Father Noel Alexandre's Literal Commentary on 1 Peter 1:3-9

 

18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven. At this point the Apostle abruptly quits the subject, which he had just introduced, of the justice of God, to speak of the wrath of God, provoked by the prevarications of Gentile and Jew. Of this wrath is born the sore need in which all men stand of the justice of God, that is, of justification and sanctification, to which subject the Apostle returns, iii. 21.

Is revealed, in the gospel, not yet written, but preached, e.g. Acts 14:25.

Detain the truth of God in injustice. Detain, κατέχουσιν, hold back, restrain, prevent from going forth at liberty (so the word is used in 2 Thess. 2:6; Luke 4:42), or as we say, suppress truth. It is question of people suppressing truth within themselves in injustice, that is, by leading wicked lives, as we read (John 3:19, 20): Men loved darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil: for every one that doeth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light that his works may not be reproved. The anger of God against such men is revealed in many pages also of the written gospel, e.g. John 3:35–48; Matt. 11:20–24.

19. That which is known of God by natural knowledge from the evidence of creation. The argument that follows in the next verse turns upon such natural knowledge.

Manifest, manifested, φανερόν, ἐφανέρωσεν, of a conclusion discerned (clearly seen) by the light of reason. Such is the conclusion of the existence of God, worked out by a reasoning process, which will be more or less scientific according to the capacity of the reasoner. The validity of this reasoning process is ruled by the Vatican Council in the following canon: “If any one says that God, one and true, our Creator and Lord, cannot with certainty be known by the natural light of human reason through the things that are made, let him be anathema” (sess. 1, De Revelatione, can. 1). This canon is simply an enforcement of St. Paul’s words, v. 20. This knowledge is not faith, but is one of the “preambles,” or previous conditions, of faith. Of matter of faith, as such, it is not said that it is manifest (cf. 2 Cor. 4:7; Heb. 11:1), but that it is revealed (ἀποκαλύπτεται, vv. 17, 18). Manifest in them, i.e. in their minds.

20. His eternal power also and divinity. For also read to wit, the Greek τε, Latin que, for which the Vulgate quoque seems to be a clerical error. The particle explains what the invisible things above mentioned are.

So that they are inexcusable, goes better with the next verse.

21. Cf. Eph. 1:18; and Wisdom 13:1–10, which passage St. Paul evidently had in view.
22. Cf. Ps. 106:20: And they changed their glory into the likeness of a calf eating grass. Four-footed beasts and creeping things and birds were worshipped in Egypt. The Greek deities were all in the likeness of man. All cults, at the time the Apostle wrote, were to be met with in Rome, “where with most diligent superstition was held gathered together whatever had been set on foot by vain errors anywhere,” as St. Leo says. The Apostle does not mention nature-worship, referred to Wisd. 13:2.
23. This verse might be turned more accurately from the Greek: Wherefore also God gave them up in the desires of their hearts unto uncleanness, to the end that they should dishonour their own bodies one with another. Read ἐν αὐτοῖς, and make ἀτιμάζεσθαι reciprocal middle.

This word gave them up means more than that God permitted the sin with what is called a “permission of fact,” i.e. did not hinder it. Such mere absence of hindrance on the part of God may be predicated of any sin that ever is actually committed. But in regard of these sins of uncleanness in the heathen of old, God acted, not positively putting anything to cause them, but by way of privation withholding those gracious thoughts and pure visions, that sense of shame and feeling of dignity, whereby man is usually kept back from going all lengths in the gratification of sensuality. With the idea of God, Maker and Lord of man, which these heathen wilfully flung away, or refused ever to take up, they lost also by the just ordinance of God what Plato calls the “vision of Beauty with Modesty standing on holy pedestal” (Phaedrus, 254 B), and rushed headlong into sin. So Theodoret and St. John Chrysostom, the former of whom likens them to a boat left without ballast, the latter to an army abandoned by its general, not however till they have first gone away from him.

This is not one universal condemnation of all the men and women in the Gentile world. The Apostle presently uses almost as severe language of the Jews; and yet we know there was the host of saints of Israel, of whose deeds the Old Testament is the record, the great cloud of witnesses; whose praise is in the eleventh chapter to the Hebrews. There was a certain measure of genuine goodness in the old Gentile world (recognised, ii. 14–16). There was accumulated in time a huge mass of invincible ignorance (recognised by St. Paul speaking on the Areopagus, Acts 17:30; see notes on ii. 26; v. 13). Lastly, as there was no obligation on a Gentile to become a Jew, we are not to suppose that, remaining a Gentile, a man was necessarily cut off from those supernatural graces and that supernatural holiness, which obtained even under the Old Law through the anticipated merits of the Redeemer, and made saints among the children of Israel. Christ died for men of all nations and men of all times, for all the sons of Adam.

25. Changed the truth of God into a lie, i.e. exchanged the worship of the true God for the worship of idols. A lie means an idol, Jer. 16:19.

To worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator is the essential note of all paganism, Hellenism, secularism,—call it what you will—in every age of the world.

27. The sin that drew down the rain of fire on Sodom (Gen. 19:1), in Greece amounted to an institution, commended by economists, as Aristotle tells us (Politics, ii. 10, 9), restricted, but not suppressed by legislation, connived at by philosophy,—only in his old age did Plato see his way to an entire condemnation of it (Laws, vii. 836–841): it was in Hellas, and wherever the Hellenes went, the national sin.

Receiving in themselves the recompense due to their error, i.e. to their idolatry. So above, 23, 24: cf. Wisdom 11:22–31.

28. “But, when God is abandoned,” says St. Chrysostom, commenting on the above mentioned fact, “everything goes topsy-turvy.” And so says St. Paul in this verse.

A reprobate sense, ἀδόκιμον νοῦν, a castaway mind, a mind rejected of God: so the word ἀδόκιμος is used five times by St. Paul, e.g. 1 Cor. 9:27; 2 Cor. 13:5–7. There is a play of words, οὐκ ἐδοκίμασαν and ἀδόκιμον, which is lost in translation.

29. Iniquity, or injustice, in the general sense, as in v. 28, opposed to the justice of God (v. 17), and including all the species, next enumerated.

Malice, πονηρία, “the mind of a wild beast,” says Theodoret: it means all disposition to injure others. The devil is eminently ὁ πονηρός, the malicious one (Matt. 13:19; 1 John 2:13).

Fornication, probably an interpolation here.

Avarice, the desire of money, the root of all evil (1 Tim. 6:10).

Wickedness, κακία, vice as opposed to virtue.

As virtue, ἀρετή, is manliness of soul, so vice, as Plato says, is “disease and disfigurement and weakness” (Rep. iv. 444 E). Or possibly κακία stands here for κακοηθεία, wicked cunning, as it may in 1 Cor. 12:20.

Envy, murder, φθόνον, φόνου, alliteration as in Gal. 5:21. The example primeval of both sins is Cain (1 John 3:12; Gen. 4:1). Among his imitators come those who envy and murder innocence.

Contention, that our Lord prayed against for His Church (John 17:21–23). See however St. Thomas, 2a 2ae, q. 29, art. 3, ad 2.

Malignity is defined by Aristotle, “the putting the worse construction on all things” (Rhet. ii. 13).

Whisperers, i.e. mischief-makers between friends, described by St. Thomas, 2a 2ae, q. 74. Be not called a whisperer (Ecclus. 5:14: cf. 2 Cor. 12:20). This word should have headed the next verse.

30. Detractors, James 4:11. One of the lighter sins of heathenism, common enough in Christendom.

Hateful to God. Informers (Tacitus, Annals, vi. 7), perjurers (Plato, Laws, xi. 916 E), and other such enemies of the human race bore this appellation. But from a passage of St. Paul’s disciple St. Clement, imitating and almost quoting this passage, the word bears an active sense, haters of God (Clem. 1 Cor. 35).

Contumelious, ὑβριστάς, wantonly violent, adding injury to insult. St. Paul applies the term to himself before his conversion (1 Tim. 1:13), on account of the unprovoked violence (ὕβρις) that he did to the Christians.

Proud, haughty, both these are renderings of the same word ὑπερφάνους, which appears in the well known passages, Luke 1:51; James 4:6.

The next term ἀλαζόνας does not answer to the Vulgate elatos (haughty). The ἀλάζων (Aristotle, Ethics, iii. 10) is one who pretends to brilliant qualities which he does not possess. It may be Englished pretentious.

Inventors of evil things, “those who are not content with the vices common in society, but invent new ones” (Theodoret), as the reigning emperor Nero did. Antiochus, King of Syria, is called inventor of all vice (2 Macc. 7:31).

Disobedient to parents. According to the received morality of the Greeks themselves, to ill-treat a parent was the very acme of wickedness. See Plato, Rep. 569, 574. Nero’s treatment of his mother is a noted example.

31. Foolish, ἀσυνέτους, destitute of spiritual understanding (Col. 1:9). Their foolish heart was darkened (v. 21).

Dissolute. The word ἀσυνθέτους, well rendered by the Vulgate incompositos, does not mean dissolute, but uncombinable, or we might say, uncompanionable, or as Dr. Johnson phrased it, unclubbable. It is exactly expressed by a phrase of Plato’s (Gorgias, 507 E), κοινωνεῖν ἀδύνατος, unable to be a partner in social life. Of such a one Aristotle (Politics, i.) says he must be “either a brute or a god.” Clearly in this context we have the “brute.”

The words without fidelity (ἀσπόνδους, absque foedere, Vulg.) are not in the best MSS., and are evidently a gloss to explain ἀσυνθέτους, which in some measure they do.

Without (natural) affection between parent and child.

Without mercy, for the beaten, for the offending, for the suffering, for the needy, for the weak.

So much for the old paganism, not unlike to which will be the new paganism of the last days, as foretold, 2 Tim. 3:2–4.

32. Though the general sense of this verse is clear, the structure is uncertain, and amid the various readings of the MSS. it is impossible to be sure what exactly St. Paul wrote. The following is the more probable: Who having known the just doom of God, that they who do such things are worthy of death, not only do them, but also consent to them that do them.

Worthy of death, that is, generally, of the severest punishment. Cf. David’s saying (2 Kings 12:5): As the Lord liveth, the man who hath done this thing is a son of death.

The men in question, not only yielded to sin themselves, as it were perforce and in secret, but applauded and abetted and maintained the cause of sin in the world around. We must remember that in the ancient world religion often, so far from being a check upon vice, was an incentive to it: its legends were tales of lust, and its rites filthiness.