This is a reprint of the second edition of Medieval Theory of Authorship, as originally published in 1988 (the first edition having appeared in 1984). I am grateful to the University of Pennsylvania Press, the original American publisher of the second edition, for reissuing it in this form, and for inviting me to offer the following reflections, some twenty-two years later, on the significance of its materials.1
I begin with reference to a previous preface: Beryl Smalley’s introduction to the third edition (published in 1984) of her monumental Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. The ‘retractions’ there offered include an expression of regret for her elevation of the literal sense of Scripture over its spiritual senses; in large measure this was a result of her concentration on the exegesis produced by university-educated friars rather than the work of monastic communities. And she certainly had a blind spot concerning Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202), whose reformist apocalypticism was of far greater cultural significance than she originally had allowed. But nevertheless it seems to me that, in the history of medieval theories of the senses of Scripture, Smalley’s controversial heading, ‘The Spiritual Exposition in Decline’, still has much life in it. There are many testimonies to the new prestige and scope which the literal sense came to enjoy, within thirteenth-century schools of theology and beyond. Take, for instance, the paradoxical notion of a ‘double literal sense’, as discussed by such major scholars as Nicholas of Lyre (d. 1349) and William of Nottingham (d. c. 1336). The details need not concern us here,2 simply the obvious fact that when a sense of Scripture is expanded and amplified in this way, its stock is indubitably high. The most elaborate version of the ‘double literal sense’ known to me was devised by the fifteenth-century Spanish polymath Alfonso de Madrigal (d. 1455).3 Alfonso also describes five ways in which the literal sense may be judged as superior to the spiritual sense. First, the sensus litteralis is the only ‘immediate’ sense, whereas the spiritual or mystical senses are ‘mediate’, senses not of the littera but rather of the things which the littera signifies.4 Second, the literal sense is fixed, determinate, single, and incapable of being changed by us, whereas the spiritual senses can be assigned as we wish; mean whatever we want them to mean. Third, the sensus litteralis is verifiable, that is, it can be adjudged to be true or false, which cannot be done with a spiritual sense. Fourth, Scripture cannot be completed or fulfilled in its mystical sense but only in its literal sense, for only a sense which is either true or false can be verified as fulfilled or not. Fifth, arguments may be drawn only from the literal sense of Scripture. The spiritual sense cannot prove anything because we cannot say that a given passage is true or false in its spiritual sense, only in its literal sense. Spiritual senses are uncertain since it is not evident whether one spiritual exposition is the sense of a given passage rather than another. Indeed, a single passage can have disparate and opposing spiritual senses, and so one and the same passage could be cited in arguing for different and contradictory things. All of this renders the spiritual sense impossible to use when one is trying to prove something. In short, only from the literal sense may proof in argument be drawn.
That last statement is an elaboration of a passage in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae (a crucial source for Lyre also): ‘All argument must derive from this [the sensus litteralis] alone, and not from what is said in the allegorical sense, as Augustine says in the letter against Vincent the Donatist’ (cf. pp. 73–74 below). Our schoolmen took that to mean rigorously logical, syllogistic argumentation. Thus understood, the principle was to resonate across several centuries of Scriptural exegesis, and to be enlisted in many a controversy, including some which had ramifications far beyond the narrow confines of the schools. Take, for instance, William of Ockham’s attack on an understanding of the ‘two swords’ mentioned at Luke 22:38 (and generally read as signifying the competing powers of church and state) which went against the interests of his patron and protector, Ludwig of Bavaria.5 In the brilliantly argued Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico super divina et humana,6 Ockham makes the case that, because his opponents’ position is based on a spiritual sense which lacks the confirmation of a literal sense found elsewhere in Scripture, it therefore lacks credibility. Citing Augustine’s letter against Vincent, Ockham declares that in disputation an allegorical sense cannot be adduced ‘unless it is explicit in Scripture, because if it cannot be proved explicitly by Scripture his opponent will say that it can be as easily despised as approved’. Anyone can make up (fingit) a spiritual sense ‘according to the strength of his own wit’. Whereas John of Paris’s treatise De potestate regia et papali (c. 1302)—a major influence on Ockham’s Breviloquium—attacks various allegorical readings of Luke 22:38 which his opponents had adduced, Ockham goes farther, in dismissing allegory tout court as a means of reaching secure truth in the matter under discussion.
