During the ten centuries following the last of these men this structure continued to rise steadily above the plain meanings of Scripture. The Christian world rejoiced in it, and the few great thinkers who dared bring the truth to bear upon it were rejected. It did indeed seem at one period in the early Church that a better system might be developed. The School of Antioch, especially as represented by Chrysostom, appeared likely to lead in this better way, but the dominant forces were too strong; the pa.s.sion for myth and marvel prevailed over the love of real knowledge, and the reasonings of Chrysostom and his compeers were neglected.(467)
(467) For the work of the School of Antioch, and especially of Chrysostom, see the eloquent tribute to it by Farrar, as above.
In the ninth century came another effort to present the claims of right reason. The first man prominent in this was St. Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, whom an eminent historian has well called the clearest head of his time. With the same insight which penetrated the fallacies and follies of image worship, belief in witchcraft persecution, the ordeal, and the judicial duel, he saw the futility of this vast fabric of interpretation, protested against the idea that the Divine Spirit extended its inspiration to the mere words of Scripture, and asked a question which has resounded through every generation since: "If you once begin such a system, who can measure the absurdity which will follow?"
During the same century another opponent of this dominant system appeared: John Scotus Erigena. He contended that "reason and authority come alike from the one source of Divine Wisdom"; that the fathers, great as their authority is, often contradict each other; and that, in last resort, reason must be called in to decide between them.
But the evolution of unreason continued: Agobard was unheeded, and Erigena placed under the ban by two councils--his work being condemned by a synod as a "Commentum Diaboli." Four centuries later Honorius III ordered it to be burned, as "teeming with the venom of hereditary depravity"; and finally, after eight centuries, Pope Gregory XIII placed it on the Index, where, with so many other works which have done good service to humanity, it remains to this day. Nor did Abelard, who, three centuries after Agobard and Erigena, made an attempt in some respects like theirs, have any better success: his fate at the hands of St.
Bernard and the Council of Sens the world knows by heart. Far more consonant with the spirit of the universal Church was the teaching in the twelfth century of the great Hugo of St. Victor, conveyed in these ominous words, "Learn first what is to be believed" (Disce primo quod credendum est), meaning thereby that one should first accept doctrines, and then find texts to confirm them.
These principles being dominant, the accretions to the enormous fabric of interpretation went steadily on. Typical is the fact that the Venerable Bede contributed to it the doctrine that, in the text mentioning Elkanah and his two wives, Elkanah means Christ and the two wives the Synagogue and the Church. Even such men as Alfred the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas were added to the forces at work in building above the sacred books this prodigious structure of sophistry.
Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the tenacity of the old system of interpretation than the sermons of Savonarola. During the last decade of the fifteenth century, just at the close of the medieval period, he was engaged in a life-and-death struggle at Florence. No man ever preached more powerfully the gospel of righteousness; none ever laid more stress on conduct; even Luther was not more zealous for reform or more careless of tradition; and yet we find the great Florentine apostle and martyr absolutely tied fast to the old system of allegorical interpretation.
The autograph notes of his sermons, still preserved in his cell at San Marco, show this abundantly. Thus we find him attaching to the creation of gra.s.ses and plants on the third day an allegorical connection with the "mult.i.tude of the elect" and with the "sound doctrines of the Church," and to the creation of land animals on the sixth day a similar relation to "the Jewish people" and to "Christians given up to things earthly."(468)
(468) For Agobard, see the Liber adversus Fredigisum, cap. xii; also Reuter"s Relig. Aufklarung im Mittelalter, vol. i, p. 24; also Poole, Ill.u.s.trations of the History of Medieval Thought, London, 1884, pp. 38 et seq. For Erigena, see his De Divisione Naturae, lib. iv, cap. v; also i, cap. lxvi-lxxi; and for general account, see Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, New York, 1871, vol. i, pp. 358 et seq.; and for the treatment of his work by the Church, see the edition of the Index under Leo XIII, 1881. For Abelard, see the Sic et Non, Prologue, Migne, vol.
iii, pp. 371-377. For Hugo of St. Victor, see Erudit. Didask., lib. vii, vi, 4, in Migne, clxxvi. For Savonarola"s interpretations, see various references to his preaching in Villari"s life of Savonarola, English translation, London, 1890, and especially the exceedingly interesting table in the appendix to vol. i, chap. vii.
