Commentaria in Exodum
16. AND THE GLORY OF THE LORD DWELT UPON SINAI,—“Glory,” that is, the majesty of the Lord making itself known by wonderful appearances, namely darkness and fire.
COVERING IT WITH A CLOUD SIX DAYS.—God willed that through these six days Moses should be drawn away and cleansed from all earthly thought and care, and raised by hope and prayer to the contemplation of heavenly things, and so prepared for converse with God, or rather with the angel.
17. AND THE SIGHT OF THE GLORY OF THE LORD WAS LIKE A BURNING FIRE.—The like here signifies not similitude but the truth of the thing, as also John chap. 1, verse 14: “We saw him as it were the only begotten.” And 1 Cor. chap. 3, verse 15: “He shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” And 1 Peter chap. 2, verse 13: “Whether it be to the king as excelling.” Here, therefore, was a true appearance of fire, and true fire.
This vision is different from that of the ancients, verse 10. For here all the people saw only the appearance of fire, as in chap. 20, verse 18. The cloud, therefore, covered the whole mountain, but on its summit the appearance of fire, which was the sign of God, stood out, and this vision remained the whole forty days that Moses was on the mount, and this that the Israelites might not despair of his return.
18. AND MOSES ENTERING INTO THE MIDST OF THE CLOUD, WENT UP INTO THE MOUNTAIN.—Josue being left on the mountain, Moses went up higher to the summit of the mount, to converse with the angel who bore God’s person, and to receive the tables of the law.
Tropologically, let him who seeks God, and desires to converse with Him, betake himself to the cloud, that is, to the secret of the heart, let him despise all things that are seen, seek the heights, and transfer his mind to the invisible. So Nyssen and Rupert.
So in the Lives of the Fathers, book 6, near the end, the elders say:
“When Moses entered into the cloud, he spoke with God; but when he came out of the cloud, with the people. So also a monk, when he is in his cell, speaks with God; but going out of his cell, he is with the demons.” Again, book 5, chap. 7, num. 38, an old man says: “The monk’s cell is that Babylonian furnace where the three children found the Son of God; but it is also the pillar of cloud, out of which God spoke to Moses.” Golden also is that saying of Blessed Nilus, who was a disciple of St. Chrysostom: “He who loves quiet remains unpierceable by the arrows of the enemy; but he who mixes with the multitude will receive frequent wounds.”
AND HE WAS THERE FORTY DAYS.—It is added in Deut. 9:9 that Moses in those forty days ate nothing and drank nothing; for Moses then lived by the word and converse of God, and by the power of God sustaining him.
Josue, for just as many days awaiting the return of Moses, remained in that place of his (whence Moses, called to the summit, had departed from him), given, as it is right to believe, to contemplation after the example of Moses; but whether Josue, like Moses, lived forty days without food and drink is uncertain. Abulensis thinks that Josue was fed by manna falling there, and by the torrent which Deut. 9:21 is said to descend from the mount.
Some think that Moses, besides the six days of which verse 16 speaks, was also forty other days on the mount with God, so that in all he was there forty-six days. But it is truer that he was on the mount altogether only forty days; the six days, therefore, of which verse 16, are included in these forty.
Note: The number forty is frequent and sacred in Scripture: the fast of Moses, of Elias, of Christ. Again, the 42 mansions, or stations, of the Hebrews in the desert; and the 40 years of their pilgrimage in the same, in which, continually lacking earthly food, they were fed with the heavenly manna until they came to the land of promise: as Christians through the 40 days of fasting tend toward the resurrection; which days of fasting, on account of that old figure of the pilgrimage and stations of the Hebrews in the desert, are also called stations by the Fathers, as by Cassian, Collat. 21, chaps. 28 and 29, where he also calls Lent the yearly tithe, because it is the tenth part of the year, and so through it we as it were pay the tithes of the year to God. They are so called also by Hermas, who is also called the Shepherd, book 2, chap. 5: “What is fasting? It is a station,” because it is as it were a fixed day for fasting; and in serm. 25: “Fasts are called stations, because standing and abiding in them we repel the lurking enemies;” and by Tertullian, book On Prayer, at the end, where he says: “The station is to be dissolved when the body of the Lord is received (for formerly Christians met almost daily at evening for prayer, as at a station, and in it, fasting, performed the Supper of Christ and communicated; for they fasted until evening, that is, until the supper of the Eucharist). But if station takes its name from military usage (for we too are God’s soldiery), surely no gladness or sadness befalling the camp dissolves the stations of soldiers; for gladness will administer discipline more willingly, sadness more carefully.” So Tertullian; the same, in his book On Fasting: “The stations of the fourth and sixth days of the week,” that is, fasts. See the note of Pamelius on Tertullian’s book On Prayer, at the end.
So Simeon Stylites, who for thirty years, day and night, stood on a pillar, passed twenty-eight whole Lents without any food or drink, so that he was rightly thought a portent of the world, and seemed not so much a man as an angel. But hear more men besides: Lucian in the Philopatris is witness that Christians were wont so to keep the fast of Lent that they passed ten days without food. Gregory Nazianzen writes to Hellenius that there were many among the monks in Pontus who abstained from food for whole twenty days and nights, imitating half the fast of Christ and Moses, and testifies that one of them was subject to himself. St. Augustine, epistle 86 to Casulanus, relates that he knew some who kept a continuous fast beyond a week; and adds: “That one has come to the very number of forty, has been affirmed to us by brethren worthy of credit.” St. Jerome, epistle 7 to Laeta, on the training of a daughter, forbidding burdens of abstinence in tender age, says: “In Lent, however, sail must be spread for the continent, and all the reins of the charioteer loosed to the eager horses.” The same writing to Marcella of Asella: “When,” he says, “through the whole year she was fed on continual fasting, remaining so for two or three days together; then in Lent she spread the sails of her bark, joining almost all the weeks with a cheerful countenance, and so came to the age of fifty without pain of stomach or injury of the bowels.” The Emperor Justinian led a hard life in Lent: “For two days he abstained from food; when he craved food, he would have wine, bread and other such victuals absent; he ate only cabbage and wild herbs steeped in salt and vinegar; his drink was water alone, nor did he use these to satiety; but the food he asked for he tasted a little and soon put away, not taking what was enough for nature,” says Procopius, book 1 On the Buildings of the Emperor Justinian; and thus armed with fasting he overcame the Persians, Goths, Vandals and other barbarians. The ancient monks in Lent withdrew into the desert, wholly intent on fasts and contemplation, as Zozymas relates in the Life of St. Mary of Egypt. St. Francis, besides the Paschal Lent, kept two other fasts: one before the feast of the Assumption, in honour of the Blessed Virgin; the other after that feast, in honour of the holy Angels: hence at the end of this fast, as a reward, he received the sacred stigmata of Christ, impressed upon him by the Seraph. So St. Bonaventure in his Life.
The monks of Tabennesis passed Lent with food not cooked by fire; the Abbot Paul of Galata with a sextarius of lentils and a small vessel of water; Adolius eating only after five days; Macarius of Alexandria eating nothing except a few raw cabbage leaves on Sunday, never bending the knee, never reclining, always standing. So it is related in the Lives of the Fathers.
Symbolically Bede says: Moses was with the Lord forty days, that by this number he might learn that only those can fulfil the Decalogue whom the grace of Gospel truth, to be described in four books (the Gospels), should help; for four times ten make forty. Again, by this number forty were signified the ten precepts which Moses in these forty days received from God, to be published to the four quarters of the world, that is, to all nations, in the time of the Gospel.