On True Religion

Since the whole way of a good and happy life is established in true religion, by which one God is worshiped and is known with most purified piety as the principle of all natures, by whom the universe is begun, perfected and held together, the error of those peoples who chose to worship many gods rather than the one true God and Lord of all is more evidently detected from this: that their wise men, whom they call philosophers, had schools that disagreed and temples in common. For neither the peoples nor the priests were unaware how different were their views about the nature of the gods themselves, since each was not afraid to profess his opinion publicly and strove to persuade everyone of it, if he could; yet all of them, with their followers holding different and opposed views, came to the common rites with no one forbidding them. The question now is not which of them thought more truly; but this at least, it seems to me, is clear enough: that they adopted one thing in religion with the people, and defended another privately in the hearing of that same people.

Socrates, however, is reported to have been bolder than the others, swearing by any dog, any stone, and whatever was ready to hand when he was about to swear, as if it had come to hand. I believe he understood that any works of nature whatever, which come into being under the administration of divine providence, are much better than those of men and of any craftsmen, and therefore more worthy of divine honors than the things that were worshiped in the temples. Not that a stone and a dog were truly to be worshiped by the wise, but so that those who could might understand in this way that men were sunk in such superstition that, to those emerging from it, so shameful a step had to be shown; and if they were ashamed to come to it, they would see how much more shameful it was to remain in a more shameful one. At the same time he admonished of their shame those who thought this visible world was the supreme God, teaching that it would follow that any stone might rightly be worshiped as a particle of the supreme God. If they abhorred this, they would change their opinion and seek the one God, who alone, it would be agreed, is above our minds, and by whom every soul and this whole world was made. Afterward Plato wrote, more pleasantly to read than powerfully to persuade. For these men were not so born as to convert the opinion of their peoples from the superstition of idols and the vanity of this world to the true worship of the true God. And so Socrates himself venerated idols with the people, and after his condemnation and death no one dared to swear by a dog or to call any stone Jupiter, but only to commit these things to memory and writing. Whether they did this from fear of severity or from some knowledge of the times, it is not for me to judge.

But this I would say most confidently, with the leave of all those who obstinately love their books: that in Christian times there can be no doubt which religion above all is to be held, and what is the way to truth and happiness. For suppose Plato himself were alive and did not scorn my questions; or rather, suppose some disciple of his, in the very time when he lived, had questioned him, when he was being persuaded by him that truth is seen not with bodily eyes but with a pure mind; that any soul which cleaves to it becomes happy and perfect; that nothing hinders the perception of it more than a life given to lusts and the false images of sensible things, which, impressed on us from this sensible world through the body, generate various opinions and errors; that therefore the mind must be healed in order to behold the unchangeable form of things, and the beauty that is always the same and everywhere like itself, not spread out in places nor varied in time, but keeping itself one and the same in every part, which men do not believe exists, though it alone truly and supremely is; that other things are born, die, flow and slip away, and yet, insofar as they are, are made and stand by that eternal God through his truth; and that among them it is given to the rational and intellectual soul alone to enjoy the contemplation of his eternity, to be affected and adorned by it, and to be able to merit eternal life; but that while it is wounded by love and grief for things that are born and pass away, and, given over to the habits of this life and the senses of the body, vanishes into empty images, it laughs at those who say that there is something which is neither seen by these eyes nor conceived by any phantasm, but can be perceived by the mind and intelligence alone. When, then, these things were being taught him by his master, suppose that disciple asked him whether, if some great and divine man should arise who would persuade the peoples that such things are at least to be believed, if they could not perceive them, or, if some could perceive them, that they should not be entangled in the depraved opinions of the multitude and overwhelmed by common errors, he would judge him worthy of divine honors. He would answer, I believe, that this could not be done by a man, unless perhaps the very Power and Wisdom of God had taken him up apart from the very nature of things, and, enlightened from the cradle not by human teaching but by inner illumination, honored him with such grace, strengthened him with such firmness, and raised him with such majesty, that by despising all that wicked men desire, enduring all that they shudder at, and doing all that they marvel at, he should convert the human race with the highest love and authority to so wholesome a faith. As for his honors, he would say it was useless to consult him, since it could easily be judged what honors are owed to the Wisdom of God, bearing and guiding whom that man would merit, for the true salvation of the human race, something great and his own, above men.

If these things have been done, if they are celebrated in writings and monuments, if from one region of the earth, in which alone the one God was worshiped and where such a one had to be born, chosen men sent throughout the whole world have kindled by their virtues and words the fires of divine love; if, having established a most wholesome teaching, they have left enlightened lands to their posterity; and, not to speak of the past, which anyone may refuse to believe, if today it is preached among nations and peoples: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made”; if, so that the soul may be healed to perceive, love and enjoy this, and the sight of the mind grow strong to drink in so great a light, it is said to the greedy, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, nor thieves break in and steal: for where your treasure is, there is your heart also”; it is said to the self-indulgent, “He who sows in the flesh will from the flesh reap corruption; he who sows in the spirit will from the spirit reap eternal life”; it is said to the proud, “He who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted”; it is said to the angry, “You have received a slap: make ready the other cheek”; it is said to the quarrelsome, “Love your enemies”; it is said to the superstitious, “The kingdom of God is within you”; it is said to the curious, “Do not seek the things that are seen, but those that are not seen. For the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal”; finally it is said to all, “Do not love the world or the things that are in the world; for everything that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the world”; if these things are now read to peoples throughout the whole world and heard most gladly with veneration; if after so much blood, so many fires, so many crosses of the martyrs, the churches have sprung up all the more fruitfully and abundantly even among barbarian nations; if no one any longer marvels at so many thousands of young men and virgins scorning marriage and living chastely (when Plato had done this, he so feared the perverse opinion of his times that he is said to have sacrificed to nature, so that it might be wiped away as a sin); if these things are so received that, as it was once monstrous to argue for such things, so it is now monstrous to argue against them; if to such a promise and pledge the Christian mysteries are handed on throughout all parts of the earth that men inhabit; if these things are read daily in the churches and expounded by the priests; if those who try to fulfill them beat their breasts; if so countless a number enter upon this way that, as men of every kind abandon riches and the honors of this world, wishing to dedicate their whole life to the one supreme God, once-deserted islands and the solitude of many lands are filled; if finally, through cities and towns, forts, villages and even fields and private estates, turning away from earthly things and turning to the one true God is so openly urged and sought that daily throughout the whole world the human race answers almost with one voice that it has lifted up its heart to the Lord: why do we still yawn out yesterday's drunkenness and search for divine oracles in dead cattle, and, if ever we come to a discussion, are eager to have mouths rattling with the name of Plato rather than a heart full of truth?

Those, then, who think it vain or evil to despise this sensible world, and to subject and subjugate to the supreme God the soul purified by virtue, must be refuted by another argument, if indeed it is worth arguing with them. But those who admit that this is good and to be desired should acknowledge God and yield to God, through whom all peoples have now been persuaded to believe these things. Surely they would have done this themselves, if they had been able; or if they did not do it, they could not escape the charge of envy. So let them yield to him by whom it has been done, and not be hindered by curiosity or empty boasting from acknowledging the difference between the timid conjectures of a few and the manifest salvation and correction of peoples. For if those men in whose names these boast were to come to life again, and find the churches full and the temples deserted, and the human race called and running from the desire of temporal and fleeting goods to the hope of eternal life and to spiritual and intelligible goods, they would perhaps say (if they were such as they are reported to have been): These are the things which we did not dare to persuade the peoples of, and we yielded to their custom rather than bringing them over to our faith and will. And so, if those men could live this life again with us, they would surely see by whose authority mankind is more easily helped, and, with a few words and opinions changed, they would become Christians, as very many of the Platonists of recent times, and of our own, have done. Or if they did not admit or do this, remaining in pride and envy, I do not know whether they could fly back, with that filth and birdlime, to the very things they had said were to be sought and desired. For as to the third vice, the curiosity of consulting demons, by which those with whom we are now dealing, the pagans, are chiefly held back from Christian salvation, I do not know whether such men would have been hindered by it, because it is too childish.

But however things stand with the boasting of the philosophers, anyone can easily understand that religion is not to be sought from those who took part in the same rites as the peoples, and who in their schools, with the same multitude as witness, loudly proclaimed different and contrary opinions about the nature of their gods and the supreme good. If we saw this one vice alone healed by Christian teaching, no one ought to deny that it must be proclaimed with ineffable praise. For the heresies, so countless, which have turned away from the rule of Christianity, are witnesses that those who think about God the Father, and his Wisdom, and the divine Gift otherwise than the truth demands, and try to persuade men of it, are not admitted to share the sacraments. For so it is believed and taught (and this is the chief point of human salvation) that philosophy, that is, the pursuit of wisdom, is not one thing and religion another, since those whose teaching we do not approve do not share the sacraments with us either. This is less surprising in those who chose to differ even in the rite of the sacraments, such as those called Serpentines, whoever they are, such as the Manichaeans, and some others. But it is more to be noticed and more to be proclaimed in those who, celebrating the same sacraments, yet because they differ in opinion and preferred to defend their errors spiritedly rather than correct them cautiously, were excluded from catholic communion and from participation in the sacraments, though these were the same, and earned their own names and their own assemblies, not only in speech but also in superstition, such as the Photinians, the Arians, and many others besides. As for those who have made schisms, that is another question. For the Lord's threshing floor could have borne them like chaff until the time of the last winnowing, had they not, through excessive lightness, yielded to the wind of pride and separated themselves from us of their own accord. The Jews, though they pray to the one almighty God, yet expecting from him only temporal and visible goods, out of excessive security would not notice in their own Scriptures the first beginnings of the new people rising from humility, and so remained in the old man. Since this is so, religion is to be sought neither in the confusion of the pagans, nor in the refuse of the heretics, nor in the languor of the schismatics, nor in the blindness of the Jews, but only among those who are called catholic or orthodox Christians, that is, guardians of integrity and followers of what is right.

For this catholic Church, spread vigorously and widely throughout the whole world, uses all who err for its own advancement, and for their correction when they are willing to wake up. It uses the Gentiles as material for its work, heretics as a test of its teaching, schismatics as proof of its stability, Jews as a comparison for its beauty. Some therefore it invites, some it excludes, some it leaves, some it goes before; yet to all it gives the power of sharing in the grace of God, whether they are still to be formed, or to be reformed, or to be gathered again, or to be admitted. Its own carnal members, that is, those living or thinking carnally, it tolerates like chaff, by which the grain on the threshing floor is safer, until it is stripped of such coverings. But since on this threshing floor each is chaff or grain by his own will, the sin or error of anyone is borne until either it finds an accuser, or he defends his depraved opinion with obstinate animosity. Those excluded either return by repentance, or, wickedly free, flow away into wickedness, to admonish our diligence; or they make a schism, to exercise our patience; or they give birth to some heresy, to test our understanding or give it occasion. These are the ends of carnal Christians who could neither be corrected nor borne.

Often too divine providence allows even good men to be driven out of the Christian congregation through some overly turbulent seditions of carnal men. When they have borne this insult or injury most patiently for the peace of the Church, and have attempted no novelties of schism or heresy, they will teach men with what true affection and what great sincerity of love God is to be served. The purpose of such men, then, is either to return when the storms have calmed; or, if they are not allowed to, whether because the same storm persists or lest a similar or fiercer one arise from their return, they keep the will to help even those very people by whose disturbances and agitations they gave way, without any separation into conventicles, defending until death, and aiding by their testimony, that faith which they know is preached in the catholic Church. These the Father, who sees in secret, crowns in secret. This kind seems rare, but examples are not lacking; indeed, there are more than can be believed. So divine providence uses all kinds of men and examples for the healing of souls and the instruction of the spiritual people.

Therefore, since a few years ago I promised to write to you, my dearest Romanianus, what I think about true religion, I have judged that the time has now come, since, for the love by which I am bound to you, I could no longer bear your most searching questions to drift about without any certain end. Rejecting, then, all those who neither philosophize in their rites nor consecrate in their philosophy; and those who, puffed up either by depraved opinion or by some rivalry, have strayed from the rule and communion of the catholic Church; and those who have refused to have the light of the holy Scriptures and the grace of the spiritual people, which is called the New Testament (all of whom I have touched on as briefly as I could), we must hold the Christian religion and the communion of that Church which is catholic and is called catholic not only by its own members but also by all its enemies. For willing or not, even heretics and the nurslings of schisms, when they speak not with their own people but with outsiders, call the Catholic Church nothing but the Catholic Church. For they cannot be understood unless they distinguish it by the name by which it is called by the whole world.

The chief thing in following this religion is the history and prophecy of the temporal dispensation of divine providence for the salvation of the human race, which is to be re-formed and restored to eternal life. When this has been believed, a way of life in harmony with the divine precepts will purify the mind and make it fit to perceive spiritual things, which are neither past nor future but always remaining in the same way, subject to no change: that is, the one God himself, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. When this Trinity is known, as far as is granted in this life, it is seen without any doubt that every intellectual and animal and bodily creature has its being, insofar as it is, from the same creating Trinity, and has its own form, and is governed in the most orderly way; not so that the Father is understood to have made one part of the whole creation, the Son another, and the Holy Spirit another, but that the Father made all things together and each single nature through the Son in the gift of the Holy Spirit. For every thing, or substance, or essence, or nature, or whatever other word expresses it better, has these three at once: that it is some one thing, that it is distinguished from others by its own form, and that it does not go beyond the order of things.

