Did Christ Teach in Secret? Parables, the Spoken Word vs. the Written Word, and the Start of Christ's Miracles (ST III q.42 a.3-4, q.43-45 Prologues)

Orientation #

He takes up article 3 of the question on Christ’s teaching, then article 4, and at the end says “we have time here” and reads the prooemium of the question on the miracles, plus the prooemia of the questions on the particular kinds of miracle and on the transfiguration — “so we’ll get through the whole thing here about these miracles.” The neighbouring classes treat Christ’s preaching to Jews and Gentiles, and then Christ’s miracles.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections: Christ ought not to have taught all things publicly (“many things apart he said to his disciples”) #

• Obj. 1: many things he said apart to his disciples (the Sermon [ed.: on the Mount, to the disciples]); and Matthew 10, “what you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftops” — so not all things publicly.
• Obj. 2: profound things of wisdom should be expounded only to the perfect — “we speak wisdom among the perfect” (Paul); Christ’s teaching contains the most profound wisdom, so it ought not to be communicated to the imperfect multitude.
• Obj. 3: it is the same to hide a truth by silence and by obscurity of words; Christ hid truth from the crowds by obscurity (“without parables he did not speak to them”), so for like reason he could have hidden things by silence.
• Sed contra: John 18, to the high priest — “I have said nothing in hidden.”

2. Three ways a teaching can be hidden (“can be hidden in three ways”) #

1. As regards the intention of the teacher, who means to hide rather than make known. Two sub-cases: (a) from envy, wishing to excel by his knowledge — aside: Aristotle complains of the theological poets, who said things like “those who did not eat the manna became corruptible” and we do not know what they meant; “they kind of despised us.” Not so in Christ: “What I have learned without fiction and without envy I communicate, and I do not hide its virtue.” (b) from the uncleanness of the things taught — he first says “moral defects of the people,” then corrects himself: “not the people he’s speaking to, but of those things which are taught.” Augustine on John: some things are bad, which human modesty cannot bear. Of heretical teaching it is said “hidden waters are more sweet” — his translation reads “stolen waters are sweet.” Christ’s teaching is neither error nor uncleanness, and so, Mark 4, a true and honest teaching is not put under the measure.
2. Because it is proposed to few. Christ taught nothing this way: all his teaching was proposed either to the whole people or to all his disciples in common. Augustine on John: who speaks in hiding who speaks before so many men — especially if what he says to a few he wishes made known to many?
3. As regards the way of teaching. Here Christ did speak hiddenly to the crowd, in parables, announcing spiritual mysteries to those not apt or worthy to grasp them — and it was better for them to hear of spiritual things under the covering of parables than to be deprived of them altogether. To the disciples he expounded the open and naked truth (“it is given to you to know the mysteries”), and through them it would arrive to others who were suitable: 2 Timothy, “what you have heard from me through many witnesses, commend to faithful men who are suitable and can teach others.” Signified in Numbers 4, where the sons of Aaron carry some things wrapped and some unwrapped.

3. Reply to the first: night, and the smallness of Judea (“he speaks in a comparative way”) #

• Hilary on Matthew: we do not read that the Lord was accustomed [solet] to preach at night or to treat his teaching in the dark; he says this because all his speech to the carnal, and his word to the faithless, is night — and because what is said among the faithless should be spoken with the liberty and confession of faith. A student corrects the reading of solet to “accustomed”; he accepts it.
• Or Jerome: comparatively — he instructed them in the small place of Judea, as against the whole world in which, through the apostles’ preaching, his teaching would be made public.

4. Reply to the second: not all, but what was given was given clearly (“many have heard me”) #

• The Lord did not make known all the profound things of his wisdom, not even to the disciples: John 16, “I have many things to say which you cannot yet bear.” But whatever it was worthy to hand on, he proposed clearly, not hiddenly — though not understood by all. Augustine on John: “I have spoken openly in the world” means many have heard me; it was not manifest to all, because they did not understand.
• Examples for “rich yet popular”: Mozart said there are things in his piano concertos only a true connoisseur can appreciate, yet they are such that everybody will like them. So Shakespeare keeps his popularity. Even the Nicomachean Ethics an educated person can pick up and make some sense of — “it’s not like reading USA Today.”

5. Reply to the third: how much was said in parables (“without parables he did not speak to them”) #

• Chrysostom: that saying refers to that particular speech; otherwise he said many things to the crowds without parables. He notes the word alias may also mean “otherwise.”
• Augustine, Questions on the Gospels: not that he said nothing properly, but that he made no sermon in which he did not signify something through a parable — though within it some things were said properly.
• He ties this to the early question whether sacred Scripture should use metaphors: an objection was that a metaphor is unclear; Thomas answered that what is said in one place metaphorically is said elsewhere non-figuratively, and metaphor serves partly to bring our imagination into subjection to God, partly to stimulate people to see the meaning. A parable is like an extended metaphor; the parabolic and the plain “work together,” the parable stimulating the imagination.

6. Article 4: should Christ have written his teaching? (“Christ ought to have treated of his teaching by the written word”) #

• Obj. 1: writing exists to commend teaching to memory for the future; Christ’s teaching is to endure forever (Luke 21, “heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away”).
• Obj. 2: the old law was a figure of Christ (Hebrews 10, “the law had the shadow of future goods”) and was written by God himself (Exodus 24, the two stone tablets). A student: “He did write in sand.”
• Obj. 3: Christ came to enlighten those in darkness (Luke 1), so it belongs to him to exclude occasion of error. Augustine, On the Agreement of the Gospels I: some ask why the Lord wrote nothing, so that we must believe others writing of him; and the pagans, who do not dare blaspheme him and attribute to him the most excellent wisdom but only as a man, say his disciples made their master more than he was in calling him Son of God and Word through whom all things were made — and they seem prepared to believe whatever he had written of himself, but not what others preached of him by their own judgment.
• Sed contra: there are no books written by him in the canon of Scripture.
• Asides on authors and their books: Shakespeare apparently did nothing to ensure his works survived (the first folio, 1623, after his death in 1616), though he seems to have known how great the plays were; he doubts Aristotle did much either. Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations ends like a man closing a lecture — the first to have worked this out, be thankful for what is found and forgiving for what is missing — and some take his works as the official account of the Lyceum lectures, well ordered, not ordinary student notes. Thomas is said to have written the Summa contra Gentiles on scraps of paper.

7. The body: three reasons Christ wrote nothing (“to a more excellent teacher, a more excellent way”) #

1. His own dignity. To a more excellent teacher a more excellent way of teaching is suitable; Christ as the most excellent teacher impressed his teaching on the hearts of hearers — Matthew 7, he taught them as having power. So among the Gentiles the most excellent teachers, Pythagoras and Socrates, wished to write nothing; things written are ordered as to an end to the impressing of teaching in hearers’ hearts. His gloss: “the spoken word is a more perfect tool of teaching than the written word.”
   • Illustrations: a friend of his brother Marcus, so excited by what he sees that it shakes you. De Koninck reading the first book of the Physics with Thomas’s text, then sitting back and showing how Descartes or another modern repeats the errors Aristotle expounds. A dollar-bin collection by the author of Closing the American Mind [Allan Bloom, inferred], containing a recollection of Leo Strauss and the influence of his spoken word; the man who asked to study under Strauss and got “We’ll see.” His own difficulty: “I can’t listen and take notes. I have to listen” — and his brother Mark at Laval, who told an examiner “I can’t follow you if I take notes, especially in French.” He is bothered by students who start taking notes at once: “they’re not really following what you’re saying.” A student notes that if Plato (and Xenophon) had not written, Socrates would have been lost to us; also that Aristotle was peripatetic, not sitting writing books.
2. The excellence of his teaching, which letters could not comprehend: John 21, the other things Jesus did, which if written one by one the world could not contain. Augustine: not the spaces of places, but the capacity of the readers, cannot contain them. And if Christ had committed his teaching to writing, men would think nothing higher of his teaching than what the Scriptures contain. (He recalls: the Holy Spirit will recall things to you.)
3. Order. He taught his disciples immediately, and they afterwards taught others by word and by writing; had he written himself, his teaching would have reached all immediately, without order. Wisdom “sent her handmaidens to call them to the tower.”
   • Digressions: Muhammad, illiterate, dictated; the several versions of the Quran, later ordered burnt but for one, though Muslims throw the many translations at Christians — “what goes around comes around.” Thomas dictated pacing back and forth, even two works at once; Chesterton and Belloc dictated; admiration for indices compiled before computers — “the best indices were not compiled by computers.”

8. The pagans’ magic books, and two relic digressions (“they thus err”) #

• Augustine (same book): some Gentiles thought Christ wrote books of magic by which he did his miracles, which Christian teaching condemns; yet those who claim to have read such books of Christ do none of those things themselves. By divine judgment they err so far as to say those books were addressed to Peter and Paul, because they found them depicted with him — no marvel that the inventors [fingentes] were deceived by the painters, since through the whole time Christ was in mortal flesh Paul was not yet his disciple. What he likes best: “whatever they say they read about these magic tricks that he did, they never seem to be able to do them.”
• Student digressions he takes up: the Shroud, where removing the backing cloth revealed a second faint image on the reverse, slightly different from the front, said to rule out forgery or photography; the image is a surface burn a tenth of a red blood cell thick, so the two sides do not meet. And a Drudge Report item on Noah’s Ark, an expedition on Ararat, satellite images, and trouble from the Turkish government.

