Aquinas for Everybody, Part I Introducing His Literal Exposition on Isaiah

The above photograph is the very handwriting of St Thomas Aquinas, his Literal Exposition on Isaiah to be exact.  If you click on it for a closer view, you will see just how indecipherable his penmanship is--if we can even call it that!  Most of his writings were either dictated to secretaries or reported as lecture notes by his students.

As I explained elsewhere, the study of the Bible in the Middle Ages was a much weightier affair than it is today; in fact, St Thomas all but uses the terms 'Scripture' and 'doctrine' as though they were synonyms (S.th. 1a, q. 1, art. 7 & art. 8).  In fact, his contemporary, St Bonaventure, goes so far as to begin his theological handbook by speaking of "Scripture, which is to say theology" (Breviloquium, I, 1).  Fr Yves Congar OP has gone so far as to say that Catholic theology can, in fact, make use of the Protestant battle-cry of "the Bible only!" but in a qualified sense:  "We can admit sola Scriptura in the sense of a material sufficiency of canonical Scripture. This means that Scripture contains, in one way or another, all truths necessary for salvation."  Ever since the Council of Trent, there has been a knee-jerk reaction to the question of authority in doctrine by speaking of "Bible" and "Tradition."  While that is true, it would have sounded strange to St Thomas' ears, or to any mediaeval theologian for that matter.  Part of why it would have sounded strange to them would be because they would likely have replied, "When are we not doing Scripture?"  Indeed, as any historian of the Middle Ages will tell you, mediaeval culture was, by necessity, a Biblical culture.  Yes, it is fact difficult for post-Henry VIII Anglophones to come to grips with, but Beryl Smalley has definitively settled that for us in her groundbreadking The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (South Bend, University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).

St Thomas spent his early years in what we might today call a boarding school, except for him, he wore the habit of a Benedictine monk (he was an oblate), shared in their liturgical and fraternal life, and studied at their school attached to the great abbey of Monte Cassino.  The bulk of the time was taken up in consuming the Bible in large quantities:  At the celebration of the Divine Office, at Mass, during meals when it was read (along with other texts), and in private reading during lectio divina, the hallmark of Benedictine spirituality.  The mediaevals read Scripture in a somewhat obtuse way compared to our own age, with layers and levels of meaning:  Beyond the literal, to the spiritual sense.

When St Thomas became a Dominican friar in April of 1244, his method of reading Scripture changed considerably.  During the years of 1239-1244, he was a student at the University of Naples studying the liberal arts--principally grammar, logic, and rhetoric.  Centuries prior, both St Augustine and St Cassiodorus defended the study of the "secular" liberal arts as a preparation for Bible reading; Charlemagne later made it standard curriculum in the cathedral and monastic schools.  Since St Thomas was a Friar Preacher, it was important for him (and his brothers) to have a firm grip on the word of God in such a way that when it was presented to the heretics, say, or even to Catholic believers, it would be quickly grasped and understood, and that meant focusing on the literal sense.  It is easy to quarrel over the interpretation of symbols and the like, but when we read the Sacred Text as text, we paint ourselves into a corner with the plain meaning of what's written.  And the tool for that was, principally, grammar.

In fact, St Thomas begins his great Summa theologiae by speaking of the literal sense as the foundation of "sacred doctrine" (the word "theology" was only beginning to gain the sense it has today).  And that is why the title of his commentary on the prophet Isaiah is called Literal Exposition on Isaiah--because he focuses on the literary sense of what this "Fifth Evangelist" (as St Jerome called Isaiah) wrote.  When we say "literary," however, we don't mean literalistic, as though God wore a long wedding-dress (Is 6:1) or has a cloud for an automobile (Is 19:1).  In fact, the "literal sense" has three levels of meaning: 

These three--history, etiology, analogy--are grouped under the literal sense.  For it is called history, as Augustine expounds (Epis. 48), whenever anything is simply related; it is called etiology when its cause is assigned, as when Our Lord gave the reason why Moses allowed the putting away of wives--namely, on account of the hardness of men's hearts; it is called analogy whenever the truth of one text of Scripture is shown not to contradict the truth of another (S.th., 1a, q. 10, art. 1, ad 2).

That being said, St Thomas employed the full gambit of the literal sense in his Literal Exposition on Isaiah.

We are looking at the years 1251 as the earliest possible start of this commentary, and 1253 as the latest possible completion; moreover, it would have been a two-year project sometime within these dates, during which Thomas gave a brief and rapid 'exposition' on the text of Isaiah as part of his training to become a theologian--except the proper title was Magister in Sacra Pagina, "Master of the Sacred Page."  After finishing his B.A. in the liberal arts (hence "Bachelor of Arts"--baccalaureus artium), his training in sacred doctrine began at the University of Cologne under St Albert the Great with two additional Bachelors' degree:  A Bachelor of the Bible (baccalaureus Biblicus), then a Bachelor of the Sentences (baccalaureus Sententiarum).  Each required something like a Senior's Thesis, except as a Biblical Bachelor, they--including St Thomas--had to lecture on a book of the Bible and give a rapid commentary on it.  This is what St Thomas' Literal Exposition on Isaiah was all about.

It appears as though he began his commentary on Isaiah in Cologne and finished it in Paris, though some scholars think it was done entirely in Paris.

As I mentioned earlier, St Jerome considered Isaiah, though it is an Old Testament book, "the Fifth Gospel"; it is the most oft-quoted text in the New Testament.  Having sixty-six books, commenting on Isaiah was no small feat for a twentysomething!  But he already had long years of ferment to prepare him for such a task--his monastic experience at Monte Cassino, his study of of the liberal arts as well as Aristotle at Naples, and his tutelage under the brilliant polymath Albert the Great.

And it is a marvel to read.

Renewing the City of GodPart I: Who's In Charge?

Canada, where I live, is a constitutional monarchy; while the Prime Minister is the head of government, Queen Elizabeth II remains the head of state.  There are plenty of people who don't like that, but wishful thinking otherwise does not erase the fact that our government consists of the Queen-in-Council, Queen-in-Parliament, and Queen-on-the-Bench serving as the executive, parliamentary, and judicial powers, respectively.  The proper title for the opposition party in the Parliament is, in fact, "Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition."  And her likeness on our coins and bills are no mere ornaments.

Though Her Majesty has very little say on what goes on (and very much, in fact, goes on against her wishes) does not diminish one bit the fact that she was and is the Head of State.

The rank and file in the Body of Christ, I think, often find themselves in a position similar to those Canadian "republicans" (or worse) who wish to replace our constitutional monarchy with something else.  This wishful thinking, more to the point, arises from an ignorance about one very particular thing:  The Lordship of Jesus.

As the hymn All Saints of Wales has it,

Lord, Who in Thy perfect wisdom / times and seasons dost arrange, / Working out Thy changeless purpose / in a world of ceaseless change!

exemplifies well God's purpose in allowing the Israelites to have a king to govern them "like all the nations" (1 Sam 8:5; cf. vv. 1-22).  Though they had, in fact, rejected God as their king, Providence permitted it nonetheless, because the last Scion would prove to be a surprise.

First Saul, who was then rejected; David, Solomon, Rehoboam, until all that was left was the "stump of Jesse" (Is 11:1; cf 10:32-34) after the Exile to Babylon in 582 B.C.  Still, the prophecy held promise:

The Lord swore an oath to David a sure oath / from which he will not turn back:  / "One of the sons of your body / I will set on your throne" (Ps 132:11).

We know how the story ends:  When the archangel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, he said:

"He will be great, and will be called Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to Him the throne of His father David, and He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of His Kingdom there will be no end' (Lk 1:32-33).

What was the element of surprise?  Simply, that the God who was rejected as king over Israel became king once again in the God-Man, Jesus Christ; the kingship of God and the princedom of David's scion converged in one Person, the Emmanuel.  In dogmatic theology, we call this the Hypostatic Union.

But the kingship of Jesus isn't just Christmasy; it is also Easterly.  St John's gospel uses word-play to highlight Jesus' kingship by using the rhetorical device of irony--the mocking purple robe, crown of thorns, and reed, highlighting, in fact, the royalty, crown, and authority of Jesus.  And the Cross was His throne.

Yet what's often overlooked is the title of Lord.  St Paul often began his epistles by referring to "the Lord Jesus Christ..."  But "Lord" is neither honorific nor ornamental; it is thickly theological.

In the very first sermon ever preached by the Church, St Peter said, "Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified" (Acts 2:36).  Moments ago, he quoted Psalm 110, "The LORD said unto my Lord, 'Sit thou at my right hand...'" (110:1), a reference to the Father's declarative utterance to Jesus at His Ascension, where He "sat down at the right hand of God" (Mk 16:19).

In a later sermon, St Peter likewise said--

"You know the Word which he sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace by Jesus Christ--He is Lord of all--the Word which was proclaimed..." (Acts 10:34).

In his magnificent epistle to the Holy Roman Church, St Paul wrote:

None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself.  If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.  For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. 

In  other words, nothing, but nothing escapes the Lordship of Jesus--either in life or in death.  More to the point, the Apostle to the Nations said, the very Paschal Mystery of Jesus' death and resurrection had this end in purpose:  "that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living."