Analysis such as this dealt a powerful blow to the status of the allegorical reading of the Bible as an academic procedure. St Paul’s dictum, ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth’ (II Cor. 3:6), had often been cited in monastic exegesis to affirm the superiority of the spiritual sense over the literal sense, even as the kernel far exceeds in value the husk of a nut.7 A reading of the most radical hermeneutic theory produced in the later Middle Ages could well give the impression that spiritual quickening had moved to reside in the literal sense. Striking testimony to such a shift in perception is afforded by the way in which the literal sense was expanded to include figurative language of all kinds, including parables, proverbs, likenesses, ironies, metaphors, and similes, these being textual features which previously (and concurrently, in certain contexts) were treated as parts of the spiritual sense. It might be said that the literal sense had invaded and occupied territory previously governed by allegory, a major redrawing of boundary-lines being the consequence.8
But this is not to say that allegory was made redundant. The evidence I have just summarized could equally well be interpreted as indicating that much of its business had actually been relocated, brought under new management, as it were. Furthermore, even a cursory reading of the quaestiones produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries makes it abundantly clear that the spiritual sense was not banished from the classroom. In interpreting and appropriating Biblical auctoritates, the schoolmen were fully prepared to offer one type of exegesis in one place and another type in another, bending the waxen nose of authority (cf. p. 143 below) to take on different meanings, whether literal or allegorical. The attack on the truth-value of allegorical exegesis which I quoted above from Ockham’s Breviloquium is accompanied by the admission that, when a truth has been proved with evident argument, ‘it is permissible afterwards to adduce mystical senses in favour of that certain truth—to delight those who know the truth, many of whom are delighted when they see that mystical senses of the words of Scripture can be fitted to the truth’.9 And in this same treatise Ockham does indeed adduce mystical sense in support of his thesis.
In practice what often mattered was not whether the Bible should be interpreted in one way or another but rather such pragmatic considerations as the specific pedagogic purpose of the given interpretation and the perceived nature and needs of its target-audience. It was widely admitted that allegory had an important part to play in the sphere of ædificatio (building up the faith) and exhortatio (pious exhortation, as in sermons).10 A commentator could engage in rigorous literal/historical analysis of some textual crux, while a preacher (perhaps the commentator himself, performing a different function) could subject that same passage to virtuoso allegorizing which moved far beyond ‘the letter’—a common justification being that preaching sought to move rather than prove, to persuade rather than offer logical proof. Nicholas of Lyre, arguably the most able literalist exegete of his time, produced a Postilla moralis ‘for the readers of Bibles and preachers of the word of God’.11 Alfonso de Madrigal found nothing incongruous in affirming the superiority of literal sense over spiritual sense (as quoted above) while planning a bigger and better version of that same treatise of Lyre’s. In sum, the methodologies of medieval exegesis were a lot more flexible and context-specific than has sometimes been allowed.
Therefore, in a manner of speaking, both Henri de Lubac (whose Exégèse médiévale emphasizes the continuity and continued importance of allegorical interpretation) and Beryl Smalley (who saw the literal sense triumphing as the spiritual exposition declined) were right—or, better, they saw different aspects of a complicated cultural situation which does not lend itself to positivistic solution. The senses of Scripture were subjected to the requirements (whether actual or supposed) of different audiences and the demands of the different professionals who had to cater for those audiences. And, to reiterate a crucial point made above, what was included within the literal sense and what was included within the spiritual sense were a matter of distribution and a subject of negotiation rather than due to some immutable principle of exclusion and division. Acceptance of these contingencies will, I believe, enable us to achieve a more balanced and nuanced account of the ‘grand narrative’ of medieval Biblical exegesis.
According to the narrative offered below, in late medieval exegesis (or at least, in certain spheres thereof) the human authors of holy Scripture were granted more agency than before, as ‘instrumental efficient causes’ working with a degree of autonomy under the primary ‘efficient cause’, God. The literal sense—now expanded to include a rich array of figurative and metaphorical expression—was sometimes identified as the sense intended by the human author. Concomitant discussions of literary form or modus brought out the ways in which auctores humani had implemented various ‘formal causes’ in expressing and organizing their divine revelations. The result was the emergence of an inspired but fallible author who was allowed his individual authority and his limitations, his style and his sins (cf. p. 159 below).12 I continue to hold the belief that, within this matrix, the influence of the theory of causality and instrumentality which thirteenth-century schoolmen drew from Aristotle was of considerable importance. To reiterate my paraphrase of Aquinas on pp. 83–84 below, the instrument was believed to have its own distinctive and ‘proper’ action, ‘which was fully taken into account by the superior agent who sought to utilize this property’. But of course, when I speak of the literal sense being ‘the personal meaning of the human author’ (p. 86) I do not wish to imply that the literal sense was the exclusive personal property of the human author. On the contrary, the human author depended on God, as primary efficient cause, for inspiration and authority.13 God was the ultimate auctor of holy Writ, responsible for all the meaning that could be extracted from it (within the boundaries of ‘reverent interpretation’ to be sure), including the literal sense and all it could comprise. Further, my argument is not that a theory of causality created a method of reading authorship in holy Writ, but rather it offered a discourse for explaining, to those who might want an explanation, the nature of the relationship between God and man, between the ultimate auctor and His human instrument, in the production of the inspired text.14
By the same token, the identification of literary form (denoted by such terms as modus agendi, modus procedendi, forma tractandi, and forma tractatus) as a function of the literal sense provided methodologies for describing the many and varied ways in which the human authors of Scripture had expressed and organized their divine messages, in light of the different needs and capacities of different audiences. Since writing Medieval Theory of Authorship, I have become more acutely aware of the tensions and dissonances which existed between the discourse of sensus and the discourse of modus and/or causa formalis. The multiplex modus of holy Scripture, as described by Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), ‘operates through the inculcation of a pious disposition (affectus pietatis)’. Thus it proceeds ‘by way of precept, example, exhortation, revelation and prayer’, in contrast with the mode characteristic of human science, which proceeds ‘by definition, analysis, and deduction’ (cf. pp. 119ff. below).15 Many of Alexander’s Biblical modes—a list which was expanded by his successors to include such terms as modus affectivus, modus parabolicus, modus praedicandi, modus poeticus, and modus sacrae poetriae—may be traced to standard explanations of the art of rhetoric. Others have precedents in the accessūs ad auctores, which merged rhetorical ideas with discourse from commentary on the classical poets and other secular writers as studied in medieval grammar schools.16 Of course, traditional rhetoric and poetics could not provide a vocabulary copious enough to accommodate all the problems of description and classification posed by divinely inspired texts—as the inclusion of the ‘revelatory mode’ in Alexander’s list makes perfectly clear. That said, the dominant influence on the repertoire of the multiplex modus was rhetorical.
