A Poetic Christ

Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language and Reality

Olivier-Thomas Venard, Kenneth Oakes, Francesca Aran Murphy

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780567684721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Olivier-Thomas Venard's Thomas d'Aquin poète théologien trilogy, an in depth analysis of the scripture of St. Thomas Aquinas, is translated for a new audience in this streamlined anthology. Featuring selections from all three books in the trilogy, chosen in accordance with Venard's direction and discernment, it introduces not only arguments pertinent to the theme of this volume, but an invitation to explore the full breadth of Venard's work. Concentrating on the subjects of scripture, theology and literature, language as a theological question and the word of God, Murphy and Oakes capture the scope and energy of Venard's trilogy while collating many of its key passages. Ranging from the themes of a poetic gospel and Christology to the Thomist theories of semiology and the metaphysics of the Word, this volume sets scholars on the path to a deeper understanding of Aquinas's systematic theology.

Part I

SCRIPTURE

Chapter 1

A Poetic Gospel?

Introduction

In his commentary on the Gospel of John, L’Ironie christique, Jean Grosjean says this about the fourth evangelist:

John thinks that the gospel text or texts as they are encountered are necessary but also sufficient to reach the very heart of each generation. The é lan of life outside of itself (called ‘love’ because like language it presupposes another) is the very moment of language and its bright virtue. It is necessary but sufficient that in each generation this movement advances the gospel text towards the very center of each human being’s soul.¹

We might say ‘necessary’ but not ‘sufficient’, for these texts neither fell from heaven nor were they magically transmitted. The synthesis of poiesis and faith includes the mystery of the Church as the Institution of the theandric mystery of language.

Along with the Fathers and most Christian writers, St. Thomas Aquinas read the gospels as a unified whole. The Jesus he encountered throughout the New Testament was none other than the Christ of Catholic dogma and liturgy: the divine Word, the second Person of the Trinity who assumed human nature. As an act of prayer or lectio divina, reading itself was an encounter with the same resurrected and glorified Jesus Christ encountered in liturgical celebrations and works of charity. Within these presuppositions, the gospel stories are captivating portraits of the interaction between the divine Word and human language.

In line with this theological tradition, this chapter and the next attempt in various ways to recover a harmonic reading of the four gospels. They do so for the sake of developing an account of the unity of ‘Christic speech’ (Christ’s own speech) and Christian speech. After all, should not the principle of Christological unification that the Fathers found in the Bible more generally apply a fortiorito the New Testament?² Today, however, it seems more common to be highly sceptical about any hasty integration of the diverse texts of the New Testament. The following chapter consists of four parts.

We do not intend to engage solely in historical theology but in fundamental theology as well. We want to describe not only the conditions for the existence of Gothic theological speech, but also the conditions for any theological speech whatsoever. The first part of this chapter, then, will evaluate the current possibilities for maintaining the unity of the Gospel among the diversity of the gospels. We will offer several reasons for thinking that such a reading, fairly uncommon today, remains epistemologically legitimate within the context of Catholic theology. We will also justify the significant role given to the fourth gospel. After preparing this epistemological overture, we will then show how the gospels fulfil and ‘Christo-centrate’ an ontology of the sacred text. According to the gospel stories, Jesus began this ‘reconfiguration’ of the sacred text during his public ministry. We will dedicate the third and fourth parts of this chapter to showing the principle which guides this reconfiguration. The aesthetics of this principle, and in particular the synthesis of hearing and vision, will be handled in the third part, and in the fourth part we will cover its rhetorical aspect, especially the dialectic of works and speech. These parts attempt to recover the Christian tradition of the dynamic between the eye and the ear and between speech and life, which also animates Jewish life with the Book.

The Unity of the Gospel in the Diversity of the Gospels

Traditionally the unity of (the inspiration of) the collections of writings which make up Scripture was grounded in the immutability of God’s salvific plan within history, and here the harmony of the gospels was emphasized. Their theological unity patently depended upon the unity of the person of Christ. In the past century, however, emphasis on the differences between the gospels has steadily increased, for the sake of either admiring their doctrinal complementarity or, conversely, highlighting the variations which have marked Christianity since its birth. If the historical existence of Jesus is no longer questioned by serious scholars,³ the theology of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, as well as what has been called a ‘Christology from above’,⁴ has slowly and consistently been subordinated to the idea that one should not ‘flatten’ the texts and thus risk indulging in anachronism and misinterpretation. Within this context, traditional exegesis appears insufficiently cautious. This appearance of incaution means we should begin by examining the tenability of a harmonic reading of the books of the New Testament.

