Cornelius a Lapide
Table of Contents
Title Page
Commentaries on Sacred Scripture.
By Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide of the Society of Jesus, formerly Professor of Sacred Scripture at Louvain, afterward at Rome.
Carefully revised and illustrated with notes by Augustin Crampon, Priest of the Diocese of Amiens.
New Edition, carefully purged of the errors which had crept into the previous one.
Volume Eighteen. On the Epistles of Saint Paul.
Paris: At the establishment of Louis Vives, Bookseller and Publisher, 13, Rue Delambre, 13. 1891.
To the Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord, Dom Matthias Hovius, Archbishop of Mechlin.
Saint Ambrose, the exemplar and mirror of Pastors and Pontiffs, Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord, was wont to commend the study of Sacred Scripture to Priests and Prelates so earnestly that he called it the priestly book; in which matter he followed that great and heavenly Dionysius, who, being a disciple and admirer of Saint Paul (for he himself calls Paul a divine man and a second sun, and looks up to him), asserts that Sacred Scripture is the very substance of our priesthood.
And lest Ambrose should seem to have said more than he did, he offered himself as an example of this very thing: for his continuous and tireless labor in Sacred Scripture, both in reading and examining it, and in expounding it by voice and writing, is plainly evident, partly from the commentaries and treatises which he published upon it, many and brilliant; partly from the sermons and discourses by which, as a vigorous Pastor of the Church, he assiduously fed and instructed his people with the word of God: how great was their power and energy one may conjecture from this alone, that by these same he converted Saint Augustine, then a Manichean and in his heresy as learned as he was obstinate, to sound faith, and restored him, nay gave him, to the Catholic Church (what a light!).
Nay more, Saint Ambrose not only toiled earnestly at this study of Sacred Scripture while vigorous and strong, but even in old age wished to keep applying himself to it and, so to speak, to die upon it: for down to his final illness, says Paulinus, he never ceased writing, commenting, and expounding the Sacred Letters; and at last, upon his commentary on Psalm 43: "Great is the Lord, and exceedingly to be praised," he died: whence he left the commentary upon it unfinished, with its two final verses untouched, at which time a fiery globe sent down from heaven, encircling and licking his head, gave evident sign and testimony that these his commentaries were not only approved by God and the Holy Spirit, but had been inspired and suggested by the same; just as at other times, when this same Saint Ambrose was disputing against the Arians and contending against them, Saint Paul, appearing by night in bodily form, confirmed and strengthened both him and his sayings and writings.
Blessed Charles Borromeo, the new Ambrose of the Milanese, has followed Saint Ambrose in all things in this age; he diligently commended Sacred Scripture to his Clergy and Pastors both by word and by example. For he himself was wont assiduously both to turn its pages and to expound it to the people, and that with such zeal, devotion, and reverence, that in the last years of his life he would not read Sacred Scripture, as the very letters of God to men, except bareheaded and on bended knees in veneration.
Blessed Borromeo was the Ambrose of the Milanese; you, Most Illustrious Lord, are our Ambrose of the Belgians, and accordingly, like Ambrose, you yourself take wonderful delight in Sacred Scripture, and earnestly commend the same to your people. Ambrose drew from Sacred Scripture, and chiefly from Saint Paul, sound doctrine, innocence of life, gravity of conduct mixed with affability, an Episcopal — nay, an Apostolic — spirit; you in like manner have drawn the same, and you so express in your life that saying of Saint Paul to Titus: "In all things show thyself an example of good works, in doctrine, in integrity, in gravity; the word sound, beyond reproach, that he who is on the opposite side may stand in awe, having no evil thing to say of us;" so that all may seem not so much to read this Pauline pattern of an Archbishop in your conduct, as if described and depicted in a living idea, but to see it and contemplate it close at hand.
Saint Ambrose was a scourge of heresy, and on every side he persecuted and routed the Arians: you likewise, Most Illustrious Lord, are a scourge of heretics, so much so that in all Flanders no cities are more untouched by heresy than your Mechlin, Louvain, and Brussels: which is the more wonderful and the more illustrious in proportion as we are here on every side surrounded by heretics, and almost intermingled with them. This is the work of your vigorous watchfulness and authority, which even the heretics themselves so look up to, fear, and revere, that during these truces with the Hollanders they do not — I will not say nest, but even — dare to profess and make their heresies public in your diocese. We saw lately in this kind a certain new dogmatist — no Paul — secretly spreading his errors with the great favor, and also peril, of many, exposed by you, refuted, and made to abjure his dogmas; and thus the great conflagration which threatened the Brabantines, you extinguished at its very tinder.
In Saint Ambrose there shone forth an unconquered greatness of soul, liberty, and constancy, by which he repressed both the audacity of the Arian Empress Justina and the corroding tyranny of Maximus and Eugenius, fearing neither threats nor death; nay, when Caligonus, the Emperor's eunuch, was threatening him with murder, he answered with calm and cheerful countenance: "May God permit you to fulfill what you threaten: for I shall suffer what is a Bishop's part; you will do what is a eunuch's." But how freely did he rebuke and bring back into order the Emperor Theodosius when he had sinned! Whereupon Theodosius bestowed upon him before Nectarius, Patriarch of Constantinople, that eulogy: "Ambrose alone do I know to be a Bishop worthy of that name: he is the master of truth, who taught me what difference there is between an Emperor and a Bishop."
Your integrity and constancy, Most Illustrious Lord, both the highest and the lowest know and have experienced; and their estimate and fame among all so settled, and from the use and experience of so many years confirmed as if by prescription, you maintain and possess, that all suppose Your Most Illustrious Reverence will sooner give up life than constancy; whereby it comes to pass that no one, however powerful, dares to ask anything of you that would even in the smallest matter seem — I will not say to transgress — but even to overstep the bounds of equity or of Ecclesiastical discipline: in which respect they keep repeating that saying once celebrated of Chrysostom: The Archbishop of Mechlin fears nothing but sin; for surely with Timothy and Saint Paul you have learned that: "For God hath not given us a spirit of fear, but of power."
Saint Ambrose purged the Milanese Republic and Church, infected and corrupted with depraved morals and vices, and restored it to its pristine integrity and splendor, and presented to us, as it were, another Milan — just as Blessed Borromeo lately did. Your Most Illustrious Reverence has so reformed and repaired this our Mechlin diocese, which a few years ago, both from the incursion of heretics and from wars and enemies, was running wild, deserted, and almost cast aside — so much so that in the countryside and villages there seemed to dwell not so much Christians as Indians and Barbarians (inasmuch as for many years they had seen neither sacred rites nor priests) — that here that saying of Isaiah seems fulfilled: "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: to them that dwelt in the region of the shadow of death, light is risen." And: "I will set the desert into pools of water, and the impassable land into streams of water; I will give in the wilderness the cedar, and the thorn, and the myrtle, and the olive tree, that they may see, and know, and consider, that the hand of the Lord hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it."
Now how great, with you as leader and choragus, in Mechlin's choir is the comeliness, order, reverence of the psalmody and divine office? what adornment and dignity of the Church, what of the rites? what religion and majesty of all things sacred? In a word: it is Ambrosian; those who behold it marvel and are amazed, and seem to themselves to be looking upon the sacred battle-line of camps drawn up in order — nay, the living image of the heavenly hierarchy and harmony alike. I do not flatter, nor do I tell secrets, but public matters which the thing itself openly speaks.
Lastly, you never fail to have before your eyes the living image of Saint Ambrose — the idea, I say, of the perfect Pontiff, complete in every measure — which Saint Bernard so prescribes for Pope Eugene and depicts to the life: "Consider that you must be the form of justice, the mirror of holiness, the exemplar of piety, the asserter of truth, the defender of the faith, the teacher of the Gentiles, the leader of Christians, the friend of the Bridegroom, the bridesman of the Bride, the orderer of the clergy, the pastor of the peoples, the master of the unwise, the refuge of the oppressed, the advocate of the poor, the hope of the wretched, the guardian of orphans, the judge of widows, the eye of the blind, the tongue of the dumb, the staff of the aged, the avenger of crimes, the dread of the wicked, the glory of the good, the rod of the powerful, the hammer of tyrants, the father of Kings, the moderator of laws, the dispenser of Canons, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the priest of the Most High, the Vicar of Christ, the Anointed of the Lord, lastly the God of Pharaoh."
Wherefore, under such a Prelate, the Mechlin Church at this time, in doctrine and discipline, and in integrity of morals and piety, is so composed and instructed, that it can be set forth as a model and exemplar not only to the Belgian Churches, but to those of all Europe; in which matter the ancestral piety, religion, and zeal of our Most Serene Princes has greatly aided, and daily aids; who reverence your counsels and constantly cherish, defend, and promote them — so that we may rightly hope that in this present eclipse, as it were, of Belgium, with such Princes and Prelates, the pristine vigor, flower, and dignity of religion and of the commonwealth alike will be restored to Belgium by right of postliminy. Just so, Gratian and Valentinian the Younger, Emperors, as long as they followed the admonitions of Saint Ambrose as their pedagogue and hierarch, administered the empire piously and prosperously, and rendered the kingdom of Italy peaceful and happy. So Constantine, Constans, Theodosius, Marcian, Charles, and other Kings and Emperors, by yielding to the decisions and wishes of the Pontiffs as of their own parents, were blessed, directed, and made fortunate by God, and rendered the Empire, both of the East and of the West, flourishing and renowned in piety and religion as much as in wealth and glory.
And so you exhibit to us an Ambrose, Most Illustrious Lord, in zeal and doctrine; an Ambrose in wisdom and prudence; an Ambrose in affability, integrity, gravity; an Ambrose in liberty and constancy; an Ambrose in watchfulness, fortitude, and zeal; and therefore, like Ambrose, you eagerly embrace the Sacred Letters, and especially these Pauline Epistles, as a priestly book, as the living mirror of Pastors and Prelates; and you are equally a student and a doctor of them; thence have you imbibed Paul's morals, spirit, courage, and fires, and you draw and imbibe them more daily; just as you assiduously thumb and turn over the Sapiential books of Solomon and Sirach, even on journeys and in lodgings (like that great Cardinal Hosius, who presided over the Council of Trent), and you know to a nicety their weightiest sentences, which in every matter teach and prescribe particular prudence both human and divine, and according to their prescription and dictate you moderate and direct all your actions.
To whom then more justly should I dedicate this Pauline work, and especially its Pontifical and Archiepiscopal Epistles to Titus and Timothy, than to Your Most Illustrious Reverence, who are also our own Bishop, nay Archbishop, and Hierarch of Belgium; and who, having obtained the rank and office of Saint Paul, strive to emulate him and to express him in word and conduct, and instruct, form, and create for us many Tituses and Timothys — as last year you formed and created your Vicar, a man upright, prudent, strong as well as gentle, and in Ecclesiastical affairs eminently versed and exercised by long use, the Most Reverend Bishop of Ghent (the delight of the people of Ghent)?
There is also this: that I, summoned to Mechlin for many years by Your Most Illustrious Reverence and by the Most Reverend Bishop of Ghent (then your Vicar) on the more solemn appointed feasts of the year, have served as Penitentiary in your Metropolitan Church; and while I would often confer familiarly with Your Most Illustrious Reverence, you became the author and inciter of this work for me; for in friendly fashion you would advise and exhort me to publish in print, and to make common to all Belgians, and indeed to other provinces, those things which over the course of eighteen years I had already publicly taught once and again upon the whole of Sacred Scripture in this celebrated city of yours and at the University of Louvain. And I, indeed, then drew back and excused myself, and would say that books are children: because no less care, labor, and solicitude must be expended on books — especially in this so erudite an age — than on conceiving, fostering, and educating children. For I was, and still am, more a lover of silence and quiet, and I had impressed deeply upon myself that saying, λάθε βιώσας ("live unnoticed"); and that of holy Job: "I said, In my little nest I shall die;" and that of Saint Jerome concerning Saint Hilarion: "Often did he change his place, not from levity, but in flight from honor and from importunity. For he always desired silence and an obscure life." Wherefore in his eightieth year, dying, he said with confidence: "Go forth, my soul, why dost thou fear? For nearly seventy years thou hast served Christ, and dost thou fear death?" Especially since my old and continual infirmities continually admonish me of the brevity of life, that I should set my house in order, and polish my soul with virtues and the contemplation of heavenly and divine things, and prepare myself for a happy passage, and for the blessed eternity; for this is the one care which continually drives and impels the Religious to despise human affairs and to desire heavenly things and the heavenly life, and which has goaded me from the very beginning of my entrance into Religion, and which, with God ever stirring me on, continually goads and spurs me.
But when to the friendly exhortation of Your Most Illustrious Lordship there was added the will and command of my Superiors — to whom, as it were to God's vicars in this our Religious Order, I am bound by my vow of obedience — ordering that I should publish these very things, I had to acquiesce, although the matter was difficult and laborious for me, weak and infirm as I am; for I would rather lose my life than obedience. I therefore began to divide my hours and labors between Magdalene and Martha, and to undertake the work with God as my guide, and I began with the Epistles of St. Paul: both because they are most weighty and likewise most difficult; and because I had taught them three times and more carefully than the other books of Holy Scripture; and because our Sectarian opponents continually rattle on about Paul, and proclaim to the ignorant masses that he stands with them and their sects; and finally because Paul, being a vessel of election and the Doctor of the Gentiles, in these Epistles instructs and informs Bishops and Pastors as well as Princes, Magistrates, and Christians of every condition, station, and rank, in wisdom equally with virtue and Christian perfection. For which reasons, although in this work I am briefer than other commentators, I have nonetheless been somewhat more expansive than my custom, adding from time to time those things that pertain to dogmas, controverted questions, and the regulation of morals; yet nothing other, nor drawn from any other source, than from the matter at hand and from this our Pauline garden: to which end I have inserted here and there rare and select sayings, examples, and apophthegms of the ancients, which can sharpen and stimulate the spirit, wisdom, and prudence of each one, and serve as a help to Pastors and Ecclesiastics for sharpening and stimulating the same in others: for Paul frequently suggests and breathes forth these incentives of Christian prudence, spirit, and zeal.
Furthermore, I have devoted many years of assiduous and immense labor to composing and polishing these commentaries, and I have applied myself most especially to four things: first, to soundness, that I might expound the genuine mind of Paul; second, to brevity — for in the study of Holy Scripture that saying is most true: "Art is long, life is short" — and for this reason I have made, as it were, a honey-gathering from so many and such vast commentaries of others, and, leaving the bran, I have given the fine flour: but my own things I have set forth with equal selectivity and brevity. I have cited the Fathers verbatim, so far as brevity allowed; but on account of brevity I have at times restrained those who were luxuriant in words, and I have cited only their more illustrious sayings, and even those, though disparate, I have joined together, omitting what lies between, by adapting and changing a single word, or the case of a word, to make the syntax fit. For I intended to convey their marrow and energy in few words, and therefore sometimes, though rarely, I have exchanged several of their rather involved words for one clearer word of my own, in order to avoid prolixity: but in such a way that I have always faithfully expressed their meaning. Third, to method, of which I shall speak shortly; fourth, to clarity; for I shall teach the principle that what is clear is wise and learned, not what is obscure. For why is language and speech given to us, except that it may clearly express and explain the thoughts both of our own and of another's mind? Why do we explain difficult and obscure authors, if by our own obscurity, however elegant, we entangle and envelop ourselves and our sayings and writings, like cuttlefish, even more than the authors themselves?
My aim, therefore, has been to convey solidly, briefly, methodically, and clearly the most genuine and literal sense of these epistles, as also of the rest of Holy Scripture in due course: and therefore I bring forth from the Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac text, and from the Fathers and Doctors, those things which either demonstrate or illustrate this genuine sense. I have aimed and continue to aim at this goal in all things, and toward this I direct my efforts everywhere; whether I attain it, let it be the judgment of the Readers.
Wherefore I do not pursue floridness and ornamental digressions, nor do I court elegance; for I act as a Theologian, not an Orator; I track down truth, I seek utility, not shadows and pomp; I insist on substance, not on words: especially since the Apostle himself, whom I interpret, professes himself unskilled in speech, but not in knowledge, 1 Cor. 2: "And my speech," he himself says, "was not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power." For whoever studies and applies himself to elegance of words must necessarily take away and subtract just as much from the study and depth of the realities themselves.
Therefore I use a didactic and methodical style, broken up and distinguished by notations, questions, numbers, members, and points, which is the style customarily used in the schools and most apt for instruction and memory: for here the subject matter itself forbids being adorned, content to be taught.
My method is this: after a brief synopsis of the whole chapter I undertake the matter, and I bring forward the more illustrious expositions of the Fathers and Doctors, each in its own order: both that the commentary may be full and complete; and that the fruitfulness of Holy Scripture may appear; and because this variety in pulpits and lecterns, together with abundant material, brings much both of ornament and of profit. But that sense which seems most genuine I expressly designate, and prefer it to others and illustrate it. I also clearly show the connection and force of the Pauline arguments, where they are obscure, and set them forth in dialectical form. Furthermore, the expositions of others I often do not refute, both that I may not be too long-winded, and out of reverence for the authors, and because many are probable, and because the proposing and confirming of the true and genuine opinion is in fact the refutation of those opposed to it. I detest the Critics who chase fame from the censure of others; but falsely: for they themselves likewise endure either Critics or Apologists. Ausonius truly said: "Three things must be turned away by those who seek glory: the eyes from the writings of others, the hands from the money another possesses, the ears from the secrets of princes." Finally, I have always considered it the part of a Christian mind to foster, praise, and admire the labors of others; to carp at, despise, reject, and hinder no one's. For what do we seek? The glory of Christ, not our own, that the name of Christ may be spread throughout the whole world by us and by any others, according to the measure of grace given by God to each.
I have preserved this uniform brevity and method everywhere, so far as was possible. But, just as Paul himself sometimes rises higher, sometimes lowers himself more; in some epistles plain and easy, in others (as clearly appears in the Epistle to the Ephesians) obscure and sublime, so much so that he seems unlike and dissimilar to himself: so likewise it has been necessary for me, in interpreting him, now to draw in my sails, now to let them out; now to raise them, now to lower them.
Accept then, Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord, this slight token and memorial — indeed debt — of my love and respect toward Your Most Illustrious Lordship: for to this you bind me both by other titles, and especially by this, that you so kindly and benevolently cherish and embrace both me and our whole Society.
Our houses at Louvain and Brussels know this; of which, to pass over other things, you have given this recent and illustrious proof, that two years ago you admitted our novitiate and House of Probation into your city of Mechelen, and that you so love, visit, help, and protect our novices, as if they were your little Benjamins, that to them you seem to be Abraham, the father, I say, of beloved Isaac and of his great and faithful and religious progeny, made ready for the salvation of others, which you instruct and adorn for Christ Jesus and His Church, that, when they have grown larger, they may at some time come into a share of the labors and the harvest, and that they may aid Your Most Illustrious Lordship and your auxiliary soldiers, as it were, both in catechizing and instructing the people, in confuting heretics, in converting sinners, and in increasing and promoting all Ecclesiastical discipline and the Christian spirit: for Religious men, who have renounced their possessions and hopes in the world for the love of Christ, that they might follow Him as closely as possible; and who in religion itself have been long cultivated by years in letters, in morals, and in the meditation of divine things, and have learned, like Noah and Enoch, to walk with God: true Religious, I say, who, being bound and joined to God, and seeking not their own gains but those things which are of Jesus Christ, are select and most fitting instruments of God for converting, directing, perfecting, and saving souls, as the manifold experience both of this age and of preceding ages has taught and teaches. And this is the reason which impels Your Most Illustrious Lordship to love, defend, and promote tenderly this our novitiate and the whole Society, which was raised up by God in this age to oppose Luther and Calvin, to convert the Indians, the Japanese, and the Chinese, and to rouse languishing Christians and Clergy.
May the divine Goodness preserve Your Most Illustrious Lordship safe for many years for us, for Belgium, and for His Church, and clothe you with new virtue from on high, that your old age — nay, your youth — may be renewed like the eagle's, and that as an emulator of Blessed Borromeo and St. Ambrose you may fully and perfectly express Paul to us, and may you become a great Pastor and Doctor of many peoples subject to Your Most Illustrious Lordship by both Episcopal and Archiepiscopal right; and finally, when that supreme Prince of Pastors shall have appeared, may you receive from Him the unfading crown of glory. Amen. Louvain, from our College, in the year of the Lord 1614, on the very feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.
OF YOUR MOST ILLUSTRIOUS LORDSHIP
Servant in Christ
CORNELIUS CORNELII of the Society of Jesus.
Approbations
Faculty of the Provincial.
Carolus Scribani, Provincial Superior of the Society of Jesus for the Flandro-Belgian Province.
Since four Theologians of our Society, to whom this had been entrusted, have reviewed Father Cornelius a Lapide's Commentary on all the Epistles of St. Paul, and have approved that it can be brought to light: by the power granted to me by the Most Reverend Father N. Claudio Aquaviva, Superior General of our Society, I grant to the heirs of Martin Nutius the faculty of committing it to print. In witness of which I have given these letters, signed by my own hand and fortified with the seal of office, at Antwerp, March 21, in the year 1614.
