The Literal Sense and the Gospel of John in Late Medieval Commentary and Literature

MArk Hazard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136719523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on the famous Medieval commentator Nicolas of Lyra and the anonymous Middle English biblical adaptation of the Gospel of John, the Cursor Mundi, this book examines the development of the analytical tools of biblical literary criticism showing how late Medieval commentators negotiated the paradoxical interdependence of the literal and spiritual senses, as transmitted by traditional and inherited vocabularies, through a focus on narrative structure. Mark Hazard combines an enlightening account of the actual practice of professional commentators, the history of Gospel interpretation and cultural history to reveal that remarkable shift in the treatment of the Bible that modern scholars would regard as having laid the groundwork for the historical-critical methods in biblical research. As such this book sheds light not only on the 14th century practice of biblical interpretation, but will also be of value to those currenlty engaged in reading and writing about the bible.

THE LITERAL SENSE AND THE GOSPEL OF JOHN IN LATE-MEDIEVAL COMMENTARY AND LITERATURE

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

This study concerns the development of the literal sense in late-medieval Bible commentary, and the relationship of the literal with what commentators called the allegorical or spiritual senses. It deals with how the foremost exponent of the literal sense, Nicholas of Lyra, dealt with that relationship in his postills on the Gospel of John. The choice of John as the focus for a study of the literal sense requires explanation. Since patristic times John was differentiated from the other Gospels precisely because it seemed the least concerned with the historical events of Christ’s life. However, the Gospel of John is important for our understanding of the literal sense not only for its wide prominence in the history of late-medieval theology and literature, but for the questions it posed Lyra about the nature and reach of literal interpretation. These questions led Lyra to what in modern terms would be termed a literary appreciation of John. Lyra recognized that to explain John it is necessary to deal with his account as a narrative text whose structure—its choice and sequence of episodes, its characteristic modes of dialogue and discourse—embodies the meaning of the events and words it contains. As a consequence, Lyra also recognized that a narrative interpretation of the Gospel implies a narrative interpretation of theology and its relationship to history. God, that is, structured the revelations of history much as John structured the Gospel. Just as John the evangelist selected and organized his presentation of the events of Christ’s life, so too Christ selected and organized the events of his life into the meaningful sequence of history. Lyra’s structural understanding of the Gospel confirmed the rhetorical structure and purpose of sacred history.

The second part of this study deals with a poetic corollary to Lyra’s understanding of Scripture, that of the Cursor Mundi, which represents a self-consciously literary version of narrative biblical interpretation, a reconfiguration of the Bible’s meanings which treats some of the same interpretive issues concerning the literal sense posed by Lyra’s commentary on the Gospel of John. The figure of John provides the common link between these two modes of interpretation, between the literary criticism of Lyra and the literary creation of the Cursor-poet. The link is established by more than common subject matter. As different as Lyra’s Gospel commentary is from a poetic biblical paraphrase, the two works provide evidence of a similar perception, that spiritual meaning depends on development of the literal sense, and that the two realms of meaning are inextricably involved with each other. This awareness explains a long-noted paradox of late medieval literature, the simultaneous coexistence of allegory with a deepening appreciation for and development of the literal sense. Nicholas of Lyra, as the prime exponent of the literal sense, helps us understand how the interdependence and even amalgamation of the two modes was possible and, in the context of late medieval thought, necessary.

The background for Lyra’s commentary can be found in the convergence he represents between the teaching program of Hugh of St. Victor and the ecclesiastical reforms demanded by the mendicants, notably by Lyra’s own Order, the Franciscans.¹ (Born in Normandy in 1270, Lyra died in 1349. He spent most of his career, from 1301 on, as a teacher and administrator with the Franciscans in Paris.) Calls for a return to the purity of Gospel practice, of Christlike concern for one’s flock as opposed to concern for status and property, are the primary subject matter of Lyra’s Postilla moralis on the Gospel, the much shorter tropological or moral commentary which he wrote subsequent to completing his literal postills on the Bible in 1331. This concern was consistent with the purposes of the Franciscan Order from the time of its inception. But, for Lyra and for earlier Franciscans, reform of Church practices also had a profound relationship to practices of reading and interpretation.

The deep suspicion felt by the reforming orders toward the overelaborate and self-protective customs of Church hierarchy extended likewise to distaste for complicated and abstruse explications of biblical texts in support of those customs. Simplification of the Church meant also simplification of one’s approach to the Bible. For St. Francis, there was no dividing line between the literal and the spiritual. Hence it was that his insistence on living the life of Christ literally, and on his Rule being lived to the letter, implied a mode of reading which did not require or allow for a separation of spiritual or allegorical meaning from the primary meaning of the text. In Franciscan legend, the voice of Christ came out of heaven to confirm divine authority on Francis’s words: “I wish the Rule to be obeyed to the letter, without a gloss, without a gloss.”²

