But if you bite and devour one another, take heed that you be not consumed one of another.
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Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
But if ye bite and devour one another. Beware, if you attack one another with calumnies, lest you be mutually consumed. Two men calumniating and enviously pursuing each other are like two dogs fighting, and biting each other. They consume each other, nay, they devour themselves. Well said the poet: "Than envy nothing is more just, for it forthwith bites and tortures its author." And therefore: "Than envy not even Sicilian tyrants have found a greater torment." See my notes on Philippians 1:18, where I enumerate the properties of envy. Wisely and piously said S. Augustine (Sent179): "To a religious man it ought to be little not to excite enmities, or to excite them only by awkward speech; he ought to strive to extinguish them by seasonable discourse."
Paul is not here erupting suddenly into ad hoc legal precepts against the tenor and sequence of the whole letter. He is still discussing circumcision and the observance of the law…. If you read the whole Old Testament and understand it according to the text “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” … what appears as justice will eat you away, not avenging anything but consuming everything. .
That he may not distress them, he does not assert this, though he knew it was the case, but mentions it ambiguously. For he does not say, Inasmuch as you bite one another, nor again does he assert, in the clause following, that they shall be consumed by each other; but take heed that you be not consumed one of another, and this is the language of apprehension and warning, not of condemnation. And the words which he uses are expressly significant; he says not merely, you bite, which one might do in a passion, but also you devour, which implies a bearing of malice. To bite is to satisfy the feeling of anger, but to devour is a proof of the most savage ferocity. The biting and devouring he speaks of are not bodily, but of a much more cruel kind; for it is not such an injury to taste the flesh of man, as to fix one's fangs in his soul. In proportion as the soul is more precious than the body, is damage to it more serious. Take heed that you be not consumed one of another. For those who com...
He does not accuse explicitly, but he speaks hypothetically, so as not to irk them. He has said not “Since you bite one another” but “If you bite.” Again, he has not said explicitly here, “You will be destroyed by one another,” but instead he says “Take care lest you be destroyed by one another.” He is expressing his concern and admonition rather than his condemnation…. He does not refer only to biting, as the act of a person out of control, but also to devouring, which implies malice. For the one who bites satisfies the immediate passion of anger, but the one who devours proves he is acting like an animal. By “bitings and devourings” he does not mean a literal biting and devouring. He refers to something more pernicious. The harm done by one who tastes human flesh is not so great as that done by the one who sinks his teeth into the soul. In proportion as the living soul is more precious than the corruptible body, so much the worse is the harm done to it.
