St. Jerome / Fr. H. D. Lacordaire, O.P.
Jerome's Prefaces / On the Worship of Jesus Christ in the Scriptures
Table of Contents
THE PREFACES OF ST. JEROME.
I. THE HELMETED PROLOGUE.
That there are twenty-two letters among the Hebrews is attested also by the language of the Syrians and Chaldeans, which is largely cognate with Hebrew; for they too have twenty-two elements with the same sound but different characters. The Samaritans also write the Pentateuch of Moses with the same number of letters, differing only in shapes and strokes. And it is certain that Ezra the scribe and doctor of the Law, after the capture of Jerusalem and the restoration of the temple under Zerubbabel, discovered other letters which we now use, since up to that time the characters of the Samaritans and Hebrews had been the same. In the book of Numbers also, this same reckoning is mystically shown under the census of the Levites and Priests. And the tetragrammaton name of the Lord, in certain Greek manuscripts, is found expressed in the ancient letters even to this day. Moreover the Psalms -- the thirty-sixth, the hundred and tenth, the hundred and eleventh, the hundred and eighteenth, and the hundred and forty-fourth -- although they are written in different meters, are nevertheless woven with an alphabet of the same number. And the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and his Prayer, and also the Proverbs of Solomon at the end, from the place where he says, "Who shall find a valiant woman?" are reckoned by the same alphabets or divisions. Furthermore, five letters among the Hebrews are doubled: Caph, Mem, Nun, Pe, Sade; for the beginnings and middles of words are written differently through these letters than their endings. Whence also five books are considered by most to be double: Samuel, Melachim, Dibre hajamim, Ezra, Jeremiah with Cinoth, that is, with its Lamentations. Just as, therefore, there are twenty-two elements by which we write in Hebrew everything that we speak, and human speech is comprehended by their initial forms, so twenty-two books are reckoned, by which, as by letters and beginnings, the still tender and nursing infancy of the righteous man is instructed in the teaching of God.
The first book among them is called Bereshith, which we call Genesis.
The second, Veelle Semoth, which is called Exodus.
The third, Vaiicra, that is, Leviticus.
The fourth, Vajedabber, which we call Numbers.
The fifth, Elle Haddebarim, which is designated Deuteronomy.
These are the five books of Moses, which they properly call Torah, that is, the Law.
The second order they make of the Prophets, and they begin with Joshua the son of Nave, who among them is called Josue ben Nun.
Next they attach Sophetim, that is, the book of Judges. And into the same they bind Ruth, because her history is narrated in the days of the Judges.
Third follows Samuel, which we call the first and second of Kings.
Fourth, Melachim, that is, of Kings, which is contained in the third and fourth volume of Kings.
And it is much better to say Melachim, that is, of Kings, than Mamlachot, that is, of Kingdoms. For it does not describe the kingdoms of many nations, but of one Israelite people, which is comprised of twelve tribes.
Fifth is Isaiah.
Sixth, Jeremiah.
Seventh, Ezekiel.
Eighth, the book of the Twelve Prophets, which among them is called There Asar.
The third order possesses the Hagiographa.
And the first book begins with Job.
The second with David, which they comprise in five divisions and one volume of Psalms.
The third is Solomon, having three books: Proverbs, which they call Misle, that is, Parables.
The fourth, Ecclesiastes, that is, Coheleth.
The fifth, the Song of Songs, which they designate by the title Sir Hassirim.
The sixth is Daniel.
The seventh, Dibre Hajamim, that is, Words of Days, which we can more expressively call the Chronicle of the entire divine history; this book is inscribed among us as the first and second of Paralipomenon.
The eighth, Ezra, which likewise among the Greeks and Latins is divided into two books.
The ninth, Esther.
And so the books of the old law come equally to twenty-two: that is, five of Moses, eight of the Prophets, and nine of the Hagiographa. Although some write Ruth and Cinoth among the Hagiographa and think these books should be counted in their own number, and that thereby there are twenty-four books of the ancient law -- which, under the number of twenty-four elders, the Apocalypse of John introduces worshipping the Lamb and offering their crowns with faces cast down, standing before the four living creatures, having eyes before and behind, that is, looking into the past and into the future, and crying with unwearied voice: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come.
This prologue, as a helmeted beginning of the Scriptures, can apply to all the books which we have translated from Hebrew into Latin, so that we may know that whatever is outside of this is to be placed among the apocrypha. Therefore the Wisdom which is commonly ascribed to Solomon, and the book of Jesus son of Sirach, and Judith, and Tobit, and the Shepherd, are not in the canon. The first book of the Maccabees I found to be Hebrew. The second is Greek, which can be proved also from its very style. Since these things are so, I beseech you, reader, do not consider my labor a reproach of the ancients. In the temple of God each one offers what he can: some offer gold, silver, and precious stones; others offer fine linen and purple and scarlet and hyacinth; it goes well with us if we offer skins and goats' hair. And yet the Apostle judges our more contemptible parts to be more necessary. Whence also all that beauty of the tabernacle, and the distinction of the present and future Church through its individual elements, is covered with skins and haircloth, and those things which are cheaper ward off the heat of the sun and the injury of rains. Read therefore first my Samuel and my Melachim -- mine, I say, mine. For whatever we have both learned by more frequent translating and hold by more careful emending is ours. And when you have understood what you did not know before, either esteem me a translator, if you are grateful, or a paraphrast, if ungrateful -- although I am by no means conscious of having changed anything from the Hebrew truth. Certainly, if you are incredulous, read the Greek codices and the Latin ones, and compare them with these little works which we have recently emended; and wherever you see them disagree with each other, ask any Hebrew to whom you should rather give credence; and if he confirms ours, I think you will not consider him a mere guesser, as though he divined similarly with me in the same passage. But I also ask you, handmaids of Christ (who anoint the head of the Lord reclining at table with the most precious myrrh of faith, who by no means seek the Savior in the tomb, for whom Christ has already ascended to the Father), that against the barking dogs who rage against me with rabid mouth and go about the city, and think themselves learned in this, if they detract from others -- set against them the shields of your prayers. I, knowing my humility, will always remember that saying: I said, I will guard my ways, that I may not sin with my tongue. I set a guard over my mouth, when the sinner stood against me. I was silent and was humbled, and kept silence even from good things.
