He comes forth like a flower, and is cut down: he flees also as a shadow, and continues not.
Read Chapter 14
George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
Shadow. Pulvis et umbra sumus. (Horace iv. Ode 7.) "Come then, ye men, whom nature condemns to spend your days in darkness, ye who resemble the leaves, are of little strength, formed of mud, shadow-like. Of a day's duration, miserable mortals, men like dreams, attend to the immortals. "(Aristophanes, Avib.)
Most of these expressions occur in Job, Psalm ci. 12., Wisdom ii. 5., and Ecclesiastes ii. 23.
67. For, ‘as a flower, he cometh forth,’ in that he shews fair in the flesh; but he is ‘crushed,’ in that he is reduced to corruption. For what are men, as born in the world, but a kind of flowers in a field? Let us stretch our interior eyes over the breadth of the present world, and, lo, it is filled as it were with as many flowers as there are human beings. So life in this flesh is the flower in grass. Hence it is well said by the Psalmist, As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. [Ps. 103, 15] Isaiah too saith, All flesh is grass, and all the glory thereof is as the flower of the field. [Is. 40, 6] For man cometh forth like a flower from concealment, and of a sudden shews himself in open day, and in a moment is by death withdrawn from open view into concealment again. The greenness of the flesh exhibits us to view, but the dryness of dust withdraws us from men’s eyes. Like a flower we appeared, who were not; like a ‘flower’ we wither, ...
Man, who is born of a woman, “has a short life,” because he has been ordered to return to the earth. With regard to the expression “full of wrath,” Job thinks about that moment in which man received the order to observe the commandment but transgressed it. And therefore “like a flower that has finished blooming, he fell after being shaken”; he bloomed in paradise, so that he imposed a name on every animal. But “he fell after being shaken,” when Adam was enticed into the deception of the dragon. At that stage “he fled like a shadow,” because, being naked, he concealed himself away from God and hid under a tree of the paradise. When God called him, “Adam, where are you?” he did not show up.… Therefore our hope was destroyed. Since he had fallen from paradise, man was deprived of his goods and perished completely, because with a single blow he was condemned as someone who had fallen, without any possibility for us to hope of judgment. In fact, if there is hope for judgment, there is also ...
