Commentaria in Isaiam
But the true wonder of wonders was Christ, whose name is Wonderful, God, the Mighty, Counsellor, the Prince of Peace, the Father of the world to come, the Angel of great counsel. Was not his life and doctrine a wonder to the world, when he said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst. Blessed are they that suffer persecution”? The world bids us hate enemies, and pursue vengeance for the sake of fame and honor; it says: If any man strike you, strike him back; if he give a blow, return two. But Christ commands: “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you. Overcome evil with good.” For the noblest vengeance is to conquer the enemy by kindnesses, subject him to yourself, and compel him to love in return. Again: “If one strike thee on thy right cheek,” he says, “turn to him also the other.” The world bids us seek high things and court honors. But Christ says: “He that exalteth himself shall be humbled: and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” Is this not a paradox? The way to exaltation is to go the opposite way, to descend, to humble yourself; yet this most true philosophy is the surest way to the heights, because humility alone exalts. Sons of Adam, you wish to be great, to be gods? You will be, if you will. You err in the way: you enter the way of pride, the way of ambition, the way of show. You err by the whole diameter, the way is the opposite; descend, hide, love to be unknown, submit yourself; resist no one, even the least, in any way, let it please you rather to yield than to overcome.
So shall you be exalted, so shall you climb to the stars.
Was not the life of Christ a wonder of humility, a wonder of charity, a wonder of poverty, a wonder of the cross and austerity? The King of kings, the Lord of lords, whose are heaven and earth, was born in a stable, lived always as a guest, died on a gibbet: “I,” he says, “am a worm, and no man: the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people.” He was laid in a manger, “because there was no room for him in the inn. The foxes,” he says, “have holes, and the birds of the air nests: but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” He lived in hunger and want, fasted forty days and nights without food or drink, lived on alms, and often begged, saying: “But I am a beggar and poor.”
Was he not a wonder of the cross? Throughout his life engaged in perpetual labors, journeys and persecutions; in death tortured, scourged, crowned with thorns, stretched out, he died like a robber. And yet he subdued the whole world not with the sword but with wood; not with a spear but with the cross: “I,” he says, “if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself.” To this standard you are called, O Christian! You serve under the cross. It is shameful to live with delicate limbs under a thorn-crowned head.
It is shameful, when the commander labors, thirsts and hungers, for the soldier to grow torpid, soft and fond of delights.
Christ cries: “Take heed that your hearts be not overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness.” I led a most abstinent life, indeed a most poor one, for thirty-four years: and will you abound in wine and delights? I on the cross, in the last agony, in burning thirst, when even robbers are given wine, was given gall and vinegar to drink, that I might atone for, take away and abolish your gluttony: will you indulge it? Will you stuff yourself with strong wine? Look at your leader, look, and do according to the pattern that was shown thee on the mount.
He was a wonder of love: giving himself at birth as a companion, at table as food, in death as a price, in reigning as a reward. For you I was born, for you I sweated, for you I preached, for you I was crucified. I gave myself wholly to you; give yourself wholly to me: enlarge your heart; drive out the cold of sloth and self-love. Give, consecrate to me your labors, your life, your studies, body, sweat, blood, life and soul. Thus far I have loved you; return like for like; indeed return one for a thousand, one point for the infinite. For what are you to Christ but a point to the immense and infinite majesty?
Behold, I and my children: my Apostles were a wonder of the world. Hear Paul: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ: by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world. From henceforth let no man be troublesome to me: for I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus in my body. For whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but as dung, that I may gain Christ.” Therefore, Paul, are riches, dignities, delights and learning dung? Are all things without Christ, compared with Christ, dung? Altogether they are. Again, for Christ, he says, “Thrice was I beaten with rods, once I was stoned, five times did I receive forty stripes save one: a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea, in perils, in persecutions, in fastings, in many watchings, in labor and painfulness.” For Christ “I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection: lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway.” Do you then, Paul, fear to be condemned and cast away? You chastise a body worn out with so many labors; and shall we, idle and slothful, follow the desires of the flesh, and yet be secure about our salvation?
Were not the Apostles a wonder? They say: “Even unto this hour we both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no fixed abode,” like wanderers and exiles we roam without settled homes; “and we labor, working with our own hands: we are reviled, and we bless: we are persecuted, and we suffer it: we are blasphemed, and we entreat: we are made as the refuse of this world, the offscouring of all even until now,” like sweepings, shavings, filth gathered from the whole world by the broom, we are made as sin-offerings and purifications of the world. “For I think that God hath set forth us Apostles last, as it were men appointed to death, because we are made a spectacle to the world, and to Angels, and to men”: in Greek it is theatre, “we are made a theatre”: as in a theatre, like criminals fighting with beasts, or like thieves and robbers to be slaughtered.
So our Campion, Apostle to the English, martyr of England, truly a Campion, truly an athlete, marked in large letters with this title: “This is the seducer, the Jesuit Campion,” was led to prison with all London looking on; condemned to death as a traitor and rebel, he gave thanks to God, and singing like a swan: “We praise thee, O God, we confess thee to be the Lord”; brought out into the theatre, to which not so much the whole city as all England had flocked: “We are made a spectacle,” he said, “to the world, and to Angels, and to men”; I am here looked upon, about to be hanged and cut alive into four parts, as a seducer, a traitor, an enemy of my country; I am made a spectacle to the world. Thou, Lord, knowest my innocence, thou knowest what I sought, thou knowest that I sought nothing else than the faith and salvation of England. Had I sought anything else, I would have accepted in England the ample wealth and honors offered me by those who condemn me to death. The day will come, Elizabeth, the day will come, which will reveal the secrets of darkness and the hidden things of hearts; which will show whether I and my companions loved you sincerely, who for you and your salvation exposed ourselves to so many labors, dangers and death itself; or your ministers, who expect from you nothing but wealth and dignities, flatter you, lead you into heresy and into the slaughter of the saints, the slaughter of those who thirst for your salvation. I have prayed and I pray God that this my death, which I suffer most willingly, may be an atonement for your sins, and may obtain for you pardon, faith and eternal happiness; may I by this death of mine, inflicted on me by you, win and reconcile you to love! Behold, my children have been made a wonder, says Christ.
St. Paula of Rome was a wonder. Sprung from kings, the most noble of the Romans, leaving her relatives, her children, her very large household, her wealth and her estates, she sailed to Jerusalem to live at Bethlehem by the Lord’s manger a Christian, indeed a religious life, in humility, poverty, devotion and love of Christ. She built five monasteries there; St. Jerome presided over the men, she over the virgins. She was first in the psalms, first in services, first in humility, first in fasts. She so distributed all she had to the poor and the saints that, as she had wished, at her death she did not possess a linen cloth in which to be buried, but her daughter Eustochium had to beg one: she had so despoiled herself of her own goods that with Christ she was buried in what was another’s. Behold a wonder, behold a new and unusual epitaph: