Miscellanies 4.7.42–4.8.69

Then the one who has lied and shown himself faithless and gone over to the devil's army, in what evil, do we think, is he? He lies to the Lord, or rather he has cheated his own hope, the one who does not believe God; and the one who does not do what he commanded does not believe. What then? Does not the one who denies the Lord deny himself? For he does not deprive the Master of his lordship, but deprives himself of his relationship to him. The one, then, who denies the Savior denies life, because “the light was life.” He does not call these people of little faith, but faithless and hypocrites, having the name inscribed on them but denying that they are faithful. And the faithful one is called both servant and friend. So if anyone loves himself, he loves the Lord and confesses salvation.

so that he may save his soul. And yet, even if you die for your neighbor out of love, and consider the Savior our neighbor (for God, who saves, is said to draw near to the one being saved), you will die having chosen death for the sake of life, suffering for your own sake rather than his. Is not this why he is called brother? Because the one who suffers out of love for God has suffered for his own salvation, and again the one who dies for his own salvation endures for love of the Lord. For he himself, being life, wished to suffer for those for whom he suffered, so that we might live by his suffering. “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’” he says, “and do not do what I say?” For the people who love with their lips but have their heart far from the Lord is another, persuaded by another, and has willingly sold himself to him. But those who carry out the Savior's commandments bear witness in every action, doing what he wills, naming the Lord consistently, and bearing witness by deed to the one to whom they trust they belong, “those who have crucified the flesh with its desires and passions.” “If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit,” he says. “The one who sows to his own flesh will reap corruption from the flesh; but the one who sows to the Spirit will reap eternal life from the Spirit.”

To wretched men, martyrdom by blood for the Lord seems the most violent death, since they do not know that such a gate of death is the beginning of the truly existing life. And they do not wish to understand either the honors after death of those who have lived holily or the punishments of those who have lived unjustly and licentiously; I do not mean from our Scriptures only (for almost all the commandments indicate these things), but they will not even listen to their own writers. For Theano the Pythagorean writes: “Life would indeed be a feast for the wicked, who having done evil then die, if the soul were not immortal; death would be a windfall.” And Plato in the Phaedo: “For if death were a release from everything, it would be a windfall,” and so on.

It is not possible, then, to think, as in Aeschylus's Telephus, that “a single path leads to Hades”; the ways that lead there are many, sins that wander in many directions. Aristophanes, it seems, mocking such unbelievers, says: “Come, you men of dim life, like the generation of leaves, feeble, figures of wax, shadowy tribes, powerless, wingless, creatures of a day.” And Epicharmus: “This is the nature of men: puffed-up wineskins.” But to us the Savior has said: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” That is why the apostle explains that “the mind of the flesh is enmity toward God, for it does not submit to the law of God, nor can it; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” And explaining further, so that no one, like Marcion, should ungratefully take creation as evil, he adds: “But if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness.” And again: “For if you live according to the flesh, you will die.” “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us, if indeed we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him, as fellow heirs of Christ.”

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to purpose. Because those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he might be the firstborn among many brothers; and those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.” You see martyrdom taught for love's sake. And even if you wish to bear witness for the reward of good things, you will hear again: “For in hope we were saved; but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with endurance.” “But even if you suffer for righteousness' sake, you are blessed,” says Peter. “Do not fear what they fear, nor be troubled; but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you for an account of the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and fear, having a good conscience, so that when you are slandered, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if God's will should will it, than for doing evil.”

And if someone says mockingly, “And how is it possible for weak flesh to resist the powers and the spirits of the authorities?” let him know this, that trusting in the Almighty and the Lord we wage war against the rulers of darkness and against death. “While you are still speaking,” he says, “he will say, ‘Here I am.’” See the invincible helper who shields us. “Do not be surprised, then,” says Peter, “at the fiery trial that comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you; but insofar as you share in Christ's sufferings, rejoice, so that at the revelation of his glory you may also rejoice with gladness. If you are reproached in the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.” As it is written: “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we were regarded as sheep for slaughter. But in all these things we are more than conquerors through the one who loved us.”

