The debate about the role of faith, reason, and history in Catholic biblical exegesis is a long one that extends back into the medieval period. Contemporary concerns over an overly secularized historical exegesis often point to examples from the more skeptical seventeenth century, like Hobbes and Spinoza. One often suggested alternative option from that time is Fr. Richard Simon. Thus, in the first half of this article, I take a look at Simon, regarded as a first-rate historical biblical critic from historical criticism's earliest inception in the seventeenth century. Simon could be presented as escaping the skepticism of the three more skeptical exegetes against whom he wrote in his own work. After all, Simon's historical critical work is a critique of the more perilous approaches of Isaac La Peyrère, Hobbes, and Spinoza, and Simon's is intended to be a robust defense of Catholic tradition. What I hope to show, however, is that Simon's apologetic is dubious at best, and his hermeneutic, although more learned and rigorous than even Spinoza's, is little more than an elaboration upon the very methods initiated by La Peyrère, Hobbes, and Spinoza. Far from being a defense of Catholic tradition, Simon's hermeneutic is a carefully crafted and subtle defense of Spinoza's exegetical method. Simon's method thus suffers from the same pitfalls as Spinoza's.
In the second half of this article, I then take a look for an alternative approach to the question of the relationship between history and exegesis at some of the theoretical work from the previous century at the dawn of the Reformation, namely St. Thomas More's Christian defenses of humanism and secular learning in relation to the study of Scripture. Several of More's letters, and his life in general, exemplify the possibility of maintaining the unity of faith and reason, as well as admitting both theology and history in biblical interpretation.
1. History, Criticism & Theology: Richard Simon, Father of Historical Criticism
Catholic scholars sometimes assume the path blazed by Simon is the best approach to questions of faith and history in exegesis. Hence this examination of Simon's work explores this possibility. What we find in the work of Simon is not far removed from La Peyrère, Hobbes, or Spinoza, even if the proposed intent contrasts with theirs. Although Simon argued against this triad, he followed their basic methodology, albeit to suit his own purposes. Simon was born in 1638 in Dieppe, France, a mere ten years before the end of the Thirty Years’ War.Footnote 1 He gained international fame through the publication of his masterpiece of historical criticism of the OT, his 1678 Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (HCVT).Footnote 2 As Hume proverbially woke Kant from his philosophical slumber, so Spinoza, it would seem, roused Simon to produce his own historical critical work.Footnote 3
One of the main motives of Simon's HCVT differed greatly from his contemporaries: Simon was attempting, in part, to provide a Catholic apologetic to defend the necessity of Catholic tradition vis-à-vis Protestant interlocutors who assumed a sola Scriptura position.Footnote 4 Indeed, his comments about the challenges posed by ‘the uncertainty of Hebrew grammar’, and the like, resemble many of Spinoza's comments—but to a very different end.Footnote 5 Whereas Spinoza's project was to sound the death knell to theological exegesis, Simon instead emphasized the necessity of Catholic tradition. So threatening did Protestant theologians find his work that most of the published refutations of Simon for the next century were from Protestant intellectuals, not from Catholics.Footnote 6 As Manlio Iofrida remarks:
In the end, then, chance, disorder consume the written text, reducing it to a kind of ruin. The philologist can undertake the task of restoration, but in the field of doctrine only the Church can guarantee the essential function, both religious and political, of the Sacred Scriptures. In this way, these Scriptures regress from an inspired corpus to something much less sacred, and are as a matter of fact secularized and stripped of sacredness. Imperfect, often incomprehensible, they assume the chiaroscuro of a historical document to be deciphered.Footnote 7
Although Simon ostensibly provided a robust defense of Catholic tradition, and, by virtually all accounts, demolished any tenable notion of sola Scriptura, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker make the observation that Simon's work provided little reason to rely on Catholic tradition at all, and, in fact, implicitly contributed to challenges opposing the authority of Catholic tradition. They note how, for Simon, ‘traditio acted more like an arbitrary Hobbesian authority settling intractable disputes than a divinely guided shepherd leading its flock into the deeper mysteries of God's Word….undermining the certainty of Scripture, Simon was also destroying traditio's support of its authority and mission as affirmed from Scripture.’Footnote 8 Simon thus set the stage for the more robust critique of Catholic tradition that would emerge among radical enlightenment thinkers.Footnote 9
