Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer

Aquinas on Scripture by John F. Boyle

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/aquinas-on-scripture-how-to-read-scripture-in-the-old-fashioned-way-42bad22eac85

The way we read the Bible today is not how the first Christians (and Christians up until the Reformation) read the Bible. Before a loosely defined “modernity,” beginning around the 17th century, Christians engaged in rampant allegorizing of scriptural text that defied common sense. For example, one Christian teacher taught that the Jewish dietary prohibition against pork had a deeper meaning than not eating a particular kind of food but was a warning to Christians to avoid the sins of gluttony and sloth.

In modernity, we view this as being slightly nutty. Texts usually mean one thing. They mean the obvious thing. They mean the customary sense of the word and not something that seems to make the text a silly putty.

But again, it was not always so. 1 Peter 3:21 analogizes baptism to the ark of Noah as a method of “saving through water.” Was that the intent of the author of Genesis? That seems unlikely.

One modern author has made an effective argument that the Doctrine of the Trinity developed from imaging that certain texts of the Bible involved a conversation between different persons. In The Birth of the Trinity by Matthew Bates, an argument is made that the doctrine of the Trinity developed out of “prosopological exegesis” [“PE”] whereby apparent dialogues in the Old Testament, particularly Psalms, were assigned to different speakers. For example, in Psalm 110:1, the psalmist says, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies as a footstool for your feet'” [Ps. 109: 1 LXX]. The conundrum is “who is the second “Lord” (aka “my Lord.” Jesus pointed out that it cannot be David since David calls himself “Lord.” (Mark 12: 35–7; cf. Matt. 22: 41–6; Luke 20: 41–4) Christian thinkers used the slippage in these persons to imagine that there were two Lords, such that there were two Gods in play.

This is not a typical way of doing exegesis today. Doing a prosopological exegesis today would tend to be labeled “eisegesis” to imply that the reading is begging the question. However, it was accepted in the past and supported cornerstone doctrines.

In this book, Father Boyle looks at how Aquinas read the Scriptures. Father Boyle began with an observation involving Augustine, which clearly clarified the difference between modern and pre-modern, Catholic and Protestant hermeneutics. Boyle discusses Book 12 of Augustine's Confessions, which deals with reading the Bible. Boyle notes:

But what if multiple interpretations of a passage could each be signified by the words and none is in violation of the three criteria? What is one to do then? Augustine's answer is arresting, at least to readers of Scripture formed in a post-Reformation intellectual world. Augustine asks, simply: could not Moses have meant both? Could not all such interpretations of a given passage be true interpretations? And they would be true not only in a narrow sense of fitting the words and criteria but also in a way proper to an authored text: the author meant them. In this case, however, the author meant not simply one thing by his words but many things. But what if Moses did not mean more than one meaning? What if the reader is confronted with not just two or three alternatives but dozens, maybe hundreds of alternatives. Did Moses mean all of them? Augustine is prepared to entertain the possibility. But he need not insist on it and he does not for the simple reason that Moses is not the only author of Scripture and thus his is not the only meaning in question. God is also the author of Scripture. For the Christian, the more important question is what did God mean when he wrote these words through Moses? Could God have meant more than one meaning? Certainly. Could God have meant hundreds? Certainly. Indeed, it might be particularly fitting that a book that has God as its principal author have such ambiguity. For our purposes, two important points are made by Augustine. First, beware the question of “what the author means” divorced from the signification of the words. When the words themselves are ambiguous, “what the author means” is not a way of resolution. Second, why be concerned with a single meaning? There is no intrinsic reason why there should be one and only one meaning of a given passage of Scripture. There could be many. Given this, the checks become very important and these checks are the criteria of truth and charity.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (pp. 28-29). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

This basic theological point is illuminating. There is a tendency today for Christian theologians to note that the Bible is NOT a book – it is a LIBRARY OF BOOKS.

This is certainly true from a secular standpoint, but is it true as Christian doctrine? From the Christian standpoint, the Bible has either a single author or a single common author, i.e., God. Further, from a Christian standpoint, all Bible books have a single context, i.e., Christ. So, from a Christian standpoint, it should not be controversial to treat the Bible as a single book where the author could plant clues to the ending in the beginning. It also should not be controversial to think that God would write a text that is “polyvalent,” i.e., contains meanings directed to one people at one time and to another at another time.

In this case, it makes sense to be agnostic about multiple interpretations. As Augustine points out, they might all be right insofar as they meet certain criteria, such as not contradicting clearly established traditions.

Aquinas followed the traditional method of considering scripture as having two broad senses, namely, a historical or literal sense and a spiritual sense, which was further divided into various categories such as the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical, which are explained as follows:

Thomas stakes a claim but hardly seems doctrinaire about it. He adopts a traditional threefold division: allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. More precisely, he adopts three traditional names. He understands “allegorical” to refer to things that signify Christ, most especially things in the Old Testament that signify Christ. “Tropological” refers to things that signify the moral life in Christ. “Anagogical” refers to things that signify eternal beatitude with Christ.29 Thomas himself gives a handy example of the four senses using Genesis 1:3, “Let there be light.” “When I say ‘Let there be light' and speak of corporeal light, it pertains to the literal sense. If ‘Let there be light' is understood as ‘let Christ be born in the Church,' it pertains to the allegorical sense. If it is understood as ‘let us be introduced into glory through Christ,' it pertains to the anagogical sense. If it is understood as ‘let us be illumined in our intellects and inflamed in our affections,' it pertains to the moral sense.”

