Annotatio CLXXI

”Let their sword enter into their own hearts.” — Psalm 36:15

Ambrose, in the commentaries on the Psalter, disclosing the understanding of this clause, is believed to consent to Origen¹ — saying that all who are, who have been, and who shall be men (one Christ excepted) are to be examined, proved, and in some manner burned by the fire of the world’s conflagration on the day of judgment. For he transferred from Origen’s explanation into this psalm almost all the following words: “‘By fire thou hast examined us,’ David says:² therefore we shall all be examined by fire. And Malachi says, ‘Behold the omnipotent Lord comes: and who shall endure the day of his entrance? For he himself shall enter in, like a refining fire; and he shall sit refining and purging, like gold and silver, and he shall purge the sons of Levi.’³ By fire, therefore, shall the sons of Levi be purged; by fire Ezekiel, by fire Daniel. But even if they shall be examined by fire, yet they shall say, ‘We have passed through fire and water’;⁴ others shall remain in the fire. To these the fire shall be as dew — as [it was] to the Hebrew boys, who were cast into the burning of the fiery furnace; but the avenging fire shall burn up the ministers of impiety. Woe is me, if my work shall have burned, and I suffer the loss of this labor! And if the Lord shall save his servants, we shall be saved by [our] faith — yet so saved, as if by fire; and if we be not burned up, yet we shall be burned. But in what manner some remain in the fire, and others pass through, the divine Scripture teaches us: namely, in the Red Sea the people of the Egyptians was drowned, [while] the people of the Hebrews passed through before, [and] Moses passed through; Pharaoh was cast down, because, when heavy sins drowned [them], in that manner the sacrilegious are cast down into the lake of burning fire. Let us, therefore, placed here, follow the pillar of fire, which may illumine us in this body, and show [us] the way, that in the future the cloud may cool us, so that we may be able to relieve [ourselves from] the savage burnings of the night.” Again, in the exposition of Psalm 118, upon that [verse], “See my humiliation, and deliver me,” etc., he says: “All, [as many] as desire to return to paradise, must be proved by fire: for not idly is it written that — Adam and Eve being cast out of the seat of paradise — God placed at the exit of paradise a fiery turning sword; all must pass through the flames, even if [one] be that John the Evangelist, whom the Lord so loved that he said of him to Peter, ‘So I will [him] to remain: what is that to thee? follow thou me.’ Concerning his death some have doubted; concerning [his] passing through the fire we cannot doubt. Even if [one] be Peter, who received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, he must say, ‘We have passed through the fire.’ But for John the fiery sword shall be quickly turned aside, because iniquity is not found in him whom equity loved: if there was anything of vice in him, divine charity burned it away. He shall be examined as silver; I shall be examined as lead — until the lead melt away, I shall burn. If nothing of silver shall be found in me, woe is me! I shall be thrust down into the lowest [part] of hell; or, as stubble, I shall be wholly burned up. If anything of gold or of silver shall be found in me — not through my [own] acts, but through the mercy and grace of Christ — [I shall say], perhaps, ‘For they who hope in thee shall not be confounded.’ One [alone] could not feel that fire — [he] who is the justice of God, Christ, who did no sin: for nothing of the fire found in him anything which it could burn up. Therefore, since we are to be examined, let us so act, that in the judgment we may deserve to be proved by the divine [examination]. Let us hold, placed here, humility — so that, when each one of us shall come to the judgment of God, to those fires which we are to pass through, he may say, ‘See my humiliation, and deliver me,’ etc.”

Hilary, together with Ambrose, following his own Origen, in the commentaries on Psalm 118, upon that verse, “My soul hath coveted to desire thy judgments,”⁵ etc., thus wrote: “The prophet remembers that it is arduous to desire the judgment; for since no living [man] is clean in his sight, how can the judgment be desirable, in which that unwearied fire must be undergone by us — in which those grave punishments, [needing] to be expiated from sins, must be undergone by the soul? The sword passed through the soul of the blessed Mary, that the thoughts of many hearts might be revealed. If, therefore, that Virgin of God — subject [to it] — is to come to the severity in the judgment, who shall dare to desire to be judged by God?” And in the canon on Matthew 3, explaining that [passage], “He shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire”:⁶ “Baptized in the Holy Spirit, it remains that we be consummated in the fire of judgment.”

