Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation

TWO: From Aquinas to Raymond Brown

— 36 — C H A P T E R T W O From Aquinas to Raymond Brown The previous chapter suggested that once historical reality came to be understood as metaphysically non-participatory, one could hardly expect exegetical practice to remain unaffected. To make this argument more concrete, I set forth Thomas Aquinas’s exegesis of John 3:27–36 as a benchmark of the kinds of truth claims one finds in “participatory” biblical exegesis. Building on this work, the present chapter takes some further steps, admittedly tentative, toward appreciating how the understanding of history develops and changes in Catholic biblical exegesis from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. Often such narratives begin with seventeenth-century exegetes such as Richard Simon, and locate the significant shift largely in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries. Taking my cue however from Henri de Lubac—who showed that Catholic biblical exegesis, especially as regards the spiritual senses, had already undergone a significant shift by the fifteenth century1 —I discuss ten examples of Catholic biblical exegesis of John 3:27–36 from the fourteenth through the twentieth century.2 The ten figures include Meister Eckhart, O.P. (Germany, 1260–1328), Nicholas of Lyra, O.F.M. (France, 1270–1349), Denys the Carthusian (Belgium and Holland, 1402–71), Erasmus (Holland, 1466–1536), Tommaso Levering-02 2/11/08 11:28 AM Page 36 de Vio, O.P. (Cajetan) (Italy, 1469–1534), Francisco de Toledo, S.J. (Spain, 1532–96), Juan de Maldonado, S.J. (Spain, 1534–83), Alexander Natalis, O.P. (France, 1639–1724), Marie-Joseph Lagrange, O.P. (1855–1938), and Raymond Brown, S.S. (1928–1998).3 It seems to me that these figures illumine, however partially, the gradual stages by which a new understanding of history influenced Catholic biblical exegesis. This development does not displace all at once the participatory dimensions of history; these dimensions remain but grow increasingly tangential. Catholic biblical exegesis very gradually takes account of this change, which accelerates in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the twentieth century the difference between Aquinas’s exegesis and contemporary mainstream exegesis is striking. This difference certainly does not mean that contemporary mainstream exegesis lacks value and insight. But contemporary mainstream exegesis does understand history in a restricted way that, in my view, limits interpretative options and should not go unchallenged. I have chosen these ten figures because of their importance in their day, but the ten hardly constitute an exhaustive historical survey, a task that I hope others will take up. In what follows I arrange them into three time periods: fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; sixteenth century; seventeenth through twentieth centuries. For each of the three periods, after describing their exegesis of John 3:27–36, I offer a brief summary of how the understanding of historical realities appears to be shifting during the period. What we will find, through patient examination because the transition is at first so gradual, are signs of increasing disjunction of the literal and the spiritual senses, along with an increasing display of linear-historical apparatus. Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Lyra, Denys the Carthusian: Late-Medieval Options Aquinas belonged to the last generation of high-medieval theologians . After the deaths of Aquinas and Bonaventure in 1274, and Albert the Great six years later, theological rationalisms gained ascendancy in the late-medieval universities. As a result, whereas before 1274 the From Aquinas to Raymond Brown — 37 — Levering-02 2/11/08 11:28 AM Page 37 leading theologians had all commented on the Bible, afterward this practice became rare.4 Describing this situation, Hans Urs von Balthasar comments: Particularly in the universities, Averroism, quite independently of the “spirituals,” had accorded pride of place to ratio over fides, thus profoundly upsetting the entire clerical world of learning; in doing so, it had also pushed the latter toward the contrary movement, an irrational mysticism that was no less dangerous to faith in the incarnate Word, or toward a voluntaristic Nominalism that was partly to blame for the break that took place in the Reformation.5 It is telling that the greatest theological minds of the period, Scotus and Ockham, did not write commentaries on the Bible, and their formal theological writings relatively infrequently appeal to Scripture or the Fathers.6 During this period, biblical interpretation became increasingly the province not of the “masters,” but of “mystically” inclined theologians , generally outside the universities. I will discuss three examples...