case of memory, our unification of the many moments of the world’s unfolding takes us closer to the way the world preexists in God’s eternity, closer to the material world’s own inner truth than the material world itself can come. All of this is what happens when memory receives the fragmented “now” and “now” of time. But in addition to endowing its object with stability simply by receiving it, memory also enriches its object in an active way. Again, this is because of the general fact that memory is a power of knowing, and human knowing powers creatively fill in gaps in order to know things better. Some examples will clarify what I mean. If I enter a dark room in my house, I really see very little: a patch of white here, a dot of light there, a few odd lines. But I usually do not notice how scant my actual vision is, because my familiarity with the room combines with my imagination to generate a view of the walls and the furniture and so on as though I really saw it all. It happens so quickly and so automatically that I only notice myself filling in the gaps when something goes wrong. If someone moves the furniture or puts the vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room, my familiarity with what should be in the room may combine with my imagination to

generate a clear view of a witch or a goblin—again, as though I really saw it. This is why, for example, my children have never wanted to sleep with the closet door open: their imaginations interact with the random patterns of white sleeves and shirt-fronts to create monsters creeping up from the abyss. But apart from these rare cases, my visual filling of the gaps is a powerful tool that allows me to move around in the real world without getting hurt.14 The same thing happens in our intellectual pursuits. Most of the time we do not entirely understand what we are studying, but without trying or even being aware of it, we create mental models of what must be the case, and we use these mental models to interpret what we discover. The scientific method amounts to a way of using this process consciously and critically so that we will create the best model we can and use it only so long as it is fruitful. It may seem strange to say that we can know the world by inventing causal relationships between things, and yet this is what a theory is, a set of creatively fabricated causal relationships. The successes of modern science testify to how powerful this creative way of knowing can be. This creative filling-in of gaps also happens constantly in our perception of events. What we actually know of a person are a few outward actions and a few words, all of which admit of many interpretations. But our imagination of what it would be like if we did and said those things combines with our general opinion of that person to generate a view of his motives and beliefs seemingly even clearer than our vision of a goblin in the dark room. Consequently, the memory does not simply store information, like the hard drive on a computer, but unifies what it gathers by giving it a rational structure.15 And again, I have to emphasize that the memory does this, not to betray the event, but really in order to know it. Memory is a way of understanding. Failures here are common. We often realize we have misunderstood someone, and even more often we realize we have been misunderstood. The suspect who seemed obviously guilty turns out to be innocent, while the last person we would have suspected turns out to be a criminal. But most of the time, this enriching of experience with rational structure is marvelously

successful; because of it, we walk confidently through the world of personal interactions with only occasional awkwardness. And the alternative, not filling in the gaps, would be far worse: we would be awash in various and fragmented sensations, paralyzed, afraid to act, like a man in a dark room who can only see a few disparate patches of light. All of this affects what we call an “event”. An event is not only a stable and continuous thing, made possible by the reception of the “now” in memory, but it is also a rationally structured thing. Some of the event’s rational structure is received from the material world itself, and the rest is completed by our filling in of the gaps. The essential thing to see is that this rational completion is not something we do to the event after we have perceived it but is part of the process of perceiving it. By the time we call something an event, it is already to some degree a rationally structured thing. We may reunderstand and re-structure it several times, but we would not think of it as “an” event at all unless it had already been grasped as somehow rationally coherent, as one thing.16 To this point I have linked eternity to time, time to memory, and memory to event. Now I want to link event to narrative. C. Event and Narrative Although our perception structures experience to some degree as it comes in, this does not provide nearly enough coherence for a truly human life. This automatic process is usually enough to unify individual events in a provisional way, but it is rarely enough to grasp the individual event thoroughly, and it is never enough to pull together a long string of events into a larger whole. Human beings need a level of identity and continuity that can only arise from conscious reflection on past events. The person who fails to reflect comes across as inconstant, a kind of butterfly, lacking a permanent center on which one can depend. This person is less “put together” and seems like less of a person.17 On the other hand, the one who habitually recalls past experiences and joins them to his present awareness lives as an image of God. As a result, human beings not

only need to perceive and remember events but also to reflect on them. I use the word “reflect” because the person has already perceived the event and knows it, but now the person needs to “bend back” his perception upon itself and re-perceive the event. A human person is like a cow with its several stomachs: to perceive and remember is already a kind of chewing and swallowing of experience and a first digestion, but the digested experience must be brought back up for a re-chewing and re-digestion. One can reflect on an event in several ways. For example, one might look back over many events and try to abstract from them something common, or one might try to see how certain universal ideas apply to the event. Human beings need these kinds of reflection, but they lead the event to exist in the mind as something other than an event: a universal principle is not an event, nor is an analysis. The kind of reflection that leads to narrative is one that reflects on the event in its own mode, by discovering more thoroughly the networks of cause and effect, by seeing more clearly the agents at work, all the while seeing these things in the mode of something unfolding over time. This reflection on the event in its own mode does not lead to lessons derived from the experience but leads to the experience itself existing more perfectly in the mind. It takes the event, already partially a result of rational activity, and perfects it in its own line, makes it to be more truly itself. Sometimes this kind of reflection is done simply by replaying and reliving the event in one’s mind until it is seen more clearly. I am not aware of any special name for this particular mode of reflection. But due to the close relation between words and reason, often reflection on an event in the mode of an event is carried out by means of words, either words spoken interiorly or words spoken to others.18 We translate our memory into words, giving the event a new, verbal mode of being in the mind. Thoughts by themselves are difficult to think about and work on because they tend to stand in the middle of our thinking effort instead of out in front of it where we can see them clearly. Every thought has an imaginative component, some kind of sensory impression that accompanies the intellectual act, but the

imaginative elements native to thought are too much a part of the thought to objectify it sufficiently. Words give thought a new way of being in sound or sight that gives them enough distance from us that we can see what we have been thinking.19 Everyone knows that we grasp our own thoughts more clearly by “talking them out”, and often we understand our experiences clearly for the first time in the process of speaking them to someone else. To give the event a verbal mode of being is a mode of reflection, a way of re-chewing and digesting the event.20 The words we use when we talk something out point to the difference between reflecting on an event in its own mode and reflecting on an event in the mode of something else. The words “he acts”, for example, signify a man’s deed in the manner of a deed, as something that unfolds over time and proceeds from an agent. The words “his action” signify the same reality, but signify it as though it were a static object, not unfolding over time, but possessed all at once, not proceeding from an agent, but belonging to an owner. This different way of signifying does not confuse us into supposing that “his action” was not really an action, but it translates the man’s deed into a mode not its own for the sake of reflection. This different way of signifying is especially apt for abstracting principles or for applying them, as when we apply moral principles to say, “His action was morally bad.” But when we use words to reflect on an event in the mode of an event, then we especially use words that signify in the manner of an action: “He kicked the sleeping child.” The moral badness of the action is not spelled out in those words, but the action itself stands forth in our minds as a morally bad act unfolding over time and from an agent and in the concrete way that makes it bad. Translating the event into a verbal mode of being still allows the event to exist as an event in our minds. This is “narrative” in its primordial sense: a narrative is the event itself reflectively understood in its own mode by means of words. Making narrative, telling stories, is natural and necessary for a fully human existence, because without it our experience—our very life—

remains raw, partially digested, and lacking unity.21 Only in narrative does memory image God’s eternity to its full ability.22 There is another, secondary kind of “narrative”. When we hear the words “narrative” or “story”, we often associate them with fictional stories as opposed to historical or biographical accounts. I think our contemporary culture experiences too much of an opposition between history and fiction, as though they were fundamentally different kinds of activity. At some point in the transition from antiquity to modernity, we began to set “memory” in opposition to “imagination”, with memory being mere rote recall and imagination being linked to creativity and intelligence.23 Along with this came a contrast between merely perceiving the world in an objective way, as in history and science, and creating our own fictional world that emancipates us from the tyranny of the real.24 In reality, history and fiction are closely allied activities. On the one hand, I pointed out above that historical narrative itself involves a creative act whereby we endow time with stability and fill in the gaps in our perceptions. On the other hand, making a fictional narrative uses the same powers we employ all the time for perceiving reality: once the seed of an idea has been planted, the story writer fills it out using exactly the same ability that would allow him to “see” a friend’s real motive in a conversation. For all that their work is described as “creative”, as though they pulled stories out of thin air, fiction writers themselves talk to one another in terms of “discovering” their plot and “getting to know” their characters like real people; they even complain about certain characters getting out of control, disobeying the author, and taking over a scene. The subjective experience of writing fiction is one of exercising a knowing power. This is not to deny that there is a difference between history and fiction. As we pass from history to fiction, the emphasis shifts from that aspect of perception by which we receive what happened toward that aspect of perception by which we fill in the gaps in our reception. As a result, we leave behind the individuals existing in the world, although not the way philosophy does. Philosophy moves beyond individual existing things by abstraction, by shifting to a

different and more immaterial way of knowing. Fiction moves beyond individual existing things but continues to use the same power and way of knowing that we employ on individuals. After discarding several shallow accounts of the difference between poetry and history, Aristotle concludes: [The difference] consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do.25

This claim remains true across the spectrum of fiction from realism to fantasy. Very realistic fiction, such as the tragic plays Aristotle had in mind, considers how a certain type of person would act. Less realistic fiction, like those whose main characters are talking animals, considers what types of persons there are in the world. Fantasy fiction investigates the nature of the world’s fundamental laws by finding out what would happen if some of them were different and so, in the process, reminds us of what the world’s fundamental laws actually are.26 All the while, fiction never abstracts, never moves away from the mode of the individual, but remains an exercise of that same power by which we perceive events in the world. Fiction, like story in general, is a mode of reflection.27 Because it is the exercise of a distinct faculty, it has a pleasure distinct from that of philosophy, and yet the pleasure of fiction has rightly been described as a “shock of recognition”, the thrill of knowing.28 Like history, fiction is a fundamental human way of giving our lives a more eternal and rational way of being. D. Storytellers As I noted above, a person can create a story by speaking to himself, internally, or by speaking out loud to another person. Even for understanding a small experience, however, it is often helpful to speak to another person, as the nature of speech suggests: if words

are helpful because they give our thoughts a bit of separation from ourselves, words addressed to another have even more of this character. For understanding one’s life as a whole, conversation with others seems indispensable because life as a whole is such a tremendous action to unify that we need all the help we can get and because often we need help recalling the relevant parts. But this is not all. The larger reason we need conversation with others to understand our total life story is that man does not live his life as only his own. He belongs to a society, and he lives his life as a member of that society.29 If we were monads, cut off from all others, perhaps we could tell our own story ourselves. But if we are truly parts of a whole, then our life story is part of a larger story that has a wider scope than our own action and spans more time than our own life. The aspect of perception that is simple reception of experience must be widened to encompass the whole “event”. It requires taking in what others tell us. Even if it were possible for every person to live the entire duration of a society’s existence and to be present for everything that happened in that society’s career, we would still need others to complete our story. We could take in the “event” ourselves with respect to passive reception, but that aspect of perception which is a filling in of gaps would happen differently for all of us. If we did not enlist others to help us, that second digestion of the event which is narrative would differ even more, and our society would have no one story, no one identity. Consequently, Americans need both personal stories and an “American story”; family members need both personal narratives and the “family tale”. Every society and even every smaller community within a society needs identity and continuity through a narrative, and the members of those societies and communities need to see how their personal stories fit into the larger narratives of the several groups to which they may belong. If every society has its tradition by which it hands on the totality of its interior wealth, we can say more specifically that a key element of that tradition must be the society’s life narrative.30

If what really happened in the past is somehow lost or inadequate to the purpose, then fiction will have to supply what should have happened. This is what Virgil did for Rome, what Homer did for Greece, and what legends like that of George Washington and the cherry tree do for America: even though they are fictional, they tell their societies who they are. One way or another, the story must be had if the society is to have any identity. That societies need stories means that societies need storytellers, weavers of narratives. These individuals yield themselves to the societal tradition, become an extension of it, and speak in its name, providing for an entire society the experience individuals have when they suddenly realize who they have been all their lives. The maker of narratives first receives himself from the society and then gives the society to itself. In literate cultures, societies need authors who will steep themselves in the cultural literary canon and add something to it through that “extinction of personality” Eliot describes.31 The authors who do this give the society’s life a single, coherent, verbal existence in the hearts of the members. Previously, I said that every act of knowing involves a “marriage” of the knower and the known. While every member of a society brings his unique self to the marriage—and I will consider the reader’s reception at greater length in a later chapter—the storytellers act as matchmakers between society and events, ensuring that they meet in the best way and to the best end. In the marriage of two persons, the marriage is one thing and the begetting of offspring another, but this “marriage” of knower and the object is the same thing as their begetting of knowledge; if the knowers are the members of society and the known is the society’s total life, one might also describe storytellers as midwives who bring narrative to a happy birth.32 E. The Literal Sense of Scripture Everything I have said about narrative applies to Scripture, the supernatural canon of the supernatural society.33 The Church, too, has a life, a supernatural one, that like all life consists of actions. Her head and exemplar, Jesus Christ, came to earth not only to teach but

also to do (Acts 1:1), and his life not only recapitulated the whole story of mankind but also fit into the sweep of mankind’s career at a particular time and place. As Saint John Paul II says, “God entered the history of humanity and, as a man, became an actor in that history, one of the thousands of millions of human beings but at the same time Unique!”34 As his recapitulation of all mankind grounds the spiritual sense of Scripture, so his entrance into the sweep of history grounds the literal. Consequently, the Church’s canon, too, must have a great narrative that gives her deeds a new verbal existence in the mind of each believer. Christ’s members must not only pattern their lives on Christ as on an exemplar but also fit the steps of their journey into the long course of the Church’s pilgrimage. An example may clarify what I mean. The Book of Ruth offers what at first glance is the story of two women.35 It is presented, not as an argument or as a catalogue of undigested facts, but as a narrative, a carefully constructed action unfolding in four scenes with a prologue and an epilogue: when Naomi loses everything, Ruth follows her home to take care of her; Ruth receives a kindness from Naomi’s relative, Boaz, who allows her to glean in his fields; Naomi advises Ruth to seek marriage with Boaz, which she does; Boaz redeems both Naomi’s property and Ruth. Each scene turns on one central dialogue, replete with beautiful, gentle speech and even wordplays; the characters are not ciphers for something else but individuals acting the way that individuals in that time and place would act.36 The event, reflectively crafted, unfolds in its own mode through the artistry of words. But the first line of the story tells us that this happened “in the days when the judges ruled”, which immediately ties the story to the history of Israel (Ruth 1:1; cf. 4:7). Ruth’s fidelity to Naomi means leaving her own people and risking the status of a perpetual foreigner, and her redemption at the hand of Boaz is her becoming an Israelite forever. The story of these two women is also a story about Israel and the nations. At the same time and inseparably, theirs is a story about turning to the Lord: as Ruth says to Naomi, “Your people shall be my people,

and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). The Book of Judges tells us that “the days when the judges ruled” was a time when Israel was repeatedly unfaithful to God, suffered famine and conquest as a consequence, and regained the Lord’s favor when it repented and returned to him. This historical cycle is evoked by the famine in the first chapter of Ruth that leads Naomi’s husband to leave Israel (Ruth 1:1) and by the comment later that “the Lord had visited his people and given them food” (Ruth 1:6). The story of Ruth is a story about turning to the Lord in a time of mercy and finding redemption at the hand of his people. But even further, the last chapter of the story reveals that Ruth was the grandmother of King David, whose monarchy dominates the story of the Old Testament, and, as a result, her name appears in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. One Gentile woman’s beautiful action turns out to be one small part of a long, complex action that culminates in the Incarnation of God and the opening of salvation to all the Gentiles. All of this exemplifies the literal sense of Scripture: the life-action of the people of God reflectively understood in its own mode by means of words. The nature and importance of the literal sense is most of all evident in the Gospels, because they present the life-action of Jesus Christ, the head and exemplar of the people of God. As Dei Verbum 18 says, “It is common knowledge that among all the Scriptures, even those of the New Testament, the Gospels have a special preeminence, and rightly so, for they are the principal witness for the life and teaching of the incarnate Word, our savior.” That is to say, the Letters of Paul or the Catholic Epistles offer invaluable statements about Jesus, but only the Gospels present Jesus himself, concretely, in his own mode.37 By ancient custom, we acknowledge this unique presence of Jesus especially in the liturgy. We hear the letters of Paul and, indeed, most of the New Testament sitting down, but we stand to hear the Gospels; the text of the Gospels is elevated, venerated, and kissed; after a reading from Paul, we say, “Thanks be to God”, but after a Gospel reading, we say, “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ”, as though speaking to the Lord present in the text.38

This liturgical encounter marks out the importance of narrative unmistakably: Christian faith is not primarily adherence to propositions but adherence to Christ, the reality about which the propositions speak. Consequently, the genre of writing that presents Christ’s deeds in the mode of deeds and Christ’s person in the mode of a concrete person is the most fundamental genre in Scripture. In the Gospels, the object of faith, the rich reality that we must grasp and take on ourselves, itself meets the reader.39 F. Conclusion In many ways, the Church’s narrative is like the narrative of any other society. But because the Church is a supernatural society, and her canon a supernatural canon, her narrative excels every other societal story. It is the story, not just of a nation, but of all mankind, of every nation and tribe; its action begins, not with a distant political founding, but with the creation of the world; its story does not just explain the past but races ahead to the end of time. In this narrative, the believer discovers that he is part of the greatest whole possible, a whole bigger even than mankind, embracing countless ranks of angels. While every societal narrative brings to mind the antecessores who have blazed the path before us, the Church looks to the past and finds herself surrounded by “so great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1), all the great figures of her past now living and praying and encouraging her on her way. But the greatest dignity of the sacred text is that God is its author. Even as God worked in and through human storytellers, God attached his own voice to their words and took personal responsibility for their story. He made himself the primary author, the primary creator of the narrative. In the literal sense of Scripture, the very one who created the events of history wants to be, himself, the “matchmaker” between the believer and the event, between the knower and the known. Because the human authors of Scripture were inspired and reflected on Israel’s history with a graced insight, the biblical narrative give us the only history that really achieves what every history wants to be, an inner account of why things really happened.40 Piercing through the mundane reasons why Assyria attacked and conquered Palestine, for example, the sacred authors

declare that it happened as a consequence of Israel’s sins and in order to prepare for the Messiah. Every other history offers us a series of contingent events with a plausible filling in of causal connections; the sacred story connects its series of events directly to the first cause of all things, God, and shows us how the unfolding action fulfills his eternal mandate. If memory, event, and narrative constitute our participation in God’s eternity, the biblical story goes farther than every other, giving us, in the way we can receive it, our story as it exists in God’s mind.

9

Literary Forms In the previous chapter, I offered a basic answer to the question, “How do texts mean?” and I drew on that answer for a first look at the literal sense of Scripture. Even though I restricted my focus to narrative, my account of how texts mean was exceedingly general, abstracting from the many specific ways that different kinds of narratives convey meaning. Because God chose to employ men as true authors of his word, his word shows the full range of human expression: poetry, satire, chronicle, and so on, with the palette of expression available to the author changing over time. After recalling the importance of true human authorship, Dei Verbum emphasizes this variety of expression: To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to “literary forms.” For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture.1

Our age has here something new and important to contribute to the tradition. Although good interpreters in every age have had some awareness of different literary forms, focusing on this principle and bringing out its full import is one of the jewels in the crown of modernity. Paradoxically, however, modern readers are also tempted to undersell the importance of the very principle modernity has nourished. The problem has to do with the ancient and modern ways of experiencing time. Ancient man had at least two ways of experiencing time. The first I have described already: it is the mindset of tradition. Key terms for this mode of experience are “ancestors” and “tradition”, pointing to those who have gone before us on the path and to what they have

handed back to us as they went. In this mode, the ancestors have gone before; they have run the path on which we are now running; they are ahead of us on that path; they have given to us or delivered to us something, perhaps trail markers, instructions on how to walk, how to run, how to climb, what to avoid, where the dangers lie, equipment for the journey, instruction on what lies at the end of the path, and so forth. We are coming behind. We receive what they have given to us, and in turn we deliver it to those coming behind us. It is something like a relay race. The other ancient mode of experience is history. The word “history” comes from the Greek verb historeo, to inquire into or about a thing, and from the Latin historia, a narration of things past.2 In this mode of experiencing time, we are not following the ones who have gone before, nor are we receiving what has been delivered to us, nor are we running one leg of a relay: we are examining, we are inquiring, and more specifically we are inquiring about the past. The object of our mental endeavor is “the past”, namely, what has passed or what has been passed. We are moving away from the past, and as we move away, we look to see what it was, not what it is, for it is no longer. When we think in the mindset of tradition, in such a way that we imagine our ancestors as ahead of us, we are thinking of entrance into realities that abide: human nature, birth, life, death, faith, suffering. When we think in the mindset of history, we are thinking, no longer of abiding realities, but of the flow of time that bears the ark of the present ever farther away from the shores of creation. We do not think of ourselves as “ahead”—unless we think of our ancestors as excluded from the goal toward which time is tending!— but as increasingly distant. Modern man conceives of time differently, and his different conception yields a different experience. The distinctly modern conception of time is often attributed to the influence of nominalism, the view that human knowledge consists of attaching names to individuals. In the previous chapter, I outlined three levels of existence: God’s eternity, which gives shape to the world, and the new way of being this world takes on in human knowledge.