Rhetoric’s most fundamental concern is with the impact of language on its audience. And that is precisely what the Summa Alexandri identifies as the objective of the multiplex modus of Scripture. By contrast, the sensūs Scripturae was first and foremost a hermeneutic discourse, driven by the needs of textual analysis and explanation, and fundamentally concerned with authority rather than audience. Sensus and modus did not make easy bedfellows; it was difficult if not impossible to map the one onto the other, and sometimes schoolmen prudently preferred to discuss them separately, keeping them apart in different quaestiones or chapters.17 But Henry of Ghent (d. 1293) met the problem head-on. His extensive treatment of ‘the mode of imparting theology’ brings out quite directly the tensions between the senses and the modes of Scripture, for he saw the latter as subversive of the former. Hence Henry critiqued the views of several of his distinguished predecessors, most obviously those of Alexander of Hales (cf. pp. 128–29 below).18 According to Alexander, the commands, prohibitions, inductions of fear, and so forth which appear in Scripture are distinct and different modes of treatment, deployed to suit the many different situations and dispositions of humankind. For Henry they are different subject-matters, the modus remaining single and uniform.19 Alexander had argued that various aspects of the science of theology are communicated in various ways to various people. Henry will have none of this piecemeal diffusion and diminution (as I think he saw it) of the divine wisdom. In his view, theology is offered in its totality to every condition of man, and each man will understand according to his capacity. Some people will be content with the surface literal interpretation while others seek the spiritual understanding; one and the same passage can offer milk to beginners and solid food to experts. Here, then, we see the victory of sensus over modus; hear a voice raised in opposition to the recent revaluation of the literal sense.
Despite Henry’s protest, Alexander’s account of the multiplex modus of Scripture enjoyed considerable influence and may be taken as representative of a major trend in scholastic hermeneutics, a trend which reveals fascinating fault-lines between some of the crucial discourses that came together in late medieval theology. The trouble with theology (as disclosed by the exegesis of its major professionals) was that it seemed to proceed in a way which ‘is poetic or historical or parabolical’, and such methods are not appropriate to any human art or science ‘which operates by means of the comprehension of human reason’.20 That seems hardly consonant with the belief (as discussed above) that the literal sense provided language capable of functioning within rigorous logical argumentation. Further, that ‘poetic or historical or parabolical’ modus brought theology rather close—perhaps dangerously close—to the distinctive methods of rhetoric and poetics. According to medieval scholarship on the corpus of Aristotelian texts known as the Organon, the Rhetoric and the Poetics were deemed the seventh and eighth parts of logic, far inferior to the Prior and Posterior Analytics, which were concerned with syllogisms that proceed from true and necessary premises (as in metaphysics).21 What, then, do rhetoric and poetics offer? The former seeks to persuade and employs the enthymeme and the exemplum; the latter has imaginative representation as its purpose and the imaginative syllogism as its characteristic device. Hardly a ringing recommendation of the truth-value of rhetoric and poetry, which have, as their stock and trade, many of those modes which were listed in the context of discussions which established theology as the queen of the sciences. Could it be that, within debate on the ‘scientific’ nature of theology, the traditional hierarchy of knowledge is being up-ended, with poetic and rhetorical modi agendi being given pride of place?