The revival of learning in the fifteenth century seemed likely to undermine this older structure.
Then it was that Lorenzo Valla brought to bear on biblical research, for the first time, the spirit of modern criticism. By truly scientific methods he proved the famous "Letter of Christ to Abgarus" a forgery; the "Donation of Constantine," one of the great foundations of the ecclesiastical power in temporal things, a fraud; and the "Apostles"
Creed" a creation which post-dated the apostles by several centuries.
Of even more permanent influence was his work upon the New Testament, in which he initiated the modern method of comparing ma.n.u.scripts to find what the sacred text really is. At an earlier or later period he would doubtless have paid for his temerity with his life; fortunately, just at that time the ruling pontiff and his Contemporaries cared much for literature and little for orthodoxy, and from their palaces he could bid defiance to the Inquisition.
While Valla thus initiated biblical criticism south of the Alps, a much greater man began a more fruitful work in northern Europe. Erasmus, with his edition of the New Testament, stands at the source of that great stream of modern research and thought which is doing so much to undermine and dissolve away the vast fabric of patristic and scholastic interpretation.
Yet his efforts to purify the scriptural text seemed at first to encounter insurmountable difficulties, and one of these may stimulate reflection. He had found, what some others had found before him, that the famous verse in the fifth chapter of the First Epistle General of St. John, regarding the "three witnesses," was an interpolation. Careful research through all the really important early ma.n.u.scripts showed that it appeared in none of them. Even after the Bible had been corrected, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicholas, cardinal and librarian of the Roman Church, "in accordance with the orthodox faith," the pa.s.sage was still wanting in the more authoritative Latin ma.n.u.scripts. There was not the slightest tenable ground for believing in the authenticity of the text; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated that, after a universal silence of the orthodox fathers of the Church, of the ancient versions of the Scriptures, and of all really important ma.n.u.scripts, the verse first appeared in a Confession of Faith drawn up by an obscure zealot toward the end of the fifth century. In a very mild exercise, then, of critical judgment, Erasmus omitted this text from the first two editions of his Greek Testament as evidently spurious. A storm arose at once. In England, Lee, afterward Archbishop of York; in Spain, Stunica, one of the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot; and in France, Bude, Syndic of the Sorbonne, together with a vast army of monks in England and on the Continent, attacked him ferociously. He was condemned by the University of Paris, and various propositions of his were declared to be heretical and impious. Fortunately, the worst persecutors could not reach him; otherwise they might have treated him as they treated his disciple, Berquin, whom in 1529 they burned at Paris.
The fate of this spurious text throws light into the workings of human nature in its relations to sacred literature. Although Luther omitted it from his translation of the New Testament, and kept it out of every copy published during his lifetime, and although at a later period the most eminent Christian scholars showed that it had no right to a place in the Bible, it was, after Luther"s death, replaced in the German translation, and has been incorporated into all important editions of it, save one, since the beginning of the seventeenth century. So essential was it found in maintaining the dominant theology that, despite the fact that Sir Isaac Newton, Richard Porson, the nineteenth-century revisers, and all other eminent authorities have rejected it, the Anglican Church still retains it in its Lectionary, and the Scotch Church continues to use it in the Westminster Catechism, as a main support of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Nor were other new truths presented by Erasmus better received. His statement that "some of the epistles ascribed to St. Paul are certainly not his," which is to-day universally acknowledged as a truism, also aroused a storm. For generations, then, his work seemed vain.