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (pp. 36-37). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

One should not be doctrinaire about these categories. The “literal” sense could be a metaphor. The woman crowned by the stars in Revelation is Israel, the Church, and the Mother of the Messiah. Likewise, a verse might have multiple historical/literal meanings:

Thomas may speak of what the author meant, but it is never by way of argument to determine one reading over another. It is by way of conclusion, not by way of premise. As for the possibility of multiple literal interpretations of a given passage, Thomas's answer in practice seems clear enough: he is thoroughly comfortable with multiple literal interpretations of Scripture. In his most carefully prepared Gospel commentary, the commentary on the Gospel according to St. John, Thomas regularly sets multiple literal interpretations side by side, often drawn from the Fathers. He sets them down and moves on. He rarely adjudicates between them. “This can be explained in many ways without error.”20 Perhaps the most striking instance of this in practice is his Catena aurea, his commentary on the four Gospels made up entirely of quotations—sententiae—from the Fathers. Here one sees over and over again multiple literal interpretations from the Fathers for a given passage of Scripture. Thomas does not do this so that he can argue against one or show the preferability of one over another. He does it because he holds them all to be true.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (p. 30). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

As with Augustine, one should be careful to rule out plausible alternative interpretations:

With regard to the dispute over the meaning of the text, here too one should avoid two things. First, one should not attribute something false to Scripture. There can no more be something false in Scripture than there can be something false in the faith, since both are given by the Holy Spirit.22 Second, one should not so force Scripture to one single meaning (sensus) that other meanings are excluded that are also true (i.e., they meet the first criterion) and fit “the circumstance of the letter.”

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (p. 31). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

Obviously, with this approach, Aquinas did not think that Scripture was perspicuous:

How far St. Thomas is from considering Scripture as being self-evident is seen clearly enough in his frequent practice of adding an explanatory word or two in the text as he quotes the passage of Scripture on which he is commenting.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (p. 33). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

Thomas followed Aristotle's understanding of how words work. Words are conventional sounds that refer to an idea in the speaker's mind which in turn refers to an external substance. We tend to cut out the middleman and say that words refer to things. When Aquinas said that the spiritual sense had to be based on the literal sense, he meant that while the literal sense made a connection between a word and a thing, the mystical sense would consider the connection between thing and thing. Thus, Deuteronomy says, “don't eat pigs.” The words bring up pigs in a literal sense. But what do pigs represent? Greed, perhaps? This is how pre-modern thinking can end up with what moderns consider fanciful.

I know that modern readers are outraged by mystical sense exegesis, usually for the following reason:

A danger lurks in the mystical sense, for it would seem to give license to every nut with a loony reading of Scripture. One could make Scripture say anything. To put it perhaps more delicately, but no less pointedly, the mystical senses open wide the possibility, indeed the probability, that readers will simply read into Scripture what they want.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (pp. 38-39). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

Boyle explains the limitation as:

As a second check, although he does not say it explicitly, St. Thomas's criteria for the evaluation of literal interpretations could also be used for mystical interpretations. One ought not claim something to be true that is not, nor insist on one's own reading to the exclusion of others. There would be a possible qualification in that the circumstance of the letter might not directly pertain; we could, in the light of what we have just said, say that one ought to preserve the reality of the thing. Thus we can see there are limits, but they are wide limits indeed, just as the limits on the literal sense are wide. I am inclined to think this is why medieval commentators on Scripture, St. Thomas included, seemed to have so much fun. The playing field is indeed a big one. It has a fence, but the enclosed area is spacious. Or perhaps this might be a better image: Scripture is like a playpen with many splendid toys. It has sides to keep one from falling out and getting hurt, but the area one has is nonetheless a source of fun and joy. I cannot help but think that many of these commentators simply had fun. Of course, this was a serious business, but it was about something so huge and capacious that it was itself a source of great delight.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (pp. 40-41). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

Another element of Aquinas's reading I had not understood is the importance of Aquinas's division of texts according to an end he attributes to the author. For Aquinas, the central purpose of the Gospel of John is to show the divinity of the divine Word. Aquinas then breaks down the text to the level of verses according to that goal. This division is as important to understanding Aquinas's commentary as the commentary. Boyle explains:

These divisions give the reader St. Thomas's understanding of the order of thought in the book. Because of that, the division is itself a substantive commentary that is presumed in the explicit commentary on a given passage or verse. It is not uncommon for modern students of the Middle Ages to be disappointed by St. Thomas's commentaries. The disappointment tends to follow a pattern. A particular passage of Scripture is of interest to the student who turns to Thomas and finds that he has remarkably little to say in commenting on that specific verse. And so it is. In comparison with the holy commentators, Thomas can have a modest word count. This is in part because Thomas is famously frugal in his prose. It is also because he has already done quite a bit of expository work in getting to this point in his commentary. Because a given passage is articulated in relation to the whole and its parts, one must see the commentary on that passage in those relations to understand St. Thomas's commentary. Thomas is not one to repeat what he has said; he presumes his reader recalls or will reread. This applies not only to what has come before but also to what comes after a passage. If one really wants to understand St. Thomas's commentary on a given passage of Scripture, one would need to appreciate its place in a division that situates it within the book and within the commentary as a whole.

Boyle, John F.. Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (p. 88). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.

There is a lot in here. If you are a Thomist, as I am, this is a great introduction. If you are a modern Evangelical, you ought to read this to be exposed to how your intellectual ancestors read the Bible.