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 CRITICISM

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CRITICISM

drawn line between the exegetes of the critical and those of the traditional school. In the process by which the critics arrive at their conclusions there is a divergence of attitude towards the supernatural ele- ment in Holy Writ. Those of the rationalistic wing ignore, and at least tacitly deny, inspiration in the theological meaning of the term, and without any doctrinal preoccupations, except some hostile to the supernatural, proceed to apply critical tests to the Scriptures, in the same manner as if they were merely human productions. Moderate critics of Protestant persuasion — a school that predominates in Great Britain — hold to inspiration and revelation, though with a freedom incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy. Catholic Biblical critics, while taking as postulates the plenary inspiration and the inerrancy of the sacred Writings, admit in a large measure the literary and historical conclusions reached by non-Catholic work- ers in this field, and maintain that these are not ex- cluded by Catholic faith. With the exception of Abbe Loisy and his followers, no Catholic scholar has claimed autonomy or complete independence for criti- cism, all proceeding on the principle that it cannot validly, and may not lawfully, contradict the estab- lished dogmatic teaching of the Church. Its Christian exponents insist that a reverent criticism is quite within its rights in sifting the elements which enter into human aspects of the Bible, as a means of a better understanding of the written word, since its component parts were given their form by men in certain historical enviromnents and under some of the limitations of their age and place, and since, more- over, inspiration does not dispense with ordinary hu- man industry and methods in Uterary composition. (See LvsPiRATioN.)

Higher Criticism may be called a science, though its processes and results do not admit of nicety of control and demonstration, as its principles are of the moral-psychological order. Hence its conclusions, even in the most favourable circumstances, attain to no greater force than what arises from a convergence of probabilities, begetting a moral conviction. While some attempts have been made to elaborate a system of canons for the higher criticism, it has not, and probably never will have, a strictly defined and gen- erally accepted code of principles and rules. Some broad principles, however, are universally admitted by critical scholars. A fundamental one is that a literary work always betrays the imprint of the age and environment in which it was produced; another is that a plurality of authors is proved by well-marked differences of diction and style, at least when these coincide with distinctions in ^-iew-point or dis- crepancies in a double treatment of the same subject. A third received canon holds to a radical dissimilarity between ancient Semitic and modern Occidental, or Aryan, methods of composition.

History. — Before the eighteenth eentury. — The early ecclesiastical writers were unconscious of nearly all the problems to which criticism has given rise. Their attention was concentrated on the Divine content and authority of sacred Scripture, and, looking almost exclusively at the Divine side, they deemed as of trifling account questions of authorship, date, com- position, accepting unreservedly for these points such traditions as the Jewish Church had handed down, all the more readily that Christ Himself seemed to have given various of these traditions His supreme confirmation. As for the N. T., tradition was the determining factor here too. As exceptions we may note that Origen concluded partly from internal evi- dence that St. Paul could scarcely have written the Epistle to the Hebrews, and his disciple Dionysius adduceti linguistic grounds for rejecting the Apoca- lypse as a work of St. John. The Fathers saw in every sentence of the Scripture a pregnant oracle of God. Apparent contradictions and other difficulties

were solved without taking possible human imperfec- tion into view. Only in a few isolated passages does St. Jerome seem to hint at such in connexion with history. Except in regard to the preservation of the sacred text there was nothing to elicit a critical view of the Bible in the age of the Fathers, and this applies also to the Scholastic period. Even the Humanist movement preceding the Reforma- tion gave no impulse to the critical spirit beyond fostering the study of the Scriptures in their original ' languages. It was not a Humanist, but the erratic Reformer Carlstadt, who first broke with tradition on the authorship of an inspired book by declaring that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, because the account of his death is in the same style as the rest of his book. But though Carlstadt adduced a critical argument he cannot be styled a critic. Hobbes (1651), Pereyre (1655), Spinoza (1670) attacked the Mosaic authorship, but merely incidentally, in works in which anything like a systematic criticism found no place. A French priest, Richard Simon (1638- 1712), was the first who subjected the general ques- tions concerning the Bible to a treatment which was at once comprehensive in scope and scientific in method. Simon is the forerunner of modern Biblical criticism. The broadening opportunities for the study of Oriental languages, a keen and methodical mind, probably, too, a reaction against the rigitl view of the Bilile which reigned amongst both Catholics and Protestants of the age were the factors which produced Simon's first great work, the "Histoire critique du Vieux Testament", which was published in 1G7S. In this he called attention to the double narratives and variation of style in the Pentateuch, and thence deduced that, aside from the legal portion, which Moses himself had written down, nmch of the remaining matter was the work of several inspired annalists, a class to whom are due the later historical books, and who in subsequent generations added touches to the inspired histories by their predecessors. This theory did not survive its author, but the use of internal evidence by which Simon arrived at it entitles him to be called the father of Biblical criti- cism. Ilis novel view of the Mosaic books excited only condemnation, and his critical work, being an isolated effort which did not win the support of a school, found appreciation only in recent times. A continuously developing higher criticism was not to begin till the middle of the eighteenth century. But a capital distinction is to be made between criticism as applied to the Old and as applied to the New Testa- ment. The two have followed different courses. O.-T. criticism has been developed along the lines of lingu- istic and historic research. Philosophico-religious prej- udices have been kept in the background. But in re- sjiect to the N. T., criticism began as the outgrowth of philosophic speculations of a distinctly anti-Christian character and, as exercised by rationalists and liberal Protestants, has not yet freed itself from the sway of such a priori principles, though it has tended to grow more positive — that is, more genuinely critical — in its methods.

Since the eighteenth century. (1) Old-Testament Criticism outside the Church. — In 1753 Jean Astruc, a French Catholic physician of considerable note, pub- lished a little book, "Conjectures sur les m^moires originau.x doiit il parait que Moise s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Gene.se", in which he conjec- tured, from the alternating use of two names of God in the Hebrew Genesis, that Moses had incorporated therein two pre-existing documents, one of which employed Elohim and the other Jehovah. The idea attracted little attention till it was taken up by a German scholar, who, however, claims to have made the discovery independently. This was Johanii Gott- fried Eichhorn, the author of an Introduction to the O. T., issued 17S0-S3, and distinguished by vigour