34. The Lily oj the Valley (ibid840C-841B)

34. The Lily oj the Valley (ibid840C-841B)

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things that are held in honor in this world only have their existence in the minds of those who think they exist. But Thou art truly beautiful; no, not merely beautiful, Thou dost subsist for all eternity in the very essence of Beauty, remain ing forever what Thou art. Thou dost not merely blossom for a time, and then in time shed the blossom. Thou dost extend

Thy beauty over the entire eternity of Thine existence. This is Thy love for man.

34. The Lily oj the Valley (ibid840C-841B) 1 am the flower of the field, and the lily of the valleys

(Cant. 2.1). By what we have already seen, the soul has in deed been cultivated upon the broad surface of human exist ence. For in hearing the word field, we understand the breadth of man's nature, because of its ability to comprehend so many, such limitless thoughts, words, and doctrines. Thus the soul that has been cultivated in this way by the husband man of our human nature grows up like a bright, pure and fragrant flower upon the field of our human existence. Com pared to the life of heaven this field may be called a valley; but it is, nonetheless, a field, and there is nothing to prevent the soul that has been rightly tended from growing into a flower. And just as in the case of the lily, the shoot rises up from the hollow to the very heights. The lily usually shoots straight up from its root like a reed, developing a flower at the top; and there is a good distance between the flower and the ground, for the reason, I think, that its beauty might re main pure up above and not be defiled by contact with earth.

The bride, then, either has become this flower, or longs to

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become one. Either meaning is possible from the text: either she is glorying in the fact that she has become what she wanted to be, or else she is asking the Husbandman for the grace to become a flower, that she may shoot up, by His wis dom, from the valleys of human existence into the beauty of the lily. In either case, whether or not she has already attained her desire, the righteous eye of the Bridegroom gazes upon His bride and on her good desires as she looks up at Him.

He grants her desire to become a lily, not choked by the thorns of life, which He here calls daughters (Cant. 2.2), suggesting by this, I think, the evil forces in man's life, whose parent is the originator of all wickedness.

35. The Fruit of the Apple Tree (ibid., 841C-844B) The soul has now become a flower and has not been hurt by the thorns of temptation in her transformation into a lily.

She now forgets her people and the home of her father and mother, and looks towards her true Father. Thus she is called the sister of the Lord (Cant. 4.9), being brought into this re lationship by the spirit of adoption (Rom. 8.15), and removed from any contact with that pretended father. She then rises higher and higher again and gazes upon the mystery with the eyes of the Dove, that is, with the spirit of prophecy. And this is what she says: As the apple tree among the trees of the woods, so is my beloved among the sons (Cant. 2.3). What is this vision which she sees ? Holy Scripture is accustomed to use the word woods with reference to man's material exist ence: it becomes overgrown with all sorts of passions, and dangerous wild beasts make it their lair and hiding-place,

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although they have strength only at night, and remain power less in the light of the sun. After the sun goes down and night comes on, the beasts rise up out of their dens into the night, as the Prophet tells us (Ps. 103.20). Now the solitary wild boar, that has been bred in the woods, has laid waste the fair vine of human nature, as the Prophet says: The boar out of the wood hath laid it waste: and a singular wild beast hath devoured it (Ps. 79.14).

This is why the apple tree grows in the woods, and being of wood, it is similar to man's nature, tested in all things like ourselves without sin (Heb. 4.15). But because this tree bears fruit to charm the senses of the soul, there is a greater differ ence between the apple tree and the woods than there is between the lily and the thorns. The lily gives pleasure to sight and to smell; but the charm of the apple tree is har moniously proportioned to three senses: it gives pleasure to the eye by its beauty, to the sense of smell by its fragrance, but also to the sense of taste by its nourishment.

The bride then rightly recognizes the difference between herself and her Lord. As Light, He is an object of beauty for our eyes; He is a sweet odor for our sense of smell; and Life for those who partake of Him. He that eateth Him, as the Gospel says, shall live (John 6.58). Our human nature, matured by virtue, becomes a flower—but it does not offer nourishment to the Husbandman but simply adorns itself.

For He has no need of our goods, but rather we have need of His, as the Prophet says: For thou has no need of my goods

(Ps. 18.2).

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36. The Mystic Winepress {ibid., 845 A-C) Next she says: Bring me into the cellar of wine, set charity in order within me. Stay me up with perfumes, compass me about with apples, for I am wounded with love (Cant. 2.4—5)*45

Her thirst has so greatly increased that she is not satisfied with the cup of wisdom; her thirst is not quenched even though a whole cup is poured into her mouth, but she asks to be brought into the very wine cellar, and have her mouth held right beneath the vats bubbling over with sweet wine.

She asks to see the cluster crushed in the vats, to see the vine that produced the cluster and the Husbandman of the true vine Who made the cluster so sweet and nourishing.

It would be superfluous for me to explain all this, for the spiritual meaning of each detail is manifest. Surely the mys tery which the bride wants to see is how the Bridegroom's garments become red by treading the winepress, as the Prophet says: Why is thy apparel red, and thy garments like theirs that tread the winepress? (Is. 63.2). This, then, is the meaning of her desire: she wants to enter the house where the mystery of the wine is enacted.

But when she has entered, she leaps straightway to higher things. She desires to be subject to charity. And God is charity, as John tells us (1 John 4.8); to be subject to Him, as David reveals to us, is the soul's salvation (Ps. 61.2). Since

I have come, she says, into the cellar of wine, subject me to love, set charity in order within me; whichever way you put it, the meaning is the same, whether she is subject to charity or charity is ordered in her.

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37* The Order of Charity (ibid., 845C-848B) I think a familiar doctrine is being taught us here, namely, the charity we should have towards God and the charity we should show towards each other. Everything should have its correct and proper order; much more so should there be a right order in the matter of love. Cain was not condemned

(Gen. 4.5) because he had wrongly divided his offerings, if only he had observed the proper order in addition to mak ing the right offerings, keeping what he needed for himself, and consecrating the rest to God. He should have offered to God a sacrifice of the firstlings of his flocks; instead he filled himself with what was the more valuable and offered the remainder to God.

We must then be aware of the order of love which the Law teaches us, that is, how we are to love God, our neigh bor, our wives, our enemies; and our fulfillment of the law of charity must never be inverted or contrary to good order.

We should love God with our whole heart and soul and strength and with all our senses, and our neighbor as our selves. If we are men of pure souls, we are to love our wives as Christ loved the Church (Ephes. 5*25); but if we are sub ject to passion, we should love them as our own bodies

(Ephes. 5.28). This is the command of Paul, who has set up the order in this matter. We are to love our enemies by not returning evil for evil, but by requiting injury with kindness.

But as it is we see in most people a confused and disordered charity, totally lacking in harmony and orderly direction.

Some so love money and honor and (if they feel so inclined) women, with their whole soul and strength, that they would

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even be willing to give up their lives for them. Their love for God is only so much show;46 and for their neighbor they barely show the love which they owe to their enemies. And on those who hate them their habit is to inflict more pain on them than they themselves have suffered.

And so she says: Set charity in order within me that I may offer God what is His due and strike the right proportion in my relationships with all else. And we perhaps may also understand the text to mean: Though I was at first beloved, by disobedience I was reckoned with the hated; but now once again I have been restored to favor and united by love to my

Bridegroom. Confirm in me the stability and permanence of this grace, you who are the friends of the Bridegroom; and by your care and concern preserve for me permanently that inclination I have towards constant improvement.

38. The Wound of Love (ibid., 852A-853A) The bride says: Because 1 am wounded with love. Here she explains the dart that has gone right through her heart, and the Bowman is Love. From the Scriptures we learn that God is love (1 John 4.8), and also that He sends forth His only begotten Son as His chosen arrow (Is. 49*2) to the elect, dipping the triple point at its tip in the Spirit of life. The arrow's tip is faith, and it unites to the Bowman whomso ever it strikes. As the Lord has said: I and the Father are one (John 10.30), and we will come, and will ma\e our abode with him (John 14.23).

As the soul then is raised up by these divine elevations, she sees within herself the sweet dart of love that has wounded

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her, and she glories in the wound: 1 am wounded with love.

Indeed it is a good wound and a sweet pain by which life penetrates the soul; for by the tearing of the arrow she opens, as it were, a door, an entrance into herself. For no sooner does she receive the dart of love than the image of archery is transformed into a scene of nuptial joy.

We all know how a bow is handled, and how each hand is usefully employed. The left hand grasps the wood; the right hand draws back the bowstring, pulling the arrow back at the same time by holding on to the notched end, and thus aiming it at the target by means of the left hand. In the previous text the bride had been the arrow's target; now she sees herself as the arrow itself in the hands of the Archer, held on the one side by His right hand and on the other by His left.48 But the images in which the doctrine is contained are developed, according to the context, along the lines of a marriage allegory. Hence the text does not say that the pointed end of the arrow is held by the left hand and the rest by the right, as though the soul were a dart in the hands of a powerful archer aimed at the heavenly goal. Rather, it says that His left hand is supporting not the arrow-point but her head, and the rest he holds in His right hand. And the reason for this is, I think, that the Word by using two kinds of symbols wishes to teach us the same lesson with regard to our ascent towards God. The Bridegroom and our Archer are the same. And the bride and the arrow is the purified soul which he takes and aims at a good target. Thus does

He allow the bride to share in His eternal incorruptibility: with His right hand He gives her the grace of years and a long life; with His left he dispenses the wealth of eternal riches and the glory of God, in which those who seek the

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glory of the world cannot share. This is why she says: His left hand is under my head (Cant. 2.6), for this is the way

He aims the arrow towards the mark. With His right hand He takes and draws me back and makes my journey to heaven an easy one, and I am sped thither on my way even though

I do not leave the Archer; I am carried on my flight and yet I rest in the arms of my Master. For these are the qualities of His hands, as Proverbs tells us: in Wisdom's right hand is length of days and years of life, and in her left hand riches and glory (Prov. 3.16).

39. The Divine Oath (ibid., 853A-857A) An oath is a form of speech that bears its own guarantee of truth. It can have two functions: it is either a guarantee of truth for those who receive it, or else it forces those who are under oath not to tell a lie. Thus in the verse The Lord hath sworn truth to David, and he will not make it void (Ps.

131.11), the security of the promise is confirmed by the oath.

Abraham, concerned that his son might make a noble marriage, ordered his servant not to take as a wife for his son any woman of the race of Canaan; for he did not want the nobility of his line to be contaminated by intermingling with a race of slaves. And so he ordered the servant to prepare a marriage for his son with a woman from his own land and kin. And he forced the servant not to neglect this charge by making him take an oath that in whatever orders he gave, he would execute in Abraham's interest whatever he decided for his son. And thus Abraham's servant was bound under oath to arrange a suitable marriage for Isaac.49

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Now the soul in our text, is rising rapidly to such heights as we have previously seen, and she is leading other souls along the way of perfection who are still in a state of instruc tion. But granting now the two functions of an oath, she is not using the oath to guarantee to her listeners the indubita ble truth of her own progress. Rather, as she leads them on to a life of virtue she is adjuring them under oath to keep their love sleepless and vigilant until His good will should come to its term. And this is for all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (i Tim. 2.4).

Now the oath we mentioned took place on the thigh of the patriarch. So too, here it is by the powers and dominions of the field. Thus the text has: 1 adjure you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the powers and dominions of the field, that you stir not up, nor make my love to awake until he please

(Cant. 2.7).50 Here first of all we must consider what the field is; and then the meaning of "power" and "dominion," and whether there is any difference between them or whether the same thing is meant in each case. Next we must consider what is the meaning of the stirring and awakening of the beloved.

The phrase, until he please, has already been explained by what has been said.

It will be obvious to everyone that in the Gospel the voice of the Master refers to the world as the field. The form of this world shall pass away, and there is nothing permanent in its unstable nature, as is clear from the mighty voice of Ecclesiastes, who counts all passing phenomena among the things that are vain. What then is the power of this field, the world, and what is its dominion, to which the bride ap peals in order to bind the daughters of Jerusalem to an in violable command?

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Now we cannot look for this power in the sense phe nomena, for Ecclesiastes would contradict any such notion; for him anything that we might look for and find in this world is vanity. What is vain is unstable; and what is essen tially unstable cannot have any power. But there might per haps be a clue to the meaning of the passage in the fact that the word "power" is used in the plural. We are familiar with the distinction that occurs in words of this sort from holy

Scripture. When for example the word "power" ocurs in the singular, it usually refers to the divine power; but when it is used in the plural it refers to the angels. Take, for example,

Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God (1 Cor.

1.24), where the use of the singular designates the Godhead.

Whereas in the verse Praise ye the Lord, all his powers (Ps.

148.2b), the use of the plural makes it clear that the reference is to the spiritual substance of the angels. Now the addition in our text of the word dominion, simply emphasizes the same idea. The Scriptures are accustomed to use synonomous expressions in order to stress an idea more strongly, as, for example, in O Lord, my strength and my firmament (Ps.

17.1-2). Here the same idea is expressed in both phrases, but the use of the two synonomous expressions suggests the em phasis that is intended in the thought.

So too in our text, the use of the plural word "powers" and the equivalent term "dominions" would seem to suggest the angelic nature to the minds of the audience. And so the oath is laid upon those who are still making progress for the con firmation of the results of their instruction: and it is taken not by the passing form of this world but by the eternal nature of the angels; and we are bidden to look to them,

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that their example might support the permanence and sta bility of the life of perfection.

Now it has been promised that after the resurrection the life of men will be like that of the angels. Hence it should follow—since He Who has promised us cannot deceive—that our lives even in this world should be directed towards the life to come: though living in the flesh and sojourning in the field of this world, we shall not be conformed to this world

(Rom. 12.2); rather throughout the course of this life we shall meditate on the life that is to come.

Hence the bride strengthens the souls of those under in struction by her adjuration: so that even though they pass their lives in the field of this world they will nonetheless look towards the powers and will imitate angelic purity by their self-restraint. In this way is love awakened and aroused, that is, heightened and intensified by an ever greater increase; and the text means that God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven when we too achieve that angelic freedom from passion.

40. The Springtime of the Spirit {ibid., sermon 5, 865A868A) How lovely is the Creator's description of the springtime which He has made! To Him David says: The summer and the spring were formed by thee (Ps. 73.17). He dissolves winter's oppressiveness, and tells us that the sadness of the season has passed, and with it the unpleasant rains. He shows us the meadows filled and blossoming with flowers. The flowers, He tells us, are in full bloom and ready for plucking;

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and so now the flower pickers can gather them either for making garlands or preparing perfume. Sounds of speech make the season joyful, the song of birds echoes in the glens, and the sweet voice of the dove resounds in our ears.

He tells us also of the fig and the vine and, from what they augur, of the pleasure that they will bring: for the fig tree is putting forth its fruit, and the vine is blossoming with flowers, delighting our nostrils with their fragrance. Thus the text revels in the picture of spring; it puts aside any thing oppressive, and delights in pleasant descriptions. And yet, I think, the mind must not rest in the picture of these lovely things, but it must penetrate through them to the mystery here revealed, so as to disclose the treasure of mean ing concealed beneath the words.

What I am referring to is this. In days of old the human race grew cold with the chill of idolatry, and man's change able nature was transformed into the nature of the immobile objects which he worshipped. As the Scripture says: Let them that make them become like unto them: and all such as trust in them (Ps. 113.8). And this was only likely. For those who look towards the true God receive within themselves the characteristics of the divine nature; so too, those who turn their minds to the vanity of idols are transformed into the objects which they look at, and become stones instead of men. Turned thus to stone by the worship of idols, human nature became immovable and unable to advance; it had become stiff with the chill of idolatry. And therefore the Sun of Justice rose in this cruel winter, the spring came, the south wind dispelled that chill, and together with the rising of the sun's rays warmed everything that lay in its path. Thus mankind, that had been chilled into stone, might become

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warm again through the Spirit, and receiving heat from the rays of the Word, might again become as water leaping up into eternal life. His wind shall blow, it says (Ps. 147.18), and the waters shall run', and the roc\ was changed into pools of water, and the stony hill into fountains of water

(Ps. 113.8).

The Baptist preached this clearly to the Jews, telling them that the very stones were being raised up to become children of Abraham (Matth. 3.9), imitating him in virtue. This is the message which the Church hears from the Word, re ceiving the splendor of truth through the windows of the Prophets and the grill-work of the Law.47 Indeed the symbolic wall of doctrine still stood (I mean the Law), throwing a shadow of the good things to come, although not in itself an image of the reality; and behind it stood Truth wrapped in symbol. And first the brightness of the Word was com municated to the Church by the Prophets. Later, by the revelation of the Gospel the entire shadowy substance of symbol was dispelled and the intervening wall was torn down. In this way the atmosphere within the house was connected with the light of the upper heavens; and so there was no further need of using the light from the windows, since the true Light was enlightening all the interior by the rays of the Gospel.

Thus the Word cries through the windows of the Church to raise up all that have been crushed: Now indeed arise from your fall, you who have slipped in the mire of sin; and you who have been tripped by the serpent and have fallen to earth by the sin of disobedience, rise up!

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41. "Arise and Come" (ibid., 868B-869A) But it is not enough, He continues, for you to rise up from sin. You must also advance in goodness, and accomplish the course of perfection. This is the lesson we learn from the story of the paralytic: the Word not only tells him to take up the burden of his bed, but He also bids him walk (Matth.

9.6). And by walking, here, I think the text refers to progress and advancement in perfection.

And so He says: Arise and come (Cant. 2.13). What power there is in this command! For indeed the voice of the Lord is a voice of power as the Psalmist has said: Behold he will give to his voice the voice of power (Ps. 67.34) 5 an<^ again:

He spo\e and they were made: he commanded and they were created (Ps. 32.9). So too He speaks to His reclining bride: Arise; and again Come—and straightway does His word become deed. For no sooner does she receive the power of the Word than she rises, approaches and draws near to the Light, as is clear from the words of Him Who calls her:

Arise, come, my love, my beautiful one, my dove (Cant.

2.13-14). Notice here the order of the words. How does each one link with the next ? Do you see how the thought sequence is closely kept in a kind of chain ? The bride hears the com mand; she is empowered by the word; she arises, advances, comes close, becomes beautiful, is called a dove. Now, how can you see a beautiful image in a mirror unless it has re ceived the impression of a beautiful form? So it is with the mirror of human nature: it cannot become beautiful until it draws near to the Beautiful and becomes transformed by the image of the divine Beauty.

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When our human nature lay fallen upon the earth it looked towards the serpent and held its image. But now that it has arisen and looks towards the good, turning its back on sin it takes on the form of the good towards which it faces.

For it looks now upon that archetypal Beauty—for that is the Dove. For, turning towards the light, it has been made into the image of light, and within this light it has taken on the lovely form of the Dove—I mean the Dove that sym bolizes the presence of the Holy Spirit.

42. "The Winter Is Now Past" (ibid., 869A-872B) The Word has spoken to the bride, calling her my love because she is close to Flim, and my dove because she is beauti ful. Fie now goes on to say that the sadness of winter no longer dominates our souls. For the cold cannot resist the rays of the sun. Behold, He says, winter is now past, the rain is over and gone (Cant. 2.11). Sin is given many different names in accordance with its different effects. It is called winter, rain, drops—each name suggesting a different sort of temptation. In wintertime everything that is lovely withers away. All the leaves, which are the natural crown of the beauty of the trees, fall from the branches and are mingled with earth. The song of the birds is silent, the nightingale flies away, the swallow sleeps, and the dove leaves its nest.

Everything imitates the oppression of death. The blossom perishes; the grass dies; the branches are stripped of their leaves like bones of their flesh, and what was once lovely flower and leaf is now an ugly spectacle.

To this we may add the change that comes over the sea in

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the winter: churned up and swollen from its depths it rises in peaks and mountains, and the water mounts up like a cliff. Rising beyond its limits, it attacks the land as though it were an enemy and strikes with the successive blows of its waves, reminding us of the assaults of military machines.

Keep in mind, then, all the things we see in winter, that we may transpose them to a more allegorical level. What is it that withers and fades in the winter ? What falls from the branches of the trees and dissolves in the earth ? What is the meaning of the silence of the birds' song, and the sea tossed by the waves? What, again, is the rain and the rain-drops, and how does it pass over ? In all of this the deeper meaning of the text suggests that the winter is something human and endowed with freedom of will.

Now even though my discourse may not explain each point, the meaning of all of these details will be quite clear to our audience. Man's nature in the beginning flourished while it was in Paradise, growing fat and thriving on the water of the fountain there; and he flourished so long as he had the blossom of immortality and not the leaves. But when the winter of disobedience came and withered its roots, the blos som was shaken off and fell to the ground. Man was dius stripped of his immortality; the grass of virtue was dried up; the love of God was chilled by repeated sin; and the passions were stirred up into a great swell by stormy winds, causing many souls to be shipwrecked.

But then came One Who brought spring to our souls. And whenever an evil wind churned up the sea, he scolded the winds and spoke to the sea: Peace, be still (Mark 4.39). And thus all was brought to peace and calm. Our nature began once again to blossom and reveal its beauty with its own

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flowers. For the flowers of life are the virtues, which blossom now and bring forth their fruit in season.

This is why the sacred text tells us: Winter is now past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning is come (Cant. 2.11-12).

Do you see, He says, the meadow blossoming with flowers ?

Do you see chastity, shining like a fragrant lily ? Do you see the rose of modesty, and the violet, the good odor of Christ?

Why not make a garland of these ? Now is the time to gather these flowers and adorn ourselves with them. The time of pruning is come. This is what we are told by the voice of the turtle (Cant. 2.12), that is, the voice crying in the wilder ness (Matth. 3.3). For John is the turtle-dove, the harbinger of lovely spring: he points out to men the fair flowers of virtue and offers them to those who are willing to gather them. It was thus he showed us the flower that sprang from Jesse's root, the Lamb of God that tafeth away the sins of the world, and showed us the penance we must do for our sins, the lives of virtue that we must lead.

43. From Dove to Dove (ibid., 873C-876C) The blessed and eternal substance of God, that surpasses all understanding, contains all perfection within itself and cannot be limited. Hence nothing that is limiting, whether name, or concept or thing, can be considered as His attribute, as, for example, time, place, color, shape, form, mass, magni tude, dimension. But every perfection that He is conceived to have is present to an infinite and unlimited degree. For where evil has no place, Good must be without limit.

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But in our changeable natures, however, good and evil exist by turns, because of the power we have to choose equally either side of a contradiction. The consequent evil becomes the limit of our good. And all the operations of our soul, insofar as they are opposed, terminate in and are limited by their opposites. But the divine nature is simple, pure, unique, immutable, unalterable, ever abiding in the same way, and never goes outside of itself. It is utterly immune to any par ticipation in evil and thus possesses the good without limit, because it can see no boundary to its own perfection, nor see anything that is contrary to itself. When therefore it draws human nature to participate in its perfection, because of the divine transcendence it must always be superior to our nature in the same degree. The soul grows by its constant participa tion in that which transcends it; and yet the perfection in which the soul shares remains ever the same, and is always discovered by the soul to be transcendent to the same degree.

