Question
204
Why
was prophecy veiled with obscurity?
Since you ask and wish to know
why, after all, prophecy has been veiled with obscurities. I will answer you briefly.
It is because prophecy is not history. For more than anything else, the virtue
of history is to speak clearly and without intricate expressions, since it teaches
events that happened in the world and were known to all alike—great and common
people—at the time they occurred, and even now can be readily known.
Prophecy, on the other hand,
whose task is to reveal the unknown to the worthy and to make it inaccessible
to the profane, is fittingly expressed in a veiled, enigmatic, and symbolic
manner. From this, I think, your question is also resolved: for if we were not
meant to learn certain things, they should not have been told to us at all; but
if it was judged that we should learn them, prophecy should not be obscure—and perhaps
they ought hardly to have been spoken.
For from what has been said it is
clear that men both needed to learn them, and it was necessary that they not be
expressed in a profane or common way, but that they be spoken clearly to the
initiated, while to the uninitiated they should remain hidden and inaccessible.
(Photius, The Collected Amphilochia, 3 vols. [trans. Nun Christina;
2025], 3:481)
