Writings of Gregory of Nyssa - Ascetic and Moral.
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Translated, with prolegomena, notes, and indices,
by William Moore, M.A., Rector of Appleton,
Late Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford;
and Henry Austin Wilson, M.A.,
Fellow and librarian of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Edited by Henry Wace,
Kings College, London, 6th November, 1892.
II.--Ascetic and Moral.
Preface.
A few words are necessary to explain the scope and aim of this
remarkable treatise. It is not the work of one who held a brief for
monasticism. Gregory deals with the celibate life in a different way
from other Catholic writers upon this theme. Athanasius and Basil both
saw in it the means of exhibiting to the world the Christian life
definitely founded on the orthodox faith; and, for each celibate
himself, this visible imitation of Christ would be more concentrated,
when secular distractions and dissipations had been put aside for
ever. Their aims were entirely moral and ecclesiastical. But Gregory
deals with the entire human development in things spiritual. He has
given the history of the struggle for moral and intellectual
perfection, and the conditions of its success. He had his own inner
Christian experience, the result of a recluse youth, on the one hand;
he had the systems of heathen and Christian philosophy on the other.
The ideal life that he has sketched is as lofty in its aspiration as
the latter, and is couched in philosophic rather than in Scriptural
language; but its scientific ground-work is entirely peculiar to
himself. That groundwork is briefly this; spirit must be freed, so as
to be drawn to the Divine Spirit; and to be so freed a "virginity" of
the soul is necessary. He comes in this way to blame marriage, because
in most of the marriages that he has known, this virginity of the soul
is conspicuously absent. But he does not blame the married state in
itself; as he himself distinctly tells us. The virginity he seeks may
exist even there; and it is not by any means the same thing as
celibacy. It is disengagedness of heart; and is, as many passages in
this treatise indicate, identical with philosophy, whose higher
manifestations had long ago been defined as Love, called forth by the
sight of the immaterial Beauty. Where this sight is not interrupted,
or not treated with indifference, there Virginity exists. With Gregory
philosophy had become Life, and it is virginity that keeps it so, and
therein keeps it from being lost. Another word with which Gregory
identified virginity is "incorruptibility," in language sometimes
which recalls the lines--
"What, what is Virtue, but repose of mind?
A pure ethereal calm that knows no storm,
Above the reach of wild ambition's wind,
Above the passions that this world deform,
And torture man, a proud malignant worm."
Yet no one would imagine that here the poet, any more than S. Paul in
Ephes. vi. 24 (see p. 343, note 3), meant celibacy per se. But it may
be asked, how came Gregory to use the word Virginity at all for pure
disengagement of soul? The answer seems to be, that he was very fond
of metaphors and elaborate comparisons, ever since the days that he
was a student of Rhetoric; this treatise itself is full of similes
from nature, and they are not so much poetry or rhetoric, as necessary
means of bringing his meaning vividly before readers. Virginity, then,
is one of these bold and telling figures; and in his hands it is a
very suggestive metaphor; though certainly at times it runs away with
him. The accusation, then, that when he identifies Piety and
Virginity, he makes the former consist in a mere externality, is
unfounded. He uses the one word for the other without apprising us
that it is a metaphor, and he omits to give any dietary rules by which
this virginity is secured. Therefore he appears to mean celibacy. But
on the other hand no arguments can be drawn from this treatise against
the monastic life; only Gregory is busied with other matters. Rather,
if the actual marriages of his time are such as he describes, it is a
silent witness to the reasonableness, if not to the necessity, of such
a life within the church. For this view of virginity as solving the
question of Gregory's supposed marriage, see Prolegomena, p. 3.
.
On Virginity.
Introduction.
The object of this treatise is to create in its readers a passion for
the life according to excellence. There are many distractions [1344] ,
to use the word of the Divine Apostle, incident to the secular life;
and so this treatise would suggest, as a necessary door of entrance to
the holier life, the calling of Virginity; seeing that, while it is
not easy in the entanglements of this secular life to find quiet for
that of Divine contemplation, those on the other hand who have bid
farewell to its troubles can with promptitude, and without
distraction, pursue assiduously their higher studies. Now, whereas all
advice is in itself weak, and mere words of exhortation will not make
the task of recommending what is beneficial easier to any one, unless
he has first given a noble aspect to that which he urges on his
hearer, this discourse will accordingly begin with the praises of
Virginity; the exhortation will come at the end; moreover, as the
beauty in anything gains lustre by the contrast with its opposite, it
is requisite that some mention should be made of the vexations of
everyday life. Then it will be quite in the plan of this work to
introduce a sketch of the contemplative life, and to prove the
impossibility of any one attaining it who feel's the world's
anxieties. In the devotee bodily desire has become weak; and so there
will follow an inquiry as to the true object of desire, for which (and
which only) we have received from our Maker our power of desiring.
When this has received all possible illustration, it will seem to
follow naturally that we should consider some method to attain it; and
the true virginity, which is free from any stain of sin, will be found
to fit such a purpose. So all the intermediate part of the discourse,
while it seems to look elsewhere, will be really tending to the
praises of this virginity. All the particular rules obeyed by the
followers of this high calling will, to avoid prolixity, be omitted
here; the exhortation in the discourse will be introduced only in
general terms, and for cases of wide application; but, in a way,
particulars will be here included, and so nothing important will be
overlooked, while prolixity is avoided. Each of us, too, is inclined
to embrace some course of life with the greater enthusiasm, when he
sees personalities who have already gained distinction in it; we have
therefore made the requisite mention of saints who have gained their
glory in celibacy. But further than this; the examples we have in
biographies cannot stimulate to the attainment of excellence, so much
as a living voice and an example which is still working for good; and
so we have alluded to that most godly bishop [1345] , our father in
God, who himself alone could be the master in such instructions. He
will not indeed be mentioned by name, but by certain indications we
shall say in cipher that he is meant. Thus, too, future readers will
not think our advice unmeaning, when the candidate for this life is
told to school himself by recent masters. But let them first fix their
attention only on this: what such a master ought to be; then let them
choose for their guidance those who have at any time by God's grace
been raised up to be champions of this system of excellence; for
either they will find what they seek, or at all events will be no
longer ignorant what it ought to be.
Footnotes
[1344] perispasmon. The allusion must be to 1 Cor. vii. 35; but the
actual word is not found in the whole of the N.T., though periespato
is used of Martha, S. Luke x. 40.
[1345] Basil; rather than Gregory Thaumaturgus, as some have
conjectured.
Chapter I.
The holy look of virginity is precious indeed in the judgment of all
who make purity the test of beauty; but it belongs to those alone
whose struggles to gain this object of a noble love are favoured and
helped by the grace of God. Its praise is heard at once in the very
name which goes with it; "Uncorrupted [1346] " is the word commonly
said of it, and this shows the kind of purity that is in it; thus we
can measure by its equivalent term the height of this gift, seeing
that amongst the many results of virtuous endeavour this alone has
been honoured with the title of the thing that is uncorrupted. And if
we must extol with laudations this gift from the great God, the words
of His Apostle are sufficient in its praise; they are few, but they
throw into the background all extravagant laudations; he only styles
as "holy and without blemish [1347] " her who has this grace for her
ornament. Now if the achievement of this saintly virtue consists in
making one "without blemish and holy," and these epithets are adopted
in their first and fullest force to glorify the incorruptible Deity,
what greater praise of virginity can there be than thus to be shown in
a manner deifying those who share in her pure mysteries, so that they
become partakers of His glory Who is in actual truth the only Holy and
Blameless One; their purity and their incorruptibility being the means
of bringing them into relationship with Him? Many who write lengthy
laudations in detailed treatises, with the view of adding something to
the wonder of this grace, unconsciously defeat, in my opinion, their
own end; the fulsome manner in which they amplify their subject brings
its credit into suspicion. Nature's greatnesses have their own way of
striking with admiration; they do not need the pleading of words: the
sky, for instance, or the sun, or any other wonder of the universe. In
the business of this lower world words certainly act as a basement,
and the skill of praise does impart a look of magnificence; so much
so, that mankind are apt to suspect as the result of mere art the
wonder produced by panegyric. So the one sufficient way of praising
virginity will be to show that that virtue is above praise, and to
evince our admiration of it by our lives rather than by our words. A
man who takes this theme for ambitious praise has the appearance of
supposing that one drop of his own perspiration will make an
appreciable increase of the boundless ocean, if indeed he believes, as
he does, that any human words can give more dignity to so rare a
grace; he must be ignorant either of his own powers or of that which
he attempts to praise.
Footnotes
[1346] to aphthoron; this is connected just below with the Divine
aphtharsia. In commenting on the meaning of this latter word at the
close of the Epistle to the Ephesians, Bishop Ellicott prefers to take
it with agaponton, "in a manner and an element that knows neither
change, diminution, nor decay" ("in uncorruptness" R.V.): although in
the six other passages where it occurs in S. Paul "it refers directly
or indirectly to a higher sphere than the present." i.e. of
immortality above, and might so, if the construction allowed, be taken
with charis. This illustrates Gregory's use of aphtharsia in its human
relation.
