Eternal Life as Our End: Jude, Dei Verbum, and Thomas's Division of Scripture

Orientation #

He connects the division of the New Testament to “our study of grace” (“because of our connection with our study of grace”) and mentions that he has been re-reading Thomas’s commentary on John. No explicit reference to last time. The next class continues with Thomas’s prologue divisions of the four Gospels and the fourteen Pauline epistles.

The class, in order #

1. What do we call our goal? (“What would you call our goal”) #

The point: distinguish what we call our last end from what it is; the best name is “eternal life.”

• A student answers “to see God”; he replies that is what it is, not what we call it. Example: asked “what do you call this figure?” you say “square,” not “equilateral right-angled quadrilateral” (that would be saying what it is).
• Names offered: “heaven” (his grade-school answer; “nothing wrong with it,” but not too good), “the kingdom” (better: “thy kingdom come”), “the house of God” in John (a house is where someone lives; God lives there).
• He was struck, reading John in Greek and Thomas’s commentary, by how often “eternal life” comes up as the name for it.

2. Jude 20-21 in Greek: building up in faith, prayer, love (“Agapetoi beloved. You, my beloved”) #

The point: Jude names the three theological virtues as the way, and eternal life as the end.

• He reads the Greek: epoikodomountes heautous (building yourselves up; from oikos, house — aside: the yogurt brand “Oikos” in the supermarket), tē hagiōtatē pistei humōn (in your most holy faith), en pneumati hagiō proseuchomenoi (praying in the Holy Spirit), keep yourselves en agapē theou (in the love of God), prosdechomenoi (awaiting) the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ eis zōēn aiōnion (unto eternal life).
• The three are faith, hope, charity: pistis and agapē (Greek for caritas) are explicit; hope is not named but “praying” stands for it, as Augustine and Thomas, treating doctrine by faith, hope, charity, attach the Creed to faith, the Our Father to hope, and the two commandments of love plus the Ten Commandments to charity.
• Church Fathers on “unless the Lord build the house”: “house” can mean the Church, the heavenly kingdom, or the individual soul; in the metaphor the foundation is faith, the walls hope, the roof charity — “very concrete.”
• All this is for an end other than these: eternal life. “That’s a beautiful text.”

3. The order of faith, hope, charity (“what is the order here of those three”) #

The point: the order Jude gives is at least an order in time.

1. You believe there is a God, that he created you and has providence, before you hope in him.
2. You have hope before charity.
3. You have all three before eternal life.

• Thomas: faith tells us what the end is, hope pursues it, love joins us to it; hence charity remains in heaven (more perfectly), but belief is replaced by vision and hope by possession.
• He hints at “another order” (in being) but says: “see one part of the truth at a time” — taken up in segment 5.

4. What eternal life is; the virtues as the road (“virtue is the road to what happiness”) #

The point: eternal life is named as above but is the vision of God, and the way is the theological virtues, which shape one of the chief orders of sacred doctrine.

• John 17: eternal life is to know God and him whom he sent; also “beatific vision,” “seeing God as he is” (John’s epistle), “face to face” (Paul) — the latter “a little more metaphorical.”
• Thomas: virtue is the road to happiness; the principal virtues to this end are faith, hope, charity, then the four cardinal virtues — the plan of the Secunda Secundae (aside: Greek proverb mega biblion, mega kakon, “big book, big evil”; the Secunda Secundae is almost as big as the rest of the Summa).
• The catechetical division of sacred doctrine: faith, hope, charity — Augustine’s Enchiridion, Thomas’s catechetical instructions, and even Thomas’s Compendium of Theology (unfinished; the part on faith done, hope in progress). He calls this “one of the three chief orders” of sacred doctrine as a whole.

5. Dei Verbum’s proemium: eternal life, then believe-hope-love (“Dei Verbum religiose audiens”) #

The point: the proemium treats the same two things (eternal life, then faith-hope-charity) and adds a second sense of the order of the three virtues.

• Vatican II’s chief documents: four constitutions, two pastoral (Church in the Modern World, Liturgy), two dogmatic (on the Church, completing Vatican I; and Constitutio Dogmatica de Divina Revelatione). Aside: at Laval the “Dionnians” (Msgr Dionne) prized Aristotle’s proemium to De Anima as explained by Thomas, so students all wrote proemia to their papers.
• He reads the Latin: Dei Verbum religiose audiens et fidenter proclamans — “Word of God” is his favourite amphibole, meaning the Son of God or the Bible. The synod quotes John: annuntiamus vobis vitam aeternam quae erat apud Patrem et apparuit nobis … that you may have societatem nobiscum, and ours with the Father and with Jesus Christ. “Interesting that they tacked the idea of eternal life there.”
• Adhering to Trent and Vatican I, it proposes genuine doctrine on revelation and its transmission, so that the whole world audiendo credat, credendo speret, sperando amet — from Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus (“catechizing the rude”: beginners).
• The added order: “by believing you come to hope” is not necessarily the moving cause but a disposing cause: what you learn by believing disposes you to hope; hope disposes you to love. So the three are ordered (a) in time, (b) in being — a man can believe and still despair, can hope without yet loving, but cannot love without hoping or hope without believing; faith can be without hope but not vice versa, hope without love but not vice versa — and (c) “a little bit” as cause before effect, in the sense of material cause: each disposes for the next, “doesn’t complete the movement,” but makes you more suitable.

