Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 58/87

Therefore, lest he should be guilty of so great a sacrament violated in Saul, because he thus handled even his garment, he was greatly afraid. For thus it is written: 'And David's heart smote him over it, because he had taken away the little flap of his cloak.' But to the men who were with him and were urging him to slay Saul, delivered into his hands, he said: 'Let it not befall me from the Lord, that I should do this thing to my lord, the christ of the Lord, to lay my hand upon him; for he is the christ of the Lord here.' To this shadow of the future, therefore, so great a veneration was shown, not on account of itself, but on account of that which it prefigured. Whence also that which Samuel said to Saul:

'Because you have not kept my commandment, which the Lord commanded you, whereas the Lord had now prepared your kingdom over Israel for ever: and now your kingdom shall not stand for you, and the Lord shall seek for Himself a man according to His own heart, and the Lord shall command him to be prince over His people; because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you' — this is not to be so received as if God had prepared Saul himself to reign for ever, and afterwards had refused to keep this to him when he sinned (for He was not ignorant that he would sin); but He had prepared his kingdom, in which there should be a figure of the eternal kingdom. Therefore he added: 'And now your kingdom shall not stand for you.' It has stood, therefore, and shall stand, that which was signified in it;

but it shall not stand for him, because neither was he himself going to reign for ever, nor his progeny, so that at least through posterity succeeding one another it might seem to be fulfilled, that which was said: 'For ever.' 'And the Lord shall seek for Himself a man,' he says; signifying either David or the Mediator Himself of the New Testament, who was figured also in the chrism with which David himself and his progeny were anointed. But God does not so seek a man for Himself as if He knew not where he might be; but He speaks through a man after the manner of men, because by so speaking He seeks us. For not only to God the Father, but to His Only-begotten also, who came to seek that which had perished, we were already so well known that in Him we were chosen before the foundation of the world.

'He shall seek for Himself,' therefore, he said, meaning 'He shall have as His own.' Whence in the Latin tongue this word receives a preposition and is called 'adquirit' (acquires); which is plain enough what it signifies. Although even without the addition of the preposition, 'to seek' may be understood as 'to acquire'; from which gains and profits (quaestus) are named. CHAPTER VII. Concerning the rending of the Israelite kingdom, by which is prefigured the perpetual division of the spiritual Israel from the carnal Israel. Again Saul sinned through disobedience, and again Samuel in the word of the Lord said to him: 'Because you have despised the word of the Lord, the Lord has despised you, that you should not be king over Israel.' And again, for the same sin, when Saul confessed it and begged pardon and asked Samuel that he would return with him to appease God:

'I will not return,' he said, 'with you; because you have despised the word of the Lord, and the Lord shall despise you, that you should not be king over Israel.' And Samuel turned his face to go away; and Saul laid hold of the little flap of his double cloak and rent it. And Samuel said to him: 'The Lord has rent the kingdom from Israel out of your hand this day, and shall give it to your neighbour, who is better than you; and Israel shall be divided in two; and He shall not turn nor repent; for He is not as a man, that He should repent; He Himself threatens, and does not abide by it.' This is he to whom it is said: 'The Lord shall despise you, that you should not be king over Israel,' and:

'The Lord has torn the kingdom away from Israel out of your hand this day.' He reigned forty years over Israel, that is, for the same span of time as David himself, and he heard this in the first period of his reign; so that we may understand it was said because none of his line was to reign, and that we may look to the line of David, from which there sprang, according to the flesh, the Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus. Now Scripture does not have what is read in very many Latin manuscripts, 'The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel out of your hand'; but, as it has been set down by us, found in the Greek, 'The Lord has torn the kingdom from Israel out of your hand'; so that 'out of your hand' is understood to mean 'from Israel.'