In the Greek language, κύριος (kyrios), "Lord,"--Dominus in Latin--refers to someone who "exercises absolute ownership rights" (HELPS Word-Studies, #2692).  Thus "Lord Jesus Christ" is neither honorific nor ornamental, far from it; it refers to the absolute authority of Jesus.  Hence,

Therefore God has highly exalted Him / and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, / that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow / in heaven or on earth or under the earth, / and every tongue confess that JESUS CHRIST IS LORD, / to the glory of God the Father" (Phil 2:9-11).

I believe that many people in the Church have contributed to her faltering missionary outreach precisely because the the sovereignty and reign of Jesus has been compartmentalized and put away because the topic of Christ's sovereignty and reign is considered too impolitic for our supposedly enlightened age, not unlike how many Canadians speak little about our Queen.  (How often do we even pray for Her Majesty--as we pray for government leaders--in the General Intercessions at Mass?)

What is the result of muting our proclamation of Jesus' Lordship?  Three things, at least.

First, it unravels the Gospel tapestry which has, in its very warp and weave, the Lordship of Jesus who, as the descendent of David (Mt 1:1; Jn 7:42) , is the heir to his throne (Mt 22:43-45) and, in the mystery of the Ascension, took His seat at the Father's right hand, and from there to rule.

Second, it fails to tell the truth about Creation, which is really ruled by Christ.  It is a lie by omission to keep quiet about the reality of Jesus' Lordship.  In Apocalypse 5, we see the image of the Lamb "with seven horns"--a Jewish apocalyptic symbol of fullness of authority, who alone is "worthy to open the scroll" of human history which He rules.

Third, it is mutinous on the part of Christians to speak little, if at all, about who Our Lord is, thus lulling us into thinking that we, or "our best selves" is our master.  As St Paul said, "You are not your own!" (1 Cor 6:19).

A few years ago, on the weekend of the Solemnity of Christ the King, an Australian cleric expressed his discomfort with the theme of Christ's kingship and even suggested that the feast be done away with.  In so doing, he betrayed even a basic ignorance of a fundamental, profound, Biblical-theological truth and unwittingly espoused an alternative gospel.  In so doing, he was dismantling the City of God and advanced the antithetical City of Man.  

Wishfully thinking away will not erase the Lordship of Jesus, so it's best to get with the programme.

As we await the fullness of the Kingdom, the Lord Jesus has tasked us with building the City of God, a task which has no escape clause if we claim to be His disciples.  But if we build this City apart from the Lordship of Jesus, we risk a scenario of "Too many chiefs, not enough Indians."  By remembering Who is in charge, and to Whom we owe our personal allegiance, the Church's apostolic life of building the City of God can be renewed. 

Ecclesiastical ArchitectureAnd Lay Contemplation

The "Sacred Monster of Thomism," Fr Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP (who, incidentally, was Karol Józef Wojtyła's--the future Pope John Paul II--doctoral supervisor at the Angelicum University in Rome), more than anything, ought to be remembered for this basic thesis, namely, that the contemplative life is the normal life of grace for every Christian.

Fr Garrigou-Lagrange is no innovator, nor is this thesis an innovation.  He is, rather, recovering something that had been lost since the seventeenth century when certain Jesuit spiritual directors began cutting off the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit from the 'life of virtue.'  Since the Seven Gifts are necessary for salvation, and since the gifts of Wisdom and Understanding are given for the perfection of the contemplative life, it follows that every Christian--both clergy and laity--are called to some measure of contemplation.

Last summer, just before the grueling Pentecost Pilgrimage from St-Suplice in Paris to Chartres Cathedral, my small troop of peregrinators spent almost a week at Vézelay Abbey, a ninth-century Romanesque-turned-Gothic church in the Burgundy region of France.  Its claim to fame is mainly threefold, the famous Great Tympanum above the main entrance (in the narthex rather than on the façade), the addition of a Gothic choir and apse to a Romanesque nave, and, most notably, the ninety capital sculptures in the side aisles and nave columns.

Two things are especially striking about these capital sculptures:  Though very, very creative in their depictions, the carved Biblical scenes contain nearly the whole gambit of salvation history--except the Gospel narratives.  But not only are there Biblical scenes, there are also scenes from Greco-Roman mythology co-opted by Christians in attempt to highlight the life of virtue that the morals of these stories are intended to show.

At this stage in the Church's history, the purpose of sacred art was more didactic than devotional.  There are no places to light candles near these capital sculptures.  As Prof Dr Fans van Liere reminds us, the "Bible of the poor" was not so much intended to depict the Biblical narrative as to remind the faithful that what was preached from the ambo can be reflected upon, savoured, and digested by a careful scrutiny of sacred art (cf "The Bible of the Poor?" in An Introduction to the Medieval Bible [New York, Cambridge University Press, 2014], 237-259).

But why the absence of Gospel scenes?  Simply, because the Gospel scene is presented in the liturgical action on the altar.  Not only do we hear the Gospel at every Mass, but it is at the Eucharistic celebration where we "proclaim the Lord's death until He comes" (1 Cor 11:26).  The faithful are thus invited to reflect on the Biblical truths depicted in the capital sculptures during the celebration of the liturgy and, in partaking of the Lord's Sacred Body and Precious Blood, receive further graces to live the Christian life encouraged by the lessons that these capital sculptures depict.

Gradually, sacred art became more complex, with detailed portal sculptures outside and stained-glass windows inside.  One would see, for example, a lintel statue depicting Christ between the doors at Sainte-Chapelle, with His right hand gestured in blessing and his left hand open and ready to strike (cf Lk 23:39-43), all the while standing on a lion and a basilisk (cf Ps 91:13), reminding the courtiers of King Louis IX the demands of righteousness.  Or, at Chartres Cathedral, the unusual juxtaposition of the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Hexameron invites pilgrims to think about how these two Biblical stories may inform each other, bearing in mind the Patristic axiom "The New Testament is hidden in the Old; the Old Testament is unveiled in the New."

Churches on the Italian peninsula retained their Romanesque layouts for the most part, but with increasing influence of Byzantine iconography in frescoes--and the Basilica di San Francesco d'Assisi is a good example of this.  Frescoes in the lower basilica show the life of Christ reflected in that of St Francis of Assisi, thus reminding pilgrims that the basic programme of discipleship is the imitatio Christi (1 Jn 2:6).  Even simple churches--and my absolute favourite is that of the Chiesa di Santo Stefano tucked away in a charming alley in the middle of Assisi--have frescoes of simple Biblical truths about the Incarnation (cf Jn 1:14) and how the Blessed Virgin's body helped to 'enflesh' the Eternal Word (Gal 4:4).  Or, closer to our own time, Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Familia whose interior evokes the sense of being in a thick forest reminds us of Eden that was lost, now sought again in the programme of salvation (Is 51:3). 

I won't get into the footprint and layout of Gothic churches, nor altar reredos, nor the open spaces under preaching pulpits intended to depict the Empty Tomb, and many ways that pre-modern churches made Biblical stories and doctrinal truths palpable to the ordinary believer.  The point, ultimately, is this: Mediaeval churchmen knew full well that the laity were capable of the contemplative life, and the thirteenth-century Paris theologians, culminating with St Thomas Aquinas, identified this proclivity towards contemplation as the Septenarian gifts of Wisdom and Understanding.  Ecclesiastical architecture and sacred art was geared towards encouraging, enabling, and engaging the laity's contemplative life.

(It is also interesting to note that "the Mediaevals" which moderns love to villify as being illiterate and ignorant had a better grasp of Christian doctrine in their art and architecture than most holders of an M.Div. degree.)

Recently, I looked at a 'yearbook' of parishes in a certain North American diocese and was dismayed to see a stark contrast between the 'contemplative-friendly' style of pre-modern churches and the artistic and doctrinal barrenness of post-1950s churches, most of which were renovated to turn houses of worship into austere auditoriums that resemble a Calvinist meetinghouse.  I have, also, had the unfortunate privilege of hearing fist-hand stories of priests hiring steamrollers to crush dismantled stained-glass windows, selling altar reredos, and pawning liturgical vessels.  

I'm saving those stories for a time when my listeners need a good squirm in their seats.

What are we to make of artistically barren churches?  Three things, at least, culminating with the third.  First, The style of churches since the 1950s and especially the 1960s betrays a profound Biblical and theological ignorance that serves precisely to inform such barrenness.  I dare to say that the unusual 'aesthetics' of contemporary sculpture works to distract viewers from the artists' spiritual vacuity.  Second, the aversion to beauty reflects a fear of that transcendence which is inimical to the narcissism of the modern "spiritual, but not religious" man which, in turn, flattens the heavenward orientation of the liturgy to a "community celebration."  Third and most importantly, it undercuts the laity's baptismal propensity for the contemplative life by depriving them of artistic points of meditation and reflection (which may also be a transference of the artists' incompetence in matters Christian).

I also wonder whether there is a residual Gnosticism at play in such artistically barren and Biblically bereft churches.

The supreme irony?  The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (rightly, I think) heralded an "Age of the Laity"; before the Council, a number of theologians (and I use that term loosely) thought that the "modern man" was too sophisticated for supernatural things.  Yet we have ended up with a clericalism that deprives the laity of contemplation-inducing sacred art and claimed them too dumb to understand deep Biblical truths--all in the name of Vatican II.  More than that, such clericalism esteems itself more enlightened than the gifts of Wisdom and Understanding that the Holy Spirit endows even the simplest Christians with.  (Think of St Joan of Arc's answer that left the Inquisitors speechless.)

(Another irony is that, in renovating for a barren church interior, or simply building an artistically bland church, held no conversation whatsoever with Cistercian architecture.)

