Did he not also obtain a richer and more honorable glory than very many of the apostles themselves—he who before was both dishonorable and inglorious, when he persecuted the Church of God? This poor and feeble one in the Church has himself redeemed you by his prayers. And, to open up greater mysteries: what is so ignoble as the Gentile people? Poor, inasmuch as it had no oracles of God; feeble and lame in both feet, since it had believed neither in the Law nor in the Gospel; yet, being called, it believed, and being baptized, received grace. Therefore, because more was forgiven it, it loves more. The people of the Jews remained, lame indeed in one foot, although it limps even in the Law itself.
And so he who was held most glorious lost everything—the wonderful Counselor, the prudent Architect, and the wise Hearer; while he who was ignoble, having gained everything by the title of faith, glories in the trophy of the martyrs and the fellowship of the angels. Therefore Plato applied what brilliance of speech he could; but the Apostle, who had the Spirit of God, revealed the mystery. Enough has been said about the door, since those who were behind have become first. Now let us inquire into this: what is the meaning of what the Lord said: 'You shall make the lower parts of the ark with two chambers and with three chambers'? By saying 'the lower parts,' indeed, we perceive that He beautifully willed us to understand that the receptacles of food are to be reckoned in a lower place—that is, those bowels which work up the food received.
For food is corruptible, and what is corruptible is not to be compared with the higher things, but with the lower. Likewise, because the food is carried downward—of which a small portion profits the strength of the body and its nourishment, while the remaining part is led off to be purged from the belly, since there are intestines through which the superfluities of food descend—our Maker so arranged it that they should be not extended straight from the stomach to the bottom, but folded in and bent back, whereby the use of our life might be prolonged. For if the intestines of man, which receive and lead off the food, were extended straight, it would at once pass through without any delay, and it would be necessary for us to be perpetually hungry, perpetually feasting, or, when the substance of nourishment failed, to faint on the spot.
But now, in that folding and winding of the intestines, twofold and threefold, the food lingers, and as it descends little by little it furnishes strength, infuses juice into the body, sustains satiety, defers the appetite for eating; and there is neither a sudden outpouring and abrupt evacuation, nor an insatiable appetite, nor an unappeasable craving for feasting. For first there would be want and hunger; then from these would follow continual eating without intermission. But what is more unsightly than always to be devoted to the belly, which, when it is filled, must be emptied, and when it is emptied, must be filled? What third thing remains except death intermingled amid the very foods and feasts?
For how could they prolong their life any longer, eating and hungering at once, drinking and thirsting, and, before they were filled, emptying out all that they had taken in, and straightway hungering? But now, while the food descends little by little, natural providence tempers hunger and indigestion. For first, in the stomach—which most people call the upper belly—the food is worked up; then it is cooked in the liver and digested by its heat. Its juice is distributed to certain portions of the bowels, from which the whole body grows strong. To this the growth of the young bears sufficient witness, and the perseverance of the old.
The remainder of the food flows down into the belly—which we all call the belly without addition, and which most people call the lower belly—from which there must necessarily be excrement, which, having descended already full of corruption, is discharged through that door on the side. Although these things appear so skillfully arranged by natural ordinance according to God's precept, yet, unless a measure of eating and acting be kept by us, a deluge is generated, as it were, from overflowing passions, and a certain ruin of the whole body; for intemperance kindles lust, generates indigestion, creates corruption.
And so either they are strained by internal hardness and shaken with pains, or, through the undigested moisture of foods and the harshness of indigestion, a certain inner lining of the intestines is scraped away, since their lining is asserted to be twofold, like the appearance of paper: one outer, which the experts—or those who have examined more curiously—call continuous, directed from top to bottom; the other inner, attached as it were to the sides, whence they say it is not wholly dissolved when it is scraped; for if the inner were continuous, its tearing would be incurable. There, through the slowness of the junctions, the remnants of foods adhere; and if these junctions be dissolved, the half-eaten foods pass through and the drinks flow down. This is the deluge of man.
Whence it seems to me that, through the figure of this ark, God willed to instruct us how we may be safe from this special deluge. For corruption is the cause of the deluge. When it has crept in, the waters are opened, all the fountains of desires bubble up, so that the whole body is submerged in so great and so deep a flood of vices. For there is nothing that so subjects man to wretched servitude as lust and cravings of this sort, which press down the wretched conscience under a certain heavy yoke of crimes, so that it cannot lift itself up, inasmuch as it has lost the liberty of innocence. The greatest remedy, therefore, against this deluge is that you set the just man before you and choose him as the executor of the heavenly commandment.
Who is the just man in us, if not the vigor of the mind, which encloses within this ark every kind of living creature that is upon the earth? Restrain, therefore, you too, all your irrational passions, and subject all your senses to the mind, and accustom them to the commands of the spirit. Do not allow your cravings to fly forth abroad, nor your lust to go out among the crowd; and through the rational mind you will be able to free even your irrational and unclean sins from all peril of the deluge. 'All things,' He says, 'that are on the earth shall die.' What, indeed, had the dumb living creatures done amiss? For what cause are they subjected to punishment, which have no sense of sinning?
But just as in war, when the commander is slain by the enemy, his army dies with him and all its military strength is shattered, so it seemed not to depart from justice that, when man perished—to whom the Lord God had given a certain royal authority over every kind of living creature, that he might preside with imperial authority over all the birds, wild beasts, and animals—therefore even the cattle and whatever irrational animals there were should die together with him. In short, whenever there is a pestilence through the corruption of a tract of the heavens, the dread plague first contaminates those creatures that are irrational, and chiefly infects dogs, horses, oxen, and those that seem to associate with men; thus the force of disease implicates the human race as well.
This, then, is the first cause of the just claim, as I judge. The second is this: that no one accuses nature for asking why the remaining members of our body die when the head alone is removed, since we see many survive when their hands and feet are amputated. But the prerogative of the other members is not the same as that of the head; and therefore, when the head is cut off—whence our senses go forth into the rest of the body—all the members die together as well; nor in this is the providence of the Maker found wanting, nor the frailty of human substance refuted. Similarly, then, let no one now find fault, because man is the head and a certain principal of the other animals, at whose death it ought not to seem strange if the other living creatures die together with him.
The third is this: that the creatures lacking reason were generated not for their own sake, but for man's sake; for they were commanded to be for man's cause, that the human condition might excel by their subjection. In short, the prophet attributed this to the grace of man, saying: 'You have subjected all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and moreover the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea'—since all those things are for his sake: some for utility, some for the sake of delight, some for pleasure. It was consequent, therefore, that when man was blotted out from the face of the earth, for whose sake they were made, those things too should be blotted out in a like destruction. These things according to the simple exposition of the reading.
But a loftier and deeper interpretation adds this: that when the soul is bent down by the heavy mass of passions and is, as it were, submerged by the surge of diverse cravings, all earthly thoughts and concupiscences rush headlong, because every sinner becomes the more insolent the graver the crimes he has committed. For by habit and practice wickedness is increased, and audacity is nourished by impunity. He therefore withdraws from all regard for honor, and in him all earthly things die through the bitterness of deadly sin, which destroys the sinner with a true and perpetual death; for no one dies more grievously than he who lives in sin.
In him each of the passions dies; sight dies, which announces sin, which gazes at a deceitful woman, which is captivated by another's beauty of countenance, which the eyes of a harlot have bound, which the look of a fornicating woman has ensnared. Does he not seem to die who has pressed upon himself the dart of lust, who has rushed of his own accord into the pit of death? Hearing too dies, when it reports crimes, when it announces the speech of a soliciting adulterer, when it instills into souls the words of a harlot, who seduces the young man with much flattery of speech and binds him with the snares of her lips. The voice dies in silence, if it does not confess to God; it dies in much speaking, because it is written for you: 'In much speaking you shall not escape sin.'
It dies through wrath, when it transgresses the measure of vengeance; finally, every sense dies, if it be a minister of iniquity. And therefore, because all earthly things die in the deluge, but the just man alone abides forever, it is said to him: 'I will establish my covenant with you,' because he is the heir of divine grace, he the possessor of the heavenly inheritance, the partaker of the most blessed goods. And men indeed, when they die, are wont to transcribe their patrimony by testament, nor does the inheritance pass while the testator lives; but God, since He is everlasting, transfuses to the just the inheritance of the divine substance, and, Himself lacking nothing, bestows His own without any loss of the gift, since the partners of His own goods are no burden to Him.
And He enjoys the more that which we use. In short, the Lord Jesus, though He was rich, became poor, that by His poverty we might be enriched—He who consummated both testaments by His own blood, that He might make us coheirs of His life and heirs of His death, whereby we might have both the fellowship of His life and the benefit of His death. Moreover, He bestowed much on the just man by saying, 'I will establish my covenant with you,' inasmuch as the rational and faithful man is himself the testament of God. For he is the inheritance of God, he the possession, in whom is the virtue of the divine testament, in whom the fruit of judgment, in whom the inheritance of the promise, of whom David said: 'Behold, the inheritance of the Lord are sons, the reward, the fruit of the womb.'
