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14. That the devil, envying God and us, by deceit persuaded man that he was envied by God, and so contrived that he transgress the commandment—on God's part, so that his all-praised power might not become manifest in action, deifying man; and on man's part, plainly, so that he might not become a partaker of the divine glory in the form of virtue. 15. That, he says, the general condemnation of the law of nature that prevailed through the transgression is the true incarnation of God among men; and the particular condemnation of this law is the regeneration in Christ, according to purpose, of each individual. 16. He called deification unbegotten—the enhypostatic illumination of the Godhead according to form, which has no generation, but an inconceivable manifestation in those who are worthy. 17. How one ought to contemplate the "where." 18. He who will not receive the pure divine life, he says, in which there is no account of circumscription at all, will not be free of pain, having perpetually his own begotten existence circumscribing him—that is, containing him—and not the unbegotten one, which is free from all local position and temporal motion, and has no comprehension, and for this reason neither circumscription. For the divine life is also inconceivable, even if it gives the enjoyment of itself to those who will partake by grace, yet not comprehension. For it ever remains, even in the participation of those who enjoy it, incomprehensible, because by nature, as unbegotten, it possesses infinity.

19. God, it says, by one boundless-power will of his goodness will hold together all things, both angels and men, both good and evil. But all these will not, perhaps, partake of God, who will pass through all things without being held by them, but proportionately to themselves. Those who by nature have kept their judgment evenly balanced through all things, and have made it receptive in activity of the principles of nature, in accordance with the whole principle of always being well, because of the good disposition of their judgment toward the divine will, will wholly partake of the goodness according to the divine life that shines upon them, as among angels or as among men. But those who by nature have made their judgment uneven through all things, and have shown it to be dispersive in the activity of the principles of nature, in accordance with the whole principle of being well, because of the antipathy of their judgment toward the divine will, will fall away from the whole of goodness, according to the affinity for being wretched that is manifest in them; by which there will be a separation of such persons from God, since they do not have, according to the purpose of their judgment, the principle of being well brought to life in the activities of good things, according to which the divine life is naturally made to shine forth. The principle of nature, then, will be the balance of each one's judgment at the judgment, convicting its movement toward the wretched or the well, according to which the partaking or non-partaking of the divine life naturally comes about. For as regards being, God, being present, will always hold all things together; but as regards always being well, only the holy angels and men in their own peculiar way; while he leaves the always being wretched to those who are not such, as the fruit of their judgment, mingled in.

62. Concerning the sickle that Zacharias the prophet saw. (62. Question 62: What is it that the holy Prophet Zacharias says: "And I lifted up my eyes and saw, and behold, a sickle flying, twenty cubits in length and ten cubits in breadth. And he said to me: This is the curse that goes forth over the face of all the earth." And shortly after: "And I will bring it forth, says the Lord Almighty, and it shall enter into the house of the thief and into the house of him who swears falsely by my name, and it shall lodge in the midst of his house and shall consume it, both its wood and its stones." What is the sickle, and the measure of both its length and its breadth? And why was it flying? And who is the thief and the perjurer, and what is his house; and what are the wood, and what are the stones? Answer. God, who said, "I have multiplied visions and have been likened in the hands of the prophets," pre-established the outlines of his wonderful visitation for the salvation of men through his flesh, variegating them with symbols, showing them beforehand through one prophet after another, as each was able to receive.

Therefore, also to the great prophet Zacharias, granting the initiation into his own mysteries and, as it were, bringing before his eyes for understanding the power of his future coming in the flesh, he wisely prepared a sickle for him in the vision, teaching that he himself was going to—he who in many forms mystically shaped himself for the types in the visions of the prophets—voluntarily and in truth submit to our formation by nature, in order to show that the truth foretold through the types is present in the realities. Therefore the sickle is our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son and Word of God, who both is and always remains simple by nature on his own account, but for my sake, by the assumption of a rational soul-endowed flesh, as he himself knows, became composite according to hypostasis, neither admitting confusion into one nature through the union according to hypostasis to the flesh at the extreme, nor being cut into a duality of Sons through the difference according to nature to the flesh at the extreme. And I mean the extreme of the union according to hypostasis is the completely indivisible, and the extreme of the difference according to nature is the completely unconfused and unchangeable, because the mystery of the divine incarnation does not altogether bring along with the otherness according to nature of the things from which it is composed the difference according to hypostasis either, nor indeed with the union according to hypostasis the confusion into one nature; the one, so that the mystery of the Trinity may not receive an addition, the other, so that nothing may be naturally of the same kind and consubstantial with the Godhead.

For the union of two natures has come about with respect to a hypostasis, but not with respect to one nature, so that both the one according to hypostasis, shown to be accomplished from the natures that ran together with each other according to the union, and the difference of those that came together for the inseparable union according to natural propriety might be believed, remaining outside all change and confusion. For if the coming together of the natures had been for the generation of a nature, the mystery of our salvation would have been altogether indistinguishable to us, who have no means from which or how we could be able to learn the condescension of God toward us—whether the flesh was changed into the divine nature because of the union, or the divine nature was turned into the substance of the flesh, or both were commingled by some mixture into the generation of another nature besides themselves, and neither of the natures from which it consists bears its principle intact. For whether the flesh was changed into the nature of divinity, or the nature of divinity into flesh, or the mode of union into one nature thrust the natures together into the generation of another nature besides these, I do not recognize the mystery of the divine incarnation, finding no natural

in the mystery, the difference of flesh and divinity. But if in Christ there exists by nature after the union a difference of flesh and divinity—for divinity and flesh are never the same in essence—then the union of those that came together has not at all come about for the generation of one nature, but for one hypostasis, according to which we find no difference in Christ in any way whatsoever; for the Word is the same as his own flesh according to the hypostasis. For in whatever respect Christ has a difference, he cannot be one in every way; but in whatever respect he does not admit any difference at all, in every way the one in his case is always both in being and in being spoken of piously. Therefore, since every difference, insofar as it is a difference, altogether has a certain quantity of the things that differ—for difference could never be without quantity, and quantity does not admit of declaration without number—we would rightly take up number for the sole purpose of declaring the difference of the natures of which Christ consists after the union, signifying that the natures are preserved without change after the union, but not dividing by number the union of those that have run together into one hypostasis. And we make this clear, holding that we do not introduce number in any way into the principle of the hypostasis; for that in which difference is not at all observed, neither is quantity introduced along with it; and that which does not have quantity introduced along with it does not admit the number that declares difference.

We confess, then, that Christ is composite according to the hypostasis, in which the identity and the wholly singular are contemplated, but not according to nature, in which the difference and the not wholly singular are contemplated, so that we may preserve both the sameness and singularity of the hypostasis and confess the difference of the natures that have run together into one hypostasis. This is the one whom the wondrous Zechariah saw flying in the form of a sickle; for the Word of God is a reaper of all evil and ignorance. “Its length,” he says, “of twenty cubits and its width of ten cubits.” As God and Word, then, Christ is naturally widened into ten cubits—I mean the practical and divine commandments—in the manner of providence by procession; for the Word of God is widened into a decade of commandments, through which, legislating both the performance of what ought to be done and the abstention from what ought not, he encompassed every movement of the self-chosen will of those under his providence. But as the same one become flesh and perfectly made man, he is lengthened into twenty cubits because of the composition of the elements for the generation of the body perceptible to the senses; for there are five senses and there happen to be four elements, from which, by their conjunction, the nature of human beings is constituted; and five added to four clearly makes the number twenty. And the Scripture called the manner of the economy “length” both because of its height and because the mystery of the divine incarnation is beyond all nature.

Flying, both because it has nothing earthly and because it is swift and quick-moving, and, to speak concisely, because it is the shortened word and circumscribes the whole salvation of men by faith alone and a good conscience held together in the heart of those being saved alone. For nothing is swifter than believing, and nothing is easier than confessing with the mouth the grace of what has been believed; for the one reveals the living love of the believer toward the Creator, and the other the God-loving disposition toward one's neighbor. But love and a genuine disposition, that is, faith and a good conscience, are plainly the work of the invisible movement in the heart, having no need at all of external matter for its generation. For "the Lord," it says, "will make a shortened word upon the earth." This is the curse which God and the Father sent forth upon the face of all the earth, the curse that is truly the curse of the true curse. For since the disobedience of Adam became a curse through the transgression, not permitting

For the commandment of righteousness had to be increased, so that creation might receive the blessing; the natural blessing of God and the Father becomes, in Adam's curse, a curse of the curse that is according to sin, for the removal of the injustice of fruits toward generation, once disobedience had increased, so that creation might receive the deprivation of increase according to sin. For for my sake he has become both curse and sin, according to the divine Apostle, he who looses my curse and takes away the sin of the world. For I had two curses: one, the fruit of my own choice, that is, sin, through which the fertile seed of the soul according to virtue fell to the earth; the other, the death of nature justly condemned because of my choice, driven there by necessity, even against the will of nature, to the place where the motion of my choice had been sown according to its inclination. The God who established the generation of nature, having willingly submitted to the curse condemned upon nature—I mean death—slaughtered and put to death by his own death through the cross the living curse of sin within me according to choice; and the curse of my God has become the curse and death of my sin, not permitting the transgression to come to the generation of the fruits of injustice, but rather the blessing of the divine righteousness according to the commandment and unending life.

This sickle, that is, our Lord and God Jesus Christ, cuts off the thief and perjurer, and destroys his house, and casts down his wood and his stones. The thief and perjurer in truth is the evil one and liar, the devil. A thief, in that by deceit and guile he despoiled man from paradise—man being God's work and creature and a precious possession—and led him into this place of affliction, and defiled the image of the divine glory with many stains of sins, the one who wickedly covets the goods of others seeking to make another's wealth his own property, not that he might preserve it, but that he might steal and slaughter and destroy. And a perjurer, as a liar and deceiver; for having promised Adam to give him the glory of divinity, he cast him down to the dishonor and outrage of irrational beasts, and made him more dishonored than every beast—to speak more accurately—having as much more in the outrage of irrationality than the beasts, as the unnatural is more abominable than the natural; and having estranged him from immortality, he defiled him with the garment of corruption. And the house of this thief and perjurer is the present world of corruption and successive confusion, which perhaps he appropriated to himself, having robbed man, in which he was also permitted to rob, for reasons God knows, who permitted him to rob, until the cyclical course of time has run its course.

In this world, as in a house, the Word of God, having come down through his ineffable incarnation, bound the devil and rendered him powerless, and utterly brought to an end the wood and the stones of this world, completely destroying and obliterating the carved images and the altars and the statues of the idols, through which the father of error, the devil, thought to be worshipped by those who had been led astray, as though he were some multiform and strange god, making their folly the material of his own glory, as being far more foolish than those who were led astray. For what is more senseless than to suppose that a thing exists when in truth it does not exist by nature? In this house of the thief and perjurer, the devil—I mean this world—the lover of mankind, the Redeemer of our souls and bodies, having come down through the flesh, overturned the whole in the manner of the former error and again set the whole right according to the word of true knowledge; and, to speak simply, having driven off the robber from the possessions that were not his own, he himself again, as Master, has taken possession of his own through virtue, having magnificently built his holy Church throughout all that is under heaven.

Or perhaps the devil is a thief, since even until now he contrives by deceit and guile to transfer each person's desire to himself; and he is a perjurer and liar, since he is at once a deceiver and persuades the more frivolous to abandon the good things they presently hold through hope of better things, and through what are thought to be pleasures he secretly creates pains for those who obey him. And the house of this thief and liar is the sin-loving disposition of each person's heart, having, as it were, stones—the hardening and insensitivity of the heart regarding good things—and wood—the kindling thoughts of the impure burning of the passions. Or perhaps Scripture figuratively calls desire wood; for the wood of this desire—that is, of desire—is first recorded as having corrupted its movement contrary to nature, and for this reason this power of the soul is receptive of every passion, as woody material is of fire; and stones perhaps means the firm and insensate and unyielding-to-the-word-of-virtue element of the irascible movements—all of which, together with the house in which they happen to be, that is, the disposition, the Word of God destroys and consumes when he comes, first casting out of it through faith the devil who once dwelt in it through deception, binding with unbreakable fetters him who thought himself strong and plundering his house, and driving away from the heart the kindling habit of the passions together with the hardening regarding good things. Or perhaps he calls stones the slackness of the soul regarding good things, as being insensible to virtues, and wood the eagerness for evil things.

All these things the Word does not cease to thrust outside the heart of the faithful, making peace and reconciling in one body of the virtues both those far off and those near—that is, destroying the middle wall of the partition, I mean sin—and annulling the handwriting of the will against vice, and subjecting the mind of the flesh to the law of the Spirit. For he called those far off, as I think, the movements according to sense, which are far off by nature and wholly alien to the law of God; and those near, the noetic energies of the soul, which are not far off from the Word by kinship. These he joins together after the destruction of the law of the flesh, in the manner of virtue, binding them to one another in the Spirit. For the middle wall, as I think, he has called the natural law of the body, and the partition the relation to the passions that is in the law of the flesh—that is, sin. For only the relation to the passions of dishonor of the law of nature, that is, of the passible part of nature, becomes a partition, walling off the body from the soul and not permitting the passage of the Word of the virtues to the flesh through the soul in the middle, according to practice. But the Word, having come and having wrestled down the law of nature—that is, the passible part of nature—abolished the relation to the passions contrary to nature that was in it.

