On Noah 30–52

This is the flood of man. Hence it seems to me that by the figure of this ark God wished to teach us how we may be safe from this particular flood. For corruption is the cause of the flood. Where it has crept in, the waters are opened and all the springs of desires boil up, so that the whole body is drowned in so great and so deep an outpouring of vices. For nothing subjects man to so miserable a slavery as lust and desires of that kind, which press down the wretched conscience with a heavy yoke of crimes, so that it cannot raise itself, since it has lost the freedom of innocence. The greatest remedy in this flood, then, is to put the just man first and choose him as the executor of the heavenly command. Who is the just man in us but the vigor of the mind, which shuts up within this ark every kind of living thing that is upon the earth? You too, then, restrain all your irrational passions, subject all your senses to the mind, and accustom them to the commands of the soul. Do not let your desires fly out of doors or your lust go out among the crowd; and through the rational mind you will be able to free even your irrational and unclean sins from all danger of the flood.

'Everything that is on the earth shall die,' he says. What wrong had the dumb animals done? Why were they subjected to punishment, when they have no sense of sinning? But just as in war, when the commander is killed by the enemy, his army dies with him and all its military strength is shattered, so it did not seem out of keeping with justice that, when man perished — to whom the Lord God gave a kind of royal power over every kind of living thing, to rule all birds, wild animals, and beasts with imperial authority — the cattle too and all irrational animals should die with him. Indeed whenever there is a pestilence from a corrupted region of the air, the dire plague first infects the irrational creatures, and especially dogs, horses, oxen, and those that are seen to live with men; and so the force of the disease involves the human race as well.

This, then, is the first reason, as I think, for justifying this; the second is that no one accuses nature because the other members of our body die when the head alone is removed, though we see many survive after their hands and feet are cut off. But the other members do not have the same prerogative as the head; and therefore, when it is cut off, from which our senses go out into the rest of the body, all the members die with it, and in this neither is the providence of the maker found wanting nor is the frailty of human substance to be blamed. Likewise, then, let no one now find fault: since man is the head and, as it were, the ruling part of the other animals, it should not seem strange that when he dies the other living things die with him.

The third reason is that animals without reason were brought into being not for their own sake but for man's; they were ordered to exist for man's sake, so that the human condition might be the better for their subjection. Indeed the prophet attributed this to the grace of man, saying: 'You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of heaven, and the fish of the sea,' because all these exist for his sake, some for usefulness, some for delight, some for pleasure. It followed, then, that when man, for whose sake they were made, was destroyed from the face of the earth, they too should be destroyed in a like downfall. So much for the simple explanation of the reading.

A higher and deeper interpretation adds this: when the soul is bowed down by a heavy mass of passions and drowned, as it were, in the surge of various desires, all its earthly thoughts and lusts rush headlong, because every sinner becomes the more insolent the graver the crimes he has committed. For wickedness grows with use and practice, and boldness is fed by impunity. And so he withdraws from all regard for what is honorable, and in him all earthly things die through the bitterness of deadly sin, which would destroy the sinner with a true and everlasting death; for no one dies more grievously than he who lives in sin. In him the passions die one by one: sight dies, which reports sin, which fixes itself on a deceitful woman, which is captured by the beauty of another's face, which the eyes of a harlot have bound, which the look of a prostitute has ensnared. Does he not seem to die who has driven the dart of lust into himself, who has rushed of his own accord into the pit of death? Hearing too dies when it relays crimes, when it reports the words of an adulterer's solicitation, when it implants in souls the words of a harlot, who seduces a young man with much flattery of speech and binds him with the snares of her lips. The voice dies by silence if it does not confess to God; it dies by much speaking, for it is written for you: 'In much speaking you will not escape sin'; it dies through anger, when it goes beyond the measure of retribution;