As a result of thieving the laity of external opportunities for contemplation (to say nothing of how few opportunities they are given for Bible studies and adult catecheses), a vacuum in their spiritual lives has opened up such that they seek to fill it with lesser things like dubious Marian apparitions and "devotionalism."

But clerics and religious who are frustrated with the often-odd devotional lives of their parishioners might want to consider the insufficiency of the preaching and teaching that is offered, as well as the Real Absence in the very house of the Church where they gather to liturgize.

Six or Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit?A Textual Quandary in Isaiah 11:1-3a

The Problem

Catholics who have attended Confirmation prep worth any salt will have memorised that there are Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (cf Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶ 1831).  The older Douai-Rheims version, for example, reads:

And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of its root.  And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him:  the Spirit of Wisdom, and of Understanding, the Spirit of Counsel, and of Fortitude, the Spirit of Knowledge, and of Godliness [= Piety].  And he shall be filled with the Spirit of the Fear of the Lord (Is 11:1-3a).

When we pick up a modern Bible, say the New American Bible Revised Edition, this is what we read:

But a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom.  The spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him:  a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength [= Fortitude], a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the LORD, and his delight shall be the fear of the LORD (Is 11:1-3a). 

The same text in the Essene Jewish community's Great Isaiah Scroll isn't all that different, either:

And there shall come a rod out of the stem of Jesse and a branch (nazar) from his roots will bear fruit.  And the spirit of YHWH will rest upon him and the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel, the spirit of might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of YHWH.  And he shall have an air of the fear of YHWH... (1Qlsa^a).

Notice how in both the Hebrew translations "Piety" or godliness is missing from the second text, though "Fear of the LORD" is repeated twice.  What is going on?  How can such a venerable tradition in Catholic devotion to the Holy Spirit seem to be wrong?

A Quick Historical-Critical Overview

The above Arbor Iesse pericope--from the Latin words "Tree of Jesse"--is situated within the broader "Book of Emmanuel" that runs from the start of chapter six to the end of chapter twelve, in which the ideal king is spelled out in Isaiah's oracles.  Opening with the call of Isaiah, son of Amoz, a vision of the heavenly temple is shown with the angelic Seraphim singing "Holy, holy, holy" (6:3), whence we get the Sanctus of the Mass.  God asks "who will go for Us?" and Isaiah volunteers.

Chapter seven begins with Isaiah encouraging King Ahaz in the Syro-Ephraimite War:  "Take care you remain calm and do not fear; do ot let your courage fail before these two stumps of smoldering brands," namely the city-states, of Aram and Ephraim, and promises that Judah will be victorious.  Then comes the revelation of the "Emmanuel" born of a "young woman" or "virgin" (9:10-16).

In chapter 8, God warns by way of Isaiah that if Judah wanted to be kept safe from the attacks from Assyria, they will need to trust in God's purposes and protection instead of warfare.  Towards the end of the chapter, another Messianic prophecy is given (8:23).  The same prophecy continues in chapter 9 about His coming Kingdom and coming peace:

For a Child is born to us, a son is given to us; / upon His shoulder dominion rests. / They name Him Wonder-Counsellor, God-Hero, / Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.  / His dominion is vast / and forever peaceful, / upon David's throne, and over his kingdom, / which He confirms and sustains / by judgment and justice, / both now and forever.  / The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this! (9:5-6).

Next comes God's judgment on the Northern Kingdom of Israel (9:7-20), then a generic judgment on injustice and oppression in chapter 10, followed by God's judgment on Assyria (10:5-34) and against its impending conquest of Jerusalem (10:28-34).  What is important to notice is that at the very last verse, we read:

He shall hack down the forest thickets with an ax, and Lebanon in its splendor shall fall.

This dovetails with the very first verse in chapter 11, "But a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse..." because the failed conquest set in motion the Southern Kingdom's future Exile to Babylon, thus bringing the Davidic dynasty to an end.  The rest of chapter 11 promises a (Messianic) restoration.  The "Book of Emmanuel" concludes with a thanksgiving hymn in chapter 12.

Note, too, that the "Messiah" is someone anointed; the prophecy here is that He will be anointed not so much with oil, but with "the Spirit of the Lord."

The Greek Text of Isaiah 11:1-3a

Behind the Douay-Rheims text stands the Septuagint text, a translation of the Old Testament into Greek in the third century before Christ, which accounts for the difference between the Vulgate text and the modern translations from the Masoretic Hebrew:

Καὶ  ἐξελεύσεται ῥάβδος ἐκ τῆς ρίζης ᾿Ιεσσαί, καὶ ἄνθος ἐκ τῆς ρίζης ἀναβήσεται.  καὶ ἀναπαύσεται ἐπ᾿ αὐτὸν πνεῦμα τοῦ Θεοῦ, πνεῦμα σοφίας καὶ συνέσεως, πνεῦμα βουλῆς καὶ ἰσχύος, πνεῦμα γνώσεως καὶ εὐσεβείας· ἐμπλήσει αὐτὸν πνεῦμα φόβου Θεοῦ.

And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a blossom shall come up from [his] root: and the Spirit of God shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and godliness shall fill him; the spirit of the fear of God (L. C. L. Brenton's translation).

We immediately see three changes between the Greek text (LXX) and the Hebrew text (MS, given in the Revised New American Bible version above).  First, whereas the MSS has two instances of "Fear of the Lord at the end of v. 2 and at the start of v. 3, the LXX has only one.  Second, what was the first MSS instance of "fear of the Lord" was condensed simply to "godliness" (or "piety" in some translations).  Whereas the Hebrew text says that the "spirit of fear" will "fill" him in the second instance of the phrase, the Greek connects it with the first instance instead.  The other three couplets, wisdom/understanding, counsel/strength, and knowledge/godliness remain intact.

What happened?  For a culture that places great stress on the preservation of tradition, it is somewhat surprising to see such a shift.  Or was there even a shift in the first place?  Could it be that the MS does not necessarily reflect what the older Hebrew text might have carried?

Some think so.  The exegete J. J. M. Roberts relays, regarding the line "And his sense (for justice) comes from the fear of [YHWH]" (Is 11:3a), that "Because the meaning in this passage is not immediately transparent and the phrase has many similarities with the last line of the preceding verse, many scholars delete as entirely as a corrupt dittography of that line" (First Isaiah [Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2015], 178).  Otto Kaiser likewise says that "'And his delight is in the fear of [YHWH] and' is a half-line which arose through dittography... and in view of the absence a parallel half-line cannot be rescued even by more elegant translations" (Isaiah 1-12 [London:  SCM Press, 1983], 252).  In other words, these scholars believe that some scribe early on unwittingly repeated the phrase "...fear of the Lord..." (hence dittograph) and, given Hebrew literature's proclivity for parallelisms, it is next to impossible to construct such a parallel by the repetition of "...fear of the Lord..." and so, they think, one of the two instances is really a copyist's mistake.

The Aramaic and Syriac Old Testament

Interestingly enough, the Aramaic Targum has a wildly different rendition of this same text:

And a king shall come forth from the sons of Jesse, and the Messiah shall be exalted from the sons of  his sons.  And a spirit before the LORD shall rest upon him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and might, a spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.  And the LORD shall bring him near to his fear (Bruce D. Chilton, The Aramaic Bible, vol. 11, The Isaiah Targum [Wilmington, Michael Glazier, Inc., 1987], 28).

The italicised portions are divergences in the Aramaic text with respect to the Hebrew.  Note that the three couplets remain intact, but the verses in question (the end of v. 2 and the start of v. 3) are rather different:  "...and the fear of the LORD.  And the LORD shall bring him near to his fear."

Is it possible that the gifts which "stand behind" godliness/piety and fear of the Lord were in a state of flux when they were translated from the Hebrew to Greek and Aramaic?  It seems likely.

Another possibility, and not mutually exclusive with what we've just proposed above, is that "fear" (in Hebrew, yiraw) had a certain polyvalence that was translated as "piety" in the first instance and "fear" in for the dittograph itself.  Yet, if you think about it, "fear of the Lord" which means a kind of reverential awe is indeed inclusive of such notions as godliness and piety.  In fact, the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew dictionary does include "reverence" and "piety" among its meanings.  It seems likely, therefore, that the Septuagint translators might have wanted to avoid repetition by translating two instances of the same Hebrew word differently.  An example of this would be the famous "and the young woman will conceive" in Isaiah 7:14.  The Hebrew text has ha 'almah, literally "young woman" or "maiden."  But, of course, as any father would hope for his young daughter, she would be a virgin as well as young when getting married, and so the Septuagint translators made this latent naunce more obvious in translating it as parthenos, "virgin."  A similar mechanism may be at work in Isaiah 11:2-3a.

But that's only if we assume that the Hebrew text which the LXX translators had access to was similar to the MS we now have.  If there was a dittograph, what was lost?  If we still had Origen's Hexapla--in which, among others, he compared various Greek editions of the New Testament with the proto-Masoretic text in attempt to defend the superiority of the Septuagint.  But the Hexapla was destroyed by one of the Islamic invasions of the early seventh century, and only fragments remain, none of which are that of Isaiah.