And, if so, why not denigrate the texts to which the Organon gives pride of place by declaring that they serve those merely human sciences which proceed by ‘definition, division, and inferring’, and elevate the humble Rhetoric and Poetics, just as Christ Himself had elevated the poor and the lowly? After all, had not Christ and the Apostles preached to people from all walks of life through language which was common, broad, and gross (grossus), making excellent use of affective, figurative, metaphorical, and indeed poetic methods, either originating or adapting from the Old Testament those modi which generations of theologians identified as the Bible’s distinctive, and therefore prestigious, formae tractandi?22
No theologian (to the best of my knowledge) was quite prepared to go that far in his advocacy of the multiplex modus scripturae. There was no desire to call into question a system of instruction in argumentation which had been in place for many centuries, and which, after all, could be put to good use in Scriptural exegesis; no-one called for logic’s superior position in the schools to be ceded to poetics, so that the Scriptural modi might better be understood. In this case medieval scholars managed to think in compartments, thereby preventing their different systems of valuation from coming into direct confrontation. Poetry and rhetorical discourse continued to be demoted within the Organon, even as they were promoted within scholastic accounts of Scriptural style and textual structure.
The situation was exacerbated by other doctrines from Aristotle—not from the Organon this time, but from the Nicomachean Ethics. As Aristotle ‘writes in the second book of the Ethics, we undertake moral study not for the sake of abstract contemplation, nor to gain knowledge, but in order that we may become good’.23 Thus Giles of Rome draws on Aristotle at the beginning of his highly popular De regimine principum (c. 1285), going on to say that the objective of ethics24 is not to gain knowledge concerning its own matter, but moral activity (opus); it is concerned with goodness rather than with truth.
In the speculative sciences, where the main aim is the illumination of the intellect, one must proceed by way of proof and in a subtle manner, but in moral matters (in negocio morali), where the goal is an upright will and that we should become good, one must proceed by way of persuasion and the use of figures (persuasive et figuraliter).25
This Aristotelian justification of ethics serves well Giles’ purpose of introducing a treatise wherein a ‘broad and figurative’ mode of procedure is used. But it bears a troubling resemblance to the justification of the modus procedendi of sacred Scripture which St Bonaventure offered in his Breviloquium (written 1254–57):
Holy Scripture had to be handed down to us in whatever way would dispose us best [to goodness]. Our affections are moved more strongly by examples than by arguments, by promises than by logical reasonings, by devotions than by definitions. Scripture, therefore, had to . . . adapt its own modes to the various dispositions of men’s minds which incline those minds differently. Thus, if a man is not moved to heed precepts and prohibitions, he may at least be moved by the examples narrated; if someone is not moved by these, he may be moved by the benefits which are pointed out to him. . . .26
And so forth. This resemblance is not coincidental, since Bonaventure clearly has in mind the very same passage of Aristotle’s Ethics that is explicitly cited by Giles of Rome in his account of the modus procedendi followed in the instruction of princes.
Further evidence is afforded by Bonaventure’s assertion that ‘particular facts do not admit of formal proof’, from which he infers that Scripture’s narrative modes, being concerned with particular facts, are not susceptible of such proof: it is impossible to gain ‘certainty based on reasoning’ in such a case. This derives from Aristotle’s statement in book ii, chapter 2 of the Ethics that ‘things pertaining to actions . . . do not have anything fixed about them’, and thus are uncertain (and hence unprovable) in scientific terms. Indeed, Giles of Rome had quoted that very same passage a little earlier in his introduction to De regimine principum, noting that ‘the subject-matter of morals . . . concerns individual matters, matters which, as is shown in the Ethics, book ii, are very uncertain because of the variability of their nature’.27
It would seem, then, that both the Bible and Aristotelian ethics have as their goal moral action, making men good, and the correct disposition of the human will rather than the illumination of the intellect. May it be concluded, then, that the ends (and the means to those ends) of ethics and holy Scripture are the same; indeed, that the Bible may be deemed an ethical book, seen as falling within the scope of morals, and classified under ‘practical’ (as opposed to ‘theoretical’) philosophy as defined by Aristotle? Or, in other words, that it ‘pertains to ethics’, just like all those lesser texts which served the curricula of medieval grammar schools? Quite a lot for the queen of the sciences to swallow, surely, despite the sugar put on the pill by Aristotle’s powerful celebration of ethics.
This problem seems to have arisen whenever the ‘new’ Aristotle was brought into contact with doctrina Christiana, as may be illustrated with reference to Roger Bacon (c. 1220—c. 1292). Bacon asserts that the speculative procedures of dialectic and demonstration are unsuitable for moral philosophy because, as Aristotle says in the Ethics, its end is not that we should contemplate grace, but rather that we should become good.28 A much better job is done by a kind of rhetoric which deals with subjects that move us to labor in the service of ‘divine worship, laws and virtues’. This kind of rhetoric, Bacon claims, is called ‘poetic’ by Aristotle and other philosophers, because, rightly understood, poets have as their true mission the direction of men to the honesty of virtue. While the speculative sciences delight in argument, opinion, and knowledge for its own sake, the ‘practical sciences’ consider arguments ad praxim, with the aim of inciting men to good works. Likewise, poetical argument pursues vice and honors virtue in order that men may be attracted to honor and moved to hatred of sin. Crucially, for Bacon the ‘practical sciences’ are theology and moral philosophy.29 This bringing together of the two ‘sciences’ is quite understandable in view of Bacon’s exceptionally high opinion of moralis sciencia, an opinion which few of his Parisian successors shared in such an extreme form. And they were more aware of the dangers of appearing to reduce theology to ethics than their cantankerous but brilliant predecessor had been.