We see the Word, then, leading the bride up a rising stair case, as it were, up to the heights by the ascent of perfection.

The Word first sends forth a ray of light through the win dows of the Prophets and through the lattices of the Law and the commandments. Then He bids the bride draw near to the light and then to become beautiful by being changed, in the light, into the form of the Dove. And then, even though she has enjoyed her share of good things as far as was in her power, He nonetheless continues to draw her on to participate in transcendent Beauty as though she had never tasted of it. In this way her desire grows as she goes on to each new stage of development; and because of the trans cendence of the graces which she finds ever beyond her, she always seems to be beginning anew.

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For this reason the Word says once again to His awakened bride: Arise; and, when she has come, Come (Cant. 2.13).

For he who is rising can always rise further; and for him who runs to the Lord the open field of the divine course is never exhausted. We must therefore constantly arouse our selves and never stop drawing closer and closer in our course.

For as often as He says Arise, and Come, He gives us the power to rise and make progress.

In this light you must understand the sequel. In bidding the bride to become beautiful even though she is beautiful,

He reminds us of the words of the Apostle who bids the same image to be transformed from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3.18).

This means that though what we find and grasp is always glory, no matter how great or sublime it may be, we always believe it to be less than what we hope for. Similarly, though the bride is a dove because of her previous perfection, she is ordered to become a dove once more by way of being trans formed into what is more perfect.

44. The Cleft of the Rock (ibid., 876D-877D) Come, my dove, in the cleft of the roc\ next to the wall

(Cant. 2.13-14). What sort of ascent to perfection is here im plied in our text ? It is that we must no longer consider the impact of those things which attract us; rather, we must take as our guide our yearning for perfection. Come, He says, by yourself; not out of sadness, or necessity, but by yourself, reinforcing your yearning for the good by your own reason, and not out of any necessity. For perfection must not be coerced, it must be self-determined and free of all necessity.

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Such was David, for he realized that of all the things that he had done, only those were pleasing to God that were done freely, and so he vows that he will freely offer sacrifice. And this is the spirit of every holy man of God, not to be led by necessity.

So too should you48 now show that you have achieved the state of perfection in your desire constantly to rise to what is higher. When you have done this, He says, you will come in the cleft of the roc\ that is next to the wall. Now I will tell you what He means by this, for we must translate the words a little more clearly out of their enigmatic obscurity. The one cleft in the roc\ for man is the sublime message of the Gos pel; for once we come to it there is no further need for types and symbolic representations, and the truth clears up the obscure message of the Law. No one surely who at all under stands our faith would deny that the Gospel can be called a rock; and this can be gathered from many places in Scripture.

The meaning, then, of our text is this: when you have exercised yourself, dear soul, in the Law, and have gazed in spirit upon the rays that shine through the prophetic win dows, abide no longer in the shadow of the wall. For the wall indeed casts a shadow of the good things that are to come; in no sense does it offer the very image of reality. And so you must move from the wall to the rock that is con tiguous; the rock is adjacent to the wall, since the Law had been the bulwark for the truth of the Gospel. In such wise, then, are the doctrines consistent; the meaning of one is coherent with that of the other. For what is closer to the com mandment, Thou shalt not commit adultery, than Lust not; or the precept binding one to be purified of all bloodshed than the command not to defile the heart by anger? Since

the cleft is contiguous with the bulwark, you have not far to go from the wall to the rock.

The wall has its circumcision, and so has the rock; there is a lamb here and a lamb there, blood here and blood there, a Pasch here and a Pasch there, and so on almost all through; and these are very close to each other. But the rock is spiritual and the wall is earthly. The wall has been fashioned of our bodily clay. Whereas the rock of the Gospel has no fleshly clay mingled with its message. Here, too, man is circumcized, and yet he remains whole and entire and suffers no mutilation in his material nature. He keeps holy the Sabbath day by abstaining from sin, but he does not cease from acts of virtue, for he has learned that it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.

He chooses his food indiscriminately, and yet he touches no unclean thing. For he has learned from the rock that nothing that entereth into the mouth is defiled (Matth. 15.17). The rock rejects all the bodily precepts of the Law and translates the sense of the words on a spiritual and supernatural plane, according to the words of St. Paul: The law is spiritual (Rom.

7.14). He who truly casts out the Law enters into the cleft of the roc\ of the Gospel, and this is contiguous with the material wall.

45. The Little Foxes [ibid., 880C-881D) And so the pure Bridegroom accepts the just request of His bride; but before revealing Himself openly, He first urges the hunters to catch the foxes to prevent them from spoiling the growth of His vine to maturity; and He says: Catch us the little foxes that destroy the vines (Cant. 2.15).49 For our

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vines will flourish if we kill what is harming them. Hence, Catch us the little foxes that destroy the vines: for our vine yard hath flourished. Can we do justice to the profound thought concealed here ? What marvel of the divine grandeur is here contained? What effect of the divine omnipotence underlies the meaning of our text? The reference here is to the slayer of men, the tyrant of evil, whose tongue is sharp as a razor, of whom the Prophet says: The sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals that lay waste (Ps. 119.4), and he lieth in wait in secret life a lion in his den (Ps. 10.9 [Heb.]). This is the Serpent, the great apostate, Hades himself with open maw, the tyrant of the powers of darkness who holds sway over death, and all the other things that the inspired word tells us of him.

It was he who broke down the barriers between the nations which were established clearly by the Most High in accord ance with the number of His angels.50 He swooped down on the world like a bird upon a nest; he carried off the lost sheep; it was he who said that he would set his throne above the heavens and become life the Most High (Is. 14.14) • And there are also all those horrible and frightening things which the Word tells us in the book of Job:51 that his sides are of brass, his back of molten iron, his vitals of emery stone—not to mention all the other horrible details with which the Scrip tures describe him.

This great commander of the legions of devils—how is he described by Him Who is the sole true Power ? As a little fox. And as He urges His hunters to the chase, He uses the same contemptuous expression of all those who are with the devil and the entire force that is under him. The hunters would perhaps be the angelic hosts who accompany the Lord

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T95 in His descent to earth, and conduct the King of glory into this world, and make Him known to those who know Him not. Who is this King of Glory? He who is strong and mighty in battle (Ps. 23.8).

It might however be suggested that these hunters are the ministering spirits, sent to minister for them, who shall re ceive the inheritance of salvation (Heb. 1.14); or perhaps the holy Apostles, who have been sent to hunt such beasts, and to whom He said: 1 will ma\e you to be fishers of men

(Matth. 4.19). For they could not undertake their fishing of men—by snaring the souls of the elect in the net of their sacred message—if they had not first cast out those beasts, those little foxes, from their lairs—that is, the hearts of men— in which they were hiding. Thus they could make a place for the Son of God, a place whereon to lay His head, once the tribe of foxes ceased to make their dens in men's hearts.

In any case, whoever the hunters are supposed to be accord ing to the Word, from the commands given to them we are taught the tremendous and ineffable power of God. For He does not say: Hunt the boar of the forest that ravages God's vine, nor the solitary wild boar, nor the roaring lion, nor the great whale, nor the sea serpent. By such phrases as these would the Word show the hunters what power our adver saries have. Rather, it tells us that all those terrestrial powers who struggle against mankind, the principalities and powers and the cosmic rulers of darkness and the spirits of wicked ness—all these are but little foxes, pitiful and miserable when compared with our strength. If you conquer them, you will win a grace that will be your own. The vine, which is our human nature, begins to put forth its clusters of fruit with the flower of perfection. Thus, Catch us the little foxes that

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destroy the vines; and our vineyard hath flourished (Cant.

2.15). The vine has heard the divine word of command, like the woman of whom David speaks as the wife of the fruitful vine (Ps. 127.3). She saw herself protected from the viola tion of those beasts by the power of Him Who commanded her. And straightway she gives herself to the Husbandman

Who has destroyed the intermediate wall of separation. For no longer is the wall of the Law to separate her from being united with Him Whom she loves.

46. "Forgetting the Things That Are Behind" (ibid., sermon

6, 885C-888A)

Divine providence has divided creatures into two classes: the one is material and bound to the senses; the other is im material and spiritual. By the sensuous I mean anything that we can perceive by our sense faculties; and the spiritual is that which transcends the sensuous. Now the spiritual is with out bound or limit, whereas the other is completely circum scribed by limitations.52 For everything material is deter mined by quantity and quality, and in our concept of its properties there is always limitation in its magnitude, form, appearance and shape; no one who considers matter can grasp anything in his imagination beyond these dimensions.

What is spiritual and immaterial, however, is free of all such determinations, it evades all terms and has no limits.

Spiritual substances are further divided as follows: first there is the uncreated substance, itself the Creator of all things, that remains eternally what it is. Remaining ever unchange able, it transcends all addition or diminution; it cannot re-

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ceive any further perfection. The other class of spiritual sub stance has been brought into being by creation; thus it con stantly looks towards the first Cause, and is preserved in exist ence by a continual participation in transcendent Being. Thus, in a certain sense, it is constantly being created, ever changing for the better in its growth in perfection; along these lines no limit can be envisaged, nor can its progressive growth in per fection be limited by any term. In this way, its present state of perfection, no matter how great and perfect it might be, is merely the beginning of a greater and superior stage. Thus the words of the Apostle are verified: the stretching forth to the things that are before involves the forgetting of what has already been attained (Phil. 3.13). For at each stage the greater and superior good holds the attention of those who enjoy it and does not allow them to look at the past; their enjoyment of the superior perfection erases all memory of that which was inferior. This, I think, is the lesson which we are taught by our consideration of the bride's discourse.

47. Loves Quest {ibid., 888C-893C) In earlier stages of the soul's ascent, the lesson of the pas sage depended on the particular nature of her increase in perfection. The bride, constantly making progress and never stopping at any stage of perfection, was compared to the stallion that overthrew the Egyptian tyrant; and then to the sort of chains and ornaments which adorn the neck. Not content with these stages she proceeds higher. In the sweet spikenard she recognizes the divine fragrance, but she does not remain here; she takes what she most desires and, like a

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sweet-smelling sachet, she suspends it between the breasts of the spirit, and worn within the space of her heart it gives forth the fragrance of the divine message.

After this she brings forth a fruit which is the Vine-dresser Himself, calling Him the cluster, as she exhales a sweet and lovely fragrance through her blossoms. Thus growing by these spiritual ascensions, she is called beautiful, beloved, and the beauty of her eyes is likened to doves. Then she proceeds even further. Becoming more clear-sighted, she begins to comprehend the beauty of the Word; she marvels how He descends in shadow to the bed of this life, under the shade, as it were, of the matter of His human body.

Next she begins to describe the dwelling of virtue: it is covered with cedar and cypress wood, which do not admit any rottenness or corruption, and in this she teaches the permanence and immutability of her desire for perfection

(Cant. 1.16). Then she explains her growth in virtue by a comparison, appearing as a lily among thorns (Cant. 2.2).

Once again, she realizes the difference between her Spouse and the others. He is called an apple tree among the fruitless woods blossoming with the loveliness of the spring. She comes into His shadow and enters His house, where she is supported by perfumes and strengthened by the fruits of the apple tree. By a delicious wound she receives His special dart in her heart; and then she herself becomes the arrow in the hands of the Bowman, Who with His right hand draws the arrow near to Himself, and with His left directs its head towards the heavenly goal.

Afterwards, as though she has arrived now at perfection, she explains to the other maidens her affection for Him

Whom she desires, stirring up their love by a kind of oath.

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Now who would not say that the soul that reached this height had attained to the highest limit of perfection ? And yet the final stage of all her previous attainments becomes the be ginning of her introduction to all that still lies beyond.

All this now is thought of as the sound of a voice that calls the soul, through its spiritual sense of hearing, to a con templation of the mysteries. She begins to look upon her

Beloved as He appears in different forms. Now he is like a roe, now like a young hart (Cant. 2.17); but the vision does not stay within the same spot, nor is it always in our vision, but He leaps upon the mountains, and skips from the peaks to the hilltops.

Here again, the bride is in a more perfect state, when a second call comes to her to leave the shadow of the wall, to come out into the light and to rest in the cleft of the roc\ which is adjacent to the wall (Cant. 2.14), to take her pleas ure in the springtime and gather the flowers of the season, now that they are in full bloom and ready for pruning—and so on with all the other pleasures which the season offers to those who would enjoy it—in the midst of the songs of the birds. Through all of this the bride emerges ever more perfect, and she now thinks herself ready to see the speaker's face openly and to listen to him directly instead of through others.

Once again, it is right for the soul to rejoice at this, now that she is arriving in her lofty ascent at the peak of her desires. What greater happiness could be imagined than that of seeing God? And yet this climax of all she has now at tained becomes the beginning of her hope for the things that lie ahead. She now hears the voice of her Lord entrusting the hunters with the life of the spiritual vines, ordering them

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to catch the beasts that harm the fruit, those little foxes we spoke of. This done, the two are united: God comes to the soul, and the soul in turn unites itself with God. For she says: My beloved to me, and l to him who jeedeth among the lilies (Cant. 2.16), to Him indeed Who has transformed our human nature from the realm of shadowy appearances to that of ultimate truth.

Thus you see the heights to which the soul rises, proceed ing, as the Prophet says, from virtue to virtue (Ps. 83.8), so that it would seem to have achieved its hopes in the highest degree. For surely nothing can surpass the joy of being within the Beloved when the Beloved is also within us. And yet, though she has arrived at this stage, the bride still laments as though she were still deprived of her goal. As though she does not yet possess the object of her desire, she is anxious and perplexed; and she expresses her anxiety in the narrative of the text (Cant. 3.1-4), describing how she found what she was seeking.

All this we learn from our contemplation of the words of the text, and we are thus taught never to set any bounds to the immensity of the Godhead; nor can any measure of human knowledge ever become a limit to our comprehension of our goal, so as to force us to stop in our ever forward progress towards heaven. Rather, the soul that is rising towards trans cendent truth in the ways of higher understanding should be so disposed that every stage of perfection that is possible for human nature should be merely the beginning of a yearning for things more sublime.

And so, consider now the doctrine that is proposed for our consideration, keeping in mind the fact that the bridal cham ber and the preparations for marriage are merely the material

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level of the Scriptural message and offer us matter for higher contemplation. The ultimate meaning transfers the mental concepts to a pure and spiritual level, and through these various doctrines are proposed; the symbolism of the narra tion is used to bring out the clear doctrine that is revealed.

Thus in our text the bride refers to the soul; God is called the Spouse, Whom she loves with all her heart and soul and strength. And consequently, having come, as she thinks, to the height of her hopes, and thinking that she is already united with her Beloved, she speaks of her more perfect participation in good as a bed, referring to the night, the time of darkness. By the night she refers to the contemplation of the invisible, just as Moses, who entered into the darkness to the place where God was; and God, as the Prophet says, made the darkness his covert round about him (Ps. 17.12).

Arriving at this point, the bride is then instructed that, far from attaining perfection, she has not even begun to approach it. Now, she says, that I have been deemed worthy of the nuptial rites, I rest as it were upon the bed of all that I have hitherto understood. But I am suddenly introduced into the realm of the invisible, surrounded by the divine darkness, searching for Him Who is hidden in the dar\ cloud. Then it was that I felt that love for Him Whom I desired—though the Beloved Himself resists the grasp of our thoughts. And so / sought him in my bed by night (Cant. 3.1), to learn of His substance, His beginning and His end, and in what His essence consists. But I found Him not. I called Him by name

—as though it were possible to find Him in a name when He cannot be named.

No name would have a meaning that would reach Him Whom we seek. For how can He be discovered by a name

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when He is beyond all names? Thus she says: 1 called him, but he answered not (Cant. 3.1). For then I recognized that of the magnificence of the glory of His holiness there is no end (Ps. 144.5, 3)- Hence she gets up again and in spirit traverses the entire spiritual and transcendental world, which she calls here a city. Here there are principalities and domina tions and thrones assigned to powers, and gatherings of heavenly hosts (which she calls the mar\et-place) and an innumerable multitude (which she calls the broad ways), and through all she hopes to find Him Whom she loves. In her search she surveys the entire angelic army. And not find ing among the good things there the object of her quest, she reasons thus with herself: Is it possible that my Beloved can be comprehended? Have you seen him whom my soul loveth? Their only answer to the question is silence; and by their silence they show that what she seeks is incompre hensible to them. And after she has gone about the entire supramundane city by the operation of her mind, and has not recognized her Beloved even among things spiritual and im material, then at last she gives up all she has found; for she realizes that what she seeks can be understood only in the very inability to comprehend His essence, and that every intelligible attribute becomes merely a hindrance to those who seek to find him. This is why she says: When l had a little passed by them (Cant. 3.4), I abandoned all creatures and passed by all that is intelligible in creation; and when I gave up every finite mode of comprehension, then it was that I found my Beloved by faith. And 7 will never let Him go, now that I have found Him, from the grasp of faith, until He comes within my chamber (Cant. 3.4). For the heart is indeed a chamber to be filled by the divine indwelling—that is, when

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it is restored to the state that it had in the beginning, as it was when it was made by her that bore me (Cant. 3.4). For surely we would be right in understanding the mother here as the first Cause of our being.

48. The Pillar of Smoke in the Desert (ibid., 896B-897D) Who is she that goeth up from the desert, as a pillar of smoke of aromatical spices, of myrrh, and frankincense, and of all the powders of the perfumer? (Cant. 3.6) Whoever would give serious thought to this text would find here con firmed the truth of the doctrine we have already put forward.

In theatrical spectacles it is always the same actors who act out the proposed plot; but we always think that different characters appear, because the actors take on different roles by changing their masks. So, for example, the same actor who came out before as a slave and a private citizen next appears as a noble or as a soldier; then afterwards, taking off the costume of the subordinate, he comes on in the character of a general or else with the costume of a king. So it is with the life of perfection. Those who, in their desire for higher things are being transformed from glory do not remain in the same character; but according to the degree of perfection which is established in each one, a different character will manifest itself in their lives, a new one always following on the old, by reason of their increase in grace.

This is the reason, I think, why the friends of the Bride groom are surprised at what they see. First of all they recog nize the bride as beautiful, but beautiful as a woman. Later they praise her beauty by comparing it to gold with silver

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inlays. Now, however, they do not consider any of her pre vious attributes; but qualifying her with the highest perfec tion, they marvel not only at the height she has reached but also the depths from which she has risen. And this is the point which indicates the intensity of their wonder: she alone is seen ascending, and she is compared to a grove of trees. A pillar of smoke is imagined as rising up and expanding. And what nourishes this pillar is not any fertile or irrigated soil, but rather a dry and arid wilderness. Where then are the roots of these pillars and how do they grow? Their roots are the dust of perfumes. And they are watered by the smoke of incense which irrigates this grove with its fragrance. Such is the praise which the Word heaps on the bride so described in our text. And as she is seen, each one asks the other about her, as though she were changing to some other form. And this perfect praise which they give her progress in virtue is not because of her previous form, but because of the great change and transformation for the better.

This, then, is the voice of those who are struck with admira tion at the unusual way her loveliness has blossomed: Can she be rising up from the desert, whom before we saw so black? How has she removed the form of darkness? How is it that her face shines as white as snow? It is the wilder ness, apparently, that is responsible and caused her to rise to the heights like a young sprout, transformed into such love liness. And she did not rise by some coincidence or by some haphazard chance. No, she won her beauty by her own efforts, by her devotion and her continence.53 In the same way the Prophet's soul thirsted for the divine spring (Ps. 41.3): when his flesh became like a parched and trackless desert, then did he experience this thirst for God (Ps. 62.2-3).

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So too here, the rising of the bride in the desert is evidence that she has risen so high out of her devotion and her con tinence that she causes even the friends of the Bridegroom to marvel. And they give expression to her loveliness through many images, because it is impossible to explain it with one.

First they compare her beauty to pillars; then they express the marvels that have been wrought in her not by the image of one tree, but by comparing her to an entire forest; the variety and the charm of her virtues can only be described by the comparison with a grove.

Next her beauty is compared to the smoke of incense; and again, it is not a simple smoke, but a mixture of frankincense and myrrh—as though the bride's beauty can only be ex pressed by the combination of each of these delightful odors.

Another aspect of their praise is derived from the association of these two perfumes: myrrh is used for burying the dead, and frankincense is, in a sense, consecrated to the divine wor ship. The meaning, then, is that a person who intends to dedicate himself to the divine service will not be good incense, consecrated to God, unless he first becomes myrrh; that is, he must mortify his members on earth by being buried with Him Who assumed death for our sake, and he must take that myrrh that was used for the Lord's burial in order to mortify his members in his own flesh. Thus all the different perfumes of virtue are, in the course of life, reduced to a fine ash in the fire of sacrifice to produce that sweet powder; and whoever breathes its sweet odor becomes fragrant and filled with the spirit of the perfumes.

After their praise of the bride's beauty, the Bridegroom's friends who prepare that holy bridal chamber and are the escorts for the virginal bride, point out to her the beauty of

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the royal bed, for they wish to arouse in her a more intense desire for that spotless and divine marriage with Him.

49. The Guardians of the Heart (ibid., 900B-905C)54 What is the meaning of the threescore soldiers, expert in the doctrines of terrible war, who surround the bridal bed ?

What is the meaning of the sword's adornment girt at their side and the terror they instill in the night? For the Word speaks of a fearful terror that comes from certain fears in the night (Cant. 3.8), and this has reference to the soldiers. We must then examine the meaning of these words for an inter pretation which will be consistent with what we have pre viously seen.

What then can this meaning be ? It would seem that the attractiveness of the divine beauty has something terrifying about it, and this is characterized by qualities which seem the exact opposite of bodily beauty. For what makes bodily beauty desirable is that it is pleasant to the sight, soft to the touch, and not at all connected in our minds with fear or sternness. But that divine, incorruptible Beauty is at once something stern and terrifying, though in itself it cannot be terrified. But that carnal desire that settles on the body's members is an obsessive and sordid thing, and like a band of brigands lays siege to the mind, often seizing it and taking it captive against its will. Thus it becomes God's enemy, as the Apostle says: the wisdom of the flesh becomes an enemy to God (Rom. 8.7). It follows that the love of God can only arise from what is contrary to carnal desire. The love of God is made up of a fearsome, imperturbable fortitude; whereas

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the love of the flesh is dominated by a slackness, an indul gence, and a sense of indolent relaxation. Only a stern wrath terrifies and puts to flight the spirit of pleasure: only thus can the chaste beauty of the soul be revealed, unsoiled by an in clination to carnal pleasure.

