De inspiratione sacrae Scripturae: theologica disquisitio

Augustine warns us not to receive the knowledge of the Scriptures from their enemies among the expositors. « Nothing, he says, is fuller of temerity than to desert the expositors of any books whatever who profess that they hold them and can hand them on to their disciples, and to seek their judgment from those who have declared the bitterest war, I know not by what compelling cause, upon the founders and authors of those books. For who ever thought that the recondite and obscure books of Aristotle should be expounded by his enemy—to say nothing of those disciplines in which a reader can perhaps err without sacrilege? »¹. That, surely, even in profane matters, no prudent man will fail to judge absurd and rash. But how much more in the case of those sacred Scriptures which, since they were written with the Holy Spirit dictating, are far, far removed from human sense, human judgment, human thought and workmanship; which, filled on every side with the deepest mysteries, are most rightly compared to a sealed book², and were therefore entrusted by their author to the Catholic Church, so that they may receive their interpretation from the same Spirit from whom they also came down. « We, indeed, poor as we are, said Hilary, praying to God in the opening of his books On the Trinity³, will pray for the things we need, and in searching the sayings of Thy prophets and apostles we will bring a persistent zeal, and we will knock at all the approaches of a locked understanding. But it is Thine to grant what is prayed for, to be present to what is sought, and to lie open to him who knocks... We expect, therefore, that... our words may be admitted to the fellowship of the prophetic or apostolic Spirit, so that we may grasp their sayings in no other sense than that in which they themselves spoke ».

Yet what prudence forbids in human matters, and what the Catholic spirit forbids most of all in divine matters, we see done everywhere in our own days. To be sure, there have been from of old those who declared the bitterest war upon the authors of the sacred books, for the cause that we know. But two centuries ago that war, once begun by Celsus, Porphyry, Manichaeus, and Julian, broke out afresh with a new and incredible violence. Nothing was left untried so that those authentic letters of God to men might be convicted of falsehood or falsity. Not an apex, not an iota was passed over. No word, no name, no expression was left unshaken in the sieve of criticism. No discipline either—physical, philological, or historical—was not called in to assist the demolition. Finally, no opinion, no conjecture, no frivolity was not shamelessly alleged, as though it were a most solid conclusion of science, against the oracles of truth. And yet that ever-reviving impulse and fury of destruction, gathering strength day by day, even setting aside the Babel-like confusion of the systems that struggle together, shows clearly how firm a citadel always remains. For who would strive against a ruin cast down and lying prostrate? Or to whom would it ever occur to dispute against the fabulous cosmogonies of the nations, or against any sacred books of theirs? Here, however, we see with our own eyes continually fulfilled that word of David: Thou enlightenest wonderfully from the eternal mountains; all the foolish of heart are troubled.

But it has not seemed so to certain men who still glory in the name of Catholic. For they have been persuaded that the knowledge of the Scriptures is to be received, if not wholly, at least in great part, from the aforementioned haters and enemies of them. And, by way of example, they have been persuaded that those great masters of rationalism judge rightly when they traduce as infantile and like to childish myths most of the things that are read at the beginning of Genesis: that God created heaven and earth in six days, formed man from the slime of the earth, planted a paradise toward the East, and placed in its midst the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, brought the animals to Adam to see what he would call them. Again, that it sounds like an infantile myth that Eve was fashioned from Adam's rib, that the serpent converses with the woman, that Jehovah walks in the garden at the breeze after midday, and clothes the first parents in tunics of skins. It is a myth that Cain fears lest he be killed when the earth was not yet inhabited, and obtains a sign so that no one who found him should kill him. A myth is the marriage of the sons of God with the daughters of men, whence giants are born. A myth is the flood and Noah's ark, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved. A myth too is the confusion of tongues and the division of the nations at the building of the tower. But concerning the deeds of the later patriarchs, one will now have to judge not dissimilarly, nor will it be fitting to seek in them a true and properly so called history, so much as popular traditions under a legendary form. The wanderings of Abraham are the immigrations of peoples. The marriage of Ishmael with an Egyptian woman is a symbol of the mixed origin of the Ishmaelites, who derive their origin from Abrahamites and Egyptians. Isaac is the son of Abraham insofar as he was the head of the branch that remained in the land of Canaan, from which afterwards the new branch of the Idumaeans, signified by the legend of Esau-Edom, separated itself. But the other legend of Esau and Jacob will show you, under the allegory of personal deeds, the vicissitudes, the fates, and the character of two peoples. Esau, indeed, simple and sound of heart, but rough and rude; Jacob, however, cunning, ambitious, and by his cunning about to supplant the elder by birth. And while he is presented returning to the land of Canaan after his flight into Mesopotamia, you will think nothing other than of a certain legendary memory of a new immigration of the Chaldean stock, from which, after its fusion with the remnants of the first invasion, the Israelite people took its origin. And so at last it comes about that the historical foundation of the narrative of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph must be placed in nothing other than a certain great and slow movement of peoples from the northern parts of Mesopotamia into Arabia, Canaan, and Egypt. All these things, I say, the placita of rationalistic criticism could please even Catholic men, and are now already almost carried about by them as irreformable conclusions of science⁴.

