論詩篇的標題 第 1 章 第 9/9 段

but if someone devotes his zeal to foul-smelling licentiousness, or to superfluous greed—which one might properly call dung—or to the other forms of vice, then, wandering and crawling about outside the circuit of that city, he cries out against himself that he is a dog, his nature having been transformed from likeness to God into the canine.

and by "the dogs" he certainly means, throughout, the primordial dog—the flesh-devouring and man-slaying one—as Scripture says.

And what follows in the psalm depicts the canine life.

For he says that, instead of barking, a certain sound comes through their mouth; and instead of canine teeth, he says that a sword lies hidden in their lips, speaking thus in these words:

"Behold, they will speak out with their mouth, and a sword is on their lips."

But these terrifying things are a laughingstock to those who have God within themselves.

"For you, Lord," he says, "will laugh them to scorn;"

"but I will keep my strength for you."

And a little further on he foretells the dispensation determined by God concerning his own creation.

"Do not slay them, but bring them down from the height of vice to the level and even ground of the citizenship according to God."

which indeed both Paul the Great and John the Baptist did:

in Paul, every height that is raised up against the knowledge of God is being cast down;

and by John, according to the prophecy of Isaiah, every mountain and hill is drawn down to what is low.

Through which we learn that there will be no destruction of human beings, lest the divine work be rendered useless by vanishing into non-existence,

but instead of them, sin will perish and be reduced to non-being.

"For," he says, "the sin of their mouth and the word of their lips,"

"and pride and cursing and falsehood—in the wrath of the consummation they shall not exist."

these no longer existing, "they will know," he says, "that God is master of Jacob and of the ends of the earth."

For when vice is left remaining nowhere, the Lord will altogether be master of the ends of the earth, the sin that now reigns over the many having been put out of the way.

Then again he takes up the same statement concerning those who turn back at evening and hunger like a dog and go about the city in a circle, showing, I think, by this repetition of the statement, that in either case—with respect to what is worse and what is better—human beings will remain, after these things too, in the very state in which they now come to be.

For he who now walks about in a circle through impiety, and does not dwell within the city nor keep the human character in his own life, but is brutalized through his own choice and becomes a dog—this one, having fallen from the city above, will then also be punished with a famine of good things.

But the one who is victorious over his adversaries and, as the psalmist says somewhere else, advances from strength to strength, exchanging victory for victory, says: "I will sing to your power, and I will rejoice in the morning at your mercy, because you have become my helper and my refuge"; and to you belongs the glory unto the ages of ages.