F. SIXTUS OF SIENA, OF THE ORDER OF PREACHERS — ON THE ANNOTATIONS AND CENSURES:

upon the interpreters and expositors of the divine volumes of the Old Testament.

BIBLIOTHECA SANCTA, BOOK FIVE.

PREFACE.

In the preceding book I reviewed the Catholic Expositors of the sacred volumes — all whom I was able to come to know, whether by varied reading or by sure report — together with all their exegetical writings. Now, in this fifth book of the work, I shall annotate, according to the order of the divine volumes, a number of passages worthy of annotation and censure, which I have gathered out of the various explanations of those same expositors: not because I myself desire in any part to obscure, or to render suspect, the sincere piety and admirable erudition of those most holy and most learned men, but that by the present labor I may take counsel for those who are offended by the writings of the holy expositors — whether from prudence, or from malice, or from immoderate zeal — and who likewise give offense.¹

Of their number, those who do harm maliciously, and the more [grievously], are certain perverse men addicted to detestable errors: who, while they wish to make their heresies more easily persuasive, generally snatch out of the orthodox commentaries of the ancient expositors certain opinions — either obscurely written, or put forth by [the Fathers] through carelessness — and drag them off to the confirmation of their own perfidy, lest they seem to be the first, or the only ones, to hold such things. Thus of old the most impious Arians drove the letters of blessed Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria — however much those letters resisted — to the overthrowing of Christ’s divinity. Thus once the Pelagian heretics fought against original sin and against the aid of divine grace, wrongfully making use of the opinions of Chrysostom and Augustine. Thus five hundred years ago Bertram the Priest and Berengarius the Deacon, by violently wresting the sayings of Ambrose and Augustine, attempted to take away the Lord’s Body and Blood from the Church of Christ. Thus too, in this wretched age of ours, Luther, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bodius [Bucer], Calvin, Illyricus [Flacius], and very many other heresiarchs, clad in false arms and spoils — that is, covered over with the testimony of the holy Fathers, whether feigned, or corrupted, or falsely interpreted — assail the uncorrupted integrity of our faith. These men I judge worthy of no pardon whatsoever: whether because they do not shrink from serving up to others the poisons of heresies; or because they iniquitously defame the venerable memory of the saints, imputing to them things they never held; or because they call back into the light again — not without great harm to Christians — certain now-slumbering errors of the Fathers, which ought to have been buried in perpetual silence — following in this the footsteps of their most wicked author, Ham:² who not only did not cover the nakedness of his father Noah, but proclaimed it to the rest to be mocked. But contrariwise the other brothers, Shem and Japheth, far unlike their brother, endured neither to look themselves upon the father’s nakedness which was to be revered, nor to have it looked upon by others, but, turned away (as it is written), covered it — showing by such an example that the errors of the holy Fathers, if not to be approved, are yet rather to be concealed than to be published.

There are, next, others so extreme toward the contrary side that, if they find in the catholic and ever-so-ancient commentaries of the expositors anything that has the appearance of error, at once, seized by a certain headlong severity, they cast away the whole work and condemn the author most severely. These men seem to me indeed to have a zeal for God, but — as Paul says — not according to knowledge.³ For they ought with mature consideration to weigh the not-few occasions on account of which those ancient masters of the churches did at times stray somewhat from the intended mark of truth.⁴ First, because they set out upon a road never before attempted, with no guide going before, and — the first, as the proverb has it, to break the ice — opened a way for those who came after, by which the hidden senses of the Scriptures might be tracked out; and the first attempts of any discipline are not wont to be in every part successful and free of all fault. Secondly, they said, dictated, and wrote things almost innumerable according to the opportunity of the times, places, and persons.

→ and, as Augustine says, excusing himself by a saying of Solomon, declares: “In much speaking there is no lack of sin”⁵ — especially since no one is so keen-eyed that he cannot often be deluded, and does not sometimes grow dim of sight; for even the good Homer sometimes nods. There are, indeed, certain moles even on the most beautiful bodies; and nothing in human affairs is in every part blessed. Moreover, those men of old burned with so great an ardor of sincere piety and of catholic defense that, while they strove with every effort of their powers to destroy one error, they often either fell into the opposite one, or seem in some way to have fallen — after the manner of farmers,⁶ who, wishing to straighten the trunk of a tender tree bent crooked, sometimes exceed the measure by an immoderate pull, and draw the very plant into the contrary and opposite shape. Thus Dionysius, Bishop of the Corinthians — as Basil writes in his letter to Bishop Maximus⁷ — while he strove too vehemently and sharply to combat Sabellius (who asserted one person of Father and Son), did not perceive that he was, by an excessive zeal for controversy, being carried into the opposite fault, and was defending a difference and inequality of the two substances. Thus the divine Augustine, while with all ardor of spirit and words he fights in defense of divine grace against the Pelagians — who exalted free will to the injury of divine grace — seems to slip, as it were, into the other pit, and at times to attribute to man’s free will less than is fair. And on the contrary Chrysostom, in the heat of disputing with the Manichees and pagans — who asserted that man is either evil by nature or often driven to sin by the necessity of fate — raises the powers of our nature higher than is right.

