ventura's application of the Psalter to the Virgin Mary.1 Bonaventura expatiates on the length, breadth, height, and width, of Scripture; he says, that its altitude is unattainable because of its inviolable authority, its plenitude inexhaustible because of its inscrutable profundity, its certitude infallible because of its irrefutable progress, its value inappreciable because of its inestimable fruit, its pulchritude incontaminable because of its impermixtible purity, and so forth with all the inexhaustible verbosity of scholastic eloquence, and with an artificiality which lacks the ring of genuine feeling. This supremacy, he says, belongs to God's Word, "in order that to secular sciences which inflate the heart and overshadow the intellect, there may be no room for glorying against Holy Scripture." But his many-syllabled eulogy only serves as an introduction to an account of the river of Paradise which divides itself into four heads, the rivers namely of histories, of anagogies, of allegories, and of tropologies. This fourfold river of exegesis had its fountain not, as Bonaventura imagined, in Paradise, but partly in the Greek Stoa and partly in the Jewish Synagogue. It had broadened and deepened in the works of interpreters who found in the mystic sense a facile way of gratifying ingenuity, of concealing ignorance and of furnishing homiletics. During the whole of this period Christian exegesis resembled that of the Rabbinic school of Tiberias in its age of decadence. Both had their oral tradition with which they made the Word of God of none. effect. The Fathers took the same position as the Mishna, and allegory as the Qabbala. From Rabbis and Alexandrians

1 Bonaventura has been highly praised for his method of "explaining Scripture by Scripture." But in the first place the method is not in the least degree peculiar to him, and in the next the indiscriminate use of "parallel" passages, which have nothing "parallel" in them, leads in all the Schoolmen to mere confusion.

2 Prooem. in Breviloquium. Comp. Hugo, Erudit. Didasc. iv. 1; Johann. Sarish. Polycrat. vii. 12. The sciences which reveal the laws of God were thus treated as menials "in the service of a mistress who had grown sluggish and immovable."

3 Bonaventura himself prefers to regard the Bible as a book with seven seals, and not content even with the fourfold sense, he adds to it three more senses- the symbolic, the synekdochic, and the hyperbolic!

T

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. 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."

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.

ventura's application of the Psalter to the Virgin Mary.1 Bonaventura expatiates on the length, breadth, height, and width, of Scripture; he says, that its altitude is unattainable because of its inviolable authority, its plenitude inexhaustible because of its inscrutable profundity, its certitude infallible because of its irrefutable progress, its value inappreciable because of its inestimable fruit, its pulchritude incontaminable because of its impermixtible purity, and so forth with all the inexhaustible verbosity of scholastic eloquence, and with an artificiality which lacks the ring of genuine feeling. This supremacy, he says, belongs to God's Word, "in order that to secular sciences which inflate the heart and overshadow the intellect, there may be no room for glorying against Holy Scripture." But his many-syllabled eulogy only serves as an introduction to an account of the river of Paradise which divides itself into four heads, the rivers namely of histories, of anagogies, of allegories, and of tropologies. This fourfold river of exegesis had its fountain not, as Bonaventura imagined, in Paradise, but partly in the Greek Stoa and partly in the Jewish Synagogue. It had broadened and deepened in the works of interpreters who found in the mystic sense a facile way of gratifying ingenuity, of concealing ignorance and of furnishing homiletics. During the whole of this period Christian exegesis resembled that of the Rabbinic school of Tiberias in its age of decadence. Both had their oral tradition with which they made the Word of God of none effect. The Fathers took the same position as the Mishna, and allegory as the Qabbala. From Rabbis and Alexandrians

1 Bonaventura has been highly praised for his method of "explaining Scripture by Scripture." But in the first place the method is not in the least degree peculiar to him, and in the next the indiscriminate use of "parallel" passages, which have nothing "parallel" in them, leads in all the Schoolmen to mere confusion.

* Prooem. in Breviloquium. Comp. Hugo, Erudit. Didase. iv. 1; Johann. Sarish. Polycrat. vii. 12. The sciences which reveal the laws of God were thus treated as menials "in the service of a mistress who had grown sluggish and immovable.'

3 Bonaventura himself prefers to regard the Bible as a book with seven seals, and not content even with the fourfold sense, he adds to it three more senses-the symbolic, the synekdochic, and the hyperbolic!

