Commentaria in Judices
AND SHE BEGAN TO DRIVE HIM AWAY, AND TO THRUST HIM FROM HER; FOR IMMEDIATELY HIS STRENGTH DEPARTED FROM HIM.—Such is the nature of harlots, that they drain men’s wealth and strength, and soon thrust them away needy and poor. Behold how so great a strength of Samson is laid low by a feeble little woman, and when laid low is mocked.
From this deed of Samson and Dalila arose the history, or rather the fable, of the Gentiles concerning Nisus king of Megara, reigning about this same time, whose hair was so heavenly that as long as he kept it he could neither be conquered nor driven from his kingdom; but Scylla the daughter of Nisus, maddened by love of Minos besieging the city, cut off the hair of her sleeping father, and so betrayed father and country to the enemy. But Minos shrank from Scylla as such an infamous parricide, and gave her with bound feet headlong into the sea, saying:
May the gods remove thee, O infamy of our age, from their world, and may earth and sea be denied thee.
So from Pausanias, Servius, Apollodorus and others. Martin de Roa, book V Singular, chap. vii, and Serarius, Question XVI, who adds: Others, as Ovid, relate that she, seized and driven by the furies, threw herself headlong into the sea, and by Minos’ imprecation migrated into a bird, which, because to the Greeks keirein is to shear, she called by her name for herself a perpetual disgrace and infamy:
She was a plume, changed into a bird by plumes she is called Ciris, and from the shorn hair has gained this name.
By all of which what else is signified than the fatal issue of all deeds, the shameful disgrace of crimes, the infamous wage of lusts? And our Ciris indeed is Dalila, whose end we do not know, indeed we even see the money paid her by the Satraps, verse 18, yet there is no doubt but that, driven by the dire furies of conscience, she paid the penalty of her crimes.
21. AND THE PHILISTINES TOOK HIM, AND PRESENTLY PUT OUT HIS EYES,—that if his strength returned, they might render it useless, since he would not see whom to strike, and so be immune and secure from him. Samson blinded by the Philistines was a type of Christ blindfolded in the Passion by the Jews mocking him, as also of the blinding of the Jews which followed from it. So St. Augustine, serm. 107 On the Time.
By a just and fitting penalty Samson is deprived of his eyes, because with them he had looked lasciviously and had desired Dalila, who therefore by God’s just judgment was the cause of his captivity and blindness. “Samson and Sedecias,” says St. Jerome on chap. xxvi of Ezechiel, “are deprived of sight, because they had badly abused it;” for lust blinds the eyes both of the body, because it exhausts the visual spirits, and still more of the mind. Yet this punishment was salutary to him; for through the blindness of the eyes of the body the eyes of the mind were opened, that from the punishment he might recognise the fault, and repent of it, and repenting call upon God, and so returning into favour with him recover his strength from him.
Tropologically, hear St. Gregory, book VII of the Morals chap. xii: “Very often,” he says, “the eye of contemplation is first lost, and afterwards through desires of the flesh the mind is subjected to the labours of this world, as Samson testifies, captured by the Philistines, who after he lost his eyes was assigned to the mill: because evidently the malignant spirits, after they dig out within by the goads of temptation the keenness of contemplation, send men outwards into the round of labours.” And St. Bridget, book IV, chap. 126, warns a Bishop to beware of three enemies: “Of whom the second,” she says, “pricks the eyes, as is the beauty of the world and the possessions of the earth, the splendour of things and garments, the favours of men and honours. For when all these are desired and offered, they so blind the eyes of the soul and of reason that it seems sweeter to stand with Samson at the mill of worldly care than with the spouse the Church at the dispensation of pastoral care.”
Hear also St. Paulinus, epist. 4: “By the blindness of Samson, who captured only in bodily eyes did not lose the spiritual, I am enlightened to a good understanding, that by his example I may know which eyes I ought rather to have. For that man would not have called upon the Lord for aid of his strength, had he not had the eyes of his mind unharmed, of which Christ is the light, in whose light we shall see light.” And afterwards: “And I wish for myself Samson’s death and blindness, that I may live and see God. For perhaps he, having recovered his strength in his hair on account of the future mystery, did not desire to recover his eyes as he had lost them, because that virtue of heavenly grace, sound in its interior lights, needed not the bodily gaze.” Hence from the blindness he draws this moral lesson: “By this example, then, let us also, with our senses directed to the Lord, blind our carnal eyes by aversion from worldly things, of which the Prophet desired to be bereft when he said: Turn away my eyes that they may not behold vanity. And the Lord himself, preferring to the eyes of the Jews blindness, says: If you were blind, you should not have sin. Let us remember by what ruin the eyes were opened to them in Paradise; which they had enlightened by God as long as they had them closed by sin. For then at last they drew the shame of their puberty and age, when they lost by the crime of prevarication the chastity of good conscience, by whose light they were clothed. And therefore it is the loss of the true light to use lights for the use of darkness, and to blind eyes fixed on earthly things to heavenly. But the soul is enlightened by such blindness, by which it despises the world, that it may behold God.”
BOUND IN CHAINS AND SHUT UP (in Hebrew, they bound him with two brass or steel fetters) IN PRISON, MADE HIM GRIND,—“To grind,” that is, they compelled him to turn and drive round the hand-mills (with which slaves once ground corn in the bakehouse).
Tropologically St. Paulinus, epist. 4 to Severus: “He who works sin,” he says, “grinds at the mill of his life hostile wheat, to feed Zabulus (that is the devil), to whom the bread is the soul, which is hunger to itself.”
Modern and ancient Rabbis, as St. Jerome testifies on chap. xlvii of Isaias, verse 2, take “to grind” for the venereal act, as if the Philistines had compelled Samson to it, that from him they might draw like seed, that is strong offspring, namely that he might beget for them new Samsons, who would pay back the Hebrews in kind and oppress them, as Samson had oppressed the Philistines.
But away with this obscenity: let obscene Rabbis feed on it, as also the Gentiles, who, as Apollodorus testifies, book II of the Library, relate that king Thestius put his fifty daughters under the sleeping Hercules, “striving with all his might that all, filled with the seed of Hercules, might bring forth grandsons for him.” The Saracen women tried the same with Samson, as Father Gaspar Barzaeus says of Ormuz, but in vain, as our Trigault relates in his Life.
22. AND NOW HIS HAIR BEGAN TO GROW AGAIN.—It is likely, says Abulensis, that Samson then, returning to his heart, did penance for his fornication and imprudence, and again kept the rule and life of the Nazarites; and so reconciled himself to God, and as his hair grew recovered little by little the gift of strength and received it from God. The same asserts the Author of On the Wonders of Holy Scripture in St. Augustine, book II, chap. vi, Arias, Serarius and others. Hence it is also gathered that Samson was not long held captive; for hair cut off grows again at once.
Tropologically St. Paulinus, epist. 4: “That image,” he says, “which is woven again in that Samson, whether re-haired or dying, I think suits every servant of Christ; for a man who has been overtaken in some sin, and by wholesome penance returns to the restoration of grace as with hair growing again, placing like a brazen bow his arms, that is, the faith of the true hope, and the hope of unfeigned faith, exercising to the battle his hands by works of piety, the exercise of which is profitable for all things; then, strong, as by the arms of a good conscience and faith, he will dare to attack, and will be able to overturn the pillars of his enemies: which indeed are the pillars of the hostile house on which it rests, in which the enemy as our conqueror feasts, mocking our head, if our members use their arms of iniquity.”