When this is known, it will be clear enough, as far as man can attain, by what necessary, invincible and just laws all things are subject to their God and Lord. From this, those things which we first believed, following nothing but authority, are understood partly so that we see them to be most certain, partly so that we see they can happen and that they had to happen so; and we grieve for those who do not believe here, who chose to mock us when we believed rather than believe with us. For then that most holy assumption of a man, and the Virgin's giving birth, and the death of the Son of God for us, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven, and the sitting at the right hand of the Father, and the abolition of sins, and the day of judgment, and the raising of bodies, once the eternity of the Trinity and the changeableness of the creature are known, are not merely believed, but are also judged to belong to the mercy of the supreme God which he shows to the human race. But since it was most truly said, “There must be many heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you,” let us also use this benefit of divine providence. For heretics come from those men who would err even if they were in the Church. But when they are outside, they are very useful, not by teaching the truth, which they do not know, but by rousing carnal catholics to seek the truth and spiritual catholics to open it. For there are countless men in the holy Church approved by God, but they are not made manifest among us so long as, delighted with the darkness of our ignorance, we prefer to sleep rather than behold the light of truth. Wherefore many are awakened from sleep by heretics, so as to see the day of God and rejoice. Let us then use even heretics, not so as to approve their errors, but so that, asserting the catholic teaching against their snares, we may be more watchful and more cautious, even if we cannot call them back to salvation.

I believe that God will be present, so that this writing, with piety going before, may avail for good readers not against some one false opinion but against all depraved and false opinions. Yet it is set up chiefly against those who think there are two natures or substances, rebelling against each other, each with its own principle. For, offended by some things and again delighted by others, they want God to be the author not of those by which they are offended, but of those in which they delight. And since they cannot overcome their habit, already entangled in carnal snares, they think there are two souls in one body: one from God, which by nature is what he is; the other from the race of darkness, which God neither begot, nor made, nor brought forth, nor cast off, but which had its own life, its own land, its own offspring and animals, and finally its own kingdom and an unbegotten principle; but which at a certain time rebelled against God; and that God, since he had nothing else to do and found no other way to resist the enemy, under the pressure of necessity sent here a good soul and a certain particle of his own substance, by whose commingling and mixture, they dream, the enemy was tempered and the world made. We are not refuting their opinions now, which we have partly already done and will partly do as far as God allows; but in this work we show as far as we can, by the reasons which the Lord deigns to give, how safe the catholic faith is against them, and how those things by which men are moved to go over to their opinion need not disturb the mind. This above all I want you to hold, who know my mind well: that I am not saying this as a formality to avoid arrogance, namely that whatever error may be found in these pages is to be attributed to me alone, but whatever is true and fittingly set forth, to God alone, the giver of all good gifts.

So let it be clear and plain to you that there could have been no error in religion if the soul did not worship in place of its God a soul, or a body, or its own phantasms, or any two of these joined, or all of them together; but if, conforming without guile to the society of the human race in this life for a time, it meditated on eternal things, worshiping the one God, who, unless he remained unchangeable, would leave no changeable nature remaining. That the soul can change, not indeed in place but in time, everyone knows from his own feelings. That body is changeable both in time and in place anyone can easily notice. And phantasms are nothing but figments drawn by bodily sense from the form of body; to commit them to memory as received, or to divide, multiply, contract, extend, arrange, disturb, or shape them in any way in thought is very easy, but when truth is sought, it is difficult to guard against and avoid them. Let us not, then, serve the creature rather than the Creator, nor become vain in our thoughts, and religion is perfect. For cleaving to the eternal Creator, we too must be affected by eternity. But since the soul, overwhelmed and entangled by its sins, could not see and hold this by itself, there being no step set in human affairs for grasping divine things, by which man might strive from earthly life to the likeness of God, by the ineffable mercy of God help is given, through a temporal dispensation by means of changeable creation, which yet serves eternal laws, to remind it of its first and perfect nature, partly to individual men, partly to the human race itself. That is, in our times, the Christian religion, to know and follow which is the most secure and most certain salvation. It can be defended against the talkative and opened to seekers in many ways, while the almighty God himself shows through himself what is true, and helps good wills to behold and perceive it through good angels and through men of every kind. Each uses the way which he sees suits those with whom he deals. I therefore, having long and much considered what kinds of barkers and what kinds of seekers I have experienced, and what kind I myself was, whether when I was barking or when I was seeking, have thought I should use this way. What you perceive to be true, hold, and attribute to the catholic Church; what is false, reject, and pardon me, who am a man; what is doubtful, believe, until either reason teaches or authority commands that it is to be rejected, or is true, or is always to be believed. Attend, then, to what follows, diligently and piously, as far as you can; for God helps such.

There is no life that is not from God, because God is surely the supreme life and himself the fountain of life; nor is any life, insofar as it is life, evil, but insofar as it tends toward death. And the death of life is nothing but wickedness, which is so called from being nothing at all; and therefore the most wicked men are called men of nothing. Life, then, falling away by a voluntary defect from him who made it, and whose essence it enjoyed, and wishing, against the law of God, to enjoy bodies, over which God set it, tends toward nothing; and this is wickedness; not because body is already nothing. For body too has some harmony of its parts, without which it could not exist at all. So body too was made by him who is the head of all harmony. Body has a certain peace of its form, without which it would be nothing at all. So he is the founder of body too, from whom all peace comes, and who is the unmade form, and the most beautiful of all. It has some appearance, without which body is not body. If, then, it is asked who established body, let him be sought who is the most beautiful of all. For all beauty is from him. And who is this but the one God, the one truth, the one salvation of all, and the first and supreme essence, from which is everything that is, insofar as it is; because whatever is, insofar as it is, is good. And therefore death is not from God. For “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living”; since the supreme essence makes everything that is to be, whence it is also called essence. But death compels whatever dies not to be, insofar as it dies. For if things that die died completely, they would undoubtedly come to nothing; but they die only so far as they participate less in essence; which can be said more briefly thus: they die the more, the less they are. And body is less than any life; since however little remains in form, it remains through life, whether that by which each animal or that by which the whole nature of the world is governed. Body, then, is more subject to death, and therefore nearer to nothing; wherefore life, which, delighted with the enjoyment of body, neglects God, inclines toward nothing, and that is wickedness.

In this way life becomes carnal and earthly, and for this reason is even called flesh and earth; and as long as it is so, it will not possess the kingdom of God, and what it loves will be snatched from it. For it loves what is even less than life, because it is body; and because of the sin itself, what is loved becomes corruptible, so that by flowing away it deserts its lover, because he too, by loving it, deserted God. For he neglected the precepts of him who said: “Eat this, and do not eat that.” So he is drawn to punishments: because by loving lower things he is set, in want of his pleasures and in pains, among those below. For what is the pain that is called bodily but the sudden corruption of the soundness of that thing which the soul, by using it badly, made liable to corruption? And what is the pain called mental but to lack the changeable things which it enjoyed or had hoped it could enjoy? And this is the whole of what is called evil, that is, sin and the punishment of sin. But if, while the soul spends its time in this race-course of human life, it conquers the desires which it nourished against itself by enjoying mortal things, and believes that it is helped by the grace of God to conquer them, serving him with its mind and good will, it will without doubt be restored, and will return from the many changeable things to the one unchangeable, re-formed through the Wisdom which is not formed but through which all things are formed, and it will enjoy God through the Holy Spirit, who is the Gift of God. So man becomes spiritual, judging all things while he himself is judged by no one, loving the Lord his God with his whole heart, with his whole soul, with his whole mind, and loving his neighbor not carnally but as himself. And he loves himself spiritually who loves God with all that lives in him. For on these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets. From this it will follow that after bodily death, which we owe to the first sin, in its own time and order this body will be restored to its original stability, which it will have not of itself but through the soul made stable in God. And the soul again is made stable not of itself but through God whom it enjoys; and therefore it will flourish more than the body: for the body will flourish through the soul, and the soul through the unchangeable truth, who is the only Son of God; and so the body too will flourish through the Son of God himself, because all things are through him. By his Gift too, which is given to the soul, that is, the Holy Spirit, not only does the soul to which it is given become safe and at peace and holy, but the body itself also will be given life, and will be most pure in its nature. For he himself said: “Cleanse what is within, and what is outside will be clean.” And the Apostle says: “He will give life also to your mortal bodies because of the Spirit dwelling in you.” When sin is taken away, then, the punishment of sin will also be taken away; and where is evil? “Where, O death, is your strife? Where, O death, is your sting?” For being conquers nothing, and so death is swallowed up in victory.

Nor will the evil angel, who is called the devil, harm the sanctified in any way; for he too, insofar as he is an angel, is not evil, but insofar as he is perverted by his own will. For it must be admitted that the angels too are changeable by nature, if God alone is unchangeable; but by that will by which they love God more than themselves, they remain firm and stable in him, and enjoy his majesty, most gladly subject to him alone. But that angel, loving himself more than God, refused to be subject to him, and swelled with pride, and fell away from the supreme essence, and fell; and for this reason he is less than he was, because he wished to enjoy what was less, when he wished to enjoy his own power rather than God's. For although he did not exist supremely, yet he existed more fully when he enjoyed that which supremely is, since God alone supremely is. But whatever is less than it was is evil, not insofar as it is, but insofar as it is less. For by being less than it was, it tends toward death. And what wonder if from defect comes want, and from want envy, by which the devil is indeed the devil?

But if this defect which is called sin seized one against his will, like a fever, the punishment which follows the sinner, and which is called condemnation, would rightly seem unjust. But in fact sin is so much a voluntary evil that it is in no way sin if it is not voluntary; and this is so evident that neither the few who are learned nor the crowd of the unlearned disagree with it. Therefore either it must be denied that sin is committed, or it must be admitted that it is committed by will. But one does not rightly deny that the soul has sinned who admits both that it is corrected by repentance, and that pardon is given to the penitent, and that one who persists in sins is condemned by the just law of God. Finally, if we do not do evil by will, no one at all is to be rebuked or admonished; and if these are taken away, the Christian law and all the discipline of religion must be taken away. It is by will, then, that sin is committed. And since there is no doubt that sin is committed, I see that this too is not to be doubted: that souls have free choice of the will. For God judged that his servants would be better if they served him freely, which could in no way happen if they served not by will but by necessity. The angels, then, serve God freely, and this profits not God but themselves. For God does not need the good of another, since he is from himself. And what is begotten of him is the very same as he, because it is not made but begotten. But the things that have been made need his good, namely the supreme good, that is, the supreme essence. And they are less than they were when through the sin of the soul they are moved less toward him; yet they are not wholly separated, for then they would be nothing at all. What happens to the soul in its affections happens to the body in place: for the soul is moved by will, the body by space. And as for what is said to have been urged on man by the perverse angel, to this too he certainly consented by will. For if he had done it by necessity, he would be held by no charge of sin.

And that the body of man, which before sin was the best of its kind, after sin was made weak and destined to death, although it is a just punishment of sin, still shows more of the Lord's clemency than of his severity. For in this way we are persuaded that our love ought to be turned from the pleasures of the body to the eternal essence of truth. And the beauty of justice is in harmony with the grace of kindness, so that, since we were deceived by the sweetness of lower goods, we are instructed by the bitterness of punishments. For divine providence has so moderated even our punishments that even in this so corruptible body we may strive toward justice, and, laying aside all pride, bend our neck to the one true God, trust nothing to ourselves, and commit ourselves to him alone to be ruled and protected. So, with him as guide, the man of good will turns the troubles of this life to the use of fortitude; in the abundance of pleasures and the prosperous successes of temporal things he tests and strengthens his temperance; in temptations he sharpens his prudence, so that he is not only not led into them, but becomes even more watchful and more ardent in the love of truth, which alone does not deceive.

Though God heals souls in every way according to the opportunities of the times, which are ordered by his wonderful wisdom (about which either nothing should be said, or it should be discussed only among the pious and perfect), in no way did he provide more beneficently for the human race than when the very Wisdom of God, that is, the only Son, consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, deigned to take up the whole man, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. For so he showed to carnal men, who were unable to behold truth with the mind and were given over to the bodily senses, how high a place human nature holds among creatures, in that he appeared to men not only visibly (for he could have done that in some ethereal body tempered to what our sight can bear) but in a true man: for the very nature that was to be freed had to be taken up. And lest either sex should think itself despised by its Creator, he took up a man, born of a woman. He did nothing by force, but everything by persuading and admonishing. For the old servitude being over, the time of freedom had dawned, and man was now fittingly and wholesomely persuaded with how free a choice he had been created. By miracles he won faith for the God he was, by his passion for the man he bore. So, speaking to the crowds as God, he refused to acknowledge his mother when she was announced to him; and yet, as the Gospel says, as a boy he was subject to his parents. For in teaching he appeared as God, in the stages of life as man. Again, about to turn water into wine as God, he says: “Woman, depart from me: what have I to do with you? My hour has not yet come.” But when the hour had come in which he was to die as man, from the cross he acknowledged his mother and commended her to the disciple whom he loved above the others. The peoples, servants of pleasures, ruinously sought riches: he chose to be poor. They gaped after honors and power: he refused to be made king. They thought children of the flesh a great good: he scorned such marriage and offspring. They most proudly shrank from insults: he bore every kind of insult. They thought injuries intolerable: what greater injury than for a just and innocent man to be condemned? They abhorred bodily pains: he was scourged and tortured. They feared to die: he was punished with death. They thought the cross the most ignominious kind of death: he was crucified. All the things in desiring to have which we did not live rightly, he made worthless by going without them. All the things in desiring to avoid which we turned aside from the pursuit of truth, he cast down by enduring them. For no sin can be committed except when either those things are sought which he despised, or those are fled which he endured. So his whole life on earth, through the man whom he deigned to take up, was a discipline of morals. And his resurrection from the dead showed sufficiently that nothing of human nature perishes, since all things are safe with God, and how all things serve their Creator, whether for the punishment of sins or for the liberation of man, and how easily the body serves the soul when the soul is subject to God. When these things are accomplished, not only is no substance evil, which can never be, but no substance is even affected by any evil, which could happen through sin and its punishment. And this is the natural discipline, worthy of full faith for Christians who understand less, but for those who understand, purged of all error.

