Then she arose and, coming forward before the entrance, spoke as follows: It is not lawful for me to grow slack, even after so many discourses, O Virtue, since I believe without dispute in the manifold wisdom of God, which is richly able to give, and to give in differing measure to whomever it wills. For sailors on the deep say that the same wind bears those who voyage, yet that others, handling the matters of the voyage in differing ways, hasten to put in not at the same harbor; for to some the wind stands fair astern, while it bears others off to the side, and yet for both the voyage is most easily accomplished. But the intelligent and holy and only-begotten Spirit of wisdom, breathing down gently from above out of the Father's treasuries, having blown a clear breeze of knowledge upon us all, will suffice to direct without grief the course of our words; for it is now time for me to speak. There is one mode of praises, O virgins, and a reverent one, when the one who praises furnishes a witness greater than the praises of the one praised; for it is possible thence to learn accurately that the commendation of words is made neither for favor's sake, nor of necessity, nor according to opinion, but according to truth and unflattering judgment. For the prophets and apostles too, who set forth more fully concerning the Son of God who is before the ages, and who theologized about Him more than other men, did not refer His praises to angelic speech, but to Him on whom hangs the sovereignty and might of all; for it was fitting that He who is greater than all the others, after the Father, should make use of His own greater Father alone as witness. And so I too will not refer the praises of chastity to human opinion, but to Him whose care we are and who has taken up the whole, declaring Him to be its husbandman, and a lover of its bloom, and a trustworthy witness. This too may anyone who wishes plainly discern in the Song of Songs, where Christ Himself, praising those firmly established in virginity, says, 'As a lily among thorns, so is my neighbor among the daughters,' likening her to a lily because of the pure and fragrant and sweet and cheerful gift of chastity; for chastity is springlike, ever blooming daintily with white calyxes upon incorruption. Whence too He is not ashamed to confess that He loves the beauty of her prime, saying in what follows, 'You have ravished our heart, my sister bride,' saying, 'You have ravished our heart with one of your eyes, with one ornament of your neck. How beautiful are your breasts beyond wine, and the scent of your garments above all spices. Your lips drop honeycomb, O bride; honey and milk are under your tongue, and the smell of your garments is as the smell of frankincense. A garden enclosed is my sister bride, a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed.' Christ sings the praises of those who have come to the very limits of virginity, embracing all under the one name of 'bride,' since the bride must be both joined and named to Christ, yet must still be undefiled and unmingled, like a sealed paradise in which grow all the spices of the fragrance of the heavens, that Christ alone, when He comes, may pluck them, sprung from incorporeal seeds. For the Word loves nothing of the flesh, since it is not its nature to accept anything of the corruptible—such as hands or face or feet—but, looking unto the immaterial and spiritual beauty itself, He is gladdened, not touching the bodily bloom.
For consider, O virgins, that the 'You have ravished our heart,' spoken to the bride by Him, 'with one of your eyes,' indicates the discerning eye of prudence, when the inner man, having cleansed it purely, beholds the truth more clearly. For it is everywhere plain that the power of sight is twofold—one of the soul, the other of the body. But it is not of the body's that the Word confesses love, but only of the one according to the understanding, saying, 'You have ravished our heart with one of your eyes,' and 'with one ornament of your neck'; which is to say: O you, with the lovely gaze of your understanding you have winged our heart to longing, flashing from within the radiant adornment of chastity. For 'ornaments of the neck' are what the necklaces are called, composed of precious and varied stones. But the souls that pamper the body put this sensible adornment about the outer neck of the flesh, for the deception of those who behold; while the chaste, on the contrary, kindle within the ornament composed, as it were, of the precious and varied stones of liberty, of magnanimity, of wisdom, of love, caring little for these passing trinkets here below, which, like leaves blooming for a season, wither away with the changes of the body. For the adornment about the man appears to be twofold, of which the Lord accepts the inner, the unalloyed, saying that He has been ravished in heart by 'one ornament of the neck' of the bride—signifying, as it were, that He has yearned for the splendor of the inner man's deportment as it gleams; even as the psalmist too testifies, saying, 'All the glory of the daughter of the king is from within.'
But let no one suppose that the other company of believers is rejected, imagining that we introduce the virgins alone as attaining the promise, without considering that there will also be tribes and families and ranks, each according to the proportion of their faith. This too Paul delineates, saying, 'There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead.' And the Lord too does not acknowledge that He gives the same honors to all, but numbers some to the kingdoms of the heavens, promises to others an inheritance of earth, and to others to see the Father. And indeed here He prophesies that the first rank and the holy chorus of virgins shall enter in with Him, as it were into the bridal chamber, accompanying Him to the rest of the new ages. For they bore witness not for some small part of time, having endured the hardships of the body for a little while, but throughout their whole life they endured, not shrinking back from contending out truly the Olympic contest of chastity; for, having withstood the wild tortures of pleasures and fears and griefs and the other evils of the wickedness of men, they carry off the prizes first of all the rest, ranked in the better region of the promise. Assuredly, these souls alone the Word calls His own chosen and genuine bride, but the rest concubines and maidens and daughters, saying thus: 'There are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and maidens without number. But my dove is one, my perfect one; she is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her who bore her. The daughters saw her and will bless her; the queens and the concubines also praise her.' For though the daughters of the Church are many, evidently there is one alone, chosen and most honored in her eyes above all—the rank of the virgins.
But if anyone has a dispute about these things, as though the main points were not yet sufficiently worked out, and should still wish them to be more fully articulated according to their spiritual anagogy—who are the queens and the concubines and the maidens—we shall say that these things can also be spoken of those who from the beginning, in the course of the ages, were distinguished in righteousness: for instance, of those before the flood, and those after the flood, and those from Christ onward in succession. For the bride is the Church; the queens are those royal souls before the flood who became well-pleasing to God—that is, those about Abel and Seth and Enoch; the concubines are those after the flood, of the prophets, with whom, before the Church was joined to the Lord, He, consorting after the manner of concubines, sowed true words in abundant and pure philosophy, that, conceiving, they might bear for Him a spirit of salvation. For such offshoots do souls produce, bearing an ever-memorable beauty, as many as Christ has been blended with. For if you will look, O virgins, into the books of Moses or of David or of Solomon or of Isaiah or of the prophets in succession, you will know what saving offspring of themselves they have left behind for life, through their fellowship with the Son of God. Whence, with discernment, the Word called the prophetic souls concubines, because He did not betroth them openly to Himself, as He betrothed the Church.
And besides these, this too must be inquired into, that nothing of the necessary points may escape us: why ever He said the queens were sixty, the concubines such-and-such a number, and the maidens so many that they are beyond number on account of their multitude, but the bride one. And first, we must speak concerning the sixty. He called sixty queens, as I think, those who from the first-formed man down to Noah, in succession, were well-pleasing to God; since these had no need of other commandments and statutes for their salvation. For the structure of the world according to the Hexaemeron was still fresh to them. For these remembered how in six days God fashioned the creation, and the things that came to pass in paradise, and how the man, having a commandment not to touch the plant of understanding, was banished, the sophist of vice having beguiled him. Thence, then, those souls that from the very framing of the world chose in succession to long for God—and that are well-nigh, if one must say it, the offspring of the first age and neighbors of the great Hexaemeron—He called sixty queens symbolically, because they came to be straightway after the Hexaemeron, as I said. For these had great honor, having consorted with angels and oftentimes beheld God waking, not in a dream. For consider how great boldness Seth had toward God, how great Abel, how great Enos, how great Enoch, how great Methuselah, how great Noah—the first to become lovers of righteousness, and the first to be counted worthy of the firstborn children enrolled in the heavens of the kingdom, having sprung up to God as it were an early first-fruit of those planted for salvation, a fruit. And concerning these, enough; but concerning the concubines we must speak again.
