HeyJ XLII (2001), pp. 451 462 THE FOURFOLD SENSE : DE LUBAC, BLONDEL AND CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGY KEVIN L. HUGHES Villanova University, Pennsylvania, USA The publication of the first two instalments of Henri de Lubac s Medieval Exegesis in English translation has met with mixed reviews. The point of argument has nothing to do with this particular translation; to the contrary, the translators smooth translation has been justly praised, and the volumes themselves are quite handsome. The quibble rather is with de Lubac himself. At a recent session of the Society for the Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages devoted to de Lubac, 1 one participant suggested that a subtitle for the session might be now that we have him, do we want him? And in a review of the first volume of the new translation, John Contreni has warned that de Lubac s book is devoid of a sense of Christianity as a historical religion and is therefore terribly dated and largely irrelevant to current scholarship on biblical exegesis. 2 So the question truly seems to be, do we want him? Determining the theological legacy of this work, such as it is, requires reflection on whether we will accept or reject the notion of the fourfold sense. This spectre seems to lurk in the background (and occasionally comes to the foreground) of recent work in the field of the history of exegesis. But readers of de Lubac on the fourfold sense may be missing an essential element of his argument a theology of tradition that draws heavily on Blondel. Without this piece of the puzzle, the reader risks misreading de Lubac s work simply as bad history. But de Lubac s work is more theology than history and it should be read and judged as such, whether that judgement be yea or nay. TERMINOLOGICAL ANARCHY Anyone who has spent any time digging around in the fields of medieval exegesis and hermeneutics knows deeply, and sometimes even painfully, what Walter Burghardt meant when he coined the term terminological anarchy. 3 The many and various uses of the terms historia, littera, The Editor/Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.
452 KEVIN L. HUGHES allegoria, moralia, anagogia, intellectus spiritualis, intelligentia spiritualis, and so on can haunt the historian of exegesis as she tries to wrestle with a particular biblical text or medieval author. The awareness is so sharp that any reference to the famous distich, Littera gesta docet, quod credas allegoria, // moralia quid agas, quo tendas anagogia, is enough to bring a wry smile to many a face. 4 The pluralism medieval exegesis presents seems so irreducible, that I remember once imagining that the little ditty above was the invention of some sadistic scholastic master looking to throw his students a curve ball. That de Lubac would build his study of medieval exegesis around precisely this little poem may be thus a bit off-putting to those of us who labour in the field. One might wonder if, after a tumultuous career, the old Jesuit had lost his edge. Or one might write it off to a sort of oldfashioned scholarship that paints with too-broad strokes over the nooks and crannies of particular idiosyncrasies in exegesis in the effort to say something grand and sweeping. And yet, the experience of reading de Lubac s work belies such conclusions. On or about page five of any of de Lubac s works, early or late, one cannot help but be impressed with and, as Robert Wilken suggests in the preface to the English translation, a bit dizzied by de Lubac s encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient and medieval texts. This was a scholar well acquainted with the particularities and idiosyncrasies of Christian thinkers. And in his work on exegesis, de Lubac makes it quite clear that he is aware of the terminological anarchy he faced. So then, what is it that motivated de Lubac to take this dusty old mnemonic poem and make it the centerpiece of the work? Frances Young seems to ask similar questions in her recent book, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Her book begins from the deep awareness of the terminological anarchy. She never addresses de Lubac s argument for the fourfold sense directly, but first reference to him is critical: He is offered as the primary example of those who characterize patristic exegetes as precursors of the medieval fourfold sense. 5 Relegating the Fathers to the status of precursors leads to the imposition of anachronistic categories upon their exegesis, and thus the whole notion of the senses of scripture is deeply problematic. The traditional categories of literal, typological, and allegorical are quite simply inadequate as descriptive tools, let alone analytic tools. 6 She deepens her critique: My contention is that neither the selfconscious practice of detailed exegesis, nor its broader hermeneutical principles, are properly attended to by the standard analysis into senses. 7 She takes it as the basic task of her book to challenge accepted generalizations so, hopefully, alerting a wider theological readership to the pitfalls of uncritical acceptance of summary accounts. 8 There is no note citing de Lubac here, but one cannot help but wonder if his summary account is one which she has in mind.
