The labor of the foolish wearies every one of them, because he knows not how to go to the city.
Read Chapter 10
Didymus the Blind
AD 398
By “town” he does not mean a place but the deed according to the law. The fool does “not even know the way to town.” But the one who says, “Even if we live on earth, our citizenship is in heaven,” “knows the way to the town” in which he is a true citizen. And further: “As we have heard, so we have received in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God.”
City. Being so stupid, that they know not, or will not take the pains to find what is most obvious. (Calmet)
Thus the pagan philosophers knew all but what they ought to have known; (St. Jerome) and many such wise world lings never strive to discover the paths which lead to the city of eternal peace: like him who contemplated the stars, and fell into a ditch. (Calmet)
Thus, having turned aside from the royal path, they are unable to get to that metropolis to which our journeying must ever and unswervingly be directed. Ecclesiastes expressed this quite distinctly when he said, “The toil of fools afflicts those who do not know how to go to the city”—namely, to “that heavenly Jerusalem, which is the mother of us all.”
