As the book of Judith is read, we sing of how victory was given by the hand of a woman, and by this, the Church exhorts us to holiness, that is, to continence, by the example of Judith. For just as she killed Holofernes, a name which means, “he who weakens the fatted calf,” so does the Church advise us to kill Holofernes, that is, the devil, who weakens and kills the lustful in this world; and this will be done through holiness, by cutting off his head. For the head of the devil is lustfulness, because it is, as it were, the first way he begins to tempt men. Therefore does the Lord say, “Let your loins be girded” (Luke 12, 35), that is, gird yourselves against the first vice, according to that which is said in Exodus concerning the eating of the Paschal lamb (12, 11), “Ye shall gird your loins.” But in another sense, pride is the beginning of every sin. (Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, VI, 128, 1)
 |
| Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1612-13, by the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) |
Our friend Durandus is here working on an exegetical tradition by which the general Holofernes in his drunkenness symbolizes the various ways in which the carnal vices weaken the spirit, and is therefore defeated by Judith, the virtuous widow who “fasted all the days of her life, apart from sabbaths and new moons and the feasts of the house of Israel.” This is the common tradition of the Fathers, as exemplified by the readings from St Ambrose’s book “On Elijah and fasting” which follow the opening of the book in the breviary: “For (Judith), girt with fasting, went forth into the camps of the foreigners; (Holofernes) lay buried with wine, such that he could not even feel the blow of the wound (that killed him). Therefore, the fasting of a single woman laid low countless armies of the Assyrians.”
Durandus also alludes briefly to a later development by which Holofernes and the king whose ambition he serves, Nebuchadnezzar, become principally symbols of pride, and hence of the devil. This is exemplified in the first Latin commentary on the book of Judith, written by the
Blessed Rabanus Maurus in the first half of the 9th century. “Why is it that Nebuchadnezzar, filled with wrath, and lifted up by the pride of arrogance, promises that he will avenge himself upon those who resist him, and boasts that he wishes to subject all the earth to his rule, if not that the devil, stirred up by his own pride, promises to himself the rule of all the world, and strives with all his might to draw men away from the due worship (of God), and make them share in his wickedness?” Judith therefore represents the contrary virtue of humility: “...the divine power, through the humility and simplicity of its faithful, overcomes the throng of the enemy, beats it down and scatters it; for the beauty and brightness of all the virtues, which shone forth in the speech of this Judith, and likewise in her works, was the cause of the greatest ruin to the enemies.”
.jpg) |
| Judith Presents the Head of Holofernes, ca. 1660, by the Italian painter Mattia Preti (1613-99) |
.jpg)
