It could have happened that those who had crossed the river first should go straight on beyond [it] — without any lingering or delay on the bank — namely, to that place which had been appointed for the camp that night. Nevertheless—
(col. 473 — left column; printed “480”)
Nevertheless [it was] otherwise — as Abulensis rightly says (quaest. 25). For on the bank itself the first [crossers] waited for the last, and then, a signal being afterward given, all advanced together. This is gathered from [the fact] that [what] the Lord had commanded (ch. 3 v. 4) — that the ark should go before, [and] the Israelites follow, and indeed at an interval of two thousand cubits — had now to be observed. But the ark went out from the channel only after the very last of all the crossers, so that all had to wait for and await it [as] the guide of the journey, the defender of the people, [and] the terrifier of the enemy. Now [there] is an old custom, that those who have sought out some city, or region, or place with great journeys or perils and difficulties, or [who] have returned to it after a long interval — when at last, at some time, they touch it — are wholly carried away with joy and gladness, and even greet the land itself. The sons of Aeneas were making for Latium; and, driven by many wanderings of land and sea, they had begun one morning, with a dim gaze as it were, to descry Italy; and then indeed (Aeneid 3):
“‘Italy!’ Achates first cries out; ‘Italy!’ the companions greet with joyful shout.”
But when they had entered the river Tiber with the fleet, and had disembarked (Aeneid 7), Aeneas himself:
“Straightway: ‘Hail, O land owed to me by the fates; and you,’ he says, ‘O faithful household-gods of Troy, hail. Here [is] home, this [is our] fatherland.’”
And Ovid, in the first [book] of the Fasti:
“‘And hail,’ he said, ‘ye gods of the sought-for places, and thou, O earth, about to give new gods to heaven; and [ye] rivers and springs which the hospitable land uses, and Nymphs of the groves, and choirs of Naiads.’”
Elsewhere [Ovid, of Cadmus]:
“Cadmus gives thanks, and fixes kisses on the foreign land, and greets the unknown mountains and fields.”
Plautus, in the Bacchides, a slave:
“Hail, my master’s fatherland, which — two years after I went off to Ephesus — I gladly behold.”
And in the Stichus:
“Hail, Athens, thou nurse of Greece.”
Catullus:
“Hail, O lovely Sirmio.”
Seneca, in the Agamemnon:
“At last I return, safe, to [my] fathers’ hearths. O dear land, hail.”
Claudian, On the Rape of Proserpina:
“——Hail, most welcome land.”
From Stobaeus [he] adduces (bk. 5 ch. 20); [and] P. Victorius [gives] these [lines] of Menander:
χαῖρ᾽ ὦ φίλη γῆ, διὰ χρόνου πολλοῦ σ᾽ ἰδὼν / ἀσπάζομαι [chair’ ō philē gē, dia chronou pollou s’ idōn / aspazomai, “Hail, O dear land; seeing thee after a long time, I greet [thee].”]
Of Alexander the Great, Curtius (bk. 3): “He himself ascended to the ridge of the lofty mountain, and, with many torches shining round about after his country’s custom, made a sacrifice to the gods, guardians of the place.” And the beginning of bk. 2 of the Cyropaedia in Xenophon can be consulted; and our Pontanus’s Summaria (Tome 3, dial., part 1). For a fatherland most of all, and one seen after an interval, was greeted. Did not, then, the Israelites also greet Canaan — promised so many ages before, longed-for with so many and so ardent vows, sought now through so many years, with such wanderings, troubles, and windings, but now at last found and entered? Truly, indeed, someone may say [that] this belongs to ignorance, and to the error of the Gentiles. For to what end should a “greeting” [of well-being] be addressed to an inanimate thing, understanding nothing, and utterly stu-
(col. 474 — right column; printed “481”)
—pid? Yet if we should consider that [greeting] to be rather the affection of a certain natural [feeling], which can be free from all fault; and if we ourselves for a moment give heed to the mind and person of these [who greet], nothing will seem unlikely [in the notion] that a new abode is greeted — if not with a shout, yet with each one’s subdued voice and feeling. For why should that be reckoned an evil? The land is indeed mute, and devoid of sense and reason; yet such an addressing of it displays a man’s inmost feelings, affections, and prayers. Nor in the Scriptures are examples lacking of those who have wisely addressed the same [earth], and the heavens, and many other [things] of that kind: Isaiah 1 v. 1[–2]; 2 Kings 13 v. 2; Daniel 3; Psalm 147 [148]; and elsewhere. Then, “to greet” [salutare] is to wish someone health [salus], or felicity, and an abundance of some good things — whether he does not yet have it, or has [it]. For if he does not have [it], who would doubt [that it] can be wished-for? If he has [it], who would deny [that it] can be approved, and — by our vote and wish, as it were — desired to be perpetual for him; or at least, since it is of that kind, be proclaimed and celebrated by our speech? [It is] certain [that] we can pray good-fortune for some land, city, or house — especially since [that good fortune] wholly redounds upon [its] men. Does not our Lord and Master most clearly [say] (Matt. 10 v. 12): “Entering into the house, greet it, saying, Peace [be] to this house”? For although these last [words] are not there in today’s Greek and Syriac [texts], [that] they ought to be [there] is plain from v. 13, and from those expounding that place — St. Hilary, the divine Jerome, St. Chrysostom, Theophylact, and others; but especially from St. Luke, in whom too, in the Greek and Syriac, those words are [present] (ch. 10 v. 5). St. Jerome’s teacher — as [he] is called by him in bk. 1 Against Jovinian — Nazianzen, in [his] oration to the 150 Fathers, says “Farewell” [Vale] to his own Pontifical see, and to [its] walls, when he departed from Constantinople. And St. Jerome himself, concerning St. Paula, in her Epitaph: “With joy and tears mingled,” he says, “she spoke: ‘Hail, Bethlehem, house of bread, in which was born that Bread which came down from heaven; hail, Ephratha, most fruitful region, and καρποφόρος [karpophoros, “fruit-bearing”], whose fertility is God.’” And in this manner, in the Church, the holy Chrism too is greeted — Calvin (bk. 4 Institutes ch. 19 §. 21) mocking [it] in vain; and perhaps the Cross itself, when [it] is said, “O Cross, hail, [our] only hope” — although what is the truer [sense] seems nearer [to be] that the Lord himself is then greeted, who for our cause was fastened to the cross — so that the compiler of the Montbéliard [Montispelgardensis] colloquy wrote impiously [in saying] that that little prayer is idolatrous. Was St. Andrew an idolater — who, as his own disciples say in their epistle to the universal Church, when he had come to the place where the cross was prepared, seeing it from afar, cried out with a loud voice, saying: “Hail, O Cross, [thou] who wast dedicated in the body of CHRIST, and adorned with the pearls of his members”? Luther, moreover, greeted not only Rome — as [it stands] in his Table-Talk ch. 77 — but also his own Eisleben [and] Wittenberg. And in the Enselian Animadversions (p. 66), Scaliger: “Hail, venerable Olympiad, guardian of the times, vindicator of the truth of history.” But if anything, in salutations of that sort — of things lacking sense and reason — has been mixed in from paganism, that indeed [is] to be wholly wiped away and omitted, as [I shall show] in the following ques-
(col. 475 — left column; printed “482”)
—will be said in the [following] question.