Ocker Review

We medievalists fancy that we are now rather skilled at resisting the persuasive rhetoric of Reformation histories and their vision of the medieval past, but recently some scholars, as James Simpson in his Reform and Cultural Revolution, have vigorously argued for the existence of “revolutionary” differences between late-medieval and early modern textual cultures in England. Christopher Ocker’s contribution to our sense of the relationship between the two periods focuses narrowly on biblical hermeneutics, an extremely polemicized issue for the late-medieval and early modern periods which most would assume to fall under the rubric of “revolutionary” change. Without denying the considerable difference that a renewed study of rhetoric made to Protestant biblical interpretation, Ocker claims that there remained a significant continuity between late-medieval and Reformation attitudes towards the Bible as a text.

Ocker’s method is comparative; he is looking for general presuppositions and shared attitudes among late-medieval scholars who rarely focus on the same biblical texts or self-consciously discuss their own interpretive practice. The evidence seldom permits tracing specific relationships between commentators, so Ocker contextualizes their attitudes towards biblical textuality within the shared problem-solving culture of fourteenth-century scholasticism. Most laudably, Ocker relies on unpublished works, including long excerpts in translation as well as appendices with the original texts of the fourteenth-century commentators Nicholas Goran, Jacques Fournier (later Pope Benedict XII), and Hermann of Schildesche. Of course, the comparative approach does limit Ocker to making only modest claims from suggestive connections. He is, after all, trying to trace a slightly amorphous mental landscape, and it is greatly to Ocker’s credit that he manages within these constraints to make careful, tightly interrelated arguments.

Ocker begins with a brief overview of the scholastic context of biblical interpretation and documents the confusion between literal and spiritual senses in medieval exegesis. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Victorine exegesis rested on the assumption that “not only words, but things also are representational”; in biblical literature, the words signify things (res1), which in turn signify other, more profound things (res2), which were closer to spiritual truth and called the spiritual senses or allegory. However, even while commentators affirmed the distinctions between the senses in their theorizing of interpretation, Ocker persuasively demonstrates that they struggled to maintain those same distinctions in their interpretive practice. In Victorine thought, with its reliance on things (res1) to mediate signification and its aim of a non-linguistic experience of truth, biblical language was something to go beyond, not something significant in itself. However, by the late thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas was contending that not merely the things signified in the Bible but the verbal signs themselves are revelatory—whether used “properly” or figuratively—and therefore biblical knowledge could result from mental apprehension of the words themselves, rather than only from reaching beyond words to the immediate experience of things. Ocker indicates that the coexistence in individual commentators of the perspectives of verbal signification and of Victorine natural signification was widespread in the later Middle Ages. Also, biblical discourse was seen by these same theologians as concerning itself with what Ocker calls “a present religious world of thought”, and this idea enabled the fusion of doctrine with exegesis: the very words of biblical text inform the biblical thought-world which in turn informs biblical meaning.

Ocker next considers the tools and then the ideas available to late-medieval exegetes as they approached the Bible as a text. He first examines the tool of rhetoric; his contention is that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century interpreters did not employ the resources that Augustine’s rhetorical inventio could provide for literal readings, but rather relied on the legacies of Aquinas’ verbal signification to perform rhetorical functions. This is most pointedly seen in the letter of revelatory history. Since history was regarded as meaning-imbued divine action, the letter of the biblical text could directly refer to spiritual matters, including moral and allegorical meanings. Additionally, changing notions regarding the relations of words to their spiritual referents enabled exegetes to see figurative speech as a type of literal meaning which uses meaningful, though “improper”, signification. Ocker then discusses aspects of late-medieval conceptions of divine speech which shaped attitudes towards the biblical text and pointed towards the possibility of a biblical poetics. The most significant aspects stem from characterizations of divine speech in terms of its “verbalness” and its “intersubjectivity”. The verbal nature of divine speech is emphasized in fourteenth-century discussions of parabolic or double-literal senses. Furthermore, divine speech represented textually was also characterized by intersubjective experience of divine truth via inspired, consensual readings. Influenced by these ideas, late-medieval exegesis thus intuitively translated biblical narratives into sentences for logical analysis, a process by which meaning could emerge within the textually-mediated fraternity of God, human authors, theologian-translators, and readers.

Finally, Ocker turns to the Reformation, arguing that the new tools of exegesis developed by Protestants in fact served to reinforce late-medieval textual attitudes towards the Bible, rather than enable a break from them. Although the scholastics’ reliance upon logic—the same tool that enabled their exegesis—was soundly critiqued by Reformers, the vital connection which late-medieval thinkers made between literal meaning and a present religious world of thought was buttressed. The tools of rhetoric which were re-emerging likewise served to continue analysis of the ways in which biblical language, divine speech, and present-day human speech converged in biblical reading. Ultimately, the late-medieval legacy for biblical poetics furnished three critical presuppositions to later commentators: literal meaning could communicate divine truth, the truth of the biblical text was translatable into theological discourse, and biblically-mediated divine speech found its proper end when experienced within the inspired community of believers.

Ocker’s study prompts many questions, not the least of which is how “revolutionary” Luther’s hermeneutics really was. Clearly, with this provocative book, Ocker has offered the scholarly community much food for thought and new texts to analyze in our discussions of the textual transformations (or lack thereof) between the late-medieval and early modern periods.

Diane Vincent, U. of Cambridge