“What you need to learn from my mind, you would not learn, neither by burning me nor by driving terrible saws from the top of my head to the ends of my feet, not even if you put all bonds on me,” says a woman in the tragedy, being fearlessly manly. And Antigone, despising Creon's proclamation, says boldly: “For it was not Zeus who proclaimed these things to me.” But God proclaims to us, and we must obey him. “For with the heart one believes for righteousness, and with the mouth one confesses for salvation. For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.’” Fittingly, then, Simonides writes: “There is a saying that Virtue dwells on rocks hard to climb, and a holy chorus of swift nymphs attends her; she is not visible to the eyes of all mortals, but only to him in whom heart-biting sweat comes from within, and who reaches the summit by manliness.”

And Pindar: “The cares of the young, whirled about with toils, find glory; and in time deeds shine out, lifted to the sky.” Aeschylus too, taking up this thought, says: “To the one who toils, glory, the offspring of toil, is owed by the gods.” For “greater deaths obtain greater portions,” according to Heraclitus. “And who is a slave, if he takes no thought of dying?” “For God did not give us a spirit of slavery again to fear, but of power, love, and self-control. Do not, then, be ashamed of the testimony (martyrion) of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner,” he writes to Timothy. Such a one would be the one who “holds fast to the good,” according to the apostle, “abhorring evil, having love without hypocrisy”; “for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” And if the God of hope is the one to whom we bear witness, as indeed he is, we confess our hope, hastening toward the hope. “And those full of goodness,” it says, “filled with all knowledge.”

The philosophers of the Indians say to Alexander of Macedon: “You will move our bodies from place to place, but you will not force our souls to do what we do not wish. Fire is the greatest punishment for men; we despise it.” And from this Heraclitus chose “one glory instead of all things,” and confesses that he leaves the many to be glutted like cattle. “For because of the body are the many toils; for its sake we have discovered the roofed house, and to dig white silver and sow the earth,” and all the other things we know by name.

For the many, then, this vain toil is to be chosen; but for us the apostle says: “We know this, that our old man was crucified with him, so that the body of sin might be done away, that we might no longer be slaves to sin.” Does not the apostle plainly add the following, showing the disgrace of faith among the many? “For I think God has exhibited us apostles last, as men condemned to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. To this very hour we hunger and thirst, are naked and beaten and homeless; persecuted, we endure; slandered, we entreat. We have become like the refuse of the world.”

Such too are Plato's words in the Republic: that even if the just man is racked and has his eyes dug out, he will be happy. So the one who knows will never have his end lying in fortune; but being happy and blessed and a royal friend of God will rest with him. And even if someone surrounds him with dishonor, exile, confiscation, and above all death, he will never be torn away from his freedom and his most sovereign love for God, which “bears all things and endures all things.” Love is persuaded that divine providence governs all things well.

“I urge you, then, be imitators of me,” he says. The first step of salvation, then, is instruction with fear, through which we abstain from injustice; the second is hope, through which we desire the best things; and love perfects, as is fitting, now training in the way of knowledge. The Greeks, I do not know how, having handed what happens over to irrational necessity, confess that they obey it unwillingly. Euripides, at any rate, says: “Accept from me, woman, what I advise. No mortal was ever born who does not toil; he buries children and begets other new ones, and dies himself. And mortals are grieved at this.” Then he adds: “We must bear what must by nature be passed through; nothing necessary is terrible for mortals.”

Set before those who hasten to perfection is rational knowledge, whose foundation is the holy triad, faith, hope, love; “but the greatest of these is love.” Indeed, “all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable; all things are lawful, but not all things build up,” says the apostle. “And let no one seek his own good only, but also that of the other,” so as to be able both to do and to teach, building up and building upon. For that “the earth is the Lord's and its fullness” is agreed; but the conscience of the weak is supported. “Conscience, I say, not your own, but the other's. For why is my freedom judged by another's conscience? If I partake with thanksgiving, why am I blasphemed for what I give thanks for? So whether you eat or drink or do anything, do all to the glory of God.” “For walking in the flesh we do not wage war according to the flesh; for the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, but powerful before God for the pulling down of strongholds, pulling down reasonings and every height raised up against the knowledge of the Lord.”

