Through Dry Places Seeking Rest: The Waterless Wilderness and the Water the Devil Fears
Old Testament: Psalms 106:4-5, 35
They wandered in a wilderness, in a place without water: they found not the way of a city for their habitation. They were hungry and thirsty: their soul fainted in them. ... He hath turned a wilderness into pools of water, and a dry land into water springs.
Old Testament, also: Isaias 35:6-8
Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall be free: for waters are broken out in the desert, and streams in the wilderness. And that which was dry land, shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water. In the dens where dragons dwell before, shall rise up the verdure of the reed and the bulrush. And a path and a way shall be there, and it shall be called the holy way: the unclean shall not pass over it.
New Testament: Matthew 12:43-45; John 7:37-38
And when an unclean spirit is gone out of a man he walketh through dry places seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith: I will return into my house from whence I came out. And coming he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then he goeth, and taketh with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there. ... Jesus stood and cried, saying: If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drink. He that believeth in me, as the scripture saith, Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.
The connection
In Scripture the wilderness is the place without water. Israel "wandered in a wilderness, in a place without water ... They were hungry and thirsty: their soul fainted in them" (Psalms 106:4-5), and Moses remembered "the great and terrible wilderness, wherein there was the serpent burning with his breath, and the scorpion and the dipsas, and no waters at all" (Deuteronomy 8:15). The dry land is where the serpents live; Isaias speaks of "the dens where dragons dwell" (Isaias 35:7). The prophets promised that God would undo it: "He hath turned a wilderness into pools of water, and a dry land into water springs" (Psalms 106:35). "Then shall the lame man leap as a hart ... for waters are broken out in the desert, and streams in the wilderness ... In the dens where dragons dwell before, shall rise up the verdure of the reed and the bulrush", and the road through it "shall be called the holy way: the unclean shall not pass over it" (Isaias 35:6-8). Christ answered John's disciples from that chapter: "The blind see, the lame walk ... the deaf hear" (Matthew 11:5). He also said where the unclean spirit goes when it is driven out: "he walketh through dry places seeking rest, and findeth none" (12:43). And on the last day of the feast He cried, "If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drink ... Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water" (John 7:37-38), which He "said of the Spirit" (7:39). St Gregory Nazianzen reads the dry places of Baptism: "The unclean and malignant spirit is gone out of you, being chased by baptism ... He goes through waterless places, dry of the Divine Stream ... He fears the water." Tertullian says the same of the serpents: they "generally do affect arid and waterless places. But we, little fishes ... are born in water". The Catechism teaches that Baptism means freedom from sin and from the devil who leads to it, which is why exorcisms are prayed over the one to be baptized, who renounces Satan (CCC 1237).
Moral sense
The house the spirit left was "empty, swept, and garnished" (Matthew 12:44), and he came back with seven worse than himself. A soul is kept from the devil not by being swept but by being filled. St Gregory gives the answer: "If he finds that Christ has taken up His abode there, and has filled the place which he had vacated, he is driven back again." Even the thirst is a grace, as David found in the desert: "For thee my soul hath thirsted ... In a desert land, and where there is no way, and no water" (Psalms 62:2-3).
Anagogical sense
Isaias's desert ends in a homecoming: "the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and shall come into Sion with praise, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads" (Isaias 35:10). John sees the water that waits there, "a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb" (Apocalypse 22:1), and hears the promise, "To him that thirsteth, I will give of the fountain of the water of life, freely" (21:6). In that city there are no dry places left for the serpent to haunt.
The Fathers
St Gregory Nazianzen, Oration XL, On Holy Baptism, 35: "The unclean and malignant spirit is gone out of you, being chased by baptism. He will not submit to the expulsion, he will not resign himself to be houseless and homeless: He goes through waterless places, dry of the Divine Stream, and there he desires to abide. He wanders, seeking rest; he finds none. He lights on baptized souls, whose sins the font has washed away. He fears the water ... If he finds that Christ has taken up His abode there, and has filled the place which he had vacated, he is driven back again." Tertullian, On Baptism 1: "vipers and asps and basilisks themselves generally do affect arid and waterless places. But we, little fishes, after the example of our ΙΧΘΥΣ Jesus Christ, are born in water, nor have we safety in any other way than by permanently abiding in water."
Warrant
Patristic. St Gregory Nazianzen reads the dry places of Matthew 12:43 as the places without the water of Baptism, which the unclean spirit haunts and fears (Oration XL, On Holy Baptism, 35), and Tertullian sets the serpents' love of arid and waterless places against the Christian born in water (On Baptism 1). Checked in the Greek: one word, anydros, waterless, joins the passages. Psalms 106:4 has en anydro, in a waterless place; Isaias 35:7 has he anydros eis hele, the waterless land into marshes; and Matthew 12:43 has di' anydron topon, through waterless places, which the Douay renders dry places. In the New Testament the word comes only four times: here, in Luke 11:24, and of false teachers as fountains and clouds without water (2 Peter 2:17; Jude 1:12). Isaias 35:8 in the Septuagint has ou me parelthe ekei akathartos, the unclean shall not pass there, the same word as the unclean spirit, to akatharton pneuma, of Matthew 12:43. The dragons' dens of Isaias 35:7 are in the Hebrew, tannim, and the Latin, dracones; the Septuagint has birds there instead. The water from the rock and the living water of the well have entries of their own; this one follows the dry places and the one who haunts them. Dunk found the entry from the verses where there is no water, from Agar's fountain to the Psalms.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1237.
The verses
Psalms 106:4 · Psalms 106:5 · Psalms 106:35 · Isaias 35:6 · Isaias 35:7 · Isaias 35:8 · Matthew 12:43 · Matthew 12:44 · Matthew 12:45 · John 7:37 · John 7:38
