It has been customary to denounce Origen and the Alexandrian school for their indul gence in allegory and to contrast with them most favorably the next great school of exe getes at Antioch. The most distinguished names here were those of Lucian, Diodorus, Theo dore, Theodoret, and Chrysostom. We are told that these men were literalists rather than alle gorists. They held rigidly to the historical and grammatical sense and it is but natural that the historical and grammatical critics of the 19th century should applaud their opposition to the allegorical flights of the Alexandrians. However, it is well for us to remember that this school has its dangers 'and faults as well as the Alexandrian. Its literalism resulted in a rationalism which was like a dry rot in the Church. Historically, it led directly to Arianism, which threatened to cut the tap-root of the Christian faith; and against this the orthodox exegesis of Athanasius the Alexandrian, proved to be the only safeguard of the Church at the last. Its tendency was to narrowness, rather than to richness. What it gained in straitness, it lost in breadth. However, among all the Greek fathers, Chrysostom will rank next to Origen in uniting the best characteristics of both schools. "Through a rich inward ex perience he lived into an understanding of the Holy Scriptures; and a prudent method of interpretation, on logical and grammatical prin ciples, kept him in the right track in deriving the spirit from the letter of the sacred volume* (Neander,
Augustine has exerted a wider influence upon the Church than any other of the church fathers. He was the chief authority through the whole of the medieval age. Mar tin Luther was an Augustinian monk at the time of his conversion; and he and Melanchthon and Calvin and Bucer all built upon the foun dations which Augustine had laid down. The works of the great Latin father have been read and reverenced by Protestant and Roman Catho lic alike, and it is only in our day that serious question has arisen as to his right to continued supremacy. In the present reaction from the theology of the Latin fathers to the older and purer theology of the Greek fathers, it is in the field of scholarly exegesis that the inferior ity of Augustine becomes most apparent. He was not even equal to Jerome in scholarship. He knew no Hebrew. He was very deficient in his knowledge of the Greek. He preferred a translation to the original text. He was con tinually making mistakes as to the meaning of words. He had all the defects of his predeces sors,' without their excuse for them. The Alexandrians had been driven into the use of allegory to harmonize the Gospel teaching with the truth of Greek philosophy and to command the hearing and respect of their Jewish con temporaries. But Augustine was an allegorist of the allegorists when no necessity was laid upon him and when allegory had degenerated into mere imaginative ingenuities. Augustine had genius and a genuine Christian experience and consequently flashes of illuminative inter pretation are found in his books, but these can not compensate for the lack of the critical faculty and a sound basis of linguistic scholar ship in exegesis. "Spiritual insight though a
far diviner gift than the critical faculty, will not supply its place. In this faculty Augustine was wanting, and owing to this defect, as a con tinuous expositor he is disappointing" (Light foot,
The Schoolmen contented themselves for the most part with copying and compiling the work of their predecessors in this field, It became a proverb among them, Si Augustinus adest suf ficit ipse tibe. One of them stated plainly that no interpretation of Scripture must be accepted which ran counter to the authority of the Church, °however much such a sense may be in conformity with the literal meaning. Indeed that ought not to be called the literal sense which is repugnant to ecclesiastical authority.* (Paulus of Burgos, (Prol. in Additiones'). Even Gerson declares, °The literal sense must be judged according as the Church has deter mined* (Propp. de sens., lit. 3). With no inde pendence of thought and with no fresh scholar ship the schoolmen added no new principle of exegesis in a thousand years of commentary writing. They were expending their energies upon subtle and futile speculations. They com posed great folios which aimed at nothing orig inal and arrived nowhere in particular. They labored hard in a treadmill. They wera weakest in exegesis. Only two or three of them knew any Hebrew, and most of them knew very little if any Greek. They were unoriginal, un courageous, uncertain, uninforrned. TheY had a wrong notion of the Church and a wrong conception of inspiration, and it naturally fol lowed that they had a wrong method of exe gesis. They had their merits too, but not as exegetes.