Such an anxiety may be discerned in the Summa Alexandri and Bonaventure’s Breviloquium. Is the Biblical multiplex modus capable of certain verification, that is, can we be sure that its doctrine is in some sense true and certain?30 The answer is ‘yes’—but it is true in terms of experience and disposition rather than investigation and intellect, and certain in respect of that knowledge which is transmitted ‘through God’s spirit’ rather than that which is transmitted merely though the ‘human spirit’.31 Similarly, Bonaventure admits that the Bible’s ‘narrative modes cannot proceed by way of certainty based on reasoning’, because they treat of particular facts, which do not admit of formal proof. But there is no risk of holy Scripture seeming doubtful, because ‘instead of certainty based on reasoning God has provided it with certainty based on authority’.32 The implication is that, no matter how those modes are employed by other (merely human) authors, no matter how humble they may be in other hands and in other contexts, in holy Scripture they are under divine control, in the hands of God. And therefore their prestige—in the Bible at least—is unquestionable. Bonaventure’s solution, then, is to appeal to holy Scripture’s unique authorship rather than seek to valorize the specific modes themselves. For his part, Thomas Aquinas explained that, while both poetry and ‘sacred instruction’ employ metaphors, poetry employs them ‘for the sake of representation’ (because representation ‘naturally gives men pleasure’)33 whereas theology uses them ‘because they are necessary and useful’ (cf. p. 128 below).34
By such means, medieval schoolmen maintained a decorous distance between ethics and theology. Thus the supreme science was rescued from the threat of being reduced to practical philosophy, just because the respective ends of theology and ethical poetics have much in common and share certain means to those ends. And yet—the apparent similarities between them were exploited to great effect by innovative literary theorists of trecento Italy, including Francis Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, as they labored to elevate the status of poetry (cf. pp. 216–17 below). ‘Poetry is not at all inimical to theology’, Petrarch declares.
I would almost say that theology is poetry written about God. When Christ is now called a lion, now a lamb, and again a worm, what is that if not poetic? You will find a thousand more instances in Holy Scripture. . . .
He goes on to argue that the Saviour’s parables in the Gospel employ discourse wherein the meaning differs from the normal sense of the words, ‘to which we give the more usual name of allegory’, a device regularly used by the poets.35 A fuller version of this argument is offered in Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium, where it is emphasized that many literary devices—including pure fiction—are shared by secular and Scriptural authors.36
Of all the thirteenth-century theologians I have read, the one who seems to anticipate this position most fully is Roger Bacon, who (as already noted) claimed that Scripture and moral philosophy often relied on the same kind of poetical argument, and, to prove it, pointed to many parallels between the poetical modes used by secular writers and those found in the Bible. But Bacon was just one among many schoolmen who furthered the tradition of describing the multiplex modus of holy Scripture (to revert once again to Alexander of Hales’ terminology) in ways which highlighted its affective, imaginative, figurative, and even fictive properties.
This tradition was pervasive and highly influential; there is no need to seek specific sources for the relevant arguments of the trecento theorists who managed to posit a significant relationship between poetry and theology. Of course, as Boccaccio freely admits in his Trattatello in laude di Dante, ‘the holy and the secular writings do not . . . have a common end (fine; cf. the Latin term finis) in view’.37 All that the poets can show us is ‘how we may, by behaving virtuously, achieve that end (fine) which they, not knowing the true God aright, believed to be the supreme salvation’.38 In other words (though Boccaccio does not actually put it like this), their poetry pertains to ethics, and its end is limited by pagan ignorance of revealed Christian truth.
But these (very real) differences do not drive a firm wedge between poetry and theology; the lesser end of poetry is certainly not antithetical to the greater end of theology. And there is no doubt that they ‘share a common mode of treatment (modo del trattare; cf. the Latin modus tractandi)’.39 In his Genealogia, Boccaccio elegantly builds on the common ground which poetry and theology supposedly share, directing theological discourse to serve the cause of poetry. The argument that the obscurity of poetry is no reason for condemning it is supported by theological defenses of the obscurity of holy Scripture.40 The declaration that the poets are not really liars is supported by theologians’ affirmations that the Bible is never false or mendacious, though it sometimes uses fictions and even on occasion seems to recount blatant lies.41 Particular emphasis is placed on the use of ‘not literally true’ discourse by St John (in the Apocalypse) and other prophets. A counter-argument by his opponents is anticipated and trenchantly dismissed.
