II. Papalist Exegesis
9. Jean Gerson on the “Traditioned Sense”
of Scripture as an Argument for an Ecclesial Hermeneutic
Mark S. Burrows
Within the polemical arena of sixteenth-century biblical scholarship, Prot- estant voices routinely announced their abrupt departure from the fun- damental exegetical methods of the medieval schools, above all in rejecting the use of tradition in the theological task. In a characteristic outburst in the Table Talk for example, Luther insisted that “the text of Holy Scripture alone endures; Augustine and Ambrose offer us nothing.“1 Again, and in
1. Tischreden, WA 2, 1745. The claim that Scripture alone should be the theological norm is a rhetorical claim that Luther often expressed, but one which his actual exegetical practice and even his advice regarding theological education did not always support. Thus, for example, in To the Christian Nobility, Luther challenges the honor giiren to the study of the Sentences which he argues had come to “dominate the situation in such a way that we find among the theologians more heathenish and humanistic darkness than we find the holy and certain doctrine of Scripture.” Later in the same treatise, however, he concedes that “the Sentences ought to be the first study of young students in theology. . . . Indeed, the writings of all the holy fathers should be read only for a time, in order that through them we may be led to the Holy Scriptures. As it is, however, we read them only to be absorbed in them and never come to the Scriptures. We are like people who study the signposts and never travel the road. The dear fathers wished, by their writings, to lead us to the Scriptures, but we use them as to be led away from the Scriptures, though the Scriptures alone are our vineyard in which we ought ail to work and toil.” To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate,1 trans. C. M. Jacobs, rev. James Atkinson (St. Louis, 191X$204-5; WA 6,461. In other words, the fathers are to serve as proiegomenon lo the study of Scripture itself, precisely in order to lead us properly into Scripture. This understanding seems to be the rationale which inspired among Protestants a renewed atten- tiveness to catecheticai instruction and the formulation of new “evangelical” creeds. This concern also led Melanchthon to write his Loci communes, and John Calvin his Institutes of
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GERSON ON THE “TRADITIONED SENSE” OF SCRIPTURE 153
much the same mood, he rejected in one of his treatises against Emser the validity of a “spiritual” exegesis, contending that “it is much more certain and much safer to stay with the words and the simple meaning [of Scrip- ture], for this is the true pasture and home of all the spirits.“2 But should we accept such protestations at face value as an accurate assessment of the state of biblical study at this juncture? Or are they not rather an index of the turbulent currents of sixteenth-century Kontroverstheologie? The latter is certainly true; the former, we must now recognize, is doubtful. Luther’s sweeping opposition to the supposed excesses of medieval allegory should be read in basic continuity rather than conflict with developments in later medieval exegesis. Indeed, his critique aligns his position firmly within this historical trajectory when he concedes, in his Lectures on Genesis, that
“grammar should not rule the meaning [res], but ought to be guided by the meaning. “3 The question which Luther faced - along with earlier medieval
the Christian Religion Calvin, in fact, instructs his reader in the preface to the French edition of 1560 that “I can at least promise that [this work] can be a key to open a way for all children of God into a good and right understanding of Holy Scripture” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vois., ed. John T. McNeili, trans. F. L. Battles, LCC [Philadelphia, l%O], 1:7). With regard to Luther, Gerhard Ebeiing rightly notes that alongside the Re- former’s strongly worded aversion to any “books” other than “die biosse iautter schrifft oder Bibiie,” is his insistence that catecheticai instruction provides the essential perspective for the study of Scripture: “Doch sieht Luther niichtem die Nohvendigkeit einer den Bibeiieser ieitenden Norm im Sinn eines Bekenntnisses. Es ist ratsam, bei jeder Ausiegung sich an den Grundregeln des Katechismus auszurichten, eventuell such Meianchthons Loci communes heranzuziehen, dessen Kommentare er im iibrigen noch am ehesten empfehlen kann, da sie sich die klassischen Kommentare, den R(imer-, Galater- und Hebriierbrief zum Vorbild genommen haben; Diese Leitung der Ausiegung vom Bekenntnis her will sachlich nichts anderes iein als eine Anieitung, der Seibstausiegung der Schrift nachzugehen” (Evangel&he Ewngelienausle~g: Eine Unrersuchung zu Luthers Hermeneutik [Darmstadt, 19621,496;
see also ibid., 402-9). On this point see also Jarosiav Pei&an, Luther the Expositor (St. Louis, 1959), 71-88; John M. Headley, Luther’s via0 of Church History (New Haven/London, 1%3), 69-94. More recently, and with reference to the Reformers more broadly, G. R. Evans has rightly noted that “the habit of looking to the Fathers was not broken in the changes of the Reformation. On the contrary, it seemed to many of-the reformers that it was only since the patristic age that things had begun to go wrong, and that it was therefore necessary to go back to.the Fathers for help in interpretation” (The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Road to Reformation [Cambridge, 19851, 21).