CAROLUS SCRIBANI.
Approbation of the Censor.
These Commentaries on all the Epistles of St. Paul, by the Reverend Father Cornelius Cornelii, Priest of the Society of Jesus, are learned and pious, and worthy to be handled by the hands of students. Wherefore I judge it most useful that they be brought before the public. To which I bear witness on January 14, in the year 1613.
EGBERTUS SPITHOLDIUS, Licentiate in Sacred Theology, Canon and Pastor of Antwerp, Censor of books.
Proemium on the Prerogatives of Saint Paul
Eight outstanding gifts and prerogatives are to be considered and admired in St. Paul. The first is his illustrious nature and disposition; the second is his wonderful calling and grace; the third is his rare wisdom; the fourth, his heroic virtues; the fifth, his effectiveness and fruit in evangelizing; the sixth, his glorious martyrdom; the seventh, his miracles; the eighth, his fame and glory.
Chapter I: On Paul's Lineage and Disposition
As to the first, Paul was born of a noble Jewish family, of the tribe of Benjamin. St. Jerome, in his book On Ecclesiastical Writers, chapter 15, seems to relate that Paul was born at Gischala, a town of Judea; and that when it was captured by the Romans, he migrated with his parents to Tarsus in Cilicia. But the same St. Jerome, in his Letter to Philemon, calls this tradition a fable, and a fable it truly is. For it is certain that Paul was born not at Gischala but at Tarsus. For he himself affirms this in Acts xxii: "I," he says, "am a Jewish man, born in Tarsus of Cilicia."
Furthermore, Tarsus was the metropolis of Cilicia, and had obtained municipal rights from the Romans, so that the Tarsians were reckoned as Roman citizens and enjoyed the privileges of Roman citizens. Hence Paul, in Acts xvi, 37 and xxii, 25, proclaims that he is a Roman citizen: "Is it lawful," he says, "for you to scourge a Roman man, and uncondemned?" And when the Tribune said: "I obtained this citizenship at a great sum," or, as the Greek has it, politeian, "civitas"; Paul replied: "But I was born so." The Tarsians obtained this right of Roman citizenship from Julius Caesar and from Augustus, because they had vigorously aided the parties of both in the civil wars. Hence Tarsus was also called Juliopolis, as Dio Cassius testifies in book XLVII.
For this reason Paul was liberally and nobly educated, and was outstandingly trained in Greek letters and the liberal disciplines: for the schools of these flourished at Tarsus, and the Tarsians were so devoted to them that, according to Strabo, book XIV, they surpassed Athens and Alexandria in these studies; so much so that even Rome itself abounded in lettered men from Tarsus. Paul therefore, having been thoroughly imbued with the sciences of the Gentiles at Tarsus, then, because he was a Jew by birth, set out for Jerusalem, the metropolis of the Jews, to be educated in the sacred disciplines by Gamaliel. "I," he himself says in Acts xxii, "was brought up in this city, taught at the feet of Gamaliel according to the truth of the law of the fathers, zealous for the law, as also all of you are this day."
He made such progress in these studies that Tertullian, in book V Against Marcion, near the end, does not hesitate to assert that no one knew the marrow of the Scriptures more than St. Paul. Hear also St. Jerome to Paulinus: "Why," he says, "is Paul called the vessel of election? Surely because he was the armory of the Law and the Holy Scriptures."
Paul was moreover a Pharisee, which was the noblest and most distinguished sect among the Jews. For he himself says in Acts xxvi, 5: "According to the most certain" — in Greek akribestaten, that is, most diligent, most exact, most religious — "sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee."
Now indeed his outstanding, magnanimous, and heroic disposition shines forth in his ardent zeal and combat on behalf of Judaism, in which, though mistakenly and thinking he was rendering service to God, he, while still a young man, made himself a leader to the Jews in persecuting and extirpating the Christians.
"Saul," says Luke in Acts viii, "was laying waste the Church, entering houses, and dragging away men and women, delivered them to custody." And in chapter ix, 4: "Saul, still breathing out threats and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, came to the high priest, and asked of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he should find any men and women of this Way, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem." But Paul himself speaks more clearly in Galatians chapter i, verse 13: "Beyond measure," he says, "I persecuted the Church of God, and was destroying it, and advanced in Judaism above many of my contemporaries in my own nation, being more abundantly zealous for the traditions of my fathers."
Surely the prophecy of Jacob in Genesis xlix was mystically fulfilled in Paul: "Benjamin a ravening wolf, in the morning shall devour the prey, and in the evening shall divide the spoil." St. Augustine speaks excellently in book XXII Against Faustus, chapter 70: "Souls," he says, "capable and fertile of virtue often send vices ahead, by which they indicate to which virtue they are most especially suited, if they be cultivated by precepts. Thus Moses, slaying the Egyptian, gave forth signs that were vicious indeed, but of great fertility: so also Paul's savagery was a wild vice, but it was an indication of great fertility."
For who afterwards equaled the spirit and the fires of Paul in propagating the Gospel throughout the whole world? Who endured more labors? Who suffered more imprisonments? Who endured greater crosses and stripes? Who was so undaunted in dangers? Who was so bold and lofty in difficult undertakings? Who dared, I will not say to undertake, but even to think, such great things as Paul undertook, accomplished, and completed?
Chapter II: On the Wonderful Calling and Grace of Saint Paul
Secondly, Paul's illustrious calling and grace shine forth especially in this, that he himself was called from heaven by the immortal and glorious Christ, while the other Apostles were called by the mortal Christ on earth. Again, in that Christ entered into a kind of duel with Paul, and threw him to the ground in the very midst of his persecution, vanquished him, and subdued him though he was burning with hatred of Him. For when Christ had cried out to him: "Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute Me?" He at once replied: "Who art Thou, Lord?" Again Christ: "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the goad." To Whom he immediately surrendering said: "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" How vigorous this contest of Christ with Paul! how powerful the calling! how efficacious the grace, which in a moment made Paul's heart, hostile to Him, subject to Him, friendly and obedient; which transformed Saul into Paul, the wolf into a lamb, the persecutor into a preacher, the Jew into an Apostle! And what kind and how great an Apostle, hear: "This is for Me a vessel of election (a chosen instrument and organ), that he should bear My name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel. For I will show him how great things he must suffer for My name's sake."
St. Ambrose, Basil, Aristotle, Pliny and others marvel at the echeneis or remora, a tiny fish, which, by no labor of its own, neither by holding back, nor by laying hands on, nor by any other means than by clinging to them, holds back and stops the vastest masses of ships, agitated even by the strongest blasts of winds. Various authors variously divine the cause and manner of its stopping these ships. Some think it happens because the echeneis impresses on the ship some quality which slows down its motion, however swift; others, that by clinging it holds it back through a virtue innate to itself, just as a man with his hand holds back a stone from falling; others, that it first stops itself and clings immovably to its place and space, so that by no force, even though a ship is propelling it, can it be moved from there, and consequently neither can the ship to which it clings and to which it has fastened itself.
How much more wonderful was it that in Paul, God stayed a man rushing headlong into the abyss in the whirlwinds of concupiscence? — that He restrained his loves and passions, indeed turned them into their opposite? — that He drew him to Christ, whom he had hated most bitterly, and united and bound him to Christ?
Marveling at this his calling and grace, Paul says in 1 Timothy i, 15: "Faithful is the saying and worthy of all acceptance: that Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the first. But for this reason I obtained mercy, that in me first Christ Jesus might show forth all patience, for the instruction of those who shall believe in Him unto life eternal." What penitent will not hope for pardon and grace, when he sees Saul, the blasphemer and persecutor of Christ, received by Him into grace and intimate friendship?
Now truly how great was the grace of Christ, by which He made Paul the doctor of the Gentiles and the teacher of the world? "To me," he himself says, Ephesians chapter iii, 8, "the least of all the saints, this grace is given, to evangelize among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to enlighten all men what is the dispensation of the mystery hidden from the ages in God." And 1 Timothy chapter ii, verse 7: "Whereunto I am appointed a preacher and an Apostle (I speak the truth, I lie not), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth." That flatterer said: "Caesar holds an empire divided with Jove." We can truly say that Christ has divided with Paul, not the empire, but His titles and offices: for Christ is the Redeemer and Doctor of the world; Paul is the herald and doctor of the world and of all the nations.
And how vigorously did Paul cooperate with this grace? With what fidelity did he discharge the office committed to him? How diligent, ardent, and tireless a herald did he show himself to all the Gentiles? Let him say himself, Romans xi, 13: "As long as I am the Apostle of the Gentiles, I will honor my ministry," — I will adorn the Sparta I have obtained; and 1 Corinthians chapter xv, verse 10: "By the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace in me has not been void; but I have labored more abundantly than all they: yet not I, but the grace of God with me."
Furthermore, how many labors he generously bore for the cause of the Gospel and the Gentiles, how many dangers he undauntedly faced, how many mockeries, hardships, blows, and scourges he eagerly endured, he himself recounts in 1 Corinthians chapter iv, verse 9: "We are made," he says, "a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men: we are fools for Christ's sake, until this very hour we both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and we are unstable (akatastatoumen, we wander and run about in uncertain places and dwellings), and we labor working with our own hands: we are reviled, and we bless; we suffer persecution, and we endure; we are blasphemed, and we entreat; we have been made as the refuse of this world, the offscouring of all even until now."
But the noble athlete of Christ weaves, or rather summarizes, the catalogue and series of his labors and sufferings more abundantly, more fully, and more vigorously in 2 Corinthians xi, 23: "In very many labors," he says, "in prisons more abundantly, in stripes beyond measure, in deaths often. From the Jews five times I received forty stripes save one. Thrice I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea: in journeys often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils from my own nation, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils from false brethren: in labor and painfulness, in much watching, in hunger and thirst, in much fasting, in cold and nakedness."
Chapter III: On Paul's Rare Wisdom
Thirdly, Paul's exceptional wisdom is conspicuous everywhere in his epistles. For they contain the marrow of the Christian faith and religion. Indeed, on grace, on predestination; on Christ's redemption and the whole economy of His incarnation, on marriage and the rights of spouses, on celibacy, on the Venerable Sacrament and Sacrifice, on the nine orders of angels, on the offices of Bishops, Priests, Deacons and the whole hierarchical order, no one has discoursed so plainly, weightily, exactly, and wisely as Paul.
I pass over his natural and Greek learning, in which, as I said, he was outstandingly trained at Tarsus, and which even the pagans admired: so much so that, as St. Chrysostom relates in homily 3 on 1 Corinthians, it was disputed among the pagans whether Paul should be preferred to Plato, whose gravity and subtlety of doctrine they especially revere.
Worthy of remembrance is what Clement of Alexandria writes about St. Paul in book VI of the Stromata, in these words: "As God willed the Jews to be saved by giving them Prophets, so also He set apart from the common people the most distinguished of the Greeks, those skilled in their own language, that they might receive God's beneficence as far as they were able. Besides Peter's preaching, the Apostle Paul declared, saying: Take up also the Greek books, recognize the Sibyl, how she signifies one God, and the things which are to come: take up Hydaspes, and read, and you will find the Son of God written much more clearly and openly, and how many kings would draw up battle-line against Christ, hating Him, and those who bear His name, and His faithful ones, and His coming, and His patient endurance." This Clement set down, transmitted to posterity by hand, not from St. Paul's epistles but from his sermons: from which you may learn how greatly the ancients and St. Paul esteemed the Sibylline Oracles. So Baronius in the Apparatus to the Annals.
Let us behold his Christian and divine wisdom: whose excellence and depth he himself sufficiently intimates, when in Galatians i he asserts that he received and learned the Gospel not from man, but through the revelation of Jesus Christ. Again, in 2 Corinthians xii, he asserts that he was caught up into the third and highest heaven of the Blessed, namely into paradise, and there heard secret words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter, which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man. Those things are sublime and heavenly, ineffable, indeed incomprehensible to man. "Three things," says the Wise Man, "are difficult for me: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent upon the earth, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea." Who can even with his eyes follow this eagle, Paul, soaring most swiftly into heaven? Paul therefore was trained not in an earthly but in a heavenly school, and there was as it were created and consecrated as master of the Gospel and doctor of the world.
Moses, after conversing with the Lord on Sinai and receiving from Him the tablets of the law, came forth from there as a new and heavenly lawgiver to the people: but Paul, not from Sinai but from heaven, as a Prophet, indeed as a heaven-pointing angel, descended to earth, that he might unfold the mysteries of the Gospel law to the whole world, and pour forth the mysteries kept silent through eternal ages and hidden from the foundation of the world. Therefore Origen affirms that there have been some who believed Paul to be the Spirit of truth sent from the Father, whom Christ had promised to His disciples, saying, John xv: "I will ask the Father, and He shall give you another Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive: He shall teach you all things, and shall bring to your mind whatsoever I shall have said to you."
More truly and more solidly St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul's offspring and heir, in chapter vii of On the Divine Names, points to Paul as our common sun; and elsewhere, points to him as the abyss of wisdom, and glories that he received from him the deepest mysteries and likewise his Ecclesiastical and Celestial Hierarchy. Hear St. Chrysostom, homily 4 On the Praises of St. Paul: "Paul," he says, "the archetype of good men, to whom God granted all preaching, the affairs of the world, all mysteries and the whole dispensation. He himself having the sun of justice as his heaven, he himself the purest and deepest sea of wisdom." Hear St. Jerome, letter 61 to Pammachius: "Paul," he says, "the vessel of election, the trumpet of the Gospel, the roar of our Lion, the river of Christian eloquence, who marvels more than he speaks at the mystery unknown to former generations, and the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God: whom as often as I read, I seem to myself to hear not words, but thunders."
I say further: Paul was the teacher of Peter, the teacher of the Apostles, indeed the teacher of the Angels. To pass over other things, Paul with outstanding wisdom, confidence, and constancy reproved, recalled, and corrected Peter when he was deviating from the right path of Christian liberty and somewhat inclining toward Judaism. "When Cephas came to Antioch," he himself says in Galatians ii, "I withstood him to the face, because he was reprehensible. And when I saw that he walked not uprightly unto the truth of the Gospel, I said to Cephas before them all: If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles, and not as the Jews do, how dost thou compel the Gentiles to live as the Jews?" Again, that great mystery of the calling of the Gentiles to the faith and to Christ he himself was the first to know fully soon after his conversion, as one elected and declared by God to be the doctor of the Gentiles, Acts ix, 13: he himself instructed the Apostles, the Church, the angels. Let him speak himself, or rather let the Holy Spirit speak through him, Ephesians iii: "As you may, by reading, understand my prudence in the mystery of Christ: to me, the least of all the saints, is given this grace, to preach among the Gentiles; that the manifold wisdom of God may be made known to the principalities and powers in heavenly places through the Church (namely through me, the doctor of the Church), according to the preordination of the ages which He made in Christ Jesus our Lord."
No one will now wonder that St. Chrysostom, in the preface to the Epistle to the Romans, proclaims that all laymen, even artisans and merchants, ought to read Paul again and again. "And if anyone is not allowed to do so because of business," he says, "let him at least listen to me diligently expounding and explaining Paul": for which reason the commentaries on Paul which Chrysostom left us were homilies of the same delivered to the People. Indeed Chrysostom himself, as George, Patriarch of Alexandria, relates in his Life, never let Paul slip from his hands, but read him assiduously, and held his wisdom as a kind of miracle.
Now Paul, the scourge of heretics, by his wisdom and sharpness destroys and transfixes all the errors of the Innovators of every age. St. Augustine is our authority that, in book VII of his Confessions, chapter 21, at the beginning of his conversion he most eagerly read the Sacred Scripture and, above the others, the Apostle Paul, with immense fruit; nay more, the same Augustine confesses that he was clearly converted by reading Paul, as we shall presently hear from him. And this was the reason why the early heretics proscribed Paul and Paul's epistles. These were of three kinds. The first repudiated all of Paul's epistles and cut them off from the canon of Sacred Scripture. The parent and leader of these, according to Irenaeus, book I, chapter 26, and Eusebius, book III of his History, chapter 27, was the witless Ebion (for so St. Ignatius truly puns on him: for Ebion in Hebrew means "poor" and "needy"), who in Judaizing fashion called the Apostle Paul, as it were an enemy of his law, an Apostate and a Greek, by way of utmost insult. Eusebius, book VI, chapter 27, is our authority that the Helcesaites followed Paul as their leader and into his error.
The second kind did not indeed reject all of Paul's epistles, but only some which they saw to be hostile to their dogmas, scraping them out from the sacred catalogue in the manner, temperament, and arrogance customary to heretics. These were the Encratites, the Severians, the Marcionites, the Manichaeans, the Arians, the Aetians: namely, the Encratites and Marcionites removed both Epistles to Timothy and the one to Titus, while others removed others.
The third kind received all of Paul's epistles, but asserted that many things in them were written not at the dictation of the Holy Spirit, but by human temperament and reason: such as the Epistle to Philemon, and likewise those things which Paul could know and write naturally and from familiar acquaintance. So judged that anonymous writer, the disciple of Fabricius, against whom St. Augustine published two books under the name of "the adversary of the Law and the Prophets." Erasmus also alluded to this when, in chapters ii and xxvii of Matthew, he asserts that the sacred writers occasionally lapsed in memory and admitted certain slight errors. Others, finally, dreamed up that these epistles had occasionally been corrupted and depraved by some forger.
For this or a like cause Marcion, according to Epiphanius, heresy 42, in the rest of the epistles which he himself admitted, wiped out and expunged with his polished and dainty sponge whatever seemed to him, and whatever did not please his palate and his eyes, as though spurious.
But the truth and authority of St. Paul soon dispersed and dissipated all these mists; so much so that these heresies, with their authors, are now obsolete and dead, fit rather for fanatics or shadows than for men. Therefore I will not delay in refuting them; whoever wishes may consult Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Peter of Cluny in his first letter Against the Henricians and Petrobrusians, and Sixtus of Siena, book VII of his Library, chapter 7. Only this is worthy of notice here, that those ancient heretics, though they rejected these epistles, yet ascribed them to Paul. Therefore the common consensus of all the Orthodox of old was, and is, that all these epistles, except the one to the Hebrews, about which some at one time doubted (as I shall say in its place), are canonical, full of Apostolic majesty and spirit: nay, our Sectaries praise, venerate, and boast of these Pauline epistles above the other books of Sacred Scripture. But these too dash against another stone. For while they do not pay attention to when, against whom, and for what cause Paul again and again so sharply rises up, they wander from Paul's mind and meaning: for just as one who too sharply pursues some error or vice seems to decline and dash into the opposite and another extreme; so Paul, while disputing against the Jews and Gentiles of his time and lifting up and tearing down the works and ceremonies of the law and nature, while inculcating the faith and grace of Christ, seems to the unskilled to abolish free will and good and meritorious works, and to ascribe and assign salvation and justice to faith alone. Surely, the unskilled and the foolish, while they flee vices, run into their opposites. In this way that Philip — truly Melancholy-thon — in place of Paul, in his Augustana Confession — or rather Confusion — repeatedly cites St. Paul as his witness; and one would have to say that this profane man was outstandingly versed in his epistles. For they all use and abuse Paul's statements for their own heresies, and perpetually contend with the Orthodox, indeed among themselves, about their sense and meaning.
Luther stupidly and arrogantly extols Melanchthon's commentaries on St. Paul. Luther made this haughty pronouncement: "I truly attribute to you, my Melanchthon, that no one has written better than you on St. Paul. I know with what judgment and spirit I make this pronouncement about you: Jerome's and Origen's commentaries are mere trifles and absurdities if compared with yours." What sort of arrogance is this? Surely as the saying goes, "either Plato Philonizes, or Philo Platonizes" — that is, by passion Luther philippizes, because Philip lutherizes. So Luther truly spoke according to his own mind: "No one wrote better" — namely to Luther's palate and sense, no one better, that is, more in Luther's manner — "on St. Paul than Melanchthon." Jerome, Origen and the other Fathers, because they were anti-Lutheran, therefore wrote very badly according to Luther: for by their writings they fix, destroy, and overturn Luther's new faith and its bad-news (cacangelion).
Calvin, the hatred of God and of men, everywhere produces Paul and St. Augustine as witnesses for his bald (calva) faith, destitute of good works, for [his denial of] free will, for the fate of reprobation, predestination, of virtues and sins, for the justice of Christ imputed to us, for concupiscence as guilt and other like opinions of his — he cries that they stand on his side, and praises them as if they were the authors of his heresies. But the wanderer is mistaken, the imposter is mistaken, as I shall show in their respective places. And so that you may recognize the lion from his claw and see how he and other Innovators reason wrongly, and what kind of sophisms they weave from Paul: take one out of many, their common and frequent sophism, indeed manifest fraud. They are accustomed to infer a universal proposition from an indefinite proposition of Paul; to conclude the whole from one part; to infer a universal negative from an indefinite affirmative, e.g.: "Faith," they say, "with Paul as witness, faith alone justifies; therefore works do not justify, therefore nothing other than faith justifies"; which is just as if by such reasoning they were to conclude: "Bread nourishes man, therefore meat or fish does not nourish man"; "Man lives by breathing, therefore he does not live by food"; "Man is an animal, therefore a lion is not an animal."
