Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, Vol. 11: Prolegomena (prefaces and canons)
To the Most Holy Trinity
To you, O most holy Trinity, and threefold Unity, I offer, nay, I wholly render back and restore to you as your own, this third and threefold work on the Prophets. From you is the beginning; in you it shall end. I am yours from the womb, where you formed me to your image and likeness. Yours from my birth, when I was baptized and born again in your name. Yours from the first use of reason, when I began to worship you with faith, hope and charity, which you had instilled in me in baptism. Yours from adolescence, when, moved by your prompting, willingly and gladly I bound myself to you by the three vows of religion. Yours from youth, when, consecrated a priest by your gift, I have offered to you daily, to this very day, as a perpetual sacrifice, the one and threefold victim of Christ. Yours from manhood, when I dedicated to you these labors of mine and the fruits you gave me; all my studies, all my learning, all my writing I consecrated to your glory, and I desired that every action of mine, every suffering, my whole life, should be nothing else than your continual praise. “A hymn, O God, becomes you in Sion, and to you shall a vow be paid in Jerusalem,” Ps. lxiv; nay rather, for you silence is the hymn in Sion, as the Psalmist says: because all our praise, set beside you and your majesty, is mere and mute silence. Receive in these my Commentaries a threefold image of yourself, impressed by you on my mind and hand. I have published the Pentateuch, Paul, the Prophets: that is, the Law, the Gospel (for Paul is its herald), and Prophecy. The Law represents you as the Father, the lawgiver; the Gospel, you as the Son incarnate; Prophecy, you as the Holy Spirit, who spoke by the Prophets. The work, too, is in three parts: Isaias portrays you, O eternal Father, whom he saw sitting on the lofty and august throne of the Godhead! Jeremias, most afflicted, as Isidore of Pelusium says, foreshadows you, O Christ, suffering! Ezechiel foretells you, O gracious Spirit, to be poured out upon the Apostles and the faithful! These are yours, yours, O most holy Trinity, who are the Father of lights, the fountain of every triad, the origin and cause of all things that have been, are, shall be, and can be! You revealed yourself to my mind long ago, that I might esteem and seek you as the one thing, and count all else as slight, empty and fleeting, and loathe it. For the king, the wisest of mortals in God’s judgment, found them to be such, and so pronounced, saying: “Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity,” Eccles. i. The Doctor of the Gentiles taught me to count all things as dung, that I may gain Christ. Isaias thunders in my ears: “All flesh is grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of the field. The grass is withered, and the flower is fallen, etc.: but the word of our Lord endureth for ever,” Isaias xl, 6. Often that saying of the royal Psalmist sounds in my ears: “Be still, and see that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, and I will be exalted in the earth,” Ps. xlv, 11. Wherefore I flee courts and the breezes of the world, and I follow quiet and retirement, pleasant to me and not useless to others, with St. Basil, Gregory, and Jerome, whose holy Bethlehem, which he anxiously sought in Palestine, I have found here at Rome. Once, when younger, I played Martha; now in declining age I play Mary Magdalene the more, and love her, mindful of the shortness of life, mindful of God, mindful of the eternity that presses on. My cell (which as a faithful friend is dearer to me than the whole earth, and seems to me a heaven on earth, as it appeared to St. Bernard) I inhabit in silence and alone: a dweller in the cell and a follower of the sacred Muses, I strive to be a dweller in heaven; I pursue the leisure, or rather the business, of holy contemplation, reading and writing; I devote myself to the one and triune God, to receiving, meditating on and celebrating his oracles and inspirations; I sit at the feet of Christ, that hanging on his lips I may drink in the words of life, which I may afterwards pour out upon others. For what is more worthy, more wholesome, wiser, more divine, than to direct oneself to him alone, from whom are all things, that you may say and understand with the Psalmist: “But it is good for me to adhere to my God?” Ps. lxxii, 28; to be wholly free for him, to please him, to think on him, imitate him, follow him; to love him, to sound his praise in word and love, with mouth and heart; to praise him alone with life, tongue and heart; to celebrate him with hand, pen and mind? This is the continual work of the Angels, this is a foretaste of the life of heaven, this is the beginning of eternal blessedness; namely, to persevere in contemplating and enjoying the one and triune God, and with the Seraphim, who veil their eyes and feet in awe and reverence, ceaselessly to sing: “Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lord God of hosts; all the earth is full of his glory;” and with the Apostle to cry out: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God!” O sacred Trinity, threefold and one Godhead, how incomprehensible, how unsearchable you are, that in the confession of the true and everlasting Godhead, propriety may be adored in the persons, unity in the essence, and equality in the majesty. From you, through you, in you are all things: “The whole Father,” says St. Augustine, “is in the Son and the Holy Spirit; the whole Son is in the Father and the Holy Spirit; the whole Holy Spirit also is in the Father and the Son: none of them is outside any one of them: because none precedes another in eternity, or exceeds in greatness, or surpasses in power. But of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit there is one divinity, equal glory, coeternal majesty,” St. Augustine, On Faith, to Peter, bk. ii, ch. 1; St. Athanasius in the Creed. For it is as great a thing for the Son to be begotten as for the Father to beget; as august for the Holy Spirit to be breathed as for the Father and the Son to breathe: for in being breathed he receives the same numerical essence and majesty which the Father and the Son have. “You, therefore, one in substance, a Trinity in persons, we confess.” You we invoke, you we praise, you we adore, our hope, our salvation, our honor, O blessed Trinity. To you praise, to you glory, to you thanksgiving, for ever and ever. You, God the Father unbegotten, you the only-begotten Son, you the Holy Spirit the Paraclete, holy and undivided Trinity, we confess and bless with whole heart and mouth. But with what eulogies shall I celebrate you, by what names address you? You transcend immeasurably the conceptions and words of men and Angels, and dwell in inaccessible darkness, and are therefore to be venerated rather in chaste silence, as St. Dionysius says, than celebrated in the meager speech of a lowly mind. You are the Godhead … , the threefold relation, the triangle of divinity, the triplet nature, the thrice-holy majesty, the saving Three, the tripartite hypostasis, the triad of persons, the triumvirate (so to speak) … By what ideas, parables, similitudes shall I represent you? Everything of ours that is like is very unlike you. Every trace of you on earth is as far from you as creature from Creator, shadow from body, nothing from being, finite from infinite. If infants may stammer, and it is fitting, if the lowest may be compared with the highest, human things with divine; if our minds may in some measure fashion you through our conceptions, images and forms, however unlike: you are the three-fingered … , the thrice-great God, the three-faced mirror, the three-powered Mind, the threefold Parhelion, the three-rayed Sun, the three-bodied Soul, the three-pronged Thunderbolt, the three-edged Sword, the three-branched Tree, the Trefoil of paradise, the three-flamed Fire, the three-lighted Lamp, the three-cornered Dioptra, the threefold Harmony, the Triglyph of elegance, the Tricolon of beauty, the Triangle of the alpha, the Three-tongued of eloquence, the Three-armed of power, the Trivium of wisdom, the Three-eyed of providence, the Citadel of the Three, the Triclinium of ambrosia, the Trireme of the abyss, the Tripod of eternity, the Three-peaked summit of loftiness, the Three-crested height of glory, the Trident of creation, the Three-footed support of substance, the Three-roofed house of the heavens, the Three-rayed light, the three-colored Rainbow, the Hand of three …, the Fountain of …, the three-horned Brow, the three-pointed Spear, the three-gemmed Diamond, the three-knotted Cord, the three-threaded Thread, the Trimodius of being, the Three-turned of essence, the Trimeter of … , the Three-crowned empire, the Tripolis of the universe, the Threefold cosmos of magnificence, the threefold Jehovah, the threefold … and ….
You are the origin of things, you their end as well;
The Son, offspring equal to the eternal Parent;
The common love of both, the golden flame of heaven,
The Spirit of fire, filling the world with ardors.
One Godhead, the same in three, and in the three one will, one majesty, one nature, one power.