This is my Lord and my God, Christ Jesus, whom the prophet saw as a sickle twenty cubits in length—for he encompasses every sensory activity directed at sensible things—and ten cubits in width—for my God and Savior is the one who defines every rational motion. For they say that counting is by nature proper to the rational alone, and the decade is the containment and end of every number. Therefore the Word of God encompasses not only sensory powers but also noetic activities, so that he is the creator not only of bodies but also of incorporeal things. And he was called a sickle, according to the vision, not only as one who reaps the evil that he himself did not sow in the rational nature, and gathers the nature that he himself did not scatter, but also as one who reaps and places those who are saved within the divine storehouses, and furthermore as one who, by the activities of the virtues, is gently united to the practical powers of the soul. But if it seems to anyone that the word of Scripture makes an indication of two persons and so many houses, whose destruction the sickle works, saying, "And he will enter into the house of the thief and into the house of the one who swears falsely by my name," let us understand that, taking the two general activities of the devil's deception, which contain all the rest, in place of two persons—that is, the modes of the activities—and the two general dispositions of humanity concerning deception, which define the rest, the word called them two houses. For example:

Whenever, by deceit, with guile stealing the innate knowledge of God that belongs to nature, the evil one appropriates it to himself, he is a thief, attempting to transfer to himself the worship that belongs to God, evidently leading away the soul's contemplation according to the intellect from the spiritual principles (logoi) within created things and confining the intellectual power solely to the outward appearance of sensible things. But whenever, beginning from natural impulses, he sophistically drags down the soul's practical power toward things contrary to nature, and through things reputed good persuasively fastens its desire to worse things by pleasure, he swears falsely in the name of the Lord, leading the persuaded soul to things other than what was promised. And he is a thief, in that he steals the knowledge of nature for himself, having as his house the disposition of those who are deceived, which is ignorance; and he is a perjurer, in that he persuades the practical faculty of the soul to labor in vain at things contrary to nature, having as his house the sin-loving disposition of the mind of those who tolerate him.

So then, as I said, the devil is a thief, diverting the knowledge of nature; and he is a perjurer, passing over the activity of virtue in practice. The house of a thief is the disposition held fast by the fallible principle of knowledge; and the house of a perjurer is the disposition colored by the defilement of the passions of dishonor. These the saving Word of God, in his love for humanity, enters and makes a dwelling place of God through the Spirit, creating knowledge of truth in place of error and ignorance, and virtue and righteousness in place of wickedness and evil, by which he is naturally disposed to make his own manifestation in those who are worthy. Therefore, in place of the persons, the passage has named the modes of the varied wickedness of the one and the same evil devil, and in place of the houses, the dispositions of those acted upon, suited to the devilish modes. And again, a thief is the one who, for the deception of his hearers, practices the supposedly divine words, whose power he has not recognized through the works, making the mere utterance a trade of reputation and hunting by the word of the tongue the praise of being considered righteous by his hearers. And to speak simply, the one who has a life discordant with his word and a disposition of soul opposed to his knowledge is a thief, appearing improperly from the goods of others; to whom the passage will reasonably say: But to the sinner God said:

Why do you recount my statutes and take up my covenant through your mouth? And again, a thief is the one who, by apparent manners and habits, conceals the unseen wickedness of the soul, covering over the inner disposition with a counterfeit of gentleness, and stealing—just as that one by the utterance of words steals the understanding of knowledge from those who hear, so also this one by the manner of hypocrisy in morals steals the perception of those who observe. To him it is likewise said, “Be ashamed, you who are clothed in garments not your own,” and, “The Lord will uncover their form in that day.” For each day, in the hidden workshop of the heart, I seem to hear God saying these things to me—the day, as it were, by which I stand plainly condemned on both counts. And he is a perjurer—that is, one who swears falsely in the name of the Lord—who promises God a life according to virtue and yet practices things alien to the pledge of his own profession, and transgresses the covenant of his confession of a venerable life through the idleness of the commandments, such as I am. And to speak briefly, the one who has chosen to live according to God and is not completely dead to the present life is a liar and a perjurer: he has sworn to God—that is, he has promised the blameless course in the divine struggles—and has not fulfilled it, and for this reason is in no way praised. For “everyone who swears in him shall be praised,” it says—that is, everyone who has promised to God the life that is according to God and fulfills, through the truth of the works of righteousness, the oaths of his good promise.

But if the one who fulfills his own promises has praise in every way, as the one who swears in God and speaks truth, it is clear that the one who becomes a transgressor of his own covenants will have blame and dishonor, as one who swore in God and lied. Passing over these, as though over certain houses—the hearts, that is, the disposition of each—the sickle, that is, the Word of God and the Father, since he is knowledge and virtue in his essence, completely finishes them off, by the change toward the better destroying the former state of each one's heart and bringing each one to participation in the good that he lacks, and making the one who was a thief of knowledge an unashamed worker of virtue, and the one who was a thief of the apparent covering of morals a knowledgeable cultivator of the disposition hidden in the soul, and making the perjurer a true guardian of his own promises, confirming his own promises by the works of the commandments. SCHOLIA 1. See the mystery; see the strangling of the Physitheists; see the death of the Italian and of Nile.

2. We do not speak, he says, of a difference of hypostases in Christ, because the Trinity has remained the Trinity, even when God the Word was made flesh, no addition of person having accrued to the Holy Trinity through the incarnation. But we speak of a difference of natures, lest we should hold that the flesh is consubstantial with the Word according to nature. 3. For he who does not speak, he says, of a difference of natures has no means of confirming the confession that the Word became flesh without change, not knowing that what assumed and what was assumed are preserved according to nature in the one hypostasis of the one God and Christ after the union. 4. How the Lord is a sickle, and what is the breadth of it, measured in cubits. 5. How he again, as a sickle, has a length of twenty cubits. 6. For what reason the prophet saw the sickle flying. 7. Faith establishes perfect love toward God through hope; a good conscience brings about love toward neighbor through the keeping of the commandments. For a good conscience has no accusing commandment that has been transgressed; and these things the heart alone is naturally believed, by those who strive for true salvation. 8. How the Lord is a curse, and whose curse. 9. Since, he says, man had his desire set in motion toward the earth, you thrust him into it even against his will by death. 10. What the thief is, and the perjurer.

11. Evil theft is the capture of nature through deceit. A sacrifice is what the devil sacrifices—those whom he steals—the slaughter of the will according to the God-given life, and the complete destruction of memory in accordance with it. Destruction is the ignorance that comes upon those who are sacrificed, through the deprivation of the knowledge of God. For this reason he steals, snatching away the reasoning, so that he may bring about the deprivation of the life according to virtue and knowledge. 12. What is the house of the thief and of the perjurer. (13. Someone might perhaps conjecture the reason why the devil was permitted to rob: so that his wickedness might also be known to human beings through experience, that being exposed he might be hated the more; and so that the dispositions of all human beings might be shown to one another through testing, that each might bring forward in his own defense his own conscience. For God has no need of learning through experience, possessing the knowledge of all things essentially, even before their coming into being. 14. What are the woods, and what are the stones.

15. That the destruction of the house, that is, of the world, has come about through error by means of the incarnation. 16. An exposition of the same things according to another contemplation. 17. Another contemplation concerning the same things. 18. He set down this contemplation as suitable for the passionate. For the one who is sick with complete immobility toward the good is in the realm of evil, altogether easily moved. For it is impossible to be immobile in both respects. 19. The motion according to sense, joined to the activity according to the intellect, produces virtue accompanied by knowledge. 20. Why did he call it a sickle? 21. Because the Word is mingled with the practical powers of the soul, just as the sickle is with the hand of the reaper, for the removal of passions and the gathering in of virtues. 22. The devil, he says, is a thief, as being of ignorance; and a perjurer, as being a maker of wickedness; having, as it were, houses—of ignorance, the erring mind; of evil, the sin-loving disposition. 23. A noble contemplation, and altogether fitting for us, who adulterate the glory of virtue and knowledge because of vainglory. 24. A thief, he says, is also the one who counterfeits the deceptive molding of the virtues of character, and by the apparent form conceals the hidden wickedness of his disposition.

25. He who counterfeits knowledge by mere verbal utterance, it says, steals the mind of his hearers for his own glory; and he who counterfeits virtue by his morals steals the sight of those who behold him for his own glory; and both, stealing through deceit, lead astray—the one, the mind of the soul of his hearers; the other, the bodily sense of those who behold him. 26. What is a perjurer. 63. CONCERNING THE LAMPSTAND WHICH THE SAME PROPHET SAW. (63. QUESTION 63. In the same prophet it is written again: "And he said to me: What do you see? And I said: I have seen, and behold, a lampstand all of gold, and its bowl upon it, and seven lamps upon it, and seven pipes for the lamps that are upon it; and two olive trees above it, one on the right of its bowl and one on the left." What is the lampstand? And why is it of gold? And what is the bowl upon it? Who are the seven lamps, and who are the seven pipes of the seven lamps, and who are the two olive trees? And why on the right and on the left of its bowl?)

Answer. The Word, sketching in symbols beforehand for the prophet from afar the much-radiant and transcendent splendor of the holy Church, thus adorned this vision for him, teaching, I think, the power of the new mystery that is in her. The all-gold lampstand, therefore, is the all-lauded Church of God, pure and undefiled, unstained and unadulterated and undiminished, and receptive of the true light. For they say that unadulterated gold neither turns black when buried, nor is corrupted by any rust, nor indeed is diminished when completely fired, but is also, by some natural operation, strengthening and renewing for the visual power of those who gaze upon it. Such also is the all-glorious Church of God, being and appearing in truth through the things themselves according to the most pure nature of gold: unadulterated, as having nothing at all mixed in or foreign to the mystery of theology according to the faith; and pure, as translucent and glorious in the brightness of the virtues; and undefiled, as polluted by no stain of passions; and unstained, as untouched by all evil spirits, nor indeed blackened by material circumstances, by any rust of wickedness; and undiminished and un diminished, as not being fired even by the furnace of persecutions at various times, nor tortured by the successive uprisings of heresies, enduring any loss in reason or life—that is, in faith and conduct—because of the weight of temptations. Therefore she is also strengthening to every mind according to grace of those who piously contemplate her.

For it calls the ungodly, offering them the light of true knowledge, and it preserves those who love to behold the mysteries within it, keeping the virgin part of their mind free from passion and unstained; and those who have endured some disturbance it recalls and renews their suffering mind by the word of consolation. In this way, then, we have understood, in a single overview through what has been said, the lampstand that appeared to the prophet in this condition. And the lamp above it is the paternal and true light, which enlightens every man coming into the world, our Lord Jesus Christ, who because of his assumption of our flesh from us has both become and been called a lamp, that is, the subsistent Wisdom and Word of God the Father according to nature, who is proclaimed in the Church of God according to pious faith and is exalted among the nations by the life of virtue through the keeping of the commandments and shines forth, and shines on all who are in the house—I mean this world—just as God the Word himself says somewhere: "No one lights a lamp and puts it under the bushel, but on the lampstand, and it shines on all who are in the house," clearly calling himself a lamp, as being God by nature and having become flesh by economy, as being light in essence, like a lamp, held without circumscription through the middle of the soul, as fire through a wick, by the earthen vessel of the flesh. Understanding this, I think, the great David also called the Lord a lamp, as being the Word of God the Father and the natural law, saying:

Your law is a lamp to my feet and a light to my paths"; for my Savior and God is the one who releases from darkness—both ignorance and wickedness. Therefore he was also called in Scripture a lamp; for a lamp is so called from loosing the night, and those who busy themselves with words call the darkness night. He alone, as a lamp, having dissolved the gloom of ignorance and the darkness of evil, has become for all a way of salvation, leading to the Father, through virtue and knowledge, those who wish to walk him as the way of righteousness through the divine commandments. And the lampstand is the holy Church, upon which the Word of God, shining in preaching, illumines all who are in this world as in a certain house, filling the minds of all with divine knowledge by the rays of truth. And by the mode of symbolic representation he has called the modius the synagogue of the Jews, that is, the bodily worship of the law, which by the thickness of the symbols in the letter keeps wholly indiscernible the light of the true knowledge that lies in the meanings.

Under which bushel the Word does not at all wish to be held, desiring to be set upon the height and the greatness of the beauty of the Church; for otherwise the Word, held fast by the letter of the law as by a bushel, would have deprived all of the eternal light, not granting spiritual contemplation to those who hasten to put off the senses as deceptive—and capable of receiving only deception and perceptive only of the corruption of the bodies connatural to them—but [hastening] to the lampstand, I mean the Church, that is, the rational worship in the Spirit, so that he might enlighten all, teaching those throughout the whole world to live and conduct themselves by the Word alone, and to have such care concerning bodies as to cut off entirely, through much concern, the soul's attachment to them, and to grant no imagination of matter at all to the soul, making it their work and zeal, now that there has been extinguished by the Word the [pleasure] which at the beginning thrust aside the Word and admitted the irrationality of pleasure, like a creeping serpent, through the senses; against which death was justly ordained, so that it might cease providing the devil with an entrance to the soul; for the senses, being one in kind, are fivefold in their forms, persuading the erring soul, through the perceptive activity in each form, to love the object of sense connatural to it instead of God. Therefore he who wisely follows the Word, before the forced and involuntary death, voluntarily condemns the flesh to death, making a complete separation of the will from the senses. So then, he who sits by the letter of Scripture alone has only the senses ruling his nature.

according to which only the soul's relation to the flesh is naturally made visible; for the letter, not understood spiritually, has only the sense that circumscribes its utterance and does not permit passage to the mind of the power of what is written. But if the letter has affinity only with the sense, everyone who receives the letter in a Jewish manner according to history alone lives according to the flesh, dying each day by sin through the living sense by his own choice with the death, unable to put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, so that he may live the blessed life in the Spirit; for "if you live according to the flesh, you are about to die," says the divine Apostle; "but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live." Let us not, then, having kindled the divine lamp, that is, the illuminating word of knowledge, through contemplation and action, place it under the bushel, lest we be condemned as circumscribing by the letter the incomprehensible power of wisdom, but upon the lampstand, I mean the holy Church, in the height of true contemplation, enlightening all with the light of the divine doctrines. This holy Church, perhaps, the law also, pre-announcing typically, commanded to become a lampstand all of gold, solid and wrought, in one respect as having nothing empty and no share in the power of the word, in another as completely smoothed of all material excess and having nothing earthly; which the great Zacharias, beholding wondrously with some alteration, says besides the lamp: "and seven lamps upon it.

Here the seven lamps must be understood by us in a different way from the lamp that the Word, having already taken it up beforehand, set forth in the Gospel. For not always, nor do all things that have the same wording, necessarily get understood in one and the same way; rather, each of the things said must be understood according to the capacity that underlies it—clearly, in the place of Holy Scripture—if we are going to rightly hit the mark of the purpose of what has been written. I therefore surmise that here the lamps mean Holy Scripture: the energies of the Holy Spirit, that is, the charisms of the Spirit, which the Word, as head of the whole body, naturally bestows on the Church. For it says, "And the Spirit of God shall rest upon him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and piety; the spirit of the fear of God shall fill him." And if Christ is the head of the Church according to the conception of his humanity, then to the Church has been given the one who by nature possesses the Spirit—the energies of the Spirit—as God. For to me the Word became man, and for me he works out the whole of salvation, giving back to me through my own things the things that are his by nature, through which he also became man; and, as one receiving through me, he makes the manifestation of his own things, and, as a lover of humanity, reckoning my grace as his own, while inscribing upon me the power of his own natural achievements, through which he is now said to receive what is naturally present to him, without beginning and beyond reason.

For the Holy Spirit, just as by nature and in essence he belongs to God the Father, so also by nature and in essence he is the Son's, since he proceeds ineffably from the Father through the Son, who was begotten essentially, and he grants to the lampstand—that is, to the Church—his own energies as lamps. For every energy of the Spirit, in the manner of a lamp that destroys darkness, is by nature fitted to drive out and expel from the Church the manifold generation of sin. For wisdom effects the removal of folly, understanding the removal of thoughtlessness, counsel the abolition of indiscretion, strength the expulsion of weakness, knowledge the obliteration of ignorance, and piety the pursuit of impiety and of the baseness of deeds that accompanies it, while fear drives away the hardening caused by contempt. For not only the commandments but also the operations of the Spirit are light. And again, those who kindle the light of salvation for the whole of life through the Church are lamps, as are the ranks that complete the good order within her. For example: the wise teacher of divine and lofty doctrines and mysteries is a lamp revealing what until then was not seen by the many; he who with understanding and knowledge listens to the wisdom spoken among the perfect is another lamp, as an intelligent hearer guarding within himself the light of the truth of what is spoken.

But the one who judges times in counsel, fittingly adapting them to circumstances, and devising for words the appropriate modes, and not allowing them to clash with one another in unseemly collision and be confounded—this man too, as a wonderful counselor, being another, has been shown to be a lamp. And the one who bears the assaults of involuntary temptations, like blessed Job and the noble martyrs, with an unshaken mind, is a strong lamp, himself also keeping the inextinguishable light of salvation in the manner of endurance according to courage, as one who has the Lord as his strength and his hymn. And the one who knows the devices of the evil one and is not ignorant of the entanglements of unseen wars—this man too, illumined by the light of knowledge, has appeared as another lamp, rightly agreeing with the great Apostle: "For we are not ignorant of his designs." And the one who pursues the life according to the commandment, piously flourishing in the virtues, is another lamp, as one who piously confirms his piety in his ways. And the one who by self-control has walled off the entrance of the passions against the soul by the expectation of judgment has become another lamp, eagerly cleansing by the fear of God the stains of the passions that have been rubbed into him, and by the removal of things contrary to nature making his life clear and bright from defilements.

The Holy Spirit, then, effects purification for those worthy of the purity of the virtues through fear, piety, and knowledge; and the illumination of the knowledge of the reasons according to which existing things subsist he grants through strength, counsel, and understanding to those worthy of light; and perfection he bestows through the all-radiant, simple, and complete wisdom on those worthy of deification, leading them directly to the cause of existing things in every way possible for a human being, known only from the divine properties of goodness themselves; according to which, knowing themselves from God and God from themselves, with nothing standing in between as a dividing wall—for there is nothing between wisdom and God—they will possess unchangeable immutability, since all things that were between them have been wholly crossed over, in which there once lay the danger of erring in knowledge, and since they have been led up by grace to that very infinite and endlessly infinite and infinitely beyond all things by nature summit, through unutterable speechlessness and silence and unknowing, ineffably and beyond comprehension.

And seven snuffers for the seven lamps that are above it." The account concerning the lamps, so far as it is for me to speak, has been given according to two approaches of contemplation; and the account concerning the snuffers will begin from here. They say that a snuffer is a certain vessel, cup-shaped, into which people are accustomed to put the oil poured out for the lamps, for the nourishment and preservation of the light. Therefore, according to the principle of spiritual interpretation, the snuffers of the seven lamps of the lampstand that was seen are the capacities receptive of the things that nourish and preserve the seven lamps—that is, the energies of the Spirit—namely, the habits and dispositions of various principles and modes and characters belonging to those who have received in the Church the distribution of the gifts. For just as it is impossible for a lamp to be kept unquenched without oil, so too, without a habit nourishing the good things with fitting principles and modes and characters, and again with fitting thoughts and reasonings, it is impossible for the light of the gifts to be kept unquenched. For every spiritual gift needs a closely fitting habit, pouring upon it unceasingly, like oil, the intelligible material, so that it may remain, held fast according to the habit of the one who received it.

The snuffers, then, of the seven lamps of the lampstand are the fitting dispositions of the divine charisms of the holy Church, from which, as from certain vessels, in accordance with the wise virgins in the Gospel, the wise and vigilant guardians of the goods that have been given pour the oil of exultation into the torches of the charisms. "And two olive trees above it, one on the right of its lamp, and one on the left." Well and very fittingly has the account arranged the whole vision, bending it evenly toward itself. For having spoken of a lampstand and a lamp and lamps and snuffers, it added also two olive trees. For it was necessary—truly it was necessary—that the generative cause of the power that preserves the light be conceived together with the light by nature, so that the light might not depart from the lampstand, extinguished through lack of nourishment. The two olive trees, therefore, of the golden lampstand, that is, of the holy catholic Church, are the two Testaments; from which, as from certain olives pressed out through pious seeking and inquiry, there is given forth, like oil, the power of the thoughts that nourishes the light of the divine charisms; and the disposition of each individual, being filled in proportion to its own power, keeps the light of the grace corresponding to it unquenchable, preserved as if by oil through the thoughts from the Scriptures.

For just as without olive trees it is in no way possible by nature to find genuine oil in truth, and without vessels it is impossible for the oil to be held by the one receiving it, and what is not nourished by oil is altogether extinguished (the light of the lampstand), so without the holy Scriptures there is no power of thoughts worthy of God in truth, and without a disposition receptive of thoughts, as of a vessel, a divine thought would in no way be established, and the light of the knowledge that is in the charisms, not being nourished by divine thoughts, is not kept inextinguishable by those who possess it. Therefore, rightly leading the vision up to spiritual contemplation, the word compared the lampstand to the Church, the lamp to the incarnate God who in accordance with the hypostasis put our nature around himself without change, the seven lamps to the charisms, that is, the energies, of the Spirit, as the great Isaiah clearly showed beforehand, the snuffers of the lamps to the receptive dispositions of the divine thoughts of Scripture in those who have received the divine charisms, and the two olive trees to the two Testaments, from which the power of divine thoughts, wisely cultivated, naturally issues forth, by which the light of the divine mysteries is kept inextinguishable as it is nourished.

And one," it says, "on the right of her lampstand and one on the left." I think the prophet means the more spiritual part of the word by "right," and the more bodily part by "left." And if the more bodily part of the word indicates the left, and the more spiritual part signifies the right, I take it that the Old Testament signifies the olive tree on the left, as being more concerned with the practical philosophy, and the New Testament the one on the right, as teacher of a new mystery and maker of the contemplative habit in each of the faithful. For the one provides modes of virtue, the other the principles of knowledge to those who philosophize about divine things; and the one, snatching the mind away from the mist of things seen, leads it up to what is akin to it, once it has become pure of all material fantasy, while the other purifies it from material attachment, striking out, as it were with a hammer, by the tension of courage, the nails that fix the mind to the body through attachment; and the Old Testament, having been reckoned as body in relation to soul, leads it up through the midst of the virtues, preventing the mind from descending to the body, while the New leads the mind up to God, winged by the fire of love; and the one makes the body the same as the mind in its movement by position, while the other makes the mind the same as God in the habit of grace, having so great a likeness to God that through it God is known—he who by nature from himself is in no way at all known by anyone—as an archetype through some image.

Let these things be so in this way according to this manner. But if anyone wishes also to take the force of what has been said as applying to each individual man, he will certainly not be at a loss for noble and pious contemplations. For he will be able to understand the lampstand as the soul of each person, wholly golden, as being by nature intellectual and rational, incorruptible and immortal, and honored with the most royal power of self-determination, having upon itself the little lamp of faith, that is, the Word who became flesh, believed by it firmly and truly served by it; upon which the lamp of the word, kindled by knowledge, is placed, according to the teaching and exhortation of God and the Word himself. For he says: "No one lights a lamp and puts it under the bushel, but on the lampstand, and it shines for all who are in the house," calling the lamp, perhaps, the word of knowledge according to action in the Spirit, that is, the law of the Spirit, and the bushel the earthly-mindedness of the flesh, that is, the passionate law of the body, under which the law of grace must not be placed, but upon the soul, the truly golden lampstand, so that, shining with the flashes of the works of righteousness and of wise thoughts for all who are in the house, that is, the Church or this world, it makes those who behold it imitators of the good, themselves also glorifying through the works of virtue, and not by mere utterance of words, the Father who is in the heavens, that is, God, who in the heights of the mystical contemplations of knowledge [directs] the works of righteousness that appear according to virtue among those

...generating magnificence for those who are worthy, "so that," he says, "they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in the heavens." In this way, then, he who delights in the intelligible contemplations of Holy Scripture will understand the lampstand that was seen and the small lamp according to the manner that has been set forth. And he will interpret the seven lamps as the division of the diverse gifts of the Spirit according to the explanation previously given—which gifts mystically shine upon and rest upon the one perfected in Christ through virtue and knowledge, since the word knows him who lives according to Christ to be a Christ, shining forth in the same manners and words, insofar as is lawful for a man, as one who himself has wisdom and understanding, counsel and strength, knowledge and piety and fear, through which, as through intelligible eyes, God is said to look upon all the earth of each one's heart. "For these are the seven eyes of the Lord," he says, "which look upon all the earth." "And seven funnels for the lamps that are upon it." The funnels are the states of those worthy of the division in the divine gifts, in respect of practice and contemplation; from these, as from certain vessels, pouring out, like oil, the power of the mystical meanings, they keep the light of the gifts of the Spirit unquenchable.

