Commentary on Matthew 13.1–13.7

“The disciples asked him, saying, Why then do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” The disciples who had gone up with Jesus remembered what the scribes handed down about Elijah: that before the coming of Christ, Elijah would come and make ready for him the souls of those who would receive him. But the vision on the mountain, in which Elijah appeared, did not seem to agree with what had been said, since it seemed to them that Elijah had come not before Jesus but after him. That is why they say this, thinking that the scribes were lying. To this the Saviour answers, not setting aside what was handed down about Elijah, but saying that there was another coming of Elijah, before Christ, which the scribes did not recognize; in it, not knowing him, they became accessories to his being thrown into prison by Herod and to his being put to death by him, and “they did in him whatever they wished.” Then he says that the Son of Man will suffer at the hands of the same people in a manner corresponding to what they did to Elijah. The disciples asked about these things as about Elijah, and the Saviour answered; but those who heard understood that “Elijah has already come,” and what the Saviour said next, referred to John the Baptist. Let this much be said to make the passage before us clear; now let us, as far as we can, also examine the matters stored up in it. In these words “Elijah” does not seem to me to mean the soul, lest I fall into the doctrine of transmigration of souls into bodies, which is foreign to the church of God, neither handed down by the apostles nor appearing anywhere in the Scriptures. For it is contrary to the truth that the things that are seen are temporary, and that this age will come to its consummation; and also to the fulfilment of “Heaven and earth will pass away,” and “For the form of this world is passing away,” and “The heavens will perish,” with what follows it. For if, for the sake of argument, the same soul can come to be in a body twice within the order of things from the beginning to the consummation of the world, for what reason would it come to be in it? If it comes to be in a body twice because of sin, why not three times, and more often, since the punishments for this life and the sins committed in it would be paid back to it in this one way only, by transmigration? If this is granted as a consequence, there will perhaps never be a time when a soul is not transmigrated; for it will always come to dwell in the body because of its earlier sins, and so there will be no room for the passing of the world, according to which “Heaven and earth will pass away.” And if, on this hypothesis, it is granted that one who is wholly without sin will no longer come into a body through birth, how long a time do you think it will take to find one soul wholly purified and not needing transmigration? Yet even so, if one soul at a time is always removed from the fixed number of souls and no longer comes into a body, birth will at some point fail, after what are, as it were, endless ages, when the world has come down to some one or two, or a few more; after these too are perfected the world will be destroyed, because there is no one left to come into a body. But this does not please Scripture; for it knows of a multitude of sinners at the time of the world's destruction. This is clear when one examines “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” together with what we found said in Matthew: “As the days of Noah were, so will the coming of the Son of Man be; for as they were in the days of the flood,” and what follows. For the people of that time the exaction for their sins will not be by transmigration. For if they are taken while still sinning, then either they will be punished afterwards by another mode of punishment, and in that case there will be two general modes of punishment, one by transmigration and the other outside such a body (and let them state the causes and differences of these); or they will not be punished, as if those left at the consummation had cast off their sins all at once; or, which is better, there is one mode of punishment for those who have sinned in a body: to suffer, outside the state of this life, what their sins deserve. Each of these, for anyone able to look into the matter, overturns transmigration. And if the Greeks who bring in transmigration, laying it down as consistent with their views, necessarily refuse to have the world destroyed, then it is time for them too, faced with the Scriptures that plainly declare that the world will be destroyed, either to disbelieve them or to invent ingenious explanations of the account of the consummation; which, even if they wish, they will not be able to do. Further, to those who would dare to say that the world will not be destroyed we shall say this also: if the world is not destroyed but goes on without limit, God will not be one who knows all things before they come to be. But if he does, then only part by part: either he will know each thing before it comes to be, or some things, and after these again others; for things infinite by nature cannot be comprehended by knowledge, which by nature sets limits to what it knows. And it follows from this that there cannot be prophecies about all things whatsoever, since they are infinite …

