Scriptural Science and Signification: From Alexander’s Sum of Theology to Nicholas of Lyre

Abstract

Abstract From the thirteenth century until the end of the Middle Ages, Aristotle was ‘the Philosopher’. The stimulus provided by his libri naturales and other recently recovered works can hardly be exaggerated. He caused medieval academics to reconsider long-established definitions of and methods in all the arts and sciences, and to analyse as never before their relationship with the queen of the sciences, theology. The implications for the commentary tradition were considerable. Aristotelian theory of causality encouraged exegetes to adopt a new type of prologue organized around the four main causes described by ‘the Philosopher’, an approach which encouraged new attitudes to such matters as authorship and authority, and literary style and structure. Aristotelian epistemology gave the human faculties and human perception a new dignity; late medieval scholars afforded the ‘body’ of Scripture, its literal sense, a corresponding dignity. A new semantics emerged. Meaning was no longer believed (as in twelfth-century exegesis) to have been hidden by God deep in the biblical text; rather it was expressed in the literal sense by the human authors of Scripture, each in his own way or ways. The allegorists’ obsession with auctoritas at the expense of the particular auctor receded to reveal divinely inspired yet supremely human beings who possessed their own literary and moral purposes and problems, their sins and their styles.