Latin original · 39 verses · some words can be tapped for a gloss · long chapter, split into parts; this part covers 1:1260–1:1298 (3306 verses in all)
And at last he ventured to say that it was the Holy Spirit who met Abraham, and that it was He who was seen under the figure of a man. But how the Holy Spirit brought forth bread and wine, and received the tithes of the spoil which Abraham had carried off after the defeat of the four kings, he was altogether unwilling to touch upon; and you ask that I should answer what I think both of the writer and of the question. I confess, I wished to conceal my opinion and not to involve myself in a perilous and quarrelsome treatise, in which, whatever I might say, I was bound to have detractors.
But when again I read your letter and found on its last little page that I was adjured by wondrous entreaties not to spurn a suppliant, I turned back over the books of the ancients, to see what each of them said, and to answer you as if from the counsel of many. And at once, at the very beginning of Genesis, I found the first of Origen's homilies written about Melchizedek, in which, disputing with manifold discourse, he slid to the point of calling him an angel; and with almost the same arguments by which your writer spoke of the Holy Spirit, he spoke of the heavenly powers. I passed on to Didymus, his follower, and I saw that the man had gone over, foot and all, to his master's opinion.
I turned to Hippolytus, Irenaeus, Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Emesa, and also Apollinaris and our own Eustathius, who as the first bishop of the church of Antioch sounded the battle-trumpet most clearly against Arius; and I found that the opinions of all these, through various argumentations and by-paths, had come to one meeting-point: they said that Melchizedek was a man, a Canaanite, king of the city of Jerusalem, which was first called Salem, afterward Jebus, and at last Jerusalem; and that it was no wonder if he is described as a priest of God Most High without circumcision and the legal ceremonies and the lineage of Aaron, since Abel too and Enoch and Noah pleased God and offered sacrifices, and we read in the book of Job that he himself was both an offerer of gifts and a priest, and daily sacrificed victims for his sons.
And they say that Job himself also was not of the lineage of Levi, but of the stock of Esau, though the Hebrews suppose otherwise. And just as Noah, made drunk in his own house and stripped and mocked by his elder son, presented a type of the Savior and of the Jewish people; and as Samson too, lover of the harlot and of poor Delilah, in his death slew far more of his enemies than while he lived, so as to express the passion of Christ; and as almost all the saints and patriarchs and prophets expressed in some matter a figure of the Savior—so also Melchizedek, in that he was a Canaanite and not of the lineage of the Jews, went before as a type of the priesthood of the Son of God, of whom it is said in the hundred and ninth Psalm: 'You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.'
And they interpret his 'order' in many ways: that he alone was both king and priest, and exercised the priesthood before circumcision, so that the Gentiles received the priesthood not from the Jews, but the Jews received it from the Gentiles; that he was not anointed with priestly oil, as the precepts of Moses ordain, but with the oil of gladness and the purity of faith; that he did not sacrifice victims of flesh and blood, nor take the entrails of brute animals, but with bread and wine, a simple and pure sacrifice, consecrated the sacrament of Christ; and many other things, which the brevity of a letter does not admit.
Moreover, that the matter is more fully treated in the Epistle to the Hebrews—which all the Greeks and some of the Latins receive—namely, that this Melchizedek, that is, 'king of righteousness,' was king of Salem, that is, 'king of peace,' without father, without mother; and how this is to be understood is at once explained by a single word, 'without genealogy'—not that he was without father and mother, since Christ too, according to both natures, had both a father and a mother, but because he is suddenly introduced in Genesis as meeting Abraham returning from the slaughter of his enemies, and neither before nor afterward is his name recorded as inscribed.
And the Apostle affirms that the priesthood of Aaron, that is, of the Jewish people, had both a beginning and an end, but that the priesthood of Melchizedek, that is, of the Church of Christ, is eternal both in the past and in the future, and had no author; and that, the priesthood being transferred, a change of the law also takes place, so that the word of the Lord and the law of God should go forth by no means from Hagar the bondwoman and Mount Sinai, but from Sarah the free woman and the citadel of Zion, from Jerusalem. And he heightens the difficulty of the matter in his preface, saying: 'Concerning whom we have much to say, and hard to be interpreted.'
If the vessel of election stands amazed at the mystery and confesses that what he discusses is ineffable, how much more ought we little worms and fleas to confess only that we know our own ignorance, and to display so vast a house through, as it were, a tiny opening—so that we may say that two priesthoods are compared with one another by the Apostle, that of the former people and that of the latter, and that the whole disputation aims at this: that before Levi and Aaron, Melchizedek was a priest from among the Gentiles, whose merit is so preeminent that Abraham, and in his loins the future priests of the Jews, was blessed; and that everything which follows in praise of Melchizedek is to be referred to the type of Christ, whose advances are the sacraments of the Church.
These things I read in the volumes of the Greeks, and I wished to demonstrate, as it were, the widest regions of the earth on a small tablet, not extending the spaces of the meanings and treatises, but signifying infinite things by certain points and abridgments, so that in a small letter you might learn at once the intentions of many. But since you inquire lovingly, and all that I have learned must be instilled into faithful ears, I will set down also the opinion of the Hebrews, and, lest anything be lacking to your curiosity, I will append the Hebrew words themselves: 'umelchisedech melech salem hosi lehem uaiain, uhu cohen lehel helion: uaibarcheu uaiomer baruch abram lehel helion cone samaim uares: ubaruch hel helion eser maggen sarach biadach uaiethen lo maaser mecchol.' Which is rendered into Latin in this manner:
這些事我是在希臘人的著作中讀到的，我願意彷彿在一塊小板上展示大地最遼闊的區域，不是延展意義和論述的篇幅，而是藉某些要點和摘要來表示無限的事，好使你在一封短信中同時得知眾人的用意。但既然你充滿愛意地詢問，而我所學的一切都當灌注入忠信的耳中，我也要記下希伯來人的意見，並且，免得你的好奇有所缺欠，我要把希伯來原文附上：「umelchisedech melech salem hosi lehem uaiain, uhu cohen lehel helion: uaibarcheu uaiomer baruch abram lehel helion cone samaim uares: ubaruch hel helion eser maggen sarach biadach uaiethen lo maaser mecchol.」這譯成拉丁文是這樣的：
'And Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine—now he was a priest of God Most High—and he blessed him and said: Blessed be Abram of God Most High, who created heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who delivered your enemies into your hand; and he gave him tithes of all.' And they hand down that this man was Shem, the firstborn son of Noah, and that at the time when Abram was born he was three hundred and ninety years of age, which is reckoned thus: Shem, in the second year after the flood, when he was a hundred years old, begot Arphaxad, after whose birth he lived five hundred years, that is, six hundred in all. Arphaxad, at thirty-five years of age, begot Salah, who himself at thirty begot Eber, whom we read to have begotten Peleg at thirty-four years of age.
Again Peleg, having completed thirty years, begot Reu, who himself after the thirty-second year of his birth brought forth Serug; of whom, when he had reached thirty years, was born Nahor, who at twenty-nine years of age begot Terah, whom we read to have begotten, at seventy years of age, Abram and Nahor and Haran. Reckon the number of years through the several ages, and you will find from the birth of Shem to the generation of Abram three hundred and ninety years. Now Abraham died in the hundred and seventy-fifth year of his age: by this reckoning it is found that Shem survived his great-great-grandson Abraham of the tenth degree by thirty-five years.