Take another: Paul is often obscure and difficult; the Innovators abuse this, and with his obscurity, as with hiding-places, they veil and conceal their errors; and they strive from Paul's obscure statement to demonstrate their own equally obscure and abstruse dogmas. But here they undo themselves. For here they are convicted, even by their own confession, and forced to admit, that Paul and Sacred Scripture are not clear and perspicuous, and consequently cannot be a judge to decide, untangle, and determine the controversies of the faith. For a judge who delivers an obscure and ambiguous sentence, which each of the contending parties can claim and attribute to themselves, does not decide the case, does not determine it, does not adjudicate the cause to either party. Therefore the strife in faith and religion among heretics is endless, "a war without truce" (kai aspondos polemos). For they all use and abuse Pauline statements for their own heresies, and perpetually contend with the Orthodox, indeed among themselves, about their sense and meaning.
The matter will become clear by an example not obscure but clear: St. Paul asserts that Christ at the institution of the Eucharist said: "This is My body, this is My blood." The Evangelists all said the same in the same words, who recounted Christ's last supper. Calvin and Calvin's followers twist Christ's clear, simple, historical, testamentary words of His last will to a figure and trope, and want the meaning to be: "This is the figure of My body and blood." What are you doing? You are putting out the eyes — of the crows, I mean, of yourselves. You appeal to Scripture against the Orthodox; you call upon it as a sure and clear judge; through it you exclude all the tradition of the Fathers and the Church. We bring forth Scripture; the words of Scripture are clear and plain: "This is My body, this is My blood." We embrace the plain and clear sense of the words; you decline from it; nay, by your own exposition you invert and overturn the very words, because instead of "body" you substitute "figure and shadow of the body": by what right? by what good faith? By the same right and method it will be permissible to undermine all wills, all books, all histories, all faith.
Scripture asserts that Christ was born, suffered, and was crucified: with the same liberty as you use, Manichaeus will explain that Christ was born, suffered, and was crucified — not truly, but only by figure, semblance, and appearance. Scripture asserts that the Son is God: in your manner Arius will explain that the Son is God, not properly, but tropically by metonymy, namely that He is God, that is, He is a divine man. Scripture asserts that we are to be baptized in the faith of the Most Holy Trinity, of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: in your spirit Sabellius will explain that these three signify a Trinity, not of persons, but only of names, and of powers of one and the same divine person. If you make such a clamor against us in a passage so plain and clear, if you contend with us about so open a sense, what will you do in passages plainly obscure and complicated?
What? You yourselves in this and other passages of Paul most fiercely fight among yourselves about Paul's mind: who will settle these disputes? who will sit as judge here? who as arbiter? Surely, unless the venerable antiquity of all ages defines the cause, unless the ancient faith of our forefathers and the Fathers shows the hoary truth, unless the Church — which is the pillar and ground of truth (for Sacred Scripture and its meaning has been entrusted to the Church by Christ, that she may be its custodian and teacher) — be heard: there will be no one until the day of judgment to resolve and end these disputes. Who would believe that Christ the Lord so badly counseled and provided for the Church, and every other commonwealth of men should have its own judges who may decide and determine whatever disputes arise. The most illustrious Cardinal Bellarmine recounts a great many such things in his work Controversies, which is truly a panoply of right faith and a work worthy of eternal remembrance. St. Peter foresaw and forewarned of this in his Second Epistle, chapter III: "Our most beloved brother Paul," he says, "according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles: in which there are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction."
Moreover, that Paul belonged to no Calvinist nor Lutheran, but to the Catholic and Roman religion and faith — no one who reads him can be in doubt. For Paul affirms that he himself was celibate, praises celibacy, urges virginity; he glories in the cross, in fastings, in vigils; he chastises his body; he fears to become reprobate; he commends the merits of good works, and asserts that God will give them the crown of righteousness; he condemns those who violate the faith pledged to God — vows, I mean; he teaches that men have free will, and exhorts and commands them, as free, to acts of humility, obedience, charity, etc.; he teaches that man is the author of his own sin and damnation, and treasures up wrath for himself — not God, who wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, etc. These things Paul speaks, these things he writes. Which side teaches them — the Catholics and Romans, or the Calvinists and Lutherans? I appeal to your faith, your judgment, your conscience, O reader.
I know, you will say: the Catholics, not the Calvinists, nor the Lutherans — who have no celibates, no virgins, who want all to be married, who shrink from fasts and penances, who pamper the body, who by a divine and special faith each believe themselves predestined and to be saved, who execrate the merits of works, who are vow-breakers and welcome and praise vow-breakers, who teach that men lack free will, that God is the author of all human works, both good and evil, and consequently of each one's damnation as well as salvation; that faith alone covers sins, justifies, saves, etc. What concord, then, has Christ with Belial, light with darkness, Paul with Calvin?
But, leaving the heretics aside, let us return to our Orthodox ocean. Paul, as I have said, is an ocean and an abyss as much of wisdom as of zeal and divine spirit, and both these things he belches forth and rolls together so confusedly and in such a heap, that he seems unable to contain himself or to express his own force; and just as our cannon, heavy with nitrous and sulphurous powder, when it is ignited, hurl forth huge balls of iron, brass, and stone like thunderbolts, with flames bursting out, with a horrid roar and rolling clouds of smoke; so Paul's kindled breast, pregnant and swollen alike with wisdom and spirit, when it strives to put forth and shoot out the dense flames of both, vomits and rolls together flashes glittering as through smoke, and frequent thunders of words and sentences, and for this reason not seldom pours a cloud over the mind of his hearers and readers, which afterwards, if it is illuminated and made clear by a teacher, blazes up into a great fire of doctrine and of charity.
"My preaching," he himself says in 1 Corinthians 2, "was not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith might not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. We speak wisdom among the perfect; yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, who are brought to nought; but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the wisdom which has been hidden, which God predestined before the ages unto our glory, which none of the princes of this world has known."
The Apostle therefore, swollen with thought and matter, does not pay equal regard to words and syntax, but mixes much together, inserts, breaks off, mutilates, divides, absorbs. Hence he has frequent aposiopeses, broken sentences, hyperbata, anantapodota, and tropes of that kind, which the reader or interpreter must supply or set in order. I say nothing of his Greek and Hebrew phrases: for Paul, as he was a Hebrew, so abounds in Hebraisms. And this is one among other causes of the obscurity of these epistles, by which St. Augustine, though a man of such great genius and learning, was held back and turned away. Once he had begun a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, but soon recoiled from it: "I had begun," says St. Augustine, in book I of the Retractations, chapter 25, "a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans; but since, if it were completed, there would have been many books, and being deterred by the labor and magnitude of the work itself, I turned aside to other easier matters." But St. Chrysostom, the great admirer of Paul, his interpreter and follower — whom afterward Theophylact, Photius, Oecumenius, Euthymius, and others followed — and who in this commentary will likewise be our chief torch-bearer above the others: Chrysostom, I say, whose praise in expounding the Pauline epistles is most established, attempted this with greater success, not by his own light, but by Paul's light and instruction.
For while he was dictating these his commentaries on Paul, a certain venerable man, in the likeness and habit of St. Paul, was seen to stand by him, who suggested into his ear the things he was writing. An eyewitness of this matter is Proclus, who was afterwards made Bishop of Constantinople, in the Life of St. Chrysostom by Leo the Augustus. Whence also Damascene, in his first oration On Images, testifies that St. Chrysostom had always in his study an image of St. Paul, and often turned his eyes and his mind toward it.
Finally, Eusebius weightily and truly, in book III of his History, chapter 24: "Paul," he says, "who among the other Apostles seems also more learned in words and most powerful in thought, has left no more than a small body of his epistles, which nevertheless contains within itself immense and innumerable mysteries: as one who, caught up to the third heaven, had inspected what was being done there, and being likewise carried into that paradise worthy of God, had seen there unspeakable words, and the teaching, for he had received them, having in the meantime been made a disciple of His school."
Chapter IV: On the Virtues of Saint Paul
Fourthly, Paul was an illustrious mirror and exemplar of all virtues: for he had to teach all the Gentiles scattered throughout the whole world to practice them exactly, not so much by words as by deeds: for the teaching of virtues by words is long and feeble, but by facts and examples it is short and effective. The Gentile philosophers also saw this. Whence Epictetus, in chapter 29 of his Enchiridion: "Never," he says, "profess yourself a philosopher, nor among the unlearned discuss precepts at length, as at a banquet, nor say in what manner one should eat, but eat as is fitting. For neither do sheep bring hay to the shepherds, but having digested their pasture inwardly, produce wool outwardly. So you also, do not display words to the unlearned, but works that follow upon the digestion of words."
Paul therefore, the most skilled master of Christian virtue and perfection, taught and expressed it more by his life and deeds than by speech. Whence in 2 Corinthians 6:4: "Let us exhibit (in Greek συνιστάντες ἑαυτούς, that is, commending, that is, we commend) ourselves as ministers of God, in much patience, in tribulations, in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in labors, in watchings, in fastings, in chastity, in knowledge, in long-suffering, in sweetness, in the Holy Spirit, in unfeigned charity, in the word of truth, in the power of God, through the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left." "Paul," says Chrysostom, "was the threshing-floor of all the virtues; so much so that even if anyone should weigh against him the entire choir of the just one by one, he would find the scale of the virtues depressed on Paul's side as the heavier."
Moreover, he has so brightly planted and set forth these virtues in these epistles, as in a certain garden of delights, that, if not from elsewhere, you would certainly recognize and admire Paul from his writings; nay, you would even feel them within yourself. For just as those who walk for a long time in the sun procure for themselves both warmth and color from it, even without knowing or noticing it; so it cannot happen that one who handles Paul not casually and as a side matter, but carefully and diligently, should not be inspired with Paul's mind and spirit. Come then, if you please, let us walk through this paradise of delights, and pluck a flower and a fruit here and there.
Do you wish the violet of humility? "I," he says, "am the least of the Apostles, who am not worthy to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. Last of all, as to one born out of due time, Christ also appeared to me. To me, the least of all the saints, has this grace been given. I was a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and contumelious."
Do you wish the myrrh of penitence? "Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the first. I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection, lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway. We ourselves also were once foolish, unbelieving, erring, slaves to desires and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness and humanity of God our Savior appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy, He saved us."
Do you wish the walnut of temperance? "To this very hour we hunger and thirst." Baronius, in the year of Christ 36, and others, hold that Paul was abstemious and never drank wine. This can also be inferred from the fact that Timothy, Paul's disciple, was abstemious — surely from Paul's instruction, example, and discipline. "Do not still drink water," he himself says in 1 Timothy 5:23, "but use a little wine, on account of your stomach and your frequent infirmities." The same thing is gathered from the Nazarite vow which Paul made, that he might satisfy the Jews, in Acts 21, and immediately fulfilled on the following day. But how could he have fulfilled it on the following day and been purified in the Temple, unless he had already by his customary practice abstained from wine (which belonged properly to this rite and to the Nazariteship, as Josephus testifies in Wars, book II, chapter 15)? Otherwise this would have been not religion but rather a kind of mockery of the Law, and a feigning of pretended sanctity, and like a stage-play, and in an actual deed an affected lie, all of which are utterly unworthy not only of so great an Apostle, but of any Christian whatsoever.
Do you wish the lilies of chastity? "I am jealous over you with the jealousy of God. For I have espoused you to one husband, that I might present you a chaste virgin to Christ." Again: "Concerning virgins, I have no commandment of the Lord; but I give counsel, as having obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful. For I think this to be good, on account of the impending necessity. I would that all men were as myself." Whence it is clear that Paul lived not a married, but a celibate life, as is the common opinion and consensus of the Fathers and the Orthodox.
Do you wish the palm of contempt for the world, for human praise and reproach? "If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you, or by man's day; but neither do I judge mine own self: but He that judges me is the Lord."
Do you wish the amaranth of the cross? "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world. Let no one trouble me: for I bear the marks of our Lord Jesus Christ in my body."
Do you wish the thorny rose of the love of Christ? "I live, yet not I; but Christ lives in me; for me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain." For this reason also he often repeats and rings out the name of Jesus or Christ in nearly every period; inasmuch as he had engraved it upon his heart in letters more enduring than adamant. Truly, if to any of the Saints, then certainly to Paul, Jesus was honey on the mouth, melody in the ear, jubilation in the heart. How constant Paul's converse was everywhere with Christ, St. Chrysostom teaches in homily 55 on Matthew, chapter 16: "Paul," he says, "while he was on earth, where the Seraphim are, there he conversed, standing closer to Christ than these spearmen and bodyguards stand to a king: for these turn their gaze hither and thither, but he, moved by no appearance of things, ever directed the whole keenness of his mind to the King (Christ)."
Do you wish the hyacinth of heavenly thoughts and desires? "Brethren, you are now no longer strangers and foreigners; but you are fellow-citizens with the Saints and of the household of God. We have not here a lasting city, but we seek one to come. Our conversation is in heaven: from whence also we look for the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, who will reform the body of our lowliness, fashioned to the body of His glory." And indeed everything in these epistles breathes heavenly minds and fires. Nor does Paul in them anywhere do anything else than teach all men to despise earthly things, to calm the storms of concupiscence, to extinguish the flowing and base, yet inflamed loves of the flesh, to call the mind back to heavenly things and to God, and to unite and join it to Him.
Do you wish the heliotrope of gratitude, prayer, and devotion? Ephesians 1: "Blessed," he says, "be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ: as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and unspotted in His sight in charity. Who has predestined us unto the adoption of sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself, according to the purpose of His will, unto the praise of the glory of His grace, in which He has graced us in His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of His grace which has superabounded in us, in all wisdom and prudence: that He might make known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Him, in the dispensation of the fullness of times, to gather together in one all things in Christ, both that are in heaven and on earth, in Him. In whom we also are called by lot, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will: that we may be unto the praise of His glory, we who first hoped in Christ." Behold what whirlpools, what rivers of thanks and praises he rolls and revolves, belches forth and pours back into God, the fount of all things.
Do you wish (to pass over other things) the pomegranate of charity? This indeed, so blooming in Paul, so fragrant, so blushing with crimson, wonderfully allures. Take and taste. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation? or distress? or famine? or nakedness? or peril? or persecution? or sword? As it is written: 'For Your sake we are put to death all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.' But in all these things we overcome on account of Him who loved us. I am sure (πέπεισμαι, I am firmly persuaded, it is fixed and certain to me) that neither death (threatened), nor life (promised), nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth (neither heaven nor hell), nor any other creature (that could be or be imagined), shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
And lest you suppose these to be only the idle and empty wishes of a lover, or the words of a flatterer, hear the words of charity's efficacy. Armed with this charity, Paul, says Chrysostom, esteemed Nero and all the tyrants as so many gnats; by this charity he reckoned labors, perils, tortures, death, a thousand torments to be as a children's game; in this charity Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ, glories more than if he had been crowned with a diadem. "I," he himself says, "in many labors, more abundantly in prisons, beyond measure in stripes, often in deaths." Nor did Paul's love stop here, but rising daily higher, and as it were incorporeal, indeed fiery toward all labors, forgetting the things behind, but stretching himself toward the things which are before, he pursued the appointed prize of the supernal calling of God in Christ Jesus: nor did he cease until, returning recompense for the divine love, he poured back and poured out his life upon Him with sweat and blood.
Let us now wonder that Paul, by the love of God, flew from East to West; let us wonder that by his charity he embraced the whole world; let us wonder that he wandered over so many lands and seas. For surely he had consecrated himself to God and to the love of Christ, and therefore he busied himself, at the cost of his sweat and blood, to offer Him all men and the whole world, and to make from men — nay, from brute beasts and demons — angels; and like a most powerful fire and wind he ran through the whole world, and in running through it, purged it. The breast of Paul was therefore the tabernacle of Christ, carrying and bearing God around throughout the whole world. St. Gregory teaches this in the Moralia, book 27, chapter 8, expounding that passage of Job 36:29, "If He will spread out the clouds as His tabernacle": "While Paul," he says, "bound in chains, was making for Rome, about to take possession of the world, God went hidden in his breast as it were beneath a tabernacle: for He could neither be seen as concealed, and being made known through the words of preaching, He pursued the journey of the grace He had begun without cessation. So therefore God went to Rome in Paul, Christ went, thence about to invade and conquer the world as it were from the head."
For He it is who makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire. "Daily," he himself says, "I am sacrificed for your glory, brethren: but if I am even offered up upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice and congratulate you all." Let me be the priest, you the victim, my blood the libation. For this reason, as a father who had begotten the whole world, he was thus disturbed, thus solicitous; thus he hastened to bring all into the kingdom of God. "My daily instance," he says, "is the solicitude for all the Churches: who is weak, and I am not weak? who is scandalized, and I am not on fire?" For this reason he became to the Jews as under the Law, to the weak as weak; he became all things to all men, that he might gain all to Christ. This love compelled him, as a mother, to change his mouth and his words, by turns coaxing, rebuking, asking, frightening, consoling, and turning himself and his own to every side. "O senseless Galatians!" he says; and at once coaxing: "My little children," he says, "of whom I am again in travail, until Christ be formed in you." And in Philippians 2: "If there is, then," he says, "any consolation in Christ, if any solace of charity, if any bowels of compassion; fulfill my joy, that you may be of the same mind, having the same charity." Behold with what charity he almost disembowels himself.
Finally, Paul, kindled with charity, busied himself with nothing else than to propagate the worship and glory of God, and to bring all to the faith and love of God. "As iron," says St. Chrysostom in homily 3 On the Praises of Paul, "cast into the fire is wholly turned to fire; so Paul, set ablaze with charity, was wholly made charity. Whence now by epistles, now by exhortations, now by prayers, now by threats, now by himself, now through his own people, with all zeal he strove to raise up the struggling, to confirm those standing, to lift up those lying on the ground, to heal the contrite, to animate the sluggish, to beat back enemies; after the manner of the best general, soldier, and physician, he alone undertook the persons and duties of all offices."
Receive from among many one living example and proof of this charity toward the most hostile and most troublesome enemies he had by land and sea, the Jews and the Judaizers: "I speak the truth in Christ, I do not lie, my conscience bearing witness to me in the Holy Spirit:" do not think I use courtly speech, ambiguity, or rhetorical exaggeration; do not think I jest; I call Christ to witness, I call my conscience to witness, I call the Holy Spirit to witness, the witnesses — nay, the causes — of this my grief and love: "For I have great sorrow, and continual sorrow in my heart. For I myself was wishing to be anathema from Christ for my brethren, who are my kinsmen according to the flesh."
What are you doing, Paul? Are you not out of your mind? Are you not fighting against charity, against Christ, on behalf of the blind Jews? By no means, but for charity, against charity, into charity I struggle and strive; I was wishing and I do wish to be anathema from Christ; I wish for the love of Christ to be torn from Christ; I wish, for the salvation of the Jews — not from His love, but from the beatitude and glory of Christ, from Christ and from heaven, even forever, if need be — to be cast out as an exile: I plead to be anathema for them, I plead to be a head devoted to dread curses; setting aside sin and the shipwreck of charity, I plead for myself their eternal exile. I wish and pray, O Lord, that all the lightnings of Your wrath that hang over the Jews, that You may spare them, may be turned back upon my head — flash, pour out, drain dry, "On me, on me, here am I who did the deed, on me turn the steel." [Vergil, Aeneid IX.427]
Chapter V: On the Efficacy and Fruit of Saint Paul's Preaching
Fifthly, from what has been said it follows that there was in Paul an admirable efficacy in acting and in speaking, by which he could move men in any direction. For what would not so great a zeal, so kindled a charity, persuade? For if a magnet draws iron to itself, and communicates the same force to that iron, so that it may draw another piece of iron to itself; and this again another and another, as if forming a chain — as St. Augustine says, whether this happens by a force communicated to the magnet from the pole toward which it inclines; or as it were from a final cause, that the iron itself, by an internal and innate force and a natural weight, balances itself and moves toward the magnet as toward its own center; or rather, as the better-noted Philosophers everywhere hold, that this happens from a certain sympathy of iron and magnet, through an attractive power in the magnet, which impresses upon the iron the quality or force of being driven, by which it impels and draws it to itself: why should not love seize men? why should not Paul, by his burning charity, bind all men to himself and to Christ? For the magnet of love is love; the most effective philter, that you may be loved, is — to love.
When Paul was disputing before the unjust and incestuous governor Felix concerning justice, chastity, and the judgment to come, the Governor was terrified, however impious and wicked he was. Likewise also Festus: "You are mad, Paul," he says, "much learning has driven you to madness." To whom Paul: "I am not mad, most excellent Festus, but I speak the words of truth and soberness." King Agrippa finally: "In a little," he says, "you persuade me to become a Christian." To whom Paul: "I wish before God, both in little and in much, that not only you, but also all who hear today, would become such as I am, except for these chains." Hear the Lycaonians, astounded at Paul's Gospel and voice, in Acts 14: "The gods, become like men, have come down to us; and they called Paul Mercury, because he was the chief speaker;" and the priest of the Lycaonians was preparing for him, as for a god, a sacrificial victim which he would have sacrificed to him, had not Paul himself with sharp rebuke forbidden it.