Moreover, the very method of the whole teaching, partly most plain, partly in likenesses, in words, in deeds, in sacraments, adapted to every instruction and exercise of the soul, what else has it fulfilled but the rule of rational discipline? For the exposition of the mysteries too is directed to those things which have been said most plainly. And if there were only those things which are most easily understood, truth would neither be sought with zeal nor found with delight. Nor, if there were sacraments in the Scriptures, and in the sacraments there were no signs of truth, would action sufficiently agree with knowledge. But now, since piety begins with fear and is perfected by love, the people bound by fear in the time of servitude under the old Law were burdened with many sacraments. For this was useful for such people to make them desire the grace of God, which was sung by the prophets as to come. When it came, a few most wholesome sacraments were established by the very Wisdom of God, by whom a man was assumed and by whom we have been called into freedom, to hold together the society of the Christian people, that is, of a free multitude under the one God. But many things which had been imposed on the Hebrew people, that is, a multitude fettered under the same one God, have been removed from practice, but remained in faith and interpretation. So now they do not bind slavishly, and they exercise the mind freely.

Whoever, then, denies that both Testaments can be from the one God because our people is not bound by the same sacraments by which the Jews were bound or are still bound, might as well say that it cannot be that one most just father of a family commands one thing to those for whom he judges a harsher servitude useful, and another to those whom he deigns to adopt to the rank of sons. And if the precepts of life trouble anyone, because in the old Law they are lesser and in the Gospel greater, and therefore both are thought not to belong to the one God, he who thinks this might be disturbed if one physician prescribes some things through his assistants to the weaker, and other things himself to the stronger, to restore or keep health. For as the art of medicine, though it remains the same and is in no way changed itself, changes its prescriptions for the sick, because our health is changeable, so divine providence, though itself wholly unchangeable, yet comes to the aid of the changeable creature in various ways, and according to the diversity of diseases orders or forbids different things at different times, so as to bring back and make firm in their own nature and essence, from the vice in which death begins and from death itself, those things which are failing, that is, tending to nothing.

But you say to me: Why do they fail? Because they are changeable. Why are they changeable? Because they do not exist supremely. Why do they not exist supremely? Because they are inferior to him by whom they were made. Who made them? He who supremely is. Who is he? God, the unchangeable Trinity, since he both made them through supreme Wisdom and preserves them with supreme kindness. Why did he make them? That they might be. For to be, in whatever degree, is good, because the supreme good is to be supremely. From what did he make them? From nothing. Since whatever is must have some appearance, however slight, so even if it is the least good, it will still be good, and will be from God. For since the supreme appearance is the supreme good, the least appearance is the least good. And every good either is God or is from God. Therefore even the least appearance is from God. Indeed, what can be said of appearance can be said of form too. For not in vain are both ‘most comely’ and ‘most shapely’ used in praise. That, then, from which God made all things is what has no appearance and no form, which is nothing other than nothing. For what is called formless in comparison with perfect things, if it has anything of form, however slight, however incipient, is not yet nothing, and so it too, insofar as it is, is only from God. Therefore even if the world was made from some formless matter, this matter itself was made wholly from nothing. For what is not yet formed, but is yet in some way begun so that it can be formed, is formable by God's benefit: for it is good to be formed. So even the capacity for form is some good; and therefore the author of all goods, who gave form, himself made the possibility of being formed. So everything that is, insofar as it is, and everything that is not yet, insofar as it can be, has it from God. Which is said in another way thus: every formed thing, insofar as it is formed, and everything not yet formed, insofar as it can be formed, has it from God. And no thing keeps the integrity of its nature unless it is sound in its own kind. And all soundness is from him from whom is every good; and every good is from God: so all soundness is from God.

From this, anyone whose mind's eyes are open, and not darkened and disturbed by the pernicious pursuit of vain victory, easily understands that all things that are corrupted and die are good, although corruption itself and death itself are evil. For unless they were deprived of some soundness, corruption or death would not harm them; but if corruption did not harm, it would in no way be corruption. If then corruption opposes soundness, and soundness, as no one doubts, is good, all things are good which corruption opposes; and those which corruption opposes are themselves corrupted: so the things that are corrupted are good; but they are corrupted because they are not supreme goods. Because, then, they are good, they are from God; because they are not supreme goods, they are not God. The good that cannot be corrupted, therefore, is God. And all other goods are from him, which of themselves can be corrupted, because of themselves they are nothing; but through him they are partly kept from corruption, partly healed when corrupted.

The first vice of the rational soul is the will to do those things which the supreme and inmost truth forbids. So man was expelled from paradise into this world, that is, from eternal things to temporal, from abundance to want, from firmness to weakness; not, then, from substantial good to substantial evil, because no substance is evil, but from eternal good to temporal good, from spiritual good to carnal good, from intelligible good to sensible good, from the supreme good to the lowest good. There is, then, a certain good which the rational soul sins in loving, because it is ranked below the soul; so the sin itself is evil, not the substance which is loved in sinning. So that tree which is written to have been planted in the middle of paradise is not evil, but the transgression of the divine precept. And since this has just condemnation following it, from that tree which was touched against the prohibition there comes the discernment of good and evil: because when the soul has become entangled in its sin, by paying the penalty it learns the difference between the precept which it would not keep and the sin which it committed; and in this way the evil which it did not learn by avoiding it, it learns by feeling it; and the good which by not obeying it loved less, it loves more ardently by comparison. The vice of the soul, then, is what it has done, and the difficulty resulting from the vice is the punishment which it suffers; and this is the whole of evil. But doing and suffering are not a substance; therefore substance is not evil. So neither water is evil, nor an animal that lives in the air; for these are substances; but evil is the voluntary plunge into water and the suffocation which the drowned man suffers. An iron stylus is skillfully made, with one end with which we write and another with which we erase, and is beautiful in its kind and suited to our use. But if someone wanted to write with the end with which one erases, and erase with the end with which one writes, he would in no way make the stylus evil, though the act itself would rightly be blamed; and if he corrects it, where will the evil be? If someone suddenly looks at the noonday sun, his eyes will be struck back and disturbed: will either the sun or the eyes be evil on that account? In no way; for they are substances; but the evil is the disordered looking, and the disturbance itself that follows; and this evil will not exist when the eyes have been restored and look at their own light fittingly. Nor, when that same light which belongs to the eyes is worshiped in place of the light of wisdom which belongs to the mind, does it itself become evil; but the superstition is evil by which the creature is served rather than the Creator; and this evil will not exist at all when the soul, having recognized the Creator, has subjected itself to him alone, and has perceived that other things are subjected to it through him. So all bodily creation, if it is merely possessed by a soul that loves God, is the lowest good, and beautiful in its kind, since it is held together by form and appearance; but if it is loved by a soul that neglects God, not even so does it itself become evil; but because the sin by which it is so loved is evil, it becomes penal to its lover, entangles him in miseries, and feeds him with deceitful pleasures, because they neither last nor satisfy, but torture with pains. For when the beautiful changeableness of the times runs its course, the coveted form deserts its lover, departs from the senses with the torment of the one who perceives it, and drives him about with errors; so that he thinks that this is the first form which is the lowest of all, namely that of bodily nature, which the flesh, wrongly delighted, has reported through the slippery senses; so that when he thinks something, he believes he understands, deluded by the shadows of phantasms. And if ever, not holding the whole discipline of divine providence but thinking he holds it, he tries to resist the flesh, he gets as far as the images of visible things, and in thought vainly forms immense spaces of this light which he sees bounded by fixed limits; and he promises himself this appearance as his future dwelling, not knowing that he is drawn by the lust of the eyes, and wishes to go with this world outside the world; which he does not think to be this world because he stretches its brighter part to infinity by false thought. This can very easily be done not only with this light but also with water, finally with wine, with honey, with gold, with silver, even with the flesh or blood or bones of any animals, and other things of this kind. For there is nothing bodily which, though seen as one, cannot be thought of as countless, or, though seen in a small space, cannot by the same faculty of imagination be spread out to infinity. But it is very easy to curse the flesh, very hard not to think carnally.

By this perversity of the soul, then, which comes about through sin and punishment, the whole of bodily nature becomes what is said through Solomon: “Vanity of those who are vain, and all is vanity. What abundance has man in all his labor at which he labors under the sun?” For not in vain was ‘of those who are vain’ added, because if you take away the vain, who pursue the last things as if they were first, body will not be vanity; but in its own kind it will show beauty, though the lowest, without any error. For the multiplicity of temporal forms has scattered man, fallen from the unity of God, through the carnal senses, and multiplied his affection with changeable variety: so there has arisen a laborious abundance, and, if one may say so, a plentiful want, while he pursues one thing after another and nothing remains with him. So “from the time of his grain, wine and oil he has been multiplied,” so that he does not find the selfsame, that is, the unchangeable and singular nature, following which he would not err, and having attained which he would not grieve. For he will have, as a consequence, also the redemption of his body, which will no longer be corrupted. But now “the body which is corrupted weighs down the soul, and the earthly dwelling presses down the mind that thinks many things,” because the lowest beauty, that of bodies, is swept along in the order of succession. For it is the lowest precisely because it cannot have all things at once; but while some things give way and others succeed, they complete the number of temporal forms in one beauty.

And all this is not evil because it passes. For so a verse too is beautiful in its kind, although two syllables can in no way be said at once. For the second is not pronounced unless the first has passed; and so the end is reached in order, so that when the last alone sounds, without the earlier ones sounding with it, yet, woven together with those that are past, it completes the metrical form and grace. Yet the art itself by which the verse is made is not so subject to time that its beauty is spread out through measures of duration; but it has all things at once, by which it makes a verse that does not have all things at once but replaces the earlier parts by the later; yet the verse is beautiful because it displays the last traces of that beauty which the art itself keeps constantly and unchangeably.

So, as some perverse people love the verse more than the art itself by which the verse is made, because they have given themselves more to the ears than to the intelligence, so many love temporal things and do not seek divine providence, the founder and ruler of the times; and in their very love of temporal things they do not want what they love to pass, and are as absurd as if someone, at the recitation of a famous poem, wanted to hear one single syllable perpetually. But such hearers of poems are not found; yet everything is full of such judges of things; because there is no one who cannot easily hear not only a whole verse but a whole poem; but no man can perceive the whole order of the ages. Add to this that we are not parts of the poem, but we have been made parts of the ages by condemnation. The poem, then, is sung under our judgment; the ages are carried through by our labor. To no defeated man are the athletic games pleasing, yet they are graceful even with his disgrace: for this too is a certain imitation of truth. And we are forbidden such spectacles for no other reason than lest, deceived by the shadows of things, we stray from the very things of which they are shadows. So the condition and governance of this universe displeases only impious and condemned souls; but even with their misery, it pleases many, whether victors on earth or spectators without danger in heaven: for nothing just displeases the just.

Therefore, since every rational soul is either miserable through its sins or happy through its right deeds, and every irrational soul either yields to a more powerful one, or obeys a better, or is matched with an equal, or exercises one who strives, or harms one condemned; and every body serves its soul as far as is permitted according to the soul's merits and the order of things: there is no evil to universal nature, but to each his own fault becomes evil. Moreover, when the soul, regenerated by the grace of God, restored to wholeness, and now subject to him by whom it was created, with its body also restored to its original firmness, begins not to be possessed with the world but to possess the world, there will be no evil for it: because that lowest beauty of temporal changes, which used to run its course with it, will run its course beneath it; and there will be, as it is written, a new heaven and a new earth, not for souls laboring in a part, but reigning in the whole. “For all things are yours,” says the Apostle, “and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's”; and, “The head of the woman is the man, the head of the man is Christ, and the head of Christ is God.” Since, then, the vice of the soul is not its nature but against its nature, and is nothing else than sin and the punishment of sin, it is understood from this that no nature, or, if it is better put so, no substance or essence is evil. Nor does it follow from the sins and punishments of the soul that the universe is disfigured by any deformity. For the rational substance which is pure of all sin, subject to God, rules over the other things subject to it. But that which has sinned is ranked where it is fitting that such should be, so that, with God as founder and ruler of the universe, all things are seemly. And the beauty of the whole creation is blameless through these three: the condemnation of sinners, the exercise of the just, and the perfection of the blessed.