But he will understand the two olive trees, as I said before, as the two Testaments: the Old, on the left of the lamp, generating, as it were oil, for the cognitive part of the soul, that is, the contemplative, the modes of the virtues according to practice; and the New, on the right, generating ceaselessly, as it were oil, for the affective part of the soul, that is, the practical, the spiritual principles of knowledge according to contemplation, so that through both the light of theology, like a lamp, together with the connatural gifts of the Spirit, may be more strengthened, being supplied from the Old Testament with the modes that adorn knowledge through practice, and from the New Testament with the principles that illuminate the practice of the virtues through spiritual contemplation, and so that the mystery of our salvation may be brought to perfection into one beauty from both, making the life an exhibition of the principle and the principle the glory of the life, and practice a contemplation put into action, and contemplation a practice mystagogically enacted, and, to speak briefly, making virtue a manifestation of knowledge and knowledge a power preservative of virtue, and through both—I mean virtue and knowledge—displaying one wisdom constituted, so that we may know that the two Testaments agree with each other in all things according to grace, more for the completion of one mystery than soul and body concur with each other for the generation of one man according to composition.

But if anyone, ambitious for the contemplations that pertain to the intellect, should take up the passage and say that the two olive trees are the two laws—I mean the natural law and the spiritual law—he has not gone outside the truth. For the natural law, as being on the left of the lamp, that is, of God the Word who became flesh, will be understood as bringing forward, through the sense that is akin to it, the modes of virtue that are in perceptible things; while the intellectual, that is, the spiritual law, on the right, through the understanding that is akin to it, gathers up the principles that are in existing things for spiritual knowledge; through which, having filled the various capacities of the spiritual gifts, like the reservoirs of lamps, with practical and cognitive contemplations, we keep the light of truth unquenchable. But perhaps this passage of Scripture, understood more gnostically through the two olive trees, those on the right of the lamp and on the left, signifies providence and judgment, in the midst of which stands, as on the golden lampstand of the holy catholic Church or of the soul of each individual saint, illuminating the light of truth for all, the Word who, as God, encompasses the whole, and the things that are according to providence and judgment

Revealing the true and most universal principles of the cohesion of beings, according to which the mystery of our salvation—foreordained before all the ages and accomplished in the last times—has been established; of these principles we behold the providence, as an olive tree on the right of the lampstand, only through faith, in the ineffable manner of the hypostatic union of the Word with the rationally ensouled flesh; and the judgment, which is on the left, we understand ineffably in the mystery of the life-giving sufferings endured for our sake by God made flesh. For the one came about primarily by will, as being good, inasmuch as He is by nature the Savior of all; and the other He endured subsequently by voluntary forbearance, as being a lover of humanity, inasmuch as He is by nature the Redeemer of all. For God did not become man primarily in order to suffer, but in order to save man through sufferings, which man, who at the beginning was impassible, brought upon himself through the transgression of the divine commandment. The mystery of the incarnation of the Word according to providence is therefore on the right, as being effective of the deification of the saved—foreordained by grace before the ages, beyond nature—which no principle of beings whatsoever, by nature, will be able to attain.

The left-hand side is clearly the mystery of the judgment of the life-giving Passion of God, who willed to suffer in the flesh, inasmuch as it is effective for the complete removal of all the unnatural properties and motions that were introduced into nature by disobedience, and productive of the unerring restoration of all the properties and motions that were previously according to nature, according to which no principle of beings whatsoever will be found counterfeit; from these—I mean providence and judgment, incarnation and passion—because of the firm, pure, and incorruptible character of manly virtue and constancy in action, and because of the transparent and radiant character of mystical contemplation and knowledge, the holy fourfold of the Gospels has gone forth like a team of horses, as it were from between two bronze mountains, the Gospels which have traversed and gone around the whole earth and healed the wound of Adam's transgression and given rest to the Spirit of God through faith and the good citizenship in accordance with that faith in the land of the north, that is, among the nations, in which the darkness of ignorance prevailed and the darkness of sin tyrannized nature.

Or again, the power of the holy Gospels, equal in number to the four generic virtues, having encompassed, like the earth, the heart of the faithful and having gone around the wound that arose in them from the passions of dishonor, and having given rest to the Spirit of God through the practical activity of the commandments, showed the law of the Spirit shining forth in the land of the north, that is, in the flesh, through the works of righteousness. Or again, the two olive trees must be understood as contemplation and action; of these, the providence according to the incarnation gives the word (logos) of contemplation to appear, while the judgment according to the passion gives the manner of action to be enacted, since the one according to the soul is on the right of the Word, and the one according to the body is on the left, and the one calls the mind to kinship with God, while the other sanctifies the senses by the Spirit and removes the impressions of its passions. Or again, faith and a good conscience must be understood as the two olive trees, in the midst of which stands the Word, rightly worshipped by the faithful according to faith, and piously served according to a good conscience through mutual well-pleasing.

Or the two peoples, I mean those from the Gentiles and those from the Jews, the word likened to two olive trees; whom it also addressed as sons of fatness, as it were interpreting the olive trees through the birth in the Spirit and the grace of adoption unto deification; in the midst of whom stands the incarnate God, as upon a lampstand, of the one and only catholic Church, reconciling them to himself and to one another and making them productive of light, that which is according to virtue and knowledge. And perhaps the word mystically hinted at the soul and the body through the two olive trees, the one as flourishing with the words of true knowledge according to the olive tree, and the other as thickly covered with the practices of the virtues. But if the word of Scripture also hints through the two olive trees at the two worlds, I mean the intelligible and the sensible, it would be well understood also in this way: in the midst of which stands, as God, the Word, mystically delineating the intelligible world to appear in the sensible by means of types, and teaching the sensible world to be understood in the intelligible by means of its principles.

But if the vision according to the olives also prefigured the present life and the life to come, this manner of contemplation would also be well put: the Word stands in the midst of them, leading away from the one through virtue and leading back to the other through knowledge. Understanding this, perhaps the wondrous Habakkuk says, "You will be known in the midst of two living creatures," calling the two worlds—that is, ages—"living creatures," just as the great Zechariah called the bronze mountains and the olive trees, or their natural living forms, or the soul and the body, or practice and contemplation, or the state of the good and its activity, or the law and the prophets, or the whole Old and New Testament, or the two peoples, those from the Gentiles and those from the Jews, or the two laws, the natural and the spiritual, or faith and a good conscience. In the midst of these the Word stands, hymned and glorified through all things, and leading all things to one harmony of the good, as God of all, and for this reason having made all things, so that he might become for all things an indissoluble bond of the identity of the good in unity with one another. And the lampstand in the vision the word perhaps called the Church and the soul, as having the light of grace as something acquired by nature and capable of being restored, since the good belongs by nature to God alone, from whom all things that are receptive of light and goodness by nature are enlightened and made good by participation. And these things the word has gone through concerning these matters, taking care for due proportion. But do you yourself, having with God contemplated from yourself the things better than these, gladden, holy father, with the ever-shining rays of your mind my dim-sighted soul.

SCHOLIA 1. What is the lampstand? 2. How is the Church unalloyed gold? 3. How is it pure? 4. How is it undefiled? 5. How is it unstained? 6. How is it undiminished? 7. What is the lamp of the lampstand? 8. Not every man, he says, who comes into this world is altogether enlightened by the Word; for many remain unenlightened and share not in the light that comes by knowledge. But it is clear that every man who comes into the true world of the virtues by his own choice—for everyone who in truth, through voluntary birth, comes into this world of the virtues is altogether enlightened by the Word, receiving an unshakable habit of virtue and an unerring knowledge of true understanding. 9. How is God the Word made flesh also a lamp? 10. What is the bushel under which the lamp is not hidden? 11. By the senses he saw the woman, and by pleasure the serpent; for both stand diametrically opposed to the Word. 12. Because the senses, having taken the mind captive, teach polytheism, serving through each sense, in slavery to the passions, the innate sensible object as though it were divine.

13. Whom does the Word call the lamps? 14. See the greatness of grace; see the boundless sea of theology. 15. Whose are the gifts of the Spirit that set things right? 16. Who are the lamps in another mode of contemplation? 17. Fear, together with piety and knowledge, brings about the practical philosophy. Strength, counsel, and understanding set right the natural contemplation in the Spirit; but divine wisdom alone grants mystical theology. 18. He calls the substance of things perceptible and things intelligible "middle things," through which the human mind is naturally led up to God as the cause of beings. 19. Who, in the anagogical sense, are the snuffers of the lamps? 20. Who are the two olive trees? 21. A definitive and brief recapitulation of what has been contemplated. 22. What is the right, and what is the left? 23. The Old Testament, he says, being a symbol of action and virtue, prepares the body to be in harmony with the mind in its movement; but the New, being productive of contemplation and knowledge, illumines the mind that mystically holds fast to it with divine gifts.

24. Another specific mode of contemplation, referring to each person's soul—both the lampstand and what belongs to the lampstand. 25. Who is the lamp? 26. He is called, and becomes by grace, Father of those, he says, who have a purely volitional birth in the Spirit; according to which, having as it were the face of the soul—the impress of the God who begot them, visible in the virtues—in their manner of life, they prepare those who behold them to glorify God through the transformation of their ways, offering their own life to them as an outstanding example of virtue for imitation. For God is not by nature glorified by mere word, but by works of righteousness, which cry out the divine magnificence far more than word. 27. Who should we understand the seven lamps to be? 28. Who are the snuffers? 29. Who are the two olive trees? 30. The Old, he says, supplies to the contemplative the modes of the virtues; the New grants to the practical the principles of true knowledge. 31. That he calls the practical the passible part of the soul. 32. He who shows knowledge embodied by practice, he says, and practice ensouled by knowledge, has found the precise mode of true deification. But he who holds either of these separated from the other has either made knowledge a substanceless fantasy, or has established practice as a soulless idol. For knowledge without practice differs nothing from fantasy, since it does not possess practice as subsistent; and practice without reason is the same as a soulless idol, since it does not possess knowledge to ensoul it.

33. Just as soul and body produce a human being by composition, so practice and contemplation produce a single wisdom by their union—a wisdom that is knowing; and the Old and New Testaments bring about one mystery. 34. The natural law is on the left, on account of the senses; it leads the modes of the virtues to the Word, and produces knowledge that is active. But the spiritual law is on the right, on account of the intellect; it mingles the spiritual principles in existing things with the senses, and produces practice that is reasoned. 35. Providence, he says, is shown in the Word's being united to flesh according to hypostasis; and judgment is seen in his consenting to suffer in the flesh on our behalf; through these two, union and suffering, the salvation of the whole has come to be. 36. The incarnation, he says, came about for the salvation of nature; but the sufferings, for the redemption of those held by death because of sin. 37. The mystery, he says, of the incarnation removes the unnatural properties of human nature, and restores those that are according to nature. 38. Providence and judgment, incarnation and suffering, he has understood as bronze mountains; from these the fourfold of the Gospels comes forth.

39. He understood the nations as a land of the north—nations that once existed, as it were, in a region of darkness through the error of ignorance, but now have come to be in a region of light, through the knowledge of the truth, according to the grace of the holy fourfoldness of the Gospels, as of incorruptible elements, having been remolded through faith into eternal life according to the inner and spiritual human being. 40. Another contemplation of the four horses. 41. Another contemplation of the olive trees. 42. The contemplative man, he says, has the visible meaning of the incarnation according to providence; the practical man shows the manner of the judgment of the sufferings of the Word being worked out. 43. Another contemplation concerning the olive trees. 44. Another contemplation concerning the same. 45. Another contemplation concerning them. 46. Another contemplation concerning the two olive trees. 47. He who understands the visible world contemplates the intelligible world; for he impresses the intelligible things upon sense by forming images, and shapes the meanings that have been seen according to the mind; and he transfers the constitution of the intelligible world to sense in many forms, and the composition of the sensible world to the mind in many intricate ways; and he understands the sensible in the intelligible, having transferred sense to the mind by means of meanings; and the intelligible in the sensible, having wisely transmuted the mind to sense by means of impressions.

48. Another contemplation concerning the same things. 64. CONCERNING JONAH AND HIS PROPHECY. (64. QUESTION 64: What meaning does the saying in the prophet Jonah concerning Nineveh have, which says, "in which dwell more than twelve myriads of men, who did not know their right hand or their left hand," since from the letter I find no single consolation? For he did not say "children," so that I might suppose it concerns infants, but "men." And what man, having his wits unharmed, does not know his right hand or his left? But tell me who the men are, and what is the right hand and what is the left, according to the principle of spiritual interpretation. Answer. None of the persons or places or times or other things recorded in Scripture—whether animate or inanimate, perceptible or intelligible—always has its history or contemplation wholly consistent with itself when understood in the same manner. Therefore one who pursues without stumbling the divine knowledge of Holy Scripture must receive each of the enumerated things differently, according to the differences of what is done or said, and duly assign to each the contemplation that befits it according to place or time. For the name of each of the things signified in Scripture is polysemous according to the force of the Hebrew tongue, which we find clearly here as well.

