‘It is a wondrous and beneficial thing that the Holy Spirit organised the Holy Scriptures so as to satisfy hunger by means of its plainer passages, and remove boredom by means of its obscurer ones … If you cannot yet understand [a passage of Scripture], you should leave the matter for the consideration of those who can; and since Scripture does not abandon you in your infirmity, but with a mother’s love accompanies your slower steps, you will make progress. Holy Scripture, indeed, speaks in such a way as to mock the proud readers with its heights, terrify the attentive with its depths, feed great souls with its truth and nourish little ones with sweetness’.
– Augustine
(Cited in Katherine Green-McCreight, Ad Litteram: How Augustine, Calvin, and Barth Read the ‘Plain Sense’ of Genesis 1-3 (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1998), 164, 167)