Therefore the very medicine of the soul too, which is carried out by divine providence and ineffable kindness, is most beautiful in its steps and distinctions. For it is divided into authority and reason. Authority demands faith and prepares man for reason. Reason leads to understanding and knowledge. Yet reason does not wholly abandon authority, when it is considered whom one should believe; and certainly the highest authority belongs to truth itself once known and clearly seen. But since we have fallen into temporal things and are hindered from eternal things by love of them, a certain temporal medicine, which calls to salvation not those who know but those who believe, comes first not in the order of nature and excellence but in the order of time itself. For wherever one has fallen, there one must lean in order to rise. So we must strive, by means of the very carnal forms by which we are held back, toward knowing those which the flesh does not report. And I call those carnal which can be perceived through the flesh, that is, through the eyes, through the ears, and the other bodily senses. To cleave with love to these carnal or bodily forms is necessary for children, and nearly necessary for adolescents; but from then on, as age advances, it is not necessary.

Since, then, divine providence provides not only for individual men, as it were privately, but for the whole human race, as it were publicly, what is done with individuals is known to God who does it and to those with whom it is done. But what is done with the human race he willed to be made known through history and through prophecy. And faith in temporal things, whether past or future, avails more by believing than by understanding. But it is for us to consider which men or which books are to be believed in order to worship God rightly, which is the one salvation. The first question in this matter is whether we should rather believe those who call us to worship many gods or those who call us to worship one God. Who would doubt that those are rather to be followed who call to one, especially since those worshipers of many agree about this one Lord and ruler of all? And certainly number begins from one. So those are to be followed first who say that the one supreme God is the only true God and alone to be worshiped. If truth does not shine out among them, then at last one must move elsewhere. For as in the very nature of things the authority of the one who brings all things to one is greater, and in the human race a multitude has no power unless it is in agreement, that is, of one mind, so in religion the authority of those who call to one ought to be greater and more worthy of faith. Another consideration is the dissension that has arisen among men about the worship of the one God. But we have received that our forefathers, at that stage of faith by which one ascends from temporal to eternal things, followed visible miracles (for they could not do otherwise), and through them it was brought about that these should not be necessary for posterity. For since the catholic Church has been spread and founded throughout the whole world, those miracles were not allowed to last into our times, lest the mind should always seek visible things, and the human race grow cold through familiarity with the things by whose novelty it had been set aflame; nor ought we now to doubt that those are to be believed who, though they preached things which few attain, yet were able to persuade the peoples to follow them. For the question now is whom one should believe before one is fit to undertake reasoning about divine and invisible things; for to reason itself, that of a purer soul which has reached clearly seen truth, human authority is in no way preferred. But no pride leads to it. If there were no pride, there would be no heretics, nor schismatics, nor those circumcised in the flesh, nor worshipers of creatures and idols. Yet if these did not exist before the perfection of the people which is promised, truth would be sought much more sluggishly.

The temporal dispensation, then, and the medicine of divine providence toward those who by sin deserved mortality, is handed down as follows. First, the nature and education of any one man who is born is considered. His first age, infancy, is spent in bodily nourishment, to be wholly forgotten as he grows. Childhood follows it, from which we begin to remember something. To this succeeds adolescence, to which nature now permits the propagation of offspring and makes one a father. Then youth takes over from adolescence, now to be exercised in public duties and tamed under laws; in which the more vehement prohibition of sins, and the punishment of sinners coercing slavishly, produces in carnal souls more violent assaults of lust, and doubles every offense. For it is no simple sin to commit what is not only evil but also forbidden. After the labors of youth, some peace is granted to the elder. Then a worse and faded age, more subject to diseases and weak, leads on to death. This is the life of man living from the body and bound by desires for temporal things. He is called the old man, and the outer, and the earthly, even if he obtains what the crowd calls happiness, in a well-ordered earthly city, whether under kings, or under princes, or under laws, or under all of these: for otherwise a people cannot be well ordered, even one that pursues earthly things; for it too has a certain measure of beauty of its own.

This man, whom we have described as old and outer and earthly, whether moderate in his kind or even exceeding the measure of servile justice, some live wholly from the rising of this life to its setting. But some begin this life necessarily from him, but are reborn inwardly, and by their spiritual strength and growth in wisdom destroy and kill the other parts of it, and bind them to heavenly laws, until after visible death the whole is restored. This one is called the new man, and the inner, and the heavenly, he too having, proportionally, certain spiritual ages of his own, distinguished not by years but by advances. The first at the breasts of useful history, which nourishes with examples. The second, now forgetting human things and tending toward divine, in which he is not held in the lap of human authority, but strives toward the supreme and unchangeable law by the steps of reason. The third, now more confident, marrying carnal appetite to the strength of reason, and rejoicing inwardly in a certain conjugal sweetness, when the soul is joined to the mind and veiled with the veil of modesty, so that he is no longer compelled to live rightly, but, even if all permit it, takes no pleasure in sinning. The fourth, now doing the same much more firmly and orderly, and shining forth into the perfect man, apt and fit for enduring and breaking all persecutions and the storms and waves of this world. The fifth, peaceful and wholly tranquil, living in the riches and abundance of the unchangeable kingdom of supreme and ineffable wisdom. The sixth, of total change into eternal life, passing, to the complete forgetting of temporal life, into the perfect form which was made to the image and likeness of God. For the seventh is eternal rest and perpetual happiness, not to be distinguished by any ages. For as the end of the old man is death, so the end of the new man is eternal life. For the former is the man of sin, the latter the man of righteousness.

But as these two undoubtedly are such that one man can live one of them, the old and earthly, through this whole life, but no one can live the new and heavenly in this life except together with the old (for he must begin from it, and it lasts with him until visible death, though it declines as he advances), so, proportionally, the whole human race, whose life, as of one man, runs from Adam to the end of this world, is so governed under the laws of divine providence that it appears divided into two kinds. In one of them is the crowd of the impious, bearing the image of the earthly man from the beginning of the world to the end. In the other, the succession of the people dedicated to the one God, but from Adam to John the Baptist living the life of the earthly man with a certain servile justice: its history is called the Old Testament, as promising an earthly kingdom; and all of it is nothing else than an image of the new people, and of the New Testament promising the kingdom of heaven. The temporal life of this people meanwhile begins from the Lord's coming in humility and runs until the day of judgment, when he will come in glory. After that judgment, when the old man is extinguished, there will be that change which promises the angelic life: “For we shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed.” The pious people, then, will rise, so as to transform the remnants of its old man into the new. And the impious people, which from beginning to end has borne the old man, will rise to be cast headlong into the second death. Those who read carefully find the divisions between the ages; and they do not shudder at tares or chaff. For the impious lives for the pious, and the sinner for the just, so that by comparison with them the just may rise up more eagerly until he is perfected.

Whoever, in the times of the earthly people, deserved to attain the illumination of the inner man helped the human race for its time, showing it what that age required, and intimating by prophecy what it was not opportune to show: such are the patriarchs and prophets found to be by those who do not leap at them childishly, but piously and diligently treat so good and so great a secret of divine and human things. This I see most cautiously provided for, in the times of the new people too, by great and spiritual men, nurslings of the catholic Church: they do nothing publicly which they understand it is not yet the time to do with the people; they pour milk food abundantly and urgently into the many weaker ones who are eager, but share stronger food with the few wise. For they speak wisdom among the perfect, but from the carnal and natural men, though new men, still little ones, they cover some things, but they lie about nothing. For they do not consult their own vain honors and empty praises, but the benefit of those with whom they have been granted to share the fellowship of this life. For this is the law of divine providence: that no one is helped by superiors to know and receive the grace of God who has not helped inferiors to the same with pure affection. So, from our sin, which our very nature committed in the sinful man, the human race has also become a great glory and ornament of the earth, and is so fittingly governed by the care of divine providence that the ineffable art of medicine turns the very foulness of vices into a certain beauty of its own kind.

And since we have spoken of the beneficence of authority as much as seemed enough for the present, let us see how far reason can advance, ascending from visible to invisible things and from temporal to eternal. For it is not in vain and idly that one should behold the beauty of the sky, the order of the stars, the brightness of light, the alternations of days and nights, the monthly courses of the moon, the fourfold tempering of the year, corresponding to the four elements, the great power of seeds producing forms and numbers, and all things keeping their proper measure and nature in their own kind. In considering these, no vain and perishing curiosity is to be exercised, but a step is to be made toward immortal and ever-abiding things. For the next thing is to attend to what that living nature is which perceives all these things; which surely, since it gives life to the body, must be more excellent than the body. For no mass whatever, however brightly it shines with this visible light, is to be highly esteemed if it lacks life. For any living substance whatever is placed by the law of nature above any non-living substance. But since no one doubts that irrational animals also live and perceive, that is most excellent in the human mind, not that by which it perceives sensible things, but that by which it judges about sensible things. For many beasts both see more sharply and touch bodies more keenly with the other bodily senses than men; but to judge about bodies belongs not to a merely perceiving life but to a reasoning one; in this they are lacking, and we excel. Now it is very easy to see that the one judging is more excellent than the thing about which it judges. And rational life judges not only about sensible things but about the senses themselves: why an oar in water must appear broken when it is straight, and why it must be perceived so through the eyes; for the sight of the eyes can report this, but in no way judge it. Therefore it is clear that, as sensitive life excels the body, so rational life excels both.

So if rational life judges according to itself, there is no nature more excellent. But since it is clear that it is changeable, being found now skilled, now unskilled, and it judges the better the more skilled it is, and is the more skilled the more it shares in some art or discipline or wisdom, the nature of art itself must be sought. And I do not want art now to be understood as what is noted by experience, but what is tracked down by reasoning. For what splendid thing does he know who knows that stones cohere more firmly with mortar made of lime and sand than with mud? Or he who builds so elegantly that, where there are several things, like answers to like, and where there are single things, they hold the middle place? Though this sense is now nearer to reason and truth. But surely it must be asked why it offends us if, of two windows placed not one above the other but side by side, one is larger or smaller, when they could have been equal; but if they are one above the other, even if both are unequal by as much as half, that inequality does not offend so; and why we do not much care how much one of them is larger or smaller, because there are two. But in three, sense itself seems to demand either that they not be unequal, or that between the largest and the smallest the middle one be such that it exceeds the smaller by as much as it is exceeded by the larger. For so nature itself is first consulted, as it were, about what it approves. Here it is especially to be noted how what displeased less when seen alone is rejected in comparison with something better. So it is found that common art is nothing else than the memory of things experienced and found pleasing, with a certain practice of body and work added; if you lack this, you can still judge about works, which is much more excellent, though you cannot produce works of skill.

But since in all arts harmony pleases, by which alone all things are sound and beautiful, and harmony itself seeks equality and unity, either by the likeness of equal parts or by the gradation of unequal ones, who is there who finds supreme equality or likeness in bodies, and dares to say, when he has considered carefully, that any body is truly and simply one, since all things change by passing either from form to form or from place to place, and consist of parts occupying their own places, through which they are divided into different spaces? Moreover, true equality and likeness itself, and true and first unity itself, is beheld not with eyes of flesh nor with any such sense, but by the mind that understands. For whence would any equality whatever be sought in bodies, or whence would one be convinced that it differs very greatly from perfect equality, unless the perfect were seen by the mind? If indeed what is not made is to be called perfect. And while all things that are sensibly beautiful, whether produced by nature or worked by arts, are beautiful in places and times, like a body and the motions of a body, that equality and unity known only to the mind, according to which judgment is made about bodily beauty through the sense as messenger, is neither swollen in place nor unstable in time. For it cannot rightly be said that a round wheel-rim is judged according to it and a round little vessel not, or a round little vessel according to it and a round denarius not. Similarly in times and in the motions of bodies, it is ridiculous to say that equal years are judged according to it and equal months not, or equal months according to it and equal days not. But whether something moves harmoniously through these spaces, or through hours, or through briefer moments, it is judged by the same one unchangeable equality. And if smaller and larger spaces of figures and motions are judged according to the same law of parity, or likeness, or congruence, the law itself is greater than all these, but in power. In space, however, whether of place or time, it is neither greater nor smaller: because if it were greater, we would not judge smaller things according to the whole of it; and if it were smaller, we would not judge larger things according to it. But now, since a square forum, a square stone, a square tablet and a square gem are judged according to the whole law of squareness; and again, according to the whole law of equality the motions of the feet of a running ant are judged to be in harmony, and according to the same those of a walking elephant: who would doubt that it is neither greater nor smaller in intervals of places and times, while in power it surpasses all things? And since this law of all arts is wholly unchangeable, while the human mind, to which it is granted to see such a law, can undergo the changeableness of error, it is clear enough that above our mind there is a law, which is called truth.

Nor is it any longer to be doubted that the unchangeable nature which is above the rational soul is God; and that the first life and the first essence are where the first wisdom is. For this is that unchangeable truth which is rightly called the law of all arts and the art of the almighty Artificer. So, since the soul perceives that it judges the appearance and motion of bodies not according to itself, it must at the same time recognize that its own nature excels the nature about which it judges, but that the nature according to which it judges, and about which it can in no way judge, excels it. For I can say why the members of any body ought to correspond to each other similarly on both sides: because I delight in supreme equality, which I behold not with the eyes of the body but of the mind; and therefore I judge the things I see with the eyes to be the better the nearer they are, according to their nature, to those which I understand with the mind. But why those are so, no one can say; nor would anyone soberly say that they ought to be so, as though they could be otherwise. And why they please us, and why, when we are wiser, we love them most vehemently, not even this will anyone dare to say, if he understands them rightly. For as we and all rational souls judge rightly about lower things according to truth, so about us, when we cleave to it, truth itself alone judges. But about it not even the Father judges, for it is not less than he; and therefore what the Father judges, he judges through it. For all things that seek unity have this as their rule, or form, or exemplar, or whatever other word it allows itself to be called by; since it alone has fulfilled the likeness of him from whom it received being, if indeed ‘received’ is not unfittingly said, in the sense in which it is called the Son, because it is not from itself but from the first and supreme principle, who is called the Father, from whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named. “The Father, therefore, judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son”; and, “The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is judged by no one,” that is, by no man, but only by that very law according to which he judges all things; since this too was said most truly: “We must all be presented before the judgment seat of Christ.” He judges all things, therefore, because he is above all things when he is with God. And he is with him when he understands most purely and loves with all charity what he understands. So, as far as he can, he himself also becomes that very law according to which he judges all things, and about which no one can judge. As in these temporal laws, although men judge about them when they establish them, yet once they have been established and confirmed, it will not be permitted for a judge to judge about them, but only according to them. Yet the founder of temporal laws, if he is a good and wise man, consults that eternal law, about which it is given to no soul to judge, so that according to its unchangeable rules he may discern what is to be commanded and forbidden for the time. It is lawful, then, for pure souls to know the eternal law, but not lawful to judge it. And the difference is this: for knowing it is enough that we see that something is so or not so; but for judging we add something by which we signify that it can also be otherwise; as when we say, ‘It ought to be so,’ or ‘It ought to have been so,’ or ‘It will have to be so,’ as craftsmen do in their works.

But for many human delight is the end, and they do not want to strive toward higher things so as to judge why these visible things please. So if I ask a builder, when one arch has been built, why he constructs another equal to it on the other side, he will answer, I believe, so that the members of the building may correspond, like to like. If I go on to ask why he chooses that very thing, he will say that it is fitting, that it is beautiful, that it delights those who see it: he will dare nothing more. For, bent down, he rests on his eyes, and does not understand on what it depends. But I will not cease to urge a man who has inner eyes and sees invisibly to ask why these things please, so that he may dare to be judge of human delight itself. For so he rises above it and is not held by it, while he judges not according to it but judges it. And first I will ask whether things are beautiful because they delight, or delight because they are beautiful. Here I shall be answered without hesitation that they delight because they are beautiful. I will then ask why they are beautiful; and if there is hesitation, I will suggest whether it is because their parts are like one another and are brought by some joining into one harmony. When he has found this to be so, I will ask whether they supremely achieve this very unity which they are shown to seek, or lie far below it and in some way lie about it. If this is so (for who, once reminded, does not see that there is no form and no body at all which does not have some trace of unity, and that no body, however beautiful, since it necessarily has one part here and another there through intervals of place, can attain the unity which it pursues?), if this is so, I will demand that he answer where he himself sees this unity, or from where he sees it: for if he did not see it, how would he know both what the form of bodies imitates and what it cannot achieve? For now, when he says to bodies, ‘You would be nothing unless some unity held you together, but again, if you were unity itself, you would not be bodies,’ he is rightly asked: ‘Whence do you know that unity according to which you judge bodies, which unless you saw it you could not judge that they do not fulfill it? But if you saw it with these bodily eyes, you would not truly say that, though they are held by its trace, they are far from it; for with these bodily eyes you see only bodily things: so it is with the mind that we see it.’ But where do we see it? If it were in this place where our body is, one who in this way judges about bodies in the East would not see it. So it is not contained in place; and while it is present wherever one judges, it is nowhere through spaces of place, and through power it is nowhere absent.

But if bodies lie about it, we must not believe them when they lie, lest we fall into the vanities of the vain; but we must rather ask, since they lie about it in that they seem to show it to the eyes of flesh while it is seen by the pure mind, whether they lie insofar as they are like it, or insofar as they do not attain it. For if they attained it, they would fulfill what they imitate. And if they fulfilled it, they would be wholly like it. If they were wholly like it, there would be no difference between that nature and this. And if that were so, they would not lie about it: for they would be what it is. Yet to those who consider more carefully they do not lie: for he lies who wishes to seem what he is not; but what, without willing it, is thought to be other than it is, does not lie, but only deceives. For the liar is distinguished from the deceiver in this, that in every liar there is the will to deceive, even if he is not believed; but one cannot be a deceiver who does not deceive. So bodily form, since it has no will, does not lie; and if it is not even thought to be what it is not, it does not deceive either.

But not even the eyes themselves deceive, for they can report to the mind nothing but their own affection. And if not only they but all the senses of the body report as they are affected, I do not know what more we ought to demand of them. Take away the vain, then, and there will be no vanity. If someone thinks an oar is broken in water and made whole when it is taken out, he does not have a bad messenger, but is a bad judge. For the sense, by its nature, could not perceive it otherwise in water, nor ought it to have: for if air is one thing and water another, it is right that it be perceived one way in air and another in water. So the eye is right, for it was made for this, only to see; but the soul is perverse, for which the mind, not the eye, was made to contemplate the supreme beauty. But it wants to turn the mind to bodies, and the eyes to God. For it seeks to understand carnal things and to see spiritual things, which cannot be done.

Wherefore this perversity must be corrected, because unless one makes what is above below and what is below above, he will not be fit for the kingdom of heaven. Let us not then seek the highest things in the lowest, nor cling to the lowest themselves. Let us judge them, lest we be judged with them; that is, let us attribute to them only as much as the lowest form deserves, lest, when we seek the first things among the last, we be counted by the first among the last. This does no harm to those last things, but very much to us. Nor is the administration of divine providence any less seemly on that account; for both the unjust are ordered justly and the foul beautifully. And if the beauty of visible things deceives us because it is held together by unity and does not fulfill unity, let us understand, if we can, that we are deceived not by what is but by what is not. For every body is a true body but a false unity. For it is not supremely one, nor does it imitate unity so far as to fulfill it; and yet it would not even be a body unless it were in some way one. Moreover, it could not be in some way one unless it had this from that which is supremely one.

O stubborn souls, give me someone who sees without any imagining of carnal sights. Give me someone who sees that the principle of everything that is one is nothing but the One alone, from whom every one thing is, whether it fulfills that unity or not. Give me one who sees, not one who quarrels, not one who wants to seem to see what he does not see. Give me one who resists the senses of the flesh and the blows by which through them he has been beaten in his soul; who resists the custom of men, resists the praises of men; who is pierced with compunction in his chamber, who re-carves his spirit, who does not love vanities outside and seek lies; who already knows how to say to himself: If there is one Rome, which some Romulus or other is said to have founded by the Tiber, this one which I fashion in thought is false: for it is not that Rome, nor am I there in mind; for then I would surely know what is happening there now. If there is one sun, this one which I fashion in thought is false: for that one runs its courses in fixed places and times; this one I set where I will and when I will. If that friend of mine is one, this one whom I fashion in thought is false: for where that one is I do not know; this one is fashioned where I will. I myself am certainly one, and I feel my body to be in this place; and yet by a figment of thought I go where I please and speak with whom I please. These things are false; and no one understands false things. So I do not understand when I contemplate these and believe them; for what I contemplate with the intellect must be true. Are these perhaps what are commonly called phantasms? Whence then is my soul filled with illusions? Where is the true which is beheld by the mind? To one thinking thus it can now be said: That light is true by which you know that these are not true. Through it you see that One by which you judge whatever else you see to be one, and yet judge that whatever changeable thing you see is not what that One is.

But if the gaze of the mind trembles at beholding these things, be still; do not struggle except with the habit of bodies: conquer that, and all will be conquered. We seek the One, than which nothing is simpler. So let us seek him in simplicity of heart. “Be still,” it says, “and you will know that I am the Lord”: not the stillness of sloth, but the stillness of thought, so that it is free from places and times. For these phantasms of swelling and of revolving do not allow us to see the constant unity. Places offer what we may love, times steal away what we love, and leave in the soul crowds of phantasms by which desire is roused toward one thing after another. So the mind becomes restless and full of trouble, longing in vain to hold the things by which it is held. It is called, then, to stillness, that is, not to love those things which cannot be loved without labor. For so it will rule them; so it will not be held but will hold. “My yoke,” he says, “is light.” Whoever is subject to this yoke has all else subject to him. So he will not labor; for what is subject does not resist. But the wretched friends of this world, whose masters they would be if they willed to be sons of God, since he gave them power to become sons of God, these friends of this world fear so much to be separated from its embrace that nothing is more laborious to them than not to labor.

But whoever sees at least this clearly, that falsity is that by which something is thought to be what it is not, understands that truth is that which shows what is. And if bodies deceive so far as they do not fulfill that One which they are shown to imitate (that Principle by which whatever is is one, and whatever strives toward whose likeness we naturally approve, because we naturally disapprove whatever departs from unity and tends toward its unlikeness), it is given us to understand that there is something which is so like that sole One, the Principle by which whatever is in any way one is one, that it wholly fulfills it and is the very same; and this is the Truth, and the Word in the Beginning, and the Word God with God. For if falsity comes from things that imitate the One, not insofar as they imitate it but insofar as they cannot fulfill it, that is the Truth which could fulfill it and be what that One is; it is that which shows it as it is: whence it is most rightly called its Word and its Light. Other things can be called like that One insofar as they are, for to that extent they are also true; but this is its very Likeness, and therefore the Truth. For as true things are true by truth, so whatever things are like are like by likeness. As truth, then, is the form of true things, so likeness is the form of like things. Therefore, since true things are true insofar as they are, and are insofar as they are like the principal One, that is the form of all things that are which is the supreme likeness of the Principle; and it is Truth, because it is without any unlikeness. Whence falsity arises, not from the things themselves deceiving, which show to the perceiver nothing but their own form, which they received according to the degree of their beauty; nor from the senses themselves deceiving, which, affected according to the nature of their body, report to the presiding mind nothing but their own affections; but sins deceive souls when they seek the true having abandoned and neglected the truth. For since they loved the works more than the artificer and the art itself, they are punished with this error, that they seek the artificer and the art in the works; and when they cannot find them (for God is not subject to the bodily senses, but transcends the mind itself), they think the works themselves are both the art and the artificer.

From this arises all impiety, not only of those who sin but also of those condemned for their sins. For not only do they wish to search into the creature contrary to God's precept, and to enjoy it rather than the law and truth itself (which is found to be the sin of the first man, misusing free choice), but in their very condemnation they add this too: that they not only love but also serve the creature rather than the Creator, and worship it in its parts, coming down from the highest to the lowest. Some keep themselves at this, that they worship in place of the supreme God the soul, and the first intellectual creature, which the Father made through the Truth to behold the Truth itself always, and itself through it, because it is in every way most like it. Then they come to the generative life, through which creature the eternal and unchangeable God works the begetting of visible and temporal things. From there they slip down to worshiping animals, and thence bodies themselves; and among these they first choose the more beautiful, among which the heavenly ones especially excel. So first the body of the sun presents itself, and some stop at it. Some think the brightness of the moon too worthy of worship: for it is, as is said, nearer to us; whence it is felt to have a nearer form. Others add the bodies of the other stars too, and the whole sky with its stars. Others join the air to the ethereal sky, and subject their souls to these two higher bodily elements. But among these, those seem to themselves most religious who think the whole creation together, that is, the whole world with all that is in it, and the life by which it breathes and is animated, which some believed bodily, others incorporeal: this whole together they think to be one great God, of whom the other things are parts. For they did not know the author and founder of the whole creation. Thence they are cast headlong into idols, and are sunk from the works of God down to their own works, which however are still visible.

For there is another worse and lower worship of images, by which men worship their own phantasms, and whatever they have imagined in thought with an erring mind, through pride or swelling, they observe under the name of religion, until it comes about in the soul that nothing at all is to be worshiped, and that men err who wrap themselves in superstition and entangle themselves in wretched servitude. But they think this in vain: for they do not bring it about that they do not serve; for the very vices remain by which they were drawn to think such things worthy of worship. For they serve a threefold desire: of pleasure, of excellence, or of spectacle. I deny that there is any of those who think nothing is to be worshiped who is not either subject to carnal joys, or cherishes vain power, or raves with delight in some spectacle. So, without knowing it, they love temporal things, so as to expect happiness from them. And to the things by which anyone wishes to be made happy he must be a slave, willing or not. For wherever they lead, he follows; and whoever seems able to take them away is feared. And a spark of fire and some small creature can take these away. Finally, to pass over countless adversities, time itself must take away all passing things. So, since this world encloses all temporal things, those who think nothing is to be worshiped, lest they serve, are slaves to all the parts of the world.

Yet although they lie wretched at this extremity of things, letting their vices rule them, condemned either by lust, or pride, or curiosity, or two of these, or all, as long as they are in this race-course of human life they may engage and conquer, if they first believe what they cannot yet understand, and do not love the world; for “all that is in the world,” as was divinely said, “is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the world.” In this way those three are marked: for ‘the lust of the flesh’ signifies the lovers of the lowest pleasure; ‘the lust of the eyes,’ the curious; ‘the ambition of the world,’ the proud. A threefold temptation, too, was shown to be guarded against in the man whom Truth itself took up. “Tell these stones,” says the tempter, “to become bread.” But that one and only Teacher said: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” So he taught that the desire for pleasure must be tamed so that one should not yield even to hunger. But perhaps he who could not be deceived by the pleasure of the flesh could be by the pride of temporal domination; so all the kingdoms of the world were shown him, and it was said: “All these I will give you if you fall down and worship me.” To which the answer was: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.” So pride was trampled. And there was presented the last allurement too, that of curiosity: for he urged him to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple for no other reason than to test something. But here too he was not conquered, and so he answered in such a way that we might understand that there is no need, in order to know God, of temptations that try to explore divine things visibly: “You shall not tempt,” he said, “the Lord your God.” Therefore whoever is fed inwardly by the word of God does not seek pleasure in this desert. Whoever is subject to the one God alone does not seek boasting on the mountain, that is, in earthly elevation. Whoever cleaves to the eternal spectacle of unchangeable truth is not cast down through the pinnacle of this body, that is, through these eyes, to know temporal and lower things.