Yet by the end of the thirteenth century the friars’ interest in the letter did not prevent them from producing the most subtle and ingenious theologians. We will see a similar combination of concern for literal expression nonetheless linked to a taste for sophisticated and complex organization in both Lyra’s commentary and in the Cursor Mundi. The systematic speculations of Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, prepared the way for the abstract logical complexities of the Franciscans John Duns Scotus and the “doctor subtilis,” William Ockham, in the fourteenth century.³ The scientific speculations of the mendicants were just as far-reaching. Roger Bacon, who is most closely identified with the development of scientific thought during this period, was a Franciscan, a student of Robert Grosseteste, who though not himself a Franciscan was their first lecturer at Oxford in the thirteenth century. History and biography were also promoted by the Franciscans, motivated by their interest in preserving the memory of their own early activities.⁴

All these literary activities of the Dominicans and Franciscans were directly related to the Bible. Their interest in geography and natural history, for example, was prompted, as it had been at a much earlier time for Jerome, by the desire to investigate and explain every physical and historical detail in Scripture. So, too, with natural history. In the preface to his thirteenth-century encyclopedia, the Franciscan Bartolomaeus Anglicus explained that he undertook his enormous project “to understand riddles and meanings of Scripture and of writings that the Holy Ghost has given darkly hid and wrapped under the likeness and figures of the properties of things of nature and craft.”⁵ The image of the veil Bartholomew uses here is one of the most common metaphors in the Middle Ages for the relationship between letter and spiritual meaning. He goes on to say that only by means of visible things can we be drawn up to contemplation of unseen things. This invocation of the physical world as a necessary vehicle for the stages of spiritual understanding is an idea we will see again in Lyra’s commentary. Its significance in Bartholomew is in the purpose it articulates for his investigation of the physical world, whose study he clearly offers not for its own sake but for the sake of a spiritual meaning which he says can be approached in no other way. “Bartholomew has sometimes been written about as though his role were dimly to prefigure a modern scientific consciousness; he himself saw matters differently.”⁶

The veil image was one of the most common figures used in the Middle Ages for the relationship between the literal and spiritual senses in the Bible.⁷ The image’s long history in exegesis begins with Paul, who used it to explicate Moses veiling his face when he came down from the mountain.⁸ In the second prologue to his Postilla litteralis, Nicholas of Lyra deals with the value of the literal sense and its relationship to the spiritual senses.⁹ Significantly, however, he does not use the image of the veil. Instead, he uses two others, that of the relationship of foundation and building, and that of the book written inside and out.

“I saw in the right hand of Him that sat upon the throne a book written on the inside and on the outside” (Rev 5:1). As was said in the preceding prologue, this book is Holy Scripture, which is said to be written on the outside in terms of the literal sense of the text, and on the inside in terms of the mystical and spiritual sense. It [i.e., the mystical and spiritual sense] is, generally speaking, divided into three categories, as I have already said. Yet in each of these, the number of mystical meanings in any particular place can be multiplied. But all presume the literal sense as a kind of foundation. So, just as a building which begins to part company with its foundations is inclined to collapse, so a mystical exposition which deviates from the literal sense must be considered unseemly and inappropriate, or at any rate less seemly and less appropriate, than other interpretations.¹⁰

The connotations of the veil and foundation metaphors had important differences, which bear on Lyra’s approach to the relationship of the senses. The image of the book written inside and out adds other aspects to this issue, which I will describe further below.

A great variety of metaphors was used to describe Scripture—it was a river, a honeycomb, a tree, a seed-and-kernel, food, a book, a building, a mirror.¹¹ My purpose here is to look at the metaphors of veil and foundation as expressions of certain attitudes toward meaning. Although these figures were both widely employed by exegetes and do not by themselves indicate what importance a given commentator gave in practice to the literal sense, nonetheless the two images express quite different valuations of literal meaning. In commentaries, the literal sense tended to be viewed as either an intermediary obstacle to spiritual meaning, or that meaning’s necessary preparation and vehicle; the images of veil and foundation marked the contrasting attitudes. A crucial implication of the veil image is the lack of any intrinsic relationship between the literal and spiritual. The veil is at best a beginning step, but primarily an obstacle, something to be pulled back or ripped aside. The foundation image implies a quite different relationship, in which the literal sense, though still only a starting point, is now the indispensable basis, the finished structure’s necessary support. It is true that the idea of the literal sense as a necessary preparation is also part of the veil image, as in the passage quoted from Bartholomew, in which he goes on to explain the necessity of beginning with sense-based perceptions before progressing to contemplation of nonmaterial reality. Lyra, as we shall see later in his commentary on John, believed very strongly in this epistemological and pedagogical sequence. But what is lacking in the use of the veil image as a model for this approach is any idea that the world of sense perception, or history, has any intrinsic relationship to the nonmaterial truths beyond it. It is a hierarchy in which the surface, once passed, may be discarded.

