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It was probably in the years which immediately preceded and followed St Anthony's death, that the principle which had inspired his career, the secret of that life to which he had attained, first found expression in literature: in the work of his favourite disciple, St Macarius the Great of Egypt. (1)
Macarious had lived in closest sympathy with Anthony, and is said to have tended him during the last fifteen years of his life. Moreover, the curve of his development closely followed that of his master. For twenty years, he too lived the solitary and penitential life of an anchorite, "alone with the wild beasts" in the Desert of the Thebaid: orienting his whole personality to that inflowing Power by which he felt himself to be possessed, warring with his lower nature, subduing the machinery of sense to the purposes of spiritual consciousness, by those hard austerities which seem to our softer generation to be compounded of the offensive and the miraculous. Only when he had already become celebrated for an exceptional sanctity — when psychic equilibrium was restored, the affirmative state of spiritual illumination established in him — did the compensating instinct of service to his fellow men make itself felt. then, as Anthony came out of his ruined fort, "strong in the spirit" to teach others how they might vanquish the demons of sin and desire, so Macarius, too — urged by
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the entreaties of those disciples who perpetually broke in upon his solitude begging for spiritual help and advice — exchanged the life of complete isolation which he had loved, for that of the head of a laura, or village community of hermits, who dwelt around him in the Scetic Desert, and whom he trained in that rigorous asceticism which he regarded as the foundation of all spirituality. For these and others whom he helped and taught, he wrote the homilies and tracts upon the spiritual life process and its "graces" which we still possess: the greatest literary monument of Christian mysticism in the fourth century. In asceticism the pupil of St Anthony, in mystical thought the descendant of St paul and the Fourth Evangelist, he is the first scientific mystic of Christendom; reducing the experiences and intuitions of the New Testament giants to a clear and orderly system which is yet lit up by the vivid light of personal experience. (2)
I have said that the mystical doctrine of Macarius, like the life which he learned from Anthony the Great, was rooted in asceticism. But this asceticism was not pursued for its own sake: was neither the result of a Manichaean dualism, nor the deliberate self-torture of the fanatic, trying to propitiate an angry deity. It was a means to an end: the athletic and educative asceticism of the Christian mystic, re-ordering hios disordered loves, subduing his vagrant instincts, that all his desires, all his conative powers, may be trained towards the one Reality. Its aim, says Macarius, is the production of a "strong, clean and holy" personality; an instrument adapted to the true goal of life — the union of the soul with its
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Creator. (3) "We can only behold that which we are" — this law of knowledge, with its logical corollary that only the God-like can know God, was already clear to him.
It was, then, on the solid and practical basis of character building — long and strenuous discipline, slow growth, profound psychological adjustments — that his theory of the mystical life was raised. Macarious was neither a theologian nor a philosopher; but he was a born psychologist, with few illusions about human nature, and a singularly clear perception of those native disharmonies, those downward-falling tendencies in it which we call "sin". Though his writings show that he was familiar with many schools of thought — had read not only the Scriptures and early Fathers, but the Stoics and some at least of the Alexandrian Neoplatonists — yet he does but use the language of those thinkers to express the results of an intense personal experience. It was by the Christian method of steadfast attention to the Spiritual Order, unwearied and lovingmeditation and prayer, and for the Christian reason of disinterested love, that he grew to the full stature of the mystic life: and it was by the same means that he strove to induct other men into that universe which he describes with the certitude and enthusiasm of a citizen, as "Light", "Glory", and "True Life".