What then remains from which the soul cannot recall the first beauty which it abandoned, when it can do so even from its own vices? For so the Wisdom of God reaches from end to end mightily. So through it that supreme Artificer wove his works together, ordered to one end of beauty. So that goodness, from the highest to the lowest, begrudged no beauty which could come from him alone; so that no one is cast down from truth itself who is not received by some image of truth. Ask what holds you in bodily pleasure: you will find nothing else but harmony; for if things in conflict produce pain, things in harmony produce pleasure. Recognize, then, what is the supreme harmony. Do not go outside; return into yourself; truth dwells in the inner man; and if you find your nature changeable, transcend yourself too. But remember, when you transcend yourself, that you are transcending a reasoning soul. So strive toward that from which the very light of reason is kindled. For where does every good reasoner arrive but at truth? Truth certainly does not arrive at itself by reasoning, but is itself what reasoners seek. See there a harmony than which there can be no higher, and come into harmony with it yourself. Confess that you are not what it is; for it does not seek itself, but you have come to it by seeking, not by distance of places but by the affection of the mind, so that the inner man may come into harmony with his indweller, not with the lowest and carnal pleasure but with the highest and spiritual. Or if you do not perceive what I say and doubt whether it is true, perceive at least whether you do not doubt that you doubt about these things; and if it is certain that you doubt, ask whence it is certain: there the light of this sun will not meet you at all, but “the true light which enlightens every man coming into this world.” This cannot be seen with these eyes, nor with those by which phantasms are thought, impressed on the soul through these same eyes; but with those by which it is said to the phantasms themselves: You are not what I seek, nor are you that by which I put you in order; and what meets me as foul among you, I disapprove; what is beautiful, I approve; though that by which I disapprove and approve is more beautiful; therefore I approve this itself more, and prefer it not only to you but to all those bodies from which I drew you. Then conceive the rule itself which you see in this way: Everyone who understands that he doubts understands something true, and is certain about this thing which he understands: so he is certain about something true. Everyone, then, who doubts whether there is truth has in himself something true about which he does not doubt; and nothing true is true except by truth. So he who could doubt about everything else ought not to doubt about truth. Where these things are seen, there is light without spaces of places and times, and without any phantasm of such spaces. Can these things be corrupted in any part, even if every reasoner perishes or grows old among the carnal dead below? For reasoning does not make such things but finds them. So before they are found they remain in themselves, and when they are found they renew us.

So the inner man is reborn, and the outer is corrupted day by day. But the inner looks at the outer and sees it foul in comparison with itself; yet beautiful in its own kind and rejoicing in the harmony of bodies, and corrupting what it turns to its own good, namely the food of the flesh: which, once corrupted, that is, losing their own form, pass into the structure of these members, and restore what is corrupted, passing into another form through harmony; and by the vital motion they are in a way sorted, so that from them what is fit is taken into the structure of this visible beauty, while what is unfit is expelled through suitable passages. Of these, the foulest part is returned to the earth to take on other forms, another part is exhaled through the whole body, another receives the hidden numbers of the whole animal and begins to become offspring, and, moved either by the union of two bodies or by some such phantasm, flows down through the generative passages from the very head in the lowest pleasure. Then in the mother, through fixed numbers of times, it is fitted into the numbers of places, so that each member occupies its own regions; and if they keep the measure of symmetry, with the light of color added, a body is born which is called beautiful, and is loved most ardently by its lovers: yet in it the form which is moved does not please more than the life which moves it. For if that living being loves us, it attracts us more violently; but if it hates us, we are angered and cannot bear it, even if it offers its very form to be enjoyed. This whole is the kingdom of pleasure, and the lowest beauty; for it is subject to corruption: and if it were not, it would be thought the highest. But divine providence is present, to show it to be not evil, because of such manifest traces of the first numbers, in which the wisdom of God has no number; and yet to be the lowest, by mixing with it pains and diseases and distortions of limbs, and darkness of color, and animosities and dissensions of minds, so that we may be admonished by these that something unchangeable must be sought. And it does this through the lowest ministers, for whom to do this is a pleasure; whom the divine Scriptures call destroyers and angels of wrath, though they themselves do not know what good is done through them. Like them are men who rejoice in others' miseries, and provide themselves with laughter and amusing spectacles, or want them provided, from the ruin and errors of others. And so in all these things the good are admonished, exercised, conquer, triumph and reign. But the wicked are deceived, tortured, conquered, condemned and serve; not the one supreme Lord of all, but the lowest servants, namely those angels who feed on the pains and misery of the condemned, and for that malevolence are tormented by the liberation of the good.

So all are ordered by their offices and ends into the beauty of the universe, so that what we shudder at in the part pleases very much if we consider it with the whole: because neither in judging a building should we consider only one corner, nor in a beautiful man only the hair, nor in one who speaks well only the movement of the fingers, nor in the course of the moon only the shapes of some three days. For these things, which are lowest precisely because they are perfect as wholes with imperfect parts, whether they are perceived as beautiful at rest or in motion, must be considered as wholes if we wish to judge rightly. For our judgment, if true, whether it judges of the whole or of a part, is beautiful: for it is raised above the whole world, and insofar as we judge truly, we cling to no part of it. But our error, clinging to a part of it, is itself foul in itself. But as a black color in a picture becomes beautiful with the whole, so the unchangeable divine providence fittingly presents this whole contest, assigning one thing to the conquered, another to those striving, another to the victors, another to the spectators, another to those at rest and contemplating God alone: since in all these there is no evil but sin and the punishment of sin, that is, a voluntary falling away from the supreme essence, and an involuntary toil among the lowest things; which can be said in another way thus: freedom from justice and slavery under sin.

The outer man is corrupted either by the progress of the inner, or by his own defect. But by the progress of the inner he is corrupted in such a way that he is wholly re-formed for the better, and restored to wholeness at the last trumpet, so that he is no longer corrupted nor corrupts. By his own defect, however, he is cast headlong into more corruptible beauties, that is, into the order of punishments. Nor should we wonder that I still call them beauties: for nothing is ordered which is not beautiful; and, as the Apostle says, all order is from God. We must admit that a weeping man is better than a happy worm: and yet I could speak copiously in praise of a worm without any lie, considering the brightness of its color, the smooth roundness of its body, the front parts fitting the middle and the middle the hind, striving for unity according to the lowliness of its nature; nothing formed on one side that does not correspond on the other with equal measure. What shall I say of the soul itself animating its little body: how it moves it rhythmically, how it seeks what suits it, how it overcomes or avoids obstacles as far as it can, and, referring all things to the one sense of its safety, suggests much more clearly than the body that unity which is the founder of all natures? I am speaking of any living worm whatever. Very many have spoken most truly and abundantly in praise of ashes and dung. What wonder then if I say that the soul of man, which, wherever it is and whatever it is like, is better than every body, is beautifully ordered, and that other beauties come from its punishments, since, when it is miserable, it is not where it is fitting for the happy to be, but where it is fitting for the miserable to be? Let no one deceive us at all. Whatever is rightly blamed is rejected in comparison with something better. But every nature, however last, however lowest, is rightly praised in comparison with nothing. And no one is well off if he can be better off. So if we can be well off with truth itself, we are badly off with any trace of truth whatever: much worse, then, with the last of traces, when we cling to the pleasures of the flesh. Let us conquer, then, either the caresses or the vexations of this desire; let us subjugate this woman to ourselves, if we are men. With us as leaders she too will be better, and will no longer be called desire but temperance. For when she leads and we follow, she is called desire and lust, and we rashness and folly. Let us follow Christ our head, so that she too may follow us, whose head we are. This can be commanded to women too, not by marital but by fraternal right; by which right in Christ we are neither male nor female. For they too have something manly by which they may subjugate feminine pleasures, by which they may serve Christ and command desire. This is manifest in many widows and virgins of God, and in many married women too who now keep the rights of marriage in a fraternal way, in the dispensation of the Christian people. But if by that part which God commands us to rule, and which he both exhorts and helps us to recover as our possession, if, then, by this part the man, that is, mind and reason, has been subjugated through negligence and impiety, the man will indeed be foul and miserable; but he is destined in this life, and after this life ordered, where that supreme Ruler and Lord judges he should be destined and ordered. So the universal creation is permitted to be stained by no foulness.

Let us walk, then, while we have the day, that is, while we can use reason, so that, turned to God, we may deserve to be enlightened by his Word, which is the true light, lest the darkness overtake us. For the day is the presence of that light which enlightens every man coming into this world. He said ‘man,’ because man can use reason, and where he fell, there lean in order to rise. If, then, the pleasure of the flesh is loved, let it be considered more carefully; and when the traces of certain numbers have been recognized there, it must be asked where they are without swelling. For there what is is more one. And if such numbers are in the very vital motion which works in seeds, they are more to be wondered at there than in the body. For if the numbers of seeds swelled like the seeds themselves, from half a fig seed half a tree would be born, and from animal seeds that are not whole, whole and entire animals would not be produced, nor would so tiny a single seed have the countless power of its own kind. For from one, according to its nature, crops of crops, forests of forests, flocks of flocks, peoples of peoples can be propagated through the ages, so that there is not a leaf or a hair, through so numerous a succession, whose principle was not in that first and one seed. Then we must consider how rhythmic, how sweet the beauties of sounds which the struck air carries when the nightingale sings, which the soul of that little bird would not produce so freely, whenever it pleased, unless it had them impressed incorporeally by vital motion. This can be noticed in the other animals too, which, lacking reason, do not lack sense. For there is none of them which does not produce something rhythmic and measured in its kind, either in the sound of its voice or in the other motion and activity of its members, not by any knowledge, but by the inmost bounds of nature, measured by that unchangeable law of numbers.

Let us return to ourselves, and leave those things which we have in common with trees and beasts. For the swallow builds its nest in one way, and each kind of bird in some one way of its own. What is it, then, in us by which we judge about all of them, what shapes they seek and how far they fulfill them, and by which we ourselves, as masters of all such shapes, devise countless things in buildings and other bodily works? What is it in us that understands inwardly that these visible masses of bodies are great or small by proportion; and that every body, however small, has a half, and if a half, countless parts: so that every grain of millet is as great to a part of itself of the size that our body holds in this world as the world is to us; and that this whole world is beautiful by the principle of its figures, not by its mass; and that it seems great not by its own quantity but by our smallness, that is, of the animals with which it is full; which again, since they too can be divided infinitely, are so small not in themselves but in comparison with others, and above all with the universe itself? Nor is there another principle in spaces of time; for as every length of place, so every length of time has a half of itself: for however short it is, it begins, proceeds and ends. So it cannot but have a half, since it is divided where it passes to its end. And by this the time of a short syllable is short compared with a longer one, and a winter hour compared with a summer hour is shorter. So the duration of an hour relative to a day, a day to a month, a month to a year, a year to a lustrum, a lustrum to greater cycles, and these referred to the whole of time, are short; while that very rhythmic succession and a certain gradation, whether of spaces of place or of time, is judged beautiful not by swelling or duration but by ordered harmony.

The measure of order itself lives in perpetual truth, neither vast in mass nor revolving in extension; but great in power above all places, unmoved in eternity above all times; without which, however, neither can the vastness of any mass be brought to unity, nor the extension of any time be kept from straying, nor anything be either a body so as to be a body, or a motion so as to be a motion. It is the one principal thing, neither thick through finite nor infinite extent, nor changeable through finite or infinite duration. For it does not have one thing here and another elsewhere, or one thing now and another later: because supremely one is the Father of Truth, the Father of his Wisdom, which, in no part unlike, is called his likeness and image, because it is from him. So the Son too is rightly said to be ‘from him,’ other things ‘through him.’ For the form of all things went before, supremely fulfilling the One from whom it is, so that the other things that are, insofar as they are like the One, should be made through that form.

Of these, some are through it in such a way that they are also toward it, like every rational and intellectual creature, among which man is most rightly said to be made to the image and likeness of God: for otherwise he could not behold unchangeable truth with the mind. Others are made through it in such a way that they are not toward it. And so, if the rational soul serves its Creator, by whom it was made, through whom it was made, and toward whom it was made, all other things will serve it: both the lowest life, which is so near to it and is its helper, through which it rules the body; and the body itself, the last nature and essence, over which, yielding in every way, it will rule at will, feeling no trouble from it; because it will no longer seek happiness from it or through it, but will receive it from God through itself. So it will govern the body re-formed and sanctified, without the loss of corruption and without the burden of difficulty. “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but will be like the angels in heaven.” “Food is for the belly and the belly for food: but God will destroy both the one and the other”; since “the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy.”