Nominalism denies the last step in this chain and thereby undoes the whole chain: knowledge is nothing but names of individuals, and so individuals in the world have no nature, no intrinsic “form” or “whatness”, and hence no participation in the divinity. As nominalism flattens the individual, so it flattens time. Whereas ancient man saw events as having a depth to them and time as arising from events, the nominalist sees events as flat, with no participation in eternity, and time as independent of events.3 The paradigmatic expression of time in modernity is the timeline: all its parts are homogenous; what differentiates one part from another is simply that the first is outside of the other. No one part can be said to “participate” or “enter into” another part. Events in history are like the parts on the timeline: they are merely units or counters, and the historian’s task is to get the counters into the correct order and explain how one counter has pushed or pulled another counter. For antiquity, events in history were like caverns inside of caverns, and the all-important thing was to explore within; for modernity, events in history are like billiard balls on a pool table that strike one another in a definite sequence, and the all-important thing is to discover the sequence. This new conception of time has led to a difference in how time is experienced. In the mindset of tradition, the ancients experienced their own lives as coming behind their ancestors and following in their footsteps; past history was something into which one entered. In the mindset of history, the ancients saw themselves as drifting farther and farther in time away from great events of the past. In contrast, moderns experience their passage through time as a forging ahead of their ancestors and a blazing of new trails. The ancient experience arises from the depth of history and the possibility of participating in the same realities as one’s forebears, while the modern experience arises from the flatness of history and the inevitable forward motion of an undifferentiated time. For the distinctively modern mindset, no abiding reality unites all times into a meaningful order; instead, what exists are indivisible moments of time, and each new moment totally negates the one before it in the

inexorable forward march. Here we see the beginnings of an ideology of progress that disparages memory and tradition. We can call the modern experience the mindset of progress. Its key words are “evolution” and “development”. Like tradition, the mindset of progress addresses the question of abiding realities. It attends to the material side of what things really are and notices that, materially, better things are more complex than simpler things, and beginnings are necessarily simple rather than complex. What is later is more complex and therefore better. We who are later, who have drifted farthest from the shores of creation, have made of ourselves something better than our ancestors; humanity then was not as noble as humanity now; we do not enter into the same birth, life, and death. What is important for our purpose is that the new way of experiencing time has led to a new experience of reading and writing. The modern mindset places a tremendous emphasis on originality and creativity, on being different from everyone before; the “pioneer” is our archetype. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, we have set up an exaggerated opposition between memory and imagination, between rote recall and creativity, between history and fiction.4 Creativity was important for an ancient author, but creativity was understood as entering into the stream of the tradition. One “ate” the authoritative texts by reading and memorizing, “ruminated” the texts by meditation, and finally “digested” the texts—made them one’s own flesh, so to speak—by composing one’s own discourse (which might or might not be written). One modified the tradition only after becoming its organ; one did not triumph over it. The new experiences of time and of reading and writing have led to a difference in how texts from the past are handled. The ancients took up the past as an inheritance into which they must enter, and so they handled past texts as things to be venerated but, nonetheless, as belonging to them. There was a being-at-home in the text that we sometimes find scandalous today. Moderns take up the past as something foreign, and, as a result, our emphasis falls on letting the past speak on its own terms: we do not own it.

The end result for reading Scripture has been both strength and weakness, blessing and curse. On the one hand, modernity is sensitive to the real distance between our ways of speaking and ancient ways of speaking, and so only in modernity did we overcome the ancient tendency to homogenize all biblical narratives into one voice and one way of signifying. We realized that by letting the ancient author be truly distinct and even distant from us, we could actually see more of what he had to say. On the other hand, the mindset of progress means that we not only find ancient literary forms hopelessly foreign, but we also tend to think of them as inferior. We are like sociologists who have discovered a previously unknown native tribe in the Amazon basin: we insist on keeping our distance, on letting their culture and customs remain untouched, but at the same time we assume that our own culture is superior in just about every respect. The challenge for a modern Christian reader is to synthesize the strengths of antiquity and modernity. From modernity, we need to learn that literary forms in the ancient world were truly different and require careful research to understand. From antiquity, we need to regain a confidence in God, the primary author of Scripture, who chose human instruments from different eras precisely because he wanted them to write in their own literary genres. While we tend to feel disappointed when a biblical text falls short of modern standards, God thinks we can learn something important from it. In the present chapter, I will explore the opportunity and the challenge of literary forms by way of two examples. First, I will consider the Gospels, which appear to us as history in some way and yet baffle our historical instincts in others. Second, I will look at the creation story of Genesis 1, which is radically foreign in genre to our modern sensibilities. In each case, my goal is to show, on the one hand, how these texts depart from how we would have written them and, on the other hand, how the difference is a good thing. We begin with the Gospels. A. The Four Gospels

Someone who only hears the Gospel at Mass may never realize what every reader of the Gospels knows, namely, that the Gospel texts do not record the exact words of Jesus. I recall when, as a teenager, I first compared Synoptic texts and saw for myself how one saying may be reported in three different ways. I was puzzled and deflated. Eventually I understood that the Evangelists were, in the best-case scenario, working from memory many years later, so it would be unreasonable to expect verbal precision in their accounts. This gave me a sympathetic view of the text, but it did not decrease my sense of loss: we do not know precisely what Jesus said; what is worse, the Evangelists themselves did not know. It may have taken me longer to realize that the Gospels do not offer a consistent chronology of Jesus’ life. When all our attempts to reconcile the Gospels into a single, coherent chronology have exhausted themselves, we realize that the Evangelists simply do not care much about the historical order of the details. Some things are clear: Jesus was born before he did other things; he attracted disciples and aroused the hatred of the authorities before his final days in Jerusalem; he was betrayed before he was arrested. But the Gospels are not written as modern biographies. We know next to nothing about Jesus’ childhood, and even the general shape of Jesus’ career looks very different in John’s Gospel from in the Synoptics. Moreover, a careful examination of the Synoptic Gospels shows beyond doubt that they have a literary relationship to one another, that is, they are dependent either on one another or on a common source text.5 This means that the Evangelists have not only presented different chronologies of Jesus’ life but have done so intentionally: with access to the same information, they chose to go their different ways. Matthew has the sayings of Jesus collected mostly into five great speeches, presenting Jesus as a new Moses with a new Pentateuch; Mark keeps everything short and even hurried, moving breathlessly through the entire story in just over an hour’s reading; Luke gathers many of Jesus’ deeds and sayings into the time between Jesus’ departure from Galilee and his arrival in Jerusalem, because he wants to create a long and meaningful

journey toward Jerusalem to match the general movement away from Jerusalem that he will present in the Book of Acts. If we pursue the issue into the Book of Acts, we find still more intentional shaping. Although we often think of Acts as a history of the early Church, and although its traditional title is “The Acts of the Apostles”, only two apostles do or say much of anything in the book: Peter and Paul. And when Peter’s deeds are compared with Paul’s, it becomes clear that Luke uses Peter to set the stage for Paul by way of parallels between the two. The entire story of Acts is arranged around a geographical progression from Jerusalem outward to Rome, the mission to the Gentiles, and details or anecdotes that do not fit into this progression are excluded. What is more, Luke writes out in full speeches at which he could not have been present and for which no eye witness could have remembered the details. An examination of the use of Scripture in these speeches strongly suggests that Luke himself has composed them and put them into the mouths of his characters.6 All of this is familiar to anyone who has worked closely with the Scriptures. Many modern readers do not study the problem closely, and so they assume that there must be some way of reconciling all the discrepancies in such a way that each Gospel is historically accurate by modern standards. My goal here is not to demonstrate that there are discrepancies or to resolve the discrepancies, but simply to look at our own instincts, our own honest reaction to the situation: if it were up to us, there would be only one Gospel, not four apparently conflicting ones; or if we must have four different witnesses, then we want someone to present to us the one, true historical order of events that emerges from them. As an anguished undergraduate once asked me, “Why couldn’t the Evangelists just tell us what really happened?” As a matter of fact, Luke clearly signals in his prefaces to both his Gospel and Acts that he intends to write an actual history according to the best standards of the time, with appeal to eyewitness accounts and attention to right order. Part of our difficulty is that “actual history” did not mean the same thing in his day as it does in ours. For example, when Thucydides introduces his History of the

Peloponnesian War, he presents himself as a historian and takes the task seriously, even complaining that others before him have not checked their facts carefully enough. And yet he openly states that he was not present for many of the speeches he records, and so he has combined whatever report he could get of them with his own imagination to create something suitable for the occasion—what should have been said. A later author of the second century A.D., Paul of Samosata, explains in his book How to Write a History that this is exactly what one should do: create a speech that fits the person speaking and the occasion in which he is speaking, and also take the opportunity to show off a bit of one’s rhetorical skill.7 Today no serious historian would do such a thing; in those days, a serious historian had to. The Gospels combine an ancient view of “history” with a focus on proclaiming the Good News of salvation to produce a genre of text foreign to us as moderns, despite the fact that we have heard the Gospels all our lives. In addition to a change in the conception of history, a change in the technology of texts is also at work here. The Gospels were written in a manuscript culture, which is somewhere in between an oral culture and a print culture.8 Like a print culture, manuscripts make it possible to visualize speech, and yet participants in a manuscript culture still experienced a text very much as though it were oral speech, and their expectations of the text match more closely their expectations for oral speech. In our era, now that the printing press has had its full effect, we expect a text placed within quotation marks to be a verbatim report—even though we do not expect a friend’s oral account of what someone said to be accurate word-for-word. In the manuscript culture of the ancient world, texts were experienced more as we would experience the friend’s oral account. In a way that may be unavoidable, we promote misunderstanding by using quotation marks in the Gospel texts, as though they meant to conform to our modern experience. These historical arguments help us to see rationally that the Gospels lived up to the standards of their day, and yet those standards still make us uncomfortable as moderns. We understand that all history requires interpreting the facts, but we prefer to have

our facts presented as facts and our interpretations presented as interpretations so we can spend at least a few moments alone in front of the naked facts. This blending of fact and interpretation strikes us as sloppy, irresponsible, perhaps even manipulative. Why, we ask, can they not just tell us what happened? And yet God, it seems, preferred four different Gospels written anywhere from decades to half a century after the events in a mode of “history” that blends fact and interpretation. Our society is what Richard Weaver called a society of “philistines”.9 That is to say, peoples who have not yet acquired culture are barbarians, and they are rustic because they have never been refined; but peoples who live after the death of a culture are philistines, uncultured because they have rejected culture. One of the aspects of our post-cultural society is our almost superstitious belief in “bare facts”. We do not like veils around reality. For example, why all the mystery and multiple veils around the marital act? “Oh come on, it’s just.” Or why must we surround the Mass with ceremonies and symbols? We do not need all this frilly stuff, just the facts. We revel in “demythologizing” great men, and movie reviewers use the word “irreverent” as a compliment. We like plain facts, the bare thing itself. This mental habit prevents us from seeing that everyday things such as marriage or politicians or even eating meals together have a weight of significance, that they are “bigger” than appears to the eye. The veils with which culture has always surrounded these things are meant to emphasize the otherness of what we experience, so that we will remember and recognize the fullness of what stands before us—or rather, the numinous character of that before which we stand. Let us suppose that God gratified our every desire with regard to the Gospels. I said that we would prefer a single Gospel with one, consistent chronology, but, in reality, we would prefer a video tape of Jesus’ ministry. In fact, if technology were no barrier, we would ask for a 3-D movie with surround-sound, so that we could wear virtualreality goggles and experience the events exactly as if we were there. If we had our way, we would experience the life of Jesus exactly as did the eyewitnesses, the original disciples—who, as the

Gospels themselves emphasize, were obtuse, confused, in the end demoralized, and wandered off to go fishing. They had no idea “what really happened”. Were God to grant our desires, it would end in disaster. To use an analogy from the previous chapter, our problem is that we do not want a matchmaker between our minds and the events, but, without a matchmaker, the marriage does not turn out well. At no point in the history of the cosmos has what appeared to the eye stood so far from the reality as was the case with Jesus of Nazareth. God himself wanted to be the matchmaker between our minds and these all-important events, and he did not want to abandon us alone before the naked sensible. To accomplish his purpose, God chose the four Evangelists. These men are not stand-ins for video cameras, poor human substitutes for what would have been better done by modern machines. Their human faculties of piercing intellect, of poetic imagination, and of ardent will were the indispensable channels through which God delivered the truth about Jesus to ages to come (Lk 1:4). Their cooperation with the Spirit in writing the Gospels was not a mechanical process and, indeed, could not have been, but required their inmost human qualities to succeed. They are theologians, guiding our minds into union with the events. By the order they choose for their stories, and by the wording they choose for the sayings they received, they give us not only the bare facts but the reality inside those facts. The patristic tradition sees an image of the Evangelists’ unique qualities in the four “living creatures” of Revelation 4:7: “The first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle.” The tradition assigns each Evangelist one of the images according to the character of his Gospel. But Revelation 4 seems to stand in tension with the description of the “four living creatures” in the first chapter of Ezekiel, where each creature has four faces: “Each had the face of a man in front; the four had the face of a lion on the right side, the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle at the

back” (Ezek 1:10). Twelfth-century monk and biblical commentator Rupert of Deutz brought Ezekiel and Revelation together by seeing in the four faces a reference to four mysteries of Christ, namely, that Christ was man, God, priest, and king: The one animal is the one Jesus Christ; the four faces or four animals are the aforementioned four mysteries of this same Jesus Christ. Those faces shine on the just, because Jesus sees them—as it is written, “The eyes of the Lord are on the just” (Ps 33)—and by his seeing, he conforms them to himself, or conforms them to whichever he chooses of his faces; he penetrates them more effectively than if they were a mirror, and he forms in them his own image. He saw the just and blessed Matthew, as Matthew himself recounts: “As Jesus was passing by, he saw a man, Matthew by name, sitting at the tax collector’s office” (Mt 9:9). The true sun, I say, saw him, and in the mirror of his breast he formed the face of a man; he saw another, and in him he drew the figure of his own face, the face of a lion; he saw another, and in him he molded the face of a flying eagle. These are the four Evangelists, who in a secondary way are called the four animals. For the first four mysteries that were described above are four faces, and the one animal is Jesus Christ.10

There is only one Gospel, the Gospel of Christ, but the canon of Scripture offers us the Gospel according to Matthew, the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel according to Luke, and the Gospel according to John.11 God wants to bring our minds into union with the one, saving life of Christ through four men whom he chose and formed in Christ’s image. B. Genesis 1-11 Although the Gospels stand at some distance from the modern reader’s conception of history, they are nonetheless close enough to our “comfort zone” that we do not notice a problem until we read them closely. When we turn to the early chapters of Genesis, we find a genre of text so alien to our way of thinking that we cannot fail to notice it and wrestle with it. As a matter of fact, Genesis 1 is a challenging text no matter in what millennium the reader was born. The Literary Genre of the Creation Story To understand the difficulty, we should review some of what was said earlier about how it was possible for an Israelite author to write about

so remote and inaccessible an event as the creation of the world or the formation of mankind. He reflected on creation by reflecting on Israel’s history. All of creation, but mankind in a special way, is recapitulated or summed up in Christ, and, to prepare for Christ, God made Israel as a foreshadowing of him. Now if Christ recapitulates mankind, and if Israel was made to reflect Christ, then it follows that Israel also recapitulated mankind. Because the human author was contemplating an object designed to reflect creation, and because he had a supernatural gift of insight into this object, he was able to offer an account of creation based on his reflections about Israel’s history —he gazed into Israel’s institutions and history and there saw mankind’s beginnings. For example, knowing the story of Israel, one can readily see how the human author arrived at the notion that mankind in the beginning had a personal relationship with God as well as a law and that, by breaking God’s law, he was expelled from a holy land. This is how an Israelite author could use his own powers to write about creation: God gave him a supernatural object to contemplate, namely, Israel, and gave him grace whereby to contemplate it. Because he used his own powers, enhanced by grace, our human author used the resources one would normally use in a literary effort to describe creation, namely, other accounts of creation. The human author of Genesis, when he wished to write about creation, used the literary forms conventional at the time for talking about creation. The accounts of creation around at the time were mythical, and so he took up mythical elements to write Israel’s own creation story. But it was impossible—and this is important—it was impossible for Israel to use myth simply speaking.12 Myth is based on a particular mindset in which a timeless “beginning time”—which is nonetheless not some particular number of years in the past but conceived atemporally—serves as the pattern for all things, and the world will sometimes re-contact the “beginning time” to renew the world through liturgy. Hence, for this mindset, history moves in a circle, and the “beginning time” is like a point in the middle of the circle sending radii out to the circumference. Israel, on the other hand, came to know God and came to its story of creation by experiencing the

linear-historical plan of God, which had a beginning, was then in its middle, and was headed toward some end. God’s plan for history was not circular. The “beginning time” for Israel had to be in some sense historical, even though Israel used a mythical literary form to convey it. As a result, Israel’s creation story fits neither into the genre of history as understood today nor into the genre of myth as understood then. It is in fact a unique form of literature with no exact precedent and no exact successor—which makes it very hard to interpret. The Pontifical Biblical Commission, acting at the time as a branch of the Magisterium of the Church, expressed the difficulty well in a letter written to clarify questions about Genesis 1-11: The question of the literary forms of the first eleven chapters of Genesis is. . . obscure and complex. These literary forms correspond to none of our classical categories and cannot be judged in light of Greco-Roman or modern literary styles. One can, therefore, neither deny nor affirm their historicity, taken as a whole, without unduly attributing to them the canons of a literary style within which it is impossible to classify them.13

To put the same thing in other words, in the ancient world, people wrote stories as a way of doing theology, and the mythical genre signaled to the listener, “I mean to present theology, not history.” When our Israelite author wanted to present theology, he took up the myth format, just as Aquinas adopted the disputation format when he wanted to do theology in the thirteenth century. But since Israel’s theology itself was bound up with history, their myth-like writings could not signal that they meant to do theology as opposed to history. So the result was a non-historical story form whose theology frequently implied that the story was in some respects historical. To complicate the picture even further, Israel meant to refute the theology of the surrounding nations. Our author sometimes took up material from the myths of other nations in order to show that the other nations were wrong: he shows God creating the great sea monsters and seeing that they are “good” (Gen 1:21) in order to refute the notion that anything in creation could be independent of God or opposed to him; he shows God granting mankind dominion

over the world to refute the notion that man was created as a slave to save God from having to work.14 So Israel’s borrowing from ancient myths was in some ways a use of what was useful but in other ways a subversion of what was harmful. Pius XII offered a helpful account of the situation in his encyclical Humani generis, which is worth quoting at length: Just as in the biological and anthropological sciences, so also in the historical sciences there are those who boldly transgress the limits and safeguards established by the Church. In a particular way must be deplored a certain too free interpretation of the historical books of the Old Testament. Those who favor this system, in order to defend their cause, wrongly refer to the Letter which was sent not long ago to the Archbishop of Paris by the Pontifical Commission on Biblical Studies. This Letter, in fact, clearly points out that the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters, the Letter points out, in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people. If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents.15

In other words, the pope says:           1.  The first eleven chapters of Genesis are not written in the same way as modern histories. One cannot read the creation story in the same mode as one would read a biography of Abraham Lincoln.      2. These chapters use metaphorical language to describe truths fundamental for our salvation. We are free to admit that the talking snake is a symbol.      3. We can admit that these chapters borrow materials from nonbiblical sources. Our author used normal means; we do not

need to envision him as receiving the text in an ecstatic vision.           4.  However, these first eleven chapters of Genesis do record history in some real sense. This sets them apart from the myths of the surrounding nations.           5.  Exactly how these chapters record history is a matter that experts need to define further.      6. None of these facts should be understood as undermining our belief that Scripture is inspired by God and therefore free from all error. Where the Creation Story Implies History In light of the unique literary genre of the Genesis creation story, the Church’s approach to the text has been to examine the theology in a story and then determine what history it requires. For example, the entire story of salvation history, including the redemption wrought by Christ, depends on the premise that humanity as a race stood under a curse. This makes no sense unless a historical person who really acted on behalf of mankind committed some kind of sin and brought down punishment on the human race—that is, unless Adam was somehow a real, historical person. As Pius XII warns in his encyclical Humani generis, The faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.16

The pope examines the theological meaning of Genesis to determine whether it does or does not imply a historical assertion. In this case, he thinks that the theology does require some real history. When the Creation Story Denies History

Having seen a case in which the theological meaning does seem to require a historical claim, I would like to look at another case where the theological meaning seems to rule out a historical claim. The question is whether the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 are to be read chronologically. Does the text assert that day one of creation is prior in time to day two, day two prior in time to day three, and so on? A first hint of an answer comes from the structure of the text. The first six days of creation are laid out in such a way that days one through three correspond to days four through six, with the first three days providing “containers” for what comes in the next three days:      1. Light      2. Sky and seas      3. Dry land and plants      4. Sun, moon, stars      5. Birds and fish      6. Land animals and man (who eat plants) The parallel between the light of the first day and the luminaries of the fourth day has caused readers of every generation to stop and wonder: Where did the light come from before there was a source of light? Was it like sitting in a well-lit room until the lightbulb appears, at which point the light is coming from the lightbulb? How are we supposed to understand the sequence of events? I would suggest that the author was not oblivious to the problem but planted the difficulty in order to draw our attention to the nature of the light. To understand the author’s riddle, we have to slow down and use our lower, not our higher, powers of understanding. The answer does not depend on an advanced knowledge of Hebrew, on research into the nature of light, or on speculations about the intentions of providence. The answer may best be found with a crayon, using powers we exercised deeply in kindergarten but sometimes overlook in our older years. I mean a simple and slow imagining of what the text describes.