On the coming in of the Reformation the great structure of belief in the literal and historical correctness of every statement in the Scriptures, in the profound allegorical meanings of the simplest texts, and even in the divine origin of the vowel punctuation, towered more loftily and grew more rapidly than ever before. The Reformers, having cast off the authority of the Pope and of the universal Church, fell back all the more upon the infallibility of the sacred books. The att.i.tude of Luther toward this great subject was characteristic. As a rule, he adhered tenaciously to the literal interpretation of the Scriptures; his argument against Copernicus is a fair example of his reasoning in this respect; but, with the strong good sense which characterized him, he from time to time broke away from the received belief. Thus, he took the liberty of understanding certain pa.s.sages in the Old Testament in a different sense from that given them by the New Testament, and declared St. Paul"s allegorical use of the story of Sarah and Hagar "too unsound to stand the test." He also emphatically denied that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by St. Paul, and he did this in the exercise of a critical judgment upon internal evidence. His utterance as to the Epistle of St. James became famous. He announced to the Church: "I do not esteem this an apostolic, epistle; I will not have it in my Bible among the canonical books," and he summed up his opinion in his well-known allusion to it as "an epistle of straw."
Emboldened by him, the gentle spirit of Melanchthon, while usually taking the Bible very literally, at times revolted; but this was not due to any want of loyalty to the old method of interpretation: whenever the wildest and most absurd system of exegesis seemed necessary to support any part of the reformed doctrine, Luther and Melanchthon unflinchingly developed it. Both of them held firmly to the old dictum of Hugo of St.
Victor, which, as we have seen, was virtually that one must first accept the doctrine, and then find scriptural warrant for it. Very striking examples of this were afforded in the interpretation by Luther and Melanchthon of certain alleged marvels of their time, and one out of several of these may be taken as typical of their methods.
In 1523 Luther and Melanchthon jointly published a work under the t.i.tle Der Papstesel--interpreting the significance of a strange, a.s.s-like monster which, according to a popular story, had been found floating in the Tiber some time before. This book was ill.u.s.trated by startling pictures, and both text and pictures were devoted to proving that this monster was "a sign from G.o.d," indicating the doom of the papacy. This treatise by the two great founders of German Protestantism pointed out that the a.s.s"s head signified the Pope himself; "for," said they, "as well as an a.s.s"s head is suited to a human body, so well is the Pope suited to be head over the Church." This argument was clinched by a reference to Exodus. The right hand of the monster, said to be like an elephant"s foot, they made to signify the spiritual rule of the Pope, since "with it he tramples upon all the weak": this they proved from the book of Daniel and the Second Epistle to Timothy. The monster"s left hand, which was like the hand of a man, they declared to mean the Pope"s secular rule, and they found pa.s.sages to support this view in Daniel and St. Luke. The right foot, which was like the foot of an ox, they declared to typify the servants of the spiritual power; and proved this by a citation from St. Matthew. The left foot, like a griffin"s claw, they made to typify the servants of the temporal power of the Pope, and the highly developed b.r.e.a.s.t.s and various other members, cardinals, bishops, priests, and monks, "whose life is eating, drinking, and unchast.i.ty": to prove this they cited pa.s.sages from Second Timothy and Philippians. The alleged fish-scales on the arms, legs, and neck of the monster they made to typify secular princes and lords; "since," as they said, "in St. Matthew and Job the sea typifies the world, and fishes men." The old man"s head at the base of the monster"s spine they interpreted to mean "the abolition and end of the papacy," and proved this from Hebrews and Daniel. The dragon which opens his mouth in the rear and vomits fire, "refers to the terrible, virulent bulls and books which the Pope and his minions are now vomiting forth into the world."
The two great Reformers then went on to insist that, since this monster was found at Rome, it could refer to no person but the Pope; "for,"
they said, "G.o.d always sends his signs in the places where their meaning applies." Finally, they a.s.sured the world that the monster in general clearly signified that the papacy was then near its end. To this development of interpretation Luther and Melanchthon especially devoted themselves; the latter by revising this exposition of the prodigy, and the former by making additions to a new edition. Such was the success of this kind of interpretation that Luther, hearing that a monstrous calf had been found at Freiburg, published a treatise upon it--showing, by citations from the books of Exodus, Kings, the Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel, and the Gospel of St. John, that this new monster was the especial work of the devil, but full of meaning in regard to the questions at issue between the Reformers and the older Church.