But now, the exposition of the deeper mystery being preserved, let us proceed to the rest. 'Enter,' He says, 'you and all your house into the ark, for I have seen you just in this generation.' Manifestly the faith of the prophetic sentence is established also in this place, because the fool is foolish to himself alone, but he who plunders gains for himself and for very many. And so by the merit of just Noah his house too is preserved in the deluge. Thus those who sail on the sea, and the army in war, if to the former the skill of the helmsman be not lacking, and to the latter the prudence of the commander, are safe from peril by another's help.
But because a good army belongs to a good commander, therefore in this too we understand that the praise of the just man is not passed over, who so established his house that it shone with the fellowship of virtue, and his kindred deservedly found salvation. Nor is it a contradiction that afterward either the son or the wife gave offense. The just man was sleeping when the son erred. The woman too, as being of the more fragile sex, troubled by the mass of peril, who would believe that the whole world was perishing by the divine conflagration—what wonder if she could not follow her husband, when the just man himself, warned by the angels, barely escaped? And what wonder if error creeps upon a man, or his attention relaxes? Accuse him, then, because even the just man was made drunk. But these things I judge are to be reserved for their own place. Now let us consider what remains. For He beautifully said:
'Because I have seen you just in this generation.' Many seem just to men, few to God: it is one thing to men, another to God—to men according to the outward appearance of life, to God according to the purity of soul and the truth of virtue; men approve what is outside, God examines what is within. But thoughtfully He added, 'in this generation,' so that He might neither condemn the earlier nor exclude the later, and might rightly establish that the deluge was made by the destruction of that generation which had no fellowship of equity. These things according to the letter. But the loftier sense calls us to suppose that this vigor of the mind is in the soul, and the soul in the body, as the father of the family is in his house. For what the mind is in the soul, this the soul is in the body. If the mind is safe,
the house is safe, the soul is safe; if the soul is unharmed, the flesh is unharmed. For the sober mind restrains all the passions, governs the senses, rules the speech. And therefore the Lord well says to the just man: 'Enter you,' that is: enter into your very self, into your mind, into the principal part of your soul. There is salvation, there is the helm; outside is the deluge, outside is the peril. But if you are within, you are also safe outside, because where the mind is mistress of itself, the thoughts are good, the actions are good. For if no vice overshadows the mind, the thoughts are sincere. If chastity be your zeal, if temperance be in your heart, no flame of lust burns hot, no ulcers of sickness creep forth; for the sobriety of the mind is the medicine of the body.
Now let us consider on what principle He commands to be brought into the ark, of the clean beasts seven and seven, male and female, but of the unclean two and two, that seed may be nourished upon all the earth. And, as I judge, He asserts that the clean number is the hebdomad (seven), because the seventh number is clean and sacred; for it is mingled with none nor generated by another. And therefore it is called a virgin, because it generates nothing of itself, and deservedly, as being free and exempt from maternal and womanish coupling and birth; and although the hebdomad be named by a feminine word, it has the grace of a virile sanctification; for 'every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord,' that is, holy. And in the prophet you have: 'She fled and bore a male,' that is, a holy one.
But the second number is not full, because it is divided; and what is not full is held to be empty. The seventh number, however, is full, because the hebdomad is like the decad, and similar to that first one, because the alpha is in the likeness of Him who is forever, from whom flow forth and are moved the virtues that are in every kind. These are the natural meanings. But to speak of the moral ones: there is no doubt that the irrational part of our soul is divided into the five senses and speech and the generative faculty, which by nature seem to be feminine, because our senses creep quickly into material and worldly things. Whence it is clear that they have a substance of a softer nature.
But to the educated and diligent man all things are clean, because the wisdom and virtue of the disciplined man transfuses a virile firmness into these. Therefore, by the judgment of the prudent and the purpose of him who governs, they are transferred from the quality of the inferior sex into a stronger substance. For valid and fixed is the resolve of the wise man, not changeable like that of the senseless and the fool, who wavers with uncertain counsel, like the wicked man, who chooses not what is true and just, but what is convenient or useful to himself, cutting it off from the true, separating it from the just. For justice is a singular good, contemplated by itself, by its own worth alone; but iniquity, being as it were divided, brings forth now bent by hatred, now by gain, and confounds the things that ought to be kept distinct.
