Commentaria in Isaiam
And therefore they that dwell therein shall be mad,—as if to say: Because men have been mad in sins, as if raving with lust and desires, so that, seeing and feeling the pestilence, famine, and the other horrible plagues of God and of the seven Angels, which are described in Apocalypse 8, they as it were refuse to repent, as is said in Apocalypse 9:20; therefore likewise they shall be mad with grief and horror at so great a disaster: for they shall be so struck, so tormented, that they will seem driven to fury and rage, according to what God threatened, Deuteronomy 28:28: “The Lord strike thee with madness and blindness and fury of mind”; this is what Christ says, Luke 21:26: “Men withering away for fear, and expectation of what shall come upon the whole world.”
From the trembling and madness of sorrows a few shall be freed, who namely live not as brutes but as men created to the image of God, and who therefore, seeing this disaster, will not feel it: for they will long for a better life to be entered through and after death: this is what Christ says, Luke 21:28: “Lift up your heads: because your redemption is at hand.” So St. Jerome and Haymo. It is here intimated that the number of the saints and of those to be saved will be small at the end of the world.
7. The vintage hath mourned, the vine hath languished.—“Mourned,” that is, made to mourn; “languished,” that is, the vine made to languish those who gave themselves to wine and gluttony, because it will bring them to the horrible judgment of God and to the eternal torments of hell. Secondly and genuinely, as meadows and vineyards are metaphorically said to laugh when they luxuriate with leaf and fruit, so on the contrary they are said to mourn and languish when from dryness they are squalid and bear neither grapes nor wine, in which voluptuaries are wont to delight and exult. God therefore at the end of the world will bring sterility on vineyards and fields, both by the fire of the conflagration and by the preceding plagues.
9. They shall not drink wine with a song.—That Jews and Gentiles as well as Christians are wont to use songs and music at banquets and wine, I have shown elsewhere.
10. The city of vanity is broken down.—First, the city of vanity, they say, is Babylon, that is, Rome, which at the end of the world, wholly given to vanity, luxury and ambition, will be most wicked, and therefore will be laid waste with her daughters, that is, other cities subject to her, Apocalypse 18:2. Hear also Blessed Peter Damian, epistle 9, who asks leave that, having resigned the bishopric of Ostia and the cardinalate, he may be allowed to return to the quiet and silence of a monastery: “Why,” he says, “should I not forsake Rome, to avoid so many wounds of the soul? Although even to the body itself it is not altogether harmless, being fruitful of fevers, and not wandering ones. Whence I remember to have once produced this tetrastich:
Rome, devourer of men, tames the lofty necks of men; Rome, fruitful in fevers, is most abundant in the harvest of death. Roman fevers are faithful by firm law: whom they once invade, they scarcely quit while he lives.”
Secondly, Sanchez: The city of vanity, he says, that is, given to gain and vanity, was Tyre, of which in the preceding chapter. Now Tyre was the type and image of the luxury and vanity of the whole world, as if to say: The whole world, like the city of Tyre, will be most vainly broken down, and burned with fire, and will become the very vanity, and the emptiness both of citizens and of all things.
Thirdly, the same Sanchez: The city, he says, that is, all the cities of the world, which seemed most strongly fortified and to be eternal, at the end of the world will be ground down and destroyed, and then it will appear that they were cities of vanity, and that all their wealth, citadels, fortifications, etc., were mere vanity. So Solon, the lawgiver of the Athenians, as Beroaldus testifies in his book On Earthquakes, used to say “that cities are nothing else than the dwellings of the wretched, nay of miseries and misfortunes,” in which are hidden infinite troubles, sorrows, disgusts, groans and lamentations.
Fourthly, plainly and genuinely, the city of vanity is the world itself, in which, as Ecclesiastes says, chapter 1, verse 2, is “vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.” For nothing in it is stable, nothing solid, but all things are fleeting, flow and pass away. Hence the Arabic renders: the creature, or the earth, is plundered. See St. Augustine, City of God, at the beginning, where he sets up two cities opposed to each other, one of God, the other of the devil; one of truth, the other of vanity.
