Symbolic numbers

Meaning

The numbered expressions in Part IV: the spiritual comparison · unit 16 gather the earthly stone's various modes of description: compounded from three yet one, and produced from one through five. The catalogue then places its many titles within the highest and most perfect number, a thousand. This is symbolic and rhetorical numeration, not a literal count of a thousand separately printed names or a practical quantity of material. The English preserves the numbers without solving them in that unit. Their following theological application receives its own explanation under Trinity, where persons, divine unity and Christ's two natures must be kept distinct.