For Jonah is interpreted, according to various pronunciations, as "rest" and "gift of God" and "healing of God" and "grace of God to them" and "labor of God" and "dove" and "flight of beauty" and "their distress." And he comes to be both in Joppa and in the sea and in the sea-monster and in Nineveh and under the gourd-plant. And Joppa is interpreted as "watchtower of joy" and "wondrous beauty" and "powerful joy." Therefore Jonah the prophet bears a type both of Adam and of the common nature and of Christ and of the prophetic grace and of the ungrateful people of the Jews, who are distressed at every good thing and always begrudge the divine graces. For example, he bears a type of Adam and of the common nature, fleeing from Joppa into the sea and for this reason, according to the force of his name, being called "flight of beauty." And Joppa signifies, being typified in it, Paradise—the true "watchtower of joy," both being and being named, and "powerful joy" and "wondrous beauty" because of the wealth of incorruption in it, whatever this Paradise may be, which was planted by the hand of God; for "the Lord God," it says, "planted a Paradise in Eden, and placed there the man whom he had formed"—and what the trees in it are, whether contemplated or understood, and what the tree of life in the middle of the Paradise is; of all these Adam, having received the command to eat, perhaps did not even touch them; for "from every tree," it says, "of the Paradise you shall eat for food." And again Joppa signifies virtue and knowledge and the wisdom that is upon them.

virtue, when it is interpreted as "wondrous beauty," and knowledge, when it is taken as "watchfulness of joy," and wisdom, whenever it signifies the "mighty" joy, according to which man, being perfected, receives the ineffable joy, the mighty and truly sustaining joy of man's constitution according to God and divine, since wisdom is a tree of life to all who hold fast to it, according to what is written, "and to those who lean upon it, as upon the Lord, it is sure." For we see the nature of men always fleeing Joppa, that is, the grace of the habit of virtue and knowledge and of the wisdom based on them, as Adam fled paradise through disobedience, because its mind is diligently set upon evil things, and being willingly dragged down into the sea—I mean the salt-water of sin—just as the forefather Adam, having fallen out of paradise into this world, was rolled down, and diligently cherishing the unstable and otherwise salt-bearing and borne-along error and confusion of material things; of which the gain to those who hold fast to it is only so much as to be sunk and swallowed by the sea-monster and to have water poured over him even to the soul and to be encircled by the uttermost abyss and to sink his head into the clefts of the mountains and to descend into the earth whose bars are eternal holders, as being clearly the bottom of the uttermost abyss—the earth that is truly dark and murky, a land of eternal darkness, in which there is no light nor to see the life of mortals, as somewhere says the great Job, who contended in great contests for the truth.

The prophet signifies Adam, that is, the common nature of humanity, mystically prefiguring these things in himself: the nature that slipped away from the divine goods as from Joppa and was carried down to this misery of life, as though to a sea, and was sunk in the unstable and much-resounding deep of attachment to material things, and was swallowed by the noetic whale, the insatiable beast, the devil, and received the water of temptations in evil poured around it from every side—even to the soul—so that life was encompassed by temptations and encircled by the uttermost abyss, that is, the mind was bound by complete ignorance and the reason was flooded by the great weight of evil, and the head sank into the clefts of the mountains, that is, the first principle of faith concerning the Monad, which is the head of the whole body of the virtues, was shut up as into certain lightless clefts of the mountains—the thoughts of the evil powers—and was divided into many opinions and fantasies; for the word called the clefts of the mountains the notions concerning error of the spirits of wickedness that lie somewhere in the depth of the uttermost abyss of ignorance; and it went down to the earth whose bars are its eternal holders, that is, it was carried down to a state utterly destitute of all divine sense and deprived of the life-giving motion of the virtues, a state having no perception whatsoever of goodness and no motion of the soul toward God by way of longing.

on which he has walked, as it were an abyss, the darkness of ignorance and the incomparable depth of evil, and the mountains of error have taken root—I mean the spiritual mountains of wickedness; into whose clefts human nature first crept and afterward became a base because of its most evil disposition, as being receptive of their error and wickedness; the nature that has, as it were eternal bars, the inward attachments to material things, which do not allow the mind, once it has been freed from the darkness of ignorance, to see the light of true knowledge; this disposition, whatever it may be, as I said a little before, the great Job hinted at when he said: "a land dark and gloomy," a land of eternal darkness; dark, indeed, as being destitute of all true knowledge and contemplation, and gloomy as being deprived of every virtue and action; in which, he says, "there is no light," that is, of knowledge and truth, "nor can one see the life of mortals," clearly the conduct befitting rational beings. (These things happen in him, perhaps, whenever the prophet, imprinting in himself the passions of humanity, into which it wretchedly cast itself, appropriates the things of the common nature, and the meaning of the name is fittingly applied to him who prefigures Adam, being interpreted "flight of beauty.")

But when he prefigures beforehand the God who for our sake became in our own [nature], through flesh endowed with a rational soul, without sin alone, and traces beforehand the mystery of the economy and of the sufferings that pertain to it, he signifies the descent from the heavens into this world by the passage from Joppa into the sea; and he reveals the mystery of death and burial and resurrection by being swallowed by the sea monster and being given up unharmed after three days and three nights; and for this reason, fittingly, in accordance with the power of his calling, he is well named "rest" and "healing of God" and "grace of God to them," and perhaps also "labor of God" because of his voluntary passion. For the true rest of those who have grown weary in pains and the healing of the broken and the grace of the forgiveness of sins—Christ Jesus, the true God—the prophet mystically traced beforehand through his own deeds.

For our Lord and God himself, having become man and dwelt in the sea of our life here, as from the heaven of Joppa—which is interpreted “watchtower of joy”—into the sea of this present life, according to what is written, “who, for the joy set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame,” and into the heart of the earth, where the evil one held us confined, having swallowed us down through death, he descended willingly, and by his resurrection drawing us up and leading the whole captive nature back up to heaven, is truly our rest and healing and grace—rest, as loosing the law of bondage in the flesh (because of the temporary life), healing, as having healed the fracture of death and corruption through the resurrection, and grace, as the distributor of adoption as sons in the Spirit to God the Father through faith, and of the grace of deification worthily to each. For it was necessary, truly necessary, that the light and the power of God the Father come into that earth in which the darkness and the eternal bars were, so that, loosing the darkness of ignorance, as being the Father’s light, and shattering the bars of wickedness as the subsistent power of God, he might set free the nature terribly secured by these things by the evil one, granting it the unquenchable light of true knowledge and the indestructible power of the virtues.

But when the prophetic grace, as from a certain Joppa—that is, from the bodily worship of the law formerly considered glorious—passing over in gospel fashion to the Gentiles and leaving the Jewish people desolate of the joy that is according to it because of their unbelief, and through many afflictions and dangers and straits and toils and persecutions and deaths turning the Church of the Gentiles, like Nineveh, back to God—the prophet mystically prefigures this in himself, and leaves Joppa, signifying that the grace of prophecy departs from the worship according to the law and comes into the sea of involuntary circumstances and into the surge of the uprisings in persecutions and of the struggles and toils and dangers that follow them, and is swallowed by the sea monster of death, yet in no way wholly destroyed. For nothing that exists could hinder the course of the grace proclaimed in gospel fashion to the Gentiles—neither affliction nor distress nor persecution nor famine nor danger nor sword; on the contrary, through these the grace was confirmed, prevailing over all who rose up against it and conquering its attackers more in suffering than they, and it turned the wandering nature back to the living and true God, as Jonah turned Nineveh. And even if the evil one seemed, through the malice of persecutions, to cover over the grace as the sea monster covered the prophet, yet he could not hold it to the end, being unable to alter the strength of the power that works the grace.

Hence he also made the grace shine forth more brightly in his disciples after the trial from the adversaries, to the very extent that he himself, by the assaults, was being consumed in his own strength, seeing that grace was altogether invincible to him, and that even the natural weakness of the saints who proclaimed it to the nations became a power destructive of his own dominion and utterly annihilating every height raised up against the knowledge of God, and that what seemed to be bodily capture by the assaults was rather being made strong spiritually. Having learned this by experience from suffering, Paul—who became in newness of spirit, not in oldness of letter, the prophetic grace in Christ unto the nations, the great trumpet of truth—says, "We have this treasure in earthen vessels," calling the word of grace a treasure, and an earthen vessel this passible body, or the plainness of speech in the word according to utterance that is reckoned as such, which conquered all the wisdom of the world, or contained, as far as is attainable, the wisdom of God that is altogether uncontainable by the world, and filled the whole inhabited world with the light of true knowledge that is according to it, "so that the exceeding greatness of the power," he says, "may be of God and not from us; in everything afflicted but not straitened, perplexed but not utterly at a loss, persecuted but not forsaken, cast down but not destroyed, always carrying about the dying of Jesus in the body, so that the life of Jesus may also be made manifest in our body.

For we who live are always being delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our mortal flesh; so then death is at work in us, but life in you. For those who became heralds of the Word of grace, enduring death blamelessly in sufferings by their voluntary choice for the sake of truth, were at work bringing to the nations the life in the Spirit through the knowledge of truth; and this is exactly what Jonah also mystically suffered beforehand in himself, he who prefigured this grace, having himself endured so many dangers, so that he might turn the Ninevites from their error to God, and for this reason, according to the power inherent in the name, being rightly interpreted as “gift of God” and “labor of God.” For the grace of prophecy directed toward the nations is a gift of God, and truly a gift both dear and loving to mankind, and a divine labor and one worthy of praise: a gift, in that it bestows the light of true knowledge and provides incorruption of life to those who receive it; and a labor of God, in that it persuades its servants to take pride in labors for the sake of truth and teaches them to be widened more by sufferings than by comforts—those who are exceedingly anxious about the life in the flesh—making for them the natural weakness of the flesh in regard to suffering an occasion of surpassing power according to the Spirit.

For the word of grace, passing through many trials to the nature of men—that is, to the Church of the Gentiles—just as Jonah passed through many afflictions to Nineveh, the great city, persuaded the ruling law of nature to rise from its throne, that is, from its former disposition toward evil according to sense, and to take off its robe—I mean to put away the conceit of worldly glory in its manners—and to clothe itself in sackcloth, that is, mourning and the harsh and rough conduct of hardship, which is fitting for a life according to God, and to sit upon ashes. Ashes are the poverty of the spirit, upon which sits everyone who is taught to live piously and who has the scourge of conscience lashing him for the sins he has committed. And the Word of grace, being preached, persuades not only the king to believe in God, but also the men—that is, those who make up the nature of men—convincing them to confess with one voice that God is the Maker and Judge of all things, and to proclaim it faithfully, preparing them for the perfect abstention from their former evil practices, and to clothe themselves in sackcloth, from the least to the greatest of them, that is, to pursue eagerly the mortifying hardship of the passions. By “small and great” here, according to the principle of spiritual interpretation, I understand those who are caught by the word in lesser and greater vice.

And the men of Nineveh believed in God,” it says, “and they proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth, from the least of them even to the greatest of them. And the word came near to the king of Nineveh, and he rose up from his throne and took off his robe from himself and put on sackcloth and sat upon ashes. And it was proclaimed and spoken to Nineveh by the king and by his nobles, saying: Let the men and the cattle and the oxen and the sheep taste nothing, nor feed, and let them not drink water.” The king of nature, as I said, is the law of nature; and its rulers are the rational, the irascible, and the appetitive; and the men of this city—that is, of nature—are, in a single conception, those who stumble in reason and hold a mistaken knowledge concerning God and divine things; and the cattle are those who err in accordance with appetite and, through bodily passions, bear the burden of pleasure; and the oxen are those who cast down every motion of anger toward the acquisition of earthly things (for they say that the blood of the ox, when drunk, brings death immediately to the one who drinks it; and blood is plainly a symbol of anger). And they say that the sheep—that is, the blameworthy ones—are those who, foolishly and by sense alone, graze toward passion, as on grass, the contemplation of visible things.

For we surmise that all these things stand in a blameworthy sense in this passage of Scripture, until the word, taking them up, should change them for the better. Hence the word adds to these things, saying, "Let them not taste nor feed, and let them not drink water," evidently forbidding the former causes that established the passions in each of the things said; and when these are done away, showing the change for the better of those once entangled in evil practices, it adds: "And the men and the cattle put on sackcloth, and they cried out earnestly to the Lord God; and each turned back from his evil way and from the injustice that was in their hands." Let us understand, as I said, that "men" are those who, according to the erroneous judgment of the word, are held fast by the passions of the soul, and "cattle" are those who, for pleasure, through the misuse of anger and desire, are fastened to bodily passions—all of them, as it were, putting on sackcloth, the mortification of the members upon the earth, that is, of the whole earthly law and mind, and crying out earnestly, that is, with a great voice, namely with boldness against lawlessness, confessing the license of their former sins, and departing, as from a road, from the course according to habit and from the injustice that is wrought, as it were in their hands, in their deeds.

Thus, then, when Nineveh is understood as the common nature—that is, the Church of the Gentiles—it continually shows Jonah preaching in it, that is, the word of prophetic grace, and each day turning the erring back to God. But if we understand Nineveh in relation to the contemplation of each individual, we say that the city—the great city—is the soul of each person, to which the Word of God is sent when it is transgressing the law, to proclaim repentance unto life.

