Commentaria in Isaiam
SAID THE KING OF JACOB.—He deliberately calls God the ruler of Jacob, to taunt the gods of the Gentiles, who, though they received worship from their votaries, are yet neither ruled nor defended by them, as the Israelites are by their God.
22. TELL US THE THINGS THAT WERE FORMER: AND WE WILL LAY OUR HEART TO THEM, AND KNOW THE LATTER END OF THEM.—“Of them” does not refer to the idols but to the former things: for in the Hebrew the gender is feminine in both places. God here addresses the idols themselves, and disputes with them, as if to say: O idols! O stones! O stocks! O trunks! if you are gods, show your divine omniscience, or at least knowledge of former and past things, declare the beginnings of things, the beginnings of the world and of the Godhead. Tell what God from the beginning and from eternity has done, thought, decreed; thereupon “we will lay our heart to them,” that is, we shall understand, and “we shall know” that you also know “the latter end of them,” that is, the things which will follow and come to pass after those former things now spoken of; thence we shall learn that there is in you something prescient and divine. So Origen, Periarchon, book 4. This sense is plain and easy. For although demons, who speak at times through idols, know the beginnings of the world (for they saw them, since they were created together with heaven and earth), yet they do not know the beginnings of the Godhead.
Again, the Prophet speaks to the wooden and stone idols themselves, which in themselves and ordinarily are mute and senseless: for it more rarely happens that a demon speaks through them.
Secondly, Sanchez explains thus, as if to say: Declare, O Gentiles, what your gods have foretold, and “we will lay our heart to them,” that is, we shall consider and examine “the latter end,” that is, the results and outcomes of them, and from the outcome we shall judge whether they are true. But then it should have been said: “We shall know your latter end”; yet he says, “of them”: which cannot be referred to the idols, as I have shown.
The same gives another sense, as if to say: Consider the former things of the idols, and you will see the latter end, namely that as they were made out of nothing, so they will return into nothing, and that as they were fabricated from earth, so they will return to earth.
Thirdly, Forerius explains thus, as if to say: From the things which God wrought miraculously with Abraham and our other fathers, one may conjecture what end those things will also have, as truths from shadows, as I explained in verses 8 and 14, namely that God, as he was present to Abraham, will likewise be present to his descendants. In like manner, if you, O Gentiles, announce to us any of the former and past things which your gods wrought divinely, we shall be able to gather their latter end, that is, that the issue and end will also be divine. This sense answers aptly to what he recounted above, in verse 2, of God’s benevolence toward Abraham and his descendants; and in verse 9 of the following chapter, where he concludes this dispute with the idols.
23. DECLARE THE THINGS THAT ARE TO COME HEREAFTER, AND WE SHALL KNOW THAT YE ARE GODS.—He asks another sign of the divinity and omniscience of the idols, namely knowledge and prediction of future things. “The witness of divinity is the truth of divination,” says Tertullian, Apologeticus, chapter 20. Therefore the soul of man has not the power of divining and prophesying, as many have supposed, whom I have cited and refuted at Canon 21 on the Minor Prophets. Hence from this passage Theologians teach that God, as he alone is of himself the knower of hearts, or privy to thoughts and free volitions, which the mind hides in itself, and neither speaks nor betrays, so he alone certainly foreknows future contingent and free things. For properly only those things are contingent which are free, or depend on someone’s freedom: for those which are merely natural are determined, and therefore happen necessarily; whence they are not contingent: and so they can certainly be predicted by one who sees and penetrates the whole series of natural causes, such as eclipses, comets, winds, floods, pestilences, etc. But free things, because they depend on the choice of the will, are undetermined; whence they cannot be foreseen and foretold except by God, who penetrates and comprehends the minds and wills of men and Angels, and most certainly knows and foresees what each will, any circumstances whatever being supposed, freely will, choose or do.
