Commentaria in Isaiam
Secondly, in the Chaldaic signification it means “my secret to myself,” as if to say: When at the end of the world I foresee so great a glory of the elect persevering in faith and holiness, yet that they will be so few, and on the other hand so great torments of the damned, yet that they are so many, that I cannot utter them and those, nor if I uttered would the hearers believe: for this reason I ruminate and meditate on them in secret with myself. Hence the Chaldee renders: The secret reward of the just has been shown to me, the secret vengeance of the impious has been revealed to me: woe to those who do violence, for they shall suffer violence; and to the plunderers, for behold they shall be plundered! And St. Jerome: I cannot, he says, relate all that I see, my tongue cleaves to my jaws, my voice is shut in by sorrow: woe is me, what an array of punishments is before my eyes! So also the Hebrews. This sense is the genuine one.
Thirdly, St. Augustine on Psalm 7, and from him Leo Castrius, take this secret to be the mystery of the calling of the Gentiles and the reprobation of the Jews, whose depth and silence the Apostle commends not so much by exposition as by admiration, in Romans chapter 11, when he says: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God,” etc.
Hence Theodotion, as St. Jerome testifies, renders: my mystery to myself. Some add, and to mine.
Tropologically, St. Bernard, sermon 92 on the Canticle, applies this to the spouse who in the secret of conscience seeks and finds the spouse: “Thomas,” he says, “in the side, John in the breast, Peter in the bosom of the Father, Paul in the third heaven, have attained the grace of this secret. Thomas in the solidity of faith, John in the breadth of charity, Paul in the inmost of wisdom, Peter in the light of truth, Magdalen in the mud of humility.”
Woe is me.—Alas for me, because at the end of the world all transgression, all wickedness will overflow; and I cannot utter the horrible punishments decreed for them by God: hence I am inwardly tormented.
17. Fear, and the pit, and the snare.—These are symbols, and signify the extreme evils impending over sinners at the end of the world, and their extreme distress. He alludes to hunts in which a scare is set before birds and wild beasts, that, fleeing it, they may fall into the pit, and wishing to rise out of the pit may fall into the snare laid for them; for “fear” here is a bugbear, or scarecrow, which is set before birds and beasts, that they may be driven to the opposite side, and be driven into the prepared nets. So Horace says of the image of Priapus:
Hence I, a god, am the greatest terror of thieves and birds.
And Baruch, chapter 6, verse 69: “As in a garden of cucumbers,” he says, “a scarecrow (that is, a bugbear, for example a figure of straw) guards nothing.”
Wherefore Sanchez rightly notes that “fear” is here called a line or rope woven with feathers of divers colours, which, set in a certain place by hunters, frightened the deer by the shaking of the feathers, so that in fear they fled to the opposite side and there fell into the spears, or pits and nets prepared for them; for this is what Seneca says, On Anger, book 2, chapter 12: “Since a line marked with feathers terrifies the greatest herds of wild beasts, and drives them into ambush, from the very effect it is called formido (fear)”; and St. Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, book 1: “And when they fear a false infamy, they incur a true one, like beasts that are surrounded with feathers, that they may be driven into nets”; and Arrian, in book 2 of the Life of Epictetus, chapter 1, says that the same happens to us as to deer, which, when they flee the feathers, turn and throw themselves into the nets, exchanging those things which are to be feared for those which are to be borne with a brave mind. Seneca also uses it, On Clemency, book 2, to teach that so men commonly, while they do not bravely oppose lesser evils but turn their backs, fall into worse vices and greater inconveniences. So Delrio, adage 142. The sense is: As deer and wild beasts are in every way beset and hemmed in that they may be taken, so in that last disaster of the world God will prepare so many pits and snares that the wicked cannot escape, but, if they escape one, will fall into another. In the Hebrew there is a paronomasia; for instead of “fear, and the pit, and the snare,” it is pachad, vapachath vapach.
