The teeth represent the understanding and memory, which serve to chew and masticate the things we desire to know. These powers have been already purified as well as the imagination and the fancy, so that there is no longer any confusion; they are appropriately compared to sheep even shorn, on account of the simplicity they have acquired by their union with the Divine Persons, where they have been deprived of their excessive inclination and even of their power to reason and to act in a self-reflective and disordered manner, as they formerly did. But though divested of their operations, they are not by that process rendered barren or unfruitful; on the contrary, they bear double fruit, and that exceedingly pure and perfect; for the powers are never more fruitful than when they are lost with reference to the creature and vanished in God their centre.