27.

'Give us this day our daily bread' — or as Luke has it, 'Our daily bread give us day by day.' Since some suppose these words are said concerning bodily food — that we pray for it — it is worth removing their false opinion by these arguments and setting forth the truth concerning the daily bread. We must say to them: how could he who says we must ask heavenly and great things — when neither is the bread dispensed into our flesh heavenly, nor is the request concerning it a great petition — as it were forgetting what he taught, command the address of an entreaty to the Father concerning an earthly and small thing?

But we, following him as teacher, shall set forth at greater length the teachings concerning this bread. He says in John, to those who came to Capernaum seeking him: 'Amen, amen, I say to you: you seek me not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.' For he who ate 'of' the loaves blessed by Jesus and was filled with them rather seeks to grasp the Son of God more exactly, and hastens to him. That is why he well commands, saying: 'Labor not for the food that perishes, but for the food that abides unto eternal life, which the Son of Man shall give you.' And when his hearers asked and said, 'What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?' Jesus answered and said to them: 'This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he sent.' And God sent 'his Word and healed them,' as written in the Psalms — plainly, those who were sick. With this Word, those who believe work 'the works of God' — which are food abiding unto eternal life. And 'my Father,' he says, 'gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.' And true bread nourishes the 'true' 'man' — made 'after the image of God' — who, nourished, becomes 'after the likeness' 'of him who created.' And what is more nourishing to the soul than the Word? What more precious to the mind that holds her than God's wisdom? What more fitting to the rational nature than truth?

But if someone objects to this, saying he would not teach us to ask for the daily bread as for another bread distinct from himself, let him hear that in John too, in one place he discourses of it as of another beside himself, in another as being himself the bread: as of another, in these words — 'Moses gave you not the bread from heaven,' 'not the true,' 'but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven'; as of himself, he says to those who said to him, 'Evermore give us this bread': 'I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.' And after a little: 'I am the (living) bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eat of this bread, he shall live forever. And the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.'

And since every food is called bread according to Scripture — as plain from its being recorded of Moses that 'bread he did not eat for forty days, and water he did not drink' — and varied and diverse is the nourishing Word, since not all can be nourished, by firmness and vigor, on the divine lessons — therefore, wishing to present athletic food suited to the more perfect, he says: 'The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.' And after a little: 'Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who chews my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him at the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. He who chews my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, I too live by the Father; and he who chews me, he too shall live by me.' And this is the 'true' 'food' — the 'flesh' of Christ, which, being 'Word,' became 'flesh,' according to the saying 'And the Word became flesh.' And when we chew and drink him, he 'tabernacled in us'; and when he is dispensed, 'we beheld his glory' is fulfilled. 'This is the bread that came down from heaven — not as the fathers ate and died; he who chews this bread shall live forever.'

But Paul, discoursing to 'babes' and Corinthians walking 'after man,' says: 'Milk I gave you to drink, not food; for you were not yet able. But neither even now are you able; for you are still carnal.' And in Hebrews: 'And you have come to need milk, not solid food. For everyone who shares milk is without experience of the word of righteousness — for he is a babe. But solid food is for the perfect, who by habit have their senses trained to discern good and evil.' And I take even the 'One believes he may eat all things, but the weak eats herbs' to be said by him principally not of bodily foods but of God's words that nourish the soul: the most faithful and most perfect can partake of all — whom he indicates through the 'One believes he may eat all things' — while the weaker and more imperfect begins with simpler lessons, which do not strongly impart vigor — whom, wishing to mark him, he calls 'the weak eats herbs.'

