Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/782

Rh 746 advocates of yvwo-ts. The appeal soon came to be made to a rule of faith which may at first have meant nothing more than the harmony of Scripture teaching, but which was speedily identified with something outside Scripture, with the contents of doctrinal summaries, or with the verdict of exegetical tradition. The East and the West gave way alike to this bias, but the West first and most positively, In both we find early mention of an ecclesiastical canon or norm of truth. In the Church of the East, indeed, that took originally the form of an authoritative yvuxris or private exposition of the esoteric meaning of Scripture handed down by careful tradition from Christ and the apostles, while in the Church of the West it was rather the voice of the church itself, and that soon the voice as formulated. Both churches, however, more or less dis tinctly recognized an ecclesiastical tradition represented in compends of doctrine which were used for catechetical and other purposes, and an interpretative tradition embodied in the expositions of influential doctors. Thus hermeneutical independence was sacrificed. In Irenseus and Tertullian we see how a very natural reaction took this direction. The necessity of meeting errorists who were greater adepts in arbitrary spiritualizing than any whom the church could present led them to protest against the practice. They saw the propriety of looking to Scripture itself for hermeneutical guidance, and of rescuing it from the despotism of a mystical philosophy which threatened the life of its cardinal doc trines. They adopted a simpler reading of its message, and so far they deserve the name of pioneers in real historical interpretation. But, as appears in their gross chiliastic expositions, their literalism was carried to excess. It came into conflict with the deeper declarations of Scripture, and this conflict they were tempted to compose by a relapse into fanciful methods. It created difficulties in their controversy with Gnostic opponents, and these they thought to remove by a final appeal. to an authoritative tradition fixing the sense in which the sacred books which both parties used as witnesses to their doctrine were to be understood. This was to be found in its integrity in those ancient churches which had enjoyed direct apostolic teaching, and, as Irenasus conceived, in some special way in that of Ilome. Gradually the idea of a normative analogy of faith discovered within Scripture was externalized, and the standard of interpreta tion was looked for in ecclesiastical symbols and the formal decisions of the heads of the church. In this process, which issued in the Tridentine definition of the ultimate determination of the interpretation of Scripture as resident in the church, and the more recent declaration of the in fallibility of the pope as the voice of the church, Vincent of Lerins claims particular notice. In his Commonitorium, for which we are indebted to the Semi- Pelagian controversy, he lays down rules for the attainment of certitude in belief. Faith is to be settled by two things, the authority of Scripture and the tradition of the church. The former is a perfect and adequate foundation. Yet the caprices of inter pretation require it to be supplemented by the latter. The sense of Scripture is the sense in which the church under stands it, and this tradition of the Catholic Church, which is to be accepted as the canon of hermeneutics, is defined as &quot; quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.&quot; This treatise, still retained in singular honour by large sections of the Christian Church, exhibits the herme neutics which had been winning acceptance since the times of Irenseus and Cyprian, and by which the Latin com munion was led to bind itself. The result of the deference paid to the fathers in both churches, and especially in the West, was the renunciation of independent exegesis and the production of compilations of patristic comments. These cmpai or Catenae epitomized the interpretations of most of the great expositors, particularly Origcn, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine, and were on the whole more suc cessfully executed in the Greek Church than in the Latin. They were in use by the end of the 5th or beginning of the 6th century. Andreas of Caesarea, who belongs to the former period, or Olympiodorus, whose date is about the beginning of the 7th century, has sometimes been recog nized as the earliest epitomizer; but the position is to be assigned rather to Procopius of Gaza, who comes between these two. For many centuries the most eminent divines took part in the preparation of Catence, such as Cassiodorus (also a literalist), Bede (already cited as an allegorist), Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus (often honoured as the most learned interpreter of the 8th and 9th centuries), Haymo, Remigius, Sedulius, Theophylact, CEcumenius, Paschasius Radber-tus, and Aquinas. The Catena aurea of Aquinas on the gospels was of great value. Redactions of the Catena, were also made in course of time. These were the Glossa?, which were known as maryinales or extrinsecce when the comments were given on the margin, and inttrlineares or intrinsecve when these were introduced in the text. The most influential glossa of the second class was that of Ansel m of Laon, who belongs to the end of the llth and the begin ning of the 12th century. Of the former the most im portant was the Glossa ordinaria of Walafrid Strabo, which was esteemed the chief exegetical manual for some six cen turies. Throughout the Middle Ages, full as these were of theological activity, dogmatic and polemic, hermeneutics became more and more a tradition. The less the Bible was studied in a free spirit, the more it became the subject of strained panegyric. Aquinas, indeed, though his practice was often in conflict with his theory, could still speak of the literal sense as that on which all the senses of Scripture are founded, and of argument as to be drawn only from that one literal sense and not from those senses which are ex pressed according to allegory (Summa, i. 1, art. 10). But at last independence was so completely resigned that John Gerson, the illustrious chancellor of Paris, was only the ex ponent of the prevalent opinion, when he declared that those who did not take the literal sense as the church defined it ought to be dealt with not by curious reasonings but by statutory penalties. 3. But alongside these two hermeneutical tendencies there can be traced from the earliest times, however obscurely or fitfully, a third which we term the Historical. Men like Irenseus, Origen, Augustine, &c., were not wholly incapa citated for the exercise of a better method by their allegorical or dogmatic bias. There has been a line of interpreters, slender enough as that line has been at times, who have recognized ib to be the exegete s object to dis cover the one sense intended by the writer himself, who have allowed allegory therefore only where the writings themselves indicated their mystical design, and who have laid the first importance on the grammatical sense and on the capacity of transporting oneself into the writer s posi tion. Even Alexandria presents in the great Athanasius and in Isidore notable instances of interpreters who, though given to occasional spiritualizing, proceed on the principle of the avTapKeia of Scripture (this specially in the case of Athanasius), and on the necessity of considering the occasion of each writing. But in direct antithesis to the allegorizing school of Alexandria stood the school of Antioch, which was grammatical and historical, with a tendency to an extreme literalism which yielded in not a few cases a jejune and unspiritual exegesis. Theophilus and Julius Africanus may claim a place in this order. But the acknowledged representatives of the Antiochene school are Lucian of Samosata, who is sometimes reckoned its real founder, Diodorus of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and above all John Chrysostom and Theodoret of the Syrian Cyrrhus. The last two, while not less careful of the