THE FOURFOLD SENSE 453 To demonstrate the inadequacy of the terminology of the senses, Young engages in a careful reading of early patristic material, especially 1 Clement, Melito of Sardis, and Origen. Through what amounts to a sort of phenomenological study of these early texts, she takes every interpretive move offered on its own terms, trying to determine the exact nature of the reference. By so doing, she uncovers five different notions of the literal sense, seven different types of allegorical interpretation, and four different senses of typology. Not one of these terms is univocal, she complains, and therefore they have little use as methodological categories. After the demonstration, she concludes: Our review proves that to approach patristic exegesis through the senses of scripture is not as straightforward or as illuminating as has generally been supposed. 9 But if de Lubac is the intended target here, in what way does she see his approach as straightforward? And illuminating for what and whom? Young s work is a fascinating journey through a broad scope of early Christian material, not without its own problems, to be sure, but on balance with insights too particular and too numerous to summarize adequately. And yet I find it curious that she refers to de Lubac so briefly and indirectly. In fact, she refuses even to address the arguments raised by him for the integrity and unity of the concept of the fourfold sense from Origen onwards. So, I suppose the question then becomes, Is she right? Has her study (and others like it) demonstrated why there seems to be no legacy of de Lubac to speak of among historians of exegesis? And if her book succeeds in its aim to alert a wider theological readership to the pitfalls of uncritical acceptance of summary accounts, might we expect that whatever theological legacy there may be will soon wither and fade? Perhaps. But I still doubt whether her critique actually touches the heart of de Lubac s argument. THE FOURFOLD SENSE OF SCRIPTURE We might begin by asking how de Lubac conceived his task in Medieval Exegesis, and to do this we might give his own preface a rather close reading. True, de Lubac states at the very beginning that he intends his work to be an historical and literal study of the ancient commentators on Scripture. 10 This would seem to suggest that de Lubac is in strict pursuit of the historical record, and thus might be subject to the sorts of mistakes and omissions that Young s work suggests are inherent in any historical enquiry guided by the senses of Scripture. But before we leap to this conclusion, we should realize that de Lubac is being a bit clever here. His invocation of the terms literal and historical follow
454 KEVIN L. HUGHES upon the first sentence of the Preface: The present work is not an allegorical or spiritual study of Scripture. So de Lubac invites the reader to consider his intent within the hermeneutical framework of medieval exegesis itself, and this makes the meaning of literal and historical more complex. Given his definition of the medieval literal sense, his statement of intent would seem to indicate only that this work does not itself engage in the spiritual interpretation that he portrays. Rather, he is claiming that the book explores the intention of the ancient and medieval authors, not their particular practices. In other words, he aims to portray a mentalité, not a method. This notion then helps us understand why he goes on to say that this work is not a contribution to the history of exegesis properly speaking at all, but rather a contribution to the history of theology or to the study of Christian thought and spirituality in general. 11 Far from laying out the many and various applications of exegetical method, de Lubac s work presents spiritual exegesis (his preferred term) as a whole theology of history which is connected with a theology of scripture. Exégèse Médiévale is the exploration of a theological hermeneutic, not of exegetical technique. First of all, de Lubac asserts that there are essentially two fundamental senses of Scripture the letter and the spirit. This basic division, he argues, is essentially Christian, regardless of what family resemblances may be found elsewhere in the Hellenistic world. What we have here is a theory that, even in its very form, owes everything to this Christian faith and that, in its content, seeks to give it full expression. 