Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, Vol. 11: Prolegomena (prefaces and canons)
Fifteenth, Aggeus, festive and joyful, builds the temple afterwards constructed, celebrating the teaching of Christ: “Yet one little while,” he says, chapter 2, verse 7, “and I will move the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land. And I will move all nations: and the desired of all nations shall come.”
Sixteenth, “Zacharias, mindful of his Lord, manifold in prophecy, sees impiety shut up in a measure, with its mouth stopped, carried by two winged women into the land of Sennaar: Jesus clothed in filthy garments, and the stone with seven eyes; and a golden candlestick with as many lamps as he sees eyes: so that after the black, red, white and speckled horses, and the chariots scattered out of Ephraim, he prophesies the poor king sitting upon a colt, the foal of an ass under the yoke,” offering to us the corn of the elect, and the wine springing forth virgins.
Seventeenth and last, Malachias, celebrates the dignity of priests and the sacrifice of the Eucharist: “In every place,” he says, chapter 1, verse 11, “there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation.” He sees Elias the Thesbite, forerunner of Christ the Judge, returning from paradise.
V. THE FIFTH QUESTION concerning the obscurity of the Prophets, its use, and the manner and method of overcoming it. Surely it is plain that they are obscure and difficult, both because they prophesy of secret and hidden things, especially future ones, and because future things are often set forth through symbols. That I may meet the difficulties, I will set down Canons first, which as in darkness may carry a torch before and shine ahead. Truly St. Jerome on Nahum, chapter 3, toward the middle: “And we shall say that holy Scripture is therefore woven with such difficulties, and especially the Prophets, who are full of enigmas, that the difficulty of the senses may also be wrapped in difficulty of speech: that the holy may not lie easily open to dogs, and pearls to swine, and the Holy of Holies to the profane.”
But this adds not a little to the difficulty, that the interpreters confess that they did not understand these books by their own natural talent as they did the Gospels and the others; St. Augustine, book 9 of the Confessions, relates, chapter 5, that when, newly converted, having left the profession of Rhetoric, he had transferred his whole mind to sacred studies, he consulted St. Ambrose what he should read first: and he advised Isaias.
But I, he says, not understanding the first reading of it, and thinking the whole of such a kind, put it off to be taken up again when I should be better practised in the Lord’s speech. These are the words of St. Augustine, Augustine, I say, that acuteness, who by himself read Porphyry and Aristotle, and in all human learning and philosophy he was cultivated: what then shall we little boys be compared with him, if a teacher be lacking, if one be lacking to carry the light before? “For divination is in the mouth of the teacher, and in his teaching his mouth shall not err.”
Wherefore St. Clement, book 1 of the Apostolic Constitutions, chapter 4, and 6, ordains thus from the teaching of the Apostles: “Meditate on the holy Scriptures with assiduous memory. For it is written: In his law shalt thou meditate day and night, walking in the field, and sitting at home, lying down and rising up, that in all things thou mayest be intelligent,” and again: “Read the law, the books of Kings, the Prophets: sing the psalms of David: run diligently through the Gospel, in which these are consummated;” he adds: “Abstain from all books of the Gentiles. For what dost thou desire in the law of God, that thou wouldst turn thy mind to those writings of the Gentiles? For if thou desirest to read histories, thou hast the books of Kings; if sophistical things, that is, such as are acutely referred to wisdom, and poetical, thou hast the Prophets, Job, Proverbs; in which thou shalt find more acuteness than in all poetry and the wisdom of sophists: because He who alone is wise has uttered them;” and in book 2, chapter 5, he ordains thus of the Bishop: “Let him meditate on the books of the Lord, and study them. Let him be much in reading, that he may accurately interpret the Scriptures: the Gospel, that it may accord with the Prophets and the law; the law and the Prophets, that they may accord with the Gospel. For the Lord saith: Search the Scriptures.”
