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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2008
Henri DeLubac's work on multi-sense scriptural reading has become a major resource for Catholic and Protestant theologians seeking a new integration of biblical studies and theology. Rarely, however, is it noticed that De Lubac's account of scriptural interpretation involves a robust notion of the soul and its transformation in the Christian life – and that in linking these themes De Lubac accurately reflects a central theme of pre-modern exegesis. This article thus suggests, first, that defending a notion of soul is important for those seeking to appropriate pre-modern exegesis. The article then argues that such a project is only possible if we move beyond Harnackian notions of early Christianity's ‘hellenisation’ and see the soul as a theological doctrine. The soul is the fundamental locus of a transformation in which Christians act in and through the Spirit as members of the body of Christ. Once the status of the soul is acknowledged, we are then best able to follow De Lubac's call for the reintegration of moral-practical aspects of Christianity and the discipline of theology. The article finally argues that Christian accounts of scriptural interpretation should find their core in an understanding of scripture as a graced resource for the formation of Christians, and that these accounts should be ever attentive to the place of scripture within the drama of salvation.
1 Sister Bonaventure Theresa of St John, quoted in Henri, De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 2, The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Macierowski, E. M. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 366, n. 108Google Scholar.
2 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the ‘Bible and Christian Theology’ Group at the 2004 SBL meeting in San Antonio. I am grateful for comments and discussion by Andy Gallwitz, Luke Timothy Johnson, Ian McFarland, Brent Strawn, Trent Pomplun and Medi Ann Volpe. Some of the work lying behind this piece was conducted within a study group, ‘Toward Christian Reading(s) of the Old Testament’, sponsored by the Candler School of Theology at Emory University: I thank my fellow participants, Brent Strawn, Carol Miles and Ross Wagner for their discussion and stimulation.
3 The interrelationships here are sketched very helpfully by Susan, Wood, Spiritual Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri De Lubac (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), esp. chs 3 and 4Google Scholar.
4 De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 2, pp. 134–43.
5 Some readers will, no doubt, be concerned that allegorical and tropological reading involves ignoring the text itself in favour of a meaning established elsewhere. I do not think this is a good interpretation of multi-sense reading, but a defence of this position is beyond the scope of this article. Any discussion that I would offer on this point would be related to aspects of David, Dawson'sFigural Reading, the Fashioning of Identity and the Suppression of Origen (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar and to aspects of Stephen, Fowl'sEngaging Scripture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)Google Scholar.
6 De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 2, pp. 137–8.
7 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 140. Cf. Henri, De Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Shephard, L. C. and Englund, E. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 341Google Scholar: ‘And how can one here speak “unequivocally” of a “solidarity of the personal and the universal” since in fact both these terms are abolished?’
8 E.g. see Nancey, Murphy, Religion and Science: God, Evolution and the Soul, ed. Helrich, Carl S. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2002), p. 20Google Scholar: ‘the concept of soul was originally introduced into Western thought as an explanation for capacities that appeared not to be explainable in bodily terms’. The statement is not made about Christianity alone, but sets the stage for assumptions about why Christians increasingly became ‘dualists’. Murphy nods towards scholarship which questions simple Hebrew/Greek divisions but ultimately gestures towards Cullman's insistence on the bodily resurrection as a doctrine which reveals the flaw in the Christian tradition's use of soul language. Such ‘nodding’ misses the point of that scholarship because it fails to see that, if correct, such scholarship would render inadequate the idea that Christians adopted the language of soul purely for its ultimately illusory explanatory power.
9 Deep engagement with notions of soul in Hellenised Judaism around or just before the time of Christ is demonstrated by texts such as 2 Macc. 6:20, 2 Enoch 23:5, Test. Job 20:3. Within the New Testament James 1:21 and 5:20 demonstrate the non-controversial use of such language (cf. 1 Pet. 1:22). An excellent example of the tendency of modern scholars to write this language out of the New Testament is revealed in the contrast between translations of Matt. 10:28 which continue to use ‘soul’ for psuche, and Matt 16:26 where ‘life’ is usually substituted for no good reason (no such qualms troubled the KJV translators). The opposition between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’ as a recent scholarly trope is excellently discussed in Dale, Martin, ‘Paul and the Judaism/Hellenism Dichotomy: Toward a Social History of the Question’, in Troels, Engberg-Pedersen (ed.), Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), pp. 29–61Google Scholar. For further literature on the notion of soul in biblical writings see Green, Joel B., ‘“Bodies – that is, Human Lives”: A Re-Examination of Human Nature in the Bible’, in Brown, Warren S. (ed.), Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 151–2Google Scholar, nn. 6–8. Green's account of the diversity of biblical terminologies is helpful and yet he assumes unnecessarily that deployment of a notion of soul involves a non-'integrated' view of the person, implying the principles that soul is separable from body and that the material body must be understood as prison.