And I take what is said with Solomon in the Proverbs to teach that he who, through simplicity, cannot hold the more vigorous and greater doctrines — yet does not think amiss — is better than the readier, sharper man who charges more greatly upon realities but does not make plain the word of the peace and harmony of all. The wording runs thus: 'Better a portion of herbs with friendship and grace than a calf from the stall with hatred.' Often, at any rate, we have welcomed a private and simpler feast with a good conscience — entertained by those who could set nothing more before us — rather than loftiness of words raised 'against the knowledge of God,' proclaiming with great plausibility a doctrine foreign to the Father who gave 'the law and the prophets,' the Father of our Lord Jesus. That our soul, then, may not sicken for lack of foods, nor die to God 'by famine of the Lord's word,' let us ask of the Father the living bread — who is the same as the daily — persuaded by our teacher and Savior, believing and living more rightly.

But what the 'daily' is must now be considered. And first know this: that the word 'daily' (epiousios) has been named by no Greek, neither of the wise nor in common private usage — but seems coined by the evangelists. At any rate Matthew and Luke agreed upon it, bringing it forth nowise differing. The translators of the Hebrew did the like in other cases too. For what Greek ever used the appellation 'give ear' (enotizou), or the 'be eared' (akoutistheti) for 'receive with ears and make hearing'? Like the appellation 'daily' (epeousion) is what stands written with Moses, spoken by God: 'But you shall be to me' 'a peculiar people' (periousios). And each word seems to me made from 'substance' (ousia) — the one declaring the bread that contributes toward substance, the other signifying the people concerned with substance and sharing in it.

Now 'substance,' properly, is conceived by those who say the subsistence of the incorporeal is prior: after the incorporeal — things stably having being, admitting neither addition nor suffering subtraction (for this is peculiar to bodies, about which increase and wasting occur, since they are fluent, needing the incoming sustainer that nourishes; if more comes in seasonally than flows away, increase occurs; if less, decrease; and perhaps some receive the incoming thing not at all, in unmixed, if I may so speak ... ). But by those who deem substance consequent, with bodies prior, its definitions are these: substance is either the first matter of beings, and that from which beings come; or the matter of bodies, and that from which bodies come; or of named things, and that from which named things come; or the first substrate without quality; or what pre-subsists for beings; or what receives all changes and alterations, itself unaltered in its own ratio; or what abides through all alteration and change. On their view substance is both qualityless and unfigured in its own ratio — having no appointed magnitude either — but is set under every quality like a ready place. And 'qualities' they ordinarily call activities and makings — wherein happenings and relations turn out to be; for they say substance shares in none of these in its own ratio, but is ever inseparable from one of them by affection — no less receptive of all the maker's activities, as he makes and changes. For the tone connate with it, pervading through all of every quality, is the cause of the economies about it. Through wholes, then, they call it changeable and through wholes divisible, and say all substance can be mingled with all — united, however.

But since, inquiring concerning substance on account of the 'daily bread' and the peculiar people, we said these things to discern what substance signifies — and bread in what went before was intelligible, which we had to ask — substance akin to the bread must necessarily be conceived: that as bodily bread, dispensed, passes into the body of the nourished and into its substance, so the 'living' bread, 'come down from heaven,' dispensed into mind and soul, may share its own power with the one who offered himself to nourishment from it. And so shall be what we ask: 'daily bread.' And again: as, according to the 'quality' of the 'food' — whether 'solid' and suited to athletes, or milky and herby — the nourished comes to be in diverse power, so it follows that, as God's Word is becomingly given — whether as milk to babes, or as herbs to the sick in season, or as flesh to contenders in season — each of the nourished, by the analogy of the Word to which he offered himself, can do this or that, and become this or that. Yet there is a deemed food that is poisonous, and another that makes sick, and another that cannot even be dispensed — all of which must by analogy be transferred to the diversities of deemed nourishing lessons. Daily bread, then, is what is most fitting to the rational nature and most akin to substance itself — procuring at once health and good habit and strength for the soul, and sharing its own immortality (for God's Word is immortal) with the one who eats it.