It is necessary, then, that the nuptial couch of the king be surrounded by soldiers expert in war; the swords girt on their thighs strike terror and fear not only into our darkened thoughts but also in those who lie in wait for the righteous and aim their arrows at them in the nights when the moon is hidden.

The weapons of those who stand guard around the bed destroy all wicked thoughts, as is clear from the text: All expert in war: and every man s sword upon his thigh (Cant.

3.8). It is clear indeed that they know how to fight flesh and blood, having their swords girt on their thighs. All those who are familiar with the obscurities and the concepts of the Scriptures surely understand this reference, and are aware that the sword is the Word. Now he who has girt Himself with that fearful weapon, I mean the sword of continence, is the Beloved lying upon His immortal bed. He is one of the valiant of Israel, worthy to be counted among the threescore.

Again, I do not doubt that this number has a mystical mean ing, though it is clear only to those to whom the grace of the Spirit reveals the hidden mysteries. We do, of course, say that it is sufficient if we are filled with the obvious sense of Scripture, if (iust as Moses commanded for the celebration of the Passover) we eat the flesh that appears and leave un touched the bones of obscurity (Exod. 12.8-10). But if anyone desires the hidden marrow of the Word, he must seek it of Him Who reveals His mysteries to those who are worthy.

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In no case should we give the impression of letting the Scriptures pass without examination, negligent of the Lord's command to search the Scriptures (John 5-39)* And so we must closely examine the text here which refers to the three score valiant ones.

Moses received twelve rods in accordance with the number of the tribes of Israel, but the one that flowered was superior to the rest (Num. 17.2 ff.). Again Joshua took twelve stones from the Jordan (Jos. 4.9 ff.), as many as the tribes of Israel; and of these none were rejected but all were received in equal honor to bear witness to the mystery that took place at the Jordan.

There is an important inference to be drawn from these facts. The Word teaches us that the people had made a cer tain progress towards perfection. In the beginning only one rod is found to be living and flourishing; all the others are rejected as dry and sterile. But with the passage of time, as they studied the precepts of the Law with sharper compre hension, they recognize and accept the second circumcision which Joshua brought them; and the stone knife cuts away all that is unclean in them. Every attentive listener will, I am sure, understand the symbolic meaning of the stone and the knife. At any rate, as their life of virtue became stronger in accordance with the Law, it was only likely that none of the stones taken up with the name of the tribes of Israel would be rejected. As time advanced one would expect to find an increase in perfection; and Israel's virtue was, in deed, becoming stronger.

Now in our present text it is not a question of a rod or a stone being taken from each of the tribes of Israel. Rather, instead of rods or stones we have five warriors, expert in

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war, taken from the valiant ones of Israel, holding up their swords and standing guard over the divine bed. None, there fore, are rejected: because the pick of every tribe (signified by the number five), multiplied by twelve, make up the full complement of threescore. There had to be, therefore, five terrible warriors to stand guard over the royal bed', if there were not five, the others could not be admitted.

Now how may we dare to develop the rest of the argu ment? How is it that five men are armed from each tribe to guard the royal couch? And how does each of these five become a terrible adversary to the enemy with his sword girt upon his thigh? Is it not clear that the five warriors are the same as the stone, that is, they represent each of the five senses, each brandishing a ready sword to terrify the enemy ?

The sword of the eye is to look constantly upon the Lord, to see aright, not to be defiled by unclean things. Again, the sword of hearing is to listen to spiritual instruction, and never to open oneself to any vain discourse. So too, we can arm taste, touch and smell with the sword of continence, putting the proper armor on each sense in turn, and thus prevent the shock and terror which enters as a result of the thoughts of darkness. For the time when our souls are attacked is always the night and the darkness. It is the nighttime, the Prophet tells us, when the beasts of the field attempt to make their foul meal on the flocks of the Lord: Thou hast ap pointed darkness, and it is night: in it shall all the beasts of the field go about: the young lions roaring after their prey

(Ps. 103.20-21).

Now Israel embraces all who are saved. Yet all are not Israelites that are of Israel (Rom. 9.6): only those who look towards the Lord deserved so to be called by reason of their

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cooperation. Now anyone who looks toward the Lord ought not to have his senses directed towards sin. No man can look at two masters, but he must hate the one if he expects to love the other. Thus the bed of the king represents all the elect. Now all those who are clean of heart shall see God; and those who see God are rightly called Israel. On a mystical level this name is given to all the twelve tribes. Thus the full number of the elect is fittingly summed up in the num ber sixty; for one is taken from each of the twelve sections and, as it were, divided into five warriors according to the number of the senses.

And so all who have put on the armor of the Lord and surround the single royal bed are Israel. And because of the universal excellence of the twelve tribes, the entire number of the warriors comes to the number sixty. And yet there is one battle line, one army and one bed, that is to say, one

Church. And all shall become one bride, to be joined in the unity of one Body under one Commander, one Leader, one

Bridegroom.

But the bed also represents the rest and happiness of the elect. We learn this from what the Lord says to the man who knocks importunely at the door at night: The door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed (Luke 11.7).

Rightly does He call His children those who have won im passibility by the arms of righteousness. And by this we are taught that the perfection we attain by our efforts is none other than that which was implanted in our nature at the beginning. For when a man has girt his sword on his thigh by devotion to the life of perfection and has thus cast out all passion, he becomes as it were a child in years because he is no longer sensitive to such passionate impulses. For im maturity of years does not allow the experience of passion.

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Hence the meaning of the warriors over the bed and the children in the bed comes to the same thing. Both enjoy a freedom from passion: the children because they never ex perienced it, the warriors because they have driven it off.

The former have never known it; the latter have returned again to their pristine state by becoming children once again so far as passion was concerned. And thus the elect are dis covered under all these symbols: as a child, as a warrior, as a true Israelite. As the true Israelite, he sees God with a clean heart; as a warrior he guards the royal couch, that is, his own heart, in purity and freedom from passion; as a child he sleeps upon the couch of salvation.

50. The Doctrine of Infinite Growth (ibid., sermon 8, 940C941C)55 The great Apostle told the Corinthians of the wonderful visions he enjoyed during the time of his mystical initiation in Paradise—it was a time when he even doubted his own nature, whether he was body or spirit—and he testifies: 1 do not count myself to have apprehended. But forgetting the things that are behind, I stretch myself forth to those that are before (Phil. 3.13). And clearly this is meant to include even that third heaven which Paul alone saw; for even Moses told us nothing of it in his cosmogony. Yet even after listening in secret to the mysteries of heaven, Paul does not let the graces he has obtained become the limit of his desire, but he con tinues to go on and on, never ceasing his ascent. Thus he teaches us, I think, that in our constant participation in the blessed nature of the Good, the graces that we receive at every point are indeed great, but the path that lies beyond

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our immediate grasp is infinite. This will constantly happen to those who thus share in the divine Goodness, and they will always enjoy a greater and greater participation in grace throughout all eternity.

The pure of heart will see God, according to the Lord's infallible word (Matth. 5.8), according to his capacity, re ceiving as much as his mind can sustain; yet the infinite and incomprehensible nature of the Godhead remains beyond all understanding. For the magnificence of His glory, as the Prophet says (Ps. 144.5), has no end, and as we con template Him He remains ever the same, at the same dis tance above us. The great David enjoyed in his heart those glorious elevations as he progressed from strength to strength; and yet he cried to God: Lord, thou art the most

High, forever and ever (Ps. 82.19). And by this I think he means that in all the infinite eternity of centuries, the man who runs towards Thee constantly becomes greater as he rises higher, ever growing in proportion to his increase in grace. Thou, indeed, art the most High, abiding forever, and canst never seem smaller to those who approach Thee for Thou art always to the same degree higher and loftier than the faculties of those who are rising.

This, then, is the doctrine that I think the Apostle is teaching about the ineffable nature of the Good, when he says that the eye does not know it even though it may see it.

For the eye does not see it completely as it is, but only inso far as it can receive it. So too, even though we may constantly listen to the Word, we do not hear it completely according to its manifestation. And even though the clean of heart use his eyes as much as he can, yet it has not entered into the heart of man. Thus though the new grace we may obtain is

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greater than what we had before, it does not put a limit on our final goal; rather, for those who are rising in perfection, the limit of the good that is attained becomes the beginning of the discovery of higher goods. Thus they never stop rising, moving from one new beginning to the next, and the begin ning of ever greater graces is never limited of itself. For the desire of those who thus rise never rests in what they can already understand; but by an ever greater and greater desire, the soul keeps rising constantly to another which lies ahead, and thus it makes its way through ever higher regions towards the Transcendent.

51. "Come From Libanus" {ibid., 941D-944D) Come from Libanus, my spouse, come from Libanus, come: thou shalt pass and come from the beginning of faith, from the top of Sanir and Hermon, from the dens of the lions, from the mountains of the leopards (Cant. 4.8).

The fountain of grace constantly draws to itself all those who thirst, as the Source has said in the Gospel: If any man thirst, let him come to me and drin\ (John 7.37). Here He puts no limit on our thirst, nor on our movement towards

Him nor on the satisfaction of our thirst; but He has created our tendency to thirst, to drink, and to move towards Him by a command that is constant and perpetual. To those who have tasted and seen by experience that the Lord is sweet

(Ps. 33.9), this taste becomes a kind of invitation to further enjoyment. And thus the one who is rising towards God con stantly experiences this continual incitement towards further progress.

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Let us now recall the invitation which, as we have seen, the Word often uses to rouse His Beloved: Come, my love,

He says; and again: Arise, my dove; and: Arise and come to the cleft of the roc\. With these words or others like them the Word urges and attracts the soul to a longing for higher things. And now He testifies to the utter purity of the soul that rises to meet Him, saying: Thou art all fair, and there is no spot in thee (Cant. 4.7). To prevent her from becoming too proud because of His praise, and thus prevent herself from rising higher, He tries to urge her once again with this word of encouragement to rise to a desire of the Transcend ent: Come from Libanus, my spouse. By this He means: You did well in following Me up till now, and you have come with me to the Mount of Incense. You were buried with Me in Baptism unto death; but you rose again and ascended in communion with My divinity. This is what is meant by the word Libanus.56 So rise up now from here and go on towards other peaks, advancing and ever rising by operative knowl edge. Come, then, from Libanus, He says, no longer as My betrothed, but as my bride. For no one can live with Me as My bride unless by the myrrh of death she is transformed into the incense of Libanus. Since you have reached this height, do not stop climbing as though you have already attained. This Libanus is the beginning of your faith, in which you shared by the resurrection, and it is the begin ning of your progress towards the highest graces. From this beginning, then, which is faith, thou shalt pass and come: that is to say, You will now arrive and at the same time not cease to pass on perpetually by continuing to rise.

And so our text says: Thou shalt pass and come from the beginning of faith, from the top of Sanir and Hermon (Cant.

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4.8). Here the reference is to the mystery of our rebirth from heaven. For it is here, they say, that the sources of the Jordan rise, and over them lies this mountain which is divided into two peaks called Sanir and Hermon. The river that came from those sources became the beginning of our divine trans formation. That is why the soul hears her Beloved calling to her: Come from Libanus, from the beginning of faith, from the top of those mountains from which you received those mystical springs.

52. The Lions' Den [ibid., 944D-945D) Very fittingly does the bride mention lions and leopards

(Cant. 4.8); by introducing unpleasant things she enhances her enjoyment of those that are pleasant. Indeed, man was once created in God's image, but became a wild beast, trans formed into an irrational creature, becoming a lion and a leopard by reason of his sinful ways. For whoever is attracted by the lion, who lieth in wait in his den, as the Prophet says

(Ps. 10.9 [Hebr.]), is caught in his trap and, because he has been crushed by the beast, is transformed into his nature.

Let them that ma\e them, he says (Ps. 113.8), become like unto them: and all such as trust in them. So too, in allowing his soul to become tainted by the defilement of life, man becomes a leopard.

Now there was a time when man lived in idolatry and in the error of Judaism and wandered along all the various evil paths of sin. But after that he passed through the Jordan and the Mount of Myrrh and Libanus, and rose to such a height that he now walks in the heavens with God. For this reason

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the Word intensifies the bride's present joy by introducing the unpleasant things that are now past, in the days before Libanus and the beginning of faith, before the mysteries of the Jordan that we have considered. A time of peace is much more enjoyable after the war is past, and can be made pleas ant by stories of past sufferings. The body takes much more pleasure in the blessing of good health, when nature has been restored after a painful bout of sickness. So, too, here the Bridegroom gives the soul that is ascending towards Him a greater increase and intensity in her enjoyment of perfec tion not only by showing His bride His own beauty, but also by reminding her of the terrifying beasts. He does this that she might enjoy her present delights all the more, by com paring them with the state from which she was transformed.

It is possible, too, that He is providentially arranging an other grace for His bride. Though we are changeable by nature, the Word wants us never to change for the worse; but by constant progress in perfection, we are to make our mutability an aid in our rise towards higher things, and so by the very changeability of our nature to establish it im movably in good. This is the reason why the Word, like a pedagogue or a guardian protecting us from any change for the worse, makes reference to the beasts that have been conquered. And thus we are to strengthen our immutability and stability in good by our turning away from evil: while not ceasing in our progress towards the good, we do not de cline towards what is evil. And so the Bridegroom, in calling

His bride from Libanus, reminds her of the lions' den in which she used to live, and he also mentions the mountains of the leopards where she passed her life when she lived together with the beasts.

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53. The Mirror of the Church (ibid., 945D-949B) Now the voice of the Word is ever a voice of power. At the creation, light shone forth at His command, and again at His order the firmament arose; and similarly all the rest of creation came into being at His creative Word. So too now, when the Word calls a soul that has advanced to come unto Him, it is immediately empowered at His command and becomes what the Bridegroom wishes. It is transformed into something divine, and it is transformed from the glory in which it exists to a higher glory by a perfect kind of alteration. Thus the angelic choir that surround the Bride groom express their admiration for the bride in these words of praise: Thou has given us heart, our sister and spouse

(Cant. 4.9).57 For the attribute of integrity shines forth now in the bride as well as in the angels, so that she, like they, experiences no movement of passion in her flesh; and so this brings her into a kind of sisterly relationship with these spiritual powers. Hence they say to her: Thou has given us heart, our sister and spouse. She is rightly honored with the title of sister because of her integrity, and of spouse, because of her union with the Word.

Now I think that the expression Thou hast given us heart means the same as "Thou hast given us life," as though they had said: "Thou hast put heart into us." And for the sake of clarity, in order to make clear what the expression means,

I shall call upon the divine Apostle for an explanation of these mysteries. For he says somewhere in writing to the Ephesians, where he is explaining to us the great economy of salvation through the epiphany of God in the flesh, that in

2l8

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addition to the revelation that was made to men with regard to the divine mysteries of salvation, the manifold, wisdom of God was also revealed to the heavenly principalities and powers through the same economy which Christ manifested to men. The text reads: That the manifold wisdom may be made \nown to the principalities and powers in heavenly places through the church, according to the eternal purpose, which he made, in Christ Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him

(Ephes. 3.10-12). It is indeed through the church that the manifold wisdom of God is made known to these supramundane powers, for the wisdom of God works great wonders through things that are quite the contrary. How is it that life comes through death, justice through sin, praise through malediction, glory through dishonor, strength through weak ness? In earlier times these celestial powers were familiar only with the regular and uniform operation of the divine wisdom as it worked miracles in accordance with its nature.

There was not that variety in what they then beheld: the omnipotent Godhead working according to its power, bring ing creatures into existence by a simple act of the will, creat ing all things good as they welled up from the very Source of Beauty.

But that manifold quality of the divine wisdom, which arises by the union of opposites, has only now been clearly revealed to them through the Church: how the Word be comes flesh, life is mingled with death, in his bruises our wound is healed, the infirmity of the Cross brings down the power of the Adversary, the invisible is revealed in the flesh, the captives are ransomed, He Himself is both purchaser and price (for He gave Himself to death as a ransom for us), He

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is in the throes of death and does not depart from life, He is sent into slavery and remains a King.

All these and more are the works of a wisdom that is mani fold and obscure; and all these the friends of the Bridegroom learn through the Church, and thus they are given heart as they recognize in mystery another aspect of the divine wis dom. Perhaps (if I may venture a rather bold conjecture) in seeing the beauty of the Bridegroom in the bride they are really admiring the invisible and the incomprehensible as it is in all creatures. For God, as John tells us, no man hath seen at any time (1 John 4.12), nor, as Paul reminds us, can see (1 Tim. 6.16). And yet He has made the Church His body, and He builds it with love through the increase of the faithful, until we shall all be united in one perfect Man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ (Ephes. 4.13).

If then the Church is Christ's body, Christ is the Head of the body, forming the countenance of the Church with His own features. Perhaps it is this that the friends of the Bride groom saw when they were given heart: in her they see more clearly that which is invisible. It is like men who are unable to look upon the sun, yet they can see it by its reflection in the water. So the friends of the Bridegroom see the Sun of Justice by looking upon the face of the Church as though it were a pure mirror, and thus He can be seen by His reflection.

54. The Single Eye (ibid., 949C-952D) Hence more than once His friends say to the bride: Thou hast given us heart (Cant. 4.9). And by this they mean: You have instilled in us a soul, and a faculty by which we can

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see the light in you. But they repeat it, and by saying it again add credibility to their statement. They repeat it saying:

Thou hast given us heart with one of thy eyes. It is this par ticularly that has filled the friends with admiration for the bride. For the soul has two faculties of vision, one that sees the truth, and the other that wanders off into senseless things.

But the pure eye of the bride is only open for the vision of the Good, and the other faculty is completely inoperative.

Hence the friends praise only one of the eyes, the one by which alone she sees Him Who is unique, I mean Him

Whose nature is unchangeable and eternal, the true Father, His only-begotten Son, and the Holy Spirit. And their one nature is truly unique, for the distinctions which arise from the three Persons cause in it no separation or division. Some men have very bad vision with regard to the eternal nature of the Godhead because their eyes are at variance; because of the images which arise from their distorted vision they di vided His unique nature into many. These are the men who are said to see much, and in seeing so much they see nothing.

And even some who look upon God soon wander off in the material images of their imagination; they are unworthy of the angels' praise, since they waste their time in fantasies about the non-existent.

But the man who has sharp vision for God alone, is blind in all the other things which attract the eyes of the multitude.

And this is why the bride excites their admiration by one of her eyes. The man who has many eyes is really blind, because he uses all his eyes to look at foolish things. But sharp-eyed and clearsighted is the man who looks only to the good with the single eye of his soul.

Though the language of the context is obscure, it will not

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be hard, from what we have already seen, to understand what is meant by the word one and by the chain on the bride's neck. The text reads: Thou hast given us heart with one of thy eyes, with one, and with a chain of thy nec\.58 The words

"with one" are parallel with the words "with one of thy eyes," and we must assume that they mean "with one soul."

For the uninstructed have many souls; their passions exercise such dominance that they take the place of the soul, and the soul's character is constantly assuming the form of grief and pleasure, anger and fear, boldness and cowardice. And so we are taught that the person who looks towards the Word has but one soul, because of the uniformity of her life of virtue. And so this is the way we should punctuate the text, taking the words "with one" closely with what precedes, and understanding it to mean "in one soul" or "in one dis position."

There is a different idea in what follows, with a chain of thy nec\. Paraphrasing the whole context a little more clearly, one might say: Your eye is one insofar as it looks towards the One; you have one soul because you are not divided according to different passions; the form of your neck is perfect because it takes upon itself the divine yoke.

The yoke of Christ, as we see, must be the chain of thy nec\, and the one eye and the one soul consist in your attitude towards the true Good. Thus we confess that you have given us heart with these wonders, revealing your one eye and one soul and the chain of your neck (the chain on the bride's neck being the yoke, as we have said).

Now we have taken the friends of the Bridegroom to be the angels; and this is the praise which they express on seeing the beauty of the bride. And to prevent this eulogy of His

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bride from appearing false or exaggerated, the Word con firms His friends' judgment of His bride's beauty by voicing

His own view; and He testifies to her beauty by referring to even great wonders in the description He gives of the love liness that is radiant in her body. But all of this I shall explain farther on, God willing, if I receive some assistance from the power on high to give me an insight into these mysteries and into the meaning of the beauty of His Church.

55. An Odor of Sweetness (ibid., sermon 9, 956D-957D) How beautiful are thy breasts, my sister, my spouse! Thy breasts are more beautiful than wine, and the sweet smell oj thy ointments above all aromatical spices (Cant. 4.10).

Every fragrant perfume gives pleasure to the sense of smell.

And here we must understand the text to refer to those per fumes which, as we have learned, breathe from the Scriptures.

Noah, for example, offered a sacrifice to God, and the Lord smelled a sweet savour (Gen. 8.21). Sacrifice, therefore, brings a sweet savor to God; and thus later on under the old

Law many sacrifices were offered to Him, sacrifices of pro pitiation, thanksgiving, purification, and for sin. These then are the perfumes of the text: holocausts and burnt-offerings, partial offerings of things consecrated to God, the breast of the sacrificial animal, the lobe of the liver, the kidney fat, frankincense, wheaten flour dampened with oil, incense of various compositions—and all the other ways in which the worship of God is expressed by fire. All of these must be counted in the list of perfumes.

When we hear that the bride's fragrance is above all aro-

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matical spices, this is the lesson we are taught: the mystery of truth which was accomplished through the message of the Gospel is alone sweet to God, and it is judged to be superior to all the spices of the old Law, because it is no longer concealed by type and shadow but gives forth its fragrance in an open revelation of truth. And if any of those former spices pleased the Lord in an odor of sweetness, the reason why they were accepted was not the superficial or material appearance of these cult acts, but rather the meaning which was manifested in each one of them. This is clear from the great saying of the Prophet: I will not tafe calves out of thy house: nor he goats out of thy flocfs. I shall not eat the flesh of bulloc\s or dr inf the blood of goats (Ps. 49.9,

13)'

There have been all kinds of animal sacrifices. Nonethe less there is one thing further which you are commanded here in the spiritual meaning of the text, namely the neces sity of sacrificing your passions. A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit: a contrite and humbled heart God will not despise (Ps. 50.19). This is the way we offer our sacrifice of praise which gives glory to Him Who smells the savor of our offering.

So it is then that the soul that breathes a sweet spiritual fragrance, in the manner of Paul who was the good odour of Christ (2 Cor. 2.15), surpasses all the aromatical spices of the old Law. She becomes fragrant throughout her entire life, breathing the myrrh of holiness and an incense variously mixed and compounded of all the virtues; and thus she comes to delight the nostrils of her Spouse in an odour of sweetness. And thus the divine senses, as Solomon speaks of them, in comparing the material spices of the old Law, pre-

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fers that pure and spiritual fragrance which has been distilled from all the virtues, saying: And the smell of thy ointments above all aromaticcd spices.

