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Therefore the one who clings to the letter of Scripture alone, like Saul, dismisses the natural meanings and does not accept the calling of the Gentiles that was proclaimed in mystery beforehand, gaping only—according to the law, as he supposes—at the enjoyment of the flesh. Since this bodily disposition according to the law prevails among those who live by sense perception alone, the famine of the divine knowledge in the Spirit is not made evident. For famine truly is the eclipse of the good things known by experience of it, and the utter destitution and scarcity of the spiritual foods that sustain the soul. For how would anyone regard as famine or loss the removal of things that were in no way known to him at all? Hence, while Saul lives, there is no famine, because it is not natural for the lack of spiritual knowledge to be discerned while the letter according to the law lives and reigns over the minds of the material Jews.

But when the flash of the gospel grace shines forth, and the all-praised David receives the kingdom of spiritual things—that is, the understanding—who is the law according to the Spirit, after the death of Saul, that is, after the demise of the letter (for David is interpreted as "despised" and "strong in vision": the former is said among the Jews, when the spirit has the advantage over the letter, and the latter is proclaimed among Christians, when the letter has been conquered by the spirit)—then the famine of knowledge in the spirit is discerned, both commonly in the faithful people and individually in the soul of each person, whenever one prefers the outward, visible garment of the letter to the mystical contemplation in the spirit, and, so to speak, makes the soul of Scripture more dishonored than its body. For truly the people of the faithful who have come to know the truth hunger, and the soul of each person hungers, when it abandons the spiritual contemplation in grace and becomes enslaved to the typical servitude in the letter, not nourishing the mind with the noble grandeur of the meanings but filling the senses with the bodily impressions of the scriptural symbols, which belong to passionate imagination. Therefore there is a famine of divine knowledge especially for three years, one year following upon another. For everyone who does not accept the spiritual contemplation of the Holy Scripture has, in the Jewish manner, joined to it the natural law and has ignored the law in grace, according to which deification is given to those who are led by it.

Therefore the three-year famine indicates the lack of knowledge that occurs in the three laws—I mean the natural, the written, and the law of grace—proportionately to each, for those who do not take care for their own ascent through contemplation. For he cannot at all take care for the intelligible knowledge of the Scriptures who rejects the natural principles of beings in contemplation and clings only to material symbols, devising no spiritual loftiness for them. For while only the historical narrative of the Scriptures prevails, the power of the mind over things temporary and temporal has not passed away, but the children of the dead Saul are still alive, and his offspring, seven in number—that is, the bodily and temporary service of the law, from which the passionate disposition is accustomed to be begotten in those who love the body, according to the cause that has been given, having as an ally of its error the ordinance that is evident in the symbols. For this reason, I think, there was no famine in the days of Saul—that is, in the time of the legal service according to the flesh the lack of knowledge in the Spirit was not recognized—but in the time of the gospel grace, according to which, whenever we do not interpret the whole Scripture spiritually after the passing of the dominion of the letter, we are altogether famished, not enjoying the mystical service according to the Spirit that is fitting for Christians.

But when, having taken perception, we seek the face of the Lord according to David, we are taught clearly that, because they did not accept the natural principles for the ascent of the mystical contemplation in the Spirit, but still cling to the bodily thoughts in the letter of the law, the grace of knowledge was taken away. "And David," it says, "sought the face of the Lord"; and the Lord said, "Upon Saul and upon his house is the injustice concerning him whom he put to death, the Gibeonites." David is every mind that is clear-sighted according to Christ, always seeking the face of the Lord. And the face of the Lord is the true contemplation and knowledge of divine things according to virtue; seeking which, he is taught the cause of the lack and perplexity concerning it, and is commanded to put to death the two sons of Saul by the concubine Rizpah and the five sons of his daughter Merab. Saul is, as I said, "the requested Hades," that is, "desired ignorance"; and clearly the desired ignorance is the legal letter, that is, the bodily strength of the worship in the law, which is the bodily element of the law, or a mind that clings only according to sense, bodily, to the matter of the letter. And Rizpah is, according to its interpretation, "course of the mouth," which is the learning of the law according to mere utterance in speech; and he truly has a course of the mouth, but not of the mind, who is a stranger to the spiritual contemplation of the law.

The sons of Respha are Hermonthi and Mephibosheth. Hermonthi means "their anathema," which is the corruption through the body in accordance with sin of the activity of the passions, or the place—that is, the world—in which the penalty of the transgression was given, that is, the inward disposition toward the world in accordance with pleasure, or perhaps the slavish and unlovely and unformed motion of the passions. And Mephibosheth means "the shame of their mouth," which is the motion of the mind contrary to nature toward vice, that is, the inventive conception of the passions, or perhaps the world-loving and body-loving meditation of the thoughts, or again the motion of the mind that brings form to the passions and molds the beauty of the mind in accordance with pleasure toward sensation. For these sons the written law and the mind that attends to the letter of the law alone are naturally disposed to beget from learning that comes through utterance in word only. And Merob, according to its interpretation, is the daughter of Saul, "the fullness of the throat," which signifies the passion of gluttony. For the law, which by the letter circumscribes with symbols those who serve it, and the mind, which because of the flesh-loving life confines the law by the letter to types, know how to beget only the luxury of the body and the pleasurable disposition toward material things. And five sons of Merob, the daughter of Saul, have been established—the five passionate modes of the five senses according to misuse, which the disposition that cares for the body alone according to the law through luxury is altogether accustomed to beget to Esdriel, that is, to the contemplative part of the soul.

