Slave eye/tooth → free if soul harmed; leave masters who lead into error

Palladius: And in what manner then has the law also helped these?

Cyril: For it loosens from bond and necessity, if the harm should be about soul, and it has clearly justified that the wronged may run off if he should wish, nothing tripping him. For he said thus sideways in Exodus: ‘And if someone should strike the eye of his house-slave, or the eye of his maidservant, and should blind it, he will send them out free instead of their eye; and if he should cut out the tooth of his maidservant, or the tooth of his house-slave, he will send them out free instead of their tooth.’ As far as concerns outward contemplation and a ready mind, it checks the boldness, and makes the angers of the owners measured, and does not wish to go as far as those things through which the subordinated would come to be the loss unto being well. And it nowhere allows the things from passion to go unbridled, and already to be practiced unto the nature itself, of which the Creator alone would be understood as existing Master; for slavery and the suffering upon it is not a natural sickness, but brought in from grasping. In Christ then God and Father reshapes the whole nature at once unto what was in beginnings. ‘For if someone is in Christ, a new creation.’ And the shame of slavery is altogether taken away; for Paul writes that ‘In Christ Jesus there is neither slave nor free.’ And for the present the law, training on toward the perfect, takes away the unbridled of the authority, and what is beyond the measure of what is fitting, setting as penalty for those who slight the law the release of the wronged. But these things unto letter and shadow, if someone should also choose to understand this way; and if the aim of the law should be interpreted spiritually, you would also strike, O Palladius, in another way the contemplations in it; for this worldly light we receive and marvel at with the eyes of the body; but the divine and intelligible light rises in our hearts; and the food of the body is ground with teeth, and the matter will be a path unto life; but the things of the divine contemplations, hard and hard to reach, are all but crushed with the strength of the understanding as with a tooth, and feed a soul. And indeed Wisdom, opening for us the divine and spiritual table, ‘Come, eat my bread,’ she says. So even if harm should somehow befall a house-slave concerning some of such things, a master going astray and forcing him to slip from uprightness of dogmas unto outlandish wandering, let the bond be loosed, he says, and let there be no word of a necessary yoke. And let the terror of the authority also be thrown somewhere, and let the yoked one go thereafter wherever the unharmed holding would be found for him; for nothing was better than soul. And in order that he may save, he says, let him have been released from slavery. And you would see the word true, and still being fulfilled in times according to us; for house-slaves do not endure masters who lead them unto wandering, having nobly withdrawn from the authority hung over them