From his homilies, and the seven little tracts on "Christian perfection", we can yet deduce the exultant vision by which Macarius was possessed: the form which it took in his consciousness. His whole "system" — though it is no more self-consistent, ring-fenced and complete than any other vital and evolving thing — hangs on one central truth: itself the purest product of that mysticism of the "Kingdom" and "divine sonship" which descends from Jesus of Nazareth. This truth has an obverse and a reverse, a temporal and an eternal side. the temporal, dynamic aspect of it is the idea of man's
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soul as an infinitely mysterious and precious thing, possessed of a latent divine quality — a seed that can spring to life — and of deification as the natural goal of its development. The other aspect is the complementary idea of God, the transcendent and eternal Reality, as revealing himself to that divine-human soul and willing its union with Him: the mutual tendency or love existing between separated spirits and their Source. Like Origen, Macarius finds in the historic life of Jesus the classic "drawing together" of the human and divine, of immanent and transcendent Reality. This, first accomplished in Him, must be continued in the "New Race" which is descended from Him: and which represents a genuine fresh creation, a new type, one of Life's "saltatory ascents". He speaks in uncompromising terms of this novelty and high destiny of the Christian life. "Christians belong to another world, they are the sons of a heavenly Adam, a new generation, the children of the holy Spirit, the bright and glorious brethren of Christ, perfectly like their Father." (4)
The movement of the self towards this transcendence, its achievement of "divine humanity" is clearly understood by Macarius as an organic, not a magical process. It takes place through the birth of consciousness into, and its growth within, a new order: helped by deliberate effort, moral storm and stress. As gradually and naturally as the embryo of physicasl life emerges into the physical world, the germ of real life which is latent in human personality takes form and develops to the mystic climax of perfect participation in the Eternal World. thewhole great movement — at once a pilgrimage and atransmutastion from the enslaved and degenerate life which he calls "sin" to the free, mature, exultant life which he calls "glory" — is for Macarius the essence of the Christian idea. "As the child in the womb does not suddenly grow into a man, but gradually takes form and comes to birth, and even themn is not a pefect man, but must grow during
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many years that he may attain to manhood; so also must man grow gradually in the spiritual life, which is a state of highest wisdom and most ethereal form, until he attains at last to perfect manhood and to complete maturity." (5)
This gradual and orderly deification of human personality originates, like human life, in the conjunction of two forces; in a communication of vitality from without. the fertilising touch of Divine Energy must somehow penetrate the ramparts of self-hood and sting to life the hidden seed, man's little spark of reality (6) It begins, in fact, with the experience of mystical conversion, the group of movements and changes that together result in a "new birth". Moreover, Macarius sees with an unusual sharpness that this same dependence on the Universal Life characterises the "new creature" during the whole of its unresting and adventurous career. Its growth is conditioned by correspondences with that world of spirit which supports and feeds it. these correspondences are not automatic but are set up by the deliberate willed acts of the free personality. its attention and receptivity, its eagerness and desire, are essential to the inflow of power: "the perfect operation of the spirit is conditioned by the will of man." (7)
Thus, will and grace, the interaction of an interior and an exterior energy, are the coefficients which together work the mystical life-process. This life-process, then. is not merely a miraculous gift forced upon man from without, nor merely the gradual upgrowth of something"natural" that he has within, but the result of the interplay of both these elements: of a growth that depends, like physiocal growth, upon the perpetual, eager, voluntary absorption of new material from the surrounding
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universe, upon the feeding of the soul upon the substance of Reality. the babe sucking its mothers breast, says Patmore, is the type and prince of mystics: (8) the child of the Infinite must be nourished at the source of his being if he is to grow up to maturity. this idea, prominent in the Fourth Gospel, is central for the mysticism of Macarius. "For as the body hath not life from itself, but from without, that is, from the earth, and without those things which are external to it, cannot continue in life: so, too, the soul cannot be reborn from this world into that more living world, and take to itself wings to grow and grow up into the Spirit of God, and put on the secret heavenly clothing of beauty and holiness, without that food which is its life. for the bread of life, and rthe living water, and the wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and the oil of gladness, and the whole variety of the food of the heavenly Spirit, and the heavenly clothing of light which is of God — in these doth the eternal light of the soul consist." (9)
Note well, that it is not a sacramental act which St Macarius is here concerned to acclaim: nor should we expect this in one who had lived, as did these first Egyptian mystics of the desert, outside the sphere of all ecclesiastical observances. the first hermits were as independent of Church and sacraments as the Quakers themselves. (10) They "walked and talked with God": their ideal was a direct an unmediated intercourse with the Divine Order. The Lord Himself is the heavenly food
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and spiritual drink of the soul," says Macarius. (11) "I do not need the communion for I have seen Christ Himself today," says the hermit Valens to his disciples; (12) and this was no doubt the spirit of the true solitaries, whose loneliness would have been unendurable had it been as complete as it seemed to other men, unrelieved by that which Thomas a Kempis calls the "great craft" of heavenly conversation.