These two sons of Saul, that is, matter and form, and the five grandsons of Saul, that is, the five modes of the five senses directed toward matter and form in misuse—I mean the passionate and contrary-to-nature entanglement of the senses with sensible things, that is, the things subject to time and flux—after the death of Saul, that is, after the passing of the bodily worship in the law according to the letter and the crossing over of ignorance, the wonderful David hands over to the Gibeonites to be put to death according to the divine oracle, that is, the spiritual law or mind hands them over to the higher principles and reasonings according to natural contemplation, to make away with and put to death the most universal relation of things subject to time, which is in symbols toward sense and body, for those who are becoming according to the height of the hill of Saul—I mean, of the law of spiritual contemplation. For unless someone first, naturally, having examined the incongruity in the symbols of the divine and intelligible things, desires to come in mind, placing sense entirely outside the divine sanctuaries, he cannot once and for all be released toward the comeliness of intelligible things from the bodily variety in the types; according to which, as long as he stands clinging to the letter, he does not reasonably find consolation for the perplexity from the famine of knowledge, having condemned himself to eat the earth of Scripture, that is, the body, according to the deceitful serpent, but not according to Christ the heaven, that is, the spirit and soul of Scripture, that is, the heavenly and angelic bread—I mean the spiritual contemplation of the Scriptures in Christ and

knowledge, being fed, which God gives richly supplied to those who love him, according to what is written: "He gave them bread from heaven; man ate the bread of angels." (It is necessary, therefore, that the interpretation of Scripture according to sense, directed toward the body, since it is plainly generative of passions and of the relative disposition toward things temporal and fleeting—that is, of the passionate activity of the senses toward sensible things—as children and offspring of Saul, we destroy through the natural contemplation, as on a mountain, in the upward leading of the divine oracles, if indeed we desire to be filled with divine grace. For if, according to the divine oracle, the injustice is upon Saul and upon his house, for which he put the Gibeonites to death, it is clear that he does injustice to the truth—both the law understood according to the letter alone, and the people of the Jews, and anyone who is a imitator of them in mind. For the Word knows this to be the house of Saul: the one who circumscribes the power of the law by the letter alone and does not accept, for the manifestation of the knowledge mystically hidden in the letter, the natural contemplation, which is midway between types and truth—leading those who are led away from the former, and toward the one that leads back—but, as it were, utterly denying this and placing it outside the mystical initiation of divine things.)

It is necessary, therefore, that those who attend to divine visions put to death this bodily and temporary interpretation of the law, as being under time and flowing, through natural contemplation, as on a mountain, in the height of knowledge. For "David," it says, "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 pursued us and planned to destroy us, we shall make away with him so that he may 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 Respha, daughter of Ea, concubine of Saul, Hermonthi and Memphibosthe, and the five sons of Merob, daughter of Saul, whom she bore to Esdriel, and gave them into the hand of the Gibeonites; and they exposed them on the mountain before the Lord. And there the seven fell together, and they were put to death in the days of harvest, in the beginning of the harvest of barley." Where in the history do we find that the Gibeonites made away with Saul so that he should not stand in any border of Israel, when Jonathan's son, Saul's son, Maribaal, was saved with King David, and many others of Saul's kindred, as is recorded in the book of Paralipomena? And how, having taken seven men from his seed, did they say, "We shall make away with him, so that he may not stand in any border of Israel," when he had died many years before this?

But, as it seems, the irrational has been mingled with the literal sense of the history, so that we might seek the true meaning of the mind of what has been written. Therefore the bodily sense of Scripture—that is, Saul—he who by practice through natural contemplation, as through certain Gibeonites, utterly destroys from every border of Israel, putting to death the pleasure-loving and body-loving attachment of the soul, born from the written law, toward unstable and flowing matter, slaying as children and offspring of Saul the lowly meaning of the law through the midst of natural contemplation, as on a mountain, in the height of knowledge, and making manifest before the Lord—through confession, that is—the former understanding of the law in relation to the body. For this can be understood by lovers of learning as “to remove out of sight” before the Lord; and “they removed them out of sight,” it says, “on the mountain before the Lord,” bringing them into the light—through knowledge, that is—the erroneous preconception of the law according to the letter. For everyone who has put to death the bodily meaning of the law, the letter of the

Clearly killed and obliterated by the law, "so as not to stand in any border of Israel," that is, in any mystical mode and principle of spiritual contemplation. For if Israel is interpreted as "a mind that sees God," it is clear that the bodily sense of the law in no way whatsoever subsists in any mode of spiritual contemplation for those who prefer the spirit to the letter, since "God," according to what is written, "is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and Truth," but not in letter; "for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." Therefore it is necessary that what is naturally inclined to kill be killed by the life-giving Spirit; for it is entirely impossible for the bodily sense of the law and the divine—that is, the letter and the spirit—to coexist in actuality simultaneously in the same thing, since what is naturally able to take away life cannot agree with what naturally provides life. So then, taking this passage according to the history, we do not find Scripture speaking truth. For where did the Gibeonites obliterate Saul from every border of Israel, when much of Saul's kinship is found among the people after this? But understanding according to contemplation, we clearly find that through the middle of natural contemplation, in the height of knowledge, the written law entirely passes away—that is, the bodily institution in symbols for worship. For where will circumcision of the flesh still stand, when the law is understood spiritually? Where are the sabbaths and the beginnings of months? Where are the festivals' assemblies? Where are the sacrifices and the idleness of the land and the rest of the law's tradition according to bodily worship?