The foundation image has almost as long a pedigree in biblical commentary as that of the veil. Origen gave it importance in the late fifth century, as de Lubac insisted when he disputed the modern scholarly consensus that Origen was interested only in allegory, not in history.¹² In the early sixth century, Gregory gave it prominence in the prologue to his enormously influential Moralia in Job. But though Gregory in a general way affirmed the importance of the literal sense, his practice was quickly to move beyond it in order to elaborate spiritual meanings, in effect giving the literal sense theoretical importance while scanting it in practice.¹³ The foundation metaphor took on new weight when it was adopted by Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141) in his Didascalicon.¹⁴ Hugh’s purpose was not to weaken allegorical interpretation, but rather to strengthen it by giving it a more secure basis in the literal historical sense.¹⁵

Hugh thus directed his pedagogical work both to literal interpretation and to spiritual meaning, a dual aspect of his methodology which is reflected in the quite different interpretive directions his followers took. The mystical writer Richard of St. Victor is as much Hugh’s heir as the literal commentator Andrew of St. Victor (1110–1175), the central figure in Beryl Smalley’s The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages.¹⁶ In fact, Smalley detected in Richard of St. Victor a sensuous appreciation of “the letter” that both marks the quality of his mystical writing and connects him to the Victorine interest in the literal sense.¹⁷ Such compatibility of literal and allegorical modes may strike modern readers as contradictory. It is a compatibility we shall find many times in the writings that form the primary subject of the present study, the postills of Nicholas of Lyra and the Cursor Mundi. The importance of Hugh of St. Victor as a model for interpretation both of the spiritual as well as the literal senses was seen very clearly in the thirteenth century by, for example, Bonaventure, who like Lyra was a Franciscan but unlike Lyra is more identified with complex allegorical exposition.¹⁸ Bonaventure identified the various figures he considered masters at using the traditional subdivisions of the spiritual senses—allegory, tropology, and anagogy. For allegory, there was Augustine, followed in recent times by Anselm; for tropology, Gregory the Great, followed by Bernard of Clairvaux; for anagogy, Dionysius, followed by Richard of St. Victor. The first two excelled in doctrine, the next two in preaching, the last two in contemplation. Hugh excelled in everything.¹⁹

Hugh gave a primary role to the literal sense in his educational program, recommending the value of reading the historical sections of the Bible as the first stage in spiritual study.²⁰ In order to facilitate the practical implications of this approach, Hugh’s follower Andrew of St. Victor made the literal sense of Old Testament history the special focus of his work, including the use of Hebrew traditions in the explication of events. In Paris, Peter Comestor carried on the tradition of Hugh’s program in his Historia scholastica, in which he grounded biblical interpretation by explicating historical backgrounds and harmonizing apparent inconsistencies in biblical narrative. Comestor’s Historia became the most popular form in which Victorine appreciation for historical narrative was preserved and transmitted, and is today regarded by some scholars as a vital source for many other narrative and literary treatments of the Bible in the later Middle Ages, including the Cursor Mundi.²¹

Another important application of the ideas of Hugh and Andrew of St. Victor was made in England in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Inspired by the example of Robert Grosseteste, a group of English scholars at Oxford and Cambridge that included Roger Bacon and Nicholas Trevet continued the kind of investigation pursued by Andrew, using Hebrew traditions to construct an historically-based understanding of the literal sense.²²

The work of the Victorines, of the English Hebraists, and of Lyra is commonly viewed as a promising trend in biblical historical studies that, in the end, did not bear fruit. Instead, the historical study of Scripture languished while allegory retained its dominance in preaching and in the reference tools—concordances and collections of distinctiones—used by preachers. According to this model, Lyra’s work pointed the way to consideration of the literal sense in isolation from the spiritual senses, and so prepared the way for historical-critical methods of study that would not take hold for centuries.

Beryl Smalley largely shaped the story I have just outlined of the literal sense’s rise and of Andrew of St. Victor as its exemplar, lending great support to this oppositional model of the senses. In her Study of the Bible she traced from patristic times, in particular from the spiritualizing practices of Origen and Alexandria, the dominance of an allegorical school of exegesis over an often-dormant literal school which struggled into wakefulness for a brief period during patristic times in Antioch, and again during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.²³ Smalley accordingly described the work of the Victorines in the twelfth century and in particular that of Andrew of St. Victor and Peter Comestor as a bright interlude of interest in history amid the predominant obfuscating atmosphere of allegory.²⁴ According to this historical paradigm, the development of the literal sense built toward the clarifying genius of Thomas Aquinas, who defined the relationship between the senses more clearly than anyone before, and who, with his commentary on Job, put into practice an effort to explain biblical texts entirely by means of the literal sense. This did not, however, prevent the long-term general denigration of literal historical meaning. The Victorines had started a promising movement...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor Foreword
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Note on Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Nicholas of Lyra and the Narrative of John’s Gospel
• Chapter Three: The Cursor Mundi, Narrative, and Sacred History
• Chapter Four: The Four Daughters of God, the Last Judgment, and the Scope of the Real
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index