The beautiful chapters in which a Kempis tries to treach this heavenly art, this direct and loving intercourse, and describes its rapturous satisfactions, tell us far more of the secret life which was possessed by these fathers of the desert, the friendship that lit their loneliness, the character of their communion with, and "feeding upon" God, than the fantastic biographies of the Vitae Patrum: for a thousand years makes little difference to the true monastic temperament, which is conditioned by its outlook on eternity rather than by its circumstances in time. "In the wilderness the Beloved" must often have spoken thus to the heart of the lover, "as it were a bashful lover that his sweetheart before men entreats not." (13) In the long still days and watchful nights, a Presence drew near, and became the strength and refrshment of the solitary's soul.
"Shut thy door upon thee, and call unto Jesu thy love," says a Kempis. "Dwell with Him in thy cell, for thou shalt not find elsewhere so great peace . . . . When Jesu is nigh, all goodness is nigh, and nothing seemeth hard; but when Jesu is not nigh, all things are hard. When Jesu speaketh not within, the comfort is of little price; but if Jesu speak one word, there is found great comfort. . . . To be without Jesu is a grievous hell, and to be with Jesu is a sweet Paradise. If Jesu be with thee, there may no enemy hurt thee. . . . It is a great craft for a man to be conversant with
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Jesu; and to know how to hold Jesu is a great prudence." (14)
Here, the intercourse of the soul with the suopersensual takes its most intensely personal form. The "feeding," which Macarius describes is the completing opposite of such an experience. it is the impersonal aspect of man's most intimate communion with the Divine Order. His constant use of Christological language, his free movement between the ideas of Personality and Grace, show that for him, as for most great mystics, these were but two ways of apprehending one Reality. For him in fact, as for Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine, heavenly contemplation is the "food of the full grown spirit," the medium of its refreshment and sustenance, of an actual appropriation of new energy: yet, in that act of feeding, it is the personal Christ of whom he conceives, in true Johannine fashio, as mystically assimilated and knit up into the substance of the soul.
The new-born life of Spirit, thus sustained from without by its "feeding" on Reality, enters at once on the process of growth. this process is to Macarius so real, so objective, that he conceives of it not only as a spiritual, but in a sense as a physical occurrence. the gradual "change", from "glory to glory" into the image of God which he accepts from Paul as the essence of the Christian psychology, becomes a change in the substance, the constitution, of the soul: because he regards the soul, with the Stoic philosophers, as something not wholly immaterial, but made of a fine, ethereal stuff. the mystical life process, then, signifies the active, steady transmutation of this substance from its original "density" to purest spirituality, under the purgative action of the Divine Fire, which cleanses, hreals and renews it: and ends in a personal and physcial approximation of the re-made, etherealised, transmuted, soul to the spiritual being of Christ (15) —
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an elaboration of Paul's most splendid dream, made under the influence of Stoic philosophy.
Such a process means for consciousness a searching moral readjustment, a destruction of old paths, a cutting of new: the steadfast endurance of that which St John of the Cross called "the dark night of loving fire" — in a word, Purgation of the most drastic kind. it means for a mystic of that time and place, a thorough-going asceticism; the outward and visible sign of this interior and painful change in the direction of life, this deliberate war declared on old ideals. As a corn of wheat hidden in the earth slowly ripens during the storms and hardships of winter, so Macarius — who loves, as do all great mystics the close parallels between "nature" and"grace" — describes the seed of new life as slowly ripening amongst the turmoils, deprivations and miseries of this season of stress. It then, he says puts forth four little shoots, which mark the steady march of its development: faith, renunciation, charity and humility. These are the crescent indications of the unfolding of the mystic type. Often enough, macarius and his disciples must have watched this natural process in the laura, where each hermit grew a patch of wheat sufficient for his own needs.
If it be faithful to the harsh and storm-swept career of sacrifice and love, the growing spirit passes from the period of stress to a spring-like state of mystical elevation: from Purgation to Illumination. "Like metals, which, cast into the fire, lose their natural hardness, and the longer they remain in the furnace are more and more softened by the flame," he says, under another image, its resistances to grace having been burned away; the hard edges are melted, every part of it is made molten and incandescent by the Fire of Love. (16) hence, instead of the painful burning of the Fire, the agony of collision between two inharmonious orders of reality, it experiences that same onslaught of spirit, that same inflowing dower
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of grace and truth, as the irradiations of the heavenly Light.