finally, every sense dies if it is a servant of iniquity. And therefore, since all earthly things die in the flood, but the just man alone remains forever, it is said to him: 'I will establish my covenant with you,' because he is the heir of divine grace, the possessor of the heavenly inheritance, the partner in the most blessed honors. Men, when they die, commonly transfer their estate by testament, and the inheritance does not pass while the testator lives; but God, since he is everlasting, transfers to the just the inheritance of the divine substance, and, himself lacking nothing, he gives what is his without any loss from the giving, for those who share his honors are no burden to him. And he enjoys more what we make use of. Indeed the Lord Jesus became poor, though he was rich, so that by his poverty we might be made rich; he sealed both testaments with his blood, to make us co-heirs of his life and heirs of his death, so that we might have both a share in his life and the benefit of his death. He granted much to the just man in saying: 'I will establish my covenant with you,' because the rational and faithful man is himself the covenant of God. For he is God's inheritance, he is God's possession; in him is the power of the divine testament, in him the fruit of judgment, in him the inheritance of the promise; of him David said: 'Behold, the inheritance of the Lord is sons, the reward the fruit of the womb.' But now, keeping the explanation of the deeper mystery, let us go on to the rest.

'Go into the ark,' he says, 'you and all your house, because I have seen you righteous in this generation.' The trustworthiness of the prophet's saying is plainly confirmed in this passage too, that the fool is a fool to himself alone, while the one who takes is wise for himself and for many. And so, by the merit of just Noah, his house too is saved in the flood. So those sailing at sea and armies in war, if the former do not lack a helmsman's skill and the latter a commander's prudence, are safe from danger by another's help. But since a good commander has a good army, we understand that here too the praise of the just man is not passed over, who so formed his house that it shone with the fellowship of virtue, and his kindred deservedly found salvation. Nor does it contradict this that later either his son or his wife gave offense. The just man was asleep when his son went astray. As for the woman, being of the weaker sex and troubled by the weight of the danger, believing that the whole world would perish in a divine fire, why do you wonder if she could not follow her husband, when the just man himself, warned by angels, barely escaped? And what wonder if error steals upon a man or his attention relaxes? Accuse, then, the just man also of having become drunk.

But I think these things should be kept for their proper place. Now let us consider what remains. He said well: 'because I have seen you righteous in this generation.' Many seem righteous to men, few to God; one way to men, another to God: to men according to the appearance of life, to God according to purity of soul and the truth of virtue. Men approve what is outward; God examines what is within. And he added with care: 'in this generation,' so as neither to condemn those before nor exclude those after, and to affirm that the flood was rightly brought about by the destruction of that generation, which had no share in fairness.

So much according to the letter. But a higher sense invites us to think that the vigor of the mind is in the soul, and the soul in the body, what the father of a family is in his house. For what the mind is in the soul, 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 a sober mind restrains all the passions, governs the senses, rules speech. And therefore the Lord says well to the just man: 'Go in, you,' that is, go into yourself, into your mind, into the ruling part of your soul. There is safety, there is the helm; outside is the flood, outside is danger. But if you are within, you are safe outside too, because where the mind is its own judge, the thoughts are good, and the actions good. For if no vice overshadows the mind, the thoughts are pure. If chastity is your pursuit and temperance dear to your heart, no flame of lust kindles, no sores of sickness creep out; for sobriety of mind is the medicine of the body.

Now let us consider for what reason he orders that there be brought into the ark of the clean animals seven and seven, male and female, but of the unclean two and two, so that seed may be nourished upon all the earth. And, as I think, he declares that the clean hebdomad enters, because the number seven is clean and holy; for it is mixed with no other number, nor is it begotten of another. Therefore it is called virgin, because it begets nothing from itself; and rightly, as having no share in motherly birth and free from union with a woman, though the hebdomad is called by a feminine noun, it has the grace of a male sanctification; for every male that opens the womb shall be called to the Lord, that is, holy. And in the prophet you have: 'She escaped and bore a male,' that is, a holy one. The number two, however, is not full, because it is divided; and what is not full is reckoned empty. But the number seven is full, because the hebdomad is like the decad, and similar to that first number, for the monad bears the likeness of him who always is, from whom flow and are moved the powers that exist in every kind. So much for natural matters.

