Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, Vol. 11: Prolegomena (prefaces and canons)
If you look to the doctrine of Isaias and his prophecies, he seems not so much to weave prophecy, says St. Jerome, as Gospel: of the Virgin’s childbearing, of Emmanuel, of the boy who is born to us a little one, how piously he kisses! The calling of the Gentiles, the rising of the Church’s dawn, the victory of the south, how he sings it with tuneful voice! how he exults! how he rejoices in spirit! I seem to myself here to behold the choir of the Church and the dance of the Saints with Isaias as precentor. Finally, by His admirable providence, for an eternal testimony to the truth and to Christ, God willed that all that the Gospels have be foretold to the Jews and to all the Gentiles, and often word for word, by Isaias, eight hundred years before Christ. Leo Castrius collected a harmony of the several chapters of the Gospels which answer to Isaias, so that all the Gospels seem to be drawn from Isaias. And this is a new and hitherto unheard-of method of speaking and preaching, which those who will enter on and take up will be admired; namely, that while they treat the Gospel they show that same thing foretold and treated by Isaias in the places and times noted. If you seek the grace and elegance of diction, if the force of preaching, what sinews, what weight there is! learn all from one; thus he begins: “Hear, O ye heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken. I have brought up children, and exalted them: but they have despised me. The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel hath not known me, and my people hath not understood. Woe to the sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a wicked seed, ungracious children: they have forsaken the Lord, they have blasphemed the Holy One of Israel, they are gone away backward. For what shall I strike you any more, you that add prevarication? Hear the word of the Lord, ye princes of Sodom: give ear to the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrha,” and what follows: here as many words as thunders, as many thunderbolts, piercing mouth and soul. And in chapter 14, with what strong and proud ardor does he insult, not an angel, but the king of Babylon! “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning? how art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations? And thou saidst in thy heart: I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the most High. But yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit. Hell below was moved to meet thee at thy coming, it stirred up the giants for thee. All the princes of the earth are risen up from their thrones, all the princes of nations. All shall answer and say to thee: Thou also art wounded as well as we, thou art become like unto us. Thy pride is brought down to hell, thy carcass is fallen down: under thee shall the moth be strewed, and worms shall be thy covering.” On the contrary, how he consoles the poor, the meek, the penitent, the humble! Chapter 40: “Be comforted, be comforted, my people, saith your God. Speak ye to the heart of Jerusalem. Get thee up upon a high mountain, thou that bringest good tidings to Sion: lift up thy voice with strength, thou that bringest good tidings to Jerusalem: lift it up, fear not. Say to the cities of Juda: Behold your God, behold the Lord God shall come with strength, and his arm shall rule: behold his reward is with him. He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather together the lambs with his arm, and shall take them up in his bosom, and he himself shall carry them that are with young.” Chapter 61: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, etc., to heal the contrite of heart, and to preach a release to the captives, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and to comfort all that mourn, and to give them a crown for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, a garment of praise for the spirit of grief.” Chapter 58, verse 12: “And the places that have been desolate for ages shall be built in thee: thou shalt raise up the foundations of generation and generation: then shalt thou delight in the Lord, and I will lift thee up above the high places of the earth, and will feed thee with the inheritance of Jacob.” [Chapter 60: “I will make thee] a pride of the ages, a joy unto generation and generation.”
Fifth, Abdias, that is, servant of God: “He thunders,” says St. Jerome, “against Edom, a bloody and earthly man: and with a spiritual spear he strikes him who is ever the rival of his brother Jacob.” How sweetly he himself presses down pride, so that you may rightly say of him: “A bee is small among flying things, but her fruit hath the chief sweetness;” of sweetness, but also of the sting.
Sixth, Jonas, “a most beautiful dove, foreshadowing by his shipwreck the Lord’s passion,” swallowed up, and on the third day brought forth from the belly of the whale, prefiguring Christ rising from the sepulchre, “calls the world back to penance, and under the name of Ninive announces salvation to the Gentiles.”
Seventh, “Micheas of Morasthi, co-heir of Christ, announces the devastation of the daughter of robbers, and the siege; he lays a siege against her: because she smote the cheek of the Judge of Israel.” The same congratulates Bethlehem upon Christ the Son: “And thou, Bethlehem Ephrata, art a little one among the thousands of Juda: out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be the ruler in Israel: and his going forth is from the beginning, from the days of eternity.”
Eighth, “Nahum, consoler of the world, rebukes the city of blood, and after its overthrow, speaks: Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, and that publisheth peace.”
Ninth, Habacuc, a strong and rigid wrestler, stands upon his watch, that he may contemplate Christ on the cross, and say: “His glory covered the heavens, and the earth is full of his praise. His brightness shall be as the light: horns are in his hands: there is his strength hidden. Death shall go before his face.”
Tenth, Sophonias, “a watcher and knower of the secrets of God,” with a great cry and howling roars over the devastation of the city of Jerusalem, and of the whole world at the end of the world: “Because all the people of Chanaan is silenced, all that were wrapped up in silver are destroyed.”
Eleventh, Jeremias, a priest, in his mother’s womb initiated and consecrated a Prophet by the Holy Spirit, like another seer of Troy, foretelling with prophetic proclamation and lamentable voice the captivity of Jerusalem to his fellow-citizens, sees the watching rod, and the boiling pot from the face of the north, and the leopard stripped of its colors, and in fourfold manner weaves the alphabet with diverse showers: he groans everywhere the lament of impending destruction. He represents Christ both by voice and by life, harassed by the Jews with prison and a thousand reproaches because he proclaimed that Jerusalem would be laid waste: “Let us put wood on his bread, and cut him off from the land of the living. And I was as a meek lamb that is carried to be a victim: and I knew not.” Elsewhere he exhorts, threatens, prays, curses, And likewise the Thracian priest in a long robe, Speaks forth in measures the seven distinctions of the notes.
The true herald of God turns himself in every direction, to drive the people to penance and a better life: “And the Lord said to me,” he says, chapter 14, verse 11: “Pray not for this people for their good. Let my eyes shed down tears night and day, and let them not cease: because the virgin daughter of my people is afflicted with a great affliction, with an exceeding grievous evil;” and chapter 22, verse 29: “O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord;” and chapter 15, verse 2: “He that is for the sword, to the sword; and he that is for famine, to famine; and he that is for captivity, to captivity.”
Twelfth, Baruch, from the pen and commentaries of Jeremias, forewarns the captives going into Babylon not to follow the idols and vices of those nations. He teaches that true wisdom is to be fetched not from philosophers, not from the earth, but from heaven: “Learn,” he says, chapter 3, verse 14, “where is wisdom, where is strength, where is understanding: that thou mayest know also where is length of days and life, where is the light of the eyes, and peace. Where are the princes of the nations, and they that rule over the beasts that are upon the earth? that take their diversion with the birds of the air, that hoard up silver and gold? they are cut off, and are gone down to hell: but the way of knowledge they have not known: it hath not been heard of in Chanaan, neither hath it been seen in Theman. This is our God, to whom the stars shone with joy, and called: Here we are: this found out all the way of knowledge, and gave it to Jacob his servant. Afterwards he was seen upon earth, and conversed with men.”
Thirteenth, Ezechiel, at the beginning sees God riding on a chariot of Cherubim; at the end the architecture of the temple: wherefore the beginning and the end, says St. Jerome, has so many obscurities wrapped up that among the Hebrews these parts, with the beginning of Genesis, are read by no one before the thirtieth year: in other things he is like Jeremias and Isaias; Ezechiel he imitates in many things, and St. John follows him in the Apocalypse.
Fourteenth, Daniel, conscious of the times, and polyhistor of the whole world, foretells in clear speech the series of all the monarchies in order, their rise and fall; and finally the kingdom of Christ, like a precious stone from the mountain without hands, overturning all kingdoms. Then, running through the times of the Machabees, the deeds of the kings of Syria, and above all of the most impious Antiochus, he concludes with the tyranny and desolation of his antitype, Antichrist. Isaias therefore exults in style, Jeremias laments, Ezechiel threatens, Daniel is carried away by visions. Thus each Prophet has his own genius, his own spirit and style breathed by God, who apportions and divides His gifts to each as He will. What wonder? So each philosopher, orator, doctor has, and has always had, and will have his own genius and spirit. Hear Sidonius Apollinaris, book 4, epistle 3, skilfully assigning to each his own: “No one,” he says, “affirms like Claudian, unfolds like Plato, entangles like Aristotle, flatters like Aeschines, grows angry like Demosthenes, flourishes like Hortensius, lingers like Fabius, feigns like Crassus, dissembles like Caesar, counsels like Cato, dissuades like Appius, persuades like Tully. And if for comparison we come to the most holy Fathers, no one instructs like Jerome; is lifted up like Hilary; is humble like John; like Eusebius, narrates; like Paulinus, challenges; like Ambrose, perseveres.” The same, epistle 1 to Probus, assigning to each kind its own style: “Whatever the Heroic poet has produced of the arduous, the Comic of the witty, the Lyric of the tuneful, the Orator of the mature, the Historian of the true, the Satirist of the figured, the Grammarian of the regular, the Panegyrist of the plausible, the Sophist of the serious, the Epigrammatist of the wanton, the Commentator of the lucid, the Jurisconsult of the obscure, in many ways, who does not know that you have handed down in every way?”