10 e.g. Marius Victorinus, Against the Arians IB.61–2 (Eng. trans. Fathers of the Church, vol. 69, pp. 188–91) and Galen, The Soul's Dependence on the Body (Eng. trans. Singer, P. N. in Galen: Selected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 150–76)Google Scholar.
11 For this terminology see Kathryn, Tanner, ‘Theology and the Plain Sense’, in Garret, Green (ed.), Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), pp. 59–87Google Scholar. The phrase ‘the way the words run’ I copy from Eugene, Rogers's essay ‘How the Virtues of an Interpreter Presuppose and Perfect Hermeneutics: The Case of Thomas Aquinas’, Journal of Religion 76 (1996), pp. 64–81Google Scholar, where he uses the phrase as a trans. of Aquinas' circumstantia litterae at De Potentia, q. 4, a.1, c. For examples of how this understanding of scripture's basic sense may function see n. 13 below and Fowl, Stephen E., Engaging Scripture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), chs 4 and 5Google Scholar. It is important to note that within this emerging tradition the ‘plain sense’ is understood to be inherently flexible.
12 One of the best examples of a piece offering a historical model of such engagement for modern emulation is Marshall, Bruce D., ‘Absorbing the World: Christianity and the Universe of Truths’, in Bruce, Marshall (ed.), Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1990), pp. 69–102Google Scholar. I suggest my own account in Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), ch. 16, and in the earlier sketch, ‘On the Practice and Teaching of Christian Doctrine’, Gregorianum 80/1 (1999), pp. 33–94.
13 It is important also to note that a doctrine which may have seemed plausible on external philosophical grounds as well as on theological grounds may at times lose that philosophical plausibility but retain its theological necessity. One might argue that this is the fate of the soul in our own time.
14 I have the term ‘dual-focus’ on lend-lease from Michel Barnes. I offer a more extensive discussion of ‘dual-focus’ purification specifically in late-fourth-century pro-Nicene theology in Nicaea and Its Legacy, ch. 13.
15 Henri, De Lubac, ‘Tripartite Anthroplogy’, in Theology in History, trans. Anne, Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), p. 126Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., p. 127.
17 Ibid., p. 129.
18 De Lubac, Catholicism, p. 358. It might be thought odd that in what follows I have not attempted to draw out of De Lubac arguments which see soul language as a necessary consequence of Christianity's belief in human immortality. I have not done so because De Lubac's own emphasis is always on the link between some form of a ‘tripartite anthroplogy’ and the possibility of accurate description of human life. It is clear enough, of course, that De Lubac sees humanity's permanent end as a completion of our growth into the vision of God and that our capacity for this growth rests in the existence of the soul.
19 The same argument is further developed his closely related paper ‘Mysticism and Mystery’ in Theological Fragments, trans. Rebecca Howell Balinski (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), pp. 35–69. Similarly, the theme of the soul and human transcendence is central to his polemic against Marxist materialism, e.g. Catholicism, ch. 12.
20 One can imagine De Lubac saying to the virtue theorist, who leaves little room for the complex relationship between grace, the theological virtues and virtues learnt by habitual practice, that while it is true that habit reaches down to the core of the soul, so too grace reaches all the way up!
21 In dense fashion Rowan, Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections of Cultural Bereavement (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2000), ch. 4Google Scholar, offers us something of a parallel. Williams first offers a meditation on what it is to know oneself in the act and process of self-questioning (esp. pp. 145–6) such that (following Walter Davis) ‘reflection itself becomes the experience that the self thinks about: the questioning of the self . . . is the consolidation of selfhood that then, in turn, presents itself for thought’. He then articulates an account of a possible (and desirable) mutual desire in which the participants discover each other as mysterious, as being beyond any one relationship and as a source of gratuitous joy because of being so (pp. 159–60). The ‘soul’ that Williams then seeks to recover is a self that is itself sensed to be there not because of need but because of gift in ways that secular discourse cannot sustain (p. 161): ‘For any self to be free to enable another's freedom means that it must be in some way aware of the actuality, not only the possibility, of a regard beyond desire – and so of its own being as a proper cause of joy, as a gift’. Only a self that is the image of God renders possible an appropriate account of human existence and relationship. The paradox of Williams's wonderful discussion is that it is precisely the theological narration of the soul that makes this possible: in his text the avoidance of the too specifically theological a language is a tactic intended to gain a wider audience for the argument, but one that perhaps hides one of its fundamental grounds.