56. The Honeycomb (ibid., 957D-960D) The text which follows enhances the bride's praise, at tributing to her a wealth of spiritual gifts as a result of her prayer and devotion. When the book of Proverbs bids the disciple of Wisdom to go to the bee (and from the disciples you can surely guess who the Master is), it says: Go to the bee and learn that she is a worker.59 He proclaims her work as most important, since kings as well as lowly citizens use her labors as a means to health. And he says that the bee is loved and esteemed by everyone, because despite the weak ness of her powers, she holds wisdom high and hence is al ways proposed as the model of the life of perfection. She has been preferred, it says,60 because she has honored wisdom.

The lesson for us here is that we ought not despise any teaching of piety, but, as we fly over the meadow of the inspired doctrines, we ought to gather from each one some thing for our store of wisdom. Thus we may mould within ourselves a honeycomb, as it were, storing this sweet product in our hearts as it were in a hive, and with the various doc trines fashioning in our memory storehouses, just like the different cells in the wax, that cannot be destroyed. Just like the bee whose honeycomb is sweet and whose sting does not prick, we should constantly be busy in the important labor of virtue. It busies itself indeed by exchanging the labors of this life for eternal blessings, and offering its own toils for

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the health of kings and people.61 In this way too the soul attracts the Bridegroom, and is an object of admiration to the angels, perfecting her power in weakness by honoring wisdom.

This discourse on the wisdom of the bee offers a good example of the value of instruction and diligent toil. Indeed, the varied distribution of God's spiritual gifts is always in proportion to the efforts of those who seriously labor. Hence the Spouse says to the bride: Your heart is full of the honey combs of different spiritual doctrines, and it is from your heart's good treasure that you draw the honeyed drops of the Christian message, that the Word may be for you as milk and honey. So, thy lips, my spouse, drop a honeycomb, honey and mil\ are under thy tongue (Cant. 4.11).

The divine message is so prepared that it does not answer the same needs in all who listen to it, but it is adapted to the capacities of the audience. It is suited both to the more per fect as well as to infants: to the perfect it is honey, to infants milk. Thus did Paul preach: the new-born babes he nursed with the softer elements of doctrine, and to those who were perfect he spoke the message of wisdom in mystery, hidden from all ages, inaccessible to the powers of this world. This is the mixture of milk and honey which He says is under the bride's tongue; and by this He refers to the hidden treasure of doctrine and its adaptability. For the man who knows how to speak to every sort of person and has under his tongue the varied power of the divine word, he it is who can offer to each according to his capacities what each one needs in good season.

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57. The Garment of Virtue (ibid., 960D-961C) After thus praising the bride's mouth and tongue, the Spouse passes on to even greater encomia, saying: The smell of thy garments as the smell of frankincense (Cant. 4.11).

The underlying meaning of this text is an instruction to men on the goal of perfection. For the aim of the life of virtue is to become like God; and this is the reason why the virtuous take great pains to cultivate purity of soul and free dom from the passions, so that the form, as it were, of tran scendent Being might be revealed in them because of their more perfect life. Now the life of virtue is by no means every where the same and uniform. Rather, it is like the way the craft of weaving makes a garment by fitting together many pieces of cloth, each made up of many strands, some stretched straight and others drawn crosswise against them. So too many elements must cooperate to produce the life of virtue, till the perfect life is woven from all of them. The divine

Apostle Paul tells us of the various strands that must compose the texture of our pure works, when he speaks of chanty, joy, peace, long-sufering, goodness, and all the rest (Gal.

5.22). In these we must clothe ourselves when we exchange this earthly and corruptible garment for heavenly incorrupti bility.

And so the Spouse finds His bride's garment acceptable, comparing its odor to the fragrance of frankincense. Yet earlier He had said that the odor of her ointments were above all aromatical spices; thus this passage would seem to suggest a diminution in praise. For whereas before she was placed above all spices, now she is compared to only one of

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them, since the Word says: The fragrance of thy garments is like the smell of frankincense. But the offering of frankin cense is in a certain sense particularly consecrated to God's worship. Hence, even though she had earlier been judged to be above all aromatical spices, she is rightly honored now by being compared to one, the one that is dedicated to God.

And so the spiritual meaning of our passage is as follows:

The clothing of your virtue, my bride, imitates the divine perfection and has become like the transcendent Godhead because of your purity and integrity. And such is the frag rance of your divine garments that they may be compared with frankincense that is consecrated to the worship of God.

58. The Garden Enclosed (ibid., 961C-964C) Once again, in the text which follows, we learn from His praise what it means to be the sister and the spouse of the Lord. He says: A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse

(Cant. 4.12). Does anyone lay claim to be the spouse of the Lord, because he is closely united to Him, or His sister, be cause, in the words of the Gospel, he does His will? Then he must become a flourishing garden, having within himself the beauty of all kinds of trees. There must be the sweet fig, the fruitful olive, the lofty palm, the blossoming vine. He must have no thorn bush or fleabane; these must be replaced by the cypress and the myrtle.62

It was such a garden that the mighty David knew how to cultivate, and the profound Isaias. The just, says David, shall flourish life the palm tree (Ps. 91.13). And again: But 1, as a fruitful olive tree in the house of the Lord (Ps. 51.10). . . ;

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and Thy wife as a fruitful vine (Ps. 127.3). In another prophet a blessing is pronounced on the man who rests under his fig tree (Micheas 4.4). And it is Isaias who tells us that instead of the shrub, the fir tree, and instead of the nettle, he says the myrtle shall come up (Is. 55.13).

It is not necessary for me to explain in detail all the hidden meanings of these trees introduced by the Prophets for our instruction. It is clear to everyone what is meant by the sweet fruit of the fig tree, ripened from very sour juice. In the beginning it is sour and inedible, but later on it becomes a very pleasant fruit and delightful to all the senses of the soul.

Consider also the bounty we receive by the cultivation of the olive. At first, in the autumn, it contains a sharp and bitter juice. But later by proper care and maturation it is trans formed into the true olive: and this supplies fuel for light, eases pain, relaxes from exertion, gladdens the head, and brings assistance in the conflict for all those who exercise themselves in accordance with the law.

Notice too how the palm tree makes it difficult for thieves to reach its fruit, and keeps its treasure on high, and does not bring it close to earth. Consider the charm of the vine, the fragrance of the cypress and the sweetness of the myrtle.

Anyone who considers them seriously will clearly see their meaning when they are taken allegorically in reference to the life of virtue. For it is with such trees and plants that the flourishing and well-kept garden is filled. In addition, our garden is closed in on all sides by the fence of the Com mandments, so that no thief or wild beast can gain entrance to it. Closed in on all sides by the paling of the Command ments, it cannot be reached by the solitary wild boar or the boar out of the wood (Ps. 79.14). Whoever is such a fortified

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garden, he is the spouse and sister of Him Who says to the soul: A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse (Cant. 4.12).

59. The Fountain Sealed Up (ibid., 964C-965B) But our garden also needs a fountain, that the grove may constantly flourish, irrigated forever by its water. And so in His praise of His bride, He adds a fountain to the garden, saying: A garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up (Cant. 4.12).

Proverbs teaches us the meaning of this fountain by way of an allegory: Let thy fountain of water he sweet and to thy self alone, and let no stranger be partaker with thee (Prov.

5.16-17).63 Here the text forbids anyone else from wasting the fountain's water. So too in our former text strangers are not at all allowed to partake of the fountain as is implied in the word sealed up, which means the same as "under guard." Thus the sense of the text is as follows: the fountain, in my view, correctly refers to the intellectual faculty of the soul, because of all the ideas that are constantly bubbling and welling up from it. But the actual movement of thought oc curs when it is attracted towards things that are advantageous for us, thus offering us cooperation in the attainment of the good. Now when a person turns the energy of his thoughts towards sin, then he is wasting the stream of water on strangers. Thanks to our wicked thoughts, the thorny path of life flourishes by being watered, and the better plants dry up and wither since their roots receive no nourishment from the irrigation of good thoughts.

Now a seal guards the inviolability of whatever it protects, because the seal scares off the thief. What is unstolen remains

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inviolate for the master. In our text, then, we would seem to have the highest praise bestowed on the bride, inasmuch as her mind remains untouched by the enemy, protected in its purity and integrity. It is purity which seals up this foun tain for its Master: the light and transparent quality of her heart is not soiled by the slime of wicked thoughts.

To make my meaning clearer to everyone, let me put it another way. Some things in us are truly our own, as, for example, the properties of the soul. Other things we acquire as our own—I mean external things, things connected with the body—under the mistaken impression that these things which do not belong to us are our own. Indeed, what does the spiritual substance of the soul have in common with crass matter ? That is why Proverbs counsels us not to waste the fountain of our thoughts on things foreign to us, that is, on things of the body and external things; rather, it should be turned on our own garden, to water the plant of God.

And this plant, we have seen, refers to the virtues; for if the intellectual faculty of our soul occupies itself with them and does not flow off to anything external, then will it be impressed with a disposition towards the good and sealed with the stamp of truth.

60. The Paradise of the Soul {ibid., 968D-969B) Thou sendest forth from thy mouth, He says, a paradise of pomegranates (Cant. 4.13).64 And the meaning of this text is as follows: The words that come forth from your mouth are like a garden of pomegranate trees. The pomegranate tree produces a variety of fruit, cypress with spikenard,

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saffron, sweet cane and cinnamon, and every sort of frankin cense, and myrrh and aloes, and all the chief perfumes (Cant.

4-I3'I4)* According to the blessing pronounced by the Psalm ist, the bride, with the divine assistance, has kept all these elevations within her heart, proceeding always from strength to strength. Now, at a more perfect stage of her progress, the words that issue from her mouth are called a paradise of pomegranates. And very aptly is the word "issue" used in accordance with the underlying idea.65 For that which issues proceeds from a sender to a receiver. And we may take a lesson from the habitual use of this word in the Gospels; for the Word gives the title Apostles to those who "issue forth" to proclaim the truth. Now what is it that issues forth from the bride's mouth ? It must of course be the message of faith; and when this is received it becomes a paradise planted in the hearts of those who hearken to it. A grove that is thickly planted with trees is accustomed to be called a paradise.

61. The Pomegranate (ibid., 969B-972A) Now we should like to learn the types of plants which the Word cultivates in the souls of those who believe; the text calls the trees, which the Word produces, pomegranates, and it is these that issue forth from the mouth of the bride.

The pomegranate tree makes a thief despair: its branches are lined with thorns, and its fruit is covered and protected with a rind that is extremely bitter and harsh to the taste.

But when the fruit ripens in due season, if you tear off the rind and look inside you will see a fruit that is sweet and attractive looking, quite pleasant and honey-sweet to the

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taste, and a joy to the palate with its winelike flavor. Hence, if we would take a lesson from the text, I think that the mes sage that issues from the bride's mouth, as a paradise of pomegranates to the souls of those who are attentive, teaches us that we ought never to grow soft in the indulgence and luxury of this life, but that we should choose the way of life that has become hardened by continence. In this way the fruit of virtue will never be accessible to thieves, protected by the harsh covering of continence; and surrounded by a severe and rigorous way of life, as though by the pricks of thorns, it will sting those who approach it bent on an evil purpose.

But when the season allows us to enjoy it, the pomegranate offers us the combined pleasure of every kind of fruit. And the taste is not like that of peaches or dates or any other similar kind of fruit. But all sorts of different kinds of per fumes are found in its fruit. There is the happy blend of cypress with spikenard (Cant. 4.13), the one being warm and the other fragrant. Now heat is not praiseworthy in itself, as for example when it is the source of a fetid odor. But purity, by its fragrance, must cooperate with warmth in testi fying that we are fervent with the Spirit and purified of all unpleasant heat.

Here too among these fruits we can find other perfumes, as spikenard and saffron, says the text (Cant. 4.14). From what we have said we already understand the meaning of the fragrance of spikenard. And so now we need only explain the symbolism of the saffron. Those who have studied the char acteristics of this flower state that it is midway between heat and cold, avoiding any excess in either. Thus it would seem

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that the Scripture is here in mystery teaching us a lesson with regard to virtue.

62. The Symbol of Saffron (ibid., 972A-C) All virtue stands midway between two evils, which con sist in a defect or an excess of the good. Thus it is claimed that fortitude is the mean between timidity and audacity, and generosity the mean between stinginess and lavishness.

Timidity and stinginess are both called vices because they fall short of the norm; lavishness and audacity, because they go too far beyond it. Virtue, then, they consider to be the mean between two extremes.66 In this light, then, the passage on the saffron would have something to do with virtue, and this would be consonant with the moderate property of the flower; and this is interpreted as referring to the avoidance of excess or defect in the habit of virtue.

Though this might seem to be a more popular interpreta tion, I should say that the symbol of saffron is more properly taken as referring to our doctrine of faith. The saffron is in reality three flowers which are hidden underneath the ex ternal petals. The outermost flower has a cloudy color; and when the outside layer of petals is peeled off, we find three distinct flowers, which are both fragrant and useful from a medicinal point of view. Each of these, again, is hidden be neath its own petals, and all three are alike in size, beauty, fragrance, and properties. And thus all three flowers are in all things seen to be one, in beauty, as I have said, fragrance and medicinal potency. But alongside of these grow up three other flowers that are yellow-colored,67 but completely devoid

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of all medicinal value. Those who do not know might make a mistake, and because of their fine color pick the false flower instead of the true one. And the same thing is done today by men who err in regard to faith, when they choose falsely contrived errors instead of sound doctrine.

Of these two interpretations I will leave it to my hearers to choose as they will, either one, or both. In a certain sense they come to the same thing. For the one suggests the mean ing of perfection, the other the possession of the divine na ture. There is, of course, no perfection outside of the God head.

63. The Symbol of Cinnamon (ibid., 972 D-973C) It is said that cinnamon possesses quite varied and diversi fied applications, because of an innate property it has, and some of these would seem to pass belief. For example, it is said that if you merely drop some of this spice into a kettle of boiling water, the water will immediately get cold. If you bring it into a heated bath, it will make the warm atmosphere chilly.68 It also has the power to destroy any life that develops from putrefaction. Indeed, they relate a good many things of the same sort about this spice that would seem to go beyond our power of belief. For instance, they say that if you put cinnamon into the mouth of a sleep ing person, he cannot help answering questions put to him even though he remains asleep. Even though he is asleep, he will give you sensible and accurate answers.

Now it would be rash and overcredulous to put complete faith in these assertions without making an investigation of their truth. In any case, cinnamon is mentioned in the list

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of the fruits in our text with some hidden significance. It does not actually grow on a pomegranate tree; the mouth of the bride does not bring forth gardens in any material sense.

Rather, it is mentioned as a symbol of some deeper meaning, as symbolic of all those qualities which contribute to the eulogy of the bride. Hence I feel that we should not neglect the tales that are told of the cinnamon, or anything else which it may seem good to add in this connection.

From all that has been said, then, we could gather together all the details which would contribute to the glorification of virtue, if each of the points discussed is taken symbolically as pointing to the perfection of the Christian life. Thus I think we can discover the role of cinnamon in the soul, in view of our instructive discussion of it. When you are boiling with desire or on fire with anger, reason extinguishes the passions. Again, if in the sleep of this life you put the sober cinnamon of reason into your mouth (like the sleepless and ever watchful angels), you will bring forth clearly and ac curately the meaning of what is said. Thus by the truth of your speech will you imitate the vigilant angels, who are never forced to wander from the truth by the imagination.

In this way it can be said that cinnamon wells up from your mouth. It cools the heat of desire and the boiling of the heart's wrath; and every dreamlike fantasy and confusion in this life are purified by reason.

64. The Well of Living Water (ibid., 977B-D)69 We are familiar with these descriptions of the divine es sence as a source of life from the holy Scriptures. Thus the prophet, speaking in the person of God, says: They have for-

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sa\en me, the fountain of living water (Jer. 2.13). And again, the Lord says to the Samaritan woman: If thou didst \now the gift of God, and who he is that saith to thee, Give me to drin\: thou perhaps wouldst have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water (John 4.12). And again

He says: If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drin\.

He that helieveth in me, as the scripture saith, Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. Now this he said of the Spirit which they should receive, who believed in him

(John 7.37-39)Here in all these places by living water is meant the divine nature. So too in our text (Cant. 4.15) the infallible Word declares that the bride is a well of living waters that have flowed down from Libanus. Now here is a very strange para dox. All wells hold still water; only in the bride is there said to be running water. She has the depth of a well together with the constant flow of a river. Now how can we really do justice to the wonders revealed here in the symbol that is applied to the bride ? It would seem that she has no further height to reach now that she has been absolutely compared to the very archetype of all beauty. Very closely does she imi tate His Source in her own, His Life in hers, that living

Water by hers. God's Word has life, and so too does the soul that receives Him. And this Water flows from God, as He, the Source, explained when He said: From God I proceeded and came (John 8.42). And the bride embraces and holds what flows into the well of her soul, and thus she becomes a storehouse of that living water that flows, or, rather, rushes, down from Libanus, as the Word tells us.

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65. The Food of the Bridegroom (ibid., sermon 10, 985B— 988B) Let my beloved, she says, come down into his garden, and eat the fruit of his apple trees (Cant. 5.1). Here is a cry from the heart! Here is a fine, high-minded soul, surpassing all the bounds of generosity! And whom does she invite to enjoy her fruit? For whom does she prepare this banquet out of her own store ? Whom does she call to feast on what she has prepared ? Him, from Whom and by Whom and in Whom all things exist (Col. 1.17), Who gives sustenance to every one in due season (Luke 12.42), Who opens His hand and fills with blessing every living creature (Ps. 144.16), Who descends as the bread of heaven (John 6.41), gives life to the world, and from His own Source pours life upon every creature. It is for Him that the bride sets her table. And the table is a garden, planted with living trees. We are the trees, and the food we offer Him is the salvation of our souls, as He Himself said when He took His fill of our human exist ence: My food is to the will of my Father (John 4.34). And the object of the divine will is clear, for He will have all men to be saved and to come to the \nowledge of the truth (1

Tim. 2.4). It is our salvation, then, that is the food prepared for Him. The fruit is our free will, which offers God our souls, as it were, on a branch to pluck. Here too we should consider that earlier it was the bride who enjoyed the fruit of the apple, saying: And his fruit was sweet to my palate

(Cant. 2.3). Here, however, she herself becomes the sweet, ripe fruit, offered to the Husbandman for His enjoyment.

Now the phrase, Let my beloved come down (Cant. 5.1),

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is a command, similar in construction to the prayer, Hal lowed be thy name, and thy will be done. Just as the con struction of these two expressions denotes a prayer, so it is with the prayer of the bride, Let him come down, as she in dicates to God the abundant fruit of her perfection. His coming down, then, suggests the operation of divine love.

For we cannot be exalted to the Most High unless the Lord stoop to the humble and exalt the mee\ (Ps. 146.6). Hence the soul that is rising to heaven calls upon the assistance of the transcendent Godhead and begs Him to come down from His immensity and mingle with us here below.

And His reply comes through the Prophet: Whilst thou art still crying, Here I am (Is. 58.9). Even before the bride has made her prayer, He hears her petition and attends to the preparation of her heart (Ps. 10.17 [Hebr.]). He comes to her garden which the south wind blows through (Cant.

4.16); He plucks the fruit of her aromatical spices and is filled with the fruit of her virtues. Then He tells of His feasting, saying to the bride: / have come down into the garden, 0 my sister, my spouse, l have gathered my myrrh with my aromatical spices: I have eaten my bread with my honey, I have drun\ my wine with my mil\: eat, my friends, and drin\, and be inebriated, my brothers (Cant. 5.1).

66. Sober Intoxication (ibid., 989B-992B) Eat, my friends, and drin\, and be inebriated, my brothers

(Cant. 5.1). For one who is familiar with the mysteries of the Gospel there will appear no difference between this text and the words used in the mystic initiation of the Apostles.

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For there too does He say: Eat and dnn\. Now the exhorta tion to the brethren in the present text to become inebriated might seem to many to go much further than the Gospel.

But anyone who examines both texts carefully will find that this text is quite in harmony with that of the Gospel. For the command that is here given to the brethren in words is, in the Gospel, transformed into deed. All intoxication causes the mind, overwhelmed with wine, to go into an ecstasy.

Hence what is urged in our text actually is realized in the Gospel through the divine food and drink. And this con stantly recurs insofar as there is a continual ecstasy in this food and drink, that is, there is a transformation from a worse to a better condition.

Thus do they become inebriated, as the Prophet tells us, with the -plenty of God s house, they who drin\ of the torrent of His pleasure (Ps. 35.9). In this way the mighty David be came intoxicated and went out of himself: he saw, while in ecstasy, that divine beauty which no mortal can behold, and cried out in those famous words: Every man is a liar (Ps.

115-n), ^us giving us some hint of that ineffable treasure.

So too Paul, the new Benjamin (Ps. 67.28), while in ecstasy, said: Whether we be transported in mind, it is to God, for this ecstasy was a movement towards the Godhead; or whether we be sober, it is for you (2 Cor. 5.13). Similarly in his words to Festus he showed that he was not mad, but spoke words of truth and soberness (Acts 26.25).

I am aware also that the blessed Peter experienced this sort of intoxication, hungry and drunk as he was at the same time. For even before real food was brought to him, being hungry and desirous to taste, while his household were pre paring (Acts 10.10), he experienced that divine and sober

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inebriation. And thus he went out of himself and beheld that symbol of the Gospel, the linen sheet let down by the four corners, wherein were all manner of men in innumer able forms of birds, four-footed beasts and creeping things, and beasts of all different shapes, according to the various kinds of cults. Of these the Word orders Peter to sacrifice all animals and irrational creatures, so that after they were puri fied, what remained would be edible. And this meant that when the message of salvation is transmitted purely, as the voice of God has told us more than once, That which God hath cleansed is not common (Acts 10.15). And this message is given three times, that we might learn that in the first voice God the Father purifies, in the second it is God the Son, and similarly in the third it is He Who purifies all that is unclean, God the Holy Spirit.

This then is the inebriation to which the Lord exhorts His table-companions, and it is through this that the soul's divine ecstasy takes place. Rightly does the Lord urge those who are close to Him by their virtuous life (but not those who stand afar off): Eat, my friends, and drin\, and be inebriated, my brothers (Cant. 5.1). He who eats and drinks unworthily, eateth and drin\eth judgment to himself (1 Cor. 11.28). And rightly does the Lord address as His brothers those who are worthy of this food; for whoever does His will, the Word calls His brother and His sister and His mother (Mark

12.50).

67. Watchful Sleep (ibid., 992C-993D) Sleep usually follows drinking, and in this way the banqueters can promote their good health by allowing time

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for digestion. Thus after her banquet the bride, too, is over come with sleep. But this is indeed a strange sleep and for eign to nature's custom. In natural sleep the sleeper is not wide awake, and he who is wide awake is not sleeping.

