Teaching Christianity (continued)
these rules, but that it is simply a divine gift which makes possible the praiseworthy opening up of the obscurities of this sacred literature.
3. Let me reply briefly to them all; what I can say to those who do not understand what I write is this: I am not the one to be blamed because they do not understand. It's as though they wished to see the old or the new moon, or some very dim star, which I would be pointing to with my outstretched finger; but if their eyesight was not good enough for them even to see my finger, that would be no reason why they should get indignant with me. As for those who have learned these rules and grasped their import, and even so have been unable to fathom the dark depths of the divine scriptures, they should count themselves as indeed being able to see my finger, but unable to see the heavenly bodies to which it is pointing. So both these and those others should please stop blaming me, and should rather pray that God may grant them light to see with. After all, while I am able, no doubt, to use my finger to point to something, I am not also able to sharpen people's eyes so that they can see either me pointing or the objects I am wishing to point out.
4. And now, finally, for those who rejoice in having received a divine gift, and are proud of understanding and commenting on the holy books without the aid of such rules as I have undertaken to pass on here, and who therefore reckon that what I have wished to write is quite superfluous; this is how their objection is to be met: they should recollect that, though they are quite right to rejoice in a splendid gift from God, it was still from human beings that they learned, at the very least, how to read and write. Nor is that any reason why they should be crowed over by that holy and perfect man Antony, the Egyptian monk,[1] who is said to have known the divine scriptures by heart simply through hearing them, though he himself didn't know how to read, and to have understood their meaning through intelligent