In the beginning, we are told, the earth is without form and void and darkness is on the face of the deep. So we envision a great water covering the world, and no light shines on the water. Then God creates light, and we imagine this as shining on the water. Next, God divides the water horizontally in the middle so as to make a cavity in between the upper waters and lower waters; at this point, the light shines on top of the upper waters. Then God divides the lower waters to reveal land, so that the lower waters and the land are below the upper waters, which are below the light; this cavity in the middle is called “the firmament”. Next, God places the sun, the moon, and the stars in this “firmament”, in the cavity between the lower waters and the upper waters, in order to provide light during the day and during the night as well as to measure times and seasons. So at this point, the land and seas are below the sun, moon, and stars; these are below the upper waters; and these are below the light that began shining on the first day. The important thing to notice is that, when we carefully follow the story in our imaginations, the sun, moon, and stars are in a different place from the original light of the first day; in other words, neither the sun nor any other heavenly body replaces that original light. It is in a different realm. One cannot help but wonder what that original light is supposed to be. While separate from the sun and other heavenly luminaries, it is placed in parallel to them. Since the first chapter of Genesis is in many other ways combating the paganism of the surrounding nations, and many Gentile religions involved worship of the heavenly bodies, I would suggest that our author wants us to see that the heavenly bodies point beyond themselves to a greater light in the highest heavens. Is Augustine right to see here the angels of God enlightened by the beatific vision? Is the very Person of the Word perhaps in view?17 However that may be, the heavenly luminaries that measure our time are set apart from the original light of the first day. This fact is important. The heavenly bodies that measure our time are set apart from the original light of the first day, and that original light created on the first day causes the division of creation into

seven days. The sun, which causes our days to be distinct from our nights, comes later and is set apart as a different light and perhaps even as a different kind of light. As a result, the seven “days” of creation in Genesis 1 are not the same days, or even the same kind of days, as what we typically call “days”. If I am right in suggesting that the human author wants us to lift our minds beyond the physical luminaries to something greater, then attending to a historical chronology is in fact contrary to his intention, a falling back into that very focus on physicality he hoped to prevent. Learning from the Genre of the Creation Story At this point, we face again the bias we all share as modern men and women: modernity has developed its own conventions and genres, and we tend unconsciously to believe they are superior to ancient ways. Like the ancients, we have a conventional way of telling a creation story, but our convention is to write the story in the mode of the physical sciences. In our day, knowledge gained by science is felt to be the most solid, the most necessary, and the noblest. Since a modern scientific account of the origin of the world would be a historical, step-by-step description of which forces acted on matter to make it take on what shapes, we want our sacred text to give us that kind of account. It is a pious instinct: God’s Word should impart the best wisdom, and the best wisdom is science, so when God’s Word describes creation, then the account should be historical in the modern sense. When we discover that it is not, we may accept the fact with a sense of deflation. God’s Word, it seems, has suffered a loss. But do we not have something to learn from antiquity here? Before the rise of nominalism, thinkers of both East and West believed that the highest wisdom was to know the very first causes of things. When modern science is true to its own genius, it leaves aside the pursuit of the very first causes of things as something beyond the scope of its method, because science can deal only with what can be tested by the senses. From its founding, for example, modern science has consciously set aside the pursuit of purpose as a cause in nature, because purpose is not something detectible by the senses. Similarly, science cannot ask whether things have an

essence, because if they do, then it is beyond what instruments could probe. If Aristotle’s view of the first material cause of things as pure potency is correct, then even in the realm modern science claims as its own, the realm of the material, modern science as such cannot investigate it, because no instrument could make pure potency available to the senses. The Genesis creation story gives us this wisdom unavailable to science. To use the terminology of Aristotle’s “four causes”, the creation story shows us that God is the very first efficient cause of all things, the first beginning of motion. It shows us that God, or union with God, is the ultimate purpose of all things. It makes it clear that God himself is the pattern or extrinsic formal cause of all things through his Word. And finally, when read in the context of the rest of Scripture, it tells us the most fundamental truth about the material of all things, namely, that the world was made out of nothing and that matter is good. As simple as these statements seem, they are difficult to discover without help. In the myths that Israel had to combat, one finds a very different view. In one common creation account, for example, the first things existing are ocean water and fresh water.18 These two beget the gods, but the gods conspire together to kill the fresh water. The ocean then comes to devour them all in vengeance, but one of the gods—Marduk, in the version that has come down to us from Babylon—steps forward as a hero, slays the ocean, and carves up her carcass to make the world as we know it. The story is typical of ancient creation accounts: the root of all things is chaos, symbolized by the waters, and the world is formed out of chaos through a couple of factors. One factor is the violence of the gods against the waters and of the ocean against the gods, and another factor is the chance happening that Marduk was born bigger than all the other gods and so able to inflict violence on the ocean. When the Genesis creation story was written, the major view was that the world had been formed out of chaos by violence and chance. Over against this, Genesis asserts that the root of all things is rationality and that rationality formed all things out of nothing by purposeful command. In the pagan myths, the maker is on a level

with the forces that oppose him, and he must overcome chaos with violence; in Genesis, nothing is on a level with God, and he simply issues commands that are obeyed. There is no enemy in Genesis 1; the sea monsters that appear as foes of Marduk in the Babylonian story are brought peacefully into being by God in Genesis 1:21. Although our storytelling conventions have changed with the years, the fundamental alternatives about the origin of the world remain the same. In our own day, the secular view is that the world originated out of chaos through chance and violence, even though we do not anthropomorphize them. And the major alternative is that the world is rooted in rationality and purpose. For all the wonderful advances we have made in the physical sciences, these are still the two possible positions, and science cannot show us which is correct. If the Genesis creation story had offered a historical account of the world’s physical origins, either it would have been outdated by now or it would have had no message for the generations before modern science. But because of its strange, semi-mythical genre, it has spoken to every age and still offers us a wisdom we need today. C. Bringing Together Antiquity and Modernity My goal in the present chapter has been to show that we have something to learn both from modernity and from antiquity about the literal sense of Scripture. The mindset peculiar to modernity makes us keenly aware that different texts, even different narrative texts, convey meaning in very different ways. The mindset of antiquity, however, enables us to capitalize on this discovery by learning from the different genres of Scripture. How are we to bring these strengths together? At the beginning of this chapter, I said that each of these strengths is rooted in a particular way of experiencing time. If we look into how these experiences arose, it turns out that Christianity already offers the possibility of a synthesis. While all the ancients shared the mindsets of tradition and history, they tended to think of history as circular or static, repetitive or unchanging. The idea of progress, of a real and purposeful forward movement in the whole of history, was introduced through Israel’s experience of salvation history moving

from creation to consummation. And yet this notion of progress in history did not negate the mindset of tradition because it still supported the understanding that there are abiding realities into which we enter after our ancestors. Scripture’s depiction of the final consummation is in fact an upward spiral that returns to the beginning at a higher level: to enter heaven is to enter the new and greater Eden. “Sacred history” or “salvation history” thus implies a richer view than either that of the ancients or that of the moderns, in which progress sublates—takes up and transforms but does not negate— history and tradition. In fact, one might argue that the modern ideology of progress arose as a distortion of Christianity. As belief in Christian revelation ebbed, it left a residue behind it: from the residue of the teaching that man is made in God’s image, we developed our modern sensibility about the equality of all human beings, and from the residue of the teaching that all things are rooted in rationality, we retained a confidence that science can explain the world. Similarly, from the residue of salvation history, we developed our modern feeling that time is an inevitable evolution toward better and better things. Perhaps this helps us to see why modernity’s unique mindset has a great deal to contribute to our understanding of Scripture. As Christian thought first formed, the ancient world was emerging from a traditional mindset and so tended to stress that side of the Christian synthesis. While the modern break with tradition was an evil, a good that may come out of it is a new stress on a different aspect of the Christian synthesis. If premodern Christians were more especially attuned to the fact of abiding realities, we are more especially attuned to the fact of historical change. We have an opportunity to make our understanding of the Christian synthesis more robust. The ancient mindset, because it looks to abiding realities and organic developments, can bring the modern experience into fruitful union with itself. Antiquity offers an understanding of time that connects it to eternity and so opens it up to depth and purpose, while modernity offers a sensitivity to distance and difference that allows

us to hear the distinct voice of the past. Modernity brings into view the human author as a distinct individual, while antiquity joins us to the author in one community. Antiquity experiences memory and creativity as united, so we can understand that history and fiction stand on a single gradient of narrative as a way of knowing, while modernity opens our eyes to see that various texts stand at various points on the gradient. Taken separately, modernity shows us one slope of a mountain while antiquity shows us another; taken together, modernity and antiquity allow us to glimpse the peak of revelation rising above the plain.

10

Difficulties in Scripture Everything I have said about Scripture to this point underscores how and why Scripture brings us light and refreshment and communion with God and man. But casual readers of Scripture are often repelled rather than attracted by what they know of it, whether a violent passage from the Old Testament or a seeming historical or scientific impossibility asserted in its pages. Even serious readers remain aware of many passages that have resisted satisfactory interpretation to the present day. A great many books have been devoted to listing problematic passages in Scripture and resolving the problems.1 The present chapter is not intended to answer the questions these apologetical books answer. Instead, it is intended to answer the question the apologetical books raise: Why are there difficulties and apparent errors in Scripture at all? Why are there so many difficulties in Scripture that an entire genre of book has been invented to deal with them? In offering a general account of the fact of biblical difficulties, I hope to show that an account of this sort is essential to understanding how Scripture brings light and refreshment and communion with God and man. A. Why There Are Difficulties in Scripture In the second book of De doctrina christiana, when Saint Augustine takes up the interpretation of biblical texts, he begins by pointing out that it is hard: “But those who read at random are deceived by many and manifold obscurities and ambiguities”, he observes, adding that “in many places they do not even find something to be wrong about, so do the obscure sayings wrap themselves in a kind of densest darkness.”2 The books of the Bible do not open themselves to one who leafs through them casually.

The source of the problem is manifold. Some factors are external to the Bible’s making, like customs that change over time or manuscript errors introduced by later copyists. Other factors are internal to the writing of Scripture, like ambiguity of phrasing or difficulty of doctrine. But Saint Augustine pushes past the obvious to ask himself a most basic question: Why would an omniscient, almighty God write anything but a perfectly clear text? Surely he knew how to write clearly, and surely the means were at his disposal. Given the divine authorship of Scripture, why are there difficulties, especially difficulties internal to the writing of the text? One answer, and not a shallow one, would be to say that God allowed evils in his text for the sake of a greater good. He so wanted men to be true causes of revelation that he willed them to be true authors of Scripture, and this good could not be obtained without some concomitant problems. As metaphysically plausible as this account seems, however, Saint Augustine cannot go this way. Such an account would give certain passages of Scripture the same status that sin has in the world, not willed by God but permitted. The reader would be forced to stand in judgment over the text, deciding which things are due to God’s intention and which things permitted by his concession. The text in its entirety would no longer be crafted by God to communicate his mind; it would no longer be entirely the Word of God. The only option remaining is the one Saint Augustine takes: “I do not doubt”, he avers, “that this whole situation was divinely provided in order to overcome pride and recall the intellect from disdain, because things that are easily investigated often seem of little account.”3 In other words, there are difficulties in Scripture because God wants them to be there, he intends them, and he can intend them to be there because Scripture’s purpose includes more than imparting doctrine. If Scripture existed only to illuminate the mind, obscurity would have no place; because the life of the Church is much more than light in the mind, obscurity can be a gift from God.4 Consequently, the reader can hand himself over entirely to the text, even to its obscurities, as Saint Augustine describes:

Before all else it is necessary, therefore, that one be converted by the fear of God toward knowing his will, what he commands us to desire and what to flee. . . . Then one must grow meek through piety so as not to contradict the divine Scripture— whether we understand it and something in it runs counter to our vices, or whether we do not understand it, as though we understood better and could command something better—but to think rather and to believe what is written there to be better and truer, even if it be obscure, than what we of ourselves can grasp.5

The first step toward reading Scripture is to entrust ourselves to God, leaning on his commands as a path out of ourselves. This in turn dispels our tendency to fight his words, making us “meek” readers who hand our minds over even to the opaque passages of Scripture. Trust and meekness are not just preliminary to obtaining Scripture’s goods but part of the good Scripture offers: the hard texts provide a spiritual gym for the exercise of foundational virtues. We develop a patience before the text, trusting that if it is not clear now, then one day its meaning may suddenly appear, and even if that day never comes, then still its meaning is from God and worthy of trust. So long as we understand Scripture easily and its message seems obviously coherent, it is easy to overlook the fact that the Church’s confidence in Scripture is not grounded in human intellectual perspicuity. We are like citizens who suppose themselves to be lawabiding because the law has never happened to forbid what they desire or command what they dislike. The difficult passages grate against our inclinations, deny us intellectual light, and force the question of why we trust Scripture. Do we believe it because it all makes sense to us, or because it has been spoken by someone we trust? The question is not intellectual but volitional: What is our decision? And the question itself sharpens our resolve. Because difficult passages demand virtue, the reader’s experience of them changes with time. At first they are inevitably painful because they run counter to his inclination. But virtue is not a matter of obeying rules despite pain but, rather, of acquiring a new and more wholesome inclination that makes a good deed pleasant: your average person suffers from being temperate, but one who has acquired the virtue of temperance enjoys being temperate and would find it painful to be otherwise.6 Similarly, once Scripture has acted on

its reader for some time, the difficult passages become an occasion of enjoyment. The reader delights in trust and patience, like an old married couple who have come to find joy in mutual submission. Like a runner who begins to feel a burn in his legs, the reader senses that the parts of Scripture challenging him most profit him proportionately. Even at this point, the obscure or even unsettling passages accompany the reader on his path to God. They give him an instinct for the whole of revelation as a vast and unsettled forest with known paths and hidden coves, a landscape defined by light and shade that simultaneously delights the eye and exceeds its grasp.7 They forbid him ever to believe that he has finished learning to read, always pushing him to new ways of thinking, and these new horizons open the Scriptures still farther without removing the difficult passages. No one can say in how many ways God acts on us through these hard sayings, but the reader becomes aware that God does act through them and learns to delight in holding his hand without knowing everything about the path ahead.8 B. How God Writes the Difficult Passages It sometimes happens that Scripture is obscure because its human authors wanted it so. The Book of Proverbs begins by describing its purpose, one of which is that “the man of understanding [may] acquire skill, to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles” (Prov 1:5-6). In other words, wise men sometimes speak in riddles on purpose, as in Proverbs 30:15, “The leech has two daughters; ‘Give, give,’ they cry.” Beyond the usefulness of poetic imagery for driving home a point, there is a pleasure in unlocking a puzzle and a respect for what is difficult to get; as Saint Augustine says, it prevents the mind from disdaining what is too easy. Jesus also told parables in order to be obscure.9 When his disciples asked him why he spoke to the crowds in parables, he told them bluntly: “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I

speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand” (Mt 13:11-13). Jesus did not always speak in parables in Matthew’s account, but once hostility to his ministry arose, then he began using stories that could be understood only by those who had committed to him. Those whose stance was one of mere curiosity or hostile pride would be stymied. As a practical matter, they could not report what he said to the authorities if they did not know what he said; at the level of what is appropriate, only those who “have”, who have committed to the kingdom of heaven, can rightly receive “more”, the secrets of the kingdom. But these places are not the obscure passages driving the subject of this chapter. No one has been put off from Christianity or thrown into crisis by pondering the leech’s two daughters, because the author’s intention clearly matches the result: he meant to set a riddle, and a riddle it is. More difficult are those passages where the author seems to intend clear communication and yet fails. Most difficult of all are those passages where the author seems to communicate clearly and yet what he seems to say is either wrong or immoral. These latter passages are the ones that tempt us to judge the text or to throw up our hands in frustration, metaphorically landing Scripture “in court” yet again. To understand how such passages come to be, we have to consider how God uses human beings as instruments to write the text. He does so as a composer chooses instruments for a symphony. The composer chooses an instrument not only to sound a particular melody but also to sound it in a particular scale or with a particular timbre and to blend with the other instruments in some particular way. A trumpet and a violin playing the same note sound very different, one bright and hard and triumphant and the other soft and almost human, because they are made of different materials and produce their sounds by different mechanisms. Two brass instruments may sound very different from one another because their tubes are of different lengths. The composer writes for different instruments depending on how he wants the notes sounded.

An author is like a musical instrument because he not only writes truths but writes them in a certain way—with his own timbre, so to speak. His authorial fingerprint is shaped by the character of his native language, the extent of his education, the dominant metaphors of his age, his courage or lack thereof, whether he inclines to anger, and just about anything else that shapes him as a person. The author’s soul is like the body of the instrument, determining the overtones of everything he writes. We can take Saint Paul as an example. He writes in Greek, and so he is more inclined to long, periodic sentences than an English speaker would be today. Paul’s Greek is the marketplace, international Greek of his day, something like the English one would hear today spoken between an oil merchant from the Middle East and a banker from India, and grammatical errors abound. Paul is nonetheless steeped in the literature of his people, so his letters are evocative, constantly echoing the Old Testament. He was trained as a rabbi, and he uses their exegetical techniques such as finding keyword connections between biblical texts.10 As his temperament is forceful, so he preaches his Gospel directly and boldly, without apology. He does not dance around delicate subjects or hedge his judgments. All of this and more add up to Paul’s authorial fingerprint or timbre: no one else writing the same things would be Saint Paul the Apostle. Consequently, we have to distinguish between what an author says and what a reader can learn about the author from what he says. For example, Saint Paul says that he was educated as a rabbi, but even if he had never mentioned the fact, we could probably have inferred it from the way he handles Scripture. He never says, “I am fearless”, but his readers have always perceived him so. He never asserts that Christianity in his day lacked a technical vocabulary for its doctrines, but the absence of such a vocabulary is everywhere felt in his letters. Put most generally, Saint Paul’s Letters do not teach or preach the entire content of his soul, but his soul’s fingerprints are all over his Letters in the how of his teaching and preaching. When we consider Saint Paul’s Letters as Scripture, this distinction between what is taught and what is inferable becomes

important. For example, we can infer from his writing that Paul was not an Aristotelian philosopher; he just does not write the way an Aristotelian philosopher would have written. It is entirely possible that if we were able to interview Paul, he would even contradict Aristotle on points that have later been adopted into the Church’s language for expressing the faith, such as the description of the soul as the form of the body. But his views on these things, even when we can infer them with some probability, are not God’s teaching. When God writes through a human author, he asserts what the human author asserts; he does not endorse the entire contents of the human author’s soul. He does not affirm or deny whatever Saint Paul thought about Aristotelian philosophy any more than he asserts Saint Paul’s grammar as the best kind of Greek. The Gospels offer another example. In Mark’s Gospel, Mary Magdalen and other women go to the tomb of Jesus and see there a young man dressed in white—obviously an angel (Mk 16:5). In Luke’s Gospel, Mary Magdalen and the others go to the tomb and see two men in dazzling apparel—again, obviously angels (Lk 24:4). A lot is at play in these two passages, and we cannot say for sure what each author intended or what each author knew; the previous chapter argued that their intention with regard to historical details may have been what we would consider “fuzzy”. But it is quite possible that there really were two angels at the tomb and that if we took Mark aside by himself and questioned him that he would deny the presence of a second angel. The texts are compatible, strictly speaking: if there were two angels at the tomb, then there was one angel at the tomb. But the fact that Mark only mentions one angel just might be the fingerprint of an error he believed without asserting it. It may be that he never mentions a second angel because he thought there was no second angel. As with Saint Paul’s Letters, we would say that God has attached his own voice to Mark’s written words, not to the entire contents of Mark’s mind. It might be the case that Mark, if we were to interview him alone, would say a number of things that God does not want to teach. We do not make this distinction in everyday life. If we can tell by reading a book that its author held an error, we say that there are

errors in this book. It would seem like special pleading to say that no, in fact, the errors are nowhere asserted in the book itself, even though one can infer from the book that the author believed the errors; we would laugh at such a defense. But this is because in everyday life a book has only one author. The reason biblical interpreters distinguish between what the human author says and the other contents of the author’s mind is that we distinguish between the human author of Scripture and the Divine Author whose instrument he is. God’s Word and this man’s words are entirely one; God’s mind and this man’s mind are not. To put the point most forcefully, for those who do not believe that Scripture is God’s Word it is entirely reasonable to say that there are errors in Scripture. Those of us who do believe that Scripture is God’s Word do not turn a blind eye to the obvious, as though faith were a suppression of reason. But faith tells us about a new situation, impossible under normal circumstances, namely, the situation in which one true author uses another true author as an instrument. This new situation forces us to make new distinctions that unbelievers could not be expected to make. This is the reason for the plethora of apologetical books mentioned above. On the one hand, God chooses human authors as true authors, which means that they leave their mental “fingerprints” all over the text; on the other hand, he does not attach his voice to everything in their souls but only to what they write. It is a recipe to guarantee that obscurities and seeming errors abound. On the other hand, the distinctions necessary to grasp the situation are only available to those who believe, that is, to those who have already committed to the proposition that Scripture is God’s Word. In the end, Scripture as a whole operates like the parables of Jesus, separating out and even repelling those who do not commit to God while enlightening and comforting those who do. C. Examples of Difficult Passages Offering examples may clarify the general account laid out above. I will look briefly at a case where Scripture seems to say something false about history or science, a case where it seems to say

something false about the doctrines of our faith, and a case where it seems to approve of immorality. But I should emphasize that I do not intend to solve the difficulties I raise. This chapter is not about how to solve difficulties but about why difficulties are present in the first place. So for each example I will outline the problem, indicate why the problem persists, and suggest how the problem is fruitful for the Church, but I will not try to leave the reader with the sense that the problem has gone away. Saint Augustine offers some good generalizations about the fruits of difficulties: patience, meekness, and so on. But the particular fruit of a particular difficulty may change with time as readers change, so that the sacred text challenges every generation but does not challenge every generation in the same way. For the sake of illustration, I will focus on the fruit that particular difficulties have to offer our time, which may or may not be what pious readers were getting from the text a thousand years ago. The abiding thesis of this chapter is that God ensures Scripture will have difficult passages in order to bring us closer to him; what follows are particular and possibly changeable examples. Apparent Error about What Happened In the previous chapter, I noted that seeming historical or scientific falsehoods in Scripture often have to do with the literary genre of the text. If an author did not intend to assert something historical or scientific, then he cannot have said something false. So, for example, Rebekah is said to have ridden a camel (Gen 24:64), while historians have reason to think that camels were unknown in that region at that time: if the nature of the Rebekah story is such that details like the camel are not asserted as historical, then there is no falsehood and, for a theology of Scripture, no problem. However, the literary genre is usually only half of the answer. For example, the fact that Genesis 1 does not mean to assert an ancient Near Eastern cosmology may get the sacred text a “not guilty” verdict, so to speak, but it does not explain why the text so frequently ends up “back in court” on this very point. If the solution is so simple, why does the conversation keep going? Really to account for the

problem of Genesis 1, we have to acknowledge the simple fact that the author(s) of Genesis 1 believed something false about the physical structure of the solar system. Anyone today writing the Genesis story would insert phrases or choose vocabulary so as to avoid being misunderstood as asserting geocentrism, but the sacred text lacks any such precautions. The text as it stands shows no concern to avoid such a misunderstanding, because when the text was written, geocentrism was what people believed. Consequently, even though the text is not “guilty” of asserting a geocentric view as scientifically true, it bears the fingerprints of a geocentric view. There will always be some population of readers who, wishing to submit themselves to the text, conclude that they must accept a geocentric cosmology or something else not really taught by the text. As I argued in the previous chapter, this undying conversation is good for our age because it forces us to reexamine essential questions. What kind of explanation of the world counts as “wisdom”? Why are we so bent on having one particular kind of history? How have we advanced, and what have we lost? Could it be, could it possibly be, that we can learn from men who not only predate science in the modern sense but who come even before Socrates and Plato? Real docility to the text will prompt these reflections. Apparent Error about Doctrines of the Faith To students in my classes, scientific or historical problems are less unsettling than statements in Scripture that appear to contradict the Christian creed. They never cease to wrestle with the book of Ecclesiastes, for example, because they cannot reconcile its unrelentingly bleak portrayal of life and death with the Gospel. Qoheleth would not sign on to the Nicene Creed, with its claims about resurrection and everlasting life: “For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?” (Eccles 3:19-21). As far as Qoheleth is concerned, “A living dog is

better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward; but the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and they have no more for ever any share in all that is done under the sun” (Eccles 9:4b-6). In the introduction to his excellent commentary on Ecclesiastes, Roland Murphy offers one expert’s summary of Qoheleth’s views on life and death.11 While ancient Israelites were remarkably resigned to death, overall, Qoheleth simply cannot reconcile himself to it. They found solace in the thought that they lived on in others’ memory (Prov 10:7) and in their own posterity, but he denies that there was any memory (Eccles 1:11; 2:16) and wonders whether his heir will be wise or disastrously foolish (2:18-19). Although he thinks that death would be preferable to certain extreme situations (4:2-3; 6:1-6), otherwise, it is entirely unwelcome, as the lugubrious tone of 12:1-7 shows. Death is the complete opposite of the only good Qoheleth can find, the life of pleasure; after death, there is nothing (9:10). Why is Ecclesiastes so unrelentingly negative? Part of the answer is that things were more negative in his day. Before Christ’s victory, the afterlife was in fact not a pleasant thing: everyone went to the abode of the dead, where memory and sensation and action gave way to a dim existence in the realm of shadows. The best one could hope for was to “live” in the memory of others, but even this was doomed to pass. What is more, revelation proceeded in stages, so Israelites of Qoheleth’s day did not know that the situation would change in the future, that there would in the future be a glorious afterlife and a resurrection from the dead. They did not even have clarity on whether and in what way the human soul is immortal: “Who knows?” they could well ask. However, my students would hardly be perturbed by a text that reported accurately about the past: “People back then had it bad, and they did not know everything we know.” Ecclesiastes has more shock value than that, and for a simple reason: the author himself did not know the full truth about the afterlife and very probably believed something false. Each text in his book can be reconciled with the truth—the Bible gets yet another “not guilty” verdict—and yet

one can tell that, if interviewed, the author would not sign his name at the bottom of the Nicene Creed. This fact worries at the reader and keeps him circling around and around the text, trying to make it fit, but it is like a renegade wind instrument whose note harmonizes with the orchestra but whose timbre sticks out. In the end, the fact that Qoheleth was uninformed and even misinformed makes his writing more trenchant and profitable. He has a way of forcing the Christian to face the vanity of this earthly life, because we can tell that he is not holding some secret card of consolation up his sleeve. His gloom is not for rhetorical effect, but utterly sincere and therefore powerful. Seeming Immorality in Scripture Perhaps the most disturbing passages in Scripture are those that seem to recommend immorality. To outside ears, the list of offending texts goes on and on: harsh Deuteronomic penalties for, say, disobeying parents; entire clans vanishing into the earth because the men celebrated a liturgy the wrong way; Egyptian babies killed by an angel for Pharaoh’s sin. The most famous instance, and the one with which I have the most experience, may not in fact be the worst, namely, the slaughter of the Canaanites in the Book of Joshua. Every children’s Bible includes the story of Joshua and the Walls of Jericho. It is celebrated in a famous vacation Bible school song, and has its own Veggie Tales episode. In its popular form, the story proceeds up to the moment when the walls fall down and then concludes with a generic statement about Israel defeating Jericho. But in the original, biblical story, it ends this way: “Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword” (Jos 6:21). Noncombatants, babies, even dumb animals all die. This jarring image follows from the Lord’s own command in Deuteronomy: But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do

according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their gods, and so to sin against the Lord your God. (Deut 20:16-18)