My opponents will add that their [the prophets’] writings are not fiction but rather figures, to use the correct term, and their authors are figurative writers. O silly subterfuge! As if I were likely to believe that two things to all appearances exactly alike should gain the power of different effects by mere change or difference of name.42
A mere change of name does not make the problem go away; erase the evident fact that both sacred and secular writers have used one and the same literary technique.
Not everyone approved of this method of comparing poetry and theology, however, as is made abundantly clear by the vigorous reaction of Girolamo Savonarola (d. 1498),43 who sought to make a bonfire of such vanities. It cannot be argued, he declared, that just because poetry and theology both use metaphors therefore ‘poetry is nothing other than theology’. Offering a more stringent version of the distinction which Thomas Aquinas had made between metaphor in poetry and metaphor in theology (as quoted above), Savonarola asserts that it is one thing ‘to use metaphors because of necessity and the magnitude of the subject’, as in the Bible, and quite ‘another to use them for pleasure and weakness of truth’, as in pagan poetry.44 The ‘tender minds of young men’ should not be nourished on poems which ‘are full of lust and the most foolish and wicked sexual liaisons of gods and men’! And so Savonarola proceeds to justify the material destruction of such poems.45
Here, then, was the trouble with theology. The fact that it shared certain styles and methods of literary procedure with the writings of the poets, who habitually were branded as liars, obliged generation after generation of medieval theologians to defend the epistemological and moral credentials of their subject and the ‘scientific’ basis of its knowledge. The tradition that poetry ‘pertained to ethics’ offered some help, but help of a kind which could hardly be accepted because it threatened to replace one problem with another. For, if the distinction between poetry and theology was eroded significantly, the status of the higher science would be demeaned, the specter raised of theology being reduced to ethics, a mere branch of practical philosophy. If, on the other hand, one wished to emphasize the more ratiocinative and intellectual aspects of theology, then that tended to place theology within the same category as the higher logical sciences (with their characteristic modi procedendi of definition, division, and inference). While this was a more elevated position within the classifying system of the Organon—the same system that placed rhetoric and poetics at the very bottom of its epistemological hierarchy—it was insufficiently elevated for the supreme science of theology, which had sources of knowledge that even the cleverest of pagan thinkers knew nothing about, the revealed and eternal truths of Christianity. And one major strand of Christian triumphalism involved a denigration of all merely human (i.e., non-revealed) knowledge, on the grounds that mere cleverness was insufficient for salvation (and indeed could hinder it, given the human tendency to succumb to intellectual pride): the sincere prayer of the poorest and lowliest lay person could win him or her a higher place in heaven than that allocated to the greatest cleric who, while rich in intellectual gifts, was sadly lacking in Christian charity. That subversive, anti-intellectualist impulse in medieval Christianity is nowhere more obvious than in the ‘affective Dionysianism’ found, for example, in the thought of Thomas Gallus and Robert Grosseteste during the 1230s and 1240s46—though, to be sure, it had its own brand of subtlety and mind-bending complexity.
Therefore, theologians had to return to confront the affective, imaginative and fictive qualities of the multiplex modus of holy Scripture, which ranged from the sublime allegories of the Apocalypse and Song of Songs to the humble and homely parables which constituted the preferred didactic method of the Son of God, Jesus Christ Himself, during his earthly ministry. They could appeal to the unique (because divinely inspired) authorship of the Bible, emphasize the more comprehensive and infinitely more important end of theology (which seeks not merely to make us good in ethical terms but also to enable our salvation), or indeed use a positive term like ‘figure’ in their Scriptural exegesis instead of a negative one like ‘fiction’ (to recall Boccaccio’s shrewd remark). Whatever they did, this particular trouble with theology continued to demand their attention, to provoke their best efforts at synthesis and systematization. And that is hardly surprising, given its crucial importance for the central project of medieval Christianity—the reconciliation of faith and reason.
The previous versions of Medieval Theory of Authorship were dedicated to my father and to the memory of my mother, who died in 1972. Since my father died in 1988, this reissued second edition is appropriately dedicated to the memory of both parents. The longer I live the more conscious I become of the many gifts they gave me.