This daily bread, then, seems to me called by another name in Scripture 'the tree of life' — toward which he who stretches 'his hand' and takes from it 'shall live forever.' And by a third name this 'tree' is called God's 'wisdom' with Solomon, in these words: 'She is a tree of life to all who cling to her, and safe as upon the Lord to those who lean.' And since angels too are nourished by God's wisdom — empowered, from contemplation in truth with wisdom, to perform their own works — it is said in the Psalms that angels too are nourished, with men of God — Hebrews, as they are called — sharing with the angels, and as it were feasting with them. Such is the 'bread of angels man ate.' For let our mind not be so poor as to suppose the angels, who ever partake, are nourished by some bodily bread — the storied bread that came down from heaven upon those who left Egypt — with the Hebrews sharing this same bread with the angels, God's ministering spirits.

It is not untimely, as we seek the 'daily bread' and the 'tree of life' and God's wisdom — the common food of holy men and angels — to attend also to the three men recorded in Genesis, brought down with Abraham and partaking of three measures of 'fine flour' kneaded into loaves: lest these things be said barely tropically, since the saints can at times share intelligible and rational food not only with men but even with diviner powers — whether for their benefit or to display what most nourishing things they have been able to procure for themselves — with the angels rejoicing and nourished in such display, and becoming readier to co-work in every way and to breathe together thereafter toward the grasp of more and greater things, upon the nourishing lessons furnished beforehand to the rest — he having gladdened and, if I may so speak, nursed them. It is no wonder if a man nourishes angels — when even Christ confesses he stands at the 'door' and knocks, that, entering with the one who opened to him, he may sup 'with him' from that one's goods, and afterwards himself share his own with the one who first feasted the Son of God, according to his own power.

Of the daily bread, then, he who partakes, strengthening his 'heart,' becomes a son of God; but he who shares in the 'dragon' is no other than the intelligible Ethiopian — changing, through the dragon's ... , even himself into a serpent — so that, reproached by the Word, even if he says he wishes to be baptized, he hears: 'Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?' And David says this concerning the dragon's body feasted upon by the Ethiopians: 'Thou didst crush the heads of the dragons upon the water; thou didst break the serpent's head in pieces; thou gavest him for food to the Ethiopian peoples.' But if it is no absurdity — with the Son of God substantially subsisting, and the Opponent also subsisting — that each becomes food, one to this one, one to that — why do we hesitate to accept, for all powers better and worse, and for men, that each of us can be nourished from all these? At any rate Peter, about to share with the centurion Cornelius and those gathered with him in Caesarea, and after this to share God's words with the nations too, sees 'heaven opened' and a 'vessel let down by four beginnings,' 'wherein were all the quadrupeds and creeping things and wild beasts of the earth' — and is bid 'rise,' sacrifice, and eat. And when, begging off, he said, 'Thou knowest that never did common or unclean enter my mouth,' he is ordered to 'call no man common or unclean' — since what God cleansed Peter must not make common. For the saying runs: 'What God cleansed, make thou not common.' So the clean food and the unclean, distinguished in the Mosaic law under names of many animals, referring to the diverse characters of the rationals, teaches that these are nourishing to us, these contrariwise — until God, cleansing all, makes all nourishing, or those 'from every nation.'

With these things so, and so great a difference of foods, one beyond all those named is the daily bread — concerning which we must pray to be counted worthy of it, and, nourished by the Word, who 'in the beginning' is 'toward God,' to be made godlike. But someone will say the 'daily' (epiousion) is formed from 'coming upon' (epienai) — so that we are commanded to ask the bread proper to the coming age, which God, taking beforehand, may already grant us: so that what is, as it were, to be given tomorrow be given us 'today' — 'today' taken of the present age, 'tomorrow' of the coming. But since the former interpretation is better, so far as I am judge, let us examine what lies beside it: the 'today' with Matthew, or the 'day by day' written with Luke. It is the custom in many places of Scripture to call the whole age 'today' — as 'this is the father of the Moabites unto this day,' and 'this is the father of the Ammonites unto this day,' and 'this saying was spread abroad among the Jews unto this day,' and in the Psalms, 'Today, if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.' And with Jesus it is said most plainly thus: 'Depart not from the Lord in the today's days.' And if 'today' is this whole age, perhaps 'yesterday' is the age gone by. Which we have taken to be said in the Psalms and with Paul in Hebrews: in the Psalms thus — 'A thousand years in thy sight are as the day of yesterday, which is past' (whatever the famed millennium is, likened to the 'yesterday' day, differing from the 'today'); and with the Apostle it is written: 'Jesus Christ, yesterday and today, the same, and unto the ages.' And it is no wonder that to God the whole age has the ratio of one day with us — I suppose, of even less.

