Scholion
by St. Bonaventure
Source text: Public Domain Mark 1.0. English translation/apparatus/encoding: CC BY-NC 4.0, Wroot Press.
https://bonaventure.wrootpress.com/browse/15/d/13/q/bon-eccl-scholion
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### SCHOLION

I. In composing this Commentary St. Bonaventure, besides the *interlinear* and *ordinary* Gloss (which is for the most part derived from the Commentary of St. Jerome on Ecclesiastes), made use both of the aforesaid exposition of *Jerome* itself and of another, that of *Hugh* of St Victor, which, at least in the editions, does not extend further than chapter 4, 7 of Ecclesiastes. From Hugh he himself borrowed that principal division of the threefold vanity, namely of *mutability*, of *iniquity*, of *penalty*. That he also knew the *Mystical Exposition* on Ecclesiastes of *Salonius*, bishop of Vienne (see Migne, Patrol. Latina vol. LIII, col. 993 ff.), who flourished about 453, a certain passage cited by us seems to suggest, unless perhaps he received that sentence as reported by other authors. Nor have we found any certain trace that he made use of the Commentaries of Alcuin and of Rupert, abbot of Deutz, who in expounding Ecclesiastes closely follow Jerome. — For the rest, this exposition is a work wholly proper to the Seraphic Doctor and bears his native character. He himself, bringing in at times other versions, especially those of Jerome and of the Septuagint, expounds the text of the Vulgate according to the *literal* sense, in such a way that by very many parallel places of Scripture, as if Scripture itself were explaining Scripture, he illustrates the sense. When a part of the text, and no small one, has been expounded according to the literal sense, there is for the most part subjoined a brief exposition of the *mystical* or spiritual sense of the same part. Moreover, there are added in their places more than eighty *quaestiones* composed in the scholastic manner, in which special difficulties occurring concerning the doctrine or the sense of the more obscure places are briefly and clearly resolved.

II. In drawing out, dividing and ordering weighty sentences from the words of holy Scripture, the holy Commentator shows a most ingenious subtlety. Very many recent expositors of this book indeed deny that a determinate order and a logical progression are to be found in it. Whatever is to be thought of this, there can serve for understanding the true view of our author concerning the order disposed by him that which, in the Collations on the Hexaemeron, collation 14, n. 5, he puts forward with respect to *all* the books of Scripture concerning the order — the organic order, so to speak — of holy Scripture, or concerning the difference that there is between its order and the order of human books, namely that in Scripture sentence is not set after sentence in that way: « It is not so, he says, because it is most ordered, and its order is like the order of nature in the sprouting of the earth » etc. — It is indeed difficult to keep in mind the very great number of the divisions and subdivisions. Lest, then, the reader be confused, we have already provided for this, as far as we could, in ordering the text, both by the titles which we have set above the larger parts and by marginal notes and by the type which they call cursive. But we think it neither superfluous nor unwelcome to the reader that we set the multitude of the divisions and of the principal sentences that are in the *literal* exposition, sketched in these four schemata, within a single view. Similar schemata are found here and there in the codices of the Commentaries on holy Scripture, written in the margin.