2. Martin Luther, Answer to the Hyperchristian, Hyperspiritial, and Hyperlearned Book by Goat Emser in Leipzig, Including Some Thoughts Regarding His Companion, the Fool Murner in LW 39 (St. Louis, 1970), 179.
3. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, 16.12, in LW 3 (St. Louis, 1961), 70-71.
Elsewhere in this lecture Luther goes on to say that “knowledge is of two kinds: (1) what the words mean; (2) what the subject matter is. To one who has no knowledge of the subject matter the knowledge of the meaning of words will be of no help. . . . It is not grammar that gives us this meaning; it is the knowledge of sacred matters. . . . See to it that you are thoroughly familiar with the subject matter; after that it will be easy to learn the grammar.
154 MARK S. BURROWS
exegetes - was not whether but how the meaning (res) of the text was to be discerned; grammatical analysis alone could not fulfill this demand, because “the letter [ro [email protected]] kills, but the spirit [zo XVE@~] gives life”
(2 Cor. 3:6).4 This is the problematic confronting theologians during the later Middle Ages, who increasingly turned away from the fourfold exege- sis5 practiced in the earlier monastic tradition in order to concentrate their attention on the senses ZitteruZis.6 We must thus locate Luther as an heir to
He who sins in the matter of grammar commits a venial sin, but to sin in the subject matter is a mortal sin” (ibid., 67, 72).
4. For a thorough discussion of the use of this passage in late medieval exegesis, with specific attention given to Jean Gerson and the Petit affair, see Karlfried Froehlich “ ‘Always to Keep the Literal Sense in Holy Scripture Means to Kill One’s Soul’: The State’of Biblical Hermeneutics at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century,” in Literary Uses of Typologyfrom the Lute Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Earl Miner (Princeton, 1977), 20-48. This biblical passage (i.e., 2 Cor. 3:6) had provided patristic biblical commentators with one of their central arguments in defense of allegorical or spiritual exegesis. Cf., e.g., Origen On First Principles 1.1 (2) PG 11:122B, Gregory of Nyssa, “Prologue” to Homilies on the Song of Songs, PG 6:757 (Zn Cunticum Cunticorum, ed. H. Langerbeck [Leiden, 1%0],6); Augustine On Christian Doctrine 3.59, CCSL 32:82-83.
5. In the opening remarks to his important study of fifteenthcentury exegesis, Karl- fried Froehlich noted that the origins of the fourfold exegetical method - itself an elaboration of the fundamental Pauline “letter/spirit” dialectic - seem to be found in John Cassian and Eucher of Lyons, while a cursory explanation of this schema is already present in Philo’s exegesis of Ezekiel’s vision; see “Biblical Hermeneutics,” 21-24. In the later Middle Ages, we find a marvelous metaphorical application of this exegetical approach in the Diifusculicon of Hugh of St. Victor, who described the threefold meanings of Scripture - i.e., history, allegory, tropology - by means of the image of a building. This metaphor, which came to have an enduring legacy in the High Middle Ages, portrayed history as the foundation of exegesis, allegory as its main structure consisting of stones of different sixes carefully set into place by the master mason, and morality (or tropology) as the color which conveys “the meaning of things” rather than “the meaning of words” alone. See Didiasculicon 6.2-S. cf.
also Hugh, De urcu Noe moruli 1.1, PL 176:513C, where he describes how God resid& in the soul through knowledge and love such that “knowledge constructs the building of faith, while love on the basis of virtue paints the building in the form of color spread upon the entire surface.” The analogy can be traced to Gregory the Great’s De universe 14.23 PL 111:400. Bernard of Clairvaux offers a different metaphor to describe the various “se&es”
of Scripture, interpreting the “storeroom,” “ garden,” and “bedroom” mentioned in the Song of Songs to refer to three levels of exegesis: “The man who thirsts for God eagerly studies and meditates on the inspired word, knowing that there he is certain to find the one for whom he thirsts. Let the garden . . . represent the plain, unadorned, historical sense of scripture, the storeroom its moral sense, and the bedroom the mystery of divine contemplation” (On the Song of Songs, serm. 23.2.3, trans. Kilian Walsh [Kalamazoo, MI, 19761, 28; Sernrones super Canticu Canticorum, vol. 1, S. Bemurdi Operu, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, H. M.
Rochais [Rome, 19571,140). Nicholas of Lyra returns to the fourfold schema and summarizes it with the memorable lines: “Lrttera gesta docet/Quid credas allegoria/Moralis quid’ agas/Quid speres anagogia.” For a discussion of this verse, see Beryl Smalley, Studies in Mediaeval Thought and Learning (Oxford, 1979), 285.
6. The pioneering work of Beryl Smalley on this question has accentuated the in-
GERSON ON THE “TRADITIONED SENSE” OF SCRIPTURE 155
his predecessors, and this despite his most vehement denunciations to the contrary.7
Yet to identify the “literal sense, ” as late medieval theologians often did, as both the primary domain of exegesis and the foundation of the theological task was not yet to settle the hermeneutical question. In an age wracked with conflicts theological and ecclesiastical, both church leaders and their critics frequently found themselves embroiled in disputes con- cerning the exact nature of that elusive sense. Such debates often took shape as efforts to defend, or dismiss, an authoritative reading of the meaning (res) “behind” Scripture’s grammatical sense. As Thomas Aquinas had framed this task, anticipating Luther at least on a theoretical plane,
“the duty of every good interpreter is to consider not the words, but the [proper] sense” of the words (non considerare verba sed sensum).8 The question facing Luther along with Gerson and other late scholastic prede- cessors, therefore, was: How does one apprehend the res which underlies the verbum (or Signum, to follow Thomas)? How is one to grasp - and medieval exegetes, unlike recent deconstructionist critics, were not yet brash enough to question this possibility -the authentic sensus of the
creasing interest from the 12th century in the literal sense and a “natural” or historical rather than spiritual exegesis; see her The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1941;
repr. Notre Dame, 1964). In this study Smalley argued that the decline of spiritual exegesis corresponds to the rise of what she considered to be a more scientifically defensible approach;
indeed, she offers a stident caveat in her concluding chapter in which she laments that the renewed interest in mysticism, “even though . . . confined to a small circle, . . . provides a fascinating though alarming example of the way in which the history of exegesis prolongs itself in that of its historians. . . .Conditions today are giving rise to a certain sympathy with the allegorists. We have a spate of studies on medieval ‘spirituality.’ The scholars who tried to counteract its effect on exegesis are still too little appreciated” (p. 368). One of the products of this sympathy, which attempts to trace the demise of modem theology at the hands of the Enlightenment and its successors, is Andrew Louth’s study, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theo&y (Oxford, 1981). Cf. also David Steimnetz, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” 27”uy 37 (1980): 27-38.
7. G. R. Evans has made the same point, arguing that the exegetical approaches of the sixteenth-century Reformers exhrbit continuities alongside challenges to earlier practice:
“There was, undoubtedly, much in the outcome that was new and revolutionary and a sense of making a fresh start. But the extent to which mediaeval scholarship led the way has often been underestimated, and the condemnation of the scholastics has tended to sink with them a proper recognition of what they achieved as students of the Bible. Sixteenth-century writers were themselves not always quite clear what it was they were putting behind them. They were less clear still perhaps how much they were taking with them” (The Roud to Refomu- tion, 2). Her conclusion, however, that in the late Middle Ages “questions of logic gave way to questions of language” (p. 3), is puzzling, since already in the 12th century the question of the nature of language in general, and biblical language in particular, had become a dominant concern of theologians.
8. In Mufth. 27.1, n.2321, ed. R. Cai (Turin, Rome, 1951), 358.
156 MARK S. BURROWS
“bare” letter? There is surprising agreement among university theologians of early fifteenth-century Paris that the literal sense alone should occupy the exegete’s attention. But how was one to grasp its true sense, to recover its proper meaning in the midst of apparent ambiguity and confusion, particularly when theologians argued for widely differing “literal” readings of the same biblical texts?9
,On this point of exegetical practice the general agreement on basic prinhple faltered. No longer could theologians suppose, as had Thomas Aquinas in a characteristically confident mood, that “Holy Scripture sets up no confusion, since all meanings are based on one, namely, the literal sense.“10 Such an assertion seemed wildly naive in the polemical atmo- sphere of the early fifteenth-century church, an arena of theological con- troversy in which the coherence of biblical language splintered under competing readings. At this juncture it had become increasingly clear that while “many meanings” (plures sensus) might be present in the literal sense as Augustine and later Aquinas had argued, it did not follow that sued
“multiplicity of meanings” would not lead to “ambiguity or any other kind of mixture of meanings,” as Aquinas had concluded.11 In the heated forum
9. Froehlich argues, with penetrating insight, that late medieval exegesis joined together Aquinas’s earlier conviction that God’s intention stood as the definition of the true literal sense with an anti-Thomist distrust of words to the point of a “free-for-any-guess”
approach: “Because words were no longer regarded as invested with some kind of unam- biguous truth but rather can be deceptive, they might be related to truth in different ways, and biblical words were no exception. . . . When the theological virtues had become part of a system of ambiguous words and could be given meanings based on differing goals, then the door was open (to put it positively) for a new kind of creative playing with different meanings of equal claim to truth” (“Biblical Hermeneutics,” 46-47). One might add here that this development anticipates the recent assault of deconstructionist criticism which has been aptly characterized recently as “nihilist hermeneutics”; see Robert W. Jenien t‘Can a Text Defend Itself? An Essay De inspiratione scripturae,” Dialog 2814 (1989): 25;-53.
