The Wisdom of Peter of Damascus

In his Treasury of Divine Knowledge, Peter of Damascus presents a more perfect way of reading the Scripture by reminding us that true hermeneutics is moral rather than theoretical and that understanding and application are so paradoxically intertwined as to never be possible in isolation:

For this reason the fathers say that we ought to search the Scriptures assiduously, in humility and with the counsel of experienced men, learning not merely theoretically but by putting into practice what we read; and that we ought not to inquire at all about what is passed over in silence by Holy Scripture...For the Lord commands that we should search the Scriptures above all by means of bodily and moral actions, and in this way find eternal life.