To those after the flood the knowledge of God was henceforth more remote, and they had need of another teaching—idolatry now creeping in—which might again be for them a defense against evil and a help. God, therefore, that the race of men might not utterly perish in forgetfulness of good things, commanded His own Son to whisper to the prophets His coming, which was to be in the flesh into the world, in which the joy and knowledge of the spiritual ogdoad would be proclaimed, being productive of remission of sins and of resurrection; for through it the passions and the corruption of men would be circumcised. And on this account He called the catalogue of the prophets from Abraham—on account of the dignity of circumcision, which embraces the number eight, on which the law too depends—eighty concubines, because they were the first, before the bride, the Church, was betrothed to the Word, to have conceived the divine seeds and foreannounced the circumcision of the intelligible ogdoad. And again, He calls maidens, summing up into a numberless throng, those multitudes that did righteousness under their betters and contended manfully and nobly against sin.
But of these neither the queens nor the concubines nor the maidens are compared to the Church; for she who is reckoned perfect and chosen above them all, who is constituted and joined together out of all the apostles, is the bride surpassing them all in the beauty of her prime and her virginity. Wherefore she is also blessed and praised above the rest, because she both saw and heard abundantly the things which those others longed even briefly to behold and did not see, and to hear and did not hear. 'For blessed,' the Lord says to the disciples, 'are your eyes, which see the things you see. For I say to you that many prophets desired to see the things you see, and saw them not, and to hear the things you hear, and heard them not.' Therefore on this account the prophets bless her and marvel, because the things which they themselves did not attain to become hearers and beholders of, the Church was counted worthy of and has partaken of. 'For there are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and maidens beyond number. My dove is one, my perfect one.'
But one might also in another way say that the bride is the undefiled flesh of the Lord, for whose sake, having left the Father, He came down here and was joined to it and descended into it, becoming man in it. Wherefore He also called it a dove figuratively, since the creature is tame and dwells under roofs and delights in life together with men. For it alone, so to speak, was found spotless and undefiled, surpassing all in the adornment and beauty of righteousness, so that not even any of those who in the highest degree were well-pleasing to God could stand near it, as a comparison of virtue, and on this account it was counted worthy to become a partaker of the kingdom of the Only-begotten, being joined and made one with Him. And in the forty-fourth psalm too, the queen who stands at His right hand, set forth from among the more numerous parts, arrayed in the gold-wrought adornment of virtue, whose beauty the King desired, is the flesh, as I said—that undefiled and blessed flesh which the Word Himself, having brought up to the heavens, set at the right hand of the Father, adorned in gold-wrought raiment, that is, in the pursuits of incorruption, which He symbolically called 'golden fringes,' since this garment is variously embroidered and woven together out of varied achievements—such as chastity, prudence, faith, love, patience, and the rest of the good things—which, veiling the unseemliness of the flesh, adorn the man with golden adornment.
Next we must consider what again, in the verses that follow in the psalm, after the man whom the Word assumed has been enthroned at the right hand of the Almighty, the Spirit goes on to deliver. 'Virgins shall be brought to the king,' it says, 'behind her; her companions shall be brought to you. They shall be brought with gladness and rejoicing; they shall be led into the temple of the king.' Here, quite plainly, the Spirit seems henceforth to be praising chastity, declaring that after the Bride of the Lord—the one we have explained—the virgins approach the Almighty in the second rank, in rejoicing and gladness, escorted and ushered along by angels. So unattainable a thing is the glory of virginity, and so thrice-desirable, that behind the queen, whom the Lord brought up to the Father, fashioning her sinless, the choir and rank of virgins is presented, having been allotted the place next after the Bride. Let these too, O Virtue, stand inscribed from us as our exercises of discourse on behalf of chastity.