Sleeping and waking are contraries, and they succeed and follow one another. But in this case there is a strange and contradictory fusion of opposites in the same state. For / sleep, she says, and my heart watcheth (Cant. 5.2).

What meaning ought we to take from these words? Sleep is the image of death. All the body's sensory perception is suspended: in sleep, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch do not perform their function. In sleep bodily tension is relaxed, a man s worries are forgotten and fears are put to rest, anger is calmed; so long as sleep has control over the body, it re laxes the strain of those who are in grief and makes them unaware of any evil.

From what we have said, then, when the bride proudly declares, I sleep and my heart watcheth (Cant. 5.2), we learn that she has risen higher than ever before. For indeed, so long as reason lives alone within itself and is undisturbed by the senses, it is as though the body were overcome with sleep and exhaustion. Then may it truly be said that the sight is inactive and asleep, when the soul despises such things as make an impression on the eyes of little children. And I am not only referring to material things such as gold, silver and precious stones, which excite the concupiscence of the eyes (1 John 2.16), but also to all those heavenly phenomena, such as the shining stars, the orb of the sun, and the ever changing face of the moon, and anything else which gives pleasure to the eyes—because none of these will abide for ever, but will keep moving and passing with the cycle of time.

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The contemplation of our true good makes us despise all these things; and so the eye of the body sleeps. Anything that the eye reveals does not attract the perfect soul, because by reason it looks only to those things which transcend the visi ble universe. So too the sense of hearing is dead and does not function, because the soul is absorbed in things that surpass speech.

With regard to our more animal sensations, the soul keeps far off from them as though they were a foul odor. I am referring to the sense of smell sniffing at perfumes; the taste that is devoted to the cult of the belly; and also the sense of touch, that blind and servile function that nature, I think, made only for those who cannot see. When all of these have been lulled into inactivity by a kind of sleep, the heart's functioning becomes pure, the reason looks up to heaven, un shaken and unperturbed by the motion of the senses.

Man enjoys two types of pleasure. One is spiritual and without passion; the other occurs in the body and derives from passion. And of these two the one which the free will chooses is the one that holds sway. Thus if we look only to the senses, attracted by the pleasure which they produce in the body, we would live our whole lives without tasting the divine delights, because the higher can somehow be over shadowed by what is lower. But for those whose desires in cline them towards God a good awaits which nothing can overshadow, and they will come to feel that they must avoid all things that bewitch the senses. Thus the soul, enjoying alone the contemplation of Being, will not awake for any thing that arouses sensual pleasure. After lulling to sleep every bodily motion, it receives the vision of God in a divine wakefulness with pure and naked intuition.

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68. Angelic Vigilance (ibid., sermon n, 996A-997B) The Lord has given His disciples many precepts by which their minds might shake off all material elements, like so much clay, and thus rise to a desire for the Transcendent.

And one of these is that all who are seriously concerned with the life of heaven must conquer sleep; they must be con stantly awake in spirit, driving off, like a kind of drowsiness, the deceiver of souls and the destroyer of truth.

By drowsiness and sleep here I am referring to those dream like fantasies which are shaped by those who are submerged in the deceptions of this life: I mean public office, money, influence, external show, the seduction of pleasure, love of reputation and enjoyment, honor, and all the other worldly things which, by some sort of illusion, are sought after vainly by those who live without reflection. For all these things will pass away with the flux of time; their existence is mere seeming; they are not what we think they are, nor do they even abide constantly in the conception we have of them. No sooner do they appear than they must pass away. They are like waves that raise their crests above the water, and for a moment are given a certain substance by the action of the winds; but the dignity they have cannot be permanent, for soon after they are raised by the wind's blast, they are re stored once more to their place and reveal nothing but the flat surface of the sea.

Hence, that our minds may not be subject to such illusions, we are bidden to shake off that heavy sleep from the eyes of our soul, lest by our attraction towards the unsubstantial we slip away from those which have true being and subsistence.

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This is why our Lord warns us to be vigilant: Let your loins be girt, and lamps burning in your hands (Luke 12.35). For then the light reflected in our eyes will banish sleep, the loins pinched by the cincture will help the body resist it, and the sense of effort will not permit the relaxation of sleep. Surely the lesson revealed by these symbols is clear. The man who has girt himself with self-control lives in the light of a clean conscience, and his life is lit up by the lamp of sincerity. Thus under the rays of truth his soul remains sleepless and unde ceived, and he is not bemused by those vain dreams we spoke of.

If we achieve this, as the Word directs, we shall enter an angelic way of life. For the divine command likens us to angels, as for example when He says: And you yourselves li\e to men who wait for their lord, when he shall return from the wedding; that when he cometh and \noc\eth, they may open to him immediately (Luke 12.36). It is the angels who receive the Lord as He returns from the wedding: they sit vigilant before the gates of heaven, that, when He rises from the wedding, the King of glory might enter in once more, returning to that beatitude beyond the stars.

Hence, according to the psalm, as a bridegroom coming out of his bride chamber (Ps. 18.6), he has espoused us to Himself by that mystical rebirth—we were the maiden that com mitted fornication with idols (Ezech. 23.37)—transforming our nature into virginal incorruptibility. The marriage rites are now completed; the Church is wedded to the Word, as John has said, He that hath the bride, is the bridegroom

(John 3.29); the Church is taken into the mystical bridal chamber, and the angels await the return of their King while

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he leads the Church to that blessedness that befits her na ture.70

We too, He has said, should be like the angels. Their lives are passed far from sin and temptation; they are constantly ready to welcome the Master's final coming. And so too should we make ourselves ready for his call, keeping awake by the doors of our dwellings, whenever He should come and knock. Blessed are those servants, He says, whom the Lord when he cometh, shall find so doing (Luke 12.37).

69. The Bubbling Spring (ibid., 997D-1000C) The path of those who rise to God is, as you see, unlimited.

But how does the grace that the soul continually achieves become in turn the principle of a higher good? From the words spoken to the bride, we should have supposed that there would be a halt in her progress towards the heights. For after such an assurance of perfection, what more could any one hope for? But then we realize that she is still inside

(Cant. 5.3) and has not yet gone out of doors; she does not yet enjoy that vision face to face, but is still making progress in her participation in good merely by the sounds she hears.

Now the lesson we are taught here is that for those who are ever advancing towards higher things there applies the saying of the Apostle: If any man thin\ that he knoweth any thing, he hath not yet \nown as he ought to \now (1 Cor.

8.2). For up to this point, the soul is aware of only so much as she has understood. Yet what she still does not know is infinitely more than what she has comprehended. That is why, though the Bridegroom often reveals Himself to the

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soul, she never sees him directly, though He keeps assuring the bride by His voice that she will.

To make this idea a little clearer, I shall illustrate it by a comparison. It is just as if you could see that spring which Scripture tells us rose from the earth at the beginning in such quantities that it watered the entire face of the earth

(Gen. 2.10 ff.). As you came near the spring you would marvel, seeing that the water was endless, as it constantly gushed up and poured forth. Yet you could never say that you had seen all the water. How could you see what was still hidden in the bosom of the earth ? Hence no matter how long you might stay at the spring, you would always be beginning to see the water. For the water never stops flowing, and it is always beginning to bubble up again.

It is the same with one who fixes his gaze on the infinite beauty of God. It is constantly being discovered anew, and it is always seen as something new and strange in comparison with what the mind has already understood. And as God con tinues to reveal Himself, man continues to wonder; and he never exhausts his desire to see more, since what he is waiting for is always more magnificent, more divine, than all that he has already seen. So too in our text the bride is in wonder and amazement at what she is beginning to see, yet she never, for all that, puts an end to her yearning for further vision.

70. The Nocturnal Dew (ibid., 1000C-1004C) Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one: for my head is full of dew, and my lockj with the drops of night (Cant. 5.2). Our interpretation will help you to grasp

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the meaning of this text. Moses' vision of God began with light (Exod. 19.18); afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud

(Exod. 20.21). But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness (Exod. 24.15-18).

Now the doctrine we are taught here is as follows. Our initial withdrawal from wrong and erroneous ideas of God is a transition from darkness to light. Next comes a closer awareness of hidden things, and by this the soul is guided through sense phenomena to the world of the invisible. And this awareness is a kind of cloud, which overshadows all appearances, and slowly guides and accustoms the soul to look towards what is hidden. Next the soul makes progress through all these stages and goes on higher, and as she leaves below all that human nature can attain, she enters within the secret chamber of the divine knowledge, and here she is cut off on all sides by the divine darkness. Now she leaves outside all that can be grasped by sense or by reason, and the only thing left for her contemplation is the invisible and the incomprehensible. And here God is, as the Scriptures tell us in connection with Moses: But Moses went to the dar\ cloud wherein God was (Exod. 20.21).

Now that we have considered this, we must examine how our text is connected with what we have said. The bride used to be blac\ (Cant. 14), when she was darkened with obscure doctrines. And then the sun shone, the sun that warms the seeds cast rootless upon the rocks by temptation. She has been overcome by the powers that war within her; she has not kept her vineyard (Cant. 1.5); and because she did not understand herself, she has led herds of goats to pasture in stead of sheep. But when she has torn herself from her attach ment to sin, and by that mystic kiss she yearns to bring her

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mouth close to the fountain of light (Cant. 4.15), then does she become beautiful, radiant with the light of truth, having washed away the dark stain of ignorance.

She is compared to a steed (Cant. 1.8) because of the speed of her progress, to a dove (Cant. 2.10) because of the agility of her mind. Like a steed she races through all she perceives by sense or by reason; and she soars like a dove until she comes to rest with longing under the shade of the apple tree

(Cant. 2.3). That which overshadows her the text calls an apple tree instead of a cloud. But then she is encompassed by a divine night (Cant. 3.1), during which her Spouse ap proaches but does not reveal Himself.

But how can that which is invisible reveal itself in the night? By the fact that He gives the soul some sense of His presence, even while He eludes her clear apprehension, con cealed as He is by the invisibility of His nature. What then is the mystic initiation which the soul experiences during that night? The Word touches the door (Cant. 5.2); and by the door here we may understand man's reason in its search for what is hidden; it is through reason that what we seek can make its entrance. Truth, then, stands outside the door of our souls, because we merely know in part, as the Apostle says

(1 Cor. 13.12), and knocks at the door of reason with symbols and mysteries, saying: Open. And by His urgent message He suggests how we must open the door, by handing us certain keys, that is, the beautiful words of our text, by which we may open the lock.

The keys which can open up the mysteries are precisely those expressions like sister, love, dove, perfect one. If you will open the door, He tells us, to lift up the gates of your soul that the King of glory might enter in (Ps. 23.7), you

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must become my sister by achieving my wishes in your soul, in accordance with the Gospel text where He says that those who live by His wishes are His brother and sister (Matth.

12.50).

Further you must come close to Truth and become its love, so that nothing separates you from it; you must achieve perfection in the guise of a dove, that is, you must never fail or be deficient in all innocence and purity.

Taking these titles, dear soul, as keys, open with them the door to Truth, becoming a sister, love, dove, and perfect one.

And the reward for receiving Me and taking Me into your house will be the dew of My head, with which I am filled, and the drops of the night which flow down from My locks

(Cant. 5.2). Here the dew, as we learn clearly from the Prophet, is a symbol of healing: Thy dew is their cure.71

But the drops of the night are connected with an idea we have considered earlier. When a man enters into the precinct of the hidden and invisible, it is impossible that he should encounter a storm or a torrent of illumination. Rather, it is sufficient if Truth merely whets our knowledge with some meagre and obscure ideas; and these spiritual drops flow through the saints and God's representatives.

The lockj, in my view, are those which hang from the head of the universe, and they refer, in allegory, to the Prophets, the Evangelists and the Apostles. For all of these have become rivers for us, drawing their water so far as they could from dark, hidden, and invisible treasuries. Even though everyone of these is full to overflowing with the vastness and depth of doctrine, they are merely drops of dew in comparison with the actual Truth.

Paul was such a river. On the waves of thought he rose

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above the world to the third heaven, to Paradise, to those se cret and unutterable words. And though he swells like the sea with such great eloquence as he speaks, he shows us nonethe less that all his message is but a drop of dew in comparison with the true Word, when he tells us: We know in part, and we prophesy in part (1 Cor. 13.9); and: If any man thin\ that he \noweth any thing, he hath not yet known as he ought to know (1 Cor. 8.2); and: I do not count myself to have apprehended (Phil. 3.13).

Now if the dew and the drops that flow from His locks seem like rivers, seas and floods in comparison with our fac ulties, what ought we to think of the Fountain itself which has said: If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drink

(}ohn 7.37). All of us here who are listening should try to form an idea of this wonder by taking a comparison from what we have said. Even if the dew drop were sufficient to produce great rivers, how could we ever conceive of the very river of the Godhead merely from this little drop?

71. The Garment of the Flesh [ibid., 1004C-1005C) She says: 7 have put off my garment, how shall 1 put it on?

1 have washed my feet, how shall I defile them? (Cant. 5.3).

Correctly did she hear her Spouse calling her to be His sister and love, dove and perfect one, that in this way Truth might come and dwell in her soul. She did as she was commanded and removed her garment of skin (Gen. 3.21), with which she clothed herself after her sin; she washed her feet of the dust with which she had been covered ever since she had re turned to the earth after her sojourn in Paradise, when

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she had heard the words: Earth thou art, and into earth thou shalt return (Gen. 3.19).

In this way then the bride opened her soul to the Word by removing the veil before her heart, that is, her flesh. When I speak of the flesh I mean old man, which the divine

Apostle bids all to strip off and lay aside (Col. 3.9) who are about to wash away in the laver of the Word the dirt that clings to the soul's feet.

Hence by stripping off the old man and tearing away the veil before her heart, she made a passage for the Word. And when He enters, the soul makes Him her garment, as the Apostle teaches us when he tells us to strip off the fleshly covering of the old man and put on the tunic created accord ing to God in holiness and justice (Eph. 4.24). And this gar ment, he tells us, is Jesus.

Now the bride says that she will never again put on the garment she has taken off, and that she is content with the one tunic, according to the precept given to the disciples, which she had put on when she was born again from on high.

And this confirms the word of the Lord Who commands that those who are once dressed in the divine garment should not put on the garment of sin, or have two tunics instead of one

(Mark 6.9; Matth. 10.10; Luke 9.3), lest we wear two incom patible tunics at the same time. For what is there in common between the garment of darkness and the bright and imma terial one?

The divine law not only forbids us to have two tunics, but also to sew a patch on an old cloak (Mark 2.21); and this is to prevent the shame of the man who puts it on from growing worse, for the patch may not be able to stay on, and the rip in the old cloth may get worse and harder to mend. The new

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piecing, He says, ta\eth away from the old, and there is made a greater rent (Mark 2.21), and through it what is shameful may be exposed. Thus the bride says: I have put off my gar ment, how shall l put it on? For the man who sees himself wearing the radiant tunic of the Lord, the one which he put on in purity and incorruptibility (like the one the Lord re vealed in His transfiguration on the mountain), will surely not allow himself to be clad in the poor and ragged cloak which the drunkard and the fornicator wear according to the proverb.72

72. The Symbol of Pure Feet (ibid., 1005C-1008C) 1 have washed my feet, says the bride, how shall l defile them? (Cant. 5.3). So too Moses, before walking on holy and enlightened ground, removed from his feet at the divine command the covering of dead skins (Exod. 3.5). And he is never again reported to have put his sandals on again. Even when he devised those priestly vestments according to the model he had seen on the Mount, with gold, purple, white linen, blue, and scarlet, blending all these colors into the tex ture so that the combined beauty of all of them would shine forth—even then he designed no adornment for his feet.

The adornment of the priest's foot consisted in its being com pletely free and bare of any covering whatsoever. For the priest must, of course, walk on holy ground, and here it is unlawful to walk with dead skins. Hence the Lord forbids

His disciples to wear sandals, when He commands them not to walk in the path of the Gentiles, but walk on the road of holiness.

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And surely you are not ignorant of this holy way on which the disciples are bidden to run, since we learn this from Him

Who said I am the Way (John 14.6); and on this way we can not walk unless we remove the covering of the dead man.

This is the way on which the bride has come, in which the Lord washes the feet of all who walk on it and wipes them with the towel with which He is girt. Indeed, the Lord's cinc ture has the power to cleanse from sin: The Lord is clothed with strength, and hath girded himself (Ps. 92.1). Hence the bride, once she has lifted her feet upon the royal way, watches herself carefully, turning neither to the right nor to the left, for she does not want to soil her feet with mud by setting them down on either side of the road. You are, of course, familiar with the lesson we are taught here. The bride has taken off her sandals once and for all by Baptism. Now it is the proper function of the person baptizing to untie the thongs of the sandals, as John testifies when he says he is unable to do this in the case of the Lord. For how could John have loosed the thong for One Who had never at all been bound by the thong of sin ? At any rate, the bride then washed her feet, after shaking off all earthly dust from her sandals.

And she keeps her feet unsullied on the paved way, just as David did when he placed his feet upon the rock after he had washed away the mud, saying by the Word: He brought me out of the pit of misery and the mire of dregs. And he set my feet upon a roc\, and directed my steps (Ps. 39.3).

Now the rock, we know, is the Lord; and He is light, truth, immortality and justice; and with these the spiritual highway is paved. And the man who does not turn off to either side keeps his feet unsullied by the mire of pleasure.

These, then, are the ways, I think, by which the bride opens

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her door to the Word. Her declaration that she will never again take up the mud she has cast aside, that she will never on this journey of life admit any earthly defilement: this be comes an entrance for the sanctification of the soul that is in readiness. And the Lord is sanctification. And thus we have completed the interpretation of the text.

73. The Myrrh of Penance {ibid., sermon 12, 1016C1024B) I rose up to open to my beloved: my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers were full of myrrh (Cant. 5.5). It is impossible for the living Word to be present in us—I mean that pure, invisible Spouse Who unites the soul to Himself by sanctity and incorruptibility—unless by the mortification of our bodies on earth we tear away the veil of the flesh, and in this way open the door to the Word that He may come and dwell with the soul. This is clear from the divine instruction of the Apostle as well as from the words just spoken by the bride. 7 arose up, she says, to open to my beloved, and this I did by making my hands fountains of myrrh which flowed with spices, and showing that myrrh has filled my fingers.

And by her words she shows us how she opened the door to her Spouse: Being buried with Him unto death by Baptism,

I rose again. For the resurrection would have accomplished nothing had it not been preceded by a voluntary death. Now an indication that it was voluntary is the drop of myrrh that flows from her hands, and the fact that her fingers too are filled with this aromatic spice. For she says that the myrrh did not come to her hand from any other source; for otherwise

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one might have thought that the symbol of the myrrh re ferred to something purely accidental and indeliberate. But she tells us that her hands flowed with myrrh of their own accord (and the hands symbolize the effective operations of the soul); that is, there was a free and spontaneous morti fication of all her bodily passions, and this is why it is said that it filled all her fingers. For the text uses the word "fingers" to suggest all the different sorts of activity connected with the practice of virtue. Hence the complete meaning of the text is as follows: I received the power of resurrection by mortify ing my members on earth; this mortification I undertook willingly; the myrrh was not put into my hands by someone else, but flowed from my own free will. Thus the same dispo sition of soul may be seen constantly in all my works of vir tue, which the text calls "fingers."

Among those who practice virtue, you may see some who have died to one passion, but are alive to others. So, for ex ample, we see men who have mortified incontinence, but still cultivate pride or some inclination that disfigures the soul, such as avarice, anger, ambition, love of honor, and the like.

And if any of these are still alive in the soul, one cannot show one's fingers as full of myrrh. For the mortification and re moval of sin has not extended to all our life. But when all the fingers have been filled with myrrh in this way, then the soul rises up and opens to the Spouse.

Hence it would seem that the great Paul has rightly under stood the words of his Master, Unless the grain be dissolved by death the sheaf cannot grow.73 This is the doctrine that he preaches to the Church: that death must precede life, and that it is impossible for life to be in a man unless it enter by way of death.74

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For our nature is made up of two parts. In one part it is spiritual, fine, and light; and in the other, thick, material, and heavy. Hence it must follow that each part has a proper motion which is not communicated to the other. The char acteristic motion of the light and intellectual part is upwards; whereas the heavy, material part is always directed and car ried downwards. But since their motions are by nature con trary, the one cannot function properly unless the other is diminished in its natural movement. And between the two motions stands our faculty of self-determination and free will, which can of itself make the weaker element strong or the stronger element weak. The side to which it throws its support, carries the victory against the other.

Thus in the Gospel the prudent and faithful steward is praised; this in my view, is our faculty of free will. It is praised because it defends the master's household, destroying his enemies; for our better inclinations thrive and grow strong on their destruction. The wicked servant, however, is condemned, because consorting with drunkards he strikes and abuses the members of God's household (Matth. 24.4549). Virtue indeed gets beaten when vices flourish. And so we would do well to put into practice the saying of the Prophet, that we should set ourselves in the morning to put to death all the wicket of the land, so as to cut off from the city of the Lord—and the city is the soul—all the wicked thoughts that are the workers of iniquity (Ps. 100.8); for if we destroy them, our better inclinations will thrive.

In this way, then, we live by death, when of the two men that are within us, as the Prophet says, one is slain and the other is given life by the Word: I will kill, he says, and l will make to live (Deut. 32.59). Thus, too, Paul by dying

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lived, in weakness and strength, though in chains pursued his course, in his poverty was rich, though having nothing possessed all, always bearing about in his body the mortifica tion of Jesus (2 Cor. 4.10).

But we must return to our discussion, that it is through death that the soul rises again from death. If it does not die it will remain forever dead and incapable of life. By dying it comes alive and puts off all death. And this doctrine is sup ported by our present text, in which the bride says: I arose up to open to my beloved: my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers were full of myrrh (Cant. 5.5). No one who is familiar with Holy Scripture can doubt that myrrh is a symbol of death. But I know that some will think it right to ask for a clearer explanation of this doctrine, that is, how it is that death can raise us up from death. And so we shall answer this difficulty as best we can, treating the matter in logical order.

The story of the creation bears witness to the fact that all that God created was very good (Gen. 1.31). And among these very good things was man. Or rather, he was fashioned in a beauty which far exceeded all other things. For what else could be as lovely as the image of incorruptible beauty ?

And if all things were very good, and man was among them, indeed above them, then surely death had no place in man.

For man would not have been beautiful if he had had within him the miserable and gloomy form of death. No, he was the image and likeness of eternal life, he was truly and exceedingly good, radiant with the luminous form of life.

