Reinterpreting Nature in Early Modern Europe: Natural Philosophy, Biblical Exegesis and the Contemplative Life

Abstract

In offering this advice on the reading of scripture, Cistercian monk Arnoul of Bohériss (fl. 1200) provides a useful example of the place of the bible in the meditative traditions of medieval monasticism. For Arnoul, scripture was studied not in order to confer knowledge (scientia) upon the reader; rather, the words of scripture were to be savoured and digested in such a way that they would provide the fertile subject matter for prayer and contemplation. In this long-standing tradition of prayerful reading — lexio divina — the divine words of scripture were ruminated upon and literally ‘tasted’ with the heart. Arnoul’s counsel, concerning the reading of scripture, contrasts instructively with the position of the Calvinist theologian Lambert Daneau (1530-95), who some three and a half centuries later was to suggest, to the contrary, that one should indeed search for ‘science’ within the pages of scripture. In his Physica Christiana (‘Christian Physics’, 1576), Daneau argued that the book of Genesis was a ‘Treatise of Naturall Philosophie’ penned by Moses. Daneau’s English translator went so far as to insist that all true natural philosophy was ‘founded uppon the assured round of Gods word and holy Scriptures’. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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