To speak now of moral matters: there is no doubt that the irrational part of our soul is divided into the five senses, speech, and the generative faculty, which seem to be feminine by nature, because our senses quickly creep toward material and worldly things; hence it is clear that their substance is of a softer nature. But to a learned and diligent man all things are clean, because the wisdom and virtue of a well-trained man pour into them a manly firmness. By the judgment of a prudent man, then, and the purpose of one who governs, they are transferred from the quality of the weaker sex into a stronger substance. For the judgment of a wise man is firm and fixed, not changeable like that of the unwise and foolish, who wavers in uncertain counsel, or like that of the wicked man, who chooses not what is true and just but what is advantageous or <useful> to himself, cuts himself off from the truth, and separates himself from what is just. For justice is a single good, considered by itself for its own worth alone, while iniquity, as something divided, brings forth now one thing, now another, bent now by hatred, now by gain, and confuses what should be distinguished. For the fool changes like the moon, and, disfigured with many-colored variety of humors, stains his soul with foul contagion into the likeness of a leprous body, often mixing wholesome thoughts with harmful ones.

But perhaps, since you see that both clean and unclean animals are commanded to be brought into the ark, it may rightly trouble you, because I said that unseemly things should not be mixed with honorable discussions. Nor do I deny that there are in our soul certain seeds and, as it were, beginnings of movements that are irrational yet clean, and of those that are not clean. For the nature of man is capable of contraries, so that there is an entrance into it both for wickedness and for virtue; and rightly at the beginning of this book, which is Genesis, you have read of the knowledge of good and evil under the figure of a tree in the midst of paradise. Of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil it was commanded that it must not be tasted, because our mind, in which is knowledge and discipline, takes in the notion of good and evil. And so the maker of nature, just as he preserved living creatures for propagating or even restoring their kind, so that the whole earth might be filled with the seed of living things, so also he did not think that the earthly substance of our body should be left empty of passions of this kind, as of unclean animals; when it is gorged with delicacies and luxury, as by a flood, it is tossed about by these passions. But when each one, by sobriety and continence, has drained the flood of overflowing passions and has restored a kind of dryness to the soul, he begins to give life to his body and to the purity of the soul, whose governor is wisdom.

It is also worth asking what the reason is why, after Noah entered the ark and brought in the animals, the flood came after seven days. For it does not seem idle that neither more nor fewer days were placed in between, but as many as there were at the founding of the world. For the world was made in six days, and on the seventh day God rested from his works. By this sign he showed that he himself was the author both of the world and of the flood. He founded the world because of his goodness; he made the flood because of the desert of our sins. Men were therefore admonished, even by the number of the days in which the world was founded, that they ought to reconcile their founder not only with tears and prayer but also with the amendment of their ways. So the Lord gave a space for repentance, wishing rather to pardon than to punish, so that, holding them in suspense with the terror of the impending flood, he might drive them to ask for pardon, and that, shuddering at the danger of coming death, they might renounce ungodliness and injustice. The second reason is that from this too we may gather the clemency of a Lord merciful beyond measure, because he was willing to remit in a few days, had they repented, the offense of many years accumulated from the founding of the world to the end. For God does not remember sin and rewards virtue, as he himself says in the prophet: 'I am, I am he who blots out iniquities, and I will not remember them. But you, remember, and let us be judged; tell your iniquities, that you may be justified.' For when he has seen that true virtue has been poured back into the soul, he grants it so much honor that he not only bestows pardon for past sins but also imparts grace and justifications. He waited, then, even on the seventh day, the very day on which he rested from his work, so that if pardon were asked, amendment might follow, and he might rest from indignation.

