Commentaria in Exodum
See here the blindness of carnal men, who in their sins delight themselves secure, play and exult, while the vengeance of God hangs over them. So Baltasar delighted himself secure, when he saw the hand writing on the wall, mane, thecel, phares; which the same night brought him ruin. Would you have a more recent example? Hear a memorable one. Ugolino, chief of the Guelph faction, when, the Ghibellines being either driven out or struck down, he ruled all things, on his birthday invited all his friends to a banquet, where, boasting of himself and his fortune, he asked one of his friends whether anything was wanting to him. The other, as if prophetic, answered: “Only the wrath of Heaven cannot long and far be absent from so prosperous a state.” And so, the strength of the Guelphs waning, the Ghibellines took up arms and surrounded his house, assailed it, and slew one of his sons and one grandson, who tried to keep off the violence: himself and two sons and three grandsons they shut up in a tower, the doors being barred and the keys cast into the river Arno. There, by hunger, before his eyes, in his bosom, the dearest pledges, the father dying saw dying. Though he cried out and begged that the enemy would be content with human punishments, the power of sacred confession and of holy viaticum was not granted, as Paulus Aemilius relates, book 8 of the History of the Franks.
So St. Ambrose, journeying from Milan to Rome, when he had fallen in with an impious host, who among other things affirmed that he had never experienced adverse fortune, turning to his companions said: “Let us depart hence in haste, lest the divine vengeance overwhelm us here. For God does not dwell in this house.” And when Ambrose with his companions had gone a little way, the earth opening swallowed up that house with the host and all his household.
It is sufficiently plain from the end of the preceding chapter that this happened after the receiving of the tables of the law, when Moses was already descending from Sinai, and that in the very descent the Lord spoke this to him. So Cajetan.
THY PEOPLE HATH SINNED.—“Thy” people, not now mine, which has so grievously sinned against me, which has left me and gone to the calf. So St. Jerome on chap. 9 of Daniel. For hath sinned the Hebrew is shichet, that is, hath corrupted, hath broken, namely my covenant, and consequently its faith, its way and its life.
10. LET ME ALONE, THAT MY WRATH MAY BE KINDLED AGAINST THEM.—Thou wilt ask: Why, if God wished to punish the people in his wrath, does he reveal it to Moses, who would hinder it? Julian the Apostate from this place slanders God as fickle, inconstant and repenting of his purpose. But St. Cyril, book 5 against him, answers him well, and Theodoret here, and St. Gregory, book 9 of the Morals, chaps. 11 and 12, that God did this not from mutability of mind, but first, to show how much he makes of his saints and their prayers. “For the sentence of God,” says St. Jerome on Ezechiel 13, “is broken by the prayers of the saints.” This is what let me alone signifies, that is, as the Chaldee renders it, leave off thy prayer, which binds my hands. Secondly, to show his immense clemency; for he had not decreed by an absolute and efficacious will to destroy the Hebrews, but by a conditional will, if namely no one should interpose himself as a mediator and intercessor for them: which condition he himself willed to be set, to make known his clemency, and therefore he revealed to Moses the sin of the people, that Moses might pray for it, and that he, being entreated, might spare the people. “What else is let me alone,” says St. Gregory, “than to give an occasion of praying,” and, as Theodoret says, “to say: Hinder me?”
Here God willed to teach us to do nothing precipitately in anger which we shall afterwards repent, but to let it subside, and compose the mind to quiet and clemency before we say or do anything. So Athenodorus, taking his leave of Caesar Augustus on account of old age, left him this advice: “When thou art angry, Augustus, say and do nothing before thou hast repeated to thyself the twenty-four letters of the alphabet.” Straightway Augustus, taking him by the hand, said: “I still have need of thy presence,” and kept him with him through the whole following year, saying: “The reward of silence is safe.” Plutarch bears witness in the Roman Apophthegms.