The breathtakingly harsh condemnation of Canaan has scandalized Christians in every age, but in our own day, the genocides in Nazi Germany and in Rwanda together with the resurgence of Islamic jihad have made the Book of Joshua almost intolerable.12 When one delves into the details of the text, the surface difficulty becomes considerably more complex. There are extensive parallels between the Exodus from Egypt and the entry into Canaan, with Joshua as a new Moses and the Jordan as a new Red Sea, and with the theme of “hardening of the heart” that is so prominent in the story of the Ten Plagues resurfacing in Joshua 11:19-20. The Rahab story adds context to the ensuing violence, making Canaanites into real people who can understand what is at stake. The broader context of the flow of Scripture’s story introduces new factors as well: Israel’s constant flirtation with idolatry (Ex 32); Canaan’s particular history of abominable behaviors (Gen 15:16); and the fact that the conquest of Canaan was to be a one-time event, not a model for any future action. Theologically, one can point out that God is in fact the lord of life, who can give and take life without fault, and that all human beings are liable to death due to Adam’s fall.13 Still, no matter how persuasively one argues that the “cleansing” of Canaan makes narrative sense or was compatible with God’s nature, the text remains disturbing. The much later Book of Wisdom seems to acknowledge as much, offering a defense of the story in anticipation of readers’ objections (Wis 12:3-16). When I teach through the Book of Joshua, students come to a point where they have no more intellectual objections to the story and yet cannot help a feeling of turmoil, of revolt. The reason is that the narrator of Joshua shows no sign of recoiling at the violence or of compassion for the Canaanites: if he would package his report in language of regret, if he would say that “despite the horror of the deed, we knew that somehow God’s justice must reconcile with his love”, if he would raise some kind of linguistic eyebrow at the death cries of the infants —if he would react at all as we do to his story, then it would be easier to read.

But the narrator’s voice never quavers. The reality is that the author of the Book of Joshua did not feel about killing as later Jews and Christians would. Just as Qoheleth stood at an earlier point in God’s plan of gradual revelation, so the author of Joshua stands at an earlier point in God’s plan of gradual moral formation. The author comes across as fiercely loyal to God and as someone who rejects any obstacle to union with God, but he does not sound like he has read the Sermon on the Mount. As a result, even though the text of Joshua does not actually say anything contrary to right faith or morals, readers can sense that if they could interview the author, then he would say things unacceptable to a Christian. He would not, for example, buy into the idea of turning the other cheek. His text sounds only God’s note, but the timbre of the note grates on the ear.14 Despite this seeming flaw, I always look forward to teaching through Joshua. When I ask my students to examine their own reaction to the text and explain it, the responses are fascinating. They realize that they feel that the Canaanites’ rights are being violated. So we talk about it: Do human beings have rights before God in such a way that he could be found guilty of violating them? The students discover that they do not trust God’s judgment; they worry that if somehow they could grasp all the relevant circumstances, then they would not think it was better that these people die. So we talk about it: How far does trust in God extend? Some students find that they are not so much worried about whether God can command death as they are about whether the action of killing all those people was bad for the Israelites who were commanded to do it. So we talk about it: Can a human being find himself in such a moral state that actions harmful for good people are healing for him? Can people be so different from one another? Notice that none of these questions actually solves the problem of Joshua. My students probably do not leave class convinced that the conquest of Canaan was just fine, but the very act of wrestling with the story opens up deep and fruitful questions about their own relationship with God and neighbor. I do not teach them to allegorize the Canaanites as sins to be overcome and destroyed, but they end

up asking themselves whether they are in fact willing to reject anything that stands between themselves and God, to hand themselves over to God entirely. Here is the point: had the author packaged his story in the language of regret, he would not have had this effect on them. The spiritual fruit of Joshua is drawn largely from the author’s imperfection. The original bluntness of the text was preserved as it was received into the canon of Scripture. We should keep in mind that the final editors of the biblical texts were not crude men like that first generation of Israelites but men cultivated by God’s careful attention over hundreds of years. They were not oblivious to the fact that the conquest of Israel was shocking; for them, I suspect, the value of these shocking texts was their shock value. No matter where we stand in God’s pedagogical plan for humanity, we need to be shaken awake. D. Dangers in the Difficulties This chapter has focused on the benefits of difficulties in Scripture. But just as honesty requires us to admit that there truly are difficulties in Scripture, honesty also requires us to admit that these difficulties really are dangerous as well as beneficial. When readers approach them well, they benefit; but when they approach them badly, they are not only left without benefit but often even harmed. For example, the scientific difficulties mentioned above have left a sizable population of readers truly convinced that the world was made in six twenty-four hour days and that the world is only six thousand years old. It is easy to make fun of error, but this is in fact a tragedy. Because these readers believe that Scripture gives the lie to contemporary science, they are led to posit a vast conspiracy on the part of scientists to conceal the truth; in other words, they are led to assert evils falsely of their fellowmen. They end up isolated from the main currents of intellectual discourse and deprived of certain professional opportunities. And of course they are excluded from knowledge of the truth about the physical structure of things, which in itself is bad.

The moral difficulties mentioned above have led some readers to vindicate their own violence against others by appeal to divine revelation. Christians have been the perpetrators, of course, as when the Puritan settlers cast the American Indians as “Canaanites and Amalekites” to justify exterminating them. But Christians have also suffered this effect. As John J. Collins reports, “Oliver Cromwell drew a parallel between his revolution and the exodus and proceeded to treat the Catholics of Ireland as the Canaanites. He even declared that ‘there are great occasions in which some men are called to great services in the doing of which they are excused from the common rule of morality’, as were the heroes of the OT.”15 It is not clear how responsible Scripture is for these problems. The same people who believe that the earth was created in six days and that most scientists are hostile to truth often believe that the fall of the Twin Towers was an inside attack by the U.S. government and that vast numbers of Americans are actively concealing this fact from their fellow citizens. Ancient peoples committed atrocities before the Scriptures existed, appealing to their gods, and modern Communists committed atrocities after rejecting religion altogether, appealing to their philosophy. But to some degree, it must be admitted that difficulties in Scripture present an occasion for bad things to happen. The argument of this chapter has been that the benefits of biblical difficulties depend on the reader’s moral effort and growth in virtue, and every demand for moral effort brings with it the possibility of failure. Some readers will fail because they lack courage, others because they are unjust, and others because they do not control their appetites—reasons for failure will be many. And of course there are “structures of sin”, ways in which a reader has been set up to fail by his upbringing, peer group, or cultural milieu. Many readers will never encounter a good example of intellectual honesty, and many will be misled about the Bible by their friends and teachers. But just as a child cannot learn to ride a bike without the danger of falling down, so people cannot undertake the interior battle required for moral growth without the danger of deformity.

The struggle Scripture requires can be put in the form of a dilemma: this text has a claim on me, and yet it presents problems. Accordingly, failure to struggle falls toward one side or another of the dilemma. On the one side are readers who bold-face their way past the problems, convincing themselves that only ill-willed people see problems here. These tend to be the readers who see Scripture as entirely literal and self-explanatory, and they heap scorn on scientists and historians who claim to have discovered something contrary to the surface sense of the text. They think of themselves as trusting the text without reservation, but in reality they fear letting it take them anywhere scary. On the other side are people who escape the dilemma by denying that the text has a claim on them. The soft version is when a reader simply ignores certain parts of Scripture, effectively limiting which parts of Scripture have a claim on them: maybe there would be problems if I looked in those dark corners, he might say in an honest moment, but nobody can make me look. The strong version is when a reader rejects Scripture’s nature and claim on him entirely, so that there is no need to struggle with anything in it. Collins believes that the fundamental reason Scripture leads people to violence is that they accept it as a divine voice offering certainty: “Perhaps the most constructive thing a biblical critic can do toward lessening the contribution of the Bible to violence in the world”, he concludes, “is to show that that certitude is an illusion.”16 Readers of Collins’ sort think of themselves as brutally honest, but in reality they are afraid to be honest about the possibility of the divine in the world. Both extremes retain an element of truth. The bold-facers are right that Scripture is truly the Word of God and that its message is a message intended for us by Truth itself. The rejecters are right that the human authors of Scripture are not all equally models for us: New Testament authors are better models for the theologian than Old Testament authors, and some Old Testament authors are better models than others. Between these extreme stands the mean, a never-ending struggle to read the difficult passages honestly but with docility. E. Allegorization of Difficult Passages

Before leaving the topic of difficult passages, I want to look back at the Christian tradition, for which a common way to deal with a difficult passage of Scripture has been to read it allegorically. Sometimes such allegorical readings are true instances of the spiritual sense, as described in chapter 4, but often they are highly subjective or eisegetical. Chapter 10 will look at how and whether eisegesis is problematic in itself, but for now I want to ask a question focused on difficulties in Scripture: Is allegorization an attempt to avoid the struggle? Does the tradition enshrine a way of avoiding the dilemma mentioned above? Sometimes, the answer seems to be yes. When a reader deals with troublesome passages only by allegorizing them, then he seems to be qualifying the way in which Scripture has a claim on him. Origen, for example, argues that when the surface of the text does not make sense or is morally repugnant, this is because there is no literal sense and one should seek a deeper sense instead.17 He is right that sometimes there is no surface sense; for example, the wild images of the Book of Revelation are not always meant to cohere into a picture that one could draw on paper, and certain sayings in the Sermon on the Mount defy one to take them at face value.18 But Origen extends this idea to cover problematic passages in general, so that he can simply drop any surface meaning that bothers him. He changes the moral struggle with these passages into more of a mental one, an effort to crack a code. But in another way, allegorization does not seem to be a simple failure to struggle. Origen is surely right to claim that problems with the surface meaning are intended to prevent us from getting complacent in our understanding and to drive us to recognize something deeper going on in the text.19 This thesis admits that there are real problems and does not seek to limit, effectively or in principle, which passages of Scripture are the Word of God. Moreover, the point of the allegorical approach is to find a spiritual fruit in the difficult passages, some means of moral growth, and this is in fact the reason difficult passages are present in Scripture. As a result, allegorical interpretations sometimes come closer to the moral fruit intended than is possible with either the bold-facer approach or

the rejecter attitude. The allegorical interpretation of Joshua, in which the Canaanites are vices we need to root out and the violence reflects our grim determination to put God before all, states in an abstract way the concrete effect the text is really supposed to have on us. It would be more effective and penetrating really to struggle with the difficulty and let the sacred words do their work in us, but the allegorical approach cannot be said simply to fail even when taken by itself. When taken together with the other elements of the tradition, the allegorical approach is a valuable tool in the struggle. This is obviously true of those cases where an allegorical reading is a genuine instance of the spiritual sense of Scripture, but it is even true of those cases where an allegorical reading is highly subjective and personal. To this we turn in the following chapter.

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The Reader Words are go-betweens. They stand in between reality, on the one hand, and a reader, on the other, and they bring reality and the reader into a happy union. Reality, word, and reader form the essential triad from which the “book” arises. To this point, we have examined two members of this triad: the spiritual sense of Scripture deals with the meaning of reality itself, while the literal sense of Scripture brings into play the meaning of words. Is there a meaning of Scripture tied to the third member of the triad, to the reader as such? Should the reader also contribute something to Scripture? Or would any injection of readerly subjectivity merely contaminate the clear streams of revelation? In this chapter, I mean to argue that there is some value to subjectivity as such, provided the “subject” is properly subjected to words and things. A. The Problem of Subjectivity As I mentioned in chapter 3, ancient scribes felt free even to modify a canonical text somewhat for new circumstances. When the scribe produced his own text, he quoted the normative texts from memory and rather inexactly—not out of disregard for the normative text, but because the text itself had become an interior medium in which he thought, communicated, and expressed himself. The canon had become more than an exterior instrument; it had become an organic part of the scribe. It was not merely an object of thought, but the background for thought. As the scribe pushed himself more and more deeply into the canon, the canon pushed itself more and more deeply into the scribe. The foundation of the scribe’s freedom and subjectivity was the fact that he grasped the tradition as a common good. He did not feel that the tradition was his private possession, to be deconstructed and reconstructed at will, and yet he did feel some ownership or

stake in it. It was in fact the same kind of ownership he felt of his own writings: even when the ancient scribe expressed his own thoughts through the medium of the canon, he knew that his writing did not have its meaning alone, but only in relation to the scribes before him. Just as their work was not theirs individually but common and therefore his, so his work was not his individually but a common possession.1 Again, T. S. Eliot’s description of the poet and his work within a literary tradition is helpful: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”2 Paradoxically, therefore, the scribe’s sense of freedom with regard to the canonical texts arose from his deep submission to them.3 But as I also noted in chapter 3, our instincts about texts have changed. The text has become more intensely the private possession of its author, and new writings are valued more for originality than for expression of tradition. The modern writer must never plagiarize another’s work, and the modern reader must be on guard against violating the author’s rights by trampling on his authorial intention. This focus on the author’s intention has become a focus on the author’s act of intending at the expense of the object upon which the author was intent. It is like the old practical joke in which the speaker points across the room and says, “A nail!” Everyone looks across the room for a moment in confusion, because there is no nail there; when their eyes return to the speaker, his eyes have focused on the fingernail at the tip of the pointing finger—and they realize they have been had. What appeared to be a pointer at an object was itself the object. In what could be called a hermeneutical joke, the modern reader picks up an ancient author who pointed to a reality, and he focuses, not on the reality, but on the author’s mind.4 However, a result of this over-attention to the author’s and the reader’s subjective consciousness has been genuine deeper insight into the presence and influence of the reader’s subjectivity. Every text, we now realize, is like a musical score that must be “performed” by the reader: just as no two performances of Bach’s Saint

Matthew’s Passion are the same, so no two readings of Matthew’s Passion story are the same. And yet every performance of Bach’s music is controlled by the score Bach wrote, and every reading of Matthew’s Passion story is controlled by the text of Matthew’s Gospel.5 Composer Arvo Part referred to performers as “cocomposers” of his music; in a similar way, a reader is always a “coauthor” of what he reads.6 But this insight into subjectivity often takes the form of a problem. The rise of the “heroic author” as a singular individual of genius came along with a vivid realization that the (possibly less heroic) reader is also an individual with his own preferences and blind spots.7 As faithful readers, striving to discover the author’s intention, we aim to overcome our subjectivity as far as is possible. The ideal is exegesis, receiving our reading from the text; the enemy is eisegesis, reading things into the text. We feel the ever-present danger of an arbitrary biblical interpretation that makes the text mean whatever we want it to mean, imposing our will on the text while clothing our own agenda in its authoritative aura. Our own struggle with subjectivity leads to embarrassment over premodern biblical interpreters who were less aware of the danger. Cardinal Ratzinger, who advocated a return to key aspects of traditional exegesis, nonetheless cautioned that patristic and medieval interpreters of Scripture “easily fell into arbitrariness” because they did not habitually situate texts in their historical contexts.8 Sometimes Church Fathers themselves raise the problem of arbitrary reading. Having laid down the rule that only interpretations that build up charity can be correct, Saint Augustine comments on those well-meaning people whose interpretations are less than a pursuit of authorial intention: But whoever perceives in Scripture something otherwise than did the author. . . if he is deceived by a conclusion that builds up charity, which is the goal of the law, he is deceived in this way, as though someone were to abandon the path in error and nonetheless go through a field to the very place to which the path leads. Such a one

should be corrected and persuaded that it is better not to abandon the path, lest the habit of deviating force him to go sideways or even backwards.9

Augustine does not denounce the subjective interpreter, but he cannot quite condone him, either. A more forceful condemnation comes from Saint Irenaeus, who encountered an extreme of arbitrary interpretation in the Gnostic movement. His criticism is worth citing at length: Such is their system which neither the prophets preached, nor the Lord taught, nor the apostles handed down. They boast rather loudly of knowing more about it than others do, citing it from non-scriptural works; and, as people would say, they attempt to braid ropes of sand. They try to adapt to their own sayings in a manner worthy of credence, either the Lord’s parables, or the prophets’ sayings, or the apostles’ words, so that their fabrication might not appear to be without witness. They disregard the order and the connection of the Scriptures and, as much as in them lies, they disjoint the members of the Truth. They transfer passages and rearrange them; and, making one thing out of another, they deceive many by the badly composed phantasy of the Lord’s words that they adapt. By way of illustration, suppose someone would take the beautiful image of a king, carefully made out of precious stones by a skillful artist, and would destroy the features of the man on it and change around and rearrange the jewels, and make the form of a dog, or of a fox, out of them, and that a rather bad piece of work. Suppose he would then say with determination that this is the beautiful image of the king that the skillful artist had made, at the same time pointing to the jewels which had been beautifully fitted together by the first artist into the image of the king, but which had been badly changed by the second into the form of a dog. And suppose he would through this fanciful arrangement of the jewels deceive the inexperienced who had no idea of what the king’s picture looked like, and would persuade them that this base picture of a fox is that beautiful image of the king. In the same way these people patch together old women’s fables, and then pluck words and sayings and parables from here and there and wish to adapt these words of God to their fables.10

Irenaeus’ complaint sounds like a definition of eisegesis: the Gnostics do not derive their views from Scripture, but read them into Scripture; they ignore the “order and connection of the Scriptures”; they pry the jewels of the Bible out of their setting in order to rearrange them into a different picture.