The Diversity of the Gospels

Since the advent of redaction criticism, New Testament scholars have attempted to distinguish the different literary and theological projects operative in the books of the New Testament. Each gospel is said to reflect the theological concerns of the witness on which it depends and the communities in which it developed. Each evangelist ‘included only information that served that purpose [of advancing his theology], and the needs of the envisioned audience affected both contents and presentations. That is why the Gospels written by different evangelists for different audiences in different decades had to differ.’⁵ Thus Mark is primarily addressed to a Roman community which had been subjected to persecutions and disruptions and which is sufficiently distant from Jewish practices that Mark thinks it necessary to offer explanations of these practices to his readers. Matthew is intended for heavily Jewish communities (some think that it is for Antioch of Syria, others Caesarea Maritima) and attempts to relate Jesus’ strikingly novel teachings to the demands of the Mosaic Law. Luke, written in a Greek clearly superior to the other three, is intended for groups in Greece and Syria and is obviously marked by the grandeurs of the Roman Empire. John, however, reflects the teachings of the original communities and yet is somewhat cut off from the communities of the other disciples.

In addition to these undeniable pragmatic differences, it also seems possible to divide the gospels into two groups based on their style of writing. Luke and John bear the marks of easily detectable individual redactors who do not hesitate to explain their literary or theological projects (both of these gospels begin with a prologue). The author of Luke seems to be the only cultivated hellenophone among the evangelists and emphasizes the diversity of his sources. The author of John, however, blends all of his sources into his own unique poetic style (albeit some scholars see the fingerprints of a school of this unique style such that one or two redactors may have reworked the original author’s composition). Matthew and Mark, on the other hand, seem to arrange various elements which had already been formed and stylized within their early transmission in the context of orally communicated literature.

As for the viewpoint of the four writings, John is clearly different from the other three by its claim to be eyewitness testimony. This would help to explain how its unique chronology and the numerous topographical details it offers consistently turn out to be more precise than those of the three Synoptics who organize their material in a more topical fashion. These characteristics tend to support the claim that the origin of this gospel tradition genuinely is eyewitness testimony and yet this does not call into question the standard dating of the gospels: John can very well be the last gospel written and yet still be the closest to the original context. We will return to this idea in the next chapter.

Finally, different theological questions permeate each gospel. Mark’s Christology offers the most human Jesus, a suffering servant shrouded by a Messianic secret that is only revealed after the resurrection. John, on the other hand, directly proclaims that the Word became flesh and describes Jesus’ ministry roughly in the same way that the ancient prophets imagined God coming ‘in person’ to judge his stubborn people. Between the second gospel’s ‘Christology from below’ and the fourth’s ‘Christology from above’ (if one wants to use this anachronistic schematization), there stand Matthew and Luke, the two gospels with genealogies. Matthew paints a portrait of Jesus as a wise teacher in the vein of a new and higher Moses while Luke-Acts follows a narrative development that depicts the triumphant expansion of the Word from its hidden beginnings in the Jerusalem Temple to the very heart of the Roman Empire.

Accentuating the genuine diversity of the gospels, which we do here all too briefly, was a helpful step in recovering the realism of the incarnation. From the very beginning, Christian communities cautiously refrained from producing a fifth gospel which would replace the canonical texts and smooth over their differences. None of the ‘Gospel harmonies’ which have variously appeared were definitively adopted into the canon.⁶ In the context of modern historical positivism, however, the reasons for maintaining this diversity have changed. The traditional defence for the diversity of the gospels was inspired by a strong confidence in their apostolicity, and by the desire to ‘lose nothing’ of the historical and theological truth they contained. In the modern rediscovery of this diversity, however, there is present a certain methodological scruple based on the ‘methodological doubt’ inherent in historical criticism.

Methodological Limits and Novel Elements

Scholars have written histories of the communities which supposedly correspond to each of the gospels and base these histories on the putative composition-history o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Translators’ Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Translators’ Preface
• Part I SCRIPTURE
• Part II THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE
• Part III LANGUAGE AS A THEOLOGICAL QUESTION
• Part IV WORD, CROSS, EUCHARIST
• Part V CONCLUSION
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Copyright