This image of the Divine vitality successively experienced as a painful Fire and a heavenly Light — of the purging of the soul as in a furnace; the anguish through whicn it passes to that condition of harmony in which, "itself becoming fire," the flame that had been in its onslaught a torment to the separated will becornes to the transmuted creature an indwelling radiance, a source of joy and life; all this is found again and again in the later Christian mystics. Whatever be its ultimate origin, or the exact course of its descent, they all recognised it as a faithtul picture of the experiences which they had known: and hence their declarations may help us to understand something of the spiritual adventures which Macarius here struggles to describe.
"As a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature," says St. Bernard, "or as the air radiant with sunbeams seems not so much to be illuminated as to be Light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away, by some unspeakable transmutation, into the Will of God."(17) "The naked will," says Ruysbroeck, "is transformed by the Eternal Love as fire by fire." (18) "We are like coals," he says in another place, "burned on the hearth of Infinite Love." (19) "Souls thrown into the furnace of My charity," says the Divine Voice to St. Catherine of Siena, "the whole of them being inflamed in Me, are like a brand which is not wholly consumed in the furnace, so that no one can take hold of it or extinguish it, because it has become fire.'' (20)
For St. Catheri.ne of Genoa, too, the love of God was felt in terms of fire and light: and this conception is the basis of her celebrated doctrine of Purgatory. "This holy soul, yet in the flesh, found herself placed in the purgatory of God's burning love, which consumed and
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purified her from whatever she had to purify, in order that after passing out of this life she might enter at once into the immediate presence of God her love. By means of this furnace of love she understood how the souls of the faithful are placed in purgatory to get rid of all the rust and stain of sin that in this life was left unpurged. . . The souls are covered with a rust, the rust of sin, which is gradually burned away by the fire of purgatory. The more it is burned away, the more they respond to God their true Sun: their happiness increases as the rust falls off, and lays them open to the Divine Light." (21)
Here we have the exact psychological situation described by Macarius. In the work of a later mystic, St. John of the Cross, its implications are made yet more clear. The Fire and the Light are, of course, two ways of experiencing one Reality, which brings torment or rapture according to the temper and purity of the receptive soul. "When the Divine Light beats upon the soul," he says, "it makes it suffer, because the purgative and loving knowledge, or Divine Light, is to the soul which it is purifying in order to unite it perfectly to itself as fire is to fuel which it is transmuting into itself." Because the spirit is opaque and resistant, it feels this Divine Energy as a "dark night of loving fire"; but when it has been purified . . . it will have eyes to discern the blessings of the Divine Light." (22)
For the soul of the lover there is a subtle joy even in the anguish of the Fire. It is a "flame of living love," says John of the Cross again: and its pain is like the pain of lovers, strangely compounded of anguish and delight.
"O burn that burns to heal!
O more than pleasant wound!
And O soft hand, O touch most delicate,
That dost new life reveal,
That dost in grace abound.
And, slaying, dost from life to death translate.
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O lamps of fire that shined
With so intense a light
That those deep caverns where the senses live,
Which were obscure and blind,
Now with strange glories bright
Both heat and light to his beloved give," (23)
The spiritual Fire and Light, then, shining ever more clearly within the purified soul which they have raised to their own tension and temperature, bring it to that state of perfect self-knowledge, in which its own situation within the transcendental order becomes clear to it; enable it to apprehend the unspeakable revelations of God; and even. confer on it the ecstatic vision of the Divine Nature.(24) For Macarius, as for the Fourth Evangelist, Light and Life are identical: they are interchangeable names for the primal Reality manifested in the Christ-Logos, and now experienced by human consciousness. He leaves us in no doubt as to the all-round enhancement of life, the rich variety of response towards every level of existence, every aspect of the Being of God, made possible to those who are irradiated by this Incomprehensible Light: the balanced and Christ-like career of charity and contemplation which awaits them.
"Those who have become the true children of God and are re-born of the Spirit, . . . these receive from the Spirit of God many and various favours and activities. Sometimes, like guests at a royal feast, they are satiated with indescribable enjoyments; sometimes they are fllled with a divine and intimate delight, like that of the bride when she rejoices in the presence of the bridegroom . . . sometimes the communication of the divine mysteries induces in them a holy inebriation. Sometimes they are seized by a lively compassion at the sight of human misery, and, in the ardour of their charity, they
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give themselves wholly to prayer and tears, begging the Divine Mercy for the whole human race . . . as a brave
soldier puts on the armour of his king, rushes into the battle, and returns victorious; so we sometimes see the spiritual man put on the armour of the Spirit, and attack the enemies of the soul and crush them under his feet. At other times, he immerses himself in a profound silence; and then his soul enjoys great peace, and tastes in its quietude of ineffable delights. Or else the Holy Spirit illuminates his intelligence, and communicates to him a supernal wisdom, and high knowledge which human speech cannot express. Thus does divine grace cause the incessant alternations of peace and of activity" (25)
Such a career of inspired activities, however — irradiated by the Divine Spirit, but not yet one with it — is for Macarius only a half-way house. In very different language he describes the state of those "deified " selves in whom has been accomplished the "spiritual marriage " of the Logos and the soul. These are the utterly surrendered spirits whom "the heavenly charioteer '' drives wherever He will; and who are themselves so completely transmuted to another glory and power by the action of the divine Fire and Light, that they became centres which reflect something of that absolute Power and Glory to the world. "The soul," he says in the great homily which sums up his whole mystic doctrine, "that, prepared bv the Holy Spirit to be His seat and habitation, and found worthy to participate in His light, is illuminated by the beauty of His ineffable glory, becomes all light, all face, all eyes,(26) nor is there any part of her that is not
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full of these spiritual eyes of light. That is to say, no part of her is in shadow, but she is all entirely wrought into light and spirit and is all full of eyes, having neither an anterior nor a posterior part; but appears as it were all face because of the ineffable beauty of the glory of the Light of Christ, that hath descended on her and dwells with her. And as the sun is altogether of one likeness, having no hinder nor imperfect part, but is all throughout resplendent with light, and is all light without least variety of part; or even as fire, that is to say the light of fire, is all like unto itself, neither hath in itself before nor behind, greater nor less, so too the soul that is perfectly illuminated by the ineffable beauty of the glory of the light of the face of Christ, and perfectly partakes of the Holy Spirit, and is adjudged worthy to be made the dwelling-place and seat of God, becomes all eyes, all light, all face, all glory and all spirit. . . . The Cherubim, then, are driven, not whither they would themselves go, but the way in which He who holds the reins directs. Which way so ever He is willing, there they go, and He carries them. For it saith "Manus enim erat sub illis." Thus the holy souls are led and directed on their way by the spirit of Christ, who leads them where He chooses; sometimes into heavenly contemplation, sometimes to bodily activities. Where His pleasure is, there do they serve Him. . . . If therefore thou art become the throne of God, and the Heavenly Charioteer hath seated Himself within thee, and thy soul is wholly become a spiritual eye, and is wholly made into light; if too thou art nourished with the heavenly food of that spirit and hast drunk of the Living Water, and hast put on the secret vesture of light — if thine inward man has experienced all these things and is established in abundant faith, lo! thou livest indeed the Eternal Life, and thy soul rests even in this present time with the Lord. Lo! thou art an adept, and hast verily received from the Lord these things that thou mayest live the true life. But if thou art conscious of
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none of these things, lament and grieve and mourn, because as yet thou art not made a sharer of the eternal and spiritual riches and hast not received true life."(27)
We may observe in this passage a synthesis of all the main elements of Christian mysticism: and first, how completely it is governed, not by the idea of vision, but by the idea of life. "To live the true life" — this it is which St. Macarius has learned in the desert; this total surrender of the individual to the universal purpose, which makes the mature soul like to the swift-moving Cherubim, seats of the Divine Wisdom, who "go not whither they would," but are driven by the will of the Spirit that holds the reins. At the end of the Mystic Way he finds himself, like Paul, to be God-possessed; subject to a "secondary personality of a superior type," an indwelling power that drives him where it will. "The hand of the charioteer is under his wings." Even in this present life, then, he knows that such high levels of response to the Transcendent Order are possible for the spirit of man. They represent the dynamic aspect of that supernal life and consciousness which he calls "glory": the divinely governecl progress, the "movement which is life itself," and which balances that fruition of Reality — "all joy, all delight, all exultation, all love" — in which the deified soul feels itself to be "immersed in the Spirit, as a stone at the bottom of the ocean is immersed in the sea." (28)
Thus the end to which the mysticism of Macarius tends, and for which he has endured hunger, thirst and utter loneliness, the trials and uncertainties of the spiritual adolescence, and heroic struggles with the flesh, is no selfish satisfaction. It achieves the paradoxical combination of humility and ecstacy, of complete surrender and energetic love. Its aim is identical with the supreme ambition of the German mystic: "to be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man " — an absolute dedicatian to the purposes of the Infinite Life. The
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mystic, like the Cherub, is submitted to the secret guidance of the Spirit; yet his individual activity remains. He is "all eyes and all wings" — all vision and all energy; "all light and all face" — reflecting the splendour of Reality to other men. To this career his new birth, his long endurance of the heavenly Fire, his steady upward growth, his participation in the heavenly Light, his final transmutation into "light and spirit," have been directed. Such an ideal has more affinity with Gethsemane than with Alexandria, for it makes of self-naughting man's highest good: Non rnea voluntas, sed tua fiat.