The reason, then, why God foreknows and foresees all future things is his infinite keenness and cognitive power, his infinite intellect, his infinite light, which sees and penetrates every truth wherever it is. For God is like a sun, seeing all things, shining on all things. As therefore lynxes placed on a mountain see farthest; for they are of most acute sight: so God, from the highest mount and watch-tower of his eternity, sees all things that are done and will be done in this valley of the world through all times. Again, as one who stands at the axle of a wheel sees all its felloes and all their turning, so God, standing in eternity as at an axle, sees the whole course of all the ages. For all things past, present and future revolve about the eternity of God. Add that this world, and time, and all that is in it or comes to pass, is like a small globe, indeed a point, in respect of God, and of his immensity and omniscience. Easily, then, can the whole that is in it be foreseen by God: for if what takes place in a small chamber is seen entire most easily by a man who stands in the middle of it, much more is what takes place in the whole world beheld by God. Finally, St. Cyril and Theodoret take it thus: O idols! O gods of the Gentiles! declare your former things, that is, your origin and beginning, how, when and by whom you were fabricated; and foretell also your latter end, namely what will befall you, whether and when you are to be demolished. But this you cannot do; therefore you are not gods.
You will say: Demons also have often foretold future things. I answer: They did it not from certain knowledge, but from conjectures, and therefore this was not sure divination, but only probable conjecture. For demons are of keen mind, and subtle and sagacious in conjecturing. The ways in which they do this St. Augustine recounts in his book On the Divination of Demons. Hence in this conjecturing they have often erred, or have mixed false things with true; hence also they have often answered ambiguously, so that their oracles could be taken either way: whence Apollo was called Loxias, that is, the oblique. Such was his answer to King Pyrrhus, by whom he had been consulted whether he would overcome the Romans or not:
“I say that you, O Aeacid, can conquer the Romans.”
Moreover, that the demon is false in his conjecturing and has deceived many can be taught by examples. Take a few. Famous is the example of King Achab, to whom, when all the false prophets and diviners foretold victory against the Syrians, Micheas alone foretold the contrary, namely slaughter and death, which truly befell him. See the story in 3 Kings, the last chapter. Like was the prophecy of Hananias, who promised the Jews deliverance from the siege of the Chaldeans and victory: for Jeremias foretold the contrary, and that truly, and therefore, by God’s command, threatened death to Hananias, Jeremias 28:16.
When the mother of Ferrand of Flanders consulted soothsayers about his fortune, she received this oracle from them: “The king shall fall in battle, shall be trampled by the feet of men and horses, and shall not be buried; Ferrand, however, shall be received by the Parisians most joyfully.” But it turned out otherwise. For in the war against Philip, king of the French, Ferrand was taken, led to Paris and shut in prison, in the year of Christ 1214. So Robert Gaguin, book 6, History of the French.
I have recounted a like thing of Meroveus in chapter 7, at the end.
Cato the elder used to say that “he wondered how a soothsayer could look at a soothsayer without laughing,” because he saw that this whole kind of divination was an imposture, by which a deceit was practised on the people. For impostors are wont to laugh among themselves at the folly of the multitude.
Finally, St. Cyprian, in his work On the Vanity of Idols, says with vigor and elegance: “These spirits (demons) lurk under consecrated statues and images. These by their breath inspire the breasts of prophets, animate the fibres of entrails, steer the flights of birds, direct lots, produce oracles, and always involve falsehood with truth. For they both are deceived and deceive, they disturb life, make sleep restless, creeping into bodies secretly they terrify minds, twist the limbs, break health, provoke diseases, to compel men to worship them, so that, fattened with the savor of altars and the pyres of cattle, they may seem to have cured what they themselves had bound. This is their cure, when their injury ceases: nor have they any other aim than to draw men away from God, and turn them from the understanding of true religion to the superstition of themselves; since they are themselves under punishment, they seek for themselves companions, whom they have made sharers of their crime by error. These, however, adjured by us by the true God, straightway yield and confess, and are compelled to go out of possessed bodies. You may see them, by our voice and by the working of a hidden majesty, beaten with scourges, scorched with fire, stretched by the increase of the spreading punishment, howling, groaning, entreating.”