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7. But hasty and careless readers are led astray by many and manifold
obscurities and ambiguities, substituting one meaning for another; and
in some places they cannot hit upon even a fair interpretation. Some
of the expressions are so obscure as to shroud the meaning in the
thickest darkness. And I do not doubt that all this was divinely
arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a
feeling of satiety in the intellect, which generally holds in small
esteem what is discovered without difficulty. For why is it, I ask,
that if any one says that there are holy and just men whose life and
conversation the Church of Christ uses as a means of redeeming those
who come to it from all kinds of superstitions, and making them through
their imitation of good men members of its own body; men who, as good
and true servants of God, have come to the baptismal font laying down
the burdens of the world, and who rising thence do, through the
implanting of the Holy Spirit, yield the fruit of a two-fold love,
a love, that is, of God and their neighbor; how is it, I say,
that if a man says this, he does not please his hearer so much as when
he draws the same meaning from that passage in Canticles, where it is
said of the Church, when it is being praised under the figure of a
beautiful woman, "Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are shorn
which came up from the washing, whereof every one bears twins, and
none is barren among them?" Does the hearer learn anything more than
when he listens to the same thought expressed in the plainest language,
without the help of this figure? And yet, I don't know why, I
feel greater pleasure in contemplating holy men, when I view them as
the teeth of the Church, tearing men away from their errors, and
bringing them into the Church's body, with all their harshness
softened down, just as if they had been torn off and masticated by the
teeth. It is with the greatest pleasure, too, that I recognize them
under the figure of sheep that have been shorn, laying down the
burthens of the world like fleeces, and coming up from the washing,
i.e., from baptism, and all bearing twins, i.e., the twin
commandments of love, and none among them barren in that holy fruit.
8. But why I view them with greater delight under that aspect than
if no such figure were drawn from the sacred books, though the fact
would remain the same and the knowledge the same, is another question,
and one very difficult to answer. Nobody, however, has any doubt
about the facts, both that it is pleasanter in some cases to have
knowledge communicated through figures, and that what is attended with
difficulty in the seeking gives greater pleasure in the finding. For
those who seek but do not find suffer from hunger. Those, again, who
do not seek at all because they have what they require just beside them
often grow languid from satiety. Now weakness from either of these
causes is to be avoided. Accordingly the Holy Spirit has, with
admirable wisdom and care for our welfare, so arranged the Holy
Scriptures as by the plainer passages to satisfy our hunger, and by
the more obscure to stimulate our appetite. For almost nothing is dug
out of those obscure passages which may not be found set forth in the
plainest language elsewhere.
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