What Plutarch reports in his Life concerning Cato the Elder — that he had three regrets in his whole life: first, that he had ever entrusted a secret to a woman; second, that he had gone by ship somewhere he could have gone on foot; third, that he had remained even one day intestate in this so brief, fragile, and uncertain life — this they relate of St. Augustine: that he was most especially pleased with three things, and uniquely wished and desired these three: first, to see Christ in the flesh conversing among men; second, to behold Rome in flower and triumphing in the pristine splendor of her empire; third, to hear Paul thundering from his seat and chair.
About these three wishes of St. Augustine, Ravisius, Lipsius, and many others have written. Truly, if the writings and the dead speech of Paul have such great power to move the souls of those who read and hear, what would have happened if you had heard, not Demosthenes (as Aeschines did), but Paul re-echoing his words with living voice and spirit? A single Pauline saying, when read, was able to convert Augustine; what would a whole, living speech have done? Augustine himself recounts in book VIII of the Confessions, chapter II [in fact ch. 12], the seething and inner duel of his soul, when on the one hand he was held in heresy and lust by the chains of ingrained habit and pleasure, while on the other he was drawn back by fear and the grace and inspiration of God: he heard a voice crying out, "Take, read: take, read;" the book then appeared, and, with God guiding, his eyes suddenly fell upon that passage of Paul, Romans 13: "Not in revelings and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and rivalry; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ." Struck as it were by a thunderbolt at this saying, Augustine ended his struggle, and of his own accord transferred himself from heresy to the faith, from fornication to chastity — not the marital but the religious kind, wholly celibate and untouched — and preserved it inviolate steadfastly through his whole life.
St. John Chrysostom continually pored over Paul, and from him became so great an ecclesiastic that he deserved to be called Chrysostom, that is, "golden-mouthed." Wherefore the same Chrysostom holds that no one is more to be read by the future ecclesiastic than Paul. I add that even Chrysostom himself, as the imitator of Paul, must be diligently turned over by him too. St. Dominic, the illustrious head and founder of the Order of Preachers, when he was forming his own to that office and instituting Preachers, before all things commanded that they should constantly study Sacred Scripture, and especially St. Paul. Thus the Friars sent by him to preach used to carry with them only the Bible, or only St. Paul's epistles, and from these they preached with such great spirit that they converted many to penitence: nay, Dominic himself knew thoroughly and had by heart the whole epistles of St. Paul. And, what is a rare and memorable thing, St. Paul himself appeared to St. Dominic, offering him his book for preaching; and thus he as it were consecrated him preacher and master of preachers, as the author of his Life relates in book II, chapter I.
Likewise St. Paul appeared by night to St. Thomas Aquinas, the disciple and pupil of St. Dominic and the Angelic Doctor, while he was watching and praying, and taught him, and explained that obscure passage of Isaiah which had tormented him for many days, and whose explanation he had begged from God with many fastings and prayers; this Thomas himself, asked by importunate prayers from his companion and scribe Reginald (who had noticed his unusual ease in dictating), and almost compelled, revealed. Wherefore at that very hour at which St. Thomas died in the monastery of Fossanova, Friar Paul Aquilinus, a man of distinguished probity and reputation, in a vision saw Thomas at Naples lecturing before a crowded auditorium, and St. Paul, with a great throng of Saints, entering the schools. But when St. Thomas was descending from his chair, about to go forth in honor to meet him, the Apostle bade him continue in the lecture he had begun. St. Thomas asked him whether he had rightly grasped the meaning of his Epistles. The Apostle replied: "As much, indeed, as anyone can attain in a mortal body." And he added: "But now I am about to lead you where you will be instructed in far greater knowledge and understanding." And while saying these things, he seemed to take Thomas by the garment and lead him out of the schools with him. Then Friar Paul Aquilinus began to cry out loudly: "Help, Brethren, help: behold, Friar Thomas is being taken from us." Aroused by these cries, the Friars asked him what he had seen, that he was crying out so. When he had recounted the whole vision in order, the hour was noted; and after diligent inquiry it was observed that at that very hour the holy Doctor had departed from this life. Thus, word for word, his Life records it.
Let Scholastics learn from St. Thomas to study St. Paul: thus likewise will they experience his light and aid, especially in the hour of death.
Now indeed this same preaching energy in Paul stands out the more illustrious on many other counts. First, if we look at the uncultivated fallow lands — the barbarous nations, I mean — which he was the first to subdue, instruct, cultivate, and polish by the Gospel. "So," he himself says in Romans 15, "have I preached this Gospel, not where Christ was named, that I might not build upon another's foundation, but as it is written: 'They to whom it was not told of Him, shall see, and those who have not heard, shall understand.'"
Secondly, that he most amply propagated the faith of Christ from Jerusalem all the way to Illyricum, through all the intervening provinces. "I do not dare," he says in the same place, "to speak of any of those things which Christ does not work through me unto the obedience of the Gentiles, by words and deeds, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Holy Spirit: so that from Jerusalem round about even to Illyricum I have filled up the Gospel of Christ." Thence going on from Illyricum into Italy and Spain, he traversed these and other provinces preaching the Gospel. Indeed St. Irenaeus, book III, chapter 1, expressly affirms that Paul, together with Peter, evangelized at Rome and founded the Roman Church (which is the head and mother of all the Churches).
Finally, the whole Church reverences and points out Paul as her own and the whole world's doctor, and calls him by antonomasia "the Apostle." Whence in the Collect for St. Paul she prays thus: "O God, who taught the whole world by the preaching of St. Paul the Apostle." Wherefore Chrysostom rightly admires St. Paul in homily 4 On His Praises: "For," he says, "a humble man (Paul), abject, a wandering tradesman, who plied his craft on hides, advanced so far in virtue that within scarcely thirty years' span he brought the Romans and Persians and Parthians and Medes and Indians and Scythians and Ethiopians and Sauromatae and Saracens, and absolutely the whole human race under the yoke of truth."
Thirdly, from the wisdom and vehement spirit by which Paul, inspired and inflamed, hurled forth divine fires, and breathed them upon all, even upon the powerful, princes, and wise of the world, kindling them even against their will, and snatching them up to heavenly things. "Our word," he says, "was not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power." This very thing not even Lucian could deny — Paul's contemporary, but the enemy and mocker of Paul and of Christians — who in his Philopatris thus paints and ridicules Paul: "And when that bald-headed Galilean, with the aquiline nose, who passed through the air even to the third heaven, learned thence what is best and most beautiful, renewed us through water, made us walk in the footsteps of the blessed, and redeemed us from the regions of the impious."
Blessed Cyril, in book III of the Dialogues on the Holy Trinity, calls Paul "the storehouse of Christ," from which, namely, we may bring forth any of Christ's riches and gifts. The same, in book III Against Julian, asserts that Paul was called a magician by Julian the Apostate: to whom he himself replies that Paul might thus far be called a magician, in that he wisely enchanted the Gentiles and drew them to Christ by the harmony and efficacy of his doctrine. In which sense Clement of Alexandria calls Christ the Paeonian physician and the enchanter of souls.
Of Elijah Ecclesiasticus thus writes in chapter 48: "Elijah the prophet arose as a fire, and his word burned like a torch. Who didst cast down kings to destruction, and easily breakest their power, and the glorious from their bed; who hearest the judgment in Sinai, who wast taken up in a whirlwind of fire, in a chariot of fiery horses." Such was Paul. When Elijah was about to be caught up into heaven, Elisha besought him: "I beseech you," he said, "that your double spirit may be in me." He besought, and obtained it: "And as they went on, walking and conversing, behold, a fiery chariot and fiery horses parted them both asunder, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven." But Elisha saw and cried out: "My father (whither art thou caught up? thou who art) the chariot of Israel and his charioteer." In like manner Paul, as another Elisha, of Christ the Lord, the true Elijah, ascending into heaven, seems to have obtained a double spirit. For Paul was called by Christ from heaven — nay, was caught up to heaven; and thence he returned, like fire, that his word might burn like a torch, so that to him also we may rightly cry out: "My father, chariot of the Church, and her charioteer:" you alone, as a father, embracing the whole world with the bowels of charity, with voice and soul, as a charioteer, in the chariot of your Gospel have borne it up into heaven.
Chrysostom asserts this same thing, indeed more fully, in homily 4 On the Praises of St. Paul: "Just as," he says, "when the rays of the rising sun appear, darkness is put to flight, the wild beasts hide, thieves and robbers conceal themselves; so when Paul's preaching shone forth and disseminated the Gospel, error was put to flight and truth came back; idolatry, drunkenness, revelings, debaucheries, adulteries, and other things shameful even to mention, failed and were consumed, like wax perishing in the breath of fire, and like chaff which is suddenly burned up in a blaze."
Chapter VI: On the Martyrdom of Saint Paul
Sixthly, Paul's death and martyrdom were noble on many accounts. First, that he underwent it most steadfastly under Nero Caesar, whose cruelty is celebrated in all histories. Again, that he suffered at Rome in the sight of the whole world. "Then," says Tertullian, in the Scorpiace, chapter 15, "Paul attains the birthright of Roman citizenship, when there he is reborn through the nobility of martyrdom." To this is added, that he was slain on the same year and day as Blessed Peter, the Prince of the Apostles.
Secondly, from its cause. For everywhere the ancients hand down that Peter and Paul contended at Rome with Simon Magus, and triumphed over him; and indeed by their prayers cast him down as he was flying up into heaven by the magic art, and shattered his legs, so that Nero — to whom Simon, on account of his magical illusions, was a favorite — was bespattered with his blood. Whence Suetonius, in his Life of Nero, chapter 12, narrating a spectacle exhibited by Nero in the theater, in which an "Icarus" was made to fly, says thus: "Icarus at his very first attempt fell down close to his chamber, and bespattered him with his gore." For this cause Nero, hostile toward Peter and Paul as the antagonists of his Simon, persecuted them to death.
There was another cause peculiar to Paul, which St. Chrysostom narrates in book I Against the Detractors of the Monastic Life: "Paul," he says, "having induced Nero's mistress, of whom he was passionately fond, to receive the sacraments of the faith and of religion, had persuaded her at the same time to refuse that incestuous and impure intercourse; for which cause Nero, casting reproaches at him, and calling Paul a wicked corrupter, a scoundrel and a knave, first cast him into chains; but when he could not persuade him to desist from giving such warnings and counsels to the girl, he killed him." Therefore Paul fell a martyr equally for chastity as for the faith.
Thirdly, that Paul, when his neck was cut, poured forth milk in place of blood — a symbol surely of innocence and of the chastity for the safeguarding of which he was dying. A sure witness of this matter is St. Ambrose, sermon 68, when he says: "From Paul's neck, when the persecutor had struck it with the sword, there is said to have flowed a stream of milk rather than of blood, and in a wondrous manner the holy Apostle, by the grace of baptism, came forth in the very slaughter splendid rather than bloody. For what wonder is it, if the nourisher of the Church abounds with milk — as he himself says to the Corinthians: 'I gave you milk to drink?'" St. Chrysostom likewise, in his oration On the Princes of the Apostles: "Blessed," he says, "is Paul, whose head was cut off by the sword, a man whose praises cannot be expressed in words: but what manner of sword pierced his throat — that instrument, I say, of the Lord, to be looked up at by heaven and to be feared by earth? What place was it, O Paul, that received your blood, which appeared milky upon the garment of him who struck you: which blood indeed, rendering his barbaric spirit sweeter than honey, so affected him that he himself together with his companions was led over to the faith." Indeed in Paul that of Jeremiah was fulfilled: "Her Nazarites were whiter than snow, brighter than milk, ruddier than old ivory, fairer than sapphire."
Fourthly, that, as Chrysostom here says, Paul converted his own executioners by his milky death to the faith of Christ. The Roman Martyrology, Bede, Usuardus, and others add that Paul, when he was being led to death, converted three soldier-attendants, namely Longinus, Acestus, and Megistus, as the acts of SS. Nereus and Achilleus relate, whom the same Nero put to martyrdom on the second of July, on which day their memory is celebrated in the Menologies and the Church.
Fifthly, that the cut-off head of Paul gave as it were three leaps on the ground, and at each leap drew forth a fountain from the earth, one of milky and the others of different flavor: of which thing they give this cause, that Paul's severed neck gave first milk and then blood. Most famous is this place of the three fountains at Rome, which is visited by the concourse of all pilgrims.
Memorable is what Jacobus de Vitriaco the Cardinal writes in the Life of St. Mary of Oignies, book II, chapter 11, namely that St. Stephen having descended from the heavens was present at the martyrdom of St. Paul, and bore his soul to heaven and offered it to God: "She said (St. Mary of Oignies, caught up in ecstasy)," he says, "when she sang of Blessed Stephen the proto-martyr, whom she called the rose-garden of paradise, that to him near death, having prayed to the Lord, [Stephen] gave St. Paul as a gift: and that to Blessed Paul, after his martyrdom was accomplished, departing from the body, St. Stephen was present, and offered his spirit to the Lord, and said: Lord, You have given me this great and singular gift: but I render it back to You increased with manifold fruit."
Sixthly, that the tomb of Paul, as a most noble trophy of victory, is celebrated by the pilgrimage of the whole world and the concourse of Christians from every side, as I shall say more fully in chapter 8.
Furthermore, St. Chrysostom, both most devoted to and most expert in St. Paul, in the passage already cited, asserts that Paul died in the sixty-eighth year of his age: wherefore since he died in the 13th year of Nero, as the more common and truer opinion of Chronologers holds, it follows that he died in the 34th year from his conversion, and in the 36th year from the Passion of Christ: for you will find that many years, namely 36, if you go back from the 13th year of Nero and reckon to the 18th year of Tiberius in which Christ suffered: in the second year from the passion of Christ, Paul was converted. Again, if Paul, after his conversion to Christ, labored 34 years for the Gospel, and died in his 68th year, it follows that he was converted to Christ likewise in the 34th year of his age, so that he lived as many years after his conversion as before: for if you double 34, you will get 68, which is the full age of St. Paul's life. Others hold that Paul was converted in his 25th year, because he is called by Luke a young man at the stoning of St. Stephen. But for "young man" the Greek is neaniskos, that is, a youth, also a bold man, endowed with youthful boldness and ferocity, such as Paul was in his 34th year. What Paul's form and stature was, I shall say at 2 Corinthians 10:10.
I pass over what Nicephorus writes in book II, chapter 36, that Paul, on the third day after his martyrdom, appeared in a vision to Nero, as he had foretold to him, and declared to him that there was no other way to salvation than faith in Jesus Christ: and that by this vision Nero was wondrously dismayed. Concerning the place of St. Paul's tomb, divinely designated, and concerning the Easterners who wished to carry off his body but were deterred by thunder and lightning, hear St. Gregory, book III, epistle 30: "What shall I say about the bodies of the blessed Apostles, since it is established that at the time when they suffered, faithful from the East came to reclaim their bodies as those of their fellow-citizens? These were brought as far as the second milestone of the city, in the place called Catacombs, and there laid. But when their whole assembled multitude strove to lift them away from there, the force of thunder and lightning terrified and dispersed them with such great fear that they dared not attempt such things again. Then, however, the Romans went out, who by the Lord's mercy deserved this, lifted their bodies, and placed them in the places where they are now buried."
Finally, the place of Paul's martyrdom was so ennobled after him, that very many Martyrs were slaughtered there, and it was as it were a common butchery of Christians, so that it could rightly be called a Martyrium. Christians longed to shed their blood in the same place where Paul their teacher had shed his. To pass over others, in the same place St. Zeno the commander, with ten thousand soldiers, met his glorious contest and death for Christ. For when Diocletian and Maximian had condemned them, because they were Christians, to haul mud, stones, and bricks for the building of their baths; once it was completed, fearing lest because of their number they should stir up sedition, they ordered them all to be led to Aquae Salviae and beheaded. The Church celebrates their birthday in the Martyrology on July 9. Wherefore St. Bernard chose this same place to adapt to a monastery for his own, and received it as a gift from the Pontiff, and there appointed as first Abbot the man who afterward, being created Supreme Pontiff, was called Eugenius III, to whom he also wrote the books On Consideration. Here likewise St. Bernard saw, as another Jacob, a ladder of ascending angels and descending: namely the angels guard the place, where that Angel rather heavenly than earthly, namely St. Paul, put off his body for Christ, and flew up to the angels; therefore in the place of this their fellow-citizen, who made so many men angelic, they justly delight, and they have invited and invite St. Bernard and all Christians to come to see and venerate him, in memory of which a chapel was built there, which is called the Ladder of Heaven: where for the souls to be freed from Purgatory, the Pontiffs have granted ample indulgences. All these things are most well-known and most certain to those who visit the temple, indeed the three temples, and to those who read the tablets next to the altar, on which all these things are described, as well as the Roman Annals. For with three temples this place of St. Paul has been adorned and consecrated: first, of St. Paul; secondly, of St. Vincent and Anastasius; thirdly, that which is called the Ladder of Heaven, on account of the vision of St. Bernard which I have just recounted. I omit the imperial basilica, which Constantine the Great built not far from the place of martyrdom, in honor of St. Paul, in which the body of St. Paul was buried by St. Sylvester the Pontiff, of which in chapter 8.
Chapter VII: On the Miracles of Saint Paul
Seventhly, Paul excelled in the greatest and most numerous miracles. Luke in the Acts recounts a few of them; but he summarily touches on many of them in a word, saying in Acts 19:11: "And God wrought no ordinary miracles by the hand of Paul: so that even handkerchiefs and aprons were carried from his body to the sick, and their illnesses left them, and the wicked spirits went out." Chrysostom, homily 8 on the Epistle to the Romans, adds that Paul by his shadow not only drove off diseases, as Peter did, but even raised the dead.
Paul raised the dead, as that young man Eutychus, Acts 20, who falling asleep at Paul's preaching and falling from on high expired. Lying upon him and embracing him, Paul said: "Be not troubled, for his soul is in him." Writing of these his miracles in 1 Thessalonians, Paul, right at the beginning, says: "Our Gospel was not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Spirit, and in much fullness." And 2 Corinthians 12:12: "The signs of my apostleship," he says, "have been wrought among you in all patience, in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds." As soon as Paul was separated, designated, and sent by the Holy Spirit to evangelize the Gentiles, when he had come to Paphos, he performed his first miracle, by which he showed his strength and power not only over men, even magicians, but most of all over demons, subduing and restraining them. Looking on Elymas the magician, who was turning away the Proconsul Paul[us] from the faith, Paul said: "O full of all guile and all deceit, son of the devil, enemy of all righteousness, you do not cease to subvert the right ways of the Lord. And now behold the hand of the Lord is upon you, and you shall be blind, not seeing the sun. And immediately there fell on him a mist and darkness, and going about he sought one to give him a hand. Then the Proconsul believed, marveling at the doctrine of the Lord," Acts 13:10.
The Lycaonians indeed, seeing the miracles of Paul, were astonished and exclaimed that he was a god, Acts 14. In like manner the Maltese, when a viper had attacked Paul's hand, Acts 28, and they thought he would soon swell up with its poison and be killed, seeing him shake off the viper and not be harmed by it, said he was a god and an inviolable deity.
Christ indeed appeared so frequently to Paul that, familiar to him, He met and assisted him in every more grave circumstance. Thus, Acts 18:9, at Corinth He said to Paul through a vision: "Fear not, but speak, and do not be silent; because I am with you; and no one shall be set upon you to harm you; for I have many people in this city." Thus with Christ admonishing and helping, he escaped the danger and snares of the Jews at Jerusalem, Acts 22:17: "It came to pass," he himself says, "that when I had returned to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple, I was in a trance of mind, and saw Him saying to me: Make haste, and depart quickly from Jerusalem: because they will not receive your testimony concerning Me. Go, because I will send you far away to the nations." Again, Acts 23, when Paul had been seized at Jerusalem, "the Lord standing by him at night said: Be constant; for as you have testified concerning Me at Jerusalem, so must you also testify at Rome."
In like manner in the Adriatic shipwreck, with an angel sent to him, He was present to him, and on his account freed 276 souls from the certain peril of death, Acts 27:22: "Now," he himself says, "I urge you to be of good courage: for there will be no loss of any soul among you, but only of the ship. For there stood by me this night an angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve, saying: Fear not, Paul, you must stand before Caesar: and behold God has granted you all who sail with you." So when he was set as it were a defendant before Nero, 2 Timothy 4:16: "In my first defense," he says, "no one stood by me, but all forsook me. But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me, that through me the preaching might be fulfilled, and all the nations might hear: and I was delivered from the mouth of the lion."
Why say more? That single rapture into the third heaven, which we read was granted to Paul alone, and to no other of the Apostles or Prophets, gives illustrious testimony to Paul's prophecies and ecstasies. Again, that Paul had many other revelations and kept them in silence is manifest from what he himself says in 2 Corinthians 12:4: "I shall come to the visions and revelations of the Lord." And after recounting his rapture: "If," he says, "I should wish to glory, I shall not be foolish: but I spare, lest anyone think of me above that which he sees in me; and lest the greatness of the revelations exalt me, there was given to me a goad of my flesh, an angel of Satan, to buffet me."
Paul excelled in the gift of tongues: for although he did not receive that gift at Pentecost with the rest of the Apostles, since he was not yet converted, yet afterward he obtained it especially infused by Christ: for this was necessary for him, who was to be the teacher of all nations, to evangelize through all Syria, Asia, Greece, Macedonia, Achaia, Italy, Spain. Whence he himself, 1 Corinthians 14:18: "I thank," he says, "my God, that I speak with all your tongues."
The spirit of prophecy was greater in Paul: for Christ, who first converted Paul by His presence, Acts 9, then so directed him through every road and life, that not so much Paul, as Christ through Paul, may seem to have done all things. Thus from Troas to Macedonia He called him by a vision, Acts 16:9: "A vision," Luke says, "by night was shown to Paul: a certain Macedonian man was standing and beseeching him and saying: Crossing over into Macedonia, help us; and as he saw the vision, immediately we sought to set out for Macedonia, being assured that God had called us to evangelize them." "The signs," he says, "of my apostleship have been wrought among you, in all patience, in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds."
And here note a memorable and continuous miracle, which God granted to the island of Melita, or Malta, from that time on account of the merits of St. Paul; namely that on that island serpents and scorpions, which elsewhere are lethal, are by Paul's gift harmless; and so much so that any venomous animals, even brought from elsewhere, lay aside their venom in Malta and are deprived of the power of harming; indeed even the soil of the same island provides an antidote against venoms, which the islanders call "the grace of St. Paul," by which Paul forever abolished the unfavorable opinion which the Maltese had conceived of him as if he were a criminal, because he was attacked by a viper, and recompensed the kindness of his hosting: for before this deed of Paul, that vipers and other serpents in Malta, as elsewhere, were harmful, is clear from the fact that the islanders thought Paul, seized by the viper, would soon die. So our Sicilian Fathers told and affirmed to me at Rome, adding that this power is felt most in the soil and in fragments of stone cut from the Maltese prison, in which St. Paul lodged in passing through: wherefore these same things are brought to Rome and distributed, as also to me a portion of that white stone, like chalk, was distributed and given by them.
Alanus Copus adds, Dialogue III, chapter 28, that those who happen to be born on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, namely January 25, whatever part of the world brings them forth into the light, neither dread nor fear snakes; indeed, what is greater, with their saliva alone they cure the bites of these. The same is asserted, and confirmed by certain experience, by an outstandingly learned and exact man, Thomas Fazellus, On Sicilian Affairs, decade I, book I, chapter 1. There is a kind of men who rashly and falsely advertise themselves as kin of Paul; these too handle snakes, nor are they harmed by them: but it has been discovered that these protect themselves against snake bite with effective antidotes.
Furthermore, many portents and prodigies were produced by Paul after his death. I shall bring forward a few out of many. St. Paul appearing with St. Peter to the Emperor Constantine the Great promised him healing from leprosy, if he would take care to be baptized by St. Sylvester, and would cast off all superstition, and would build temples to Christ. Constantine did what was commanded, Paul fulfilled his promise, and restored him sound and pure to himself and to his own. Wherefore Constantine erected an outstanding basilica in thanksgiving in the name of St. Paul. Concerning which in chapter 8. So Baronius narrates from the monuments of the Roman Church in the deeds of Constantine.
St. Ambrose, book VII, epistle 53, narrates that St. Paul appeared to him while he was awake, and revealed the bodies of SS. Gervasius and Protasius the martyrs, saying: "These are they who, obeying my admonitions, despising estates and riches, followed the footsteps of the Lord Jesus Christ, desiring nothing earthly, nothing carnal, persevering in the midst of this city of Milan for ten years in the service of God, deserved to attain to this, that they should become martyrs of Christ. You will find their bodies in the place where you stand and pray. You will find an ark covered with earth twelve feet deep, which ark you shall raise up above, and in their name you shall build a church." St. Ambrose narrates that he himself fulfilled all these things in fact.
Notable is what St. Gregory relates, book III of the Dialogues, chapter 29, about a certain Arian Bishop invading the temple of St. Paul, and being blinded by him: "When," he says, "a Bishop of the Lombards (namely Arian) had come to the city of Spoleto, and had no place there where he might celebrate his rites, he began to ask from the Bishop of that city for a church, which he might dedicate to his error. And when the Bishop strongly refused, the same Arian who had come professed that on the next day he would violently enter the church of the blessed Apostle Paul situated near there. The custodian of the same church hearing this hastened, closed the church, fortified it with bolts. When evening came, he extinguished all the lamps, and hid himself in the interior. But in the very twilight of the following day's light the Arian Bishop, having gathered a multitude, came, ready to break in the closed doors of the church: but suddenly all the doors at once divinely shaken, with the bolts thrown a great distance away, were opened, and with a great sound all the bars of the church gave way. With light poured forth from above, all the lamps that had been extinguished, were lit. But the Arian Bishop, who had come to do violence, was struck with sudden blindness, and was now led back to his dwelling by other people's hands. When the Lombards placed in the same region all recognized this, they no longer at all presumed to violate Catholic places. For in a wonderful manner the matter was accomplished, that because for the cause of the same Arian the lamps in the church of blessed Paul had been extinguished, at one and the same time he himself should lose his sight, and the light should return to the church."
Blessed Gregory of Tours, in the book On the Glory of the Martyrs, chapter 29, narrates that a certain man wanting from despair to strangle himself, and imploring the help of St. Paul, was freed by him, and restored to a better mind and life.
To Albert the Great, tormenting himself in certain difficult passages of St. Dionysius's On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, when he could not elucidate them, St. Paul appeared in a vision as if celebrating Mass, and after Mass led Albert to deep waters like those of Ezekiel chapter 47, verse 5, and to the house of Aaron; and when, with him crossing the waters with dry foot, Albert, invited by him to follow, could not swim through them, he awoke, and received a resolution of his doubts, with the Apostle illuminating his mind, as Ludovicus Castiglius, a serious author, narrates in Albert's own words in the History of the Order of St. Dominic, part I, book III, chapter 47. Illumine my mind also, O St. Paul, that I may be able to penetrate and permeate this deep sea of yours, and the ocean of Sacred Scripture, by understanding and explaining it.
Concerning the relics of St. Paul sent into Gaul, by whose help sailors escaped shipwreck, the same Gregory of Tours narrates in On the Glory of the Martyrs, chapter 83. Indeed even the chains and prison of the Apostles still flash with miracles. The chains of St. Peter are seen entire in the basilica which the Empress Eudoxia built in their honor. Truly I have often seen them and placed them on my neck, and always felt myself filled with a great spirit of devotion and inner sweetness. Of St. Paul's chains, as also of his pilgrim staff or rod, a part is shown in the basilica of St. Paul, on the very day of his conversion. The Mamertine prison at the foot of the Capitol, in which Peter and Paul were enclosed by Nero, now converted into a chapel, is daily visited by the locals, as also by Roman pilgrims, with great concourse and veneration, and breathes forth and inspires devotion. There still exists in it the water and fountain which St. Peter, praying, brought forth by a miracle, that he might baptize SS. Processus and Martinianus, the guards of the prison, converted by him: from which daily pilgrims draw, and are freed from fevers and other illnesses.
Nicetas in book I records that the Emperor Andronicus Comnenus erected to St. Paul a golden image in the temple of the Forty Martyrs, and that before the death of Andronicus, as if portending it, it wept; the servants wiped the tears of the image: it poured forth more abundant ones, as if Paul living in it, from the bowels of mercy, lamented and wept the death of the Emperor, pious toward him, though otherwise impious.
Chapter VIII: On the Fame and Glory of Saint Paul
Eighthly, how great is and has been the fame and glory of Paul can be gathered, first, from what has been said up to now; secondly, from the fact that, just as Moses [is the lawgiver] of the Jews, so Paul has been considered and called the lawgiver and teacher of the Gentiles; thirdly, that Peter and Paul are reckoned the two princes of the Church. Whence St. Augustine, in the book On the Consensus of the Gospels, and chapter 10, affirms that it was once the custom that on the panel where the image of Christ was painted, on the same one Peter and Paul were painted on either side, as leaders of the Apostles. Thus even now we see Paul painted next to Peter on altars, and that on the right side of Peter, of which thing the most illustrious Cardinals Bellarmine and Baronius give various causes.
Beautifully Venantius Fortunatus, book III of his Poems, compares and combines Paul with Peter thus:
Gates of heaven, two great lights of the wide world,
Paul thunders with his mouth, Peter flashes from the citadel.
Among the Apostolic crowns of radiant light
This one more learned in admonitions, that one loftier in rank.
Through him the hearts of men are unlocked, and through that one the stars:
Whom the one teaches with his pen, the other receives in heaven.
This one opens the way to heaven by doctrine, the other by keys
For whom Paul is the way, Peter the faithful door.
From the enemy's face two bulwarks stand forth,
Which the City, head of the world, has as towers of the faith.
Whence St. Leo speaking of SS. Peter and Paul, sermon 1: "These two," he says, "illustrious germs of the divine seed, into how great offspring they have germinated, the thousands of blessed Martyrs attest, who, rivals of Apostolic triumphs, surrounded our city with peoples purpled and shining far and wide, and as if from the honor of many gems woven together crowned it with a single diadem." And of the same below: "In the excellence of these Fathers we should glory more excellently, whom the grace of God has so advanced to such a height, among all the members of the Church, that He has set them in the body, of which Christ is the head, as it were a twin light of the eyes: about whose merits and virtues, which surpass all faculty of speaking, we ought to feel nothing different, nothing distinct: because election made them equal, and labor made them alike, and the end made them equals."
And St. Chrysostom, homily 32 on the Epistle to the Romans: "I," he says, "love Rome on this account, although I might also praise her from elsewhere, namely from her magnificence, from her antiquity, from her beauty, from her riches, from her wars and triumphs. But leaving aside all those, for this reason I declare her blessed, that toward them Paul, while he lived, was so kindly, so loved them, discoursed before them, and finally ended his life [there]. Whence this city has been made distinguished from this, more than all the rest, and just as a large and strong body has two illustrious eyes, namely the bodies of those Saints. Heaven does not so shine, when the sun sends out its rays from itself, as Rome pouring forth those two lamps everywhere on the earth. Consider what a spectacle Rome will see at the resurrection: from here Paul will be caught up, from there Peter to meet the Lord. Therefore I celebrate this city, not on account of the abundance of gold, not on account of columns, nor on account of any other display, but on account of those columns of the Church."
Fourthly, that to Paul and to Paul's sacred relics, to be venerated, Christians from the whole world flock to Rome. Hear again Chrysostom, in the homily already cited, sighing at Paul's tomb: "Who will now grant me to be poured around the body of Paul, to be fixed to his tomb, to see the dust of that body which fulfilled what was still lacking in Christ, which bore his stigmata, which sowed the preaching of the Gospel everywhere — the dust, I say, of that mouth through which Christ spoke." And a little later: "I would wish to see the tomb, in which are stored the arms of righteousness, the arms of light, the limbs now living, but then, when they were in this life, dead."
St. Augustine attests, sermon 28 On the Saints, near the end, and epistle 42, that Christian emperors, with peace now restored to the Church, prostrate themselves with veneration at these tombs of Peter and Paul, and there the gems of their diadem shine, where the benefits granted to those bending their knees shine forth. "For even he himself," says Augustine, "clothed in purple, sets out on pilgrimage to embrace those tombs, and laying aside pomp touches the Saints, asking that they may intercede for him before God; and the tabernacle-maker and the fisherman as patrons, even though dead, that one wearing the diadem entreats." So Galla Placidia, wife of the emperor Theodosius, in her epistle written to Pulcheria Augusta, attests that she went to Rome for no other cause than to visit and venerate the sacred thresholds of the Apostles. The same did other kings and princes. Whence St. Chrysostom, homily That Christ is God: "Leaving," he says, "all things, kings and governors and soldiers run to the tombs of the fisherman and the leather-worker (Paul the tent-maker). And in Constantinople our kings count it a great favor, if not near the Apostles, then at least outside their vestibules, their bodies be buried." And in 2 Timothy, homily 4: "No one," he says, "of the Roman kings was held in such honor as this man (Paul) is held; besides, the Emperor lies thrown down somewhere outside: but this one, as if living and reigning, holds the middle of the city; far more illustrious than the Emperor and more honored is the tent-maker." Indeed, with persecution thriving and burning, these tombs Christians from East and West, even at peril of life, eagerly approached. So it is established that from Persia came Martha, Marius, and Audifax in the times of the Emperor Claudius to the thresholds of Peter and Paul, and obtained martyrdom as the reward of their pilgrimage, whose birthday inscribed in the sacred fasti is celebrated by the Church on January 19.
Furthermore the faithful are accustomed at the tombs of SS. Peter and Paul, with veneration, to prostrate themselves entirely to the earth, to kiss the pavement, and as it were with the whole body bowed down to entreat them. Nor do only common people do this, but also serious men and Prelates: as all of Rome saw and praised Cardinal Baronius daily visiting them, and as a suppliant lying down with his whole body kissing the ground. Nor is this recent and new: that was an ancient custom of the faithful. For the Roman pilgrims, falling to the earth, kissed the thresholds of the Apostles. So Prudentius in the hymn of St. Lawrence sings:
The thresholds of the Apostles and Martyrs
They kiss with reverence.
And in the hymn of St. Hippolytus:
They fix kisses pressed upon the gleaming metal.
Sidonius Apollinaris, book I, epistle 5, writes thus of himself: "Prostrate at the triumphal thresholds of the Apostles, immediately I felt every languor driven out from my poorly strong limbs: after these proofs of heavenly patronage, taken up in part of a hired lodging," etc. The same teaches St. Chrysostom in the place cited; indeed in homily 30 on 2 Corinthians, he says the faithful are wont to kiss the doors and vestibules of the temple; and Cassiodorus, in the Tripartite History, book IX, chapter 30, and Fortunatus, book IV On the Life of St. Martin:
Again Apollinaris licks the thresholds of the precious one,
Prostrate on the ground as a suppliant.
And Arator, History of the Apostles, book II, treating of the Philippian temple in honor of St. Paul:
How well it was a prison: there is a rush from the whole city,
Who should first seek the new roofs, or who should fix kisses
Upon the doorposts, and be consecrated by touching part of the column.
Peter of Auvergne the Venerable, book I On the Churches, treating of the thresholds of the Apostles: "By the same faithful," he says, "they are most sweetly and most devoutly kissed." St. Jerome gives the cause, writing in the name of Paula and Eustochium to Marcella: "because at these Peter and Paul, leaders of the Christian army, shed their blood for Christ." Indeed even that the Pagans in grave calamity or cause did the same thing Arnobius teaches, book I: "When they went as suppliants through all the temples, when prostrate before the faces of the gods, they swept the very thresholds with kisses." And Tibullus:
I would not, if I have deserved it, hesitate to prostrate myself in the temples,
And to give kisses to the consecrated thresholds.
Hear what St. Gregory writes, book III, epistle 30, to Constantia Augusta, who had built a church in honor of St. Paul in her palace, and had asked that relics of St. Paul be sent to her for it: "The bodies," he says, "of St. Peter and Paul flash with such great miracles and terrors in their churches, that one cannot approach there even to pray without great fear. I wished to improve something at the most sacred body of St. Paul; and because it was necessary that, near the tomb of this kind, it should have been dug deeper, the steward of the place itself found certain bones, not indeed joined to the same tomb: which since he presumed to lift, and to transfer to another place, he died by sudden death, with certain sad signs appearing." St. Gregory adds that the Eastern faithful had wished to take away the bodies of SS. Peter and Paul; but were dispersed by lightning, as I recounted in chapter 7, whence he concludes: "Who therefore now, most serene Lady, could be so rash, as knowing this, to presume not to say to touch their bodies, but even in any way to inspect them?" Finally lest he send the Augusta away empty: "Of the chains," he says, "which St. Paul himself bore on his neck and in his hands, from which many miracles are demonstrated among the people, I shall take care to transmit some part to you, if however I shall be able to take it off by filing."
Fifthly, the Emperor Constantine, at the suggestion of St. Sylvester, erected a basilica to St. Paul the Apostle, between the Ostian Way and the Tiber, and so deposited and enclosed his holy body in bronze, as he had buried that of St. Peter in his basilica; and offered great gifts to the same, which Baronius lists in the year of Christ 324, pp. 214 and 206. Indeed, Constantine himself, in his epistle to the Catholics, which is in volume I of the Councils, says he enclosed the bodies of the Apostles Peter and Paul in electrum: "Because," he says, "no material of the elements prevails over electrum." Whence Pliny asserts that electrum is more precious than gold. This basilica was afterwards made most spacious by the Emperor Valentinian Junior in the year of Christ 386: there exists the rescript of Valentinian on this matter to Sallustius, prefect of the City, in book II On Decurions of the City of Rome, Theodosian Code. The same basilica the Goths venerated in the storming of Rome, sparing those who had taken refuge there: indeed the Goths themselves led St. Marcella and her daughter Principia, most holy women and kinswomen, to the basilica of St. Paul, that they might be guarded inviolate, as St. Jerome relates in epistle 443 to Principia. The same basilica was afterward adorned with great gifts by St. Gregory and by Pope Sergius, who also converted St. Paul's lodging at Rome into a church: which still exists and is near our Roman College, so that I much congratulate myself, that I dwell in the vicinity of St. Paul, and assiduously look on him as if from close by; and it is called "the church of the Blessed Mary in via lata." We know that very many other most magnificent temples were built in Italy, Spain, Germany, Gaul, England, Belgium, and other provinces in honor of St. Paul.
Indeed, that in memory of St. Paul, monuments were erected soon after his martyrdom, namely a church by Pope Anacletus, and that it endured through raging persecutions, and grew more famous, Baronius teaches from Eusebius and others in the year of Christ 106, at the end. Even out of so many ancient titles and trophies of the Roman princes, by the providence of God it has come about that two huge marble columns have remained, one of the Emperor Antoninus, the other of Trajan, both engraved and embossed with the victories and triumphs of each, on which two columns of the Church were placed by Pope Sixtus V. And so on the column of Antoninus St. Paul stands gleaming in brass, on Trajan's St. Peter. Each is so illustrious, that there is nothing like it in the world, whether you regard the material, or the height (for Trajan's is 128 feet), or the engraving, or the amplitude, or the spiral staircase, by which one ascends from the bottom to the summit through 185 steps inwards; or the cornice of the summit and its enclosure and railings, which are so vast that several may walk around at the same time and freely move about. In like manner the obelisk of Augustus Caesar yielded to St. Peter, and today erected before his basilica it stands like a trophy or triumphal pyramid: whence by the citizens it is called St. Peter's Aguglia. So St. Peter dethroned Augustus and Trajan from his throne, St. Paul Antoninus. For he was incomparably more pious than Antoninus surnamed Pius, in reality impious; and that one was better than Trajan, more fortunate than Augustus. Indeed these are the two columns, Jachin and Boaz, which Solomon erected before the temple, 3 Kings 7:21. For Jachin, that is direction and government, denotes St. Peter, the prince and rector of the Church; Boaz, that is strength and strong execution, denotes St. Paul, the teacher of the Gentiles.
Finally St. Chrysostom, homily 8 On the Praises of St. Paul, at the end of volume III, asserts that Paul surpassed all the Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, and all the Saints in the glory of his deeds, "To whom," he says, "O holy Paul, may I dare to compare you, of the just of the Old or New Testament? For you have stored up the virtue of all as in a certain ark, but with a far greater heap. Finally, even if anyone should weigh against you the entire chorus of the just one by one, he would find the scale pressed down on your side by the weights of the virtues. Paul truly is a second Abel; but not once, but daily he is sacrificed: Paul another Noah, but without an ark sailing through the waves of impiety rising against him: Paul another Abraham, not only [cut off] from his country or people, but after his calling, even from life itself wholly cut off: Paul another Isaac, willingly bound for a victim: Paul another Jacob, as it were always vigilant for the one flock of the whole world: Paul another Joseph, distributing the foods of truth to the world wasting away with spiritual hunger: Paul another Moses, who led back all the nations from the tyranny of the devil to Christ." St. Chrysostom does not stop here; hear more and longer: "Paul another Aaron, anointed priest for the peoples of the whole world: Paul another Phineas, transfixing the impiety of the Jews and Gentiles, as it were a fornication of minds, with the one sword of faith: Paul another David, who as it were challenges the devil into combat as a certain Goliath: Paul another Elijah, more brilliantly snatched up to the heavens: Paul another Elisha, who purged the Gentiles from the inner pollution of leprosy: Paul another Hezekiah, who attracted diverse peoples to the one faith of Christ: Paul another Josiah, who scattered and destroyed the abominations of the Gentiles: Paul another John, beheaded for Christ: Paul another Peter, called from heaven to the Gospel: Paul another Gabriel, who announced the birth of Christ to all nations: Paul another Michael, who was destined to be the leader of Christians. Even though I should range through the choirs of angels, even though through the choirs of the just among men, I find no comparison to which Paul does not present himself with an even greater abundance of merits."
Prayer of the Author to Saint Paul
Look upon us from on high, St. Paul: for you are the delight of our soul. Receive these first-fruits of our labors, slight though they be — indeed yours rather than ours — which we offer and render to you with our whole heart. Obtain for your client an ever-greater wisdom, light, and grace, that I may run this biblical course, and may worthily set forth — and seal with sweat, yes, even with my blood — both Testaments which were preached by you throughout the whole world, and your glory together with Christ's. This laurel, this one reward of all my labors, I earnestly beg of you. Let this twofold spirit of yours, I beseech, come to be in me. Grant us also many, if not Pauls, at least Paulines, who like so many suns may illumine with apostolic spirit, may convert, and may inflame with divine fire this our Belgium, Holland, Frisia, Zealand and all the North, yes even the Indies and the whole world; and that on the last day of the world you may present us to our Christ, together with a great harvest of the faithful, and may say: Behold I and the children whom You have given me, O Lord, for a sign and a wonder to the world.
Argument on the Epistles of Saint Paul
These epistles look generally to a twofold object, namely Christian doctrine and Christian morals: for the earlier part of nearly every epistle is dogmatic, in which the Apostle teaches matters of faith; the latter part is ethical, in which he instructs the morals of the faithful — and this variously and intermingled, after the manner of letters and after the manner of the Hebrews. Note first: while Paul here teaches every matter and mystery of the faith, he chiefly inculcates three things, namely: first, Christ's economy and grace, and that Christ alone is our Redeemer, from whom all grace, justification, and eternal salvation must be sought and awaited; second, that Judaism and the Jewish ceremonies have been abrogated by the new law of Christ; third, that the heresies already then sprouting up — which he often touches upon here and refutes — must be guarded against. For the Apostles were sent after Christ to promulgate, explain, inculcate, and establish these things concerning Christ and Christ's redemption and salvation throughout the world, since they were all new and unheard-of in the world, yet necessary for salvation.
Hence note secondly: in some epistles Paul especially attacks the Judaizers, and works and ceremonies that are not Christian but Jewish. He does this in the Epistle to the Romans, to the Galatians, to the Philippians, and to the Hebrews. In others he uproots arising heresies — for instance those of Simon Magus, with his offspring, that is, Menander, Saturninus, Basilides, the Gnostics, Carpocrates — whom Jude and St. Peter in his second epistle also depict in vivid colors. He does this in the Epistle to the Ephesians, to the Colossians, and to Timothy. In the rest he privately instructs those to whom he writes, resolves their doubts, and confirms and perfects them in the Christian faith and duty. He does this in the Epistles to the Corinthians, to the Thessalonians, to Timothy, to Titus, and to Philemon. All these things he accomplishes with extraordinary and admirable wisdom, efficacy, and spirit.
Note thirdly that these primitive heretics whom I have just named were contemporaries of the Apostles. For Epiphanius, book I, heresy 23, and Philastrius, heresy 37, teaches that Cerinthus, who came after them, raised at Antioch the question of observing the legal precepts of Moses together with Christianity: to settle which the first Council of Jerusalem was convened, Acts xv; and that this same man stirred up the sedition at Jerusalem against Paul, as if he had brought uncircumcised men into the temple — concerning which see Acts xxi. Nor is it remarkable that Cerinthus lived a long time afterwards, reaching the year of Christ 166, as Caesar Baronius teaches. For St. Polycarp, Dionysius, Simeon, St. John, and others of that age also lived long. Paul therefore wrote the epistles to the Ephesians, to the Colossians, to Timothy, and to Titus against the errors of these innovators, as well as of the Philosophers and Poets, from whom most of all the school of Simon had patched together their doctrines. Hence it is easily understood in what sense those things must be taken which he inculcates concerning the avoidance of philosophy, the false religion of angels, the superstitious choice of foods, and the like: namely, that they must be taken in the sense in which the Simonians were asserting them, as will be shown in its place. So conversely, when Paul disparages works in order to exalt the faith of Christ, he understands by "works" those things which the Old Law dictated and prescribed, such as the Jews boasted of, as though by their own lustrations, ceremonies, and sacrifices they were justified and had no need of the faith, grace, redemption, sacraments, and precepts of Christ.
Note fourthly: in the latter part of the epistle, Paul teaches the Christian virtues and Christian ethics, not by continuous discourses and treatises, as Aristotle and others did in their books on ethics, but by various gnomes — that is, short sentences, often heaped up without order; for this was the manner of the ancient Hebrews, as is plain from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiasticus, and of the Greeks, as is plain from Phocylides, Hesiod, and Theognis.
Note fifthly: All these epistles, except the Epistle to the Romans and to the Hebrews — concerning which we must treat in their proper places — were written in Greek, since they were addressed to Greeks.
Note sixthly: There exists a Syriac version of the epistles and of the whole New Testament, in the Royal Bibles, which is still used today by the Christians of St. Thomas in India, by the Babylonians, and by the Ethiopian Abyssinians. Guido Fabricius, who translated it into Latin, reports that the Syrians believe it to be by St. Mark the Evangelist. But since the ancients — for instance St. Athanasius, Cyril, Clement, Jerome and others, indeed even St. Damascene, who lived in Syria — make no mention of it when treating of Scripture and the various editions of Scripture, it seems on this account that this Syriac version is later than these Fathers and their age. It also contains certain things that are not greatly approved by the learned. Lastly, the idiom of this Syriac version does not correspond to the Syriac language used by Christ, Mark, and the Apostles, as I shall show in the proem to the Epistle to the Hebrews. Yet against the Innovators this is to be noted: in the chapter titles of this Syriac version are placed days of fasting, feasts, commemorations of the Saints, prayers for the dead, veneration of the Cross, and other sacred rites — which from this very fact appears not to have been invented by the Roman Pontiffs, but received from the Apostles, since the Asian and Syriac Churches still preserve them as received from their own Apostles, as do also the African Churches of the Abyssinians or Ethiopians, as Damianus a Goez attests in his book On the Faith and Morals of the Ethiopians.
Note seventhly: This appears to be the order of these epistles. First, Paul wrote the prior epistle to the Thessalonians, at Corinth, in the year of Christ 52. Second, the latter epistle to the Thessalonians was written at Corinth in the year of Christ 53. Third, the prior epistle to the Corinthians was written at Ephesus in the year of Christ 57. Fourth, the prior epistle to Timothy was written in Macedonia — or, as the more common opinion holds, at Laodicea (concerning which I shall speak in the proem to the First to Timothy) — in the year of Christ 57. Fifth, the second to the Corinthians was written at Nicopolis in the year of Christ 58. Sixth, the epistle to the Galatians was written in the year 58. Seventh, the epistle to the Romans was written at Cenchreae near Corinth in the year of Christ 58. Eighth, the epistle to Titus from Greece was written in the year of Christ 58. Ninth, the second to Timothy was written at Rome in the year of Christ 59. Tenth, the epistle to the Ephesians was written at Rome in the year of Christ 59. Eleventh, the epistle to the Philippians was written at Rome in the year of Christ 60. Twelfth, the epistle to the Colossians was written at Rome in the year of Christ 60. Thirteenth, the epistle to Philemon was written at Rome in the year of Christ 60. Fourteenth, the epistle to the Hebrews was written at Rome in the year of Christ 60. Thus Baronius, the torch and lighthouse of the Ecclesiastical Annals: with whom I agree in all things except the second epistle to Timothy, of which something must be said at the end there. Theodoret, Salmeron, and Pererius arrange these epistles a little differently. Note here that the last six were written at Rome from prison, and therefore are full of spirit.
Canons of Matters
It seemed convenient that the reader would be helped if I prefixed to the Pauline epistles certain general teachings, as it were canons that hold up a torch.
I.
Let this then be the first canon: That whoever wishes to grasp the genuine sense, both of other Scriptures and especially of St. Paul, must above all investigate his aim and intention — namely, to what end, to whom, against whom he is speaking, whether against the Jews, against the Gentiles, or against Simon. For his spirit, lofty and keen, is so vehemently borne in the direction in which it inclines that it seems to slope toward extremes and to deny the other extreme. Thus St. Augustine, in the book of Retractations, often clears himself: that, when he was once writing against the Manichaeans (who said that all goods come from a good God, all evils from an evil God, as if by fate, and not freely from man), he so preached free will that he seems to have forgotten grace. Later, on the contrary, when Pelagius arose, the enemy of grace, he so extolled grace that he seems to depress free will. Thus, when Paul attacks the Judaizers, he says that circumcision is nothing, and that the old sacraments were weak and beggarly elements, Galatians chapter IV, 9. Thus, in order to extol charity among the Corinthians who were boasting in the gift of tongues, he says that without charity all the other gifts are nothing and profit nothing, 1 Corinthians xiii, 2. Thus, in order to exalt Melchizedek above Aaron, he says in Hebrews vii, 1, that he was without father, without mother, without genealogy — not because Melchizedek was really such, but because in Genesis xiv he is suddenly brought in and presented as if such. Thus, in order to put down the Jews who trusted in their own merits, he appeals to God's mercy and predestination, and exaggerating it says: "It is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God that shows mercy: He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills, He hardens," Romans ix, 16.
II.
Hence Paul often opposes the faith of Christ not to charity but to the Law — that is, he opposes grace to nature, Christ to Moses; or he opposes works done by the powers of Christ's grace, through the dictate of faith, to works done by the powers of nature, through the dictate of the natural or Mosaic law. For St. Paul is wholly intent on this, that he may inculcate Christ and teach that He alone is the Redeemer of men through His death on the Cross, that He must be believed as such by all, and that from Him (and not from Moses or from nature) all the things that pertain to salvation must be looked for — such as grace, and works done from grace, and the Sacraments by the precept of the Gospel law; for this was then new and incredible to the world. So the Fathers everywhere, and it is plain from 1 Cor. ii, 2. For this reason Paul presently says that Christ's righteousness is imputed to us, not formally but efficiently and meritoriously — concerning which see Rom. iv, 5. And that Christ was made for us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption, 1 Corinthians i, 30. Thus he says that the faith of Christ, or of Christ's passion, justifies — namely objectively; because the merits of Christ's passion, which are the object of faith, which we believe by faith, have merited righteousness for us and meritoriously justify us.
III.
Hence again under "faith" he embraces — not faith alone, as the heretics do, but charity itself and all grace flowing from Christ, as branches in their root and cause. So the Council of Trent, session VI, chapter viii; and it is plain from Romans xii, 3, and chapter xiv, last verse, and 2 Thessalonians i, 11, where he says thus: "May God fulfill every desire of goodness and the work of faith in power." Who does not see here that the Apostle requires, besides faith, the work of faith? Therefore he rightly says that faith justifies us — but not faith alone (as Luther added and perverted) — "which God forbid that the chosen vessel should hold," says St. Augustine in the book On Grace and Free Will, chapter vii. Rather it is as we say: "This tree nourished me" — namely with its fruits and apples; "this physician healed me" — namely through the medicines, the diet, the exercises he prescribed, by which I was healed. For faith is like a teacher pointing out and prescribing the works of hope, of repentance, and of charity, by which we are justified. Indeed for this reason one may rightly say: "Faith alone justifies me" — just as one rightly says, "This physician alone healed me." For faith is, in its own kind, the adequate cause of righteousness, as a physician is of health; and because faith tacitly includes within itself, as in a beginning, the other things necessary for righteousness and salvation, as is plain from the whole of chapter xi to the Hebrews. It is also clear from the fact that sometimes salvation is attributed to invoking God, as in Joel ii, 32; sometimes to hope, to fear, to charity, as in 1 Cor. xiii, 2; Luke vii, 47; elsewhere repentance is everywhere required for righteousness and salvation, as in Luke xiii, 3, and 2 Cor. vii, 10. For otherwise, if no moderation is applied, the conclusion will follow in like manner that for salvation neither baptism nor the sacraments are required, and that he who has believed will be saved even if he afterwards becomes an unbeliever. So St. Augustine, in the book On Faith and Works, chapter xiv, tome IV. Which book he expressly wrote with this end in view, to teach that the mind of the Apostle is this — namely, that faith does not exclude, but requires, works done from faith.
IV.
Thus in the Epistle to the Hebrews the Apostle opposes the sacrifice of the Cross — which he says we have as the one sacrifice — to the old Aaronic sacrifices, but not to the sacrifice of the Mass; indeed he tacitly comprehends the latter under the former, as one and the same in substance, though differing in manner. For in the Mass, just as on the Cross, the principal priest is the same, namely Christ; numerically the same is the victim, namely the Body of Christ; they are even the same in representation, since the Mass represents — indeed contains and applies — the sacrifice of the Cross; but by a sacramental and unbloody action and manner, whereas on the Cross it was visible and bloody; although, if we speak metaphysically, this mode is an essential difference and constitutes another ultimate species of sacrifice. As the mincha, which in the Old Law was a flour offering — dry and unbloody — differed in species from the holocaust, which was bloody and butchered. Yet in the Mass it is the same victim that was on the Cross, as I said, and the same sacrifice in substance, at least generically. For the sacrifice of the New Testament — which is, as it were, the genus — belongs to the sacrifice of the Mass as well as to the sacrifice of the Cross. Again, the sacrifice of the Mass is the same as the sacrifice of the Cross analogically, because it represents it; just as an image, qua image, or as regards its representation, is the same as its exemplar. Of which more in the Epistle to the Hebrews.
V.
Negative general propositions are understood absolutely and without any other added condition: as, "There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ." Affirmative promises, blessings, and rules, however, are never to be understood absolutely, but conveniently and with a condition: namely, that they signify the virtue and nature of the matter, and that so it will be, as far as the thing itself is concerned, unless something else hinders, or if the other requirements are present.
VI.
There are four senses of Sacred Scripture: the Literal, the Allegorical, the Tropological or Moral, and the Anagogical: which Lyranus, in his prologue to the Bible, describes in this verse:
The letter teaches deeds; what you should believe (namely about Christ and the Church), Allegory;
Moral, what you should do; what you should hope for, Anagogy.
For example, the city of Jerusalem, says Eucherius, signifies literally the well-known city of Judaea, allegorically the Church, tropologically the faithful soul, anagogically the heavenly fatherland. Paul plainly expressed these four senses in Galatians iv, where he says thus: "Abraham had two sons, one by a handmaid and one by a free woman" — there is the plain literal sense; "which things are said by allegory: for these are the two Testaments" — there is the allegory. "But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was after the spirit; so it is now also" — there is the tropology. "But that Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all" — there is the anagogy. Note here that every Scripture has a literal sense, but not always the others; indeed in the New Testament there is scarcely any allegory; in the epistles tropology is rare. Now the literal sense is that which the letter signifies in the first place, whether it be proper, metaphorical, or parabolical: on this the allegorical and tropological must rest and respond by an apt proportion, so as to seem to be born from it. For just as the literal sense is what the words signify in the first place, so the allegorical is what the things signified by the literal sense signify. The better and more fully, therefore, the allegory and tropology correspond to the literal sense, the more apt and genuine it is. So St. Jerome, on Hosea I, where he retracts what he had said elsewhere — that the accommodated sense is allegorical or tropological.
VII.
What is said in Sacred Scripture concerning Christ or the body of Christ — sometimes of the Head alone, that is Christ; sometimes of the Body alone, that is the Church; sometimes of both — must be understood; and it must be carefully discerned from the surrounding context what is being said about which. So Augustine, following Ticonius, in book III of On Christian Doctrine, chapters xxxi and following.
VIII.
Sacred Scripture can have various versions. Leo Castrius adds, in his prologue to Isaiah, that there are also various readings even in the Hebrew, intended by the Holy Spirit. Lastly, the same passage can have various canonical senses, even literal ones.
First, that Sacred Scripture can have various versions is plain from Matthew xii, 19, where, from Isaiah — according to the Septuagint version — it is said of Christ, "He shall not cry out": for which our [Vulgate] Interpreter, however, in Isaiah xlii, 2, renders, "He shall not show partiality." Thus, for what is said in Hosea xiii, 14: "I will be your death, O death"; the Septuagint and from them St. Paul in 1 Corinthians xv, 55, render, "O death, where is your victory?" Thus our version often differs from the version not only of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, but also of the Septuagint translators; whose version, however, the Church approved and received, and used for four hundred years — that is, until St. Jerome forged our version from the Hebrew.
Secondly, that Sacred Scripture can have various readings is proven from Genesis xlvii, 31, where our [Vulgate] Interpreter renders from the Hebrew, "Israel adored the Lord, turned toward the head of the bed"; for which, however, the Septuagint, and from them St. Paul in Hebrews chapter xi, verse 21, render, "Israel adored the top of his staff." The cause of this difference seems to be none other than that our Interpreter read in the Hebrew מטה mittah, that is, "bed"; but the Septuagint, with different vowel points, read מטה matteh, that is, "staff." Thus in Hebrews chapter xii, verse 6, Paul, citing Proverbs iii, 11, reads with the Septuagint כאב keab, that is, "He scourges"; while our Interpreter in Proverbs reads כאב keab, that is, "as a father" — for he renders, "as a father takes pleasure in his son." For which the Septuagint and Paul render, "He scourges every son whom He receives."
Thirdly, that Sacred Scripture can have various senses is plain from Matthew vi, 11, where our Interpreter renders thus: "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." For which, however, the same Interpreter, in Luke xi, 3, renders, "Give us this day our daily bread." For in both places in Greek the same word is used, ἐπιούσιον, which the Interpreter renders in Matthew as "supersubstantial," but in Luke as "daily." The same is plain both from other passages of Sacred Scripture and from the various expositions of the Fathers on the same passage — often fitting and literal. Hence St. Augustine, in book XII of the Confessions, chapter xxxii: "When one," he says, "has said: 'The writer of Sacred Scripture meant this, which I think,' and another: 'No, what I think': I judge it more religious to say, 'Why not rather both, if both are true? And if anyone sees a third truth, or a fourth, or anything else true at all in these words, why is he not believed to have seen all those things, through whom God tempered Sacred Scripture to the senses of the many who would see things true and diverse?'"
IX.
Paul is accustomed frequently to meet tacit objections. Hence St. Jerome, to Hedibia, epistle 150, Question xi: "Paul," he says, "is accustomed, before it is objected, to set forth whatever another can object, by an ἀνθυποφορά (anthypophora), which Quintilian calls subjection." As in Romans i, 18, when he had said: "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against those who hold back the truth of God in injustice," and had foreseen that it could be objected to him: "Whence then have the Gentiles known the truth of God?", he added: "Because what is known of God is manifest in them; for God has manifested it to them." Again, since here another could object once more: "How did God manifest Himself to the Gentiles, who did not have Sacred Scripture?", anticipating the same point he resolves and explains it by adding: "For the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made: His eternal power also, and divinity." For this reason the Apostle often uses interrogation in the Hebrew manner, and that for emphasis: for by interrogating he holds the hearer in suspense, and by holding him in suspense he stirs up his attention.
X.
Again, for the same reason the Apostle is accustomed, if perhaps in some argument another necessary question arises, to digress into it, and afterwards to return to his principal aim. Thus in 1 Timothy iii, when he had discussed many things about Deacons, on that occasion he digresses to their wives, and a little later returns again to the same Deacons.
XI.
St. Paul, as one most thoroughly versed in the Old Law and Testament, everywhere — whether expressly, as is plain from the whole Epistle to the Hebrews, or tacitly — alludes to the sayings and deeds of the Old Testament, in order to show that Christ was signified and foreshadowed in Moses, the Church in the Synagogue, and the New Testament in the Old. For the agreement of both Testaments — that is, the agreement of Moses and Christ, of the Prophets and the Apostles — bears great witness to Christ and to the truth, as Tertullian teaches everywhere against Marcion. For this reason Christ and the Apostles cite the Old Testament and show that it was a prelude to the New and acted as the bridesman of Christ. So Paul, in 1 Timothy iii, when he calls the Church the "pillar and ground of truth," alludes to the pillars of Solomon's temple, Boaz and Jachin. He often does the same elsewhere, as I shall show in the commentaries.
XII.
It is not always to be required in these epistles, and there is not everywhere a connection either of chapters or of sentences: for Paul wrote them in epistolary fashion, in which friends to friends customarily write various things familiarly, often without order or connection. This is clear from the Epistles to the Corinthians, in which in individual chapters he often treats new subjects, and resolves various questions proposed by the Corinthians, as in chapter VII he resolves the question concerning virginity and marriage; in chapter VIII, concerning meats offered to idols; in chapter XI, concerning the Eucharist; in chapter XIV, concerning prophecy; in chapter XV, concerning the resurrection.
XIII.
Predestination, vocation, election are twofold: one unto grace, the second unto glory. Again, this second is twofold: one inchoate, the other complete and efficacious. Holy Scripture mentions both the one and the other. Hence sometimes He calls the called, the predestined, the beloved, the elect — not those who proximately, absolutely, and efficaciously are destined for glory and beatitude, but those who are destined and called to the faith and grace of Christianity, in which those who persevere will attain eternal glory. For this is the first and notable grace, and the fountain of the others, which the Apostle therefore admires and extols in all his epistles, and he sets it against the vain confidence which the Jews had in the ceremonies of the Mosaic law, and the Gentiles in their moral virtues. So in Ephesians I, 3, he calls all Ephesian Christians predestined and elect unto grace and sanctity. For he says: "Who predestined us unto the adoption of sons, etc., wherein He has graced us in His beloved Son." And in verse 4: "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and immaculate in His sight in charity." Therefore this predestination and election is proximately unto adoption, grace, and sanctity, not however unto glory.
In this sense all the just are elect and predestined, namely completely unto grace and justice, but inchoately unto glory. Hence Paul throughout calls Christians elect, beloved, and called saints; that is, elect, beloved, and called unto sanctity. This distinction of predestination, or of inchoate and complete election, is not recent and novel, as some think, but ancient. For St. Thomas hands it down — not as to words, but as to the matter and meaning — in Part I, Question XXIV, article 3, where he teaches that some are written in the book of life absolutely and perpetually, others only for a time, namely as to present justice; and that these can fall away, indeed often in fact are deleted from the book of life, according to that of Psalm LXVIII: "Let them be blotted out of the book of the living." For to be written in the book of life is to be predestined and elect. For the book of life is the book or catalogue of the predestined and elect. Now to be written in this book absolutely, or absolute predestination, what is it other than complete predestination? And predestination as to present justice, what is it other than inchoate predestination? Hence St. Augustine, Book III Against the Two Epistles of the Pelagians, chapter III, teaches that salvation is twofold: one inchoate through grace and consummated through glory. Therefore inchoate salvation is present grace and justice; consummated is glory itself and beatitude. Again St. Augustine, in his book On the Predestination of the Saints, chapter X, distinguishes predestination from grace in no other way than that, as he himself says, "predestination is the preparation of grace, but grace is the giving itself;" since therefore grace is one thing inchoate, another complete, there will likewise be predestination one inchoate, another complete. Finally, the Church recognizes this distinction of predestination when on the first Sunday of Lent, in the Collect attributed to St. Augustine, she prays for the inchoately predestined: "That He may keep the names of all the faithful written in the book of blessed predestination:" for one does not properly and rightly pray for those completely predestined that they may be kept and remain predestined, since their complete predestination includes and presupposes that they will always remain predestined. For this predestination of God is immutable.
XIV.
When the Apostle says we are "called, predestined, elect according to the purpose," he calls the purpose the decree or good pleasure of God, by which from love and liberal favor He proposed and decreed to recall men lost in sin to grace and salvation through Christ. Hence he opposes this purpose to the debt of justice or of nature, that is, to our merits, as I shall show more fully and at greater length in Romans chapter VIII, verse 18.
XV.
The Apostle often attributes justification, good works, merits, salvation, beatitude to grace, vocation, election, the mercy of God — not as if free will did nothing here, as Luther wishes: for thus we would act, or rather be acted upon, like brute beasts, indeed like stocks and tree-trunks; and ridiculously God would command us and prohibit us from that which is not in our power and choice, and would tyrannically threaten and inflict eternal punishments on transgressors. "Virtue and vice," says the Philosopher, "are in our power. But the things which are in our power, those we can do or not do. And around these revolve law, praise, blame, punishment, and reward; for to those things which are not in our power, no one exhorts, commands, punishes; no one consults, deliberates, chooses concerning them; just as we do not choose to be hungry, to be cold, but we suffer them." Aristotle has these and many more things on this matter, Book III of the Ethics, chapters I, II, III, V. Holy Scripture therefore attributes our works rather to grace than to free will: first, because in them the first and most powerful part is held by God's grace, which prevents and excites the free will, and then cooperates with it. Secondly, in this sense it gives the whole good work to grace, because even our cooperation flows from God's exciting grace, and depends on God's cooperating grace. Thirdly, because the whole dignity of the supernatural work is grace: for that the work of charity is supernatural and most noble, and most pleasing to God and meritorious of eternal life, this it has from grace, not from free will. For from free will it has only that it is free, not coerced. So St. Augustine teaches everywhere against the Pelagians, and expressly in his book On the Spirit and the Letter, chapter XXXIV, and the Council of Trent, session V, chapter V; indeed the Apostle in 2 Timothy chapter II, verse 19 and 21.
XVI.
Paul and Holy Scripture attribute perdition, hardening, reprobation, damnation to man, and that primarily and properly: for God of Himself (since He is goodness itself and infinite clemency) wills the justice and salvation of all men: hence He often says the Jews are reprobated, because they refused to receive Christ, nor to believe in Him. For every good is from God, but evil from ourselves. And again, predestination and vocation is a work of God's grace, because it precedes every work and merit. But reprobation is a work of vindictive justice, which by its nature does not precede, as Calvin wishes, but follows and supposes demerit or sin. For a judge condemning a defendant presupposes the sin of the defendant. And from this consideration sometimes Holy Scripture attributes reprobation, hardening, and perdition, equally with predestination, vocation, and election, to God — namely because God hardens and reprobates man on account of preceding demerits. Hence He says: "It is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God that shows mercy. On whom He wills, He has mercy; and whom He wills, He hardens. Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated."
Where it must be noted that Scripture by these phrases signifies only the most lofty and most general providence of God concerning all things both good and evil, and that nothing in the world is or comes to pass outside it so as to be able to escape God's hand; rather God by His providence embraces, holds, governs, and orders all things, even sins. Yet this providence of God concerning good and evil in particular is diverse and unequal. For God properly foresees, predestines, intends, excites, promotes, protects, and crowns good things, but evils — out of certain knowledge — He determines only to permit each one with its circumstances, though if He willed He could easily impede them; and these once done He orders to a good end and just punishment, by which He punishes them. So St. Augustine, Enchiridion chapters XI and CX.
XVII.
Man properly, directly, and actively hardens himself, blinds himself, hands himself over to a reprobate sense: yet God is said to do the same, not properly and directly, as Calvin wishes. For blindness of mind is not merely the simple lack of light, but a perverse affection, by which one freely repels the divine illuminations, or places an obstacle to them, so that he is never illuminated by God; and consequently this blindness is a grave sin, as Augustine teaches, Book V Against Julian, chapter III; and so also hardness of heart, or wickedness and malice of perception, is a grave sin. God therefore hardens and blinds a man: first, permissively; secondly, by gradually withdrawing not the sufficiency of grace but its accustomed abundance; thirdly, by giving the demon power over the man, who of his own accord tempts the man and impels him to every crime and obstinacy of heart; fourthly, by setting before man occasions — namely by introducing into body and mind those affections and thoughts, otherwise good or indifferent, or by presenting them externally, e.g. the appearances of women, riches, honors, plagues, by which He foreknows that man will freely fall into sins and harden himself in them; although God for no other end but for some other good sets and infuses these things into man. Thus He hardened Pharaoh, sending plagues into Egypt, intending that Pharaoh, humbled by them, might come to his senses; by which however he, the more exacerbated by his own fault, hardened himself and resisted God more strongly. And this is all that Augustine means, Book V Against Julian, chapter III, when he says that God hardened Pharaoh not only by patience but also by power, that is by His plagues, as Bellarmine learnedly and solidly teaches, Book II On the Loss of Grace, chapter IV. For God could have acted with Pharaoh in other ways, by which He foreknew that he would be softened and bent; but He did not will to: He preferred, on account of his pride and hardness, to crush him with plagues, by which however He foreknew he would harden himself the more.
XVIII.
Paul speaks, as do also the other hagiographic writers, sometimes to the perfect, sometimes also passing immediately to the imperfect: hence sometimes he praises, sometimes he blames. Thus he praises the Corinthians as saints, and yet soon afterward rebukes their (those, presumably, of the imperfect among them) schisms, avarice, lust, and other vices. In like manner he sometimes flatters, soon threatens; and is as a mother who, that she may persuade her children and accommodate herself to all, turns herself in all directions, from the vehemence of love. These things are clear in Galatians chapter III, verse 1, and chapter IV, verses 19 and 20.
XIX.
Christian liberty, which the Apostles preach, is the exemption by which Christ exempted us, not from servile servitude, not from obedience to the Decalogue, to laws, to Princes, Prelates, Superiors; not from works of penance and satisfaction, not from the obligation of vows, as the heretics will have it (whom the Council of Trent condemns, session IX, canons 19, 20, 21: for that liberty is irrational, animal, carnal, base, and against every right of nature, and against every right reason); but from the servitude both of the old law and of sin, the devil, and vices here, and from concupiscence, misery, and death in heaven. This is clear from 1 Peter II, 13, 16, 17; Galatians V, 15. Concerning which more in 2 Corinthians III, 17.
Canons of Words
XX.
The Apostle wrote in Greek, therefore he often Grecizes; but because he was a Hebrew, hence he often Hebraizes. For it must be noted that the Holy Spirit, speaking through him, accommodated Himself to His instrument, as He makes nature serve grace both in an angel and in a man. Thus through the holy writers the Holy Spirit so accommodated His speech, as if they spoke and wrote in their own style, gesture, conception, voice, as is clear in 2 Maccabees II, 27; Luke I, 3. Hence the Apostle uses an eloquence not adorned, nor verbose like that of the Greeks, but the simple, yet grave and nervous eloquence of the Hebrews. Whence in these epistles you will find phrases scarcely Greek, and even solecisms, and very many Hebraisms: so likewise you will find a Hebrew antiptosis, 2 Corinthians VIII, 23; Ephesians II, 2, and elsewhere; because the Hebrews lack cases, and use the same noun unchanged through all cases. "That man (namely Paul," says St. Jerome, Book II of his commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians), "who makes solecisms in words, who cannot render hyperbaton or conclude wisdom, boldly claims wisdom for himself."
XXI.
Hence Paul often by heterosis takes abstracts for concretes, as circumcision for the circumcised, that is the Jew; foreskin for the uncircumcised, that is the Gentile; election for the elect; dominations for those dominating; virtues and powers for those endowed with virtue and power. Thus he says that Christ has been made for us justice, sanctification, redemption, that is, He has been made for us a justifier, sanctifier, redeemer, as will be said in 1 Corinthians I, 30. So Theophylact, Anselm, and others there.
XXII.
Hence also by Hebraism he often omits the marks of similitude, comparison, causality, and the bonds of any adverbs and conjunctions, as is clear in 1 Timothy I, 3, and elsewhere. For the Hebrews often signify these by the servile letters ל, כ, ב and the like, which they themselves often understand implicitly.
XXIII.
The active verbs of the Hebrews often signify passion or permission, namely when they are in the conjugation or signification of qal. So Paul says, Romans XI, 32: "God hath concluded all in unbelief:" He concluded, that is, He permitted them to be concluded. So Theodoret, Ambrose, Anselm, Theophylact there. The reason is that the permission of Him, without whose nod nothing can be done, is a certain action, not a pure negation. So therefore in God the decree by which He wills to permit sins, or by which no sin could be done, is not negative but positive. By the force of which decree, in execution God positively loosens the reins to a will wishing to act badly: for God most tightly holds the wills of all in the hand of His omnipotence, as if bound, so that they cannot think otherwise, nor in another mode, or place, or time, nor will, nor break forth into any motion at all, than He Himself shall positively have willed to permit, indeed even effectively to concur. For this pertains to God's most lofty providence concerning all things, even those which are sins. This then Holy Scripture expresses by active verbs, such as to incline, to induce, to blind, to hand over. Just as one who holds a lion by the hand and lets it go, if it kills someone, the holder is said to have killed and to have set the lion against the man. And this only is what St. Augustine means, in his book On Grace and Free Will, chapter XX and following, where he says God inclined the will of Shimei and of others — already evil through their own fault — to this particular sin, that is, He permitted it to be inclined, that he might curse David and not another. Therefore God permits evil otherwise than man: man negatively, God positively; man often with sin, because he is bound to prevent it; God justly and holily, because as the supreme Lord of all things He permits second causes to use their own liberty in any direction: for He would do violence to nature, if He necessitated them to good.
XXIV.
The same words, indeed even the marks of causality, e.g. that, because, on account of which, therefore, often signify not the cause but the event and the consequence. For thus the common people call an antecedent occasion a cause, as in: "The flattering indulgence of fathers makes idle children." But Scripture, because it speaks familiarly, often accommodates itself to the phrase of the common people. So Cyril, Chrysostom, Theophylact, Euthymius, on John chapter XIII, verse 38. Again the causal particles such as therefore, thus, and the like, in Paul sometimes are redundant after the Hebrew manner, and render no cause, but only continue what precedes with what follows.
XXV.
Nothing is more familiar to the Apostle than the enallage of prepositions, conjunctions, and adverbs. Thus after the manner of the Hebrews he uses "in" for "through," "out of," "from," "with," "on account of," "at"; and through "in" he signifies every kind of cause: as the τὸ "in Christ," which he repeats in nearly every verse in Ephesians I, now signifies through Christ, now on account of Christ, now from Christ, now with Christ, now in Christ. So Theophylact there. Thus "in the Lord" often signifies, in the affair or business of the Lord, or before the Lord, or through the Lord, or from the Lord, or on account of the Lord, with love and reverence of the Lord, for the glory of the Lord. From this phrase of St. Paul, in the rules of certain religious orders it is often said: "Let all apply themselves to prayer with all diligence in the Lord, let all love one another in the Lord; let all obey wholly, attend to their studies, act sincerely in the Lord."
Where the τὸ "in the Lord" is an incitement to virtue and industry, and that in four ways. First, as if they should say: Let all know that they serve the Lord, that they conduct the Lord's business, not man's. Secondly, not for price, not from fear, not from desire, but "in the Lord," that is, with the love and reverence of God alone, let them do that. Thirdly, as servants in the sight of their master, so let them themselves seriously do it before the Lord, let the Lord be present to their eyes. Fourthly, let them look to the end — not their own glory but that of the Lord alone. Thus the preposition κατά, which our Interpreter often translates "secundum" (according to), Paul takes very broadly and variously. For now he uses κατά for διά, that is "per" (through), as "Paul an Apostle according to (that is, through) the command," or precept "of God," Titus I, 3. Now for "in," as in the same place, verse 4: "To Titus, son according to the common faith," that is, in the common faith. Now also frequently by it he designates the subject matter or object, so that "secundum" means the same as "around," as in the same place, verse 1: "The faith which is according to," that is, around, "piety" and revolves, namely so that he might teach piety. Now he takes the same for "before" or "in the presence of," as 2 Corinthians chapter X, verse 7: "See those things which are according to," that is, before, "the face." Now also most frequently and most properly the τὸ "secundum" he takes for "juxta" (next to, according to), as "according to God, according to man I speak, they walk according to the flesh, or the spirit." Now he uses τῷ κατὰ for "from" or "out of," and by it denotes the efficient cause, as Colossians II, 8: "Let no one deceive you through philosophy according to the tradition of men, according to the elements of the world, and not according to Christ;" that is, let no one deceive you through philosophy which flows not from Christ, but from the tradition and fiction of men, who dreamed marvelous things about the elements and authors of the world. Finally, the τὸ "secundum" he takes for "on account of," as in Titus III, 5: "God hath saved us according to," that is, on account of, "His mercy." In like manner Paul takes the little words "however," "but," and the like for "rather," "nay rather." Thus he takes the word "for" (enim), not properly as causal, but adversatively for "but," Galatians II, 6. Isaiah does the same, chapter XXVIII, verse 11, which place the Apostle cites, 1 Corinthians XIV, 21. Thus Paul takes the conjunction "and" for "that is," Ephesians I, 1; Galatians VI, 16; Colossians II, 8.
XXVI.
Paul reduplicates certain things for greater emphasis, especially in the degrees of comparison, and that for the most part to signify excess; as in Philippians chapter I, verse 23: "Much more better," that is, far better.
XXVII.
The Apostles and Evangelists patch together into one testimonies from the old law, though they have been drawn from various places, as is clear in Romans III, 11. Thus also they sometimes cite not word-for-word, but with the same meaning. Finally, they cite the same things according to the Septuagint, because they wrote in Greek to the Gentiles, to whom the Greek Septuagint version was better known than the Hebrew text.
XXVIII.
Paul often uses the verb "to put on," so that he says a man puts on reproach and ignominy, puts on Christ, puts on glory, immortality, virtue. Where the τὸ "to put on" signifies that a man pursues Christ and Christian virtue, possesses it, uses it abundantly, and is clothed about with it as with a becoming garment. Again, that a man abounds in glory and immortality, is wrapped about and surrounded with it. He alludes to the toga of the Hebrews, and the praetexta of the Romans: with which young men put on, as it were, manhood and a manly spirit, virtue and dignity. See St. Jerome to Pammachius, Against the Errors of John of Jerusalem. Concerning this phrase I shall say more on Romans XIII, at the end.
XXIX.
Paul often by Hebraism takes infinitives for nouns, sometimes for verbs of any tenses and moods. Again, he often imitates the Hebrews in that, since they lack an indicative, they use participles in its place, as 1 Corinthians XII, 2: "Going to idols," that is, you went. Similar instances are 2 Corinthians X, 2, 4, 5, 12, 15. Sometimes also the Hebrews, and Paul, signify the indicative through the preterite, as Psalm CXV: "I have believed," that is, I believe, "on account of which I have spoken," that is, I speak: of which I shall say more in 2 Corinthians IV, 13. Furthermore it is well-worn that the Hebrews, especially the Prophets, speak of future things through the preterite, because those things they predict are so certainly to come, as if they were already past, and in the most lofty and ample foreknowledge of God they are already as it were past.
XXX.
The Hebrews sometimes take nouns, gerunds, infinitives actively, sometimes passively; and from them Paul, as in: "Christ was made for us justice," that is, justifier. On the contrary, 2 Corinthians chapter V, last verse, he says: "That we might be made justice," that is, just "in Christ." So Chrysostom and Cyril, Book XII of the Thesaurus, chapter III. Thus God is called our love and fear, our hope and patience, namely passively, that is, the object of our love, fear, hope, and patience; or He whom we love and reverence, in whom we hope, on account of whom we suffer. In like manner often by the same Hebrews potency or act is taken for object, and the contrary. For thus the Hebrews call color "eye," because color is seen by the eye and perceived, and is the object of the eye: as in Numbers XI, 7, where our Interpreter translates, the manna was of the color of bdellium, in Hebrew it is כעין, the manna had en, that is, the eye, of bdellium. And in Leviticus XIII, 53, for what we have, "when he shall see that the leprosy has not grown"; in Hebrew it is, if the leprosy has not changed עינו eno, that is, its color. So also the French, the Flemings, and other nations speak when they say that some thing, for instance a gem or a garment, has a beautiful eye, glance, aspect; meaning by this phrase to signify that the gem or the beautiful garment has form or appearance.
XXXI.
The Hebrews and Paul play, for elegance' sake, on a varied sense in the same words. Thus they sometimes take "sin" properly, soon for the cause or effect of sin, namely concupiscence, soon for a victim for sin. So Paul says, 2 Corinthians V, 21: "Him who knew no sin (Christ), He made sin (that is, a victim for sin) for us." So St. Augustine, Enchiridion chapter XLI. And it is an antistasis, or contrary signification of the same word; such as if I should say, "To be loved is pleasant, and let care be taken that there be nothing of bitterness in it." Thus Plautus in the Aulularia: "Spiders, he says, those I myself wish to be saved for me." The old woman had spoken of her house as utterly empty, except for spiders; but the old man understands "spiders" as the treasure that was hidden from the old woman.
XXXII.
The verbs of the Hebrews sometimes signify an inchoate act, sometimes a continued act, sometimes a perfected act: inchoate, as Romans II, 4: "The benignity of God leads thee to penance," that is, attempts to lead. Perfected, as 2 Corinthians II, 14: "God triumphs us," that is, makes us triumph. So Ambrose, and from him Anselm there. Continued, as John XIV, 1: "Believe in Me," that is, continue to believe, confirm yourselves in My faith. For long before this the Apostles had already believed in Christ.
XXXIII.
Just as Christ teaches by many parables, so also Paul, after the manner of his nation, teaches by similitudes and metaphors. Thus he often compares the Church to a building, a body, a field, a tree; Christ to Adam; sin to leaven. So St. Jerome, on Matthew XVIII.
XXXIV.
"Flesh," says St. Augustine, epistle 146 to Consentius, is now taken properly, now tropically: and then sometimes it signifies the corruption of the flesh, sometimes concupiscence, sometimes men devoted to the flesh. Thus those eminent in virtue are called free of the flesh. "You," says Paul, Romans VIII, 9, "are not in the flesh." And John III, 6: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh," that is, is carnal, animal; "that which is born of the Spirit is spirit," that is, is spiritual. Again, the Apostle sometimes calls "flesh" the external appearance and grace, and opposes it to spirit, that is to internal grace and efficacy. Thus he says the Jews glory "in the flesh," that is, in carnal circumcision and lineage, that they are sons of Abraham. So "the wise according to the flesh, and the wisdom of the flesh," he calls worldly wisdom and the wise of the world: in this sense he says he knows no one "according to the flesh," that is, by external appearance and carnal kinship, of which more in 2 Corinthians X, 2. So St. Chrysostom, Theophylact, Anselm and others. But more often he calls "flesh" concupiscence itself: the cause of which is, first, not that flesh properly is concupiscence itself, or the tinder, instigator, and dictator of sin (for the flesh does not raise up or form the thoughts and movements of sin), but metonymically: because the flesh is as it were the workshop of the soul, which in the flesh, as a potter in clay, forms the idols of its concupiscences and turpitudes, through which it carries them out and consummates them.