9. Replies to the objections of article 4 (“as if by his hands”) #

• To 1: Augustine, same book — to all his students as to members of his own body Christ is the head; when they wrote what he showed and said, it should never be said he did not write, for his members did what the head dictated; whatever he wished us to read of his deeds and words he commanded them to write as if by his hands. “So we say Christ did write, with his mystical body.” His remark: “Thomas takes the gospels as gospel truth.”
  • Aside: a letter in the mail from a former professor, Michael True of Assumption, complaining of the Church’s authority and that it ignores the scriptural scholars of the last hundred years, whose word about Christ is supposedly more authoritative and more historically accurate than the gospels — “the audacity of these guys.” A student invokes Mrs. Nussbaum’s critique of contemporary scholars, and another recalls greeting him with “you behaving yourself, Mike?” — “I hope not.” The pun: “the true man says many false things.”
• To 2: the old law was given in sensible figures, so it was suitably written with sensible signs; but Christ’s teaching, the law of the spirit of life, ought to be written not with ink [atramentum] but with the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on the fleshly tablets of the heart (Paul, Corinthians).
• To 3: those who would not believe the apostles’ writings about Christ would not have believed Christ himself writing, since they held he did his miracles by magic arts.

10. The prooemia on the miracles and the transfiguration (“let’s look at the proemium here”) #

• The miracles are considered first in general, second by different kinds, third in particular about the transfiguration.
• In general, four articles: whether Christ ought to do miracles; whether he did them by his own divine power; at what time he began to do them; whether his divinity was sufficiently shown through miracles.
• The particular kinds, in order: miracles about spiritual substances (the demons — “the ones that get into the pigs”), about celestial bodies, about men, and about irrational creatures. He remarks how curious the order is, and recalls a college paper for a Franciscan priest on “the person of Christ in the Gospel of Mark”: he wrote on the divinity manifested through the humanity — the priest objected “don’t you see his humanity?” — and organised the manifestation of the divine person through miracles in nature, the angelic order, the human order, and the rest of creation.
• The transfiguration, four articles: whether it was suitable for Christ to be transfigured; whether its clarity was the clarity of a glorified body; the witnesses; the testimony of the fatherly voice. A student: “He didn’t talk about the cloud” — left open; “maybe it’ll come up here in the objection.”
• He notes that after the part on the life of Christ comes the exit of his life, the third division.
• Closing aside: his large picture of St. Dominic with the book, meditating on the Passion, with a Christ crowned with thorns or on the cross.

His words #

• “hidden” / in occulto — his rendering of Thomas’s term for a teaching kept back, in three ways.
• “stolen waters are sweet” — his translation’s version of the text he first renders “hidden waters are more sweet.”
• solet — “accustomed” (corrected by a student and accepted).
• alias — “otherwise,” besides “at another time.”
• “properly” vs. “figuratively” — the pair in Augustine’s reply about parables.
• scripto — “by the written word”; Sacred Scripture means “writings.”
• atramentum — “ink.”
• fingentes — “the inventors,” those who fabricated the magic books.
• “mystical body” — the sense in which Christ did write, his members writing at the head’s dictation.
• “proemium” — the preface to a question listing the articles to come.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 42, a. 3 (objections, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 42, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Prooemia to the questions on Christ’s miracles in general, on the kinds of miracles, and on the transfiguration (q. 43, q. 44, q. 45 — inferred)
• Augustine, On the Agreement of the Gospels, Bk. I (quoted within a. 4)
• Augustine, Tractates on John; Augustine, Questions on the Gospels (quoted within a. 3)
• Hilary on Matthew; Jerome; Chrysostom (quoted in the replies of a. 3)
• Scripture quoted: Matthew 10; Matthew 7; Mark 4; John 16; John 18; John 21; Luke 1; Luke 21; Numbers 4; Exodus 24; Hebrews 10; 2 Timothy; 1 Corinthians (Paul on wisdom among the perfect); 2 Corinthians (tablets of the heart)

Mentioned

• Aristotle on the theological poets; Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (closing lines); Nicomachean Ethics
• Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles; the earlier question whether Scripture should use metaphors
• Shakespeare and the first folio; Mozart’s piano concertos; the author of Closing the American Mind on Leo Strauss

His questions #

• Can a teaching be hidden, and in how many ways? Three: by the teacher’s intention (envy, or uncleanness of matter), by being proposed to few, by the manner of teaching.
• Did Christ hide anything from the crowds? Only in the third way, by parables — better for them than being deprived of spiritual teaching altogether.
• Did he make known all the profound things of his wisdom? No, not even to the disciples; but what was worthy to hand on he proposed clearly, though not all understood.
• “Without parables he did not speak to them” — did he then never speak plainly to the crowds? No: either this refers to that one discourse (Chrysostom), or no sermon lacked some parable, though within it some things were said properly (Augustine).
• What is Thomas saying about writing? “That the spoken word is a more perfect tool of teaching than the written word.”
• Why then did Christ write nothing? For his own dignity as most excellent teacher, because his teaching exceeds the capacity of readers, and so that his teaching might reach others in order, through the disciples.
• Did Christ then not write at all? He wrote by his members, as the head dictating to hands.
• Why was the old law written on stone and his not? The old law was given in sensible figures, fit for sensible signs; his is written by the Spirit on the tablets of the heart.
• Would writing have removed the pagans’ objection? No — those who disbelieve the apostles would have disbelieved him, holding his miracles to be magic.
• Does Thomas treat the cloud at the transfiguration? Left open — “maybe it’ll come up here in the objection.”