This man, then, figuratively bore the character of the people of Israel, which people was to lose the kingdom to Christ Jesus our Lord, who was to reign through the New Testament not carnally but spiritually. When it is said of this kingdom, 'And he shall give it to your neighbor,' it refers to a kinship according to the flesh; for from Israel is Christ according to the flesh, whence also was Saul. But as for what is added, 'better than you,' it can indeed be understood as 'one better than you'; for some have interpreted it thus. Yet it is better taken as 'good above you,' so that, because he is good, he is therefore over you, in accordance with that other prophetic saying: 'Until I make all your enemies a footstool under your feet'; among whom is Israel too, from whom, its own persecutor, Christ took away the kingdom.

although there was there too an Israel in whom was no guile, a kind of wheat as it were among that chaff; for from there assuredly came the apostles, from there so many martyrs, of whom Stephen was the first; from there so many churches, which the apostle Paul mentions as glorifying God at his conversion. Concerning this matter I do not doubt that what follows is to be understood: 'And Israel shall be divided in two'—namely into an Israel hostile to Christ and an Israel cleaving to Christ, into an Israel belonging to the bondwoman and an Israel belonging to the free woman. For these two kinds were at first together, just as Abraham still clung to the bondwoman, until the barren one, made fruitful by the grace of Christ, cried out: 'Cast out the bondwoman and her son.'

Indeed, on account of Solomon's sin, when his son Rehoboam was reigning, we know that Israel was divided in two and so continued, each part having its own kings, until that whole nation was overthrown by the Chaldeans with vast devastation and carried away. But what has this to do with Saul, since, if any such thing were to be threatened, it ought rather to have been threatened to David himself, whose son was Solomon? Finally, the Hebrew nation is not now divided among itself, but is scattered indiscriminately throughout the lands in the fellowship of one and the same error. But that division which God, under the person of Saul (who bore the figure of that kingdom and people), threatened against that same kingdom and people, was signified as eternal and unchangeable by what was added:

'And he will not turn back, nor will he repent; for he is not as a man, that he should repent. He himself threatens, and does not relent'—that is, man threatens, and does not stand by it; but not so God, who does not repent as a man does. For where it is read that he repents, a change of things is signified, while the divine foreknowledge remains unchangeable. Where, therefore, he is said not to repent, he is understood not to change. We see absolutely that by these words a sentence was uttered from God concerning this division of the people of Israel that is insoluble and altogether perpetual. For whoever have passed over to Christ from thence, or are passing, or shall pass, were not of that number according to God's foreknowledge, not according to the one and the same nature of the human race.

Indeed, whoever of the Israelites, cleaving to Christ, persevere in him, will never be with those Israelites who persist in being his enemies until the end of this life; but in the division which has here been foretold they will abide forever. For the Old Testament, which from Mount Sinai gives birth to bondage, profits nothing except that it bears witness to the New Testament. Otherwise, so long as Moses is read, a veil is placed over their hearts; but when anyone passes from there to Christ, the veil shall be taken away. For the very intention of those passing over is changed from the old to the new, so that one no longer aims to receive carnal but spiritual felicity.

On this account that great prophet Samuel himself, before he had anointed Saul as king, when he cried out to the Lord on behalf of Israel and the Lord heard him, and when he was offering a holocaust and foreigners drew near to battle against the people of God, the Lord thundered upon them, and they were confounded and were defeated before Israel and overcome—he took a single stone and set it up between the new Mizpah and the old, and called its name Ebenezer, which in Latin means 'the stone of the helper,' and said: 'Thus far the Lord has helped us.' Mizpah is interpreted 'intention.' That stone of the helper is the mediation of the Savior,

through whom one must pass from the old Mizpah to the new—that is, from the intention by which a false carnal blessedness was awaited in a carnal kingdom, to the intention by which through the New Testament the truest spiritual blessedness is awaited in the kingdom of heaven; and since nothing is better than this, thus far God helps. CHAPTER VIII. Of the promises made to David concerning his son, which are in no way found in Solomon, but are most fully found in Christ. Now I see that it must be shown what God promised to David himself, who succeeded Saul in the kingdom (by whose change that final change was figured, for the sake of which all things were divinely spoken and all things written down), insofar as it pertains to the matter we are treating.

When many prosperous things had come to king David, he thought to build a house for God—that most exceedingly renowned temple, namely, which was afterward constructed by his son king Solomon. While he was thinking this, the word of God came to Nathan the prophet, that he should convey it to the king. There, when God had said that the house was not to be built for him by David himself, nor had he commanded anyone among his people for so long a time that a house of cedar should be made for him: 'And now,' he says, 'thus you shall say to my servant David: Thus says the Lord almighty:

I took you from the sheepfold, that you should be ruler over my people, over Israel, and I was with you in all things wherever you went, and I destroyed all your enemies from before your face, and I made you renowned according to the name of the great ones who are upon the earth; and I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, and they shall dwell apart, and shall no more be anxious; and the son of iniquity shall no more add to humble them, as from the beginning, from the days when I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies, and the Lord will declare to you that you shall build a house for him.

And it shall come to pass, when your days are fulfilled, and you sleep with your fathers, that I will raise up your seed after you, who shall be from your loins, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build me a house for my name, and I will set up his throne forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. And if his iniquity should come, I will chasten him with the rod of men and with the blows of the sons of men; but my mercy I will not take away from him, as I took it from those from whom I turned away my face; and his house and his kingdom shall be faithful forever before me, and his throne shall be set up forever.' Whoever thinks that so great a promise was fulfilled in Solomon greatly errs.

For he attends to what was said, 'He shall build me a house,' because Solomon constructed that noble temple, and does not attend to: 'His house and his kingdom shall be faithful forever before me.' Let him, therefore, attend and behold Solomon's house full of foreign women worshiping false gods, and the king himself, once wise, seduced by them into the same idolatry and cast down; and let him not dare to suppose that God either falsely made this promise or could not foreknow that Solomon and his house would be such.

But we ought not therefore to be in doubt, even if we did not yet see these things being fulfilled in Christ our Lord, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh; nor should we vainly and emptily look here for some other man, as the carnal Jews do. For they too, to such a degree understand that the son who, they read, was here promised to king David was not Solomon, that, although the one who was promised has been declared with such great manifestation, they still, with marvelous blindness, say that they await another. There was indeed made some image of the future thing even in Solomon, in that he built the temple and had peace according to his name (for Solomon means 'peaceable' in Latin), and at the outset of his reign he was marvelously praiseworthy;

but by that same person of his he likewise foretold, through the shadow of what was to come, Christ the Lord—he did not exhibit him. Whence certain things have been written of him as though these had been foretold of himself, while the holy Scripture, prophesying in a certain manner even by deeds done, defines in him a figure of things to come. For besides the books of divine history, where he is narrated to have reigned, the seventy-first psalm too is inscribed with the title of his name; in which so many things are said which cannot at all befit him, but befit the Lord Christ with most fitting clarity, so that it evidently appears that in the one a figure of some sort was sketched in shadow, while in the other the very truth was presented. For it is well known by what

bounds the kingdom of Solomon had been enclosed; and yet in that psalm it is read—to pass over other things—'He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the orb of the earth,' which we see fulfilled in Christ. For from the river he took the beginning of his dominion, where, having been baptized by the same John, he began to be recognized by his disciples, who called him not only Master but also Lord. Nor was it for any other reason that Solomon began to reign while his father David was still living—which happened to none of those kings—except that from this too it might shine forth sufficiently that he is not the one whom this prophecy signifies beforehand, which speaks to his father, saying:

'And it shall come to pass, when your days are fulfilled, and you sleep with your fathers, that I will raise up your seed after you, who shall be from your loins, and I will establish his kingdom.' How, then, on account of what follows—'He shall build me a house'—shall this Solomon be thought to have been prophesied, and not rather, on account of what precedes—'When your days are fulfilled, and you sleep with your fathers, I will raise up your seed after you'—is another peaceable one understood to be the one promised, who was foretold as to be raised up not before, like this one, but after David's death?

For however long an interval of time intervened before Jesus Christ should come, beyond doubt it behooved him, to whom he was thus promised, to come after the death of king David—him who should build a house for God, not of timber and stones, but of men, such as we rejoice that he is building. For to this house the apostle says—that is, to the faithful of Christ—'For the temple of God is holy, which you are.' CHAPTER IX. How similar in the eighty-eighth psalm is the prophecy concerning Christ to those things which are promised in the books of Kingdoms with Nathan prophesying. On which account also in the eighty-eighth psalm, whose title is 'An understanding of Ethan the Israelite himself,'

the promises of God made to king David are recalled, and to those which are set down in the book of Kingdoms certain similar things are there said, such as: 'I have sworn to David my servant: Forever will I establish your seed'; and again: 'Then you spoke in vision to your sons and said: I have laid help upon one that is mighty, I have exalted a chosen one out of my people. I have found David my servant, with my holy oil I have anointed him. For my hand shall help him, and my arm shall strengthen him. The enemy shall not prevail against him, and the son of iniquity shall not add to hurt him. And I will cut down his enemies before his face, and those who hate him I will put to flight. And my truth and my mercy shall be with him, and in my name his horn shall be exalted.