[1347] Eph. v. 27 (of the church).
Chapter II.
Deep indeed will be the thought necessary to understand the surpassing
excellence of this grace. It is comprehended in the idea of the Father
incorrupt; and here at the outset is a paradox, viz. that virginity is
found in Him, Who has a Son and yet without passion has begotten Him.
It is included too in the nature of this Only-begotten God, Who struck
the first note of all this moral innocence; it shines forth equally in
His pure and passionless generation. Again a paradox; that the Son
should be known to us by virginity. It is seen, too, in the inherent
and incorruptible purity of the Holy Spirit; for when you have named
the pure and incorruptible you have named virginity. It accompanies
the whole supramundane existence; because of its passionlessness it is
always present with the powers above; never separated from aught that
is Divine, it never touches the opposite of this. All whose instinct
and will have found their level in virtue are beautified with this
perfect purity of the uncorrupted state; all who are ranked in the
opposite class of character are what they are, and are called so, by
reason of their fall from purity. What force of expression, then, will
be adequate to such a grace? How can there be no cause to fear lest
the greatness of its intrinsic value should be impaired by the efforts
of any one's eloquence? The estimate of it which he will create will
be less than that which his hearers had before. It will be well, then,
to omit all laudation in this case; we cannot lift words to the height
of our theme. On the contrary, it is possible to be ever mindful of
this gift of God; and our lips may always speak of this blessing;
that, though it is the property of spiritual existence and of such
singular excellence, yet by the love of God it has been bestowed on
those who have received their life from the will of the flesh and from
blood; that, when human nature has been based by passionate
inclinations, it stretches out its offer of purity like a hand to
raise it up again and make it look above. This, I think, was the
reason why our Master, Jesus Christ Himself, the Fountain of all
innocence, did not come into the world by wedlock. It was, to divulge
by the manner of His Incarnation this great secret; that purity is the
only complete indication [1348] of the presence of God and of His
coming, and that no one can in reality secure this for himself, unless
he has altogether estranged himself from the passions of the flesh.
What happened in the stainless Mary when the fulness of the Godhead
which was in Christ shone out through her, that happens in every soul
that leads by rule the virgin life. No longer indeed does the Master
come with bodily presence; "we know Christ no longer according to the
flesh [1349] "; but, spiritually, He dwells in us and brings His
Father with Him, as the Gospel somewhere [1350] tells. Seeing, then,
that virginity means so much as this, that while it remains in Heaven
with the Father of spirits, and moves in the dance of the celestial
powers, it nevertheless stretches out hands for man's salvation; that
while it is the channel which draws down the Deity to share man's
estate, it keeps wings for man's desires to rise to heavenly things,
and is a bond of union between the Divine and human, by its mediation
bringing into harmony these existences so widely divided--what words
could be discovered powerful enough to reach this wondrous height? But
still, it is monstrous to seem like creatures without expression and
without feeling; and we must choose (if we are silent) one of two
things; either to appear never to have felt the special beauty of
virginity, or to exhibit ourselves as obstinately blind to all beauty:
we have consented therefore to speak briefly about this virtue,
according to the wish of him who has assigned us this task, and whom
in all things we must obey. But let no one expect from us any display
of style; even if we wished it, perhaps we could not produce it, for
we are quite unversed in that kind of writing. Even if we possessed
such power, we would not prefer the favour of the few to the
edification of the many. A writer of sense should have, I take it, for
his chiefest object not to be admired above all other writers, but to
profit both himself and them, the many.
Footnotes
[1348] deixasthai. Livineius conjectures dexasthai; so also Cod. Reg.
Cf. Sedulius: "Domus pudici pectoris Templum repente fit Dei."
[1349] 2 Cor. v. 16.
[1350] S. John xiv. 23
Chapter III.
Would indeed that some profit might come to myself from this effort! I
should have undertaken this labour with the greater readiness, if I
could have hope of sharing, according to the Scripture, in the fruits
of the plough and the threshing-floor; the toil would then have been a
pleasure. As it is, this my knowledge of the beauty of virginity is in
some sort vain and useless to me, just as the corn is to the muzzled
ox that treads [1351] the floor, or the water that streams from the
precipice to a thirsty man when he cannot reach it. Happy they who
have still the power of choosing the better way, and have not debarred
themselves from it by engagements of the secular life, as we have,
whom a gulf now divides from glorious virginity: no one can climb up
to that who has once planted his foot upon the secular life. We are
but spectators of others' blessings and witnesses to the happiness of
another [1352] class. Even if we strike out some fitting thoughts
about virginity, we shall not be better than the cooks and scullions
who provide sweet luxuries for the tables of the rich, without having
any portion themselves in what they prepare. What a blessing if it had
been otherwise, if we had not to learn the good by after-regrets! Now
they are the enviable ones, they succeed even beyond their prayers and
their desires, who have not put out of their power the enjoyment of
these delights. We are like those who have a wealthy society with
which to compare their own poverty, and so are all the more vexed and
discontented with their present lot. The more exactly we understand
the riches of virginity, the more we must bewail the other life; for
we realize by this contrast with better things, how poor it is. I do
not speak only of the future rewards in store for those who have lived
thus excellently, but those rewards also which they have while alive
here; for if any one would make up his mind to measure exactly the
difference between the two courses, he would find it well-nigh as
great as that between heaven and earth. The truth of this statement
may be known by looking at actual facts.
But in writing this sad tragedy what will be a fit beginning? How
shall we really bring to view the evils common to life? All men know
them by experience, but somehow nature has contrived to blind the
actual sufferers so that they willingly ignore their condition. Shall
we begin with its choicest sweets? Well then, is not the sum total of
all that is hoped for in marriage to get delightful companionship?
Grant this obtained; let us sketch a marriage in every way most happy;
illustrious birth, competent means, suitable ages, the very flower of
the prime of life, deep affection, the very best that each can think
of the other [1353] , that sweet rivalry of each wishing to surpass
the other in loving; in addition, popularity, power, wide reputation,
and everything else. But observe that even beneath this array of
blessings the fire of an inevitable pain is smouldering. I do not
speak of the envy that is always springing up against those of
distinguished rank, and the liability to attack which hangs over those
who seem prosperous, and that natural hatred of superiors shown by
those who do not share equally in the good fortune, which make these
seemingly favoured ones pass an anxious time more full of pain than
pleasure. I omit that from the picture, and will suppose that envy
against them is asleep; although it would not be easy to find a single
life in which both these blessings were joined, i.e. happiness above
the common, and escape from envy. However, let us, if so it is to be,
suppose a married life free from all such trials; and let us see if it
is possible for those who live with such an amount of good fortune to
enjoy it. Why, what kind of vexation is left, you will ask, when even
envy of their happiness does not reach them? I affirm that this very
thing, this sweetness that surrounds their lives, is the spark which
kindles pain. They are human all the time, things weak and perishing;
they have to look upon the tombs of their progenitors; and so pain is
inseparably bound up with their existence, if they have the least
power of reflection. This continued expectancy of death, realized by
no sure tokens, but hanging over them the terrible uncertainty of the
future, disturbs their present joy, clouding it over with the fear of
what is coming. If only, before experience comes, the results of
experience could be learnt, or if, when one has entered on this
course, it were possible by some other means of conjecture to survey
the reality, then what a crowd of deserters would run from marriage
into the virgin life; what care and eagerness never to be entangled in
that retentive snare, where no one knows for certain how the net galls
till they have actually entered it! You would see there, if only you
could do it without danger, many contraries uniting; smiles melting
into tears, pain mingled with pleasure, death always hanging by
expectation over the children that are born, and putting a finger upon
each of the sweetest joys. Whenever the husband looks at the beloved
face, that moment the fear of separation accompanies the look. If he
listens to the sweet voice, the thought comes into his mind that some
day he will not hear it. Whenever he is glad with gazing on her
beauty, then he shudders most with the presentiment of mourning her
loss. When he marks all those charms which to youth are so precious
and which the thoughtless seek for, the bright eyes beneath the lids,
the arching eyebrows, the cheek with its sweet and dimpling smile, the
natural red that blooms upon the lips, the gold-bound hair shining in
many-twisted masses on the head, and all that transient grace, then,
though he may be little given to reflection, he must have this thought
also in his inmost soul that some day all this beauty will melt away
and become as nothing, turned after all this show into noisome and
unsightly bones, which wear no trace, no memorial, no remnant of that
living bloom. Can he live delighted when he thinks of that? Can he
trust in these treasures which he holds as if they would be always
his? Nay, it is plain that he will stagger as if he were mocked by a
dream, and will have his faith in life shaken, and will look upon what
he sees as no longer his. You will understand, if you have a
comprehensive view of things as they are, that nothing in this life
looks that which it is. It shows to us by the illusions of our
imagination one thing, instead of something else. Men gaze
open-mouthed at it, and it mocks them with hopes; for a while it hides
itself beneath this deceitful show; then all of a sudden in the
reverses of life it is revealed as something different from that which
men's hopes, conceived by its fraud in foolish hearts, had pictured.
Will life's sweetness seem worth taking delight in to him who reflects
on this? Will he ever be able really to feel it, so as to have joy in
the goods he holds? Will he not, disturbed by the constant fear of
some reverse, have the use without the enjoyment? I will but mention
the portents, dreams, omens, and such-like things which by a foolish
habit of thought are taken notice of, and always make men fear the
worst. But her time of labour comes upon the young wife; and the
occasion is regarded not as the bringing of a child into the world,
but as the approach of death; in bearing it is expected that she will
die; and, indeed, often this sad presentiment is true, and before they
spread the birthday feast, before they taste any of their expected
joys, they have to change their rejoicing into lamentation. Still in
love's fever, still at the height of their passionate affection, not
yet having grasped life's sweetest gifts, as in the vision of a dream,
they are suddenly torn away from all they possessed. But what comes
next? Domestics, like conquering foes, dismantle the bridal chamber;
they deck it for the funeral, but it is death's [1354] room now; they
make the useless wailings [1355] and beatings of the hands. Then there
is the memory of former days, curses on those who advised the
marriage, recriminations against friends who did not stop it; blame
thrown on parents whether they be alive or dead, bitter outbursts
against human destiny, arraigning of the whole course of nature,
complaints and accusations even against the Divine government; war
within the man himself, and fighting with those who would admonish; no
repugnance to the most shocking words and acts. In some this state of
mind continues, and their reason is more completely swallowed up by
grief; and their tragedy has a sadder ending, the victim not enduring
to survive the calamity.
But rather than this let us suppose a happier case. The danger of
childbirth is past; a child is born to them, the very image of its
parents' beauty. Are the occasions for grief at all lessened thereby?
Rather they are increased; for the parents retain all their former
fears, and feel in addition those on behalf of the child, lest
anything should happen to it in its bringing up; for instance a bad
accident, or by some turn of misfortunes a sickness, a fever [1356] ,
any dangerous disease. Both parents share alike in these; but who
could recount the special anxieties of the wife? We omit the most
obvious, which all can understand, the weariness of pregnancy, the
danger in childbirth, the cares of nursing, the tearing of her heart
in two for her offspring, and, if she is the mother of many, the
dividing of her soul into as many parts as she has children; the
tenderness with which she herself feels all that is happening to them.
That is well understood by every one. But the oracle of God tells us
that she is not her own mistress, but finds her resources only in him
whom wedlock has made her lord; and so, if she be for ever so short a
time left alone, she feels as if she were separated from her head, and
can ill bear it; she even takes this short absence of her husband to
be the prelude to her widowhood; her fear makes her at once give up
all hope; accordingly her eyes, filled with terrified suspense, are
always fixed upon the door; her ears are always busied with what
others are whispering; her heart, stung with her fears, is well-nigh
bursting even before any bad [1357] news has arrived; a noise in the
doorway, whether fancied or real, acts as a messenger of ill, and on a
sudden shakes her very soul; most likely all outside is well, and
there is no cause to fear at all; but her fainting spirit is quicker
than any message, and turns her fancy from good tidings to despair.
Thus even the most favoured live, and they are not altogether to be
envied; their life is not to be compared to the freedom of virginity.
Yet this hasty sketch has omitted many of the more distressing
details. Often this young wife too, just wedded, still brilliant in
bridal grace, still perhaps blushing when her bridegroom enters, and
shyly stealing furtive glances at him, when passion is all the more
intense because modesty prevents it being shown, suddenly has to take
the name of a poor lonely widow and be called all that is pitiable.
Death comes in an instant and changes that bright creature in her
white and rich attire into a black-robed mourner. He takes off the
bridal ornaments and clothes her with the colours of bereavement.
There is darkness in the once cheerful room, and the waiting-women
sing their long dirges. She hates her friends when they try to soften
her grief; she will not take food, she wastes away, and in her soul's
deep dejection has a strong longing only for her death, a longing
which often lasts till it comes. Even supposing that time puts an end
to this sorrow, still another comes, whether she has children or not.
If she has, they are fatherless, and, as objects of pity themselves,
renew the memory of her loss. If she is childless, then the name of
her lost husband is rooted up, and this grief is greater than the
seeming consolation. I will say little of the other special sorrows of
widowhood; for who could enumerate them all exactly? She finds her
enemies in her relatives. Some actually take advantage of her
affliction. Others exult over her loss, and see with malignant joy the
home falling to pieces, the insolence of the servants, and the other
distresses visible in such a case, of which there are plenty. In
consequence of these, many women are compelled to risk once more the
trial of the same things, not being able to endure this bitter
derision. As if they could revenge insults by increasing their own
sufferings! Others, remembering the past, will put up with anything
rather than plunge a second time into the like troubles. If you wish
to learn all the trials of this married life, listen to those women
who actually know it. How they congratulate those who have chosen from
the first the virgin life, and have not had to learn by experience
about the better way, that virginity is fortified against all these
ills, that it has no orphan state, no widowhood to mourn; it is always
in the presence of the undying Bridegroom; it has the offspring of
devotion always to rejoice in; it sees continually a home that is
truly its own, furnished with every treasure because the Master always
dwells there; in this case death does not bring separation, but union
with Him Who is longed for; for when (a soul) departs [1358] , then it
is with Christ, as the Apostle says. But it is time, now that we have
examined on the one side the feelings of those whose lot is happy, to
make a revelation of other lives, where poverty and adversity and all
the other evils which men have to suffer are a fixed condition;
deformities, I mean, and diseases, and all other lifelong afflictions.
He whose life is contained in himself either escapes them altogether
or can bear them easily, possessing a collected mind which is not
distracted from itself; while he who shares himself with wife and
child often has not a moment to bestow even upon regrets for his own
condition, because anxiety for his dear ones fills his heart. But it
is superfluous to dwell upon that which every one knows. If to what
seems prosperity such pain and weariness is bound, what may we not
expect of the opposite condition? Every description which attempts to
represent it to our view will fall short of the reality. Yet perhaps
we may in a very few words declare the depths of its misery. Those
whose lot is contrary to that which passes as prosperous receive their
sorrows as well from causes contrary to that. Prosperous lives are
marred by the expectancy, or the presence, of death; but the misery of
these is that death delays his coming. These lives then are widely
divided by opposite feelings; although equally without hope, they
converge to the same end. So many-sided, then, so strangely different
are the ills with which marriage supplies the world. There is pain
always, whether children are born, or can never be expected, whether
they live, or die. One abounds in them but has not enough means for
their support; another feels the want of an heir to the great fortune
he has toiled for, and regards as a blessing the other's misfortune;
each of them, in fact, wishes for that very thing which he sees the
other regretting. Again, one man loses by death a much-loved [1359]
son; another has a reprobate son alive; both equally to be pitied,
though the one mourns over the death, the other over the life, of his
boy. Neither will I do more than mention how sadly and disastrously
family jealousies and quarrels, arising from real or fancied causes,
end. Who could go completely into all those details? If you would know
what a network of these evils human life is, you need not go back
again to those old stories which have furnished subjects to dramatic
poets. They are regarded as myths on account of their shocking
extravagance; there are in them murders and eating of children,
husband-murders, murders of mothers and brothers, incestuous unions,
and every sort of disturbance of nature; and yet the old chronicler
begins the story which ends in such horrors with marriage. But turning
from all that, gaze only upon the tragedies that are being enacted on
this life's stage; it is marriage that supplies mankind with actors
there. Go to the law-courts and read through the laws there; then you
will know the shameful secrets of marriage. Just as when you hear a
physician explaining various diseases, you understand the misery of
the human frame by learning the number and the kind of sufferings it
is liable to, so when you peruse the laws and read there the strange
variety of crimes in marriage to which their penalties are attached,
you will have a pretty accurate idea of its properties; for the law
does not provide remedies for evils which do not exist, any more than
a physician has a treatment for diseases which are never known.
Footnotes
[1351] epistrephomeno ten halona. This word is used for "walking
over," in Hesiod, Theogon. 753, gaian epistrephetai
[1352] heteron, following Cod. Reg., for hekateron.
[1353] huper tou allou (a late use of allos). This was Livineius'
conjecture for ton allon: the interchange of u and n is a common
mistake.
[1354] There is a play on the words thalamos and thanatos: "the one is
changed into the other."
[1355] eti touton anakleseis: "amongst these", i.e. the domestics.
Livineius reads toutois, and renders "Succedunt inutilis revocatio,
inanis manuum plausus," i.e. as the last funeral act.
[1356] Reading purosin, with Galesinius: the Paris Editt. read perosin
[1357] neoteron, in a bad sense. So Zosimus, lib. i. p. 658, pragmata
;;Romaiois neotera mechanesasthai
[1358] analuse: Philip. i. 23. Tertullian (De Patient. 9) translates,
"Cupis recipi (i.e. to flit, depart) jam et esse cum Domino." Beza,
however, says that the metaphor is taken from unharnessing after a
race. Chrysostom and Jerome seem to take it of loosing off the cable.
[1359] egapemenos pais. Cod. Reg. has ho katathumios, a favorite word
with Gregory. Livineius reads hokathemenos, which he renders "nanus"
(i.e. of low stature), and cites Pollux Onomast. lib. 3, c. 24 (where
apokathemenos = iners); it might also bear the meaning of
"stay-at-home," in contrast to the prodigal in the next sentence.
Chapter IV.
But we need no longer show in this narrow way the drawback of this
life, as if the number of its ills was limited to adulteries,
dissensions, and plots. I think we should take the higher and truer
view, and say at once that none of that evil in life, which is visible
in all its business and in all its pursuits, can have any hold over a
man, if he will not put himself in the fetters of this course. The
truth of what we say will be clear thus. A man who, seeing through the
illusion with the eye of his spirit purged, lifts himself above the
struggling world, and, to use the words of the Apostle, slights it all
as but dung, in a way exiling himself altogether from human life by
his abstinence from marriage,--that man has no fellowship whatever
with the sins of mankind, such as avarice, envy, anger, hatred, and
everything of the kind. He has an exemption from all this, and is in
every way free and at peace; there is nothing in him to provoke his
neighbours' envy, because he clutches none of those objects round
which envy in this life gathers. He has raised his own life above the
world, and prizing virtue as his only precious possession he will pass
his days in painless peace and quiet. For virtue is a possession
which, though all according to their capacity should share it, yet
will be always in abundance for those who thirst after it; unlike the
occupation of the lands on this earth, which men divide into sections,
and the more they add to the one the more they take from the other, so
that the one person's gain is his fellow's loss; whence arise the
fights for the lion's share, from men's hatred of being cheated. But
the larger owner of this possession is never envied; he who snatches
the lion's share does no damage to him who claims equal participation;
as each is capable each has this noble longing satisfied, while the
wealth of virtues in those who are already occupiers [1360] is not
exhausted. The man, then, who, with his eyes only on such a life,
makes virtue, which has no limit that man can devise, his only
treasure, will surely never brook to bend his soul to any of those low
courses which multitudes tread. He will not admire earthly riches, or
human power, or any of those things which folly seeks. If, indeed, his
mind is still pitched so low, he is outside our band of novices, and
our words do not apply to him. But if his thoughts are above, walking
as it were with God, he will be lifted out of the maze of all these
errors; for the predisposing cause of them all, marriage, has not
touched him. Now the wish to be before others is the deadly sin of
pride, and one would not be far wrong in saying that this is the
seed-root of all the thorns of sin; but it is from reasons connected
with marriage that this pride mostly begins. To show what I mean, we
generally find the grasping man throwing the blame on his nearest kin;
the man mad after notoriety and ambition generally makes his family
responsible for this sin: "he must not be thought inferior to his
forefathers; he must be deemed a great man by the generation to come
by leaving his children historic records of himself": so also the
other maladies of the soul, envy, spite, hatred and such-like, are
connected with this cause; they are to be found amongst those who are
eager about the things of this life. He who has fled from it gazes as
from some high watch-tower on the prospect of humanity, and pities
these slaves of vanity for their blindness in setting such a value on
bodily well-being. He sees some distinguished person giving himself
airs because of his public honours, and wealth, and power, and only
laughs at the folly of being so puffed up. He gives to the years of
human life the longest number, according to the Psalmist's
computation, and then compares this atom-interval with the endless
ages, and pities the vain glory of those who excite themselves for
such low and petty and perishable things. What, indeed, amongst the
things here is there enviable in that which so many strive
for,--honour? What is gained by those who win it? The mortal remains
mortal whether he is honoured or not. What good does the possessor of
many acres gain in the end? Except that the foolish man thinks his own
that which never belongs to him, ignorant seemingly in his greed that
"the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof [1361] ," for "God
is king of all the earth [1362] ." It is the passion of having which
gives men a false title of lordship over that which can never belong
to them. "The earth," says the wise Preacher, "abideth for ever [1363]
," ministering to every generation, first one, then another, that is
born upon it; but men, though they are so little even their own
masters, that they are brought into life without knowing it by their
Maker's will, and before they wish are withdrawn from it, nevertheless
in their excessive vanity think that they are her lords; that they,
now born, now dying, rule that which remains continually. One who
reflecting on this holds cheaply all that mankind prizes, whose only
love is the divine life, because "all flesh is grass, and all the
glory of man as the flower of grass [1364] ," can never care for this
grass which "to-day is and to-morrow is not"; studying the divine
ways, he knows not only that human life has no fixity, but that the
entire universe will not keep on its quiet course for ever; he
neglects his existence here as an alien and a passing thing; for the
Saviour said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away [1365] ," the whole of
necessity awaits its refashioning. As long as he is "in this
tabernacle [1366] ," exhibiting mortality, weighed down with this
existence, he laments the lengthening of his sojourn in it; as the
Psalmist-poet says in his heavenly songs. Truly, they live in darkness
who sojourn in these living tabernacles; wherefore that preacher,
groaning at the continuance of this sojourn, says, "Woe is me that my
sojourn is prolonged [1367] ," and he attributes the cause of his
dejection to "darkness"; for we know that darkness is called in the
Hebrew language "kedar." It is indeed a darkness as of the night which
envelops mankind, and prevents them seeing this deceit and knowing
that all which is most prized by the living, and moreover all which is
the reverse, exists only in the conception of the unreflecting, and is
in itself nothing; there is no such reality anywhere as obscurity of
birth, or illustrious birth, or glory, or splendour, or ancient
renown, or present elevation, or power over others, or subjection.
Wealth and comfort, poverty and distress, and all the other
inequalities of life, seem to the ignorant, applying the test of
pleasure, vastly different from each other. But to the higher
understanding they are all alike; one is not of greater value than the
other; because life runs on to the finish with the same speed through
all these opposites, and in the lots of either class there remains the
same power of choice to live well or ill, "through armour on the right
hand and on the left, through evil report and good report [1368] ."
Therefore the clearseeing mind which measures reality will journey on
its path without turning, accomplishing its appointed time from its
birth to its exit; it is neither softened by the pleasures nor beaten
down by the hardships; but, as is the way with travellers, it keeps
advancing always, and takes but little notice of the views presented.
It is the travellers way to press on to their journey's end, no matter
whether they are passing through meadows and cultivated farms, or
through wilder and more rugged spots; a smiling landscape does not
detain them; nor a gloomy one check their speed. So, too, that lofty
mind will press straight on to its self-imposed end, not turning aside
to see anything on the way. It passes through life, but its gaze is
fixed on heaven; it is the good steersman directing the bark to some
landmark there. But the grosser mind looks down; it bends its energies
to bodily pleasures as surely as the sheep stoop to their pasture; it
lives for gorging and still lower pleasures [1369] ; it is alienated
from the life of God [1370] , and a stranger to the promise of the
Covenants; it recognizes no good but the gratification of the body. It
is a mind such as this that "walks in darkness [1371] ," and invents
all the evil in this life of ours; avarice, passions unchecked,
unbounded luxury, lust of power, vain-glory, the whole mob of moral
diseases that invade men's homes. In these vices, one somehow holds
closely to another; where one has entered all the rest seem to follow,
dragging each other in a natural order, just as in a chain, when you
have jerked the first link, the others cannot rest, and even the link
at the other end feels the motion of the first, which passes thence by
virtue of their contiguity through the intervening links; so firmly
are men's vices linked together by their very nature; when one of them
has gained the mastery of a soul, the rest of the train follow. If you
want a graphic picture of this accursed chain, suppose a man who
because of some special pleasure it gives him is a victim to his
thirst for fame; then a desire to increase his fortune follows close
upon this thirst for fame; he becomes grasping; but only because the
first vice leads him on to this. Then this grasping after money and
superiority engenders either anger with his kith and kin, or pride
towards his inferiors, or envy of those above him; then hypocrisy
comes in after this envy; a soured temper after that; a misanthropical
spirit after that; and behind them all a state of condemnation which
ends in the dark fires of hell. You see the chain; how all follows
from one cherished passion. Seeing, then, that this inseparable train
of moral diseases has entered once for all into the world, one single
way of escape is pointed out to us in the exhortations of the inspired
writings; and that is to separate ourselves from the life which
involves this sequence of sufferings. If we haunt Sodom, we cannot
escape the rain of fire; nor if one who has fled out of her looks back
upon her desolation, can he fail to become a pillar of salt rooted to
the spot. We cannot be rid of the Egyptian bondage, unless we leave
Egypt, that is, this life that lies under water [1372] , and pass, not
that Red Sea, but this black and gloomy Sea of life. But suppose we
remain in this evil bondage, and, to use the Master's words, "the
truth shall not have made us free," how can one who seeks a lie and
wanders in the maze of this world ever come to the truth? How can one
who has surrendered his existence to be chained by nature run away
from this captivity? An illustration will make our meaning clearer. A
winter torrent [1373] , which, impetuous in itself, becomes swollen
and carries down beneath its stream trees and boulders and anything
that comes in its way, is death and danger to those alone who live
along its course; for those who have got well out of its way it rages
in vain. Just so, only the man who lives in the turmoil of life has to
feel its force; only he has to receive those sufferings which nature's
stream, descending in a flood of troubles, must, to be true to its
kind, bring to those who journey on its banks. But if a man leaves
this torrent, and these "proud waters [1374] ," he will escape from
being "a prey to the teeth" of this life, as the Psalm goes on to say,
and, as "a bird from the snare," on virtue's wings. This simile, then,
of the torrent holds; human life is a tossing and tumultuous stream
sweeping down to find its natural level; none of the objects sought
for in it last till the seekers are satisfied; all that is carried to
them by this stream comes near, just touches them, and passes on; so
that the present moment in this impetuous flow eludes enjoyment, for
the after-current snatches it from their view. It would be our
interest therefore to keep far away from such a stream, lest, engaged
on temporal things, we should neglect eternity. How can a man keep for
ever anything here, be his love for it never so passionate? Which of
life's most cherished objects endures always? What flower of prime?
