Spiritual Exercise and Discernment as Scholarly Disciplines

When we think of spiritual exercise today, we think of religious communities and retreats. We think of walking labyrinths or craning our limbs into yogic positions or the drone of a single, ever-repeated syllable. We are not wrong to think this way nor about these things. Spiritual exercise is an important tool in the struggle for religious seriousness. It functions in religious life to orient or position the exercisant with respect to the world she inhabits, its bodily qualities, its imaginative possibilities, its linguistic representations, and its seemingly hidden theophanies. In the process, it interrupts and transforms our ordinary way with bodies, imaginings, language, religious impulses, and tuition. Moreover, such interruption is called for when our ordinary way is deeply and persistently flawed.

All of this we are familiar with more or less. What we may be less familiar with, however, is the deep and ancient connection between spiritual exercise and philosophy. Indeed, spiritual exercise, as it is expressed in western culture, owes much to the early history of philosophy, to those philosophers of Hellenic and Hellenistic times who assumed a critical posture toward the conventional ways in which their cultures and societies ordered self-understanding in relation to the gods and the cosmos.1

Philosophers like Plato or Lucretius, Epictetus or Plotinus oriented themselves in opposition to the conventional wisdom of their day. They saw it as deficient and misleading. At the same time, they saw that this conventional wisdom suffused and gave meaning to the education or paideia made available to citizens of leisure and liturgical responsibility. They judged such conventional paideia to have become unmoored. Enclosed upon itself, it was no longer connected to the normative sources of social and cultural health, that is, in their terms, the very natures of things. Conventional paideia and the understanding it made possible were diseased.2

Such critical philosophers admitted that present conventional paideia took the form of what might be termed Wisdom’s logos or saying.3 Moreover, they affirmed conventional expectations around such logos, namely, that in the intersubjective space created by it, Wisdom might deign to reveal to the sayers the way things really were. They went on to insist, however, that the conventional paideia and logos of their day failed of its promise, veiling rather than revealing. Such logos, because it was the instrument by which society and its members learned “to see,” interposed itself between its participants or alumni and the way things really were. Phusis or Nature receded from society’s collective grasp and sank below the depth to which conventional, schooled logos could penetrate. In such a situation, the culturally dominant logos no longer led to health and flourishing; logos itself was sick.4

What was needed according to the critical philosophers of the ancient western world was a way to penetrate again beyond the virtue of conventional discourse to the hidden roots or nature of things, to reconnect culture and society to the sources of health and flourishing, and so to circumvent and transform that same society and culture’s schooled logos. Because present schooled logos was itself part of the problem, it had to be outflanked. This was done through appeals to other dimensions of human subjectivity: body, imagination, intuition. Such was the work of askesis or spiritual exercise: to reorient human beings and communities toward Nature, toward the way things really were; and the proper name for such reorientation was discernment.

Discernment demanded that the diseased but culturally predominant logos be interrupted so as to be restarted from a different place, on a different trajectory, and toward a different and therapeutic end. In light of the work of ancient philosophical discernment, it is not hard to see why ancient Christian communities, when they began to appropriate conceptual tools from the surrounding cultures, appropriated the practice of philosophical spiritual exercise. For as the Christian scriptures told the story, the human race was cut off from the sources of health and flourishing by sin. Our subsequently ingrained ways of speaking about and understanding life had led ever more readily to disease and death. What was called for was an individual and cultural turning (metanoia) from these death-dealing ways to the Way. And that turning involved (among other things) interrupting deeply ingrained speech, what might be termed, in a Pauline mode, the very law of our members, in order to hear and understand anew from a different and extrinsic source.

Resonance between the critical tradition within ancient philosophy and the ancient Christian insistence upon what Abraham Kuyper later described as the tendency of sinful human thought and culture to think the abnormal normal eased the transposition of philosophical askesis into its new religious home.5 Since then, askesis has gone underground, losing its name yet flourishing within philosophy and the many disciplines of the western academy that developed subsequently out of her.