It was also my concern not to pass over the fact that he said the flood was forty days and added forty nights. For we know that we call 'day' the time that the sun marks by lighting the earth, and 'night' the time that the surrounding darkness separates from the brightness of day; and that we often use 'day' in such a way as not to include the night, and often so as to include it. For when we speak of a month of thirty days, we mean the nights too. Hence, since it would have been enough for Moses to say the flood lasted forty days, the question is why he added 'and forty nights.' Some who were before us understood it so: that it showed the destruction of both men and women in the flood, referring 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; and also because the man comes first, as the author who stirs the woman's power and arouses it to childbearing, he more conspicuous by his public activity, she more obscure, shut in as it were by the walls of the home and closest to the night, born in second place, formed from the man's rib and owing the grace of her creation to the higher one, subject also to the prerogative of the stronger number, and comparable to material things by her function of bearing. But the number of the danger is the same in both, because the sins were also alike; and rightly the spans of time do not differ, because the deserts of their offenses do not differ.

Many also inquire with no small care why the flood lasted forty days. We can say that a material number is assigned to sadder things, that is, to the destruction of creation, but the hebdomad to the founding of the whole world, that is, to happier things. But perhaps it matters that the law too was given in forty days. For so many days Moses kept vigil and stayed on Mount Sinai when he received the precepts of the law. Rightly, then, the precepts for avoiding sins are given in the same number in which the penalty for guilt was paid, so that we may know that in the same time of life in which punishable guilt can be committed, praise can be won through amendment. Hence now forty days are prescribed not for punishment but for life, so that in this number, by fasts and more frequent prayers, we may lighten the punishments of our sins and, intent on the precepts of the law, correct our error with devotion and faith. And so, through the Lord's resurrection, the fortieth day is now counted not as the last but as the first, and life is reckoned from there, where before the number of death was counted to the end of the world and the destruction of the human race.

'And I will blot out,' he says, 'every rising of flesh from the face of the earth.' O beauty of heavenly words, if one examines them with the fitting understanding of a devout mind! God is angered at our sins, but he does not forget his kindness; he threatens punishment, but did not permit annihilation; he moderates vengeance and calls back severity. He says he will blot out flesh not from the earth, but from the face of the earth. He shakes off the flower but keeps the roots; he lets the strength of human substance remain in the depths, so that, though it labors on the surface, it persists unharmed within and, free from injury, is kept for the replacement of those who are not liable to guilt. He put 'I will blot out' well, as of the strokes of letters, which are blotted out without damage to the books and without wearing away the tablets. The ink is blotted out, but the wood remains. Letters are blotted out so that, often, better ones may 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 rising of the flesh from the face of the earth, that I may write those rising in the heavens. I will blot out from the book of the earth, that I may write in the book of life.' Let them be blotted out, my Lord, O Lord, let the letters of iron be quickly blotted out, so that the letters of Christ may be written. Let the earthly rising be abolished, so that heavenly grace may overflow. Come, Moses, make ready your lap, receive the law, take up the letters which the divine mercy will no longer blot out. Take up the tablets, which the Lord will establish forever. Would that you yourself may not break them! My own guilt too had taken them from me, had the Lord not given them back. Rightly indeed, Moses, were you angry, that those who would not render obedience should not have the divine privileges; but I think you broke them not for me but for the Jews. You broke them for the Jews; you received them back for me. The first were broken so that the later ones might remain. You broke them in the hearts of the Jews; for what use was it that they should hold 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 letters, 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 nothing of 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 with the Spirit of God, a man brought up under the law; and they want God to have written with ink, not with the Spirit.

To return, then, to what was said above: God blots out the rising of the flesh as one blots out the writing of letters. By this it is declared that he blotted out, in the manner of letters, the superfluous birth of men because of its ungodliness, but preserved the substance and way of life of the human race, as the permanence of the tablets, so that from it the remaining seed might sprout. With this meaning that saying also seems to agree: 'I will blot out every rising of flesh.' In the common usage of nature, purging seems to be the opposite of rising, because by purging the luxuriance of what rises up is cut back and checked. Yet everything that is purged loses its outward form but preserves and improves its substance. So the Lord, by the purging of the flood, checked the bodily habits and way of life of that generation, which had degenerated from the beauty of nature and the grace of the gift it had received. So much according to the letter. As for the higher sense, the form of the flood is a type of the purging of our soul. And so, when our mind has washed itself from the enticements of this world in which it once delighted, it wipes away by good thoughts the filth of former desire, as though absorbing in purer waters the bitterness of streams that before were muddy.

