The Place of Holy Scripture in the Theology of St. Thomas

THE PLACE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE IN THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS XCORDING to Pope Leo XIII, St. Thomas Aquinas was the leading exegete of Holy Scripture among the theologians of the Scholastic age.1 It may therefore be of interest to study the place the Bible occupies in his works and in his theological system. The nature of theological science has always _been much discussed. Even in the time of St. Thomas there were differences of opinion on this subject/ and after having rested some centuries, the discussion has been reopened in modern times with more acuteness and more far-reaching consequences than before. The school of St. Thomas has always based its teaching on the explanation of the word "theology"; theology is the knowledge of God, and of created things in so far as they are related to God. The knowledge of God is a double one, natural and supernatural, and so there are today two kinds of theology, natural theology, called theodicy, and theology strictly so called, which is based on revelation.3 Although essentially one, because God is one, theology has been divided into several sub-divisions. This is due to the ever increasing extension of theological knowledge, as well as to the different angles from which the fact of revelation may be considered. Revelation may be considered as something whose credibility must be proved and even defined against those who deny it; so originates the initial phase of theological science, called apologetics , or fundamental theology. Revelation, however, may also be considered from a speculative standpoint, in as much as one tries to penetrate it with the aid of speculative human 1 " Thomas Aquinas inter eos habuit palmam," in the Encyclical, Providentissimm Deus (Enchiridion Biblicum, no. SI). • Summa Theol., I, q. I, a. 8. • Ibid., a. I, ad ~urn. 398 HOLY SCRIPTURE IN THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS 899 science. This gives origin to speculative theology, which tends to be considered by many of its students as the whole of theology; it deals with the truths of faith as they are found in the sources of revelation, and it .pursues a threefold aim. First, and principally, the speculative theologian seeks to understand and to penetrate into the terms in which the truths of faith are proposed to him. Secondly, he draws conclusions from the articles of faith with the aid of human knowledge and human reasoning. Thirdly, he has to invalidate the arguments which are brought against the articles of faith by those who consider those articles absurd. Besides speculative theology there is also what has been called positive theology. This does not try to penetrate the revealed truths, or the terms in which they have been revealed, by speculative thinking; its task is to indicate the revealed truth in its sources, and to explain these sources as far as they' are obscure or not fully understood. Holy Scripture is the word of God, not in the sense that it is identical with revelation, but in the sense that it has been inspired by the Holy Ghost and contains revelation. But although it is God's word," written for our instruction" (Rom. xv, 4), "that the man of God may be perfoct, prepared unto every good work " (II Tim. iii, 17) , it is not clear to everyone. The Bible ofte., reminds one of the book with the seven seals of the Revelation of Saint John. Often its sense is discovered only with difficulty, and not without the assistance of the Holy Ghost, which may be given to the individual believer, but which is before all given to the Church. The exegete tries to determine the sense of Scripture; he opens the seals of the closed book and tries to make clear what is obscure. In so doing he may use every human means: philology, history, anthropology, sociology, etc., but his work is theological, just as much as it is the work of theology to penetrate into the revealed truth with the aid of profane philosophy. The same must be said, with the proper adjustments , of positive theology which has tradition, considered as a source of revelation, as an object. Besides this, positive the- 400 J. VAN DER...