6. Leo XIII on the history of exegesis, ending in Thomas (“the Golden Age of Biblical Exegesis”) #

The point: from Providentissimus Deus (in the little volume Rome and the Study of Scripture, Abbey Press, St. Meinrad, 1964, with the Biblical Commission’s decisions; the three principal encyclicals start with Leo XIII, then Benedict XV) he reads selected praise of the Fathers, medievals and Scholastics, culminating in Thomas.

• Immediate disciples of the apostles (Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp), apologists (Justin, Irenaeus); the schools of Alexandria and Antioch taught little but Scripture; the following three centuries the “Golden Age of Biblical Exegesis” — compare Thales-to-Aristotle as the Golden Age of Greek philosophy.
• Origen: the greatest name in the East, with his Hexapla. His puzzle: Thomas sometimes “takes Origen apart” for scandalous errors, yet in the John commentary, after Augustine and Chrysostom, keeps sticking in Origen.
• Others: Clement and Cyril of Alexandria; Eusebius and Cyril of Jerusalem; Basil, the two Gregories; John Chrysostom, singled out for eloquence — whom Thomas uses “almost” most. West: Tertullian (“careful of him too,” more than Origen), Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose, Leo, Gregory; most famous Augustine (acute in penetrating the sense, fertile in using it for the faith) and Jerome (the “great doctor”; Thomas sometimes writes his own prologue and then comments on Jerome’s).
• Middle Ages to the 11th century: Isidore, Bede, Alcuin arranging the ancients; glosses (Walafrid Strabo, Anselm of Laon); textual integrity (Peter Damian, Lanfranc); 12th-century allegory, Bernard preeminent, “Scripture all through.”
• The Scholastics: “fresh and welcome progress” — Correctoria Biblica (he hadn’t known of these); chiefly interpretation: clear distinction of the senses, the value of each in theology, division of books into parts with summaries, the objects of the writers (what a prologue points out), the connection of sentence with sentence “looking before and after”; seen in treatises and commentaries; “the greatest name among them all is Saint Thomas Aquinas.”

7. Thomas: Scripture divided into Old and New Testament (“To this life, sacred scripture leads us in two ways”) #

The point: from Thomas’s commendation and division of sacred Scripture (he passes over the commendation), Scripture leads to eternal life praecipiendo (commanding: Old Testament, “Moses commanded a law,” Ecclesiasticus) and adiuvando (aiding, through the gift of grace: New Testament, John 1:17 lex per Moysen data est, grace and truth through Jesus Christ).

• So the whole Word of God is divided into two: Old and New — primarily on the basis of time, which helps distinguish them. Texts: Matthew 13, the scribe bringing forth new and old (kingdom of heaven, “another way of referring to what we’re after”); Canticles 7:13, nova et vetera.
• Old Testament (only the general division): by kinds of command — coactorium, coercive, law of the king who can punish (Proverbs 20, the king’s terror is the roar of a lion — the lion on the arms of England), vs. monitorium, admonition, law of the father (Ecclesiasticus, “you have sons, instruct them”). A division into two; Thomas sometimes divides into three, the king’s precept being twofold — establishing the law and inducing observance through heralds, the prophets — giving king, herald, father. Aside: the textus criticus speaks of law, prophets and Psalms, the Psalms standing out among the “hagiographa.”

8. The New Testament divided by grace into three (“Novum Testamentum quod ad vitam aeternam ordinat”) #

The point: the New Testament, “which orders to eternal life” (he has “heard that before”: Jude and the proemium), not only by precepts but per gratiae dona, is divided in comparison to grace rather than law.

• Objection anticipated: Thomas does not say there are no precepts in the New (“love is freedom from the law” — “no, it doesn’t say at all”). We name things by what they have most, or in comparison: sweet wine is not as sweet as soda pop but sweet compared to dry wine.

1. Origin of grace: the four Gospels.
2. Power (virtus) of grace: the epistles of Paul (skipping Acts in book order), beginning Romans 1:16, virtus Dei in salutem to everyone believing.
3. Carrying-out (execution, effect) of that power: the rest — Acts, the canonical epistles (Jude among them), the Apocalypse.

• Division into three.