22 It is here that one also sees one reason why Christians should resist the attempt of some to argue for a ‘nonreductive physicalism’ in place of any concept of the soul. For such argument see e.g. Nancey Murphy, ‘Nonreductive Physicalism: Philosophical Issues’, in Brown (ed.), Whatever Happened to the Soul?, pp. 127–48, and Warren Brown, ‘Cognitive Contributions to Soul’, ibid., pp. 99–125. Both authors rely on precisely the problematic narrative tropes I identified in earlier sections of this article, creating a straw man from the complex negotiations between the Christian tradition and notions of soul. But ultimately an equally significant problem with their accounts is that they lose an anthropological context within which the structure of traditional discussions of grace and sanctification and the restoration of the imago Dei can be articulated. Brown, in particular, makes clear that an account of our resurrection can be sustained within this perspective only by turning to divine fiat – which seems to raise significant problems for the ways in which theologies of sanctification have long been based on the principle that grace perfects nature (the resurrection of the human person involves the final stage of the resurrection/restoration of the soul's gaze begun in the body of Christ on earth).
23 For this see the work which is the capstone of his contribution to those debates, Le mystère du surnaturel (1965): The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Crossroad, 1998), esp. chs 6 and 9. This is also the context within which we should locate John Milbank's fascination with De Lubac. See esp. his recent The Suspended Middle: Henri De Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), but also Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 218–23. For Milbank, De Lubac's emphasis on the paradox of God's gift to us of the desire for the beatific vision points towards his own argument that ‘all creation is grace-given and the constantly “new” things bestowed on humanity through history are not “in addition” to God's single creating act’ (ibid., p. 222). What De Lubac (mostly) treats as a question of theological anthropology Milbank adapts and raises to a theological ontology. Milbank also builds on De Lubac's emphasis on the paradoxical gift of grace to promote a vision of Christian life (the ‘contemplative’ and ‘political’ are interwoven here) in which the continual acknowledgement of the gift is the root of all action.
24 It is a further question of some importance here to see exactly which traditions DeLubac draws on most. I would argue that his account is compatible with a variety of pre-modern traditions, but DeLubac certainly synthesises from a variety of sources to produce a result which does not necessarily reflect any one pre-modern author. Thus, one needs also to ask to what extent he constructs a synthesis in view of its polemical utility in the controversies of his own day.
25 This aspect of his work is very clearly described in Brian Daley, ‘The Nouvelle Théologie and the Patristic Revival: Sources, Symbols and the Science of Theology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), pp. 362–82.
26 E.g. it might be argued that one of the enduring influences of an Augustinian account of the soul as implicitly always desiring God – however distorted that desire has become – is in helping to sustain patterns of spiritual and moral guidance that seek to blend judgement of the probity (or otherwise) of particular acts with a strong concern for the future nurture of the soul's vision. Perhaps it is in such a context that there is an unexpected convergence between traditions of casuistry in moral/spiritual guidance and robust doctrines of the soul.
27 De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 2, p. 142 (italics added).
28 Ibid.
29 During the SBL session at which an earlier version of this paper was presented, the respondent, Trent Pomplun of Loyola College, Baltimore, correctly drew attention to the importance of De Lubac's context as a twentieth-century French Jesuit. Much useful work could be done on seeing how far the reading practices De Lubac recommends are related to his own spiritual practices, and on exploring what range of other practices could be seen as appropriately following from the less specific account of reading we find in works such as Medieval Exegesis. A fuller discussion would also have to consider the extent to which De Lubac's account of scriptural reading is a conscious adaptation of traditions of lectio divina – and the extent to which that which we might recommend in De Lubac's wake overlaps with those traditions.
30 De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 2, p. 142.
31 De Lubac, Catholicism, pp. 338–9.
32 Augustine, Ep. 155, 12.
33 De Lubac, ‘Tripartite Anthropology’, pp. 190–1.
34 See ‘Nine Theses on the Interpretation of Scripture’, in Davis, Ellen F. and Hays, Richard B. (eds.), The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 1–5Google Scholar.
35 The nine Princeton theses offer a perspective consonant with De Lubac's insistence on the priority of learning to read the basic doctrinal matrix of scripture. There is, however, a focus on the ‘narrative’ of scripture that leaves the authors uncertain about how to handle the ‘non-narrative’ material in scripture (see thesis 2). It may be that further thought about the inseparability of narrative and embedded truth claims would help here. At the same time the Princeton authors should perhaps reflect further on the extent to which it is the text of scripture, in all its complexity and diversity, that should be the object of Christians' faith, not the ‘narrative’ that text is taken to embody.
36 One of the key achievements of these theses, against the background of recent debate, is their insistence that Old Testament texts illuminate New Testament texts: illumination does not flow in only one direction. The statement is an achievement because it tries to shape debate about how Christian readers need to return to the ways in which the people of Israel expressed their history and theology without turning to problematic language about what the Old Testament might mean ‘on its own terms’.
37 I offer a more extensive account of what might be involved in recovering an account of theological practice able to sustain a thesis such as this in my Nicaea and its Legacy, ch. 16. Cf. my earlier sketch, ‘On the Practice and Teaching of Christian Doctrine’.
