CRITICISM
492
CRITICISM
drawn line between the exegetes of the critical and
those of the traditional school. In the process by
which the critics arrive at their conclusions there is a
divergence of attitude towards the supernatural ele-
ment in Holy Writ. Those of the rationalistic wing
ignore, and at least tacitly deny, inspiration in the
theological meaning of the term, and without any
doctrinal preoccupations, except some hostile to the
supernatural, proceed to apply critical tests to the
Scriptures, in the same manner as if they were merely
human productions. Moderate critics of Protestant
persuasion — a school that predominates in Great
Britain — hold to inspiration and revelation, though
with a freedom incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy.
Catholic Biblical critics, while taking as postulates the
plenary inspiration and the inerrancy of the sacred
Writings, admit in a large measure the literary and
historical conclusions reached by non-Catholic work-
ers in this field, and maintain that these are not ex-
cluded by Catholic faith. With the exception of
Abbe Loisy and his followers, no Catholic scholar has
claimed autonomy or complete independence for criti-
cism, all proceeding on the principle that it cannot
validly, and may not lawfully, contradict the estab-
lished dogmatic teaching of the Church. Its Christian
exponents insist that a reverent criticism is quite
within its rights in sifting the elements which enter
into human aspects of the Bible, as a means of a
better understanding of the written word, since its
component parts were given their form by men in
certain historical enviromnents and under some of
the limitations of their age and place, and since, more-
over, inspiration does not dispense with ordinary hu-
man industry and methods in Uterary composition.
(See LvsPiRATioN.)
Higher Criticism may be called a science, though its processes and results do not admit of nicety of control and demonstration, as its principles are of the moral-psychological order. Hence its conclusions, even in the most favourable circumstances, attain to no greater force than what arises from a convergence of probabilities, begetting a moral conviction. While some attempts have been made to elaborate a system of canons for the higher criticism, it has not, and probably never will have, a strictly defined and gen- erally accepted code of principles and rules. Some broad principles, however, are universally admitted by critical scholars. A fundamental one is that a literary work always betrays the imprint of the age and environment in which it was produced; another is that a plurality of authors is proved by well-marked differences of diction and style, at least when these coincide with distinctions in ^-iew-point or dis- crepancies in a double treatment of the same subject. A third received canon holds to a radical dissimilarity between ancient Semitic and modern Occidental, or Aryan, methods of composition.
History. — Before the eighteenth eentury. — The early ecclesiastical writers were unconscious of nearly all the problems to which criticism has given rise. Their attention was concentrated on the Divine content and authority of sacred Scripture, and, looking almost exclusively at the Divine side, they deemed as of trifling account questions of authorship, date, com- position, accepting unreservedly for these points such traditions as the Jewish Church had handed down, all the more readily that Christ Himself seemed to have given various of these traditions His supreme confirmation. As for the N. T., tradition was the determining factor here too. As exceptions we may note that Origen concluded partly from internal evi- dence that St. Paul could scarcely have written the Epistle to the Hebrews, and his disciple Dionysius adduceti linguistic grounds for rejecting the Apoca- lypse as a work of St. John. The Fathers saw in every sentence of the Scripture a pregnant oracle of God. Apparent contradictions and other difficulties
were solved without taking possible human imperfec-
tion into view. Only in a few isolated passages does
St. Jerome seem to hint at such in connexion with
history. Except in regard to the preservation of
the sacred text there was nothing to elicit a critical
view of the Bible in the age of the Fathers, and
this applies also to the Scholastic period. Even
the Humanist movement preceding the Reforma-
tion gave no impulse to the critical spirit beyond
fostering the study of the Scriptures in their original '
languages. It was not a Humanist, but the erratic
Reformer Carlstadt, who first broke with tradition on
the authorship of an inspired book by declaring that
Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, because
the account of his death is in the same style as the
rest of his book. But though Carlstadt adduced a
critical argument he cannot be styled a critic. Hobbes
(1651), Pereyre (1655), Spinoza (1670) attacked the
Mosaic authorship, but merely incidentally, in works
in which anything like a systematic criticism found
no place. A French priest, Richard Simon (1638-
1712), was the first who subjected the general ques-
tions concerning the Bible to a treatment which was
at once comprehensive in scope and scientific in
method. Simon is the forerunner of modern Biblical
criticism. The broadening opportunities for the
study of Oriental languages, a keen and methodical
mind, probably, too, a reaction against the rigitl view
of the Bilile which reigned amongst both Catholics
and Protestants of the age were the factors which
produced Simon's first great work, the "Histoire
critique du Vieux Testament", which was published
in 1G7S. In this he called attention to the double
narratives and variation of style in the Pentateuch,
and thence deduced that, aside from the legal portion,
which Moses himself had written down, nmch of the
remaining matter was the work of several inspired
annalists, a class to whom are due the later historical
books, and who in subsequent generations added
touches to the inspired histories by their predecessors.
This theory did not survive its author, but the use
of internal evidence by which Simon arrived at it
entitles him to be called the father of Biblical criti-
cism. Ilis novel view of the Mosaic books excited
only condemnation, and his critical work, being an
isolated effort which did not win the support of a
school, found appreciation only in recent times. A
continuously developing higher criticism was not to
begin till the middle of the eighteenth century. But
a capital distinction is to be made between criticism
as applied to the Old and as applied to the New Testa-
ment. The two have followed different courses. O.-T.
criticism has been developed along the lines of lingu-
istic and historic research. Philosophico-religious prej-
udices have been kept in the background. But in re-
sjiect to the N. T., criticism began as the outgrowth of
philosophic speculations of a distinctly anti-Christian
character and, as exercised by rationalists and liberal
Protestants, has not yet freed itself from the sway of
such a priori principles, though it has tended to grow
more positive — that is, more genuinely critical — in its
methods.
Since the eighteenth century. (1) Old-Testament Criticism outside the Church. — In 1753 Jean Astruc, a French Catholic physician of considerable note, pub- lished a little book, "Conjectures sur les m^moires originau.x doiit il parait que Moise s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Gene.se", in which he conjec- tured, from the alternating use of two names of God in the Hebrew Genesis, that Moses had incorporated therein two pre-existing documents, one of which employed Elohim and the other Jehovah. The idea attracted little attention till it was taken up by a German scholar, who, however, claims to have made the discovery independently. This was Johanii Gott- fried Eichhorn, the author of an Introduction to the O. T., issued 17S0-S3, and distinguished by vigour