12 The relationship between letter and spirit is constituted by the fact of the Incarnation, eternity in time, which sheds light upon other concrete facts in salvation history. The fourfold sense is derived by subdividing the spiritual sense into three parts, and all four parts are related almost organically to each other. The literal sense for de Lubac is necessarily deeply rooted in history, in events. In essence, the literal sense is that which records the fact that God indeed has acted in history. This is not to say that every passage recounts a historical event literally. Rather, de Lubac allows that, say, Genesis s account of creation might be construed as a figurative construal of the concrete fact that God created the heavens and the earth. This inclusion of the figurative within the literal sense may make the picture rather messy, but the rationale becomes more clear when de Lubac moves on to define the allegorical sense. De Lubac s notion of allegory, or, better, of Christian allegory, is very particular and restrictive. Christian allegory, for de Lubac, is first witnessed in Paul s Letter to the Galatians. Paul sees an allegorical reference to the relationship of the old law to the new in Genesis s account of Hagar and Sarah s children. That is, allegory, as used by Paul, indicates the Christological and ecclesiological sense of Old Testament texts. And only that. The relationship, in de Lubac s analysis, between
THE FOURFOLD SENSE 455 history and allegory, is precisely that between the Old Covenant and the New: There is in one sense an opposition between the two testaments: one way then another way now. But there is nonetheless a unity. Their relationship is ambiguous. The second arises from the first and does not repudiate it. The second does not destroy the first. In fulfilling it, it gives it new life and renews it. It transfigures it. It subsumes it into itself. In a word, it changes its letter into spirit. 13 For de Lubac, this Pauline understanding of allegory is and must be rooted in the concrete historical fact of the Incarnation. Christ s life, death and resurrection initiates the New Covenant in history. In Christ, the eternal and the spiritual penetrate the temporal and corporeal. Because of this, the spiritual truth of the gospel penetrates the literal and historical sense of the Old Testament. The specifically Christian sense of allegory, then, is defined not by method, but by content not by methodology, but by theology: it grows out of the conviction that Christ is revealed in the events related in Scripture. The moral sense emerges as the response to the Christological truth unveiled in allegory. Unlike the moral sense in Origen s threefold schema of literal, moral, and spiritual (corresponding to body, soul, and spirit), the moral dimension of the fourfold sense can only follow from the allegorical sense: it generates a specifically Christian moral response. Finally, the anagogical sense points towards the eschatological and eternal realities of the Kingdom of God in its glory, which can only follow after the toil of the Christian s moral life. Together, the four senses thus present a vision of salvation history and of the individual soul s place within it. One can readily see, then, how de Lubac concludes that this fourfold sense offers more than a method for reading; it offers a theological hermeneutic for both scripture and life, both a theology of Scripture and a Christian spirituality. But perhaps this still begs the question, whose theological hermeneutic and which spirituality? De Lubac readily admits that his fourfold schema is by no means the only formula in the ancient and medieval world. The triple sense in Origen s Periarchon (literal, moral, allegorical) is preserved throughout the Middle Ages in such pre-eminent thinkers as Beatus of Liebana, Remigius of Auxerre, Rupert of Deutz, Peter Lombard, and Richard of St Victor. 14 So how can he argue that the fourfold sense in any way represents medieval exegesis as a whole? He answers this in volume 1 of the work by claiming that the threefold sense in practice amounts to the same fundamental division of letter and spirit and that the fourfold sense gives a more developed understanding of the spiritual interpretation. What, then, of other uses of the term allegory in a non- Christological sense? De Lubac simply denies that this is an authentic and proper use of the term, drawing on the authority of the Apostle Paul to do so. Other uses of the term are attributed to contamination by
456 KEVIN L. HUGHES profane [or Hellenistic] allegorization or to muddleheaded, confused, or above all, mediocre minds who, in any case, regardless of the tools, would never produce anything that was not mediocre. 15 Such contamination or confusion is not at all surprising, says de Lubac. It has to be admitted, he says, that the word allegory regardless of the authority of St Paul, who introduced it only circumstantially is not without its inconveniences. Christian writers never succeeded in any rigorous way in reserving allegory for its Pauline significance alone. 