Armed with these weapons, the one who knows says: “O Lord, give me the occasion and receive the proof; let this terror come; I despise dangers because of my love for you.” “Since virtue alone among human things does not take its rewards from outside, but has itself as the prize of its toils.” “Put on, then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience; and above all these, love, which is the bond of perfection. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which you were called in one body; and be thankful,” you who are still in the body, as the righteous of old, reaping freedom from passion and calm of soul.

For not only did the … and the Macedonians and Spartans endure when racked, as Eratosthenes says in his work On Good and Evil Things; but also Zeno of Elea, forced to reveal some secret, held out against the tortures, confessing nothing, and even at his death bit off his tongue and spat it at the tyrant, whom some call Nearchus and others Demylus. Theodotus the Pythagorean did likewise, and Praylus, the pupil of Lacydes, as Timotheus of Pergamum says in his work On the Courage of Philosophers, and Achaicus in his Ethics. And Postumus the Roman, captured by Peucetion, not only did not reveal any of the secrets, but also, placing his hand on the fire, melted it like bronze with a completely unmoved composure. For I pass over the words of Anaxarchus, who cried out, “Pound the bag of Anaxarchus; for you do not pound Anaxarchus,” when he was being pounded with iron pestles by the tyrant.

Neither, then, the hope of happiness nor love toward God is vexed at what befalls, but remains free; even if it falls among the most savage beasts, or into the all-devouring fire, or is killed by tyrants' tortures, hanging on the divine friendship, it moves about above unenslaved, having handed over the body to those who can lay hold of that alone. The Getae, a barbarian nation not without a taste of philosophy, choose each year an envoy to the hero Zamolxis. And Zamolxis was one of Pythagoras's pupils.

The one judged most approved is slain, while those who practiced philosophy but were not chosen are grieved, as though rejected from a happy service. The whole church, then, is full of those, men and likewise self-restrained women, who have practiced throughout their life the life-giving death for Christ. For the one who lives as we do may philosophize even without letters, whether barbarian or Greek, slave or old man, child or woman. For self-restraint is common to all human beings who choose it; and we have agreed that the same nature in each race has the same virtue.

The woman, then, does not appear to have one nature with respect to humanity and the man another, but the same, and so the same virtue too. If the virtue of a man is self-restraint, of course, and justice, and whatever are thought to follow from these, is it fitting for a man alone to be virtuous, and for a woman to be licentious and unjust? It is unseemly even to say so. Self-restraint, then, and justice and all other virtue must be cultivated alike by woman and by man, by free and slave, since it happens that the same nature has one and the same virtue. We do not say that the nature of the female is the same as that of the male insofar as she is female; for there must surely be some difference belonging to each of them, by which one is female and the other male. Pregnancy and childbirth, at any rate, we say belong to the woman insofar as she is female, not insofar as she is human; if there were no difference between man and woman, each would do and experience the same things.

Insofar, then, as she is the same, in soul, she will attain the same virtue; insofar as she differs, in the particularity of the body, she is for childbearing and housekeeping. “For I want you to know,” says the apostle, “that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man. For man is not from woman, but woman from man. Nevertheless in the Lord neither is woman without man nor man without woman.” For as we say that the man must be self-restrained and superior to pleasures, so we would think it right that the woman too be self-restrained and practiced in fighting against pleasures. “I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh,” the apostolic commandment counsels. “For the flesh desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” These, then, are opposed not as evil to good, but as fighting beneficially. He adds, at any rate:

“so that you may not do whatever you wish. Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are sexual immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, heresies, envyings, drunkenness, carousing, and the like; of which I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control, goodness, faith, gentleness.” By flesh, I think, he meant sinners, as by spirit the righteous. Indeed, courage must be taken up for boldness and endurance, so as to turn the other cheek to the one who strikes, and to give up the tunic too to the one who takes the cloak, mastering anger strongly. For we do not train women, like some Amazons, in the courage of war, since we wish even men to be peaceful.

