Great riches are to be found in Medieval and Patristic exegesis, but the riches are often hard to extract and require not just a dogged determination with the texts themselves, but also the acquisition of new concepts and vocabulary to make any sense of them. A short introduction with a good overview of the relevant concepts is especially welcome, and with John Boyle’s Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer, we have just that. But perhaps more importantly, John Boyle’s Primer offers an introduction from a true master of St Thomas’ exposition of Scripture.

We might chalk the difficulties of reading Scripture with someone like St Thomas to our having such a different worldview from Medieval and Patristic exegetes. To be sure, there is certainly some truth to this as Boyle shows throughout the Primer, which is structured around the four causes. This is an approach so alien to us that it might seem completely incomprehensible. Perhaps part of our failing is the fact that our understanding of cause is so mechanical, where we have an understanding of causation reduced to efficient causation, where everything is collapsed into a robotic vision of cause and effect. It is useful to be reminded of the larger web of causation which was at the heart of Medieval philosophy and theology. Scripture results not from a mechanical efficient causation, but is nested within an intelligible creation which, through God’s revelation in Scripture, is shown to be created by God who is ordering all things to their good. But more richly, Scripture also reveals God’s governance of creation through providence for our salvation, and so Scripture initiates the reader into the wisdom of the highest causes of things, a Wisdom whose incarnate life it also narrates. But while Scripture reveals God, it also relies on the intelligibility of creation in order to reveal, for it utilises things in creation, both natural and artificial, their names, locations, and properties, to reveal God and His plan for salvation in Christ. It assumes the concrete world around us as the literal landscape on which spiritual senses can be grounded and built. Scripture stands for St Thomas, and it can for us if we approach it with his mind, in a much more embedded relationship to God, creation, and salvation that is ordered to our final end in God. By acquiring St Thomas’ vocabulary, we can perhaps be freed of the view of Scripture which sees it as a discrete object, free-floating in salvation history.

Riches are there, but even the most seasoned and expert reader of St Thomas’ scriptural commentaries has to admit that they can be hard to find. Interest in St Thomas’ scriptural commentaries is certainly growing, but it is not an easy world to enter. The experience of the first-time reader of St Thomas’ beautiful and dense Commentary on John is proof enough. Some of the most beautiful of St Thomas’ words can be found here: words that bring together the Philosopher (Aristotle), the Apostle (Paul), and other authorities (the Fathers) in order to clarify and expound the words of St John, the contemplative evangelist who offers a soaring, eagle’s eye view of the Lord’s Incarnate life. But these beautiful words are often tucked away in endless divisions of the text that, to a first-time reader and to any reader without an overview in mind of how the text has been divided, quickly begins to feel like wading through treacle. John Boyle’s Primer is an indispensable tool for any reader of St Thomas’ scriptural commentaries, not just the neophyte. Boyle outlines the concepts necessary to make use of the texts and so fruitfully enter into their worldview. He makes clear the ways that our approach to Scripture differs from St Thomas, and by extension other Medieval exegetes. One of the most bewildering aspects of Medieval commentaries is the divisio of the text that, to the untrained eye, seems completely arbitrary and certainly would not pass muster with a contemporary historical-critical perspective. Boyle’s explanation helpfully highlights the way that the division of the text, far from being arbitrary, is an almost artistic tool to get at the meaning of the text. Here meaning is not so much framed around our contemporary concern with authorial intention, but with the argument that the text tries to communicate.

Boyle’s Primer also deals with questions of authorship and touches briefly here on inspiration. Boyle’s approach follows along a line which tries to balance the divine and human authorship in a way that we could describe as Chalcedonian, seeking to preserve each sphere of activity from interference of the other whilst still seeing the work of authorship as a united whole. Here again, the work of providence does quite a lot of heavy lifting, for it is only with an eye to providence that we can see the finished text of the Scriptures received by the Church emerging from the twists and turns of the deliberate composition and redaction of editing, and the unintended consequences of scribal error. Boyle’s approach is helpful although a full account of inspiration is far beyond his aim in this short introduction.

John Boyle’s conclusion ends with a brief but important remark which remains a sticking point for contemporary Catholic engagement with Scripture. Boyle says that his exposition of St Thomas’ method of reading Scripture is not intended to close off the modern advances made through the historical-critical method. ‘I have no doubt,’ writes Boyle, ‘that there is much in modern scholarship that would simply delight St Thomas. At the same time, he would have a clear sense of what to do with it, of its place in a well-ordered whole’ (p. 138). A fair enough comment, and I suspect Boyle is correct that St Thomas would indeed have carved out a niche within his system; but can the same be said for us? Much has been achieved by historical-critical scholarship in Biblical studies, and there is a small, but flourishing, corner of Catholic theology which is using the work of biblical scholars to create a more nuanced and holistic vision of what the texts of the Scriptures are trying to communicate. This is an effort in part inspired by Joseph Ratzinger’s plea for what he called the third approach between a theology ignorant of the historical-critical method and a biblical studies devoid of supernatural content or belief—a study of the Scriptures reduced to archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics. But successful examples of this work are few and far between. Sometimes it seems that the historical-critical approach is too readily accepted or too easily dismissed. Biblical scholars equally seem unwilling to share the Scriptures with theologians, setting themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of the text’s meaning. Failings on both sides, but in the realm of theology, the failure is perhaps because of a lack of a system like that of St Thomas. Medieval exegesis, often labelled as naïve or ridiculous, might, if read with the right tools and with a certain intellectual humility on our part, turn out to offer a way forward from our current impasse and a new appreciation of the living word of God.