Symposium (The Banquet of the Ten Virgins)

Contents

Reading pages: 0–1.5 · 2.1–2.7 · 3.1–3.14 · 4.1–5.8 · 6.1–8.1 · 8.2–8.13 · 8.14–8.17 · 9.1–9.5 · 10.1–11.2 · 12

1. 0Gregorion begins to tell Euboulion how Theopatra and nine other virgins, guests of Arete (Virtue) in a garden like paradise, were each asked to give a speech in praise of virginity, beginning with Marcella.
2. 1.1Marcella praises virginity as the church's finest flower, which needs a noble soul, constant study of Scripture as preserving salt, and inner as well as bodily purity.
3. 1.2God educated humanity by stages, from marriage of siblings, through monogamy and fidelity, to continence and finally virginity.
4. 1.3Circumcision ended marriage of siblings; the prophets and the Wisdom books then led from polygamy to one wife and on toward continence.
5. 1.4Virginity was reserved for Christ to teach: taking our form, he became the model by which humanity, made in God's image, may attain his likeness.
6. 1.5Christ is the chief virgin; Revelation's 144,000 virgins who follow the Lamb are few compared with the countless saints; Marcella hands over to Theophila.
7. 2.1Theophila replies that virginity does not abolish childbearing: God is still creating human beings through procreation until their appointed number is complete.
8. 2.2Adam's trance foreshadows the rapture of procreation; since God still forms each human being, it is rash to despise childbearing or forbid marriage.
9. 2.3Marcella objects: if God forms every child, is he at work even in children born of adultery?
10. 2.4Theophila answers with a parable: a hidden craftsman shapes all the clay brought to him, even clay wrongly put in another's opening, but punishes the one who put it there.
11. 2.5The house is the hidden process of generation and the craftsman is God's creative power; seed, like any material, is not evil in itself, but adulterers who misuse it are to be punished.
12. 2.6God himself forms every child in the womb; even children of adultery are given guardian angels and will accuse parents who exposed them.
13. 2.7God alone gives the immortal soul; childbearing is good and virginity better, and the church, like a meadow, is adorned with both; Thalia rises to speak next.
14. 3.1Thalia, speaking third, argues that Paul reads the union of Adam and Eve as a figure of Christ and the church, not only of procreation.
15. 3.2Paul's varied style moves from plain to lofty; the literal sense of Genesis stands, but its higher sense about Christ and the church must also be given.
16. 3.3Objection: how can sinful, mortal Adam be a likeness of the sinless Son of God?
17. 3.4Thalia argues that Christ is Adam himself, re-formed: the pre-existent Word united himself with the first man, born anew of a virgin as Adam was formed from virgin earth.
18. 3.5Like the potter's spoiled vessel, Adam was remade in the virgin's womb, united with the Word and made indestructible; the parable of the lost sheep teaches the same.
19. 3.6The Shepherd left the angelic hosts, the ninety-nine sheep, to recover man, and defeated the devil through the very man the devil had overcome.
20. 3.7Man stands between life and death and becomes what he inclines to; in Christ he became a harmonious instrument on which the Lord sings the resurrection.
21. 3.8Christ is the new Adam: from his side, in the trance of his passion, God forms the church, his bride, who through baptism and teaching bears new children to virtue.
22. 3.9Paul, born again through Ananias's baptism, became in turn a mother in labour with believers; so Adam and Eve figure Christ and the church.
23. 3.10Paul applied Genesis to Christ and the church to deprive the licentious of their pretext, who used “increase and multiply” to excuse their lust.
24. 3.11Paul first sets out that it is good not to touch a woman, then allows marital relations to those who cannot control themselves, lest they fall into sexual immorality.
25. 3.12Paul's permission of marital relations is a concession, not a command; likewise he allows a widowed person to remarry only as better than burning, as a sick man may be allowed food on a fast day.
26. 3.13Paul permits marriage for virgins without sin, but only by human concession; his counsel as a whole leans toward virginity as freeing one to please the Lord.
27. 3.14Virginity is God's gift; Paul permits those who cannot sustain it to marry, but those who freely keep it do better; Theopatra is next to speak.
28. 4.1Theopatra, the fourth speaker, sets out to praise chastity as the brightest of Christ's gifts.
29. 4.2God sent chastity to anchor souls against the flood of corruption; as Pharaoh drowned the boys, the devil seeks to destroy the soul's rational offspring.