9. Dei Verbum 18: the Gospels excel (“Neminem fugit. Let it escape no one”) #

The point: the council says the Gospels excel among all books “even of the New Testament,” and gives the reason.

• Merito excellere (aside: “we talked about merit”): which sense of before and after? A student: the fourth — the better.
• Reason: they are the praecipuum testimonium about the life and teaching of the incarnate Word (praecipuum = chief; Thomas calls Plato and Aristotle the praecipui philosophers). Playing on the amphibole: the Word of God (Bible) is chiefly about the Word of God (Son), so the books most about him are greatest. “See how beautiful it is.”
• The council names Matthew, Mark, Luke, John in that order but does not distinguish them as Thomas will. A division of four is not understandable; you get to four by divisions of two or three or both.
• Paragraph 19 (authenticity of the Gospels) skipped.

10. Dei Verbum 20 against Thomas’s third part (“They stole from Saint Thomas here”) #

The point: the council’s account of the rest of the New Testament matches Thomas’s threefold execution of grace.

• Thomas: the execution of the power of grace is shown in the progress of the Church — its beginning (Acts; Jerome: the infancy of the Church being born), its progress (apostolic instruction in the canonical epistles), its end (Apocalypse, “the end of the whole of sacred Scripture”; a little prayer to Christ there).
• Council: the canon, besides the four Gospels, contains the epistles of Paul and alia scripta apostolica (Acts not named separately, though Paul’s travels fit it), by which what concerns Christ is confirmed and his teaching more and more declared (a continuation of the Gospels); then salutifera virtus of Christ’s work preached (Paul), ecclesiae initia (Acts), admirabilis diffusio narrated (canonical epistles), consummatio gloriosa pronounced (Apocalypse). “Very close to what Thomas says” — “they don’t admit it.”
• Aside: he apologises for the water-damaged state of his book, carried in the rain.

His words #

• “what you call it” vs “what it is”: name vs definition (square vs equilateral right-angled quadrilateral).
• eternal life: his preferred name for our last end (Jude, John, Dei Verbum).
• oikos / epoikodomountes: house / building up.
• house metaphor: foundation faith, walls hope, roof charity.
• agapē = caritas.
• three chief orders of sacred doctrine: the catechetical one is faith, hope, charity.
• amphibole of “Word of God”: Son of God or Bible.
• disposing cause: believing disposes to hope, hope to love; “material cause” [ed.: dispositive cause]; “doesn’t complete the movement.”
• senses of before and after: in time; in being (can be without the other, not vice versa); cause before effect; the fourth, “the better.”
• praecipiendo / adiuvando: commanding / aiding.
• coactorium / monitorium: coercive command (king) / admonition (father).
• hagiographa: the holy writings, third part of the Old Testament.
• praecipuum: chief.
• naming by what a thing has most or by comparison (sweet wine).
• “division of four is not understandable”: four reached by two or three.

Texts #

Read in class

• Jude 20-21 (Greek)
• Dei Verbum, proemium (Latin), n. 18 (Latin), n. 20 (Latin)
• Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, section on Fathers, medievals, Scholastics (English)
• Thomas Aquinas, division of sacred Scripture (from the commendation and division of sacred Scripture), Latin and English

Mentioned

• John 17; 1 John (“seeing God as he is”); Paul, “face to face”; John 1:17; Matthew 13; Canticles 7:13; Proverbs 20; Ecclesiasticus (two texts); Romans 1:16; Psalm “unless the Lord build the house”
• Thomas, Secunda Secundae; Compendium of Theology; catechetical instructions; commentary on John; commentaries with prologues on Jerome’s prologue
• Augustine, Enchiridion; De catechizandis rudibus
• Aristotle, De Anima proemium with Thomas’s commentary
• Vatican II constitutions (Church in the Modern World, Liturgy, Lumen Gentium (inferred)); Vatican I; Trent
• Benedict XV’s encyclical; Origen’s Hexapla; Correctoria Biblica

His questions #

• What would you call our last end or goal? Not “to see God” (that is what it is); best called eternal life, or the kingdom, or the house of God.
• In the house metaphor, what are foundation, walls and roof? Faith, hope, charity.
• What sense of before and after is the order faith, hope, charity, eternal life? At least in time; later also in being and as disposing cause.
• What are the principal documents of Vatican II called? Four constitutions: two pastoral, two dogmatic.
• Is “by believing you come to hope” the moving cause? No; it disposes.
• Into how many parts is the whole of Scripture divided, and on what basis? Two, Old and New Testament, primarily by time; further by command vs grace.
• Gospels merito excellere: what sense of before and after? The fourth, the better.
• Why are the Gospels the greatest of all books? Chief testimony about the life and teaching of the Word of God, the Son.
• Would you claim to understand a division into four? No; you get to four by divisions of two or three.