I envision the era of the early middle ages commencing with the life and works of Augustine, and concluding with the life and works of Thomas Aquinas who was the leading light among the Scholastics. Indeed, after Augustine, there is little novel work until Aquinas, if there is any at all, for through his writings, and especially On Christian Doctrine, his hermeneutical method grew in prominence until it became the norm. This does not mean that every exegete in the early middle ages unthinkingly embraced Augustine, but it does mean that whatever smatterings of alternatives there were failed to gain a foothold.
In some ways, this was a good thing but it eventuated in a subtle and growing division between exegesis and spirituality so that the former was envisioned as proper to the literal sense of Scripture and the latter as proper to the spiritual senses of Scripture. “It follows that so long as this conception of Bible studies holds good, we shall have many commentaries containing little exegesis” (Smalley, 2). And for this era, this is indeed the case.
In fact, after the death of Remigius of Auxerre, about 908, there is no important commentary, and a dearth of even compilations, for about a century and a quarter. Holy abbots, as their biographers tell us, were still devoted to lectio divina, and we have unverifiable references to their study of Hebrew; they left very little written exegesis. The cathedral schools, which were improving their organization at this time, did as little for biblical studies as the monastic. It is a dramatic pause in the history of Bible studies and we should miss its significance if we explained it away as the demoralizing effect of war and Viking invasion. They certainly made scholarship difficult; but the real reason was a shift of interest. The Cluniac and other tenth-century religious reformers emphasized the liturgy at the expense of study (Smalley, 44-45).
This was a tragic development, but God is faithful. Among other lesser movements, the early twelfth century Victorines, led by Hugh, Richard, and Andrew of Saint Victor in France, revived the discussion of hermeneutics and insisted that though the Bible does contain a literal sense and an allegorical (or spiritual) sense, the former is more important than, and is the foundation of, the latter. “Hugh patiently explains that the literal sense is not the word, but what it means; it may have a figurative meaning; and this belongs to the literal sense. To despise the literal sense is to despise the whole of sacred literature” (Smalley, 93). Hugh’s “great service to exegesis was to lay more stress on the literal interpretation relatively to the spiritual, and to develop the sources for it” (Smalley, 102).
With this revived articulation of what was essentially Antiochene hermeneutics (though Hugh would not have known or said that), also came a fusion of spirituality and scholarship. Previous to this time, a division had developed between monks who prayed and scholars who studied. Now, along with several other movements (or Orders, as they were called), the Victorines sought to combine robust spirituality with disciplined scholarship. They succeeded in this endeavor so that the following generation, led by the trifecta of Peter Comestor, Peter the Chanter, and Stephen Langton, spent their lives promoting and prospering this “novel” approach (Smalley, 196).
In this way, the Victorine program made practices such as lectio divina acceptable to Paris intellectuals who then pressed their approach into what was essentially an academic lecture course. This was truly novel in history of the west, and eventually gave rise to such leading lights as Anselm and Ralph of Laon who made the first concerted effort toward a systematic theology and provided the inspiration and impetus for Thomas Aquinas’s mammoth Summa Theologica (Smalley, 49, 196).
Movements like the Victorines, then, provided the impetus for the development of universities where the Bible, spirituality, and the natural world were approached in an increasingly intellectual manner. This development, called Scholasticism, was further fueled by historic movements that forced prominent scholars to flee from the east and settle in the west, bringing with them vital, ancient texts that had been all but lost to the west. Among these works were the writings of Aristotle which were banned and burned by the church, but which were eventually enshrined in the official teaching of the church via the writings of Aquinas. In Aristotle, Aquinas saw a model for envisioning the world and organizing truth that was, to his mind, superior to Plato. Aquinas did not reject Augustine (who admired Plato), but he astutely modified Augustine’s approach.
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