For we know, by applying ourselves naturally to the things, that perfection is not the removal of the natural integrity that comes from God; for nature does not produce perfection when it is curtailed by art and when by cleverness it sets aside the property that belongs to it from God according to the principle of creation—lest we introduce the art of God as stronger than the confirmation of righteousness, and make the deficiency of nature contrived by cleverness a supplement for the deficiency in righteousness according to creation. Rather, from the local position of the member that is circumcised we are taught to make, by deliberate choice, the circumcision of the passionate disposition of the soul, in accordance with which the judgment is rather regulated to run together with nature, correcting the passionate law of acquired generation. For mystical circumcision is the complete removal of the passionate relation of the mind to the introduced generation. And the Sabbath is the perfect inactivity of the passions and the universal cessation of the mind's movement concerning created things, and the perfect passage to the divine; in which it is not right for one who has arrived, by virtue and knowledge, as far as is lawful, to think of any material whatsoever that is capable of kindling passions, as if it were wood, nor indeed to gather up the principles of nature at all, lest, delighting in passions or measured by the boundaries of nature, we dogmatize God according to the Greeks—God whom only perfect silence has proclaimed and complete ignorance by way of transcendence presents. And we say that the new moons are the various illuminations in the course of the days of virtue and knowledge.

By these, running through all the ages, we fulfill the acceptable year of the Lord, adorned with the crown of goodness. And the crown of goodness is pure faith, embellished like precious stones with the lofty utterances of the doctrines and with spiritual words, and binding together the God-loving mind as its head; or rather, the crown of goodness is the Word of God himself, who by the variety of the modes that come through providence and judgment—that is, by self-control over voluntary passions and endurance of involuntary ones—encircles the mind as a head and, by participation in the grace that comes through deification, makes the mind itself more beautiful than itself. Of the feasts, the first is a symbol of practical philosophy, leading those held captive by sin, as from Egypt, across to virtue; the second is a type of the natural contemplation that is in the Spirit, offering to God the pious opinion concerning beings, as the firstfruits of summer; and the third is the mystery of theology, containing the gnostic habit of all the spiritual principles in created things, and the complete sinlessness through grace that comes by the economy of the incarnate Word, and the perfect and immortal immutability in the good that follows upon these, as the maker of trumpets and of atonement and of tabernacles.

This, for now, is my understanding, derived from the honor of the days, according to a single conception. For God, not desiring that days be honored by men, commanded that the Sabbath and the new moons and the feasts be honored; for in this way He would have taught them to serve the creature rather than the Creator, according to the law of the commandment, had He meant that the days are by nature venerable and therefore to be worshipped; but He indicated that He Himself is honored symbolically through the days. For He Himself is the Sabbath, as the rest of the soul from its labors in the flesh and the cessation of the toils of righteousness; and the Passover, as the liberator of those held in the bitter slavery of sin; and Pentecost, as the beginning and end of all things and the Word, by whom all things by nature subsist. For if Pentecost is after the hebdomadal cycle of the week unto itself, and Pentecost is clearly a pentad (for Pentecost is a decade), then plainly the nature of beings, existing according to its own principle as a pentad because of the senses, will be in God, who is by nature one, after the natural passage of time and the ages, not receiving an end in which there is altogether no interval. For some say that the Word is a decade, as providence extended in procession through the decade of the commandments; but whenever nature is joined to the Word by grace, there will not be the things "without which not," since the alterable motion of things moved by nature has passed away. For the finite state, in which motion necessarily comes to be by alteration of things moved, must receive an end by the presence of the infinite rest, in which the motion of things moved naturally ceases.

For where there is a limit according to nature, the motion of the things within it is altogether subject to change; but where there is no limit according to nature, no motion of the things within it will be known at all as subject to change. Therefore the world is a bounded place and a circumscribed standing still, while time is a circumscribed motion; and hence the motion according to life of the things within it is also subject to change. But when nature, having passed through place and time in actuality and in thought—that is, the things 'without which it cannot be,' namely bounded standing still and motion—is directly united to providence, it finds providence to be a simple and stable principle according to nature, having no circumscription whatsoever and for this reason altogether neither motion. Wherefore nature, existing in the world temporally, has motion subject to change because of the bounded standing still of the world and the movement of time by way of alteration; but when it comes to be in God, because of the natural unity of that in which it has come to be, it will have ever-moving standing still and a stable self-motion, eternally coming to be around the same and one and only, which (the principle knows to be a direct and abiding establishment around the first cause of the things made by it. The mystery of Pentecost, then, is the direct union of the things providentially cared for with providence, that is, the union of nature with the Word according to the conception of providence, according to which there is no indication at all of time and generation. And again, the Word is our trumpet, as sounding in us the divine and ineffable knowledges, and a propitiation, as having in himself our own things, having become according to us,

Dissolving charges of guilt and, by the gift of grace in the Spirit, deifying the nature that had sinned; and the Feast of Tabernacles, as being the firm fixing of our immutability toward the good in accordance with the God-imitating disposition, and a cohesive bond of our transformation to immortality. But that God takes pleasure in the slaughter of irrational animals and in the sprinklings of blood, and provides, as it were, the forgiveness of sins to those who offer as the wage of worship—this, by naturally applying it to Scripture, we do not believe, lest we unknowingly worship a God subject to passion, as though he passionately desired those things with great eagerness; for in matters where we observe even human beings to be passionately disposed, we denounce them as intemperate and incontinent. For we know that the spiritual sacrifices are not only the mortification of the passions, slain by the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and the pouring out, as it were of blood, of all the life in the flesh according to intention, but also the offering up of the ethical dispositions according to philosophy and of all the natural powers, consecrated to God and wholly burnt by the fire of the grace in the Spirit unto the divine portion.

Viewing in a natural way each of the symbols contained in Scripture, as if on a mountain, in the height of mystical contemplation—just as the seven sons of Saul—we put to death the temporal and temporary tradition of the law, and we make away with Saul, that is, the earthly mind that lives only in the literal sense of Scripture, "so that he should not stand in any border of Israel," that is, in the manner of spiritual contemplation. For this one, while he lives, truly completes and pursues and destroys, circumscribing the law by the flesh alone, the natural principles and thoughts, honoring as divine the passions of dishonor which the natural thoughts, taking license under the law of the Spirit, kill together and put to death at the beginning of the harvest of barley. And the beginning of the harvest of barley is the gathering of the virtues according to practical philosophy with some proportionate reason, by which the earthy element of the Scriptures is naturally put to death and every earthly movement is utterly made away with. For as soon as one pursues the philosophy of the virtues rationally, at once he also transfers the interpretation of the Scriptures naturally to the Spirit, serving God practically in newness of spirit through the lofty contemplations, and not in oldness of the letter through the perceptible acceptance of the law that is more lowly with respect to the body, becoming a nurturer of passions and a healer of sin according to the Jews.

For one must, by practice, through the natural thoughts, put to death the passionate and bodily understanding of the law, just as the word of Scripture sets forth, saying: And the king took the two sons of Respha, the daughter of Ea, the concubine of Saul, Hermonthi and Memphibosthe, and the five sons of Merob, the daughter of Saul, whom she bore to Esdriel, and gave them into the hand of the Gabaonites. The hand of the Gabaonites is the practice according to virtue of the natural thoughts, through which the sons of Respha, Hermonthi and Memphibosthe—that is, the activity of the passions born from the bodily teaching of the law in the mere utterance of the word, and the unrestrained motion of the thoughts—are killed; and besides these, the five sons of Merob, that is, the five unrestrained modes of the five senses born from luxury according to the unnatural use of activity; which it is natural to kill at the same time, as on a mountain, in the height of spiritual contemplation, at the beginning of the barley harvest, which is in the first-fruits of the practice according to virtue or of the pious contemplation according to nature—every mind that is lofty and elevated according to God, slaying at the same time both the activity of the passions and the shameful motion of the thoughts, and besides these the unrestrained modes that come from the misuse of the activity of the senses.

And the seven fell," it says, "at the same place, and were put to death at 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 of God from heaven dripped upon them." Respha, as I said, is interpreted as "course of the mouth," which is the bodily teaching of the law according to the mere utterance of the word; and this, after the death of the passions born from it and the manifestation that took place on high of natural contemplation in the heart of each of those previously possessed by it, spreads repentance like a sackcloth upon the rock—I mean the word of faith in Christ—caring for the ordinances in the Spirit according to Christ through repentance, having before her eyes day and night through memory, as children, the former bodily conduct of the law, until waters of God from heaven drip, that is, until the divine knowledges of the Scriptures are sent down from the height of spiritual contemplation, which quench the passions and renew the virtues. For the learning of the law, when it comes near to Christ, the true and firm rock, through repentance, is naturally disposed to receive the divine rain of spiritual knowledge of the Scriptures, according to the command of King David, that is, of the mind "mighty in vision." For it says: "And he did all that the king commanded. And God heeded the land after this.

Therefore the learning of the divine Scriptures, according to the command of David the king—that is, of the spiritual law, or of the mind that is strong in vision—being carried through the midst of repentance, of which the sackcloth is a symbol, by the practice of the virtues upon the rock, that is, upon Christ, is naturally disposed to call upon the divine rain of knowledge, and is accustomed to entreat God to hearken to the earth of the heart and to give showers of divine graces and to supply an abundance of the fruits of righteousness, and to loose, as it were a famine, the ignorance of divine things that had come before, and to make the soul a country full of spiritual goods, heavy with grain and wine and oil: with the one, as with the word of practical knowledge, being established; with the second, as with divine longing and the renewing of the erotic fervor toward God according to desire, being gladdened; with the third, as with the smooth and level and bright and illuminating and free from every earthly motion manner and word of impassibility, making cheerful the countenance of the virtues.

But let us also, following the great David, destroy Saul from every border of Israel—that is, the earthly and bodily institution of the law, or the Jewish manner of worship, or the ready meaning of the whole Scripture that lies in the letter alone and is more bodily—from every mode of contemplative initiation, and let us pass over to the spiritual deification of the things understood, and let us preserve the Gibeonites, that is, the natural principles of beings, which Jesus, the true heir of the divine promises, kept impassible; on whose account, when they were being destroyed by Saul, God held back the divine rain of mystical knowledge; and let us kill through these same Gibeonites, that is, through natural contemplation, as it were seven men of the sons of Saul—the passionate, premature, and temporal interpretation of the law, which Respha is naturally wont to bring forth, being interpreted “the course of the mouth,” which is the bodily learning of the law, and Merob, interpreted “fulness of the throat,” that is, the luxury of the belly—the one bearing Memphibosthe and Hermonthi, the one interpreted “shame of mouth,” the other “their curse,” that is, the habit of the passions and their activity; the other bearing the five sons to Esdriel, that is, to the contemplative part of the soul—the five passionate modes of the senses within us, misused; by destroying which through natural contemplation we propitiate God, who has been provoked to anger, having been transferred to the spirit from the letter, and the divine

We call forth the showers of knowledge, and we richly enjoy the fruits of righteousness that come from it. For the letter of the law, like a certain Saul, or the material interpretation born of the letter for those whose mind is earthly—these, as children and offspring of Saul, we lead up through the midst of natural contemplation to the height of spiritual mystagogy, and we put to death every bodily and temporary meaning of the law, and, to speak more properly, every earthly one; if indeed we too, with God, have hated Saul and have rejected him from reigning over Israel—that is, we have thrust away the obvious fleshly manner of Scripture, namely Judaism, so that it may not reign over the spiritual power within us to the slavery of the flesh. For Saul—that is, the bodily institution of the law—must be hated and thrust away from the kingdom, since he preserved alive Agag king of Amalek, and the fat of the flocks and herds and the vine and the olive—I mean the kindlings of anger and desire and the causes that produce luxury—and he himself carried Agag alive into the land of promise, that is, the calf, or the earthly mindset of the flesh, into the place of divine knowledge, I mean the heart. For Agag is interpreted as "calf"—that calf, perhaps, which foolish and senseless Israel molded in the wilderness and deified, and preferred the pleasure of the belly to the worship of God.

This calf Moses and Samuel destroy—Moses by smoothing and scattering it under the water, Samuel by slaughtering it with the spiritual sword—that is, the living and active grace of holy baptism (for this is Moses) and the obedience to God through the commandments (for this is Samuel). For Moses is interpreted as "water that leaps," and Samuel as "obedience of God," which is true faith and a life lived in God. Therefore the power of sin, that is, the mindset of the flesh, the grace of holy baptism is by nature able to destroy, and the active obedience of the divine commandments to put to death with the sword of the Spirit, that is, with the word of divine knowledge in the Spirit, crying out mystically to the passion of sin, as the great Samuel did to Agag: "As your sword has bereaved women, so today your mother shall be bereaved among women." For the passion of gluttony has bereaved many virtues, as if with a sword, by the smooth reasoning of pleasure; for through intemperance it kills the seeds of chastity, through greed it corrupts the equity of justice, through self-love it cuts through the natural bond of love for humanity, and to speak briefly, the passion of gluttony is destructive of all the offspring of virtue. And this passion, as I said, is destroyed by the grace of baptism alone and by the conduct of the commandments in obedience to God.

Therefore God repents of the law written in letters that procures this passion, having anointed him king of Israel, and transfers the power of the kingdom and gives it to David—that is, to the evangelical and spiritual law, that is, to the son of Jesse; and Jesse is interpreted as "the making of God." Consequently the holy Gospel is a offspring of the making, that is, of God's own working through the flesh, which holds the kingdom unto endless ages, according to which we have joy and gladness unbroken, as being a day without evening and without end. For it says: "This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it," calling "day" the evangelical grace, or the mystery itself of him who made this grace, in which he wills all of us, according to the divine Apostle, "to walk decently as in the day of knowledge and truth." For the day of eternal light is Christ, in which all who have believed in him must live well through the decency of the virtues. For this is he who was made without seed by

Of God alone is what is according to the flesh, and he who innovated the laws of natural ordinances, and who was prepared before the face of all the peoples, and "a light for the revelation of the nations and the glory of the people of Israel." For our Lord is truly a light of the nations, revealing to them through true knowledge the eyes of the mind that had been closed by the darkness of ignorance, and again preparing himself as a divine guide for the faithful peoples, a good example of virtue, becoming for them a pattern and model of a person according to virtue; looking to him, as the author of our salvation, we accomplish the virtues by imitation, as far as is possible for us, through action. But he himself is also "the glory of the people of Israel," God and the Word, as by the divine light of knowledge through mystical contemplation he makes the mind radiant. Or perhaps the word calls "peoples" the natural principles, and the "face" of these principles the true and unerring opinion concerning beings, the preparation of which the Word himself clearly stands for, for knowledge, as the creator of nature; and "nations" the passions contrary to nature, which he reveals when they lie hidden, granting the light of knowledge, and wholly drives them out of nature; and the Word becomes the glory of Israel, as he purifies the mind from the passions contrary to nature and adorns it with the natural principles, and moreover binds it with the diadem of immutability in deification. For truly the glory of Israel is both the release from passions contrary to nature and the right accomplishment of the natural principles and the acquisition of goods beyond nature.