And it must be examined whether the words of the feasts recorded by 'days' or 'months' or 'seasons' or 'years' or 'assemblies' refer to ages. For if 'the law has a shadow of the coming things,' the many sabbaths must be a 'shadow' of many days, and the new moons, occurring through temporal intervals — I know not with what moon attending what sun they are performed. And if the first 'month,' and the tenth day 'unto the fourteenth,' and the feast of unleavened from the fourteenth 'unto the twenty-first,' contain a 'shadow of coming things' — 'who is wise, and' to such degree a 'friend' of God, as to see, of more months, the first, and its tenth day, and what follows? And what need to speak of the feast of seven weeks of days, and of the seventh month — whose new moon is a day 'of trumpets,' and whose tenth day is a day 'of atonement' — known to the God alone who legislated them? And who has so held the mind of Christ as to grasp the seventh years of the Hebrew slaves' freedom, and the 'release' of debts, and rest from tilling the holy land? And there is one higher than the feast through seven years, called Jubilee — which, even to imagine in part, or to grasp plainly that its laws shall be fulfilled as true, belongs to none except the one who contemplated the Father's counsel concerning the ordinance in all the ages, according to his 'unsearchable' 'judgments' and his untraceable ways.

Often it came upon me to wonder, comparing two apostolic sayings, how it is the 'consummation of the ages,' at which Jesus 'has been manifested for the annulling of sins' — if ages are to come after this one. The sayings run thus: in Hebrews, 'But now once, at the consummation of the ages, he has been manifested, for the annulling of sins through his sacrifice'; in Ephesians, 'that in the coming ages he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness toward us.' Pondering such greatness, I suppose that, as the last month is the consummation of the year — after which another month's beginning sets in — so perhaps, with many ages completing, as it were, a year of ages, the present age is the consummation, after which certain coming ages shall set in, whose beginning is the coming age — and in those coming ages God shall display the riches 'of his grace in kindness' — with the most sinful, even the blasphemer against the Holy Spirit, held fast by sin in the whole present age, and from the beginning to the end, to be dispensed in the coming age afterward — how, I know not.

He, then, who saw these things, and conceived in mind a week of ages — to contemplate a holy sabbatism — and a month of ages — to see God's holy new moon — and a year of ages — to understand together the year's feasts, when every 'male' must appear 'before the Lord God' — and the proportionate years of such ages — to grasp the holy seventh year — and seven sevens of ages — to hymn the so-great Lawgiver — having examined how he can fuss over the least portion of an hour of the day of so great an age, will do everything, that, made worthy by preparation here of obtaining the daily bread, he may receive it on the 'today' day — with the 'day by day' already becoming plain from what went before. For to the God who is from boundless to boundless, the one who prays concerning not only the 'today' but in a way the 'today' of the 'day by day' — from what he can contemplate — 'beyond all measure above what we ask or conceive' — shall be able to receive, if I may speak so hyperbolically, even 'what eye saw not' and 'what ear heard not' and 'what went not up upon man's heart.'

And these things too seem to me most necessary to examine, that both the 'today' be understood and the 'day by day,' when we pray that the 'daily bread' 'be given us' from his Father. But if in the last book we shall first examine the 'our' — since it is said not 'Give us this day our daily bread' but 'Our daily bread give us day by day' — yet we must examine how this bread is 'ours.' The Apostle teaches that 'whether life or death, or things present or things to come — all' are the saints'. Concerning which there is no need to speak at present.