On Prayer 27.12

The one who partakes of the daily bread, then, strengthened in his “heart,” becomes a son of God; but the one who partakes “of the dragon” is none other than the spiritual Ethiopian, changing into a serpent himself through the nets of “the dragon,” so that, reproached by the Word, even if he says he wishes to be baptized, he hears: “Serpents, brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” And David says this about the dragon's body feasted on by the Ethiopians: “You crushed the heads of the dragons on the water; you broke the head of the dragon; you gave him as food to the peoples, the Ethiopians.” And if it is not incongruous, since the Son of God subsists in his own being and the adversary also subsists, that each of them should become food for this person or that, why do we hesitate to accept, of all the powers, better and worse, and of men, that each one of us can be nourished by all of these? Peter at any rate, when he was about to have fellowship with the centurion Cornelius and those gathered with him at Caesarea, and afterwards to impart the words of God to the Gentiles too, sees the “vessel” “let down by four corners” from heaven, “in which were all kinds of four-footed animals and reptiles and beasts of the earth”; when he is commanded to “rise,” kill, and eat, and, after he had declined and said, You know “that nothing common or unclean has ever entered my mouth,” he is commanded “to call no man common or unclean,” because what has been cleansed by God must not be made common by Peter; for the text says, “What God has cleansed, do not call common.” So the clean and unclean food distinguished by the law of Moses under the names of many animals, referring to the different characters of rational beings, teaches that some are nourishing to us and others the opposite, until God has cleansed all and made them nourishing, or those “of every kind.”