Simon was well versed in the arguments of his contemporaries. Whereas Simon had read the work of Hobbes and Spinoza, Simon not only read La Peyrère's work, but in fact knew him personally; La Peyrère and Simon became friends after La Peyrère's conversion to Catholicism and entrance into the Oratorians as a lay member. Prior to being expelled from the Oratorians, Simon served as an Oratorian priest.Footnote 10
Simon's biblical method was thorough.Footnote 11 Simon maintained that several points needed to be followed in order to come to a proper understanding of the OT: (1) a good Hebrew text must be established (HCVT, 3.1, 543–545);Footnote 12 (2) the Scriptures must be read critically as other books (HCVT, 3.1, 545);Footnote 13 (3) the texts, including the variants in the diverse manuscript tradition being translated marginally, must be translated (HCVT, 3.1, 545); (4) finally, and perhaps most significantly, Simon provided a sort of Forschungsgeschichte (history of research), showing how earlier biblical interpreters dealt with the many historical problems in Scripture (HCVT, 3.5–24), encouraging future biblical exegetes to follow the same path. Within this and prior sections, Simon himself basically followed the specific critical hermeneutic Spinoza articulated in the seventh chapter of his Tractatus theologico-politicus (TTP), but multiplying the problems encountered in such an investigation, far more thoroughly than Spinoza had.Footnote 14 As with Spinoza, Simon explicitly mentioned that the method he developed set up an ‘impossible’ task (e.g., ‘to make a good translation of Scripture’).Footnote 15 More than halfway through his mammoth tome, Simon conceded, ‘It even seems impossible to be able to succeed if we reflect on all the difficulties that have been noted above.’Footnote 16 Yet, Simon maintained that the method must be employed, and an attempt at making a good translation must continue, to which end he himself labored hard.Footnote 17 In the end, with his HCVT, Simon ‘drowned his opponents in learning and in a sea of problems.’Footnote 18
Simon, like his friend La Peyrère, maintained that the Scriptures were copies of copies, whose present form was the work of various scribes.Footnote 19 Simon posited numerous unknown editors and compilers behind the OT, attributing the redaction to court writers on behalf of the Hebrew state.Footnote 20 This did not pose a problem regarding the doctrine of inspiration, since Simon maintained that these editors and compilers were inspired by God. Of course, as scholars note, Simon's view of inspiration went hand-in-hand with the presence of all manner of distortions, errors, contradictions, and other infelicities in the biblical texts.Footnote 21 In the end, however, because of the nature of this layered editorial process, Scripture ‘was ultimately shrouded in darkness (not mystery), and only a historical-critical recovery of the original sources, an historical analysis of the needs and beliefs of the editor's own time, and finally, a psychological reconstruction of each editor could shed any light.’Footnote 22 It was his overall denial of Mosaic authorship that got Simon in trouble, even though Simon conceded more of a role for Moses than even Hobbes had, not to mention Spinoza or La Peyrère.Footnote 23 In this context, Hahn and Wiker point out that:
It was not simply the denial of Mosaic authorship, but his rejection of the traditio's attempt to explain the alleged textual imperfections by other means. As it developed, the Catholic position in regard to Scripture's seeming imperfections was that, what seemed disunited and imperfect, proved upon humble, faithful, and prayerful reading—guided by the Holy Spirit and Tradition—to be whole and harmonious, containing hidden perfections under seeming imperfections. Various ways arose to explain apparent imperfections: exegetes had recourse to a complex account of divine accommodation, to literal and spiritual senses, and even to the notion of purposely-placed divine stumbling blocks in the text to trip up the prideful and draw the humble to closer examination. Against this, Simon accepted the surface incongruities at face value—even rejoiced in them—so that the need for tradition became absolute.Footnote 24
In short, Simon's acceptance of Spinoza's method led also to his accepting the conclusions of that method which identified purported unsolvable problems in the scriptural text. Rather than clinging to ‘reason’ as an excuse to undermine the authority of the text, however, Simon clung to ‘faith’ hence inadvertently also undermining the authority of the text, which he acknowledged was unable to withstand the scientific examination of reason.