Another clue may be found in the Syriac translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that predates the Peshitta (which was a translation of the LXX).  As of this writing, I am still trying to track down someone who is an expert in the Syriac Old Testament, and I am still waiting for some replies.  Suffice it to say, however, that

It has been said that the number of seven gifts in the holy Fathers depends solely on the Septuagint version, without any foundation in the Hebrew text.  This point cannot be correct.  For the Syrian church, as is certain from St Ephraem and Aphraates, speaks about the seven gifts.  But since it uses a version independent of the Septuagint, it is necessary to conclude that a tradition existed, which joined the number "seven" with Isa. 11:2, and which was independent of that Greek version (S. G. Rivas and J. A. de Aldama, Sacrae theologiae summa IIIB:  On Grace [Saddle River:  Keep the Faith, 2014], 260).

It appears that a certain A. Vaccari thinks that, on the basis of the Syriac text, the Septuagint preserves something that has since been lost in the Masoretic (cf "Spiritus septiformis ex Isaia 11, 2," Verbum Domini 11 [1931], 131-133). 

Conclusion

The Second Vatican Council clearly indicated that "... the Church from the very beginning accepted as her own that very ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament which is called the Septuagint; and she has always given a place of honor to other Eastern translations and Latin ones..."  Why the liturgical readings in both the Lectionary for Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours, while claiming to be texts revised at the instigation of the Council, insists on using the Masoretic Text is anybody's guess, but the Fathers of the Church almost uniformly preferred to use the Septuagint in their theological writings.

That being said, we can marshal one last bit of evidence.  St Jerome preferred what he called the Hebraica veritas to the Septuagint, and was a rarity among the Fathers in this regard.  Yet, for all of his bellyaching about how the Hebrew Old Testament was superior to the Hebrew, his Commentary on Isaiah gives no indication whatsoever of any discomfort, questioning, or even allusion to the (apparent) discrepancy between the lists of the "gifts" in the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments.  He says, for example,

It must be noted that the spirit of the Lord, of wisdom and understanding, counsel and strength, knowledge and piety, and the fear of the Lord--that is, a seven fold number, who are called seven eyes on a single stone (Zech 3:9 LXX)--will come to rest on the branch and the blossom which has sprung up from Jesse, and thereby from the line of David (Robert Louis Wilken, The Church's Bible:  Isaiah [Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2007], 138).

Clearly, Jerome was unflappable in the face of an apparent discrepancy.

Maybe we can be, too. 

The Rhetorical Place of "the Fruit of the Spirit"in the Epistle to the Galatians

 

"Rhetoric" and "rhetorical" is one of those oft-misused words taken to mean, variously, "a manner of speaking," "hyperbole," or "in a manner of speaking."  Journalists multiply this confusion when they say, for instance, "That's just political rhetoric," when, in fact, they mean to say "That's just political polemic."  (Is it any wonder that newspapers are normatively written at an eighth-grade reading level?)

Described as the learned art of persuasion, an orator uses the canons of rhetoric to convince her or his listeners to a point of view that is presented.  Aristotle wrote about it in his famous On Rhetoric, and Quintilian wrote his masterful On the Institutes of Oratory.  Yet it is Cicero who, in the Middle Ages especially, was taken to be the very personification of the liberal art of rhetoric.

St Paul's Epistle to the Galatians is taken to be the example of rhetoric par excellence in the New Testament.  Our task will be to look at his "Fruit of the Spirit" pericope in Galatians 5:16-23.  But first it would be helpful to contextualise the discussion with three ideas about the relationship between "ethics" and "rhetoric" from Aristotle:

First, since the Apostle contrasts the Christian community's behaviour with that of worldlings'--a salient point since the heretics who came to upset the Galatian churches insisted on Torah-observance as a badge of membership in the People of God--Aristotle's point of what a deviant society looks like looms large in the verses about the "works of the flesh."  In his Politics, Aristotle speaks of a true society that can only be so on account of shared ethical values as a means of cohesion.  The heretics who brought in "another gospel" were in fact self-seeking oligarchs who sought to control the Christians on the basis of a profound misunderstanding of Christ's purpose in His death and resurrection.  This is why St Paul highlights his own selflessness in Galatians 4:12-20 and in 6:17--whereas he sought no gain, though he was within rights to, the oligarchic heretics aimed to satisfy their own fleshliness.

Second, Aristotle in his On Rhetoric believed that a long, deliberative discourse in attempt to persuade listeners to a more ethical life was not nearly as effective as pointing to the listeners' own experience and expanding upon that.  Walter Russel, a Pauline exegete, believes that the Apostle is really pointing to the Galatian Christians' experience of the indwelling Holy Spirit as an indicator of which way to continue in.

Third, Paul's direct quotation from Aristotle--"...against such there is no law" (Gal 5:23; Politics 3.13.12B4a)--is, in the words of Ben Witherington III, is "about what makes for an ethical society...and the phrase in particular is used of persons who surpass their fellow human beings in virtue."

Logos, Ethos, Pathos

In classical antiquity, rhetoric was triangulated within the correct use of reason (logis, logic), the credibility of the orator (ethos, ethic), and the emotional appeal to the listeners (pathos, passion).  These three can be clearly identified in Galatians.  In the first place, there is a clear logical flow (logos) of Paul's arguments.  The allegory of Hagar and Sarah forms one of the major arguments for "slavery" and "freedom" with regard to the Mosaic Law and grace (Gal  4:21-31).

The whole of the logos is found in the probatio (Hans-Deiter Betz, Bernard H. Brinsmead, James D. Hester) in Galatians 3:1-4:31, in which the Apostle marshals a series of arguments as to why the gift of the Spirit has superseded the Law of Sinai as a sign of membership in God's Messianic people.  (Walter Russell, buy the way, extends the probatio all the way to Galatians 6:10 as he sees the "Fruit of the Spirit" bit as part and parcel of Paul's overall argument.)

At the beginning of the epistle, St Paul establishes his credibility (ethos) by pointing out that whereas the heretics claimed to have the real deal, the Apostle received not only the apostleship but the very message from Jesus Himself (Gal 1:11-17) and even indicates that the Jerusalem Apostles gave a veritable imprimatur to his doctrine (Gal 1:18-24).

As for emotional appeal, pathos, "You stupid Galatians!" (Gal 3:1) certainly stands out.  Paul is "astonished" (Gal 1:6), asks "who has bewitched you...?", and perhaps signals his agitation in how he writes his epistolary salutation--without a thanksgiving for the addressees' faith as he does in his other epistles.

Now we can turn to the place of the "Fruit of the Spirit" in St Paul's use of classical rhetoric in his epistle to the Galatian churches.

Circumcision or the Indwelling?

For the Israelites, circumcision was the badge of membership in the family of Abraham.  For Christians, on the other hand, it was the indwelling Holy Spirit:

Let me ask you only this:  Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?  Are you so foolish?  Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?  ...Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? (Gal 3:2-5).

Paul is employing an elementary rhetorical device we all know, the 'play on words,' when he speaks of "ending with the flesh"--an allusion to circumcision.  At a deeper level, for Jewish males, the deeper meaning of circumcision has to do with "separation" from Gentile sinfulness but, what does it avail if it does not effect a change in the person?  Thus did the prophet Jeremiah point out that without personal transformation, circumcision amounted to nothing (Jer 9:24; cf 4:4) and thus did the protomartyr St Stephen accuse the Sanhedrin being "uncircumcised in heart and ears" (Acts 7:51) despite having the physical badge.

Rather, the gift of the Holy Spirit is the fulfillment of God's promise of the "worldwide blessing" to Abraham (Gen 22) for which St Paul retrieves the images of the Hagar's child versus Sarah's child, the latter being "the son of the free woman through the promise" (Gal 4:23).  Christians are, like Isaac, "the children of promise" for which we receive not only membership in the family of Abraham, but indeed adoption as daughters and sons within the Son of God.  More to the point, it is the indwelling Holy Spirit that marks God's People:

...God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the Law, to redeem those who were under the Law, so that we might receive adoption as sons [and daughters].  And because you are sons [and daughters], God has sent the Spirit of his Son in to our hearts, crying, 'Abba!  Father!'  So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir (Gal 4:4-7).

But the indwelling Holy Spirit isn't necessarily a done deal.

Works of the Law ≈ Works of the Flesh

Continuing his line of thought that circumcision is not efficacious for moral probity, St Paul then takes the idea that the "works of the Law" was, for the heretics, more of a bragging right than a badge of membership (Gal 6:13), and this "bragging" simply opens the floodgates of character traits inimical to the Gospel, namely, "works of the flesh."  Paul likely had Deuteronomy 10:12-22 in mind--the passage about the heart of the Law being that of an upright way of life--when he wrote:

For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another.  For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, "You shall love your neighbour as yourself."  But if you bite and devour one another take heed that you are not consumed by one another (Gal 5:13-15)..

The heretics believed that the mere, external rite of circumcision was a sufficient badge; the Apostle criticised their piecemeal adoption of the Law:  "I testify again to every man who receives circumcision that he is bound to keep the whole Law" (Gal 5:3), effectively saying 'all or nothing!'  The overall implication, it seems, was that the heretics imagined that the external mark of circumcision in lieu of holiness was enough.  Hence, 

For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness.  For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love (Gal 5:5-6).

All of the above, then, stands at the background of Paul's contrasting the "works of the flesh" and the "fruit of the Spirit."

Fractious Works, Unifying Fruit

Note well Paul's use of the singular and plural:  "works of the flesh" and "fruit  of the Spirit."  "Works" are in the plural, whereas "fruit" is in the singular, to highlight the divisive character of the heretics (along with the rest of the pagans) with the unitive character of Christian conduct.  Paul does this even in the way that he queues the "works" and the "fruit":

But the works of the flesh are plain:  immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, drunkenness, carousing, and the like" (Gal 5:19-21).

