(IBID.) 'Even if a man shall have spoken, he will be swallowed up.' (67) For a man to speak of God is for a blind man to discourse of light. — Everything that swallows something, drawing it inward, hides it from the eyes of the beholders, and snatches into the depth the thing that could be seen upon the surface. Therefore man, when he keeps silent about God, seems to be something through the reason in which he was created. But if he begins to speak of God, at once it is shown how much he is nothing, because he is swallowed up by the immensity of that greatness, and, as if snatched into the depth, he is hidden, because, desiring to speak of the ineffable, he is gulped down by the very narrowness of his own ignorance.
For flesh speaks of spirit, the circumscribed spirit of the uncircumscribed, the creature of the Creator, the temporal of the eternal, the mutable of the immutable, the mortal of the life-giver; and since, placed in darkness, he does not know the inner light as it is, man, desiring to discourse of eternity, being blind, speaks of light. If therefore a man shall have spoken, he will be swallowed up, because if a man seeks to speak out eternity as it is, he withdraws from himself even that which he perceives of it, even in silence. But behold, eternity then truly became known to men, when, revealed to them by the humanity it had taken on, it showed itself in a manner they could yet endure. Which, because it is rightly added concerning these same men: