A reflection for Feria Tertia infra Hebdomadam XIV post Octavam Pentecostes — Kalendis Septembris, IV classis; Commemoratio S. Ægidii Abbatis (1 September)
I. Liturgical Context
The first day of September falls this year on a Tuesday of the fourth class, and the Church, having no proper Mass for the day, does what she always does on such a day: she takes up the Sunday’s Mass again and reads it a second time, more slowly. The Mass is Protector noster, whose Introit asks God to look upon the face of His Christ, because “better is one day in Thy courts above thousands” (Ps. 83:10-11). The Gradual answers with the theme of the whole day — Bonum est confidere in Domino, quam confidere in homine, “It is good to confide in the Lord, rather than to have confidence in man” (Ps. 117:8-9) — and the Communion antiphon places on the lips of the communicant the very sentence that closes the Gospel: Primum quaerite regnum Dei, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God” (Matt. 6:33).
To the Sunday Mass the day adds a commemoration of St. Giles, Abbot — Ægidius to the Latins, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers and among the most widely invoked saints of the medieval West, whose churches once stood in nearly every English town and who lent his name to whole quarters of Edinburgh, Brussels and Prague. The Roman Martyrology also names on this day the Twelve Holy Brothers, martyrs, whose relics rest at Benevento. But it is Giles whose life the Gospel of the day reads as if it had been written for him, and it is Giles we shall keep in view.
The Epistle and Gospel set side by side a contrast and a consolation. St. Paul draws the line between the flesh and the Spirit; Our Lord draws the line between God and mammon. Then the Lord, having forbidden the one master, removes the fear that drives us into his service — the fear of tomorrow’s bread — and points us to the birds and the lilies. The Epistle tells us what the divided heart produces; the Gospel tells us why the heart divides, and how it is healed.
II. The Epistle: Galatians 5:16-24
“Walk in the spirit, and you shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the spirit: and the spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary one to another: so that you do not the things that you would.”
Spiritu ambulate, et desideria carnis non perficietis. The Galatians had been persuaded that the way to perfection lay backward, through the works of the Law; the Apostle has spent four chapters showing them that it lies forward, through faith working by charity. Now he tells them what the road actually looks like underfoot. It is a road on which one walks — the word is deliberate — and on which one is at war.
The Fathers are unanimous that “flesh” here is not the body. St. Augustine, in his exposition of this Epistle, insists that Paul is not condemning the substance which God made but the disorder which sin introduced into it; it is the whole man turned toward himself who is called flesh, and the whole man turned toward God who is called spirit. St. Jerome, commenting on the same passage, reads the two lists in the light of Genesis: the works of the flesh are the fruit of the first disobedience, and the fruit of the Spirit is the restoration of what was lost in Eden. And St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on Galatians, draws attention to a detail of grammar that the Douay preserves exactly: Paul speaks of the works of the flesh in the plural and the fruit of the Spirit in the singular. The flesh scatters; it produces a catalogue of disconnected sins. The Spirit gathers; it bears a single fruit with many flavours, because charity is one and all the rest are its expressions.
Notice too where the Apostle places the battle. “So that you do not the things that you would.” The war is not between good men and bad men but inside the baptized Christian who wants to do right. St. Thomas, treating this passage in his lectures on Galatians and the fruits of the Spirit in the Summa (I-II, q. 70), explains that the inclination of the flesh remains even in the just, as a wound not yet fully closed, so that the very resistance a good man feels in himself is evidence of the Spirit’s presence, not of His absence. A man in whom the flesh met no opposition would not be at peace; he would be dead.
Then the list of fruits, which the Church reads on this day as the portrait of the sanctified soul: caritas, gaudium, pax, patientia, benignitas, bonitas, longanimitas, mansuetudo, fides, modestia, continentia, castitas. St. Augustine observes the order: charity comes first because it is the root, and the last three — modesty, continence, chastity — come at the end because they are the fruit borne on the outermost branch, where the body itself is brought under the rule of the Spirit. The whole sequence descends from the heart to the members. “Against such there is no law,” the Apostle says; and Augustine’s gloss is that the law was given to restrain the unwilling, and there is nothing to restrain in the man who loves.
“And they that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh with the vices and concupiscences.” Not shall crucify, in the future; have crucified, at baptism, once for all. Chrysostom presses this: the crucifixion has been done to the old man, and what remains for us is not to take him down again.
