by Paul Hazard
The Protestants, setting to work to study the text of the Divine Word, and to disengage it from the accretions which had gathered round it in the course of time, found their task by no means easy. They reproached the Catholics for their passive attitude to the Bible; the Catholics reproached them for their audacity. In point of fact, an appreciable body of exegetical work had been accomplished by the Protestants as the works of Samuel Bochart, a minister of the Gospel and teacher at Caen, and of Louis Cappelle, minister and professor at Saumur, sufficiently testify.
On the Jewish side, there was Spinoza, who held that the methods we employ in studying Nature, should also be applied to the study of the Bible; that was how he put it and we know what came of that. To achieve the object in view it was necessary to have an accurate account of the phenomena and then, starting from that solid ground, to proceed to an accurate definition, but for all this the primary requisite was to know Hebrew, an exceptionally difficult matter, seeing that the ancient Hebrew grammarians have left us no information regarding the foundations or theory of the language; no dictionary, no grammar, no rhetoric. Next, said Spinoza, we should enter into the atmosphere and spirit of the Bible and adapt ourselves to it rather than attempt to force the Bible to fit in with our own presuppositions.
“The third requirement that the history of the Scriptures should fulfil is that it should teach us to understand the various vicissitudes that may have befallen the books of the Prophets whose tradition has been handed down to us; the life, character and aim of the author of each book; the part which he played; at what period, on what occasion, for whom, and in what language he composed his writings. Nor is that enough; we must know the fortunes of each book in particular, the circumstances in which it was originally composed, into what hands it subsequently fell, the various lessons it has been held to convey, by whom it was included in the sacred canon, and, finally, how all these books came to be embodied in a single collection. . . .”[2]
And the Catholics themselves, on their side, did they not number in their ranks Jean de Launoy, the dethroner of Saints? The learned Mabillon, deeply versed in textual criticism? Nay, the Abbé Fleury himself, the highly orthodox author of the Histoire ecclésiastique, divested the life stories of the Virgin Mary and the Apostles of the legends with which the popular imagination had so plentifully embellished them. The thing was in the air.
However, these various tendencies were not effectively polarized until a certain person came upon the scene who had the courage to deliver himself of some very simple, but very decisive words. They ran like this:
Those who profess and call themselves critics should be content to devote themselves exclusively to explaining the literal meaning of their authors and should disregard everything that is irrelevant to that purpose.[3]
With Richard Simon and his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, which was published in 1678, criticism comes into its own.
The term is a technical one, as Richard Simon pointed out in his preface: “As nothing has so far appeared in French on this subject, my readers must not be surprised if I have sometimes availed myself of expressions that may sound a little strangely in their ears. Every art has its own peculiar terminology, which is regarded more or less as its inviolable property. It is in this specialized sense that I have employed the words critic and criticism in the work which follows, together with some others of the same nature, to which I was obliged to have recourse in order to express myself in the terms proper to the art of which I was treating. These terms will come as no novelty to scholars, who have for some time been accustomed to their use in our language. When we refer, for example, to the book to which its author, Louis Cappelle, has given the title Critica Sacra, or to the Commentaries on the Scriptures which have appeared in England under the title Critici Sacri, we should, if we were speaking French, refer to la Critique de Cappelle, les Critiques d’Angleterre.”
This particular art, which now proposes to overstep the boundaries of purely learned coteries, to display its power far and wide, is an end in itself. Its purpose is to establish the degree of genuineness, of authenticity, to be ascribed to the texts with which it is called upon to deal, and it disregards anything and everything that is extraneous to that end. It is not concerned, for example, with maintaining the beauty of this passage, or the moral soundness of that. If it addresses itself to the examination of some sacred work, it does so quite independently of any theological considerations, theology being wholly outside its province. It must neither attack nor defend it. The critic, as such, may not put any gloss or interpretation of his own upon the text, and no authority can make that text other than what it is. If a certain passage runs counter to a given dogma, and if the passage in question is shown to be authentic, then it is the dogma, not the text that has to suffer. If a passage is essential to support a dogma, and that passage proves to be apocryphal, that passage must be expunged. Whether it be the Iliad, the Aeneid, or the Pentateuch that is in question, the principles of criticism are the same. Criticism will have nothing to do with the a priori. The moment it comes to busy itself with characters graven on stone, engrossed on parchment, or written on paper, criticism is its own sovereign mistress.
The basis of criticism is philology; philology, once a modest handmaiden, now a queen. What Renan wrote about the lofty status of philology, Richard Simon, from the realm of the shades, must surely have applauded, for such had been his own opinion. To be a critic and a philologist, such was his heart’s desire. Critics, the chronologists, too, had essayed to be before him. They, too, had proclaimed that they were concerned with nothing but their own art, that is to say, with the computation of time; but they had been scared at their own discoveries. What they chiefly lacked was any real understanding of the nature of the revolution they claimed to be bringing about, and in no wise had they attempted to sound the inner meaning of the sacred text. Grotius, too, had been a critic in his commentaries on the Old and New Testaments. But he had not been strict enough. Twice he had infringed the very rule which he himself had laid down; in the first place he had invoked the testimony of pagan antiquity, which was entirely irrelevant to the matter in hand; in the second place, he had permitted himself to be biased by his own personal opinions. He was an Arminian, a Socinian, yet, as a general rule, his judgments were impartial, and his readings were chosen on their intrinsic merits; as a general rule, but not always; occasionally they were selected because they happened to favour the Arminians, the Socinians. And Spinoza! A critic he certainly was, and one can hardly fail to see in him the direct forerunner of Richard Simon, who, though he very decidedly contests and repudiates his conclusions, does so with that shade, that hint of deference, which a really great mind never fails to inspire. “Do not accuse me of using the same language as does the impious Spinoza, who states his complete disbelief in the miracles recorded in the Scriptures. This idea, which is widely entertained, does me wrong, and I beg you to dismiss it from your minds. It is right and proper to condemn the impious conclusions which Spinoza draws from some of the axioms he lays down; but those axioms are not always false in themselves, not always to be cast aside.”[4] Spinoza was endowed with the insight of genius, but he is not always perfectly sound in his philology, and this defect detracts somewhat from the constructive portion of his exegesis; Spinoza allowed his metaphysics to get the better of his science. It was not until Richard Simon came on the scene that criticism attained its purity, prescribing its own laws and rigorously observing them. On the conclusions to which it led, neither philosophy nor dogma had any influence whatever. The manuscript, the ink, the writing, the letters, the way they were formed, commas, full-stops, accents—these were the things, and the only things, that mattered. This mundane science brooked no interference from religious authority.
He was a little man, with a high-pitched voice, plain of feature, and not particularly intelligent-looking. “You couldn’t say of him, as you might of some people, that ‘his face was his fortune’.” Nor had Nature sho
wn him any more indulgence in regard to his birth and worldly circumstances generally. He was the son of a humble Dieppe blacksmith. What, however, Nature had bestowed on him was a passionate love of study, a clear-sighted and powerful intelligence, and an indomitable will, and, over and above these things, with a character that was at once stubborn and supple. He got through his humanities and philosophy with the Oratorians at Dieppe, and, following his natural bent, determined to enter the Order, proceeding, in due course, with a bursary, to serve his noviciate in Paris. There, however, he came within an ace of quitting the Congregation altogether “by reason of certain aversions which he could not overcome”. Thus he would have come to grief at the very start, almost, if a wealthy patron, the Abbé de La Roque, had not put him on his feet again, and provided the money for his return to Paris, so that he might go through with his theological course. It was now that his vocation in life was definitely decided. He was an indifferent humanist, still less of a scholastic. No; what he really hankered after was a subject very much out of the common, and one that was bristling with difficulties. It was Hebrew, and at Hebrew he set to work.
In 1662, he returned to the Oratory, and was allowed to go on with his studies. Here is a story about him, one of those anecdotes that throw a revealing light on characters like his, and symbolize, as it were, their significance. His brethren were shocked to discover a number of heretical books in his room, amongst others, a polyglot Bible from London, and a number of critical commentaries on the sacred text. They went and reported what they had found. But it so happened that M. Simon had an accomplice, and that accomplice was none other than the Father Superior himself, Père Bertad. The pair of them used to get through a portion of the Scriptures in the original Hebrew every day. So it happened that the venerable sexagenarian sat at the feet of this very youthful master, and so it was that M. Simon got the best of the encounter.
Perhaps the happiest days of his life were those which he spent in the library of the Oratory House in the Rue Saint-Honoré, cataloguing the Oriental books which belonged to the Congregation. To broaden and deepen his knowledge of philology; to go back to the sources of things; to have all around him, within reach of his hand, the very best of teachers and, truth to tell, the only ones, all this made every moment a joy. Nor was he content with this daily browsing on books and manuscripts; he made the personal acquaintance of some Rabbinical Jews, in particular of one Jona Salvador, with whom he read the Bible. In 1670, the year he was ordained priest, he drew up, at Salvador’s earnest request, a document in defence of the Jews of Metz, who had been charged with committing a ritual murder.
Would you sail the wide Rabbinical Sea? Then choose, said Simon, a pilot thoroughly accustomed to making that long and difficult voyage. For him, it was to last for years, the voyage over those mighty waters. He neglected nothing that might be calculated to make it direct and sure. He consulted all the charts, and studied all the constellations. He braced himself for the effort, called up all his powers—his clarity, for clarity he could bring even into the thorniest of grammatical questions; his sagacity, his discernment, his candour, his perspicacity, his accuracy.[5] He drew on his accumulated stores of erudition, especially on his Hebrew; and at last the day came when he felt that he could give his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament with confidence to the world.
“To begin with, we cannot arrive at a thorough understanding of the sacred books unless we know in the first place the various states in which the texts were found, and in what times and places, and unless we have accurate knowledge of all the changes they have undergone . . .” Thus the guiding principle and essential rule of his method are at the outset made clear. He repeated them on every possible occasion. “I am convinced”, he said, “that we cannot read the Bible intelligently if we have no preliminary acquaintance with textual criticism”. As regards philology, here is a case in point that will give you a vivid idea of its importance: Omit a word, a single word, some seemingly quite insignificant thing, such as a conjunction, and you may find yourself lending countenance to a heresy. The third chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke begins, “Now, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius”, which implies that something has preceded it, since the particle now, which the grammarians call an adversative, necessarily denotes a reference to something already said. On the other hand, begin straightway with “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius”, and you will be playing into the hands of those early Marcionite heretics who maintained that the first two chapters of St. Luke were not part of the original gospel but were a later accretion. Still more true is it that the Old Testament, bristling as it is with difficulties, difficulties of which the uninstructed do not so much as suspect the existence, cannot be profitably studied unless we respect the rules and are actuated by the spirit to which I have referred.
Take up your Bible, look at it with a perfectly open mind. How does it strike you? Can it possibly be regarded as the word of God, directly inspired, committed to writing and handed down in its original state to us of the present day?
When looked into, replies Richard Simon, it is abundantly clear that the text has been modified, altered, and that it presents certain chronological problems which call for solution; that in some of the narratives there have been some strange transpositions, sometimes involving whole chapters. Let us, then, put ourselves back into the days when they were written, let us endeavour to discover and to understand the nature of Hebrew civilization. Who and what were the prophets? They were scribes, public writers, men whose duty it was faithfully to record the history of the State and to store these annals in the archives set apart for the purpose. “If there were public writers in the Hebrew State as far back as the time of Moses, as there most probably were, it will be easy to settle the various arguments adduced to prove that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch, the proof being founded as a rule on the manner in which it is written, the object apparently being to suggest that someone other than Moses collected the facts and recorded them in writing. Granting that these public writers did exist, to them would be allotted all the annalistic part of these books, while the laws and ordinances would be assigned to Moses, and these it is that Scripture calls the Law of Moses.” And inasmuch as these prophets or public writers not only performed the task of collecting contemporary information and consigning it to the archives, but sometimes gave a new turn to matter recorded by their predecessors, this explains the alterations and additions that are found in the other sacred books. Furthermore, as these books are but epitomes of much longer records, it is not surprising that it is impossible to elicit a strict and definite chronology from the Scriptures. It would be absurd, for example, to ignore the existence of other Persian kings besides those named in the Bible, and to base our computation of time on the duration of their successive reigns, seeing that the Scribes confined their records to matters exclusively concerning the Jews, while the profane writers make mention of several other kings, and thus greatly extend the chronological period involved. Lastly, we must bear in mind the ravages of time, and the carelessness of copyists; let us also picture to ourselves the physical conditions in which these latter did their work. “As the Hebrew originals were written on little rolls or sheets, which were put one on top of another and of which each made up a volume, it followed that if these rolls were accidentally put in the wrong order, the sequence of the events recorded would be correspondingly disarranged.”
Briefly, what happened was that Richard Simon explained his ideas with such seeming simplicity and with such cogent force that ordinary folk, though to begin with they had followed him but falteringly into regions so hallowed and mysterious, now began to listen with ever growing attention to what their guide had to tell them. He possessed the secret of imparting to his demonstrations of concrete matters an air of luminous and convincing logic. Furthermore, he purposely avoided expressing himself in the language of the theologians and resolved that his Histoire critique should be given to the world in good, h
onest French. Latin was appropriate enough for professed exegetists arguing some knotty and recondite question, but the evolution of the Biblical texts, in its general aspect, should be set forth in such a manner as to be understood by the world in general.
The characters of the great actors we have been studying hitherto were comparatively simple. Born rebels, they were never really happy unless they were breathing the atmosphere of opposition. The psychology of Richard Simon is somewhat more complex. A Catholic priest, he would have it that he was strictly faithful not only to the letter of Catholic doctrine, but also to the spirit of the Church. The Church may condemn him, but he sets to work with all his might to prove that she is mistaken, that she is acting in error.
He would insist that he was orthodox. And it is a fact that, so far from denying the inspiration of the Scriptures, he extended it so as to include even the people that re-moulded them. He declared that God, who had made known His will to Moses, made it known also to the scribes and annalists who, at various times in history, recast the Mosaic text. The persons who were responsible for the alterations we find in the Bible “having the power to write the Sacred Books had likewise the power to revise them.” The prophets, the scribes still continue to be the spokesmen of God. Though patently human in the way they were carried out, those successive changes were none the less inspired by God. Those who edited and re-edited the Biblical text were appointed by God to fulfil that sacred mission. The revisions began in the days of Moses and went on throughout the ages. The Jews were the chosen people, not in any figurative sense, but in fact and reality: “The Hebrew Republic differs from the other countries of the world in that it has ever acknowledged one sole head, namely God, who continued to guide it even when it was subjected to the rule of kings. That is why it has been given the name of the Holy and Divine Republic; its people likewise assumed the title of Saints in order that by that glorious appellation they might be distinguished from the other nations of the world. Therefore also it was that God, through Moses and the prophets that came after him, Himself gave the law to the race he had chosen to be exclusively his own.”[6]