To the same [purpose] seem to pertain those things which Basil noted on the fourth chapter of Isaiah, in those words of the prophet, “He shall purge Jerusalem in the spirit of judgment and in the spirit of burning,” etc., saying: “But this — ‘In the spirit of judgment and the spirit of burning’ — is referred to that probation, or examination, which shall be made through fire in the future age.” And a little after: “Those who, after having received the knowledge of life, deliberately and by [their own] zeal render themselves obnoxious to blood — such surely need to be purged by fire; and these are to be purged by the spirit of burning, or of examination.” And again, in the same commentaries, weighing that [passage] of Isaiah 9, “In the indignation of the wrath of the Lord the earth is burnt up,”⁷ etc., he says: “The prophet declares that the earthly [region] itself is delivered to be consumed by a punitive fire, unto the grace and benefit of the soul; for he threatens not an utter destruction and extermination, but hints at a purgation according to the sentence of the Apostle: ‘Because, as any man’s work shall have burned, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.’”⁸

To the same opinion Jerome appears to have alluded, in the third book on Amos, where, expounding that [passage] from the seventh chapter, “And behold he shall call for fire to judgment, and it shall devour the abyss, and it shall eat up at the same time a part,”⁹ etc., he thus speaks: “The calling of fire to judgment first devours the abyss — that is, all kinds of sinners: wood, hay, stubble;¹⁰ and afterward it eats up at the same time a part — that is, it comes to those saints who are in the peculium of the Lord, and are reckoned in his part. For it is the time that judgment begin from the house of the Lord; and in Ezekiel it is commanded to those who are to bring the punishments, ‘Begin ye from my sanctuary.’¹¹ And in the Apostle we read, ‘If any man’s work shall have burned, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.’¹² And when we shall all have been in sin, and shall have lain against the truth of the sentence, the Lord will have mercy on us, and will raise us up in the time of the resurrection.”

Lactantius Firmianus, speaking of this fire long before Jerome and Hilary, in the seventh [book] of the Divine Institutes, chapter 21, left this written: “The same divine fire, therefore, by one and the same force and power, shall both burn the impious and shall renew them; and as much as it shall consume from the bodies, so much shall it restore, and shall furnish for itself eternal fuel. But when God shall have judged the just, he will also examine them by fire: then those whose sins shall have prevailed, either by weight or by number, shall be singed by the fire, and shall be scorched; but those whom full justice and the ripeness of virtue has thoroughly seasoned” shall not feel that fire; for they have something of God in themselves which repels and casts back the force of the flame. So great is the force of innocence, that from it that fire flees away harmless — [the fire] which receives from God this power, that it may burn the impious [and] obey the just.”

From the opinions of these authors, those things appear to be sufficiently diverse which all the Scholastic Theologians teach concerning the fire of the final conflagration: who, although they confess that all mortals whom the time of judgment shall find living shall enter this fire¹³ — and that certain elect, needing expiation, are to be purged in it with pain, but certain [others], in whom there will be nothing to be purged, shall escape from it without any torment, [while] the reprobate, together with that very fire, are rolled down and drowned into hell — yet they refuse [to hold] that the saints who died before the judgment are to be purged by that fire; especially the Apostles, purified by the Holy Spirit, and Mary the Mother of God, sanctified in the womb and assumed into heaven with a most pure body: both because the dead do not rise again until after that fire shall have ceased from the office of purgation, the faculty of purging being laid aside; and because the bodies of the saints after the resurrection shall be so spiritual and impassible that they are no longer capable of the fiery purgation. Nor does Augustine much dissent from the Scholastics, in book 20 On the City of God, chapter 8, where he says that the future saints [shall be] in the higher parts of the world, into which the flame of that burning shall not ascend — just as neither of old [did] the wave of the flood; for such bodies shall be theirs, that they may be there where they shall have willed to be. But, made immortal and incorruptible, they shall not dread the fire of that conflagration — just as the corruptible and mortal bodies of the three men were able to live unharmed in the burning furnace. See the preceding Annotation.