sensus clarior
sensus melior
The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (2005)
Jonathan Sheehan
https://books.google.com/books?id=SJGhYCqVflUC&pg=PA98
The task of the philological critic was, then, the condensation of the significant from the random. And no one went further than Bengel did in
condensing Gerhard of Maastricht’s forty-three critical canons. Indeed, just four words, Bengel declared, “should be able to distinguish the true readings from all the false ones.”20
The four words—proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua (the harder reading is better than the easy)—would in later years be shaved down to the even leaner difficilio lectio potior, a standard canon of present-day textual criticism. The canon put the critic in the shoes of a monk. Imagine this monk, the rule said, cramped from long hours sitting in a cold and dark scriptorium. Suddenly he chances across a confusing passage in his text. He squints and still it makes no sense. It must, he concludes, be a mistake, perhaps a slip of the previous scribe s pen. So, if the monk is circumspect, he then glosses the unclarity in the margin, leaving a note that might, over time, creep into the text itself. If less circumspect, our sore and tired monk changes the passage, clears up (in his mind) the problematic piece of writing, and substitutes for the obscure original a passage better suited to his own theological or grammatical tastes.
Given such monkish proclivities, the wise textual critic assumes that corruption works to simplify, rather than complicate. The harder reading, in short, tends to be the better. This rule was, it should be said, not unknown to the early eighteenth century. Certainly Jean Le Clerc had proposed a similar idea some 25 years earlier and Erasmus some 175 years before that.21 But unlike Erasmus or Le Clerc, Bengel made the rule into the very keystone of his textual theory, The task of the philological critic was, then, the condensation of the significant from the random. And no one went further than Bengel did in condensing Gerhard of Maastricht’s forty-three critical canons. Indeed, just four words, Bengel declared, “should be able to distinguish the true readings from all the false ones.”20
for the rule of the harder reading provided him with an explanation for textual
error and a strategy for choosing between the variant readings. After its appli-
cation, Bengel proclaimed hopefully, “barely a fifth of the variant readings ...
will remain. Deo gratia."u If scholars since Quintilian had seen that errors
might enter MSS through addition, subtraction, and transmutation, Bengel’s
principle of the harder reading showed how this happened and how the errors
might be emended.25 It did this by moving the discussion of error from a purely
mechanical question to the level of historical psychology. Rather than seeing
copyists as imperfect Xerox machines, Bengel imputed a rationale to their
practices. Once this rationale is reconstructed, the true text might be resur-
rected.
Bengel’s canon was intuitively simple, but had far-reaching consequences. Not least, it overturned the so-called sensus clarior, “the clearer meaning,” a rule long emphasized in seventeenth-century biblical criticism and advocated strongly by Mill’s critic Daniel Whitby.24 When Whitby proposed that
“the reading that, caeteris paribus, establishes the clearer meaning ... is to be
preferred to the others,” he was expounding the sensus clarior.25 By contrast, the
lectio difficilior subordinated ideals of rationality to the exigencies of scribal and
historical irrationality. Thus the rationalist proposal—that “the reading that is
absurd and that is convicted of absurdity either by what precedes or what fol-
lows it, should be rejected”—was discarded. Instead, “often also that reading is
really absurd, which does not appear so; that reading not really absurd, which
does appear so.”26
At the same time, the lectio difficilior also forced scholars to attend more care-
fully to the problems of the biblical manuscripts. In what language, for example,
was the New Testament actually written? Well, as Bengel realized, “the whole
and perpetual spirit of the language employed by the writers of the New Testa-
ment was distinctively Hebraizing.” God in his wisdom ensured that the
Gospels descended “to the level of their immediate auditors and earliest readers,”
Hellenized Jews who spoke neither a purified Hebrew, nor Attic Greek.27 An-
cient copyists and modem readers alike are thus heirs to the obscurities that this
original idiom produced. Reconstructing the New Testament depends, there-
fore, on reconstructing the logic of these obscurities. And idiom was only one
hurdle in this race to reconstruction. Rather, to understand and remedy the ac-
creted errors in the text of the New Testament, the scholar must turn a penetrat-
ing gaze not only to idiom, but also to the theological, liturgical, hermeneutical,
and grammatical dispositions of scribes who might well “substitute hermeneutic
and liturgical scholia (held either in their memory or in the margins) [or] for-
mulas or phrases from the books of their churches” for the “native words.”28 Only
by understanding the logic of all of these factors could scholars guarantee their
success. This was a big job, and with centers of scribal learning spread as far apart
as Constantinople, Rome, and Britain, it became truly monumental. But Bengel
had a tool to help him, indeed his most important tool and most important con-
tribution to biblical criticism, that of genealogy.
