When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto you, into your holy temple.
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Cyril of Alexandria
AD 444
where the sea monster probably lurked in rocks and in sea caves. bars of the earth have enclosed me forever Now, the fact that he was not dead, as I said, but was alive in the sea monster, and suffered nothing in it contributing to death or corruption, would easily be grasped from his having hopes of his being rescued. Consequently he says, And you will raise up my life from corruption, he prays to emerge into the light, and be delivered up from the sea monster’s stomach as though from Hades.
Although he ought to have been corrupted and digested in the belly of the whale and diffused through the veins and joints of the fish, he came out safe and whole.
calling the God who is common to all his own and personal God; because of the magnitude of such great favor, he especially feels that God is his God ad Lord.
LXX: 'and from corruption my life comes up to me, O Lord my God.' He says rightly "you have brought up" or "let my life come up from corruption", because it had descended to corruption in hell. This is what the apostles interpret in the fifteenth psalm as prophetic speech of the Lord: "for you will not leave my spirit in hell, and you will not permit your holiness to see the corruption"[120], given that David is dead and has been buried, but the Saviour's flesh has not known corruption. Others understand that compared to celestial blessing and to the Word of God the body of man is corruption itself, for "it is sown in corruption", and in the psalm one hundred and two, the meaning is applied to a righteous man: "he who cures all illnesses, who has brought his life back from death". This is why the Apostle says, "O wicked man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?". It is called "the body of death", or "body of misery". These people take the text in the sense of their he...
When this purgative contemplation oppresses a man, he feels very vividly indeed the shadow of death, the sighs of death, and the sorrows of Hell, all of which reflect the feeling of God’s absence, of being chastised and rejected by Him, and of being unworthy of Him, as well as the object of His anger. The soul experiences all this and even more, for now it seems that this affliction will last forever.
When a person has completely abandoned the world, it seems to one that one is living in a remote desert, full of wild beasts. One is filled with unutterable fear and indescribable trembling, and cries to God like Jonah from the whale, from the sea of this life, or like Daniel from the pit of the lions and the fierce passions, or like the three children from the burning furnace and the flames of innate desire, or like Manasseh from the brazen statue of this earthly mortal body. The Lord hears that person and delivers him from the abyss of ignorance and love of this world, just like the prophet who came out of the whale, never to go back again.