Simon's work was condemned in France, at the instigation of Bossuet, and copies of HCVT were rounded up and thrown on fires. Simon's HCVT was subsequently published in the Dutch Republic when publication in France became impossible.Footnote 25 Bossuet, author of the Gallican Articles, did not oppose Simon's Gallicanist position.Footnote 26 Rather, Bossuet was upset by Simon's criticism of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, as well as what Bossuet saw as HCVT's threats to more traditional Catholic views concerning biblical inspiration and tradition. Bossuet's conflict with Simon did not curb the enormous effect Simon's HCVT and other writings would have. Despite the aforementioned censure, Simon's corpus of biblical scholarship exerted an incredible influence on eighteenth century Enlightenment biblical criticism.
Simon's work was brought into the English biblical critical world via Deist biblical critics and through Locke, who owned multiple copies of HCVT, one in which he made marginal annotations.Footnote 27 Simon's work also took Germany by storm, especially through the work of the important Bible scholar Johann Semler.Footnote 28 In the end, we may conclude with Hahn and Wiker that, ‘Simon's attempt to vanquish Protestantism's claim of sola scriptura by amplifying Spinoza's approach to exegesis only served to provide a much firmer scholarly foundation for Spinozism.’Footnote 29 Far from representing a different path from La Peyrère, Hobbes, and Spinoza, Simon's work became the vehicle for spreading the core principles of their biblical criticism through the Enlightenment and into the modern period. What is more, Simon's incredible erudition made their hermeneutic all the more formidable.
2. ‘Buried and Hard-to-Reach Treasure’: St. Thomas More and the Unity of Faith and Reason
For a response to the type of criticism represented by Simon, and thus by La Peyrère, Hobbes and Spinoza, I want to turn to the previous century, to the thought of St. Thomas More. More was not a Bible scholar, but he certainly engaged Scripture, and in fact many of his works provide an insight into his own exegesis which combined the best of traditional Christian exegesis with the tools of Renaissance humanism.Footnote 30 He argued passionately for reason, and chided clerics unwilling to use history and philology in an attempt to arrive at a more accurate text of the Bible, better translations, etc. Unlike the figures we have already discussed who would emerge on the scene in the next century, More was just as passionate about the necessity of faith as he was of reason. Faith and reason were inextricably bound in More's thought. In this, More's work reflected the holistic approach akin to that later articulated in the First Vatican Council's decree Dei Filius as well as in other magisterial documents such as St. Pope John Paul II's penultimate papal encyclical, Fides et Ratio and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI's post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Verbum Domini.
More was born in London in 1477.Footnote 31 The son of a lawyer, More spent two years as a page to Archbishop John Morton, England's Lord Chancellor. At Oxford More thoroughly immersed himself in classical studies and he quickly became one of Europe's most prominent humanist scholars, producing works that epitomized that humanist tradition, including many translations and works on humanistic learning.Footnote 32 For a few years, apparently discerning whether or not he had a vocation to the religious life, More lived alongside the Carthusian monastery in London, actively participating in the Carthusian communal life of prayer.Footnote 33 He then became a lawyer, and was quite successful, carrying a reputation for professionalism and honesty wherever he went. He was elected to parliament, and then became the undersheriff of London, a post in which he served for about eight years, requiring him to provide legal advice to London's sheriff and mayor as well as serving as a judge.
In 1518, at the age of 41 and after intentionally seeking to avoid official royal positions, More entered King Henry VIII's service as one of the King's counselors and became the King's secretary. He continued to advance in the King's service, and was awarded positions of increasing prestige on account of his tact, fidelity, and prudence. Significantly, More was instrumental in orchestrating the Peace of Cambrai which ended England's violent war with France. That same year (1529), at the age of 51, King Henry VIII appointed More the Lord Chancellor, the first layman in history to hold such a position, a position exclusively followed by laymen.
The rest of the story is well known. More did his best to retain both his fidelity to the Church and to the King, but eventually was tried and found guilty, in spite of his courageous testimony, and despite the lack of credible evidence. On the last day of the octave of Easter, Sunday April 12, 1534 More was summoned for an investigation to take place on the following day. This would be the last day that More could roam about England as a free man, since he was imprisoned immediately following the royal inquiry. After the royal summons, More went home, ‘said goodnight to his family, went to church early the next morning, made his confession, heard Mass, and went to Communion.’Footnote 34 He suffered immensely during his long imprisonment of 445 days, and after a sham trial More was executed by simple beheading.
What is often passed over was the heroic courage More showed at his trial, since the death he thought he was facing—as they read it out to him—was the same horrific procedure inflicted upon the Carthusians who broke their silence to speak the truth to the King. More's daughter Margaret was visiting him in his cell as the Carthusians were marched past on their way to their execution, and More would have been able to hear the gruesome torture and execution from within. We have a graphic description of their execution from four days later:
After being dragged to the gallows, they made the condemned men climb one by one onto a cart that was then pulled away from under their feet, leaving them dangling in the air. They then immediately cut the rope, put them in a place prepared for the purpose, and, while they were still standing, cut off their private parts, which were thrown into the fire. Then they cut open their stomachs and ripped out their entrails; finally, they were decapitated and their bodies quartered before their hearts were removed and their mouths and faces wiped with them.Footnote 35
This is what More expected to be his fate when he finally spoke out. King Henry commuted his sentence to simple beheading only on the very day More was escorted to the gallows.Footnote 36
The few scholars aware of pre-nineteenth century and pre-Enlightenment roots of modern biblical criticism, who recognize prior influences as in the Renaissance turn ad fontes, to the sources, often identify Erasmus and More as important figures leading to the Protestant Reformation itself, and to the rise of the historical critical method of biblical studies, particularly as exemplified by such early critics as Simon.Footnote 37 This view should be nuanced, especially given that both More and Erasmus saw Luther and the Reformation as dangerous and as leading to war.
But even aside from that more blatant rejection of the Reformation as problematic, one crucial difference in approach, as contrasted with that of the Protestant reformers, is that More's and Erasmus's reforming influence always placed an emphasis on the development of virtue. For More, virtue allows reason to flourish, and only when both virtue and reason flourish can there exist a modicum of peace and justice. In the words of Gerard Wegemer, ‘When, therefore, Luther emphasized the corruption of reason, denied the possibility of achieving virtue, rejected free will, and taught that his elect had a nonrational access to truth, More and Erasmus strongly opposed these revolutionary views as both untrue and destructive. These revolutionary dogmas, they were convinced, could only lead to war and bloodshed.’Footnote 38
Contrary to the opinion of some scholars, More persisted in his defense and belief in humanism, albeit a humanism firmly set within a Christian, and indeed, a Catholic milieu.Footnote 39 For More, as became especially clear in his writings against Protestants, there always remained the need for an authority to interpret Scripture. There could be only anarchy with the embrace of a solipsistic assumption like sola Scriptura.Footnote 40 As Eamon Duffy explains, in More's way of thinking:
The Bible can only be properly understood in the light of the Church's credo and its divinely inspired exegetical tradition, as embodied in the writings of ‘the olde holy fathers.’ The hermeneutic of suspicion, that systematic ‘dyffydens and mistrust’ which More thought characterized the exegesis of Lutherans like Tyndale, caused them to set Bible and Church over against each other.Footnote 41
This provides the necessary context for understanding More's thoughts on the role of such humanism, and especially philology and textual criticism, in theology and exegesis.
Through his friendship with Erasmus, and the latter's Greek edition of the NT, More felt compelled to enter the fray when his humanist compatriot was being attacked by fellow Catholics, especially religious, over what they saw as philology's and secular learning's threat to the Catholic faith. More's responses indicate that he intended no harm to the Catholic faith, but rather that such fideistic complaints, as those which were leveled at Erasmus, were themselves deleterious. More saw the pursuit of textual criticism and the attempt at recovering the original wording of the Bible to be an important task that should be carried out to the best of the scholars’ abilities. More regarded the tools of philology and textual scholarship, honed in the Renaissance, to be essential propaedeutics for theology. As with Erasmus, More was highly critical of much of what took place in the Schools, among scholastic theologians, but, as has been noted above, both were influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas and held the Angelic Doctor in very high esteem; Aquinas always escaped their liberally applied scathing criticisms.Footnote 42
More never shied away from putting the best of secular learning at the service of faith. Perhaps the most important of More's defenses of such secular learning are in his letters in defense of Erasmus and of the study of Greek at the university: Letter to Martin Dorp (1515);Footnote 43 Letter to the University of Oxford Footnote 44; Letter to Edward Lee (1519);Footnote 45 and Letter to a Monk (1519).Footnote 46 These letters can be much misunderstood, a possibility of which More seemed aware. More made clear throughout his Letter to a Monk, for example, that he was not attacking the religious state nor monasticism, but rather was calling his addressee to live out his state virtuously.Footnote 47 Indeed, as More stated, ‘the same soil produces both wholesome and noxious herbs.’Footnote 48
More did not change tenor when responding to the Protestant Reformers, or when he defended monasticism, the religious life, and traditional Catholic pious practices. Rather, as Peter Berglar points out, More ‘always defended whatever was in the greatest jeopardy.’Footnote 49 From 1515–1519, More thought that the value of secular learning for the faithful Christian was most in need of defense. By 1529 the climate had changed sufficiently that the religious state and monasticism itself was more in peril than philology, etc., and so More turned his apologetic to those battle fronts, defending the religious and monastic life to the hilt. Indeed, by 1540 not a single monastery, abbey, or the like, remained open in all of England. The crown had liquidated the monasteries, expelling and killing all of the religious who lived therein, their lands, their abbeys—after becoming state land, and thus giving birth to the phrase secularize in English idiom—passed into the hands of English nobles making them landed families.Footnote 50
Erasmus’ detractors were concerned for the future of the Church and the life of the faithful in light of the potential harm to which textual and philological studies like Erasmus’ could lead. The path trodden by Protestant reformers like Luther validates this as a legitimate concern, as More must have realized once he had to address Protestantism. But the path Luther chose was not inevitable. The politics of the time—particularly the battle over the decaying remains of the medieval political order and the attempt to achieve territorial sovereignty excluding (foreign) papal control—and the ways in which the Latin Averroist tradition, nominalism, and Machiavellianism took root in England and Germany, had much to do with the successful violent transformation in Protestant lands.Footnote 51
More (and Erasmus, for that matter) were not attempting to divorce philology completely from theology, unlike later scholars. More viewed philology and other humanistic learning as essential tools in service of the faith. Such learning developed virtue, and provided, developed, and honed skills which would help sacred learning. Berglar identifies one root of More's vitriol in his Letter to a Monk as ‘the wrath of a layman in the face of monastic pride grounded in the belief that the monk in principle was the better Christian, the once closer to God and more sure of his salvation.’Footnote 52 More's was not a simple angry reaction, however, but a fraterna monitio (CW15, 266) of sorts. Whereas More accused the monk of defaming Erasmus’ virtuous character under the guise of the praiseworthy practice of fraternal correction, More's response is in fact that which the monk claimed to have attempted: loving fraterna monitio. More argued that faith and reason must be united. Reason without faith is dead, but faith without reason is equally perilous.Footnote 53 In the end, for More, the Bible is ‘exceedingly difficult’ to interpret. As he wrote, ‘Not one of the ancients, indeed, dared to claim that he understood it, for they thought that God, in his unfathomable wisdom, deliberately hid its meaning far from the surface precisely in order to challenge the sharpest eye and to stimulate minds with the promise of buried and hard-to-reach treasure which their very assurance might otherwise render indifferent to riches set plainly in view.’Footnote 54 The textual, philological, and interpretive task then was regarded as a sacred work, a work of God.