What gift of strength and beauty? What wealth, or fame, or power? They
all have their transient bloom, and then melt away into their
opposites. Who can continue in life's prime? Whose strength lasts for
ever? Has not Nature made the bloom of beauty even more short-lived
than the shows of spring? For they blossom in their season, and after
withering for a while again revive; after another shedding they are
again in leaf, and retain their beauty of to-day to a late prime. But
Nature exhibits the human bloom only in the spring of early life; then
she kills it; it is vanished in the frosts of age. All other delights
also deceive the bodily eye for a time, and then pass behind the veil
of oblivion. Nature's inevitable changes are many; they agonize him
whose love is passionate. One way of escape is open: it is, to be
attached to none of these things, and to get as far away as possible
from the society of this emotional and sensual world; or rather, for a
man to go outside the feelings which his own body gives rise to. Then,
as he does not live for the flesh, he will not be subject to the
troubles of the flesh. But this amounts to living for the spirit only,
and imitating all we can the employment of the world of spirits. There
they neither marry, nor are given in marriage. Their work and their
excellence is to contemplate the Father of all purity, and to beautify
the lines of their own character from the Source of all beauty, so far
as imitation of It is possible.
Footnotes
[1360] en tois prolabousin. Galesinius' Latin seems wrong here, "rebus
iis quas supra meminimus," though the words often have that force in
Gregory.
[1361] Ps. xxiv. 1; xlvii. 7.
[1362] Ps. xxiv. 1; xlvii. 7.
[1363] Eccles. i. 4.
[1364] 1 Pet. i. 24.
[1365] S. Matt. xxiv. 35.
[1366] 2 Cor. v. 4.
[1367] Ps. cxx. 5, 6 (LXX.).
[1368] 2 Cor. vi. 7.
[1369] tois meta gastera (not, gasteros), Cod. Reg.; cf. Gregor.
Nazian. orat. xvi. p. 250, doulos gastros, kai ton hupo gastera.
Euseb. lib. 7, c. 20, tais hupo gastera plesmonais
[1370] Eph. ii. 12; iv. 18.
[1371] S. John xii. 35
[1372] hupobruchion; referring to the floods of the Nile.
[1373] Iliad, v. 87.
[1374] Ps. cxxiv. 5, 6, 7: to hudor to anupostaton (LXX.), i.e.
unsupportable.
Chapter V.
Now we declare that Virginity is man's "fellow-worker" and helper in
achieving the aim of this lofty passion. In other sciences men have
devised certain practical methods for cultivating the particular
subject; and so, I take it, virginity is the practical method in the
science of the Divine life, furnishing men with the power of
assimilating themselves with spiritual natures. The constant endeavour
in such a course is to prevent the nobility of the soul from being
lowered by those sensual outbreaks, in which the mind no longer
maintains its heavenly thoughts and upward gaze, but sinks down to the
emotions belonging to the flesh and blood. How can the soul which is
riveted [1375] to the pleasures of the flesh and busied with merely
human longings turn a disengaged eye upon its kindred intellectual
light? This evil, ignorant, and prejudiced bias towards material
things will prevent it. The eyes of swine, turning naturally downward,
have no glimpse of the wonders of the sky; no more can the soul whose
body drags it down look any longer upon the beauty above; it must pore
perforce upon things which though natural are low and animal. To look
with a free devoted gaze upon heavenly delights, the soul will turn
itself from earth; it will not even partake of the recognized
indulgences of the secular life; it will transfer all its powers of
affection from material objects to the intellectual contemplation of
immaterial beauty. Virginity of the body is devised to further such a
disposition of the soul; it aims at creating in it a complete
forgetfulness of natural emotions; it would prevent the necessity of
ever descending to the call of fleshly needs. Once freed from such,
the soul runs no risk of becoming, through a growing habit of
indulging in that which seems to a certain extent conceded by nature's
law, inattentive and ignorant of Divine and undefiled delights. Purity
of the heart, that master of our lives, alone can capture them.
Footnotes
[1375] Cf. De Anim§ et Resurr., p. 225, D. for the metaphor.
Chapter VI.
This, I believe, makes the greatness of the prophet Elias, and of him
who afterwards appeared in the spirit and power of Elias, than whom
"of those that are born of women there was none greater [1376] ." If
their history conveys any other mystic lesson, surely this above all
is taught by their special mode of life, that the man whose thoughts
are fixed upon the invisible is necessarily separated from all the
ordinary events of life; his judgments as to the True Good cannot be
confused and led astray by the deceits arising from the senses. Both,
from their youth upwards, exiled themselves from human society, and in
a way from human nature, in their neglect of the usual kinds of meat
and drink, and their sojourn in the desert. The wants of each were
satisfied by the nourishment that came in their way, so that their
taste might remain simple and unspoilt, as their ears were free from
any distracting noise, and their eyes from any wandering look. Thus
they attained a cloudless calm of soul, and were raised to that height
of Divine favour which Scripture records of each. Elias, for instance,
became the dispenser of God's earthly gifts; he had authority to close
at will the uses of the sky against the sinners and to open them to
the penitent. John is not said indeed to have done any miracle; but
the gift in him was pronounced by Him Who sees the secrets of a man
greater than any prophet's. This was so, we may presume, because both,
from beginning to end, so dedicated their hearts to the Lord that they
were unsullied by any earthly passion; because the love of wife or
child, or any other human call, did not intrude upon them, and they
did not even think their daily sustenance worthy of anxious thought;
because they showed themselves to be above any magnificence [1377] of
dress, and made shift with that which chance offered them, one
clothing himself in goat-skins, the other with camel's hair. It is my
belief that they would not have reached to this loftiness of spirit,
if marriage had softened them. This is not simple history only; it is
"written for our admonition [1378] ," that we might direct our lives
by theirs. What, then, do we learn thereby? This: that the man who
longs for union with God must, like those saints, detach his mind from
all worldly business. It is impossible for the mind which is poured
into many channels to win its way to the knowledge and the love of
God.
Footnotes
[1376] S. Matt. xii. 11.
[1377] semnotetos; not as Galesinius renders, "asperitate quadam
gravi."
[1378] 1 Cor. x. 11.
Chapter VII.
An illustration will make our teaching on this subject clearer.
Imagine a stream flowing from a spring and dividing itself off into a
number of accidental channels. As long as it proceeds so, it will be
useless for any purpose of agriculture, the dissipation of its waters
making each particular current small and feeble, and therefore slow.
But if one were to mass these wandering and widely dispersed rivulets
again into one single channel, he would have a full and collected
stream for the supplies which life demands. Just so the human mind (so
it seems to me), as long as its current spreads itself in all
directions over the pleasures of the sense, has no power that is worth
the naming of making its way towards the Real Good; but once call it
back and collect it upon itself, so that it may begin to move without
scattering and wandering towards the activity which is congenital and
natural to it, it will find no obstacle in mounting to higher things,
and in grasping realities. We often see water contained in a pipe
bursting upwards through this constraining force, which will not let
it leak; and this, in spite of its natural gravitation: in the same
way, the mind of man, enclosed in the compact channel of an habitual
continence, and not having any side issues, will be raised by virtue
of its natural powers of motion to an exalted love. In fact, its Maker
ordained that it should always move, and to stop is impossible to it;
when therefore it is prevented employing this power upon trifles, it
cannot be but that it will speed toward the truth, all improper exits
being closed. In the case of many turnings we see travellers can keep
to the direct route, when they have learnt that the other roads are
wrong, and so avoid them; the more they keep out of these wrong
directions, the more they will preserve the straight course; in like
manner the mind in turning from vanities will recognize the truth. The
great prophets, then, whom we have mentioned seem to teach this
lesson, viz. to entangle ourselves with none of the objects of this
world's effort; marriage is one of these, or rather it is the primal
root of all striving after vanities.
Chapter VIII.
Let no one think however that herein we depreciate marriage as an
institution. We are well aware that it is not a stranger to God's
blessing. But since the common instincts of mankind can plead
sufficiently on its behalf, instincts which prompt by a spontaneous
bias to take the high road of marriage for the procreation of
children, whereas Virginity in a way thwarts this natural impulse, it
is a superfluous task to compose formally an Exhortation to marriage.
