2.12–14. For the grace of God [our] Savior has dawned upon all men, teaching us to renounce impiety and worldly desires, to live chastely, justly, and piously in this world, awaiting the blessed hope and coming of glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself an exceptional people, zealous for good works. After the catalogue of doctrine for Titus, what he ought to teach older men, older women, younger women, and younger men, and lastly slaves, he now has rightly added, “For the grace of God [our] Savior has dawned upon all men.” For there is no difference between free and slave, Greek and barbarian, circumcised and uncircumcised, woman and man, but we are all one in Christ. We are all invited to the kingdom of God. We are all to be reconciled to our Father after stumbling, not through our merits but through the grace of the Savior. This is either because Christ himself is the grace, living and subsisting from God the Father, or because this is the grace of Christ, God and Savior. And we are saved not by our merit according to what is said in another passage, “You will save them for nothing.” This grace, then, “has dawned on all men to teach us to renounce impiety and worldly desires, to live chastely and justly and piously in this world.”
Now I am confident that what
it means to “renounce impiety and worldly desires” can be understood from what
we have explained above: “They confess to know God, but they deny him by their
deeds.” Through opposites, opposites are explained. Therefore “desires” are
“worldly” that are suggested by the ruler of this world. And since they are “of
the world,” they pass away with the clouds of this world. But when we live in
Christ “chastely” and “justly,” that is, sinning neither in body nor in mind,
we should also live “piously” in this world. This piety “awaits a blessed hope
and the coming of glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ.” For
just as impiety dreads the advent of the great God, so piety awaits him,
confident concerning its works and faith.
Where is the serpent Arius?
Where is the snake Eunomius? The “great God” is called “Jesus Christ the
Savior,” not the firstborn of every creature, not the Word of God and wisdom,
but Jesus and Christ, which are designations of the humanity he assumed. But we
do not call the one, Jesus Christ, the other, the Word, as a new heresy falsely
states. But we name the very same one, both before the ages and after the ages,
both before the world and after Mary, or rather from Mary, the “great God our
Savior Jesus Christ,” who gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity by
his precious blood and to purify for himself a περιουσιν people (for this what
the Greek has) and that he might make them “zealous for good works.”
Though I have often pondered
what the word περιουσιν means and have questioned the wise men of this world in
the hope that they may have read it somewhere, I was never able to discover
anyone who could explain to me what it meant. For this reason I was forced to
consult the Old Testament (Instrumentum) from which I thought the
apostle had taken what he had said. For since he was a Hebrew and “according to
the law a Pharisee,” assuredly recorded in his epistle what he knew he had read
in the Old Testament (Testamento). And so, in Deuteronomy I have found,
“For you are a people holy to the your Lord, and the Lord your God is pleased
with you; so that you are to be to him a περιουσιν people from all the peoples
who are on the face of the earth,” and in the one-hundred-thirty-fourth Psalm,
where we have, “Sing to his name, for it is sweet; for the Lord chose Jacob for
himself, Israel for his possession.” In place of what we have as “for his
possession,” in Greek it is recorded as εις περιουσιασμον. In fact Aquila and
the fifth edition expressed this as εις περιουσιασμον. But the Septuagint and
Theodotion in rendering it περιουσιασμον made an alteration of a syllable, not
of the sense. Symmachus, therefore, for what stands in Greek as περιουσιον, in Hebrew as sogolla,
expressed it as εξαιρετον, that is, exceptional or excellent. In another book
using Latin speech this word is translated “peculiar.”
Therefore, Christ Jesus our
“great God and Savior” rightly redeemed us by his blood to make the Christian
people “peculiar.” They would be able to be “peculiar” if they show themselves
as “zealous for good works.” This is also why what is written according to the
Latin translators in the gospel as “give us today our daily bread” reads better
in Greek as “our επιουσιον bread,” that is, excellent, exceptional, peculiar,
namely, him who when coming down from heaven says, “I am the bread who came
down from heaven.” For far be from us who are forbidden to think about tomorrow
to be commanded in the Lord’s prayer to ask for that bread that after a little
while must be digested and expelled into the drain. There is not much
difference between επιουσιον and περιουσιον;
for only the preposition is changed, not the word. Some think that in the
Lord’s prayer the bread was called επιουσιον because it is beyond all ουσιας, that is, beyond all substances. But if
this is accepted, it does not differ much from that meaning that we have
explained. For whatever is exceptional and excellent is outside everything and
beyond everything. (St.
Jerome’s Commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon [trans. Thomas P.
Scheck; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010], 327-31)
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