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the Christian teachers had taken without examination an unscriptural view of inspiration, and they supported it by a method which had been borrowed directly from Pagan philosophers.1

But we meet at last with one green island among the tideless waves of exegetic commonplace. NICOLAS OF LYRA? († 1340)—the Doctor planus et utilis-was the Jerome of the fourteenth century. From him came the revival which reached its full force more than two centuries after he had gone to rest. The fresh life came from the reviving studies of the French and Spanish Jews. The old method of Biblical study, the fantastic child of Rabbinism and the Stoa, had long fallen, it has been said, into a magic sleep, and the trees rustled in vain over the enchanted castle. It had drunk at the hands of Bede the opiate of Jerome's vague wavering elegant compilations; and had fed to repletion upon the sermon-material so abundantly supplied by Gregory. But meanwhile, on the banks of the Tigris and in Andalusia, Jews trained in Arabic schools of wisdom had found the charm to open its closed eyes. That charm was Hebrew grammar. A thoughtful monk, sitting in his lonely cell, first found its efficacy in his own enlightenment, and forcing his way through the brushwood and undergrowth of centuries awoke the sleeper. That monk was Nicolas of Lyra.3

Since the days of Ibn Ezra († 1167), a change had come over the spirit of the Jewish commentators. He had distinguished between five methods of Biblical commentary :—

1 A word of at least passing recognition should be given to the textual and practical (though hardly to the exegetical) labours of Hugo of St. Cher (†1260), who in his Correctoria attempted some improvement of the text of the Vulgate. His book first made the division of the Bible into chapters general. His efforts were due to the hints of the greatest genius of the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon.

So called from his birthplace, Lyra, in Normandy. Sixtus Senensis says: "Natione Anglus vel ex Lyra Brabantiae oppido." Bibl.

Sanct. p. 276.

There seems to be little or no proof of the common notion that he was, on his mother's side, of Jewish birth. At an early age he became a Franciscan.

Merx, Eine Rede vom Auslegen.

Jewish Exegetes.

The Verbal, which dwells on every separate word.

275

The purely Subjective, which pays no attention at all to tradition.

'The Allegoric, which reads mysteries into the sacred

text.

The Kabbalistic, which develops secrets out of letters, numbers, and syllables.

The Literal, which confines itself to developing the actual meaning of the writers.1

Of these five methods he had himself chosen the last. In the same century the labours of the Qimchis had greatly facilitated the study of Hebrew grammar. Rashi († 1170), while following traditional views, had done much to elucidate the literal sense, and Maimonides "the Light of the West," "the Eagle of the Rabbis" († 1204), whom the stricter Jews of his day regarded as a rationalist, had practically rejected much of Talmudism, and reverting to the written. Law had endeavoured to show by Aristotelian and Alexandrian methods that the written Law was founded on immutable reason.2 Nicolas had studied Rashi and had often followed him so closely as to be called Simia Salomonis. He seems intuitively to have seized on some of the best principles hitherto enunciated. Here and there he had met with hints as to the corruption of manuscripts; the necessity for a better text; the importance of understanding the original languages; the folly of splitting up texts into endless fragments; the difference between true exposition and a confused chaos of possible suggestions; the primary duty of

1 See Sale's Koran, p. 87.

On the Jewish mediaeval interpreters see Schröck, K. G. xxv. 391; Rosenmüller, Hist. Interp. v. 211, sq.; Meyer, i. 85-93; Merx, Joel, 207296; Siegfried" Ueber Rashi's Einfluss" (Merx, Archiv, i. 431). In the latter paper is shown the extent of Rashi's influence over Luther as well as over Nicolas of Lyra.

* Rashi is the abbreviated name of Rabbi Solomon Jizchaki. It was probably from Rashi that Lyra learnt the admirable old rule which he renders * Scriptura loquitur secundum modum nostrum loquendi" (note on Gen. viii. 1, "Recordatus est"). Nicolas says, "Intendo non solum doctorum catholicorum sed etiam Hebraiorum explanationes, maxime R. Salomon, qui inter doctores Hebraeos locutus est rationabilius ad declarationem sensus literalis

”.(פשט)