How the virtues of an interpreter presuppose and perfect hermeneutics: The case of Thomas Aquinas

Journal of Religion

Volumn 76, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 64-81

  Rogers Jr , Eugene F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249376308     PISSN: 00224189     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/489736     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. The essay hopes to contribute something to the work of Jeffrey Stout on the interpretation of texts in general, and to the work of Hans Frei and Kathryn Tanner to the study of the traditional sensus lateralis. By "literal reading," I have in mind what Frei describes in "The 'Literal Reading' of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?" in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 36-77
2. and what Tanner describes in "Theology and the Plain Sense," in Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. Garrett Green (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), pp. 59-78.
3. Victor Preller's Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967) lies in the background.
4. Jeffrey Stout, "What Is the Meaning of a Text?" New Literary History 13 (1982): 1-12; in particular I owe the phrase "interests and purposes" to that article, and my attention to their ethical evaluation to conversations with Stout.
5. For a diachronic reading of Thomas's work, see Michel Corbin, Le chemin de la théologie chez Thomas d'Aquin, Bibliothèque des archives de philosophie, nouvelle série, 16 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974).
6. I am using the Blackfriars' Latin-English edition of the Summa, gen. ed. Thomas Gilby, O.P. (New York: McGraw-Hill, and London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964-80), making minor changes without notice. In particular I will render "homo" by "human being" and "se," "sui," etc., by including both genders to which they tend to refer.
7. "Unter den Denkvoraussetzungen des Mittelalters war dadurch das Tor zur philologischen und historisch-kritischen Exegese geoeffnet. Hindurchzugehen war nicht mehr Sache des hl. Thomas. Aber mehr als alle vor ihm gab er denen die sachliche Rueckentdeckung, die spaeter hindurchzugehen hatten-bis heute." See Otto Hermann Pesch, "Exegese des Alten Testaments bei Thomas," in the Deutsche Thomas-Ausgabe (Heidelberg: Graz, 1977), 13:701. The article as a whole also qualifies the assessment of Preus, below.
8. It was George Lindbeck who proposed to me, without noting the remark of 1.1.10 ai 2, that "narrative" might capture the force of "sensus lateralis vel historiais." At In Sent., prol., art. 5, Thomas actually writes that "the mode of this science is narrative [narralivus]." I owe the reference to Marie-Dominique Chenu, La théologie comme science au XlIl' siècle, 3d rev. ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1957), p. 66.
9. James Samuel Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 46-60.
10. See Pesch, "Exegese," p. 701.
11. For discussion of the literature on that point, see Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l'écriture (Paris: Aubier, 1964), 3, pt. 2:272-302, esp. p. 280.
12. For a long sample of Thomas's exegesis-an account of his commentary on Romans 1-that does not much involve spiritual senses, see chaps. 3-6 in my Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame, in press). I am now at work on an article that seeks to understand the references to natural law in Thomas's commentary on Romans 1.
13. The curse of Ham: Gen. 9:22-25;
14. bronze skin and woolly hair: Rev. 1:14-15
15. King James Version. For the use of the Revelation passage by American slaves, see Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
16. That is, to take a modern historicist view of how to read the counterfactual, what would a pre-Christian author make of a Christian hermeneutic? Thomas might answer it differently. See II-II.2.7-8.
17. For my interpretation of how scripture functions in an Aristotelian and christological sense to supply the scientific character of sacred doctrine, see Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, chap. 2.
18. See also Corbin, p. 717.
19. For discussion, see de Lubac, esp. pp. 283-85
20. and, more recently, Bruce Marshall, "Absorbing the World: Christianity and the Universe of Truths," in Theology in Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck, ed. Bruce Marshall (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1990), pp. 69-102, esp. pp. 90-97.
21. For more on the analysis of an act, see my Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, excursus to chap. 6;
22. for more on prudence, see Daniel Nelson, The Priority of Prudence (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). Both works owe a great debt along these lines to Victor Preller.
23. See, e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), pp. 167-68, reflecting a view he later abandoned.
24. See George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), p. 64;
25. see also Bruce D. Marshall, "Aquinas as a Postliberal Theologian," Thomist 53 (1989): 353-402, esp. 362-64.
26. Preller, p. 233.
27. For a sketch of how for Thomas categorical relates to ontological truth, see Marshall, "Aquinas as a Postliberal Theologian" and the follow-up discussion in his "Thomas, Thomisms, and Truth," Thomist 56 (1992): 499-524.
28. One need not attribute any intemperance, injustice, and so on, to Thomas himself, given the limitations of his time and his dependence on the tradition, but only to his interpretation. See the discussion of slaveholders' culpability in Stout, Ethics after Babel, pp. 83-87.
29. II-II.83.1-3, esp. 3 ad 3.