Commentaria in I Regum (I Samuelis)
all exterior things to his Creator. Thomas Waldensis, an eminent theologian, follows St. Thomas, in On the Sacraments, title 9, chap. 89, where he shows the religious life to be not only a sacrifice but a lofty sacrifice; because by entrance into religion it perpetually consecrates to God all the acts of flesh and mind.
Finally, obedience brings with it faith, hope, charity, religion and the other virtues, as Jerome Platus rightly shows, book 3 On the Good of the Religious State, chap. 9. For a like cause God says: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” St. Bernard in the treatise On the Order of Life: “Obedience alone,” he says, “is the virtue which plants the other virtues in the mind and keeps them planted.” Wherefore, as the same says elsewhere: “Christ lost life, lest He should lose obedience: He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”
…the austerity of conversation; holocausts are to be referred to the compunction of a more secret life. For obedience is better than victims; and to hearken rather than to offer the fat of rams: because it is of far higher merit always to subject one’s own will to another’s will, than to wear down the body with great fasts, or through compunction to immolate oneself in a more secret sacrifice. For what is the fat of rams but rich and inward devotion? Yet obedience is better, because he who has learned perfectly to fulfil the will of his superior excels in the heavenly kingdom both the abstinent and the weeping.”
23. BECAUSE IT IS LIKE THE SIN OF WITCHCRAFT TO REBEL; AND LIKE THE CRIME OF IDOLATRY TO REFUSE TO OBEY.—In Hebrew, because rebellion is the sin of divination, and to break off, or tear oneself away from, the will and command of God is the iniquity of Theraphim. Vatablus: since contumacy is the sin of magic, and to harden the mind is the sin of idolatry. Note: First, Samuel speaks of disobedience not sudden and passing, of which a man shortly after repents, so as to obey; but of hardened and obstinate disobedience, so as to be rebellion, such as Saul’s was. Secondly, he speaks properly of disobedience, not general, by which one transgresses some precept of the Decalogue or a similar law; but special, by which one is unwilling to obey God commanding something particularly, by Himself or by a prophet sent by Him to someone, as Saul did, unwilling to slay the sheep and oxen of Amalec, which God had commanded him through Samuel. For this disobedience is proper and precise, by which one is unwilling to obey God, but spurns His command, transgresses and violates it; which is a grave injury and contempt of God. Whence the Chaldee renders: To attend to the words of His Prophets is better than the fat of the fatted. For as is the fault of men who ask of a diviner, so is the fault of every man who rebels against the words of the law of the Lord; and as is the fault of the people who err after errors (idols), so is the fault of every man who adds to the words of the Prophets.
Moreover, it is not said here that disobedience is magic, or idolatry, or a fault equal to them; but that it is like to both. For in itself magic or idolatry is a graver crime, in which one consults and adores a demon or an idol as God, to the injury of the true God, than is disobedience, in which one merely does not obey God’s commands. Yet this is like to both. For, as St. Gregory says: “It is like the sin of witchcraft to rebel; because, as though the divine altar were despised, they receive answers at the altars of demons, while they believe the delusive and proud inventions of their own heart, and oppose the wholesome counsels of Prelates by thinking the contrary. But to refuse to obey is said to be like the crime of idolatry; because surely no one would persist in the obstinacy of his disobedience, if he did not carry in his heart, like an idol, the fiction of his own purpose. For while he conceives in his heart what is to be done, he makes as it were an idol. And while he deliberates that he will do the purpose conceived in his mind, he bows as it were to adore an image. It is therefore like the crime of idolatry to refuse to obey, because whoever is obstinate in his own deliberation is therefore outwardly lifted up in contempt of his superiors, because inwardly he is bowed down to the images of his purpose, which by fiction he has set up.”
The disobedient man, then, is like a diviner, because he conjectures about the will of God from the lying conceits and fictions of his own reason and judgment; as a diviner conjectures about future things from the chattering and flight of birds.
