reading of Augustine’sConfessions, even (and perhaps especially) an infernal
reading of the Bible.^22
Recently our perspective is benefiting from a self-conscious and explicit
resuscitation of the hermeneutic practice of the fathers, for example as dis-
covered inressourcementtheologians such as Jean Daniélou, Hans Urs von
Balthasar, and Henri de Lubac. In theressourcementwork especially wefind
the early church hermeneutic rediscovered, articulated between the discourses
of philosophy and theology and, via the vastcollegiumof biblical reading in its
historic fullness, offering a‘new ontological discourse’in which human nature
is reinscribed in divine nature in a truly biblical way.^23
In retrospect, it now seems clear on any number of accounts that attempts
to pursue the liberal arts as though they were in themselves intrinsic goods
have not been sustainably fruitful. What we should preserve in curriculum and
cultural memory is the knowledge that diligent conservation of truth from all
sources and a‘turning of the many towards the One’in regard to the arts has
allowed the intellectual riches of the biblicalstudiumto develop and then
become a constantlyflowing fountain, irrigating all of the other arts, even to
our own time.
(^22) See Ann Hartle,The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions: A Reply to St Augustine(Notre
Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983).
(^23) John Milbank,The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the
Supernatural(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 5.
172 David Lyle Jeffrey