II. JEROME TO PAULINUS.
Brother Ambrosius, bringing me your little gifts, delivered at the same time most delightful letters, which from the beginning of our friendship exhibited the fidelity of a now proven faith and of an old friendship. For that is a true bond, joined by the glue of Christ, which neither the advantage of family property, nor the mere presence of bodies, nor deceitful and fawning flattery, but the fear of God and the study of the divine Scriptures bring together. We read in ancient histories that certain men traversed provinces, visited new peoples, and crossed seas, in order to see in person those whom they had come to know from books. Thus Pythagoras visited the prophets of Memphis; thus Plato most laboriously traveled through Egypt, and to Archytas of Tarentum, and that coast of Italy which was once called Magna Graecia -- so that he who was a master at Athens, and powerful, and whose teaching resounded in the gymnasia of the Academy, might become a stranger and a student, preferring to learn modestly from others than to thrust forward his own ideas shamelessly. Finally, while pursuing learning as though it were fleeing across the whole world, he was captured by pirates and sold, and even obeyed a most cruel tyrant, a captive, bound and a slave; yet because he was a philosopher, he was greater than the one who bought him. We read that certain nobles came from the farthest borders of Spain and Gaul to Titus Livius, flowing with the milky fountain of eloquence; and those whom Rome had not drawn to contemplate itself, the fame of one man brought there. That age had an unheard-of and memorable marvel in all centuries: that men entering so great a city sought something else outside the city. Apollonius, whether he was a magician, as the common people say, or a philosopher, as the Pythagoreans hold, entered Persia, crossed the Caucasus, passed through the Albanians, Scythians, and Massagetae, penetrated the most opulent kingdoms of India; and at last, having crossed the very wide river Phison, he reached the Brahmans, so that he might hear Hiarchas sitting on a golden throne and drinking from the fountain of Tantalus, teaching among a few disciples about nature, about the motions of the stars, and the course of days. From there, through the Elamites, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Medes, Assyrians, Parthians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Arabs, and Palestinians, having returned to Alexandria, he went on to Ethiopia, to see the gymnosophists and the most famous Table of the Sun in the sand. That man found everywhere something to learn, and always advancing, always became better than himself. Philostratus wrote about this most fully in eight volumes. Why should I speak of worldly men, when the apostle Paul, a vessel of election and teacher of the nations, who spoke from the consciousness of so great a guest within him -- 'Do you seek proof of him who speaks in me, Christ?' -- after visiting Damascus and Arabia, went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and remained with him fifteen days? For by this mystery of the week and the octave, the future preacher to the nations had to be instructed. And again after fourteen years, having taken Barnabas and Titus, he set forth the Gospel to the Apostles, lest perhaps he was running or had run in vain. For the living voice has a certain hidden power, and poured from the mouth of the author into the ears of the student, it sounds more forcefully. Whence also Aeschines, when he was in exile at Rhodes and that oration of Demosthenes was read which he had delivered against him, while all marveled and praised it, sighed and said: 'What if you had heard the beast itself sounding forth its own words?' I do not say these things because there is anything of the sort in me that you could either wish to hear from me or desire to learn, but because your ardor and zeal for learning ought to be approved on its own, even without us. A teachable mind is praiseworthy even without a teacher. We consider not what you find but what you seek. Soft wax, easy to shape, even if the hands of the craftsman and sculptor are idle, is nevertheless by its virtue everything that it can be. Paul the apostle boasts that he learned the law of Moses and the Prophets at the feet of Gamaliel, so that armed with spiritual weapons he might afterward say with confidence: 'The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but powerful before God for the destruction of strongholds, destroying counsels and every height that raises itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and ready to subdue every disobedience.' He writes to Timothy, instructed from infancy in the sacred letters, and exhorts him to the study of reading, lest he neglect the grace which was given him by the laying on of hands of the presbytery. He commands Titus that among the other virtues of a bishop, which he depicted in a brief discourse, he should also choose in him knowledge of the Scriptures: 'Holding fast, he says, the faithful word which is according to the teaching, that he may be able to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.' For indeed holy rusticity benefits only itself, and as much as it builds up the Church of Christ by the merit of its life, so much does it harm if it does not resist those who would destroy. The prophet Malachi, or rather the Lord through Haggai, says: 'Ask the priests the law.' So great is the office of the priest to respond when asked about the law. And in Deuteronomy we read: 'Ask your father and he will tell you; your elders, and they will say to you.' In the hundred and eighteenth psalm also: 'Your statutes were my song in the place of my pilgrimage.' And in the description of the righteous man, when David compared him to the tree of life which is in paradise, among the other virtues he brought in this: 'His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he will meditate day and night.' Daniel at the end of the most sacred vision says that the righteous shall shine like stars, and the understanding, that is, the learned, like the firmament. You see how much just rusticity and learned justice differ from each other? Some are compared to stars, others to the heavens. Although according to the Hebrew truth both can be understood of the learned. For thus we read among them: 'But those who are learned shall shine like the brightness of the firmament; and those who instruct many unto justice, like stars for perpetual eternities.' Why is the apostle Paul called a vessel of election? Surely because he was an armory of the law and the holy Scriptures. The Pharisees are astonished at the teaching of the Lord; and they marvel at Peter and John, how they know the law when they have not learned letters. For whatever practice and daily meditation in the law usually bestows on others, the Holy Spirit suggested this to them, and they were, according to what is written, taught by God. The Savior had completed twelve years, and questioning the elders in the temple about matters of the law, he teaches more by asking wisely. Unless perhaps we call Peter a rustic, John a rustic -- either of whom could say: 'Even if unskilled in speech, yet not in knowledge.' John a rustic, a fisherman, unlearned? And whence, I ask, that utterance: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'? For the Word (Logos) in Greek means many things: it is both word, and reason, and reckoning, and the cause of each thing through which all individual things that exist subsist -- all of which we rightly understand in Christ. This the learned Plato did not know; this the eloquent Demosthenes was ignorant of. 'I will destroy, he says, the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I will reject.' True wisdom will destroy false wisdom; and although the foolishness of the preaching of the cross exists, nevertheless Paul speaks wisdom among the perfect -- wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the princes of this age, which is being destroyed; but he speaks the wisdom of God hidden in mystery, which God predestined before the ages. The wisdom of God is Christ; for Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. This wisdom is hidden in mystery, about which the title of the ninth psalm is inscribed, 'For the hidden things of the Son,' in which all the treasures of the wisdom and knowledge of God are hidden. And he who was hidden in mystery was predestined before the ages; but predestined and prefigured in the Law and the Prophets. Whence the Prophets are also called seers, because they saw him whom the rest did not see. Abraham saw his day and rejoiced. The heavens were opened to Ezekiel which had been closed to the sinful people. 'Unveil, says David, my eyes, and I shall consider the wonders of your law.' For the law is spiritual, and there is need of revelation for it to be understood, and with unveiled face we contemplate the glory of God. A book sealed with seven seals is shown in the Apocalypse; which if you give to a man who knows letters to read, he will answer you: I cannot, for it is sealed. How many today think they know letters, hold the sealed book, and cannot open it, unless he opens it who has the key of David, who opens and no one shuts, who shuts and no one opens? In the Acts of the Apostles, the holy Eunuch -- or rather man (for thus Scripture names him) -- when he was reading Isaiah the prophet, asked by Philip: 'Do you think you understand what you are reading?' answered: 'How can I, unless someone teaches me?' I (to speak of myself for a moment) am neither holier than this eunuch nor more studious -- who came from Ethiopia, that is, from the farthest ends of the world, to the temple, left the royal court, and was so great a lover of the law and divine knowledge that he read the sacred letters even in his chariot. And yet, though he held the book, and conceived the words of the Lord in his thought, turned them on his tongue, and sounded them on his lips, he did not know him whom unknowingly he worshipped in the book. Philip came and showed him Jesus, who lay hidden, shut up in the letter. O wondrous power of the teacher! In the same hour the eunuch believes, is baptized, becomes faithful and holy; and the master found more from the pupil, more in the desert spring of the Church than in the gilded temple of the synagogue. These things have been touched upon briefly by me (for the narrow scope of a letter did not allow me to wander further), so that you might understand that you cannot enter the sacred Scriptures without a guide who shows the way. I say nothing of grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, geometers, dialecticians, musicians, astronomers, astrologers, and physicians, whose knowledge is most useful to mortals and is divided into three parts: theory, method, and practice. Let me come to the lesser arts, which are administered not so much by the tongue as by the hand. Farmers, masons, metalworkers, woodcutters, as well as wool-workers and fullers and the rest who fashion various furnishings and humble works -- without a teacher they cannot be what they wish to be. What belongs to physicians, physicians promise; craftsmen handle the work of craftsmen. The art of the Scriptures alone is one that everyone everywhere claims for themselves. We write poems, learned and unlearned alike, without distinction. This the chattering old woman, this the doddering old man, this the wordy sophist, this all presume upon, tear apart, and teach before they learn. Others, with raised eyebrow, weighing out grand words, philosophize about the sacred letters among silly women. Others learn (what a disgrace!) from women what they may teach men; and as if this were not enough, with a certain glibness of words -- nay, audacity -- they expound to others what they themselves do not understand. I say nothing of those like myself, who if perhaps they have come to the holy Scriptures after secular literature, and have charmed the ears of the people with polished speech, think that whatever they have said is the law of God; nor do they deign to know what the Prophets, what the Apostles meant, but they fit incongruous testimonies to their own meaning -- as though it were a great thing, and not the most vicious kind of teaching, to corrupt sentences and drag a resistant Scripture to one's own will. As though we had not read Homerocentones and Virgiliocento, and as though we could not thus also call Virgil a Christian without Christ, because he wrote:
'Now the Virgin returns, the Saturnian kingdoms return;
Now a new offspring is sent down from high heaven.'