Nay he prefers to the will of God, revealed and known to him, his own, as though it were wiser and better than the divine: and so reckons himself wiser, more prudent and better than God. Wherefore he denies God’s omniscience, all-prudence, all-goodness; and so tacitly denies that God is God, and makes himself, and his judgment and will, God, and his own idol.
AND LIKE THE CRIME OF IDOLATRY, TO REFUSE TO OBEY.—In Hebrew aven u-theraphim haptsar, that is, iniquity or idol, and theraphim is to resist and oppose; for as an idol is a lying god, Theraphim is a lying oracle; so the disobedient man, preferring his own judgment and will to the divine, worships it as his faithful idol, and consults and follows it as his prudent oracle, but a false and lying one. Moreover, haptsar various writers variously render; Cajetan, Marinus and others render, to force, to compel, to do violence, as if to say: It is the crime of idolatry to force the command of the Lord, and do violence to it, and twist it to the fiction of one’s own brain, as Saul did, and every disobedient man does. The Chaldee renders, to make war on, as if to say, the man disobedient to God, rebelling, is like an idolater. The Septuagint render, to bring in grief and labours; for these the disobedient man creates for himself and his. Pagninus renders, to transgress, as if to say, the disobedient man transgresses the commands of God as the idolater does. Others render more precisely, to fight with God is like the giants fighting with God; and the Titans with Jove; that, God being cast down from heaven and from the throne of divinity, they might make themselves gods; for he who, despising the will of God, follows his own opposed to it, fights with God, and as it were makes himself God. For as to the glutton the belly is God, to the lustful Venus, to the ambitious honour, to the avaricious gold; so to the disobedient his own judgment and his own will is God; for to this he refers all his actions, to satisfy this he labours with all his strength: this he sets as the end and goal of all his labours; this he reckons his own highest good, to this he dedicates and gives himself and all his. What is this but to make it his God?
Whence morally St. Bernard, in the book On the Order of Life: “Thou seest,” he says, “how great an evil it is, which is compared to idolatry and the magic arts. Young men who are filled with such an evil disdain to be subject to their elders; and their deeds or words they do not observe, but judge, with swollen and uplifted neck; they do not exalt by venerating, but mock by despising; but not with impunity. For they plainly fail just where, wretched men, they ought to have advanced.” Then he adds the cause: “Now this God wills, that man be taught by man, and the lesser be subject to the greater. For if Angel commands Angel, and between him who commands and him who obeys the highest concord always remains: let him see how gravely he sins who cares not to render due reverence to his superiors.” And after several things interposed he assigns this palm to obedience: “Obedience alone is the virtue which possesses the merit of faith, without which anyone is convicted of unfaithfulness, even though he seems faithful. This is what is said in Solomon, showing obedience:
An obedient man shall speak of victory. For the obedient man speaks of victory, because while we humbly submit to another’s voice, we overcome ourselves in heart.”
More of the excellence of obedience I have said elsewhere, and especially on Proverbs chap. 21, verse 28 already cited.
FORASMUCH THEREFORE AS THOU HAST REJECTED THE WORD OF THE LORD, THE LORD HATH ALSO REJECTED THEE FROM BEING KING,—because thou hast despised, or reprobated, the word of the Lord, the Lord hath despised, or reprobated, thee from being king. Just and fitting is this punishment of Saul; that he who would not be subject to his God should be deprived of the kingdom given by Him, so that none of his subjects should be subject to him, but they should rebel against him, as he rebelled against God: just as Adam, disobedient to God by eating the forbidden fruit, felt the animals, nay his own members and all his senses, disobedient and rebelling against him.
THAT THOU BE NOT KING.—Some think that Saul is here deprived of the kingdom by God, so that he was no longer king, but David was king of Israel; for he in the next chapter was anointed by Samuel as king. St. Chrysostom favours this, in the homily On David with Goliath, saying: “Saul is thought to be king, but David is.”