Be not overly righteous; neither make yourself overly wise: why should you destroy yourself?
Read Chapter 7
George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
Vanity, during this miserable life.
Wickedness. This seemed more incongruous under the old law, when long life was promised to the just, (Calmet; Psalm lxxii. 3., and Exodus xx. 12.) though it chiefly regarded heaven. (Haydock)
No one can say that he has strayed from ignorance into some silly fancy of separating, locally, the supreme from that which is below, and assigning to the Father as it were the peak of some hill, while he seats the Son lower down in the hollows. No one is so childish as to conceive of differences in space, when the intellectual and spiritual is under discussion. Local position is a property of the material, but the intellectual and immaterial is confessedly removed from the idea of locality. What, then, is the reason why he says that the Father alone has supreme being? For one can hardly think it is from ignorance that he wanders off into these conceptions, being one who, in the many displays he makes, claims to be wise, even “making himself overwise,” as the Holy Scripture forbids us to do.
