Commentaria in Numeros
22. AND GOD WAS ANGRY.—For although He had granted Balaam to go to Balac, yet He had forbidden him to do or say anything other than He Himself should command; but Balaam, greedy of gold, went to Balac with this mind, to curse the Hebrews, which he knew God did not will; for he had heard from Him, verse 12: “Neither shalt thou curse the people, because it is blessed.” That Balaam here wished to do the contrary is plain from the rebuke of the angel, verse 32: “I am come,” he says, “to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse, and contrary to me,” because, namely, thou goest with that mind and hope, to curse my people, of which I am the guardian and protector; for this Balaam hoped to do. Whence it is also said that he loved the wages of unjust cursing, but had as his corrector a beast of burden.
AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD STOOD IN THE WAY AGAINST BALAAM.—In Hebrew, as satan to Balaam, that is, to show himself an adversary to Balaam. This angel showed himself not to Balaam, but only to the ass on which he sat. So the blessed in a glorified body appear to whom they will, and hide themselves from whom they will.
27. AND WHEN THE ASS SAW THE ANGEL STANDING, SHE FELL UNDER THE FEET OF THE RIDER—partly in consternation, partly because she saw no passage, nor other escape. For she saw the angel, with drawn sword threatening death if she went on; to him therefore she yielded, as far as she could, that by her the hardness and blindness of Balaam might be the more rebuked: whence also the ass spoke.
28. AND THE LORD OPENED THE MOUTH OF THE ASS, AND SHE SPOKE.—The angel moved the tongue of the ass to speak, as the demon had moved the mouth of the serpent to speak to Eve, and as an angel moved the mouth of the hippocentaur and of the ass-satyr to speak to St. Antony, and show him in the desert the way to St. Paul the Hermit, as St. Jerome testifies in the Life of St. Paul. This speech was therefore made through the organs of the ass, but the angel impelling them fittingly to form articulate voice, and supplying through the neighbouring air what was lacking to the organs of the ass.
Where note first: Properly the ass did not speak here. For to speak is to express one’s conception by voice; but the ass could not conceive, nor understand what those voices, uttered by her mouth, signified. These voices, therefore, were formed not by the soul or mind of the ass, but by an external mover, namely the angel, in the mouth of the ass; just as by a man, when with his hand he strikes together the lips and teeth of another man, certain shrill sounds are formed. Whence it follows that this speech was not vital to the ass, because it was not produced by the power of her soul, nor was it her own vital act; much less was it vital to the angel himself, but was received in the air and mouth of the ass. For a vital action is one that is elicited by the soul and received in the same.
Note secondly: Yet the angel did not form these voices in the neighbouring air, nor in the mouth of the ass, without the organs; for so the ass would no more be said to have spoken than the house in which an angel spoke. But Holy Scripture and the Fathers, such as St. Augustine, Origen, Theodoret, Ambrose and others, say that the ass spoke, and rebuked Balaam.
Note thirdly: The organs of the ass alone, however, as also those of other brutes (except certain birds, such as the parrot), are not sufficient for the formation of human voice. For something else is required, the human mouth or one like it; for this alone has the inner organic power and disposition by which air is collected for the formation of voice, and by which the due striking and collision of the air against the palate, lips, teeth, etc., takes place for the emission of this or that sound, which is to articulate the voice: but the mouth of the ass and of other brutes lacks these; for, to say nothing else, their mouth, being long and open at the side, cannot collect the air proceeding from the depths, and dash and break it against the teeth, because all the air flows out at the side through the gape. The angel therefore supplied this itself, as well as all else that was lacking to the organs of the ass, through the neighbouring air; for he held the air strongly, to resist, that the air and voice should not flow out of the mouth of the ass; and on the other hand he so dashed and struck the air in the mouth of the ass against the organs of the mouth that it expressed an articulate voice. So Abulensis.
Note fourthly: It was the same angel who had spoken to Balaam at home that he should go to Balac, the same who withstood him armed in the way, the same who spoke through the mouth of the ass; for angels have a wide sphere of presence and activity.
