By exalting the kingdom of the north above all kingdoms of the world, therefore, Almighty God commands what is [now] the kingdom of the Romans to arise. By inspiring prophets from the south, by revealing his Christ through a Virgin, whom the prophets of the south had celebrated as proceeding from a dense and intact body (as the prophet Habakkuk said, "God…

Having been cleansed from every habit of the vices of the flesh and converted to the one true God from the worship of a multitude of shameful gods, Christ the Lord praises the twin beauty of the church of the Gentiles, both body and soul. For the first beauty of the soul is that it would know its Creator, second that it would know itself, the kind of…

In the present verse, therefore, three orders of merit are indicated to be in the church according to the following enigma. First, clearly, there are teachers, living an immaculate life. Second, there are the teachable, who imitate the lives of their teachers and burn with great desire to understand the content of the teaching and to distinguish sound…

He who may have been at the head of the flock of Christ is now made the tail of another flock, as God declared through Isaiah: "The prophet who teaches lies is the tail." Everyone among the people who is of right faith, even though he may hold a lower position or office, is beyond doubt at the head of the people by virtue of his right faith. But if he…

This sister is undoubtedly understood to be the Jewish people (a people that we said was converted to the God of heaven in the final days), who are led out of the prophesied desert before the end of the world. [They are]"ascending from the desert" of unbelief, where God is not worshiped, "leaning upon" the Word of God, "flowing with delights," known by…

Rising again with the same flesh as that with which he was buried, [Christ] stands behind the wall of our unbelief, the wall that as we sinned we built with our muddy, dirty works. About these works God spoke through the prophet Isaiah, "But your sins have made a wall between you and God." Behind the wall stands Christ the Lord, and he waits to be called…

By saying "Flee, my beloved," Christ makes heard the voice that he desires to hear. Through this, it is confessed that he alone on the earth, alone among all humankind (true man, but born in an ineffable manner), alone found to be a foreigner and pilgrim, alone fleeing the sordid lifestyle of humanity, alone ascending upon the prophesied "mountains of…

Like one body has five senses and five movements by which all of its works are performed, so also are five different personas typified in this Canticle, each through the image of a spouse, not counting the "sixty queens" and "eighty concubines" and "adolescents without number," or "daughters," and "the only child of her mother," who calls herself a…

Thus he was crowned by the blessed mother who begot him according to the flesh, Christ the King, the true Solomon. This was the day of his wedding and the day of gladness of heart, when the immaculate was joined to the stained. Our Lord Jesus Christ made the church immaculate by the touch of his body and blood and rendered it most beautiful, cleansed from…

We hear the voice of the Holy Spirit with wonder when it tells us in many passages of Scripture that the Word of God, in an ineffable motion of love, has given human nature the names of "sister," "daughter," "bride." For example, the words in Isaiah, "Listen to me, Israel my people, the race of Abraham my friend, you whom I carry in my womb." … Our mind…

The love of eternal life sprouts from the love of knowledge, as does the ability to endure persecution from the love of eternal life, and the virtue of fortitude from persecution, and the perfected glory of martyrdom from fortitude.

Spiritual preparation produces faith in the one Lord, and this faith is the opportunity for salvation, through which there is a coming to the knowledge of God through baptism and the doing of various noble works for the hope of eternal life. Their souls are compared with various choice gems, and the church is shown to be fashioned with a crown.