Aquinas and Bonaventure on the Inspiration and Authority of Scripture

Here’s another long selection from Richard Muller, “Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics”, Volume 2. But it’s important background information for what follows:

Like the majority of the scholastic teachers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Thomas Aquinas did not develop a separate question or article dealing with the doctrine of Scripture.

He did, however, make a major contribution to the medieval doctrine of Scripture and included an extended comment on the sources and grounds of sacred theology in the first question of the Summa.

There, he clearly argues what Alexander [of Hales] stated by implication: that Scripture by its very nature is the ground or foundation of necessary argument in theology—whereas other sources, such as the church’s normative tradition, yield up only “probable” arguments.


Aquinas accepted, as did his predecessors and successors, the truth of Jerome’s observation that the inspiration of Scripture is in no way opposed to the individuality of the various human authors. “God,” he wrote, “is the principal author of Scripture, man however is the instrument.”

In stressing the literal sense of the text, moreover, Aquinas could reiterate the issue of primary authorship in its relation to theological meaning: “the literal sense is that which the author intends, and the author of Scripture is God.”

True to his demonstrative method, Thomas proceeded to develop this principle inductively, based on his study of Scripture, rather than deductively from the doctrinal point itself.

His analysis led him to distinguish between various forms of prophetic vision, between inspiration and revelation, and between the forms of inspiration found in the prophetic books and in the hagiographa.

In the first place, Aquinas recognized that prophecy was founded on several different kinds of vision. These he identified as imaginative, intellective, spiritual, and ecstatic.

Whatever the visionary foundation of particular prophecies, however, Aquinas was convinced that prophecy itself belongs to the province of knowledge and is, therefore, a matter of revelation: “in prophecy it is required that the attention of the mind (intentio mentis) be elevated toward the perception of the divine” so that the initial elevation of the mind by the movement of the Spirit falls under the category of inspiration, while the perception of divine things, by the removal of obscurity and ignorance from the mind, is the act of revelation itself.

Thus, “inspiration” refers to the work of movement of the Spirit elevating the mind toward and giving it the capacity for divine knowledge, whereas “revelation” refers to the actual presentation to the intellect of otherwise inaccessible knowledge. Inspiration and revelation are, thus, separable both conceptually and in fact. In particular, inspiration can occur without revelation—there can be a spiritually given elevation of the intellect without the impartation of new knowledge.

This distinction, together with a distinction between “express revelation” and an inward inclination or instinctus, enabled Aquinas to identify two basic kinds of prophecy and to explain the difference between prophecy and the writings or hagiographa.

On the one hand, a distinction between inspiration and revelation can be made with reference to prophecy itself—granting that prophecy “consists primarily and principally in knowledge” and is, therefore, essentially constituted by the fact of revelation rather than by the presence of inspiration.

At its most simple level, inspiration can result in an inward gift of knowledge or discernment without clear representation of its source—so that the human subject neither knows that the knowledge comes directly from God nor knows with certainty that it is true.

Prophecy, however, more typically consists in a revelation that is clearly recognized by the prophet to be a word from God and therefore both true and a rule or foundation for judgment.66 True prophecy, according to Aquinas, consists both in the acceptance or vivid presentation in the mind of new knowledge (acceptatio seu repraesentatio rerum) and a judgment concerning the truth of the knowledge presented to the mind (judicium de rebus repraesentatis). “In making this judgment, the mind of the prophet operates under the influence of divine light.”

The identification of prophecy as consisting essentially in revelation and in a judgment concerning the truth of the revelation leads to a basic distinction between the prophets and the holy writers of historical books and wisdom literature.

The prophets are recipients of an imaginative and intellectual vision not simply for the sake of knowing divine truth but “for the sake of judging rational truths according to the certitude of divine truth.”

The holy writers do not receive revelation as such—rather they are inspired, their minds are elevated by the movement of the Spirit to the end that they can write rational truths with the aid of the divine light.

Of course, prophets are inspired and holy writers both have knowledge and make judgments concerning it, but revelation is the essence of prophecy while inspiration or divine assistance is the essence of hagiography—the former belongs primarily to the intellect, the latter more fully to the affections.

The distinction between inspiration and revelation led both Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas away from a theory of simple verbal dictation. Since inspiration is the elevation of the mind, not the impartation of words, the hagiographa cannot be described as dictated in the usual sense of the term.

What is more, in the case of prophetic revelation, the issue for Albert and for Thomas is the gift of otherwise unknowable truths to the spiritually elevated intellect of the prophet. The way in which this knowledge moves from perception to expression is different from the usual pattern of human perception and expression.

According to Aquinas, knowledge arises from sense perception: what the senses perceive is subjected to the power of the active intellect which abstracts from perceptions universals or “intelligible species” and brings about an inward or mental identification (verbum mentis) of the concept in the passive intellect—which is to say the universal ideas of things are known to the mind by a process of abstraction from things that results in the impress of the idea on the mind by nature receptive to such ideas.

The passive intellect is, thus, the potency of the intellect for ideas. Our speech, in turn, arises from the expression of these ideas.

Aquinas recognized, on the basis of this theory of knowledge, that truths given by revelation not only have a different source from truths known through the senses but also, as a result of their different source, stand in a very different relation to our words than do the truths that we learn through experience.

(We have already noted this problem in the discussion of theological prolegomena. Aquinas himself recognized the limitation of theology in via, and the later medieval doctors, followed by the Protestant orthodox, distinguished between the absolute or archetypal truth known to God and its accommodated or ectypal forms.)

We are enabled by God to know of spiritual things inasmuch as God teaches us by means of analogies drawn from corporeal things. Our words are accommodated to revealed truths and take on, by analogy, a dimension of meaning not previously associated with the word.

Aquinas could use the traditional metaphor taken from the fathers that the Holy Spirit uses the language of the biblical writers as a scribe uses a reed pen (calamus): the Spirit is principal author, the human writer is his instrument. Nonetheless, as Mangenot rather nicely argues, this is not a process that reduces the human mind to nothing:

the Spirit writes rapidly in the heart of men. Those who have knowledge by divine revelation are subtly filled with wisdom. The psalmist has first thought in his heart, then he has spoken and finally he has written. The inspiration of the psalmist thus consists primarily in the revelation of ideas that he must then propound both in speech and in writing.

Even so, according to Aquinas, the Holy Spirit has not dictated the various expressions used to indicate the divine in Scripture—rather the Spirit has influenced, by inspiration, the judgment of the human writer in using certain terms rather than others. By implication, the words themselves already belonged to the vocabulary of the writer, and the process of inspiration is integral to his own thought process.

Bonaventure vs Aquinas
Although his doctrine of Scripture and its inspiration is not laid out in the detail or with as subtle attention to the relationship of the divine and the human in the work of composition as the doctrine of Aquinas, Bonaventure does provide a distinctive view of the inspiration and authority of Scripture based on his essentially Augustinian concept of divine illumination.

This marks a significant point of contrast with Aquinas, whose intellectualistic emphasis on the acceptio rerum and the rational judicium of the prophet and whose distinction between inspiration as an elevation of the mind and revelation as a gift of knowledge was linked, most certainly, to his epistemological assumption that truth is not, typically, learned by illumination.

Bonaventure by way of contrast, taught that “Holy Scripture does not proceed by rational argumentation, definition and division, as the other sciences do, but, inasmuch as it arises from a supernatural light, it teaches truths superior to the things of this world.”

The language of divine illumination appears clearly in the Breviloquium, where Bonaventure rests the authority of Scripture on divine revelation, arguing a distinction between revelatio divina and investigatio humana: the Holy Spirit is the true author of Scripture illuminated the hearts of the prophets with his revelations.

Even so, in direct contrast with the line of Aquinas’ argument, Bonaventure could argue that prophets do not accept what they predict as true in and of itself but rather they accept it as true according to the truth of their illumination and enlightenment, that is, prophecy does not require a rational movement in the mind of the prophet but rather takes its entire rationale from the inspiration of the Spirit.

Bonaventure does not, however, intend to reduce the human authors of Scripture to the status of unthinking instruments. The Spirit does not inspire in such a way as to place the biblical writers in a trance or deprive them of their senses.

Muller, R. A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise And Development Of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 2: The Cognitive Foundation Of Theology (2nd ed., pp. 38–42). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.