He who receives this spiritual David, even if he is envied by Saul, is nevertheless not captured; but on the contrary, through great love for humanity, as one free from passion, even while being hated he heals with the lyre of the Spirit the enemy who is choked by an evil spirit, and makes him self-controlled, releasing him, as it were, from an evil demon, from the wicked seizure of the earthly-minded way of thinking. For everyone who through envy hates and slanders with evil accusations the one who is stronger in the contests of the virtues and in the abundance of the word of spiritual knowledge is a Saul, choked by an evil spirit, unable to bear the glory of the blessedness in virtue and knowledge of the better man, and for this reason raging all the more because he cannot do away with his benefactor. And often he also sends away bitterly his own dearest Jonathan—I mean the reasoning that is innate according to conscience, which convicts the unjust hatred and truthfully recounts the achievements of the one who is hated—in the manner of the ancient and truly vain Saul; to whom Samuel says, as to a transgressor of the divine commandments: "You have been made vain, because you transgressed my commandment which God commanded you." Saul, as I said before, is either the written law or the people of the Jews who live according to the written law. For when both are thus entangled with each other in an earthly manner, the Spirit of the Lord, which is spiritual contemplation and knowledge, departs, and an evil spirit comes in, that is, the material way of thinking, choking them with the successive disturbances and swirlings of things subject to generation and corruption, as though they were epileptics, by the instability of their thoughts.

For the law, understood in a fleshly way according to the letter alone, is blameworthy, shaken by countless contradictions and having no harmony with itself; and the Judaizing mind, raging with the unstable motion of material things, necessarily and unstably has its own disposition changing along with them. But whenever David, the truly musical by nature, our Lord Jesus, sings to the spirit of spiritual contemplation both the law and the Jew, he makes the one spiritual instead of fleshly, and transfers the other from unbelief to faith. Therefore, according to Saul, both the law and the people of the Jews are both blameworthy and sound. For the law is blameworthy when taken in a fleshly way, as I said, and the Jew is blameworthy when he wishes to serve God in a fleshly way; and again the law is sound when understood spiritually, and the Jew likewise is sound when he is transferred from bodily service to the spiritual worship of God. And it must be noted that Saul kills those who are saved by Jesus. For the letter naturally kills those whom the spirit of the Scripture preserves alive. Therefore God repents of having anointed this one—I mean the written law—to reign over Israel, since it is taken in a fleshly way by the Jews, and he gives the power of the kingdom to the spirit, to that which is near the letter and good beyond it. "And I will give," he says, "the kingdom to your neighbor, who is good beyond you." For just as David was near Saul, so the spirit has clearly been placed beside the letter of the law; and it naturally shines forth after the death of the letter.

Let us therefore also entreat the spiritual David to sound on the lyre of spiritual contemplation and knowledge, being played upon by material things—our mind—and to drive away the evil spirit of material entanglement with sense perception, so that we may be able to understand the law spiritually and to find the mystical word hidden within it and to make it a lasting possession as provision for eternal life, so that we may not have the symbolic law lent in the letter, being at a loss for the knowledge according to grace in the Spirit, and may not cherish only, as those who do not see, the questioning about divine things, deprived of the truly all-radiant self-vision of the mystical oracles; for both are called Saul, when translated into the Greek tongue.

For besides what has been said, it is also interpreted as "borrowed" and "questioning"; and these things the written law is established to be—the one because it is not a property most proper to nature and is not at all co-extended with existence according to nature, the other because it stirs us toward true knowledge and archetypal wisdom, for those who do not consider questioning to be a comprehension of the sought-for archetype of divine things, but only through the bodily symbols in the law, as through a kind of questioning, for those hastening toward the comprehension of divine goods, so that we may cease from the anxiety that belongs to questioning, in which there is often also error, once we have come to be in the truth of the divine things sought, and may we partake of their blessedness, appearing in us unchangeably through participation, and making the form according to it a mark of our existence in Christ Jesus our God and Savior, to whom be glory unto the ages. Amen. SCHOLIA 1. The mind, purified to the utmost through the virtues, naturally and reasonably is taught the principles of the virtues, making its own the knowledge divinely stamped by them, as a proper person. For every mind in itself is formless and unstamped, having an acquired form—either the knowledge in the Spirit that subsists from the virtues, or the ignorance that befalls from the passions. 2. He who has received the divine knowledge in the Spirit, the form of the mind that comes from the virtues, is said to have suffered divine things, because he received this not by nature according to existence, but by grace according to participation.

The one who has not received knowledge from grace, even if he speaks something gnostic, does not know by experience the power of what is said. For mere learning does not give the knowledge that comes from habit. 3. Rightly, according to this, he said that the place of Scripture is to be understood as Saul: because in many ways in other places it is taken, being fitted in a manner suited to the contemplation shown forth from the history. 4. Just as, he says, the one who joins with a concubine does not possess a lawful marriage; so the one who pursues the legal learning bodily does not have a lawful union with it, begetting bastard doctrines from it, and corrupted together with the life of the flesh. 5. The one, he says, who receives the scriptural learning in relation to the body is taught from it the sin in act, and the meditation of sin in the mind: luxury, and unrestrained intercourse, and murders, and to loathe all the creation of God he learns from the letter of the law. 6. Contemplation according to another approach. This world is also called an anathema, the place of condemnation; which by attachment it is naturally disposed to beget, for the one who does not pass over in mind to the spirit of the law.

