The Twenty-Fourth Method: Pandesia

On Pandesia. Method 24.

Pandesia, or the Pandesian Method, ¹ is the broadest and most copious elucidation of the divine scripture — gathering, either from all or from the principal Methods of exposition, the more powerful and the best of each into one most-enriched body of explanation, not without keen judgment: in which nothing is omitted that could contribute to a whole, perspicuous, and most-rich knowledge, examination, proof, and adornment of the matter to be explained — [resources] summoned from everywhere, out of every variety of tongues, disciplines, and arts, with their riches and ornaments, to illustrate, adorn, and amplify the dignity of the matter to be explained. Now we have chosen to call an exposition of this kind Pandesia, because it is like a common banquet, prepared with the parts of each publicly contributed, and furnished with so great an abundance and variety of foods of every kind that nothing in it could be desired to fill up the pleasure of all the senses: for such a banquet is called by the Greeks Πανδεσία. There seem in a certain way to have approached the amplitude of this [kind of] explanation those things which St. Augustine, explaining the first three chapters of Genesis, gathered together in ten homilies and in twenty books — overflowing with the most affluent abundance of all divine things. An example of the present Method the ingenious reader will be able to prepare for himself out of all the Methods already described, drawn together into one.