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 22-23). 

Whereas the (singular) "fruit" of the Holy Spirit yields nine character-traits, beginning with love and ending with "self-control," the (plural) "works" of fleshliness yields a sprawling list of pagan characteristics, especially when he ends with "...and the like."

We are not to imagine, as some do, that these "fruit" are somehow automatic in Spirit-filled believers; N. T. Wright points out that with the last one, "self-control," Paul indicates something that we do, in which he "gives the game away" by showing that the "fruit of the Spirit" is something we consciously and intentionally aim for.  Otherwise St Paul would not have repeated the imperative "But I say, walk by the Spirit," "...let us also walk by the Spirit" (Gal 5:16, 25).

Within the Epistle's Total Rhetoric

Several commentators, using rhetorical analysis, situate the "Fruit of the Spirit" pericope (Gal 5:16-23) within the wider paranesis (Greek:  'exhortation') of Galatians 5:1-6:10, by which they mean Paul is giving advice or counsel (exhortatio in Latin).  Others take this passage to be a refutatio, whereby the demonstration of the Holy Spirit's influence on the Christian undercuts the heretics' claims.  Walter Russell interprets this section similarly, though he prefers to use the term "causal argument" which is to say that the Holy Spirit causes such a lifestyle that the Law-observing heretics cannot even muster up.

In either case, Paul both points to the normative influence of the Holy Spirit in the Christian's ethical cleanliness and prescribes walking in conformity with the New Law of Sion as the only means--rather than the Law of Sinai--of living cleanly.

As an educated man (cf Acts 2:33) who appeared to have written all of his epistles in Greek, it should not be surprising that St Paul the Apostle was learned in the "classical" arts of his day, including rhetoric.  Even though it was a quintessentially Greek art, he thought it useful to advance the Kingdom of God:

We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when our obedience is complete (2 Cor 10:5-6).

How Could the God-Man Sorrow?

That Christ, who is both divine and human, could sorrow, might seem counterintuitive to a doctrinally sensitive believer:

And taking with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, He began to be sorrowful and troubled.  Then he said to them, "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death..." (Mt 26:37-38).

"Now is My soul troubled.  And what shall I say?  'Father, save Me from this hour'?  No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.  Father, glorify your name" (Jn 12:27-28b). 

We will briefly explain three approaches to the question of sorrow in Christ, and conclude with a reiteration of an often-overlooked aspect of the Chalcedonian definition.

St Augustine 

Augustine, the "Doctor of Grace," refers to Christ's sorrow numerous times in his Narrations on the Psalms, in which he maintains a fairly consistent interpretation of what it means for Christ to experience sorrow.  In a nutshell, in the anguished voice of Christ can be heard the suffering of His future martyrs.  This theme is repeated in his Tractates on the Gospel of John where he says, for example--

And now, again, it is my Lord Himself, who by such words has suddenly transported me from the weakness that was mine to the strength that was His, that I hear saying, "Now is my soul troubled." What does it mean?  How biddest Thou my soul follow You if I behold Your own troubled?  How shall I endure what is felt to be heavy by strength so great?  What is the kind of foundation I can seek if the Rock is giving way?  But methinks I hear in my own thoughts the Lord giving me an answer, saying,  You shall follow me the better, because it is to aid your power of endurance that I thus interpose. You have heard, as addressed to yourself, the voice of my fortitude; hear in me the voice of your infirmity:  I supply strength for your running, and I check not your hastening, but I transfer to myself your causes for trembling, and I pave the way for your marching along (52.2).

The underlying principle can be found in the revised Breviary in the Office of Matins for the First Sunday of Lent.  Commenting on the psalm, "Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer," Augustine writes:

Who is speaking?  It seems to be one individual but let us see if this is really the case.  "From the ends of the earth I called to you, when my heart was faint."  This shows that it is not one individual, except in the special sense that it is one because Christ is one and we are all members of His body.  What individual man calls out from the ends of the earth?  The only one who calls from the ends of the earth is that heritage about which it was said to God the Son:  "Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession."

It follows that it is this, Christ's possession and a heritage and body and one Church, this unity which we are, which cries from the ends of the earth (On Ps 60:2-3).

This fits within Augustine's larger theme of an ecclesial understanding of Christ's humanity, in which not only Christ as an individual speaks, but rather Christ as Head speaks on behalf of the Church.  In the tradition of a 'mystical ecclesiology' prevalent in the Church of northern Africa (think, too, of St Cyprian of Carthage), Augustine has his sights on the totus Christus, the 'whole' or 'total' Christ, of the Church together with her Founder.

St Thomas Aquinas

In his Commentary on Matthew, St Thomas offers a close, careful reading of Matthew 26:38, calling our attention to the fact that Christ did not say "I am sorrowful" but, rather, "My soul is sorrowful."  The Angelic Doctor is foremost among the theologians whose work pays special attention to Christ's soul, and locates His sorrow in the sensitive part of the soul.  In fact, he follows St Jerome who calls our attention to yet another detail, namely when the Evangelist writes that "He began to be sorrowful..."  Thus, Jerome says, Christ experienced not passion as an emotion that rebels against reason, but rather propassion.  Being perfectly sinless, the powers of Christ's soul was completely subject to His reason and His reason, in turn, entirely subject to God (stay tuned for my dissertation to see what that means!).

But, being divine, Christ knew that He would defeat death.  Why, then, did He sorrow?  Here, St Thomas takes his cue from St John Damascene and says--

But why did He sorrow?  ...Damascene says that He sorrowed for Himself.  And why?  Because sorrow is present by the fact that we lack what we naturally love.  The soul naturally desires to be united to the body, and this desire was in Christ’s soul, for He ate, and drank, and hungered. Therefore the separation was contrary to natural desire: therefore to be separated was sorrowful for it (C.26, L.5. #2225).

Death--the separation of the soul from the body--is an unnatural state insofar as human nature is concerned; confronted with the inevitability of the body-soul tear that the Crucifixion would cause, Christ's soul, during His agony at Gethsemane thus naturally sorrowed at the prospect of the unnatural state it would experience the next day.

Similar themes run through St Thomas' Commentary on John, but with an interesting twist.  Not only did Christ's sorrow demonstrate the fact of His human nature, it also modelled for Christians exemplary suffering.  With regards to John 12:27, the Magister in Sacra Pagina identifies four steps in the prayer of Christ:  "First, he poses a question, as one does when deliberating about what is to be done," hence His words when He said "And what shall I say?"  "[S]econd, he makes a request which arises from a certain inclination," as shown by His words "Father, save Me?" as a rhetorical question.  In reply, Christ declared "For this purpose I have come...":  "[T]hird, he rejects this inclination for a particular reason."  "[F]ourth, he makes another request that arises from a different inclination" in his newly-composed prayer, "Father, glorify Thy Name!" (C.12, L.5, #1655; cf ##1656-1660).

In so doing, Christ not only demonstrates His humanity--since suffering and the other emotions take place in the 'sensitive part' of the soul which, in turn, was subordinated to the 'rational part' of that same soul.  This is why Christ did not say "I am sorrowful" because the Subject of Christ Himself, His "I," is inseparable from His divine nature.  Had Christ said "I am sorrowful," He would then have indicated that the Godhead is capable of suffering.

If Augustine's take on Christ's sorrow was "ecclesial," Aquinas' concerns were primarily anthropological.

St Thomas More

On the topic of Christian death--and here Christ is the Exemplar--the martyr for the Church's liberty from secular tyranny in his The Sadness of Christ highlights a curious paradox:  Why, if the martyrs were courageous in facing their impending martyrdom, did Christ show Himself to be fearful?

Essentially, Sir Thomas, in the tradition of the Renaissance humanists, took a "rhetorical reading" of the Passion Narratives (in contrast to Aquinas' grammatical reading) and saw Christ's sorrow as, more precisely, demonstrative of His desire to feel fear as the martyrs did; the paradox is then folded inside out, as it were, as it was Christ's very example which gave the martyrs their wherewithal to die for Him.  It was, in the final analysis, a "fighting technique" for the martyrs by looking at what Christ demonstrated for their sake.

This is not to say that the sometime Chancellor of England denied Sts Augustine's and Thomas' interpretations, but rather offers still another approach to the question of why the invincible Christ volunteered to sorrow.  Thus, in contrast to the former two's "ecclesial" and "anthropological" concerns, St Thomas More's was exhortative.

It should be added that composing The Sadess of Christ was not only More's way of mustering his courage to face the executioner's block, it was also a critique of the English episcopate's pastoral cowardice in the face of Henry VIII's usurpation of the Church's authority (as one and only one bishop in all of England stood his ground, St John Fisher).

Conclusion

The dogmatic horizon against which we must gaze upon the sorrow of Christ is that of Chalcedon's insistence on the demarcation between Christ's human and divine natures.  We are used to speaking of Christ's divinity (Council of Nicaea), of Christ's unity as one Person (Council of Ephesus), but too often we forget that the Incarnate Word must remain, in the words of the Council,

...acknowledged in two natures, without confusion or change, without division or separation.  The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one Person and one hypostasis... (DH 302).

In other words, Christ sorrowed because He was human; Christ divinity did not, because the two natures were never 'cross-wired.'  And, let us never forget, His humanity meant God's solidarity with ours.

