The Great Commentary of Cornelius a Lapide: the First Epistle to the Corinthians
Fashion . The nature, appearance, and fugitive state of the world, as Ambrose and Anselm say. The Apostle does not attribute form to the world, which is something more firm and constant, but fashion , which is ever changeful, fugitive, and ready to vanish away. Cf. note to Rom. xii. 2. “Do not ,” says Anselm, “ give the world a constant love ; for the object of your love is inconstant. In vain do you firmly fix your heart on it: it flies while you love.” If the world is fugitive, so then is marriage and everything else contained in the world.
The day flies by ; none knows the morrow’s fount, whether toil or rest it brings : so the world’s glory fades. So too Lipsius, a man as wise as he was lifted up above man and human things, was wont with great discernment to say, when we talked together, as we often did freely, of the vanity of knowledge and all human things, that he had long thought of what he would have inscribed on his tomb. It was this : “ Do you wish me to speak to you still more loudly? All human things are smoke, shadow, vanity, stage-play , and in one word — nothing.”
For all the world’s a play in which this life’s story is given. Men are the players ; they have their exits and their entrances ; and the place of the theatre is the earth. “ One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever,” says Ecclesiastes i. 4. On the stage are two doors — that of birth for those coming on, that of death for those going off. Each receives the dress fitted to his part. He who personates a king will not take away with him the purple which he wore. Soon the comedy comes to an end. Seneca says that the same hour which gave us life began to end it. We often hear it said : “Tell me, O farm, O house, O prebend, O money, how many lords thou hast had, and how many yet await thee. Tell me where is Solomon and his wisdom, Samson and his strength, Absalom and his beauty, Cicero and his eloquence, Aristotle and his subtle intellect. Where are the illustrious princes, the things of old, the favour of governors, the strong limbs, the power of the princes of the world?” They are food for worms; they have returned to the dust. Transient as the morning dew, they have fled away. What seek you ? What are you so eager for? Happy the man who was able to despise the world !
Gregory of Nazianzen enumerates in detail and describes most beautifully and tersely the empty and fugitive nature of everything in this world (de Vitae Itineribus). He says : " Who am I, and whence came I into this life ? and who shall I be , after that having been nursed for a short time in the lap of earth, I return from the dust to life ? Where in His universe will God place me ? Many are the sorrows that await the traveller on life's road, and there is no good amongst men unalloyed with evil. And would that evils did not claim for themselves the greater part. Wealth is beset by snares , and the pride of high office and of thrones is the mere dream of a sleeper . To be subject to another’s power is grievous and burdensome . Poverty drags down ; beauty is as short lived as the lightning of summer; youth is nothing more than a temporary glow ; old age is the gloomy sunset of life . Words take wings , glory is but breath, nobility old blood , strength is shared with the wild-boar , satiety is disgusting , matrimony a bond , a large family is the mother of inevitable anxiety , to be bereaved is as a disease , the market is the seed-plot of vices , rest is feebleness , arts are practised by worthless men , the bread of another is scanty , agriculture is toilsome , the greater number of sailors go to the bottom, one's native land is a prison , and the region beyond it a scorn." Then he comprehends them all in one view, and holds up to our gaze the vanity of all things in many apt similitudes, saying: “All things , in short, are full of sorrow for mortals , all human things are fearful and yet ridiculous — like to thistle-down, to a shadow , to dew, to the idle wind, the flight of a bird, to a vapour, a dream, a wave , a ship , a foot-print, a breath ; to dust, to a world perpetually changing all things as it revolves —now stable, now rotating, now falling, now fixed by seasons , days, nights, labours , death , sorrows , pleasures, diseases , calamities, prosperity . Not without great wisdom is it, O Christ, that you have so appointed that all the things of this life are uncertain and unstable . Doubtless it was that we might learn to glow with love and desire of something firm and settled , that we might tear away the mind from thoughts of the folly of the flesh , and might preserve pure and intact that image given us from above ; might lead a life apart from this life ; and, in short, by changing this world for another, bear with fortitude all the difficulties and trials of this life.”
S. Augustine too remarks appositely (Enarr. Ps. cx.) on the words, “ He shall drink of the brook on the way,” that, “ a brook is the current of man's mortality . As a brook is swollen by the rains, overflows, roars as it goes, hurries along, and as it hurries hastens to its end, so is the whole current of mortality . Men are born, they live, they die ; and while they die others are born . What stands still here ? what is there that does not hasten onwards ? what is there that is not as it were collected from the rain, and on its way to the sea, unto the deep ? ”
The fashion of this world implies that it is dressed and masked as an actor. Just as if a man were to sell you a horse and its trappings, you would take off its covering and examine the body and limbs of the horse before buying — even so do here. The world offers you for sale dressed-up honours, masked pleasures, decorated riches. Remove the decorations, take off the masks, look what lurks behind them: you will see that all is foreign, slender, empty.
The Wise Man pathetically describes (v. 8) the complaint of the ungodly, and the late remorse that follows on the love of vanity ; and he compares it to a slight shadow, a messenger hastening by, a ship cutting the sea, the flight of a bird, an arrow shot forth — to thistle-down, foam, smoke, wind, and to an inn where one spends a night. S. Jerome explains these images at length in his letter to Cyprianus, in which, commenting on Ps. xc. 4, he says: “Compared to eternity the length of all time is short.” Then, at ver. 6, he says : “As in the morning the grass flourishes, and delights with its verdure the eyes of all that see it, and then gradually withers and loses its beauty , and is turned into hay to be trodden under foot, even so does the whole race of men show the freshness of spring in childhood, blossom in youth, and flourish in manhood ; but suddenly , when he knows not , the head turns white , the face wrinkles , the skin contracts , and at last, in the evening of old age, he can scarcely move . He is hardly recognised for what he used to be, and seems almost changed into another man; and, lastly, as Symmachus turns Ps.
xc. 10, we are suddenly cut down and fly away.”
Ver. 32. — But I would have you without carefulness, and therefore living in virginity and celibacy.
Ver. 33. — But he that is married careth . . . how he may please his wife. “A woman,” says Plautus, “and a ship are never ornamented enough : he therefore that wants work had better marry a wife and fit out a ship.”
Ver. 34. — There is difference also between a wife and a virgin. The Latin takes the first half of this clause with the preceding, and refers it to the husband. He that is married careth how he may please his wife and is divided. He is distracted by many anxieties, so that he cannot give himself to one Lord ; but God claims a part, and his wife and children claim a part, and that the greater. So Ambrose takes it.
But the Greeks — Chrysostom, Œcumenius, Theophylact, Basil, and Ephrem — join them as above. The meaning, then, is that the pursuits of a wife and a virgin are different. As Chrysostom says, what separates a wife from a virgin is leisure and business: the virgin has leisure, the wife has business. But S. Jerome ( contra Jovin. lib. i.) asserts that this reading is not the true one. The Greeks still support the latter reading, the Latins the former.
The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that
she may be holy both in body and in spirit. “ Holy ” is pure and unstained. “ A virgin,” says Œcumenius, “ is holy in body, because of her chastity ; she is holy in spirit, because of the close converse she holds with God, and because of the indwelling of the Spirit.”