as well as carnally he may be known to have descended from so great a father." Here, omitting some useless and irrelevant parallels, we have first a mere play on words; then a passage borrowed from the Glossa; and lastly the idle Jewish fancy that when a Prophet names his father, the father was also a prophet.1 "That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten." This verse is first explained by a mosaic of parallel places, which, being only taken from the Vulgate, is entirely meaningless. Then we are told that Jerome takes these species of locusts literally of Assyrians, Chaldaeans, Babylonians, &c.; and morally to mean sadness, joy, fear, and hope; and that Gregory takes them morally to mean either lust, vain-glory, gluttony, and anger, or (rather) incipient passion, instability, habit, and despair. As to any attempt to find the real or principal sense there is none. "For in Mount Sion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance," that is, says Albertus, in the eminence of a speculative and the peace of an active life. "The mountains shall drop down

4

"3

new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk." The mountains, he says, mean the heights of the three Persons in the Holy Trinity, or even the heights of the Apostles; and the hills, that is the heights of the angels and saints, shall flow with the truth of the white sweet doctrine of the Humanity of Christ. "Egypt shall be a desolation and Edom a desolate wilderness "—that is, spiritual and carnal sins shall be driven where God and the Saints shall not be, because they have shed the blood of martyrs! This is not exegesis but homilywork of the poorest description, allegorising passages which of themselves are perfectly clear. Let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber and the bride out of her closet."5 That is, says the Pseudo-Haymo of Halberstadt, "let Christ go out of the bosom of the Father, and the flesh of Christ from the Virgin's 2 Joel i. 4.

1 See Merx, Joel, p. 369.

3 Joel ii. 32.

4 Joel iii. 18.

5 Joel ii. 16. We find the same explanations with only slight differences of detail in Hugo of St. Victor, Remigius, Rupert of Deutz, the Glossa Ordinaria, &c. The exegesis of Albertus Magnus like that of Peter Lombard is chiefly derived third or fourth hand from the Catenae and glosses. See R. Simon, Hist. des Comment. pp. 468, sq.

womb" The explanation, which is as old as the Clavis of Pseudo-Melito, reduces the passage as a whole to sheer nonsense.1 It illustrates not only the helpless secondhandness of the mediaeval commentators, but also the absurdity to which their systematic allegorising often led them. It shows still more their fatal habit of looking at words without their connexion, and at texts without their context. "Or,"— continues Pseudo-Haymo-for the expositions of his day are always liberal of their futilities—" the bridegroom " may mean the divine word, and "the bride" (in the usual language of mysticism) the faithful soul. Mediaeval exposition very rarely explained the real meaning of the sacred writers. It was a specious transition to a totally different order of thought.

Even THOMAS OF AQUINO, with all his nobleness and greatness, profound as a thinker, incomparable as a theologian, is least successful in the interpretation of Scripture.3 Imbued with the fatal dream of the fourfold sense of Scripture, he is meagre in the explanation of the literal sense, but diffuse in

1 Pitra, Spicil. Solesm. iii. 75, ap. Merx, Joel, p. 377.

2 Even Abelard looked on the necessity for allegory as a proof of "inspiration," and on this ground extended it to Plato. Introd. ad Theol. i. P. 46.

3 Tholuck in his monograph De Thoma Aquinate et Abaclardo interpretibus N. T. says 66 Quantum ad interpretandi dogmaticum genus attinet hic ei campus laudum, hic meriti corona. Est argumenti dogmatici interpres diligens, indefessus qui ne voculam quidem praeterit quin excutiat." Erasmus said of him (on Rom. i. 2), "Meo quidem animo nullus est recentiorum theologorum cui par sit diligentia, cui sanius ingenium, cui solidior eruditio." On his work as an exegete see Vaughan, Life of St. Thomas, ii. 567, sqq. The present Pope (Leo XIII.) is the fourteenth who has loaded St. Thomas with eulogies. In his Encyclical Aeterni Patris (Aug. 4, 1879), while not vouching for oversubtlety or over rashness, or what improbable, or not in accordance with the demonstrated doctrines of a later age, he recommends the study of his writings with a glowing eulogium to the whole Christian world. "Far above all other scholastic doctors," says the Encyclical, "towers Thomas Aquinas, their Master and Prince. Greatly enriched as he was with the science of God and the science of man, he is likened to the sun, for he warmed the whole earth with the fire of his holiness, and filled the whole earth with the splendour of his teaching." According to Natalis he found Philosophy wandering like Agar in the wilderness, and sent her back to be a bondslave in the tent of Abraham. Bucer said, "Tolle Thomam et Eccl. Romanam subvertam." Ventura says, “Il n'y a aucune erreur qu'il n'ait prévue, réfutée, pulverisée d'avance" (La Raison philosophique, ii. 129). Catena Aurea is a later name. He himself in his Dedication calls it continua expositio, and in older editions it is called glossa continua.