30. 4.3In Psalm 137 the pure souls hang their bodies, the “instruments,” on the willow of chastity so that the rivers of Babylon, this turbulent life, cannot sweep them away.
31. 4.4The willows are self-control; singing the Lord's song in a foreign land means profaning the gospel or reading the law in an earthly sense.
32. 4.5The virgins, who set their hopes on heaven, are the heavenly Jerusalem that God promises to set first at the beginning of joy after the resurrection.
33. 4.6The virgin's breast-band in Jeremiah is love of God, which binds the soul to chastity; Arete calls on Thallousa next.
34. 5.1Thallousa, the fifth speaker, argues that the “great vow” of Numbers 6 is virginity, the offering of oneself wholly to God.
35. 5.2One must dedicate oneself wholly; Abraham's three three-year-old animals and the three night watches of Luke 12 stand for keeping chaste through childhood, prime, and old age.
36. 5.3Keep the lamp of faith lit and bear the yoke from youth, letting self-control rein in the senses; thus one is wholly dedicated to God.
37. 5.4True dedication means consecrating every member, mouth, tongue, eyes, ears, hands, feet, and heart, to the Lord; this is the great vow.
38. 5.5The Nazirite's abstinence from wine means that the virgin must shun the devil's vine, whose fruit is lust, violence, and every passion, and cling to Christ, the true vine.
39. 5.6The virgin must avoid not only wine but everything intoxicating, including luxury and adornment; the chaste are God's golden altar of incense in the holy of holies.
40. 5.7The tabernacle was a shadow of the church, and the church is an image of the heavenly city, which we shall see face to face after the resurrection.
41. 5.8The bronze altar is the elders and widows; the golden altar within is the virgins, pure as gold, whose prayers rise like incense.
42. 6.1Agathe, the sixth speaker, says that every soul is created beautiful, in the image of the Only-begotten, and that the devil and his angels seek to defile it.
43. 6.2The soul's beauty is kept by virginity; the ten virgins of the parable are believers, the wise truly practising virginity and the foolish only professing it.
44. 6.3The five wise virgins are the five senses kept pure; the flesh is a five-lighted lamp carried to Christ at the resurrection, and the oil is wisdom and righteousness.
45. 6.4The lamp of the old law gave way to the Sun of righteousness; the parable's delay, sleep, midnight, and cry signify the time before Christ's coming, death, the Antichrist's reign, and the resurrection trumpet.
46. 6.5Agathe ends with the virgins' reward, betrothal to the Word and a place in Christ's heavenly chorus, and urges the young to fill their lamps and meet the Bridegroom.
47. 7.1Procilla, the seventh speaker, lets Christ himself be the witness to chastity, as the Bridegroom of the Song of Songs who praises the virgin soul as his bride, a sealed garden.
48. 7.2Christ loves the soul's inner eye of understanding and its inner adornment of virtues, not bodily beauty or jewels.
49. 7.3All believers will be rewarded in ranks, but the virgins, whose lifelong contest is like martyrdom, are the first rank, the one chosen dove of the Song among queens and concubines.
50. 7.4In a higher sense, the queens are the righteous before the flood, the concubines the prophets after it, who conceived faith from the Word before the church, his bride.
51. 7.5The sixty queens are the righteous from Adam to Noah, close to the six days of creation, who knew God without further laws.
52. 7.6The eighty concubines are the prophets from Abraham, whose circumcision on the eighth day foretold the spiritual “eighth day” of resurrection; the countless maidens are the righteous multitudes.
53. 7.7The church, founded on the apostles, surpasses them all, for she has seen and heard what the prophets longed for.
54. 7.8Alternatively, the bride and dove is Christ's own sinless flesh, which he took up to the Father's right hand, the queen of Psalm 45.
55. 7.9Psalm 45 shows the virgins following the bride into the King's presence, second only to her.
56. 8.1Thecla, the eighth speaker and a disciple of Paul, explains virginity as nearness to God, which gives the soul wings to rise above the world's seductions.
57. 8.2Virgins, winged by their longing for the heavenly meadows, despise earthly goods and even torture, and at death angels escort them first to their reward.
58. 8.3In heaven the virgins behold and eat from the living trees of the virtues themselves, as Adam once did in paradise.
59. 8.4Thecla urges the virgins to endure trials like the moon behind passing clouds, and introduces the vision of the woman and the dragon in Revelation 12.
