Daniel — Chapter 2
Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the great statue with gold head, silver breast and arms, bronze belly and thighs, iron legs, and feet of iron and clay — struck by a stone cut without hands, which becomes a great mountain filling the earth. Lapide follows Jerome's commentary on Daniel as the definitive patristic interpretation, identifying the four kingdoms as Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek (Alexandrian), and Roman, with the stone as Christ and His Kingdom.
Verse 1
In the second year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, Nebuchadnezzar dreamed dreams: Lapide explains how God sends dreams to pagans to reveal His purposes — citing Pharaoh's dreams (Gen. 41) and the Magi's warning dream (Mt. 2:12). Divine revelation through dreams is not restricted to the chosen people but is part of God's universal salvific pedagogy.
Verse 19
The mystery was revealed to Daniel in a night vision: Lapide treats this as an instance of prophetic illumination granted during sleep, a lower mode of prophetic vision than waking ecstasy (following Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas's taxonomy of prophecy in Summa II-II, qq. 173-174). He notes Daniel's immediate prayer of thanksgiving as the model response to received grace.
Verse 21
He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise: Lapide's classic text for divine Providence over political history. No ruler rises or falls except by God's permission (cf. Jn. 19:11). He applies to the contemporary upheavals of the Reformation era, arguing that the rise of Protestant princes is a divine punishment for Catholic sin, not evidence against God's sovereignty.
Verse 31
The great image of surpassing brightness: Lapide gives detailed allegorical analysis of the materials — gold (Babylon's brilliance), silver (Medo-Persia, inferior), bronze (Greece), iron (Rome's hardness), clay-mixed iron (Rome's decline through mixture with barbarian nations). The decreasing quality represents the progressive deterioration of world empires as divine history approaches its consummation.
Verse 34
The stone cut without hands strikes the statue's feet: Lapide reads the stone as Christ — cut 'without hands' meaning born of a virgin without human generation (Origen, Irenaeus, Jerome). The stone's striking the feet is the Incarnation striking the Roman Empire, the last world kingdom. The stone becoming a mountain filling the earth is the Church's universal expansion.
Verse 44
'In diebus regnorum illorum suscitabit Deus coeli regnum quod in aeternum non dissipabitur' — In the days of those kingdoms the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed: Lapide's most explicit Christological text in Daniel. The eternal kingdom established during the Roman period is the Church, and its indestructibility is guaranteed by Christ's promise ('super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam,' Mt. 16:18). He refutes millenarian interpretations.