Miscellanies 7.18.109

Having shown, then, a small opening, as it were, “to the lovers of the sight of truth,” from the law about sacrifices, concerning the common run of the Jews and concerning the heresies, which are mystically set apart as unclean from the divine church, let us bring the discourse to a close. For Scripture declares clean and acceptable to God those sacrificial animals that divide the hoof and chew the cud, since the righteous make their journey to the Father and to the Son through faith (for this is the steadiness of those that divide the hoof); they “meditate night and day” on “the oracles of God” and chew them over in the storehouse of learning in their soul; this …, which is also the exercise of knowledge, the law expresses allegorically as the chewing of the cud by the clean animal. But whatever has neither of these, or only one of them, it sets apart as unclean. For instance, those that chew the cud but do not divide the hoof signify most of the Jews, who have the oracles of God in their mouths, but do not have the faith and the footing, resting on the truth, that carries one through the Son to the Father. Hence such creatures are a slippery kind, since they are not cloven-footed and do not rest on the double support of faith. “For no one,” it says, “knows the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son reveals him.” And conversely, those too are unclean that divide the hoof but do not chew the cud. For these point to the heretics, who stand upon the name of the Father and the Son, but are too weak to work out and grind fine the exact clarity of the oracles, and who, moreover, pursue the works of righteousness roughly and not precisely, if they pursue them at all.