And at the same time they hand down this also: that up to the priesthood of Aaron all the firstborn from the stock of Noah, whose series and order is described, were priests and sacrificed victims to God, and that these were the birthrights which Jacob bought from his brother Esau. Nor is it a wonder if Melchizedek went forth to meet the victorious Abraham, and for the refreshment both of himself and of his warriors brought forth bread and wine and blessed him, since he owed this by right to his great-great-grandson's descendant, and received the tithes of the spoil and of the victory from him; or—since it is held ambiguous—he himself gave him the tithes of his own substance and displayed an ancestral bounty toward his descendant.
For both can be understood, both according to the Hebrew and according to the Septuagint translators: that he himself received the tithes of the spoils, and gave to Abraham the tithes of his own substance—although the Apostle in the Epistle to the Hebrews most plainly determines that Abraham did not receive from Melchizedek tithes of his riches, but that the high priest received a portion from the spoils of the enemy. And Salem is not, as Josephus and all our own writers suppose, Jerusalem—a name compounded from Greek and Hebrew, which the mixture of a foreign language shows to be absurd—but a town near Scythopolis, which even to this day is called Salem. And there is shown the palace of Melchizedek, displaying by the greatness of the ruins of the ancient work its magnificence;
concerning which it is also written in a later part of Genesis: 'Jacob came to Succoth, that is, to booths, and built himself houses there and tents, and passed over to Salem, a city of the region of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan.' It must also be considered that, for Abraham returning from the slaughter of his enemies, whom he pursued as far as Dan—which today is called Paneas—it was not out-of-the-way Jerusalem, but the town of the metropolis of Shechem, that lay on his route; concerning which we also read in the Gospel: 'Now John was baptizing in Aenon near Salim, because there were many waters there.'
Nor does it matter whether it is called Salem or Salim, since the Hebrews very rarely use vowel letters in the middle, and according to the will of readers and the variety of regions the same words are uttered with different sounds and accents. These things we have learned from the most erudite men of that nation, who are so far from admitting that Melchizedek was the Holy Spirit or an angel, that they even ascribe to him the most certain name of a man.
And truly it is foolish that what is said in a type—namely, that Christ's priesthood has no end, and that He, being both king and priest, has bestowed both on us, so that we may be a royal and priestly race, and that, as a cornerstone, He has joined the two walls together, so that of two flocks the good Shepherd might make one flock—that some should so refer this to an anagogical sense as to take away the truth of the history, and say that he was not a king, but an angel shown in the image of a man; whereas the Hebrews strive so hard to show that Melchizedek, king of Salem, was Shem the son of Noah, that they cite what is written before this:
'Now the king of Sodom went out to meet him'—there is no doubt, to meet Abraham—'after he returned from the slaughter of Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, in the valley of Shaveh, which is the king's valley'; concerning which it immediately follows: 'And Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine,' and the rest. If then this is the city of the king and the valley of the king, or, as the Septuagint translated, the plain which the Palestinians today call Aulon, it is manifest that he was a man who reigned in an earthly valley and city. You have what I have heard, what I have read concerning Melchizedek. It has been my part to cite witnesses; it is yours to judge concerning the credibility of the witnesses.
But if you refute them all, you will surely not accept that spiritual interpreter of yours, who, unskilled in speech and knowledge, with such arrogance and authority pronounced Melchizedek to be the Holy Spirit, so as to prove most true that saying which is sung among the Greeks: 'Ignorance breeds confidence, learning breeds fear.' I, after a long illness, was scarcely able to be free of fever during the days of Lent, and, while I was preparing myself for another work, I spent the few days that remained on the exposition of Matthew, and I resumed my interrupted studies with such eagerness that what profited the exercise of my tongue harmed the health of my body. LETTER 74. TO THE PRESBYTER RUFINUS, CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON.
In both directions fame often lies, and by false rumor men celebrate evil things of the good as much as good things of the wicked. Whence I too indeed rejoice at the testimony of your holiness toward me and at the love of the holy presbyter Eusebius, nor do I doubt that you praise me publicly; but I greatly dread the silent judgment of your prudence. Therefore I beseech you rather to remember me and to make me worthy of your praise. That you first called me to the task, and that to me the second part in writing was given, came not from carelessness toward friends, but from ignorance; for had I known, I would have anticipated your discourse.
