Milk for infants; the calf; tablets of stone

Cyril went on: And for those sick with a love of flesh that is wholly hard to wash off, and caught in passions hard to escape, it was still somehow out of reach, and not ready to hand, to be able to spring up at once toward what is exceedingly fine, so as to take up a manner of life perhaps so bright and beyond nature as to walk on the earth and have their citizenship in heaven, according to what is written. For is not solid food for the mature, and milk the more fitting thing for those still infants?

Palladius said: Very much so.

Cyril: So then those still infants needed the tutoring that is in types, and, so to speak, a more tender upbringing, not the word that orders toward perfection and is able to carry them to what is complete. And the people from Israel would be found so light and small-minded, and easy toward any of the passions, that if there had been in them an exact testing of habits and attempts, they would not, I think, even have been counted worthy of a shadow. And Moses has shown this. For when God commanded, he himself sprang up the mountain to receive the Law. But they at once slipped down into apostasy. For they have made a calf, and the wretches have dared to say: 'These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.' So at such terrible lightness Moses was distressed, and he broke the tablets on which the Law was, thinking those whose mind was so struck as to forget the wonders worked for them by the divine power, and to assign worship again to a calf, and to come to a remembrance of the worship in Egypt, were not worthy even of a shadow or of types, or of any tutoring from above at all. But then the Law was sketched for the more ancient people on stone tablets by the finger of God, as it is written. And those things were a type of what we believe has come to be in us in Christ. For the Master God of all writes, as it were, in us the knowledge of his own will, using the Son in the Spirit as a pen. For he named him so through David, saying: 'My tongue is a pen of a swift-writing scribe.' For the Father's pen — that is, the Son — engraved on the hearts of all the knowledge of every good, using the Spirit of the Father and his own as a kind of finger of God. For he named the Spirit the finger of God, saying at one time, 'But if I by the Spirit of God cast out the demons,' and at another, 'But if I by the finger of God cast out the demons.' And Paul also called us the spiritual letter, saying: 'You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men, being manifested that you are a letter of God ministered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on tablets of hearts of flesh.'

Palladius: But that the things according to the Law are types and shadows, I too would say, know it well. Come then, putting a fine and exact mind to what was spoken in type, let us search very well the beauty of the truth. For so at last the mystery of the worship in spirit would be clear to no one of those who are.