Therefore even in this pleasure of the body we find something to remind us to despise it: not because the nature of the body is evil, but because the soul, which has been granted to cling to the first things and enjoy them, wallows shamefully in the love of the lowest good. When a charioteer is dragged along and pays the penalty for his rashness, he blames whatever it was that he was using. But let him call for help; let the Lord of things give the command; let the horses be checked (while others are already making a spectacle of his fall and would make one of his death, if no help came); let him be restored to his place, set upon the wheels, given back control of the reins, and let him guide more carefully the horses, now obedient and tamed: then he will realize how well the chariot and the whole team were built, which by his fall had both injured him and lost the course of the most fitting control. For in this way too the greed of the soul that used it badly in paradise brought forth weakness for this body, when it seized the forbidden food against the instruction of the physician, in which eternal health is contained. If, then, in this very weakness of the visible flesh, where the happy life cannot be, a reminder of the happy life is found, because of the beauty that reaches from the highest down to the lowest, how much more in the craving for nobility and eminence, and in all the pride and empty pomp of this world! For what else does a man seek in it but to be, if possible, the only one to whom all things are subject, in a perverse imitation, that is, of almighty God? If he imitated him as a subject, by living according to his commandments, he would through him have all other things subject to him, and he would not come to such deformity as to fear a little beast while wishing to rule over men. Pride, then, also has a certain craving for unity and omnipotence, but in the rule of temporal things, which all pass away like a shadow. We want to be unconquered, and rightly so; for our mind's nature has this after God, by whom it was made to his image. But his commandments were to be kept; had they been kept, no one would conquer us. But now, while she to whose words we shamefully consented is subdued by the pain of childbearing, and we toil on the earth, we are also overcome, to our great disgrace, by everything that can move and disturb us. So we do not want to be conquered by men, and we cannot conquer anger. What more detestable than this disgrace can be named? We admit that a man is what we are; and yet, even if he has vices, he is not himself a vice. How much more honorable it is, then, for a man to conquer us than a vice! And who would doubt that envy is a monstrous vice, by which anyone who does not want to be conquered in temporal things must be tormented and subdued? It is better, then, that a man should conquer us than envy or any other vice.

But no one can be conquered by a man who has conquered his own vices. For no one is conquered except one from whom an adversary snatches away what he loves. He, then, who loves only what cannot be snatched from one who loves it is beyond doubt unconquered, and is not tormented by that envy. For he loves something which, the more people come to love and grasp it, the more abundantly he rejoices with them. For he loves God with his whole heart, and with his whole soul, and with his whole mind; and he loves his neighbor as himself. So he does not envy him for being what he himself is; rather, he even helps him as much as he can. Nor can he lose the neighbor whom he loves as himself, since even in himself he does not love the things that lie open to the eyes or to any other bodily senses. So he has within himself the one he loves as himself. And the rule of love is this: that the goods he wishes to come to himself he wishes for the other too, and the evils he does not wish to befall himself he does not wish for the other either. This will he keeps toward all men. For evil must be done to no one, and “love of neighbor works no evil.” Let us then love even our enemies, as we are commanded, if we truly wish to be unconquered. For no human being is unconquered through himself, but through that unchangeable law which those who serve it are alone free. For in this way what they love cannot be taken from them; and this one thing makes men unconquered and perfect. For if a man loves even another man not as himself but as a beast of burden, or as the baths, or as a painted or chattering little bird, that is, in order to get from him some temporal pleasure or advantage, he must serve not a man but, what is more shameful, so foul and detestable a vice that he does not love the man as a man ought to be loved. While that vice rules, he is led on to the end of life, or rather to death. But not even in the way that brothers after the flesh, or sons, or wives, or any kindred, or relatives by marriage, or fellow citizens are loved should a man be loved by a man. For that love too is temporal. For we should have none of these ties, which arise through being born and dying, if our nature, remaining in the commandments and in the image of God, had not been banished into this corruption. And so the Truth itself, calling us back to our original and perfect nature, commands us to resist the habit of the flesh, teaching that no one is fit for the kingdom of God who does not hate these fleshly ties. Nor should this seem inhuman to anyone. For it is more inhuman to love in a man not that he is a man but that he is a son; for this is to love in him not what belongs to God, but what belongs to oneself. What wonder, then, if he does not reach the kingdom who loves not what is common but what is private? “Both rather,” someone says. “That one thing rather,” says God. For the Truth says most truly: “No one can serve two masters.” For no one can perfectly love that to which we are called, unless he hates that from which we are called back. We are called to a perfect human nature, such as God made before our sin; we are called back from the love of the nature we deserved by sinning. We must hate what we wish to be freed from. Let us then hate temporal ties, if we burn with the love of eternity. Let a man love his neighbor as himself. For surely no one is to himself a father, or son, or relative by marriage, or anything of that kind, but only a man. He then who loves someone as himself ought to love in him what he is to himself. But bodies are not what we are; so in a man the body is not to be sought or desired. For to this point also applies the commandment: “You shall not covet your neighbor's property.” Therefore whoever loves in his neighbor something other than what he is to himself does not love him as himself. Human nature itself, then, is to be loved without the condition of the flesh, whether it is still to be perfected or already perfect. All who love God and do his will are kindred under one God and Father. And they are to one another both fathers, when they counsel one another, and sons, when they obey one another, and above all brothers, because one Father by his testament calls them to one inheritance.

Why, then, should this man not be unconquered in loving a man, since he loves nothing in him but the man, that is, a creature of God made to his image, and since the perfect nature he loves cannot be lacking to him, when he himself is perfect? For example, if someone loves a good singer, not this one or that one, but any good singer at all, being himself a perfect singer, he wishes all to be such, yet without what he loves being lacking to him, because he himself sings well. For if he envies anyone who sings well, he no longer loves that, but either praise or something else which he wants to obtain by singing well, and which can be lessened or taken from him if another also sings well. He, then, who envies a good singer does not love the good singer; and again, he who needs him does not himself sing well. This can be said much more fittingly of the one who lives well, because he can envy no one: for what those who live well attain is the same for all, and it does not become less when more have it. There can be a time when a good singer cannot fittingly sing, and needs another's voice by which what he loves is offered to him, as when he is at a banquet somewhere where it would be unseemly for him to sing but seemly to listen to a singer; but to live well is always seemly. So whoever both loves and does this not only does not envy those who imitate him, but gives himself to them most gladly and most kindly as far as he can; and yet he does not need them. For what he loves in them he has whole and perfect in himself. So when he loves his neighbor as himself, he does not envy him, because he does not envy himself; he gives him what he can, because he does so for himself too; he does not need him, because he does not need himself either: he needs only God, by clinging to whom he is happy. And no one snatches God from him. That man, then, is most truly and most surely unconquered who clings to God, not so as to earn some good from him outside him, but one for whom nothing other than clinging to God is good. Such a man, as long as he is in this life, uses a friend for repaying kindness, uses an enemy for patience, uses those he can for doing good, uses all for good will. And though he does not love temporal things, he himself uses temporal things rightly, and looks after men according to their lot, if he cannot do so equally for all. So if he speaks more readily to one of his close friends than to anyone else, it is not that he loves him more, but that he has greater confidence toward him and a more open door of opportunity. For he deals with those given over to time the better, the less he himself is bound to time. So since he cannot benefit all whom he loves equally, he would be unjust if he did not prefer to benefit those more closely joined to him. And a bond of mind is greater than one of the places or times in which we are born in this body; but the greatest is the one that prevails over all. So this man is not afflicted by anyone's death, since he who loves God with his whole mind knows that what does not perish to God does not perish to him either. And God is Lord of both the living and the dead. He is not wretched through anyone's wretchedness, because he is not just through anyone's justice either. And as no one takes justice and God from him, so no one takes away his happiness. And if at times he is moved by someone's danger, or error, or grief, he lets it avail as far as helping, correcting, or consoling the other, not as far as his own overthrow. And in all dutiful labors he is not broken, through the sure expectation of the rest to come. For what will harm him who can make good use even of an enemy? For he does not fear enmities, protected and defended by him at whose command and by whose gift he loves his enemies. For such a man it is too little not to be saddened in tribulations, unless he also rejoices, knowing that “tribulation works patience, patience proof, proof hope, and hope does not put to shame; because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Who will harm him? Who will subdue him? A man who makes progress in prosperity learns in adversity what progress he has made. For when there is plenty of changeable goods, he does not trust them; but when they are withdrawn, he discovers whether they had not taken hold of him. For often, when they are with us, we think that we do not love them; but when they begin to be absent, we find out who we are. For what was present without our love departs without our grief. So the one who seems to conquer is conquered, if by overcoming he attains what he will lose with grief; and the one who seems to be conquered conquers, if by yielding he attains what he does not lose against his will.

Let him, then, who delights in freedom seek to be free from the love of changeable things; and let him who delights in ruling cling, as a subject, to the one ruler of all, God, loving him more than himself. And this is perfect justice, by which we love the better things more and the lesser things less. Let him love a wise and perfect soul as he sees it to be; a foolish one not as it is, but because it can become perfect and wise; for he ought not to love even himself as foolish. For he who loves himself as foolish will not make progress toward wisdom; nor will anyone become what he desires to be unless he hates himself as he is. But until wisdom and perfection are reached, let him bear his neighbor's folly with the same mind with which he would bear his own if he were foolish and loved wisdom. Therefore, if even pride itself is a shadow of true freedom and true kingship, through it too divine providence reminds us what we signify when we are corrupt, and where we ought to return when we are corrected.

Again, all spectacles and everything that is called curiosity: what do they seek but the joy of knowing things? What, then, is more wonderful, what more beautiful, than truth itself, which every spectator admits he desires to reach, when he watches keenly not to be deceived, and boasts if he perceives and judges something more sharply and more quickly than others in the watching? Even a conjurer, who professes nothing but deception, they watch closely and observe most carefully; and if they are fooled, since they cannot delight in their own knowledge, they delight in the knowledge of the man who fools them. For if he too did not know by what means the spectators are deceived, or were believed not to know, no one would applaud him, since he would be in error like them. But if one of the crowd catches him out, he thinks he deserves greater praise than the conjurer, for no other reason than that he could not be deceived and fooled. And if the trick is plain to many, the conjurer is not praised, but the others who cannot catch such things are laughed at. So every prize is given to knowledge, and skill, and the grasp of truth; which those who seek it outside never reach. And so we are sunk in such trifles and shameful things that when asked which is better, the true or the false, we answer with one voice that the true is better; yet we cling far more eagerly to jests and games, where it is certainly not true things but fictions that delight us, than to the precepts of truth itself. So we are punished by our own judgment and our own mouth, approving one thing by reason and following another through vanity. Yet a thing is laughable and amusing only as long as we know the truth in comparison with which it is laughed at. But by loving such things we fall away from the true, and no longer find of what things they are imitations; we gape at them as if they were the first beauties, and, withdrawing from those beauties, we embrace our own phantoms. For when we return to search for the truth, these meet us on the way and do not let us pass, waylaying us not by force but by great ambushes, because we do not understand how widely that saying applies: “Beware of idols.” And so some have wandered in roving thought through innumerable worlds. Others have thought that God could only be a fiery body. Others, imagining the brightness of an immense light stretched out in every direction through infinite spaces, yet split on one side as by a kind of black wedge, and supposing two opposed kingdoms and setting up such principles of things, have told tales with their phantoms. If I were to make them swear whether they know these things to be true, perhaps they would not dare, but would say in turn, “Then you show what is true.” If I answered them only by telling them to seek that light by which it is evident and certain to them that believing is one thing and understanding another, they themselves would swear that this light cannot be seen with the eyes, nor thought of with any vastness of places, and that it is everywhere present to those who seek it, and that nothing more certain and more serene can be found. And again, all that I have now said about this light of the mind is made plain by no other light than this same light. For through it I understand that what has been said is true, and through it again I understand that I understand this. And I understand that this goes on again and again to infinity, when anyone understands that he understands something and again understands that very thing; and I understand that here there are no spaces of any bulk or motion. I understand also that I cannot understand unless I live, and I understand more certainly that by understanding I become more alive. For eternal life surpasses temporal life by its very liveliness; nor do I behold what eternity is except by understanding. For by the gaze of the mind I separate all changeableness from eternity, and in eternity itself I see no spaces of time; because spaces of time consist of the past and future motions of things. But in the eternal nothing passes and nothing is future: for what passes ceases to be, and what is future has not yet begun to be; but eternity only is; it neither was, as though it no longer is, nor will be, as though it is not yet. Therefore it alone could say most truly to the human mind, “I am who am”; and of it could be said most truly, “He who is has sent me.”

If we cannot yet cling to it, let us at least rebuke our phantoms and cast out of the theater of the mind games so trifling and deceptive. Let us use the steps which divine providence has deigned to build for us. For when, too much delighted by playful fictions, we were vanishing into our own thoughts and turning our whole life into empty dreams, the ineffable mercy of God did not disdain, through the rational creature serving its laws, by sounds and letters, fire, smoke, cloud, pillar, as by visible words, to play in a way with our infancy by parables and likenesses, and to heal our inner eyes with clay of this kind. Let us distinguish, then, what faith we owe to history and what faith to understanding; what we commit to memory without knowing it to be true, yet believing it; and where the true is, which does not come and pass away but always remains in the same way. What is the method of interpreting allegory, which is believed to be spoken through wisdom in the Holy Spirit: whether it is enough to carry it from older visible things to more recent visible things, or on to the affections and nature of the soul, or on to unchangeable eternity; or whether some allegories signify visible deeds, others movements of minds, others the law of eternity; or whether some are found in which all these are to be traced. And what is the stable faith, whether historical and temporal or spiritual and eternal, to which all interpretation of Authority must be directed. And what faith in temporal things profits for understanding and holding the eternal, where the end of all good actions lies. And what difference there is between allegory of history, allegory of fact, allegory of speech, and allegory of sacrament. And how the very language of the divine Scriptures is to be taken according to the idiom of each tongue. For every language has certain kinds of expression of its own, which seem absurd when they are carried over into another language. What is the profit of such lowliness of speech that in the sacred books are found not only the anger of God, and sadness, and waking from sleep, and memory and forgetting, and some other things that can befall good men, but even the words repentance, jealousy, drunkenness, and others of the kind. And whether the eyes of God, and hands, and feet, and other members of this kind named in the Scriptures, are to be referred to the visible form of the human body, or to the meanings of intelligible and spiritual powers, like helmet, and shield, and sword, and belt, and the like. And, what is most to be asked, what profit it is to the human race that divine providence has spoken with us in this way through the rational, generative, and bodily creature serving it. Once this one thing is known, all childish insolence is shut out of minds, and holy religion is brought in.

