(According as it is written, God has given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear;) unto this day.
Read Chapter 11
Ambrosiaster
AD 400
These are the carnal Israelites who thought they were justified by the law and did not realize that they were justified by faith before God, because through the law they were all guilty. Those who were blinded were those who were unable to see the way of truth which in their wickedness they had rejected and gone away from so that they could no longer come to the grace of salvation. The examples taken from the prophets reveal that there are two kinds of blind people. The first kind consists of those who are blinded forever, who will never be saved. These people are of such evil will that they knowingly say that they do not know what they hear…. The second type consists of those who, although they try to live according to the law, do not accept the righteousness of Christ. These people are doing this not out of the envy of an evil will but by an erroneous imitation of the tradition of their ancestors. They are blinded for a time, for although they ought to recognize the great works of Ch...
God hath given them Not by his working, or acting in them; but by his permission, and by withdrawing his grace in punishment of their obstinacy. (Challoner)
Permitted them (says St. Chrysostom) to fall into the spirit of insensibility. Literally, the spirit of compunction. Compunction is not here taken, as in some spiritual writers, for a great sorrow for sins. In the Latin Vulgate (Isaias vi. 9.) it is called the spirit of slumber, as in the Protestant translation. We cannot have a better judge of the sense of the word than St. Chrysostom, who tells us, that it signifies a habit of the soul, firmly fixed in evil, and an insensible disposition: as, saith he, persons under a pious compunction are not to be removed from their good resolutions; so the wicked, under a hardened compunction, are nailed, as it were, to vice. And that here this is the true sense, appears by the following words out of Isaias: he hath given them eyes that they should not see And also out of David, (Psalm lxviii...
