‘As to the rest, the matters which you have propounded from the Epistles of St. Paul, since they are such as it would be dangerous to dispute of, I had rather enter into them by word of mouth when we are together than by letter. Vale!’
The reply of Colet was short, and very characteristic of the man.
Colet replies.
Colet’s love of truth.
‘Your letter, most learned Erasmus, as it is very long, so also is it most eloquent and happy. It is a proof of a tenacious memory, and gives a faithful review of our discussion.... But it contains nothing to alter or detract from the opinions which I imbibed from St. Jerome. Not that I am perverse and obstinate with an uncandid pertinacity, but that (though I may be mistaken) I think I hold and defend the truth, or what is most like the truth.... I am unwilling, just now, to grapple with your letter as a whole; for I have neither leisure nor strength to do so at once, and without preparation. But I will attack the first part of it—your first line of battle as it were.... In the meantime do you patiently hear me, and let us both, if, when striking our flints together, any spark should fly out, eagerly catch at it. For we seek, not for victory in argument, but for truth, which perchance may be elicited by the clash of argument with argument, as sparks are by the clashing of steel against steel!’[211]
Erasmus had followed the theory of the ‘manifold senses’ of Scripture.
Colet’s view.
Erasmus, at the commencement of his long letter, feeling, perhaps, that after all there might be some truth in Colet’s view not embraced in his own, had fallen back upon the strange theory, already alluded to as held by scholastic divines, that the words of the Scriptures, because of their magic sacredness and absolute inspiration, might properly be interpreted in several distinct senses. ‘Nothing’ (he had said) ‘forbids our drawing various meanings out of the wonderful riches of the sacred text, so as to render the same passage in more than one way. I know that, according to Job, “the word of God is manifold.” I know that the manna did not taste alike to all. But if you so embrace your opinion that you condemn and reject the received opinion, then I freely dissent from you.’
This was the first line of battle which Colet, in his letter, declared that he would at once attack. It was a notion of Scripture interpretation altogether foreign to his own. He yielded to none in his admiration of the wonderful fulness and richness of the Scriptures. He had made it the chief matter of his remark to the priest who had called on him during the winter vacation of 1496-7, and had written to the Abbot of Winchcombe an account of the priest’s visit in order to press the same point upon him. But from the method adopted in his expositions of St. Paul’s Epistles, and the first chapter of Genesis, it appears that he did not hold the theory of uniform verbal inspiration, which ignored the human element in Scripture, round which had grown this still stranger theory of the manifold senses, and upon which alone it could be at all logically held.
It is true that, in his abstract of the Dionysian writings, he had, upon Dionysian authority, accepted, in a modified form,[212] the doctrine of the ‘four senses’ of Scripture; and in his letters to Radulphus, whilst confining himself to the literal sense, he guarded himself against the denial of the same theory. But he had never sanctioned the gross abuse of the doctrine to which Erasmus had appealed, which asserted that even the literal sense of the same passage might be interpreted to mean different things. It was one thing to hold that some passages must be allegorically understood and not literally, and that other passages have both a literal and an allegorical meaning (which Colet seems to have held), or even that all passages have both a literal and an allegorical meaning (which Colet did not hold). It was quite another thing to hold that the words of the same passage might, in their literal sense, mean several different things, and be used as texts in support of statements not within the direct intention of their human writer.
Aquinas on the ‘manifold senses.’
Thomas Aquinas, in his ‘Summa,’ had indeed laid down a proposition, which practically amounted to this. For in discussing the doctrine of the ‘four senses’ of Scripture, he had not only stated that the spiritual sense of Scripture was threefold, viz. allegorical, moral, and anagogical, but also that the literal sense was manifold. He had laid down the doctrine, that ‘Inasmuch as the literal sense is that which the author intends, and God is the author of Holy Scripture, who comprehends all things in His mind at one and the same time, it is not inconsistent, as Augustine says in his twelfth Confession, if even according to the literal sense in the one letter of the Holy Scriptures there are many senses.’[213]