60. 8.5The woman clothed with the sun is the church, our mother, the Jerusalem of Isaiah 60, clothed with the light of the Word and crowned with stars.
61. 8.6The moon under the church's feet is the faith of the baptized; like a mother she gives new birth in baptism, and the newly baptized shine with new light each Pascha.
62. 8.7The male child of Revelation is not Christ, already born long before, but the redeemed whom the church bears in baptism, as Isaiah's Zion bears a male.
63. 8.8The church bears a “male” in that Christ is formed in each baptized believer, who thus becomes a “christ,” an anointed one, by the Spirit.
64. 8.9“Today I have begotten you” means that the eternal Son is born in the world, and in each believer, when he becomes known; so the church always bears Christ in the baptized.
65. 8.10The dragon is the devil, who cannot seize the reborn, and the third of the stars he drags down are the heresies, each erring about one Person of the Trinity.
66. 8.11The church's wilderness is Arete's garden, and the 1,260 days are the knowledge of the Trinity: a thousand for the Father, two hundred for the Spirit, and sixty, from the perfect number six, for Christ.
67. 8.12Winged by virginity, the church escapes the dragon; the virgins, armed with God's armour, should face the many-headed beast boldly, since Christ has already defeated it.
68. 8.13The dragon's seven heads are vices to be conquered for seven crowns and its ten horns the sins against the ten commandments; humans are free and not ruled by the stars, and Thecla turns to refute astrology.
69. 8.14Thecla describes the astrologers' spherical cosmos and zodiac and mocks its mythical origins: if the signs came from later myths, earlier people lived without any fate of birth.
70. 8.15If birth-fate came from later constellations, earlier people had none, yet lived better and longer; and stars that caused human evils would be more wretched than humans.
71. 8.16A series of arguments against astrological fate: the stars and God cause no evil, laws presuppose freedom, and blame and praise would be meaningless if fate made people what they are.
72. 8.17Thecla concludes that good and evil lie in our own choice; Gregorion and Euboulion praise her and recall her deeds among the martyrs, and turn to the last two speakers.
73. 9.1Tysiane, the ninth speaker, reads the feast of Tabernacles as a figure of the resurrection in the seventh millennium, when the faithful will rejoice with God in the new creation.
74. 9.2The law is a shadow, the gospel an image, and the resurrection the truth; God allowed death so that sin might die with the body, which will rise immortal.
75. 9.3The “beautiful fruit” of Tabernacles is not the citron but Christ, the tree of life, and faith in him; without it one cannot share the first resurrection.
76. 9.4The branches of Tabernacles are faith, study of Scripture, love, righteousness, and above all chastity, which virgins bear in full and chaste married people in smaller measure.
77. 9.5As Israel went from Egypt to the booths and then to the promised land, the faithful rise to celebrate the thousand-year rest with Christ and then pass into heaven; Domnina is called on last.
78. 10.1Domnina, the last speaker, argues that chastity, taught by Christ, did what the law could not: it overthrew the devil's reign over humanity.
79. 10.2Jotham's fable of the trees choosing a king foretells four stages of God's law: the fig for paradise, the vine for Noah, the olive for Moses, and the bramble for the apostles' teaching of chastity.
80. 10.3The bramble, the same plant as the chaste-tree, stands for chastity; Elijah found refuge under it, and the earlier laws given to Adam and Noah failed to save humanity.
81. 10.4When the Mosaic law also failed, God sent chastity as the fourth and final law; after it comes only judgment and fire.
82. 10.5The devil counterfeited the fig and the vine, but under the reign of chastity the true vine (Christ) and fig (the Spirit) bear fruit, as Joel, Isaiah, Paul, and Micah show.
83. 10.6Zechariah's two olive trees are Christ and the Holy Spirit, whose branches are the law and the prophets; chastity now lets us receive their full fruit and frees from the sentence of death.
84. 11.1Arete judges that true chastity governs every member and the heart, not only the body, and crowns all the speakers, giving Thecla the greater crown.
85. 11.2Led by Thecla, the virgins sing an alphabetical hymn to Christ the Bridegroom, with the refrain “I keep myself pure for you,” recalling chaste figures from Abel to Mary and ending in praise of the Father.
86. 12In the closing dialogue, Euboulion argues against Gregorion that the soul that feels desire and masters it is better than one that never feels it; they agree to continue another day.