I hear that the Sarmatian women too make war no less than men, and the Sacian women too, who shoot backward while pretending to flee, equally with the men. I know too that the women near Iberia do men's work and labor, and even when they are about to give birth they neglect nothing of what must be done; often, in the very contest of labor, the woman gives birth, takes up the baby, and carries it home. Indeed female dogs, no less than male, guard the house, hunt, and watch the flocks: “Gorgo, the Cretan hound, ran on the track of the deer.” Women, then, must philosophize like men, even if men are better and hold the first place in all things, unless they have become effeminate.

Education and virtue, then, are necessary for the whole human race, if they hasten toward happiness. And Euripides, not in vain, writes variously: at one time, “Every wife is worse than her husband, even if the worst man marries a woman of good repute”; at another, “Every self-restrained wife is her husband's slave, but the one who is not self-restrained, in her folly, surpasses her partner.” “For nothing is stronger and better than when a man and a woman keep house with like minds.” The head, then, is the ruling part. And if the Lord is the head of the man, and the man is the head of the woman, the man is lord of the woman, being the image and glory of God.

That is why he writes in the letter to the Ephesians: “Submitting to one another in the fear of God; wives to their own husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is head of the wife, as Christ too is head of the church, himself the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church. So husbands also ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh.”

And in the letter to the Colossians he says: “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged. Slaves, obey in everything your masters according to the flesh, not with eye-service as people-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing the Lord. And whatever you do, work at it from the soul, as serving the Lord and not men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will receive back the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality. Masters, grant your slaves what is just and fair, knowing that you too have a Lord in heaven,” where there is neither Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all.

The earthly church is an image of the heavenly, which is why we pray that God's will may be done on earth as in heaven. “Having put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another and forgiving each other, if anyone has a complaint against another; as Christ forgave us, so also we. And above all these, love, which is the bond of perfection. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which you were called in one body; and be thankful.” For nothing prevents citing the same Scripture often to shame Marcion, in case he should be persuaded and change, learning that the believer must be thankful to God the Creator, who called us and proclaimed the gospel to us in the body.

From these things the unity that comes from faith and who is the perfect one have been clearly shown to us; so that even if some are unwilling and oppose it in most things, even if punishments are threatened by the husband or by the master, the household slave and the wife will philosophize. Indeed the free man too, even if death is threatened by a tyrant, even if he is dragged into court and into the utmost dangers and is in danger of losing all his property, will not abstain from godliness in any way. Nor will the wife ever give up, living with a bad husband, nor the son if he has a bad father, nor the slave a wicked master, holding nobly to virtue. But as it is good for a man to die for virtue, for freedom, and for himself, so also for a woman; for this belongs not to the nature of males but to that of the good.

Faithfully, then, both the old man, the young man, and the slave, obeying the commandments, will live and, if need be, die, which would be to be made alive through death. We know, at any rate, that children, slaves, and wives have often become excellent against the will of fathers, masters, and husbands. So those who are going to live godly lives must not be less eager when some seem to hinder them; rather, I think, it is much more fitting to hasten and contend especially, so as not to be overcome and fall away from the best and most necessary resolutions. For I do not think it admits comparison, whether it is better to become a devotee of the Almighty or to choose the darkness of demons. For what we do for the sake of others we would do each time trying to look to those for whose sake it seems to be done, considering what pleases them the measure; but what is done for our own sake more than for others', we would do with equal eagerness, whether it seems to please some or not.

If, then, some indifferent things have obtained such honor that they seem choiceworthy even against some people's will, much more must virtue be considered worth fighting for, looking to nothing else than what can be done well, whether it seems otherwise to some or not. Well, then, did Epicurus write to Menoeceus: “Let no one delay philosophizing while young, nor grow weary of philosophizing when old. For no one is too early or too late for the health of the soul. The one who says that the time for philosophizing has not yet come or has passed is like one who says that the time for happiness has not yet come or is no longer. So both young and old must philosophize: the one so that, growing old, he may be young in good things by gratitude for what has been; the other so that he may be at once young and old by fearlessness of what is to come.”