We understand its king to be the mind, its rulers the natural powers, its people the passionate thoughts, its cattle the movements of the body according to desire, its oxen the acquisitive movements of the irascible part toward material things, its sheep the movements of sense perception grasping sensible things without reason; and the king, the mind, as if rising from a throne, departs from its former state of ignorance and, like a garment, lays aside the false opinion about beings, and, like sackcloth, puts on repentance for its evil thoughts, and sits upon ashes, the state of poverty of spirit, and commands the people and the cattle and the oxen and the sheep to fast from the food of vice and the drink of ignorance—that is, to abstain from the practice of evils and from the sensually erring contemplation—and to put on sackcloth, that is, the state that mortifies unnatural passions but procures natural virtues and forms of knowledge, and to cry out to God earnestly, plainly to confess their former deeds with intensity, and by humility to propitiate the one who is able to grant forgiveness of past sins, and to ask for unswerving power of purpose toward the activity and guard of better things from the one who readily grants this to those who ask, and, as from an evil path, to restrain the mind from its former error and to lay aside the inventive habit of vice from the practical powers of the soul.

Into this great city, that is, the common nature of human beings, or the Church gathered from the nations, or the soul of each individual—saved through the word of virtue and knowledge, that is, of faith and a good conscience—there are more than twelve myriads of men, who have not known their right hand or their left. I suspect that Scripture here says twelve myriads, in accordance with the principles of spiritual interpretation, the principles concerning time and nature, that is, the comprehensive knowledge of visible nature together with things not without it. For if the number twelve is composed of five and seven, and nature is fivefold because of the senses, while time is sevenfold, then the number twelve clearly signifies nature and time. And it was with deliberate significance that he said more than twelve myriads of men, so that we might know that this number has been circumscribed and surpassed by the greater number, who in an undefined manner make for themselves a quantity beyond the number twelve. Therefore the all-praiseworthy Church of God, having those who in virtue and knowledge have passed beyond the principles concerning time and nature, and have crossed over to the magnificence of eternal and intelligible realities, has more than twelve myriads of men who do not know their right hand or their left. For the man who through lawful virtue puts away the passions of the flesh as things on the left, and through faultless knowledge is not captured by the disease of self-inflating conceit over his achievements as things on the right—such a man has come to not know his right hand, as one who does not love glory that passes away, nor his left hand, as one who is not provoked by the passions of the flesh.

The Word, then, as it seems, called the right hand the vainglory that arises from supposed successes, and the left hand the licentiousness that arises from shameful passions. Every soul that is illumined by the contemplations of intelligible things possesses these men who do not know their right hand or their left. For every soul that has concentrated its intellectual power upon the contemplation of nature and time has, as it were, men who have passed beyond the number twelve—namely, the natural principles of reason—since it no longer labors over the principles that are under nature and time, but is occupied with the understanding and knowledge of the divine mysteries, and for this reason does not know its right hand or its left. For the knowledge of the virtues according to reason—that is, the true recognition, in actual practice, of the cause of the virtues—is by nature such as to produce a complete ignorance of the excess and deficiency that lie on either side of the mean of the virtues, as of a right hand and a left. For if nothing at all that is according to reason is by nature irrational, then clearly the one who has been led up to the reason of the virtues will in no way recognize the position of things contrary to reason; for it is not possible to contemplate both opposites at the same time and at once, and to know the one as it is simultaneously revealed together with the other. For if there is no principle of unbelief in faith, nor is light by nature the cause of darkness, nor is the devil by nature revealed together with Christ, it is clear that nothing at all contrary to reason coexists with reason.

But if the irrational cannot wholly be comprehended by the rational principle, the one who has been led up to the rational principle of the virtues does not know the position of things contrary to reason, as I said—knowing virtue only as it is, and not as it is supposed to be—and for this reason he knows neither the right hand through excess nor the left hand through deficiency; for in both the irrational is clearly seen. For if the rational principle is the boundary and measure of beings, then to move beyond the boundary and beyond the measure, or again above the boundary and above the measure, is equal to irrationality, and for this reason is irrational. For both equally bring upon those who move in this way the fall from that which truly is: the one persuades them to make their course unclear and their motion undefined, having no goal—God—preconceived as its end because of the mind's lack of measure, fashioning for themselves a right hand more right than the right; the other persuades them to make their motion according to sense alone, beyond the goal, because of the mind's weakness thinking the end preconceived to be what is circumscribed for them by sense. These things he does not know, not suffering them, who is united to the rational principle of virtue alone and has circumscribed for himself every motion of the power proper to the mind, and for this reason is able to think nothing beyond the rational principle or contrary to the rational principle.

But if anyone wishes ambitiously to raise his mind to a higher conception, he will understand the right hand to mean altogether the principles of incorporeal beings, and the left hand those of bodies; principles which the mind that has been raised in an unhindered way toward the cause of beings will wholly not know, since it contemplates no principle in God, who in his essence is beyond every principle, above every cause. Toward him, having been gathered up from all beings, it knows no principle of those things from which it has departed, beholding ineffably only the one toward whom it has come by grace. God knows how to spare these men and such as these, and for their sake the whole world, men who in truth do not know their own blameworthy right hand or left, since nearly all things are taken in Scripture both praiseworthily and blameworthily—even though the envious one, the enemy of all philanthropy, who labors for the salvation of men and therefore dares to fight against God's very goodness, the ungrateful, thankless, and man-hating people of the Jews, is torn with rage and refuses life and makes a cause of mourning the salvation of the Gentiles in Christ; because of their folly, judging the gourd to be far better, he mourned when he saw it withered by the worm. For I said beforehand that the great Jonah prefigured in himself typically the madness of the Jews as well, not himself suffering any of the things that belong to the Jews—may it not be!—but in himself exposing beforehand their impiety, because of which they fell from their former glory, as from a kind of Joppa.

For this reason the Holy Spirit mystically gave it such an appellation, one that is able, according to its varied interpretation, to indicate the disposition of all things prefigured in it. When, then, it typologically convicts beforehand in it the folly of the Jews—grieving at the salvation of the nations and confounded at the paradox of the calling, and refusing and blasphemously, contrary to the divine will, preferring death to life because of the withered gourd—it is interpreted as “their distress,” which the Word, exposing it, mentions: “And God saw their works,” speaking, that is, concerning the Ninevites, “that they turned from their evil ways, and God repented of the evil which he had spoken to do to them, and he did not do it. And Jonah was grieved with great grief and was confounded and said: Now, O Lord Master, take my soul from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And again: “And the Lord God commanded a worm early the next day, and it struck the gourd and it withered; and it came to pass as soon as the sun arose, and the Lord commanded a scorching wind, and the sun struck upon the head of Jonah; and he was faint-hearted and refused his life and said: It was better for me to die than to live.

Nineveh, then, is the Church of the Gentiles, which received the word of grace and turned away from its former deception of idols, and for this reason was saved and deemed worthy of the glory of the heavens. The booth that Jonah made for himself after going out of the city prefigures the earthly Jerusalem and the temple made with hands in it. The gourd foretold the temporary shadow, in the letter alone, of the law of bodily worship, having nothing at all that is lasting or able to brighten the mind. The worm is our Lord and God Jesus Christ, as he himself says concerning himself in the prophet David: "I am a worm and not a man"—a worm because of the flesh he took on without seed, and truly becoming and being called so. For just as the worm has no coupling and no intercourse preceding its generation, so neither did any intercourse precede the Lord's generation according to the flesh. And besides, as a bait for the deception of the devil, he wrapped that flesh around the hook of his divinity, so that, as

The noetic dragon is insatiable: because the flesh is by nature easy to catch, he gaped wide to swallow it, but he was pierced by the hook of divinity and vomited it all up—the whole human nature, which the holy flesh of the Word, taken from us, had already swallowed down—so that, just as he had previously swallowed man down by baiting him with the hope of divinity, so too afterward, having been baited by the display of humanity, he would vomit up the one who had been deceived by the expectation of divinity, being himself deceived by the expectation of humanity; and so that the surpassing greatness of divine power might be made manifest through the weakness of the nature that was defeated, as it conquered the strength of the conqueror, and God might be shown to be the greater victor over the devil, using the display of flesh as his means, than the devil was over man, when he promised a nature of divinity. This worm struck the gourd and withered it—I mean the legal worship—and abolished it as a shadow, and withered the conceit of the Jews that rested upon it. "And it came to pass on the next day, as soon as the sun arose": "the next day," because after the passing of the typical enigmas according to the law and the appointed time of the bodily worship under it, the grace of the new mystery arose, making another day of higher knowledge and God-inspired virtue and of the contemplative vision belonging to those who cling to it.

For after he struck this worm and this sun—for he is both worm and sun of righteousness (36), the one because he was born of the flesh without seed and his conception surpasses every thought, the other because for my sake he came under the earth according to the mystery of death and burial, and as eternal light, existing by nature through himself, rose from the dead through the resurrection—God commanded a scorching spirit of burning heat, and the sun struck Jonah on the head. For after the rising of the sun of righteousness, that is, the resurrection and ascension of the Lord, the scorching heat of temptations came upon the Jews who remained unrepentant, and it struck them on their heads by just judgment, turning back, as it is written, their pain upon their heads, just as they themselves had beforehand prayed against themselves, saying: "His blood be upon us and upon our children." For clearly after the resurrection and ascension of the Savior, the vengeance through the Gentiles came upon them as a spirit of exceedingly scorching heat, and my sun struck and cast down the glory and the power of the whole nation, as it were its head; against which, closing the eyes of their mind, they did not recognize the light of truth that shone upon them.

Or again, it is a scorching wind that is raised up against the Jews who disobey the word of grace (37)—a forsaking that withholds the rain of knowledge and the dew of prophecy, and moreover dries up the natural spring of the pious thoughts of the heart, brought upon them justly, since they filled their hands with innocent blood and betrayed the truth to falsehood, and denied the Word of God who came for the salvation of the human race, unchangeably, in a form like ours; and for this reason they were handed over to the autonomy of error, in which it is impossible to find, in any way, a disposition moistened by piety and the fear of God, but only a dry and waterless mind, colored by every base passion—a mind which only conceit can characterize, a cursed passion consisting of a combination of two evils, pride and vainglory. Of these, pride (38) denies the cause of virtue and of nature, while vainglory makes both nature and virtue itself spurious. For nothing is done by the proud man according to God, and nothing proceeds by the vainglorious man according to nature. The mixture of these is conceit: having contempt toward God, by which it is wont blasphemously to slander providence, and possessing alienation toward nature, by which all things of nature are contrary to nature

He handles it, corrupting the comeliness of nature by his manner of misuse. And to speak briefly, the people of the Jews, having been handed over to the typhonic demon because of their unbelief in Christ to be bound in mind, have hated God and humans alike: holding God lower than the pleasure of the flesh, and for this reason rejecting worship in the Spirit, while regarding humans who do not trace their lineage by the flesh from Jacob as wholly alien to the Creator, and for this reason making the study of divine well-pleasing to be murder against us—the vain one, as it seems, having failed to understand in his folly that a body is not so able to bring about kinship with God and nearness of race as the soul is, carrying the same stamp of faith as the rest, and the same inward disposition of mind toward the good in all, by which the law of the flesh is wholly extinguished, and the Word of God alone through the Spirit shines forth clearly, uniting all in mind to the knowledge of one God and to one love and harmony toward one another, by which no one is wholly separated from anyone in spirit, even if they stand far apart from one another bodily according to the position of their places. The scorching wind, then, is pride—the passion that hates God and humanity together. For it dries up the heart of the unbelievers, withering the pious thoughts concerning the Godhead and the right reasonings concerning nature, after the image of the scorching heat.

For they say that this wind arises from the mingling of the east and south winds, and for this reason dries up the moisture scattered over the earth. And they say it is also called Euroclydon and Typhonic: the one because it stirs up confusion of earth and sea from every side, the other because it produces parching darkness, which is what conceit is shown to do. For it brings great confusion upon the soul and fills the mind with the darkness of ignorance. This scorching heat of conceit God stirred up after their drunken outrage against Christ—that is, He permitted it to come upon the Jews, who possessed a disposition suited to it, so that their choice regarding God and men might become evident to all. Hence, swallowed up by the gloom of ignorance, they willingly thrust themselves into the portion opposed to God, having nothing at all except to be distressed and disquieted over the salvation and glory of the nations in respect of the faith, and over the abolition of the legal ordinances among them according to the flesh, saying, "And now, Lord, take our souls from us, for it is better for us to die than to live," because of the withered gourd—I mean the worship in the shadows of the law, which was abolished, the worship that came under night and came to be and passed away, so that, circumscribed by the riddles and types of symbols alone, it had no illumination of the mind nor power to brighten the thought of the soul.