16 Given its etymology, allegory could easily be taken to refer not to this theological principle, rooted historically in an incarnational theology, but rather to something non-literal, different from the historical sense, and outside of history. This is what de Lubac considers the Hellenistic understanding of the term, and it is what eventually becomes the Christian understanding, an understanding which provided tinder for the fire of Protestant polemics against medieval Catholic theology. And such equivocation has continued into modernity. More and more in modern times, the Christian meaning of the term has been lost. Today it almost inevitably evokes a lack of realism contrary to the Faith combined with a disdain for historical science that is shocking to our minds. 17 He is thus somewhat sympathetic with his friend and fellow Jesuit, Jean Danielou s call for rejection of allegory in favour of the modern term typology. And yet he cannot finally agree to abandon it, since the term is claimed by Paul and preserved in the classic distich. 18 His task, then, is to recover what he believes to be a theologically consistent and unbroken tradition between the Apostle and the late medieval couplet. THE ARGUMENT FROM TRADITION: DE LUBAC AND BLONDEL We may still ask whose hermeneutic this is, however. De Lubac s argument finds the basic elements of the fourfold sense in Origen, Augustine, and Gregory, but in none of these is it fully developed. Nor can de Lubac seem to find a single figure in the Middle Ages who forged the hermeneutic into so refined a form. Even for Hugh of St Victor, the senses seem to be a given to be explained. So on what basis does de Lubac argue that the fourfold sense is properly the theological hermeneutic, the proper expression of the medieval understanding of scripture, in spite of the diverse expressions in the historical evidence that he himself records and acknowledges? Is it an abstraction, an instructive ideal type with no basis in real history? De Lubac says no and adheres to the historicity of the fourfold sense throughout the Middle Ages, either implicitly or explicitly. This judgement may be the final obstacle that keeps historians of exegesis from claiming his legacy, since the evidence of medieval commentaries seems
THE FOURFOLD SENSE 457 to contradict this overwhelmingly. If de Lubac is making a historical claim, it is a bad one. But let me suggest that de Lubac s judgement itself is theological. That is, his process of reconstructing the fourfold sense from the scattered, fragmentary witness of so many ancient and medieval figures is founded on a Catholic theological understanding of tradition as an organic whole. In particular, I suggest that de Lubac s argument is founded upon the notion of tradition he learned from his philosophical mentor, Maurice Blondel. Blondel develops his particular understanding of tradition in his brief work of 1904, History and Dogma. He is writing to respond to the historicism of Alfred Loisy and other Catholic modernists without resorting to an utterly ahistorical appeal to dogma. In essence, he aims to develop a philosophical foundation for a tradition-oriented method of historical theology. He proposes that the claims of history and of dogmatic theology each have their own logic and authority, but that they are of different orders. The claims of history are based upon facts, observable events and things in time and space, while the claims of dogmatic theology are conceptual, based upon non-material rational propositions. Blondel proposes Tradition as an intermediary between history and dogma which would bring about synthesis and maintain solidarity without compromising their relative independence. 19 Tradition, for Blondel, is not the transmission by writing or word of mouth of historical facts, received truths, accepted teachings, hallowed practices, and ancient customs. 20 If it were only this, then it would be conceptual and fixed in the past already known, once and for all. On the contrary, Blondel proposes that Tradition discovers and formulates truths on which the past lived, though unable as yet to evaluate or define them explicitly, that it enriches our intellectual patrimony by putting the total deposit little by little into currency and making it bear fruit. 21 Tradition is understood in history though received as the patrimony of Jesus, the apostles, and the fathers, it is worked out in time. This begs the objection that, by this account, Tradition is either the result of a process of logical deduction from some basic first principles (and therefore the proper province of dogmatic theology after all) or that it is irrational and arbitrary, a series of knee-jerk responses to the particular exigencies of history threaded together after the fact by an argument for continuity. To this, Blondel responds that tradition is, in fact, preserved as the inheritance of the apostles and fathers, but that it is preserved first and foremost in the moral and spiritual lives of the apostles, in their moral and religious actions which are not unconscious and irrational, but subconscious and unreasoned, which are provisionally and partially irreducible to explicit thought. 22 The immensity and profundity of the truth of the gospel are by their very nature too great and too deep for finite human understanding (even that of extraordinary men like the apostles) to reduce to language and concept. But
