Of Moses, Origen discourses (Hom. 8 on Numbers); of the same and of Joshua, Rupert (bk. 1 on Num., ch. 37 and following); St. Chrysostom (Hom. 23 on Ephesians, in the moral part): “The leader of the exit from this world’s Egypt,” he says, “is not Moses, but Jesus [Joshua]. How [does this touch us]? That the same things not befall us, [we must take care] that we do not the same [things], and suffer not the same. They murmured; they were ungrateful. Let not, then, the same befall us. How did they all fall? They set at naught the desirable land…”
(col. 173)
…[the desirable] land. “How did they set it at naught? And yet they marveled — in that they had come out soft, and would not undertake labors for it. Let us not, then, set heaven at naught. This is to set [it] at naught. From heaven the fruit has been brought down to us — not the fruit that is carried in jars, but the pledge of the Spirit: the manner and preservation of the life to be led, which is in the heavens, which Paul taught, and the wondrous husbandmen. Not Caleb the son of Jephone, nor Jesus the Son of Nave [Nun], brought these fruits: but Jesus, the Son of mercies, the Son of Him who is truly God, brought every virtue, all the fruits that are thence; He brought down to us the heavenly hymns. For what the Cherubim say among those above, that He bade us too say: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’ He brought to us the virtue of the angels. Neither do the angels take wives, nor are given in marriage; this good too He planted here. They [the angels] love not money, nor other [such things]; this too He granted us. There is no longer death, but sleep. For hear Him saying: ‘Lazarus our friend sleeps.’ You have seen the fruits of the heavenly Jerusalem. And — what is more wonderful — war was not decreed [needful]; but before the promise He granted us all these things. For they indeed, even when they had come to the land of promise, labored — nay rather, they did not labor; for if they had willed to obey God, they would have taken all the cities without arms and without a battle-line drawn up.”
I, either from those same authors, or from wherever the Lord shall grant, will taste a few other [things]. The land promised to us is, at all events, heaven, most filled with all beatitude (Heb. 4). This foreknows best both Moses, who sends, and Joshua, who is sent; but for the sake of the ruder people — that is, of us all — the exploration is set up. And we can think it done in two ways. First, if some who had departed from this life, and had gone to and beheld — in whatever way perceived — the [things] in the other world, should, returned to life, report them to us. And this indeed was done in certain [persons], both in the old Synagogue and in the Christian Church. But who, in that way, discerned more and greater [things], who reported more truly and certainly, than our most truthful Joshua, Christ the Lord — who on the third day rose from the dead, and, after His Passion, showed Himself alive to the Apostles by many proofs, appearing to them through 40 days, and speaking of the kingdom of God? (Acts 1, v. 3.) But of this kind of explorers I know none who tried to induce unbelief, and contempt and despair of that most blessed land — nay rather, all those [of whom something is treated] in St. Boniface’s epistle 21 always stirred up very many impious [men] — even faithless ones, Gentiles, and [men] ensnared in the greatest crimes — to piety, penance, and the true love and desire of that heavenly land, as very many could teach by examples. (Although I know one, a certain [returner] from bk. 4 of the Dialogues of St. Gregory, who profited others very much, but himself nothing.) Yet someone could say that the [other] dead give certain [people] a cause of murmuring in this sense — that they do not return, nor report to us the state of that region to which they have been sent ahead. For so that rich man in purple said (Luke 16): “If one shall go from the dead to them, they will do penance”; and, in the Wise Man, others [say] (Wisd. 2, v. 1): “There is no refreshment in the end of a man, and there is none known to have returned from hell.” But it seems a little too harsh, if we should say that those who have not hitherto returned from that land stir up the murmur; for thus the myriads of so many holy Apostles, Martyrs, and others would sustain the character of those ten—
