Flesh, Soul, and Spirit

And why speak of the prophets? We all know that their books are full of riddles and dark sayings. And if we go on to the Gospels, the exact sense of these too — since it is the mind of Christ — needs the grace that was given to the man who said, “But we have the mind of Christ, so that we may know what God has freely given us; and this is what we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit.” And who could read what was revealed to John and not be astonished at how much is hidden there — secret mysteries that are plain even to a reader who does not understand what is written? And to anyone who knows how to test words, would the letters of the apostles seem clear and easy to grasp? There too are countless thoughts, the greatest and the most numerous, and they give you only a narrow opening onto them, as though you were looking through a chink. [a]

So, since this is how matters stand, and since countless readers go wrong, it is dangerous to read and then declare lightly that you understand what needs the key of knowledge — the key the Savior says is in the hands of the experts in the law. And let those who will not allow that the truth was present among people before Christ came answer this: how can our Lord Jesus Christ say that the key of knowledge is in the hands of men who, by their own account, did not have the books that contain the secrets of knowledge and the complete mysteries? For his words run: “Woe to you experts in the law! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not go in yourselves, and you hindered those who were going in.”

This, then, is how it seems to us we ought to approach the Scriptures and take out their meaning — a way tracked down from the sacred writings themselves. In Proverbs we find Solomon laying down some such rule as this about the divine teachings that have been written down: “And you, write them down for yourself three times over, in counsel and knowledge, so that you may answer with words of truth those who put questions to you.” [f]

So a person ought to write the thoughts of the holy writings on his own soul three times over. The simpler believer is built up by what we may call the flesh of the Scripture — that is our name for the obvious sense. Anyone who has climbed some way up is built up by what we may call its soul. And the mature reader, the sort the apostle speaks of when he says, “We do speak wisdom among the mature — not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing; we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom that God appointed before the ages for our glory” — such a reader is built up by the spiritual law, which holds a shadow of the good things to come. For just as a human being is made up of body and soul and spirit, so is the Scripture, which God arranged to be given for the salvation of human beings.

This is why we explain as we do that passage in the book some people despise, The Shepherd, where Hermas is ordered to write two books and afterward to report to the elders of the church what he had learned from the Spirit. The words are these: “You will write two books, and give one to Clement and one to Grapte. Grapte will instruct the widows and the orphans, and Clement will send his to the cities abroad, and you will report to the elders of the church.” Grapte, who instructs the widows and the orphans, is the bare letter of Scripture. It instructs readers who are still children in soul and cannot yet write God down as their father, and who are called orphans for that reason; and it instructs those who no longer keep company with the lawless bridegroom but are widowed, because they have not yet become worthy of the Bridegroom. Clement, who has already stepped outside the letter, is said to send what is written to the cities abroad — by which we mean the souls that are outside bodily and low-lying thoughts. And the disciple of the Spirit himself is ordered to report, no longer by letters but by living words, to the elders of the whole church of God, who have gone gray with wisdom.

But there are some passages of Scripture that do not have the bodily sense at all, as we will show further on, and there are places where we must look only for what may be called the soul and the spirit of the passage. Perhaps that is why the water jars said to stand there for the purifying of the Jews, as we read in the Gospel according to John, hold two or three measures apiece. The passage hints at those whom the apostle calls Jews in secret: they are purified by the word of the Scriptures, taking in sometimes two measures — the sense that belongs to the soul, so to speak, and the spiritual sense — and sometimes three, since some passages have, on top of those two, the bodily sense as well, which is able to build a reader up. And six jars are fitting for those who are being purified in the world, since the world was made in six days, a perfect number. [k]

That the first sense is useful in this way — that a reader can profit by it — is witnessed by the crowds of people who have believed genuinely and simply. Of the interpretation that is carried up to the soul, there is an example in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. “For it is written,” he says, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.” Then, explaining this law, he adds: “Is God concerned about oxen? Or does he say it entirely for our sake? It was written for our sake: the plowman ought to plow in hope, and the thresher to thresh in hope of a share.” And there are a great many interpretations in circulation that suit ordinary people and build up those who cannot follow anything higher, and they have much the same character.

The interpretation is spiritual when a man is able to show what heavenly things the Jews according to the flesh were serving as a copy and a shadow of, and what good things to come the law holds a shadow of. And in everything, according to the apostle’s promise, we must look for “wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom that God appointed before the ages for the glory of the righteous,” which “none of the rulers of this age has known.” [n]

The same apostle says somewhere, after using some texts out of Exodus and Numbers, that “these things happened to them as patterns, and were written for our sake, on whom the ends of the ages have come.” And he gives us a starting point for working out what those things were patterns of, when he says, “For they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” In another letter, sketching the details of the tabernacle, he used the words, “You shall make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.” And in the letter to the Galatians he all but scolds those who suppose they are reading the law and do not understand it, judging that anyone who does not suppose there are allegories in what is written has not understood it. “Tell me,” he says, “you who want to be under law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free woman. But the son of the slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the son of the free woman through the promise. These things are an allegory, for these women are two covenants” — and so on.

We must watch every word he uses. He says “you who want to be under law,” not “you who are under the law”; and “do you not hear the law?” — where hearing is judged to mean understanding and knowing. In the letter to the Colossians, cutting the sense of the whole legislation short in a few words, he says, “So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or in the matter of a feast or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of what is to come.” And in the letter to the Hebrews, discussing those who come from the circumcision, he writes, “who serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things.”

After all this it is likely that anyone who has once accepted the apostle as a man of God will have no doubts about the five books written under Moses’ name. But he will want to learn about the rest of the narrative, whether that too happened as a pattern. So we should note this from the letter to the Romans: “I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bent the knee to Baal,” which stands in the third book of Kingdoms. Paul has taken it to mean the Israelites who were chosen, since not only the Gentiles were helped by Christ’s coming, but also some of the divine race.

This being how things stand, we must sketch out what seem to us the marks of a true understanding of the Scriptures. And first this must be pointed out. The Spirit — who by God’s providence, through the Word who was in the beginning with God, gave light to the servants of the truth, the prophets and the apostles — had this as his chief aim: the secret mysteries of the things that have to do with human beings. (By human beings I mean here souls that make use of bodies.) The aim was that anyone able to be taught might search, and give himself to the depths of meaning in the words, and so come to share in all the teachings of God’s purpose. And among the matters that concern souls — which cannot reach maturity apart from the rich and wise truth about God — what belongs to God and to his only Son is necessarily set down first: what his nature is, and in what way he is the Son of God, and the reasons why he came down as far as human flesh and took on being entirely human, and what his working is, and on whom it is exercised, and when. It was necessary too that the divine teaching should take in the subject of kindred beings and of the other rational beings, both the more divine and those who have fallen out of blessedness, together with the causes of that fall; and the differences between souls, and where those differences came from; and what the world is, and why it exists. And we must learn where the evil on the earth comes from, so great and so widespread, and whether it is on the earth only or elsewhere as well. [s]

Now while these and similar matters lay before the Spirit who gives light to the souls of the holy servants of the truth, there was a second aim, for the sake of those unable to bear the labor of finding out things so great: to hide the account of the matters just named in wording that presents a narrative — a narrative reporting the making of the things we perceive with our senses, the creation of man, and the line of descendants from the first men until they became many; and in other stories reporting the deeds of righteous men, and the sins those same men sometimes committed, being human, and the wickedness and loose living and greed of lawless and ungodly men. And most surprising of all, through the narrative of wars, and of the victors and the vanquished, certain secret things are made plain to those who are able to test them. More wonderful still, through the written legislation the laws of truth are foretold — all of it set down in a connected series, with a power truly worthy of the wisdom of God. For it was intended that the outer garment of the spiritual things — I mean the bodily part of the Scriptures — should in many places not be useless, but should be able to make the many better, as far as they can take it.

But if the usefulness of the legislation, and the sequence and elegance of the narrative, had been plain all the way through and evident of themselves, we would not have believed that anything beyond the obvious could be understood in the Scriptures. So the Word of God arranged that certain stumbling blocks, as it were, and obstacles and impossibilities should be set in among the law and the narrative. Otherwise the sheer attractiveness of the wording would drag us off, and we would either learn nothing worthy of God and fall away from the teachings altogether, or else never move from the letter and learn nothing more divine. [w]

And we must know this as well. The chief aim being to report the connection there is among spiritual things, both those that have been done and those that ought to be done, wherever the Word found that things done in the narrative could be fitted to these hidden meanings, he used them, concealing the deeper sense from the many. But where, in the account of the sequence of things grasped by the mind, the doing of certain acts already indicated by the more hidden meaning did not follow, Scripture wove into the narrative something that did not happen — sometimes something that could not even have happened, sometimes something that could have happened but did not. And sometimes a few words are slipped in that are not true in the bodily sense, and sometimes a good many. The same thing is to be understood about the legislation, where one often finds what is useful in itself and suited to the times of the legislation; and sometimes no useful sense shows itself at all; and at other times impossibilities are laid down as law, for the sake of the sharper and more inquisitive readers, so that by giving themselves to the hard work of examining what is written they may arrive at a solid conviction that in such matters a meaning worthy of God must be looked for.

The Spirit did not deal in this way only with the Scriptures from before Christ came. Being the same Spirit, and from the one God, he has done the same with the Gospels and with the apostles. These too do not have their narrative wholly unmixed: things are woven into them, in the bodily sense, that did not happen. Nor do the legislation and the commands show throughout what is reasonable in them. [x]

For who with any understanding will suppose that a first and a second and a third day, and an evening and a morning, came about without a sun and a moon and stars — and that the first day, as it were, came about without a sky as well? And who is so silly as to suppose that God planted a garden in Eden toward the east the way a farmer does, and made in it a tree of life you could see and touch, so that a man tasting its fruit with bodily teeth took in life; and again that a man shared in good and evil by chewing what he took from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the garden in the evening, and Adam to hide under a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these things point in figures to certain mysteries, through a narrative that only seems to be one and did not happen bodily.

Cain, too, going out from the presence of God, plainly strikes those who attend to it as prodding the reader to ask what the presence of God is and what going out from him means. And why say more? Anyone who is not completely dull-sighted can gather countless instances of the same kind, recorded as having happened but not having happened according to the wording.

The Gospels themselves are filled with the same kind of thing — the devil, for instance, taking Jesus up onto a high mountain to show him from there the kingdoms of the whole world and their glory. For who among those who do not read such accounts carelessly would not condemn people who suppose that with the eye of the body — which needs a height in order to make out what lies below and around it — one could look at the kingdoms of the Persians and the Scythians and the Indians and the Parthians, and see how those who reign are honored among men? An attentive reader can note countless other passages like these in the Gospels, enough to agree that woven into the narratives that did happen according to the letter are other things that never occurred.