Harm and benefit

Meaning

The main treatise compares an incompletely prepared material medicine, more harmful than useful, with inadequate knowledge of Christ. The spiritual point is not that Christ is intrinsically poisonous, but that imagining him as God alone fails to recognize the incarnation necessary to the reader's participation. The comparison urges further knowledge of his person and of the appointed fulfilment of time. Its material premise is a genuine warning about the subject in its incomplete state; the spiritual application must not erase that warning or become a recommendation to use the substance therapeutically.