The other main branch of the Reformed Church appeared for a time to establish a better system. Calvin"s strong logic seemed at one period likely to tear his adherents away from the older method; but the evolution of scholasticism continued, and the influence of the German reformers prevailed. At every theological centre came an amazing development of interpretation.
Eminent Lutheran divines in the seventeenth century, like Gerhard, Calovius, Coccerus, and mult.i.tudes of others, wrote scores of quartos to further this system, and the other branch of the Protestant Church emulated their example. The pregnant dictum of St. Augustine--"Greater is the authority of Scripture than all human capacity"--was steadily insisted upon, and, toward the close of the seventeenth century, Voetius, the renowned professor at Utrecht, declared, "Not a word is contained in the Holy Scriptures which is not in the strictest sense inspired, the very punctuation not excepted"; and this declaration was echoed back from mult.i.tudes of pulpits, theological chairs, synods, and councils. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to find what the "authority of Scripture" really was. To the greater number of Protestant ecclesiastics it meant the authority of any meaning in the text which they had the wit to invent and the power to enforce.
To increase this vast confusion, came, in the older branch of the Church, the idea of the divine inspiration of the Latin translation of the Bible ascribed to St. Jerome--the Vulgate. It was insisted by leading Catholic authorities that this was as completely a product of divine inspiration as was the Hebrew original. Strong men arose to insist even that, where the Hebrew and the Latin differed, the Hebrew should be altered to fit Jerome"s mistranslation, as the latter, having been made under the new dispensation, must be better than that made under the old. Even so great a man as Cardinal Bellarmine exerted himself in vain against this new tide of unreason.(469)
(469) For Valla, see various sources already named; and for an especially interesting account, Symond"s Renaissance in Italy, the Revival of Learning, pp. 260-269; and for the opinion of the best contemporary judge, see Erasmus, Opera, Leyden, 1703, tom. iii, p. 98.
For Erasmus and his opponents, see Life of Erasmus, by Butler, London, 1825, pp. 179-182; but especially, for the general subject, Bishop Creighton"s History of the Papacy during the Reformation. For the attack by Bude and the Sorbonne and the burning of Berquin, see Drummond, Life and character of Erasmus, vol. ii, pp. 220-223; also pp. 230-239. As to the text of the Three Witnesses, see Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. x.x.xvi, notes 116-118; also Dean Milman"s note thereupon. For a full and learned statement of the evidence against the verse, see Porson"s Letters to Travis, London, 1790, in which an elaborate discussion of all the MSS. is given. See also Jowett in Essays and Reviews, p. 307. For a very full and impartial history of the long controversy over this pa.s.sage, see Charles Butler"s Horae Biblicae, reprinted in Jared Sparks"s Theological Essays and Tracts, vol. ii. For Luther"s ideas of interpretation, see his Sammtliche Schriften, Walch edition, vol. i, p. 1199, vol. ii, p. 1758, vol. viii, p. 2140; for some of his more free views, vol. xiv, p. 472, vol. vi, p. 121, vol. xi, p.
1448, vol. xii, p. 830; also Tholuck, Doctrine of Inspiration, Boston, 1867, citing the Colloquia, Frankfort, 1571, vol. ii, p. 102; also the Vorreden zu der deutschen Bibelubersetzung, in Walch"s edition, as above, vol. xiv, especially pp. 94, 98, and 146-150. As to Melanchthon, see especially his Loci Communes, 1521; and as to the enormous growth of commentaries in the generations immediately following, see Charles Beard, Hibbert Lectures for 1883, on the Reformation, especially the admirable chapter on Protestant Scholasticism; also Archdeacon Farrar, history of Interpretation. For the Papstesel, etc., see Luther"s Sammtliche Schriften, edit. Walch, vol. xiv, pp. 2403 et seq.; also Melanchthon"s Opera, edit. Bretschneider, vol. xx, pp. 665 et seq.