Despite Augustine’s warning and Irenaeus’ complaint, it would be easy to multiply instances of orthodox patristic exegesis quite as eisegetical as that of the Gnostics. Augustine himself was wont to romp through the fields with no apparent remorse. For example, in a homily on the ten plagues of the Exodus, Augustine takes the view that everyone who breaks the Ten Commandments suffers spiritually what the Egyptians suffered physically. He then proceeds to line up each plague with each commandment: “The fourth commandment is: Honor your father and your mother (Ex 20:12). The opposite of this is the fourth plague of Egypt. Cynoma, that is the dog-fly; it’s a Greek word. It is characteristic of dogs not to recognize their parents. There is nothing so like the behavior of dogs as not recognizing or acknowledging your parents. That’s why it is so appropriate that puppies are born blind.”11 In order to find some kind of connection between the plague of flies and the fourth commandment, Augustine focuses on the word used in the Latin translation available to him, which turns out to be derived from a Greek word meaning “dog-fly”. Turning to the Greek root, he then drops the entire “fly” part to chase the “dog” part. The result is a “reading” of Exodus so removed from the original context as to leave one breathless. As moderns who love Augustine, we feel embarrassed. B. The Enduring Tradition of Subjectivity If tradition be any criterion, however, subjectivity has a place in the Christian encounter with Scripture. We point happily to the strong literal interpretations of Scripture found in the Fathers and the medievals, and the spiritual sense of Scripture has seen renewed appreciation in recent decades, but if we were to excise from the Church Fathers every biblical interpretation that was neither a pursuit of the objective literal sense nor a sober investigation of the spiritual sense according to the best criteria, then the Patrologia Graece et Latina would fit onto far fewer shelves. Gone would be nearly all commentary on the Song of Songs or the Psalms or Leviticus. Lost would be nearly all homilies on Job and a great many homilies on the parables of our Lord. One cannot simultaneously hallow tradition and demonize eisegesis.12

Powerful instincts of faith ground this tradition of subjective reading. Merely human texts have limits to their meaning because the authors are limited: if a human author could pack intelligibility into every detail of his work, he would. Dante Alighieri, for example, spent thirty years composing his Divine Comedy so as to imbue even the smallest things with meaning. For instance, he wrote the entire work in lines of thirty uninterrupted syllables, with no punctuation disturbing their flow—except for one line, which has a comma in the middle. That comma turns out to mark the middle of the line that is in the exact center of the Divine Comedy, and the half-line before the comma draws attention to the first half of the work, while the half-line after the comma calls attention to the second half of the work.13 Given time and talent enough, a human author will give meaning even to a comma! So would not God, who suffers no limit of time or intelligence, fill even the most seemingly meaningless phrases of Scripture with hidden meaning? Such at least has been the believer’s feeling. Origen captures the sentiment: “For my part, and because I believe what my Lord Jesus Christ has said, I think that there is not a ‘jot or tittle’ in the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 5:18) that does not contain a mystery.”14 Christian exegetes have pursued the mystical meaning of numbers, and Jewish interpreters have even speculated about the meaning of individual letters within words.15 An analogy can be found in the Incarnation. Because Christ is fully human, he did many things that demonstrate the reality of his human nature: he walked on dusty roads, he hungered, he thirsted, he sought companionship. But because Christ’s human nature belonged to the Divine Person of the Word, he also did many things that exceeded his human nature: he walked on water, he multiplied loaves, he healed the blind. Similarly, because Scripture is truly authored by men, it bears all the marks of human literature: it uses ancient genres, its grammar is sometimes odd, it shows the seams and tensions of various editors. And yet because God has attached his own voice to this text, Christians of every age have found that Scripture contains meaning beyond what the human authors imagined and beyond what ancient literary genres could support. To

limit biblical interpretation to the pursuit of a human author’s meaning, or to relegate anything beyond the human author’s meaning to an “application” of the text, feels to Christian instinct like biblical monophysitism or even Nestorianism. To borrow an old phrase, it offends pious ears. C. Scripture’s Invitation to Subjectivity Building on the believer’s a priori instincts, close attention to the experience of reading Scripture suggests a need for eisegesis. For example, Genesis 1 deliberately raises a question about the nature of the “light” on the first day of creation.16 We are to see that the heavenly bodies point beyond themselves to some kind of greater light, but we are not told what the light is. Is it the wise counsel of God? Is it the illuminated intellect of the angels? Are we as Christians to think of the Person of the Word? The text invites us to the question but does not supply the answer. The reader’s only course of action, aside from declining the invitation, is to fill the answer in from his own resources. The Book of Leviticus issues many such invitations. Consider the beginning of the ritual for the cleansing of a leper in Leviticus 14:4-7: The priest shall command them to take for him who is to be cleansed two living clean birds and cedarwood and scarlet stuff and hyssop; and the priest shall command them to kill one of the birds in an earthen vessel over running water. He shall take the living bird with the cedarwood and the scarlet stuff and the hyssop, and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water; and he shall sprinkle it seven times upon him who is to be cleansed of leprosy; then he shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird go into the open field.

Such an intricate ritual feels heavily symbolic, and yet there is no guidance as to what the symbols mean. The very bizarreness of the ritual—the cedarwood, the death over running water, the dipping of one bird in another—throws down a hermeneutical gauntlet: Interpret this! The reader can either complete the meaning of the text from his own resources, or, along with most modern commentators, he can adapt for himself the response of Ahaz: “No, I will not interpret—I will not tempt the Lord!”17

The Psalms present a unique case of the text demanding more than it supplies. Compiled as a prayer book, the Psalms require the reader to pray them; but prayer always has its referent in the moment. It makes no sense for a Christian in the Second Millennium to pray Psalm 2 in celebration of the coronation of an anonymous Davidic king in the era before Christ. To pray the text, the Christian must do more with the text than its human author built it to do. This textual demand is so urgent that the redaction of the Psalter already contains a messianic reading-into-the-text, with the result that the Christian who prays the Psalms in a Christian context simply carries on a project already begun in the Psalter itself.18 Here the call to subjectivity is more than an invitation. Such examples could be multiplied. Time and again, Scripture calls the reader to more meaning than it supplies and so invites the reader to bring his own resources to the meaning. This is not the reader’s imposition on the Bible but his docility to it. The natural root of this experience is what I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, namely, that every text is like a musical score, requiring both composer and performer. Or, to take another metaphor, texts are like the physical world, which seems solid to the touch but turns out to consist mostly of empty space and only here and there of tiny bits of solid matter. Similarly, a human author cannot replicate the density of reality in words, and so he supplies a directive here and a hint or suggestion there but leaves most of his description as “gaps” to be filled in by the reader.19 To discover the author’s meaning is to fill the gaps as the author himself filled them. But not even the author himself fills every gap. A novelist often has someone ask whether this or that in the story meant such-and-such, only to be forced to confess that the author himself does not know what it means. He wrote that way and left that gap out of a fidelity to some kind of reality, some kind of thing with its own integrity that had to unfold this way, but he has only partially probed it. In a biblical text, one often finds that a redactor has put his text alongside another that he was unwilling to edit out of a fidelity to the sacred text, but in so doing the redactor has created a gap that he himself has not consciously filled. If every text is like a musical score, then

these open-ended gaps are like Baroque musical ornamentations that call on the performer to improvise. This everyday experience is intensified in the Christian’s lectio divina, his devout encounter with God’s Word, because the instinct of faith is that Scripture does not consist mostly of empty space: it presents a massive face of meaning, solid at every point. The score may ask the performer to improvise, but God has known from all eternity what this performer will choose to do, and he has woven it already into his symphony. To use still another metaphor, Scripture— and certain books and passages in particular—creates a sandbox for readers to play in, with the context and the meaning of the words as the walls of the sandbox and the hints of unsupplied meaning as sand. The reader not only can but should feel freedom: he must trust the sandbox. Scripture’s invitation to subjectivity is also bound up with its nature as the supernatural canon of a supernatural society. While the Fathers and medievals can scandalize us with their seemingly whimsical interpretation of even the smallest details of the biblical text, we have to remember that the monk’s practice of “chewing” the text by lectio divina, “ruminating” by meditation, and “digesting” it by theologizing is the Christian’s divinely graced experience of what ancient scribes did with their natural literary canons.20 The modern reader, with his complete printed Bible and a concordance or perhaps good Bible software, has Scripture more than ever at his fingertips as a tool and an object of reflection. Yet the Fathers and medievals had Scripture itself for fingers, no longer merely an object of thought, but a medium for it. They thought their thoughts and communicated their thoughts by way of the holy text. As they pushed their way farther and farther into Scripture, Scripture pushed itself farther and farther into them. Prolonged fidelity to this experience led to a second experience: in the end, Scripture has its way with the reader despite all his subjectivity. The one who prays the Psalter Christocentrically arrives at a vivid sense of the full humanity of Christ’s heart, an insight he could not have achieved otherwise. The one who reads Deuteronomy as describing Christ, really interiorly reading rather

than taking the physical page as an occasion for monologue, finds that Jesus has become earthier, more bodily, and more cosmic in significance.21 If we look at perhaps the most famous example of traditional eisegesis, the commentaries on the Song of Songs, we find that for centuries celibate males used the text as an occasion to express their spiritual desires and experiences—and arrived at a spousal spirituality.22 They used Scripture as a medium for their own reflection, but ultimately the medium became the message. D. The Value of Subjectivity It seems, then, that the natural character of canon, the instincts of faith, and real-life experience all point to a strange conclusion: God wants us to read the Bible subjectively. The Christian experience of Scripture is not complete unless the reader has at least here or there pushed the meaning of a text beyond what the human author’s intention and the literary genre’s conventions support. Why would God value and encourage something we as readers fear and avoid? As moderns, we have come to accept that subjectivity in reading is an unavoidable problem. The ideal of pure exegesis, of reading only from and never into the text, can never be realized; but if God’s plan followed our inclinations as moderns, then Scripture’s supernatural properties would tend toward eliminating subjectivity as far as possible. Allowed to pursue their own course, our desires might reconstruct Scripture as a kind of magic ball that always shows us the words we need right then to make its meaning absolutely clear. When we are confused about the meaning of a sentence, the magic ball offers a clarification in the next sentence, and it continues to clarify for each reader until no doubt can be left. The experience of reading this magic-ball version of Scripture would be entirely objective: the book would keep at us until any subjective error was eliminated. However, I would suggest that our inclination toward an entirely objective reading of Scripture stems from thinking of God as a creature, as suffering the same limitations as human authors of our everyday reading experience. As I stressed in chapter 3 (p. 75), our ability as creatures to cause is limited in surprising ways. Because

we are not the author of being, we can only act on something from the outside: we cannot cause a rock to fall or a plant to grow, because those are the rock’s and the plant’s own actions, and we do not give rocks or plants their beings and natures. Consequently, when we speak or write, we communicate our thoughts to others as from the outside, as one creature acting on another. We hope to read a book as objectively as possible because both the author of the book and the object of his attention come to us from the outside, and we must accordingly go outside of ourselves to find them. Only in the case of Scripture do we read the words of an author who is in fact also the Author of our being and of all our actions. Just as God makes the rock to fall of itself, so he causes us to see things by our own interior light; just as we are good by participation in God’s goodness, so our minds see and understand by participation in God’s uncreated light. Our very reading and thinking about Scripture flow from God as from the font of all interior light. As a result, when we read Scripture—and only in this case—our creative contribution to the meaning of the text can be a meaning the author both intended and brought about. All texts are in some way “co-authored” by the author and the reader; this is most perfectly true of Scripture, where the author is in fact the source of the reader’s contribution in such a way that the reader’s contribution can be simultaneously his and God’s. Our own minds bring something to the text, but “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16). The “magic ball” model of Scripture would push our conversation with God more and more out there, away from the heart. God’s approach pulls our conversation with God more and more in here, where cor ad cor loquitur, and so Scripture forms us and teaches us how we are to relate to God. To insist that traditional subjective reading is an “application” of the text would put a glass wall in between us and God—in between our minds and the font of our interior light and of the text’s intelligibility. E. Degrees and Limits of Subjectivity Despite the tradition behind subjective reading, despite the favorable instincts of faith, and despite the solid theological theory behind it,

allowing subjectivity into one’s reading can feel like letting the proverbial camel’s nose into the tent. Where will it stop? How could this possibly not lead to irresponsible reading? The first part of a solution is modernity’s heightened awareness of subjectivity. We can allow ourselves to read more subjectively because we know that is what we are doing; the danger comes, not from reading subjectively, but from mistaking one’s subjective reading for objective reading. Modernity’s contribution to this stream of the tradition will probably be the gift of more careful distinctions between the kinds of reading in which we engage. The second part comes from habitual submission of individuality to a common good. Subjective reading is not the same as arbitrary reading. Arbitrary reading imposes the reader’s will on the text, using the text to clothe the reader’s aims with an aura of authority. In fact, most arbitrary readings claim the mantle of objectivity. As Ratzinger notes, “[T]he daring constructions of many modern exegetes, right up to the materialistic interpretation of the Bible, show that the Word, if left alone as a book, is a helpless prey to manipulation through preexisting desires and opinions.”23 Lectio divina, on the other hand, is a response of obedience and submission, “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”. Even at the natural level, the ancient poet or scribe grounded his freedom in a submission to tradition, in the sublimation of his private good into the common good. For a Christian, this sublimation is more drastic: it is a death event. The “I” of the Christian is taken up into the “I” of Christ to the degree that the Christian believes himself to have died and risen in Christ, to be animated by the Spirit of Christ, to live by the very life of Christ. The Fathers saw their work as entering into the edifice of the whole of Scripture and of all interpretations before them, so that their interpretations were not their own merely but belonged to all the Church. But more than this, they read as members of the Mystical Body and for the Mystical Body of Christ; they could adapt for themselves the words of Saint Paul, “I read, no longer I, but Christ who reads within me.”

A modern Christian reader might, therefore, convey his subjective reading in terms like these: “By God’s generosity I seem to see in this text something that perhaps not even his servant the author saw. It may be that this is only his gift to me, but it may also be that he has given this to me in trust, to be handed on to others. I fear speaking out of presumption, but I also fear hiding my light under a basket.” Because lectio divina is essentially a kind of submission, it usually does not take the form of a radical departure from the text. It takes as intended by God any interpretation that expresses a truth and is consistent with the meaning of the words and the context. The words and the context act as the walls of the “sandbox”. When an interpretation expresses a truth but is not consistent with the context or the meaning of the words, the reader may indeed hear God “speaking”, but not insofar as these are words of Scripture. In this case, the reader approaches the words as a kind of independent unit, and he hears God “speak” in them in much the way he can find God “speaking” in the events of everyday life. The more disconnected a reading is from the words and the context, the less likely it is that the proper spirit of submission has been maintained—less likely, but not impossible. For example, when the Church Fathers read into the text, they were generally reading Scripture into Scripture. To adapt Irenaeus’ metaphor, they were in the habit of seeing the entire biblical mosaic as somehow reflected in the facets of each jewel. So even their strangest flights of fancy were at some level undertaken in submission to Scripture. The Church has used even extremely non-contextual interpretations in her liturgy, as for example when lines from the story of Mary and Martha are used on feasts of Mary the Mother of God. The very fact that the Church herself has proposed eisegetical readings to the faithful in the liturgy for a thousand years and more argues that God did want his people to hear that text that way.

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Where Is the Bible? In defining Scripture, I said that it resides in the heart of the believing Church, because it is a means of impressing Christ onto his Mystical Body. What that means has become gradually clearer, as we considered the effects of the literal and spiritual senses in the believer and as we considered the contribution made by the reader’s own subjectivity. Here in this final chapter, I will argue that Scripture’s definitive home is at the heart of the Church’s heart, that is, in the very heart of Jesus Christ himself. A. The Old Testament and the Heart of Jesus Where does the Bible exist most of all? In general, a text exists materially and instrumentally on paper or some other exterior medium and exists formally and principally in the human heart. Rocks and trees do not exist principally in the human heart, because they do not exist in the heart in their own mode, which is a physical mode of being. But texts are constructed by the heart, for the heart, and in the human heart they find their proper mode of existence. Unlike rocks, they are not purely physical; unlike ideas, they are not purely immaterial. Their use of physical signs to guide understanding is a uniquely human thing. We usually suppose that a text’s paradigmatic existence is in the heart of its author: every understanding of the text must be measured and judged against the author’s understanding of his text. The author himself, however, normally wants to bring that text into existence in the heart of his intended audience, and he tests his own understanding and crafting of the text against the way he anticipates the text coming to exist there. In one way, then, the text exists paradigmatically in the author’s heart; in another way, it exists paradigmatically in the audience’s heart.

The texts of the Hebrew Bible were written by Israelites for Israel. While the individual texts existed first and paradigmatically in the hearts of their Israelite authors, those authors did not mean to “express themselves” in an individualistic way but, rather, meant to speak as members of Israel, and they devoutly wished that their texts would take definitive form in the hearts of the entirety of God’s people. Israel wrote for Israel. But there was still another author prior even to Israel, as Pope Benedict XVI points out:1 Neither the individual books of Holy Scripture nor the Scripture as a whole are simply a piece of literature. The Scripture emerged from within the heart of a living subject— the pilgrim People of God—and lives within this same subject. One could say that the books of Scripture involve three interacting subjects. First of all, there is the individual author or group of authors to whom we owe a particular scriptural text. But these authors are not autonomous writers in the modern sense; they form part of a collective subject, the “People of God,” from within whose heart and to whom they speak. Hence, this subject is actually the deeper “author” of the Scriptures. And yet likewise, this people does not exist alone; rather, it knows that it is led, and spoken to, by God himself, who—through men and their humanity—is at the deepest level the one speaking.

At one level, these men wrote for those men; at a deeper level, Israel wrote for Israel; at the deepest level, God wrote. What is the deepest audience that corresponds to this deepest level of authorship? It is Israel at the deepest level, Israel as embodied in the one whom Israel foreshadowed. Preexisting as the Word of God, Jesus had the unique advantage of preparing the way for his own birth and formation. Together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he formed the people of Israel, guided their history, created the sacred canon that formed their culture, chose his own mother, and brought himself in his humanity into the family and into the society he had formed. Moreover, the same God who created his human nature illuminated it from within, ensuring that his human, semi-creative process of reading corresponded perfectly to the Divine Author’s intention in creating the text. From its inception, the Hebrew Bible was destined for the human heart of Jesus, who by receiving it gave it its definitive existence. He learned

the Scriptures, submitted to them as his Father’s words, and in a human way was formed by them. And yet in absorbing the words of God, he, the Word, was taking on the consciousness and the memory that were his by right, just as by receiving the Holy Spirit in his humanity he was receiving the Spirit that was uniquely his. As Jesus was necessarily “Christ”, anointed with his own Spirit, so he was necessarily the audience of God’s Word. In the usual case, a text exists first in the heart of its author. But in the case of the Old Testament, the principal author was God, in whom texts do not find their proper mode of being. The text of the Hebrew Bible does not exist as a text in the mind of God. Moreover, each secondary, human author possessed only a part of Scripture in his heart as its author; since a part takes its form from the whole, no human heart had contained Scripture in a paradigmatic way before Christ. When Jesus gave the Hebrew Bible its definitive existence by receiving it, he gave it paradigmatic existence for the first time. We often say that the history and institutions recorded in the Hebrew Bible were fulfilled in Christ, but it is also true that the very text of the Hebrew Bible was brought to completion in him. The ceremonies and institutions of Israel were fulfilled in Christ in such a way that they ceased to exist. The texts of the Hebrew Bible are still with us, but the Hebrew Bible as such also ceased to exist through being fulfilled in Christ. Even as he gave it definitive existence, Jesus transformed the Hebrew Bible into the “Old Testament” by subordinating it to a larger whole that includes the “New Testament”. B. The New Testament and the Heart of Jesus How does Jesus relate to this “New Testament”? In the New Testament, only one book speaks directly about its own supernatural origins. The Book of Revelation begins with an explicit claim to be the inspired Word of God and then traces out a chain of communication from God to the book’s audience. We can find Jesus’ place in that chain by reading the first three verses of Revelation closely:

[1] The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place; and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, [2] who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. [3] Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written therein; for the time is near.

The Revelation of Jesus Christ, Which God Gave Him The first sentence of this book states that it is the revelation of Jesus Christ. While it is certainly a revelation of Jesus in the sense that it reveals Jesus, reveals his Final Coming, the main thrust of the word of is that this revelation belongs to Jesus Christ. It is his because God gave it to him. Jesus in turn handed it to John, who entrusted it to others, and so forth. Here one could ask: Why does this revelation belong to Jesus especially, since he is one in a series of recipients? God gave it Jesus, who gave it to John, who gave it to the readers, and so on. Should the book begin the revelation of God, the original possessor? To be sure, Jesus has nothing that he has not received from the Father. In every way, he is transparent to the Father, so that the one who sees him sees the Father. And yet, while the Father is the origin and source of every good, the Father does not possess those goods in a created, sensible nature. Only Jesus has assumed human form. The truth exists first in the Father, but in the Father it is hidden from view: it only becomes “revelation” in the incarnate Son. The revelation does not come to rest in Jesus. By his death and Resurrection, Jesus has won the right to hand on to his servants everything received from his Father. Son though he was by birth, by his death he earned the title “Lord” as a reward (Phil 2:11), so that he is called “the first and the last, and the living one” (Rev 1:17-18) not only because he is in fact the second Person of the Trinity but also because “I died, and behold I am alive for evermore” (Rev 1:18). By this victory, he can take his place at God’s throne and open the seals of God’s hidden plan (Rev 5:5-14).

This power of opening the seals is not only the authority to make something known but also the authority to make things happen. The events that unfold when the Lamb opens the seven seals are not simply known to man because he opens the seals but take place because the Lamb, by opening the seal, has commanded them to happen. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him (Mt 28:18). Even after his victory, Jesus can possess this authority only by taking his seat on God’s throne. What kind of authority is this, that only God could wield it? It is an authority different in kind from that of kings and even of angels. It is authority over history itself, which can only be an authority over the hearts of men. Both by birth and by the victory of his death, Jesus has dominion where only God has dominion, namely, in the heart (Prov 21:1; Rev 2:23). This is why Jesus could send the Holy Spirit only after his victory on the Cross: the Spirit changes the hearts of men, which the Spirit can do only because the Spirit is himself God. Jesus cannot send the Spirit until he has won his title, “Lord”. Having won that title, Jesus has the authority both to enact God’s plan for history and to make known what has been planned. Both are his as the King of Hearts, namely, to turn the hearts of kings wherever he wills (Prov 21:1) and to send the Spirit to speak to the churches (Rev 2:7; 2:11; 2:17; 2:29; 3:6; 3:13; 3:22). And He Made It Known by Sending His Angel to His Servant John If Jesus makes known his revelation by sending the Spirit, why does our text say that he made it known by sending an angel? Angels do not have authority over the hearts of men. Looking more closely, we notice that the verb here for “make it known” is semaino, “to make known by means of signs” or “to signify”. It shares a root with the “sign” or “portent” of Revelation 12:1. What Jesus does by sending an angel is not to give John interior understanding but to give exterior signs to John consisting of sights and sounds in the imagination—sights and sounds that he does not always comprehend immediately (Rev 7:13-14). In other words, the angel has not taken over the role of Holy Spirit but has

been given a complementary role: he is to supply an external path that John must follow “in the Spirit” (Rev 1:10). Who Bore Witness to the Word of God and to the Witness of Jesus Christ, Even to All That He Saw John’s role is then described as that of one who “bore witness”. In the process of translating visible and audible signs into written words and thereby inevitably interpreting those signs, he did not interpose himself in between the gift of Christ and his readers. He made himself transparent to the gift, namely, “to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ”. What is “the word of God”, and what is “the testimony of Jesus”? The “testimony of Jesus Christ” is, first of all, the witness that Jesus himself gives. He is described a few lines later as “the faithful witness” (1:5) and later as “the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation” (3:14). The end of the Book of Revelation describes the entire contents of the book as the witness or testimony of Jesus: “I Jesus have sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches (Rev 22:16).2 And again: “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon’  ” (Rev 22:20). Just as Jesus witnessed to the Father to the point of giving his life, so now in glory his message delivered through an angel is entirely faithful to what God has given him. His very identity is to be the Amen, so transparent to the Father that he himself is the Father’s Word to the world: “Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God” (Rev 19:11-13). When John witnesses to “the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus”, he is handing on Jesus himself, the Word of God and the Amen. The disciple’s role in revelation is, first of all, to take on a likeness to Jesus, the faithful witness, like “Antipas, my witness, my faithful

one, who was killed among you” (Rev 2:13). Usually, the Book of Revelation describes faithful Christians not as “giving” their own witness but as “holding” the witness of Jesus: When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. (6:9) Then the dragon was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold the witness of Jesus. (12:17, translated by author)

But by holding to the witness of Jesus, the disciples become witnesses in their own right in likeness to him: “And they have conquered [Satan] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (12:11). Even before receiving these signs from Jesus, therefore, John has already borne witness to “the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus”: “I John, your brother, who share with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (1:9). In his role as witness to the witness of Jesus, he again takes on a likeness to the master, becoming transparent to the one who is transparent to the Father. Just as the disciple must “hold” the testimony that Jesus gave and so translate it into a new circumstance, John must retain “all that he saw” (1:2) and translate it into a new medium, from sight and sound to written word. This kind of fidelity requires the Holy Spirit. John tells us that he was “in the Spirit” when he received these visions (1:10). But the gift of the Spirit is not something other than or beyond taking on a likeness to the “faithful and true witness” by holding on to his testimony. One might be tempted to think that the great gift given to John was to be the recipient of the sights and sounds given him by an angel, but when he fell down at the angel’s feet to worship him, the angel forbade him: “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brethren who hold the testimony of Jesus. Worship God. For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (19:10).