I think it was necessary to spend time on examining the doctrine of transmigration because of the suspicion of some who supposed that the soul under discussion was the same in Elijah and in John, called Elijah the first time and John the second; and that it was not without God that he was called John, as is clear from the angel who appeared to Zechariah having said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard; and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will call his name John,” and from Zechariah's recovering his voice after writing on the tablet that the child who had been born was to be called John. But if the soul was Elijah, then when he was born a second time he ought to have been called Elijah, or some reason for the change of name ought to have appeared, as with Abram and Abraham, Sarai and Sarah, Jacob and Israel, Simon and Peter. And yet even so the argument would not hold in their case; for these changes of name came to the people mentioned within one and the same life. Someone might ask: if the soul is not Elijah, first in the Tishbite and second in John, what would it be in both that the Saviour called Elijah? I say that Gabriel, in his words to Zechariah, has set out what the substance was that was the same in Elijah and in John. For he says, “He will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God; and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah.” Notice that he did not say, “in the soul of Elijah,” so that transmigration might find a place, but “in the spirit and power of Elijah.” For Scripture plainly knows a difference between spirit and soul, as in “May God sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ”; and “Bless the Lord, you spirits and souls of the righteous,” which is found in Daniel according to the Seventy, sets out the difference between spirit and soul. So John was called Elijah not because of the soul but because of the spirit and the power; and it does no harm at all to the church's teaching if these were first in Elijah and later came to be in John. Also: “And the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets,” but souls of prophets are not subject to prophets; and: “The spirit of Elijah has rested upon Elisha.” But we must inquire whether the spirit of Elijah is the same as the Spirit of God that was in Elijah, or whether these are different from each other; and whether the spirit of Elijah that was in him was something extraordinary compared with the spirit of each human being that is in him. For the Apostle plainly showed that the Spirit of God, even if it is in us, is different from the spirit of each human being which is in him, where he says, “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,” and where he says, “No one among men knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him; so also no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.” Do not be surprised concerning Elijah if, just as something strange happened to him beyond all the saints on record, in that he was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind, so his spirit had something exceptional, so that it not only rested upon Elisha but also came down with John into birth; and that John, on the one hand, was “filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb,” and on the other “went before” Christ “in the spirit and power of Elijah.” For it is possible for several spirits to be in the same person, not only worse ones but also better ones. David, at any rate, asks to be strengthened by a governing spirit, and that a right spirit be renewed within him. And if, so that the Saviour might impart to us something of the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and godliness, he was also filled with the spirit of the fear of God, then these too can be understood as several better spirits in the same person. We have set this down because John went before Christ “in the spirit and power of Elijah,” so that “Elijah has already come” may be referred to the spirit of Elijah that was in John, as the three disciples who went up with him also understood that he spoke to them about John the Baptist. Now on Elisha only the spirit of Elijah rested; but John went before not in the spirit alone but also in the power of Elijah. That is why Elisha would not have been called Elijah, but John himself was Elijah. And if we must cite the Scripture from which the scribes said that Elijah must come first, hear Malachi saying, “And behold, I will send you Elijah the Tishbite,” and what follows, as far as “lest I come and strike the earth utterly.” Through these words it seems to be shown that Elijah will make ready beforehand, for the glorious coming of Christ, by certain holy words and dispositions in their souls, those who have become fit for it; for those on earth could not have borne that coming because of the surpassing glory, unless they had first been made ready by Elijah. Here too by Elijah I take not the soul of that prophet but his spirit and his power; for these are the things by which all things will be restored, so that … and when they have become able, through the restoration, to receive the glory of Christ, the Son of God, who will be seen in glory, may come to dwell among them. And if Elijah is also a kind of word, lower than the Word who was God in the beginning with God, perhaps he could come first, as a preliminary exercise, to the people being made ready by him, so that it may be prepared to receive the perfect Word. Someone might raise the question whether the spirit and the power of Elijah suffered what was done in John, and “they did in him whatever they wished.” To this it will be said, more simply, that there is nothing absurd in helpers suffering, out of love, with those whom they help; Jesus, at any rate, says, “Because of the weak I was weak, and because of the hungry I hungered, and because of the thirsty I thirsted.” But at a deeper level, that the words are not “But they did to him whatever they wished in him”; for the things that suffered were supported by the spirit and the power of Elijah, while the soul of John was in no way Elijah, and perhaps the body as well. For soul, spirit, and power are in a body in one way; but the body of the righteous is in the better things in another way, as if supported by them and depending on them. “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh but in the spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you”; for the soul of the sinner is in the flesh, but the soul of the righteous is in the spirit. Further, it might also be asked to whom “But they did in him whatever they wished” refers. To the scribes, about whom the disciples were inquiring when they said, “Why then do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” But John does not seem at all to have suffered anything from the scribes, unless perhaps that they did not believe him, or that, as we said above, they became accessories to what Herod dared against him. Another might say that “But they did in him whatever they wished” refers not to the scribes but to Herodias and her daughter and Herod, who “did in him whatever they wished.” And what follows, “So also the Son of Man is about to suffer at their hands,” would refer, on the first view, to the scribes; on the second, it too will refer to Herod and Herodias and her daughter; for Herod seems to have voted with those who wanted Jesus to die, his wife perhaps also sharing with him in the plot against him.

“And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him, kneeling before him and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son.” Those who suffer, or the relatives of those who suffer, are with the crowds. That is why, whenever Jesus has carried out the things that are above the crowds, he comes down to them, so that those who cannot go up because of the diseases that hold their souls may be helped, when he has come down to them from the loftier things of the Word. We must examine in which diseases the sufferers themselves believe and ask for their own healing, and in which others do this for them: the centurion for his servant, the royal official for his son, the ruler of the synagogue for his daughter, the Canaanite woman for her demon-possessed daughter, and now “the man kneeling before him” for his moonstruck son. Together with these you will examine when the Saviour heals of his own accord, asked by no one, as with the paralytic. For these healings, compared with one another and examined together, will present to anyone able to hear many teachings of the wisdom of God hidden in a mystery, both about the various afflictions that befall souls and about the manner of their healing.

But since our task now is to examine not all of these but the passage before us, let us see, interpreting figuratively, whom we can say the moonstruck boy is, and the father who makes the request for him, and what it means that the sufferer falls not always but often, sometimes into fire and at other times into water; and what it means that he could not be healed by the disciples, but only by Jesus himself. For it is reasonable, if every disease and every infirmity which our Saviour then healed among the people refers to the various afflictions in souls, that those paralysed in soul, who have it lying paralysed upon the body, are signified by the paralytics; that those who are blind to the things that are visible to the soul alone are signified by the blind, and are blind; and that those who are deaf to receiving the saving word are signified by the deaf. In the same way the things concerning the moonstruck boy must be examined. This affliction attacks those who suffer from it at considerable intervals, during which the one who has it seems no different from a healthy person, except at the time when the seizure is acting on him. You might find some such afflictions in certain souls, which are often thought to be healthy in self-control and the other virtues, and then sometimes are seized, as if by a kind of epilepsy, by the passions, and fall from seeming to stand, and are convulsed by the deceit of this age and by the other desires. Perhaps, then, you would not be wrong to say that such people are, so to speak, spiritually moonstruck, being thrown down by “the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places,” and that they are often ill at the times when the passions seize their soul: sometimes falling into the fire of burning passions, when, according to what is said in Hosea, they become “adulterers, like an oven burning for baking, from the flame”; and sometimes into water, when the king of all the dragons in the waters throws them down from seeming to breathe freely, into the depths of the waves of the sea of human life. The one who speaks in Wisdom will also help us with this account of the moonstruck boy, when he says of the evenness of the righteous, “The discourse of a godly man is wisdom at all times,” and of those set against them, “But the fool changes like the moon.” In such people too one may see impulses able to carry away into praise those who have not noticed their instability; so that one would say there is, as it were, a full moon in them, or nearly full. But again you might see the light that seemed to be in them imitating not the light of day but the light of night, waning until not even what seems to be light is any longer seen in them. Whether those who first gave things their names called the affliction of epilepsy “moonstruckness” for some such reason, or not, you will consider for yourself.

The father of the moonstruck boy is perhaps the angel to whom he was allotted (if indeed we must say that every human soul is placed under some angel), asking the Physician of souls, as for a son, to rescue him, since he could not be healed of the affliction by the lesser word that was in the disciples. The dumb and deaf spirit must be interpreted figuratively as the irrational impulses, even toward what seems good, which are cast out by the Word, so that what someone used to do by an irrational impulse, thought good by those who saw it, he no longer does irrationally but according to the reason of Jesus' teaching. Starting from this, Paul too said, “If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains”; for the one who has all faith, which is like a grain of mustard seed, removes not one mountain only but many like it. For faith is despised by people, and appears to be something very small and cheap; but when it finds good soil, that is, a soul well able to receive such seed, it becomes a great tree, so that none of the creatures without wings, but the birds of heaven that are winged spiritually, can nest in the branches of such faith.

Let us now attend also to the wording itself, and first inquire how one who is darkened and thrown down by an unclean, deaf, and dumb spirit is said to be moonstruck, and why “being moonstruck” takes its name from the great light in heaven, second after the sun, which God appointed “to rule the night.” Let physicians, then, give their natural explanations, since they do not think there is an unclean spirit in the case at all, but a bodily affliction; and, explaining it by nature, let them say that the moist parts in the head are moved by a certain sympathy with the light of the moon, which has a moist nature. But we, who also believe the Gospel that this disease is seen to be worked in those who suffer from it by an unclean, dumb, and deaf spirit, and who see that those who, like the enchanters of the Egyptians, are accustomed to promise the healing of such people sometimes seem to succeed with them, shall say this: perhaps, in order to slander the creatures of God, so that “unrighteousness may be spoken on high, and they may set their mouth against heaven,” this unclean spirit watches for certain phases of the moon and acts accordingly, so that, from observing that people suffer at such and such a phase of the moon, the cause of so great an evil may be thought to be not the dumb and deaf demon but the great light in heaven, appointed to rule the night, which has no part in causing such a disease among people. And all who say that the cause of everything on earth, whether general events or individual ones, lies in the positions of the stars “speak unrighteousness on high”; such people truly “have set their mouth against heaven,” saying that some of the stars work evil and others work good, though no star was made by the God of the universe to work evil, according to Jeremiah, as it is written in Lamentations: “Out of the mouth of the Lord will come good things and what is good.” It is likely that, just as this unclean spirit which produces what is called moonstruckness watches the phases of the moon, so as to act on one who for certain reasons has been handed over to it and has not made himself worthy of an angel's guard, so also other spirits and demons watch certain positions of the other stars, so that not only the moon but the other stars as well may be reviled by “those who speak unrighteousness on high.” One can, at any rate, hear the casters of nativities referring the cause of all madness and all demon-possession to the phases of the moon. That those who suffer from what is called moonstruckness sometimes fall into water is clear; that they also fall into fire is rarer, but this too happens. It is also clear that this disease is hard to heal, so that even those who have the gift of healing the demon-possessed sometimes give up in the face of it, and sometimes succeed only with fastings and prayers and greater labours. You will inquire whether, as among human beings, so also among spirits there are such afflictions, so that some of them speak and others are dumb, and some hear and others are deaf. For it will be found that, just as the cause of their being unclean lies in themselves, so also, because of their free will, they have been condemned to be dumb and deaf. For some human beings too will suffer such a condemnation, if the prophet's prayer, spoken as by the Holy Spirit, is heard, in which it is said of certain sinners, “Let the deceitful lips be made dumb.” So too, perhaps, those who have misused their hearing and received an empty report will be made deaf by him who said, “Who made the hard of hearing and the deaf?”, so that they may no longer receive an empty report.

Since the Saviour said, “O faithless and perverse generation,” he shows that wickedness has come in through perversion, having arisen contrary to nature and having made us perverse. And I think it was because the Saviour was weighed down by the whole race of people on earth on account of its wickedness, and by his stay among them, that he said, “How long shall I be with you?” We have already spoken in part on “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain,” and what follows; nonetheless these things too will be said on the passage more clearly, as it appears to us. By mountains here I think are meant the opposing powers that have been poured out in wickedness and have become great, which are, as it were, firmly lodged in certain human souls. Whenever, then, someone has all faith, so as no longer to disbelieve anything that lies in the sacred writings, and has such faith as was the faith of Abraham, who believed God to such a degree that his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness, he has all faith, as a grain of mustard seed. Then such a person will say to this mountain (I mean the dumb and deaf spirit in the one said to be moonstruck), “Move from here,” clearly from the suffering man, perhaps into the abyss, “and it will move.” And the Apostle, I think, taking his starting point from here, said with apostolic authority, “And if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains”; for the one who has all faith, which is as a grain of mustard seed, removes not one mountain only but many like it; and nothing will be impossible to one who believes to such a degree. Let us also attend to “This kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting,” so that, if ever we must busy ourselves with the healing of someone who suffers in this way, we may not adjure it, nor question it, nor speak as though the unclean spirit could hear, but, giving ourselves to prayer and fasting, may succeed as we pray for the sufferer, and by our own fasting may drive the unclean spirit away from him.