III. The Gospel: Matthew 6:24-33
“No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other: or he will sustain the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”
Nemo potest duobus dominis servire. The Lord does not say that it is difficult. He says that it cannot be done. St. Jerome, in his commentary on this Gospel, notes that mammon is a Syriac word for riches, and that the Lord has not forbidden the possession of wealth but its service — the condition of a man who is owned by what he owns. St. Augustine, in his treatise on the Sermon on the Mount, presses the logic of the two masters: a man may indeed serve two who are agreed, but God and mammon issue contrary commands, and the one who tries to serve both will find that he has made his choice already, by the one he obeys when they conflict. And Chrysostom, in his homily on this passage, asks the question that unmasks us: if the Lord had merely said that the covetous man is a bad servant of God, we might have argued; but He says that such a man serves another master, and calls that master by name.
Then the Lord turns, and the turn is tender. Ideo dico vobis, ne solliciti sitis. “Therefore I say to you, be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, nor for your body, what you shall put on.” He knows why men serve mammon. Not usually from greed — that is the sin of a few — but from fear, which is the sin of nearly everyone. Tomorrow’s bread, the winter’s coat, the rent, the old age: these are the recruiting sergeants of the second master. And so the Lord addresses not the greed but the fear beneath it.
His argument has three steps, and the Fathers trace each of them. First, the argument from the greater to the lesser: “Is not the life more than the meat, and the body more than the raiment?” St. Chrysostom observes that He who gave the greater thing without being asked — the life itself, the body itself — will not withhold the lesser things that the greater requires. Second, the argument from the creatures: the birds who do not sow, the lilies who do not spin. St. Augustine warns against reading this as a counsel of idleness; the birds are not commended for not working but for not worrying, and the Apostle Paul who labored with his hands was more free from solicitude than any idle man. St. Hilary of Poitiers sees more in the lilies than a lesson in trust: they are a figure of the glory of the resurrection, the body raised and clothed by God in a splendour no labour of ours could weave. Third, the argument from the Father: “for your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things.” The heathen seek these things, the Lord says, because they have no Father; the Christian is told to seek something else because he has one.
Quaerite ergo primum regnum Dei, et iustitiam eius: et haec omnia adiicientur vobis. The Fathers are careful about the word adiicientur, “shall be added.” St. Augustine remarks that the kingdom is to be sought as the end and the temporal goods are to be received as additions — not as wages, and not as the price of the kingdom, but as the things a father puts on the table for the children who are at home with him. To seek them first is to have inverted the order, and the inversion is exactly the service of mammon.
IV. Synthesis: The Divided Heart and the Undivided Father
Set the two readings together and a single doctrine emerges. The Epistle tells us that the Christian is a battlefield: flesh against spirit, and the works of the one contrary to the fruit of the other. The Gospel tells us why the battle is so often lost: because the heart, afraid, takes a second master to guarantee its bread, and thereafter every command of the first master is heard as a threat to survival. The flesh in St. Paul and mammon in St. Matthew are not two enemies but one, seen from two sides — the disordered love of self, and the disordered love of what the self believes it needs.
In the Thomistic order of things, this is the exitus gone wrong. Man came forth from God, and his whole nature is a movement of return, a reditus that is complete only when the will rests in the Good that made it. Solicitude is the will’s attempt to secure its own return by other means — to hold the future in its own hands rather than in the Father’s. That is why the Lord treats anxiety as a species of idolatry rather than as a weakness to be pitied. And that is why the remedy is not effort but sight: “Behold the birds of the air”; “Consider the lilies.” Grace heals the will by first correcting what the eye rests on. The man who has looked at the lilies with the eyes of faith finds that the second master has nothing left to offer him.
And here St. Giles walks into the Gospel. The Legenda tells — and we tell it as the Church has told it for a thousand years, as pious tradition and not as documented history — that Giles, an Athenian of noble birth, gave away his patrimony to the poor and crossed the sea to Provence, and lived as a hermit in a forest near the Rhône, where God sent him a hind whose milk was his food. When the king’s hunters pursued the hind, she fled to the hermit’s cave, and the arrow loosed at her struck Giles instead. He would not have the wound healed, keeping it as a penance to his death. The king built him a monastery on the spot, of which he became the first abbot; and there, at what is now Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, his relics were among the great pilgrimage goals of the Middle Ages. Whatever the historian may make of the details, the Church knew what she was doing when she let this man’s commemoration fall under the Gospel of the birds and the lilies. He is the exemplum of Matthew 6 in the flesh: a man who sought first the kingdom, and to whom bread was added — from the udder of a wild deer, in a cave, without sowing or spinning. He became the patron of the crippled and of beggars, of those who have no second master to run to, because he had chosen to be one of them.