And I will set his hand in the sea, and his right hand in the rivers. He shall call upon me: You are my Father, my God, and the upholder of my salvation. And I will make him my firstborn, high above the kings of the earth. Forever will I keep my mercy for him, and my covenant faithful to him. And I will set his seed for ages of ages, and his throne as the days of heaven.' All these things are understood of the Lord Jesus, when they are rightly understood, under the name of David, on account of the form of a servant which the same Mediator took from the seed of David out of the Virgin. Immediately too something of this sort is said concerning the sins of his sons, such as is set down in the book of Kingdoms and is more readily taken as if of Solomon. For there, that is, in the book of Kingdoms:

'And if his iniquity should come,' he says, 'I will chasten him with the rod of men and with the blows of the sons of men; but my mercy I will not take away from him,'—by 'blows' signifying the stripes of correction. Whence is that saying: 'Touch not my anointed ones.' What else is this than 'do not injure them'? But in the psalm, when he was treating as it were of David, that he might say there too something of this kind: 'If,' he says, 'his sons forsake my law and walk not in my judgments; if they profane my justifications and keep not my commandments: I will visit their iniquities with a rod, and their offenses with stripes; but my mercy I will not scatter away from him.' He did not say 'from them,' though he was speaking of his sons, not of himself;

but he said 'from him,' which when well understood means just as much. For of Christ himself, who is the head of the Church, there could not be found any sins which it would be necessary, mercy being divinely preserved, to restrain by human corrections; but in his body and members, which is his people. Therefore in the book of Kingdoms it is said 'his iniquity'; but in the psalm, 'his sons'; so that we may understand that there is said in a certain way of him what is said of his body. On which account he too, from heaven, when his body, which is his faithful ones, was being persecuted by Saul, said: 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' Then in the following parts of the psalm:

'Neither will I hurt him in my truth,' he says, 'nor will I profane my covenant, and the things that proceed from my lips I will not reject. Once have I sworn by my holy one, if I lie to David'—that is, in no way will I lie to David. For Scripture is wont to speak thus. But what he will not lie about, he adds and says: 'His seed shall abide forever; and his throne as the sun in my sight, and as the perfect moon forever, and a faithful witness in heaven.' CHAPTER X. How different were the things done in the kingdom of the earthly Jerusalem from those which God had promised, that it might be understood that the truth of the promise pertained to the glory of another king and kingdom.

After these most valid foundations of so great a promise, lest they should be thought fulfilled in Solomon (as though that were hoped for and not found): 'But you,' he says, 'have rejected and brought to nothing, O Lord.' This indeed was done concerning the kingdom of Solomon in his descendants, up to the overthrow of that earthly Jerusalem itself, which was the seat of that same kingdom, and especially the ruin of that very temple which had been constructed by Solomon. But lest on this account God should be thought to have acted against his own promises, he immediately subjoined: 'You have deferred your anointed.' Therefore that one is not Solomon, but neither is David himself, if the Lord's anointed has been deferred.

For although all the kings consecrated with that mystical chrism were called his anointed—not only from king David and thereafter, but also from that Saul who was the first king anointed over that same people (for David himself calls him the Lord's anointed)—yet there was one true anointed one, whose figure those bore by their prophetic anointing; who, according to the opinion of men who thought he was to be understood in David or in Solomon, was put off to a distant time; but according to the disposition of God, he was being prepared to come in his own season. Meanwhile, while he is deferred, what happened concerning the kingdom of the earthly Jerusalem, where assuredly he was hoped to reign, this psalm went on to add and said:

'You have overthrown the covenant of your servant, you have profaned his sanctuary on the earth; you have destroyed all his walls, you have made his fortifications a terror; all who pass along the way have plundered him, he has become a reproach to his neighbors; you have exalted the right hand of his enemies, you have made all his enemies rejoice; you have turned away the help of his sword, and you have not aided him in war; you have loosed him from cleansing, you have dashed his throne to the ground; you have shortened the days of his throne, you have poured over him confusion.'