Macarius, in fact, looks back to Paul and John, and through them to Jesus. These are the real sources of his doctrine of true life, and he is the real inheritor of their tradition; the channel through whom the " mounting flood " of their spirit passed on its way to the great mystics of the West. St. Basil the Great was his friend; and from the Rule of Basil came ultimately the Rule of Benedict, and thence the whole mediaeval theory of the religious life, with its definite system of character-building, its eager pursuit of perfection, its balanced career of contemplation and work. Hence Macarius the Coptic hermit, rather than Dionysius the Neoplatonist, is the vital link between East and West in the chain of the Christian Mystics; a true thoroughfare of the Spirit of New Life.
Notes
1. Not to be confused with St Macarius of Alexandria, also a "father of the desert."
2. The life and works of Macarius are in Migne, Pat Graec., T. XXXIV. the chief sources for his biography are the Historia Lausiatica of Palladius and the Historia Monachorum of Rufinus. the best account of his mysticism is by J. Stoffels, Die Mystiche Theologie Makarius des Aegypters und die altesten Ansatze christlicher Mystik (1908). I am much indebted to this excellent monograph.
3.Stoffels, op. cit., p. 6
4. Hom. VIII
5. Hom XV. 41. The birth imagery of Macarius, which is worked out in some passages with minute details of a physical kind, is reproduced by Dionysius the Areopagite (De Eccles. Hier., cap. 3. 6) and hence became the common property of later mystics.
6. Hom. II. 3 and IV. 6 and 7.
7. Hom. XXXVII. 10
8. The Rod, the Root and the Flower, "Aurea Dicta", 128
9. Hom. I. 11
10. Hannay, The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism, pp. 115-122. With the growth of the "lauras", or hermit villages, however, the need of a regular sacramental dispensation made itself felt; for here, many came to attempt the religious life who would never have dared the terrors of a complete solitude. hence, macarius himself, appatrently ion the advice of St Anthony, was ordained a priest in the year 340 in order that he might minister to the community of disciples which had gathered about his cell (op. cit., p. 120).
11. Hom. XIV. 3.
12. Vitae Patrum, V. 24
13. Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, Bk. II. cap. 7.
14. De Imit. Christi., Lib. I. cap. 20 and Lib II. cap. 8.
15. Stoffels, p. 162.
16. Hom IV. 14.
17. De diligendo Deo, cap.10.
18. Samuel (Hello. p. 201).
19. De Septem gradibus amoris, cap 14.
20. Dialogo, cap 78.
21. Trattato di Purgatorio, caps. 1 and 2.
22. Noche Escura del alma, Lib II. caps. 9, 10, 12, 13.
23. St John of the Cross, Llama de amor viva, translated by Arthur Symons.
24. Stoffels, op. cit., p. 147.
25. Hom. XVIII. 7-9.
26. The reference is of course to Ezekiel's vision of the Cherubim, which Macarius interpreted in true Alexandrian fashion as an allegory of the glorified soul. "And their whole body, and their backs and their hands and their wings . . . were full of eyes . . . and the glory of the God of Israel was over them above. . . . Every one had four faces apiece, and every one had four wings; and the likeness of the hands of a man was under their wings" (Ezek. x. 12, 19, 21).
27. Hom. I. 2.
28. Hom XVIII. 10.
