Sanctuarium profanis occlusum, sive, de ss. bibliorum prohibitione in lingua vulgari seu vernacula tractatus

I. PROOF taken from the letter, which etc.

enclosed their souls as if in sepulchers for a punishment and expiation of their prevarication, etc. And this was the occasion of the fall for this great man, and the origin of all his errors, while indeed leaving the truth of the letter, he adhered to the inventions of his own brain, as if the whole Holy Scripture, of which the Letter makes a part just as much as the Spirit, had not been divinely inspired! As if everything that is written had not been written for our instruction, and not every word had been dictated and put into the mouth of the Holy Prophets by the Holy Spirit! This is, says St. Basil in Homily 10 on the Hexaemeron, an entirely intolerable and grave blasphemy, to assert that even a word is found in Scripture that is idle. Any discourse, any word, all Syllables and points are themselves full of mysteries and senses according to St. Jerome in chapter 3 of Ephesians and St. Chrysostom, Homily 15 on Genesis; nor are they merely words of any kind but words of the Holy Spirit. The mouth of the Prophets is the mouth of God; and everything there is to be investigated more diligently; for from the Holy Spirit all things proceed, and in these nothing superfluous, nothing not necessary is found, says the same in Homily 35 on John.

Rightly I will say on this matter what St. Augustine pronounced about the whole of Holy Scripture in Epistle 3 to Volusianus: That mind is hostile to this doctrine which, either by erring, does not know it to be most healthy, or, by being sick, hates the medicine. And indeed, who would say of a work of GOD that it is not holy, not useful? And if the Letter in Scripture is that which the flesh is in Jesus Christ, does not the Apostle in Hebrews 1 teach us that the path of heaven has been led for us through Christ’s flesh, and through it the way of life has been opened to us? Does not Christ Himself in John 6 affirm His own flesh to be the fountain of immortality and glory?

The Jews fell into the opposite error, while separating the Spirit from the Letter, they adhered simply to the words and history, with the sense and intelligence rejected: making in this way a snare for themselves (Psalm 68, Romans 11) and a table, which would offer them dishes that were equally delicious and a deadly virus from a food healthy in itself; namely, with their eyes darkened between signs and shadows, and their back bent toward the earth; so that their gaze, says St. Augustine, is always fixed upon the earthly Jerusalem, which has no children except slaves; nor does it have the freedom to look at the heavenly Sion, whose children are no less than GOD. Whence it came about that they reproached the first Christians for the perversion of the Scriptures, as if they were sinning against the veneration and faithfulness due to the word of GOD, in that they do not follow the Letter entirely, and retreat from the figurative things to the sense of the words and the proper meaning of the terms. But Clement of Alexandria accurately vindicates the Church from that slander, and teaches at the same time what the sense of this divine Mistress is in the present business: The Jews, he says, possess the body of Scripture, and acquiesce in the understanding of the words:

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