We put forward the pleasure of it instead, as a most doughty champion
on its behalf. It may be however, notwithstanding this, that there is
some need of such a treatise, occasioned by those who travesty the
teaching of the Church. Such persons [1379] "have their conscience
seared with a hot iron," as the Apostle expresses it; and very truly
too, considering that, deserting the guidance of the Holy Spirit for
the "doctrines of devils," they have some ulcers and blisters stamped
upon their hearts, abominating God's creatures, and calling them
"foul," "seducing," "mischievous," and so on. "But what have I to do
to judge them that are without [1380] ?" asks the Apostle. Truly those
persons are outside the Court in which the words of our mysteries are
spoken; they are not installed under God's roof, but in the monastery
of the Evil One. They "are taken captive by him at his will [1381] ."
They therefore do not understand that all virtue is found in
moderation, and that any declension to either side [1382] of it
becomes a vice. He, in fact, who grasps the middle point between doing
too little and doing too much has hit the distinction between vice and
virtue. Instances will make this clearer. Cowardice and audacity are
two recognized vices opposed to each other; the one the defect, the
other the excess of confidence; between them lies courage. Again,
piety is neither atheism nor superstition; it is equally impious to
deny a God and to believe in many gods. Is there need of more examples
to bring this principle home? The man who avoids both meanness and
prodigality will by this shunning of extremes form the moral habit of
liberality; for liberality is the thing which is neither inclined to
spend at random vast and useless sums, nor yet to be closely
calculating in necessary expenses. We need not go into details in the
case of all good qualities. Reason, in all of them, has established
virtue to be a middle state between two extremes. Sobriety itself
therefore is a middle state, and manifestly involves the two
declensions on either side towards vice; he, that is, who is wanting
in firmness of soul, and is so easily worsted in the combat with
pleasure as never even to have approached the path of a virtuous and
sober life, slides into shameful indulgence; while he who goes beyond
the safe ground of sobriety and overshoots the moderation of this
virtue, falls as it were from a precipice into the "doctrines of
devils," "having his conscience seared with a hot iron." In declaring
marriage abominable he brands himself with such reproaches; for "if
the tree is corrupt" (as the Gospel says), "the fruit also of the tree
will be like it [1383] "; if a man is the shoot and fruitage of the
tree of marriage, reproaches cast on that turn upon him who casts them
[1384] . These persons, then, are like branded criminals already;
their conscience is covered with the stripes of this unnatural
teaching. But our view of marriage is this; that, while the pursuit of
heavenly things should be a man's first care, yet if he can use the
advantages of marriage with sobriety and moderation, he need not
despise this way of serving the state. An example might be found in
the patriarch Isaac. He married Rebecca when he was past the flower of
his age and his prime was well-nigh spent, so that his marriage was
not the deed of passion, but because of God's blessing that should be
upon his seed. He cohabited with her till the birth of her only
children [1385] , and then, closing the channels of the senses, lived
wholly for the Unseen; for this is what seems to be meant by the
mention in his history of the dimness of the Patriarch's eyes. But let
that be as those think who are skilled in reading these meanings, and
let us proceed with the continuity of our discourse. What then, were
we saying? That in the cases where it is possible at once to be true
to the diviner love, and to embrace wedlock, there is no reason for
setting aside this dispensation of nature and misrepresenting as
abominable that which is honourable. Let us take again our
illustration of the water and the spring. Whenever the husbandman, in
order to irrigate a particular spot, is bringing the stream thither,
but there is need before it gets there of a small outlet, he will
allow only so much to escape into that outlet as is adequate to supply
the demand, and can then easily be blended again with the main stream.
If, as an inexperienced and easy-going steward, he opens too wide a
channel, there will be danger of the whole stream quitting its direct
bed and pouring itself sideways. In the same way, if (as life does
need a mutual succession) a man so treats this need as to give
spiritual things the first thought, and because of the shortness
[1386] of the time indulges but sparingly the sexual passion and keeps
it under restraint, that man would realize the character of the
prudent husband man to which the Apostle exhorts us. About the details
of paying these trifling debts of nature he will not be
over-calculating, but the long hours of his prayers [1387] will secure
the purity which is the key-note of his life. He will always fear lest
by this kind of indulgence he may become nothing but flesh and blood;
for in them God's Spirit does not dwell. He who is of so weak a
character that he cannot make a manful stand against nature's impulse
had better [1388] keep himself very far away from such temptations,
rather than descend into a combat which is above his strength. There
is no small danger for him lest, cajoled in the valuation of pleasure,
he should think that there exists no other good but that which is
enjoyed along with some sensual emotion, and, turning altogether from
the love of immaterial delights, should become entirely of the flesh,
seeking always his pleasure only there, so that his character will be
a Pleasure-lover, not a God-lover. It is not every man's gift, owing
to weakness of nature, to hit the due proportion in these matters;
there is a danger of being carried far beyond it, and "sticking fast
in the deep mire [1389] ," to use the Psalmist's words. It would
therefore be for our interest, as our discourse has been suggesting,
to pass through life without a trial of these temptations, lest under
cover of the excuse of lawful indulgence passion should gain an
entrance into the citadel of the soul.
Footnotes
[1379] 1 Tim. iv. 2.
[1380] 1 Cor. v. 12.
[1381] 2 Tim. ii. 16.
[1382] epi ta parakeimena. Galesinius wrongly renders "in contrarias
partes." Cf. Arist. Eth. ii. 5.
[1383] Cf. S. Matt. vii. 18; from which it will be seen that Gregory
confirms the Vulgate "malum" for sapron, since he quotes it as kakon
here.
[1384] tou propherontos; not "of their Creator," or "of their father"
(Livineius).
[1385] mechri mias odinos. So perhaps Rom. ix. 10: ;;Rebekka ex henos
koiten echousa, i.e. ex uno concubitu. Below, c. 9 (p. 139, c. 11),
Gregory uses the same expression of one birth.
[1386] kairou sustolen
[1387] ten ek sumphonou katharoteta te schole ton proseuchon
aphorizon, "durch häufiges Gebet die innige Reinheit festzustellen
sucht," J. Rupp. The Latin fails to give the full force, "ex
convenientia quadam munditiam animi in orationum studio constituit:"
schole is abundant time from the business of life.
[1388] kreitton, k. t. l., "melius" (Livineius), not "validior."
[1389] ilun, a better reading than hulen. Cf. Ps. lxix. 2, "the mire
of depth" (ilun buthou).
Chapter IX.
Custom is indeed in everything hard to resist. It possesses an
enormous power of attracting and seducing the soul. In the cases where
a man has got into a fixed state of sentiment, a certain imagination
of the good is created in him by this habit; and nothing is so
naturally vile but it may come to be thought both desirable and
laudable, once it has got into the fashion [1390] . Take mankind now
living on the earth. There are many nations, and their ambitions are
not all the same. The standard of beauty and of honour is different in
each, the custom of each regulating their enthusiasm and their aims.
This unlikeness is seen not only amongst nations where the pursuits of
the one are in no repute with the other, but even in the same nation,
and the same city, and the same family; we may see in those aggregates
also much difference existing owing to customary feeling. Thus
brothers born from the same throe are separated widely from each other
in the aims of life. Nor is this to be wondered at, considering that
each single man does not generally keep to the same opinion about the
same thing, but alters it as fashion influences him. Not to go far
from our present subject, we have known those who have shown
themselves to be in love with chastity all through the early years of
puberty; but in taking the pleasures which men think legitimate and
allowable they make them the starting-point of an impure life, and
when once they have admitted these temptations, all the forces of
their feeling are turned in that direction, and, to take again our
illustration of the stream, they let it rush from the diviner channel
into low material channels, and make within themselves a broad path
for passion; so that the stream of their love leaves dry the abandoned
channel of the higher way [1391] and flows abroad in indulgence. It
would be well then, we take it, for the weaker brethren to fly to
virginity as into an impregnable fortress, rather than to descend into
the career of life's consequences and invite temptations to do their
worst upon them, entangling themselves in those things which through
the lusts of the flesh war against the law of our mind; it would be
well for them to consider [1392] that herein they risk not broad
acres, or wealth, or any other of this life's prizes, but the hope
which has been their guide. It is impossible that one who has turned
to the world and feels its anxieties, and engages his heart in the
wish to please men, can fulfil that first and great commandment of the
Master, "Thou shalt love God with all thy heart and with all thy
strength [1393] ." How can he fulfil that, when he divides his heart
between God and the world, and exhausts the love which he owes to Him
alone in human affections? "He that is unmarried careth for the things
of the Lord; but he that is married careth for the things that are of
the world [1394] ." If the combat with pleasure seems wearisome,
nevertheless let all take heart. Habit will not fail to produce, even
in the seemingly most fretful [1395] , a feeling of pleasure through
the very effort of their perseverance; and that pleasure will be of
the noblest and purest kind; which the intelligent may well be
enamoured of, rather than allow themselves, with aims narrowed by the
lowness of their objects, to be estranged from the true greatness
which goes beyond all thought.
Footnotes
[1390] ouden houto te phusei pheukton estin, hos, k. t. l. Both
Livineius and Galesinius have missed the meaning here. Jac. Billius
has rightly interpreted, "Nihil naturâ tam turpe ac fugiendum est,
quin, si," &c.
[1391] epi ta ano, Reg. Cod., better than to
[1392] Reading phrontizontas, with Reg. Cod.
[1393] S. Matt. xxii. 37.
[1394] 1 Cor. vii. 32 (R.V.).
[1395] tois duskolotatois; better than to take this as a neuter.
Chapter X.
What words indeed could possibly express the greatness of that loss in
falling away from the possession of real goodness? What consummate
power of thought would have to be employed! Who could produce even in
outline that which speech cannot tell, nor the mind grasp? On the one
hand, if a man has kept the eye of his heart so clear that he can in a
way behold the promise of our Lord's Beatitudes realized, he will
condemn all human utterance as powerless to represent that which he
has apprehended. On the other hand, if a man from the atmosphere of
material indulgences has the weakness of passion spreading like a film
over the keen vision of his soul, all force of expression will be
wasted upon him; for it is all one whether you understate or whether
you magnify a miracle to those who have no power whatever of
perceiving it [1396] . Just as, in the case of the sunlight, on one
who has never from the day of his birth seen it, all efforts at
translating it into words are quite thrown away; you cannot make the
splendour of the ray shine [1397] through his ears; in like manner, to
see the beauty of the true and intellectual light, each man has need
of eyes of his own; and he who by a gift of Divine inspiration can see
it retains his ecstasy unexpressed in the depths of his consciousness;
while he who sees it not cannot be made to know even the greatness of
his loss. How should he? This good escapes his perception, and it
cannot be represented to him; it is unspeakable, and cannot be
delineated. We have not learnt the peculiar language expressive of
this beauty. An example of what we want to say does not exist in the
world; a comparison for it would at least be very difficult to find.
Who compares the Sun to a little spark? or the vast Deep to a drop?
And that tiny drop and that diminutive spark bear the same relation to
the Deep and to the Sun, as any beautiful object of man's admiration
does to that real beauty on the features of the First Good, of which
we catch the glimpse beyond any other good. What words could be
invented to show the greatness of this loss to him who suffers it?
Well does the great David seem to me to express the impossibility of
doing this. He has been lifted by the power of the Spirit out of
himself, and sees in a blessed state of ecstacy the boundless and
incomprehensible Beauty; he sees it as fully as a mortal can see who
has quitted his fleshly envelopments and entered, by the mere power of
thought, upon the contemplation of the spiritual and intellectual
world, and in his longing to speak a word worthy of the spectacle he
bursts forth with that cry, which all re-echo, "Every man a liar
[1398] !" I take that to mean that any man who entrusts to language
the task of presenting the ineffable Light is really and truly a liar;
not because of any hatred on his part of the truth, but because of the
feebleness of his instrument for expressing the thing thought of
[1399] . The visible beauty to be met with in this life of ours,
showing glimpses of itself, whether in inanimate objects or in animate
organisms in a certain choiceness of colour, can be adequately admired
by our power of aesthetic feeling. It can be illustrated and made
known to others by description; it can be seen drawn in the language
as in a picture. Even a perfect type [1400] of such beauty does not
baffle our conception. But how can language illustrate when it finds
no media for its sketch, no colour, no contour [1401] , no majestic
size, no faultlessness of feature; nor any other commonplace of art?
The Beauty which is invisible and formless, which is destitute of
qualities and far removed from everything which we recognize in bodies
by the eye, can never be made known by the traits which require
nothing but the perceptions of our senses in order to be grasped. Not
that we are to despair of winning this object of our love, though it
does seem too high for our comprehension. The more reason shows the
greatness of this thing which we are seeking, the higher we must lift
our thoughts and excite them with the greatness of that object; and we
must fear to lose our share in that transcendent Good. There is indeed
no small amount of danger lest, as we can base the apprehension of it
on no knowable qualities, we should slip away from it altogether
because of its very height and mystery. We deem it necessary
therefore, owing to this weakness of the thinking faculty, to lead it
towards the Unseen by stages through the cognizances of the senses.
Our conception of the case is as follows.
Footnotes
[1396] anaisthetos echonton; Reg. Cod.
[1397] augazein; intrans. in N.T.
[1398] Ps. cxvi. 11.
[1399] ouchi to misei tes aletheias alla te asthenei& 139; tes
diegeseos, the reading of Codd. Vatican & Reg.
[1400] oude to archetupon, k. t. l.
[1401] These are evidently the elements of beauty as then recognized
by the eye; it is still the Hellenic standard.
Chapter XI.
Now those who take a superficial and unreflecting view of things
observe the outward appearance of anything they meet, e.g. of a man,
and then trouble themselves no more about him. The view they have
taken of the bulk of his body is enough to make them think that they
know all about him. But the penetrating and scientific mind will not
trust to the eyes alone the task of taking the measure of reality; it
will not stop at appearances, nor count that which is not seen amongst
unrealities. It inquires into the qualities of the man's soul. It
takes those of its characteristics which have been developed by his
bodily constitution, both in combination and singly; first singly, by
analysis, and then in that living combination which makes the
personality of the subject. As regards the inquiry into the nature of
beauty, we see, again, that the man of half-grown intelligence, when
he observes an object which is bathed in the glow of a seeming beauty,
thinks that that object is in its essence beautiful, no matter what it
is that so prepossesses him with the pleasure of the eye. He will not
go deeper into the subject. But the other, whose mind's eye is clear,
and who can inspect such appearances, will neglect those elements
which are the material only upon which the Form of Beauty works; to
him they will be but the ladder by which he climbs to the prospect of
that Intellectual Beauty, in accordance with their share in which all
other beauties get their existence and their name. But for the
majority, I take it, who live all their lives with such obtuse
faculties of thinking, it is a difficult thing to perform this feat of
mental analysis and of discriminating the material vehicle from the
immanent beauty, and thereby of grasping the actual nature of the
Beautiful; and if any one wants to know the exact source of all the
false and pernicious conceptions of it, he would find it in nothing
else but this, viz. the absence, in the soul's faculties of feeling,
of that exact training which would enable them to distinguish between
true Beauty and the reverse. Owing to this men give up all search
after the true Beauty. Some slide into mere sensuality. Others incline
in their desires to dead metallic coin. Others limit their imagination
of the beautiful to worldly honours, fame, and power. There is another
class which is enthusiastic about art and science. The most debased
make their gluttony the test of what is good. But he who turns from
all grosser thoughts and all passionate longings after what is
seeming, and explores the nature of the beauty which is simple,
immaterial, formless, would never make a mistake like that when he has
to choose between all the objects of desire; he would never be so
misled by these attractions as not to see the transient character of
their pleasures and not to win his way to an utter contempt for every
one of them. This, then, is the path to lead us to the discovery of
the Beautiful. All other objects that attract men's love, be they
never so fashionable, be they prized never so much and embraced never
so eagerly, must be left below us, as too low, too fleeting, to employ
the powers of loving which we possess; not indeed that those powers
are to be locked up within us unused and motionless; but only that
they must first be cleansed from all lower longings; then we must lift
them to that height to which sense can never reach. Admiration even of
the beauty of the heavens, and of the dazzling sunbeams, and, indeed,
of any fair phenomenon, will then cease. The beauty noticed there will
be but as the hand to lead us to the love of the supernal Beauty whose
glory the heavens and the firmament declare, and whose secret the
whole creation sings. The climbing soul, leaving all that she has
grasped already as too narrow for her needs, will thus grasp the idea
of that magnificence which is exalted far above the heavens. But how
can any one reach to this, whose ambitions creep below? How can any
one fly up into the heavens, who has not the wings of heaven and is
not already buoyant and lofty-minded by reason of a heavenly calling?
