On Prayer 29.14

Let us see, then, whether we have usefully set this story before you for the solution of what is incongruous in “Do not bring us into temptation” and in the apostle's words. Having lusted “with a lust,” “the mixed multitude” among the sons of Israel “wept, and the sons of Israel too” with them. And it is clear that as long as they did not have what they desired, they could not be sated with it nor cease from the passion. But the loving and good God, giving them what they desired, did not wish to give it in such a way that desire would be left in them. Therefore he says that they would eat the “meat” not “one day” (for their passion would have remained in their soul, which was set on fire and inflamed by it, if they had partaken of the meat for a short time); nor does he give them what they desired for “two days”; but wishing to make it cloying to them, he as it were does not promise but threatens, to anyone who can understand, by what he seemed to grant them, saying: “You will not spend only five days” eating “meat,” nor twice these, nor again twice those, but “you shall eat” so long, eating meat for a whole month, “until it comes out of your nostrils” with a bilious sickness—the thing you thought good, and the blameworthy and shameful desire for it—so that I may release you from life no longer desiring, and, having departed in this state, you may be able, as pure from desire and remembering through how many pains you were freed from it, either never to fall into it again, or, if this ever happens, only after long periods of time, when you forget what you suffered through your desire: unless you take heed to yourselves and take up the Word who wholly frees from every passion, you may fall into evils and, having later desired becoming (genesis) again, may need a second time to obtain what you desire and to hate what you desired, and then in this way run back to the good things and the heavenly food, despising which you longed for worse things.