'And Noah did all things,' he says, 'that the Lord God commanded him.' The just man receives commandments; the slave receives orders. The one who has done whatever he undertook to carry out is counted in the place of a friend; the one who wavers in obedience is consigned to the burden of slavery. Indeed the Lord Jesus too says in the gospel: 'You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer will I call you servants.' He is commanded, then, as a friend, as one who carries out what is commanded with strong love and sober counsel. Nor was the Lord deceived in his judgment. The just man fulfilled everything — not a part, but everything that was commanded him — and therefore he receives the testimony of divine Scripture. And do not think it superfluous that he put 'Lord' and 'God' together — for God is in the Lord and the Lord in God — but it is so that you may understand that the command is common to the Father and the Son. Some before us, however, have interpreted it this way: that by saying 'Lord' and 'God' in this place he expressed a double power, of punishing and of pardoning; and because here he first punishes sinners, he said 'Lord' first, but since afterward he is indulgent so that the seedbed of the just may be propagated, he named 'God' afterward. Indeed when about to make the world he is called God: 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth. And God said: Let there be light.'

There is also a consideration not to be passed over lightly, that the flood came in Noah's six hundredth year, <in the seventh month,> on the twenty-seventh of the month. There is no doubt that the seventh month is in springtime, when growing things increase, the field is in labor, and the young of both the earth and the animals pour forth. He brought the flood, then, at a time when the pain would be greater for those who were punished amid their abundance, when the vengeance would be more terrible, as though God were saying: 'Behold, rich nature has brought forth all things by the grace of the bounty of divine providence; the earth, more fruitful, has made everything sprout for the use of men. Crops of wheat are seen, the fields are filled with barley, the foliage of the trees is clothed with blossoms of the fruit to come. The earth does not fail in its service, nor the beasts in their gifts, which bring forth their young at the appointed time, so that man lacks nothing. Man alone fails in his part; he does not know his author, by whom all things are supplied to him; he neglects his founder. Man despises his rewarder, though God did not despise his own work. Let all things perish with man, for whose sake all things were born. Let man be consumed in his riches; let him die with his dowry. The earth had committed no fault before man; it went wrong in none of its fruits. It knows that it has degenerated in man alone, bearing thorns and thistles instead of fruit. The one admirable gift, the ruling part of the mind, has perished. Why then are all those things kept?' This is why the water is not poured in after the fruits have been gathered, lest the earth feel a kindness rather than a flood. Indeed among the Egyptians the Nile floods in springtime, though in a different month, so that the earth may be softened for the casting of seeds and receive the seeds sown in a gentler bosom and a kinder lap. That the flood came in Noah's six hundredth year seems to show that Adam was created on the sixth day. The same number, the one called even, is kept both in the author and in the restorer, because six is the source of sixty and six hundred. The same month is called both the first and the seventh. But we ought rather to observe the first, because after the flood the care of tilling the fields is restored in springtime, and the produce of a calm and fertile soil begins to come forth. By this it is signified that God would never have brought about the destruction of men in the number and season in which he made the beginning, had he not been offended by monstrous sins. At the same time the reckoning of the season and of the number promises pardon, because even when angry he is reminded by such prior grounds of his kindnesses not to destroy utterly the substance of those to whom he himself had given it.

