On 15 November 1890, in a former Turkish slaughterhouse on the edge of Jerusalem’s Old City, a French Dominican friar named Marie-Joseph Lagrange opened a school with one ambition: to bring the full machinery of modern historical study, languages, archaeology, comparative literature, and the careful dating of manuscripts, to bear on the Bible. Lagrange believed, against suspicion on every side, that rigorous history would deepen Christian faith rather than dissolve it.

For a while, it worked. He founded the Revue Biblique in 1892 and built his École Biblique into one of the most serious centers of biblical scholarship anywhere. Then Rome grew nervous. In 1905, the Pontifical Biblical Commission formally cautioned him about two of his own methodological principles. In September 1912, without ever being told precisely what he had done wrong, Lagrange was ordered out of Jerusalem, and the Revue Biblique was silenced. He had spent years drafting a scholarly commentary on the Book of Genesis. He shelved it and never returned to it. He obeyed at once and without public complaint, returned to his post the following June, and carried the suspicion of Modernist sympathies for the rest of his life regardless.

He died in 1938. Five years later, on 30 September 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, formally sanctioning the very historical-critical method that had gotten Lagrange exiled. He never lived to read it.

That is the buried half of a story most people think they already know. The famous version puts science on one side of a courtroom and religion on the other. The version Lagrange actually lived was narrower and stranger: a faithful Dominican, disciplined by his own Church, on suspicion that rigorous historical scholarship and a living faith could not occupy the same man, the same sentence, the same page of Scripture.

Half a century later, a different monk picked up the same question from the opposite direction. Thomas Merton, a Trappist at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, never doubted that historical criticism belonged in the room. His argument was narrower, and in its way more demanding: the room is not the destination.

The Doorway, Not the Room

Merton did not reject historical scholarship. He encouraged the monks he taught to study biblical history, ancient languages, and literary genre, the same tools Lagrange had spent a lifetime defending. But he insisted that historical criticism is a doorway, not a room to live in. A reader who stops at critical analysis risks treating the Bible as an ancient artifact rather than a living revelation.

The historical-critical method sets out to reconstruct a text’s origins: who wrote it, in what social and political context, through how many editorial hands, and what the human author most likely intended. It asks what a passage meant to its original audience. Merton’s Lectio Divina asks a different question: what is this text saying to me, now, in the actual shape of my life. Historical criticism aims at reconstruction. Merton’s monastic reading aims at what he called transformatio, an interior remaking rather than an accumulation of facts.

As Merton put it in Opening the Bible (Liturgical Press, 1970): “the ‘word of God’ is recognized in actual experience because it does something to anyone who actually ‘hears’ it: it transforms his entire existence.” That line does in a sentence what a semester of graduate seminar does in fifteen weeks, without contradicting it. Just saying 😎

The Critic and the Supplicant

The two methods also ask something different of the reader’s posture. Historical criticism requires methodological neutrality: the scholar stands apart from the text, questioning it the way a lawyer questions a witness. Merton’s monastic reading asks for humility and openness instead. The reader does not sit above the text in judgment. The text is allowed to judge the reader.

That posture has a shape, formalized in the twelfth century by Guigo II, a Carthusian prior, in a short letter called The Ladder of Monks. Four movements, each handing off to the next:

1. Lectio — reading the text attentively.
2. Meditatio — turning the words over, letting them resonate.
3. Oratio — answering God in prayer, out of what the text raised.
4. Contemplatio — resting silently in God’s presence, beyond words.

Critical reading has no fifth rung. It does its work in the first movement and stops there.

An Artifact, or a Voice

The two methods finally disagree about what kind of object the Bible is. Historical criticism treats the text primarily as a human artifact, a product of its culture, carrying the same editorial fingerprints and historical limits as any other ancient document. Monastic reading does not deny the human authorship. It also holds that the Holy Spirit speaks through the text in the present moment. Hence, the Bible becomes less an ancient document to be decoded than an ongoing conversation addressed to the reader’s own condition.

Laid side by side, the two methods answer the same five questions in opposite directions:

Primary tool	Reason, philology, historical comparison, redaction analysis	Prayerful attention, memory, silence, interior openness
Question asked	What did this text mean to its original audience?	What is God saying to me through this text right now?
Role of the mind	Active, analytical, categorizing	Receptive, meditative, surrendering
View of mystery	A problem to be resolved by evidence	A reality to be entered through faith
Outcome sought	Academic insight or historical hypothesis	Conversion (metanoia), peace, union with God

Neither column is wrong. Lagrange would not have argued with the left side of that table; it was his life’s work. Merton would not have argued with it either. His complaint was reserved for the reader who never crosses into the right side at all.

The Scaffolding and the Gospel

Merton often returned to one specific danger: academic criticism, practiced without a corresponding life of prayer, creates a spiritual impasse. He observed that scholars can become fascinated with what he called the scaffolding of Scripture, its dates, translations, and manuscript variants, while missing the Gospel’s direct call entirely.

Historical criticism can tell you how the cup was made. Lectio Divina is what allows you to drink the water.

Lagrange never lived to see his own vindication. Still, he would have recognized Merton’s argument for what it actually was: not a demotion of the historical method he had given his career and his exile to defend, but an insistence that the method is not the whole of the work. He spent nine months in France, forbidden to publish, precisely because the Church of his day could not yet tell a scholar’s rigor from a skeptic’s doubt. Merton, writing from a hermitage decades later, was making the same distinction Rome eventually made for itself in 1943:

that the scaffolding and the building it supports are not enemies. Something to think about this Sunday: at some point, someone still has to go inside.

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Nota Bene

I write for people of any faith or none, including the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See-Judge-Act framework is borrowed gratefully from Joseph Cardijn and remains central to Catholic Social Teaching. I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years of experience in Silicon Valley’s tech scene and in education, where I now focus on the Anthropology of Technology to understand better what it means to be human and the difference that makes in a new era of emerging technology. Technology always reflects the culture it comes from, and that belief shapes my work as both an AI ethicist and a storyteller.

So when I write essays, keynotes, and articles, I run the result through Grammarly. It fixes spelling and punctuation. That is the whole of it. See more in the “How I Write and What I Use” section on my website. Just saying…😎

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Sources

• Marie-Joseph Lagrange, Wikipedia
• École Biblique, Wikipedia
• Our Founder, Father Marie-Joseph Lagrange, OP, École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem
• Lagrange, Marie-Joseph, Encyclopedia.com
• Divino Afflante Spiritu (30 September 1943), Vatican. va
• Guigo II, Wikipedia
• Thomas Merton, Opening the Bible (Liturgical Press, 1970), quoted via Thomas Merton: Opening the Bible.