Commentaria in Isaiam
Our translator has “dew of light,” that is, of the morning twilight and herald of the light: for this makes the herbs fruitful. Again, “dew of light,” that is, of life; it is the voice of Isaias, or of those rising again to God, as if to say: As our dew brings light and life to plants, so Thy divine dew, that is, Thy life-giving grace, Thy benignity and vital breath, Thy word, Thy command, Thy voice through the Archangel, Arise, ye dead, will bring to the dead light and life, and a light more illustrious than the former earthly one, as being blessed and glorious, that they may rise again. So Irenaeus, book 3, chapter 11; Tertullian, in his book On the Resurrection of the Flesh, chapter 31; St. Jerome and Cyril here. Hence also Augustine, City of God, book 20, chapter 21, and sermon 3 On the Consolation of the Dead, takes this of the splendour of glorified bodies, by which they shall shine like stars for perpetual eternities. Hence the Arabic of Antioch translates: Thy dew shone upon them.
Tropologically, Procopius: Light, he says, or life, is the remission of sins, which Christ, who is the dew of the Father, distils into souls dead by sin. Hence the Arabic of Alexandria has: The dew which is from Thee healed them.
Symbolically, the dew and manna of light, that is, of the truth of the Gospel, is the Eucharist; for the manna and dew of the Jews was of the night, because it was typical. Again, it is called of light, because of the glory of the resurrection and the brightness of immortality which is given through it; for giving the reason why the dead and slain shall rise again, he says: “For the dew of light is Thy dew,” as if to say: Our dew, our manna, namely the Eucharist, will recall the dead to life and light, and by its power and efficacy the dead shall rise to immortal glory, according to that: “He that eateth this bread shall live for ever.” So our Vincentius Regius, book 4 of the Gospel Disquisitions, chapter 21.
Moreover, Arias Montanus refers this to the potter’s art, in which dry clay is moistened by the potter and sprinkled with water, that he may form his vessels from it. But this is colder, thinner and more foreign to the matter; for God is here compared to the dew, not to the potter.
“AND THOU SHALT PULL DOWN THE LAND OF THE GIANTS INTO RUIN,” that is, that land, which is the seat of the proud and violent and of all the impious, Thou shalt set on fire and reduce to dust. St. Jerome takes the land of the giants to mean the bodies of the wicked.
20. “GO, MY PEOPLE, ENTER INTO THY CHAMBERS.” This is the voice of God to the Saints who die in the Lord, as if to say: Go to your chambers, that is, your sepulchres; there sleep and be quiet; because shortly, namely on the day of judgment, I will raise you. For the death of the Saints is not troublesome but sweet, like the sleep of one night in respect of the resurrection and eternity: the chamber is the sepulchre; hence cemeteries are called in Greek as it were dormitories. So St. Augustine, epistle 36 to Casulanus; and Tertullian, in his book On the Resurrection of the Flesh, chapter 27, where for “chambers” he reads storerooms, that is, cellars or pantries. For so he has it:
“My people, enter into the storerooms for a little while, until my wrath be overpast. The sepulchres shall be the storerooms, in which those shall rest for a little, who at the end of the age, under the last wrath, have gone out through the way of Antichrist.”
He then asks why he calls them storerooms rather than a place of refuge, and answers: “Because in the storerooms salted flesh is kept and laid up for use, to be brought out from there in its time. For so also bodies treated with the spices of burial are set apart in mausoleums and monuments, to come forth from there when the Lord shall command.” So our Hieronymus Prado in fact ended his Commentary on Ezechiel, chapter 26, together with his life, with this sentence of Isaias: “Go, my people, enter into thy chambers, shut thy doors upon thee, hide thyself a little for a moment”; for writing this, he himself entered into his chamber, and, the door of the bodily senses shut, hidden a little from our eyes he rests for the moment of the present age, to rise again shortly, as we hope, to blessed eternity.
In the same way the souls of the Martyrs are bidden to rest for a time under the altar, Apocalypse 6:11. Similarly, as Helinandus relates in the Life of St. Gereon and the Theban Martyrs, St. Evergistus, Archbishop of Cologne, seized with a headache, going to pray in the church of the Theban Martyrs and beginning this verse, “The saints shall exult in glory,” the Martyrs answered: “They shall rejoice in their beds.” And Evergistus, touching their sacred ashes, was freed from pain. God says the same to so many hundreds of thousands of Martyrs, who were put to death in various ways at Rome by the pagan Emperors and buried there.
Truly this saying of Isaias moved me wonderfully when I saw in the Vatican the tombs of Sts. Peter and Paul; at Panisperna the very place in which St. Laurence under Decius was scourged and tortured on the gridiron; in the church of St. Cecilia her house and bath, in which she was struck with the sword, and the crypt in which she, with Sts. Valerian, Tiburtius and others, was buried, lately found intact under Clement VIII, surrounded by eighty lamps always burning, where she rests as in the dew and in the expectation of eternal light; in St. Agnes her house and church, in which she herself was likewise lately found, laid with Sts. Emerentiana and Constantia the daughter of Constantine the Great. And my heart almost leapt when in the chapel of St. Paul I saw the very place and column on which the Doctor of the Gentiles had his head cut off by Nero’s sword, and the three most limpid fountains which sprang from the three great leaps of his head, by a stupendous miracle unheard of in all ages, and have sprung continually for sixteen hundred years. Again, when I saw on Montorio the hill and chapel in which St. Peter was crucified like Christ, but with his head downward; in St. Potentiana the well in which she buried three thousand Martyrs with her own hands.
Finally, when I saw, besides many other tombs of Martyrs and Virgins, the catacombs of St. Lucina, St. Callistus, St. Priscilla and others, once reddened, indeed swimming, with the blood of Martyrs, in which the Martyrs themselves are laid. Truly, O Lord, Rome is a holy land, in which our Fathers praised Thee more by deeds than by words, more by blood than by voice, more by dying than by speaking.
Rightly therefore Thou sayest to them: “Go, my people, enter into thy chambers, shut thy doors, hide thyself a little for a moment,” until the dew of light and of the resurrection, shining, shall glitter, that then, raised in glory, you may shine like stars, nay like suns, for perpetual eternities, and, with your feet pressing Nero, Domitian, Decius, Diocletian and the rest, your former torturers and tyrants, now suppliants and accused. This is what they themselves took care to have inscribed in their crypts; this is what they cry, mute, not so much by voice as by inscription, as if under the altar: “We await here rest and resurrection.”
“SHUT THY DOORS UPON THEE.” Shut the eyes, shut the senses; and when thy sepulchre is also closed that there thou mayest rest silently without interruption. He alludes to the manner of those who, when a storm threatens or presses, enter their chambers and, having shut the doors, keep themselves at home. So Vatablus.
Morally, St. Gregory, Morals, book 4, chapter 24: “We enter the chambers, he says, when we enter the secret places of our mind. And we shut the doors when we restrain unlawful desires.”
“UNTIL THE INDIGNATION BE OVERPAST”: both that by which I have decreed to punish Adam’s sin and each of yours by the common death and corruption of all; and rather that by which I will punish the wicked, especially toward the end of the world, by so many plagues going before the judgment and resurrection; for He commands the Saints to sleep, that they may not feel these plagues.
21. “FOR BEHOLD THE LORD SHALL COME OUT OF HIS PLACE,” from heaven; He shall descend with all the Angels to judge the world, and then the earth shall give back the blood of the just and of the Martyrs, which it has swallowed and drunk in, and shall no more swallow it. Hence it adds: “And the earth shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain,” that is, the earth shall give back and pour forth all the Martyrs, all the dead and buried, as from the bosom in which it now encloses them, so that it may no more receive them into itself; as if to say: On the day of judgment all murders, martyrdoms and sins shall be revealed, and the tyrants themselves and the wicked shall be punished by God; but the Saints shall rise to a blessed immortality, and be glorified by God.