The interpretation of the judgment of Solomon concerning the quarrel of the two harlot women, as far as pertains to the simple history, is clear: that a boy of twelve years, contrary to the measure of his age, judged from the inmost feeling of human nature. Whence all Israel both marveled at him and feared him, because plainly things did not escape him who had so prudently detected hidden things. As far as pertains to the typical meanings, the Apostle saying:
'All these things happened to them in a figure, and they were written for us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.' Certain of the Greeks suppose that it is to be understood of the synagogue and the Church, and that all is to be referred to that time when, after the cross and resurrection, the true Solomon, that is, 'the peaceable one,' began to reign both in Israel and among the people of the Gentiles. But that the adulteresses and harlots are called the synagogue and the Church in the Scriptures, there is no doubt. And at first sight this seems to be blasphemous;
but for the rest, if we run back to the prophets—namely to Hosea, who took a fornicating wife and begot children of fornication and then an adulteress, and to Ezekiel, who accuses Jerusalem as a harlot, because she followed her lovers and spread her feet to every passerby and built a brothel in a public place—we turn our mind to see that Christ came for this reason: to endow the harlots with matrimony and of two flocks to make one fold, and, the middle wall being destroyed, to gather into the same sheepfolds the sheep before diseased. These are the two rods which are joined in Ezekiel, and concerning which the Lord relates through Zechariah: 'And I took to myself two rods—one I called Beauty and the other I called Cord—and I fed the flock.'
That harlot woman too in the Gospel, who washes Jesus' feet with tears, wipes them with her hair, and to whom all sins are forgiven, plainly depicts the Church gathered from the Gentiles. These things I have rehearsed at the outset, lest it seem incongruous to anyone if they are called harlots, one of whom by Solomon's judgment was granted possession of the son. Let the prudent hearer ask: how is the Church a harlot, which has neither spot nor wrinkle? We do not say that the Church remained a harlot, but that she had been one. For in the house of Simon the leper also the Savior is recorded to have entered to a banquet—not, certainly, one who was a leper at the time when he had the Savior as guest, but one who had been a leper before.
Matthew too, in the catalogue of the apostles, is called a publican—not that he remained a publican after the apostolic dignity, but because he had first been a publican, so that where sin abounded, grace might super-abound. And at the same time consider what the Church says against the calumniating synagogue: 'I and this woman were dwelling in one house.' For after the resurrection of the Lord and Savior, one Church was gathered from both peoples; and how elegantly: 'I gave birth,' she says, 'beside her in the bedchamber!' For the Church from the Gentiles, which did not before have the law and the prophets, gave birth in the house of the synagogue and did not go out of the bedchamber, but entered in. Whence she says in the Song of Songs: 'The king brought me into his bedchamber.' And again:
'And indeed they will not despise you. Taking you, I will bring you into my mother's house, into the bedchamber of her who conceived me.' 'On the third day,' she says, 'after I gave birth, this woman also gave birth.' If you consider Pilate washing his hands and saying: 'I am clean of the blood of this just man'; if the centurion before the gibbet confessing: 'Truly this was the Son of God'; if those who before the passion desired through Philip to see the Lord—you will not doubt that the Church gave birth first and that afterward the people of the Jews was born, for whom the Lord prayed: 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' And on one day three thousand believed, and on another day five thousand.
