1 Samuel 15:33

And Samuel said, "As your sword has made women childless, etc." Understand the sword of Agag as the most effective fury of pride; the Hebrew women bereft of children by him, as faithful souls deprived of the fruit of good works by victorious pride. But as you, he said, have turned countless from the path of truth, O proud presumption, so when the appointed time arrives, when He who will justly judge and destroy the entire kingdom of iniquity comes, your mother impiety, captured by innumerable crimes, will be deprived of that most wicked progeny of vices, having no more whom to seduce.

And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces, etc. And every spiritual and prophetic teacher hews the king of the licking people in pieces; when, diligently exposing the manifold deceptions of pride, carefully disemboweling the vice, he considers and explains what must be done against each of its wiles for himself and his followers. He clarifies and reveals that within the very fat Agag, that is, the covering of malice, are hidden the blind recesses of decay and corruption; and this, in Gilgal, that is, the revelation of manifest truth and faith, the teacher accomplishes. And in another sense: When, in the revelation of the final judgment, the whole body of sin is to be utterly destroyed, which the reprobate foolishly spare now, he foresees and proclaims it must be broken.

38. What is the mother of carnal sense, if not original sin? For since before the sin of the first man no lust was present in the members, the Amalekite king did not exist. There was indeed the sense of the flesh, but it was not shameful and lustful; but as soon as he fell into sin, he felt the itching of his members, because he could not have obedient movement of the flesh when he himself was disobedient to God. Original sin, therefore, is rightly understood as the mother of the shameful sense of the flesh, because from it there comes forth by birth that which began to exist from it. Whence also the Apostle, as if abhorring the law of carnal sense as that of a most severe tyrant, showed not only the king himself but the mother, saying: "Therefore it is no longer I who work that, but sin which dwells in me" (Rom. 7:20). For the sin which he declared he did not work, he understood as the movement of the flesh; but the sin dwelling in him, as original sin. Because therefore from original sin comes the sin of the movement of the flesh, when we consider the carnal sense as king, we rightly name his mother as the first sin. Moreover, the children of this mother are all concupiscences, sins, and vices. The mother is surely made without children when every fault from the flesh and every fault from the mind now seems merely to remain. For she is then without children, because even if no shameful thing now comes from the flesh, if no concupiscence now reigns in the mind, nevertheless that sin remaining in us cannot now be destroyed by the power of a teacher. For what does the Apostle mean when he says: "It is no longer I who work that, but sin which dwells in me"? From that sin indeed, which we contract from the corrupt root of our nature, we have the capacity to be corrupted by the passions of vices. The disordered law of the members, therefore, when it moves the members contrary to our will—we do not work this, but sin which dwells in us. The will indeed is then present with us, but we do not yet find the ability; since we would wish that nothing could be moved in us against our will. And these are perhaps the conceptions of the worst mother, by which that sin is impregnated; if they are allowed to pour forth into shameful and obscene acts, they are said to be, as it were, nourished. The children, therefore, are the movements which are not only naturally within,…