The Bible's language

Wyclif speaks of the vis vocis, the intention of the words of Scripture. This, he holds, makes it possible for the literal sense to carry a force of proof which the spiritual cannot. To abandon the use of ‘spiritual’ interpretations in argument and proving is to lose a number of the ways devised by patristic and earlier mediaeval scholars of getting round difficulties in the text – especially the method of resolving apparent contradictions by regarding one or both passages as ‘spiritual’ in meaning. Some of these solutions could be retained by including metaphors and some figures within the literal sense, but not all. The new work on the theory of language which had prompted the strong interest in the literal sense of twelfth and thirteenth century scholars provided some solutions in its own terms of deeper investigation into the nature and working of language.

As a rule, the endeavour was still to find a way to interpret the text as it stood. The possibility that some of the difficulties might arise from corruptions in the text was considered, and some scholars, as we shall see, tried to arrive at a correct text. But this second, and in the long term immensely important development, belongs in its full implications to the period of the humanists and reformers. For the most part, mediaeval grammar and logic pursued the hard road of trying to make sense of the text available, and we must begin with that.