The Fathers on Reading Scripture, XV

St Maximus the Confessor writes:

None of the persons, places, times, or other things recorded in Scripture – animate and inanimate, sensible and intelligible – has its concurrent literal or spiritual meanings rendered always according to the same interpretive mode. Whoever, therefore, is infallibly trained in the divine knowledge of Holy Scripture must, for the diversity of what appears and is communicated therein, interpret each recorded thing in a different way and assign to its place or time, the fitting spiritual meaning. For the name of each thing signified in Scripture lends itself to many meanings by the potency of the Hebrew language.

Excerpted from Ad Thalassium 64: On the Prophet Jonah and the Economy of Salvation (CCSG 22:187-241) as translated in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St Maximus the Confessor.