Furthermore, from Genesis they transfer the same manner of interpreting to the remaining parts of the Hexateuch, that is, to Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and the book of Joshua. For they assert that there are found in the said books contradictions, or marks of an artificial and systematic composition, which forbid that an absolutely historical value be attributed to them. The Egyptian plagues, the crossing of the Red Sea, the rain of quails and the manna from heaven, do not seem able to be a bare and simple description of reality, but all rather sound like natural phenomena more intense than usual, which divine Providence directed to its own ends, and which afterwards popular imagination, far from the places and events, liberally adorned with wonderful and poetic additions. A product of the same popular imagination will also be the sun standing still at Joshua's command. Likewise, the occupation of the promised land ought not to be received as a truly historical narrative. For irreducible contradictions stand in the way, with other biblical narratives of the same fact, since in the Hexateuch Joshua with all Israel is presented as subjugating the entire region of Canaan, while elsewhere the individual tribes are presented as fighting separately over a long course of time, to complete what under Joshua had scarcely or hardly at all been begun. And therefore, although one ought not to go over to the placita of those critics who maintain that the book of Joshua is utterly destitute of every historical foundation, it will be at least fair and necessary to acknowledge there a history of its own kind, that is, an idealized history.

And since appetite grows by going, far be it indeed that any other parts—of the old as much as of the new testament, of the evangelical as much as of the apostolic writings—be exempted from the same reasoning of exegesis. Learned men will therefore appeal to what they call the literary garment, to implicit citations, to compilations of documents of different value and different authority, of which the sacred authors make themselves not sponsors but mere reporters. And from this they will take their foundation, so that, asserting the inerrancy of the Bible to be compatible with the errors, whether historical or scientific, contained in it, they come at last to the following conclusions.

First conclusion: That the biblical narrative is indeed true in its general lines, but that nothing prevents the history, especially the primitive history, from having been narrated, as its nature carries, under that more or less legendary garment which it had received in popular tradition. Nay rather, all the pronouncements of criticism now persuade this most fully, that in fact it so happened.

Second conclusion: That the sacred authors themselves are necessarily to be acknowledged as truthful in all things, although nothing prevents them from having reported facts and circumstances according to the literary conventions by which historiography was governed in the diversity of times, especially among the Orientals, following only the authority of the documents that had come into their hands, in other respects not at all solicitous whether those documents fully answered to objective truth or not.

Third conclusion: That it would also be no harm if we say that those same sacred authors, by their own effort as well, expressed religious or moral truths under the fiction of historical facts, in order the better to inculcate them, and repeatedly accommodated the circumstances of real events in that artificial manner which more fittingly answered their intended purpose.

Fourth conclusion: That it therefore belongs both to criticism and to the Church to distinguish the kernel of true history from the imaginary forms by which that kernel is covered. To criticism indeed, by means of scientific examination. To the Church, however, by authentic and infallible judgment, wherever the matter concerns those things that have a necessary connection with faith and morals⁵.

Moreover, they do not deny that these conclusions are new. Yet they wish them to be orthodox, because their newness does not consist in any foreign conception of inspiration and its effects, but only in a more accurate notion of the laws which, especially in ancient times, governed the various literary genres employed by the hagiographers according to the end and character of each, since there is no form of book received among men which the inspiration of the Holy Spirit rejects. Hence the dogmatic principles hitherto admitted in Catholic doctrine remain unmoved, and only the applications are found to be more or less modified, a deeper study in the critical and literary field shedding light. But it is precisely in this that the progress of theology consists. And from another point of view there is no reason why anyone should take scandal from the fact that the understanding of the Scriptures will hereafter be so different among us from that which the holy Fathers had. For even if it be most true that we are compared to them as dwarfs to giants, yet it is altogether no wonder if the dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant both sees farther than the giant himself and is said to be placed on a higher watchtower of contemplation⁶.

These things notwithstanding, however, I plainly fear that Augustine, if he were perchance to hear the chattering dwarf who is supposed to be upon his shoulders, would at last give no equivocal sign of exhausted patience. I fear, I say, that raising his head he would break forth into the same exclamation with which he once addressed Julian: What you say is wonderful, what you say is new, what you say is false ⁷. Certainly, that they are wonderful, the thing itself cries out. That they are new, the confession of the authors themselves is. One thing therefore remains to be seen, whether they are likewise false. And to this the present inquiry is directed, in which it will be said first concerning the inspiration of Sacred Scripture, and then concerning the things that follow upon inspiration.