That being said, my would-be Doktorvater, the Reverend Professor Emmanuel Durand OP--who was called away by the Master of the Order to Rome at the start of my studies--observes in his recent book Les émotions de Dieu (Paris:  Les Éditions du Cerf, 2019):

Quelle est la portée salvifique de la tristesse de Jésus? Il convient ici de tenir ensemble exemplarité et réalité. La tristesse du Christ est la sienne et la nôtre. Il a pris sur lui et "transfigure" en lui la tristesse des membres de son corps, répétait volontiers Augustin dans ses discours durs le Psaumes. Comme le Christ a pris notre chair, avec ses limites et ses infirmités (le sommeil, la faim, la mort...) il a assumé nos passions, y compris la tristesse la plus accablante. La même mesure de réalisme s'applique à sa chair, qui est aussi vraie que la nôtre, et a sa tristesse, qui assume pleinement les nôtres. Afflige par la trahison, la défection et l'abandon de ses disciples, il est affligé par nos abandons, nos défections, nos trahisons, nos complicités. Saisi d'effroi devant une mort d'extrême violence et desolation, il assume nos propres tourments devant la mort, l'extrême de la séparation et du rejet. Une différence doit toutefois être relevee: alors même que les circonstances et les acteurs humains imposent certaines contraintes, la manière dont Jésus vit son agonie et sa passion fait prévaloir sa volonté aimante et salvifique. De la sorte, sa tristesse d'agonie, sainte et sans aucune complaisance, est pour nous-membres de son corps-salut offert et victoire potentielle sure toute tristesse humaine (266-267).

It appears, therefore, that St Thomas More went "full circle" and returned to St Augustine, only to give it a new application:  We hear, in the voice of Christ's cries, our own.

Was/Is Jesus a Socialist?

Mikhail Gorbachev, who is to be enormously credited for his policy of Glasnost which also enabled the Russian Orthodox Church to celebrate the millennium of Christianity in Russia in 1988, once famously said that

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

In this post, I am not going to critique socialism as an economic theory, nor will I give an apologia for capitalism (though I will make a brief critique of laissez-faire free enterprise towards the end, and an invitation to my readers to discover the Acton Institute headed by my friend, Fr Robert Sirico).  Instead, I am going to critique the claim that "Jesus was a socialist" on the basis of my field, that is, the infused virtues and the role of the indwelling Holy Spirit in the supernaturally moral life.  Let me repeat that last part again:  The supernaturally moral life, that is, not the 'merely' moral life.  This will be key.

Claims in favour of Jesus having been a socialist have been difficult to locate, as they tend to rely on vague ideas about His being on the side of the poor and how socialists are truly altruistic when it comes to the welfare of impoverished people.  At best, then, the argument runs something like this:

    1.  Socialism cares about the poor.
    2.  Jesus cared about the poor.
    ∴  Jesus was a socialist.

The implication made by "Christian Socialists" is that, like Jesus, we too ought to care about the poor.

Thanks to the "balkanization" of theology (to use the words of Fr Romanus Cessario OP) such that non-Thomistic  moral theologies have driven a further wedge between "moral theology" and "ascetical/mystical theology," we may paraphrase the famed words of St Jerome:

The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Pelagian.

"Pelgaianism," your catechist you probably never told you, is the heresy claiming that we can be morally good as Christians by our own gumption rather than by the grace of God.  It was first decried by St Augustine, condemned at the Second Synod of Orange in 529, and forcefully rejected yet again in Pope Francis' recent apostolic exhortation Gaudete et exultate.  Pelagianism has made a comeback for the reason pointed out by Fr Cessario:

According to the official teaching, these gifts [cf Is 11:2] are given to all Christians in baptism to facilitate the working of the other virtues by rendering the Christian docile to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, so that he or she shares in a divine, rather than merely human, mode of judging and acting.  This theory of the gifts is of utmost importance in the history of spiritual theology, and to neglect it would be to reinforce the disastrous separation of moral from ascetic and mystical theology which took place in the post-Tridentine period.  An example of this separation of the virtues and gifts from moral theology is to be found in the Directorium Asceticum or, Guide to the Spiritual Life, first published in 1752 by the Jesuit spiritual author Giovanni Battista Scaramelli.  ...The Directorium Asceticum disengaged both the moral virtues, which it describes as the "immediate dispositions for Christian perfection," from the theological virtues, especially charity, which it recognizes as "the essence of Christian perfection" from the canons of moral theology (R. Cessario, The Virtues Or the Examined Life [London:  Continuum, 2002], 12-13).

Pelagianism operates on the presumption in favour of human nature to be sufficiently morally good to perform specifically Christian acts.  Please read that again:  It assumes that humans are good enough to do specifically Christian things--like feeding the poor.  Yes--pace John Calvin--humans have the wherewithal to be morally good, but they do not have the wherewithal to be supernaturally good.

And the theological virtue of charity enables us to be supernaturally good.  St Paul wrote that "...God's love has been poured into our hearts though the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom 5:5).  We are not speaking here of the "passion" of love which is in the sensitive part of the soul as its subject; rather, we are speaking of the supernatural virtue of love or charity that is in the rational part of the soul, specifically in the will, as its subject, which is given in baptism.  Thus, when the Lord Jesus said "by this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (Jn 13:35; cf 15:12).

This is why, for example, Jesus asked Peter three times, "Do you love me?"  What's lost in translation is that the Johannine Jesus uses one Greek word for "love," but Peter escapes to another word:

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you agapas Me more than these?" [Peter] said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I philō You."  He said to him, "Feed my lambs."  A second time He said to him, "Simon, son of John, do you agapas Me?"  He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I philō You." He said to him, "Tend my sheep" (Jn 21:15-16). 

Notice how Jesus asks whether Peter loves Him with the love of agape; Peter, in reply, moves the goalpost:  "Yes, Lord, you that I...uh...really like You", which is what phileo means.  But when Jesus asks Peter the same question a third time he "gets busted," as they say, because Jesus catches Peter trying to lessen the demands of discipleship:

 "Simon, son of John, do you phileis Me?"  Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, "Do you phileis Me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I philō You."

Whereas Jesus asked Peter for the totality of self-effacing love of agape, Peter opted for a more worldly love of affection and human friendship in phileo; Peter "was grieved" because Jesus caught him in the act of mitigating the costliness of following Him.

Though it is used here as a literary device, we can cut Peter some slack for one very simple, crucial reason:  He had not yet been baptised in the Holy Spirit, which would take place on that first Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4; cf Lk 24:49).  It is only by the indwelling Holy Spirit that Christians are able to have that supernatural love called the theological virtue of charity, and--again--it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same thing as the emotion of love.  In the Kingdom of God, the supernatural, theological virtue of charity is the supreme precept.

But lest we imagine that it's something we can will, recall Jesus' words to Nicodemus:

Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God."  Nicodemus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"  Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.  That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Do not marvel that I said to you, `You must be born anew.'  The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit" (Jn 3:5-8).

It is only by baptism and confirmation--by baptism in the Holy Spirit--that a person becomes a Christian and is thus graced with faith, hope, and charity, out of which the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit emerge, thus elevating the theological virtues and infusing the cardinal virtues.  Only with the indwelling Holy Spirit, in Christian initiation, can one be supernaturally good.

A Christian who loves the poor and serves the poor bears a Power infinitely more effective than social activism.

Ultimately, the "confederation of love" (to use Fr Michael Schmaus' words) entails the Lordship of Jesus, because it was from His throne at the Father's right hand that the Holy Spirit was outpoured, thus extending His dominion through the acts of the Beatitudes in Spirit-baptised Christians.

Now back to our question.  Assuming that a government aspires to be "like Jesus" in espousing socialism, we must ask:  Can a government be endowed with the supernatural, theological virtue of charity?  If a "Christian Socialist" operates on the principle of religious pluralism, then No, because it tries to mix the supernatural virtue of charity with the natural emotion of love and the uninfused virtue of justice, to say nothing of trying to build the City of God in partnership with the City of Man (see Jas 4:4; cf 2 Cor 6:14-18; 1 Jn 2:15).  The worst bit about Christians' partnership with worldlings is cooperating in a series of lacunae where the Lordship of Jesus is rejected.

Thus, the only way for any kind of "Christian Socialism" to work is if there existed a society--and therefore a government--that was an aggregate of Christians who are baptised in the Holy Spirit.

The only way for that to happen is if there existed an Integralist society.  This, I think, is why the recent book by Fr Thomas Crean OP and Alan Fimister, Integralism:  A Manual of Political Philosophy (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid:  Editiones Scholasticae, 2020) is critically important for us Christians who want to live discipleship under Jesus' Lordship to the fullest by building the City of God on earth.  "Christian Socialists," on the other hand, balk at such an idea, which undercuts their very claim of being Christian.

To the best of my knowledge, the closest I've seen of an integrally Christian society are my dear, dear friends who staff the Madonna House Apostolate in Comberemere, Ontario, founded by a woman, Catherine Dougherty, who escaped the brutality of the Bolshevik Revolution and spoke against the unjust regime of the Soviet Union, and who spent her entire life at the service of the disadvantaged.  In fact, the epitaph on the simple wooden cross that marks her grave simply reads, "She loved the poor."

As Catherine would tell you, one cannot "outsource" acts of supernatural, theological charity to the government, as if we can be counted among the sheep at the right of the Judgment Seat of Christ because we've paid our taxes.  Christ demanded personal contact with the poor in order to alleviate their physical crisis with food, housing, and employment and, more importantly, their existential crisis with the Gospel of salvation.