Note fifthly: The angel appeared with a flashing drawn sword, to teach Balaam that, if he wished to curse the Hebrews, blessed by God, he would take up war against God and the angels. So St. Cyril, book VI On Adoration. Note sixthly: that this angel was Michael (who was the prince of the Synagogue of the Jews, as he now is of the Church of the Christians), Procopius and others relate in Theodoret, Question 42. Like to this is what we read in the Life of St. Galganus of Siena, printed in the year of the Lord 1572, and from it in Philip Ferrarius in the Catalogue of the Saints of Italy, at the fourth day of December; for Galganus, born in the territory of Siena in the reign of the Emperor Frederick I, about the year of the Lord 1153, leading a voluptuous life, was twice admonished in dreams by the archangel Michael to change his ways for the better and to become a soldier of Christ, and came to the mountain of the hedges, where he was a third time admonished by the same angel to leave the world and give himself to God. From this counsel his mother and kinsfolk, proposing to him a wife both elegant and rich, tried with all zeal to turn him away: but when, persuaded by them, he was riding to see his betrothed, his horse so suddenly stood still that, though spurred on to advance, it is said to have spoken, and to have said that it was forbidden by an angel to go forward; and the angel’s footprints in the rock are still shown at that mountain. Wherefore, changing his way and retiring into a hermitage, he led a heavenly life in prayers, fasts and all austerity, and after a year, being called by a heavenly voice to eternal rest in these words: “It is enough that thou hast laboured; now thou shalt reap what thou hast sown,” he fell asleep in the Lord in the thirty-third year of his age, about the year of the Lord 1181, and was renowned for miracles both living and dead.
Note seventhly: God used the voice of an ass, both because it is fitting that a brutish mind be taught by a brute, and, as Nyssen says, On the Life of Moses, near the end, that the vanity of the augur (Balaam) might be instructed and chastised, who was wont to observe the braying of an ass and the chattering of birds as omens signifying things to come. That the Gentiles superstitiously observed similar omens Cyril of Alexandria teaches, book III Against Julian, where he adds: “I will recall the oak of Dodona, which they say used a human voice.” So Caelius Rhodiginus writes, in the island of Rhodes, that the bull of Jove spoke with human speech. More wonderful is what Alexander the Great reports in his letter to his preceptor on his journey and the situation of India, of two trees, one of manly strength belonging to the Sun, the other female belonging to the Moon, speaking to him in Indian and Greek, and giving oracles. For the tree of the Sun, touched by the first beam of the rising Sun, said to him in Indian: “Alexander, unconquered in wars, thou shalt be lord of the one world; but alive thou shalt not return to thy country: for so the fates have decreed concerning thy head.” But the tree of the Moon, struck by the first rays of the Moon rising by night, being consulted by the keeper where Alexander was to die, answered in Greek: “Alexander, thou hast not the full end of thy age, but in the following year, in the month of May, thou shalt die in Babylon; thou shalt be deceived by him from whom thou least expectest it.” Alexander asked the tree of the Sun again by whom he was to be slain, and what end his mother and sisters would have. The tree answered in Greek: “If I shall disclose to thee the plotter of thy death, thou wilt easily change the fates that press. Three Sisters will be angry also with me (the Parcae, who distribute to each his fates like portions of wool), because I shall have hindered their tasks. Therefore in a year and eight months thou shalt die in Babylon, not by iron, as thou suspectest, but by poison. Thy mother, by a most shameful and pitiable end, shall lie sometimes unburied in the road, the prey of birds and beasts. Thy sisters shall long be happy in their fate. Do thou only beware that thou question us no further; rather depart from the bounds of our grove, and return to Phasis and Porus.” If these things are true, they are magical, and done by the help of the demon, who, as through idols, so can speak through trees.
Tropologically St. Gregory, part III, Pastoral Rule: “The ass sees the angel whom Balaam did not yet see; because the flesh, for the most part slow, shows by its troubles, through its scourge, to the mind that presides over it, God whom the mind itself, ruling the flesh, did not see.” The ass, therefore, that is, the flesh scourged, often reveals and shows God to Balaam, that is, to the blind and depraved mind.