'And all the fountains of the abyss burst forth, and the floodgates of heaven were opened.' Scripture fittingly expressed the force of the flood by saying that heaven and earth were moved together, the elements of which the whole origin of this world consists. So the human race, shut in, is pressed hard by masses of water flowing in from every side. So much according to the letter. As for the higher sense, by the symbol of heaven the human mind is signified, and by the name of earth the body and the senses. Great, then, is the shipwreck when the whirlwind and storm of mind and body and all the senses are mingled together. Let us weigh what is said with care. Often the fraud and guile of the mind exercise their poison, yet the sobriety and continence of the body overshadow the mind's wickedness. Frequently the mind is slippery in the uncertainty of its faith and opinion, yet the flesh is free from delicacies and luxury, so that frugality excuses the mind's error, as there are many heretics who are not unwilling to display continence of body, in order to win credit for their teaching by the testimony of a sober flesh. Though slippery in understanding, they are held to be somewhat more excusable in that they are less base. But when the poisons of the mind and the contagions of bodily obscenity confound all sense and vigor, and the soul, slippery with uncertain motion, foul with the black ink of malice, inflamed with the fury of cruelty, is also driven on to bodily crimes, and avaricious desire too, impatient of moderate means, is hurled by the craving for luxury and the lust for squandering into the crime of seeking another's life, then there is a great flood, with all the passions rushing in together; then folly, injustice, rashness, wickedness, and faithlessness seem to pour themselves out from above, like the floodgates of the mind. Then from the spring of the earthly body burst out lust, drunkenness, luxury, and at last the downfalls of various crimes, which utterly unman both the strength of the body and the vigor of the mind.

'And God shut the ark from outside.' The statement is plain according to the letter. The ark had to be shut and fenced with a safe defense, so that the wandering streams of the flood would not get in. The interpretation of the higher sense is not unfitting either, if we judge that the human body, which this ark described here prefigures, is fenced with skin and defended from cold and heat; for God the craftsman clothed it with natural hides for the protection of all its members and put on it a kind of wrapping, so that it neither freezes with cold nor melts in summer heat.

'So the water overflowed and lifted the ark, and it was borne upon the top of the waters.' Not without reason did the water overflow, when the floodgates of heaven were opened and the fountains of waters and the rivers burst out of the earth. This is said with great emphasis. For where there is a bursting forth, there must be an outpouring that cannot be recalled, nor is the downrush of huge streams easily held back. What is written, then, is plain. But if you think one should look more deeply, our flesh is driven about by various passions and tosses like a strait in a storm; by them it is thrown this way and that, as on the waves of its troubles, now by hunger, now by thirst, now by desire, now by joy, now by pain.

I think we must not pass over this either, since Scripture did not pass over it: how many cubits the water was above the earth; for it said that the water was fifteen cubits above the high mountains. The simple meaning is evident; but the allegory embraces the five senses, which are like high mountains in our body; they overshadow this flesh of passions, they are often overrun by beasts, and their dense and shady parts are disturbed. Hence the Lord too, coming to his church through the faith of the believing nations, came from Lebanon, as the prophet Habakkuk says: 'The Lord will come from Lebanon, from a shady and dense mountain.' The church too comes from Lebanon, as the Song of Songs has it. For so we read: 'Come hither from Lebanon, bride, come hither from Lebanon. You will pass and pass through from the beginning of faith, from the dens of lions and the mountains of leopards' — that is, the gentile peoples, who once suffered the heavy assaults of beastly passions as it were, and now stand out by the height of faith and the sublimity of devotion. Through these mountains, then, Christ came, subduing by the teachings of the gospel the motions of this fierce body, and destroying that loftiness of heart and self-exalting pride by his own obedience and humility; and rightly those whom the floods of grievous passions once overwhelmed began to bear the fruits of meekness. As for the number of the cubits, some before us have reckoned that the five senses have a threefold collection: sight sees the visible, hearing hears the audible, smell smells the odorous, taste tastes the tasteable, and touch touches what is subject to the substance of touching. So the five senses are reckoned threefold, or according to that saying: 'Write for yourself threefold.' I, however, think it more fitting to take them as the senses of the earthly man, of the natural man, and of the spiritual man, which those streams of the flood surmounted.