De inspiratione sacrae Scripturae: theologica disquisitio

ON THE LITERARY FORMS OF SACRED SCRIPTURE.

« The Son of God, Jesus Christ... was not est and non, but est has been in him ». 2 Cor. I. 19.

But also the serpent was more cunning than all the living creatures of the earth which the Lord God had made, says Scripture. Genes. III.1. And indeed most of our biblical scholars hold the serpent of Genesis as a myth. For who, I ask, would still believe in a serpent conversing with a woman? Certainly this had long since seemed incredible to the emperor Julian, and to all the encyclopedists after Voltaire¹. Although, to tell the truth, the common run of Christians had hitherto met no such difficulty in this matter. Whence that great Saint Cyril, whom Voltaire mocks by lying, as though he had no way of satisfying Julian when he asked: the serpent that speaks with Eve, with what language, pray, shall we say that it used? with human language? in what do these things differ from the fabricated fables of the Greeks? — he, I say, the great Saint Cyril, had replied simply and without evasion: « And again he says that these things are similar to the fables of the Greeks. He has therefore learned that they are fables and the chatter of old women, and nothing else... But we, good sir, say no such thing of the holy and divinely inspired Scripture. For in it there is nothing fabulous at all; all things are full of truth. But I wonder that a man, though most acute, and not unskilled in the more intimate disciplines, as he himself thinks, and one who sometimes raises his mind beyond the things of the senses, does not understand that the voice was produced by the efficacy of the wicked and evil prince, the demon, while they put forward the serpent as the pretext of his malignity... But even if he himself does not believe, the truth cannot on that account fail to be perceived. He, however, not assenting to things true, may deservedly be laughed at »². However, this does not much matter for the present. For whether the serpent of Genesis was a real animal that Satan possessed; whether it was a mere appearance, objective indeed and external, but artificially formed and assumed by the devil; or whether it was finally a pure and simple myth produced in the course of time in the popular imagination: always in the serpentine form you have the most faithful figure of the cunning of that wicked spirit, who is both the most crafty deceiver and the most tortuous sophist, and the insinuator and inflamer of all heresies. And this has again and again appeared clearly in the biblical question, as they call it, from the things that in these last years, after the publication of the encyclical Providentissimus Deus, have been thought out, said, and written.

The Pontiff had declared that it is the ancient and constant faith of the Church that inspiration, extending itself to each and every part of Scripture, not only excludes all falsehood, but excludes and rejects it as necessarily as it is necessary that God, the supreme Truth, be the author of no falsehood whatever. Furthermore, to this declaration, which directly assailed the opinion set forth in the preceding chapter, most had laudably submitted themselves without any delay, publishing also in public undoubted documents of their submission. You would have believed, then, that the case was finished, and so finished that there was not even room for the optative clause that is otherwise wont to be added: would that the error might be ended. But the outcome soon showed that confidence to be vain. For after some time, the opinion, laid low, cloaked under new names, was resuming new strength, and behold the serpent lurking among the fruitful trees of paradise, that he may deceive the unwary³. For all the foundations of the preceding view were retained. Still the astronomy of Scripture is in open opposition with scientific truth. Still most of the narratives consigned in the books especially of the Old Testament must be held as historically false. Still the concordances found between biblical facts and the Babylonian mysteries show either the dependence of the Bible on those mysteries, or at least a certain common origin from the same fabulous source. Still there are irreducible antilogies in the sacred books, which no skill of exegetes will ever be able to reduce to a sense free of contradiction. All these things, I say, were preserved intact. And yet no error in the Scriptures? Just so. Because there is no error in any book unless that which is materially alien to the truth is proposed as truth. Because what is proposed as truth, and what is not, must be determined from the literary genre of each book. Because each literary genre has its own proper species of truth, and the same species of truth is not to be sought in a didactic treatise as in a parable or allegory, not the same in a poem or romanzo as in history, nay rather, not even in history written according to modern criteria as in history written according to the usages and conventions of the ancients, especially of the Orientals. Because finally, if it pertains to theology to establish the integral truth of the Scriptures, which is most justly asserted in consequence of their integral inspiration, it is nevertheless the work of Criticism to determine, assign, and define the species of truth proper to each book, which depends wholly and entirely on their literary forms. This is, expressed in few words, the substance of the new system; but it is better that first of all that ingenious invention of the biblical scholars be reported at length.