Medicine in Some Thirteenth-Century Biblical Commentaries, with a Flashback on Augustine’s De genesi ad litteram

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the medical information contained in the commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, thus renewing our views on the relationship between medicine and theology. Commentaries on the Bible (both on the Old and the New Testament) have been less investigated, perhaps because this kind of information is more scattered therein and may be found almost anywhere in the bulk of these exegetical works. Indeed, apart from the description of the creation of man and the accounts of miraculous healings, which provide the principal places where medical explanations could be inserted, there is a wide variety of occurrences that can only be detected by an exhaustive reading of these commentaries. In the present modest contribution, my intention is not to deal with all kinds of topics related to medicine nor tracking down metaphors, but to focus on traces of theories which may have disturbed religious minds. The notions of corporeal spirits (pneumata) and of the virtues or powers they were supposed to convey, as well as the function of the brain and the psychic faculties located in this organ, raised the question of the link between body and soul. More subtle discrepancies between medical theories and theological requirements may be detected: for instance, the physiological explanation of nutrition, which involved the transformation of food into bodily substance, seemed to some theologians incompatible with the dogma of the resurrection of the bodies at the Last Judgment and with the concept of veritas personae humanae. Since biblical exegesis did not necessarily imply dealing with these topics, their appearance in this framework, as discreet as it was, reveals a real concern. Each period has from this point of view its proper concerns, according to the level of medical teaching and its diffusion outside the circle of physicians and also according to the contemporary theological concerns. The thirteenth century, with the development of university teaching in both theology and medicine, offers a favourable context for tracking in biblical exegesis the traces of contemporary debates. But before entering this period, a flashback to the very beginnings of Latin Christian exegesis is required.