Commentaria in Deuteronomium
Hence St. Jerome thus instructs the virgin Eustochium: “Be,” he says, “a cicada of the nights, sing with the spirit, sing with the mind; wash thy bed every night, water thy couch with tears.” And: “To the saints even sleep itself is prayer.”
Finally Jeremias admonishes, Lamentations ii, 19, saying: “Arise, give praise (that is, pray to God) in the night, in the beginning of the watches”; for the Jews, as the Romans, divided the night into four watches, and Jeremias counsels us to praise God at the beginning of each. So the Church formerly did by night; hence we have in the Ecclesiastical Office three nocturns and Lauds.
AND RISING.—Hence this custom has grown among good Christians, says Abulensis, that as soon as they have risen from bed they begin with the praises of God, or meditate something pious and holy; for it is incredible how much morning meditation profits the soul. Daily experience clearly teaches us that it is the surest support and foundation of our whole Society, and that all zeal, efficacy and fruit of all our actions through the day flow and spring from it. Whoever you are, therefore, who read this, I beseech you by your own salvation and that of others, to try and practise the same, especially if you are a Theologian or an Ecclesiastic; and to learn and accustom yourself daily to meditate something on the brevity of life, on your death, judgment, eternity, on the life and passion of Christ or of the Saints, and thence to form efficacious resolutions that on that day you will mortify anger, pride, gluttony, etc.; that you will exercise yourself in humility, charity, patience, etc.; that you will convert this or that soul: and you will feel through the whole day great strength and courage added to you to accomplish the same: especially if the pious resolutions which you formed in the morning you recall and renew through the day, and sharpen and kindle by ejaculatory prayers. He, by the daily custom of praying, even asleep prayed, and cried out: O God, O Jesus, my love, my God and my all!
The firstfruits of thoughts and actions, as of the day, are to be given to God, for four causes. First, because they, as to the first cause, the author of nature and grace and the giver of all goods, are as it were due to God, as St. Basil teaches, in the Longer Rules, answer 37, and St. Ambrose, St. Dionysius, On the Divine Names, chapter iii; nay this was the precept of Apollonius of Tyana: “At the coming of dawn one must converse with the gods,” as Philostratus testifies in his Life, book I, chapter xvi.
Secondly, because it is fitting that all the actions of the day take their beginning from God (hence that saying of Aratus and Theocritus: ek Dios archometha, which Virgil renders, from Jove the beginning), and from him be directed to a holy end, and be done perfectly in all things. Hence St. Bernard, in the book On the Solitary Life, enjoins the same: “That as we rise,” he says, “to the praises of God, the whole tenor of our work thenceforth may be formed and quickened in his praises.” St. Ephrem, tome I, sermon On Praying to God: “If thou put prayer before work, and rising from bed, draw the beginnings of thy first motions from prayer, the entrance of sin into thy soul shall not be open.” And Solomon, Proverbs viii: “With me are riches and glory.”
Thirdly, because the angels, the sun, the birds and other creatures do the same. Hear St. Basil, epistle 1 to Gregory Nazianzen: “What is more blessed than for a man on earth to imitate the harmony of the angels? as soon as day begins to go to prayers? to venerate the Creator in hymns and canticles?” And St. Ambrose on Psalm cxviii, sermon 19: “It is grievous if the ray of the rising sun find thee idle in thy bed with shameless shame, and the clear light strike eyes still weighed down with drowsy torpor. Run to meet therefore the rising of the sun, that the first brightness of the day may not anticipate thy eyes; before that rises, thou shalt see Christ enlightening; he shall first shine in the secret of thy heart, and again thou shalt say to him: Thou shalt delight the outgoings of the morning and of the evening.”