7. He says that we possess mental study in relation to that toward which we are disposed. 8. According to another contemplation, that the formless motion of the passions is also a curse; and the shame of the mouth is the motion of the mind that gives form to the passion toward the perception of the mind, and by its conceptions supplies matter suited to the passion. 9. By way of summary he set forth the three contemplations of the passage. 10. The one who has been persuaded that it is a divine ordinance to live luxuriously in the body according to the law receives gluttony as a gift of God with joy for cohabitation; from which he begets the ways that defile the operation of the senses by misuse. 11. A concise repetition of what has been previously contemplated, through which he shows that the one who takes the law bodily keeps it as a concubine in his learning; and he begets both the habit of the passions and their operation; and he takes gluttony into his house as something divine, for the generation of the ways that defile the senses by misuse; to the destruction of the natural principles and seeds in beings. 12. He says that the one who remains in the symbols of the law cannot see the nature of beings according to reason, and cannot preserve the principles that were established essentially by the Creator in beings, because of the difference between the symbols and the nature of beings. 13. The principles of nature carry wood, becoming matter for the knowledge of divine things; and they carry water, making a cleansing of passions, and a transmission of the life-giving energy in the Spirit.

14. Another contemplation of the same things, introducing through the Gibeonites the calling of the Gentiles. 15. He called Hermonthi and Memphisbosthe matter and form according to contemplation, and the fivefold misuse of the senses the five sons of Merob; joining these to one another, that is, weaving sense into matter and form because of the law's constitution in relation to the flesh, he who circumscribes only the mind by the letter brings about the fleshly passion, and corrupts the natural principles. 16. That passion and nature according to the principle of being in no way coexist with each other. 17. He who does not believe, he says, that the Scripture is spiritual does not perceive his own poverty in knowledge. 18. When, he says, David is taken in relation to the law, among the Jews, signifying the letter, it is interpreted as contempt, because of the tradition of the divine laws in relation to the flesh; but among Christians, signifying the spirit, it is interpreted as strong in vision, because of the contemplation of knowledge according to the mind. 19. He called the spirit the soul of the Scripture, and the letter the body. 20. He says the three years are the three laws—the written, the natural, and the law of grace—which hold to one another. (Therefore he who takes the written law bodily does not nourish the soul with virtues; and he who does not apply himself to the principles of beings does not feast the mind generously on the manifold wisdom of God; and he who does not know the great mystery of the new grace does not exult in the hope of the coming deification. Consequently, the deficiency of the written law according to

of spiritual contemplation has attending it the lack of the varied wisdom of God understood according to the natural law, and has following it, in every way, the ignorance of the deification that will be given by grace according to the new mystery. 21. He who does not understand the law spiritually, even if he has the law dead through not serving it bodily, still holds the lowly meanings of the law; he cherishes the children of Saul and the offspring; therefore he is tormented by the famine of knowledge. 22. Just as the face is characteristic of each individual, so also spiritual knowledge emphatically characterizes the divine; and he who seeks it is said to seek the face of the Lord. 23. David is interpreted as strong in vision and a discerning mind. 24. He who is made flesh according to the letter of the law in bloody sacrifices has an ignorance that is desired, receiving the commandment with a view only to the pleasure of the flesh. 25. He who serves the law bodily, he says, begets, as it were, the whole of sin in act; and as a form, he molds materially the consent of the mind to it through the fitting pleasures of the senses. But he who receives the Scripture spiritually puts to death, as material, the act, and as form, the consent to sin together with the modes of the senses directed to pleasure by misuse, as sons and grandsons of the legal letter, through the natural reasonings in the height of contemplation.

26. That without natural contemplation, no one recognizes the incongruity of the legal symbols in relation to divine things. 27. "To have brought forth" has been understood, in place of "to have made manifest," as meaning that, according to the height of contemplation, the letter of the law is dead, through knowledge in the Spirit. 28. He has understood the boundary of Israel to be every principle and manner of spiritual contemplation, in which the bodily tradition of the law cannot stand at all. 29. The Spirit, he says, is that which imparts life; but the letter is that which takes life away. Therefore the letter cannot act in the same way as the Spirit, just as the life-giving cannot coexist with the destructive. 30. The foreskin, he says, is natural; and everything natural is the work of divine creation. And it is a work of divine creation and exceedingly good, according to the voice that says, "God saw all things whatsoever he made, and behold, they were exceedingly good." But the law, commanding that the foreskin be removed as unclean through circumcision, introduces God as correcting his own work by art—which it is most impious even to conceive. Therefore the one who applies himself to the symbols of the law naturally knows that God does not correct nature by art, but commands that the passible part of the soul, which is obedient to reason, be circumcised—the part typified through the bodily member—which knowledge is naturally disposed to be set aside through the courage of the will in action. For the priest who circumcises signifies the knowledge that has, as it were an iron blade against the passion, the courage of reason in action. So then, the bodily tradition of the law disappears, since the letter is surpassed by the Spirit. 31.

The definition of the mystical contemplation relating to circumcision. 32. The definition of the mystical legislation relating to the Sabbath, in which he mystically sets forth what the Sabbath is, and what the spiritual principle according to it is—namely, that it is a rest from passions and from the movement of the intellect toward the nature of beings. 33. That God is manifest. 34. What the new moons signify. 35. The definition of the crown of goodness. 36. Another, more mystical definition of the same. 37. Here he says that self-control is a work of Providence, as being purifying of the passions of the will; and he says that endurance is an achievement of judgment, as setting itself against involuntary temptations. 38. He calls the first feast the Passover. 39. He calls the second feast Pentecost. 40. He calls the third the feast in the seventh month, that of Atonement. 41. Consider how the law destroys those who understand it carnally, persuading them to worship the creature rather than the Creator, and to regard as naturally venerable the things that came to be for their sake, while being ignorant of him for whose sake they themselves came to be. 42. How God is a Sabbath.