So St. Thomas, when he had come upon a certain difficult passage in Isaias, and could not resolve it, according to his custom joined prayers to fasts for several days: at length SS. Peter and Paul, sent to him, explained the passage, so that he, calling at once his Reginald, dictated easily the commentary on the passage, as if reading from a book. The same Augustine, epistle 2 to Volusianus, acknowledges here so great a depth of wisdom that to the oldest, the sharpest, the most flaming with desire of learning there happens what the same Scripture says in a certain place: “When a man hath done, then he shall begin.”
Gregory the Great, both Pontiff and doctor, in commenting on Ezechiel, recognizes so many and such hidden mysteries in these books that he asserts that certain things, not yet unlocked to mortals, lie open to the heavenly spirits alone. Indeed I think scarcely any mortal plainly understands the last chapters of Ezechiel: let him try who will. I believe that when he has strained all his powers, he will bring back only weariness of mind. I can say of myself what Ezechiel says of himself, chapter 47, and the learned interpreters after him: “I could not pass over the torrent, for the waters of the deep torrent swelled, which cannot be forded.”
But this appendix omitted, which is perhaps of rare use; come, open any chapter of Isaias or of the Minor Prophets, any treatise or any book; you will find nothing but mists, a labyrinth, an Iliad of doubts, or an Odyssey of darkness, unless there exist commentators like them. Many, I confess, have written on some of them: Origen, Apollinaris, Didymus, Pierius, Eusebius; but these have perished; St. Jerome, however, used them: after these, St. Jerome, Cyril, Theodoret, Gregory, Basil; but some of these give almost only the mystical sense: others give now the mystical, now the literal, without distinction, so that you do not know which exposition is literal and which mystical. Divine Thomas also wrote, of whom I shall say what I think in Isaias; Lyranus, Hugh, Dionysius. Of the more recent, Leo Castrius, Adam Sasbout, Guevara, Arias Montanus, Vatablus, Andreas, Capella, Francis Ribera on the Minor Prophets, Benedict, Pererius, Jerome Prado and John Baptist Villalpandus, who in elucidating Ezechiel labored strenuously for sixteen years at the expense of the King of Spain, and lately published three huge tomes at Rome. Of heretics, Calvin, Oecolampadius, Musculus and others. But of these more recent, each comments on one or another Prophet only: but one who methodically, from the Fathers and the Greek sources, would treat only the literal sense of our Latin version, I have hitherto seen none. Our Emmanuel Sa is brief; but he serves rather the more learned, and those who from a word conjecture the whole sense as it were by use: at times he does shed light, but at other times he often abandons the beginner in rough places, and mostly renders the sense of words by a word, not pursuing the difficulty of things or of incidental questions. Let him who will consult him on one or two chapters of the Minor Prophets, especially where the difficulty lies hid; and at once he will see him stuck fast! One here carries the torch before us as Lucifer, our St. Jerome; that phoenix of his age, most skilled in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and the greatest doctor of the Church in expounding the sacred Scriptures: who grew old over them, and by the testimony of St. Augustine read all the ancient Greek and Latin commentators; who surely, unless he had first broken the ice, would have left the way of the Prophets impassable to all posterity; but by God’s beneficent providence in this whole work the labor and learning of Jerome so stands that this his doctoral laurel and the gem of his writings shines out before all: I mean the most excellent of his works, in which he surpassed himself.
But lest anyone err in him, let him note one or two things. St. Jerome is wont to touch the literal sense first briefly, as he received it from the Hebrews: if he thinks anything in it false, he is wont to reject it at once; what he does not reject, he approves. This literal sense he sometimes calls Jewish, because the Jews insist on this alone. Then he passes to allegory and tropology, and ranges more fully, as do the other Fathers, who often omit the literal because allegory or tropology seems to them more elegant and more pious, and because they sought Christ in all things, who, as I showed above, is the fruit and scope of the law and the Prophets.