Annotatio CCXIV

”If the tree fall to the south, or to the north, in the place where the tree shall fall, there shall it be.” — Ecclesiastes 11:3

Jerome, on Ecclesiastes, expounding these words, seems to hint that after this life there is no place from which Souls, when they shall have come to it, can any more go out.¹ For thus it is written in him: “‘In the place where the tree shall fall, there shall it be’: for wherever thou shalt have prepared for thyself a place, and a future seat — whether to the north or to the south — there, when thou art dead, shalt thou remain. For thou, like the tree, however long-lived thou be, shalt not be [so] forever; but, overthrown by the sudden tempest of death (as [trees] by that of the winds), wherever thou shalt fall, there shalt thou remain continually — whether the last [hour] shall have found thee stiff and savage, or clement and merciful.” Olympiodorus, in the commentaries on this book and passage, subscribes to Jerome in these words: “In whatever place, therefore, whether luminous or dark,” — that is, whether in the base station of crimes, or in the honorable [station] of virtues, a man be found when he dies, in that order and grade he remains forever: for he either rests in the light of eternal felicity with the just and Christ the Lord, or is tormented in the darkness with the wicked, and their prince, the Devil.” These testimonies the Lutherans are wont to bring forward against the Catholic assertion concerning Purgatory, whence souls, the expiation of [their] sins being completed, are freed. Refuting their madness, John Bunderius, in the eleventh title of his Concertationes, says that the authority of Solomon, Jerome, and Olympiodorus means nothing else for him than that the dead [man], in whatever state he departed, in that shall he remain — namely, in charity, or outside charity. So that, if one has died without charity — which is to be stiff and savage — he cannot become merciful and clement in charity, or the reverse. For after death no one is able to lose charity, or to acquire [it] anew for himself;² yet with this [truth] it stands, by an immutable state, that those who have merited this while existing in charity can, on departing hence, be relieved from [their] due punishments by the suffrages of the living. For that relief of punishments does not change the state, but they are in that state in which they can be relieved from [their] due punishments.