st. john of damascus (676-749 - Cristo Raul

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THE FONS SCIENTLE." 87
and disobedient (i.
Tim. i., 9)
in evidence of which
;
we may observe that Moses and Elijah, in their fasts
of forty days, must have included Sabbaths, on which
the law forbade men to fast. Hence he argues that,
for the Christian, the letter of the precept
is to be ex
changed for the law of liberty.
As circumcision is
spiritualised for the Christian, so is the Sabbath ;
which he observes on the recurrence of that true and
only perfect day of rest for humanity, that first day of
the week, when Christ by his resurrection opened out
for us the inheritance of the saints.
The subject of the next chapter (c. xcvii.) is
Virginity ;
which Damascenus, as might be expected,
exalts above the married state. Marriage
is honour
able, but the other excels it : the one is a human, the
other an angelic, mode of life. From a comparison
of Gen. vii., 7,
"And Noah went in, and his sons,
and his wife, and his sons wives with him, into the
with Gen. ark," viii., 16, forth of the ark, thou,
and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons wives with
thee
he draws the strange inference (in which,
however, he is not alone among ancient expositors),
that a separation of sexes in the ark is
pointed at by
the order of the words in the former passage, to be
discontinued on their 1
leaving the ark.
After two short chapters on Circumcision and Anti-
Christ, the work ends with a final one (c. c.)
on the
Resurrection. In it he sums up the Scriptural argu
1
The order in the eighteenth verse, in which their departure
from the ark is mentioned, is the same as that in vii. 7 ;
which
seems to neutralize whatever force the inference might have
had.