Commentaria in II Machabaeorum
Note: Sharp and therefore illustrious was the martyrdom of these seven Maccabees; and therefore the Church celebrates their feast before other saints of the Old Testament on the first day of August, especially at Rome, where their sacred relics rest in the church of St. Peter in Chains, as St. Augustine testifies, Sermon 109, chapter 6, and are visited with great concourse of the people and devotion. The causes are many: first, that these first expressly and publicly contended for the true faith and worship of God; second, that they did it in the Old Testament, when faith and knowledge both of God and Christ, and of the future life and resurrection, was obscure; third, that they suffered in tender and youthful age, when life is most pleasant, and death most bitter; fourth, that they had as persecutor and tormentor Antiochus Epiphanes, a most savage and most cruel tyrant; fifth, that they most bravely resisted him, nay each sharply rebuked him, and called him most wicked; sixth, that they underwent every kind of torment, as whips and sinews of bulls, verse 1, cutting out of the tongue and of the hands and feet, likewise flaying of the head and perhaps of the whole body, verse 4, caldrons and pans in which they were burned and roasted with fire, pitch and sulphur, verse 3. From these Jews learn, Christian, what you ought to do in any temptation, persecution, affliction, which is far less, and how nobly you ought to overcome it: “You have not yet resisted unto blood,” Hebrews 12. Who stretched you on the tympanum and beat you? Who boiled you in a cauldron? Who fried you in a pan? as happened to these seven brothers, who nevertheless bore all with brave and eager spirit, that you in your small trials may do the same, in hope of blessed eternity. “For that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation, worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory,” 2 Corinthians 4. Moreover the spurs to bear and overcome all this nobly for the Maccabees were: first, faith and hope in Christ soon to come, by whose foreseen merits God gave them abundant grace, fortitude and constancy; second, hope of a better life and a blessed resurrection, namely that the members which they exposed to torments would be given back to them by God in the resurrection, and those splendid and glorious; third, that the torment would be small and short, but the reward in heaven immense and eternal. For this animated all the martyrs in even the sharpest torments; whence St. Sebastian strengthened St. Marcus and Marcellian, wavering because of their parents’ lamentation, with this dilemma: The tortures to be inflicted on you will be either grievous or light. If grievous, they will soon bring death, and send you to heaven. If light, they will be easy to bear. Bear either, then, bravely, because a brief pain will bring you eternal joy. For the moment that torments is eternal that delights. Fourth, that the mother encouraged each bravely and sharply urged him to persist in the religion of his fathers; fifth, the example of the old man Eleazar, of whom in the preceding chapter, truly suffering in the dire torments of the tympanum.
20. NOW THE MOTHER WAS TO BE ADMIRED ABOVE MEASURE,—who in the Calendar of the Greeks is called Salome; by Josephus Solomona; by Gorionides and Genebrard Anna, that is grace; by St. Thomas Maccabea, because mother of the Maccabees. Again by Josephus, chapter 15, Abraea; because, he says, “she, a pious daughter, remembered the endurance of Abraham”; and as Abraham immolated his Isaac, so she immolated seven sons to God. Josephus celebrates her with wonderful praises: “Not so lovely stands the moon in heaven with the stars, as you, who have illuminated seven stars, namely seven sons, to piety, stand glorious before God, and are fixed in heaven together with them.” Whence, chapter 15, admiring her strength he exclaims: “O mother of the nation, avenger of the law, champion of piety, and victor of the contest that was waged through the womb! O continence nobler than men’s, and patience stronger than men’s! For as the ark of Noe, bearing the world in that universal flood of the whole world, constantly bore the waves, so you also, that keeper of the law, when beaten on every side by the flood of affections and by the vehement winds of torments, so to speak, nobly bore the contest undertaken for piety.” Wherefore St. Cyprian, in the book On exhortation to martyrdom: “She offered to God a martyrdom as great,” he says, “by the strength of her eyes, as her sons offered by the torment and suffering of their members.” And St. Chrysostom [says], “she herself seven times furnished martyrdom; for while they were tortured, she received the blow.” St. Ambrose, Book I De Officiis, chapter 41: “She looked on,” he says, “glad at her sons, as many funerals as trophies, and was delighted by the voices of the dying more than by the songs of the singers: seeing in her sons the most beautiful lyre of her womb (furnished in a way with seven strings) and the harmony of piety sweeter than every number of the lyre.” Which virtue St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 22, incredibly admiring: “O manly soul in a woman’s body!” he says. “O sacrifice greater and more excellent than the sacrifice of Abraham! For he offered one with ready mind, but she consecrated to God a whole people of sons.”
21. AND SHE BRAVELY EXHORTED EVERY ONE OF THEM (while the sons one by one in order of age, being called out by Antiochus, went to examination and torments, the mother exhorted each to constancy) IN HER OWN LANGUAGE (that is Hebrew, says Josephus. Better Salianus interprets “own language” as a noble and manly voice, such as the voice of a father is wont to be, as if to say: She exhorted with a voice not maternal and womanish, but fatherly and manly: whence “patrius” is derived not from patria but from pater, and is the same as “paternal”: for this the Greek patrios signifies, as if to say: She spoke manfully, like a father, not womanishly as a mother. Wherefore, explaining, he adds:) BRAVELY (in Greek nobly), BEING FILLED WITH WISDOM, AND JOINING A MAN’S HEART TO A WOMAN’S THOUGHT (and voice).—Hear Nazianzen, Oration 22, vividly depicting the feelings and gestures of this heroine: “The strenuous mother, and truly parent of those endowed with such virtue; she, I say, the illustrious and magnanimous nursling of the law, before she was moved to joy was afflicted at once with fear, and was placed on the border between two affections: for as from their fortitude and the things she saw she took gladness; so again, when she reckoned with herself the uncertain issue of the fight and the incredible greatness of the torments, she was racked with fear: and therefore she flew round them, no otherwise than a little bird round her young when a snake or some other treacherous beast seizes them, she cried, she besought, she contended together with them, in short she said and did everything that might make them readier and more eager for victory. She caught up drops of blood, received fragments of limbs, worshipped relics, collected this one, held out that one, prepared another, cried out to all: Well done, my sons, well done, my strenuous soldiers, well done, almost bodiless in your bodies, well done, defence and bulwark of the law, and of my old age, and of the city that nourished you and raised you to such greatness of virtue. A little longer and we have conquered, the executioners are wearying: this one thing I fear. A little longer, and I am blessed among women, and you blessed among youths. But perhaps desire for your mother pains you? I shall in no way desert you. This I promise you, I do not so hate my children.
24. NOW ANTIOCHUS—the king was tormented by the great constancy of the martyrs, because he could not overcome them, but was conquered by each; and therefore, shamed and indignant to be despised by boys, he attacks the seventh most strongly, that by conquering him he might seem to have conquered the rest, but was conquered by him more than by the others, and when he himself more sharply insulted the king than the others, the king, despairing and driven to fury, raged against him more than against the rest: wherefore this youngest brother surpassed his other brothers, older in age, both in torments and in heroic spirit and endurance.
AND FURNISH HIM WITH NECESSARIES.—From the Greek it can be translated that he would entrust his affairs to him, that is, would hold him as intimate and secret friend, to whom he would entrust and commit the business and government of his kingdom, and whom he would set over his provinces as governor.
25. THE KING CALLED THE MOTHER,—that the mother might persuade her son to obey the king.