More's theoretical comments on the relationship between faith and reason, Scripture and the Church's tradition and Magisterium, theology and philology, etc., were never divorced from the ultimate goal of virtue, sanctity, divinization, and union with God. This can be seen in the unified spiritual and material fabric of More's entire life, as Berglar makes clear:
Conscience did not allow More to wait idly for death and the hereafter, but spurred him on to prepare for it. That meant seeking and following Christ, which for him meant loving his neighbor in everyday life by conscientiously fulfilling his professional duties, goodness in family life, work that strives to achieve the physical, intellectual, and spiritual welfare of one's neighbor. And something more: living at close quarters with Jesus Christ in prayer, Holy Mass, the sacraments, and sacrifice. This unity of Christian life was ingrained in him—a cheerful dinner companion who was also a deep thinker, an intellectual polemicist and valued jurist who was a humble man of prayer and preferred mercy to strict justice, a generous and practical family man who yearned for the stillness of a cloister. This servant of the King served the King of Kings at Mass; beneath the trappings of office, this courtier wore a penitent's garment that caused sores; this successful literate man offset the favor of his sovereign and popularity with the public by fasting, going without sleep, and caring for the poor. For him, memento mori was never separate from memento vivere.Footnote 55
Although More's life exemplified the universal call to holiness that would later come from Lumen Gentium's fifth chapter at Vatican II, this was likely a concept More would have been unable to articulate. He lived the virtues in his ordinary family and work life to a heroic degree, but he was canonized for his heroic act of martyrdom. He always held religious life, particularly monastic life, and in a very special way, the Carthusians, in highest esteem. He viewed such religious life as an ideal he was unable to live, viewing his married life as an impediment, a necessary concession, on his path toward God.Footnote 56 And yet, one could argue that the sanctity he achieved in his ordinary life, lovingly embracing the little martyrdoms of each day, is what prepared him for courageously facing his execution. He lived a form of union with God, while deeply engaged in family, professional, and scholarly pursuits; immersed in the world, he was at the same time immersed in God. It is within this context that he placed his secular learning, which was always at the service of developing virtue. In this way, under the loving guidance of the Church, faith, and reason together were seen as able to elevate the soul to God.
3. Conclusion
Far too often, Catholic biblical studies in the academy proceeds along the lines of the work of Richard Simon, who in turn followed the earlier more skeptical work of La Peyrère, Hobbes, and Spinoza. The problem with such pursuits is not found in the admirable mastery of languages, philological and textual methodologies, engagement in rigorous and disciplined archaeological and other historical pursuits, but rather in the severing of the ties between exegesis and the magisterium, the science of criticism and the Church's tradition, philology and traditional Catholic biblical interpretation exemplified in patristic and medieval exegesis.
It should not be surprising that some historical scholars might consider the past events related to biblical interpretation in the seventeenth century and conclude that there was no other way to proceed other than the route marked out by La Peyrère, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon. To such scholars, the foundations of the historical critical method emerged solely from an attempt to embrace unadulterated reason and to apply a scientific method to a text that was a historical document as much as a canonical and ecclesiastical one. The conclusion of the historical narrative when presented in this particular way can only be emphatic support that accords hegemony to the approach begun by these individuals. My inclusion of More into this narrative, however, is a plea for a reconsideration of these foregone conclusions.
More's inextricable uniting of faith and reason in his defense of Christian humanism, added to Erasmus's extensive philological work in seeking to recover a more accurate and faithful understanding of the biblical text, indicates that there was another possibility for an interpretation of the Bible that would not pit reason against faith in the examination of the scriptural text. Here we have a scholarly Catholic in the sixteenth century who did not see a need to undermine the authority of the biblical text, or the magisterium, for that matter, in order to apply methods of reason, such as philology and history, to its interpretation. That this particular route, holding together faith and reason, was not shared by La Peyrère, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon may in fact be the best indication that their motives were primarily political, rather than strictly theological, well-intentioned hopes for a more rigorous interpretation.
For too long, it has been commonplace to accept the conclusions of these methods without ever considering the motivations behind the method which may affect the way they can be used. For this reason, Ratzinger implored Catholic exegetes in his provocative ‘Schriftsauslegung im Widerstreit’, critically to examine the philosophical underpinnings of their exegesis, philosophies which often remain unexamined and yet even more frequently predetermine the results of such exegesis, or at least severely limit the range of possible results often to those antithetical to the faith.Footnote 57 As Benedict XVI wrote, ‘The wanting of a hermeneutic of faith in relation to Scripture not only entails the concept of absence; in its place another heremeneutic necessarily comes in, a positivist hermeneutic which favors the secular, ultimately based on the conviction that the Divine does not intervene in human history….Such a position can only prove harmful to the life of the Church.’Footnote 58 In contrast to this, More provides an example of how Catholic exegetes might approach the study of Sacred Scripture. It is an approach demonstrated by More's scholarship, his life, and his death. This saintly witness reflects what John Paul II would articulate over 450 years later, namely that, ‘faith purifies reason. As a theological virtue, faith liberates reason from presumption.’Footnote 59