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—explorers, who were wickedly and shamefully the authors of the murmur, and were therefore also, as we saw, gravely chastised by the Lord. The other way, then, by which explorers are sent into that land, is in this life — namely, that they may go and return, and by their own will narrate the [things] they have explored and come to know. And this happens when we apply ourselves to knowledge and the searching-out of truth — whether that knowledge and truth be natural or supernatural. The former we search in the contemplation of the heavens, the earth, the sea, and of all things — in histories, in mathematics, in ethics, in physics; the latter, in the books of the divine Scriptures, in the ecclesiastical traditions, the Councils, the ancient holy Fathers, and all the new Theologians — [both] those who dispute [these things] scholastically, and those who calmly and learnedly explain the divine [things]. “To explore the land of the living,” says Rupert in the cited place, “are sent all we who hold the holy Scriptures in [our] hands — the Lord saying to the Jews first (John 5): ‘Search the Scriptures, for you think in them to have life’; and then, of the Apostles, the Evangelist saying (Luke [24]): ‘Then He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.’ For to those who understand the Scriptures that [word] is rightly chanted: ‘The Lord has brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey’ — that the Law of the Lord may be ever in your mouth. By reading, then, and understanding, we go up, and explore the best land.” But those several explorers — what do they do? what do they say? They cheapen and diminish the felicity of that land by word and deed; and they turn others away and frighten them from desiring and approaching it — either by exaggerating excessive difficulties, or by too much despising their own strength, or by removing God’s help and aid, or, finally, by lying and inventing things that are nowhere. This the Gentiles’ many and so great poets, orators, [and] philosophers did — of whom [it is said] to the Romans (ch. 1, v. 21): “Because, when they had known God, they glorified Him not as God, nor gave thanks; but they became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened; for professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and fourfooted beasts, and of creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness — to dishonor their own bodies among themselves; who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever, Amen.” This so many impious and criminal heretics did, and do today, in the Christian Church — of whom [see] ch. 33 of the cited book of Rupert: “Others,” he says — “others, I say, who were with us — namely the heretics of Antichrist, who went out from us but were not of us — detract the land which they had surveyed. Whereas it is said (Matt. 19, v. 17), ‘If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments,’ these [men] say: ‘We are not able to go up, because God’s commandments cannot be kept. Our enemies, the flesh and sin, are stronger than we — because we have no free will, no strength, which the integrity of human nature otherwise demands. The cities there — the great and walled [cities] of the ecclesiastical canons and precepts. The stock of Enac we saw there — the Popes, Bishops, monks. The Lord hates us — because even before we were born, and were foreknown to have done any evil, He [assigned] the greatest part of men to eternal [damnation]…’”
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…[He assigned] the greatest part of men to eternal torments; and therefore He led us out of our mother’s womb, that He might deliver us into the hand of the hellish Amorite, and torment us with everlasting Gehenna. Compared to the devil who tempts us, we seem as locusts — nay, as a certain fleshly lump and vile clay, which can do nothing at all. The land which we have surveyed in the Papist Church devours its inhabitants — by draining their wealth and money in alms, Masses, the building of churches, [and] the adornment of altars; by killing the very bodies of men with prayers, fasts, and various and most harsh works of penance; and finally by ruining their very souls with very many superstitions, idol-manias, and will-worships [ethelothreskeia], and thrusting [them] into the pit of hell.’* Such [are] the explorers whom heresy bewitches. And those, among the Catholics, [who are] men outstanding in learning and knowledge of things, but who are held by an insane love of this world’s fleeting wealth, [and] follow the allurements of pleasures, [and] are a bad example to the untaught multitude — do they not, by their very works as by an uttered voice, cry out that one must go back to Egypt; that the region of the heavens is too arduous and almost impossible of access; that on the way there are certain monsters of toils, troubles, and temptations, against which the feeble locusts of our earthly concupiscences cannot strive? And upon these falls, without doubt, that [word] of the Savior (Luke 11, v. 52): “Woe to you lawyers, because you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves have not entered in, and those that were entering you have hindered.” But our true Joshua contradicts all these: He announces the truth; He openly attests the things seen and ascertained. “No man has ever seen God,” says St. John (ch. 1, v. 18); “the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared [Him].” And He [says] of Himself (ch. 3, v. 11): “Amen, amen I say to you, that what we know, we speak, and what we have seen, we testify.” And just as, by those ten impious explorers, is signified the whole crowd of impious teachers — both from among the Gentiles and from the heretics, nay, and of Catholics not living conformably to Catholic doctrine — so in our Caleb and Joshua are contained those few excellent and most choice [men] who either taught before the Gospel of Christ the Lord, or in the age of the same Christ, and thenceforth afterward. For these too are the faithful explorers, who [are] the members of that same Joshua — of whose number one (Acts 4, v. 20) says: “We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard”; and another (1 John, ch. 1): “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the word of life (and the life was made manifest, and we have seen and do testify, and declare unto you the life eternal, which was with the Father and hath appeared to us) — that which we have seen and heard, we declare unto you.” But, passing over those ancients, we could — either with St. Chrysostom (Hom. 23 on Ephesians) — reckon the two Apostles Peter and Paul to be signified by Caleb and Joshua; or, with Rupert (in the cited book), understand by “Caleb” the Apostles themselves and all apostolic—
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—men, who (as his [Caleb’s] name signifies) are, as it were, the “heart” [leb] of God and of Christ the Lord, or His “dogs” [keleb] guarding the Lord’s flock, barking against unbelief, against all vices, and against the thieves and robbers of the Church’s divine treasures. These, with Christ the Lord, that they might show us sure proofs of eternal felicity, brought the huge cluster of the peace and joy of consciences, and the truly wonderful apples and figs of His sacred books and of the whole ecclesiastical order. “For we are God’s helpers,” said one of them (1 Cor. [3], v. 9). These, with the same Joshua, refuted all the false, fallacious, empty, and captious dogmas of the wicked witnesses, and showed [them] to be openly repudiated. These, in all ages, when they saw the doctrine of criminal men prowling and exulting, and circumventing and driving others mad, out of just grief of soul and zeal rent their own garments — that is, [the things] which (as some have said) are, as it were, the garments of souls: they wore out and tore their bodies with the greatest toils, with most difficult modes of life, with constant exhortations, with prayers and groans perpetual before the divine Majesty, and with day-and-night poring over books and occupations of study. These, for the same zeal and for the patronage of the truth once taken up, ran into a thousand flames of raging peoples, into stonings and swords; and — with false teachers a thousand times driving [them on] — they would have been suddenly cut down, torn apart, and overwhelmed with a thousand stones, had not the divine glory hedged them about, and deferred their rewards to another, fitter time. And the same divine goodness moreover brought it about that those vain and depraved explorers and teachers were, by frequent horrible deaths, in the sight of the whole world, dispatched and slain by God — so that it might be discerned by all what difference there is between truth and vanity, between light and darkness. Some examples I have set down in my [commentary on] Judges, [ch.] 16, and in [1] Maccabees (bk. 1, ch. 6); but more [in] Bellarmine (On the Church, bk. 4, ch. 17). And at last, most wretched, they are driven headlong to the torments of hell. For “truly,” says Rupert (ch. 33 of the cited book), “as those detractors received a year for a day, so all heretics, together with the unbelieving Jews, receive for the fault of temporal blasphemy an everlasting destruction.” But with the words with which the same Rupert closes that his first book, I am pleased to close this my eighth chapter: “The malign spirits pursue, in the manner of victors, even unto Hormah — that is, even into the depth of hell, which is the eternal anathema — the aforesaid detractors of the holy land, [namely] all the heretics, cutting them down. For the Ark of the Lord’s covenant is not with them; the Law of the Lord, the Law of truth, is not with them; and therefore whatever arms they seize, as if the arms of the Word of God, will not profit them, nor does it avail them to have said, ‘We have sinned’ — because, namely, they are in no way reconciled to the Catholic Church by worthy fruits of penance.” And the same Rupert can be seen [on this] in ch. 2 on the Canticle (p. 18), and bk. 8 On the Divine Offices, ch. 4.