Annotatio CLVII

”Preserve me, O Lord, for I have hoped in thee.” — Psalm 15:1

Thomas Cajetan, when in his commentaries he prefaced [an introduction] to this psalm, wrote these things:¹ “From this Psalm we gather a general rule of understanding the Psalms: that every Psalm which cannot be expounded literally of David is to be expounded of Christ — as the Apostle [expounds] the words of this psalm, ‘Thou shalt not give thy holy one to see corruption,’ which he adduced [as] written of Christ, because they could not agree to David; and another rule can also hence be had, by the opposite: namely, that every Psalm which can be expounded literally of David is not to be expounded literally of Christ.” Ambrose, Bishop of Compsa, in the second book of the Annotations on Cajetan, weighing these words, writes in this manner: “The first rule is altogether true, but the second false, and received (unto the extinction of the spiritual sense) from the doctrine of the Jews, and against all the catholic Doctors whom I have read, who did not know that rule; nor is the second elicited from the first, as he himself thought — [it is] false, [drawn] by a fallacy which the Logicians call ‘the Consequent.’ And these things are premised to the reader, that he may know my judgment concerning [Cajetan’s] commentaries which he published upon the psalms, in which I scarcely anywhere see Christ, unless when he is so compelled by the authority of Scripture that he cannot, without manifest perfidy, tergiversate. But how many errors, and how great, he has incurred on account of that given rule, it was not worth the leisure to gather: for in those commentaries upon the Psalms there is this perpetual error; some grave ones, however, [there are] in these [Psalms] which I have embraced in this second book, and which I have marked with annotations.”