On the Faith ("The Pearl")

¹ Whereunto are you like? Let your stillness speak to one that hears; with silent mouth speak with us: for whoso hears the stammerings of your silence, to him your type utters its silent cry concerning our Redeemer.

Your mother is a virgin of the sea; though he took her not [to wife]: she fell into his bosom, though he knew her not; she conceived you near him, though he did not know her. Do thou, that are a type, reproach the Jewish women that have you hung upon them. You are the only progeny of all forms which art like to the Word on High, Whom singly the Most High begot. The engraven forms seem to be the type of created things above. This visible offspring of the invisible womb is a type of great things. Your goodly conception was without seed, and without wedlock was your pure generation, and without brethren was your single birth.

Our Lord had brethren and yet not brethren, since He was an Only-Begotten. O solitary one, you type exact of the Only-Begotten! There is a type of yours in the crown of kings, [wherein] you have brothers and sisters.

Goodly gems are your brethren, with beryls and unions as your companions: may gold be as it were your kinsman, may there be unto the King of kings a crown from your well-beloved ones! When you came up from the sea, that living tomb, you cried out. Let me have a goodly assemblage of brethren, relatives, and kinsmen. As the wheat is in the stalk, so you are in the crown with princes: and it is a just restoration to you, as if of a pledge, that from that depth you should be exalted to a goodly eminence. Wheat the stalk bears in the field; you the head of the king upon his chariot carries about.

O daughter of the water, who hast left sea, wherein you were born, and art gone up to the dry land, wherein you are beloved: for men have loved and seized and adorned themselves with you, like as they did that Offspring Whom the Gentiles loved and crowned themselves withal.

It is by the mystery of truth that Leviathan is trodden down of mortals: the various put him off, and put on Christ. In the sacrament of oil did the Apostles steal You away, and came up. They snatched their souls from his mouth, bitter as it was.

Your Nature is like a silent lamb in its sweetness, of which if a man is to lay hold, he lifts it in a crucial form by its ears, as it was on Golgotha. He cast out abundantly all His gleams upon them that looked upon Him.

2. Shadowed forth in your beauty is the beauty of the Son, Who clothed Himself with suffering when the nails passed through Him. The awl passed in you since they handled you roughly, as they did His hands; and because He suffered He reigned, as by your sufferings your beauty increased.

And if they showed no pity upon you, neither did they love you: still suffer as you might, you have come to reign! Simon Peter showed pity on the Rock; whoso has smitten it, is himself thereby overcome; it is by reason of Its suffering that Its beauty has adorned the height and the depth.