18. For the flood-gates from on high are opened.—A cataract is a place where there extends nearly to the middle of the river a certain rocky brow, flat in its upper part so that it can receive the river, but ending in a precipice from which the water is hurled down. So in mills and rivers the water-stays, which being loosed the water rushes headlong with violence and roar, are called in Greek cataracts. He alludes to the flood of Noe, in which “all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the flood-gates of heaven were opened,” Genesis 7; as if to say: With such abundance and roar the plagues will flood upon the world toward the end of the world, as in the time of Noe the waters flooded, and, as if the flood-gates of heaven were loosed, rushed upon the earth; for God will then loosen the reins of his wrath and vengeance, that he may rain plagues, which now by his clemency and the prayers of the Saints he restrains and holds in as if shut by flood-gates, according to Psalm 10: “He shall rain snares upon sinners: fire and brimstone and storms of winds shall be the portion of their cup.”
The Septuagint for flood-gates render windows, as if to say: The windows of heaven being as it were opened, God looked upon the sins of the world, to avenge them, which before, because he did not punish, he seemed, as with the windows of heaven shut, not to see but to be ignorant of, says St. Jerome. He looked, I say, and being angry sent fire and other plagues by the Angels, Apocalypse 8 and 9, with which he so smote the earth that to earthly men, as if drunk with fear and anguish, it seems to be turned over and to tremble. Perhaps also, and more truly, then the whole earth will tremble, and be torn from its centre, as Didymus teaches that the same happened in the earthquake that was at the passion of Christ, as I said on Job 9:6. For then there will be the utmost disturbance of all things, and then God will inflict extreme wrath and horror on the wicked; and this the following words signify, when he says: “With breaking shall the earth be broken, with crushing shall it be crushed, etc., with shaking shall the earth be shaken as a drunken man.”
20. And shall be removed as the tent of one night,—as if to say: As those journeying through pathless or desert places pitch by night the tents they carry with them, to spend the night in them, and in the morning take them away, so the earth shall be taken away, not as to substance, but as to inhabitants, and as to appearance and figure, and, as St. Jerome says, not the earth, but all earthly things, namely every earthly dwelling, conversation, all earthly men, and the former life, and ways and acts, shall pass away.
On high.—First, the host of heaven in Scripture signifies the sun, moon and stars, which advance in marshalled array and fair order, as a battle line drawn up, and serve God as soldiers. So St. Jerome took it here: “These stars,” he says, “as sick, God will visit, and with iron and cautery burn, that there may be a new heaven and a new earth”; for the “stars,” as Job 25:5 says, “are not clean in his sight,” especially when they are now worshipped or polluted by idolatry and other crimes; these stars therefore God will visit, that is, will darken, nay cast down from heaven, Matthew 24:29.
Perhaps St. Jerome speaks also according to the opinion of Origen, as he is wont, who thought that the stars are animate, and that all souls were created at once before the body, and that on account of the sins which they then committed some were bound to the stars, some thrust into human bodies, and are thrust daily: an error that has been exposed.
Secondly and genuinely, here the host of heaven is called the army of the Angels, that is, of the demons, who, cast down from heaven of old, now abide in this air, and vex men, and at the end of the world will be visited by God, that is, punished and condemned; for though they are already condemned even now, yet then they will be condemned by public sentence before the whole world, and will be stripped of all the liberty with which they abide in this air, and of the dominion which they here usurp over sinners, and will be relegated to the prison of hell, to be shut up and burned for ever; which will be to them a huge punishment. For this reason Scripture speaks as if the demons were to be condemned then for the first time, namely in the sense which I have said.
Thirdly, Forerius: The host of heaven, he says, are the ministers of the temple, that is, the priests, because, as the Angels in heaven, so they in the temple always stand by and minister to God; and who as heaven surpass the earth, and as Angels surpass men, surpass laymen in dignity and ought likewise to surpass them in holiness: which if they do not do, they will be more gravely visited and tormented by God than laymen. For to enter into the host, in the phrase of Scripture, signifies to perform ecclesiastical ministry, as I said on Numbers 4:3 and 30. But though this seems to Forerius the most literal, to me it seems in this place mystical.