And the Father speaking to the Son:
'My son, my strength, my great power alone.'
And after the words of the Savior on the cross:
'Such things he kept recalling, and remained fixed.'
These are childish things, similar to the games of charlatans -- to teach what you do not know; or rather, to speak with indignation, not even to know that you do not know.
Presumably Genesis is perfectly clear, in which the creation of the world, the origin of the human race, the division of the earth, the confusion of languages and nations, is written up to the departure of the Hebrews.
Exodus lies open with its ten plagues, its Decalogue, its mystical and divine precepts.
The book of Leviticus is ready at hand, in which the individual sacrifices, nay almost every single syllable, and the vestments of Aaron, and the entire Levitical order breathe forth heavenly mysteries.
Do not Numbers contain the mysteries of all arithmetic, and of Balaam's prophecy, and of the forty-two encampments through the wilderness?
Deuteronomy also, the second law and prefiguration of the Gospel law -- does it not contain the things that are prior in such a way that yet all things are new from the old? Thus far Moses, thus far the Pentateuch, with whose five words the Apostle boasts he would rather speak in the Church.
Job, the model of patience -- what mysteries does it not embrace in its discourse? It begins in prose, flows into verse, and ends in pedestrian speech; and it determines all the laws of dialectic through proposition, assumption, confirmation, and conclusion. Every word in it is full of meaning. And (to say nothing of the rest) it so prophesies the resurrection of bodies that no one has written of it either more clearly or more cautiously. 'I know, he says, that my redeemer lives, and on the last day I shall rise from the earth; and again I shall be clothed with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see God, whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. This hope of mine is laid up in my bosom.'
I come to Joshua son of Nave, who bears the type of the Lord not only in his deeds but even in his name; he crosses the Jordan, overthrows the kingdoms of the enemies, divides the land for the victorious people, and through individual cities, villages, mountains, rivers, torrents, and boundaries, describes the spiritual kingdoms of the Church and the heavenly Jerusalem.
In the book of Judges, as many princes of the people, so many types there are.
Ruth the Moabite fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah, who says: 'Send forth the lamb, O Lord, the ruler of the earth, from the rock of the desert to the mountain of the daughter of Zion.'
Samuel, in the death of Eli and the slaying of Saul, shows the old law abolished. Furthermore, in Zadok and David, it attests the mysteries of a new priesthood and a new kingdom.
Melachim, that is, the third and fourth book of Kings, from Solomon to Jeconiah, and from Jeroboam son of Nebat to Hosea, who was led away to the Assyrians, describes the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel. If you look at the history, the words are simple; if you examine the hidden meaning in the text, the smallness of the Church and the wars of heretics against the Church are narrated.
The twelve prophets, compressed into the narrow compass of a single volume, prefigure much more than what sounds in the letter.
Hosea frequently names Ephraim, Samaria, Joseph, Jezreel, and a harlot wife, and children of fornication, and an adulteress shut up in her husband's chamber, sitting as a widow for a long time, and under mourning garments, awaiting the return of her husband to her.
Joel, son of Pethuel, describes the land of the twelve tribes consumed by the caterpillar, the locust, the cankerworm, and the devastating blight; and after the overthrow of the former people, that the Holy Spirit would be poured out upon the servants and handmaids of God, that is, upon the hundred and twenty names of believers, and would be poured out in the upper room of Zion. These hundred and twenty, rising gradually by increments from one to fifteen, produce the number of fifteen steps, which are mystically contained in the Psalter.
Amos, a shepherd and a rustic, plucking mulberries from brambles, cannot be explained in a few words. For who can worthily express the three or four crimes of Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, the sons of Ammon and Moab, and in the seventh and eighth degree, of Judah and Israel? He speaks to the fat cows that are on the mountain of Samaria, and testifies that the greater and lesser house will fall. He himself sees the maker of the locust, and the Lord standing upon a wall plastered or adamantine, and a hook of fruit drawing punishments upon sinners, and a famine in the land -- not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of God.
Obadiah, whose name means servant of God, thunders against Edom, the bloody and earthly man; and strikes with a spiritual spear the one who was always the rival of his brother Jacob.
Jonah, that most beautiful dove, prefiguring the passion of the Lord by his own shipwreck, calls the world to repentance, and under the name of Nineveh announces salvation to the nations.
Micah of Moresheth, co-heir of Christ, announces the devastation of the daughter of the robber, and lays siege against her, because she struck the cheek of the judge of Israel.
Nahum, the consoler of the world, rebukes the city of blood, and after its overthrow says: 'Behold upon the mountains the feet of him who brings good tidings and announces peace.'
Habakkuk, the strong and unyielding wrestler, stands upon his watch and sets his foot upon the fortress, so that he may contemplate Christ on the cross and say: 'His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise. His brightness shall be as the light; horns are in his hands: there his strength is hidden.'
Zephaniah, the watchman and knower of God's secrets, hears the cry from the Fish Gate, and the wailing from the Second Quarter, and the destruction from the hills. He also proclaims a howling for the inhabitants of the Mortar, because all the people of Canaan have fallen silent, and all who were wrapped in silver have perished.
Haggai, festive and joyful, who sowed in tears that he might reap in joy, builds the destroyed temple, and introduces God the Father speaking: 'Yet a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land, and I will move all nations, and the Desired of all nations shall come.'
Zechariah, mindful of his Lord, manifold in prophecy, sees Jesus clothed in filthy garments, and the stone of seven eyes, and the golden lampstand with as many lamps as eyes, and also two olive trees at the left and right of the lamp; so that after the black horses, red, white, and dappled, and the chariots scattered from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem, he may prophesy and proclaim a poor king, sitting upon a colt the foal of a donkey under the yoke.
Malachi, openly, and at the end of all the Prophets, concerning the rejection of Israel and the calling of the nations: 'I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord of hosts, and I will not accept an offering from your hand. For from the rising of the sun to its setting, my name is great among the nations; and in every place incense is offered and a pure offering is presented to my name.'
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel -- who can either understand or expound them? The first seems to me to weave not prophecy but a Gospel.
The second intertwines an almond rod, and a boiling pot from the face of the north, and a leopard stripped of its colors, and a fourfold alphabet in different meters.
The third has his beginning and end wrapped in such great obscurities that among the Hebrews these parts, along with the beginning of Genesis, are not read before the age of thirty.
The fourth indeed, the last among the four prophets, conscious of the times and of the stone of the whole world cut from the mountain without hands and overturning all kingdoms, proclaims in clear speech.
David, our Simonides, our Pindar and Alcaeus, our Horace too, Catullus and Serenus, sounds forth Christ on the lyre, and on the ten-stringed psaltery raises up the risen one from the underworld.
Solomon, the peaceful and beloved of the Lord, corrects morals, teaches nature, joins the Church and Christ, and sings the sweet wedding song of the holy nuptials.
Esther, in the type of the Church, frees the people from danger; and with Haman slain -- whose name means iniquity -- she sends the portions of the feast and the celebrated day to posterity.
The book of Paralipomenon, that is, the epitome of the Old Testament, is so great and of such a kind that whoever wishes to claim for himself the knowledge of the Scriptures without it would make a laughingstock of himself. For through its individual names and joints of words, both the histories passed over in the books of Kings are touched upon, and innumerable questions of the Gospel are explained.