V. Devotional Application
The Epistle gives us the examination and the Gospel gives us the remedy.
The examination. Read the two lists in Galatians 5 slowly, and do not stop at the works of the flesh. Ask which fruit of the Spirit is least in evidence in your life this week. Most of us, honestly examined, would find that it is pax or longanimitas — peace and long-suffering — and that what has displaced them is precisely the solicitude the Gospel forbids. Then ask the harder question: in what matter am I serving a second master? Not “am I greedy,” which few will admit, but “what future do I secure by my own means because I do not trust the Father to secure it?”
The remedy. Do one thing this week that only makes sense if the Father knows what you need. Give an alms that costs you a margin of safety. Refuse an anxiety by naming it and handing it over aloud. Sit for five minutes and actually consider a lily — or, in the spirit of St. Giles, some creature that is fed without sowing — until the argument of the Gospel becomes an observation rather than a text.
Practice for the day. The Lord says first. Before the day’s business, before the news, before the reckoning of what must be done, seek the kingdom: the morning offering, the Angelus, five decades of the Rosary. Not because these earn the day’s bread, but because putting them first is the only way to keep mammon in his place — which is the place of a servant, not a master.
VI. The Collects
Of the Sunday, resumed on the feria:
Custodi, Domine, quæsumus, Ecclesiam tuam propitiatione perpetua: et quia sine te labitur humana mortalitas; tuis semper auxiliis et abstrahatur a noxiis, et ad salutaria dirigatur. Per Dominum.
“Keep, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy Church with Thy perpetual mercy: and because without Thee human frailty falls, may she ever be withdrawn from what is harmful by Thy help, and directed toward what is saving. Through our Lord.”
The Collect says in a sentence what the Epistle and Gospel say at length. Sine te labitur humana mortalitas — without Thee, mortal man slips. That is the flesh lusting against the spirit. Abstrahatur a noxiis — let her be drawn away from harmful things. That is the renunciation of the second master. Ad salutaria dirigatur — let her be directed toward saving things. That is quaerite primum.
Commemoration of St. Giles:
Intercessio nos, quæsumus, Domine, beati Ægidii Abbatis commendet: ut, quod nostris meritis non valemus, eius patrocinio assequamur. Per Dominum.
“May the intercession of blessed Giles the Abbot commend us, we beseech Thee, O Lord: that what we cannot obtain by our own merits, we may attain by his patronage. Through our Lord.”
Quod nostris meritis non valemus. The commemoration prays, in the Church’s plainest words, exactly what the Gospel teaches: that the thing we need is not in our own hands, and that this is good news.
VII. Aspiration
Pater, tu scis quia his omnibus indigeo: quaeram primum regnum tuum. “Father, Thou knowest that I have need of all these things: let me seek first Thy kingdom.”
VIII. For Further Study
This day opens onto three of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the fruits of the Spirit in St. Thomas — how they differ from the virtues and the gifts, and why the Angelic Doctor counts twelve. The Spiritual Practices path treats holy abandonment and the surrender of solicitude, from the Imitation of Christ through the great French writers on Providence. And the Lives of the Saints path continues with the Fourteen Holy Helpers, of whom Giles is the only one who was not a martyr — and with the hermit-abbots of Gaul who, like him, fled the world and found that the world followed them into the forest.
Sancte Ægidi, ora pro nobis.
IX. Source Transparency
The Mass propers follow the 1962 Missale Romanum for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, resumed on the feria; the commemoration of St. Giles is from the Sanctoral for 1 September. Scripture is given in the Douay-Rheims with the Vulgate Latin. Patristic readings are drawn from St. Augustine’s exposition of Galatians and his treatise on the Sermon on the Mount; St. Jerome’s commentaries on Galatians and on Matthew; St. John Chrysostom’s homilies on Galatians and on Matthew; and St. Hilary of Poitiers on Matthew. These are given as paraphrase with the work indicated, not as verbatim quotation. St. Thomas is cited to the Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 70, and to his lectures on Galatians, chapter 5. The life of St. Giles is drawn from the medieval Legenda and the Roman Martyrology and is presented throughout as pious tradition; the documentary history of the abbey of Saint-Gilles is a separate matter and is not claimed here.