Annotatio CXLII

”The stars are not clean in his sight.” — Job 25:5

Jerome, in the commentaries inscribed with his name, treating this passage, says:¹ “For if the Angels, and even the bodies of the heavens, are said to be unclean in comparison to God, what do you think man is to be esteemed, since he himself is rottenness?” Faustus, a bishop in Gaul around the year of the Lord 430, elicits from these words that Jerome was of the opinion of those who taught that the nature of Souls and Angels is corporeal. For thus he wrote at the beginning of his book On [the nature of] creatures: “The most learned of the Fathers define that whatever is created is a body, and assert that the nature of Souls and Angels is corporeal, for the reason that in its beginning it is circumscribed by [place] and space. For, as we read in a certain treatise of St. Jerome: ‘They think,’ he says, ‘that the globes of the stars are embodied spirits.’ And likewise, ‘If the angels — the heavenly bodies too — in comparison to God are said to be unclean, what do you think man is to be esteemed?’” Claudianus [Mamertus], bishop of Vienne in Gaul, in the second book On the State of the Soul, refuting Faustus (who asserted all created things to be corporeal), shows that this testimony was rashly and wrongly usurped by him — inasmuch as it makes nothing to the point, nor serves Faustus’s aim. But what the Fathers thought concerning this matter, you have below, Annotation 35 of book 6.