contradictions and difficulties than they can resolve:
For if he takes up rashly a meaning which the author whom he is reading did not intend, he often falls in with other statements which he cannot harmonize with this m e a n i n g . 2 ®
This warning is not an ironic reversal of the spiritual senses, since Augustine saw the spiritual senses as a reflection not only of doctrine or the Divine Author, but also of the human author of Scripture; rather the warning bears upon the "rash" neglect of the human author's
intention.
Augustine's general recognition of the human author was further developed by the more specific analysis of the literal sense among theologians of the thirteenth-century. A.J. Minnis identifies
Aristotle's Physica and Metaphysica as important influences which led to what he refers to as a "quest for an orthodox literalism".26 Although Augustine implicitly recognised the role of the human author in the writing of Scripture; commentators such as Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas greatly enlarged their understanding of the role of Scripture's authors through the application of Aristotelian theories of causality. Thomas Aquinas, for example, extended a new significance to the role of the human author, and thus the literal sense, by claiming that as an "instrumental efficient cause" the human
25 JhidL, p. 31. "
26 A.J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary
Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, second edition (Aldershot, 1988), v pp. 75-64, 69.
51 author's unique talents and personality were not erased by inspiration, rather they were appropriated by it. As A.J. Minnis states;
It would appear that the influence of Aristotle's theory of causality as understood by late-medieval schoolmen helped bring about a new awareness of the integrity of the
individual human auctor. Henceforth each and every inspired writer would be given credit for his personal literary
contribution . . , working in harmony with the crucial (but rarely overbearing) factor of divine direction.2?
One effect of Aquinas' definition of the human author's role in Scripture can be seen in his exegesis of David's sin with Bathsheba, Aquinas understood this story within the literal sense as an exemplum of the truly penitent man.28 This interpretation contrasts with that
provided by Henry of Ghent where David was interpreted allegorically as Christ and Uriah as Satan. It is clear from Henry's tract that he is opposed to the Thomist interpretation of the text in question. In response to the question "Whether Truth is Inherent in Every Exposition and Sense" (the title of his tract), Henry first cites the objection made by some that the interpretation of David as Christ and Uriah as
Satan falsifies the literal sense because it was David who sinned, not Uriah. This objection could, it seems, have been made by Augustine as well as by Aquinas, but Henry, in an ironical twist, appropriates Aristotle as support for the interpretation of David as Christ.
27 J&jnL, p. 84.
52 1 According to Henry we must consider two aspects of David's sin: its substance as a deed {substantia facti) and its quality as a deed |
iqualitas facti). Henry admits that in terms of quality no good or moral sense is present in the deed, but he claims that in terms of
substance the deed "can indeed have a true exposition in a good sense .
The terms substantia and qualitas are readily identifiable as the two main elements in Aristotle's Categories. Henry uses Aristotle in order to divide the quality of murder (evil intent) from the substance of the deed of ordering or causing a "knight" to be k i l l e d . B y removing the qualitas facti Henry could see his way clear to
interpreting David's action as having "an allegorical interpretation that is good, and being expounded for a good end, as the Gloss has in fact expounded in that passage."®^ However, this defence of the
Glossa Ordinaria required a severance of the evil intent, which informed David's action, from the deed itself, a ploy analogous to the severance of a Scriptural author's intent from an exegete's interpretation. Henry
28 JhidL, p. 266.
30 I am aware of two other instances in which à similar separation of substance and quality is carried out. Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1987), pi 993 states that in the case of ? the Eucharist late-medieval theologians altered the "Aristotelian
conception of accident [or quality] in the face of Transubstantiation.& I am grateful to Dr. John Haldane, "Voluntarism and realism in medieval ethics". Journal of Medical Ethics, 15 (1989), .39-44 (p. 41) for
suggesting that Aquinas uses a similar division to explain instances in the Old Testament where C3od appears to sanc%on^^ i^^ acts such as murder and theft. "God has the power to change the circmstances of an action so that what would otherwise have bèen theft [the dispoiling of the Egyptians] is rendered permissible though it retains the appearance of robbery.