Man also kept the garden of God, and it teemed with life in the abundance of its bountiful trees. God's commandment was the law of life, promising that man would not die. And

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in the midst of the trees of the garden was one which was filled with life (however we may interpret the meaning of this tree), and its fruit was life. But with it was also a tree of death, whose fruit we are told is both good and evil. Now it was impossible for both of these trees to be in the middle; for as soon as we grant that one was middle, we necessarily must exclude the other. In any enclosed object we take as the accurate center the point that is equidistant from the boundaries. Thus in a circle there can only be one true center; it is impossible to have two centers with the circle remaining the same. For if you should take as the center a different one from the one that is already fixed, you must substitute an other circle, and so your first center is excluded from being its center, seeing that a new circle is being described about the second center.

Yet in the garden of Paradise both trees are said to be in the center (Gen. 2.9, 3.3), as though each possessed a force that was contradictory to the other—in the one, the power of life, and in the other the fruit of death, which Paul has called sin: The fruit of sin is death (Rom. 6.23).70

But in all this interpretation of the text we must bear in mind the lesson that the most central of God's plants was life.

Death was not really planted, nor did it have roots or its own proper place. Rather, it grew by the privation of life, when living things fell short of their participation in life.

Life, then, was in the center of all the things God planted, and the entire essence of death consists in the cessation of life.

The same follows for the tree of death, which the text (teach ing us this doctrine by means of symbols) tells us lay in the middle of Paradise and that its fruit had a potency which was a mixture of contraries. For it tells us that it was at once

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good and evil, subtly suggesting, I think, what the true na ture of sin is. Surely it is pleasure which precedes everything that is done out of wickedness, and we cannot find a sin that is not connected with pleasure—take, for example, the sins committed out of anger or out of lust. For this reason the fruit is said to be fair (Gen. 3.6), at least so it seemed accord ing to the mistaken judgment of those who place their good in pleasure. Subsequently, however, it is found to be evil be cause of the bitterness of digestion—according to the words of Proverbs that tell us that honey drips from the lips of evil, and for a time moistens the throat like oil, but that afterwards it is more bitter than gall to those who have wrongfully tasted of its sweetness (Prov. 5.3-4).

And so man separated himself from the fruit of all good things, and by his disobedience he was filled with the fruit that brings destruction. And the name of that fruit was mortal sin. Straightway he died to the more perfect life: he passed from a divine life to one on the level with irrational beasts.

Once death was mingled with his nature, mortality was passed on to all the generations of his children. Hence we are born into a life of death, for, in a certain sense, our very life has died. Our life is indeed dead because we have been de prived of immortality. But the man who is aware that he lives in the midst of two lives can cross the barrier between them, such that by destroying the one he can give the victory to the other. Man by his death to the true life entered into this life of death. So too, when he dies to this irrational life of death, he is restored to life eternal. And so there is no doubt but that we cannot enter into this life of blessedness unless we die to sin.

For this reason then the Word suggests a hidden meaning

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when it places both trees in the midst of Paradise, seeing that one is there by right, and the other only comes after it by way of privation. For the cycle of life and death takes place by participation and privation with regard to one and the same thing. Whoever dies to good, lives for evil, and he who dies to sin lives again for virtue.

Rightly then does the bride fill her hands full of myrrh (Cant. 5.5). She arises by her death to sin to open her door to the Word. And the Word whom she receives is Life.

The soul, then, who looks towards God is raised up to this height in the ways we have considered. She does not yet know as she ought to know, as Paul has said (1 Cor. 8.2); she does not count herself to have apprehended, but keeps running towards the Transcendent, stretching herself forth to those things that are before (Phil. 3.13).76

74. The Door of the Spirit [ibid., 1024B-1028A) My soul, she says, went out at his word (Cant. 5.6).77 Here the bride teaches us that the only way of apprehending that Power which transcends all understanding is never to remain fixed in any single notion of Him, but ever to move forward and never to stop with what we have already perceived.

The bride full of myrrh signifies our dying to sin in all the actions of life (which she calls, symbolically, fingers). And she demonstrates the free element in virtue by the fact that the myrrh flows spontaneously from her fingers. She says that she has touched the bolt of her door with her hands (Cant.

5.6); and by this she means that her good works have come close to that straight and narrow door, whose bolt the Word

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offers to those who resemble Peter.78 And so with both of these she opens for herself the door of the Kingdom: with her hands, by which she manifests her good deeds, and with the key of faith. It is by both of these, by faith and by works, that the Word prepares in us the key of the Kingdom.

But when, like Moses, she hoped that the face of the King would be made visible to her, her beloved turned aside

(Cant. 5.6) from her comprehension. Thus she says: My be loved turned aside—but this was not with the intention of abandoning the soul that followed Him, but rather to draw her to Himself. For my soul went out at his word. Ah, what a blessed departure this is, when the soul goes out to follow her Lord! The Lord will keep thy coming in and thy going out, says the Prophet (Ps. 120.8). For surely this is what God protects in those who are worthy, their exits and their en trances. For the going out of our present state becomes an entrance into the world of transcendent good. This is the go ing out that the soul enjoys when she takes as her guide the Word, Who said: l am the door (John 10.9) and the Way; and again: By me, if any man enter in, he shall go in and go out (John 10.9). And she shall never stop going in and going out: her only rest is to continue to enter, by her prog ress, into those things that are before, and to go out of the things that she has already apprehended. In this way too the beloved face of the Lord once passed Moses by, and thus the soul of the Lawgiver kept going out of the state in which it had arrived, constantly following after the Word Who walked before.

Everyone is familiar with those elevations which Moses enjoyed, for no matter how great he had become, he never stopped in his growth towards perfection. He had grown

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great even at the outset, when he felt that the shame of Christ was a far higher thing than the kingdom of Egypt, and he preferred to suffer with the people of God rather than have the temporary pleasure of sin. He grew great once again when in the struggle between Egyptians and Jews he fought for the Israelites and punished a foreigner with death. Surely you understand the meaning of this growth, by translating the history into an allegorical level of discourse.

Once again he grew great when he spent a long time as a solitary in the desert, leading his life far from men. Next he receives an illumination by the burning bush; and here he strips from his feet the dead covering of skins. He destroys the snakes of Egypt with his rod. He removes his people from the domination of the Pharaoh. He travels with the help of a cloud. He divides the sea. He drowns the tyrant.

He sweetens the waters of Mara. He makes the rock flow.

He is filled with the food of angels. He hears the trumpets; braves the burning mountain; reaches the top; enters into the cloud; he comes into the darkness where God is; he re ceives the Testament; he becomes an unapproachable sun to those who come near, radiating light from his countenance.

Indeed, how could anyone enumerate all the various kinds of elevations and divine manifestations which he enjoyed ?

Yet great as he was, with such virtue and such graces, ele vated so high towards the divinity, he still had an insatiable desire for more, and besought God to let him see Him face to face, even though the Scriptures tell us that he had been allowed to speak with God face to face. But neither the fact that he spoke with God as with a friend, nor that he had en joyed intimate conversation with Him, prevented Moses from desiring more. Rather, what he says is: If I have found favor

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in Thy eyes, then show Thyself to me openly. God then promised He would grant this favor as he requested, saying

Thee have I \nown beyond all (Exod. 33.17). And yet God still passed by him as he stayed in that divine spot in the rock, covered over by God's hand; and even after God passes,

Moses is able only with difficulty to see His back (Exod. 33.2123). By this I think we are taught that he who wishes to see

God, will see his Beloved only by constantly following after Him, and the contemplation of His face is really the unend ing journey towards Him, accomplished by following di rectly behind the Word.

So too in our text the soul has arisen up through death, and, filled with myrrh, she puts her hands to the bolt and desires her Beloved to enter in. But He passes by. And she goes out, not remaining where she was, but rather trying to touch the Word Who leads on constantly ahead.

75. The Successive Purifications {ibid., 1029A-1037C) The keepers that go about the city found me: they struck me: and wounded me: the keePers °f the walls took away my veil from me (Cant. 5.7).79 Some might perhaps think that these are the words of one in pain, not those of one in joy, especially when she says: They struck me: they wounded me: they took away my veil. But if you consider the meaning of the words carefully, you will see they are the expressions of one who glories in what she most enjoys. And this might become clear to us in the following way. A little farther back the text says that the bride is being purified of every garment, where it has her say: I have put off my garment, how shall I

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put it on? (Cant. 5.3). Yet here it says that her veil has been removed. Now the word "veil" refers to the one brides wear to cover the head and face, such as the one Scripture tells us

Rebecca wore (Gen. 24.65). But if all the bride's clothing has been removed, how can she be still wearing her veil, which the guards now take from her ? Indeed, from these words it is clear that the bride has made great progress, since her pre vious state, towards a higher degree of perfection. For after removing her old tunic and divesting herself of all further clothing, she became much purer than she was. And yet, in comparison with this newly acquired purity, she does not seem to have removed her head-covering. Even after that complete stripping of herself she still finds something further to remove.

So it is with our ascent towards God: each stage that we reach always reveals something heavy weighing on the soul.

Thus in comparison with her new found purity, that very stripping of her tunic now becomes a kind of garment which those who find her must once again remove. These are the watchmen who patrol the city. And the city is the soul. And those whose duty it is to guard the city walls remove her veil by beating and wounding her. No one who studies the text of the Apostle can doubt that this stripping of the veil is a grace, that the eye might be free of any impediment and thus gaze unhindered at that beloved Beauty. For the Apostle at tributes the removal of the veil to the operation of the Spirit when he says: But when he shall be converted to the Lord, the veil shall be ta\en away. Now the Lord is a Spirit (2 Cor.

3.16-17).

No one who is familiar with logical thinking can doubt that whatever produces good must itself be good. Hence, if

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the removal of the bride's veil is a good thing, then so are the beating and the wounding, by which this stripping is achieved. Yet in their obvious sense, these words can have unpleasant connotations; for the words they struck me, and they wounded me suggest pain. Hence it would help if we first examined the use Holy Scripture makes of such expres sions to see whether it ever uses them in a good sense; then on that basis we may examine their connotation in the pres ent passage.

How does Wisdom save the soul of the young man from death ? What is her advice that he may not die ? Let us listen to her words: If thou stride him with the rod, she says, he shall not die (Prov. 23.13). Though you beat him with the rod, you save his soul from death. It would seem, then, that the expression they struck me suggests immortality in accordance with the text: If thou stride him with the rod, he shall not die, and that to be struck by the rod is the only way the soul can be saved from death. Thus we are shown that the expres sion has a good meaning, for it is indeed good to save one's soul from death.

And the Prophet tells us that God acts in just this way, vivifying by death, and curing by striking: I will {ill, He says, and make to live: I will strike and I will heal (Deut.

32.39). Hence, too, the great David tells us that this rod causes not a wound but consolation, saying: Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me (Ps. 22.4). Indeed, it is by these that the divine table is prepared (Ps. 22.5), with all the other details which the psalm relates in the context: oil for his head, a cup of unmixed wine (causing that sober inebriation), the mercy of God that followed him so well, and a long dwelling in the house of the Lord (Ps. 22.5-6). These then are

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the blessings implied in that sweet striking, as we are taught by Proverbs as well as the voice of the Prophet. And hence that striking, from which there is such an abundance of grace, must indeed be a good thing.

But we would do well to consider some of the earlier por tion of the text which we have passed over. The Word passed by the bride, and she was unable to grasp her Beloved. But He did not pass by as one who would run ahead and desert her; it was rather to draw her to Himself all the more. For she says: My soul went out at his word. The soul then goes out of the place where she had been, and thus she is found by the city watchmen: The \eepers that go about the city found me

(Cant. 5.7). Now this would have been a distressing occur rence if she had been found by robbers, or by the pains of Hell.80 The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to hill, and to destroy (John 10.10). But to be found by the keepers that go about the city must surely be a great blessing for her. For whoever is found by the watchman cannot be stolen by robbers. Who then are the watchmen ? None other than the ministers that keepeth Israel (Ps. 120.4), the ministers of Him

Who is our protection upon our right hand, Who we believe will keep the soul from all evil, Who protects our coming in and going out (Ps. 120.7-8). He is the watchman of the city of Whom it is said: Unless the Lord \eep the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it (Ps. 126.1).

Hence in our text the watchmen who patrol the city are those ministering spirits, sent to minister for them, who shall receive the inheritance of salvation (Heb. 1.14). And the soul, as the Word tells us, is the house of God. The watchmen, then, find the soul—as the lamb was once found by the Good

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Shepherd—and at this all the angelic choirs are moved to rejoice, as the Lord tells us (Luke 15.10).80

Similarly too the lost drachma was found with the help of a lamp,81 and all the friends and neighbors were glad (Luke

15.9). In the same way was God's servant David found, ac cording to the psalm in which David speaks in the person of the Lord: I have found David my servant: with my holy oil I have anointed him (Ps. 88.21). And once found, David belonged to Him Who found him, as we learn from the rest of the psalm: My hand shall help him: and my arm shall strengthen him. The enemy shall have no advantage over him: nor the son of iniquity have power to hurt him. And 1 will cut down his enemies before his face: and them that hate him 1 will put to flight (Ps. 88.22-24). To this we may add all the other things which that holy catalogue of praise con tains.

Thus it is a good thing for the soul to be found by the angels that go about the city. And this, too, David gives us to understand when he says: The angel of the Lord shall en camp round about them that fear him: and shall deliver them

(Ps. 33.8). And so when the bride says: The keepers . . . struck me, she is really glorying in the progress she has made towards heaven; and in saying that she is wounded, she tells us that the blow of the divine rod has penetrated deeply. The operation of that spiritual rod is not for merely on the surface, so that she would not even know the place it struck; rather, the place where she was struck is marked by a wound which the bride is proud of. This then is the meaning of our text.

The divine rod, or staff, that brings comfort and cures by striking, is the Spirit, Whose fruit consists in all those graces that Paul has enumerated, and, in particular, the continence

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of the life of perfection. So too Paul was branded with those blows, and rejoiced in his wounds, saying: I bear the mar\s of the Lord Jesus in my body (Gal. 6.17). Thus does he bear witness to that infirmity in the midst of evil, by which the power of Christ is perfected in virtue (2 Cor. 12.9). This shows us that the wounding in our text, by which the veil is stripped off, is a grace. In this way the soul's beauty is un veiled and not hidden under the mantle of darkness.

But let us recapitulate and resume our thought. The soul that looks up towards God, and conceives that good desire for His eternal beauty, constantly experiences an ever new yearn ing for that which lies ahead, and her desire is never given its full satisfaction. Hence she never ceases to stretch herself forth to those things that are before, ever passing from her present stage to enter more deeply into the interior, into the stage which lies ahead. And so at each point she judges each great marvelous grace to be inferior to what is yet to come, because each newly won grace always seems to be more beau tiful than those she has previously enjoyed. It was in this way that Paul died daily (1 Cor. 15.13). For each moment that he participated more deeply in life he died to all that was past, forgetting those graces which he had already attained.

And so the bride that ever runs towards her Spouse will never find any rest in her progress towards perfection. She has gardens of pomegranates flow from her mouth; she pre pares food for the Lord of creation, and entertains Him with her own fruit. She waters her gardens, and becomes herself a well of living water. She is shown to be radiant and immac ulate on the testimony of the Word. But then she advances even farther, and perceives something even more marvelous.

As the Word goes before her, His head is full of dew and

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with the drops of the night which fill His hair. She washes her feet, and takes off her tunic, and her hands flow with myrrh. She puts her hands to the bolt, opens the door, and looks for Him Who is beyond our comprehension, and calls to Him Whom we cannot reach. She is found by the watch men and feels the blow of the rod. She is like the rock of which the Prophet says: He struck the rock, and the waters gushed out (Ps. 77.20).

Do you see now how far the bride has come ? This is why she was struck like the rock that Moses struck: that she might, like the rock, pour forth a stream for those who thirst for the Word, welling up from her as from a spring. Now that the watchmen have stripped away her veil she can reveal the beauty of her countenance.

This then is the meaning that I have been able to obtain from the passage. But this is not to begrudge anyone else from obtaining an interpretation of the text more profitable to the soul from Him Whom reveals the hidden mysteries.

Indeed, someone might see a connection between our text and the vision of Isaias. I refer to the vision he had after the king suffering from leprosy died. Here he says he saw some one seated in magnificence upon a high and lofty throne (Is.

6.1), though his shape and size and form he was unable to see. For surely if he had been able he would have told us, as he did with the other things he saw, as, for example, the wings, their location and their motion. Yet he says he only heard a voice, and that the lintel of the doors was raised at the hymn of the seraphim, and that the house was filled with smoke (Is. 6.4). And one of the seraphim touched his mouth with a live coal; and at this his lips as well as his ears were purified for the reception of the Word (Is. 6.6-7).

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In a similar way the bride in our text says she was struck and wounded by the watchmen, and the covering of her veil was torn away. In the Isaias passage, instead of the veil the lintel is moved, so that he could have an unobstructed vision of the mysteries that were within. Instead of watch men the seraphim are mentioned; instead of a rod, a live coal; and instead of striking, burning. But with the bride as with Isaias the goal is the same, namely purification. And just as the prophet, far from being hurt when he was burnt by the coal, rather took pride that he was so honored, so too the bride does not here complain of any pain from the wound, but rather glories in the new liberty she has received by the removal of her veil.

But there is still another interpretation that we can discover in the text, quite in harmony with what we have already con sidered. The soul, having gone out at the word of her Be loved, looks for Him but does not find Him. She calls on Him, though He cannot be reached by any verbal symbol, and she is told by the watchmen that she is in love with the unattainable, and that the object of her longing cannot be apprehended. In this way she is, in a certain sense, wounded and beaten because of the frustration of what she desires, now that she thinks that her yearning for the Other cannot be ful filled or satisfied. But the veil of her grief is removed when she learns that the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on with her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfilment of her desire continually generates a further desire for the Transcendent.

Thus the veil of her despair is torn away and the bride realizes that she will always discover more and more of the incomprehensible and unhoped for beauty of her Spouse

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throughout all eternity. Then she is torn by an even more urgent longing, and through the daughters of Jerusalem she communicates to her Beloved the dispositions of her heart.

For she has received within her God's special dart, she has been wounded in the heart by the point of faith, she has been mortally wounded by the arrow of love. And God is love.

76. The Body of Christ {ibid., sermon 13, 1045D-1048D) In Christ, that which is uncreated, eternal, existing before the ages, is completely inexpressible and incomprehensible to all created intellects. Yet that which was revealed in the flesh can to a certain extent be grasped by human understanding. It is towards this element in Christ that the Church, our teacher, looks, and of this does she speak, inasmuch as this can be made intelligible to those who listen to her. What I am chiefly referring to here is the mystery of salvation, by which God was revealed to us in the flesh. He Who was in the form of God (Phil. 2.6) lived with men through the flesh in the form of a slave. And after He had reunited to Himself by the sacrifice of first-fruits the mortal substance of the flesh

He had received from an immaculate Virgin, He continued to sanctify our common humanity by His own immortality.

This He does through those who are united with Him ac cording to their share in the mystery, by nourishing His own

Body the Church, and by harmoniously fitting to it all the various limbs that grow by faith in Him.

As St. Paul says, the body indeed is one, but many are the members (1 Cor. 12.14). And all the members are not of the same sort. The eye of the body, for example, does not despise

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the hand, and the head does not spurn the feet. But the body is in complete harmony throughout all its members though composed of a diversity of powers, so that one member will not come into conflict with another. Paul tells us this first in mystery, but then proceeds more clearly, saying that God established in His Church apostles, prophets, doctors and pastors for the perfecting of the saints, for the wor\ of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: until we all meet in the unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ (Eph. 4.11-13). And again, he says:

May we grow up in all things in him who is the head, even Christ: from whom the whole body, being compacted and fitly joined together, by what every joint supplieth, accord ing to the operation in the measure of every part, mafeth increase of the body, unto the edifying of itself in charity

(Eph. 4.15-16).

And so he who sees the Church looks directly at Christ— Christ building and increasing by the addition of the elect.

The bride then puts the veil from her eyes and with pure vision sees the ineffable beauty of her Spouse. And thus she is wounded by a spiritual and fiery dart of desire.82 For love that is strained to intensity is called desire. And no one should be ashamed of this, whenever the arrow comes from God and not from the flesh. But the bride rather glories in her wound, for the point of this spiritual yearning has pierced to the depths of her heart. And this she makes clear when she says to the other maidens: I am wounded with love (Cant.

5-5)-

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77. The New Creation (ibid., 1049B-1052A)83 The establishment of the Church is a re-creation of the world. In the Church there is a new heaven, as the Prophet said (Is. 65.17). Here too there is a new firmament, which is, as Paul tells us, faith in Christ (1 Tim. 3.15). A new earth is formed, and it drinks up the rains that pour down upon it. Man is created once again, for by his rebirth from on high he is renewed according to the image of his Creator.

There is also a new light, of which He speaks: You are the light of the world (Matth. 5.14); and again: Among whom you shine as lights in the world (Phil. 2.15). And there are many stars rising on the firmament of faith. And there should be no wonder that there are so many stars numbered by God in this world and called by name, for their names, says their

Creator, have been written in heaven. For it is in this sense that I understand the Creator of the new universe to say to His luminaries: Your names are written in heaven (Luke

10.20). This is not the only striking thing about the new creation, that the Word has created in it a multitude of stars. There are also many suns, that light up the world with the rays of good works. For thus does their Creator speak:

Let your light shine before men (Matth. 5.16); and, again:

Then shall the just shine as the sun (Matth. 14.43).

Anyone who gazes upon the visible universe and sees the wisdom that has been impressed upon the beauty of all creatures, can argue from the visible to the invisible beauty, the fountainhead of all Wisdom, Whose influence brought all creatures into being. So too, anyone who looks upon the universe of this new creation reflected in the Church, can

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see in it Him Who is all in all, and thus through things that are intelligible and understandable he may be led by our faith to an awareness of the Transcendent.

And so these maidens request the soul who is rising up towards perfection to reveal her Beloved to them; and she paints a picture of her love in terms of the mysteries of salva tion. She shows how the whole Church is but the one Body of her Spouse; and in her description of His beauty she attrib utes a particular meaning to each one of His members, but it is only by the union of all of the particular members that the beauty of the Body is complete.

78. The Symbol of Closed Eyes {ibid., 1057B-1061B) His eyes as doves upon the fullness of the waters, which are washed with mil\, and sit beside plentiful streams (Cant.

5.12).84 The meaning of this text is far beyond our compre hension; indeed any notion we could form of it would be, I feel, far inferior to the truth. But after serious thought, this is what it would seem to mean. Somewhere in his writings the divine Apostle has said that the eye should not say to the hand: l need not thy help (1 Cor. 12.21). And by this he means to teach us that the body of the Church must use both these faculties for its proper operation: the faculty of vision and truth must be joined with the power of action. For con templation alone cannot perfect the soul without good works to support a morally good life; nor, on the other hand, is the active life completely sufficient without the guidance of true piety. There must then be a cooperation between the hands and the eyes, and thus we are led by our text to consider first

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of all what the eyes here refer to, and then to study the reasons why they are so praised. We shall discuss the meaning of the hands in its proper place.