10. Thomas Aquinas ST Ia q. 1, a 10 ad 1. Aquinas’s theoretical discussion of biblical interpretation in the opening question of this treatise - and his practical application of that theory in terms of his biblical commentaries and theological treatises-demonstrates a remarkable confidence in the retrievability of meaning based upon an assumed clarity of biblical language; thus, e.g., he here argues for a multiplicity of meanings rooted in language which he refuses to consider as in any sense ambiguous. Luther would later return to this conviction, arguing against Emser that “the Holy Spirit is the simplest writer and adviser in heaven and on earth. That is why his words could have no more than one simplest meaning which we call the written one, or the literal meaning of the tongue. . . . One should not therefore say that the Scripture or God’s word has more than one meaning” (Answer to . . . Emser, 178-79). Of course, Aquinas meant that the single “sense” might yet legitimately bear a multiplicity of meanings, though these had to be in essential agreement and did not set up any “ambiguity” (aequivocatio).
11. ST la q. 1, resp. and ad 1; here I follow the translation from the Blackfriars’
edition, Summa theologiae, vol. I (London/New York, 1963), 39. See also above, n.lO. The
GERSON ON THE “TRADITIONED SENSE” OF SCRIPTURE 157
of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century ecclesiastical debates, such a conviction no longer seemed tenable. To the contrary, theological argu- ments grounded in conflicting interpretations of Scripture - not only in its multiple senses, but in its foundational sensus Zitteralis -had lapsed into such “confusion” that theologians found themselves thrust into the vexing arena of a Babel redivivus: the polemic arena of discourse .had led to conflicting grammars of interpretation. Thrown upon the horns of the exegete’s dilemma, theologians of the later Middle Ages increasingly found themselves pierced either by an arbitrary exposition rooted in an unbounded individualism, on the one side, or by an equally capricious application of magisterial authority, on the other. In both cases the realist confidence in the perspicacity of biblical language had broken apart, setting a course toward a nihilistic hermeneutic which the Protestant Reformers could only temporarily divert.
This paper examines a chapter in the still dimly understood story of late medieval exegesis, 12 in this case by exploring one solution to the quest for the literal sense amid the increasing exegetical confusion and theolog- ical polemic during the early fifteenth century: namely, the defense of a
“traditioned sense” as the interpretive norm governing biblical exegesis which we find in the later works of Jean Gerson (d. 1429). The first section surveys Gerson’s proposal of this ecclesial norm as the appropriate means of resolving the ambiguities of biblical language; here we trace his con- struction in treatises written during the Council of Constance (1414-1418) of a “hermeneutic of tradition. ” In the concluding section, this historical discussion broadens to consider the continued applicability of such a her--_--___~_
meneutical theory; here we explore from a contemporary vantage point the role which tradition plays in exegesis, drawing upon Hans-Georg Gad- amer’s philosophical arguments and the “canonical approach” of Brevard Childs.
reference to Augustine, cited here by Thomas, is from Conf. 12.31, PL 32:844. Augustine had earlier allowed for the ambiguity of biblical language, pointing specifically to texts in which “what he who wrote the passage intended remains hidden” (On Christian Doctrine, 3.27.38, CCSL 32:99-100). He based this conclusion, however, upon the premise that “Scrip- ture teaches nothing but charity” (non autem praecipit scriptura nisi caritatem; ibid., 3.10.55, CCSL 32:87); in instances of varying interpretations Augustine lays down three rules: he argues that one must ask whether a reading accords with truth taught clearly elsewhere in Scripture (context), whether it agrees with “right faith” (doctrine), and whether it encourages us to love‘(practice).
12. This is a conclusion also shared by G. R. Evans, who in a study of medieval exegesis remarks that “we are particularly ill-informed about the fifteenth century” commen- taries and exegetical work. See The Road to Reformation, 2.