of the serpent to eat dust typifies the sin of curiosity,
since in eating dust he "penetrates the obscure and shadowy"; and that
Noah's ark was "pitched within and without with pitch" to show the
safety of the Church from the leaking in of heresy.

Still another exploit--one at which the Church might well have stood
aghast--was his statement that the drunkenness of Noah prefigured the
suffering and death of Christ. It is but just to say that he was not
the original author of this interpretation: it had been presented long
before by St. Cyprian. But this was far from Augustine's worst. Perhaps
no interpretation of Scripture has ever led to more cruel and persistent
oppression, torture, and bloodshed than his reading into one of the most
beautiful parables of Jesus of Nazareth--into the words "Compel them
to come in"--a warrant for religious persecution: of all unintended
blasphemies since the world began, possibly the most appalling. Another
strong man follows to fasten these methods on the Church: St. Gregory
the Great. In his renowned work on the book of Job, the Magna Moralia,
given to the world at the end of the sixth century, he lays great stress
on the deep mystical meanings of the statement that Job had seven sons.
He thinks the seven sons typify the twelve apostles, for "the apostles
were selected through the sevenfold grace of the Spirit; moreover,
twelve is produced from seven--that is, the two parts of seven, four
and three, when multiplied together give twelve." He also finds deep
significance in the number of the apostles; this number being evidently
determined by a multiplication of the number of persons in the Trinity
by the number of quarters of the globe. Still, to do him justice, it
must be said that in some parts of his exegesis the strong sense which
was one of his most striking characteristics crops out in a way very
refreshing. Thus, referring to a passage in the first chapter of Job,
regarding the oxen which were ploughing and the asses which were feeding
beside them, he tells us pithily that these typify two classes of
Christians: the oxen, the energetic Christians who do the work of the
Church; the asses, the lazy Christians who merely feed.(466)

(466) For Origen, see the De Principiis, book iv, chaps. i-vii et seq.,
Crombie's translation; also the Contra Celsum, vol. vi, p. 70; vol.
vii, p. 20, etc.; also various citations in Farrar. For Hilary, see his
Tractatus super Psalmos, cap. ix,