A happy coincidence that Diogenes wrote this post today?

We’re all familiar with the meaning . . . [of] the word “gospel” …: it means an incontrovertible truth, one that is axiomatically directive of human action; as the Oxford English Dictionary expresses it, “a statement to be implicitly received.” The OED cites examples of that usage going back to the 13th century.

Behind the usage was a common social understanding according to which the Gospels were regarded as the truest thing any human being had access to. This was because the Gospels, as Dei Verbum 11 puts it, “have God as their author,” or again, in Hopkins’s rendering of St. Thomas, “Truth himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true.”

So when was the last time you heard a homily that urged you to accept the Gospel accounts as true — true because it is God who is speaking therein? You’re probably more familiar with the backfield shift the homilist routinely performs when he climbs into the pulpit: “Luke put these words in Jesus’ mouth because the Gentile community he was writing for wouldn’t have understood or accepted Matthew‘s version …” You get the gist.

Now I wonder if this near-universal hermeneutical feint will eventually give rise to a common social understanding with secondary effects on our language. Perhaps fifty years from now a judge will pen the phrase, “It is practically gospel in the lower courts …” and the word gospel will be understood to mean “a falsehood that makes us feel good about ourselves.”

I wonder if it’s a coincidence, I say, because the reading in the old Roman breviary is from Augustine’s De consensu evangelistarum on Matthew 8:5-13, the curing of the centurion’s child. Who are the two evangelists considered therein? Matthew (of course) and Luke.

As I was reading this passage in the Breviary this morning, a thought similar to Diogenes’ had come into my head. We’re very far today from taking Augustine’s approach to the Gospels. We may claim to believe, in line with the eminent CCCCCC (that is, the, umm, Catechism of the Catholic Church), that the Gospels are historically inerrant, but the tradition, especially as we see it in a work like Augustine’s, affirms what sounds even stronger, that they can be reconciled in all particulars. Perhaps that amounts to the same thing as historical inerrancy, but it’s nice from time to time to remember Augustine’s project, one that hasn’t been “cool” for a long time now.

So I wonder if Diogenes reads the old breviary? I wouldn’t be surprised.