43. How God is also a mystical Passover. 44. The mystery of the feast of Pentecost, in which he mystically initiated us into the spiritual power of the things indicated, calling God a Pentecost. For just as the monad, remaining stationary after the hebdomadic folding of the week into itself, completes the Pentecost; and again, by its approaches to itself becoming a decade through a pentad made equal to it, produces the Pentecost, (it is both beginning and end of its own: the one, as before all quantity; the other, as beyond quantity); so also God, to whom he said the monad corresponds by a typical likeness, is beginning and end of beings, and Logos, by whom all things consist: beginning, because he is before all substance and motion; end, because he is beyond all substance and motion; and Logos, because he providentially cares for all things by cause, as a cohesion relative to the underlying form, according to which each of beings has its permanence in its own Logos. When, therefore, times and ages, to which he says the week corresponds, have reached their end, God himself will then be most alone, without the mediation of things that cannot exist without, that is, places and times, holding together through himself by true union the existence of beings in those who are saved; that is, the created nature, which he likened to the pentad, not only because of the senses, into which it naturally falls, but because of the universal knowledge, which consists in the comprehension of the faultless knowledge of things intelligible and rational, sensible and living, and of beings.

Therefore the nature of beings that are saved will one day cease from local station and from temporal motion, as having come to be beyond the things that exist because of it (that is, place and time), through its true union with God, for whose sake it also came to be. For having made God himself its own possession, in accordance with the principle of Providence, by the decalogue of the commandments (that is, the mark of the property of deification that comes from grace), it will be freed from the circumscription of station in place and from station in time according to motion, receiving a motion that is ever-moving, the boundless enjoyment of divine things, and a motion that is stationary, the insatiable appetite for them. 45. In the seventh month there are three feasts: of Trumpets, of Atonement, and of Tabernacles; of which the Trumpet is a type of the law and the prophets and the knowledge proclaimed from them, while the Atonement is a symbol of God's reconciliation with man through the Incarnation. For he who voluntarily submitted to the condemnation of the condemned dissolved the enmity once ratified against him. And the Tabernacles is a prefiguration of the resurrection and of the transformation of all things into immutability.

46. He who, it says, takes pleasure in bare blood-offerings prepares those who sacrifice to be zealous about the passions as a passionate man; for the one who genuinely worships loves to rejoice in those things in which the object of worship rejoices. 47. The Word knows, it says, that sacrifices are the slaughter of the passions and the offering up of the natural powers; of these, the ram is the type of reason; the bull bears the symbol of anger; the goat is the manifestation of desire. 48. The earthly mind of Scripture, clearly, while ruling the soul, casts off the natural principles, making them disappear through the misuse of the powers according to nature. 49. As soon as one, it says, ceases to receive Scripture according to sense in relation to the body, at the same time he runs back in spirit according to the mind through the midst of nature, doing those things spiritually which the Jew, when he performs them, has God angry with him. 50. What is the hand of the Gibeonites, by which David hands over those of the seed of Saul? 51. He calls it the exposure to the sun, the manifestation which the passions suffer, being triumphed over by the lofty reasonings of nature according to the high contemplation. 52. The teaching of the law in relation to the body, it says, having before its eyes the bodily meanings of the law dead through repentance, (sitting beside the Word according to Christ, receives the heavenly illuminations of knowledge like rains. 53. By wheat, clearly.

54. Clearly, by wine. 55. Clearly, by oil. 56. He said that grain is the support of the soul, as being spiritual knowledge; and wine, that which gladdens the heart, as being productive of the loving union with God; and oil, he called that which fills the countenance with cheerfulness, as being characteristic of the spiritual grace that brightens the mind in impassibility. 57. Amalek is gluttony; its king is the earthly-mindedness; its herds of cattle and flocks are the nourishing materials of the passions; and the vine is the rash movement of the reason; and the olive is the smoothness of desire that sets it ablaze with pleasure—things which he who sits by the bodily sense of the law transfers, as it were, into a holy land, the state of godliness; in return for which he receives, as it were a wage, the divine turning away. 58. The people of the Jews was called foolish as godless; and senseless, as evildoing, which is impious and sinful. 59. The passion of gluttony, he says, is by nature such as to kill the divine offspring of the virtues; but it itself is killed, together with the grace of faith and the obedience of the divine commandments, by the word of knowledge. 60. How is it light.

61. How the Lord is a preparation before the face of all the peoples. 62. How the Lord is also the glory of Israel. 63. According to another contemplation, who are the peoples, and what is the preparation of the people before their face. 64. Who again are the nations that the Word reveals when he comes. (65. How the Word is again called the glory of Israel. 66. At once, he says, when one kills the bodily sense in the letter of the law, he receives the Word in the spirit as king. 67. He took David both for the Lord, and for the Gospel, and for the spiritual law; and for knowledge, and for contemplation, and for what is called practice, and for the new people; and according to many modes of contemplation, he fitted him appropriately to the places for the need at hand. 68. He who has the types but not the archetypes of the mysteries, and has received the question but not the knowledge of the illuminations in the spirit as a loan—the thing agreed with what has been said before, the experience according to sense in the symbols of the law—hungering in soul for the spirit, and, as it were, blinking at the guidance, the question of the knowledge according to truth.

69. Intermediary discourse is that in which there is often also error. 70. Of blessedness, clearly, since it characterizes those deemed worthy of it by participation, and makes them known from it.