who do not know their right hand from their left

cont from Thalassium 64

He represents as well the Church of the Gentiles, which, like Nineveh has turned to God amid numerous tribulations, dangers, adversities, sufferings, persecutions, and deaths…which by no means [is] completely destroyed. For there is nothing in creation capable of impeding the advance of the grace proclaimed evangelically to the gentiles: neither tribulation nor distress nor persecution nor famine nor danger nor sword (Romans 8:35). On the contrary, grace was confirmed by these very circumstances and subdued everything which arose against it…and turned our errant nature toward the true and living God, just as Jonah turned Nineveh toward Him. Even if the evil one appears to conceal grace amid the torrent of persecution, as the whale concealed the prophet Jonah, he was nevertheless unable ultimately to hold grace in check, and remains unable to alter the strength of God’s ability to activate his grace.

…For as long as we live we are constantly being consigned to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life is at work in you (2 Cor 4: 12)…  For the prophetic grace toward the Gentiles is commended both as a gift of God…and as God’s labor: God’s gift since it bestows the light of true knowledge, and it furnishes an incorruptible life for those who receive it; God’s labor because it convinces its servants to take pride in their own labors on behalf of truth, and teaches those who are too anxious about their life in the flesh to extend themselves more through suffering than through remission of suffering. To such as these grace makes the natural weakness of the flesh in the face of suffering the basis of a transcendent spiritual power. 

So too it prepares them completely to renounce their former evil ways and, from the least to the greatest of them (Jon 3:5), to (later: fast and) don sackcloth (meaning, that is, to pursue earnestly the mortification of the passions)… propitiating with humility him who is able to grant forgiveness of their former ways, and asking him who readily bestows on those who ask, the realization of morally superior pursuits and the preservation of the power of free choice in a morally immutable state.

Twelve can mean the five senses plus the seven days of the week, in other words time and nature, or more precisely the knowledge that cannot comprehend visible nature apart from those principles. The more than twelve myriads are the Church, those who namely in their virtue and knowledge have gone beyond the principles of time and nature and passed over to the magnificence of eternal and noetic realities. For whoever, by reason of his genuine virtue, forgets the passions of the flesh on his “left”, and who because of his impeccable knowledge, does not succumb to the disease of a growing conceit over his accomplishments on his “right”, becomes a man who does not know his right hand (or does not, as it were, long for fleeting glory) or his left hand (or is not, as it were, roused by carnal passions).