Ah, "salvation," too often replaced with "social activism," the hallmark counterfeit Christianity.

This is why Fr Robert Sirico, for example, founded The Acton Institute, because he and his confreres understand full well that Christian entrepreneurs and employers must inoculate their business practices with Gospel values.  Unjust economic structures can only be remedied by virtue-ethics; since secularism seeks the "lowest common denominator" for mutual cooperation, their race to the bottom undercuts any attempt towards an ethical society.

Ultimately, "Christian Socialism" is cheap grace, as it seeks to build the City of God by following the playbook of the City of Man, the very recipe of Pelagianism.

Ultimately still, "Christian Socialism" isn't nearly radically Christian enough, because, in preferring a Marxist-inspired revolution for change, it thus unmasks the faint of heart when it comes to living in the dynamism of Pentecost and under the social reign of Jesus Christ.

Biblical Preaching in the Middle Ages

The major shift in preaching from the Patristic to the Mediaeval period is to be found in the ruralization of Church during the missionary expansion beginning with Pope Gregory the Great's dispatching of St Augustine "the Lesser" (to distinguish him from the Church Father, St Augustine of Hippo) to "the Angles."  Whereas Patristic preaching was principally expository (think St Cyril of Alexandria's Commentary on John, St John Chrysostom's Commentary on Matthew, St Gregory the Great's Morals in Job or the Forty Gospel Homilies), Mediaeval preaching tended to be occasional in several senses:  (1) itinerant preaching introducing the Gospel to a barbarian peoples gleaned the apostolic kerygma from the Bible; (2) homilies with the canonical innovation permitting parish priests to preach; (3) organised preaching missions to the heretics, first by the Cistercians but later taken over by the mendicant movement; (4) the academic sermon delivered at universities by their respective theological faculties.

This is not to say that expository preaching came to an end in the Middle Ages; rather, it tended to stay within monastic houses' chapter rooms and, often, later made available for publication, such as St Bernard of Clairvaux's Commentary on the Song of Songs.

Gregory the Great is taken to be the starting-point of the Mediaeval period, and his enormously influential manual of episcopal ministry, The Book of Pastoral Rule, lays great stress on the office of preaching, not only in terms of the Biblical substance of what is preached (the book is so full of Bible verses that it looks like the Psalms sneezed on it), but also of the preacher's conformity to the message he proclaims.

The "Gregorian Mission" of Augustine and his band of roughly forty monks preached the Gospel to the pagan Anglo-Saxons:

They had, by order of the blessed Pope Gregory, taken interpreters of the nation of the Franks, and sending to Ethelbert, signified that they were come from Rome, and brought a joyful message, which most undoubtedly assured to all that took advantage of it everlasting joys in heaven and a kingdom that would never end with the living and true God (Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 20).

In the future, I would very much like to explore what, exactly, was said point-by-point in early Mediaeval kerygmatic preaching.  It seems fair to say, however, that it tended to stress the supreme majesty and authority of Christ ("...a kingdom that would never end...") and the joys of Christian believing ("...a joyful message...everlasting joys...").

Just a few decades earlier on the Continent, we see a similar style of preaching.  St Remigus, who effectively instigated a "Christian Europe" by his baptism of Clovis, King of the Franks:

Then the queen asked saint Remi[gus], bishop of Rheims, to summon Clovis secretly, urging him to introduce the king to the word of salvation. And the bishop sent for him secretly and began to urge him to believe in the true God, maker of heaven and earth, and to cease worshipping idols, which could help neither themselves nor any one else.  ... And so the king confessed all-powerful God in the Trinity, and was baptized in the name of the Father, Son and holy Spirit, and was anointed with the holy ointment with the sign of the cross of Christ. And of his army more than 3000 were baptized (Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, 31).

Like Augustine later would, Remigus spoke of God, the "maker of heaven and earth" who was "all-powerful"--in contrast to the idols made by hands and worshipped by the Franks.

By the way, one can visit the remains of St Remigus at the Basilique de St-Remi in Reims, about a twenty minute walk from Reims Cathedral, built over the very spot where Clovis was baptised.

A generation later, still in Gaul, the Church had to learn how to maintain the Christian commitments of the former barbarians, who were now called "rustics."  St Caesarius of Arles sought to remedy this by granting permission for parish priests to preach and by composing what is thought to be the first homilary, a collection of ready-made sermons that parish priests were free to use at the Eucharistic homily.  In these homilies, we begin to see a subtle shift, one that focuses more on virtuous living based upon orthodox doctrine rather than the preaching of orthodox doctrine straightforwardly.  Perhaps the most "doctrinal" element in Caesarius' homilary was it reiteration of the Nicene definition since the Catholic Franks had recently conquered the Arian Ostrogoths.  These homilies, too, are peppered with Biblical references, thus giving the "rustics" who were often illiterate some definite contact with the word of God.

Around the same time, the Gallican lectionary was beginning to take shape and one that tried to borrow set texts for feast days from other ecclesiastical territories.  We will not go into any detail about the lectionary, except to highlight the fact that homiletic preaching presupposed an intimate bond of what was preached with the Scriptures read at the sacred liturgy.

The most notable descendant of Clovis I of the Franks was none less than Charlemagne, who envisioned a kingdom, then empire, ruled by Christ.  For that reason, instituted what is now called the "Carolingian Reform" (Jacque LeGoff disputes "Carolingian Revival" or "Renaissance") in which he brought in Alcuin of York to carry out educational revitalization not only in the court but also in the realm.  Both he and Theodulf of Orleans engaged in a careful revision of the Latin Bible, thus showing the sensitivity that the Mediaeval Church had about the integrity of the text of the Vulgate.

We already touched upon de Litteris colendis in the previous post; in that piece of legislation issued in the late eighth century, a more forceful exhortation to careful and sound preaching was declared, with an "example" of model sermon in chapter 82.  Missi dominici were officials dispatched by the royal court to ensure obedience to the reforming legislation, such as the annual preaching on the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the maintenance of theological books, especially Gregory's Book of Pastoral Rule.  We can see here the faint beginnings of what would make up the content of catechisms.

In Admonitio generalis (789), Charlemagne--and this is significant--described himself as the "New Josiah."  In the Old Testament, Josiah was the King of Judah who sought to renovate the Temple at Jerusalem and to banish worship of the false deity Ba'al.  In the decree, Charlemagne mandated that every monastery and every cathedral open a school for the education of youngsters, especially in the Bible.

It is said that Charlemagne's favourite book was (the greater) Augustine's City of God, which may have furnished him with the vision of a Christendom, and he understood clearly that Christendom cannot be engendered without preaching.

The disintegration of the Carolingian Empire saw the rise of uneducated clergy which, in turn, bred heresies, especially the perennial Manicheans in the form of Cathars in France.  Pope Innocent III rose to the challenge, in part by convoking the IV Lateran Council which, among other things, decreed:

Among the various things that are conducive to the salvation of the Christian people, the nourishment of God’s word is recognized to be especially necessary, since just as the body is fed with material food so the soul is fed with spiritual food, according to the words, man lives not by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  It often happens that bishops by themselves are not sufficient to minister the word of God to the people, especially in large and scattered dioceses, whether this is because of their many occupations or bodily infirmities or because of incursions of the enemy or for other reasons-let us not say for lack of knowledge, which in bishops is to be altogether condemned and is not to be tolerated in the future. We therefore decree by this general constitution that bishops are to appoint suitable men to carry out with profit this duty of sacred preaching, men who are powerful in word and deed and who will visit with care the peoples entrusted to them in place of the bishops, since these by themselves are unable to do it, and will build them up by word and example. The bishops shall suitably furnish them with what is necessary, when they are in need of it, lest for want of necessities they are forced to abandon what they have begun. We therefore order that there be appointed in both cathedral and other conventual churches suitable men whom the bishops can have as coadjutors and cooperators not only in the office of preaching but also in hearing confessions and enjoining penances and in other matters which are conducive to the salvation of souls. If anyone neglects to do this, let him be subject to severe punishment.

It was under Innocent III, then his immediate successor Honorius III that the mendicant movement began, with the establishment of the Order of Friars Preachers in 1216 and the Order of Friars Minorin 1223 to preach after several unsuccessful attempts by the Cistercians (who like to fly in fashion, thereby undercutting the persuasiveness of their message given the extreme austerity of the Cathar perfetti).  Yet Dominican and Franciscan preaching were not redundant:  Wheres the Friars Preachers tended to engage in doctrinal preaching, the Friars Minor tended to engage in exhortative preaching, especially by their lives as imitators of Christ.

While on the topic of Innocent III, it is interesting to read his homilies; though he was only a subdeacon when elected to the papacy at the age of 34, he already had a massive knowledge of the Bible.  Between God and Man:  Six Sermons on the Priestly Office (Washington, D.C.:  Catholic University of America Press, 2004), is a short anthology of Innocent's sermons, and it is chock-full of Biblical citations, showing what was expected of prelates.

It was about a century earlier--the so-called "Twelfth Century Renaissance"--that saw the growth of Universities out of cathedral schools.  Universitas magistrorum et scholarium, "the whole of teachers and students" was a loosely-organised guild of professors and their proteges whose terminal studies consisted of either theology, medicine, or law.  It may come to a surprise to many to learn that universities--as well as schools as we know them--are entirely an invention of the Catholic Church, as are curricula and degrees.  Theology was considered the "queen of the sciences" and, in the early and high Mediaeval period, "theology" was synonymous with "Scripture."  St Bonaventure could say " Since Holy Scripture, which is to say theology, is a science that imparts as much knowledge of the first Principle as is needed by us wayfarers for attaining salvation" (Breviloquium, I.2).  Similarly, St Thomas Aquinas makes the very same point in the whole first question at the very start of his Summa theologiae.

