Weak hands, the flattened nose and the clipped ear

Cyril: ‘Be strong, you slack hands and paralysed knees’ (Isaiah 35:3). And Christ himself accused the Jewish people of refusing to make their paths toward him straight, letting them turn aside instead into lameness (Hebrews 12:13), and of slipping away from right reasoning. ‘For foreign sons,’ he says, ‘lied to me; foreign sons grew old and limped away from their paths’ (Psalm 18:44–45). So lameness of mind and blindness are on a par and very close to each other, being afflictions alike in kind: blindness reduces to uselessness what is precious in understanding, and lameness what is strong in good works. Besides these, the law said that the man with a stunted nose must be rejected, and with him the man with a clipped ear. One might apply to them an explanation like this. By the sense of smell we test what smells foul and what is most fragrant, among things, I mean, whose nature has received the power to give off a smell; and that sense is very discerning, both of what can give delight and of what perhaps is not of that sort but otherwise, ranking, as it were, among the worse. The human mind, I would say, if it is sound in what belongs to it, sets out vigorously to discern the quality of things and will make an exact test of each; and like an excellent money-changer, testing everything, holding fast to what is good and keeping away from every form of evil, as it is written (1 Thessalonians 5:21–22), it will win high approval. For it rejects as counterfeit whatever among our deeds is in any way shameful and falsely stamped, and it would readily accept what is profitable and better. The flattened nose, then, signifies what is not altogether healthy and sound in perception, the faculty by which we discern each thing excellently, give the better verdict to the best and the worse to the more shameful, and are, and are called, wise and quick-witted and everything else of that kind. For the smell, rising as it were to the mind, is the real quality, so to speak, of the things the mind perceives. And to have the ear clipped would suggest, as it seems to me, being hard of hearing. For when the hearing is clipped, I would grant that the affliction is an obedience given only in part, not wholly answering to the rein, or else the inability to listen blamelessly to sacred things, and above all to the sacred writings. Some indeed do just that, most thoughtlessly turning the soul’s readiness to hear toward things it should not. These would be, in the words of the most wise Paul, those who have itching ears and turn their hearing away from the truth (2 Timothy 4:3–4), who devote themselves to spirits of error (1 Timothy 4:1), and who have turned aside to profane, empty talk (1 Timothy 6:20). So the man with a clipped ear would suggest the maiming of the inward and spiritual hearing, and its corruption from rightness into something worse. And if anyone is seen to have a broken foot or a broken hand (Leviticus 21:19), let him withdraw, it says, and be ranked with the others; and here the law leads us to understand, by the man whose foot or hand may have been broken but who is not wholly disabled,