speculative discussions and dialectic developments. At the beginning of his comment on Job, he goes off into a long discussion about good and bad angels. When the patience of Job is mentioned he gives an essay on the views of the ancient philosophers respecting that virtue. He is so devoted to Augustine, as to have originated the saying that the soul of Augustine had passed into him by metempsychosis.1 In his Catena on the Gospels he compiles mainly from twenty-two Greek and twenty Latin writers, and accepts without hesitation their most tasteless and empty allegories.2 "Masterly and architectonic" as is the skill shown in that work which is "nearly perfect as a conspectus of patristic interpretations," 3 yet being a catena only it did not contribute to exegetic progress. Thomas was acquainted with the writings of Maimonides and of Averroes, and has gained something from them as he shows in his remarks on prophecy. He does not, however, venture to mention the Jewish writer, whose works he was quoting side by side with those of Jerome and Gregory, at the very time that the brethren of his own Dominican order were condemning those works to the flames at Paris. But neither Greek, nor Arab, nor Jewish learning produced any adequate effect on the exegesis of the Schoolmen. Even in the hands of St. Thomas it is dependent, traditional, unprogressive. He repeats the worst excesses of Hilary and even of Remigius. Thus John ate locusts and wild honey, because his preaching was to the crowds sweet like honey, but short of flight like locusts (Rem.). By John (i.e. "the Grace of God") is signified Christ who brought grace to the world; and by his camel's-hair robe is indicated the Church

1 Sixt. Senens. Bibl. iv, 308.

2 Frigerio (Vita di S. Thomas, ii. 115) speaks of his inexplicable reverence for the Fathers.

3 Cardl. Newman, Pref. to vol. i. of Catena Aurea, Oxford, 1841; and Vaughan's Life of St. Thomas, ii. 547-574. The exquisite superiority of St. Chrysostom to other patristic commentators is constantly evinced in this Catena. A considerable drawback, however, to its usefulness arises from the fact that so many of the extracts are from spurious books.

See Merx, Joel, p. 354. Jaraczewsky in Zeitschr. für Philos. xlvi. points out his influence on Scholasticism, and especially on Albertus. For the influence of Averroes see Renan, Averroes, pp. 231-236.

of the Gentiles (Hil.). Even throughout the simplest narratives of the Gospels he allegorises incessantly. Besides this he is full of contradictions.1 A large part of his method consists in the ingenious juxtaposition of passages of which the verbal similarity depends only upon the Vulgate. From these imaginary identities of expression, by a method which seems to have survived from the days of Hillel, he deduces systems extremely ingenious but utterly without foundation. I need but mention one salient instance 2 in the arrangement which lies at the base of his commentary of 700 pages on the Pauline Epistles. The whole scheme is made to turn on the phrase "a chosen vessel." St. Thomas arrives at the conclusion that all the fourteen Epistles (for he follows the popular view in attributing the Epistle to the Hebrews to St. Paul) treat of grace, and that the Epistle to the Galatians is a sort of appendix to the treatment of grace as it is in the sacraments! It would be difficult to conceive anything more ingeniously misleading, more historically groundless, more essentially partial, inadequate, and mistaken, than this celebrated scheme of the Epistles in which every critical and historical consideration, as well as every human element in the origin of the Epistles is fatally ignored in order that they may be symmetrically arranged into an artificial diagram of abstract doctrines. The mere index to the word "Grace" in the chief edition of the works of St. Thomas fills many folio columns. How much has any reader really added to his understanding of the Scriptures, when he has read the multitudinous pages to which the index refers? In Divinity, as Bacon says, there cannot be this perfection and

1 See the fifth Index to the Summa (Migne, i. De Antilogiis).

2 His doctorial lecture on Ps. cv. 13 (see Vaughan's Life, ii. 113) gives a good specimen of his manner. For his views about allegory, tropology, and anagogy, see Summ. I. i. art. x.

3 See Opp. vi. 3 (Venet. 1745).

4 "Il ne peut être question de progrès dans un tel ordre d'exposition.. Partout ce sont les mêmes textes découpés et séparés de ce qui les explique, les même syllogismes triomphants, mais posant sur le vide, les mêmes défauts de critique historique, provenant de la confusion des dates et des milieux." Renan, Souvenirs, p. 281.

completeness. We cannot have the form of a total when there is but matter for a part.

We can hardly wonder that after his rapturous trance at Naples, Thomas of Aquino dropped the labour of his Summa and refused to write anything more.1 He had seen such visions, he said, in the ecstasy of his long illness as to reduce to insignificance all that he had hitherto published. He so far yielded to the importunity of friends as to begin dictating a commentary on the Canticles, but he died in the midst of the task. There was in him a vein of pure mysticism, which we should hardly have suspected when we read the pages of the Summa, so entirely free from rhetoric or emotion" clear as water, passionless as marble, regular as mechanism, cold as ice."

2

Mysticism and scholasticism were even more commingled in the writings of St. Thomas's great contemporary, the Seraphic Doctor. In BONAVENTURA († 1274) indeed the mystic and Neoplatonist predominated; but the scholasticism of his day affected his writings no less than those of the two great monks of St. Victor. Accepting the supernatural infallibility of every word of Scripture, his mode of commenting upon it is profoundly unscriptural. Some notion of his wearisome prolixity may be derived from his comment on "God saw the light that it was good." This verse is made the excuse for all sorts of diffuse and irrelevant remarks about vision, philosophy, and light, of which this is but one part of one sentence. "If truth is not, it is true that truth is not; something therefore is true; and if something is true, it is true that there is truth; therefore, if truth is not there is truth. For truth prevails above all things." But perhaps nothing more is wanted to show the absolute lack of all exegetic insight than Bona

1 He said to his friend, Brother Reginald, "Omnia quae scripsi videntur mihi paleae respectu eorum quae vidi." Prooem. De Vit. S. Thom. Aquin.

Corderius says that he derives almost all his theology from Dionysius (Migne, i. 96).

3 He gives his views of exegesis in Principium S. Scripturae. See Isagoge in Script. Sacr. in which he says the New Testament is only the Old spiritually expounded.