Fourthly, because the wise and saints have done the same. The Therapeutæ in Philo, in the book On the Contemplative Life, “are wont to pray twice daily, morning and toward evening: at sunrise asking a day truly happy, and that their minds be filled with heavenly light.” The Essenes, says Josephus, Jewish War book II, chapter viii, “before sunrise speak nothing profane; but to it (not the sun alone but God, the author of the sun) they offer certain ancestral prayers, as though praying that it may rise.” So the Christians formerly held assemblies before daylight, to sing to Christ and God, as Pliny testifies to Trajan. On the morning hymns of monks at cockcrow, homily 14. So Theodoric king of the Goths “sought daily with a very small retinue the assemblies of his priests before daylight, and with great diligence venerated them,” says Sidonius Apollinaris, book I, epistle 9. The Emperor Alexander Severus, taught by his mother Mammæa, in the morning performed divine service in his domestic chapel, says Lampridius. Finally, more ancient than all these, David, Psalm lxii, 2: “O God, my God, to thee do I watch at break of day.” And verse 7: “If I have remembered thee upon my bed, in the morning thou wilt hear my voice; in the morning I will stand before thee, and will see.” And Psalm lviii, 17: “I will extol thy mercy in the morning.” And Psalm lxxxvii,
The sense of all these is, as if to say: Moses: Thou shalt, O Israelite, often, as thy convenience serves, think, speak and meditate of the precepts of God, and most of all of that first and greatest which immediately went before, namely: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart,” both at home and abroad, both morning and evening. Hence some, as Father Pineda on Job xxiii, 22, derive the Hebrew torah, that is, law, from tur, that is, to explore, or to survey and besiege all round, because the whole law is to be assiduously and diligently explored, and guarded and observed on every side, lest any offend in one point. For since all the precepts of the law are connected, and meet as in a centre in this precept of the love of God, “hence he that offendeth in one point becomes guilty of all,” James ii, 10. The guard of the law, therefore, must be surveyed all round, and as it were besieged, and its wall defended on every side, lest any entrance lie open to the enemy for the storming of the law and of the mind.
8. AND THOU SHALT BIND THEM AS A SIGN ON THY HAND, AND THEY SHALL BE AND SHALL MOVE BETWEEN THY EYES.—For “shall move” the Hebrew is totaphot, which Pagninus and Vatablus translate frontlets; others spectacles, or eyeglasses (for by the precepts of God we see what is good, what God wills, Psalm cxviii, verse 6); others memorials, or reminders. Our version, Exodus xiii, 16, translates, as a thing hung up, for a remembrance before thy eyes; the Septuagint, immovable before thy eyes. Some derive totaphot from taphaph, that is, to strike, to clap, because the totaphot or frontlets, striking against the forehead with each blow and beat, like tinkling little bells, would admonish the Hebrews to keep the law and precepts of God. Hence they were called phylacteries, as if you should say, Preservatives of the law. The Jews formerly took all these literally, as they sound, as is plain from Matthew chapter xxiii, 5; hence even now they write the Hebrew sentences of their law on the walls of their houses, and when they pray hang before them a little paper containing these words: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord”; as far as verse 10, “when he shall have brought thee,” etc. But better take them metaphorically or parabolically, as if to say: So thou shalt have a continual remembrance of the precepts and of the love of God, as if they were written on frontlets, wristlets and thresholds, and were perpetually set before thy eyes and observed. So Abulensis; see what was said on Exodus chapter xiii, 9. With a like metaphor God says to Sion, Isaias xlix, 16: “Behold, I have graven thee in my hands”; which he explains when he adds: “Thy walls are always before my eyes.” Piously and truly St. Augustine in the Soliloquies, chapter xviii: “At every moment,” he says, “O Lord, thou bindest me to thee, while at every moment thou bestowest on me thy great benefits. As therefore there is no hour, or moment, in all my life, in which I do not use thy benefit, so there ought to be no moment in which I have thee not before my eyes in my memory, and love thee not with all my strength.”
14. YOU SHALL NOT GO AFTER STRANGE GODS,—you shall not follow the worship of strange gods.
16. AS THOU TEMPTEDST HIM IN THE PLACE OF TEMPTATION,—which was thence called in Hebrew Massah and Meribah, Exodus chapter xvii, verse 7.
17. TESTIMONIES,—that is, laws, which testify what God wills to be done by us.
20. TOMORROW,—in time to come.
25. AND HE WILL BE MERCIFUL TO US.—In Hebrew, and justice shall be to us. But justice here and elsewhere is taken for mercy, the reasons of which I gave on 2 Corinthians chapter ix, verse 9.