Annotatio CCXXVII

”In three years the glory shall be taken away, [like the glory] of a hireling.” — Isaiah 16:14

Jerome, at the end of book 6 on Isaiah, says:¹ “If I feign myself chaste, and there is another thing in my conscience, I have not the glory [reward] of a hireling, but the punishments of a sinner; because, in the comparison of the two evils, it is lighter to sin openly than to simulate and feign holiness.” St. Thomas, in the Second Part of the Second, question 111, article 4, notes this passage, [saying] that at first sight it seems to favor those who assert that hypocrisy is always a mortal sin;² but he indicates that Jerome’s words must be understood of that kind of simulation whereby someone feigns a holiness which he neither has, nor desires to have — nay, even hates — but not of that kind of simulation whereby many feign a holiness which is none of theirs, not for the cause of deceiving and harming, but rather from a zeal of helping [edifying]: for this, although it be not altogether free from fault, is nevertheless not a deadly vice, nor worthy of eternal punishment.

According to this understanding, St. Thomas judges that two sentences of Strabo must be interpreted. Of these, the one is had in the glosses collected by him, on Job 1, where, expounding that [verse], “As it pleased the Lord, so it was done,” etc.,³ he says: “Feigned equity is not equity, but a double sin”; the other is had on the Lamentations, chapter 4, where, expounding that [verse], “The iniquity of my people is greater than the sin of Sodom,”⁴ he says: “Crimes are bewailed in the soul which slips into hypocrisy, whose iniquity is greater than the sin of Sodom.”