458 KEVIN L. HUGHES they are carried and handed on none the less in action. A man can carry out completely what he cannot entirely understand, and in doing it he keeps alive within him the consciousness of a reality which is still half hidden from him. 23 The elements of Tradition are thus not rational or propositional in nature, but they contain the seeds which can come to bear propositional fruit. It is in this moral and religious action that the truths of tradition are preserved and explicated. But it is important to emphasize that the tradition is not preserved in the actions of any one individual or group within the Church. Rather, tradition is discerned in the collective action of the church community, what Blondel calls the total experience of the Church and the mediation of collective life. Blondel s notion of Tradition is thus historical it can account for change and development, but it cannot be reduced to an account of historical facts. At the same time, it preserves dogmatic revelation, but argues that it is a revelation of a lived reality that leads to conceptual formulae, not of the conceptual formulae themselves. In the phrase that Blondel seems most nervous about, and yet most insistent upon, one goes from faith to dogma rather than from dogma to faith. 24 Tradition, for Blondel, is therefore neither ahistorical nor historicist, but rather stands in a position to synthesize the wisdom culled from both historical facts and dogmatic formulae: One has no right to set the facts on one side and the theological data on the other without going back to the sources of life and of action, finding the indivisible synthesis; the facts and definitions are simply faithful translation of it into different languages. The link between facts and beliefs can never be rationally justified by scholarship or dialectics, as though each human reason separately performed its dogmatic task. To succeed in that justification one must consider not only the efforts of each man, but the consensus of all who live the same life and share in the same love. 25 De Lubac s account of medieval exegesis never invokes Blondel by name, nor does it even advance a systematic argument for the relationship between history and tradition or facts and formula. But de Lubac was always quick to acknowledge his intellectual debt to Blondel, 26 and the resonances between Blondel s argument about Tradition as a whole and de Lubac s notion of medieval exegesis in particular are suggestive. In an early discussion of the fourfold sense (1948), de Lubac admits that his account is undoubtedly a reconstitution : We are not pretending that, for any of the authors just cited, the theory ever took on the exact and complete form that we have given it by trying to interpret the body of their witness. Neither are we pretending that all of them had a perfectly explicit consciousness of it or that, especially in practice, they always followed it point by point Not all the conveyors of a tradition, even the active ones, have such a full understanding of it. 27
THE FOURFOLD SENSE 459 With Blondel in mind, we can paraphrase: de Lubac is not interested in recovering the facts or evidence of a particular exegetical method as expounded by this or that interpreter. Nor is he arguing that Origen deduced a fourfold sense of Scripture and handed it down to his faithful followers. Rather, he is concerned to identify the principles of interpretation intrinsic to the interpretive practice of medieval exegetes, even if it is not fully conceptualized into a theory. The last sentence of the quote above almost directly echoes Blondel s statement in History and Dogma that [a] man can carry out completely what he cannot entirely understand, and in doing it he keeps alive within him the consciousness of a reality which is still half hidden from him. 28 De Lubac here argues that ancient and medieval Christians carried out an interpretive practice, or, even more, a reality of the relationship between Scripture and the life of faith, that they may not fully have comprehended. Such a pre-apprehension cannot be demonstrated by historical facts alone. De Lubac contrasts his enterprise with the work of history more explicitly later in the same essay: one could retort, the affirmations of the distich apply to certain texts but not to all! Granted. But, when the question posed above is worded that way, we hesitate to respond. Because it assumes that one is adopting the historian s point of view, which is to consider each text successively. But this is not the essential point of view of the believer. He receives Scripture from Tradition and reads it within the context of the Church, because it was given to the Church 29 So de Lubac can try to distill the essence of the medieval theology of Scripture from the tradition as an organic unit; his claim is about this distilled wisdom, captured in the distich, not about the particular exegetical theory of this or that individual. Again this resonates with Blondel s insistence upon the necessity of the collective witness of the Church for the synthesis of Tradition. The medieval distich is synthetic and thus de Lubac s exploration of its claims in the earlier tradition is likewise synthetic. 30 CONCLUSION One of the constitutive features of de Lubac s work is this likemindedness with his subjects. He says in the Preface to Volume One of Medieval Exegesis, I have always been of the naïve belief although it must be said that all the teachings of the Church confirm me in this notion that in the witness they give to their faith, no less than in the witness they expect from us in return, all the Christian generations enjoy a oneness and solidarity. 31 It is perhaps in his solidarity with the Fathers and medieval masters that de Lubac seems most foreign to us. In a particularly insightful comment, Frances Young contrasts ancient and modern exegesis by referring to the massive shift in what is found to be
460 KEVIN L. HUGHES problematical. We, she says, have problems about historical coherence; they had problems about doctrinal coherence. 32 It might be said that a similar divide separates Young and de Lubac. In essence, Young s principles are developed on the order of discovery, not on the order of theology or doctrine. She thus demonstrates her own principle: faced with the pluriformity of ancient exegesis, her concern is for historical coherence. Is it possible that de Lubac s work itself reflects the more ancient and medieval concern for doctrinal coherence? This leads to some concluding questions. If, in fact, de Lubac s work should be read as theology and not as history, then what? Can theological judgements so in tune with ancient and medieval tradition survive the dawn of historical consciousness that is said to characterize theology since the nineteenth century? Does Blondel s philosophy of tradition open a viable channel for retrieval of premodern thought? Or are retrievals like de Lubac s fourfold sense no longer credible in a theological world that has become self-consciously historical? It may be that, rescued from misunderstanding, de Lubac s argument finds no audience among theologians. Or it may be that his confessed sympathy and solidarity with those he studies offer us a fresh perspective on the possibilities of a tradition -oriented theology. These are possibilities that I hope can now be asked in earnest about the legacy of Exégèse Médiévale in the midst of its proper audience, contemporary theologians. Notes 1 At the 34th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 1999. 2 John Contreni, Review of Medieval Exegesis vol. 1: The Medieval Review TMR 99. 08. 13. (http://www.hti.umich.edu/t/tmr/). Contreni should perhaps be more precise here. It seems that what he means is that de Lubac lacks a sense for Christianity as a religion that changes and develops historically under the influence of historical pressures and so on. This critique may be fair, but this misunderstands de Lubac s purpose, in my estimation. De Lubac s intent, it seems to me, is precisely to argue that Christianity is an historical religion, meaning that it is a religion whose reading practices and theological disciplines are formed by a deep sense of the historical revelation of God in Christ. It is de Lubac s conviction that the fourfold sense of Scripture itself bears witness to this theological-historical consciousness. 3 Walter J. Burghardt, On Early Christian Exegesis, Theological Studies 11 (1950), pp. 83, 112. 4 The literal teaches events, allegory what you believe the moral teaches what to do, the anagogical where you are headed. 5 Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 186. 6 Ibid., p. 2. 7 Ibid., p. 201. 8 Ibid., p. 4. 9 The quote continues, So what seems to be needed are new proposals about how to characterize the actual exegetical practices of the early church. Ibid., p. 201. For Young, then, the traditional senses of scripture offer only the most superficial veneer over an abundance of reading strategies. Her new proposal is to re-imagine the categories based upon a closer reading of the texts; she finds six: 1. Paraenetic reading, 2. Oracular exegesis, 3. Lexical analysis, 4. Explanatory comments, 5. Deductive expansion, 6. Mimetic reading. This last category is subdivided into four
THE FOURFOLD SENSE 461 types of mimetic reading: paraenetic mimesis, prophetic topological mimesis, ikonic mimesis, and symbolic mimesis. These latter two are her proposed alternatives to Antiochene theoria and Alexandrian allegoria. This, she thinks, covers the actual practice of exegesis in the patristic period more accurately and comprehensively. These are largely categories that grow out of the rhetorical schools, where Young believes the roots of Christian exegesis are found. But this new schema seems as problematic as the traditional formula. Why separate paraenetic reading from paraenetic mimesis? Why not consider lexical analysis and explanatory comments as two elements of a literal sense? When she correlates these six new categories with traditional terminology of the senses, it is unclear exactly what their benefit is. While she can find points of correlation with all six (or ten) of her strategies, clearly the weight of patristic exegesis falls into the last subcategory, symbolic mimesis. With some minor shuffling, it appears that Young s terminology seems simply to rename the traditional categories, and thus the new schema carries as many liabilities as the old. Perhaps the real weight of Young s critical work shows the difficulty of imposing any particular heuristic schema on early Christian exegesis at all. 10 Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1., trans. Marc Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. XIII. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 225. 13 Ibid., p. 228. 14 De Lubac, On an Old Distich: The Doctrine of the Fourfold Sense in Scripture in Theological Fragments (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), p. 111, n. 11. 15 Ibid., p. 109. 16 De Lubac, Typology and Allegorization in Theological Fragments pp. 151 2. 17 De Lubac, Typology and Allegorization, p. 158. 18 In an effort to limit the confusion, de Lubac does argue against using allegory to refer to the general hermeneutic, preferring spiritual exegesis. See de Lubac, Scripture in the Tradition, trans. Luke O Neill (New York: Crossroad, 2000), especially Chapter 1, Spiritual Understanding, pp. 1 84. 19 Maurice Blondel, History and Dogma III, in The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1994), p. 264. 20 Ibid., p. 265. 21 Ibid., p. 267. 22 Ibid., p. 272. Note the similarity of this argument to that advanced recently by Terence W. Tilley, Inventing Catholic Tradition (New York: Orbis Press, 2000), who defines a tradition as a complex set of enduring practices. 23 Blondel, History and Dogma III, p. 273. 24 Ibid., p. 279. It seems only fair to include Blondel s note on this phrase: This assertion may still, despite everything, disturb some minds; but it is, after all, no more disconcerting than the following: in digging a tunnel, even in the most crumbling sand, excavation always precedes consolidation. The fixity of arguments and definitions, in the moving depths of our life and in the obscurities of our passage to God, is simply part of the unavoidable masonry required in order to keep the road open and to permit further excavations which, in their turn, will need fresh supports. 25 Ibid., pp. 286 7. 26 See de Lubac, At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that Occasioned His Writings, trans. A. E. Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), pp. 18 19. 27 De Lubac, Old Distich, p. 19. 28 Blondel, p. 273, as in note 21 above. 29 De Lubac, Old Distich, p. 121. 30 A final point of resonance is worth noting. Blondel s treatment acknowledges the priority of practice, of action, for the transmission and development of Tradition. And Blondel specifically identifies moral and religious actions as Tradition s vessels. In his own way, de Lubac echoes this priority of moral and religious practice in Exégèse Médiévale. His first chapter begins with a somewhat lengthy discussion of the term disciplina, discipline or training. In the early church, discipline was considered an integral element of education; Greek paideia, which some Latin thinkers translated as disciplina, entailed much more than gaining facility in certain intellectual skills. Indeed, it required the formation of the whole person. In short, disciplina represented a coherent synthesis of virtues: physical, intellectual, and moral. After a prolonged discussion of the geneology of the term throughout the medieval period, de Lubac notes that there was a natural link,
462 KEVIN L. HUGHES in the exposition of the four senses of Scripture, between discipline and tropology. A disciplined life was itself a necessary hermeneutical constraint upon the tropological (or moral) sense of Scripture. The discipline of the Church, for both Blondel and de Lubac, provides the ordered context for the development of the tradition. 31 De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 1, p. XXI. 32 Young, Biblical Exegesis, p. 207.