NOTES
1 Much excellent work on late medieval Bible commentary has appeared in the interim, far too much to review here. Suffice it to mention a few publications which speak to my own specific interests: Elisabeth Andersen, Jens Haustein et al. (eds.), Autor und Autorschaft im Mittelalter: Kolloquium Meissen 1995 (Tübingen, 1998); Louis-Jacques Bataillon, Gilbert Dahan, and Pierre-Marie Gy (eds.), Hugues de Saint-Cher (+1263): Bibliste et théologien (Turnhout, 2004); Mireille Chazan and Gilbert Dahan (eds.), La méthode critique au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 2006); Marcia L. Colish, Peter Lombard (Leiden, 1994); Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991); Gilbert Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1990); idem, The Christian Polemic Against the Jews in the Middle Ages, tr. by Jody Gladding (Notre Dame, 1998); Gilbert Dahan and Richard Goulet (eds.), Allégorie des poètes, allégorie des philosophes: Études sur la poétique et l’herméneutique de I’allégorie de l’antiquité de la réforme. Table ronde internationale de l’Institut des traditions textuelles, Fédération de recherche 33 du CNRS (Paris, 2005); Gilbert Dahan, Gérard Nahon, and Elie Nicolas (eds.), Rashi et la culture juive en France du Nord au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1997); C. F. R. De Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1984); Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge, 2007); Richard Gameson (ed.), The Early Medieval Bible: Its Production, Decoration and Use (Cambridge, 1994); Theresa Gross-Diaz, The Psalms Commentary of Gilbert of Poitiers: From ‘lectio divina’ to the Lecture Room (Leiden, 1996); Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge, 2002); Margaret T. Gibson, The Bible in the Latin West (Notre Dame, 1993); Jacqueline Hamesse (ed.), Les prologues médiévaux: Actes du colloque international organisé par l’Academia Belgica et l’École française de Rome avec le concours de la F.I.D.E.M., Rome, 26–28 mars 1998 (Turnhout, 2000); Philip D. W. Krey and Lesley Smith (eds.), Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture (Leiden, 2000); Ian Christopher Levy, John Wyclif: Scriptural Logic, Real Presence, and the Parameters of Orthodoxy (Milwaukee, 2003); Guy Lobrichon, La Bible au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2003); E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia, 1990); Lesley Smith, The ‘Glossa ordinaria’: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden, 2009); Ineke van’t Spijker (ed.), The Multiple Meaning of Scripture: The Role of Exegesis in Early-Christian and Medieval Culture (Leiden, 2009); Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, 1995); Jon Whitman (ed.), Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (Leiden, 2000); and M. Zimmermann, Auctor et auctoritas: Invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, actes du colloque de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (14–16 Juin 1999) (Geneva, 2001). The best general introduction to the entire field, Gilbert Dahan’s L’Exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIe—XIVe siècle (Paris, 1999), has not received the attention it deserves within the Anglophone academy.
2 For a summary account and references see Alastair Minnis, A. B. Scott, and David Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100—c. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1991, rpt. 2001), pp. 205–6.
3 Alastair Minnis, Fifteenth Century Versions of Literalism: Girolamo Savonarola and Alfonso de Madrigal’, in Robert Lerner (ed.), Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Bibelexegese, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Kolloquien 32 (Munich, 1996), pp. 163–80 (172–74).
4 Here De Madrigal deploys the common exegetical distinction between significative words and significative things, which had received its most influential formulation from Augustine in De doctrina Christiana, I.ii.2. See below, pp. 73 and 247n, and Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 66.
5 On which see Alastair Minnis, ‘Material Swords and Literal Lights: The Status of Allegory in William of Ockham’s Breviloquium on Papal Power’, in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish, and Joseph W. Goering (eds.), With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York, 2003), pp. 292–308.
6 This was one of the anti-papal treatises which Ockham wrote in Munich between 1332 and his death (in 1347?).
7 That said, one should immediately enter the caveat that, before the transformation of hermeneutic theory by university-based scholasticism, Bible commentary was a many-splendored thing, which could vary significantly from school to school and indeed from master to master. Hence one should be wary of making totalizing claims. For example, it is salutary to compare the different attitudes and techniques found in the exegesis of Hugh of St Victor and Peter Abelard; cf. Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 65–71.
8 The differences in thinking involved here are well described by Denys Turner, who distinguishes between the ‘metaphoricist’ approach (figurative language belongs with the spiritual sense) and the ‘anti-metaphoricist’ approach (figurative language can be read as a part of the literal sense). Eros and Allegory, pp. 94–99. See further the engaging discussion by Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics Before Humanism and the Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 37ff.
9 ‘Material Swords and Literal Lights’, p. 296.
10 Cf. Beryl Smalley, ‘Use of the “Spiritual” Sense of Scripture in Persuasion and Argument by Scholars in the Middle Ages’, RTAM 52 (1985), 44-63.
11 Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 108.
12 Of course, the sins of certain Scriptural authors—most obviously, David and Solomon—had always been known and acknowledged, but fresh methods of dealing with them were now available; cf. pp. 103–12 below, and Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 207–9. The argument that authorial sin was not necessarily destructive of authority moved far beyond the parameters of Biblical exegesis. It was adapted to absolve Jean de Meun from personal responsibility for problematic materials (which some condemned as immoral) in the Roman de la Rose. See my discussion in Magister Amoris: The ‘Roman de la Rose’ and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001), pp. 247–54.