But let us spiritually, through faith and the righteousness that accompanies it, greet the spiritual Nineveh—I mean the Church gathered from the Gentiles, which is truly established as a great city to God, as it is written, and was saved through repentance by the three days appointed for its conversion—and let us strive to become citizens of this city that is great to God, through repentance and change for the better. For the account says with careful precision that the city is great to God, speaking thus: "Now Nineveh was a great city to God." Where does the Jew, caring for truth, find this exact statement written in Scripture concerning the earthly city of Jerusalem? For nowhere—though I have often read all of Holy Scripture—have I found it written that "Jerusalem was a great city to God." And who, trusting in the power of reason and the wealth of thoughts, could by defining it measure the greatness of the city that both is and is called great to God?

To me this is altogether puzzling, but I think that it is so also to everyone who is intelligent in understanding and has perceived even a little of the divine majesty, and who does not fail to recognize that the divine judgments must be similar to God. But how is the first city of the Assyrians a great city to God—where the confusion of error existed, where the kingdom of idolatrous madness was established, which is very far from the so-called holy land and from what was promised to the bodily Israel—unless God, seeing beforehand the greatness of the faith of the Church from the Gentiles, which is bounded by no reckoning, accepted the future as present, and brought in what was until then alien, and made what was once most worthless because of its godlessness to be godly in reason and most honorable, having its greatness defined by no reckoning, as he said plainly through the prophet: "And Nineveh was a great city to God"; to which the word of prophetic grace was sent and proclaimed the blessed overthrow, saying: "Yet three days and Nineveh shall be overthrown." Having come to the place of this appointed term of days, I think I shall pass over the other things, as many as can be said by those who interpret the passage, and I shall consider only this with exact observation, and say what will perhaps be found to be spoken not outside the truth. Therefore, hearing the prophet proclaim definitively, "Yet three days and Nineveh shall be overthrown," I accept the sentence against Nineveh as unalterable—or rather, to speak more properly, that the visitation will be for Nineveh.

For I understand that after the three days—which the prophet, being typically in the belly of the sea-monster, prefigured beforehand in himself, foreshadowing the Lord's three-day burial and resurrection—the word was awaiting another three days, in which the light of the truth was to be demonstrated, and the true fulfillment of the foretold mysteries, and the destruction of the city was altogether to take place; no longer prefiguring the truth of the Savior's burial and resurrection as something future, but clearly showing the truth itself accomplished in actual events, of which the preceding three days according to Jonah in the sea-monster were a prefiguration. For if every type is of the truth that is awaited, and according to the type Jonah spent three days in the belly of the sea-monster, it is clear that the truth, following the type in reality, was destined to show the mystery in a novel manner and to have the Lord spend three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, according to the Lord's own voice saying: "As Jonah was in the belly of the sea-monster three days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights." For to say "yet three days" indicates covertly that another three had passed, since "yet" would not have been used, that is, three days will come again and Nineveh will be destroyed.

Therefore the type did not destroy Nineveh according to the divine sentence, but the truth did—concerning which he said, "Yet three days," as if he were saying, "Yet three days after the type shown in me, there will be a more mystical burial and a greater resurrection, and Nineveh will be destroyed." But someone may perhaps raise a question, saying: How is God true when he gives a verdict of destruction and does not destroy? To this we say that he is true, destroying and saving the same city—doing the one by the setting aside of error, and accomplishing the other by the adoption of true knowledge, or rather, putting error to death through faith being brought to life again, and procuring salvation by the death of error. For Nineveh is interpreted as "dry blackening" and "smoothest beauty." Therefore, in agreement with the force of the interpretation, the Lord, after the three-day burial and resurrection, destroyed the dry blackening of error that had accrued to nature from transgression, and the smoothest [beauty] from the obedience of faith

He renewed the beauty of nature, again displaying in nature the beauty of incorruption at the resurrection, exceedingly smooth and in no way roughened by anything material. This saying will apply both to the common nature and to the holy Church and to the soul of each individual who, through faith and a good conscience, has put off the image of the old and earthly Adam and has put on the image of the heavenly one. Therefore it has been shown clearly that the prophet has a manifold contemplation concerning him, according to the power of the name, since each of the places in his Scripture fittingly applies according to the emphasis of the interpretation. For it signifies, on the one hand, when interpreted as "flight of beauty," Adam and the common nature; and on the other, when called "rest" and "healing of God" and "labor of God," our Lord and God, according to the power of the exposition that has been given. And indicating the "grace" of the preaching through the wealth of the Spirit in it, it is called "dove" and "gift of God" and "labor of God," on account of the many struggles of those who became ministers of this true calling. And hinting at the madness of the Jews against the truth, it is interpreted as "their distress," which is envy of others' good things, giving birth to grief for those who have it—an evil that has fallen into nature for the Jews, who have taken up hatred toward God and men and for this reason seek only the corruption of nature through blood and murders without restraint. But since the discourse, running on, has passed over the contemplation concerning the journey of the three days—for it says—

Now Nineveh was a great city to God, about a journey of three days,” if it seems good, let us fill in the omission in a few words. The journey of the three days, then, must be understood as the different ways of life of the course according to God, that is, the conduct fitting to each general law; and by general laws I now mean the natural, the written, and the law of grace. For each of these has its own distinctive manner of life and a course suited to it, since it also produces a different disposition in those who are led, according to their inclination. For one law naturally creates one disposition, and another another, for each of those under it. For example, the natural law, when the senses do not have the advantage over reason, persuades all without teaching to embrace what is kindred and of the same race, having nature itself as the teacher of assistance to those in need, and to wish for all that which each person thinks is pleasing to himself when done to him by others. And teaching this, the Lord says: “Whatever you wish that men should do to you, do likewise also to them.” For in those where nature is governed by reason, there is naturally one disposition; and where the disposition is the same, the character and the course of life are plainly one; and where the character and the course of life are the same, there is clearly one and the same bond of relationship toward one another according to the inclination, leading all, by one inclination, to the one principle of nature, in which there is absolutely no division of nature such as now prevails because of self-love.

But the written law, restraining by fear of penalties the disordered impulses of the more foolish, habituates them, teaching them to look to the equal distribution of what is fair alone, according to which the strength of justice, confirmed by time, passes over into nature, making fear a disposition, gently and little by little strengthened by the judgment concerning the good, and habit an acquired state, purified by forgetfulness of former things and giving birth within itself to mutual love, according to which it is natural for the fulfillment of the law to come about, when all have been fitted together with one another in love. For the fulfillment of the law is the mutual bond of all who have partaken of nature according to love, bearing the principle of nature crowned by the longing that is according to love and making radiant the law of nature by the addition of longing. For the law of nature is the natural principle, having received the senses as subject to its modes. And the written law is, that is, the fulfillment of the written law, the natural principle having taken to itself a spiritual longing as helper of the mutual cohesion with what is akin. Therefore it says: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," but not "you would have your neighbor as yourself." For the one declares only the cohesion of what is akin with respect to being, while the other signifies providence with respect to well-being.

But the law of grace directly teaches those who are led to imitate God, who loved us so much—beyond himself, if it is permissible to say even this—though we were enemies because of sin, that he came without change into our very substance, being beyond all substance and nature, and in a manner beyond substance deigned to accept it, and willed to become man and to be reckoned as one of men, and did not refuse to make our condemnation his own, and so greatly deified us by grace as he himself by economy became man by nature, so that we might learn not only to cling to one another naturally and to love one another spiritually as ourselves, but also to care for one another divinely beyond ourselves, and to make this the proof of love for one another: to choose willingly and eagerly death for one another according to virtue. "For there is no greater love than this," he says, "that a man lay down his life for his friend." Therefore the law of nature is, to sum it up, a natural principle, having taken the senses as subordinate for the removal of unreason, by which there is division among things naturally joined together; but the written law is a natural principle, which after the removal of unreason through the senses has also received a spiritual longing, holding together the mutual connection with what is akin; but the law of grace is a principle beyond nature, reshaping nature without change toward deification and showing in an image, incomprehensibly, to the nature of men the archetype beyond substance and nature, and providing the permanence of always being well.

If the account of the three laws has this character, then with good reason the great city of God, the Church—that is, the soul of each individual—is established as a journey of three days, since it is capable of receiving and containing the righteousness that is according to nature, law, and spirit. For in these three laws the whole order of the Church is comprised, being circumscribed by the breadth that is according to virtue, the length that is according to knowledge, and the depth that is according to wisdom of mystical theology. But let us not, by disposition, like the people of the Jews, be separated from the city, cherishing the body as a tent and tending the temporary pleasure of the body as a gourd, lest the worm of conscience strike and wither the disposition deceived by pleasure, and lest the reckoning that comes through involuntary temptations, like a scorching wind, exacting payment for the evils we have lived, make us despair of life and become impatient with the divine judgment.

For each of us who are defeated by the deceit of material things and who take pleasure in the pleasures of the body, like a worm, receives the Word of God—striking him for now through conscience, and, like the root of a gourd, eating away his attachment to pleasure, and thus through the perfect rising of the illumination of the oracles of the Spirit drying up the activity that is according to sin, and by a spirit of scorching heat—by the remembrance of eternal punishments—striking, as it were, the head, the sensory principle of the passions of evil in its assaults, so that we may learn the principles of providence and judgment, since it prefers eternal things to the temporary things whose loss the human race is accustomed to grieve over. For if the word of Scripture introduced the man grieving over the tent and the gourd—I mean the flesh and the pleasure of the flesh—while God was held fast by Nineveh, it is clear that what seemed dear to God is, for humans, far better and more honorable than all things that exist in any way whatsoever—much more than things that do not exist and seem to be only by preconception according to an erroneous judgment, of which there is no principle at all in existence, but only imagination deceiving the mind and a form empty of substance, not of reality, furnished to the passion. SCHOLIA 1. In how many ways Jonah is interpreted.

2. In how many ways Ioppe is interpreted. 3. To how many things Ionas corresponds when contemplated spiritually. 4. Of what Ioppe, understood spiritually, has the analogy. 5. According to another approach, a distinct contemplation concerning Ioppe for particular matters. 6. Of the much-troubled swell. 7. He calls the head the first account concerning the monad, as the beginning of every virtue; and the clefts of the mountains, the thoughts of the spirits of wickedness, by which our mind was swallowed up through transgression. 8. He calls the lowest earth that which in no way perceives divine knowledge, or the habit that has any manner of motion of the life according to virtue. 9. He calls the abyss the ignorance lying upon the habit of evil, upon which, as upon earth, the seas of evil have settled. 10. He called the earth the settled habit of evil; and the eternal bars, the passionate attachments of material things that hold together the worst habit. 11. He calls the light the true knowledge; and the life of mortals, the conduct befitting rational beings, of which the one who has the evil habit is deprived. 12. Here he took the sea to mean this world; into which the Lord came through the flesh.

13. He calls the Lord "rest," as the one who releases from labors for virtue; and "healing of God," as the physician of the wound that comes from death; and "grace of God," as redemption; and "labor of God," as the one who takes up our sufferings. 14. How our Lord and God is grace: behold, Nile, and do not be shaken, by the words "full of grace and truth." 15. How Ionas shows the prophetic grace. 16. That, he says, the endurance of the saints consumes the evil power that assails them. 17. That the saints, suffering bodily and willingly passing over the death of the flesh for the sake of truth, worked out for the nations the life according to faith in the spirit. 18. That the natural weakness of the saints is the occasion of superabundant divine power; the Lord showed the proud devil to be weaker than this. 19. He says the king is the natural law; the throne, the passionate disposition according to sense perception; the robe, the covering of vainglory; the sackcloth, the mourning that accompanies repentance; the ashes, humility. 20. He calls "men" those concerned with reason; "beasts," those concerned with desire; "oxen," those concerned with anger; "sheep," those who stumble in the contemplation of things visible.

21. That Nineveh signifies the soul of each person. 22. "Not without" are time and place; without these nothing of created things exists. 23. The Church, and the soul of each individual, having the words concerning virtue and knowledge, as surpassing time and nature, has more than the twelve ten-thousands; for the word of virtue does not know the sin of the flesh as the left; and the word of knowledge does not recognize the evil of the soul as the right. 24. The cause of the virtues is God; knowledge of him according to activity is the alteration, in relation to the spirit according to habit, of the one who has truly known God. 25. The natural word, he says, is naturally able to lead the one who attends to practice through the midst of the virtues to the intellect; and the intellect introduces the one who strives for knowledge through contemplation to wisdom; but irrational passion persuades the one who neglects the commandments to be dragged down to sensation; whose end is that the intellect be nailed to pleasure. 26. He calls unbelief the denial of the commandments; and faith, the assent to them; and darkness, the ignorance of the good; and light, the knowledge of it. And he has called Christ their essence and their subsistence; and the devil, the worst habit that generates all evils. 27. He calls virtue the most passionless and firm habit concerning the good; on either side of which nothing stands, since it bears the character of God, to whom nothing is contrary. 28. If the Word distinguished, as is natural, the generation of each of existing things, nothing of existing things has naturally either surpassed or fallen below itself. Therefore the mountain of existing things is the knowledge of the cause according to desire;

A measure, however, is the imitation of the cause, attainable by existing things in actuality. 29. To be carried beyond the boundary, and the measure, he says, makes the course of those who are moved by desire unprofitable, since they do not arrive at God, in whom the motion of all things according to desire comes to rest, receiving as its corresponding end the enjoyment of God. 30. Beyond the boundary and the measure; and evidently also contrary to the boundary and the measure. 31. Evidently by the word. 32. That the mind that has run back to God in ecstasy abandons both the principles of incorporeal things and those of bodies. For it is not in the nature of any of the things after God to be contemplated at the same time together with God. 33. How Jonah can also be taken typically as referring to the Jewish people. 34. How Jonah, when interpreted, prefigures the Jewish people typically. 35. That the Lord has conquered the power of the tyrant more by putting forward the weakness of the flesh than the devil did when he promised Adam the worth of divinity. 36. The Lord is a worm because of the flesh conceived without seed; and a sun, both as it were because of the setting of the burial, through which the Word became under the earth as a man, and as being by nature light in essence and God.

