It is the office of a teacher to expound what has been read, and by lucid discourse to build up and demonstrate the things obscured by mystical meanings, lest a lesser understanding should breed ruin for the hearer from that very source whence it ought—and was able—to confer saving knowledge. This, then, is the harmony of today's reading: 'And answering, one of the crowd said: Master, I have brought my son, who has a deaf and mute spirit' (Mark 9). He did not say, 'I have brought my deaf and mute son,' but, 'I have brought my son, who has a deaf and mute spirit.' Is spiritual wickedness, then, distinguished by human members and confined by human senses, so that it endures our infirmities and bears our sufferings;
so that it can see only through the windows of the eyes, and receive hearing only through the openings of the ears; utter speech by means of the tongue's office, and through this endure the wretched state of the deaf and mute—when in fact a nature so tenuous and airy knows nothing of flesh, disdains bones, and, like a breath of air, passes over the whole globe in a moment of time, takes on diverse appearances, is changed into varied forms, penetrates hearts, deludes souls, breathes in impious and most shameful thoughts, and is felt neither whence it comes nor whither it returns, and thus, like a flying dart, pierces through innocent minds with a deadly wound and with utter ease? It would be too little if the father alone had said this by his petition, when he said:
'I have brought my son, who has a deaf and mute spirit,' had not the Lord Himself driven off the unclean spirit with this rebuke: 'Deaf and mute spirit, I command thee, go out of him.' But let us now pursue the things that pertain to the resolution of the question. God, who is to burn the demons with perpetual fire, who even now, in the present, binds them with chains, racks them with torments, presses them with penalties, is able also, when He commands, to maim them with utter helplessness, and in that very mode by which they see, by which they hear, by which they speak, to render them blind, to make them deaf and mute so that they cannot speak. But in this passage let it be declared what the devil did to the man.
The ancient fugitive, when he found that God had come to the earth, stopped up the man's ears, bound his tongue, and, having barred the doors of the human senses, made and prepared the human breast as the hiding-place of his den; reckoning that thither the hearing of the word, the power of the divine Name, would not come. At the same time, crafty and cunning as he is, he believed he was ensnaring the father and deceiving the parents by such a fabrication, that they might despair of one being able to be cured who could neither hear nor speak; and that they might believe to be a matter of human infirmity what was in truth the work of the devil, and impute to the natural pledge, ascribe to nature, what the enclosed enemy had brought in. And so, as Matthew relates concerning the same, he had also deceived the father by another pretense of this wretched one; for he supplicates thus for himself:
'Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic and is grievously tormented' (Matt. 17). The demon wished then to seem to be a matter either of human nature or of a heavenly element—whatever suited his art—fitting the sufferings of the man to the courses of the moon; he vexed the body at the moon's waxings, that they might believe to be the moon's doing what was in truth of the devil's crime and fury. Thus he deluded men, circumvented the ignorant, defamed before the idle that creature which, made only for light, knows not how to harm men, whom it is rather compelled by continual service always to aid. But after the Knower of hidden things came, the most powerful Inspector of secrets, whom the devil's lurking fabrications could not oppose, the boy is brought to be healed by the divine command;
so that whatever the devil had bound might be loosed by Christ. The enemy strove and strove that this which was seen might be of nature. But why could the disciples not cast it out? Because this man is brought forward as a figure of the Gentile people; for the Gentile people, according to the Apostle, had the spirit of this air. 'The spirit,' he says, 'of the air, which now works in the sons of unbelief' (Eph. 2). This man, then, was deaf and mute, who could neither hear the law nor could confess God, but was cast into the fire of Gehenna and the waters of the ever-bitter whirlpool; nor could he be healed by the disciples or by any man, because Christ was of old called the hearing of faith, the confession of salvation, the redemption of the nations, and life.
In the end, when the devil was put to flight by the command of Christ, the closed things are opened, the bonds are loosed, speech is restored, hearing returns, the man is repaired, and the devil alone bewails himself thrust out from a long-held possession. Hence it is that one coming from among the Gentiles is, by the laying on of the hand and by exorcisms, first purged of the demon, and receives the opening of the ears, that he may be able to grasp the hearing of faith, that he may be able, with the Lord's guidance, to attain unto salvation. 'Blessed are the peacemakers,' says the evangelist, dearly beloved, 'for they shall be called the sons of God' (Matt. 5). Deservedly do Christian virtues flourish in him who has the unanimity of Christian peace; nor is one reached to the title of son of God except through the name of peacemaker.
Peace, dearly beloved, is that which strips a man of servitude, gives him the name of the freeborn, changes his person before God together with his condition, from a servant makes him a son, from a slave makes him free. The peace of brethren is the will of God, the delight of Christ, the perfection of holiness, the rule of justice, the mistress of doctrine, the guardian of morals, and in all things a praiseworthy discipline. Peace is the support of prayers, the easy and effectual way of supplications, the fitting fullness of all desires. Peace is the mother of love, the bond of concord, and the manifest token of a pure mind, which demands of God for itself what it will; which, whatsoever it has willed, asks; whatsoever it has asked, receives. Peace is to be kept by the royal precepts, the Lord Christ Himself saying:
'Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you' (John 14); this is to say: I have left you in peace, in peace I shall find you again. Setting out, He willed to give what He desired, on returning, to find in all. It is a heavenly command to keep what He gave: it is one voice: I shall find what I left. To plant peace by the roots is God's work; to tear it out utterly, the enemy's. For as the love of brotherhood is from God, so hatred is from the devil; wherefore hatreds are to be condemned, since it is written: 'He who hates his brother is a murderer' (1 John 3). You see, then, most beloved brethren, why peace is to be loved and concord to be cherished; for these are the things that beget and nourish charity. And you know, according to the Apostle, that charity is from God (1 John 4);
without God, therefore, is he who has not charity. The peace of the people, dearly beloved, is the glory of the priest, and the joy full of peace is the perfect charity of the children. It is the priest's part to admonish what is fitting, the people's part to hear what he admonishes; whatever is not lawful, it is the shepherd's part to forbid, the flock's part to hear and to will that it be not done: if both agree, all things are safe; neither does God find in the people what He may punish, nor can the priest have anything for which to grieve. Let us therefore keep, brethren, the commandments, which are life; let the brotherhood, bound together, hold itself in the bonds of profound peace, and in the saving bond of charity let it bind itself fast in mutual love, which covers a multitude of sins. Love, therefore, is to be embraced with all desires, which can have as many good things as it has rewards.
Peace is to be guarded above all virtues, since God is ever in peace. Let us give no place to the enemy, lest amid the crop of wheat he be able to sow tares, and, once the farmer is off his guard and cheated of the hope of long labor, the very harvest lose its expected fruits at the ripeness of the reaping; or lest the wine, sweet with age, changed into the liquor of treachery by an infusion of poured-in dregs, be thrown into disorder; or lest amid sweet honey it confound poisons more bitter than gall. Far off let contentions, far off let quarrels, far off let curses be cast; and because the tongue of the whisperer and the double-tongued is a snare of death, let each one spare his own soul, lest for his own punishment he weave for himself the bonds of death. Love peace, and all things are tranquil:
that you may reserve both rewards for us and joys for yourselves, so that the Church of God, founded in the unity of peace, may hold perfect discipline in Christ.