The natural function of the eyes is to see. Hence they are located above all the other sense organs, and are thus en trusted by nature with the guidance of the entire body. Now

Holy Scripture, as we know, has various names to refer to those who guide us in the ways of truth, as for example, a "seer," or one who sees, and "watchman," as we find the word used in the Prophets (Ezech. 3.17, and passim). And so in our present text we are led to consider the eyes as referring to those who have been commanded to oversee, observe, superintend. And we learn what their admirable qualities are by a comparison; for the text intensifies the comparison by saying: His eyes as doves (Cant. 5.12). This is indeed a high degree of praise inasmuch as it stresses the innocence of His eyes; and this they preserve by not being tainted with the life of the body, but by living and remaining constantly in the Spirit. The dove always symbolizes the pure life of the Spirit, for that was the form in which John saw the Holy Spirit soaring out of heaven over the waters.

Hence anyone whom God has set over His Church as an eye, must wash away all the rheum of sin if he is to oversee and superintend as purely as he should. And He tells us that there is not merely one sort of water to cleanse the eyes, but many different kinds in abundance. There are as many differ ent purifying springs of water as there are virtues, and it is through these that our eyes can become ever purer. One of these cleansing sources is the virtue of temperance, another is humility, and truth, and justice, and courage, and the desire for good and the repugnance for evil. These waters flow all

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from the same source, merging their streams into a single one, and by these the eyes may be purified of all the rheum of passion.

But these eyes upon the fullness of the waters are compared to doves by reason of their purity and their perfection, and the Word says that they have been washed in mil\ (Cant.

5.12). And it is fitting praise for such eyes as these that the dove should be made lovely by being washed in milk. For it has been truly observed of milk that it cannot reflect any image or likeness. All other liquids are like mirrors, because their smooth surfaces reflect the image of those who look into them. It is only with milk that this does not happen.

This then is the highest praise that could bestowed on the eyes of the Church, that they do not reflect, as it were, the deceptive shadow-pictures of non-existent things, things er roneous or vain and contrary to the true nature of reality.

Rather, they gaze at that which is true Being, and do not take in the mistaken visions and fantasies of life. Hence for purity of eyes the perfect soul judges that bathing them in milk is quite safe.85

The rest of the text prescribes for the hearers the things on which the eyes should be intent: which sit, she says, beside the plentiful streams (Cant. 5.12). In praising these eyes in this way, the Word teaches us that we must constantly sit down, in applying ourselves to the divine teaching. Thus we are instructed on how we might acquire this beauty, by con stantly sitting down beside the plentiful waters. True, many who have been assigned the duty of being eyes have aban doned this constant application and have sat by the rivers of Babylon, thus deserving the accusation which God Him self makes against them: They have forsaken me, He says,

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the fountain of living water, and have digged to themselves broken cisterns, that can hold no water (Jerem. 2.13).

It is thus we learn that the eye is to become beautiful, and eminently fitting for His golden head—that is, by being as spotless as the dove, as opaque to error and deception as milk, and never deluded by the fantasies of things that have no substance. By patience and application we must sit down be side the plentiful streams, as stationary as trees planted beside the running waters (Is. 44.4). Then will we bring forth fruit in due season (Matth. 21.24), and the branch will be kept green, nestling in the beauty of its leaves. But as it is, many allow the eyes of the spirit to neglect these waters, and they despise the study of the divine Word. Instead they dig their own cistern of avarice, work in the quarry of conceit, sink wells of arrogance, dig with care other reservoirs of decep tion—and these are by nature incapable of retaining for eternity the waters they so eagerly strive for. For the honor and power and glory for which so many work so hard will run off like water as soon as they are attained, and not a trace of all their labor will be left behind for these men who have been under an illusion.

The Word, then, would wish His seers and superintendents to be such as I have said. And they must erect as a bulwark— as a kind of eyebrow—the certainty of the divine doctrines.

And they must conceal the purity and splendor of their lives with continence—as it were, by an eyelid—so that the beam of self-esteem will never fall upon their clear pupils and so impede their vision.

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79. The Mystical Night of the Soul [ibid., sermon 14, 1065 C-1068C) His lips are as lilies dropping choice myrrh (Cant. 5.13).

The two comparisons in the text here suggest two different qualities. One of these is truth, which shines as bright as light in all His doctrine. For the form of the lily is such that its whiteness is an apt symbol of the purity and truth of doctrine. The other is this: His teaching sets forth only that spiritual and immaterial way of life, and the life of this world, the life of flesh and blood, must be mortified by the contemplation of spiritual reality. For myrrh flows from His body and fills the souls of those who receive Him; and this is a clear symbol of the mortification of the body. Indeed in the inspired word it often happens that the word myrrh is taken as referring to death.

And so this pure and perfect eye makes of its cheek a howl that pours forth spices as if from a spring (Cant. 5.13) ;86 this flowers now with the lilies of doctrine which pour from His mouth adorned with a divine radiance. In this way does the divine Word refer to those who are pure and fragrant with virtue; for from them flow the drops of myrrh which endlessly fill the minds of those who receive it. This implies complete contempt for a purely material existence; and all the things for which men exert themselves in this world are for them dead and devoid of interest.

It was this sort of myrrh that flowed from the mouth of Paul, mingled with the pure lily of continence, to fill the ears of that holy virgin. And the virgin was Theda,87 who caught these flowing drops so precious for the soul and put the

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outer man to death, by extinguishing every carnal thought or desire. Once she received his saving doctrine, her youth and all its beauty died along with all the faculties of her body.

Alone alive in her was the Word; because of Him the whole world for her was dead, and she, the virgin, had died to the world.

So too the mighty Peter once poured forth the bright lilies of the Word in the house of Cornelius, filling the souls of his listeners with myrrh. And no sooner had they received the Word when they were buried with Christ in Baptism, becoming dead to this world.

There are countless examples I could mention from the lives of the saints, who became the common mouth of the Church, pouring on their listeners the myrrh that kills all passion, and blossoming with flowers, with the lilies of the Word. Thus they became the great champions of the faith in time of persecution, and by their loyal confession they were covered with myrrh in their conflicts on behalf of the true religion.

But now that my interpretation has become clear, there is no need to prolong my discussion of this point any further: we have seen how the Church becomes a lily, how the lily can drop myrrh, and how these drops can fill the souls of those who receive the Word.

80. The Good Samaritan (ibid., 1085A-1088A) This is my beloved, she says, and this is my friend, 0 daughters of Jerusalem (Cant. 5.16)88 The bride had pre viously tried to set before the eyes of the other maidens all

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the signs by which they could recognize the One Whom she sought. Now, however, in her speech she points Him out directly, saying: This is my Beloved, Who rose from Judah to become our Brother, and became neighbor to him who fell among robbers, healed his wounds with oil, wine and bandages; then taking him on His own beast, He set him down to rest at an inn, offering two denarii for his stay, and promising that on His return He would repay any service that was discharged over and above His command.

The point of each of these details is surely clear. The man who was an expert in the Law wanted to test the Lord and set himself higher than the others, and in his pride had com plete contempt for any equality with the rest. And so he said:

And who is my neighbor? (Luke 10.29) And then the Word explained, in the form of a story, God's entire economy of salvation. He told of man's descent from heaven, the robbers' ambush, the stripping of the garment of immortality, the wounds of sin, the progress of death over half of man's nature while his soul remained immortal. Then came the passage of the Law that brought no help—neither the priest nor the Levite tended the wounds of the man who fell among robbers—for it was impossible for the blood of goats and oxen (Heb. 9.13) to remove man's sin. And then He came, clothed in our human nature as the first-fruits of the mass,89 in which there was a portion of every race, Jewish, Samaritan,

Greek—all mankind. With His body (that is, the beast of the story) he proceeded to the place of man's disaster, healed his wounds and set him upon His own beast. He created for him the inn of His loving providence, in which all those who labor and are burdened can find rest (Matth. 11.28). And those who enter here receive within themselves that which

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receives them, as the Word Himself has said: he abideth in me, and I in him (John 6.57).

Man, then, receives within himself the Lord Whom noth ing can contain, in accordance with his capacity. He accepts the two denarii, one of which signifies the love of God with one's whole heart, and the other the love of one's neighbor as oneself, according to the lawyer's reply. But not the hearers of the law are fust before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified (Rom. 2.13). Hence we must not merely accept these two coins (I mean our faith in God and a good con science with respect to our fellow man), but we must by our own good deeds cooperate in the fulfilment of these two commandments.

And so the Lord says to the inn-keeper that whatever he does in caring for the wounded man will be made up to him at the Lord's second coming according to the measure of his devotion. Thus it was that the Man Who became our neighbor through such love was also the One Who became our Brother by rising out of Judah. It is He Whom the im maculate bride reveals to the daughters of Jerusalem when she says: This is my beloved and this is my friend, 0 daugh ters of Jerusalem. And by these characteristics that have been revealed we shall, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, be able to find Him and keep Him for the salvation of our souls.

81. "My Beloved to Me" [ibid., sermon 15, 1093C-1096D) 1 to my beloved, says the bride, and my beloved to me

(Cant. 6.2). This is the norm and limit of all perfection. By these words we are taught that the purified soul must possess

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nothing but God alone, and must look to nothing outside of Him. Hence it must so cleanse itself of every material thought and deed, that it may be completely transformed into something spiritual and immaterial, and thus make of itself a most radiant image of that archetypal Beauty. Take the example of a man who looks at a painting on a canvas that has been very closely modelled on its archetype. He de clares that the same form exists in both, that the beauty of the model is in the likeness and the archetype is clearly visible in its imitation. In the same way the bride, in saying, 1 to my beloved, and my beloved to me, declares that she has modelled herself on Christ, thus recovering her own proper loveliness, that blessed state which our human nature had in the beginning, for now her beauty has developed in the image and likeness of that sole true Beauty which is the prototype.

It is just like a mirror that has been artistically and prac tically designed: it accurately reflects on its pure surface the image of any face that is in front of it. So too the soul reflects the pure image of that unsullied Beauty, when she has pre pared herself properly and cast off every material stain. Then may the soul say—for she is a kind of living mirror possessing free will: When I face my Beloved with my entire surface, all the beauty of His form is reflected within me.

Paul too says this when he declares that he lives to God and is dead to the world, that Christ alone lives in him (Gal.

5.19-20). And when he says, To me, to live is Christ (Phil.

1.21), he proclaims that no human or material passion lives in him, not pleasure, grief, anger, fear, cowardice, vehement emotion, self-esteem, insolence, ill will, envy, vindictiveness, avarice, or any other inordinate disposition of the soul. For

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I have Him alone, and He is none of these. For I have stripped away everything that is not Christ, and so I have nothing in my soul that is not in Him. Truly then to me, to live is Christ, or, to use the words of the bride, I to my beloved, and my beloved to me.

This is true holiness, purity, incorruptibility, light, truth, and all the rest, and these pasture my soul not in the dry undershrubs or in the pastures, but in the brightness of the saints (Ps. 109.3). And this is the meaning suggested by the lilies because of their radiant beauty. And this is the reason why He, who feedeth among the lilies (Cant. 6.2), leads his flock to the meadows of lilies, that the brightness of the Lord our God may be upon us (Ps. 89.17). When we eat we are completely affected by the nature of our food. Or, to give an example, let us imagine a hollow vessel made of glass, such that anything you put into it is clear and visible. So too, when we put the brightness of lilies into our souls, we make our souls bright, because the quality of the lilies shines out from the inside.

Now to make my meaning clear. What I am saying is that the soul feeds on the virtues, and that text by way of symbol ism is speaking of the virtues as lilies. Whosoever is filled with these by a good life makes himself radiant by reflecting in his character the quality of every virtue throughout his life.

Let your pure lily be temperance and justice and fortitude and prudence, and whatsoever the Apostle has told you as true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever fust, whatsoever of good fame, if there be any virtue, if any praise (Phil. 4.8).90 All these are proven to be present in the soul by her pure life: they at once adorn the soul that pos-

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sesses them, and are themselves adorned by the soul that receives them. So the bride offers herself to her Beloved and receives from Him His own Beauty within herself.

Now with regard to the graces which they receive from God Who glorifies those who glorify Him (1 Kings 2.30),91 we shall hear of them in our consideration of the text which immediately follows.

82. TheWings of the Dove (ibid., 1100C-1101C) Turn away thy eyes from me, for they have given me wings (Cant. 6.4).92 Some commentators think that the Lord speaks these words to the pure soul, but I think that the sentence applies more suitably to the bride. I shall explain briefly the reasons that occur to me. Very frequently in Scripture, as I am aware, God is said to have wings. So, for example, the Prophet, when he says: Protect me under the shadow of thy wings (Ps. 16.8), and again: Under his wings wilt thou have trust.93 Moses, too, suggests this in his great

Canticle, when he says: Hovering over them he spread his wings (Deut. 32.11). We may compare, too, what the Lord said to Jerusalem: How often would I have gathered to gether thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings (Matth. 23.37) 5 and, if one would consider the context, this is quite in accord with the idea we have been considering.

For some hidden reason, then, the inspired word affirms that the divine nature has wings. Now we know that man at his creation in the beginning was made to the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1.26). And this was because as an

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image it was in all things like its archetype. But, according to the Scriptures, our prototype has wings. Hence it follows that man's nature was also created with wings, that in this point too it might possess the divine likeness. It is clear, of course, that the word "wings" here will be interpreted on an allegorical level suitable for the divinity. Thus the wings would refer to God's power, His happiness, His incorrupti bility, and so on. Now all these attributes were also in man, so long as he was still like God. But then it was the inclination towards sin that robbed us of these wings. Once outside the shelter of God's wing, we were also stripped of our wings.

Hence the grace of God hath appeared to us, enlightening us, that, denying ungodliness and worldly desires, we might once again grow wings through sanctity and righteousness (Tit.

2.11-12).

So then, if what I have said has not gone beyond the bounds of truth, it is fitting here that the bride should speak of the grace she has received from the divine regard. God has similarly looked on us with the eyes of kindness, and we have been given wings again according to his primitive

And this, I think, is the meaning of the text in which David prays to the Lord in the sixteenth Psalm: Let thy eyes behold the things that are equitable—that is, my own. For thou hast proved my heart, he says, and visited it by night, thou hast tried me by fire: and iniquity hath not been found in me (Ps. 16.2-3). And this is just as though He had said:

Thine eyes do not see what is contrary. For he who sees aright does not see crookedly, and he who does not see crookedly always see aright. Hence by removing what is con trary, he points out to the divine regard what is good; and

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in this way the soul regains its wings once again, after it had lost them through the sin of our first parents.

When Thine eyes look at me, they are averted from what is contrary; nor will they see in me anything that is contrary to me. Thus by Thine eyes, O Lord, I obtain the grace of being winged again, of recovering through virtue the wings of the Dove, by which I may have the power of flight. Now

I can fly and can rest, and indeed in that rest which the Lord enjoyed when He rested from His creation.

83. "One Is My Dove" (ibid., 1116D-1120A) One is my dove, my perfect one: she is the only one of her mother, the chosen one of her who bore her (Cant. 6.8). This verse is more clearly explained by the Lord's words in the Gospel. There in giving all power to His disciples by His blessing, in His prayer to the Father he grants many other favors to those who are holy; and He adds this, which is the crown of all blessings, that in all the diversity of life's deci sions they should never be divided greatly in their choice of the good; but He prays that all may be one (John 17.22), united in a single good, so that linked in the bond of peace (Eph. 4.3), as the Apostle says, through the unity of the Holy Spirit, all might become one body and one spirit, through the one hope to which they have all been called.

But it would be better here if we would quote the actual words of the Gospel. That they all may be one, He says, as Thou, Father, in me, and l in Thee; that they also may be one in us (John 17.21). Now the bond of this unity is glory

(John 17.22), and no one, who would seriously consider

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the Lord's words, would deny that this glory is the Holy Spirit. For He says: The glory which thou hast given me, l have given to them (John 17.22). Actually He gave His disciples this glory when He said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost (John 20.22): And He Himself received this glory when He put on human nature, though He had indeed always possessed it since before the beginning of the world.

And now that His human nature has been glorified by the Spirit, this participation in the glory of the Spirit is com municated to all who are united with Him, beginning with His disciples.

Hence He says: The glory which thou hast given me, I have given to them: that they may he one, as we also are one: l in them, and they in me: that they may be made per fect in one (John 17.22-23). He who grew quickly from childhood unto a perfect man, unto the measure of that spiritual age (Eph. 4.13), though born of a slave and a bondwoman, was honored with the royal dignity and received the Spirit by his detachment and his purity—this is the per fect dove on whom the Bridegroom looks when He says:

One is my dove, my perfect one: she is the only one of her mother, the chosen one of her who bore her (Cant. 6.8).

Surely we know who the mother of the dove is, since we know the tree by its fruits. When we consider man, we can not doubt that he is born of man. Similarly, if we look for the mother of the chosen dove, we will recognize her in none other than that Dove we spoke of. For the nature of the parent is always visible in the offspring. But the offspring of the Spirit is spirit. Hence, if the offspring is a dove, then surely its mother must be that Dove that came down from heaven to the Jordan, as John testifies. This is the Dove that

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the maidens call blessed, and the queens and concubines praise (Cant. 6.8). For the path to that blessed happiness is one that is open to all souls from every rank; and that is why the text says: The daughters saw her, and will bless her: the queens and concubines will praise her (Cant. 6.8).

All men are drawn to desire that which they praise and bless. So the daughters bless the Dove. And they too would desire above all to become doves. And the fact that the con cubines praise the Dove testifies too to their earnest desire to attain what they praise, until that day when all men shall be made one, when all will look to the same end, when

God will become all in all and all evil will be destroyed, and all men will be united together in harmony by their partici pation in the Good.94

NOTES ON THE TEXTS

BY HERBERT MUSURILLO, S.J.

Gregory of Nyssa's The Life of Moses, composed towards the end of his life (about 39°/395 A.D.) is perhaps his profoundest and most representative work. Most of the earliest manuscripts assign it a double tide: On the Life of Moses the Lawgiver: a Treatise on Perfection, or something of the sort; but it is possible that it had no exact tide in antiquity. The Greek text with which most are familiar is the one reprinted in Migne, Patrologia graeca vol. 44 (Paris

1863) 298-429, and was taken from the edition of Gregory's works published by the Jesuit patrologist Fronton du Due in 1615; but for many reasons this text is very faulty, with a good number of omissions and errors. The text of Jean Danielou (Sources chretiennes, Paris: 1955) marks a distinct advance, being based, as it is, on some of the best manuscripts, and will be the most serviceable until my own text is published under the editorship of Werner Jaeger in Gregorii

Nysseni opera, vol. vii.

The Life of Moses has the form of a logos, that is, a formal treatise, intended to ask the question: What is perfection for those who are leading a life of Christian virtue? For this purpose Gregory chooses Moses as an hypodeigma, as an exemplar of the doctrine he is teaching. The method is allegorical: that is, taking the main facts from the life of Moses as given principally in Exodus 2-19, with some use of the other chapters of Exodus, and portions of Deuteronomy and Numbers. The life as such is given in the section called Historia; the heart of the doctrine, however, is contained in the Theoria, in which the literal details of Moses' life are interpreted according to the "three-fold" allegorical sense: the tropological (which applies details to the inner life of the Christian), the Messianic

(which shows how these details foreshadow Christ and His Church) and, finally, the eschatological (interpreting the details in terms of the soul's life after death).

For the doctrines of the Theoria Gregory is at times influenced by Philo's Vita Moysis and Quaestiones in Exodum. The general atmosphere of the eclectic

Neoplatonism of the fourth century is everywhere in evidence. But Gregory's originality consists, as Pere Danielou has again and again reminded us, in the doctrine of "infinite progress" of which Moses' life is a symbol. The progress of the Christian must, however, take place within a life of complete service and dedication to the new Law: the constant following of Christ becomes a more and more intense penetration into the Cloud of Darkness which surrounds the Godhead. Thus the mystical knowledge of God complements Christian asceticism as well as man's philosophic quest for the meaning of the universe.

The Life of Moses was apparently intended for the use of a Christian ascetic— the name Caesarius, mentioned towards the close of the work, is probably not authentic—especially for reading aloud in the household according to the custom of the period. It has four clearly defined sections: (1) the Preface, or covering letter of introduction; (2) the History, or paraphrase of the Biblical story; (3) the Theoria, or explanation of the History, in the manner of allegorical exegesis; and (4) the Conclusion. For a general bibliography on Gregory, see F. L. Cross,

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (London, Oxford University Press: 1957), p. 588; and for the ancient patristic catechetical technique of

GREGORY OF NYSSA

"history" and "theoria," see H. Musurillo, "History and Symbol: A Study of Form in Early Christian Literature," Theological Studies 18 (i957)> PP357"3^6.

2 The Treatise on Perfection, written towards the close of Gregory's life is, as he tells us, a discussion of the specific marks and characteristics of Christian perfection as an imitation of Christ. Though written in reply to a specific request, it is not clear whether we may trust the designation given in some manuscripts,

"to the monk Olympius." For the latest edition, see Werner Jaeger, Gregorii Nysseni opera, vol. viii, pars i (Leiden, Brill: 1952), pp. 143—214.

3 The Commentary on Ecclesiastes is really a collection of a sequence of eight sermons covering Ecclesiastes 1.2 to 3.13; apparendy they were first taken down as Gregory delivered them and then revised by him later on; there is no intro ductory dedication, and it may be that our text has come down incomplete.

Gregory calls the course "an initiation" into the hidden meaning of Ecclesiastes.

For Gregory this means the contingency of all created reality and the efforts man must make to penetrate surface phenomena to attain truth.

4 The discussion concerns the allegorical meaning of Exodus 5, in which the Israelites are condemned by the Pharaoh to fashion bricks.

5 Apparently a reference to 1 Cor. 3.12, and Matth. 3.12.

6 Gregory's Commentary on the Beatitudes is really a transcript of eight sermons which he delivered on Matth. 5.1-10 to the community of the faithful probably in his church at Nyssa. For a translation with a solid introduction and notes, see

Hilda C. Graef, Gregory of Nyssa: The Lord's Prayer. The Beatitudes (Ancient Christian Writers 18), Westminster, Maryland, 1934.

7 For a discussion of Gregory's doctrine of the image of God in man, see Walter J. Burghardt, The Image of God in Man according to Cyril of Alexandria

(Catholic University Studies in Christian Antiquity, n. 14, Washington: 1957), p. 4, with the literature quoted.