God, then, is not here changed, but the things disposed by him are changed, according to his own provident disposition: nor again is God’s sentence passed on sinners changed in God himself, since in God it is eternal and essential to him; but it is changed in the sinners themselves, namely in their absolution from the penalty to which he had condemned them: and this is done not by vanity or levity of judgment, but by the prayer of the saints, or the conversion of those against whom this sentence was passed. So St. Jerome on chap. 5 of Daniel, and St. Gregory, book 20 of the Morals, chap. 24. “God,” says Gregory, “does not change his counsel …”
Note: Anger, fury, indignation and other passions, when they are attributed to God in Scripture, signify no disturbance, but the pure operation and energy of God. So St. Augustine, book 1 Against the Adversaries of the Law, chap. 20: “Repentance,” he says, “is not after error; the anger of God has not the heat of a troubled mind; the mercy of God has not the heart of one who suffers with the wretched, whence it took its name in the Latin tongue; the zeal of God has not the envy of the mind; but the repentance of God is said to be the unlooked-for change of things placed in his power for men: the anger of God is the vengeance of sin; the mercy of God is the goodness of one who helps; the zeal of God is the providence by which he does not suffer those whom he has under him to love with impunity what he forbids.”
AND I WILL MAKE OF THEE A GREAT NATION,—one not so much to be born of thee as to be subjected to thee, and governed under thy leadership. This is plain from Num. 14:12, where a similar promise is repeated to Moses, as is plain from the Hebrew; “in a nation,” therefore, is the same as over a nation.
So Abulensis.
11. BUT MOSES BESOUGHT.—“Such,” says St. Chrysostom, hom. 12 on John, chap. 3, “ought those to be to whom the care of souls is committed, that they would rather perish with those entrusted to them than be saved without them.”
St. Ambrose also, book 2 of the Offices, chap. 7, admires the meekness of Moses: first, in that he swallows up, devours and forgets all the injuries done him by the people; secondly, in that he refuses the leadership of another and greater nation offered him by God; thirdly, in that he prays so earnestly for the ungrateful Hebrews; and he says this was done that the Hebrews might love him more for his meekness than they admired him for his deeds and wonders. For, as St. Gregory says, book 27 of the Morals, chap. 7: “Charity in his holy breast was the more inflamed by persecution,” and as if by antiperistasis was the more sharpened, as heat sharpens and increases when it is encompassed and assailed by cold.
Like was the charity of Abraamius, monk and bishop, who interceded for the unbelievers who afflicted him and became surety for them, as Theodoret relates in the Philotheus, chap. 17. And of an innocent Religious, who, to win a guilty brother, did penance with him, of whom Rufinus, book 9 of the Lives of the Fathers, num. 12. And of another, who, to keep a brother from falling, in everything obeyed him with wonderful gentleness, of whom the same, book 5, chap. 5, num. 28. And of Serapion the Sindonite, who, as Palladius testifies in the Lausiac History, chap. 83, sold himself as a slave to a certain noble Manichean, to convert him with his whole family from the heresy, which he also accomplished within two years. And of that holy monk who, to convert a fallen brother who continually fornicated, underwent a long penance for him, of whom John Moschus in the Spiritual Meadow, chap. 98.
12. CRAFTILY (in Hebrew, with malice or malignity, that is, craftily and deceitfully) HE BROUGHT THEM OUT,—that is, to do them harm, and destroy them in the desert.
BE APPEASED.—In Hebrew, repent of the evil, that is, change and revoke the sentence by which thou hast decreed to bring evil upon the Hebrews, and to punish them for idolatry.
to destroy the people, as he had designed, but to chastise it by another plague, of which in the last verse. See what the prayers of Moses alone effected here with God, which obtained the salvation of the whole people. Augustus Caesar, as Plutarch testifies, when Alexandria was taken and the citizens expected the worst, said that he spared the city: first, for its greatness and beauty; secondly, for its founder Alexander; thirdly, for his friend Arius. Far more nobly did God here spare the whole people for the sake of one Moses, his friend.
15. AND MOSES RETURNED FROM THE MOUNT.—The Hebrew mount. Whence it seems that Moses, having first conversed with God, and having now obtained pardon for the people and ended the conversation, looked back to the mountain and the people, and turned his face to the descent.
THE TABLES WRITTEN ON BOTH SIDES.—They were small tables, as Moses carried them in his hand, and as those laid up in the small ark of the testament could be neither large nor heavy; otherwise they would in time have broken it with their weight. But the letters of the tables were large, that they might be read from afar by the people, and therefore it had to be written on both sides of the tables, that the whole Decalogue might be written on them. So Abulensis. Others think that on these tables the Decalogue was written twice, namely that on each side it stood once, so that the Decalogue written on the tables on each side could be read by those standing on either side. So Lipomanus.