The true prophet of the New Testament is the one who takes on a likeness to the Word of God by his entire transparency to the one who is entirely transparent to the Father. “For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy”: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3). Blessed Is He Who Reads Aloud the Words of the Prophecy A new witness is introduced here, neither God nor angel nor disciple: the words of the prophecy. John’s faithful translation of what he saw was not delivered immediately to God’s servants (1:1) but first to a document, which document then went out into the world without John. Containing not only a description of fantastic visions but John’s Spirit-gifted understanding of the visions, the words are words of the prophecy. They are imbued with the “spirit of prophecy”, with the witness of Jesus. What was first of all a description of John, namely, that he is a prophet and transparent to Jesus, has become a description of the words. A blessing is pronounced on the person who will read these words. The Book of Revelation gives seven blessings, declaring blessed the one who reads aloud these words (1:3), those who hear and keep these words (1:3), the dead who die in the Lord from now on (14:13), the one who is awake (16:15), those invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb (19:9), the one who shares in the first resurrection (20:6), the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book (22:7), and those who wash their robes (22:14). Although God is no doubt blessed above all, and those who have come through the final judgment safely are blessed beyond anyone on this earth, every blessing pronounced in the Book of Revelation applies to those who are still engaged in the earthly struggle for salvation. As the chain of revelation proceeds from God through Christ and onward, the one who reads aloud is the first member of the chain who is still personally engaged in the struggle. The angels fight, but not for themselves; John of Patmos has long ago received his reward; the words of the book circulate in this world of battle, but they are not themselves seeking salvation. To read aloud these words is to take a place in the chain of revelation, to become an

instrument of the Holy Spirit, and to strike a blow in the fight described by the words. And Blessed Are Those Who Hear and Who Keep What Is Written Therein Here we come to the last of the seven-part chain of revelation sketched out in these opening verses: (1) God, (2) Jesus Christ, (3) an angel, (4) John, (5) the words of the prophecy, (6) the one who reads aloud, and (7) the one who hears and keeps the words. As we have seen, the words of the prophecy come from Jesus through John, and they have Jesus Christ, the faithful and true witness, as their form. But when John writes the words, the chain of revelation is still incomplete. The words’ final destination is the heart of the believer. There is also a parallel between John and the hearer of Scripture. Just as John received outward signs from the angel and had to translate them into words by a gift of the Holy Spirit, so the hearer is presented with John’s words as outward signs. His task is, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, to keep what is written, that is, to translate the words of John into the new medium of Christian life. From all this, we can draw some conclusions about Jesus’ relation to the New Testament in general. To begin with, Jesus Christ is responsible for the New Testament—for the texts of the New Testament. Before Christ, God sent his Holy Spirit on human authors so that their writings would be his words, but those sacred texts did not exist in God in the mode of texts. There was no single human heart where the texts of Scripture could exist paradigmatically as a text: they existed in “the heart of Israel”, that is, in the many hearts of those who cherished them as Israel’s common good. But ever since Christ’s victory over death, the Holy Spirit descends on men only when he is sent by Christ: this is part of the prerogative that Jesus won, so that every tongue should proclaim him Lord (Phil 2:11). Consequently, the inspiration and divine authorship of the New Testament writings comes from the man Jesus Christ. One might suppose that this implies a dictation theory of inspiration. If Jesus has the text of Paul’s Letter to the Colossians in

his heart in all its detail before ever Paul sets pen to paper, does this mean that Paul simply transcribes in a mechanical way what he is given—that Paul does not act as a true author? It does not. While some parts of the Book of Revelation are presented as dictation from a vision of Christ, the book as a whole is presented as John’s own faithful translation of Christ’s revelation from the medium of sights and sounds to the medium of words. His fidelity in witnessing to what he saw gives him a particular likeness to Christ, the faithful witness. This, like any other particular grace received by anyone in the world, was prepared and given to him by Christ. But, like any other grace received by anyone in the world, it did not take away from but rather elevated John’s own action. As the triumphant God Incarnate, Jesus Christ has the same authority over history and the human heart as does the Father: he joins the Father on his heavenly throne and opens the seals of the scroll of history. As Pope Pius XII says of him, citing Proverbs 21:1, “For it is He who reigns within the minds and hearts of men, and bends and subjects their wills to His good pleasure, even when rebellious. ‘The heart of the King is in the hand of the Lord; whithersoever he will, he shall turn it.’  ”3 Just as God’s decree causes a man to act with his own causality and so where is the bible? 257 with his own personality and resources, so the gift of Jesus Christ causes a man to carry out Jesus’ decision as a true cause and by his own resources. The fact that Jesus has the text in his heart first does not mean that it reflects Jesus’ temperament and language rather than Paul’s, because Jesus has it in mind precisely as a text to be written by Paul. The entire New Testament was written by men acting as true authors, and yet the entire New Testament is nothing other than the imprint of the heart of Jesus on those men according to their diverse conditions, like the one, simple perfection of God translated into the manifold splendors of creation. As Rupert of Deutz says of the Gospel writers, Jesus “conforms them to himself, or conforms them to whichever he chooses of his faces; he penetrates them more effectively than if they were a mirror, and he forms in them his own

image.”4 Saint Augustine describes this same influence as Christ’s headship over his body, the Church: Therefore, since they have written what he displayed and said, let it by no means be said that he himself did not write; seeing that his members have carried into effect that which they knew at the dictation of the head. For whatever he wished us to know of his deeds and sayings, this he commanded them to write as though his own hands. Whoever understands this fellowship of unity and concord of members in diverse functions under one head will not otherwise receive what he reads narrated by Christ’s disciples in the Gospel than if he were to see the very hand of the Lord, which he bore in his proper body, writing it.5

The text of the New Testament exists paradigmatically in the heart of Jesus Christ, just as all men find their true logoi in the Word.6 However, the New Testament exists in Jesus’ heart as an instrument for touching his servants. Just as the same Lord who sent the Spirit on John also sent signs to him by an angel as an instrument to guide him, so the Lord who wants to remake us interiorly sends us exterior words through John and Paul and other authors. The final goal of the New Testament is that the hearers should become like Jesus, holding to his witness and so becoming witnesses themselves. Just as the Word of God is present in the words of men so that the hearts of men should be conformed to the Word of God, so the Incarnate Word shaped the words of men so that the hearts of men should be conformed to the heart of Jesus—to the heart of the heart of the Church.

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Collins, John J. “The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence”. The Journal of Biblical Literature 122, no. 1 (2003): 3-21. Coughlin, R. Glen. “History and Liberal Education”. The Aquinas Review 5, no. 1 (1998): 1-41. Dante Alighieri. Paradise. Translated by Anthony Esolen. New York: Random House, 2004. De Koninck, Charles. “The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists”. In The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2, translated by Ralph McInerny. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. De Lubac, Henri. Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture. Translated by Mark Sebanc. 2 vols. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998 and 2000. De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. In Selected Essays 1917—1932, 3-11. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932. Farkasfalvy, Denis. Inspiration and Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Sacred Scripture. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Acts of the Apostles: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible 31. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Fox, Ruth Mary. Dante Lights the Way. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1958. Freedman, David Noel, ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Gordon, Caroline. How to Read a Novel. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Grimm, Melissa. “Scripture and Catholic Identity”. Unpublished.

Grondin, Jean. The Philosophy of Gadamer. Translated by Kathryn Plant. London: Routledge, 2014. Hallamish, Moseh. An Introduction to the Kabbalah. Translated by Ruth Bar-Ilan and Ora Wiskind-Elper. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999. Hayes, John H. “Prophecy and Prophets, Hebrew Bible”. In Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, edited by John H. Hayes. Nashville: Abingdon, 1999. Healy, Mary. “Inspiration and Incarnation: The Christological Analogy and the Hermeneutics of Faith”. Letter & Spirit 2 (2006): 27-41. Heidel, Alexander. The Babylonian Genesis: The Story of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. Higbee, Kenneth L. Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It. New York: Marlowe, 2001. Holmes, James Leon, and Jeremy Holmes. “From Aristotle to Jefferson: Christianity and the Separation of Church and State”. The Catholic Social Science Review 8 (2003): 141-50. Holmes, Jeremy. “The Ladder between Heaven and Earth”. Letter and Spirit 2 (2007): 175-88. Irenaeus. Against Heresies. Translated by John J. Dillon. Ancient Christian Writers 55. New York: Paulist Press, 1992. Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Acts of the Apostles. Sacra Pagina 5. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992. Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In Kant’s Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, translated by H. B. Nisbett, 54-60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Kavanaugh, Aidan. On Liturgical Theology. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992. Kloppenborg, John S. Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2000.

Kurz, William S. Reading the Bible as God’s Own Story: A Catholic Approach to Bringing Scripture to Life. Ijamsville, Md.: Word Among Us Press, 2007. Kwasniewski, Peter. “The Foundations of Christian Ethics and Social Order: Egoism and Altruism vs. Love for the Common Good”. The Latin Mass 23, no. 4 (Winter / Spring 2015): 28-35. Lamb, Matthew. Eternity, Time, and the Life of Wisdom. Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2007. Leclerq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture. Translated by Catharine Misrahi. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. Levering, Matthew. Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Liddell, H. G. R. Scott. Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Lohfink, Norbert. In the Shadow of Your Wings: New Readings of Great Texts from the Bible. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2003. Luther, Martin. Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings. Edited by John Dillenberger. New York: Anchor Books, 1962. MacIntyre, Alasdair. The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Martin, Francis. Sacred Scripture: The Disclosure of the Word. Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2005. Maximus the Confessor. On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. Vol. 1. Translated by Nicholas Constans. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. _____. On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from Saint Maximus the Confessor. Translated by Paul M.

Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken. Crestwood, N.Y.: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Murphy, Roland E. Ecclesiastes. Word Biblical Commentary 23A. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2015. _____. The Tree of Life: An Exploration of Biblical Wisdom Literature. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990. Neale, J. M., and R. F. Littledale. A Commentary on the Psalms from the Primitive and Mediaeval Writers and from the Various OfficeBooks and Hymns of the Roman, Mozarabic, Ambrosian, Gallican, Greek, Coptic, Aremenian, and Syriac Rites. London: Joseph Masters, 1874. Newman, John Henry. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. Ong, Walter J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. London: Cornell University Press, 1977. _____. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2002. Origen. On First Principles. Translated by G. W. Butterworth. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973. Patrologia Latina. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 217 vols. Paris, 1844— 1864. Pieper, Josef. Leisure the Basis of Culture. Translated by Gerald Malsbary. South Bend, Ind.: Saint Augustine’s Press, 1998. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 2006. Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. Vol. 1: The Beginnings of Patristic Literature. Utrecht-Antwerp: Spectrum, 1975.

Radner, Ephraim. Leviticus. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2008. Ramage, Matthew. Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013. Ratzinger, Joseph. God’s Word: Scripture—Tradition—Office. Translated by Henry Taylor. Edited by Peter Hunermann and Thomas Soding. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008. _____. Introduction to Christianity. Translated byJ.R. Foster. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004. _____. Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Translated by Adrian J. Walker. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007. _____. The Nature and Mission of Theology: Approaches to Understanding Its Role in the Light of Present Controversy. Translated by Adrian Walker. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993. _____. Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion. Translated by Henry Taylor. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. _____. Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology. Translated by Sr. Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987. _____. Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions. Translated by Henry Taylor. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004. Sailhamer, John H. The Pentateuch as Narrative: A BiblicalTheological Commentary. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1992. Sasson, Jack M. “Ruth”. In The Literary Guide to the Bible. Edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Senior, John. The Death of Christian Culture. Norfolk, Va.: IHS Press, 2008. Sertillanges, A. G. The Intellectual Life. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1987. Simon, Yves R. A General Theory of Authority. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Stockhausen, Carol. Moses’ Veil and the Glory of the New Covenant: The Exegetical Substructure of II Cor. 3,1-4,6. Analecta Biblica 116. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989. Supin, Dorian, dir. Arvo Part: 24 Preludes for a Fugue. Tallin, Estonia: F-Seitse, 1999. DVD. Synave, Paul, and Pierre Benoit. Prophecy and Inspiration: A Commentary on Summa Theologica II-II, Questions 171-178. Translated by Avery Dulles and Thomas L. Sheridan. New York: Desclee, 1961. Turner, Denys. Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs. Cistercian Studies Series 156. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1995. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998. Von Rad, Gerhard. Wisdom in Israel. Nashville: Abingdon, 1972. Waldstein, Michael. “Analogia Verbi”. Letter & Spirit 6 (2010): 93140. _____. “The Person and the Common Good”. Unpublished. Weaver, Richard. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. Wippel, John F., ed. Studies in Medieval Philosophy. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1987. Work, Telford. Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002.

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NOTES Preface 1 

Quotations in this paragraph are taken from Mary Healy, “Inspiration and Incarnation: The Christological Analogy and the Hermeneutics of Faith”, Letter & Spirit 2 (2006): 27-41, at 29. Back to text. 2  Vatican

Council II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum (November 18, 1965) (hereafter cited as DV), 13, in my own translation. The text from Chrysostom can be found in his Commentary on Genesis 3, 8 (Homily 17, 1), in PG 53:134. Back to text. 3 Augustine,

De doctrina christiana, CCSL 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), 28-29: “Omnium igitur, quae dicta sunt, ex quo de rebus tractamus, haec summa est, ut intellegatur legis et omnium divinarum scripturarum plenitudo et finis esse dilectio.” Or, as Aristotle would say, the final cause is the cause of causes. Back to text. 4  The

division between history and theology obviously admits of some blending. If this book were rewritten with chronology as a structuring principle, it might look a lot like Denis Farkasfalvy’s Inspiration and Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Sacred Scripture (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010). Back to text. 5 See,

for example, Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol. 1, trans. Nicholas Constans; DOML 28 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 3059, especially 51. In a 1989 lecture, Cardinal Ratzinger said that “Personally, I am in fact convinced that a careful reading of the whole text of Dei Verbum will detect the elements essential for a synthesis between historical methodology and theological ‘hermeneutics’, but

the connection between them is not immediately manifest” (God’s Word: Scripture, Tradition, Office, trans. Henry Taylor [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008], 98). I agree, and the present work can be understood as an attempt to spell out what I see as implicit and scattered in Dei Verbum. Back to text. 6 I

take seriously Cardinal Ratzinger’s claim that “the debate about modern exegesis is, at heart, not a debate among historians, but a philosophical debate” (God’s Word, 113). Back to text. 7  Ratzinger

goes on to say that “Thomas Aquinas framed these two ideas in the principles of analogy and participation and thus made possible an open philosophy, which is able to accept the biblical phenomenon in all its radicalism.” See ibid., 118.  Back to text. 8 

Seminal for my own thought was Matthew Levering’s Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), together with personal conversations with Dr. Levering’s mentor, the late Father Matthew Lamb. Father Francis Martin’s work showed me how such a framework might be applied in more detail, especially his Sacred Scripture: The Disclosure of the Word (Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2005). Chapter 6 in particular of this book formed around an exchange with Father Martin. Back to text. Chapter 1 1 Even

though the refrain is not repeated for each day of creation, altogether Genesis 1 declares that creation was “good” seven times, the seventh and culminating time using the phrase “very good”: see verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31. This sevenfold repetition subtly emphasizes the point that creation is in a way perfectly good. Back to text. 2  An

unpublished essay by Dr. Michael Waldstein, “The Person and the Common Good”, was formative for my thought on this topic. Waldstein in turn is dependent on Charles De Koninck’s “The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists”, in The

Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2, trans. Ralph Mclnerny (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). Back to text. 3 Aquinas,

Scriptum in Sententias Petri Lombardi II.11.2.  Back to

text. 4 Compare

Philippians 2:5-11 with Genesis 3. Back to text.

5 This

is the gist of Saint Thomas’ argument in Summa theologiae, trans. Laurence Shapcote, Latin  /  English Edition of the Works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vols. 13-21 (Lander, Wyo.: Aquinas Institute, 2012; hereafter abbreviated ST), I, q. 44, a. 4. Back to text. 6 

A beautiful exposition of the inherent “generosity” of every creature can be found in Peter Kwasniewski, “The Foundations of Christian Ethics and Social Order: Egoism and Altruism vs. Love for the Common Good”, The Latin Mass, vol. 23, no. 4 (Winter / Spring 2015): 28-35. Back to text. 7  For

example, Aquinas puts forward this principle as the reason why we ask the saints to pray for us: “It is not because of a defect in divine power that it works through the mediation of secondary causes, but it is for the greater fullness of the universal order and so that his goodness may be diffused in things in more ways, seeing as things do not only receive their own goodnesses from it but, over and above that, they become causes of goodness to others. In the same way, too, it is not because of a defect of his mercy that it is necessary to knock at the door of his clemency through the prayers of the saints, but it is for the sake of preserving in things the order described.” Scriptum IV.45.3.2. Back to text. 8 

See, for example, Roland Murphy, The Tree of Life: An Exploration of Biblical Wisdom Literature (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990), 1: “The most striking characteristic of this literature is the absence of what one normally considers as typically Israelite and Jewish.” Back to text. 9 

For evidence of outright borrowing from Egyptian wisdom literature, see ibid., 23-25. Back to text.

10  For

a comparison of Israel’s personification of God’s wisdom with the closest parallel, the Egyptian goddess of order, Maat, see Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), 153-54. Although von Rad recognizes Israel’s originality, his conclusions about what Lady Wisdom represents are flawed, as Roland Murphy points out in Tree of Life, 137-39. Back to text. 11 As

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger says in Introduction to Christianity (trans. J. R. Foster [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004], 152), “This means nothing else than the conviction that the objective mind we find present in all things, indeed, as which we learn increasingly to understand things, is the impression and expression of subjective mind and that the intellectual structure that being possesses and that we can re-think is the expression of a creative pre-meditation, to which they owe their existence. To put it more precisely, in the old Pythagorean saying about the God who practices geometry there is expressed that insight into the mathematical structure of being which learns to understand being as having been thought, as intellectually structured.” Back to text. 12  So

the Septuagint renders it, and I think it probable that John was interacting with this Greek text. Back to text. 13 

Origen, On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), I, 2, p. 15. But one sees the same connection as early as Saint Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 61, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. 1 (1885; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 227-28. Back to text. 14 

Material causality would be excluded from the comparison because it is rooted in potency, whereas God is pure act.  Back to text. Chapter 2 1 Origen,

On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), II, 6, pp. 109-10. Back to text.

2 Saint

Thomas in ST III, q. 3, a. 1 ad 2 says, “It belongs uniquely to a divine person, on account of his infinity, that there come about in him a running-together of natures, not indeed accidentally, but as regards subsistence.” Back to text. Chapter 3 1  On

the distinctions between oral, manuscript, and print culture, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2002), first published in 1982. Marshall McLuhan writes at more length about the effect of the printing press in particular in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). His disciple, Neil Postman, is clearer and less tendentious; see, for example, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 2006). Both McLuhan and Postman argue that the digital age has brought with it another shift in our experience of the book. Despite certain ways in which this new shift brings us closer again to orality, it either enhances or leaves unchanged the effects of the printing press mentioned in this chapter. Back to text. 2  Aidan

Kavanaugh, On Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), 103-4: “The technology of printing helped to blow apart a moribund medieval world, unleashing forces which the modern world copes with uneasily still. And while it would be too much to say that printing reduced God’s Word into words, since writing itself was responsible for that, it would be true to say that printing turned God’s Words into a text which all people, literate or not, could now see as lines of type marching across a page. God’s Word could now for the first time be visualized by all, not in the multivalency of a ‘presence’ in corporate act or icon, but linearly in horizontal lines which could be edited, reset, revised, fragmented, and studied by all—something which few could have done before. A Presence which had formerly been experienced by most as a kind of enfolding embrace had now modulated into an abecedarian printout to which only the skill of literacy could give complete access. God could now be approached not only through burning bushes, sacralized spaces, and holy symbols and events, but through texts

so cheaply reproduced as to be available to all. Rite and its symbols could be displaced or go round altogether, and so could the whole of the living tradition which provided the gravitational field holding them together in an intelligible union. Rite became less a means than an obstacle for the new textual piety. And once rite receded, so did the need for that kind of assembly whose common burden was the enactment of rite rather than attendance upon didactic exposition of set texts. The truth lies now exclusively in the text; no longer on the walls, or in the windows, or in the liturgical activity of those who occupy the churches.” Back to text. 3 For

this section generally, I am drawing on Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 80-90. Back to text. 4 See

Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part One: From Adam to Noah, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978), 42. Back to text. 5  I

am thinking, of course, of the social contract theory proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but one finds a softer version of the same view everywhere. Back to text. 6  ST

I, q. 96, a. 4, corp. Yves R. Simon’s magisterial work A General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991) can be read as an extended commentary on this one sentence from Saint Thomas. Back to text. 7 See

James Leon Holmes and Jeremy Holmes, “From Aristotle to Jefferson: Christianity and the Separation of Church and State”, The Catholic Social Science Review 8 (2003): 141-50, at 150.  Back to text. 8 

For references to pre-Christian philosophers on the idea of humanity as a body, see R. Eduard Schweizer, “Body”, in The Anchor Bible Dictionary 1:767-72, at 770. Key citations for each of the points made here about Saint Paul’s doctrine are conveniently gathered in Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (June 29, 1943) on the Mystical Body of Christ and in Vatican Council II,

Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen gentium (November 21, 1964), 7. Back to text. 9  Cf.

Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 85-100, at 87: “Tradition. . . is constitutive of a humanity that is truly human, of the humanitas hominis.” Back to text. 10 The

most brilliant expression of this view is probably Immanuel Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 54-60. Enlightenment, he claims, is emergence from self-imposed immaturity, and immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. Back to text. 11 

Compare Simon, General Theory of Authority, 23-24: “It is perfectly obvious that the needs of the individual call for the association of men; yet significant implications of this proposition are commonly ignored. For one thing, the notion of individual need is often restricted, in most arbitrary fashion, to needs of a biological, physical, material character. The necessity of mutual assistance and division of labor in the fight against hunger and thirst, cold, wild beasts, and disease is more commonly expressed than the immense and almost constantly increased service that society renders to individuals in intellectual, esthetic, moral, and spiritual life.  .  .  . Concomitantly, it is often taken for granted that the goods of the spirit are altogether individual and that their pursuit is an entirely individualistic concern.” Back to text. 12 

See Francis Brown, The New Brown—Driver—Briggs— Gesenius Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1979), 869-70. Back to text. 13 Gadamer

captures this point well: “Even the most genuine and pure tradition does not persist because of the inertia of what once existed. It needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. It is, essentially, preservation, and it is active in all historical change. But

preservation is an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one. For this reason, only innovation and planning appear to be the result of reason. But this is only illusion.” Quoted in Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. Kathryn Plant (London: Routledge, 2014), 97. Back to text. 14  The

view that tradition is a necessary evil does not belong to any one thinker but is itself a tradition in modern thought. For example, Alexis de Tocqueville summarizes the practical necessity of tradition eloquently and then concludes, “It is true that every man who receives an opinion on the word of another puts his mind in slavery; but it is a salutary servitude that permits him to make good use of his freedom” (Democracy in America [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 408). Back to text. 15 As

Cardinal Ratzinger puts it, “Tradition, which is by nature the foundation of man’s humanness, is everywhere mingled with those things that deprive him of his humanity.” Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 89. Back to text. 16  Even

the angels, Saint Thomas argues, are taught and teach one another. To be entirely self-sufficient in knowledge is proper to God alone, because he alone is himself Truth. See ST I-II, q. 106, a. 1; cf. ST I-II, q. 99, a. 2. Back to text. 17  David

M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8. Back to text. 18 Ong,

Orality and Literacy, 175. Back to text.

19 See

the fascinating analysis by Mary J. Carruthers in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially pp. 1-13. Back to text. 20  Compare

Carr, Writing on the Tablet, 11: “Indeed, that past is never ‘past’ in the way we might conceive it but stands in the ancient world as a potentially realizable ‘present’ to which each generation seeks to return.” Back to text. 21 See

ibid., 41. Back to text.

22  Ibid.,

36: “He was not ‘exegeting’ or ‘citing’ older works in the way a later biblical interpreter might do. Rather, the scribe was trained from the outset to think by means of blocks of tradition and express himself through those tools.” Back to text. 23 

Compare T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in Selected Essays 1917—1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 311, at 4. Back to text. 24 Ibid.,

6-7. Back to text.

25 DV

10. Ratzinger relates all three in one sentence: “This society is the essential condition for the origin and the growth of the biblical Word; and, conversely, this Word gives the society its identity and its continuity.” Joseph Ratzinger, “What in Fact Is Theology?” in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), at 33. Back to text. 26 Recall

that Jews divided the Scriptures into Law, Prophets, and Writings (see, for example, the prologue to Sirach): the “Law” contained the books of Moses, the “Prophets” encompassed everything from Joshua through Kings in addition to the books we typically think of as “prophetic”, and the “Writings” included all the rest, such as the Psalms, Proverbs, and so on. But Moses was the archetypal prophet (Deut 18:15), and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews goes on to cite God as speaking various sentences from the Psalms. In other words, the “prophets” he has in mind encompass every category of Scripture. Compare Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), 38-39. Back to text. 27 

For an overview, in addition to the works cited in the introduction, see Telford Work, Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 1927. Back to text. 28 

Joseph Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology: Approaches to Understanding Its Role in the Light of Present Controversy, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 51. Back to text.

29  Of

course, the sacraments, and most of all the Eucharist, are also ways in which the Church encounters Christ in order to live with his life. Scripture is meant to guide this “writing” process, but it is not the only guide given to the Church. Back to text. 30 Waldstein,

“Analogia Verbi”, Letter & Spirit 6 (2010): 93-140, at 120: “Dei Verbum 8 helps to drive home this sense of the Word’s presence. ‘God, who spoke in the past, speaks without any break with the bride of his beloved Son.’ In the spousal dialogue it is very important exactly who speaks to whom and when exactly. One may well be able to exchange marriage vows by proxy, letting someone else speak for oneself, even by authorized letters, but the consummation of the vows, the full gift of self, ‘I am yours,’ and its renewal in the total bodily gift of self throughout married life must be a present living word spoken in person. Unless God himself speaks to the bride as himself, he does not give the spousal gift of self, ‘I am yours.’ In that case, all we have is the memory of past words of a bridegroom who has long been dead, if he ever existed. This is the sharp existential point of the sword of God’s word in the analogia verbi.” Back to text. 31 Christ

is present personally in the Eucharist as well, but this is not something other than the Incarnation. It is a sacramental doorway to encountering the Incarnation. Back to text. 32 Compare

Ong, Orality and Literacy, 104. Back to text. Chapter 4

1  Wayne

Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 71-76. Back to text. 2 In

this chapter, I look only at the general character of that history. Chapter 2 of Telford Work’s Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation follows the development of Scripture step by step through salvation history in an illuminating way. Back to text. 3  Leo

XIII, Encyclical Letter Satis cognitum on the Unity of the Church (June 29, 1896), 2-3. Back to text. 4 ST

III, q. 2, especially article 7. Back to text.

5 See

Saint Thomas’ treatment in ST III, a. 3. Back to text.

6 Aquinas, 7 Compare

Compendium Theologiae, chap. 129. Back to text. ST I, q. 104, a. 1. Back to text.

8 Ibid. Back 9 See

to text.

ST I, q. 105, a. 4 ad 1 and a. 5. Back to text.

10 Augustine,

Confessions, trans. W. Watts, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912), 3.6, p. 121.  Back to text. 11 Leo

XIII, Encyclical Libertas praestantissimum on the Nature of Human Liberty (June 20, 1888), 8. Back to text. 12 

Paul Synave and Pierre Benoit allude to this difficulty in Prophecy and Inspiration: A Commentary on Summa Theologica IIII, Questions 171-178, trans. Avery Dulles and Thomas L. Sheridan (New York: Desclee, 1961), 95: “For St. Thomas, God moves man in such a way as not to suppress but to utilize his own natural mode of action. This is true not only when he moves him in the capacity of First Cause setting in motion every secondary cause, but also when he acts upon him by means of a direct influence of the supernatural order, such as sanctifying grace or a charism (gratia gratis data), and even when he gives him a particularly efficacious determining impulse, as is the case in the charism of inspiration. Now it is natural for man to act freely, in an intelligent and voluntary manner. Hence God respects this natural mode of action of his creature and is able to move him by his supreme power without paralyzing him. Undoubtedly, this freedom of man under the all-powerful influence of God is a mystery, but one which must be accepted as a datum and which recurs in all theological problems, whether of nature or of grace.” Back to text. 13 DV

11. Back to text.

14 When

we say that God attaches his voice to this verse, we do not mean that God is saying his work may be mediocre because he could not do any better. The human author here asserts that the text

may be mediocre due to the human author’s limitations, and it is to that assertion that God attaches himself: God here asserts that the text may be mediocre due to the human author’s limitations. In a later chapter, I will discuss how the human author’s limitations fit into God’s intentions for the sacred text. Back to text. 15 See

the discussion of the “author” as a modern figure in Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998), 45. Back to text. Chapter 5 1 This

is not a full definition of the term “prophet”, of course, a word that has many analogous meanings. For a sense of how understandings of the word “prophet” have shifted over time, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 16-39. Back to text. 2 Whether

the Letter to the Hebrews draws its language from Plato is disputed, but given the close linguistic parallels, it was inevitable that the Christian tradition would draw a connection. See Harold Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), 268. Back to text. 3 Aquinas,

In Aristotelis libros de coelo et mundo expositio (Turin: Marietti, 1952), bk. 2, lect. 18. Back to text. 4 In

Boethii de Hebd., lect. 2: “Est autem participare quasi partem capere; et ideo quando aliquid particulariter recipit id quod ad alterum pertinet universaliter, dicitur participare illud.” Back to text. 5 Or

more deeply, in the notions of act and potency, but it will be helpful to start our discussion from what is more complex and therefore more accessible to human understanding. Back to text. 6  See,

for example, Saint Methodius’ Banquet of the Ten Virgins 9:2, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. 6 (1886; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 345; for a later exposition, see Saint Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on

the Letter to the Hebrews, trans. Fabian R. Larcher (Lander, Wyo.: Aquinas Institute, 2012), chap. 10, lecture 1, par. 480. Back to text. 7 In

my enumeration of these three elements of participation, I am indebted to W. Norris Clarke, “The Meaning of Participation in St. Thomas”, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 26 (1952): 147-60, esp. 150-54. Back to text. 8 Quodl.

II, 2, 3: “Respondeo dicendum, quod dupliciter aliquid de aliquo praedicatur: uno modo essentialiter, alio modo per participationem; lux enim praedicatur de corpore illuminato participative; sed si esset aliqua lux separata, praedicaretur de ea essentialiter.” Back to text. 9  Commenting

on the preposition de (“from”) in this verse, Saint Thomas explains that Christ is the efficient cause of grace in all intelligent creatures and that the Spirit who proceeds from Christ in his divinity is the same Spirit who fills us with grace. “In a third way,” he continues, “the preposition ‘from’ denotes partiality, as when we say, ‘Take this bread, or wine,’ i.e., take a part and not the whole; and taking it this way, note that, in the one who receives, the part is drawn from a fullness. For he himself receives all the gifts of the Holy Spirit without measure, according to a perfect fullness; but we participate some part of his fullness through him, and this according to the measure which God allots to each one. Eph 4:7, ‘To each one of us grace is given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.’  ” Commentary on the Gospel of John, chap. 1, lect. 10: “Tertio modo haec praepositio de denotat partialitatem, sicut cum dicimus, accipe de hoc pane, vel vino, idest partem accipe, et non totum; et hoc modo accipiendo, notat in accipientibus partem de plenitudine derivari. Ipse enim accepit omnia dona Spiritus Sancti sine mensura, secundum plenitudinem perfectam; sed nos de plenitudine eius partem aliquam participamus per ipsum; et hoc secundum mensuram, quam unicuique deus divisit. Eph. IV, 7: unicuique autem nostrum data est gratia, secundum mensuram donationis.”  Back to text. 10 Augustine,

Quaest. In Hept. 2, 73 (PL 34:623); cf. DV 16 and Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria

Editrice Vaticana, 1997; Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 129. Back to text. 11 ST

III, q. 49, a. 6. Back to text.

12 ST

III, q. 62, a. 6. The final cause can come into being later than its effect because it is already in the mind and intention of the agent. Contemporary thought tends to deny the reality of final causality because it denies the existence or relevance of the divine mind behind historical events. In a later chapter, I will look at how this tendency affects the reading of Scripture. Back to text. 13  Christ

in his humanity is sometimes called the “exemplar” of Israel, but this is not true in the strictest sense. God did not look to Christ in his humanity to receive the pattern on which to make them; this would mean that God himself was somehow informed by the Incarnation and Passion of Christ. However, we can speak of Christ in his humanity as the “exemplar” in a broader sense of the word. In the example of an “artist’s rendering” of a house, the house to be built is some species of final cause of the painting, while the exemplar of the painting is the idea in the mind of the architect, but because the form of the painting is intended to resemble the form-tobe of the house, then we can speak of the house as the “exemplar” of the painting in an extended sense. The reason for using the word “exemplar” with reference to Christ and Israel is even stronger, because in this case the true exemplar of Israel is the eternal Word, which is the same person as the man Jesus Christ. Back to text. 14 ST

I-II, q. 101, a. 2, corp. Back to text.

15 ST

III, q. 60, a. 3. Back to text.

16 We

will see his views on this in the next chapter. Back to text.

17 ST

I-II, q. 7, a. 1, corp. Back to text.

18 Commentary

on the Letter to the Colossians, chap. 1, lect. 4 in Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, trans. Fabian R. Larcher (Lander, Wyo.: Aquinas Institute, 2012): “Tripliciter enim aliquid potest ab alio participare: uno modo,

accipiendo proprietatem naturae eius; alio modo, ut recipiat ipsum per modum intentionis cognitivae; alio modo, ut deserviat aliqualiter eius virtuti, sicut aliquis medicinalem artem participat a medico vel quia accipit in se medicinae artem, vel accipit cognitionem artis medicinalis, vel quia deservit arti medicinae. Primum est maius secundo, et secundum tertio.” Back to text. 19  It

is not a true instance of participation, since the student can obtain as complete a share of the medical art as his teacher has, but it is an example of manuductio, by which Thomas leads his reader from what is more sensible to what is less accessible by the imagination. Back to text. 20  For

a detailed discussion of how creatures participate in the being of God, see John F. Wippel, “Thomas Aquinas and Participation”, John F. Wippel, ed., Studies in Medieval Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 11758. Back to text. 21 

For the term “linear-historical”, see Matthew Levering, Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 23, 3435, and 58-59. Back to text. 22 See,

for example, The Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callan (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books, 1982), pt. I, art. II, p. 33: “And indeed the Prophets, whose minds were illuminated with light from above, foretold the birth of the Son of God, the wondrous works which He wrought while on earth, His doctrine, character, life, death, Resurrection, and the other mysterious circumstances regarding Him—and all these they announced to the people as graphically as if they were passing before their eyes. With the exception that one has reference to the future and the other to the past, we can discover no difference between the predictions of the Prophets and the preaching of the Apostles, between the faith of the ancient Patriarchs and that of Christians.” Back to text.

23 See

Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, ABRL; rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 146: “Before the advent of the modern critical method it was generally accepted by religious Jews and Christians that the Hebrew prophets foresaw the distant future. In particular, Christians thought that the prophets had foreseen the life and circumstances of Jesus the Messiah.  .  .  . However, this conception of prophecy as prediction of the distant future has disappeared from most serious scholarship today, and it is widely recognized that the NT ‘fulfillment’ of the OT involved much that the OT writers did not foresee at all.  .  . [T]here is no evidence that they foresaw with precision even a single detail in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.” In The Glory of the Lord, vol. 6: Theology: The Old Covenant, trans. Brian McNeil and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), Hans Urs von Balthasar states that “the historical-critical method has destroyed the old form of the argumentum ex prophetia, which understood sayings of the old covenant as having been spoken with direct reference to Christ” (402). Of course, the notion that the prophets were speaking to the concerns of their own time did not suddenly appear in the modern era, but its use as a hermeneutical principle to exclude prophecy of Christ is distinctively modern. For an overview of the development of this view, see John H. Hayes, “Prophecy and Prophets, Hebrew Bible”, in John H. Hayes, ed., Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999), 310-17. For some corrections on what Hayes says about Theodore of Mopsuestia, see Francis Martin, Sacred Scripture: The Disclosure of the Word (Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2005), 260-62. Back to text. 24 The

story of the prophet Balaam and his donkey in Numbers 2224 is a profound reflection on prophetic insight. The strong parallels between the donkey who sees the angel and Balaam whose “eye is opened” (24:3) suggests not only that the donkey was temporarily a prophet but that Balaam was permanently an ass—an impression confirmed by the later account according to which Balaam, even after serving as God’s mouthpiece, offered Balak human counsel on

how to defeat Israel (Num 31:8, 16; see also 2 Pet 2:15 and Rev 2:14). Back to text. 25 There

is a long history of viewing the biblical authors as the true theologoi, especially in the East but taken up in the West in the Middle Ages. See Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 320-21. Back to text. Chapter 6 1 

This is how Saint Augustine defines the literal sense in De doctrina christiana, bk. 2 chap. 10: “Now signs are either proper or figurative. They are called proper when they are used to designate those things on account of which they were instituted; thus we say bos [ox] when we mean an animal of the herd because all men using the Latin language call it by that name, as we do. Figurative signs occur when the things themselves, which we signify with proper words, are used to signify something else; thus we say ‘ox’ and by that syllable understand the animal that is ordinarily designated by that word, but again by that animal we understand an Evangelist, as is signified in the Scripture according to the Apostle’s interpretation when it says: You shall not muzzle the ox that treads the grain.” Many of the Fathers referred to the “letter” of the text in a similar way, that is, as opposed to the metaphorical. See Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 2, trans. Mark Sebank (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 56-57. Back to text. 2 

Following a similar argument, Origen divides the levels of meaning in Scripture according to the reader’s level of penetration, in On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), 4:2, pp. 275-76: “One must therefore portray the meaning of the sacred writings in a threefold way upon one’s own soul, so that the simple man may be edified by what we may call the flesh of the scripture, this name being given to the obvious interpretation; while the man who has made some progress may be edified by its soul, as it were; and the man who is perfect. . . may be edified by the spiritual law. . . . For just as man consists of body, soul

and spirit, so in the same way does the scripture, which has been prepared by God to be given for man’s salvation.” Back to text. 3 His

most mature treatment of the literal and spiritual senses can be found in ST I, q. 1, a. 10. Back to text. 4 Bonaventure,

Collations on the Six Days, Works of Bonaventure 5; trans. Jose de Vinck (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1970), 189. The thirteenth collation is a rich source for Bonaventure’s theology of Scripture. Back to text. 5 Ibid.,

190-91. Back to text.

6 “The

goat or other such things [used in Dan 8:5 as a metaphor for the king of the Greeks] are not things [res aliquae], but imaginary likenesses brought forward only for the purpose of signifying those persons.  .  . But even those things that happen in the truth of the thing are ordered to signifying Christ as a shadow to the truth.” Quodlibetum 7.6.2, ad 1. Back to text. 7 Ibid., 8 

7.6.3, corpus. Back to text.

Ibid., 6.3 ad 2. Although Saint Thomas uses this point to disagree with Saint Augustine’s definition of the spiritual sense, he is actually building on what Saint Augustine himself says in De doctrina christiana, bk. 1, chap. 2, where Saint Augustine distinguishes between things that are only things, things that are also signs, and signs that are only signs: “All doctrine concerns either things or signs, but things are learned by signs. Strictly speaking, I have here called a ‘thing’ that which is not used to signify something else, like wood, stone, cattle, and so on; but not that wood concerning which we read that Moses cast it onto bitter waters that they might no longer be bitter, nor that stone which Jacob placed at his head, nor that beast which Abraham sacrificed in place of his son. For these are things in such a way that they are also signs of other things. There are other signs whose whole use is in signifying something. For no one uses words except for the sake of signifying something. From this one can understand what I call ‘signs,’ namely, those thing that are used to signify something.” Back to text.

9 ST

I-II, q. 102, a. 2, sed contra: “Sicut praecepta caeromonialia figurabant Christum, ita etiam historiae Veteris Testamenti: dicitur enim I ad Cor. X II, quod ‘omnia in figuram contingebat illis.’ Sed in historiis Veteris Testamenti, praeter intellectum mysticum seu figuralem, est etiam intellectus litteralis. Ergo etiam praecepta caeremoniala praeter causes figurales, habebant etiam causas litterales.” Back to text. 10 ST

I-II, q. 102, a. 2, ad 1: “[S]ignificationes caeremoniarum legis quae sunt commemorativae beneficiorum Dei propter quae institutae sunt, vel aliorum huiusmodi quae ad illum statum pertinebant, non transcendunt ordinem litteralium causarum.” Back to text. 11 ST

I-II, q. 102, a. 3, corp. Back to text.

12 Ibid. Back

to text.

13 

Cf. Brevard Childs, The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 163, “Although Thomas’s ontological approach acknowledges the theological substance of the Old Testament, his great emphasis on the New Testament as the goal of the Old Testament promise is such that its theological role can become blurred or even concealed.” In other words, Childs sees Thomas as more successful than those before him because of his “ontological approach”, but less than fully effective in putting his principles into practice. Back to text. 14 ST

I-II, q. 3, a. 6, corp: “Respondeo dicendum quod, sicut supra dictum est, duplex est hominis beatitudo, una perfecta, et alia imperfecta. Oportet autem intelligere perfectam beatitudinem, quae attingit ad veram beatitudinis rationem, beatitudinem autem imperfectam, quae non attingit, sed participat quandam particularem beatitudinis similitudinem.” Back to text. 15 ST 16 

I-II, q. 3, a. 6, ob 2. Back to text.

ST I-II, q. 3, a. 6, ad 2: “Ad secundum dicendum quod naturaliter desideratur non solum perfecta beatitudo, sed etiam qualiscumque similitudo vel participatio ipsius.” Back to text.

17 

Speaking of the worship offered by Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek and mentioned in the Roman Canon, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger says, “The Fathers were right to see ‘types’ of Christ in the three figures who are mentioned.  .  . The true meaning of what people call ‘inclusivism’ becomes apparent here: it is a matter, not of absorbing other religions externally, on the basis of a dogmatic postulate, as would do violence to them as phenomena, but of an inner correspondence that we may certainly call finality: Christ is moving through history in these forms and figures, as (again, with the Fathers) we may express it.” See Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 96-97. Back to text. 18 

Lacking the technical precision of Thomas’ doctrine on participation, Augustine appears intuitively to recognize but verbally to deny the intrinsic worthiness of the Old Testament realities. In De doctrina christiana III.6, he seems to recognize the value of the Temple and sacrificial rituals even as his conceptual structure of “sign” and “thing” inhibits his expression: “But this servitude among the Jewish people was very different from the custom of other nations, since they were subjected to temporal things in such a way that the One God was pointed out to them in everything. And although they took signs of spiritual things for the things themselves, not knowing what they referred to, yet they acted as a matter of course that through this servitude they were pleasing to the one God of all whom they did not see.” The participatory exposition given above seems to bring this insight of Augustine to its natural completion. Similarly, in bk. 17, chap. 6, of The City of God, Augustine says of Saul that “the oil with which he was anointed, and from that chrism he is called Christ, is to be taken in a mystical sense, and is to be understood as a great mystery; which David himself venerated so much in him.” This seems very close to the participatory interpretation of David’s insight given above, yet Augustine goes on to say, “Therefore he showed so great reverence to this shadow of what was to come, not for its own sake, but for the sake of what it prefigured” (The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods [New York: Modern Library, 1993], 583). This tension in his

exposition arises from an appreciation of the spiritual meaning of Old Testament realities combined with a lack of philosophical tools for expounding it. Back to text. Chapter 7 1 Although

the idea and even the word “recapitulate” are present in Saint Paul’s writings (cf. Eph 1:10), the term “recapitulation” became important in Catholic theology through Irenaeus, for whom the theory of recapitulation has been described as “the heart.  .  . of his entire theology” (Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1: The Beginnings of Patristic Literature [Utrecht-Antwerp: Spectrum, 1975], 295). Back to text. 2 

John H. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative: A BiblicalTheological Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1992), 298-99. Back to text. 3 See,

for example, ibid., 310. Back to text.

4 The

parallel between the first and second waves is spelled out in Psalm 78. Of course there are other ways of parsing the narrative, but the final editors of Scripture, looking back from the perspective of the Exile, could not help but connect the loss of the Ark to the Philistines with the loss of the Ark at the Babylonian invasion, and the prophetic corpus had already connected the Babylonian Exile with the period of slavery in Egypt, so it was natural to see these three layers in the story as all parallel one to another. Back to text. 5 Dante

Alighieri claims to do just this in his Divine Comedy. In his Letter to Cangrande della Scala, he says of the Divine Comedy that “the meaning of this work is not simple. On the contrary, it may be called ‘polysemous,’ that is to say, ‘of more senses than one’.” To illustrate his point, he quotes a line from Scripture and shows how it has literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses; then he applies the point to his own work, claiming that it has both literal and allegorical meanings. The text of the Letter to Cangrande can be found in Dante Alighieri, Paradise, trans. Anthony Esolen (New York: Random House, 2004), 361-73. Back to text.

6  For

a classic expression of this widespread medieval view, see Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, sermo 3, in Adventu Domini (PL 183:45). See also Saint Thomas Aquinas’ sermon Ecce Rex tuus venit in Sermones, Opera Omnia 44 (Rome: Commissio Leonina, 2014), 58. Back to text. 7 That

Christ comes a second time in his Church is the burden of Stephen’s speech in Acts 7; see Luke Timothy Johnson, The Acts of the Apostles (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), 135-38. See also Acts 9:5. Back to text. 8 My

argument to this point is a speculative account of why this list of the “spiritual senses” is normative for theology. For the historical justification of the same claim, see Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebank (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), 75-116. Back to text. 9 

The literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses find an echo in Guigo the Carthusian’s division of lectio divina into the four stages of reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Reading takes up the words, meditation unpacks a deeper meaning, prayer applies the meaning to the reader’s life, and contemplation yearns for final union with God. See Jeremy Holmes, “The Ladder between Heaven and Earth”, a translation with notes of Guigo II’s Scala paradisum, in Letter and Spirit 2 (2007): 175-88. Back to text. 10 ST

I, q. 1, a. 10, corp. Back to text. Chapter 8

1 

The “literal” sense is also traditionally referred to as the “historical” sense, and a classic rhyme describes it as that sense of Scripture that tells us “what was done”. See de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 2, trans. E. M. Macierowski (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 41-42. Back to text. 2  For

the best of the tradition on this point, see William S. Kurz, Reading the Bible as God’s Own Story: A Catholic Approach to

Bringing Scripture to Life (Ijamsville, Md.: Word Among Us Press, 2007). Back to text. 3 

ST I, q. 1, a. 2. This was a common way to argue for the importance of history; see de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2:6971. Back to text. 4 ST

I, q. 1, a. 10, ad 1. For more examples of this argument in the tradition, see de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2:46-50. Back to text. 5  Ibid.

Saint Thomas references Saint Augustine’s Letter 93 Ad Vincentium, but it is worth noting that Augustine himself makes theological arguments based on the literal sense in that same letter. What Augustine actually says is that one cannot base one’s entire argument on the spiritual sense without any “plain” texts to back up the case, but that leaves room for Augustine’s own practice—and Saint Paul’s practice, for that matter—of using a spiritual interpretation to strengthen or finish off a series of theological arguments. Back to text. 6 

See chapter 6.A for the various meanings of the word “literal”. Back to text. 7  See

the beginning of chapter 3 for an account of one way this shift has taken place. Back to text. 8 

See chapter 1.B, in the subsection titled “Old Testament”. I describe a similar threefold structure of participation in chapter 5.D. Back to text. 9 

This section is especially indebted to Father Matthew Lamb, Eternity, Time, and the Life of Wisdom (Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia, 2007). Back to text. 10 ST

I, q. 10, a. 1. Back to text.

11 Bonaventure,

The Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 19. Back to text. 12 This

view of the memory resembles Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view of the “primary imagination”. Coleridge’s remarks are scattered

throughout his works, so the most convenient access to the key texts is Imagination in Coleridge, ed. John Spencer Hill (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978). The most famous text is from the Biographica Litteraria, at p. 126: “The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” See also the “Letter to Thomas Poole”, excerpted on p. 35: “Newton was a mere materialist—Mind in his system is always passive—a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s Image, & that too in the sublimest sense—the Image of the Creator—there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system.” Back to text. 13 This

is an Aristotelian claim, but the same claim is present in a different way in Gadamer’s contention that our experience of art is an experience of truth, but of a truth in which we know that we are always implicated. See Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. Kathryn Plant (London: Routledge, 2014), 53. Back to text. 14 

The same kind of filling of visual gaps happens in broad daylight, although we are even less frequently aware of it. I recall performing a sleight-of-hand trick in which I tossed a coin into the air several times and then pretended to toss the coin up while actually putting it in a pocket. The person watching me do this was emphatic afterward that on the last toss he saw the coin leave my hand, go up in the air, and then vanish. What really happened was that he filled in the coin where it should be until at some point his receptive visual power told him to stop filling it in. In strange situations like sleight-ofhand illusions, our creative filling of gaps may seem like a weakness, but in nearly every normal situation it is a strength, a true power of knowing what is there. Back to text. 15 

This is why the first rule Saint Thomas proposes for remembering things is to set them in order. De Memoria et Reminiscentia, lect. 5. Cited in A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1987),

181-82. The same principle can be found in modern research. See for example Kenneth L. Higbee, Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It (New York: Marlowe, 2001), 50-52. Back to text. 16  The

active, structuring aspect of memory underlines the fact that memory itself is in motion and subject to time. Even though “events” in the memory have a stability they do not enjoy in the material world, they remain somewhat unstable because the remembering person continues to live and acquire new experience that continuously re-contextualizes past experiences. The rational structure of a long-past event evolves as our life-span grows.  Back to text. 17 Melissa

Grimm, “Scripture and Catholic Identity” (unpublished), 10. Back to text. 18 See

pp. 57-62. Back to text.

19  This

is even more true of the written word, as Ong points out (Orality and Literacy [New York: Routledge, 2002], 104): “By separating the knower from the known.  .  . writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set.” Back to text. 20 A

sign of the objectifying power of words is that when we tell a story about what we have done, then it seems, even to ourselves, less like something we have done and more like something “someone” has done. Turning our experiences into words alienates us from our own experience in a subtle way even as it enables us to possess the experience in a more perfect way. Back to text. 21 Alasdair

Maclntyre argues that, due to the teleology inherent in the human intellect, telling a story is essential even to the most philosophical pursuit of timeless truths. Even as we philosophize, we have to tell ourselves the story of how our effort originated and where our efforts are going, as Aristotle does at the beginning of his Metaphysics. See Maclntyre, “First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues”, in The Tasks of Philosophy:

Selected Essays, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 143-78, especially 168: “Of every particular enquiry there is a narrative to be written, and being able to understand that enquiry is inseparable from being able to identify and follow that narrative.” Back to text. 22 Augustine,

whose thought is developed here, exemplifies what I am arguing in his Confessions. He pulls together the narrative of his life in an overtly reflective way, and then—seemingly without transition—launches into an extended reflection on eternity, time, and memory. Note also that in Augustine’s De Trinitate, the Father is represented by memory, which is fruitful of the word. Back to text. 23 Mary

J. Carruthers in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially pp. 1-13. Back to text. 24 John

Senior, The Death of Christian Culture (Norfolk, Va.: IHS Press, 2008), 33-34. Back to text. 25 Aristotle,

Poetics, chap. 9, 1451b, in The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, trans. Ingram Bywater (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 324-25. Back to text. 26 As

G. K. Chesterton says of fairy tales, “These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” See Chesterton, Orthodoxy, in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 257. Back to text. 27  Not

all fiction is equally “philosophical”, just as not all real-life experiences are equally human. Sometimes we experience the deep but difficult pleasure of exercising our most human faculties to the utmost, by enduring true suffering, by living in communion with dear friends, or by investigating the important questions of life. At other times, we amuse ourselves, watching television or going to theme parks and so on. Sometimes this amusement is just frivolity, wearing ourselves out and paying for it on Monday, while at other times it is

recreation, relaxing our efforts so as to return to life with renewed vigor. All of these distinctions are found in fiction as well, some of which is for enjoyment, some for mere amusement, and some for recreation. See Caroline Gordon, How to Read a Novel (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 228-31. Back to text. 28 Ibid.,

228. Aristotle says something similar when he claims that all art, as an imitation of the world, causes delight because we take pleasure in knowing, although he seems to collapse this pleasure into the pleasure of philosophy. Cf. Saint Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 1, a. 9, ob 1. Back to text. 29 

See chapter 3.A, under the subheading “Society Naturally Good”. Back to text. 30 See

pp. 57-62. Back to text.

31 

T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in Selected Essays 1917—1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace: 1932), 3-11. Back to text. 32 

In a marvelous phrase, Grondin speaks of “a melting of horizons, of an encounter which mysteriously succeeds”. See Philosophy of Gadamer, 59. Back to text. 33 

See chapter 3.A, the subsection titled “Canon in a Way Natural”. Back to text. 34  John

Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptor hominis (March 4, 1979), 1. Back to text. 35 

For a treatment of Ruth that fits well into this chapter’s argument, see Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 560-68. Most scholars see Ruth as a fictional work, while admitting that the case against historicity is not necessary; others see the work as reflecting some historical event. It is important to note that for the present argument, whether the work be historical or not is not important: it is part of the narrative of Scripture. Chapter 9 will address the issue of historicity in Scripture. Back to text.

36 For

a helpful exploration of these literary features, see Jack M. Sasson, “Ruth”, in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 320-28. Sasson’s focus on linguistic and narrative features is a strength, but at times he tries to be too clever; compare Childs’ critique of such excesses in the work cited above.  Back to text. 37 For

a contrasting view, see Martin Luther’s prefaces to the New Testament (John Dillenberger, ed. and trans., Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings [New York: Anchor Books, 1962]). He writes, “If I were ever compelled to make a choice, and had to dispense with either the works or the preaching of Christ, I would rather do without the works than the preaching; for the works are of no avail to me, whereas His words give life, as He himself declared. John records but few of the works of Christ, but a great deal of His preaching, whereas the other three evangelists record many of his works, but few of His words. It follows that the gospel of John is unique in loveliness, and of a truth the principal gospel, far, far superior to the other three, and much to be preferred. And in the same way, the epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter are far in advance of the three gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke” (pp. 18-19). In his preface to Romans, he says more explicitly, “This epistle is in truth the most important document in the New Testament” (p. 19). While Catholicism prefers to have Jesus himself presented, concretely, as though standing before one via the Gospel narrative, Luther prefers propositions about Jesus due to their conceptual clarity. Back to text. 38 See

the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, par. 60: “The reading of the Gospel is the high point of the Liturgy of the Word. The Liturgy itself teaches that great reverence is to be shown to it by setting it off from the other readings with special marks of honor: whether on the part of the minister appointed to proclaim it, who prepares himself by a blessing or prayer; or on the part of the faithful, who stand as they listen to it being read and through their acclamations acknowledge and confess Christ present and speaking to them; or by the very marks of reverence that are given to the Book of the Gospels.” Back to text.

39 The

Gospel stories do not present the deeds of Jesus “as they are in themselves” in the sense that they give “just the facts” without bias. This issue will be taken up in the next chapter. Back to text. 40 R.

Glen Coughlin, “History and Liberal Education”, The Aquinas Review, vol. 5, no. 1 (1998): 1-41, at 30. Cf. de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2:71. Back to text. Chapter 9 1 DV

12. Back to text.

2 The

Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 5:185; H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 842. Back to text. 3 This

is Newton’s model more than Einstein’s, but Newton still has more influence on the common imagination. Back to text. 4 Chapter

6.C. Back to text.

5 

The clearest presentation of the evidence is in John S. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2000), 11-54.  Back to text. 6 Joseph

A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 31 (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 103. Back to text. 7 Both

of these texts are handily excerpted in Darrell L. Bock and Gregory J. Herrick, eds., Jesus in Context: Background Readings for Gospel Study (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2005), 39-40.  Back to text. 8 Walter

J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 231. Back to text. 9 

Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences University of Chicago Press, 1948), 24. Back to text.

(Chicago:

10 

Rupertus Tuitensis, De gloria et honore filii hominis super Matthaeum (PL 168:1311) (translated by author). Back to text. 11 

See Childs’ subtle discussion of the canonical role of the Gospels. Back to text. 12 This

point is brilliantly exposed in Brevard S. Childs’ study Myth and Reality in the Old Testament (London: SCM, 1962). Back to text. 13 

Pontifical Biblical Commission, Letter to Cardinal Suhard, January 16, 1948. The text can be found in Dean P. Bechard, ed. and trans., The Scripture Documents: An Anthology of Official Catholic Teachings (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2002), at 223. Back to text. 14 See,

for example, the “Enuma Elish” myth in Alexander Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis: The Story of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 118-22. Back to text. 15  Pius

XII, Encyclical Humani generis Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundation of Catholic Doctrine (August 12, 1950), 38. Back to text. 16 Ibid.,

37. Back to text.

17 Augustine, 18 Heidel,

Confessions 13.18. Back to text.

Babylonian Genesis, 3. Back to text. Chapter 10

1 Augustine’s

De consensu evangeliorum is an early example. A notable recent work is Matthew Ramage’s Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and St. Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), which offers a systematic account of how the “Method C” exegesis proposed by Cardinal Ratzinger helps in responding to the various “dark passages” of Scripture. In between, there are many books or sections of books by many authors of many Christian denominations. Back to text.

2 Augustine,

De doctrina christiana, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), II.6, p. 35. Back to text. 3 Ibid. Back

to text.

4  Origen

sees the moral effect of obscurity as driving us on to better use of our minds: “But if the usefulness of the law and the sequence and ease of the narrative were at first sight clearly discernible throughout, we should be unaware that there was anything beyond the obvious meaning for us to understand in the scriptures. Consequently the Word of God has arranged for certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and hindrances and impossibilities to be inserted in the midst of the law and the history, in order that we may not be completely drawn away by the sheer attractiveness of the language, and so either reject the true doctrines absolutely, on the ground that we learn from the scriptures nothing worthy of God, or else by never moving away from the letter fail to learn anything of the more divine element.” Origen, On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), bk. 4, par. 9, at p. 285. Back to text. 5 Augustine,

De doctrina christiana, II.9, p. 36. Back to text.

6 Aquinas,

Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 2, lect. 3. Back to text. 7 I

am thinking here of John Henry Newman’s description: “It is in point to notice also the structure and style of Scripture, a structure so unsystematic and various, and a style so figurative and indirect, that no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not. It cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures.” Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 71. Back to text. 8 

As Origen points out, this is very much like the way God accompanies us through the events of everyday life: “But if in every

passage of the scriptures the superhuman element of the thought does not appear obvious to the uninstructed, that is no wonder. For in regard to the works of that providence which controls the whole world, while some show themselves most plainly to be works of providence, others are so obscure as to appear to afford grounds for disbelief in the God who with unspeakable skill and power superintends the universe.” Origen, On First Principles, bk. 4, chap. 1, at pp. 265-66. Back to text. 9 

Note that the Septuagint translation of “proverb” is in fact “parable”, so the Gospels may as well say that Jesus is speaking in proverbs. Back to text. 10 Stockhausen,

Moses’ Veil and the Glory of the New Covenant: The Exegetical Substructure of II Cor. 3,1-4,6, AnBib 116 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989), 26. Back to text. 11 Murphy,

Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2015), lxvii—lxix. Back to text. 12 When

I was in graduate school, not long after the Twin Towers fell, the president of the Society of Biblical Literature devoted his presidential address to the problem of violence in Scripture and in Joshua in particular: see John J. Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence”, Journal of Biblical Literature 122, no. 1 (2003): 3-21. His argument is tendentious and inconsistent in places, but his erudition is massive and helpful. Back to text. 13 See

Saint Thomas Aquinas’ arguments in ST I-II, q. 94, a. 5 ad 2; q. 100, a. 8 ad 3. Back to text. 14 

This is not to say that the story is about anything but God commanding the slaughter of human beings. Some apologists attempt to avoid the difficulty in Deuteronomy and Joshua by comparing the “religious genocide” texts to the commands concerning divorce, where God permits something less than desirable because he is working with a crude people. In fact, such wholesale destruction of an enemy as a kind of sacrifice to one’s god was not unknown in the Ancient Near East, so there is something to

the idea that God’s commands were culturally suited. However, this comparison runs aground at two points. First, the picture we get from the OT is not that of a people eager to destroy everything—men, women, children, beasts, goods, gold, etc. The Israelites dragged their feet about it, keeping gold and hiding it at the valley of Achor or keeping the best of the flocks as Saul did. The Israelites were crude, yes, but they were also greedy. Second, the command concerning warfare was a positive command, while the rules concerning divorce were not; God never tells the Israelites to get divorced. The text makes it clear that killing everything was not Israel’s idea, that God definitely wanted it, that folks like Saul who did not do it were punished. In other words, the command to slaughter is not lumped in with a bunch of laws, but stands alone as essential to the flow of the narrative. Certain parts of the story would not hang together if God had not given the command. In general, these apologists are right to locate the problem in ancient Israel’s lack of moral formation, but this lack is not in the message of the text but in the manner in which the message is delivered. Back to text. 15 Collins, 16 Ibid.,

“Zeal of Phinehas”, 13-14. Back to text.

21. Back to text.

17 Origen,

On First Principles, pp. 277; 286-98. Back to text.

18 

For example, Origen points out how absurd it would be to suppose, following Matthew 5:29, that one’s right eye has a peculiar responsibility for leading one into sin. Back to text. 19 Origen,

On First Principles, p. 285. Back to text. Chapter 11

1 

Compare T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in Selected Essays 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 4. Back to text. 2 Ibid.,

6-7. Back to text.

3 While

in

an Assyrian or Babylonian scribe would not have thought Aristotelian terms, Grondin’s summary of Heidegger on

subjectivity is helpful: “[F]or Aristotle, the ‘underlying element’, the subject par excellence, is not the human being, but matter (hyle), from which all beings are made. For modern thought, humankind, by a singular self-promotion, becomes the point of reference of the being in its totality” (The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. Kathryn Plant [London: Routledge, 2014], 74). Put more generally, the ancients intuitively knew that even their individual consciousnesses were not the primal reality, but dependent on prior causes not entirely known to them. Back to text. 4 

This seems to be the meaning of Gadamer’s claim that understanding is first of all agreement, that is, a common ground between author and reader. See ibid., 56. Back to text. 5 Cf.

ibid., 42-43. Back to text.

6 Arvo

Part: 24 Preludes for a Fugue, conducted by Dorian Supin (Tallin, Estonia: F-Seitse, 1999), DVD. Back to text. 7 Kevin

J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, The Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998), 45 and 125. Back to text. 8  Joseph

Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Conflict”, in God’s Word: Scripture—Tradition—Office, trans. Henry Taylor; ed. Peter Hunermann and Thomas Soding (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 91-126, at 121. Back to text. 9  De

Doctrina christiana, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), II.6, p. 30. Back to text. 10 

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, trans. John J. Dillon; Ancient Christian Writers 55 (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), bk. 1, chap. 8, at p. 41. Back to text. 11 Augustine,

Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P.; Works of Saint Augustine (Brooklyn, N.Y.: New City Press, 1990), 244. Back to text. 12 

See, for example, J. M. Neale and R. F. Littledale, A Commentary on the Psalms from the Primitive and Mediaeval Writers and from the Various Office-Books and Hymns of the

Roman, Mozarabic, Ambrosian, Gallican, Greek, Coptic, Aremenian, and Syriac Rites (London: Joseph Masters, 1874), 2: “The Church of the primitive and of the Middle Ages, then, adapted the Psalter to her own needs; she employed all the luxuriance of her imagination to elicit, to develop,—if you will, to play with,—its meaning. There is, to use the word in a good sense, a perfect treasure of mythology locked up in mediaeval commentaries and breviaries,—a mythology, the beauty of which grows upon the student, till that which at first sight appears strange, unreal, making anything out of anything, perfectly fascinates.” Back to text. 13 

Ruth Mary Fox, Dante Lights the Way (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1958), 96-97. Back to text. 14 

Quoted in Ephraim Radner, Leviticus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2008), 17-18. Back to text. 15  See

Moseh Hallamish, An Introduction to the Kabbalah, trans. Ruth Bar-Ilan and Ora Wiskind-Elper (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 13-16. Back to text. 16 See 17 Cf.

above, chapter 9. Back to text.

Isaiah 7:12. Back to text.

18 On

this point, see chapter 6 of Norbert Lohfink, In the Shadow of Your Wings: New Readings of Great Texts from the Bible (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2003); Georg P. Braulik, “Psalter and Messiah. Towards a Christological Understanding of the Psalms in the Old Testament and the Church Fathers”, in Psalms and Liturgy, ed. Dirk J. Human and Cas J. A. Vas; JSOTSup 410 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 15-39. Back to text. 19 

See, for example, Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 170-71. Back to text. 20 Jean

Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 73. Back to text.

21 Radner,

Leviticus, 20: “Jesus is rightly interpreted by Leviticus, so that the actual meaning of what he does, what he teaches, and who he is is informed even by the details of, for example, the laws on bodily fluids, sexual relations, genealogy, and planting.  .  .  . If it is difficult to find the meaning and purpose of Leviticus lodged in the body of Christ, it is even more difficult to find the meaning and purpose—the form—of Jesus expanded and explicated by the rich details of Leviticus. Indeed, the loss of the figural connection at its base has resulted in the squeezing out of the world from Jesus himself. Jesus is a ‘thinner’ figure in contemporary understanding than is the dense personal reality he represented for Origen, in part because a book like Leviticus in particular no longer traces the outlines of his being.” Back to text. 22 This

is the puzzle taken up in Denys Turner’s Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs, Cistercian Studies Series 156 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1995). Back to text. 23  Joseph

Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 34. Back to text. Chapter 12 1 Pope

Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), xxi. Back to text. 2  Or

this could be construed so as to assert the angel’s role as witness: “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to witness to you.”  Back to text. 3 

Pius XII, Encyclical Mystici Corporis on the Mystical Body of Christ (June 29, 1943), 39. Back to text. 4 

Rupertus Tuitensis, De gloria et honore filii hominis super Matthaeum (PL 168:1311). Back to text. 5 

Augustine, De consensu evangeliorum, bk. 1, chap. 35 (PL 1070). The translation is my own. Cf. Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, 50. Back to text.

6 Saint

Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 58-60. Back to text.