Annotatio CCXII
”The spirit goeth, surveying all things round about in [its] circuit.” — Ecclesiastes 1:6
Jerome, in the commentaries on Ecclesiastes, discussing the sense of this sentence, writes these things:1 “But in that he says, ‘Surveying all things round about in [its] circuit’ — or ‘wheeling, the spirit goeth wheeling, and returns into its own circuits’ — [Solomon] either called the Sun itself ‘spirit,’ because it animates, and breathes, and is vigorous, and completes the yearly courses of the orb, as the Poet says: ‘Meanwhile the great Sun rolls round the year’; and elsewhere, ‘And into itself, along its own tracks, the year rolls back’; or because [it is written]: ‘The Spirit within nourishes the shining globe of the Moon and the Titanian stars, and Mind, infused through the limbs, moves the whole mass, and mingles itself with the great body’ — [either way] he speaks not of the yearly course of the Sun, but of its daily paths.” St. Thomas, in the first volume of the Theological Summa, question 70, article 3, gathers from these [words] that Jerome held, with Origen, that the Sun and the other stars are animate2 — against the opinion of Basil and of many Fathers. See above, Annotation 108.