The second cause is that the flesh aids and fosters the movements of concupiscence: for the seething of the blood arouses anger; the motion and stirring of the spirits subservient to generation arouses lust: thus the various motions of the spirits and the blood arouse various concupiscences.
Thirdly, the flesh, not bare, but animated and informed by a concupiscent soul, is called concupiscence: because concupiscence, or the concupiscent soul, dwells in the flesh, informs it, and forms with it one composite.
Finally fourthly, many Philosophers judge that, just as sensations (such as vision, hearing, perception, taste and touch), so also concupiscences and motions of the sensitive appetite are both in the body and in the bodily organ — for instance the eye, ear, tongue, spirits, heart, etc. — as well as in the soul: although others, perhaps more subtly and more truly, think that these, being spiritual and animal, are in the soul alone: for since this alone precisely lives and feels, this alone also elicits vital and animal actions, and consequently this alone also receives them: for what is the efficient cause of vital and animal actions is the same as the recipient or subject of them. To these actions however the body, through its organs, through the spirits and the blood, disposes and aids the soul, and through sympathy stirs up and receives in itself similar but bodily passions: as for instance, when in the soul and the sensitive appetite there arises the concupiscence of anger and the appetite of vengeance (for this precisely does not seem to be in the body but in the soul alone), soon by a certain natural agreement and sympathy of body and soul, there redounds from the soul into the body a certain almost bodily anger, namely the seething of the blood and the spirits; and so concerning the other motions of concupiscence, so that on account of this sympathy and similar motions of each, concupiscence may rightly be said to be both in the body and in the soul, and so be called flesh, as St. Cyprian learnedly teaches, in the prologue of the treatise On the Cardinal Works of Christ. "This very thing," says St. Cyprian, "which I call affections of the flesh, I call improperly: because these vices are proper to the soul, which feels, and moves, and lives, to which sin is imputed: because to it is given choice, and judgment, and knowledge, and power; through which it can disapprove evil and choose good. But the soul uses the body as a smith uses a hammer or an anvil, on which it forms the idols of all turpitudes, and fabricates whatever simulacra of any pleasures whatever. The flesh is not the dictatress of sin, nor the inventress of malice, nor does it form thoughts, nor dispose actions to be done; but is the workshop of the spirit, which in it and through it carries out and consummates whatever it has desired; that the flesh itself is insensible, however, is recognized by the departure of the spirit, after whose departure there remains a mass of putrefaction and a heap of mud, fit for no use: for whatever it feels, is shown to be alien from the nature of the body."
Then St. Cyprian explains how it does not contradict what has been said, that the flesh is said to lust against the spirit: "But that," he says, "the flesh is said to contend and resist against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, I judge to be said improperly: because that strife is of the soul alone, which quarrels with itself and disputes with its own choice, more certain in questions of this kind what is good, what is evil, than in inquiries about other things what is true, what is false. But the mind, drunk with the poison of its own desire, applies the body to its insults, and both, slipping into deadly delights with joined embraces, fall asleep; and when they have awakened, confusion brings late repentance, and the horror of defilements occurs to the polluted mind. And in all other things which have been wickedly perpetrated, vengeance of this kind pursues the sinner, and he himself, gorged with the stain of his lusts, vomits himself out."
XXXV.
Paul opposes spirit to flesh, the interior man to the exterior; the law of the mind to the law of the flesh and of the members; the law of God to the law of sin, that is, the grace by which we are renewed through Christ, virtue and its movements and dictate, he opposes to concupiscence, its movements and dictate. For it must be noted that he calls concupiscence now flesh, now the law (that is, the dictate) of the members, of the flesh and of sin, or sin; now the exterior man, earthly and animal; now the old man, now the body of sin, that is, subject to sin, prone to sin. And on the contrary he calls grace and spirit "the law of the mind, the law of God, the new man, the new creature, the interior and spiritual man;" the origin and cause of which phrase I shall assign on Romans VII, 22 and 23: so Chrysostom, Ambrose, Theophylact, and most clearly Anselm there.
XXXVI.
The active real verbs of the Hebrews are often to be expounded by mental verbs: as "he led," that is, willed to lead and predestined, Hebrews II, 10. Thus in Jeremiah I, 10, it is said: "I have set thee, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy, build and plant," namely the Gentiles and kingdoms, that is, that thou mayest preach and prophesy that those things are to be plucked up and destroyed, or built and planted. Similar in 2 Timothy I, 9, and Titus I, 2.
Again the Hebrews express comparison through negation, namely so that they assert what is greater, and deny what is less. This is clear in Matthew IX, 13. So Chrysostom and Euthymius there, and Augustine, Book X On the City, V. As 1 Corinthians XV, 10: "I labored more abundantly than all, not I, but the grace of God, which is in me" (as the Greeks read), that is, in supernatural works the grace of God did more than I; and 1 Corinthians III: "Neither he that plants is anything, nor he that waters; but God who gives the increase," that is, the preacher does little in the conversion and perfection of souls, if he be compared with what God does interiorly, breathing grace into the mind.
XXXVII.
The Apostle sometimes speaks confusedly and puts the thing for the things adjacent to it. Thus he often calls Christ the faith, grace, institution, baptism, Church, religion of Christ — that is, Christianity itself. As in Colossians II, 6: "As," he says, "you have received Jesus Christ," that is, the faith, doctrine, religion of Christ; "in Him," that is in the faith and religion of Him, "walk ye." And Galatians V, 2: "If you be circumcised, Christ (that is, Christianity) shall profit you nothing." Thus throughout he says the baptized "put on Christ," that is the virtues, spirit, and morals of Christ, and that they are, are grafted, live, walk in Christ, that is in the faith and grace of Christ.
XXXVIII.
The Apostle, because he abounds with spirit, wisdom, sense, and matter, hence does not equally regard the words: "Although unskilled (he himself says) in speech, yet not in knowledge;" and, "Our preaching is not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in the demonstration of the spirit and of power," 1 Corinthians II. Hence he often rolls together sentences, gathers some upon others, leaves the first imperfect and as if snatched away to something else, digresses, interjects many things, and then returns to the first and to the proposed subject. This is clear in Galatians II, 6; Ephesians III, 1, 2, and 14. Again he uses frequent ellipsis, enallage, aposiopesis, hyperbata, and that kind of tropes which the interpreter must supply or arrange. St. Irenaeus, Book III, chapter VII, gives the reason: "The Apostle often uses hyperbata," he says, "on account of the speed of his speech and the impetus of the spirit which is in him." Furthermore by ellipsis a case, or a preposition, or a conjunction, or a verb, or even an entire sentence is elided, as when wool-working is signified by it, Romans 11, 8. For the practice and pursuit of wool-craft is signified by this name: for from eriphos comes properly the maidservant who handles wool, and eriphia is the wool-working itself. And a little later he teaches that, when the Apostle says: "Then the Son Himself also shall be subject unto Him," in the same way by this subjection of the Son one is to understand, by an extended use of language, not His servile humility, but the salvation, felicity, incorruption, and eternal kingdom which the Son shall receive from the Father, as one united to Him and most gloriously subject.
XXXIX.
Paul employs many words according to the idiom and custom of his own province, namely Tarsus and Cilicia: for he himself was a Tarsian and a Cilician, as in 1 Cor. IV, 3: "With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's day." Here he set "day" for "judgment," from the Cilician idiom: for the day used to be appointed to defendants. Thus in Colossians II, 18 he used the verb katabrabeuein, which in the language of the Tarsians means to snatch the prize from another by stealth, as St. Jerome notes, Epistle 151 to Algasia, Question X. For the Cilicians spoke Greek, but more corruptly than other Greeks. "These words," says Jerome, "and many others, the Cilicians use to this day: nor should we marvel that the Apostle uses the custom of the language in which he was born and brought up, when Virgil, that second Homer, following with us the custom of his fatherland (Mantua and the Mantuan tongue), calls cold wicked," wicked meaning dreadfully intense, biting, and harmful; just as our French speak when they say: Il fait meschamment freid, that is, wickedly, that is, it is dreadfully cold.
XL.
The Apostle from time to time coins certain words and uses them with a new signification and meaning. This canon Gregory of Nyssa hands down and illustrates with examples, in his oration on the text 1 Cor. XV, "Then shall the Son Himself also be subject unto Him who put all things under Him": "It is the custom," says Nyssen, "of the wisdom of the great Paul, to use words freely and at his own discretion for whatever has appeared good to him, and to adapt the meanings of words to the sequence of his own thought, even if usage draws the use of expressions to other conceptions of the mind. For from what source did he take the use of the word ekenose, that is, He emptied Himself, in Phil. II, and in II Cor. XI: My glorying no man shall make void or empty out; and Rom. IV: Faith has been emptied; and I Cor. I: Lest the cross of Christ be made empty: from what usage did he draw these to his own purpose? Who likewise shall judge him for what he said imeiromenoi humon, that is, we were desirous of you, eager for you? — by which expression he shows the disposition and effect of love. How by the expression ou perpereuetai, that is, it does not act perversely, does he show charity to be alien from arrogance and pride? Likewise the zeal for contention and the desire of vengeance, in what way through the word..."
XLI.
Hence also he uses epitasis, that is, a more vehement word for one less vehement, as in Romans IX, 13: "Esau have I hated," that is, I have neglected, set aside, loved less. Similarly in Genesis chapter xxix, verse 31; Luke chapter xiv, verse 26.
Paul, although he writes in Greek, nevertheless from time to time uses Roman words, and turns them from Latin into Greek, because these words were in very common use, not only among the Latins, but also among the Greeks. Thus, writing in Greek, he calls things macellum (meat market), coloniam (colony), sicarios (assassins), semicinctium (apron), membrana (parchment), penulam (cloak).
XLII.
Scripture and Paul sometimes say that we believe in God (in Deum), sometimes that we believe God (Deo). St. Augustine, on Psalm LXXVII, distinguishes these two: "It is more," he says, "to believe in God than to believe God: for one must generally believe any man at all, although one ought not to believe in him." This is true according to the common idiom of the Latins; but according to the idiom of the Hebrews, of Paul, and of Scripture, these two are the same. For with the Hebrews haamin baYHWH, that is, to believe in God or into God, and haamin laYHWH, that is, to believe God, are the same. These three therefore signify the same thing among the Hebrews and in the Scriptures, namely: to believe God, to believe in God, and to believe into God. For the word haamin, that is, to believe, signifies among the Hebrews a certain mental contact, by which the mind as it were touches with its credulity and assent the thing believed, and clings to it. And verbs of contact are often constructed in Hebrew with bet, that is, with "in."
XLIII.
The verbs of the Hebrews often signify not the act, but the duty or office, as in Hebrews xiii, 17: "For they themselves keep watch," that is, they ought to keep watch, "as those who shall give account for your souls." So the Hebrews say asa asher lo ye'aseh, that is, "he did what shall not be done," which means "he did what ought not to be done," or "what is not lawful to do."
XLIV.
Scripture and the Apostle often use metalepsis, that is, transumption, as in Philippians II: "He thought it not robbery to be equal with God," that is, He did not, as a robbery, eagerly retain, defend, parade, or boast of His equality with God the Father, but, as Lord, voluntarily laid it aside and concealed it. So also he uses hypallage, as in Isaiah I: "The ox knew his owner's manger," that is, the ox recognized the master of his manger, or the master who feeds him in the manger.
XLV.
The Apostle from time to time also uses many other tropes — periphrasis, synecdoche, metonymy, and the like — which the reader is to recognize and discern from the context, that he may not be deceived by the surface of the words, but may track down the genuine sense which the Apostle intended.
Interpreters of the Epistles of Saint Paul
Among the Greeks, Origen was the first to write on the Epistle to the Romans. He is diffuse, elegant, and excels in moral matters, but holds certain doctrines foreign to sound faith. Hence St. Jerome, in his epistle to Pammachius and Oceanus on Origen, says: "I have praised the interpreter, not the dogmatist; the genius, not the faith; the Philosopher, not the Apostle." The second is Theodoret, who wrote on all the epistles of Paul. He is brief, plain, and literal. The third is St. Chrysostom. He excels in the literal sense, in the moral, and in the Pauline spirit. Theophylact and Oecumenius follow St. Chrysostom as disciples; in them, however, certain things are to be guarded against and noted in their proper places: for example, that on Romans IX, from verse 11, they plainly seem to assert and teach, against the Apostle's mind, that predestination, not only to glory but also to grace, was made on the basis of foreseen merits. Theophylact also followed the error of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople (as one by whom he was made Bishop of Bulgaria), and teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds not from the Son, but from the Father alone.
Among the Latins, in the first place there exist commentaries on all of Paul's epistles inscribed with the name of St. Ambrose, brief but everywhere weighty. But it must be noted that they are not by St. Ambrose. Elsewhere they have been printed under the name of St. Athanasius, but that they are neither by Athanasius nor by Ambrose is plain, first, from the style, and from the fact that this author professes himself to be ignorant of Greek, whereas St. Ambrose was thoroughly skilled in Greek, as is shown by the many things he borrowed from Origen and Basil. Second, because neither St. Jerome nor St. Augustine mentions them. Third, because they contain certain things suspect in faith: for example, on 1 Corinthians VII, they teach that a husband is not so bound by the laws of matrimony as the wife is bound; that the husband can divorce, but the wife cannot — which is a manifest error, even to St. Ambrose himself in other places. Likewise on Romans IV, last verse, they teach that those who were baptized before the Passion of Christ received the remission of sins, but were not justified. Again, on Romans VIII, 28, they teach that we are called to grace according to a purpose, not God's, but our own: which is Pelagian, and contrary to the Apostle's mind. Yet these commentaries are by an ancient author. Hence he himself, on 1 Timothy III, says that he is writing these things while Damasus is governing the Church. In the time of Cassiodorus, these commentaries were circulated under the name of Gelasius, as is clear from Cassiodorus, book De Divinis Lectionibus, ch. VIII, not Gelasius the Roman Pontiff, as Cassiodorus thought (who was later than Damasus), but, it seems, of that Bishop of Caesarea who lived before the Council of Chalcedon and wrote a book On the Two Natures.
Others attribute these commentaries to Remigius: but he lived much later, namely in the year of the Lord 880, and was Bishop of Auxerre, whose other commentaries on these epistles also exist, wholly different from these Ambrosian ones. Others think their author is the man who wrote the Questions on the Old and New Testaments, in volume IV of the works of St. Augustine, because in certain things he agrees with him, but in style, weight, doctrine, and method he differs from him. St. Augustine, book IV Contra duas epistolas Pelagian., ch. IV, cites from this commentary, on chap. V to the Romans, the explanation of that sentence, "In whom all have sinned," under the name of St. Hilary. Hence the Doctors of Louvain, whom Salmeron follows (disp. XIX), and Cardinal Bellarmine (book De Scriptor. Eccles., on Ambrose), think that Hilary the Deacon of the city of Rome is the author of this commentary, who adhered to the schism of Lucifer of Cagliari, and taught that heretics ought to be rebaptized. Hence St. Jerome, writing against the Luciferians, calls him "the Deucalion of the world." You will say: How then does St. Augustine call him "saint"? I reply: Augustine was perhaps deceived by the name of Hilary, and thought him the same as St. Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers; or he takes the name "saint," according to the custom of that time, broadly for any minister of the Church. Whether therefore this man was the author of these commentaries, or some other, he is certainly learned, literal, brief in words and weighty in sentences; but, as I said, has certain interpolations which are suspect and erroneous.
The second is St. Jerome, who wrote on the epistle to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to Titus, and to Philemon. Note here that St. Jerome is accustomed to say in his preface which ancient writers he is going to follow, and then often in the commentary, to transcribe matters of the same writers' errors from the commentary, but not refute them. Wherefore in these matters St. Jerome must be read with caution, and these errors are to be ascribed to Origen, whom he names in the preface, not to Jerome himself. Again it must be noted here that, among the works of St. Jerome, besides the commentary on these four epistles, there also exist other brief commentaries on all the epistles of St. Paul. But it is certain to one who looks closely and compares the earlier with the later, that these are not by St. Jerome. Hence even in the preface itself they are ascribed to Heliodorus: for the author of the latter is more recent, has nothing of Greek or Hebrew, whereas Jerome is keen and abounds both in Hebrew and Greek. Add that this author seems to be Pelagian. For on chap. V to the Romans he seems to deny original sin; for in treating that text of Paul, "By one man sin entered into the world," he so explains it: "Through Adam," he says, "sin entered into the world," entered, I say, by imitation, not by natural transmission or propagation: namely because Adam's posterity imitated his sin of their own accord, but did not by natural propagation contract any sin from Adam: which exposition was that of Pelagius. Hence this author, under the falsified name of St. Jerome, deceived many. For Sedulius, Primasius, and Rupert followed him, so that the commentary of Sedulius Scotus on the Epistles of Paul seems to be the same as this Hieronymian one, with only most things cut out which contained Pelagius's manifest heresy. So also the commentary of Primasius of Utica, who flourished under the Emperor Theodosius and was a disciple of St. Augustine — being of the same writing falsely ascribed to St. Jerome — is nothing other than a kind of file and correction, although throughout it is not always sufficiently exact and diligent.
Third, St. Augustine began a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans: "But terrified," he himself says, in book I of the Retractations, ch. XXV, "by the difficulty and prolixity of the Apostle, I gave up." He also wrote on the Epistle to the Galatians and scattered passages on the rest, and Venerable Bede gathered them. Others followed these after some centuries. The first, who wrote more aptly, more skillfully, and more wisely than the others, is St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, disciple and successor of Lanfranc, around the year of Christ 1080. However, Francisco Ribera, on the Epistle to the Hebrews, doubts whether these commentaries are St. Anselm's; and in ancient copies it is inscribed to the monk Hervaeus, on the testimony of Sixtus of Siena under "Anselm." This author transcribed some things from the Ambrosian commentary, as can be seen in 2 Corinthians, ch. VIII.
Haymo too, Bishop of Halberstadt, wrote on these epistles briefly, simply, and clearly, in the year of the Lord 830. He so agrees with Primasius that the commentary of both seems almost one and the same.
Following these, Thomas (Aquinas) wrote on the same briefly, methodically, and theologically, and suggests much material to the reader. The Master of the Sentences, Peter Lombard, after his own manner, wove together a commentary on these epistles from the Fathers: in which this one thing is wanting, that he does not note or designate the passages of the Fathers. Similar to him is the Glossa Ordinaria, which Strabo, the pupil of Rabanus, gathered from the Fathers without naming the passages. Likewise Anselm of Laon, in the year of the Lord 1110 (as Sixtus of Siena and others report), is the author of the Interlinear Gloss, which touched on many things briefly and pointedly, but learnedly and usefully. To this gloss, both Ordinary and Interlinear, was joined Nicholas of Lyra, a convert from a Jew to a Christian, in his time a noble interpreter of Scripture. Also Hugh the Cardinal wrote, who from time to time piles up moral points from Scripture, many but brief.
Of more recent writers, those who wrote with special distinction beyond the rest are: Cajetan, Dionysius the Carthusian, Cardinal Contarini, Ambrose Catharinus, Claudius Guilliaud, D. Hasselt, a doctor of Louvain (whose work survives in manuscript among us at Louvain); Titelmann, Adam Sasbout. Gagnaeus also wrote well, but, prevented by an untimely death, he left this commentary like a posthumous embryo to be shaped, polished, and published by others. Most recently P. Alfonso Salmeron wrote on all the epistles by way of doubts and questions, copiously and learnedly. On the Epistle to the Hebrews, Francisco Ribera, a singular interpreter of Sacred Scripture, wrote, and here gave forth, as it were, his swan-song.
On the Epistle to the Romans there wrote: first, Dominic Soto, learnedly and theologically. Second, by selected questions, P. Pererius. Third, Cardinal Toletus published a full and exact commentary with great judgment, who probes the Apostle's arguments and reasonings with sharp investigation, links them and tightens them. He has many new expositions here, and seems to track them down and to grow fond of them. On the Epistles to Timothy and Titus our own Magalianus and Ludovicus Soto Major wrote copiously and ornately; and before these, Claudius Spenceaus, who inserts lengthy disputations with the heretics of our time. Erasmus too has his annotations here, often grammatical, in which he weighs the various readings and the force and meaning of the Greek expression. But about certain articles of faith — such as the divinity of the Son, the descent of Christ into hell, the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, original sin, sacramental confession — he speaks doubtfully and ambiguously, and sets forth things which Luther and the Arians afterwards carved out from him.
Among the heretics many have written, and in the first place Calvin, Beza, and Augustine Marlorat, who put together a Catena out of Luther, Melanchthon, Brentius, Bullinger, Pomeranus, Sarcerius, Peter Martyr, and others.
Vatablus was a Catholic, but his writings have been printed and depraved by heretics: otherwise the man himself was distinguished in learning, both in Hebrew and in Greek. He pursues the letter sharply and briefly; but is often different from our Interpreter (the Vulgate). For he has his own version, or rather the Tigurine version of Leo the Hebrew.
John of Gorcum forged an excellent epitome from the commentaries of Estius and Cornelius (a Lapide) on Paul, of which a most excellent edition came out at Louvain in the year 1754.