Let the ruler be near to each one through compassion, and above all lifted up through contemplation, so that both through the bowels of pity he may transfer to himself the infirmity of others, and through the loftiness of speculation he may also transcend himself in reaching after invisible things; lest either, seeking high things, he despise the weaknesses of his neighbours, or, condescending to the weaknesses of his neighbours, he abandon the reaching after high things (2 Corinthians 12:3). For hence it is that Paul is led into paradise and searches out the secrets of the third heaven, and yet, though suspended in that contemplation of invisible things, he recalls the eye of his mind to the bed of carnal persons, and directs how they ought to conduct themselves in their secret concerns, saying:
But because of fornication let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband. Let the husband render the debt to his wife, and likewise also the wife to the husband (1 Corinthians 7:2-3). And a little after (1 Corinthians 7:5): Do not defraud one another, except perhaps by consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to prayer; and return again to the same, lest Satan tempt you. Behold, he is now brought into the heavenly secrets, and yet through the bowels of condescension he searches out the bed of carnal persons; and him whom, uplifted, he raises to invisible things, this same man, moved with pity, he bends the eye of his heart to the secrets of the weak.
He transcends heaven by contemplation, and yet he does not desert the couch of carnal persons by his solicitude, because, joined by the bond of charity to the highest things and at the same time to the lowest, he is both mightily caught up on high in himself by the strength of the spirit, and, out of pity, in others patiently made weak. For hence he says: Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is scandalized, and I do not burn (2 Corinthians 11:29)? Hence again he says: To the Jews I became as a Jew (1 Corinthians 9:20). This indeed he showed not by losing faith, but by extending pity, so that, transforming into himself the person of unbelievers, he might learn from himself how he ought to have pity on others, so as to bestow upon them what he himself, if he were such, would rightly have wished bestowed on himself.
Hence again he says: For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God; or whether we be sober, it is for you (2 Corinthians 5:13); because he knew both how to transcend himself by contemplating, and how to temper himself to his hearers by condescending. Hence Jacob, with the Lord leaning upon him from above and a stone anointed below, saw angels ascending and descending (Genesis 28:12); because indeed right preachers not only seek upward, by contemplation, the holy Head of the Church, that is, the Lord, but also descend downward, by compassion, to His members. Hence Moses frequently enters and leaves the tabernacle; and he who within is caught up into contemplation, without is pressed by the affairs of the weak. Within he considers the secrets of God, without he bears the burdens of carnal persons.
He also, in matters of doubt, always has recourse to the tabernacle, and consults the Lord before the ark of the testament: offering, without doubt, an example to rulers, that when they are in doubt without as to what they should arrange, they may always return to their mind as to a tabernacle; and, as before the ark of the testament, consult the Lord, if within themselves they search the pages of sacred speech concerning those things about which they are in doubt. Hence Truth herself, shown to us through the assumption of our humanity, clings to prayer on the mountain, and works miracles in the cities (Luke 6:12); laying down, that is, the way of imitation for good rulers;
so that, even though by contemplating they seek the highest things, they may nevertheless mingle themselves by compassion with the necessities of the weak, because then charity wondrously rises to lofty things, when it mercifully draws itself down to the lowest concerns of neighbours; and the more kindly it descends to weak things, the more mightily it returns to the highest. Moreover, let those who preside so show themselves that their subjects may not be ashamed to disclose even their hidden things to them; so that when the little ones bear the waves of temptations, they may run to the mind of the shepherd as to a mother's bosom, and may wash away, by the solace of his exhortation and by the tears of prayer, that by which they foresee themselves to be defiled by the filth of the assailing fault. Hence also, before the doors of the temple, twelve oxen carry the sea of bronze, that is, the laver, for the washing of the hands of those who enter (1 Kings 7:23ff.).
which indeed stand out with their faces outward, but are hidden as to their hinder parts. For what is signified by the twelve oxen, unless the whole order of pastors? Concerning whom, as Paul discourses, the law says: You shall not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treads out the grain (1 Corinthians 9:9; from Deuteronomy 25:4). Their open works indeed we behold, but what awaits them afterward, in the hidden recompense before the strict Judge, we know not. Yet when they prepare the patience of their condescension for the washing away of the confessions of their neighbours, they carry, as it were, the laver before the doors of the temple; so that whoever strives to enter the gate of eternity may declare his temptations to the mind of the pastor, and, as in the laver of the oxen, may wash the hands of his thought or work.
And it very often happens that while the ruler's mind, by condescending, comes to know the temptations of others, he himself also, by the temptations he has heard, is assailed, because this same water by which the multitude of the people is washed is without doubt defiled by the filth of the laver. For while it receives the filth of those it washes, it loses, as it were, the serene brightness of its own cleanness. But these things are by no means to be feared by the pastor, because, since God weighs all things subtly, he is the more easily rescued from his own temptation the more mercifully he is wearied by the temptation of another.