So, leaving aside and rejecting the trifles of the theater and the poets, let us feed and refresh with the study and handling of the divine Scriptures a mind worn out and parched by the hunger and thirst of vain curiosity, and longing in vain to be refreshed and filled with empty phantoms, as with painted banquets. Let us be trained in a healthful way by this truly liberal and noble game. If the wonders and beauty of spectacles delight us, let us long to see that Wisdom which “reaches from end to end mightily, and orders all things sweetly.” For what is more wonderful than an incorporeal power that builds and governs the corporeal world? Or what more beautiful than that power ordering and adorning it?

But if all admit that these things are perceived through the body, and that the mind is better than the body, will the mind see nothing by itself? Or can what it sees be anything but far more excellent and far superior? Rather, reminded by the things we judge, let us look at what it is by which we judge; and, turning from the works of the arts to the law of the arts, we shall behold with the mind that beauty in comparison with which the things that are beautiful by its kindness are ugly. “For the invisible things of God, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made, his eternal power also and divinity.” This is the return from temporal things to eternal, and the re-forming from the life of the old man into the new man. What is there from which a man cannot be reminded to take up the virtues, when he can be reminded by the vices themselves? For what does curiosity seek but knowledge, which cannot be certain except of eternal things that are always the same? What does pride seek but power, which refers to ease of action, and which the soul does not find perfect unless it is subject to God and turned to his kingdom with the highest love? What does bodily pleasure seek but rest, which exists only where there is no want and no corruption? Therefore we must beware of the lower hell, that is, the heavier punishments after this life, where there can be no remembrance of truth, because there is no reasoning; and no reasoning because the true light, “which enlightens every man coming into this world,” does not flood it. So let us hasten and walk while it is day, lest darkness overtake us. Let us hasten to be freed from the second death, where there is no one who is mindful of God, and from hell, where no one will confess to God.

But wretched men, to whom what is known becomes cheap and who rejoice in novelties, would rather learn than know, though knowledge is the end of learning. And those to whom ease of action is cheap would rather strive than win, though victory is the end of striving. And those to whom the health of the body is cheap would rather eat than be filled, and would rather enjoy the genital members than suffer no such excitement; there are even those who would rather sleep than not be drowsy, though the end of all that pleasure is not to hunger and thirst, not to desire intercourse, and not to be wearied in body. Therefore those who desire the ends themselves first are free of curiosity, knowing that the certain knowledge is the one that is within, and enjoying it as far as they can in this life. Next they receive ease of action, laying aside obstinacy, knowing that the greater and easier victory is not to resist anyone's hostility; and this they experience as far as they can in this life. Last, they receive rest of the body also, by abstaining from the things without which this life can be lived; so they taste how sweet the Lord is. Nor will they doubt what is to come after this life; and they are nourished in their perfection by faith, hope, and love. But after this life knowledge will be made perfect, because “now we know in part, but when that which is perfect has come, it will not be in part”; and all peace will be present, for now “another law in my members fights against the law of my mind, but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord will free us from the body of this death,” because for the most part we agree with our adversary while we are with him on the way; and complete health, and no want, and no weariness will be present to the body, because “this corruptible” will, in its time and order, when the resurrection of the flesh is to take place, “put on incorruption.” And it is no wonder if this will be given to those who in knowledge love only truth, in action only peace, and in the body only health. For in them after this life will be perfected what in this life they love more.

Those, then, who misuse so great a good of the mind as to desire visible things outside it, by which they ought to have been reminded to behold and love intelligible things, will be given the outer darkness. For the beginning of that darkness is the prudence of the flesh and the weakness of the bodily senses. And those who delight in contests will be estranged from peace and entangled in the greatest difficulties. For the beginning of the greatest difficulty is war and strife. And this, I think, is what is signified by their hands and feet being bound, that is, all ease of acting is taken away. And those who want to thirst and hunger, and to burn with lust and grow weary, so that they may eat and drink and lie together and sleep with pleasure, love want, which is the beginning of the greatest pains. So what they love will be perfected in them, so that they will be where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For there are many who love all these vices together, whose life is to watch shows, to contend, to eat, to drink, to lie together, to sleep, and in their thought to embrace nothing but the phantoms they gather from such a life; and from their deceit to fix rules of superstition or impiety, by which they are deceived and to which they cling, even if they try to abstain from the allurements of the flesh. For they do not make good use of the talent entrusted to them, that is, the keenness of the mind, in which all who are called learned or refined or witty seem to excel. But they keep it tied up in a napkin or buried in the earth, that is, wrapped up in delicate and superfluous things or pressed down by earthly desires. So their hands and feet will be bound, and they will be cast into the outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Not because they loved these things (for who would love them?), but because the things they loved are the beginnings of these, and necessarily lead their lovers to them. For those who love going out more than returning or arriving must be sent farther away, because they are “flesh, and a spirit that goes and does not return.” But he who makes good use even of the five senses of the body, for believing and proclaiming the works of God and nourishing love of him, or of action or knowledge for bringing peace to his own nature and knowing God, enters into the joy of his Lord. Therefore the talent that is taken from the one who uses it badly is given to him who has used five talents well: not because keenness of understanding can be transferred, but this signifies that the careless and the ungodly, though gifted, can lose it, and that the diligent and godly, though slower in gifts, can attain it. For that talent was not given to the one who had received two, for he who already lives well in action and knowledge has this too; but to the one who had received five. For he who believes only visible, that is, temporal things does not yet have the keenness of mind fit for contemplating the eternal; but he can have it who praises God as the maker of all these sensible things, and holds him by faith, awaits him in hope, and seeks him in love.

Since this is so, I urge you, my dearest friends and neighbors, and I urge myself with you, to run with all the speed we can to that to which God urges us through his Wisdom. Let us not love the world, since all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the world. Let us not love to corrupt and be corrupted through the pleasure of the flesh, lest we come to the more wretched corruption of pains and torments. Let us not love contests, lest we be given into the power of the angels who rejoice in such things, to be humbled, bound, and beaten. Let us not love visible spectacles, lest by straying from truth itself and loving shadows we be cast into darkness. Let our religion not be in our own phantoms. For any true thing whatever is better than all that can be imagined at will; and yet we ought not to worship the soul itself, although the soul is true when it imagines false things. A true straw is better than a light shaped by empty thought at the will of the one imagining it; and yet it would be madness to believe that the straw we perceive and touch is to be worshiped. Let our religion not be the worship of human works. For the craftsmen who make such things are better, and yet we ought not to worship them. Let our religion not be the worship of beasts. For the lowest men are better, and yet we ought not to worship them. Let our religion not be the worship of dead men: because if they lived godly lives, they are not thought to seek such honors, but want him to be worshiped by us by whose light they rejoice that we are sharers of their merit. They are to be honored, then, for imitation, not adored for religion. And if they lived badly, wherever they are, they are not to be worshiped. Let our religion not be the worship of demons: because all superstition, though it is a great punishment and a most dangerous disgrace for men, is their honor and triumph. Let our religion not be the worship of lands and waters: because the air is purer and brighter than these, even when it is misty, and yet we ought not to worship it. Let our religion not be even the worship of purer and clearer air: because it is darkened when the light is absent; and purer than it is the brightness even of this fire, which nevertheless, since we kindle and put it out at will, we certainly ought not to worship. Let our religion not be the worship of ethereal and heavenly bodies, which, though they are rightly set above all other bodies, are still inferior to any life whatever. Therefore, if they are animated, any soul by itself is better than any animated body; and yet no one would think that a vicious soul is to be worshiped. Let our religion not be the worship of that life by which trees are said to live: since there is no sensation in it; and of that kind is the life by which the rhythm of our own body is moved, by which even hair and bones live, which are cut off without feeling. But sentient life is better than this, and yet we ought not to worship the life of beasts. Let our religion not be even the perfect and wise rational soul itself, whether established in the service of the universe or in the service of its parts, or one that in the greatest men awaits the change and re-forming of its portion; since every rational life, if it is perfect, obeys the unchangeable truth that speaks to it inwardly without noise, and if it does not obey becomes vicious. So it does not excel through itself, but through that which it willingly obeys. What the highest angel worships, then, is to be worshiped also by the lowest man, because human nature itself became lowest by not worshiping it. For the wise angel is not wise from one source and man from another, nor is the angel truthful from one source and man from another, but from the one unchangeable wisdom and truth. For this very thing was done in a temporal dispensation for our salvation: that the Power of God and the unchangeable Wisdom of God, consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, deigned to take up human nature, through which he might teach us that what is to be worshiped by man is what is to be worshiped by every intellectual and rational creature. Let us believe that the best angels too, and the most excellent ministers of God, want this: that together with them we should worship the one God by whose contemplation they are happy. For we too are not made happy by seeing an angel, but by seeing the truth, by which we also love the angels themselves and rejoice with them. Nor do we envy them because they enjoy it more readily, or with no troubles hindering; rather we love them the more, because we too have been bidden by our common Lord to hope for something of the kind. Therefore we honor them with love, not with servitude. Nor do we build temples for them: for they do not wish to be honored by us in that way, since they know that we ourselves, when we are good, are temples of the most high God. So it is rightly written that a man was forbidden by an angel to worship him, but to worship the one Lord under whom that angel too was his fellow servant. But those who invite us to serve them and to worship them as gods are like proud men, who, if they were allowed, would wish to be worshiped in the same way. But to put up with such men is less dangerous, to worship those beings more. For all dominion of men over men ends with the death of either the rulers or the servants; but servitude under the pride of evil angels is the more to be feared because of the very time that comes after death. This too is easy for anyone to recognize: that under a human master it is permitted to have free thoughts, but those masters we fear in our very minds, which are the one eye for beholding and grasping truth. Therefore, if we are subject, for the sake of our bond, to all the powers given to men for ruling the state, rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, there is no fear that anyone will exact this after our death. And the servitude of the soul is one thing, the servitude of the body another. Just men, who have all their joys in the one God, rejoice with those who praise when God is blessed for their deeds; but when they themselves are praised as themselves, they correct those who err, whom they can; and those whom they cannot, they do not congratulate, but wish them to be corrected from that vice. If the good angels and all the holy ministers of God are like these, or even purer and holier, why do we fear to offend any of them if we are not superstitious, when with their help we tend toward the one God and bind our souls to him alone (from which “religion” is believed to be named), and are free of all superstition? Behold, I worship one God, the one Beginning of all things, and the Wisdom by which every wise soul is wise, and the Gift itself by which all happy things are happy. Whatever angel loves this God, I am sure that he loves me too. Whoever abides in him and can perceive human prayers hears me in him. Whoever has him as his good helps me in him, and cannot begrudge me sharing in him. Let the worshipers, or flatterers, of the parts of the world tell me, then, what best being he does not win over who worships this one thing which every best being loves, in the knowledge of which it rejoices, and by recourse to which as its beginning it becomes best. But whatever angel loves his own excesses and will not be subject to truth, and, desiring to rejoice in his private good, has fallen from the common good of all and from true happiness, to whom all the wicked are given into his power to be subjugated and oppressed, but no good man except to be tested: beyond all doubt he is not to be worshiped; his joy is our misery and his loss is our return. Let religion, then, bind us to the one almighty God, because between our mind, by which we understand him as Father, and the truth, that is, the inner light through which we understand him, no creature is interposed. Therefore let us also venerate in him and with him the Truth itself, in no respect unlike him, which is the form of all things that have been made by the One and strive toward the One. From this it is plain to spiritual minds that through this form all things were made, which alone fulfills what all things seek. Yet all these things would neither be made by the Father through the Son nor be kept safe within their limits, unless God were supremely good, who begrudged no nature that could be good from him, and gave to some to remain in the good as far as they willed, to others as far as they could. Therefore it is fitting for us to worship and hold fast the Gift of God itself, equally unchangeable with the Father and the Son: the Trinity of one substance, one God, from whom we are, through whom we are, in whom we are; from whom we departed, to whom we became unlike, by whom we were not allowed to perish; the Beginning to which we return, and the Form which we follow, and the Grace by which we are reconciled; one God, by whose authorship we were created, and his Likeness through which we are formed to unity, and the Peace by which we cling to unity; God who said, “Let there be,” and the Word through which was made all that was made substantially and naturally, and the Gift of his kindness, by which whatever was made by him through the Word pleased its author and was reconciled to him, so that it should not perish; one God, by whom as Creator we live, through whom re-formed we live wisely, loving and enjoying whom we live happily; one God, from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things: to him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.