[4.] Add to these that, although some lapses which cannot be dissembled exist in the books of the ancients, yet nothing is thereby taken from their sanctity and erudition: since in those times the Church had not yet either called into question, or defined by a settled determination, anything about these matters which are now condemned; and the authority of divine Scripture seemed ambiguous on either side, nor was it yet forbidden to anyone to hold an opinion about these things, and to teach what he would.

[5.] Nor should this be passed over either, which Pamphilus the Martyr, Eusebius of Caesarea, Didymus, and Rufinus complained of⁸ — namely, that very many of the writings of Clement, Dionysius, Origen, Athanasius, and of the other noble Doctors were of old most wickedly handled by heretics: who, in order to win credit and authority for their heresies under the name of the most illustrious Fathers, corrupted, altered, and cut away much in their books, and also inserted much of their own dogmas at variance with what those celebrated men had held and taught — [men] of whom it is not credible that in the same volumes, on the same matter and at the same time, they either held or wrote contrary things, especially since they were neither mad nor utterly forgetful.

In the third place, finally, there are certain simple and incautious readers who, without any judgment or observation, are carried heedlessly into the reading of the illustrious expositors, and devour and gulp down everything without any distinction or selection — by no means discerning for what cause the things they read were written, to what feelings, occasions, places, times, and persons they were accommodated, whether they were said for the sake of disputing, of objecting, or of rebuking, or were confirmed under the settled definition of a fixed assertion. And while these inconsiderate readers take no notice of this, it necessarily follows that they for the most part slip into a number of errors — errors which, in the expositors’ works, either the authors themselves left behind, as much by occasion as by carelessness, or heretics thrust in by fraud. Most prudently admonishing this so shameless a class of men, D. Anselm, in his commentary on the second Epistle to the Corinthians, left it thus written: “In the books of the holy doctors, which the Church reads as authentic, there are sometimes found certain depraved or heretical things: yet neither the books nor the authors are on this account condemned. Let the prudent reader read their books through, and he will find that what I say is true.”

For this threefold variety of readers, then, this Fifth book is written; in which, according to the order of the volumes of both Testaments, I have gathered out of many commentaries of the divine expositors — and especially of the ancients — passages to be read with caution: not indeed all and every one, but only those which could not be dissembled either without offense to catholic piety or without great disturbance of the readers. And these same [passages] I have almost always indicated not in my own words — lest perhaps I should not be believed — but by the testimonies of the authors who noted such passages. I have also appended, wherever it could be done, to each suspect passage its own antidotes — that is, other passages and opinions of the same authors, either openly at odds with the passages cited or at least diverse and foreign to them, which by their own testimony show that those passages were either explained elsewhere more openly by the authors themselves, or wholly retracted; or were not well understood by the slanderers; or were violently wrested by heretics to the overthrow of Catholic assertions and the defense of depraved dogmas; or were falsified or adulterated by forgers, or added to; or perhaps were at first published in a disordered way by the very authors of the works, and afterward — whether by chance or by some excusable occasion — left without any correction.

Now I have gathered all these things to this end: first, lest the incautious reader, unrolling the commentaries of the catholic expositors, dash himself against some reef he has not noticed; next, that over-severe readers may recognize that the errors of the divine interpreters are to be excused with all pardon and piety, and softened with the gentlest mildness; lastly, that those who abuse the explanations of the saints to their own ruin and that of others may desist from so wicked a contrivance, once they have seen these impostures and frauds of theirs to be detected. But let us now approach the work itself: in which we shall fit together annotations and censures upon the explainers of the blessed volumes, keeping the order of the books and chapters of divine Scripture, proceeding from the beginning of Genesis all the way to the last book of the New Testament.

ANNOTATIONS AND CENSURES

upon the expositors of the divine volumes of the OLD Scripture, arranged according to the order of the books and chapters of the Old Testament.