'And we were together'—for the multitude of believers had one soul and one heart—'and there was no other in the house with us except us two,' neither of the blaspheming Jews nor of the Gentiles serving idols. 'Now the son of this woman died in the night.' For while she follows the observance of the law and couples the yoke of Mosaic doctrine to the grace of the Gospel, she was covered by the error of darkness. 'And his mother, sleeping, oppressed him,' she who could not say: 'I sleep, but my heart wakes.' 'Rising at midnight, she took the son from the side of the sleeping Church and laid him in her own bosom.' Read again the whole epistle of the Apostle to the Galatians and you will notice how the synagogue hastens to make the sons of the Church her own, and how the Apostle says:
'My little children, of whom I travail again until Christ be formed in you.' She took him alive, not to possess him, but to kill him. For she did this not out of love for the son, but out of a rival's hatred, and she laid her own dead child, by the ceremonies of the law, in the bosom of the Church. It would be long, if I wished to run through each detail, how through the apostle Paul and men of the Church the Church understood that he was not her son who was held in the law, and recognized in the light him whom in darkness she did not see. Thence a quarrel arose in the presence of the king, the one saying: 'Your son is dead, but mine lives,' the other answering: 'You lie; for my son lives and your son is dead.' And in this manner they contended before the king.
Then king Solomon, who is manifestly understood as the Savior according to the seventy-first Psalm, which is inscribed with the title of Solomon—where there is no doubt that all that is said befits not the dead Solomon, but the majesty of Christ—feigns ignorance and, by reason of the dispensation of the flesh, pretends human feelings—just as in another place: 'Where have you laid Lazarus?' and to the woman flowing with blood: 'Who touched me?'—demands a sword, concerning which He had said: 'Do not think that I came to send peace upon the earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to divide a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.'
'And a man's enemies are those of his own household'—and the Lord tests nature by nature, and wishes, according to the will of each, to divide the living son into law and grace, not that He approves this, but that He says He wills it in order to convict the calumny of the synagogue. She, who did not wish the son of the Church to live in grace nor to be freed through baptism, gladly consents that the boy be divided, not that she may possess him, but that she may kill him; the Church, whom she knows to be her own, gladly yields to her rival, provided he may at least live even with the adversary, lest, divided between the law and grace, he be struck by the sword of the Savior. Whence the Apostle also says: 'Behold, I Paul say to you, that if you observe the law, Christ profits you nothing.' Let these things have been said under the cloud of allegory.
For the rest, your prudence knows well that the same rules do not obtain in the shadows of tropology as in the truth of history. If anywhere we have stumbled and it seems trifling to the wise reader that we have written this, let him refer the fault to the author. For we dictated these very things, lying on our little bed and worn out by long illness, scarcely to be written down in haste by a notary—not to fill up the material, but lest at the beginning of our friendship we should seem to deny anything to you who command. Pray for us to the Lord for health, that after twelve months, in which I have been worn out by continual labor, I may be able to write something worthy of your desire; and pardon me, if my gushing speech does not flow in its accustomed course.
For we do not dictate with the same charm with which we write, because in the one we often turn the stylus, intending to write again things worthy to be read, while in the other we roll out with hasty speech whatever comes into our mouth. I gladly saw Caninus, who will be able to tell you how difficult and perilous a wound of my right hand I have endured up to the present day, on which I dictated these things. LETTER 75. TO THEODORA THE SPANIARD, CONCERNING THE DEATH OF LUCINUS. Struck down by the mournful message concerning the falling-asleep of the holy and, to me, venerable Lucinus, I could scarcely dictate a brief letter—not that I grieve for his lot, whom I know to have passed to better things, saying:
'Passing over, I shall see this great vision,' but because I am tormented by the desire not to have deserved to see the face of that man, whom I believed would come here in a short time. True is that prophetic oracle concerning the necessity of death, by which it divides brothers and cruelly and harshly separates names most dear to one another. But we have consolation, that death is slain by the word of the Lord, and it is said to it: 'O death, I will be your death; O hell, I will be your bite'; and in what follows: 'The Lord will bring a scorching wind rising from the desert, which will dry up all his veins and desolate his fountain.' For a rod went forth from the root of Jesse and a flower sprouted from the virginal shrub, who would speak in the Song of Songs:
'I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys.' Our flower is the destruction of death; and therefore He also died, that by His death the death of that one might die. But that He is said to be brought from the desert points to the virginal womb, which without intercourse and the seed of man poured forth for us God as an infant, who by the warmth of the Holy Spirit would dry up the fountains of lusts and would sing in the Psalm: 'In a desert land, and pathless, and without water, so in the sanctuary I appeared to you.' Against the hardness of death, therefore, and against its most cruel necessity, we are lifted up by this solace, that in a short time we shall see those whom we grieve to be absent. For it is called not death, but a falling-asleep and a slumber.