Ezra and Nehemiah -- that is, helper and consoler from the Lord -- are compressed into one volume; they restore the temple, build up the walls of the city; and all that multitude of people returning to the fatherland, and the enumeration of priests, Levites, Israelites, and proselytes, and the works of walls and towers divided among individual families -- they display one thing on the surface and retain another in the marrow. You see that I, carried away by love of the Scriptures, have exceeded the proper length of a letter, and yet have not accomplished what I wished. We have heard only what we ought to know, what we ought to desire, so that we too may say: 'My soul has longed to desire your statutes at all times.' For the rest, that Socratic saying is fulfilled in us: 'I know only this, that I know nothing.'
Let me touch briefly on the New Testament as well.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- the four-horse chariot of the Lord and the true Cherubim, which is interpreted as 'multitude of knowledge' -- are covered with eyes throughout the whole body; sparks flash forth, lightnings dart about; they have straight feet tending upward, winged backs flying everywhere; they hold one another and are interwoven with each other, and like a wheel within a wheel they revolve, and go wherever the breath of the Holy Spirit carries them.
Paul the Apostle writes to seven churches, for the eighth, to the Hebrews, is placed by most outside the number. He instructs Timothy and Titus, and intercedes with Philemon on behalf of a fugitive servant. Concerning which I think it better to be silent than to write little.
The Acts of the Apostles seem indeed to sound forth a bare history and to weave the infancy of the nascent Church; but if we know that their author, Luke, is a physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, we will observe equally that all his words are medicine for the languishing soul.
James, Peter, John, and Jude published seven Epistles, as mystical as they are concise, and at once both short and long -- short in words, long in meaning -- so that rare is the person who does not grope blindly in reading them.
The Apocalypse of John has as many mysteries as it has words. I have said too little: every praise falls short of the merit of the book. In its individual words, manifold meanings lie hidden. I pray you, dearest brother, to live among these things, to meditate on them, to know nothing else, to seek nothing else. Does it not seem to you already here on earth a dwelling place of the heavenly kingdom? I do not want you to be offended by the simplicity, and as it were the cheapness, of the words in the holy Scriptures, which were produced either by the fault of translators or deliberately, so that they might more easily instruct an unlearned congregation, and so that in one and the same sentence the learned might hear one thing and the unlearned another. I am not so impudent and dull as to promise that I know these things and can grasp the fruits of them whose roots are fixed in heaven; but I confess that I wish to. I prefer myself to one who sits idle; refusing to be a master, I pledge myself as a companion. To him who asks it is given; to him who knocks it is opened; he who seeks finds. Let us learn on earth that knowledge which will endure for us in heaven. I will receive you with open arms, and (to babble something foolish, after the pomposity of Hermagoras) whatever you seek, I will try to know together with you. You have here your most loving brother Eusebius, who doubled for me the favor of your letter by reporting the uprightness of your character, your contempt for the world, your faithfulness in friendship, and your love of Christ. For your prudence and the grace of your eloquence the letter itself displayed even without him. Hasten, I beg you, and rather cut than untie the rope of the little boat stuck in the surf. No one about to renounce the world can profitably sell what he has despised in order to sell. Whatever you have spent from your own resources, count as gain. It is an ancient saying: the miser lacks what he has as much as what he does not have. For the believer, the whole world is wealth; but the unbeliever is in need of even an obol. Let us live as though having nothing, yet possessing all things. Food and clothing are the riches of Christians. If you have your property in your power, sell it; if you do not, cast it away. From him who takes your tunic, your cloak too must be left behind. Surely unless you, always putting off until tomorrow and dragging from day to day, carefully and step by step sell your little possessions, Christ does not have the means to feed his poor. He gave everything to God who offered himself. The apostles left behind only a boat and nets. The widow cast two small coins into the treasury, and she is preferred to the riches of Croesus. He easily despises all things who always considers that he is going to die.
ON THE WORSHIP OF JESUS CHRIST IN THE SCRIPTURES.
This letter, from the work entitled Letters to a Young Man on the Christian Life, by Fr. H. D. Lacordaire, Paris, 1858, published by Poussielgue-Rusand, excerpted by the gracious permission of both the Author and the Publisher, to enrich -- nay, to adorn -- our edition; no reader will fail to receive it gratefully.
The first place where we encounter those we love is their history. History is the past of life surviving itself in a written memory. There would be no friendship if memory did not resurrect in the soul and hold present there those to whom we have given our heart. It is there that they live our own life, there that we see them with us, there that their features and their actions remain imprinted and are preserved in a relief that forms part of our being. But memory, even the most faithful, is short in some respects, and if it wishes to transmit itself to others by bequeathing them the beloved image, it must transform itself into history and engrave itself upon a brass that defies time. History is the memory of an immortalized age. Through it, generations draw near to one another, and, however pressed they may be in their course and their disappearance, they draw from the hearth of memory the unity that constitutes their soul and their kinship. A man who has no history is entirely in his tomb; a people that has not dictated its own is not yet born.
From this it follows that religion, being the first among all human things, must have a history that is also the first, and that Jesus Christ, being the center and the foundation of religion, must hold in the annals of the world a place that no other -- conqueror, philosopher, or lawgiver -- could attain. So it is, my dear Emmanuel. No matter how deeply one digs into antiquity or descends again to modern ages, nothing appears with the character of our Scriptures, nor anything with the majesty of Jesus Christ. I do not pause to show you this; I have done so elsewhere, and it is understood that between you and me it is not the question of apologetics that concerns us, but the question of life -- that is, of knowing and loving God through the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ.
Now, whether to know or to love, one must draw near to the object that has won the presentiments of our heart, look at it, study it, return to it without any weariness ever interrupting this ardor of discovery and possession; and if death or absence have taken it from our eyes, if the centuries have cast long intervals between it and us, it is from its history that we must seek it again. Have you not noticed, in the course of your classical studies, the incomprehensible and divine magic of history? Whence comes it that Greece is for us like a homeland that never dies? Whence comes it that Rome, with its tribune and its wars, still pursues us with its invincible image, and dominates with its extinguished grandeurs a posterity that is not its own? Why are these names of Miltiades and Themistocles, why are these fields of Marathon and Salamis, instead of being forgotten tombs, things of our own age, crowns woven yesterday, acclamations that resound and cling to our very entrails to shake them? I cannot, whatever I do, escape their power; I am Athenian, Roman; I dwell at the foot of the Parthenon, and I listen in silence at the base of the Tarpeian Rock to Cicero who speaks to me and moves me. It is history that does this. A page written two thousand years ago has conquered those two thousand years; it will conquer two thousand more, and so on forever until eternity replaces time, and God, who is all the future, becomes for us also all the past. But you understand -- although this dominion over the memory of men does not belong to just any page written by just any scribe about whatever deeds of his contemporaries. No, history is a privilege, a gift given to genius in favor of great peoples and great things. There is no history of the Late Roman Empire, and there never will be; it was Rome that produced Livy before dying, and it was Rome still that inspired Tacitus, by bringing back to him under Nero the soul of its consuls.
But what is Rome or Greece before Christianity? What is Alexander or Caesar before Jesus Christ? Religion is not the concern of one people; it is that of all humanity; its history is not the history of one man; it is the history of God. And if God gave historians to certain nations because they had virtues, and to certain men because they had genius, what would He not have done for His only Son, predestined from the beginning to come among us and to fill all times and all places with His presence? The history of Jesus Christ is the history of heaven and earth. There must be found the plans of God for the world, the primordial and universal laws, the beginnings of races, the succession of events that have acted upon the general course of human affairs, the directions of providence, the prophecies of the future, the election of peoples and of ages, the glory of men predestined to eternal designs, the struggle of good against evil in its most profound manifestations, the authentic promulgation of truth, and finally, above all, from summit to base, the figure of Christ illuminating everything with His light and His beauty. You recognize in these features our Holy Scriptures; you know that they were traced under the inspiration of the breath of God, who moved the will of the writers, aroused and directed their thoughts, and that thus they are not merely an admirable edifice of antiquity, of unity, and of holiness, but a divine edifice, the substantial work of infinite truth, in which the prophets contributed only the garment of their style and the accent of their soul, so that there might be something human in this as in all things, and that the immutable divinity of the substance might appear all the more through the variable accidents of the human element. A work of four thousand years, the hand of many appears in it, but a single intelligence presides over it, and it is the meeting of the one and the many over so long a span that is the first miracle of this sublime composition. When one opens it without knowing its true author, as a simple book, one cannot resist the authority of its character, and one recognizes in it, at the very least, the most astonishing monument of history, of legislation, of morality, and of eloquence that exists under heaven. But for us, who know who the historian was, who the lawgiver and the poet, a very different sentiment takes hold of us: it is not admiration alone nor astonishment; it is the adoration of faith and the trembling of a supernatural gratitude. There, from the very first line, the error of man in his infancy and the error of degenerate man fall at our feet, together with the fictions of idolatry, which sees God everywhere, and the negations of pantheism, which sees Him nowhere. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (1). From this first word to the last -- May the grace of Our Lord be with you all (2) -- the light advances ever growing, like a sun that would have no decline, and whose continued ascent would increase at every moment its brilliance and its warmth. It is no longer a writing; it is a word. It is no longer a dead letter hiding under its folds truths discovered by reasoning and observation; it is a living word, the eternal word of God.
What a word, Emmanuel -- the word of God! There is nothing sweeter than the word of man when it comes from an upright mind and a heart that loves us; it penetrates us, it moves us, it charms us, it lulls our sorrows and exalts our joys; it is the balm and the incense of our life. What must the word of God be for one who knows how to recognize it and hear it? What must it be to be able to say to oneself: God inspired this thought; it is He who speaks to me through it, it is to me that it is said, it is I who hear it? And when one has come, page by page, to the very word of Jesus Christ, to that word which was no longer a mere interior and prophetic inspiration but the perceptible breath of the divinity, the palpable expression of the Word of God, heard by the crowds as well as by the disciples -- what remains but to fall silent at the feet of the master, and to let the echo of His voice resound in our soul?
Scripture is at once the history of Jesus Christ and the word of God. It has from one end to the other this double character. From the very first page, under the stirring shades of the earthly paradise, it announces to us the coming of the Savior of men. This promise, transmitted to the patriarchs, takes on from book to book a clarity that fills all events and drives them toward the future as a preparation and a prefiguration of what is awaited. The people of God is formed in exile and in combat; Jerusalem is founded, Zion rises; the lineage of the Messiah, detaching itself from the primitive stock of the patriarchal tribes, blossoms in David, who passes from the flocks of Bethlehem to the throne of Judah, and from there contemplates and sings the son who will be born to him from his posterity to be the king of a kingdom without end (1). The Prophets take up again upon the tomb of David the harp of the days that are not yet; they follow Judah in its misfortunes, they accompany it into its captivity; Babylon hears, on the banks of its rivers, the voice of the saints it knows not, and Cyrus, its conqueror, speaks to it of the God who made heaven and earth and who commanded him to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem. That temple is reborn. It hears the lamentations and the fervor of the last prophets, and, after an interval, after having been defiled by the nations and purified by the Maccabees, it sees the Son of God come in the arms of a Virgin, and, from its porticos to the sanctuary, from the sanctuary to the Holy of Holies, it repeats to itself the supreme word of the old man Simeon: Now, Lord, you will let your servant depart in peace, according to your promise, because my eyes have seen your salvation, the salvation that you have prepared before the face of all peoples, to be a light of revelation to them and the glory of your people Israel (2). Jesus Christ has come. The Gospel succeeds the law and the prophecies, and truth, fulfilling the figure, shines upon the past, which it explains after having received its testimony. All times meet in Christ, and history takes under His steps its eternal unity. It is He who is everything henceforth; it is to Him that everything relates, from Him that everything proceeds; He created all things, and He will judge all things. The Jordan receives Him in its waters under the hand of the precursor who baptizes Him; the mountains see Him climb their slopes followed by a whole people, and they hear from His mouth that word which no other had yet spoken: Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who weep. The lakes lend their shores to His discourses and their waves to His miracles. Humble fishermen fold their nets at the sight of Him and follow Him to become under Him fishers of men. The wise consult Him in the shadow of the night; the women accompany Him and serve Him in the light of day. Every misfortune comes to find Him, every wound hopes in Him, and death yields to Him children already mourned, to give them back to their mothers. He loves Saint John, the young man, and Lazarus, the man of mature years. He speaks to the Samaritan woman and blesses the foreign woman. A sinful woman anoints His head and kisses His feet; an adulteress finds grace before Him. He confounds the vain wisdom of the doctors and drives from the temple those who made a place of commerce of the place of prayer. He withdraws from the multitude that wants to proclaim Him king, and when He enters Jerusalem preceded by the hosannas that hail in Him the son of David and the redeemer of the world, He enters upon a donkey covered with the garments of His disciples. The Synagogue judges Him, Royalty despises Him, Rome condemns Him; He dies upon a cross while blessing the world, and the centurion who sees Him die amid the insults of the crowd and the blasphemies of the great, recognizes, striking his breast, that He is the Son of God. A tomb receives Him from the hands of death; but on the third day, this tomb, guarded by hatred, opens of itself and lets the master of life pass through in triumph. His disciples see Him again; their hands touch Him and adore Him, their mouths confess Him; they receive from Him His last instructions, and, all that must be visible being consummated for man, the Son of God and the son of man takes upon a cloud the path to heaven, leaving to His apostles the world to conquer. Soon Peter, the fisherman, all illuminated by the stirrings of the Holy Spirit, descends to the gates of the upper room and addresses the multitude, astonished to hear him despite the diversity of their origins and their languages. Paul, the persecutor, is not slow to appear at his side; he carries the name of Jesus to the nations, of which he is the apostle; Antioch possesses itself of him, Athens listens to him, Corinth receives him, Ephesus drives him out and blesses him, Rome at last touches his chains and drinks of his blood upon its glorious dust. John, the most intimate of the disciples of Christ, the sacred guest of His breast, stands upon the shores of Patmos, and, the last of the prophets, he announces to the Church its transfigurations in suffering and glory until the end of the ages.
The history of Jesus Christ is thus divided into three periods distributed across four thousand years: the prophetic times, the evangelical times, and the apostolic times. In the first, Jesus Christ is awaited and prepared for; in the second, He manifests Himself, lives, and dies in our midst; in the third, He founds His Church through the apostles, who lived with Him, who received His teachings and inherited His powers. This fabric is never interrupted and carries within itself, by itself, the demonstration of its truth. But it is one thing to feel the truth of a proof, and another to nourish oneself on the truth that has been felt. Just as there are two moments in friendship -- that in which one assures oneself that one is loved, and that in which one enjoys the happiness of being loved -- so too in the supernatural life of Christianity there are two distinct moments: that in which one recognizes Jesus Christ in the divinity of His history, and that in which one surrenders to the ineffable sweetness of that verified history. At this second moment, doubts have fled, certainty is mistress; one no longer searches, one no longer examines, one no longer takes offense: history becomes word, the very word of God, and that word flows into the soul like a river of light and of unction. It penetrates to the last fibers of our most distant faculties, as the blood that animates our veins makes its way to the extremities of our most mysterious organs; it gives us a distaste for every other spiritual nourishment, or rather everything we read and everything we think is transfigured by the contact of this flood of grace and truth that comes to us from Scripture, and through Scripture, from the very spirit of God.
When I read the Scriptures for the first time, I did not have faith: and so it was not the impression of a believer that I experienced, but that of a man of good will. It seemed to me that I held in my hands a very diverse book, written at long intervals by very different men, but that all these fragments gathered together formed a single body of great beauty. However, it is difficult for me to express what I felt, because the memory of that first reading has been as it were absorbed by the feeling I have received from it since. It is today, after thirty years of faith, that the Scriptures are truly known to me, at least to the degree where the common run of souls can reach. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are, together with the historical books that follow them, a vast narrative of the origins of the world, of humanity, of the people of God, of their worship and their legislation, of their wars and their vicissitudes: nothing comparable is found in any secular literature, and the supernatural character of the narration breaks through everywhere to the eyes of reason as well as to those of faith. Emotion holds only a small place in it; it is not a drama in which the heart is shaken as by music, and in which tears flow freely before the narrative: it is the history of a humanity still in its infancy, grave, simple, monumental, illuminated by the hand of God in the broad lines of its events, covered by the veil of ancient times and customs, and in which the man of our day remains a stranger through everything in him that is ephemeral and personal. One hears, in that distant atmosphere, the voice of God who creates, the fall of man who falls, the noise of a world that corrupts itself and is punished by death, the lament of divine justice against guilty cities, and the promise of a liberator that grows stronger and more precise as one advances into that broad and unfathomable horizon. Everything in it is calm, solemn, and unhurried; no stroke of passion disturbs the serenity of things and of language; the sacred historian thinks only of God, of the people of God, and of the salvation of the world. From the height of this thought, he watches the centuries and generations pass by without being moved by anything other than divine glory and divine mercy. One would think oneself in a desert with the sun for companion, so much is the substance of these books at once immobile, luminous, and arid. Never does the weak and ardent side of our being find its nourishment there. It is scarcely if here and there, in some fragment of a history closer to us, we feel the breeze of humanity lightly stirring. Joseph finding again his brothers who once sold him, Tobias embracing his old father after a long absence and still longer anxieties, the Maccabees delivering their homeland from the yoke of the foreigner: these scenes and a few others bring us back to the hearth of our nature, but rarely and with a sort of divine parsimony. When I read that famous Song of Songs, which Voltaire called with such taste a guardroom ballad, I was astonished to remain so cold before so great and so Oriental a nudity of expression; I asked myself why, thinking I had found the only passage of the Bible that was a field for passionate emotions, I felt nothing but calm and purity. It is because Scripture, entirely inspired by God as it is, communicates nothing but what is of God. Even when it employs the language of passion, it is God who speaks in it, and the human heart that is reflected there lets only the divine part be perceived -- that which is its eternal foundation and incorruptible beauty. That is why the first reading of Scripture does not move us; one must return to it patiently and for a long time; one must exercise oneself in it and nourish oneself on it to grasp its savor; one must conquer the spirit of the flesh, as the apostle Saint Paul says, before knowing and feeling the spirit of God, and life is not long enough for this initiation. The laborer waits for the earth to yield him the fruit of his sowing; the miner does not stop at the surface of the soil -- he digs, he descends, he searches the earth with his bleeding hands, and it is only at the bottom of the shaft that the riches appear to him. Scripture is a well dug by the hand of God: go to the bottom, and the treasure will be yours.
It would therefore be in vain that I should ask the reader to sit down for the first time before the Bible with a feeling of ease and personal pleasure. Honey does not flow down its pages; nothing that pertains to man is flattered in it. All the interests of vulgar curiosity that attach us to human compositions are absent from this first encounter with the sacred book, and if the reader does not seize upon it with a bold struggle, if he is not a Christian or a philosopher -- I mean flooded with faith or with respect -- he will be tempted to close the book or to open it only through a careless love of knowledge. I encourage him to do so, however, and here is why.
There is in the books of Moses and in the historical books of the Old Testament, taken on their own, a superior merit of originality, of grandeur, and of narration, which places them in the first rank among writings of the same kind. It is not enough to say that the civilizations of antiquity have no annals so venerable by their date and their character, since the most ancient books that remain to us, after the books of Moses, are the poems of Homer, posterior to the Pentateuch by at least five centuries: it is not enough to say it, for the books of Moses surpass them not only by the antiquity of their composition, but by the simplicity of the narrative, the absence of all fabulous fiction, by a certain indefinable accent of fatherhood that partakes at once of the father, the king, and the prophet. Man may grow old as he will; he never loses the memory of a hand placed with authority and gentleness upon his earliest years, and he loves to feel it in his memory, even when it has not left there traces of virtue. How much more, then, when a father has been just, intelligent, heroic, and inspired by God, when he has founded in the desert, fighting and dying, a nation that was to last four thousand years -- the child of that man, however far removed from him by time, always recognizes in him a power of blood and of genius that has no equal in any people and at any age. If the Hebrews had been a people like any other, they would long ago have lost even the memory of their name, absorbed by the universal conquest of Christian civilization. It is the blood of Moses that has preserved them, as it is the blood of Christ that will preserve them.
Read, then, the books of Moses and the historical books of the Old Testament; read them at leisure, without any haste, remembering that you are reading the most ancient of the monuments of the human mind. Stop when the narrative wearies you; return when recollection and rest have refreshed your soul. Drink little, but frequently. Consider that the world has come forth from these pages and that your most advanced civilization will never be anything but a commentary on the Decalogue and the prophecies.
However, when you arrive at the Psalms of David and the Prophets, a new world will open before you. Prose will give way to poetry, narrative to enthusiasm, and the man of God, filled with the breath that inspires and uplifts, will touch the earth only at intervals. There is the great biblical poetry, the song of songs, the lyre that everyone knows even without having heard it. At this point of Scripture, the heart that barely beat is seized by it, and, if it is capable of opening itself, it surrenders to a passionate admiration that it has known only in reading Homer or Virgil. But in reading Homer and Virgil, one felt that the man of genius was an extremity of our nature, a kind of music drawn from our own depths to enchant ourselves. Here it is far beyond that: it is no longer man singing his own sorrows and his own joys; it is a being transported outside himself by the vision of God. He sees God, and what he expresses with the remnants of a human voice broken by that presence, no other voice could say. It is heaven speaking to earth, not with the calm of omnipotence, but with an infinite tenderness that the corruption of the earth has changed into sorrow. It is a God calling an unfaithful and beloved people; it is a father who pleads, who threatens, who weeps, who groans; it is a prophet who watches the centuries pass before him and who witnesses the spectacle of creation renewed in justice; it is a sinful and repentant king who confesses his faults and begs for mercy; it is a just man abandoned who has no one but God for a friend; it is a shepherd who watches and who hopes; it is a heart overflowing with love, with laments, and with blessings. All of Scripture is beautiful, but the Psalms and the Prophets are its summit of glory, and it is there that David and Isaiah, seated in the light that carries them away, await the Christian traveler to give him the last baptism of faith and of love.
Whence comes, you will say to me, this power of the psalms and the prophecies? Can one account for it? Yes, my dear Emmanuel, one can account for it, and the source of this eloquence is in the relationship it bears to Jesus Christ. Considered in the books of Moses and the history of the Hebrew people, Jesus Christ hides beneath events; He is their soul and their purpose, but in a hidden manner that appears only through the revelation of times and of facts. One must pierce the envelope to reach Him, and when one has reached Him beneath that thick fabric of acts, of rites, and of laws that cover Him, the ray of His face is still only a gleam borrowed from distant and mysterious reflections. But in the psalms and the prophecies, the veil falls, the mystery clears, the person of Jesus Christ takes shape; one perceives Him being born of a virgin, one follows His steps and His sorrows, one witnesses His death, one sees Him triumph on the third day, and, seated at the right hand of His father, governing from there the Church and the world until the end of the ages. But it is not this clarity alone that gives the psalms and the prophecies the emotion they communicate to us; it is the love that pierces through the light. It is not enough to see things; one must love them. To see them enlightens; to love them transports. And nothing carries us beyond ourselves like the spectacle of a man set ablaze by God as he bends over the cradle and the cross of Jesus Christ. There is in this love a force that has no analogue, not even in the love of the mother and of the bride, because its object is infinite, and nature can do nothing comparable to what grace does. All that genius has done at its greatest in the service of nature -- Homer's songs on the wrath of Achilles, those of Virgil on the misfortunes of Aeneas, the laments of Racine's Phaedra, Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, Lamartine's The Lake with its waters, its shores, and his beloved -- all that is nothing beside the Miserere of David, the Lamentations of Jeremiah and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. Where, then, is the reason for this difference, if not in the object of the love that inspired these two orders of poetry? When Achilles wept for his friend killed in battle, when Aeneas lost the shores of his homeland, when Phaedra confessed to herself the horror of her passion, when Romeo and Juliet fell asleep in the sleep of their love, and when Lamartine's beloved turned her eyes for the last time upon the waters that had cradled her confidences -- the muse of man is spent. She has exhausted all that is fecund and tender within her; she falls back withered at the edge of those tombs she enchanted for a moment, and there remains to her, in an eternal widowhood, only the memory of her own voice. But when David wept for his sin, when Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem, when Isaiah saw from afar the passion of his Savior, their soul was not diminished by all it had given; the spring from which they drew grew within them with the floods of their speech, and, far more blessed than the poets of man, they did not entrust the keeping of their memory to tombs but to altars. At these altars, raised throughout the Christian world, a man sits and a people stands: the man is the priest; the people is all of us. Neither this man nor this people are archaeologists occupied with ruins; they are believers, worshippers, supplicants, who every day repeat the psalms of David in the same places and with the same faith as the Levites of Jerusalem, at an interval of three thousand years, and who pray to God, the Father of Jesus Christ, with the same accents with which the prophets prayed to the Father of the Messiah, their Savior and ours.
The psalms and the prophecies are the great reading of the Christian. No literature surpasses that one; none could so nourish the soul and give it the bread of heaven in the bread of earth. But the capital moment of Scripture is not there; it is in the Gospel, that is to say, in the living and personal account of the life of Christ. Until now Jesus Christ had appeared to us only in prophecy; He had spoken only through the mouths of His envoys; He had revealed Himself only to the elect, and within those elect only to a part of their soul. But now the veil has fallen forever, and what was hidden in the plan of God, vaguely glimpsed by reason, clearly grasped by the prophets, manifests itself to the world in its true and perceptible form. A man has appeared -- God Himself -- and we are about to hear Him.
As for the Gospel, it has no need of such precautions. One may be young, passionate, filled with the world and with oneself, and the Gospel will know well how to speak its word to us: not that our first impulse is to understand it and love it; but, however far one may be from Christ by faith or by morals, it is impossible not to feel before that luminous and merciful figure one of the greatest blows ever struck at the door of a human soul. I know of only one thing to set beside it: the first sight of the Alps at one of those moments when the snow, the sky, the sun, the greenery, and the shadows have given themselves a perfect harmony. One stops, and a cry escapes. It is the same with the Gospel; it stops you and makes you utter a cry.
Now, what is the Gospel? It is the history of a man such as the earth had never seen and will never see again. I will say nothing more. It is a man who was born poor, who lived poor, and who died poor; who, from his very poverty, did not make a pedestal for any greatness; who never wrote a single line, delivered a single discourse before a great assembly, commanded a single battle, governed a single people, practiced any of the arts that make fame, and who nevertheless filled the world with his name and his presence, with a breadth and a duration that leave behind them no room for anything human whatsoever. All great men make a moment of light, then fall back into the obscurity of their tomb. He alone has been a fixed and growing star; and if the universe continues to subsist after two thousand years of Christianity, it is only to finish illuminating itself by the torch of a life whose brightness and warmth nothing has ever equaled.
But let us open the Gospel; it will speak better than I.
Listen to the first words that are found there: it is Jesus Christ who says to his precursor Saint John the Baptist, who wished to dissuade him from receiving the baptism of penance: Let it be so for now, for it is fitting that we thus fulfill all righteousness (1).
There is a word. I do not explain it to you, I adorn it with nothing; you will understand it if you can. Further on, after a fast of forty days in the desert, tempted by the devil who says to him: If you are the Son of God, command that these stones be changed into loaves, he answers: Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (2).
Further still, from the top of a mountain in Galilee, addressing the crowd that follows him, he says in a voice that no one had yet heard: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God. Blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (3).
Shall I cite the entire Gospel? If I wished to extract from it everything worthy of being displayed outside the frame in which it is set, I would cite it in its entirety. But I cannot say everything, nor can I make a choice: that would be to admit that Jesus Christ said something better than something else, which would be to think as badly as to judge badly. I shall content myself with a few words sown at random, from passages that relate to different occasions.
Whatever you wish that men should do to you, do so to them (4).
Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (5).
Love your enemies (6).
If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other (7).
Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone (8).
Which of you will convict me of sin (9)?
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest (10).
Whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your servant, as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many (11).
(1) Matt. 3:15. -- (2) Matt. 4:4. -- (3) Matt. 5. -- (4) Matt. 7:12. -- (5) Matt. 5:48. -- (6) Matt. 5:44. -- (7) Matt. 5:39. -- (8) John 8:7. -- (9) John 8:46. -- (10) Matt. 11:28. -- (11) Matt. 20:27.
Whoever humbles himself shall be exalted (1).
Feed my sheep (2).
Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, you also may be (3).
Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you (4).
Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me; yet let your will be done, and not mine (5).
My Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do (6).
I add nothing.
Would you like me to show you a page of another kind, and perhaps more beautiful still? Listen to the parable of the Prodigal Son:
A man had two sons, the younger of whom said to his father: Father, give me the share of the property that falls to me. And the father divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger of these two sons, having gathered together all that he had, went away to a distant country, where he squandered all his property in excess and debauchery. After he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country, and he began to fall into want. So he went and attached himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his farm to feed the swine. And there he would have been glad to fill himself with the husks that the swine ate; but no one gave him any. At last, coming to himself, he said: How many hired servants in my father's house have bread in abundance, and here I am dying of hunger! I must rise and go to my father, and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants. So he rose and went to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with compassion, and running to him, threw himself on his neck and kissed him. And his son said to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Then the father said to his servants: Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet. Bring also the fatted calf and kill it; let us eat and make merry, for this my son was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and is found. And they began to make merry.
Now the elder son was in the fields, and when he came and drew near the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what this meant. The servant said to him: Your brother has come back, and your father has killed the fatted calf because he has received him back in good health. But he was angry and refused to go in. His father therefore came out and urged him to enter. But he answered his father: Behold, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed any of your commands, yet you never gave me a young goat that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him. But the father said to him: Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But it was fitting to make a feast and rejoice, for this your brother was dead and has come to life; he was lost and is found (7).
(1) Matt. 23:12. -- (2) John 21:17. -- (3) John 14:1-3. -- (4) John 17:1. -- (5) Matt. 26:39. -- (6) Luke 23:34. -- (7) Luke 15:11.
To this page one could add a thousand others no less beautiful, and these are precisely the ones I do not cite, because they do not have the same kind of beauty. But this one suffices. What more is needed? Genius alone does not dictate such things, and heaven, which dictated them, will never manifest itself in an accent that surpasses language. From the earth, nothing reaches God but groaning and lamentation; from heaven, nothing descends to us but tenderness and pardon: the parable of the Prodigal Son is the expression of that pardon in a narrative that will never be equaled, because it will never be surpassed in its principle.
