Loading…
VRSZ
This sets the art on your cards and whose commentary you read on each verse. You can change it later in settings.
Translation
Loading…
What the Fathers say
Eastern Fathers
Theophylact of Ohrid
This wretched one "desires to be filled" with sin, but no one gives him this satiation. For one accustomed to evil finds no satiation in it. Pleasure is inconstant, but as it comes, it departs at the same time, and this wretched one is again left with emptiness (in his soul). For sin is like "husks," having both sweetness and bitterness: it sweetens for a time, but torments forever. No one will give satiation of evil to the one who delights in it. And indeed, who will give him satiation and rest? God? …
Western Saints
Augustine of Hippo
The husks then with which the swine were fed are the teaching of the world, which cries loudly of vanity; according to which in various prose and verse men repeat the praises of the idols, and fables belonging to the gods of the Gentiles, wherewith the devils are delighted. Hence when he would fain have filled himself, he wished to find therein something stable and upright which might relate to a happy life, and he could not; as it follows, And no one gave to him.
Bede
And he desired to fill his belly with the husks that the swine did eat. The husks with which he fed the swine are secular teachings, resonating with barren sweetness, from which praises of idols and myths to the gods of the nations slip through in various speech and songs, which delight demons. Hence, when he wished to be filled with these, he wanted to find something solid and true that pertained to the blessed life in such things, and he could not. For this is what he said:
Bonaventure
Third, however, as regards the extreme kind of beggary, he adds: And he desired to fill his belly with the husks that the swine were eating. "The husk, as the Gloss says, is a kind of legume with noisy and empty pods, which burdens the belly more than it refreshes it." And therefore it designates the pleasures of vices, which sometimes seem to the sinner to sound like something outwardly, but inwardly are nothing; whence pleasures of this kind are compared to dreams: Isaiah twenty-nine, "As when a hungry man dreams and eats, but when …
Translation