37. That the spirit of the scorching heat signifies not only temptations but also the abandonment by God, which removed from the Jews the supply of divine gifts. 38. He says it is proper to pride to deny that God is the begetter of virtue and of nature; and to vainglory, to divide nature toward diminishment; of which arrogance is by nature the offspring, being a composite habit of vice, having a voluntary denial of God and ignorance of the natural equality of honor. 39. The kinship of the soul through the spirit dissolves the relation of the flesh in choice, and binds it fast to God, fastened by desire. 40. He calls night the legal symbols, under which the law is fulfilled; in which it is not possible to find the illumination of the soul unless they are understood spiritually. 41. That because of the great mystery of the divine economy, measured by no reason, the Church of the Gentiles, he says, was called a great city to God. (42. In essence, he says, the truth precedes the types; but in manifestation, the types precede the truth in time. Therefore, since Jonah, having first sketched out the truth typically in himself beforehand, remained in the belly of the sea-monster three days and three nights: "Yet three days," he says, meaning the three days of the Lord's burial and resurrection, after which the error and ignorance of the Gentiles will be destroyed.

43. Evidently of faith. 44. A concise exposition of the meaning of the name Jonah, according to the power inherent in it concerning each of the persons and manners set forth. 45. Evidently the law. 46. He says it is the work of the natural law to bring about the concordant disposition of all men's judgment toward all. 47. Canons demonstrating the distinctive property of the natural law. 48. The written law, he says, by fear restraining injustice, accustoms one to what is just; and in time it makes habit a disposition that loves justice; from which arises a firm habit toward the good, bringing forgetfulness of former wickedness. 49. Definitions demonstrating the operation of each of the laws previously mentioned. 50. That to regard one's neighbor as oneself belongs to the care for life that concerns mere existence alone, which is a matter of the natural law. But to love one's neighbor as oneself, and by virtue to provide for the neighbor's well-being, belongs to the written law, which enjoins this. But to love one's neighbor above oneself is most proper to the law of grace.

51. Boundary marks in summary form demonstrating the distinctive character of the goodness that is effective through the three days. 52. The way of the three days, he says, is the perfection through the three laws of the one who keeps them in righteousness. (53. Another, more subtle contemplation concerning the tabernacle and the gourd and the worm and the scorching heat and the sun. 54. He who is hindered from the impulses of the body that lead to pleasure, he says, learns the principles of providence, which restrains the seductive matter of the passions. But he who receives the scourges of the body that lead to pain is taught the principles of judgment, which purges him by involuntary pains when defilements have come first. 65. CONCERNING THOSE OF THE SEED OF SAUL WHO WERE DESTROYED BY THE GIBEONITES IN THE TIME OF DAVID THE KING. (65. QUESTION 65. In the second book of Kingdoms it is written: "that there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year following year; and David sought the face of the Lord. And the Lord said: Upon Saul and upon his house is the iniquity, concerning him whom he put to death, the Gibeonites. And David called the Gibeonites and said to them: What shall I do for you, and with what shall I make atonement, and bless the inheritance of the Lord? And they said to the king: The man who consumed us and persecuted us and purposed to destroy us, we shall destroy him so that he shall not stand in any border of Israel; give us seven men from his sons, and we shall expose them to the Lord on the hill of Saul. And the king took the two sons of Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, the concubine of Saul, Hermonthi and Mephibosheth, and the five sons of

Merob, daughter of Saul, whom she bore to Esdriel, and he gave them into the hand of the Gibeonites; and they put them to death on the mountain before the Lord. And there the seven fell together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the beginning of the barley harvest. And Respha, the daughter of Ea, took the sackcloth and spread it for herself upon the rock, until waters from God from heaven dripped upon them. And he did all that the king commanded. And God was entreated for the land after these things. Why, after the death of Saul, was David required to pay the penalty, when famine had seized the land, until he gave seven men of the seed of Saul to be put to death by the Gibeonites? What is the power of these words, and how shall we contemplate them spiritually? Answer. The exact knowledge of the oracles of the Spirit is by nature revealed only to those who are worthy of the Spirit; who, through great diligence in the virtues, having cleansed their mind from the soot of the passions, like a pure and translucent mirror, at the very first impact, as it were a face, receive the knowledge of divine things imprinted and falling upon them; but for those whose life, like mine, is stained with the spots of the passions, it is barely possible, even by probable conjectures, to infer the knowledge of divine things, let alone to presume to understand and express it with exactness. And I know clearly that you yourself, suffering, know divine things better, honored father, and having gained the knowledge of them by experience you possess it more than I know it by speaking, since I am able to declare nothing about divine powers from having suffered.

However, even what is according to one's ability is not to be rejected, especially by you who have enjoined this task and laid on me this labor of speaking about things beyond my ability. Saul, then, in this passage of Scripture, is the law that reigns according to the power of a fleshly commandment over fleshly Jews in the letter, that is, the bodily manner or reasoning that reigns over those who are led by the letter of the law alone. For "Saul" is interpreted as "asked for" or "Hades," according to one rendering; for the people of the Jews, having preferred a life of pleasure to the life and kingdom in the Spirit of God conducted according to virtue, asked for Hades—that is, ignorance—to reign instead of His knowledge. For everyone who has fallen away from divine love has the law in the flesh reigning through pleasure, being unable or unwilling to keep any divine commandment. In another sense, "Saul" is interpreted as "one who has borrowed" or "a loan." For the written law was not given to those who received it as an acquisition of property, but for instruction until the promised inheritance. Therefore God, having given the kingdom to Saul, did not promise him an eternal kingdom in His covenant with him. For every loan does not become an acquisition of property for the one who receives it, but an occasion of toil and labors for the gathering of another property. And Saul's concubine Rizpah is interpreted as "a course of the mouth." And a course of the mouth is the learning of the law according to mere utterance in speech, which the one who attends only to the bodily worship of the law unlawfully takes in, from which he begets nothing pious or God-loving.

For he who practices only the bodily learning of the law according to the utterance of the word does not have a lawful cohabitation with the word—that is, with the learning of the law. Hence his offspring are base-born and rejected. For through the unlawful union with Respha there are born to him Hermonthi and Memphibosthe, which is their anathema and the shame of their mouth. For Hermonthi, in a single rendering, is interpreted as "their anathema," and Memphibosthe as "the shame of their mouth." And their anathema is the corruption through the body, by sin, of the activity of the passions; and Memphibosthe is the movement of the mind against nature toward vice—that is, the inventive conception of base things according to the mind—being and being called the shame of the mouth, that is, of the mind. Or again, their anathema is the place of the present penalty of nature that now prevails—that is, this world, which has become a region of death and corruption because of sin, into which the first man fell from paradise after the transgression of the divine commandment. This world, in accordance with the pleasure-loving disposition of the will—that is, worldly attachment—he who does not pass in mind to the inner divine beauty of the legal letter in the Spirit is by nature prone to beget from the learning that comes from the utterance of the law in word alone. And the shame of their mouth is the world-loving and body-loving meditation of thoughts according to the mind.

For in this, the world is naturally born from the bodily formation that appears in the letter of the law, according to the disposition of the will—that is, the disposition that loves the world—and the world-loving meditation of thoughts according to the mind is reasonably co-born with it, and body-loving as well. Or again, their anathema is the material and unlovely and formless motion of the passions, and the shame of the mouth is the motion of the mind that brings form to the passions and shapes the beauty of the mind according to pleasure toward sensation. For without the mind's inventive power, passion is in no way led toward the formation of a shape. Therefore, he who circumscribes the power of the divine promise by the letter of the law alone has the learning of the law as a concubine and not as a lawful wife. Hence of necessity such learning, not for its own sake but for the sake of the one who receives it bodily—that is, who consorts with it—gives birth to the anathema and the shame. For he who believes that God ordained the sacrifices and the feasts and the sabbaths and the new moons according to the law for the sake of bodily luxury and rest will altogether and in every way come under the constraint of the working of the passions and the shame of the filth of the shameful thoughts concerning them, and he will be under the corruptible world and the body-loving meditation in his thoughts, and under the matter of the passions and the form, being able to hold nothing else precious except corruptible things, and for this reason perhaps begetting badly Merob, who bore five sons to Esdriel. And Merob is interpreted as "fullness of the throat," which is gluttony.

For this alone, having received license from the commandment in a Jewish manner, gives birth to the modes of the senses according to misuse for Esdriel, that is, for the contemplative part of the soul. For Esdriel is interpreted as "divine power or strong helper or mighty vision," which is the mind that came to be according to the image of God. But gluttony, as the offspring of the fleshly law according to the commandment, that is, of the letter, having been persuaded, it cohabited with. For the mind, persuaded that it is the ordinance of a divine commandment, according to the law in the letter, does not admit any other delight of the flesh for cohabitation except itself, having considered it divine and the offspring of the law that rules it, and it establishes the modes of the senses from it according to misuse. For whenever the contemplative part of the soul welcomes delight according to the law in the letter as divine because of the commandment for cohabitation, it pursues the use of the senses contrary to nature, allowing no use of activity according to nature to shine forth.

Therefore the one who practices the learning of the law in a bodily manner, having the knowledge of divine things as a concubine, as it were, and not a lawful wife, and begetting from her the curse of the activity of the passions and the shame of the unpleasantness of the thoughts concerning them, and from Merob, that is, from his own daughter gluttony, receiving as offspring the modes of the senses according to misuse—the principles and thoughts that are in the nature of beings, that is, the natural ones—is accustomed to kill, like the Gibeonites. For Gibeonites is interpreted as "mountainous or lofty"; and these clearly indicate the loftier principles according to natural contemplation, or the natural thoughts that are in our power, which Saul kills—and anyone else who is now a Saul in disposition, not shrinking from dismissing and falsifying the natural principles because of the error in the written letter of the law alone. For no one who devotes himself to the bodily worship of the law alone could altogether receive a natural principle or thought, since symbols are not naturally the same as nature.

But if the symbols are not the same as the nature, then the one who clings to the symbols of the law as though they were the originals can never clearly see the generation of beings according to nature, and for this reason irrationally dismisses the principles that accord with nature, not considering that it is necessary to preserve those saved by Jesus, on whose behalf he also stirred up that fearful war against the five kings who rose up against them, in which even heaven itself fought alongside Jesus for the Gibeonites against those who rose up, by means of hailstones of stone; whom the incarnate Word appointed as wood-bearers and water-bearers of the divine tabernacle, that is, of the holy Church prefigured through the tabernacle. For this is Jesus who put to death the passionate ways and thoughts that rise up against them through the senses. For the Word of God, Jesus, always preserves the principles that accord with natural contemplation, establishing them as wood-bearers and water-bearers of the divine tabernacle of the mysteries, as providers of the kindling material of the illumination of divine knowledge and of the cleansing purification of the passions, or of the occasion of the life-giving transmission in the Spirit. For without natural contemplation, the power of the mysteries can in no way, by no means, in no respect be preserved.

But if the Gibeonites also signify the Gentile portion, which comes over to Jesus, the heir of the divine promises, and is saved and taught to carry wood and draw water—that is, to bear about practically on the shoulders of the virtues the mystical and saving word concerning the cross and the divine regeneration through water, and to supply it to the divine ark of pious faith as though it were wood: through the practical life, the mortification of the earthly members; through contemplation, like water, the inflow of knowledge in the Spirit—this is not absurd nor alien to piety. Whether, then, the Gibeonites prefigure the principles of natural contemplation, or the portion of the Gentiles that is saved through faith, they hold as an enemy the one who has chosen to live in a Jewish manner according to the law in the letter alone, and as an adversary of the one being saved. For he who makes a god of his belly and adorns himself with shame as though it were glory knows how to cling zealously only to the passions of dishonor as though they were divine, and for this reason embraces only temporal things—that is, matter and form and the fivefold activity of the senses in misuse—some as the children of Rhespha the concubine, others as the offspring of the dishonored daughter Merob. For sense, entwined with matter and form in mixture, is naturally disposed to produce passion and to kill and destroy the principles according to nature. For a principle of nature cannot by any means be manifested together with passion, just as passion cannot be co-generated with nature in the process of generation.