(4) The Manna, Exod.
xvi.
Honorius: col. 904, 'The Lord rained down manna from
heaven for the children of Israel, and forbade that any should be saved for the
morrow. He was willing to give it anew on the morrow, but the manna. was kept,
and it brought forth worms. By the manna Mary is meant, of whom the worm Christ
was born. For he himself saith : I am a
worm and no man (Ps. xxi). For a man is born by the intercourse of a man
and a woman, but Christ was born of a Virgin only, even as a worm is formed out
of the mud of the earth.'
This, perhaps the most curious of all symbolic
interpretations, can hardly have gained much popularity; but the Virgin is
compared in a hymn to the white manna of which' bread sweeter than honey is
made, whereon the court of heaven feedeth and likewise the Church '.1 But the
bread is here' ‘the Bread of Angels', and the manna is not the manna which preserved
in disobedience to the command of the Lord.
aye
manna candiditor,
de qua fit melle dulcior
panis, quo coeli curia
vivit nec non ecclesia.
(Anal. Hymn. xxxv, p,
193)
(5)
Gideon's Fleece, Judges vi.
Honorius, co1. 904,
'Gideon, the captain of Israel, spread out a fleece on the threshing-floor,
into which the dew descended from heaven, while the threshing-floor remained
dry. Again spreading out the fleece, the floor was wet with dew, but the fleece
was dry. This was a sign of the victory
of the faithful and of the flight of the enemy. The fleece wet with dew is the
holy Virgin, having conceived. The dry threshing-floor is her inviolate
virginity. The floor was on the second
occasion wet with dew, because the Church was pregnant with the gifts of the
Holy Spirit .... The fleece was dry because the Synagogue was barren and lacked
those gifts:
The fleece of wool, the most famous of all the
symbols of the virginity of Mary, is often represented in medieval art; with the Burning Bush, it figures in the
thirteenth-century windows at Laon, and on the facade of the Cathedral. With the story in Judges was associated the verse
of Psalm lxxi, which reads in the Vulgate (verse 6), "Descendet sicut
pluvia vellus '-' he shall come down like rain into a fleece,' and the ‘Rorate
coeli desuper' of Isaiah-' Drop dew, ye heavens fromabove, and let the clouds
rain down the just one’.
Adam expounds the mystery thus:
tu, perfusa coeli rore,
castitatis salvo flore,
novum florem novo more
protulisti saeculo.
In sequence lxv he combines the symbols of the
Fleece and Burning Bush:
super
vellus ros descendens
et in rubo flamma
splendens,
(neutrum tamen laeditur),
fuit Christus carnem
sumens,
in te tamen non
consumens
pudorem, dum gignitur.
(6) The
Rod of Jesse.
Isaiah xi. I 'Et egredietur virga de radice
Iesse, et flos de radice eius ascendet.'
Honorius, co!. 904,2
Jesse was the father of King David, who was the root of this sacred stock. From
this root David grew as a tree, of which a noble rod sprung, because the Virgin
Mary derived her ancestry from his offspring. This rod brought forth a flower,
when the Virgin Mary bore Jesus. For he himself saith: "I am the flower of
the field and the lily of the valleys" (Cant. ii). A field is soil untilled,
that is, an unwedded virgin. This field produced a precious flower when Christ
born of a virgin shone forth on the world.'
Adam uses this symbol in his second Sequence, on
the Nativity. 'The rod of Jesse flowered. The root brings forth a rod, the rod
a flower, the Virgin brings forth the Savior, as the law foretold. The root signifies
David, the rod is Mary, who descended from his royal seed; the Child who is
born unto us is the flower, rightly likened thereunto for his exceeding
loveliness.'
Similarly in Sequence lxv (55-60).
de te virga progressurum
florem mundo profuturum
Isaias cecinit,
flore Christum
praefigurans
cuius virtus semper
durans
nec coepit, nec desinit.'
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