Divino Afflante Spiritu

Background and Occasion

Divino Afflante Spiritu was issued on the feast of St Jerome in 1943, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus. Leo had defended the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture against rationalist criticism and urged Catholics to take up serious biblical study. The half-century that followed was turbulent: the Modernist crisis led to Pascendi (1907), and the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a series of cautious responses on authorship and historicity. Catholic exegetes worked under suspicion, and some in the Church argued that the Latin Vulgate alone should guide interpretation.

At the same time the materials for studying the Bible had changed. Archaeology in the Near East, the recovery of ancient papyri and inscriptions, and the comparative study of ancient literatures had opened up the world in which the biblical books were written. Pius XII judged that Catholic scholars should use these resources with confidence. He wrote in the middle of the Second World War, and the encyclical ends by commending the consolation of the Scriptures to a suffering world.

Central Teaching

Inspiration and inerrancy reaffirmed

Pius XII begins by restating the doctrine of Providentissimus Deus and of Vatican I: the books of Scripture, whole and in all their parts, are written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and have God for their author. He rejects again the view that inerrancy covers only matters of faith and morals. The encyclical’s freedoms are given within this doctrine, not in place of it.

The original texts

The interpreter’s first duty is to study the original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and to establish the text as accurately as possible by textual criticism. Pius XII explains that the Council of Trent’s declaration of the Vulgate as “authentic” concerned its use in the Latin Church for public reading, preaching and disputation. That authenticity is juridical rather than critical: it guarantees that the Vulgate is free from error in faith and morals, not that it is the best text in every detail. The encyclical therefore encourages translations into modern languages made directly from the original texts.

The literal sense and literary forms

The chief aim of the exegete is the literal sense, what the human author meant to say. To find it, the interpreter must enter into the mind of an ancient Eastern writer and recognise the literary forms he used. The ancients did not write history, law or poetry by modern conventions; they used their own ways of narrating, approximating and expressing themselves. When Scripture is read according to the forms the authors actually used, many supposed errors turn out to be no errors at all. This is the most influential teaching of the encyclical.

The spiritual sense

Pius XII also defends the spiritual sense: the meaning that the realities described in the Old Testament carry as signs of the New, as when the Fathers saw Christ prefigured in the Passover. But he insists that only what God intended may be put forward as the spiritual sense; figurative applications devised by preachers are legitimate as illustration but must not be presented as the meaning of Scripture.

Freedom of research

The encyclical defends Catholic scholars against suspicion. Few texts, Pius XII observes, have had their meaning defined by the Church, and fewer still by the unanimous consent of the Fathers. There remain many questions that exegetes are free to investigate, and their work should be judged with fairness and charity, not with a zeal that treats everything new as dangerous.

Theological Significance

Divino Afflante Spiritu is often called the charter of modern Catholic biblical scholarship. It opened the way for Catholic exegetes to use historical and critical methods, and within twenty years Catholic scholarship had become a full participant in biblical studies.

Its teaching was confirmed and set into a wider theology of revelation by Vatican II’s Dei Verbum (1965), which repeats its emphasis on literary forms and on the human author’s intention (DV 12), while adding that Scripture must be read within the living Tradition and the unity of the whole of Scripture. Humani Generis (1950) also cautioned against applying the new freedom in ways that undermine the historicity of the early chapters of Genesis. Later documents, notably the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1993) and Benedict XVI’s Verbum Domini (2010), develop the same balance between historical study and theological reading.

For the tracts on this site, the encyclical belongs with the treatment of Scripture as a source of revelation in the apologetics manuals of Walshe and Wilhelm and Scannell. It also shows how Pius XII handled the relation of faith and reason in one specific field: scholarship is welcomed, but it serves the faith rather than standing in judgement over it.