13 Here I have in mind comments by Ocker, Biblical Poetics, p. 141. We seem to disagree on the import of the concept of instrumentality in understanding the relationship between God and man in the production of the sacred text. Further, I feel that at some points Ocker gives too much personal credit to Thomas Aquinas for vast changes in hermeneutic theory which were driven by several generations of medieval theologians, many of whom remain under-studied. And he never manages to achieve a wholly satisfactory definition of ‘Biblical poetics’. (He has my sympathy. I have reservations about my own use of the term ‘literary’, deployed in the present book as a shorthand means of referencing and conflating issues relating to authorship and authority, rhetoric, poetics, style, textual structure, etc. But I cannot think of a better term. No single medieval Latin or vernacular word or phrase covers the entire field, and it seems preferable to use an anachronistic term rather than stretch a medieval one beyond the boundaries of what it meant within its medieval contexts.) The issues are confused rather than clarified by the remarks in Deeana Copeland Klepper’s study, The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2007), p. 33.
14 Here I have appropriated some remarks made by Ocker (Biblical Poetics, p. 50) about the theory of verbal signification which he sees (with good reason I believe) emerging in late medieval exegesis, since I believe they apply with equal validity to authorship theory.
15 See also Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 214.
16 Here I draw on my article, ‘Quadruplex Sensus, Multiplex Modus: Scriptural Sense and Mode in Medieval Scholastic Exegesis’, in Jon Whitman (ed.), Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (Leiden, 2000), pp. 229–54 (234–35).
17 As Bonaventure did in the prologue to his Breviloquium, sections 5 and 6; tr. Minnis, Scott, and Wallace, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 235–38.
18 See further Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 202–3, 250–56. Even more virulent comments about what I believe was the same trend were made by John Wyclif (d. 1384); cf. my discussion in Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 107-10.
19 Cf. Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 202.
20 Summa Alexandri, tractatus introductorius, qu. 1, cap. 4, art. 1; tr. in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 212–15.
21 Cf. Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 279–81.
22 Such doctrine was characteristic of the medieval artes praedicandi; cf. pp. 136–38 below.
23 Nicomachean Ethics, ii.2 (1103b, 26–28).
24 Ethics as applied here in the education of princes. Giles’ treatise also offers instruction in other branches of practical philosophy (economics or family-management and politics) as understood within medieval Aristotelianism.
25 De regimine principum libri III, lib. I, cap. 1: Quis modus procedendi in regimine principum (Rome, 1556), fol. 2r–2v; tr. in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 249.
26 Cf. pp. 127–28 below. The relevant passage is tr. in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 235–36.
27 Tr. in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 248.
28 Yet again, Nicomachean Ethics, ii.2 (1103b, 26–28).
29 Vincent Gillespie, ‘The Study of Classical Authors: From the Twelfth Century to c. 1450’, in Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2: The Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 145–235 (170).
30 Summa Alexandri, tract, int., qu. 1, cap. 4, art. 2; tr. in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 215–17.
31 Tr. in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 217.
32 Breviloquium, Prologue, 5, tr. in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 235–36.
33 Here the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics is evident, presumably in the version of Averroes/Hermann the German. On the significance of Hermann’s translation see chapter 7 of Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, the relevant discussion in Minnis and Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, pp. 171–72, 252–55, and Alastair Minnis, ‘Acculturizing Aristotle: Matthew of Linköping’s translatio of Poetic Representation’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 124 (2005), 238–59.
34 Summa theologiae, la 1, art. 9, responsio; tr. in Minnis, Scott and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 240.
35 Letters on Familiar Matters, x.4, to his brother Gherardo; tr. in Minnis, Scott and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, p. 413. Once again, parable—here identified with poetic allegory—is seen as a type of verbal signification. Petrarch immediately admits that poetry and theology differ in their subject matter: the subject of holy Scripture is God and matters divine, whereas in poetry (evidently he is thinking of pagan poetry) it is man and the gods. But even here an empowering connection may be found. ‘The poets were the first theologians’, as Aristotle says (Metaphysics i.2; 982b); that elementary knowledge of things divine which is found in secular poetry came to enjoy its full flowering in poetry about God. The subject-matters of theology and poetry are not, it seems, utterly opposed.
36 Cf. Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 391–2.
37 Cf. p. 217 below.
38 Trattatello in laude di Dante, red. 1, tr. by David Wallace in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 494–95.
39 Trattatello, tr. Wallace, p. 495.
40 Genealogia xiv.12, tr. in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 428–31.
41 Genealogia xiv.13 (pp. 431–36). On scholastic treatment of the apparent lies in holy Scripture see the brief account in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 209–12.
42 Genealogia xiv. 13 (p. 433).
43 On which see Minnis, Fifteenth Century Versions of Literalism’, pp. 164–70.
44 Cf. O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Westport, Conn., 1962), p. 7.
45 Cf. Minnis, Fifteenth Century Versions of Literalism’, p. 170.
46 On which see chapter 5 in Minnis, Scott, and Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism.