For example:
the Protestant has no way, other than fallible arguments, to secure his account of what belongs in the canon, which account, in the case of the OT, runs counter to what the older traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy eventually concluded. Therefore, he has no way, other than the use of fallible arguments, to show how the canon should be identified. And if he doesn’t have more than that, then he has no way of making certain that the way he identifies the norma normans for the other secondary authorities is correct.
[For Roman Catholics] there is a principled as opposed to an ad hoc way to distinguish the formal, proximate object of faith from fallible human opinions about how to identify it in the sources. And that is the way in which the Catholic can distinguish the assent of faith from that of opinion.
Well, the Medievals, it seems, were in the same boat as the post-Tridentine Protestants, because the “infallible Church” with the “unbroken succession” during those centuries really hadn’t ruled authoritatively what the “infallible canon” was to be. In fact, the claim was, they didn’t need one.
So the “Catholics” of that day had the same problems that the Protestants had. As Richard Muller relates:
The problem of the text and canon of Scripture debated by Reformers and humanists alike is rooted firmly in medieval discussion. The importance of the original languages to the interpretation of the text of Scripture, including the need to re-translate the Old Testament from Hebrew into a literal Latin version, was recognized as clearly by Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln (d. 1253), as it was by the humanist-trained scholars of the sixteenth century.
Similarly, critique of the Vulgate text can be cited as easily from Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1294) as from the Reformers.
It cannot, of course be claimed that the medieval writers had either the expertise or the incentive characteristic of the Hebraists and classicists of the sixteenth century, but it must also be recognized that we are dealing with a long history of approach to the text rather than with a sudden and historically discontinuous biblicism.
The history of text and canon, like the history of hermeneutics, does not oblige the desire to create neat boxes called “Middle Ages,” “Reformation,” and “Post-Reformation Orthodoxy.”
Medieval theologians and, indeed, early medieval Bibles manifest a relative fluidity of the canon. Perhaps the most prominent examples of the openness of the medieval canon are the occurrences in medieval bibles and in the works of medieval commentators and theologians of the text and of references to the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle to the Laodicenes.
The seventh-century Codex Claromontanus offers, for example, a final grouping of books including (in order) James, 1, 2 and 3 John, Jude, Barnabas, the Revelation of John, the Acts of the Apostles, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Acts of Paul, and the Revelation of Peter.
Among these books, the Revelation or Apocalypse of Peter occupies an important place in the larger realm of medieval theology and popular religion.
Where the Revelation of John lacks detail on such matters as the geography of Hell, Peter supplies a storehouse of information.
The medieval mind, as witnessed by Dante’s Inferno and its various predecessors, was profoundly influenced by such deutero-canonical literature.
No “principled way” here. Or rather, the “principle” in those days was that “Peter” had to be the more predominant character, and the [spurious] writings [wrongly but perhaps hopefully] attributed to Peter were thus provided better actual descriptions of how the world worked than did the actual Scriptures.
Similarly, the Epistle to the Laodicenes was viewed by a medieval commentator like Haimo of Halberstadt as a useful or edifying work, and quite a few of the Bibles of the later Middle Ages, both in Latin and in the vernacular (English and German), include a brief Epistle to the Laodicenes usually after Galatians or Colossians and sometimes just before the Pastorals.
As for the Apocrypha, so hotly disputed by Protestants and Roman Catholics in the sixteenth century, they were quite commonly singled out by medieval teachers as deutero-canonical.
Thus Hugh of Saint Victor noted that the Apocrypha do not belong to the canon but ought to be read for edification, while John of Salisbury not only distinguished between the canonical and apocryphal books but also listed the Shepherd of Hermas among the Old Testament Apocrypha.
Hugh could also understand as Old Testament all sacred books written before Christ and as the New Testament all churchly books written after Christ, so that “New Testament” referred to all subsequent writings of the church, with the four gospels standing in the first rank (in primo ordine), the Acts, the Pauline and the catholic epistles, and the Apocalypse on the second rank, and the Decretals on the third, followed by “the writings of the holy Fathers … which are numberless” occupying the place of a final link in the historical chain of witnesses.
The harmony of the whole was so obvious to Hugh that he could state “no one of [these writings] is superfluous.” The fourfold exegesis, with its powerful emphasis on the unity and analogy of the faith, made such statements possible and rendered a strictly defined canon unnecessary.
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. 30–31). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
So unfortunately for Roman Catholics, we see again that when actual history is applied to their “philosophical” speculations, difficulties arise.
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