Note: As God and heaven, in which are eternal life and truth, are the city of truth, so the earth and all that is in it are vanity. Moreover, as truth is manifold, so too is vanity. First, truth is veracity: so vanity is deceit and falsehood. God is truthful, the Angels and the Blessed truthful, the true goods which are in heaven: vain and deceitful are men, false the goods which are on earth. So it is said in Exodus 20:7: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” that is, to a lie. Hence others render, thou shalt not forswear. So Sinon, Aeneid 2:
Though Fortune has made Sinon wretched, she will not, the wicked one, make him also vain and a liar.
Rightly the Philosopher defined the world, saying: “What is the world? It is a school of vanity, a market of impostors, a treasury of sorrows.” Would you have a striking example? Q. Caecilius, who by the zeal and liberality of L. Lucullus had attained great dignity and patrimony, having always boasted that Lucullus would be his sole heir, and dying having even handed over to him his rings, adopted Pomponius Atticus by will, and left him heir of all his goods: but the Roman people, with a rope about the neck of the deceitful and treacherous man’s corpse, dragged it through the street. So the wicked man had the son and heir he wished: but the funeral and obsequies he deserved, say Valerius Maximus, book 7, chapter 8, and Cornelius Nepos in the Life of Atticus.
Secondly, truth is in God, in heaven and in the Blessed, because they have full and solid being: vanity is on earth and its goods, because they have a thin and shadowy essence. Delights tickle only for a moment, do not penetrate, do not satisfy. Honour is not a solid thing, but only the estimation and opinion of men: what are gold and silver, but red and white earth? what are pearls, but the excrements of shellfish? whence is nobility, but from the deeds of others, of grandfathers and great-grandfathers? What is the whole earth but a centre and a point with respect to heaven? Hear Nazianzen in his poem On the Ways of Life: “Beauty,” he says, “is brief; grace like a lightning flash; youth is nothing else than the heat of time; grey hair, the sad sunset of life; glory, air; nobility, old blood; strength is common with boars; satiety, wanton; marriage, a chain; abundance of children, the mother of necessary cares; childlessness, a disease; the forum, a school of vices; arts, the narrow and alien bread of abject men: in short all human things are fear, laughter, down, shadow, dew, breath, flight, vapour, dream, wave, the track of a ship, a breeze.”
Caninius Rebilius was Consul at Rome for one day only; for on the day he entered the consulship he was also deposed: so that afterwards it was asked under which Consuls he had been Consul. Whence Cicero jested at him, book 7, epistle 30: “We have,” he says, “a vigilant consul, who in his whole consulship did not see sleep.”
Thirdly, in God and in eternal life is truth, that is, constancy; for this is the Hebrew emuna, and amen; on earth is vanity, that is, mutability, and the constant inconstancy of all things.
Sesostris, king of the Egyptians, very illustrious and fortunate, subjected to himself very many and very great nations. And uplifted by this success into insolent arrogance, he had a golden chariot made for himself, inlaid with transparent and precious gems. Seated in it, he yoked to the chariot four of the conquered kings to draw him, a yoke being put upon them. This being done frequently, on a certain famous festal day one of those four kings, turning his eyes, kept looking back at the wheel and contemplating its revolving, and Sesostris asked him why he so often cast his eyes upon the wheel; he is said to have replied: “I wonder with amazement at the wheel, when I see it carried unsteadily, and turned now one way and now another, and now letting down what is high, and again raising what has been let down.” Sesostris, when he understood the saying, decreed that they should no longer draw his chariot thereafter. Which story, when Theodorus, ambassador of the Emperor Maurice, had once told it to Chagan king of the Persians, so crushed the barbarian’s pride that, mindful of the vicissitude of human affairs, he made peace with the Roman people. So Nicephorus, Ecclesiastical History, book 18, chapter 39. Hear Boethius, On Consolation:
Trust the fortunes of men, which fall away; trust fleeting gifts.
It is established, and laid down by eternal law, that nothing born shall stand.