The Twenty-Second Method: the Thematic Exposition

On the Thematic Exposition — The Twenty-Second Method

The Thematic Method of explaining ¹ is that which applies particular parts of divine scripture, together with their expositions, to the treatment of some particular subject — showing that the whole body of the subject undertaken, and its several members and parts, are to be found, as though painted in a picture, in the proposed places of holy scripture. The artifice of this interpretation, St. Ambrose intimates, flowed from Xenophon, the hearer of Socrates, who — in that book which he entitled Κύρου παιδίαν [Kyrou paidian], that is, the Education of Cyrus — setting before himself the person of Cyrus king of the Persians, and the narration of the things done by him, described the discipline of a just and wise king from the inmost bosom of Philosophy. Him afterward the distinguished expositors of the divine volumes emulated. Among whom Philo, among the Jews, being about to treat of the subjects of the twofold life (namely the contemplative and the political), wrote two separate books: in the former, entitled On the Life of the Wise Man Perfected by Doctrine, or On Abraham, he expounds summarily the life of Abraham gathered from the 12th to the 23rd chapter of Genesis, showing that Moses wished to paint in Abraham the image of a man perfected through contemplation; ² but in the latter, entitled On the Civil Man, or On Joseph, expounding selectively the deeds of Joseph from the 37th chapter of Genesis to the 48th, he teaches that Joseph is the exemplar of the civil man, ³ and one fit for the helm of the commonwealth. This same thing, among the Greeks, Gregory of Nyssa performed, in the book to which he gave the title On the Perfect Life of Man, or On the Life of Moses, in which, briefly explaining what Moses wrote of himself in the Pentateuch, he expressed in the image of Moses whatever conduces to a perfect kind of life. ⁴ This very thing also, among the Latins, Ambrose did, in various books which, under diverse titles and subjects, he composed for the explanation of the Old Testament — but especially in the two volumes entitled On Abraham the Patriarch, or On the Man Perfect through Action, in which, explaining the deeds of Abraham from the 12th to the 18th chapter of Genesis, he delineated the idea of the moral and truly active man. In these authors, therefore, you may read an example of the present method, which cannot here be inserted on account of its prolixity.