Jonah 2:7

"When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD." LXX: 'when my spirit failed in me, I remembered the Lord'. Although I hoped for no aid, he says, the memory of the Lord saved me, according to this passage: "I remembered the Lord and I rejoiced" [Ps. 76:4], and in another passage, "I remembered former days and I remembered the days of eternity" [Ps. 76:6]. I had lost all hope of finding a way out: my body was so frail in the intestines of the whale that I could not hope for my life. And so, everything that seemed impossible I found to be surpassed by the thought of the Lord. I saw myself imprisoned in the intestines of the whale, and all my hope was the Lord. From this we can learn that, according to the Septuagint, at the time when our spirit fails us, it is wrenched from its union with the body, and we ought not to turn our thoughts from Him who inside and outside our body is the Lord. For the Saviour the interpretation is not very difficult because he said, "my spirit is sad to die" [Mt. 26:38; Mk. 14:34], and "My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass me by" [Mt. 26:39], and, "I place my spirit in your hands" [Ps. 30:6; Lk. 23:46], and other passages which are similar to this. And my prayer came in unto you, into thine holy temple. LXX: similar. In my distress I remembered the Lord so and my prayer came in to heaven from the depths of the sea and from the roots of the mountains, and came to your holy temple where you reside in eternal beatitude. This new kind of speech should be noted here: a prayer made for a prayer. Jonah asks that his prayer rise up to the temple of God. He wishes like the Pope that in his body the people should be freed.

Having been saved by the ineffable power of God, he wished to send up more splendid odes of thanksgiving. He surely recounts in some way what happened, and he teaches subtly with what calamity he was encompassed, and again he proclaims how he was saved. That he was, then, in the sea, and in a great abyss, and in the clefts of mountains, as the sea monster likely plunged down among rocks and the caves in the sea, he was not ignorant as a prophet; but he says he reached a land whose bars are eternal bolts, that is, Hades, not that he had been there; for we shall not find him to have died; but that the greatness of the danger and the weight of what had happened was in no way short of seeming to have died completely, and to have arrived in Hades itself, from where no one could depart, and one who had once been entrapped would in no way return. For I think this is what signifies to have its bars as possessors forever, as it were unbreakable and never overcome or loosened by anyone. But that he did not die, but lived, as I said, in the sea monster, and was in it, having suffered nothing that leads to death or corruption, would easily show that he was also in hope of being saved again. For this reason he says, "Let my life come up from corruption, O Lord my God." For he prays to be given to the light, and to be brought up, as it were, from Hades, from the belly of the sea monster.

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.

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.

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.