Saints share gifts; their brightness covers the weak

Paul was addressing some of those who had believed: ‘For I long to see you, that I may share some spiritual gift with you.’ Or do you not say that the blameless and unwandering knowledge concerning God, and the precise understanding upon all the excellent things, is a heavenly gift of hospitality and a spiritual charism?

Palladius: Yes—if the matter is life-making. Therefore one must see clearly who is by nature and truly the Fashioner of the wholes and God, and what life—the best path—carries off unto a long-aged and endless life.

Cyril: You have spoken rightly. Teaching us these things Christ himself also was commanding the holy apostles, saying: ‘Freely you received; freely give.’ And the saints’ brightness would be not unprofitable for others also otherwise; for in their good reputations our defeats somehow vanish, and our God who loves virtue, having attended to the more famous ones’ good courage, remits the charges for the weaker. And indeed those from Israel, having bent unrestrainedly unto disobedience, and leaving nothing of the base things unpracticed, necessarily provoked the lawgiver against themselves; and when he already wished to exact justice of the daring from those who had so fiercely grieved him, the prophet Jeremiah was bringing forward the petitions. And what does God say toward this? ‘Run round,’ he says, ‘in Jerusalem’s roads, and see and know, and seek in her squares, if you find a man—if there is one doing judgment and seeking faith—and I will be gracious to them, says the Lord.’ And he said he would also remit for Sodom the justice through fire, if some five were in them holy and good. Therefore the saints’ brightness sometimes also procures for those very sinful the need not to be punished at once, as it were entreating the divine temper and checking the anger; and for those who have genuinely received the faith, yet are not able to go unto this in good courage, so as to be able to take by toils, they all but share the good reputations with them—that they also be filled with divine gifts—training as far as possible, and carrying them off toward every thing whatever that pleases God, and showing them partners of their own manly deeds; and what they themselves barely find through very many toils, these they put into others’ souls. For that we will share with the saints also the brightness present in them, and will be partners of the manly deeds, from gentleness and love of humans—God as it were mixing and blending our defeats with those ones’ successes, and yoking the deficient to the more perfect, so that it may be acceptable—would become clear also through this again.

Palladius: Through what sort of thing do you say?

Cyril: Moabites and Midianites were both unholy and barbarous nations, and they were pasturing upon the land of the promise