The Great Commentary of Cornelius a Lapide: the Epistle to the Galatians
Crying. Causing you to invoke God ardently, confidently, with filial affection. It is the clamour of the heart, not of the mouth, as in Exod. xiv. 15.
Abba . The Hebrew Ab, the Syriac Abba, which in Greek and Latin becomes Abbas , denotes father. See my notes to Rom. viii. 15. As this place is a terror to the lukewarm, who rarely experience this feeling of filial prayer, so does it inspire the devout, who seek it within with a hope of salvation and enjoyment of their heavenly inheritance.
Ver. 8. — Howbeit then. When you were pagan unbelievers, and lived in ignorance of God.
Which by nature are no gods. But only in the estimation of man.
Ver. 9. — But now after that ye have known God, &c. Known by God, as beloved sons of their Father. “ God is ignorant of no one,” says S. Jerome, “ but He is said to know those who have exchanged error for piety.” Better still, it may be rendered, made to know, taught by God, by a common Hebraism. The Hiphil (“ he caused to know”) and the Hophal (“he was made to know”) have no exact equivalent voice in Latin or Greek, and are, therefore, expressed by a participle, with a loss of the force of the original Hebrew. Cf. 1 Cor. viii. 3. In other places, God is said to know when He makes us to know; and the Holy Spirit is said to cry aloud, or to pray, when He makes us cry aloud or pray. Cf. Rom. viii. 26. The meaning of the verse is, therefore, this : Since you have been taught by God inwardly by His grace, outwardly by our preaching what is the way of salvation in Christ, why do you turn again to the elements of the law, to be taught perfection by them ? You are like a metaphysician beginning again the elements of grammar, or a runner returning from the goal to the starting-point. You were once near the goal of salvation ; why then go back to the place you started from ? You were theologians taught by God ; why do you return to the law, as though you had lost your rights and were beginning again ?
To the weak and beggarly elements. What are these? 1. Augustine and Ambrose understand by the phrase the sun and moon, and the idols formerly worshipped by the Galatians, and see a reference to the false gods mentioned above in verse 8. Tertullian, in a similar vein, says (de Prescript c. 33) : “ The Apostle censures Hermogenes , who, by introducing matter as uncreated, compares it to the uncreated God, and by making a goddess as mother of the elements , sets her up as an object of worship side by side with the one God.” But the objection to this explanation is that the Galatians had no wish to return to Gentilism but to Judaism ; and this the whole Epistle, with its condemnation of the Jewish ceremonies, clearly shows.
2. The explanation of Chrysostom, Theophylact, and Œcumenius is better. According to them, these elements are the sun and moon, to which the Galatians wished to return, not to serve them as gods, as they had been used to do before they embraced Christianity, but to determine by their courses the Sabbaths, New Moons, and other Jewish feasts. He calls these elements weak and beggarly with reference to God, whose support they require continually , without which they are weak, and even unable to exist.
If God withdrew His hand, they would sink into the nothing from which they came. That S. Paul is referring to the sun and moon appears from the fact that they are properly the elements of the world, as he styled them in verse 3, and also because he asks, “ Why turn ye again” to the things which you used to worship? Among the Galatians these of course were not the Jewish ceremonies, but the sun and moon.
3. But the best explanation is that of Jerome, Theodoret, Anselm, and Tertullian ( contra Marcion , v. 4), who understand by these elements the Sacraments, and feast-days, and other ceremonies of the Old Law, which were given to the Jews, as the first rudiments of faith and piety, and through them to the whole world, and which were, as I have said in the notes to verse 3, symbols of the creation and government of the world. They are beggarly , and, as Tertullian calls them, fallacious, because they neither contain nor confer grace, but need for this the power of Christ. They are also weak , because they are of themselves of no efficacy to justify or sanctify ; for without faith in Christ they could justify no one, nay, even with that faith they did not justify by themselves and ex opere operato , but only ex opere operantis, i.e., by the faith of the receiver. Accordingly, they were done away with when Christ came.
That this last explanation is the correct one is evident from what follows ; for S. Paul goes on to say, “ Ye observe days and months , and times and years ,” by which he gives them to understand that these were the elements that they served.
Moreover, this explanation is much the more simple and pertinent. For these elements, that is to say, these festal days they did observe, but they did not worship the sun and moon. Nor can it be said with strict truth that whoever observes the first day of the month is a moon-worshipper, or that one who keeps the Lord's Day is a sun-worshipper, when the Lord's Day is merely identified with Sunday, because the best of all days is assigned to the chief of all the heavenly bodies.
It may be objected that the word again is opposed to the explanation , and implies that the Galatians, as being formerly worshippers of the host of heaven, had returned to this worship, and not to Jewish observances, to which they had not been addicted.
I reply that S. Paul regards all men without distinction as having been under the law as their pedagogue, and accuses the Galatians of again setting up, by their action, the obsolete rites of Judaism.
But the answer of Adam is perhaps better, who refers the word again, not to the whole but to the part, as signifying only that slavery was restored in general, but not in this or that particular. The Galatians had at one time served idols, and afterwards Judaism, and they are here exhorted not to become slaves once more, whether to demons or to Jewish shadows. So we might say to a Lutheran who had embraced the Catholic faith, and afterwards lapsed into Calvinism : How can you fall into Calvinism again, that is into heresy ? It is not Calvinism that is the significant word, but lapse, and the force of the question lies in its appeal against deserting the Catholic faith for heresy of any kind whatsoever.
Ver. 10. — Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. As S. Augustine (Ep. 119 and Enchirid. 79) and Anselm understand the elements to be the sun, moon, and idols, so do they understand this verse to mean days that were lucky or unlucky, according as astrology made them so. But Chrysostom and Jerome and others explain the days to be the Jewish Sabbaths ; the months to be the new moons, and the seventh month, which was held sacred throughout ; the times to be the stated feasts of the four seasons — the Passover , Pentecost, the Day of Atonement, and the New Year ; and the years to be the seventh year of remission of debts, and the fiftieth year of Jubilee. By the observance of days, months, and years, S. Paul means the ceremonies of the Old Law as a whole.
From this appears the error of the heretics, who infer from this that the feasts of the Church are condemned. If they were, then would the heretics themselves be condemned for keeping Sunday. What is condemned here is the observance of the Jewish feasts only. These are happily distinguished from those observed by Christians, by Nazianzen, in his Whitsuntide Oration, in which he says : “ The Jew keeps feast days , but it is according to the letter ; for by observing the corporeal law he attains not to the spiritual. The Gentile keeps feast days , but it is according to the body , in revelling and wantonness. [Accordingly Lucian (Saturnalia) bids that nothing be done during the time of the feast, whether in public or in private, but what pertains to sport, to pleasure, and to lust ; nay, the feasts of the heathen were obscene in themselves, witness those of Venus, Priapus, and Bacchus, in whose honour every abomination was practised]. We Christians keep feasts , but only such as are pleasing to the Spirit .”
Jerome, too, says : “ Any one may say that if it is not lawful to observe days , and months , and times , and years , then we do what is forbidden in observing Wednesdays , and Good Friday , and the Lord’s Day, and the Lenten fast , and the Easter solemnities , and the Whitsuntide festivities, and the days set apart in different places in honour of the martyrs. A wise and simple reply to this will be that the Jewish feast-days differ from ours. We do not observe the feast of unleavened bread, but that of the Cross and the Resurrection , nor do we number our weeks to Pentecost as the Jews did, but celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit .” From which we may observe that, in S. Jerome’s time, days were set apart in honour of the martyrs, and that the practice is approved by him.