De inspiratione sacrae Scripturae: theologica disquisitio

And indeed, one would have thought it more certain, even a priori, that men still glorying in the Catholic name had subscribed to the theory just stated not without the gravest reasons—indeed, only when compelled by ineluctable evidence. For although many are now found to whom applies exactly what is written of the Athenians, Act. XVII-21: Now all the Athenians and the strangers sojourning among them had leisure for nothing else but either to tell or to hear something new, yet novelty itself can by no means have an unlimited power of attracting minds, especially when one reaches those limits where the poet's saying has its place: Whatever you show me thus, incredulous, I loathe. Here, then, the mere allurement of novelty could not have intervened; weightier reasons must undoubtedly have been in play, which we must consider before we proceed further.

First, then, they note that Scripture openly errs in the astronomical matter, as regards the system of the world. For it presents to us the sun as moving around the earth, and the earth as immovable. It says that the stars are luminaries made for man's use, of which the two greatest of all are the sun and the moon. It teaches also that God founded the earth upon the waters, and stretched out the heavens above like a tent. But all these things, as is now known to all, contradict flatly the truth of science¹. — But if you reply timidly that Scripture speaks in the very way in which all modern astronomers still speak, whenever they are not obliged to use technical circumlocutions²; that the earth is said by Ecclesiastes to stand forever, not absolutely, but in opposition to the perpetual succession of generations following one another in turn³; that the sun and the moon are most truly called by Moses the greater luminary and the lesser luminary in relation to us; finally, that the sacred writers used in hymns and canticles and psalms the same expressions that poets everywhere use to this day, without ever affording from themselves the least suspicion of error or ignorance in physical matters: if, I say, you timidly oppose the simple and obvious answers that we all learned from childhood, you must know that those answers no longer hold. It remains, therefore, that you hold without scruple that there are in the Bible many statements that stand in contradictory opposition to scientific truth, although the errors just mentioned are not yet found except in what are obiter dicta. But here is something more serious.

Second, then, they proclaim the necessity of adhering to the conclusions that modern science has made definitive. Now the conclusions are of such a kind that most of the narratives consigned in the books of the Old Testament must altogether be held as historically false⁴. You will perhaps object that those definitive conclusions of science are definitive only in the imagination of those who assert them, or in the benevolent credulity of their disciples. You will also adduce certain examples in confirmation. For instance, the example of those definitive conclusions of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists as to the fabulous character of the accounts of Abraham and of Joseph with the kings of Egypt, which at the very beginning of the nineteenth century the discovery and interpretation of the hieroglyphs showed to be anything but definitive. Likewise the example of the conclusion, equally definitive, and immediately antiquated after the discovery of the tablets at El-Amarna, by which, scarcely twenty years ago, they decreed that the art of writing among the Israelite people had been invented only three or four centuries after Moses and Joshua⁵. You will observe further that it happens daily that even thoroughgoing rationalists explode their own definitive conclusions against biblical facts, and destroy them with the most solid arguments⁶. No, sir! For the science of the rationalists is valid when it fights against the Bible, but when it confirms the Bible it is no longer valid, because then it by no means supplies a sufficient pledge of independence and, as it were, surety.

Third, the learned exegetes do not doubt that a prodigious antiquity must be attributed to the world and to the human race. And since, according to Scripture, the appearance of man upon earth is relatively recent, it remains for us to concede that biblical history, as history, is false, and by no means consistent with the facts⁷. — You reply again that there are perhaps many things that would seem more than enough to enervate the force of this argument. The codices do not agree among themselves as to the reckoning of the years, so that in this part the errors of copyists or transcribers can and must legitimately be presumed. Nothing forces us to take the series of the patriarchs, whether before or after the flood, as a series of men succeeding one another immediately, with no intermediate links suppressed. Above all, the principle from which they proceed is false, since they suppose that man raised himself from a shapeless and wholly savage state to the state of civilization by a very slow and continuous progress, whereas the Scriptures expressly testify—and indeed in a matter pertaining to faith and morals, according to the biblical scholars themselves—that man came forth perfect from the hands of his Creator: so that, clearly, civilization is not to be thought of as terminating a movement of emergence from barbarism, but rather barbarism, wherever it is found, as placed at the term of an inverse movement, namely of corruption and degeneration. Finally, no more trust is to be placed in the calculations of learned masters in estimating the antiquity of humanity than was to be placed, for example, in the judgments of experts concerning the authenticity of the tiara of King Saitaphernes. For if experts sometimes err so shamefully as to take things fabricated by contemporary artisans for monuments of the most remote times, how far will palaeontologists wander in a matter that lies much more open to arbitrary estimations, and is involved in far greater obscurities, and contains, for modern man, causes of error multiplied almost to infinity!⁸. — Notwithstanding all this, you will still have firmly to believe that such is the biblical chronology that it contradicts historical truth in all things, and that from this head also the absolute inerrancy of Scripture is not sustained.

Fourth, they observe certain notable concordances of the scriptural narratives with the fables of the nations. And these concordances the study of the Semitic languages, the discovery of cuneiform inscriptions, and the continuous investigations of Orientalists make more evident every day. Although the matter was not of such weight, since classical letters, both Greek and Latin, had long since abundantly sufficed for the same observation. For who, for example, would not notice in Aeschylus' tragedy Prometheus vinctus a shadowing forth of all that is related by Moses concerning the temptation and fall of man in the earthly paradise, and also of the promised seed of the woman that shall crush the serpent's head? especially since of this future savior Mercury says at the end: Do not expect an end of such misery, O Prometheus, before another of the gods shall appear as the successor of your labors, and shall will to descend to the gloomy Orcus and to the murky depth of Tartarus⁹. Who would not recognize the biblical giants, and the later building of the tower of Babel, in the following verses of Ovid: They say the giants aspired to the heavenly kingdom, and piled up mountains heaped to the stars. Then the almighty Father, hurling his thunderbolt, shattered Olympus and cast down Pelion upon subject Ossa? Who also, reading in the first book of the Metamorphoses of the same Ovid how chaos was unfolded, and how in the beginning the elements were each arranged in their own places; how the heaven was adorned with stars, the earth with living things, and man, last of all, was created; how finally the golden age was first sown, to which then succeeded the silver age, then the bronze, then the iron, until, war having been declared against the gods by the giants, Jupiter resolved to destroy the world by a flood, with Deucalion alone saved and received on mount Parnassus, where carried with the companion of his bed in a small raft, he clung there: who, I say, has not noted an evident parallelism with the first eleven chapters of Genesis? Who will not think Adam expressed in Saturn devouring his children, or Noah in Janus having a double face, the one aged, with which he looks back upon the old world destroyed by the waters of the flood, the other youthful, with which he casts joyful eyes upon the new world about to be born from him? The same narratives, then, are found both in Moses and in the ancient poets of the nations. But if these are false inventions in the Greek or Egyptian or Babylonian mythologies, will they at last be truth in the Bible? It remains, therefore, to say that God, in inspiring the sacred writers, accommodated Himself to the common mentality of ancient men, inasmuch as, in view of the end He intended, namely the teaching of divine and moral truths, He indeed employed false legends that were everywhere admitted, but purified them from every dogmatic stain; nay rather, He made them the vehicle of a most sublime and most lofty religious doctrine¹⁰. — You will perhaps wonder at such a conclusion, because you are still held by the outworn prejudices of the old apologetics. For you thought that the very fables of the nations, in that in which they agree, undoubtedly show a certain substratum of historical truth, albeit adulterated with many fantastic and absurd chimeras. For in any order of things whatsoever, a cause proportioned to the effect is to be sought. But if the imagination of peoples is rightly assigned to explain the dissimilar varieties, it would be only irrationally posited as the principle of common and universal traditions, of the kind that those are concerning a certain original age of innocence and felicity, concerning the tempting serpent, concerning the fall of the human race into the present state of misery and tribulation, concerning the promised restorer, concerning the impiety of the giants, concerning the catastrophe of the flood, and so on. Hence, then, you deduced that if any narrative of these things should chance to be found, shining above all the rest as the sun above the darkness, a narrative pure, simple, limpid, sublime, and consonant with right reason, it would undoubtedly have to be regarded as receiving from the others testimony of absolute truth, so far from being dragged into the partnership of a common falsification. You deduced especially that even the mere suspicion of a derivation of so sublime a book from the corrupt fountains of fables would have to be removed, since the pure scarcely arises from the impure, and even in natural things clear water is not wont to flow from a muddy spring, whereas on the contrary it happens most frequently that from a most pure spring the stream flowing first, afterwards in its course, is defiled or corrupted by the admixture of many heterogeneous elements; wherefore, if one had necessarily to acknowledge that the one was derived from the other, the derivation of the fable from Scripture would seem far, far more probable than that of Scripture from the fable. This, I say, you deduced according to the rules of the ancient wisdom. But since in those rules some defect of logic or other has been discovered, we must now really conclude that Scripture is indeed immune from every stain as regards the dogma of religion, but is in the same condition as the pagan mythologies as regards the rest.

Fifth, they enumerate the antilogies found in the Scriptures. Of Antiochus, for example, it is related in 2. Mach. I-13 that he was killed by the priests in the temple of Nana; and further on, IX-28, it is said that, fleeing from Persepolis while he was meditating to destroy the Jews utterly, struck by God with the greatest pains of the bowels, with worms swarming from his body amid an intolerable stench, he died a natural death. Likewise, Genes. XI-12, Sale is called the son of Arphaxad, and Luc. III-36, the son of Cainan, of whom, if you except the version of the Seventy, no trace is found. Again, 1 Reg. XVII-55¹¹, Saul asks Abner of what stock David, who was going out against Goliath, was sprung, although David could not then have been unknown to Saul, since he had already before that become Saul's own armor-bearer and table-companion, 1 Reg. XVI-21. Further, in the census of the people that David had ordered to be made toward the end of his reign, there are numbered 2 Reg. XXIV-9 eight hundred thousand valiant men of Israel, and of Judah five hundred thousand; but 1 Par. XXI-5 there are numbered a thousand thousand and a hundred thousand of Israel, and of Judah four hundred and seventy thousand. Likewise in the Gospels very many discrepancies are noted, both as regards the infancy of the Savior, and as regards the deeds of His public life, and finally as regards the circumstances of the passion, and especially of the appearances after the resurrection. But to these and other difficulties of the same kind, on the supposition of the absolute inerrancy of the Bible, satisfactory answers have nowhere been given¹². — To these things, however, it might perhaps be replied that this assertion about the insufficiency of the answers seems to have been brought forward rather rashly; that it has not hitherto been so judged among Catholics, and that whatever is newly affirmed without any proof against the common estimation of prudent men is rightly and deservedly regarded as a purely subjective appraisal. That man shows himself too harsh who still finds the evangelical antilogies irreducible after the manifold and highly reasonable solutions given by our commentators, and to whom that radical solution, by which errors would have to be admitted in divinely inspired books, would now appear preferable to conciliation procedures so probable as those proposed up to now¹³. With regard to the Old Testament, account must first be taken of the present state of the codices in names and numbers, lest you transfer to the original Scriptures difficulties that take their origin from the versions or copies alone¹⁴. With regard to Antiochus also, there is no great need to be solicitous, both because it is highly uncertain whether the same Antiochus is spoken of in each place¹⁵, and because, granted that it is Antiochus Epiphanes who is meant in the letter found reported at the beginning of the book, solid explanations are still not lacking¹⁶. In short, there is so much subjectivity in estimating matters of this kind that a writer of no small repute from the rationalist school finds a positive document of historical truth in that very questioning of Saul, 1 Reg. XVII-55¹⁷, which the encyclopedists adduced in demonstration of an open contradiction¹⁸. — These and other similar things you would reply to the argument that our exegetes draw from the biblical antilogies. But again, the case is closed, because such is the critical evidence in this part that it admits of no other demonstration of a matter already judged¹⁹.

It remains, however, that the critics show this position of theirs, concerning the manifold errors of the Bible in matters as much scientific as historical, to be reconcilable with the dogma of inspiration. And here is the work, here the toil. Are there, then, certain weighty considerations by which the possibility of a reconciliation may be—I do not say now persuaded, but even from afar insinuated?