In the White Library of Cornell University will be found an original edition of the book, with engravings of the monster. For the Monchkalb, see Luther"s works as above, vol. xix, pp. 2416 et seq. For the spirit of Calvin in interpretation, see Farrar, ans especially H. P. Smith, D.
D., Inspiration and Inerrancy, chap. iv, and the very brilliant essay forming chap. iii of the same work, by L. J. Evans, pp. 66 and 67, note. For the att.i.tude of the older Church toward the Vulgate, see Pallavicini, Histoire du Concile de Trente, Montrouge, 1844, tome i, pp 19,20; but especially Symonds, The Catholic Reaction, vol. i, pp. 226 et seq. As to a demand for the revision of the Hebrew Bible to correct its differences from the Vulgate, see Emanuel Deutsch"s Literary Remains, New York, 1874, p. 9. For the work and spirit of Calovius and other commentators immediately following the Reformation, see Farrar, as above; also Beard, Schaff, and Hertzog, Geschichte des alten Testaments in der christlichen Kirche, pp. 527 et seq. As to extreme views of Voetius and others, see Tholuck, as above. For the Formula Concensus Helvetica, which in 1675 affirmed the inspiration of the vowel points, see Schaff, Creeds.
Nor was a fanatical adhesion to the mere letter of the sacred text confined to western Europe. About the middle of the seventeenth century, in the reign of Alexis, father of Peter the Great, Nikon, Patriarch of the Russian Greek Church, attempted to correct the Slavonic Scriptures and service-books. They were full of interpolations due to ignorance, carelessness, or zeal, and in order to remedy this state of the texts Nikon procured a number of the best Greek and Slavonic ma.n.u.scripts, set the leading and most devout scholars he could find at work upon them, and caused Russian Church councils in 1655 and 1666 to promulgate the books thus corrected.
But the same feelings which have wrought so strongly against our nineteenth-century revision of the Bible acted even more forcibly against that revision in the seventeenth century. Straightway great ma.s.ses of the people, led by monks and parish priests, rose in revolt.
The fact that the revisers had written in the New Testament the name of Jesus correctly, instead of following the old wrong orthography, aroused the wildest fanaticism. The monks of the great convent of Solovetsk, when the new books were sent them, cried in terror: "Woe, woe! what have you done with the Son of G.o.d?" They then shut their gates, defying patriarch, council, and Czar, until, after a struggle lasting seven years, their monastery was besieged and taken by an imperial army. Hence arose the great sect of the "Old Believers," lasting to this day, and fanatically devoted to the corrupt readings of the old text.(470)
(470) The present writer, visiting Moscow in the spring of 1894, was presented by Count Leo Tolstoi to one of the most eminent and influential members of the sect of "Old Believers," which dates from the reform of Nikon. Nothing could exceed the fervor with which this venerable man, standing in the chapel of his superb villa, expatiated on the horrors of making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two. His argument was that the TWO fingers, as used by the "Old Believers," typify the divine and human nature of our Lord, and hence that the use of them is strictly correct; whereas signing with THREE fingers, representing the blessed Trinity, is "virtually to crucify all three persons of the G.o.dhead afresh." Not less cogent were his arguments regarding the immense value of the old text of Scripture as compared with the new. For the revolt against Nikon and his reforms, see Rambaud, History of Russia, vol. i, pp. 414-416; also Wallace, Russia, vol. ii, pp. 307-309; also Leroy-Beaulieu, L"Empire des Tsars, vol. iii, livre iii.
Strange to say, on the development of Scripture interpretation, largely in accordance with the old methods, wrought, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, Sir Isaac Newton.