All these things came upon the bondwoman Jerusalem, in which there reigned also some sons of the free woman, holding that kingdom in a temporal stewardship, but holding the kingdom of the heavenly Jerusalem, whose sons they were, in true faith and hoping in the true Christ. But in what manner these things came upon that kingdom, the history of deeds done is the index, if it be read. CHAPTER XI. Of the substance of the people of God, which is in Christ through the assumption of the flesh, who alone had power to rescue his soul from the lower regions. After these things prophesied, the prophet turns to praying to God; but that very prayer is a prophecy. 'How long, O Lord, do you turn away unto the end?' there is understood 'your face,' as elsewhere it is said:

'How long will you turn your face away from me?' For on this account some manuscripts here do not have 'do you turn away,' but 'will you be turned away'; though it can be understood: 'You turn away your mercy, which you promised to David.' But as for what he said, 'unto the end,' what is it but 'even to the end'? Which end is to be understood as the last time, when even that nation is to believe in Christ Jesus; before which end those things had to come to pass which it lamented above as full of distress. On account of which here too there follows: 'Your wrath blazes up like fire: remember what is my substance.' Nothing here is better understood than Jesus himself as the substance of his people, from whom is the nature of his flesh. 'For not in vain,' he says, 'have you established all the sons of men.'

For unless there were one Son of man as the substance of Israel, through whom Son of man many sons of men should be set free, assuredly all the sons of men would have been established in vain. But now indeed all human nature has, through the sin of the first man, collapsed from truth into vanity, on account of which another psalm says: 'Man has become like to vanity, his days pass away like a shadow'; yet God did not establish all the sons of men in vain, because he both sets many free from vanity through the mediator Jesus, and those whom he foreknew were not to be set free, he assuredly did not establish in vain, in the most beautiful and most just ordering of the whole rational creation, for the benefit of those to be set free and for the comparison of the two cities one against the other.

Then follows: 'Who is the man that shall live and not see death, that shall rescue his soul from the hand of hell?' Who is this, but that substance of Israel from the seed of David, Christ Jesus? Of whom the apostle says that, rising from the dead, he now dies no more, and death shall no longer have dominion over him. For so shall he live and not see death, that nevertheless he had died, but had rescued his soul from the hand of hell, whither he had descended in order to loose the infernal bonds of certain ones; and he rescued it by that power, of which he says in the Gospel: 'I have power to lay down my soul, and I have power to take it again.' CHAPTER XII. To whose person the demanding of the promises ought to be understood to pertain, concerning which it is said in the psalm:

'Where are your mercies, O Lord, the ancient ones,' and the rest. But the rest of this psalm, which run thus: 'Where are your ancient compassions, O Lord, which you swore to David in your truth? Remember, O Lord, the reproach of your servants, which I have held back in my bosom, of many nations; with which your enemies have reproached, O Lord; with which they have reproached the exchange of your anointed,'—whether these were spoken from the person of those Israelites who longed for the promise made to David to be rendered to them, or rather of the Christians, who are Israelites not according to the flesh but according to the spirit, may with reason be asked. These things were indeed spoken or written in the time when Ethan lived, from whose name this psalm received its title;

and that same time was the time of David's reign; and on this account it would not be said: 'Where are your ancient compassions, O Lord, which you swore to David in your truth?' unless the prophet were transfiguring into himself the person of those who were to be long afterward, to whom this time would be ancient, when these things were promised to king David. But it can be understood that many nations, when they were persecuting the Christians, reproached them with the passion of Christ, which Scripture calls an exchange, since by dying he was made immortal.

The exchange of Christ can also be taken according to this as having been cast as a reproach to the Israelites, because, when he was hoped to be theirs in the future, he became the Christ of the nations, and now many nations cast this in their teeth—nations which have believed in him through the New Testament, while those remain in the old—so that for this reason it is said: 'Remember, O Lord, the reproach of your servants,' because the Lord does not forget them, but rather has mercy, and they themselves after this reproach are going to believe. But that sense which I set down first seems to me more fitting. For to the enemies of Christ, to whom it is cast as a reproach that Christ in passing over to the nations abandoned them, this utterance is incongruously fitted: 'Remember, O Lord, the reproach of your servants'; for such Jews are not to be called the servants of God;

but these words befit those who, when they suffered the grievous humiliations of persecutions for the name of Christ, were able to remember that an exalted kingdom had been promised to the seed of David, and out of desire for it to say—not despairing, but asking, seeking, knocking: 'Where are your ancient compassions, O Lord, which you swore to David in your truth? Remember, O Lord, the reproach of your servants, which I have held back in my bosom, of many nations' (that is, in my inner parts I have patiently endured); 'with which your enemies have reproached, O Lord; with which they have reproached the exchange of your anointed'—not thinking it an exchange but a consummation. But what is: