And the LORD said unto Noah,
Come you and all your house into the ark; for you have I seen righteous before me in this generation.
Read Chapter 7
Ambrose of Milan
AD 397
Let us see now why it was ordered that seven males and seven females of clean animals and two males and two females of unclean ones were received into the ark, so that the seed all over the earth might be nourished. And, as I believe, it is said that a clean week begins, since pure and holy is number seven. In fact it is united to no number and generated by no number. Therefore it is said to be virgin, because it generates nothing from itself, and we may add that this is said with good reason, since it is lacking and immune from maternal childbirth and from intercourse with female. The number two, on the other hand, is not full because it is divided; and what is not full has some void in itself. But the number seven is full, because the week is like the decade and is similar to that principal number, because the alpha is similar to that One who always exists. From him the virtues that are in every species take their origin, and by him they are moved.
But a deeper meaning leads us to believe that the strength of the mind in the soul and the soul in the body is what the father of a family is in his house. What the mind is in the soul, the soul is in the body. If the mind is certain, the house is safe; the soul is safe if the soul is uninjured; the flesh also is uninjured. A temperate mind restrains every passion, controls the senses, rules the words. Therefore God justly says to the righteous, “Go into,” that is, go into yourself, into your mind, in the ruling part of your soul. Salvation is there, the rudder is there; outside the deluge rages, outside there is danger. In truth if you have been inside, you are safe outside too, because when the mind is the straightforward guide of the self, the thoughts are righteous, the actions are righteous. If no vice obscures the mind, the thoughts are trustworthy.
By this prefiguration it is prophesied that in the church there will be the impure by reason of tolerance, not because of corruption of doctrine or dissolution of discipline. Furthermore, the unclean animals did not break their way into the ark through any part of the structure, but because the ark was an integral whole, they entered by the one and only entrance that the architect had made.
Let us recognize that the ark prefigured the church. Let us be the clean beasts in it. Yet let us not refuse to allow the unclean ones to be carried in it with us until the end of the deluge. They were together in the ark, but they were not equally pleasing to the Lord as a savor of sacrifice, for after the deluge, Noah offered sacrifice to God of the clean, not of the unclean. But the ark was not on that account abandoned before the time by any of the clean because of the unclean.
