Commentaria in IV Regum
And the Child Gaped Seven Times, and Opened His Eyes
For since the boy had suffered in the head, as was said at verse 19, he seems to have had his head filled with humours, which, occupying the passages of the vital spirits, suffocated him. (Wherefore, heat, life and vigour being now restored to him by Eliseus, and the head strengthened, he expelled by sneezing the humours that oppressed him: so he purged the brain, and restored the boy to perfect health.) Colocynthis is a wild gourd which physicians use to purge phlegm vehemently; and it is most bitter, whence it is called “the gall of the earth,” says Vallesius, Sacred Philosophy, chapter xxxvi, and he adds: it is not only bitter but also pernicious; so that if even when corrected it be taken above four oboli, it can bring on purgings and ulcerations of the belly and death; and applied outwardly it kills the foetus. Hence learn zeal for poverty. Hear Theodoret: “That the life of the prophets had no possessions,” he says, “history teaches. For he who was first of them (Eliseus) at one time received them with a feast of wild herbs: at another set twenty barley loaves before a hundred men, and these brought by others. But to the few loaves he imparted a blessing, so that it both satisfied the hundred, and after the satisfying very many remained.”
DEATH IS IN THE POT,—as if to say: The pottage of this pot is most bitter and very bad, so that it seems to be deadly poison. Tropologically, “death is in the pot” of the delights of the world, which provoke gluttony and lust, and therefore bring on various diseases and death, present and eternal; they are bitter, therefore, like colocynths. St. Bernard explains it otherwise, as I shall presently say.
41. BRING MEAL: for meal, because it is glutinous and soothing like starch, says Vallesius, tempers the biting and acrimony of the colocynths; whence it was prudently applied here by Eliseus; although the virtue in correcting the pottage was divine and miraculous. In like manner in curing the leprosy of Naaman the water of the Jordan helped somewhat, chapter v, and in the ulcer of Ezechias the lump of figs helped somewhat, chapter xx, 7; because they cleanse and disperse swellings, if a poultice is made of them with barley or wheaten meal. So Vallesius and Serarius, although Angelomus and others think the contrary, namely that these did not help but rather hindered, that it might be shown that this cure was effected not by natural force, but by supernatural and divine.
POUR OUT FOR THE PEOPLE.—Theodoret notes, Question XIX, that the sons of the prophets possessed nothing of their own, but lived in common, as religious now do.
Tropologically, St. Bernard, sermon 65 among the Little Sermons: “The prelate, from the duty of his office, sets before his subjects a great pot containing wild herbs, that is, an admonition discoursing of grave matters, full of harshness, yet cooked with the fire of the Holy Spirit. Frequent discourses will therefore shrink from the austerity, they cry out: Death is in the pot, and they cannot taste it. The wise steward therefore does not bring, but bids to be brought, meal; since he does not approve, but exhorts, to have charity, by whose seasoning the pottage grows sweet which before seemed bitter. For the preacher can indeed sound in the ears of those standing about the whole of salvation; but no one except God alone can pour the savour of charity into the palate of the heart.”
43. HOW MUCH IS THIS, THAT I SHOULD SET IT BEFORE A HUNDRED?—Eliseus here, miraculously multiplying the loaves, represents Christ, who with a few loaves fed many thousands of men. For one who adapts each of these things mystically to preachers, see Angelomus.