 Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pearce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority where this week we're going to be talking about the authority of the Holy Bible. So, you know, this is a series about authors and about literature. So you might think it's a little bit odd that we're going to have an episode on the Bible in terms of importance. Of course, it should have come first. But we're doing this at least at the moment. We're going through a little history of Western civilization. So beginning with the earliest great epics of Western literature by Homer and taking it chronologically. It's then Sophocles and then last time we did Virgil. But now in terms of chronology, the Bible is something which was born out of the Gospel, born out the incarnation about God becoming man. So we need to talk about the centrality of the Bible as a text, but also as a literary text, not just an historical text. So our theological text or philosophical text is also a literary text as we shall see. So we mentioned in previous episodes about the Virgin Muse awaiting the bridegroom. But with the coming of Christ, the Virgin Muse meets the bridegroom, right? The marriage is consummated in the life, death, resurrection, ascension of Jesus Christ, the founding of his church, the mystical body, which continues to be his incarnation mystically throughout the centuries thereafter. So what we see is the Virgin Muse in some sense Jerusalem, the faith of the Virgin awaiting the coming of the Messiah in the covenant, being fulfilled in the marriage with the bridegroom with the coming of Christ. So that's Jerusalem and Athens, the path of reason, the great Greek philosophers, the path of storytelling with both the the epics of Homer and the plays of such esophagus that we've discussed. And then they come together. The faith of Jerusalem and the reason and myth of Athens come together in Rome, in the Roman Catholic Church, as the synthesis, the marriage, not just of the bride and the bridegroom, but through that marriage, the marriage of faith and reason, where faith and reason are now melded together. They come together. They're no longer seen as being in conflict or as being distinct. They are basically synthesized in the person of Jesus Christ and in the teaching of his church. Now the Holy Bible, of course, is the author, so therefore the authority is God himself, the Holy Spirit. But it was, if you like, what was canonical, what was put into the Bible as seen as being definitive and true, was a decision of the mystical body of Jesus Christ, which is the Catholic Church. It was the Catholic Church that decided in the early years of the church, certainly by the first, second century, which books were canonical, which ones were authentically the voice of God and which were not. So we have this authority, both ultimately of the Word of God himself in the words of the Bible, the Holy Spirit as being the one who inspired, for instance, the Gospel, the writers of the Gospel and the other books of the Bible, but also this understanding of the authority to bind what's bound on earth and what's bound on earth with bound in heaven, what's loosed on earth with loosed in heaven, that power which Christ gives to his mystical body of the church is actually the authority by which we get what is the Holy Bible. So we have the Holy Spirit in league with the mystical body of Jesus Christ, the church, and that's how we know what is authentically part of Holy Scripture, the Holy Spirit inspiring human writers in an infallible way. Now I talked about the Bible being a literary text, right? It's a work of literature. And we're going to get scandalized if you think literature means nonfiction and nonfiction means something which is not true. That's what we're going to discuss now about that's not what literature is. It's not something which is not true. I mean, it can be. You have bad philosophy means philosophy, the love of wisdom. But something could be a philosophy which is leading people astray, Karl Marx, for instance, Marxism, Friedrich Nietzsche. So you have philosophy which is evil, that doesn't teach people the truth, but on the contrary, teaches them error. You have theology, which teaches people error, that's called heresy. So literature can either be either reflect the truth, or it cannot, just like just like theology or philosophy. So Bible as a literary text, first of all, is historical narrative. But the Bible is different, different genre, right? It's not just one genre. So there's historical narrative, right? The historical narrative is itself a narrative, even if it's factually true, it's still a story that unfolds history is a story, history is his story, in which he is weaving facts to ultimately bring about his providential design. So, so it's a historical narrative, they're also, it's a songbook. The book of Psalms are songs, the song of songs, the mystery stories, a book of Job is a mystery story. There are fictional narratives within it. So fictional narratives. Is there fiction in the Bible? You bet. I'll give you an example. When Jesus Christ teaches some of his most powerful lessons through the telling of fictional stories. It's not, should not be core scandal if I would say to you that the prodigal son never existed. The prodigal son is a product of our Lord's divine imagination. The prodigal son is a figment of Christ's imagination, his brother, his father, the servants, the pigs. It's a fictional narrative. And yet that story, although it never took place in history, is so true that every time anybody has heard that story or read that story in the 2000 years since it was first told, does not say the prodigal son is like me. We say we are like the prodigal son. So paradoxically, this fictional character who never existed in history is more real as an archetype of the repentant sinner who returns to the father. And of which we are only types. That's the archetype. We are types. We are types of the prodigal son. The prodigal son is the real thing told by Christ in the story. So this is an example of the power of fictional narratives used by Christ himself in scripture through the telling of parables. One of the most powerful ways that he teaches us lessons is through the telling of fictional stories. And then of course there's proverbs, there's a book of proverbs. There's something which might almost be seen as surreal, a dreamscape in the apocalypse and in the book of Revelation. So that the Bible is a whole collection of different literary genres forged together by the will of God as the word of God. Now, how do we read the Bible? Well, insofar as the Bible is a literary text, it has to be read literarily and not merely literally. And you don't have to take my word for that. Take the two greatest doctors of the church, St. Augustus and Thomas Aquinas, and what they teach about this. And this is, this is something we really do have to understand. So in his, in his book, They Doctrina Christiana of Christian doctrine. So Augustine says that we perceive reality through signs. And a sign is something which signifies, right? It's something which signifies something else. And the word allegory, by the way, also from allegoros in Greek means a thing that points to something else. So you could say that a sign and an allegory are synonyms, right? They mean essentially the same thing, a thing which points to something beyond itself. So St. Augustine gives some examples of what he calls natural signs, signs that that that exist in nature, that we read, we have to read the sign to see the truth that that we can't actually see directly. So he uses the example of smoke, that when we see smoke, we don't see fire. But we know that smoke signifies fire. And therefore, we do see fire in the sense that we know that where there's smoke, there is fire, even if we can't physically see it, we know we can be see it now in our mind's eye. We should have mentioned it, by the way, that the imagination, this is important for us to know, we are made in the image of God, we are the Imago Dei. And what does that mean? I mean, in some sense, everything that God makes is made in the image of God, right? They're the fruits of his creativity. So a horse is made in the image of God, because God created it from his own mind, right? He thought of it and thought it into being brings it into being. So a horse is made in the image of God in that sense. But we made the image of God in a much deeper sense. We are divine in some sense, in a way which the other creatures are not. And so how do we detect that? We detect that by looking what it is in us, that we don't see in the other creatures. And ultimately, we see the good, the true and the beautiful, the goodness of love, the truth of reason, and the beauty of creativity and creation. So the good, the true and the beautiful. So these ancient Greek understandings of transcendental, these three things are really one. So at their triune, their eternity as an image of the divine, the image of God. So let's, when Christ says, I am the way, the truth and the life, he is saying, I am the good, the true and the beautiful. I am the way of goodness, love. I am the truth of the true, the truth of reason, that the source of reason and where reason leads back to. And I am the life. Because beauty is the life in the things. If we don't see the beauty, it's not the life in things necessarily biologically, by the way. It's not that sort of, it's not midi biological. It's the life of God in things. So if we don't see the beauty of a sunrise, I mean, there's nothing biological in the beauty of sunrise, it's physical matter or inorganic matter, no light going through the atmosphere, etc. and sun. If we don't see the beauty of that is not because it's not beautiful because there's a life in it, which is the life of creation that God has, has, has breathed his life of beauty into that. And if we don't see it, it's because we are dead. Right? We are not alive to the life in it. So this beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It's in the thing beheld. If we don't behold the beauty, it's because we're blind. So, so this is very important. So the way it's with the life is the good, the true and the beautiful. So how does that manifest itself in us as the Imago Dei? Well, we have to be able to be good as God is good. We have to be able to love the way of goodness. We have to be true as God is true by by by being true to reason to the Logos reason himself. And we have to be beautiful. We have to have the life of beauty in us both by seeing the beauty of creation, but also then producing that beauty creatively by using our own creative gifts, unlike all the other creatures we can love, we can reason and we can create, we are creators. So these are marks of God. Another one, by the way, is we can laugh, but that's another subject. Only humor is something also, which is part of the divine image in us. So now we understand the imagination as part of the divine image, the Imago Dei in us, the imagination. We can see that we're meant to see the the goodness, truth and beauty of reality imaginatively, right? By using imagination. And one way we do that is to see not just the thing literally, but the thing it signifies. So we see smoke and we use our imagination and we see the presence of fire, even if we can't physically see it. Another example some Augustine gives is animal tracks. Now, literally speaking, an animal track is a shape, an indented shape in the mud. That's what it is, literally. But it signifies the fact that a certain type of animal, and if you know the shape, you can read the sign, right? That the sign signifies which which animal what sort of animal walk past here. And if you're good at reading the signs and that the soil and what have you can probably work out how long ago it was. And whether it was running or walking. So you animal signs as another natural sign. But then he said there are conventional signs. These are signs which we create to signify other things. And the most commonly used creative signs are conventional signs to use Augustine's words are words what we're doing now. If if we don't read the sign, we will not understand what it signifies. So for instance, if you do not speak English, and I use a word such as dog, you will it would just sound like a monosyllabic noise or grunt. If you read the signs, if you speak the language, you will have an image presented into mind by that verbal sign I've made of a four legged canine. If I reverse the letters, letters are also signs as words are the components by which we make the word. If we reverse that instead of having dog we have God we see something at least hopefully very different from a four legged canine mammal. So this is conventional signs. The most common conventional signs are words. Every word is not the literal thing. It's not the sound or the visual thing. It signifies something beyond itself. It's an allegory, something which signifies something beyond itself. So we can't even think because we think by using words. We can't even communicate to ourselves through thoughts led on to other people through words without reading the signs. So we have to be literary and not merely literal. Now, Thomas Aquinas takes things further when talking about the Bible. He says the Bible has four distinct levels of meaning. One levels the literal meaning and the other three are three different types of allegorical meaning. And bear in mind that that that Thomas Aquinas is the angelic doctor. He's the greatest and most authoritative authority in terms of theology. We should be listening to him. This is the way the church reads the Bible. It's the way that God intends us to read the Bible. One literal level, three allegorical levels. So the literal level is the literal meaning of the words. I mean, obviously you have to understand the literal meaning of the words. What's happening? What's being said? But he said the next level of meaning is the allegorical level. And that is how the Old Testament serves as a prefigurement of the New Testament. In other words, I talked about the Virgin Muse meeting the bridegroom. Well, the Old Testament meets the bridegroom. And when the Old Testament meets the bridegroom in the coming of Christ, the Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ. So the whole of the Old Testament is made sense of by Christ. And we therefore have to read the Old Testament through Christ. And that means that the whole of the Old Testament is an allegory of Christ, of the coming of Christ, the whole covenant, the whole of the story of the Old Testament, all of the Psalms point to the coming of God as man in Jesus Christ. So we have to read the Old Testament as an allegory of the New Testament, the New Testament as a fulfillment of that allegory to which the Old Testament points. So that's the first level of allegorical, literary meaning in reading the Bible, the allegorical level. And then above that, as well as that is the moral level. It's another allegorical level, but the moral level. So how does our understanding of the allegorical connection of the Old Testament and New Testament reflect in what I should be doing? How does this pertain to me? How does the reading of the Bible hold up a mirror to show me myself and not just show me who I am, but show me who I should be and also who I shouldn't be? A magic mirror. That's the moral level of meaning. And then the fourth level meaning, the third allegorical level is the anagogical level. And the anagogical level of meaning is that how the allegorical connection with the Old New Testament, how that shows itself to me as a magical mirror that shows me who I am, who I should be and who I shouldn't be, how all of that ultimately comes to fulfillment and fruition in eternity. So the anagogical level is how all of this relates to eternity, how everything in time somehow points to eternity. So in a simple sense that what the church calls the four last things, that death, judgment, heaven and hell. That somehow the reading of the Bible, that focus should always be there also. That we're mortal, but we are destined for eternity, either in the good place or the bad place. So we're mortal, death. Once we die we will be judged. So death, judgment. And then following judgment, only two possibilities, heaven or hell. Purgatory of course is a one-way street to heaven. So only heaven or hell. So Thomas Aquinas and Augustine both teach us of the necessity of reading the Bible literally. Seeing the signifiers, seeing the allegories in it. So what, in what sense is the Bible a true mirror and all other literature is a true mirror in relation to it, relative to this. In other words, to the extent that other literature reflects biblical truth, gospel truth. It's also a true mirror and of course no mirror is as perfectly true, capital T, capital M, as the true mirror which the Bible is, which the gospel is. So what we've learned about ourselves by holding up this magic mirror, who we are and who we should be and who we shouldn't be, is that we're at three aspects, three dimensions of who we are as human persons. Homo viator, homo superbus and anthropos to Latin phrases and the Greek word. We'll start actually with, we'll start with anthropos because it's the older word, it's the Greek word for man and anthropos. And etymologists argue about the the root of the word, where the word comes from originally, but Plato and the great philosopher, and he's a good enough authority for me, said that it means he who turns upwards. So, so how do the Greeks distinguish who we are as as as as human persons from every other creature? Well, we look up. The way I sometimes put it is that the animal grazes man gazes. That the animal is confined and constrained by instinct. We can transcend that instinct in in the quest for that which is transcendental, in the quest for goodness, truth, beauty. We can do it in various ways, we can do it for one of a better word scientifically or we can do it for what a better word artistically or poetically. So, we can look up at the sun, obviously not presumably midday without protection, look up the sun and we can work out how far the sun is from us. We can work out how long it takes light to get to us from the sun. So, we can look at it in that scientific sense or we can look at the sun and be astonished at its beauty and be moved to to employ the Imago Dei in us the imagination to write a sonnet to the sun. So, for instance, at the beginning of it at least a sonnet by Roy Campbell to the sun. Oh, let your shining orb grow dim of Christ the mirror and the shield that I may gaze through you to him see half the miracle revealed. So, the poet doesn't just see the ball of gas, he sees something which signifies that the one who created the sun and created the one who can look up at the sun and write a poem to the sun. So, anphropos and then we have homo viator. So, we now went into Latin. Homo viator means man on a journey or man on a quest or man on a pilgrimage and this is that I understand all of us in our individual lives are on a journey. The only purpose of life is to get to heaven. If we fail that quest for heaven, we are literally miserable losers for eternity. The quest is for heaven. We're all on a journey homo viator and if the quest is for heaven it's not just a journey of course it's a pilgrimage. It's also a quest in the sense that we would have to fight dragons on the way and yes dragons exist most of them are inside us in our hearts demons, evil thoughts, evil thoughts, temptations and if we don't defeat the dragon the dragon defeats us and we can't defeat the dragon without the help of god and we'll see how obviously holy scripture shows us that great works of literature show us that so homo viator the man on the quest for heaven pilgrim man the bible shows us antropos also shows us homo viator this is who we should be right we are but we can refuse as we should talk a minute so we should be he who looks up in wonder in praise at the beauty of the cosmos and the beauty of the creator of the cosmos we should be those on the appointed journey the pilgrimage of life the quest for heaven but we also third aspect of us homo superbus we are proud man man who refuses the journey we refuse to choose the path of self-sacrificial love we refuse to to look up in wonder we're too self-absorbed with our own shrinking shriveling ego centrism and there's a wonderful verb which comes from a wonderful work of literature called the lord of the rings uh well tokin doesn't use it as a as a verb uses a noun that the character of gollum but the verb is to gollumize that if we choose to be homo superbus instead of homo viator we are choosing to gollumize ourselves we're choosing instead of growing in wisdom and virtue instead of taking the the the the quest for heaven we choose instead to just disappear into this malice of ourselves thinking we're big that's the irony the more that we think we big the more we shrivel and shrink into a pathetic wretch pathetic wreck a pathetic remnant of the good person or hobbit we were called to be we become a gollumized shadow of that that's the power that's the power applied to destroy ourselves and destroy others so the bible shows us who we should be homo viator and a thlopos who we shouldn't be homo superbus and it shows us the consequences of choosing one or the other as regards the relationship between between uh gospel truth and literary truth there i i can go no better than to go back to september the 19th 1931 to oxford to the rooms of c.s louis in mortland college oxford and to a long night talk as louis called it between um uh himself j r r talking the author lord of the rings and their friend hugo dyson and in that uh long night talk c.s louis said but myths are lies and therefore worthless even though breathed through silver so myth stories you know the iliad the odyssey the ineared lord of the rings uh that that that that that these stories these myths are lies and therefore they're worthless they have no power uh because they don't tell the truth even though they breathe through silver we love them because they're beautiful but they don't tell us the truth and talking said no they're not lies he said all myths all stories contain splintered fragments of the one true light that comes from god and he says that the gospel is a story like all the others except it's a true story it's the it's the myth that really happened where god tells the story not with words but with facts and when god himself enters the story the gospel is the true myth the true story and that was that that understanding of reality the understanding of art literature and truth so powerful to see us louis that within a few weeks he was declaring himself to be a christian he converted to christianity because of that long night talk and he said that I definitely started believing in in in god and christ and the long night talk with Tolkien and Dyson had a great deal to do with it see us louis learned the lesson we need to learn the lesson the authority of the bible is that it's the true myth that makes sense of all the other myths and to read it literally is to read reality realistically that's the authority of the bible thanks for joining me on the authority next time we'll be going to look at the authority of the bear wolf poet this has been an episode of the authority with joseph pierce brought to you by tan for updates on new episodes and to support the authority and other great free content visit the authority podcast dot com to subscribe and use coupon code authority 25 to get 25 percent off your next order including books audio books and video courses by joseph pierce on literary giants such as Tolkien chesterton louis shakespeare and bellach as well as tans extensive catalog of content from the saints and great spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life to follow joseph and support his work check out his blog and sign up for email updates and exclusive content at j pierce dot and thanks for listening