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Exegetical traditions.

 

“It is necessary for those who preside over the churches... to teach all the clergy and the people... collecting out of divine Scripture the thoughts and judgments of truth but not exceeding the limits now fixed, nor varying from the tradition of the God-fearing Fathers. But, if any issue arises concerning Scripture, it should not be interpreted other than as the luminaries and teachers of the Church have expounded it in their writings; let them [the bishops] become distinguished for their knowledge of patristic writings rather than for composing treatises out of their own heads.”

 

This text of Canon 19 of the Council in Trullo (692) reflects the traditionalist and conservative character of the Byzantine, approaches to theology and to exegesis in particular, and explains the presence in all monastic and private libraries of Byzantium, of innumerable copies of patristic catenae, and “chains” of authoritative interpretations of particular Biblical texts expressing or claiming to express the continuity of exegetical tradition.

Even though the consensus patrum reached by this method was in some instances partial and artificial, the standard Church teaching came to rely on it especially when it was sanctified by liturgical and hymnographical usage. The Bible was always understood not simply as a source of revealed doctrinal propositions or as a description of historical facts but as a witness to a living Truth, which had become dynamically present in the sacramental community of the New Testament Church. The veneration of the Virgin, Mother of God, for example, was associated once and for all with a typological interpretation of the Old Testament temple cult: the one who carried God in her womb was the true “temple,” the true “tabernacle,” the “candlestick,” and God’s final “abode.” Thus, a Byzantine, who on the eve of a Marian feast listened in church to a reading the Book of Proverbs about “Wisdom building her house” (Pr 9:1 ff.) naturally and almost exclusively, thought of the “Word becoming flesh” — i.e., finding His abode in the Virgin. The identification of the Old Testament Wisdom with the Johannine Logos had been taken for granted since the time of Origen, and no one would have thought of challenging it. As early as the fourth century, when much of the Arian debate centred on the famous text “The Lord created me at the beginning of his works” (Pr 8:22), it was quite naturally interpreted by the Arians in favour of their position. Athanasius and other members of the Nicaean party declined to challenge the identification between Logos and Wisdom preferring to find references to other texts supporting the uncreated character of the Logos-Wisdom. No one questioned the established exegetical consensus on the identification itself.

Much of the accepted Byzantine exegetical method had its origin in Alexandrian tradition and its allegorism. St. Paul, in describing the story of Abraham’s two sons as an allegory of the two covenants (Ga 4:23), gave Christian sanction to a non-literal method of interpreting Scripture known as Midrash, which had developed among Palestinian rabbis in pre-Christian times. Thus, in pushing the allegorical method of interpreting Scripture to its very extremes, the Alexandrian Hellenistic milieu, common to Philo, Clement, and Origen, could refer to the illustrious precedent of St. Paul himself. Allegory was first of all consonant with the Hellenic and especially the Platonic concern for eternal things as the opposite to historical facts. The Greek intellectual’s main difficulty in accepting Christianity often lay in the absence of direct speculation on the Unchangeable since his philosophical training had led him to associate changeability with unreality. The allegorical method however allowed the possibility of interpreting all concrete, changeable facts as symbols of unchangeable realities. Thus, history itself was losing its centrality and in extreme cases simply denied.



But consonance with Hellenism was not the only element, which contributed to the widespread use of allegory in exegesis. The method provided an easy weapon against Gnosticism, the main challenge of Christianity in the second century. The major Gnostic systems — especially those of Valentinus and Marcion — opposed the Demiurge, the Yahweh of Judaism, to the true God manifested in the New Testament. Christian apologists used allegory to “redeem” the Old Testament and counteracted the Gnostic dualism with the idea that the Old and the New Testaments have the same “spiritual” meaning and reflect a continuous Revelation of the same true God.

Origen also made use of this concept of the “spiritual meaning” in his notion of Tradition. The Spirit, which had inspired the Biblical writers, was also present in the “spiritual men” of the Christian Church. The saint alonetherefore could decipher the authentic meaning of Scripture.

 

The Scriptures [Origen writes] were composed through the Spirit of God, and they have not only that meaning which is obvious, but also another, which is hidden from the majority of readers. For the contents of Scripture are the outward forms of certain mysteries and the images of divine things. On this point, the entire Church is unanimous, that while the whole Law is spiritual, the inspired meaning is not recognized by all, but only by those who are gifted with the grace of the Holy Spirit in the word of wisdom and knowledge.1

 

Although it raises the important problem of authority in exegesis, this passage certainly expresses a view largely taken for granted in Medieval Byzantine Christendom and explains the concern for a consensus patrum expressed in a formal way in the canon of the Council in Trullo quoted at the beginning of this section.

In addition to Alexandrian allegorism, the Byzantine tradition of exegesis incorporated the more sober influence of the School of Antioch. The opposition between Alexandria and Antioch —, which found a well-known and violent expression in the Christological debates of the fifth century — should not be exaggerated on the level of exegesis. The chief minds of the Anti-ochian school — Diodore of Tarsus (ca. 330-ca. 390), Theodore of Mopsuestia (ca. 350-428), and Theodoret of Cyrus (ca. 393-ca. 466) — did not deny the possibility of a spiritual meaning in Biblical texts; yet they reacted strongly against the elimination of the literal, historical meaning and against an arbitrary allegorism based on Platonic philosophical presuppositions foreign to the Bible. Thus, the notion of theory (“contemplation”), which implied the possibility of discovering a spiritual meaning behind the letter of the text, was not rejected, but the emphasis was placed upon what actually happened or said historically as well as upon the moral or theological implications of the text.

The theological authority of the School of Antioch was shattered by the condemnation of Nestorius, a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia, at Ephesus in 431 and by the anathemas against the Three Chapters (Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the anti-Cyrillian writings of Theodoret of Cyrus and Ibas of Edessa) pronounced by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. After 553, the scriptural commentaries of Theodore, one of the greatest exegetes of early Christianity, could be preserved only clandestinely in Syrian or Armenian translations while the Greek original survived only in fragments scattered in the catenae. But the tradition of Antiochian exegesis survived in the exegetical works of Theodoret, which were never prohibited, and even more so in the writings of Theodore’s friend John Chrysostom, by far the most popular of all Greek ecclesiastical writers. His definition of typology, as opposed to allegory, as “a prophecy expressed in terms of facts”2 and his concern for history served as safeguards against the spiritualizing excesses of the Alexandrian tradition in late-Byzantine exegetical literature, while still leaving room for theory, i.e., fundamentally a Christ-oriented typological interpretation of the Old Testament.

 


Date: 2016-01-14; view: 519


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