For the fool, like the moon, is changed, and, disfigured by the variegated and shifting variety of his humors, stains his own soul into the appearance of a leprous body by a foul contagion, often mingling wholesome thoughts with harmful ones. But perhaps, because you perceive that both clean and unclean living creatures are commanded to be brought into the ark, it may rightly move you, since I said that unseemly disputes ought not to be mingled with honorable ones. Nor do I deny that there are indeed certain seeds and, as it were, beginnings of irrational—yet clean—motions in our soul, and of those that are not clean.
For the nature of man is capable of contraries, so that into it there is an entrance both for malice and for virtue; and deservedly, at the beginning of this book, which is Genesis, you have read of the knowledge of good and evil through the appearance of the tree in the midst of paradise. Of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil it was commanded that it was not to be tasted, because our mind, in which is cognition and discipline, receives the notion of good and evil.
And so the Maker of nature, just as He reserved living creatures for the propagating or even repairing of the species, that the whole earth might be filled with the seed of living creatures, so also He did not think that the earthly substance of our body should be left empty of passions of this sort, as of unclean animals, which, when it is glutted with delights and luxury as with a kind of deluge, fluctuates with the aforesaid passions. But when each one, by sobriety and continence, has emptied out the deluge of overflowing passions and has laid bare a certain dryness of the soul, he begins to give life to his own body and to the purity of the soul, whose governance is wisdom.
It is also worth inquiring with diligence what the cause is why, after Noah entered the ark and brought in the living creatures, the deluge came to pass after seven days. For it does not seem idle that neither more nor fewer days were interposed, but just as many as there were in the constitution of the world. For in six days the world was made, and on the seventh day God rested from His works. By which sign He declared that He Himself was the author both of the world and of the deluge. The world He founded because of His goodness; the deluge He made by the merit of our sins. Men, then, were admonished even by the number of days in which the world was founded, that they ought to have reconciled their Founder not by tears and prayer alone, but by the correction of their morals.
Therefore the Lord gave space for repentance, willing rather to pardon than to punish, that He might compel those held in suspense by the terror of the impending deluge to ask for pardon, whereby, while they dread the peril of future death, they might renounce impiety and injustice. The second point is that from this too we may gather the clemency of the Lord, who is merciful beyond measure, because the offense of many years, contracted from the constitution of the world even to the end, He willed to remit in a few days, if they had repented. For God is forgetful of sin, a rewarder of virtue, as He Himself says in the prophet: 'I am, I am He who blots out iniquities and will not remember them. But you, be mindful, and let us be judged; declare your iniquities, that you may be justified.'
For when He has perceived that the true virtue of the soul has been poured back, He attributes such honor to it that He not only grants pardon of former sins, but also imparts grace and justifications. He waited, therefore, even until the seventh day—the very day on which He rested from His operation—so that, if anything more were demanded, correction might follow, and He might rest from His indignation. This too was a matter of care not to pass over: that He said the deluge was made in forty days, and added forty nights. For we know that day is called that which the sun, illuminating the earth, marks out; night, that which the surrounding darkness divides off from the brightness of day; and for the most part day is so signified by us that we do not comprehend the night, but for the most part so that we include it.
For in signifying a month of thirty days we signify also the nights. Hence, since it would have been enough for Moses to have said that the flood lasted forty days, the question is asked why he added 'and forty nights' as well. And some have understood it thus.
Those who lived before us did so in order to show that by the flood there came the destruction of both men and women: they referred the day to the man, who is purer and like the light, and the night to the woman, who is described as created while the man slept; likewise because the man came first, as if the author, who stirs up the strength of the woman and rouses her to childbearing, more conspicuous in his public activity, while she is more obscure, as though shut within domestic walls and close to the night, brought forth in the second place, and formed in her creation from the rib of the man, owing her favour to the one above her, subject also to the privilege of the greater number, and to be likened to material things by her function of bearing children.
Now the number is consonant in both as regards the peril, because the sins too are consonant, and rightly the spans of time do not differ, because the deserts of the transgressions do not differ. Many also inquire not slightly by what reason the flood lasted forty days. And we can say that the material number was assigned to the more sorrowful things, that is, to the creation that was to be destroyed, but the week to the constitution of the whole world, that is, to the more joyful things. But perhaps it is relevant that the Law too was given in forty days. So many days Moses observed on Mount Sinai and tarried there, when he received the precepts of the Law.
Rightly, therefore, the precepts for the avoidance of sins are given in the same number by which the guilt was paid off in punishment, that we may recognize that in the same span of life in which a punishable fault can be committed, praise ought to be won by correction. Whence now no longer are forty days prescribed for punishment, but for life, that by this number, through fastings and more frequent prayers, we may lighten the penalties of our sins, and, intent upon the precepts of the Law with devotion and faith, may correct our error. And so through the Lord's resurrection the fortieth day is now held to be no longer the last, but the first, and from there life is reckoned, where before the count was reckoned unto death, unto the consummation of the world and the destruction of the human race.
'And I will blot out,' He says, 'every uprising of flesh from the face of the earth.' O beauty of heavenly words, if anyone should examine them with the becoming understanding of a devout mind! God is indignant at our sins, yet He does not forget His mercy: He threatens punishment, but He has not permitted destruction: He tempers vengeance, He calls back severity. He says He will blot out the flesh, not from the earth, but from the face of the earth. He shakes off the flower, He preserves the roots: He allows the strength of human substance to remain in the depths, though it labour on the surface; within it endures impassible, and is preserved free from harm for the replacement of those who are not liable to guilt.
Beautifully, moreover, He set down 'I will blot out,' as it were the small marks of letters, which are blotted out without harm to the books and without diminution of the tablets. The ink is blotted out, but the wood remains. The elements are blotted out, that better ones may generally be written; the ink is removed, the substance is not destroyed. 'I will blot out,' He says, 'the corruption of the flesh, that I may write incorruption. I will blot out the resurrection of flesh from the face of the earth, that I may write those who rise again among the heavenly. I will blot out from the book of earth, that I may write in the book of life.' Let them be blotted out, my Lord, Lord, let the elements of iron be quickly blotted out, that the elements of Christ may be written. Let the earthly resurrection be abolished, that the heavenly grace may overflow. Come, Moses, prepare your lap, receive the Law, take up the characters, which now the wretched...
Let it not blot out the divine skins. Take up the tablets which the Lord may set up forever. Would that you yourself may not break them! Yet my own fault had taken these away from me, had not the Lord restored them. Rightly indeed, Moses, were you indignant, lest those should possess the divine privileges who did not render obedience; but I think that you broke them not against me, but against the Jews. You broke them for the Jews, you received them back for me. The first were broken, that the latter might remain. You broke them in the breasts of the Jews; for what did it profit that they should hold the tablets, whose precepts they could not hold? Behold, they say they hold the second tablets, but they do not hold them. They say they read the divine characters, but they do not read them. Moses says that the tablets were written by the finger of God:
They do not read the finger of God, they read the iron. They see the ink, they do not see the Spirit of God: but the Church knows not the ink, it knows the Spirit. And therefore Paul knew how to write not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. O sacrilegious and foolish people of the Jews! A man writes by the Spirit of God, even a man nurtured under the Law, and they would have it that God wrote with ink, not with the Spirit. Therefore, to return to what is above, God blots out the resurrection of flesh as it were the writing of letters. By which it is declared that He blotted out the superfluous birth of men because of its impiety under the figure of letters, but preserved the substance and the conversation of the human race as it were by the permanence of the tablets, that from it the remaining seed might sprout forth.
To this meaning it seems also to accord that He says: 'I will blot out every uprising of flesh.' Now to resurrection, by the common usage of nature, purgation seems to be contrary, because by purgation the rankness of growth is cut back and repressed. Yet everything that is purged loses its appearance, preserves its substance, and is made better. The Lord therefore by the purgation of the flood repressed the bodily use and the conversation of that generation, which had degenerated from the comeliness of nature and from the beauty of the gift received. This is according to the letter. But as for what pertains to the higher sense, the figure of the flood is a type of the purgation of our soul. And so, when our mind [from bodily...]
...] has washed itself from the allurements of this world, in which it formerly delighted, by good thoughts it wipes away the old filth of desire, as it were absorbing with purer waters the bitterness of the previously turbid streams. 'And Noah did,' it says, 'all that the Lord God commanded him.' The just man receives commands, the slave commands as orders. He is reckoned in the place of a friend who does whatever he has undertaken to carry out; he who wavers in obedience is consigned to the burden of servitude. In short, the Lord Jesus too says in the Gospel: 'You are my friends, if you do what I command you. Now I will not call you slaves.' It is commanded, therefore, as to a friend; it is commanded to him who carries out what is commanded with strong charity and sober counsel. Nor did his judgment deceive the Lord.