Spiritual Exercise, Scholarly Reading, and the Criteria of Academic Excellence

The North American Christian academy, in its struggle with the norms of academic excellence operative in its institutional and cultural context, finds itself in a position reminiscent of the founding conditions in which spiritual exercise was developed as a scholarly practice and adapted to serve as a tool of Christian discernment. There is, for example, something about how academic excellence is identified that gives one pause. There still exists a widespread assumption that the criteria of academic excellence should be religiously indifferent. For many, the academy as a social and cultural sphere of life is properly distinct from and opposable to the spheres in which religious faith operates in that its structural principles and normative criteria are properly separate from and other than the criteria generated, so to speak, in the presence of religious faith.6 Christian academics of many types have learned to pause before such assumptions, to demand that or wonder if there might be another way to think about things.

Although a distinction should be made between the scholarly and the devotional, that distinction need not be articulated as a dichotomy. Indeed, discernment and scholarly spiritual exercise point toward one way in which the two modes can be intertwined to produce a properly faith-inflected scholarly understanding. It is in this context that Micah 6: 8 can serve as spiritual exercise in thinking about the criteria of academic excellence. I will make my point using as my example reading when considered as a hermeneutical act.

Reading is a central scholarly act, of course, but it is not confined to the scholarly world; it intersects with life in multiple ways.7 In my own life, I engage daily in what I call scholarly reading, for I am a professional scholar, a medievalist, a ponderer of long forgotten words. But I also read in a second mode that supplements the reading of my scholarly life. That is, I also read beautifully or fluidly written material in the hope that something of their effectiveness and elegance will rub off and work its way into my own patterns of expression, thereby transforming the tweedy pedantry of my academic prose. In addition, I read for pleasure and entertainment. Finally I read devotionally, that is, in devout absorption with and by sacred texts.

These four kinds of reading exemplify four discrete attitudes or postures of the reading self vis-à-vis texts and arise in response to four different dynamics moving me to read. I can begin to elaborate what I mean by arranging these kinds of reading along continua marked out by three contrasts: the contrast between (1) mobility and immobility, (2) permeability and impermeability, and (3) priority and posteriority. Scholarly and pleasure reading assume readerly postures vis-à-vis texts that demand that the reading self be relatively immobile, impermeable, and prior with respect to the texts read, whereas mimetic and devotional reading assume postures that demand that the reading self be relatively mobile, permeable, and posterior with respect to those same texts. In addition, scholarly and devotional readings tend toward the extremes of our contrasts, while pleasure and mimetic reading tend toward the mean.

When we consider reading in terms of the permeability, mobility, and posteriority we are referring to the reader’s openness to allow what she reads to get under her skin, to change something in her essential posture toward the text at hand, or by extension, her life.

In contrast, we note the scholar’s relative impermeability, immobility, and priority; she asks questions of texts to which they answer “yes” or “no.” For example, she might ask: “Do you, oh texts, exhibit the motif of the jaws of hell? If so, are they depicted in classical terms? If not, do they owe their divergence to the language of biblical apocalyptic? If dependent upon biblical apocalyptic, do they draw primarily upon New Testament imagery?” In such an approach, the text’s impact upon the scholarly reader is controlled. It can only really confirm or refute the scholar’s a priori guesses or hypotheses. The honest scholar goes where the text leads, but grudgingly. Her methodology sets up a steady countermovement—nudging the text in the direction the scholar wills to go, never more so than when she is looking to uncover what is hidden between the lines. The scholarly reader achieves this relation to texts by bracketing all concerns that lie outside of the horizon formed by the scholarly need bringing her to the text in the first place, that is, regardless of what else may be found in the text.

Of course, scholars do not always or even often approach texts in so rigid a fashion; there is an appropriate play indeed. There are spectacular instances in which scholars have been converted by the texts they read: evangelical Sinologists taking up the Tao, or lifelong agnostics finding spiritual rebirth in Julian of Norwich’s depiction of Christ.

Nevertheless, my jaws-of-hell illustration is paradigmatic. Seldom do we scholars go to texts and read without a precise focus, without some kind of methodic precision. Scholarly reading is by definition carried on in the imperative mood. It discovers textual meaning by demanding that the text stand still so that we can determine whether this or that is to be encountered in texts and how best to conceive of their relation, one to the other.8

Devout readers, on the other hand, are intentionally permeable, mobile, and posterior with respect to the texts they approach devoutly. The devotee is in search of the “Words of Life.” By implication, she does not have them. She may not know exactly what she hopes to find, though that will be equally true of honest scholars. What differentiates her reading-in-ignorance from a scholar’s, however, is that she knows in her bones where to look: there in the Good Book, in the Lives of the Saints, in the Summa—there she will encounter words and patterns that transform life, that enter, possess, and make her anew. Indeed, one can calibrate the devotion of the devout reader by the degree to which sacred locution subsequently inscribes itself on her body, tongue, and heart, for it is in subsequent living that one comes to understand the meaning of the text and so can be said to have read it at all.

The devout reader opens herself to the transformational effect of the text.9 She submits herself as subject to the text and its way of putting things; she longs to receive herself again in the gift of the text and so to see the world through the lens its words and sentences provide. Her receptive pose, however, does not determine her voice as we might expect. It is not that she is passive in her reception of the text’s agency. Rather, she approaches the text in the middle voice: the text approaches her even in and through her approaching it, and the text acts upon her and at the same time she acts upon the text.

One can see that conservative Protestant language about the normative posture of Bible-believers with respect to the Bible flows from and assumes the contours of devout reading with one important difference. In an allergic response to the contemporary modernist emphasis on the reader’s involvement and agency in the production of textual meaning, conservative Protestant language radicalizes; it insists that the reader is passive all the way down. In such a view, there is only one agent in the transformations properly at work between reader and text, the text in its capacity to bear the Real Presence of the Divine Word.

Scholarly reading and devout reading are distinct, and this distinction extends to other acts properly qualified as scholarly and devout. They arise from different needs and involve different attitudes to text and meaning, different selves one could say, even in reference to the same reader. The question remains, however, how are they to be thought of in relation to each other? Are they to be thought of as mutually exclusive, such that where the one is the other is not, or can they co-exist such that one speaks meaningfully and coherently of a devout, scholarly reader? By extension, can a devout and a scholarly understanding of God, self, and world be one and the same, or must they be kept separate? Or to reframe our questions in light of the theme of academic excellence, can a devout understanding of the world ever be judged scholastically excellent?

Such questions are still asked as if they articulate a terrible conundrum. It is often assumed that we face here a dichotomy that cannot and should not be resolved into less absolute contrasts.

Here is where Micah 6:8 performs its interruptive function: “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” If one takes up its words to orient our search for criteria of academic excellence then our search becomes bounded by what the Lord requires. That is, scholarly as well as devotional excellence will have to do with our capacity to recognize and point ourselves toward what the Lord requires. Though the devout and the scholarly can be legitimately distinguished, they are not to be distinguished absolutely, for they are both to be understood in light of what the Lord requires. To the degree that dichotomizing notions of scholarship and devotion still predominate in the academy at large, Christian scholars, and those of other faiths, will see something misformed and unhealthy in academic discourse built upon such assumptions. They will resist criteria of excellence formed in light of such assumptions.

So the question becomes: how might we conceptualize the relationship of scholarly and devout understanding? We return to our paradigm case, reading understood as a hermeneutical act.

There is one scholarly Western culture that was particularly sensitive to both the distinction between and the conjunction of scholarly and devout reading in advanced scholarly study—the theological culture of the early or medieval Western university.

Thirteenth-century faculties of theology inherited from patristic and early medieval tradition a sense of the fecundity and levels of meaning to be found within the language of the scriptures. Augustine understood the scriptures to be a complex weave of signs that each and together pointed ultimately at some “thing” or other.10 In this, the scriptures were like any other text. The literal sense of the scriptures was the thing or things to which the words or signs of the scriptures pointed. The use of the word rabbit, for example, pointed to a furry long-eared hoppy-happy rodent, or at any rate the conception we use to think about such rodents.

Ordinarily, when one followed the indicative function of words to the conceptual things to which they pointed, one arrived at the meaning of the text. The scriptures, however, were different. Its things were themselves so replete with multiple layers of meaning that they functioned as signs pointing to further things, things that could be organized under three general rubrics. These three rubrics and the sets of things they represent marked out hidden or mystical senses attached to the things to which the words of scripture pointed. The rubrics arose because every thing pointed to by the words of scripture was to speak not only of itself but also beyond itself, to speak christologically to the mystery of Christ in all the manifold ways he is present in the world (the allegorical sense), anthropologically to the mystery of the our selves as image of God (the tropological sense), and eschatologically to the mystery of the world-made-right at the end of time as we know it (the anagogical sense).

When we keep these four levels of signification or four senses of the scriptures in mind (i.e., the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical), we begin to understand how theological study of the scriptures was organized. Classroom instruction centered upon the literal sense of the scriptures. At this level, the student was led through the text of the scriptures from Genesis to the Apocalypse identifying the “things” to which the words of scripture pointed. The things of scripture at this literal level were conceived as a single logical intention or in Alvin Plantinga’s vocabulary as one gigantic proposition.11 That is, the student was taught to read via the hermeneutical device of divisio textus or the formal division of the text.12 By this device the whole of the scriptures or one of its units was treated as a single logical whole constituted by ordered parts that students needed to be able to identify and distinguish.

The Book of John, say, would be divided into two distinct themes. Theme one would be further divided into two subthemes. The first of these subthemes would in turn be subdivided into two sub-subthemes and so on until one arrived at the text’s fundamental thematic units. Having distinguished the literal things of scripture into its parts via the use of a binary logic and the ramifications it suggested, commentary would take the form of articulating the logical relations that hold between the parts. If one compares this mode of operation to the jaws-of-hell illustration considered above, it is very clear that we are looking here at that form of reading I termed scholarly reading.

A second stage of theological study centered upon the allegorical meaning of the scriptural res or “things” identified via study of the literal sense. This was done using the four books of Sentences of Peter Lombard, in which was gathered in a nutshell the allegorical sense of the scriptures.13 The Sentences were studied in a similar way to the study of the scriptures in their literal sense, but the units for division and subsequent composition were not words of the scriptures but rather scriptural things viewed christologically. Here again we witness a scholarly reading of the scriptures as they were mediated by the Sentences of Peter Lombard.

Theological instruction culminated in mastery of the Sentences. Pedagogy centered around two exercises, the lectio and the disputatio, that is, around the memorization of the words and the things they point to (lectio) and a dialectical sifting of the meanings arrived at via lectio (disputatio). Peter the Chanter, an early thirteenth-century theologian of Paris, called these pedagogical exercises the foundation and the walls of the theological edifice.14 Being a building, however, theology also had a roof. He identified that roof with preaching, praedicatio. Preaching brought theological study of the scriptures to its perfection. It represented the learning act that lectio and disputatio existed in virtue of. And yet there was no formal instructional context for studying the scriptures via preaching. There were formal occasions in which students were required to preach, but such occasions were infrequent and highly stylized; they were not programs of regular study.

Thirteenth-century preaching, however, was focused upon two ends. The first end, self-knowledge unto repentance, entailed consideration of scriptural things in their pointing to the mystery of human persons as image of God. The second end, the desire for sanctification, entailed consideration of scriptural things in their pointing to the mystery of the fulfillment of all things in the world-made-right. In other words, preaching flowed from a reading of the scriptural things as to their tropological and anagogical senses. As such, preaching was aimed at hearers with a view to the transformation of their lives. They were to take in the words of the preacher and the tropological and anagogical senses of the scriptures those words mediated and exegete the senses they received via their subsequent practice of life, most immediately and visibly in the sacraments of penance and eucharist.15

Again, if we view the reading of the scriptures that preaching mediated with the description of devout reading articulated above, we see that the reading that preaching was to flow from looks very much like the present description of devout reading. Such reading involves a different reading self than that of the scholarly reader—one open to the text in a different way. It is a reading with the body, imagination, and intuition quite as much as the intellect. Consequently, it cannot be contained in concepts without remainder; it must be performed, lived. Because these senses can only emerge performatively, they cannot be learned in the classroom. Rather, the preacher, too, only gains access to them experientially, that is, by living a preacher’s life, not in the classroom but on the highways and byways.

But here we must remember Peter the Chanter’s point. Praedicatio and the devout reading it presupposes is not divorced from the scholarly edifice marked out by classroom lectio and disputatio. Rather, in Peter the Chanter’s image, devout reading (for preaching) is the roof of the house of theology and as such, it brings scholarly reading to its perfection. It is what all that leads up to it exists in virtue of. We see then in the medieval university and its theological education the productive intertwinement of scholarship and devotion, for the devout reading of the preacher and his hearers is that in virtue of which the scholarly forms of scripture study exist. Devout reading is the final cause of scholarly reading, and that means that it is its intrinsic condition of possibility, for scholastic theologians insisted that final causes are first in the order of causes and are presupposed by everything that precedes them in their position as end.

If we were to take this medieval example to heart we would say that the criteria for reading excellence in the academy would be the degree to which readers’ lives were transformed by what they read. One might say the same of the scholarly enterprise as a whole. In addition, we could say that Micah 6:8 provides us fitting landmarks for such transformed living—doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God.

Christian Scholarship, Academic Excellence, and the Flourishing of Human Life

Of course, by now it should be clear that a hermeneutical circle has been performed. I have argued that, via spiritual exercise, devout understanding ought to both stand at the end of and aboriginally to guide the internal elaboration of the scholarly process in a manner analogous to the medieval theological reader’s devout reading for preaching in its guiding of the elaboration of his study of scripture at the literal and allegorical levels. When Micah 6:8 is used to orient the direction of scholarship, one begins to see the emergence of a pattern of academic excellence that serves to interrupt and reorient a believer’s involvement in scholarly life. In such an orientation, academic work is at bottom subject to the Lord’s requirements, and they are three: doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God.

Academic excellence in such a perspective can never be bounded by or limited to conceptual penetration, narrative expansiveness, competitive ambition, or whatever else the wider academy rewards. Rather, academic excellence in this perspective is about the concrete flourishing of human life. Scholarship is excellent to the degree that it fosters a personal and communal orientation toward doing justice and loving mercy as part and parcel of walking humbly with our God. Academic work is excellent then to the degree that it contributes to the lifting up of the poor, the widow and the orphan, to the degree that it provides the resources necessary to a personal and societal ethos of forgiveness and reconciliation, and to the degree that it does all this as the very expression of walking with our God.

I am guessing that such an orientation to academic excellence also interrupts and reorients widespread habits of thinking within a North American Christian academy that is determined to succeed in its long twentieth-century struggle to be judged worthy by the academic mainstream. It strikes me that certain forms of success and the excellence that measures that success come at too steep a cost. The work of spiritual exercise that Micah 6:8 calls Christian scholars to invites us to question things that we Christian educators have worked ever so hard to put in place. But as evangelical Christians have been ever wont to emphasize, metanoia is itself a perennial discipline of Christian living and as such it is embedded in all the works of the Christian life, including its scholarly works; indeed, isn’t our openness to such “turnings” the very mark of our walking humbly together with our God?


Notes

1. For the connection between spiritual exercise and ancient philosophy see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).  This is a partial translation of his L’exercises spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1987).  A later and more extended (and refined) treatment of the theme of ancient philosophy and spiritual exercise was published as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), translated as What is Ancient Philosophy, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard, 2002).

2. This evaluation of the operative ethos of current society (however understood by the philosopher in question) underlay and gave oomph to a medical analogy for philosophy and its social task.  It is medicine for the soul, a therapy administered to restore social, cognitive and psychic health.  For the resulting complex of metaphors and the flowering of this sense of philosophy in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman centuries of the ancient world see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

3. Logos is a very complex term in ancient philosophy.  At its base, it is the human capacity to form thought into significant sound.  Because the mode of logos used here refers to the exchange of significant sound, I have rendered logos in this instance as saying.

4. For an early Christian adaptation of this analysis that brings the analysis itself into stark relief see Peter Brown, “The Desert Fathers: Anthony to John Climacus,” in The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 213-40.

5. See in this regard, Abraham Kuyper, “Calvinism and Science,” in Lectures on Calvinism: Six Lectures Delivered at Princeton University Under Auspices of the L. P. Stone Foundation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1931), 110-41, especially 136-41.

6. George Marsden’s work in the middle to late 1990s has made this description abundantly clear.  See his The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

7. I have approached this matter of reading twice in print.  See Robert Sweetman, “Thomas of Cantimpré, Performative Reading and Pastoral Care,” in Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, ed. Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 134-67; and Robert Sweetman, “Beryl Smalley, Thomas of Cantimpré and the Performative Reading of Scripture: A Study in Two Exempla,” in With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish, Joseph W. Goering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 256-75.  The section of the present paper that follows repeats the points made in these articles.  The context in which this discussion takes place, however, is, in each instance, different.  In one instance I try to show that medieval Christian theology, for all its debts to Aristotle continues to see the contemplative as in service of lived faith (practice).  In another instance, I use the same material to evaluate Beryl Smalley’s groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the scholastic contribution to the long history of biblical exegesis.  Here, of course, I am speaking of the relationship between Christian and general criteria of academic excellence.

8. I need to insert an important qualification at this point.  Logical or conceptualizable distinctions lie at the foundation of scholarly reading.  All else is built upon them.  I have chosen to bring the foundation to the surface so to speak, but of course, as a foundation, this logical or conceptual activity is often buried below the surface and indeed taken for granted.  Scholarly readers will follow other themes or look for other effects (than that of logical distinction) in the course of their reading.  But the scholarly choice to focus on this and not that, to give this motif one charge or nuance and not another, to identify a transgressive state as transgressive as opposed say to hegemonic—all of this must be in principle open to question and capable of being legitimated.  Consequently, it all relies on defensible distinctions—this is not that but it is like that in. . . .  The emotional dynamic of a poem is not a logical argument but uses the feeling dimension of words and images—such a judgment is certainly true and is based upon a distinction between emotional and logical dynamism, a distinction that is itself logical in the sense of being conceptualizable and conceptually legitimatable.

9. Again, I am in all of this bringing out the foundation of devout reading while not restricting the process and reach of the devout reader to her existential receptivity alone.

10. For Augustine’s semiotics and their hermeneutical implications see his De doctrina christiana, especially the first two books.  What follows here depends upon  and develops the last section of my “Beryl Smalley, Thomas of Cantimpré and the Performative Reading of Scripture,” 266-69.

11. See his “The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship” in Seeking Understanding: The Stob Lectures 1986-1998 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s, 2001) 121-61.

12. For Thomas Aquinas’s practice of divisio textus, see John F. Boyle, “The Theological Character of the Scholastic “Division of the Text” with Particular Reference to the Commentaries of Saint Thomas Aquinas,” in With Reverence for the Word, ed. Joseph W. Goering, Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 276-91.

13. For this claim see John Van Engen, “Studying Scripture in the Early University,” in Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Bibelexegese, ed. Robert E. Lerner and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 17-38.

14. This much cited text of Peter the Chanter’s Verbum Abbreviatum can be found in John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 Volumes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 2.63.n.22.  It reads:  “The exercise of sacred scripture consists of three things: reading, disputation and preaching.  A boundless cascade of words is inimical to each of these three; it is the mother of forgetfulness and a numbing of the memory.  Reading therefore is laid first as if the pavement or foundation of all that follows so that all the little streamlets might flow to the other two [i.e., disputation and preaching–rs] as if from a single source.  Second, the structure or walls of disputation are placed on top [of the foundation].  Third the roof of preaching is erected so that one who hears might say: come and let the oracle draw forth an oracle.  Therefore, after the reading of sacred scripture and investigating the issues of about which there is appropriate uncertainty, and not before, one ought to preach.  Moreover, the Christian religion is made up of faith and faithful living (bonis moribus).  Reading and disputation address faith and preaching faithful living.”  (In tribus autem consistit exercitium sacrae scripturae: in lectione, disputatione et praedicatione, cuilibet istorum inimica est prolixitas, mater oblivionis et noverca memorie.  Lectio ergo primo iacitur quasi stratorium et fundamentum sequentium ut ex ea omnia amminicula quasi ex quodam fonte ceteris duabus propinentur.  Supponitur secundo structura vel paries disputationis . . . .  Tercio erigitur tectum praedicationis ut qui audit dicat: veni, et cortina cortinam trahat.  Post lectionem igitur sacre scripture et dubitalium disputationum inquisitionem et non prius est predicandum.  Religio vero christiana est de fide et de bonis moribus.  Lectio et disputatio ad fidem referantur, predicatio ad mores.)

15. The account of the senses of scripture that still remains obligatory is Henri de Lubac, L’exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’écriture, 4 Volumes (Paris: Aubier, 1959-1964) and published in English translation as Medieval Exegesis, 2 Volumes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1998-2000).