117 Eccl. ix. 11 (LXX.); 1 Cor. xii. 11.
1 Nesteros. In the Vitae Patrum there are some stories of one or two of this name (for it is not quite clear whether they are distinct persons or one and the same to whom the stories refer). One was known as o9 me/gaj, and was a friend of St. Antony, and is supposed by some to be the same whose Conferences Cassian here relates, but nothing of certain is known of him.
4 It is doubtful whether this is the same John mentioned in the Institutes V. xxviii. and to whom the xixth Conference is assigned. Thmuis is the coptic Thmoui, a little to the south of the Mendesian branch of the Nile. See Rawlinson's note to Herod. ii. c. 166 and cf. Ptolemy IV. v. § 51.
5 On the two Macarii see the note on the Institutes V. xli.
9 The meaning of the four senses of Scripture here spoken of; viz., the historical, tropological, allegorical, and anagogical, is well summed up in these lines: Litera, gesta docet; quid credas, allegoria; Moralis, quid agas; quo tendas anagogia. Or, as the lines are sometime given: Litera scripta docet; quod credas, allegoria; Quod speres, anagoge: quid agas, tropologia. Both Origen and Jerome had spoken of the threefold sense of scripture, referring to the LXX. rendering of Proverbs xxii. 20 (which Cassian quotes below): but in general the Latin Fathers, and the Schoolmen after them, seperated the third of Origen's senses; viz., the spiritual, into two, the allegorical and the anagogical: and so the "fourfold" sense became the established method of interpretation in the West.