Commentaria in Isaiam
Offspring of the Gracchi, famed progeny of Agamemnon, who followed the poverty of Christ and the fields of Bethlehem.
Such a wonder was St. Paul the first Hermit, who from the fifteenth year of his age to the hundred and thirteenth lived in a cave, saw no man and spoke with none, but only with God and the Angels. Water was his drink, his food half a loaf, which a raven brought him daily from heaven.
When Antony came, he said: “It is sixty years since I have received half a loaf daily from a raven; now at your coming it brings a whole one: the Lord has doubled the ration for his soldiers, truly pious, truly merciful.” And soon after, as Antony was leaving, he saw the soul of Paul carried up to heaven by Angels amid the choirs of Saints and Prophets.
Such a marvel of the world was St. Antony, who to the age of a hundred and five lived as a solitary in the utmost abstinence and austerity, and with monsters and legions of demons fought continually, and triumphed.
Such too was St. Romuald, who from the year of his age lived an angelic life.
Such also were those Saints “who wandered about in sheepskins, in goatskins; being in want, distressed, afflicted: of whom the world was not worthy; wandering in deserts, in mountains, and in dens, and in caves of the earth.” Why? because they looked to the reward. They thought continually on this: “The sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, that shall be revealed in us. For that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation, worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.”
Do you want wonders among the noble and the young? Alexius, the most noble of the Romans, after his wedding was celebrated, tore himself away from the very banquet and the company of the nobles, his parents and his bride; he changed his clothes and traveled over the whole world like a beggar. At Edessa, at the door of the church of the Blessed Virgin, he begged alms among the beggars and lay hidden there seventeen years; he was betrayed by the Blessed Virgin as to who he was; he fled, returned to Rome, presented himself before his father, and was admitted as a beggar. He saw daily his parents and his weeping bride: Where is my Alexius? For those same seventeen years he lay like a dog under the stairs, was laughed at, was beaten by the servants; he died with this paper in his hands: I am Alexius your son, your bridegroom. Who would have known Alexius, but for this heroic hiding, this flight from honors and delights? Alexius was, is, and will be more glorious in his den than Augustus on the imperial throne.
Do you want wonders of folly, or rather of unheard-of wisdom? Simeon, surnamed Salus, that is, the fool, as Leontius tells, so affected the name and reputation of folly that he made himself the laughing-stock of the world. He ran through the streets like one mad and silly; boys pelted him with mud and filth as a lunatic; he did and bore the most foolish things in the eyes of men. Why? To fulfil that: “We are fools for Christ’s sake. The foolishness of God is wiser than men.” These fools condemn the wisdom of the world, condemn vanity, despise riches, honors, pomp, ambition and whatever the world admires: they look to heavenly things, and “with unmoved brow laugh at all earthly and perishing things.”
Such a wonder was St. Francis, who as a fool clad in cowl and cape made foolish the wisdom of this world; as great a lover of poverty as others are of riches. He was so great a despiser of himself that he ordered his own to reproach him as a hypocrite;
to whom he would say: “God bless you, my sons, because you speak the truth; such things befit the son of Peter Bernardone to hear.” Why? To teach his own and all such to suppress arrogance, to root out the innate desire of praise and glory, to implant and imprint in the mind the deepest humiliation of Christ, and contempt of self; as if he said: If you wish to be mad, be wisely mad with me; if to be foolish, behold I bear the standard; if to rave, rave piously with me. Do not excuse yourself, let me be ashamed, that you may not be alone: behold me and mine, so many thousands of foolish wise men who go before you.
And to conclude, take Simeon Stylites as a wonder of the ages, who, as Theodoret relates, an eyewitness and a son of Simeon in spirit (since Simeon obtained him by his prayers as a son for his mother), being a shepherd of sheep, entered a church and heard the Gospel voice that pronounces blessed those who weep, mourn, and are clean of heart, and pronounces wretched those who laugh and are filled. He asks God there to lead him into this way of perfect piety and religion, and withdraws among ascetics and monks; soon he spent a whole week fasting; he girded his loins with a most rough rope, so that all that part of the body was ulcerated; in labors and penances he was constant and eager to the point of astonishment. He fasted the whole of Lent without food. He climbed a column; a chain binds his foot to it: the foot rots to the ankles; he stands continually night and day; in winter and summer, in rain and frost, in snow and hail, in the heat and burning of the sun. All night he watches and prays, and likewise from morning until the 9th hour. Then he receives those who flock to him from the whole world, heals, teaches, settles quarrels, and toward evening returns to prayer. So he lived eighty years, and died when he had passed his hundredth year. Persians, Armenians, Gauls, Ethiopians, Britons, Dukes, Princes and Kings flocked to him in crowds, to see an earthly angel, to obtain miracles, to ask for any spiritual gifts.
What do you teach, not by voice but by life? What do you preach, O Simeon? Hear, mortals, learn from me to despise temporal things and to seek heavenly ones: see in me what nature can do with the grace of God, which is denied to no one. You flatter yourselves too much when you say: I cannot bear that labor, that hunger, that mortification. Behold, I was a man like you, clothed in your flesh; I bore these things, I bore them gladly and bravely; among men I lived as an angel. What then do you meditate on the column, O Simeon? I live, he says, for eternity; I paint the image of a life to shine with brightness and glory. Why then should we not paint an image most exactly and most beautifully, to endure not for a hundred years, nor a thousand, nor a hundred thousand, nor a thousand times a thousand years, but for all eternity, and to shine before God, Angels and men?
Let us too paint for eternity, let us live for eternity, and therefore let us make ourselves a wonder of constancy and fortitude, so that we may be like adamant: by no mockery, no shame, no derision let us be turned aside from the fear and piety of God; but let us eagerly design, and in fact accomplish, great, rare and heroic deeds of virtue. Let us be a wonder of humility and piety, that like Angels we may live soberly, justly and piously in this world, that walking in holiness and justice before God we may serve him all the days of our life. Let us be a wonder of charity and religion, and, inspired with heavenly fire (of which Christ says, Luke 12:49: “I am come to cast fire on the earth, and what will I, but that it be kindled?”), let us breathe fire, let us have a fiery mind and fiery tongues, that in the Apostolic spirit we may set on fire with divine love companions and cities and the whole world. So shall we be, with Christ and all the Saints, a wonder of time, a wonder of eternity, a wonder of labors and virtues, and finally a wonder of everlasting glory and joys. May God give us many Isaiases, give us Christs, give us Apostles, give us teachers, give us preachers, who may be wonders of the world, to strike worldly men in their hearts by the rare example of their life and by fiery words, to convert them and lead them to heaven. Amen.
19. Seek of pythons, and of diviners, who mutter, etc. Pythons are called the divining spirits who, insinuating themselves into human bodies, give oracles. Likewise the diviners themselves, who have such spirits and familiar demons, or are seized or possessed by them. So the Pythia was the name of the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, who gave oracles to those who consulted her.