Commentaria in II Machabaeorum
38. IN ME INDEED AND IN MY BRETHREN THE WRATH OF THE ALMIGHTY SHALL CEASE,—as in a victim for the sins of all Israel. This was done in the following year, as we shall hear in chapter viii, 4; this then was the swan song of the pure and innocent Jacob, by which he, like an ancient prophet dying, merited and foretold the salvation of Israel.
39. THEN THE KING, INFLAMED WITH ANGER, WAS MORE CRUEL AGAINST HIM THAN ALL THE REST, TAKING IT HEAVILY THAT HE WAS MOCKED—both by the mother and by the son.
40. AND SO THIS MAN DIED UNDEFILED (by eating swine’s flesh, by apostasy, by violation of the law), TRUSTING IN THE LORD ENTIRELY,—that he would receive from him his limbs torn for love of him, glorious in the blessed resurrection. Moreover, the martyrdoms of these seven Maccabees were so many miracles, among which that of the seventh, and the least of all, was, as more atrocious, so more noble and illustrious. For a boy could not by the natural strength alone have borne and overcome so many and such horrible torments, much less have shown so great alacrity and spirit with which he insulted the tyrant. This was therefore the work of the grace of God through the foreseen merits of Christ, of whom these seven martyrs were types, and therefore they were beaten with stripes, stretched on stakes, and fried in fire, as Christ was scourged, stretched on the cross, and roasted and fried for us in the fire both of sorrow and of love.
So after Christ boys and girls, such as St. Agnes, St. Vitus, St. Celsus, St. Pancratius, surpassed men martyrs both in the bitterness and variety of their torments and in strength and alacrity of spirit: for indeed, Greater virtue reigned in a small body.
And divine “power is made perfect in” human “infirmity.” For in the little ones the great Christ conquers and triumphs, and therefore he “hath chosen the weak things of the world, that he may confound the strong,” that “he that glorieth” may not
41. AND LAST OF ALL, AFTER HER SONS, THE MOTHER ALSO WAS CONSUMED.—In Greek, “died.” But by what kind of death? First, some think she died of immense joy, because she saw all her sons triumph so gloriously over the tyrant. So Marius Victorinus in his poem On the Maccabees.
While the boy, he says, did these things, joy unloosed the mother.
And now, as she was relaxed by her woes, her voice now denied,
Sighing, and fallen amid the hands of her own,
She dropped lifeless, and her limbs, relaxed, were still,
So she herself, the mother of the Saints, was received into their company.
So some Roman mothers died of joy when they suddenly saw their sons whom they had heard had fallen in the battle against Hannibal, as Livy testifies, Book XXII, and Valerius, Book IX, chapter xii. Secondly, Gorionides says she asked death from God and obtained it. “This brave woman,” he says, “standing over their corpses, spread out her palms to heaven, and said: O most high God, God of the world, let me go, I pray, with my sons, I thy handmaid, to the place which thou hast prepared for them. And when she had said this, she gave up her soul, and her spirit went forth, and she fell upon her sons, and died with them, and so the most happy mother was at last joined to her most faithful sons.” Thirdly, it is more probable that she was fried in a frying pan like her sons, for this is what “was consumed” signifies; and this was demanded both by her magnanimity and her magnanimous mockery of the tyrant, and by the tyrant’s own indignation and fury against her. Josephus adds that she herself threw herself into the fire prepared for her, as St. Apollonia did by God’s inspiration. Hear Josephus from his Greek text: “At last, all her sons being consumed, the admirable parent of such great athletes, in the bloody butchery of punishments, suddenly bending her knees, begged of God the dissolution of her body. For she had not prolonged her time for desire of living, but only for her sons’ sake. Seven triumphs, then, the most pious mother received. Antiochus gnashes his teeth, orders the noble mother to be afflicted; she is tyrannically seized, her tender limbs stripped, her hands bound on high, she is more cruelly mocked with scourges, her breasts wounded, and being cast upon the flame-breathing frying pan she of her own accord accompanies her scorched sons into their punishments.” Rightly St. Ambrose, Book II On Jacob, chapter xi: “Who,” he says, “would deny that woman blessed, who, as if fenced with seven walls, among the bodies of her sons felt no onset of death? Who, I say, could doubt of her blessedness, who, surrounded with seven towers, lifted her head to the seat of paradise; who, girt with seven sons, brought to the heavenly altars a chorus most sacred to God, not only melodious in voices but also in sufferings, to sing the praises of the Lord? How good the offspring of faith, how safe this harbour of piety, how splendid a lamp of the Church, shining with sevenfold light, and from an eighth womb supplying oil to all the lights!” Wherefore St. Augustine says of her in the sermon on that mother: “So great the patience, the ineffable virtue with which she knew how to preserve her sons. She knew how to have what she did not fear to lose. They suffered each in himself by feeling; she suffered in all by living. Made the mother of seven martyrs, she was seven times a martyr, not separated from her sons by beholding them, and joined to her sons by dying.” And in chapter vii he says she said to her son: “Christ will keep thee for me there, whence Antiochus will not take thee away.” Again St. Ambrose, Book II On Jacob, chapter xi: “Not so does the moon shine among the stars as the mother among her sons; both when she led them to martyrdom to enlighten them she shone, and when, embracing the victors, she lay in the midst of her sons. O mother truly stronger than adamant, sweeter than honey, more fragrant than a flower! O indissoluble bond of piety! O charity truly strong as death, devotion and faith hard as hell! No floods of so many sufferings could shut out thy charity, no rivers of so many bitternesses overflow it. As the ark in that deluge of the world was carried unharmed over the spaces of the whole earth, so thou also, by piety, stood immovable against the waves of such heavy sufferings, and when thou couldst have chosen the safety of thy sons, thou wouldst not.” Wholly like this mother of the seven Maccabees was St. Felicitas, mother of seven sons and as many martyrs, who bore for heaven the same whom she had begotten for earth. For when under the Emperor Antoninus, Publius the Prefect said to her: “Have pity on thy sons, good young men, flourishing in the flower of early youth,” Felicitas answered: “Thy mercy is impiety, and thy exhortation is cruelty.” And turning to her sons she said: “See, my sons, heaven, and look upward: there Christ awaits you with his saints. Fight for your souls, and show yourselves faithful in the love of Christ.” Nor did she only say it, but did it; for she also went through the glorious contest of martyrdom; whence St. Augustine, sermon 110 On Various Subjects, says of her: “More fruitful in virtues than in offspring; seeing those contend in whom she herself also contended, in all the conquerors she herself also conquered.” And St. Gregory, homily 3 on the Gospels: “I would not therefore call this woman a martyr, but more than a martyr, who, having sent seven pledges before her to the kingdom, died so many times before herself, and came first to the punishments, but arrived the eighth. The mother beheld the death of her sons, tortured and undaunted; she gave the joy of hope, and applied sorrow to nature. She feared for the living, rejoiced in the dying. She wished to leave none behind her, lest if she had any survivor, she could not have a companion.”
Like her was St. Symphorosa, who was to her seven sons both a teacher of the faith and a leader to martyrdom; her sevenfold, nay eightfold triumph the Church commemorates every year on the 18th of July.