Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, Vol. 11: Prolegomena (prefaces and canons)
This Cardinal Hosius saw, president of the Council of Trent, and terror of heretics, a follower of that great Hosius of Cordova who fought against the Arians in the Council of Nicaea, who was daily frequent in the Prophets and Scripture, although most occupied with the public affairs of the Church and of the Council of Trent, so that he most diligently read over more than thirty times the paraphrase on Isaias by Jerome Osorius, which had then appeared; chiefly because he remembered that this Prophet had been recommended to Augustine by Ambrose to read. So he himself longed to draw his theology and heavenly wisdom from the Prophets: so he strove to make his breast the library of Christ. The authority is the Protonotary Reschius, and that of the care in his Life.
Moreover the Prophets teach not only the Theologian or the Prelate, but any faithful Christian. For what else are the Holy Scriptures, and especially the prophets, but oracles of faith, oracles surely of doctrine, oracles of orthodox truth, which the Prophets, Christ, the Apostles preached to the whole world both by voice and in writing? What are the Prophets but divine Philosophers, secretaries of the Most High, heavenly pipes, organs of the Holy Spirit? who convey to us the very secrets of the Most Holy Trinity, who announce to us the very Word of God, by which that first and uncreated Truth teaches all the faithful what they ought to believe, what to hope, what to fear, what to worship and love. “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, in these days, hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world,” says Paul, Hebrews 1:1. The Prophets therefore are the book of God Himself, the book of the Holy Spirit, the book of the Most Holy Trinity, a book, I say, composed and dictated by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, in which He has described and painted, as in a living image, Himself and His attributes, the mysteries of the Trinity, of the incarnation of the Word, of predestination, of providence, of grace, of the calling of the Gentiles, His Sacraments, His eternal laws, His will, His beatitude and the immense goods which He has prepared for those who love Him and obey Him; the right way, I say, into heaven to blessed eternity; so that what the Wise Man said of all holy Scripture, Ecclesiasticus 24:32 [23], that it is “the book of the commandments of God, and the book of life,” this especially befits the Prophets.
St. Justin, Philosopher and Martyr, relates at the beginning of his Dialogue with Tryphon, of himself, and of his own conversion to the faith and worship of Christ, that being a Gentile, and eager for philosophy and for that true wisdom which leads to God, he wandered in vain, as in an Odyssey of errors, through every one of the more famous sects of the Philosophers, and at length found rest in the Prophets and in the Christian philosophy of the Holy Scriptures, as the only solid one. First, he says, I gave myself as disciple to a certain Stoic, from whom, hearing nothing about God, I chose a Peripatetic master; whom, despising him as he sold wisdom for a fee, I turned to a Pythagorean; but because I was neither a Musician, nor an Astronomer, nor a Geometer, which arts he required as preliminary to the blessed life, from him I slipped to a Platonist, deluded by all of them with a vain and empty hope of wisdom; until unexpectedly I fell in with a certain divine Philosopher, whether man or angel he was, who straightway persuaded me, abandoning all that circular training, to read the books of the holy Prophets, since their authority is greater than any demonstration, and their wisdom most saving; and in these to whet all my desire of knowing. And he went away, and was seen no more by Justin; but so great and so ardent a desire of this study and of sacred reading was cast into him that, bidding farewell straightway to all other learning, he most eagerly sought and most steadfastly held to this one, with so rich a fruit that it produced for us Justin, both Christian, and Philosopher, and Martyr. Truly therefore St. Gregory said, book 4, epistle 84: “What is Holy Scripture, but a kind of letter of almighty God to His creature?” In which, namely, God has prescribed to it His good pleasure, and what He wills to be believed and done by it. For this letter announces and explains the thoughts of the Holy Spirit, and the wisdom of the eternal Word. “No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him,” the secret and hidden things surely from the foundation of the world. When therefore you read the Prophets, you hear not Aristotle, not Plato, not a king, not a pontiff, not an angel, not a Seraph; but God Himself speaking to all men, and to you and your conscience individually, teaching, admonishing, exhorting, promising eternal goods, terrifying, and, if you obey not His law, threatening eternal punishments.
The second office of the Prophets, to which they were sent and destined by God, was to preach: hence their writings seem to be perennial and perpetual sermons, likewise ardent and effective, like hammers breaking rocks: for they dealt with rocks, that is, with the hard, rebellious and obstinate hearts of the Jews; and to break and soften these how great a force of speech, what courage, what spirit, do you think was needed? Rightly therefore will you say that the Prophets were not only most learned Theologians, but also heralds most eloquent and most effective, nay fiery; as those who bring forth and announce not their own sermons but God’s, by the spirit and breath not of themselves but of God, nay, through whom as through his own mouths God Himself preaches.
Wherefore St. Charles Borromeo, a model of ancient learning and holiness, a second Ambrose, Archbishop and Cardinal of Milan, dwelt much and long both in all holy Scripture (which, with divine Thomas, after a prayer first said, he was accustomed to read daily, and for six years before his death never save on his knees), and most of all in the Prophets, whom he held as heavenly orators, and from them he treated the harder and fairer passages in his sermons, with that fruit which we still behold and admire in Milan, in the ancient piety and religion of the fathers recalled, as by a right of return, among the Clergy and citizens. The Prophets therefore made Borromeo, formerly a Jurist, a Theologian and Preacher. His intimate, Augustine Valerius, Bishop of Verona, is witness in his Life.
Francis Foreiro, of the family of St. Dominic, illustrious preacher of the kings of Portugal, in the preface to his Commentary on Isaias, written at Trent during the Council of Trent, openly professes that he owes all that power and grace of preaching of his, which all Portugal admires, to the Prophets and sacred letters, and to the Hebrew fountains.
Edmund Auger of our Society, called commonly the Trumpet of France for the effectiveness of his preaching, so that the churches could not hold the crowds of the people, but he had to go out into the fields and plains to speak to them; for the people hung upon his lips as an infant upon its mother, and he by his wonderful force and energy of speaking and persuading drove them wherever he would; he, I say, handled no others than Isaias and St. Paul, and in each sermon treated one passage of Isaias and another of Paul, copiously and forcibly: which so pleased his hearers that he drew, nay swept, all first into admiration of himself, then into his opinion. They say that Auger himself converted to fruitfulness and holiness some forty thousand men.
This very thing St. Augustine saw and felt, book 18 On the City of God, chapter 41 [12], when he says: They (the Prophets) were to them (the Israelites) philosophers, that is, lovers of wisdom, they were the wise, they were the theologians, they were the Prophets, the teachers of probity and piety. Whoever, according to them, was wise and lived, not according to man but according to God, who spoke through them, was wise and lived. There, if sacrilege is forbidden, God forbade it. If it was said: Honor thy father and thy mother, God commanded it. If it was said: Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not swear, etc., not human mouths but divine oracles poured it forth.
The Prophets therefore by exhorting teach virtues and implant them, and by rebuking vices teach men to unlearn them. This is their part, this their work: to instil and breathe into the souls of readers and hearers piety, the true worship of God, humility, patience, charity, zeal, and all holiness; for they furnish to minds not bare precepts, bare exhortations, or words merely sounding in the ears, but also an energy, a spirit, and a wonderful impulse, by which they urge and almost compel them to a just and holy life. For God, who is the most powerful and most perfect preacher, enters the soul through their voices, and what they persuade outwardly, He Himself inwardly in the soul speaks and persuades, by sending heavenly illuminations into the intellect and pious affections into the will, that what it receives from without it may take in within, relish, love, embrace and carry out in deed. Hence the Psalmist prays: “Open thou my eyes: and I will consider the wonderful things of thy law;” and Paul, Hebrews 4:12: “The word of God,” he says, “is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword, and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow.”