It is hard to believe that from the mind which produced the Principia, and which broke through the many time-honoured beliefs regarding the dates and formation of scriptural books, could have come his discussions regarding the prophecies; still, at various points even in this work, his power appears. From internal evidence he not only discarded the text of the Three Witnesses, but he decided that the Pentateuch must have been made up from several books; that Genesis was not written until the reign of Saul; that the books of Kings and Chronicles were probably collected by Ezra; and, in a curious antic.i.p.ation of modern criticism, that the book of Psalms and the prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel were each written by various authors at various dates. But the old belief in prophecy as prediction was too strong for him, and we find him applying his great powers to the relation of the details given by the prophets and in the Apocalypse to the history of mankind since unrolled, and tracing from every statement in prophetic literature its exact fulfilment even in the most minute particulars.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century the structure of scriptural interpretation had become enormous. It seemed destined to hide forever the real character of our sacred literature and to obscure the great light which Christianity had brought into the world. The Church, Eastern and Western, Catholic and Protestant, was content to sit in its shadow, and the great divines of all branches of the Church reared every sort of fantastic b.u.t.tress to strengthen or adorn it. It seemed to be founded for eternity; and yet, at this very time when it appeared the strongest, a current of thought was rapidly dissolving away its foundations, and preparing that wreck and ruin of the whole fabric which is now, at the close of the nineteenth century, going on so rapidly.
The account of the movement thus begun is next to be given.(471)
(471) For Newton"s boldness in textual criticism, compared with his credulity as to the literal fulfilment of prophecy, see his Observations upon the Prophesies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, in his works, edited by Horsley, London, 1785, vol. v, pp. 297-491.
II. BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION.
At the base of the vast structure of the older scriptural interpretation were certain ideas regarding the first five books of the Old Testament.
It was taken for granted that they had been dictated by the Almighty to Moses about fifteen hundred years before our era; that some parts of them, indeed, had been written by the corporeal finger of Jehovah, and that all parts gave not merely his thoughts but his exact phraseology.
It was also held, virtually by the universal Church, that while every narrative or statement in these books is a precise statement of historical or scientific fact, yet that the entire text contains vast hidden meanings. Such was the rule: the exceptions made by a few interpreters here and there only confirmed it. Even the indifference of St. Jerome to the doctrine of Mosaic authorship did not prevent its ripening into a dogma.
The book of Genesis was universally held to be an account, not only divinely comprehensive but miraculously exact, of the creation and of the beginnings of life on the earth; an account to which all discoveries in every branch of science must, under pains and penalties, be made to conform. In English-speaking lands this has lasted until our own time: the most eminent of recent English biologists has told us how in every path of natural science he has, at some stage in his career, come across a barrier labelled "No thoroughfare Moses."
A favourite subject of theological eloquence was the perfection of the Pentateuch, and especially of Genesis, not only as a record of the past, but as a revelation of the future.
The culmination of this view in the Protestant Church was the Pansophia Mosaica of Pfeiffer, a Lutheran general superintendent, or bishop, in northern Germany, near the beginning of the seventeenth century. He declared that the text of Genesis "must be received strictly"; that "it contains all knowledge, human and divine"; that "twenty-eight articles of the Augsburg Confession are to be found in it"; that "it is an a.r.s.enal of arguments against all sects and sorts of atheists, pagans, Jews, Turks, Tartars, papists, Calvinists, Socinians, and Baptists"; "the source of all sciences and arts, including law, medicine, philosophy, and rhetoric"; "the source and essence of all histories and of all professions, trades, and works"; "an exhibition of all virtues and vices"; "the origin of all consolation."
This utterance resounded through Germany from pulpit to pulpit, growing in strength and volume, until a century later it was echoed back by Huet, the eminent bishop and commentator of France. He cited a hundred authors, sacred and profane, to prove that Moses wrote the Pentateuch; and not only this, but that from the Jewish lawgiver came the heathen theology--that Moses was, in fact, nearly the whole pagan pantheon rolled into one, and really the being worshipped under such names as Bacchus, Adonis, and Apollo.(472)
(472) For the pa.s.sage from Huxley regarding Mosaic barriers to modern thought, see his Essays, recently published. For Pfeiffer, see Zoeckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. i, pp. 688, 689. For St. Jerome"s indifference as to the Mosaic authorship, see the first of the excellent Sketches of the Pentateuch Criticism, by the Rev. S. J. Curtiss, in the Bibliotheca Sacra for January, 1884. For Huet, see also Curtiss, ibid.