But we're not talking about the Bible in the universities as much as the Bible in preaching, so we close with two final points.  First. the mendicant movement instigated a very rapid growth in the theological faculties, especially at Paris; at some of these universities, there were multiple chairs in theology--for the diocesan clergy, for the Franciscans, and for the Dominicans.  This, too, instigated a rapid rise in enrollment.  Second, the itinerancy of preachers and the need to possess one's own copy of the Bible gave rise to the personal Bible suitable for carrying, in contrast to the enormous pandects that needed to be carried by its own oxcart.  This was the logical conclusion to carrying several volumes of the Scriptures; St Dominic, for example, was known to carry the epistles of St Paul and the gospel of St Matthew on his person all the time.  Now, personal Bibles made it easy to consult the Scriptures on foot and to own copies for study and for preaching.

So, you can thank the Middle Ages for that compact Bible that you read (please, God!) every day.

The Bible and the Liberal Arts

Whenever I visit Chartres Cathedral, the very second thing I do (after gazing upon our beautiful Mother at the Verrière window) is visit the south bay of the Royal Portal on the west façade, whose tympanum sculpture features the Sedes Sapientiae (cf Is 7:14; Mt 1:23) at the centre and the "Seven Liberal Arts" in the archivolts.  The image at the top of this post shows it rather well:  Each "discipline" or ars libera is personified by a woman teaching (since ars libera is in the feminine) in the inner archivolt, with a figure from antiquity whose claim to fame was one of these arts in the outer archivolt.

Starting from the viewer's left and working upward to the apex, dialectic (or logic) is accompanied by Aristotle, rhetoric is accompanied by Cicero, and geometry is accompanied by Euclid near the apex.  Then, going down to the viewer's right and working up again is music with Pythagoras, grammar with either Donatus or Priscian, astronomy with Ptolemy, and near the apex again is arithmetic with Boëthius.

Why is there something apparently secular on an obviously Christian temple?  For two reasons:  First, learning--depicted on the south bay--was intended to accompany evangelisation--depicted on the north bay--thus representing the two "fronts" of the Church's mission to the world.  Second, the west facade of Gothic churches, generally, faced the orientation of sunset and, therefore, darkness; by evangelisation and by learning, the Church sought to enlighten the world about the Gospel (evangelisation) and Creation (learning).  By placing the Sedes Sapientiae at the centre of the tympanum, the "Chartres School" intended to show how, at the Incarnation, God inserted himself in the world as man among women and men, and that the tools of learning--the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, with the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry--are valid tools to explore the consistency of the cosmos which, in turn pointed to the glory of the Creator who took to himself creaturely body, soul, and mind in Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

In the year of Our Lord 789, then-king Charlemagne took the Scripture of Matthew 12:37 as the rationale for his educational reform:

For it is written: "Either from thy words thou shalt be justified or from thy words thou shalt be condemned." For although correct conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge precedes conduct. Therefore, each one ought to study what he desires to accomplish, that so much the more fully the mind may know what ought to be clone, as the tongue hastens in the praises of omnipotent God without the hindrances of errors. For since errors should be shunned by all men, so much the more ought they to be avoided as far as possible by those who are chosen for this very purpose alone, so that they ought to be the especial servants of truth.  For when in the years just passed letters were often written to us from several monasteries in which it was stated that the brethren who dwelt there offered up in our behalf sacred and pious prayers, we have recognized in most of these letters both correct thoughts and uncouth expressions; because what pious devotion dictated faithfully to the mind, the tongue, uneducated on account of the neglect of study, was not able to express in the letter without error.  Whence it happened that we began to fear lest perchance, as the skill in writing was less, so also the wisdom for understanding the Holy Scriptures might be much less than it rightly ought to be. And we all know well that, although errors of speech are dangerous, far more dangerous are errors of the understanding. Therefore, we exhort you not only not to neglect the study of letters, but also with most humble mind, pleasing to God, to study earnestly in order that you may be able more easily and more correctly to penetrate the mysteries of the divine Scriptures. 

When the Frankish king (he would not be Emperor until Christmas Day, 800) spoke of "letters," he had in mind the trivium, in which the structure of sentences in grammar, the logic of words and ideas in dialectic, and the patterns of persuasion in rhetoric served as the basic building-blocks of Biblical literacy.  It was not enough to be able to read; modernity's boast of a low illiteracy rate is scarcely meaningful when most people evade even the basic norms of logic and--as evidenced by the gullibility of the masses when they listen to the mainstream press--being unable to spot marketing, spins, or verbal sleight-of-hands for having absolutely no ability in rhetorical analysis.  Charlemagne wanted truthfulness to season the speech of believers, and the trivium to enable that, with the Bible as the springboard.

The idea of the "seven liberal arts" reaches back to Cassiodorus, who lived about two centuries prior to Charlemagne, and whose book de Institutione first classified the subjects of ancient learning into the seven we have now, on the basis of how frequently "seven" appears in the Bible.  When, during the Carolingian Reform, Benedict of Aniane was tasked with bringing all monastic houses of Europe into the observance of the Rule of St Benedict, a "homogenization" took place in which the scholarly tradition of Celtic monasticism and the legacy of Cassiodorus was absorbed into Benedictinism which placed great stress on a careful, meditative reading of the Scriptures and who operated (rural) "monastic schools" which later had spin-offs in the (urban) cathedral schools.  These schools were required, by Charlemagne, to offer learning even for students who could not afford tuition, a mandate reiterated by the magnificent Pope Innocent III.

Cassiodorus only counted the number of the liberal arts; Augustine had already identified these subjects, once the boast of pagan learning, and claimed them for Christ as tools for Bible-reading.  In Book II of his de doctrina Christiana, Augustine explains these tools and lists not only what we now call the "liberal arts," but also the "mechanical arts" and the study of history, though he placed greater stress on "eloquence" (rhetoric), "dialectic," and grammar" for a more unified purpose:  Exploring things and signs in the Bible:

All teaching is teaching of either things or signs, but things are learnt through signs...  These are things, but they are at the same time signs of other things.  There are other signs whose whole function consists in signifying.  Words, for example:  nobody uses words except in order to signify something.  So every sing is also a thing, since what is not a thing does not exist.  But it is not true that every thing is also a sign [...] (de doctrina Christiana, II.4, 5).

In effect, Augustine "married" the study of the arts to semiotics.

Later, a canon who would earn the sobriquet of "The Second Augustine," namely Hugh of St-Victor, was a Master (Magister, in the classical sense of the Latin word, means "teacher") at the Abbey School of Saint-Victor in Paris, an institution that represented a mature development of the cathedral schools and almost--but quite yet--an early form of the university.  Early in his de Sacramentis, a theological textbook, Hugh retrieves Augustine's semiotics and refines the application of the trivium, the quadrivium, and other subjects to Biblical exegesis.  After pointing out that "To pronunciation alone grammar applies, to meaning alone, dialectic applies; to pronunciation and meaning together rhetoric applies."  He goes on to say:

Therefore, it is clear that all the natural arts serve divine science [= "knowledge"], and that the lower wisdom, rightly ordered, leads to the higher.  Accordingly, under the sense of the significance of words in relation to things of history is contained, which, as has been said, is served by the three sciences:  grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.  Under that sense, however, consisting in the significance of things in relation to mystical facts, allegory is contained.  And under that sense, consisting in the meaning of things in relation to mystical things to be done, tropology is contained, and these two are served by arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, and physics.  Besides these, there is above all that divine science to which the Divine Scripture leads, whether allegory or tropology; one division of this which is allegory, teaches right faith, the other, which is in tropology, teaches good work.  In these consist knowledge of truth and love of virtue; and this is the true restoration of man (Hugh of St-Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith [Ex Fontibus Company, 2016], 5-6, emphases added).

So foundational was the liberal arts to the study of Scripture, in fact, that students who aspired to become a professor in theology was required, at the University of Paris at least, to have three baccalaureate degrees:  Baccalaureus artium in the liberal arts, Baccalaureus Biblicus in the Scriptures, and finally Baccalaureus Sententiarum in the  Four Books of the Sentences of Peter Lombard.

Not only did the Bible render the liberal arts needful, it also served as a surrogate for "secular" learning, since these arts likewise supplied the skills which, in turn, gave rise to mechanics, the physical sciences, and the like.

It should be added that the seven liberal arts, but especially the trivium, was not the exclusive domain of "professional" theologians; it was also widely used by monastics (and later, mendicants) in the prayerful, meditative reading of the Bible, since it supplied them with  mental tools to mine the deep riches of the Word of God in view of contemplative nearness to God.  This was the overarching theme of Jean Leclerq's classic and still-standard work The Love of Learning and the Desire for God.  Complementing this is Professor Beryl Smalley's epoch-making The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages.

One final note.  There is a word-play in the word ars libera, since liber, Latin for "book," is tucked in libera, from which we get the Latin word liberalis, "a free person."  Literacy and liberty go together, especially in Biblical literacy:  "For freedom, Christ set us free!" (Gal 5:1).

This post is dedicated to my good friend and fellow-priest,
Dom Cassian Elkins OSB of Subiaco Abbey, Arkansas,
with fraternal affection.