One could cite many other passages from the Gospel, and that is a first pleasure we leave to the reader.
But after the account of the public life of Christ comes that of his passion and death. The Gospel, so great up to that point, rises there to the highest accent of history and poetry -- that is to say, of what man possesses that is at once most true and most beautiful. I hesitate to touch it with words, and I shall speak of it as little as I can. When Jesus Christ had completed the instruction of his apostles through the discourse recorded in chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 of the Gospel of Saint John (the reader, for God's sake, must not fail to read it); when he had gone to a garden situated beyond the torrent of Cedron, his enemies came to him, accompanied by soldiers of the temple guard, and Judas, one of his disciples, betrayed him with a kiss. You know the rest, and nearly everyone knows it. He is arrested, judged, condemned, bound, scourged, crowned with thorns, loaded with his cross, and he dies between two criminals. This account, told so simply by the Evangelists, has traversed the world: the world is divided between those who believe it and those who do not, and unbelievers as well as the faithful have never heard this story without being moved by it. How is this possible? How did such a thing come about? How did this man, dying on a cross between heaven and earth, take possession of universal admiration, and how did the account of his end, more than that of any other, find the path to every heart? I see only one reason for this. It is that the man who died on the cross was a just man, and not an ordinary just man, but a just man who leaves nothing to be thought against him. Everything there is pure; the eye finds no shadow. A life without stain, a knowledge without error, a charity without limits, a courage without weakness, the complete sacrifice of self: that is what is seen there, and that suffices to explain the divine sympathy that the death of Christ has obtained from his contemporaries and from posterity. The just man always moves us, whatever fate God assigns him, just as the wicked man, even at the height of his fortune, leaves behind him something indefinably sad. But an innocent just man who dies by the ultimate punishment without having deserved it reaches the summit of the pathetic, and if he lived and spoke as Christ did, the entire world will be nothing but a faint echo of his story.
It is his own mouth that will tell you his thought, his eyes that will tell you his love, his hand that will press yours to encourage you while blessing you. You will see him born in the silence of a night, on the straw of a stable, and you will bring him, together with humble shepherds, the first fruits of the adoration of the human race. The East, ancient land of remembrances, will send visitors to his cradle, and from this very awakening of a glory destined to fill the world, innocent blood will flow to stifle it. An impure land will receive in exile the child who will purify all things and make of the universe a single homeland. You will return with him to the roof of his ancestors -- no longer the palace of David, of whom he is the last son, but the obscure house of an artisan who lives by his hands -- and there you will marvel at thirty years of silence and peace. Nothing will trouble this long preparation, until the day when a voice resounds in the desert: Prepare the way of the Lord and make straight his paths (1). Jesus Christ will obey this cry of a prophet; he will leave Nazareth and go down to the banks of the Jordan, where the crowd, drawn by the man of the solitudes, pressed around him asking for the baptism of repentance. He will plunge into it as they did, and when he rises above the waters, heaven will open above his head and this voice will be heard: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased (2). You will recognize the Son of God; you will follow in the footsteps of his apostles; you will join the immense throng that accompanied him through the countryside of Galilee, and you will hear the word of salvation fall from his sacred lips. You will be among the guests at the feast of Cana and among the five thousand men who were fed by five barley loaves in the wilderness. You will see the tears of his friendship flow upon Lazarus, and you yourself will weep with sorrow and joy in the account of the last week of his life. It begins in Jerusalem, palm in hand, amid the Hosannas of triumph; it will end on a gibbet, amid the acclamations of hatred. Mysteries unknown to man will be accomplished in the last scene of his last supper; Peter will weep for him, Judas will betray him, all will flee, and it will be in the hands of John, of Mary, and of Magdalene that he will find the last farewell of earth. He will ascend to heaven after having given his supreme instructions; the Holy Spirit will descend to complete the edifice of the Church, and the acts of that miraculous foundation will be told to you by the pen of one of the companions of Saint Paul.
(1) Matt. 3:3. -- (2) Matt. 3:17.
After the Gospel, it seems that Scripture can give us nothing more. This is not entirely so, however, and in the Epistles of Saint Paul the soul of the Christian still finds a nourishment and a joy. Saint Paul resembles nothing; he has no analogue in any secular literature, nor in any sacred literature. He stands alone, and at an altitude that disconcerts, from the very first pages, every creature in possession of itself. Others saw Jesus Christ born in a stable, speak in Judea, die on a cross, and ascend to heaven: Paul saw him only in a ray descended from on high, which pierced him like the blade of a sword; he spoke to him only in ecstasy, he heard his voice only from the bosom of a cloud, and when he was caught up to the third heaven, he did not know himself whether it was in his body or out of his body that he enjoyed the sight of his God. And so, when he tries to convey to us what he saw, heard, tasted, touched of the Word of life, he brings to the expression of his apostolate something that is the first and last accent of the Christian faith. David foretold, Isaiah prophesied, Jeremiah wept, Daniel calculated the hour of the promise; the Evangelists narrated, the apostles bore witness: Paul, for his part, believed, and he tells you the shock of his belief with a force in which there is nothing of art, nothing of the science of discourse, but in which the fullness of the man overflows through every channel of speech. One does not know whether to admire his dialectic or his emotion; he is at once more rigorous than Aristotle and more passionate than Plato; he makes enthymemes that tear out the entrails, deductions that make one weep, and when he suddenly bursts forth with a word that he has no longer linked to another, one would say that heaven has opened by accident, and that the lightning that escaped from it belonged neither to earth nor to heaven itself, but to the impatience of the genius of God seeking to break through in a man.
Paul has a language of his own, a sort of Greek wholly steeped in Hebraism, abrupt turns, bold, brief, something that would seem like contempt for clarity of style, because a higher clarity floods his thought and seems to him sufficient to make itself seen. Indifferent to eloquence as to luminosity, he repels at first the soul that comes to sit at his feet; but when one has the key to his language, and once, by dint of rereading him, one has risen little by little to understand him, one falls into the intoxication of admiration. Every stroke of his thunder shakes and seizes; there is nothing above him anymore, not even David, the poet of Jehovah, not even Saint John, the eagle of God; if he has neither the lyre of the first nor the wing-beat of the second, he has beneath him the entire ocean of truth and that calm of waves that fall silent. David saw Jesus Christ from the heights of Mount Zion, Saint John rested on his breast at a banquet; for Saint Paul, it was on horseback, his body drenched in sweat, his eye aflame, his heart filled with the hatreds of persecution, that he saw the Savior of the world, and that, thrown to the ground under the spur of his grace, he said to him this word of peace: Lord, what do you wish me to do!
Once Saint Paul has been studied and savored, my dear Emmanuel, the Scriptures are yours. You will open them at the first page, and you will read them at your leisure in the order in which the tradition of the Church has arranged the books. You will thus arrive at the Apocalypse of Saint John, which is the prophecy of the New Testament and of the entire future of the Church on earth. I say nothing to you about it. Saint John, in that famous vision, saw idolatrous Rome fall, the Christian monarchies form from the debris of the Roman Empire, a power opposed to the reign of Christ establish itself in the world, falls and errors succeed one another, and finally, at the end of time, the last and most formidable of persecutions open, from which the Church will triumph through the second coming of Christ. Taken as a whole, this prophecy is of extreme clarity; but in its details, it escapes the efforts that would follow it step by step and apply its scenes to accomplished events. This more or less thankless labor will succeed only in the last days, when, the destiny of the Church approaching its end, the eye of our descendants will trace back from epoch to epoch the course of all our sorrows and all our virtues. Until then, shadow will impede light, and this should not be a regret for those who live as we do between the past and the future of faith, under the splendor of the two Testaments.