Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology

Introduction

Introduction Like all medieval biblical commentaries, Aquinas’s Commentary on John consists to a significant degree in speculative theological questioning inspired by the biblical text. Proceeding on the assumption that it would not have been possible for St. John to have written what he wrote without the ecclesial light of faith and without engaging speculative questions, Aquinas’s commentary recommends a similar movement in the thought of the biblical interpreter: speculative thinking about divine realities emerges from within biblical exegesis itself. The circular movement from biblical exegesis to speculative theology and back again must be a continual one for the health of both exegesis and theology. The present volume, as a speculative theological commentary upon Aquinas’s biblical commentary, further displays the fruits of this circular movement. By way of contributing to the reintegration of biblical studies and speculative theology, Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas seeks to illumine and recover the convergences between the scriptural words, exegetical commentary, and theological analysis. Insofar as biblical exegesis and speculative theology are distinct, the essays in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas are the latter, as speculative theological reflection upon St. Thomas’s biblical exegesis. Yet the two tasks indwell one another. St. Thomas’s biblical exegesis is constituted by his procedure of continually moving, within the exegetical task, from exegesis proper to speculative theological questioning and back again. In this dynamic process of exegesis, he brings to bear not only parallel interpretive texts from throughout the Bible, but also the accumulated insights of the Fathers. Biblical exegesis depends upon the exegete’s gifts as a speculative theologian, which in turn depend upon the exegete’s acquaintance with not merely the particular text at hand but indeed the whole Scriptures as illumined in faith by the Fathers and interpreted doctrinally by the Church. This exapansive view of exegesis and of the exegete is justified by Aquinas’s understanding of sacra scriptura as sacra doctrina, sacred teaching, in which the Church’s teachers participate. = xiii The present volume, therefore, should contribute to developing the rationale for contemporary exegetical approaches that interpret Scripture primarily through the historical lens of tradition and with a speculative intention . As a theological commentary, furthermore, Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes the congruence of biblical exegesis and systematic theology in Aquinas’s thought by adopting the basic structure of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. A brief sketch of the contents of the volume will draw out this pattern. In the volume’s first section—on Revelation, taking up issues found in I, q.1, of the Summa theologiae—John F. Boyle proposes, pace Beryl Smalley’s view that Aquinas’s interest in the literal sense anticipates modern historicalcritical exegetical approaches, that Aquinas is actually not concerned to determine precisely what the author meant. Drawing upon the De potentia, Boyle finds that Aquinas, influenced by Augustine, instead poses two negative principles for interpreting the literal sense: one cannot hold something contradictory to the truth, especially the truth of faith, to be the meaning of Scripture, and one cannot insist upon one’s own interpretation if other interpretations may be valid. These principles enable Thomas to admit that the literal sense of a particular passage may admit of many meanings. Unlike modern biblical exegetes, then, rather than pursue arduously the exact meaning of the literal sense of a passage, St. Thomas uses the method of “divisio textus” to focus upon the intention or goal with which the author wrote, namely the salvation of human beings. Stephen F. Brown seeks to uncover the role of Aquinas’s citations of the Fathers in the Commentary on John. Drawing upon the work of the fourteenth -century theologians Durandus and the Franciscan Peter Aureoli, who establish a distinction between deductive theology and declarative theology, Brown surveys how Aquinas in the Commentary on John uses the work of the Fathers to expose central articles of the faith. In contrast to Durandus and other late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century theologians, who considered Aquinas’s theology to be primarily an effort to deduce further truths from the articles of faith, Brown argues (in agreement with Aureoli) that Aquinas practices declarative theology, that is, theology whose purpose is to defend, clarify, and explain the articles of faith. Examining both the Commentary and Aquinas’s numerous discussions elsewhere about the nature of theology, Brown shows that Aquinas’s practice of declarative theology relies heavily upon his use of the Fathers. The second section of...