8 The passage discusses Exod. 13.18-14.31, the crossing of the Red Sea.

9 On the taste of the manna, we are told by the tradition reflected in Exod.

16.31 that it was like to flour and honey. But Gregory here seems to follow the Alexandrian Jewish tradition which we find in Philo; it is reflected in Wisdom

16.20 which speaks of the bread from heaven as having in it all that is delicious, and the sweetness of every taste. See Danielou, La Vie de Mo'ise (Sources chretiennes, Paris, 1955), p. 73.

10 The passage is primarily a discussion of Matth. 5.8: Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.

11 The De virginitate is one of Gregory's earliest published writings and pro fesses to deal with the general perfection of the Christian life; its dedication has been lost. For the latest edition and discussion of the manuscript tradition, one must now consult J. P. Cavarnos in Werner Jaeger's Gregorii Nysseni opera, op. cit., pp. 215-343.

12 The reference may be to the great and precious promise of 2 Peter 1.4, or perhaps to several passages of Proverbs (e.g., 6.12, 17.27).

FROM GLORY TO GLORY

13 There is actually no mention of "dirt" in our text of Luke 15.8-9, nor is the woman who loses the drachma a "widow." In this section of the treatise

Gregory doubtless has incorporated part of an earlier homily on this Lucan parable.

14 It is not precisely clear how Gregory intends this withdrawal from the labour and toil (Gen. 3.17) which is man's lot on earth. He perhaps means a withdrawal fom the cares of this life and ultimately the adoption of the con templative or monastic life. But the text remains obscure.

15 Eunomius, an heretical bishop of Cyzicus who died about 394, wrote an Apology (about 361) in defence of his modified doctrine of Arianism (sometimes called Anomoeanism or Eunomianism). Gregory's elder brother Basil then attacked

Eunomius in a treatise called Against Eunomius some three years later; and al though Eunomius was reduced to silence for the remainder of Basil's life he took

Basil's death, Jan. 1, 379, as an occasion for his "Apology for an Apology" shortly afterwards. Gregory of Nyssa then took the cudgels on behalf of his brother

Basil, and the four works that he composed in the controversy are united in the traditional vulgate edition of the Contra Eunomium; they are Contra Eunom. 1, the work directly composed against Eunomius' Apology for an Apology; Contra

Eunom. 12b; then Contra Eunom. 3-i2a; and finally Contra Eunom. 1. For the best edition one must now consult Werner Jaeger, Contra Eunomium (2 vols.,

1921-1922; ed. 2 Leiden: Brill, i960), with the discussions in the introductions to each volume.

16 The words I have translated "token" and "symbol" here are the same in Greek—semeion, "sign." Actually the term is borrowed from Stoic or Epicurean philosophy (see Liddell-Scott-Jones, s.v.) and refers to sense data which serve as the basis for an inference to the invisible or the metaphysical.

17 In the actual text of Hebrews the reference is to Moses' faith.

18 This sentence, "It is just like people ... see anything" would seem to fit the context better when placed before the previous sentence, "Thus it is . . . our appetite." It is very likely that the Greek has been dislocated.

19 Probably a variant of Isaias 1.16, which is (in the Greek text of the LXX version): Take away the evils of your souls.

20 Gregory supports his doctrine of "silence" by using Psalm 144, one of the so-called Laudate hymns added at the end of the fifth book of the Psalter. Here and through the rest of the passage he has fused two verses, Ps. 144.3: And of his greatness there is no end, and Ps. 144.5: They shall speak of the magnificence of the glory of thy holiness: and shall tell thy wondrous works.

21A curious instance of a conflated quotation. Ecclus. 46.20 has: the Lord thundered from heaven; but Gregory may unconsciously be thinking of the bold metaphor in Homer, Iliad 21.388: "The mighty heavens trumpeted."

22 The word used in Exod. 20.21, gnophos, literally means "darkness."

23 Here Gregory has abridged the lengthy prescriptions dealing with the pillars of the Tabernacle as incorporated into Exod. 26.32-37 and 27.10-17. The "wood that does not rot" is the so-called setim or acacia wood mentioned many times in

GREGORY OF NYSSA

Exodus; growing around the vicinity of Mt. Sinai this useful wood later became a symbol of incorruptibility. On the strong wood, and that will not rot, see also Is.

40.20.

24 For a note on the doctrine of these "cosmic powers," see Danielou, ha Vie de Moise, p. 87, n. 4, with the literature cited.

25 These "supports" were really poles of acacia wood overlaid with gold slipped through rings on two sides of the ark in order to carry it: Exod. 25.12-15.

28 On the seven lamps as the seven spirits of God, see Apoc. 4.5; but Gregory is rather referring here to the seven gifts of the Spirit as given in Is. 11.2-3.

27 All the manuscripts read: "the laver for Candacus" as though Candacus were the name of the eunuch baptized by Philip in Acts. 8.27 ff.; but Gregory could hardly have made this mistake, and I have translated as though he had written

"for the man of Candace."

28 This entire sentence is missing from some very good manuscripts and may well be a later gloss.

29 Cf. a related interpretation reflected in Wisdom 18.24; for the Philonic pas sages which develop the idea, see Danielou, op. cit., p. 92, n. 1.

80 The passage is most important for what Danielou has called the doctrine of the epectasis, or the indefinite progression of the soul in its movement towards

God. Gregory's principle finds its Scriptural basis in an image used by Paul in the episde to the Philippians (3.13-14). Paul tells the Philippians that he is not yet perfect, but constantly strives to make progess: Vor getting the things that are behind, and stretching myself [epekteinomenos] to those that are before, I press towards the mar\, to the prize of the supernal vocation of God in Christ Jesus.

In Paul the verb used in the Greek would seem to mean, literally, "stretch the hands out toward" (see Liddell-Scott-Jones, s. v. epekteino); it implies a constant effort to move forward in an attempt to grasp something. For Gregory this move ment becomes a symbol for the soul's ability to make indefinite progress in grace and perfection as it moves towards the infinite. Pere Danielou has further seen in this doctrine an explanation of Gregory's account of the soul's progress in mystical prayer: see La Vie de Moise, op. cit., pp. xviii-xxxi, and 105-106. Cf. also the discussion in the Introduction, above.

31 An interesting illustration of Gregory's epistemology. What the soul receives at each stage in its progress is an ei\on, an image (as in a mirror, or as in a statue) of the Good; what it desires is the character, that is the direct stamp or impression of the Good acting directly upon it, so that no third thing comes in between.

32 The words "at the end of his life" would seem to be, perhaps, a projection of Gregory's own feelings. The Life of Moses, we know, was one of his last works.

In Moses Gregory perhaps sees his own experience, and this doctrine of the knowledge of God is, as it were, Gregory's final testament.

33 Composed towards the end of Gregory's life, perhaps in the years 390/5, the Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles, was originally a course of sermons which Gregory delivered and which was taken down by members of the congre-

FROM GLORY TO GLORY

gation. Gregory then revised the fifteen sermons which we have (they go only as far as Cant. 6.8) and sent them with a covering letter to the young widow, and later deaconess, of Constantinople, Olympias. Olympias's home was one of the most famous of Christian centers at Constantinople, and among her friends she counted Gregory of Nazianzus, who had composed a marriage hymn in her honor, and St. John Chrysostom, whose correspondence with her is still extant. She died some time after the year 405. Gregory realized the commentary was incomplete and hoped one day to send Olympias the rest. The aim of the commentary was to explain the theoria or symbolic meaning of the Canticle insofar as it referred to the life of Christian perfection. In continuing the Origenist or allegorical tradi tion of interpretation, Gregory hoped to refute those who saw nothing in the Canticle but the literal sense. For him the mystery of the Canticle touches on a threefold relationship between the soul and God: (1) it is the story of the Christian's conversion by the grace and teaching of the Church; (2) it is a symbol of man's progressive knowledge of the nature of the Godhead; and (3) it is the story of the mystical ascent of more privileged souls towards the cloud of darkness in which they will find the ultimate Ground of Being.

Gregory, while admitting that he knows little or no Hebrew, says that he has consulted Hebrew scholars for assistance; in any case, he does not attempt to solve the problems which the Canticle presents on a textual or philological level.

For a summary of the traditional as well as modern interpretations of the Canticle, see H. H. Rowley, The Servant of God and Other Essays on the Old Testament

(London, 1952), pp. 187-234, with the bibliography cited; and see also the intro ductory material (largely the work of A. Robert) included in La Sainte Bible de

Jerusalem (Paris, 1956), pp. 856-857. The latest critical edition of the text is

H. Langerbeck, Gregorii Nysseni opera vol. vi, ed. Werner Jaeger, Leiden: Brill, i960.

34 On the implications of this "angelic life," see H. Musurillo, "The Problem of Ascetical Fasting in the Greek Patristic Writers," Traditio 12 (1956), esp. pp.

11-17, with the literature there cited.

35 Not in our Proverbs as we have it; but Gregory may have been referring to Prov. 2.5: Then shalt thou . . . find the knowledge of God.

36 This alternate version (which substitutes the perfect tense for the imperative) is not reflected in our known manuscripts either of the Greek or of the Hebrew

Old Testament.

37 Or, alternately, "as He pervades (you) with His entire Being"; the Greek is somewhat ambiguous. The version we have adopted is also more in accord with Hervetus' Latin translation as reprinted in the Migne edition.

38 The present passage is developed from the text: While the king was at his repose, my spikenard sent forth the odour thereof (Cant. 1.11), that is, for Greg ory, the odor of the king. Nard (Hebrew nerd) or spikenard was a fragrant oil or ointment made chiefly with the juices extracted from an Oriental aromatic plant.

39Demas was Paul's companion during the captivity (Col. 4.14; Philemon 24), but is reported as leaving him in 2 Tim. 4.9; Hermogenes is among those who

GREGORY OF NYSSA

are turned away from me (2 Tim. 1.15), and Alexander was a coppersmith (2 Tim. 4.14), who was delivered up to Satan (1 Tim. 1.20).

40 Gregory applies the allegorical technique to Cant. 1.12: A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me, he shall abide between my breasts. The "bundle" is really a small bag or sachet, and the "myrrh" perfume.

41 This is far too vague an account to be identified with any ancient medical writer; for the dominant explanation of the period, see Galen's discussion of the heart and arteries in On the Natural Faculties (ed. A. J. Brock, Loeb Library)

3.15 and passim.

42 Because of the word "cypress" (Greek \ypros'), and the related verb "blossom"

{kyprizo, used in Cant. 2.13), Gregory here uses the expression kyprizo, "blossom," but immediately feels he must explain it by the more normal Greek word for "blossom" or "flourish." A more literal translation here would be: "the divine cluster that gave forth its cypress, that is, blossomed, before the Passion." For the meaning of "cypress" see the following note.

43 In the phrase "cluster of cypress" Gregory takes the word "cypress" (Greek kypros, Hebrew kppher) to mean the "bloom of the vine." But actually the text of the Canticle here seems to refer to the henna plant, whose oil was used for perfume in the ancient world; hence the meaning of Cant. 1.13 is rather

"my beloved is like a sprig of henna."

44 The subsequent discussion of the forms of virtue and vice arises from the text of Cant. 1.15: Behold thou art fair, my beloved, and comely.

45 The Hebrew and the Vulgate texts are slightly different from the Greek which Gregory follows; they have "he brought me" instead of the imperative "bring me," and "he set in order" instead of "set in order." The sense of the Hebrew, however, is: "He brought me into the banqueting house, and his standard over me was love; give me strength with raisins and refreshment with apples, for I am sick with love." Gregory's exegesis is, however, based on the supposition that the "house of wine" refers to a wine-cellar or winepress.

46 The Greek phrase used here is the same as that Sophocles uses in Oedipus Rex 1191: "What man has more than merely apparent happiness?" The meaning in Gregory, however, is slightly different: the love of the worldly for God is "mere seeming," that is, it is purely superficial or hypocritical. See H. Musurillo, "The Illusion of Prosperity in Sophocles and Gregory of Nyssa, Amer. Journ. of Pkilol.

82 (1961), 182 ff. with the bibliography.

47 The discussion continues on the text of Cant. 2.9: Behold he standeth behind our wall, looking through the windows, looking through the lattices. Gregory then proceeds to discuss the description of springtime in Cant. 2.11-13, which is

"framed," as it were, by a repeated invitation to the bride, Arise . . . and come

(Cant. 2.10 and 13).

48 The directness of the address here, as well as the use of the feminine gender in Greek, suggests that Gregory may have particularly adapted this passage in view of his benefactress, Olympias of Constantinople, to whom the Commentary was dedicated. It should also be noted that Gregory follows the LXX version of the Canticle which differs here somewhat from the Hebrew, which means rather:

FROM GLORY TO GLORY

"My dove, thou who art in the clefts of the rock, in the shelter of the steep place."

Hence Gregory will use the "contiguity of the bulwark" as the focal point of his allegorical exegesis.

49 Cant. 2.15 has long been a mystery and seems to destroy the thought se quence of this song of the bride. The bride reminisces, thinking how her lover sang to her of the springtime; and the single verse about the foxes despoiling the vineyard have been taken by. some, since the time of S. Driver (An Intro duction to the Literature of the Old Testament [ed. 8, Edinburgh: 1909], p.

439)j to be a fragment of a vinedresser's ditty which the bride is supposed to have sung.

50 The meaning here is difficult; Gregory seems to be saying that the different ethnic groups were arranged by God to correspond to the various divisions in the angels. The destruction of the boundaries between nations may refer to the confusion of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11.9).

51 Following here the description of the Leviathan in Job. 41.

52 By "limit" here, as is clear from the context, Gregory means material deter mination: created spiritual substances share this lack of limitation with the Godhead. But created spirits (the souls of men, angelic natures) are already limited insofar as they are created and are subject to change. They are un limited in their growth in perfection insofar as no limit can be set to the acquisi tion of finite perfections or to the number of changes they can undergo once they are created, without their being able to attain the perfection of the Godhead.

It is this doctrine of limitless growth which is at the heart of Gregory's ascetical and mystical theology: the epektasis, or "stretching forth to the things ahead" in the text of Phil. 3.13 which Gregory so often likes to quote. See the discussion in the Introduction; and see also selection n. 21 above and n. 50 below.

53 It is such phrases as these that have caused some to attribute to Gregory a Sem-Pelagian concept of the role of the supernatural. But here, as in other pas sages of the Commentary, it is clear that the bride "by her efforts" is only revealing the beauty she was given as God's image in the beginning; she can only come and rise because of the voice of the Spouse calling her and giving her the power to come (see Selection n. 43). The soul must in some sense "make an effort"— this would be no more than its exercise of freedom within the potentiality of limit less growth, as Gregory everywhere teaches. See the discussion in the Introduc tion above.

54 The discussion arises from the text of Cant. 3.7-8 which describe the "bed," that is, the palanquin of Solomon moving in procession surrounded by his body guard. In fact, according to the Hebrew text, it is most likely Solomon and his cortege that are referred to in the preceding verse (Cant. 3.6), "Who is this that comes up from the wilderness like pillars of smoke," etc. Gregory, however, follows the LXX version which reads: "Who is it (she) who comes," etc.

55 The passage, which is the beginning of the eighth homily of the Commen tary on the Conticles, serves as a prelude to the discussion of Cant. 4.8-9, Come from Libanus, my spouse, come from Libanus, etc.

GREGORY OF NYSSA

56 In Hebrew the mountain is Lebanon, but in the Greek version this is called Libation, causing some confusion with the Greek word libanos which means

"frankincense." It is thus that Gregory associates the mountain with incense in his exegesis.

57 Thus following the Greek version of the passage; in the Hebrew it is clear that the Bridegroom is still speaking: "Thou hast ravished my heart, my love, my bride."

58 The meaning of the Greek here is made clear by the Hebrew which refers to a kind of chain or ornamental collar worn by women. Hence Gregory can apply the symbol to the spiritual yoke of Christ.

69 The passage referred to is not in Proverbs nor anywhere else in the Bible so far as can be determined. Ecclus. 11.3 reads: The bee is small among flying things, but her fruit hath the chiefest sweetness. From Gregory's discussion, the text he is thinking of must have been somewhat as follows: "Go to the bee and learn that she is a worker. She busies herself in the importance of her work, and her labors are used by kings and people for their health's sake. She is desired and praised by all: and though she is weak in strength, he has honored wisdom. Wherefore has she been preferred as a model to the virtuous." The passage may have arisen in some manuscripts of the Bible as a gloss on Ecclus. 11.3.

60 A quotation from the passage referred to in the previous note.

61 See n. 59.

62 The passage introduces us to the technique of "botanical exegesis," which seems to have been especially developed by Origen and the Alexandrian school in order to explain the frequent references to trees, plants and shrubs which we find in the Bible. Trees in general stand for the virtues and vices; and the shape, odor, taste, and medicinal qualities of their fruit were skillfully interpreted from an allegorical point of view.

63 A text quite different from either our extant Hebrew or Greek editions.

64 The Greek of Cant. 4.13 is literally, "Thy issues are a paradise," etc.; but the ambiguity is cleared up from the Hebrew: "Thy shoots are an orchard of pomegranates." Gregory seems to understand the text as meaning that the pome granate tree of the Canticle produced cypress, spikenard, saffron, etc., whereas these fragrant plants are merely mentioned along with the pomegranate, to enhance the picture of the orchard's fragrance.

65 The play on words is difficult to reproduce. In the verse "Thy issues are a paradise," the Greek version uses apostolai, "sendings forth," "issues," and this naturally calls to mind the word apostoloi, "aposdes."

66 A brief summary of the Aristotelian doctrine on the virtues as found, for ex ample, in Nicomachean Ethics ii.6-7.

67 The genuine saffron is a type of crocus with a purple flower rising up on a stalk; the flower has three orange-colored stigmas which, when reduced to powder, can be used as a dye, flavoring or medicine. By the three "flowers" of the saffron, Gregory apparently means the three stigmas; with regard to the false

FROM GLORY TO GLORY 297

saffron, which apparently has three "flowers" or stigmas growing in the same way, there are several varieties which Gregory could have intended.

68 The cinnamon, an aromatic spice imported from Ceylon and the Indies, was apparently used in the ancient world in a variety of ways. Gregory's description of the experiment with boiling water seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the method of preparing an infusion of cinnamon and water. The use of cinnamon as a kind of "truth-drug" may be based on an account of the medicinal properties of cinnamon oil.

69 Cf. Cant. 4.15: (Thou art) the fountain of gardens: the well of living waters, which run with a strong stream from Libanus.

70 That befits her nature" would seem to mean "connatural" in the sense that (a) the Church as founded by Christ deserves its eternal reward; or (b) all men were made for heaven by reason of the image of God impressed on them at their first creation. In any case, after the Bridegroom has wed his spouse, heaven is the only fitting place for her, and perhaps both meanings (a) and (b) are implied.

71 It has been impossible to identify this text.

72 The reference does not seem to be to any specific text of the Old Testament.

73 Cf. John 12.24.

74 Referring apparently to the doctrine contained in i Cor. 15.42 ff.

75 Gregory almost writes as though he was familiar with a textual variant. Our Greek text has, of course, The wages of sin.

70 On Phil. 3.13 and the doctrine of infinite progress (the "epe\tasis"), see n. 30 above.

77 So the LXX; My soul melted when he spo\e, according to the Vulgate.

78 Gregory's exegesis here relies on the resemblance of the two Greek words for bolt and key." The bolt, of course, is the metal or wooden bar which locks the door from the inside.

79 The original text is difficult, but the song of the maiden in Cant. 5.2-7 most probably represents a recollection of a dream. She had retired for the night, and therefore had removed her dress or tunic (Hebrew \etoneth)\ later, in the poetic dream-sequence, the watchmen are said to remove her veil or mantle (Hebrew simelah); Gregory interprets the Greek word used in the LXX as a kind of head dress or shawl.

80 This sentence and the previous one mark a rather abrupt transition from Gregory's previous discussion, and there may be several lacunae here, the result of incomplete revision.

81 The Greek text seems deficient; one would have expected that the coin was found "by the woman with the help of the lamp."

82 For "desire" here Gregory uses the Greek eros, and for "love" the Greek agape. In this passage eros would seem to be merely a more intense, less satisfied, form of agape. For this intense love or yearning, Gregory regularly uses the words

298 GREGORY OF NYSSA

"epithumia" ("desire") and "pathos" ("yearning"). See the discussion in the Introduction above.

83 The passage is a commentary on the bride's description of her Spouse in Cant. 5.10-16: My beloved is white and ruddy, chosen out of thousands, etc.

84 These verses are taken from the maiden's song which occupies Cant. 5.8-6.3, where she describes her beloved's comely features. More literally, following the Hebrew, the passage 5.11-12 runs as follows: "(My love's) head is as the finest gold; his locks are curling and black as the raven. His eyes are like doves beside the brooks, washed with milk and fittingly set" (or: "sitting by full streams ).

85 The Greek here is reminiscent of a medicinal prescription and there may be a slight suggestion of humor.

86 The LXX for Cant. 5.13 reads: "His checks are as bowls flowing with aromatical spices," and it is on this that Gregory is basing his commentary. The Hebrew has: "His cheeks are as a bed of spices (or: balsam), as banks (or: towers) of sweet herbs."

87 The relationship between Paul and Thecla, as teacher and disciple, may have perhaps been intended by Gregory as a special reference to the lady Olympias, to whom the Commentary is dedicated. According to a tradition which is reflected in the apocryphal second-century Acta Paul et Theclae, Thecla was a Greek maiden from Iconium in Lycaonia who became a devoted follower of St. Paul. Though

J. Stiltinck, Acta Sanctorum, Sept., 6 (1867), 546 ff., upheld the substantial truth of the tradition, it is considered uncertain today: cf. H. Delehaye, and others, Acta

Sanctorum: Propylaeum Decembris (Brussels: 1940), 412 f. (for Sept. 23, n. 2).

88 The Greek for the words "beloved" and "friend" can also mean "brother" and "neighbor." It is for this reason that Gregory develops the idea of Christ as man's Brother and Neighbor throughout the following passage.

89 "Mass," that is, "mixture," or "dough," referring here to the common hu manity in which all men share. Christ is the "first-fruits" because He is the choicest part separated for sacrifice; and since His humanity is, as it were, taken from the mass, all men are elevated to a new dignity in Him. We have one of Gregory's profoundest doctrines in explanation of the Atonement and the Incarna tion. See the discussion in the Introduction above.

90 Gregory's quotation differs from the text as we are familiar with it.

91 The Greek text of Gregory is here deficient, but the sense seems clear and the reminiscence from 1 Kings 2.30 fairly certain.

92 Following the Greek as Gregory quotes it. The Hebrew has "Turn away thy eyes from me, for they have overwhelmed me (or: made me afraid)."

93 Cf. Ps. 35.8 and 56.2.

94 This sentence is the last of the entire collection of sermons on the Canticle and ends with the familiar doxology: "In Christ Jesus our Lord, to Whom be all power and glory forever and ever. Amen."

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