Whence the blessed Apostle also forbids us to be saddened concerning those who sleep, so that those whom we know to sleep we may believe can be roused, and after the slumber is digested may awake with the saints and say with the angels: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.' In heaven, where there is no sin, there is glory and perpetual praise and unwearied proclamation; but on earth, where there is sedition, wars and discords, peace is to be invoked—and peace not in all, but in those who are of good will and hear the apostolic greeting:
'Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ be multiplied,' so that His place may be in peace and His dwelling in Zion, in the 'watchtower,' in the sublimity of doctrines and virtues, in the soul of the believer, whose angel daily sees the face of God and with unveiled countenance contemplates the glory of the Lord. Whence I beseech you, and, as they say, drive you on though you are already running, that you may indeed miss your Lucinus as a brother, but rejoice that he reigns with Christ, because he was snatched away lest malice should change his mind. For his soul was pleasing to God, and in a short space he completed many times. We are rather to be grieved for, who daily stand in the battle of sins, are defiled by vices, receive wounds, and shall render an account of an idle word.
He, now secure and victorious, looks upon you from on high and favors you in your labor, and prepares a place beside himself with the same love and the same charity with which, forgetful of the conjugal office, on earth also he had begun to have you as a sister—nay rather as a brother, because a chaste union has no nuptial sex. And if, still placed in the flesh and reborn in Christ, we are not Greek and barbarian, slave and free, male and female, but all are one in Him, how much more, when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption and this mortal shall have put on immortality, will they neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be as the angels in heaven! When it is said:
'They will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but will be as the angels in heaven,' it is not the nature and substance of bodies that is taken away, but the greatness of glory that is shown. For it is not written: 'They will be angels,' but 'as the angels,' where a likeness is promised, but the reality is denied. 'They will be,' He says, 'as the angels,' that is, like the angels: therefore they do not cease to be men, illustrious indeed and adorned with angelic splendor, but nevertheless men, so that both the apostle may be an apostle and Mary Mary, and the heresy may be confounded which promises uncertain and great things precisely so that it may take away those which are certain and moderate.
And since we have once made mention of heresy, by which our Lucinus can be proclaimed with a worthy trumpet of eloquence—he who, while the most filthy heresy of Basilides raged through the Spains and, like a plague and disease, laid waste whole provinces within the Pyrenees and the Ocean, kept the purity of ecclesiastical faith, by no means receiving Armazel, Barbelo, Abraxas, Balsamus, and the ridiculous Leusibora, and the rest, which are portents rather than names, which, to stir up the minds of the ignorant and of little women, they draw as though from Hebrew fountains, terrifying the simple with a barbarous sound, so that they marvel the more at what they do not understand.
Irenaeus relates it — a man of the apostolic age and a disciple of Papias, who was himself a hearer of the evangelist John — bishop of the church of Lyons: that a certain Marcus, sprung from the stock of Basilides the Gnostic, came first to the Gauls and to those parts through which the Rhône and the Garonne flow, and defiled them with his teaching; and that above all he seduced noble women, promising them certain hidden mysteries, and led them astray by this error, winning their love for himself by magic arts and by the secret pleasure of the body; and that, crossing thence the Pyrenees, he seized upon the Spanish provinces and made it his study especially to make his way into the houses of the wealthy and among them chiefly after the women — those who are 'led by various desires, ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth.'