Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham Iwell remember how Juan Alfaro, S.]., held up the first volume of de Lubac's book on medieval exegesis (volume 1 was published in 1959),...
...I have recommended de Lubac's book to a whole generation of students in art history, literature, and theology...
...The text is laced with names, both familiar and obscure, of patristic and medieval authors (sometimes as many as twenty on a page...
...It is also evident in how Scripture gets cited in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and in the general public prayer of the church...
...hence the subtitle of this book, "The Four Senses of Scripture...
...Medieval Exegesis (volume 1) by Henri de Lubac translated by Mark Sebanc Eerdmans, $45,466 pp...
...Now nearly forty years later we finally have an English translation of the first of four volumes of this monumental study...
...In line with this project he also disentangles the complex evolution of the tripartite way (the well-known division of allegory, moral, and anagogical sense) in which Scripture was understood...
...The most general name for these two meanings is the literal meaning and the spiritual (pneumatic) meanings and these two meanings have the same kind of relationship to each other as do the Old and New Testament to each other...
...The myriad Latin quotations studding both the text and the footnotes are also translated, with the original Latin retained in the footnotes...
...There seems to be nothing that de Lubac did not read in the period...
...The perennial value of this approach is reflected in the ways, for example, the present-day liturgy utilizes Scripture, with the lectionary juxtaposition of passages from the Old with those of the New Testament...
...The burden of de Lubac's book is to show that the affirmation quoted above was the understanding of the church from its beginnings down through the medieval period, how this understanding came to be, and, finally, to argue that such an understanding has not been replaced by a more historical and scientific approach...
...RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham Iwell remember how Juan Alfaro, S.]., held up the first volume of de Lubac's book on medieval exegesis (volume 1 was published in 1959), telling our class at the Gregorian University in Rome, in his Hispanic-tinged Latin, that the work was a staggering piece of scholarship...
...The fourfold levels of scriptural interpretation were a commonplace in early exegesis...
...If you wish to understand biblical allusions, metaphors, and narratives in medieval culture, this is an invaluable, indeed a fundamental, work...
...It is not, however, an easy read...
...The late Commonweal # 3 April 9,1999...
...However, for all of the complexity of the text, his thesis is rather straightforward: "...the Christian tradition understands that Scripture has two meanings...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 7
