Catena

A catena (Latin 'chain') is a form of commentary in which passages of a source text — most often a book of the Bible — are followed by a linked sequence of quotations from earlier commentators, each set out one after another, so that the reader can see how the tradition has treated the passage. The great medieval example is the Catena Aurea, the 'Golden Chain' compiled by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, which linked patristic commentary on the four gospels verse by verse.

The catena is a distinctive form of reference work because it does not synthesise. It does not argue for one reading over another; it presents the chain of readings and lets the reader watch the tradition think. Its virtue is exactly this humility, and its use is that the reader who wants to understand a passage's history of interpretation can find, in a single place, the voices that shaped that history.

The form is older than Aquinas. Byzantine scholars had produced catenae on scripture from at least the sixth century, and the technique migrated into the Latin west in the twelfth. Outside Christian scholarship, the same idea appears in the great rabbinic commentaries — the Talmud is, among many other things, a catena on the Mishnah — and in the classical Chinese tradition of layered commentary on the Confucian classics.

For a modern editorial team, the catena is a useful mental model. When a topic has been argued about for a long time, presenting the chain of what has been said — briefly, in order, without editorialising — is often more useful to the reader than one more synthesis. The reader who sees the chain can find their own place in it.