Few can be such strangers to evangelic mysteries as not to know that
there is but one vehicle on which man's soul can mount into the
heavens, viz. the self-made likeness in himself to the descending
Dove, whose wings [1402] David the Prophet also longed for. This is
the allegorical name used in Scripture for the power of the Holy
Spirit; whether it be because not a drop of gall [1403] is found in
that bird, or because it cannot bear any noisome smell, as close
observers tell us. He therefore who keeps away from all bitterness and
all the noisome effluvia of the flesh, and raises himself on the
aforesaid wings above all low earthly ambitions, or, more than that,
above the whole universe itself, will be the man to find that which is
alone worth loving, and to become himself as beautiful as the Beauty
which he has touched and entered, and to be made bright and luminous
himself in the communion of the real Light. We are told by those who
have studied the subject, that those gleams which follow each other so
fast through the air at night and which some call shooting stars
[1404] , are nothing but the air itself streaming into the upper
regions of the sky under stress of some particular blasts. They say
that the fiery track is traced along the sky when those blasts ignite
in the ether. In like manner, then, as this air round the earth is
forced upwards by some blast and changes into the pure splendour of
the ether, so the mind of man leaves this murky miry world, and under
the stress of the spirit becomes pure and luminous in contact with the
true and supernal Purity; in such an atmosphere it even itself emits
light, and is so filled with radiance, that it becomes itself a Light,
according to the promise of our Lord that "the righteous should shine
forth as the sun [1405] ." We see this even here, in the case of a
mirror, or a sheet of water, or any smooth surface that can reflect
the light; when they receive the sunbeam they beam themselves; but
they would not do this if any stain marred their pure and shining
surface. We shall become then as the light, in our nearness to
Christ's true light, if we leave this dark atmosphere of the earth and
dwell above; and we shall be light, as our Lord says somewhere to His
disciples [1406] , if the true Light that shineth in the dark comes
down even to us; unless, that is, any foulness of sin spreading over
our hearts should dim the brightness of our light. Perhaps these
examples have led us gradually on to the discovery that we can be
changed into something better than ourselves; and it has been proved
as well that this union of the soul with the incorruptible Deity can
be accomplished in no other way but by herself attaining by her virgin
state to the utmost purity possible,--a state which, being like God,
will enable her to grasp that to which it is like, while she places
herself like a mirror beneath the purity of God, and moulds her own
beauty at the touch and the sight of the Archetype of all beauty. Take
a character strong enough to turn from all that is human, from
persons, from wealth, from the pursuits of Art and Science, even from
whatever in moral practice and in legislation is viewed as right (for
still in all of them error in the apprehension of the Beautiful comes
in, sense being the criterion); such a character will feel as a
passionate lover only towards that Beauty which has no source but
Itself, which is not such at one particular time or relatively only,
which is Beautiful from, and through, and in itself, not such at one
moment and in the next ceasing to be such, above all increase and
addition, incapable of change and alteration. I venture to affirm
that, to one who has cleansed all the powers of his being from every
form of vice, the Beauty which is essential, the source of every
beauty and every good, will become visible. The visual eye, purged
from its blinding humour, can clearly discern objects even on the
distant sky [1407] ; so to the soul by virtue of her innocence there
comes the power of taking in that Light; and the real Virginity, the
real zeal for chastity, ends in no other goal than this, viz. the
power thereby of seeing God. No one in fact is so mentally blind as
not to understand that without telling; viz. that the God of the
Universe is the only absolute, and primal, and unrivalled [1408]
Beauty and Goodness. All, maybe, know that; but there are those who,
as might have been expected, wish besides this to discover, if
possible, a process by which we may be actually guided to it. Well,
the Divine books are full of such instruction for our guidance; and
besides that many of the Saints cast the refulgence of their own
lives, like lamps, upon the path for those who are "walking with God
[1409] ." But each may gather in abundance for himself suggestions
towards this end out of either Covenant in the inspired writings; the
Prophets and the Law are full of them; and also the Gospel and the
Traditions of the Apostles. What we ourselves have conjectured in
following out the thoughts of those inspired utterances is this.
Footnotes
[1402] Ps. lv. 6.
[1403] Cf. Augustine, Tract. 6 in Joann.: "Columba fel non habet.
Simon habebat; ideo separatus est a columbæ visceribus." Aristotle
asserts the contrary; but even Galen denies that it possesses a
bladder (lib. de atr. bil. sub fin.).
[1404] diattontas, corrected by Livineius, the transcriber of the
Vatican ms., for diatattontas. Cf. Arist. Meteor. I. iv: kai homoios
kata platos kai bathos hoi dokountes asteres diattein ginontai: and,
in the same chapter, diatheontes asteres. Cf. Seneca. Nat. Quæst. iii.
14: "Videmus ergo `Stellarum longos a tergo albescere tractus.' Hæc
velut stellæ exsiliunt et transvolant." This and much else, in the
preceding and following notes to this treatise, is taken from those of
Fronto Ducæus, printed in the Paris Edit. The Paris Editors, Fronto
Ducæus and Claude Morell, used Livineius' edition (1574) of this
treatise, which is based on the Vatican Cod. and Bricman's (of
Cologne); and they corrected from the Cod. of F. Morell, Regius
Professor of Theology; and from the Cod. Regius.
[1405] S. Matt. xiii. 43.
[1406] S. John ix. 5; i. 9.
[1407] ta en to ourano telaugos kathoratai. The same word in S. Mark
viii. 25 ("clearly") evidently refers to the second stage of recovered
sight, the power of seeing the perspective. The mss. reading is en to
hagio, for which aeri and heli& 251; have been conjectured; ourano is
due to Galesinius; there is a similar place in Dio Chrys. (de regno et
tyrann.): "impaired sight," he says, "cannot see even what is quite
close, hugies de ousa mechris ouranou te kai asteron exikneitai, i.e.
the distant sky. Just above, apor& 191;upsameno (purged) is a better
reading than apor& 191;ipsameno, and supported by F. Morell's ms.
[1408] monos.
[1409] Gen. v. 24; vi. 9.
Chapter XII.
This reasoning and intelligent creature, man, at once the work and the
likeness of the Divine and Imperishable Mind (for so in the Creation
it is written of him that "God made man in His image [1410] "), this
creature, I say, did not in the course of his first production have
united to the very essence of his nature the liability to passion and
to death. Indeed, the truth about the image could never have been
maintained if the beauty reflected in that image had been in the
slightest degree opposed [1411] to the Archetypal Beauty. Passion was
introduced afterwards, subsequent to man's first organization; and it
was in this way. Being the image and the likeness, as has been said,
of the Power which rules all things, man kept also in the matter of a
Free-Will this likeness to Him whose Will is over all. He was enslaved
to no outward necessity whatever; his feeling towards that which
pleased him depended only on his own private judgment; he was free to
choose whatever he liked; and so he was a free agent, though
circumvented with cunning, when he drew upon himself that disaster
which now overwhelms humanity. He became himself the discoverer of
evil, but he did not therein discover what God had made; for God did
not make death. Man became, in fact, himself the fabricator, to a
certain extent, and the craftsman of evil. All who have the faculty of
sight may enjoy equally the sunlight; and any one can if he likes put
this enjoyment from him by shutting his eyes: in that case it is not
that the sun retires and produces that darkness, but the man himself
puts a barrier between his eye and the sunshine; the faculty of vision
cannot indeed, even in the closing of the eyes, remain inactive [1412]
, and so this operative sight necessarily becomes an operative
darkness [1413] rising up in the man from his own free act in ceasing
to see. Again, a man in building a house for himself may omit to make
in it any way of entrance for the light; he will necessarily be in
darkness, though he cuts himself off from the light voluntarily. So
the first man on the earth, or rather he who generated evil in man,
had for choice the Good and the Beautiful lying all around him in the
very nature of things; yet he wilfully cut out a new way for himself
against this nature, and in the act of turning away from virtue, which
was his own free act, he created the usage of evil. For, be it
observed, there is no such thing in the world as evil irrespective of
a will, and discoverable in a substance apart from that. Every
creature of God is good, and nothing of His "to be rejected"; all that
God made was "very good [1414] ." But the habit of sinning entered as
we have described, and with fatal quickness, into the life of man; and
from that small beginning spread into this infinitude of evil. Then
that godly beauty of the soul which was an imitation of the Archetypal
Beauty, like fine steel blackened [1415] with the vicious rust,
preserved no longer the glory of its familiar essence, but was
disfigured with the ugliness of sin. This thing so great and precious
[1416] , as the Scripture calls him, this being man, has fallen from
his proud birthright. As those who have slipped and fallen heavily
into mud, and have all their features so besmeared with it, that their
nearest friends do not recognize them, so this creature has fallen
into the mire of sin and lost the blessing of being an image of the
imperishable Deity; he has clothed himself instead with a perishable
and foul resemblance to something else; and this Reason counsels him
to put away again by washing it off in the cleansing water of this
calling [1417] . The earthly envelopment once removed, the soul's
beauty will again appear. Now the putting off of a strange accretion
is equivalent to the return to that which is familiar and natural; yet
such a return cannot be but by again becoming that which in the
beginning we were created. In fact this likeness to the divine is not
our work at all; it is not the achievement of any faculty of man; it
is the great gift of God bestowed upon our nature at the very moment
of our birth; human efforts can only go so far as to clear away the
filth of sin, and so cause the buried beauty of the soul to shine
forth again. This truth is, I think, taught in the Gospel, when our
Lord says, to those who can hear what Wisdom speaks beneath a mystery,
that "the Kingdom of God is within you [1418] ." That word [1419]
points out the fact that the Divine good is not something apart from
our nature, and is not removed far away from those who have the will
to seek it; it is in fact within each of us, ignored indeed, and
unnoticed while it is stifled beneath the cares and pleasures of life,
but found again whenever we can turn our power of conscious thinking
towards it. If further confirmation of what we say is required, I
think it will be found in what is suggested by our Lord in the
searching for the Lost Drachma [1420] . The thought, there, is that
the widowed soul reaps no benefit from the other virtues (called
drachmas in the Parable) being all of them found safe, if that one
other is not amongst them. The Parable therefore suggests that a
candle should first be lit, signifying doubtless our reason which
throws light on hidden principles; then that in one's own house, that
is, within oneself, we should search for that lost coin; and by that
coin the Parable doubtless hints at the image of our King, not yet
hopelessly lost, but hidden beneath the dirt; and by this last we must
understand the impurities of the flesh, which, being swept and purged
away by carefulness of life, leave clear to the view the object of our
search. Then it is meant that the soul herself who finds this rejoices
over it, and with her the neighbours, whom she calls in to share with
her in this delight. Verily, all those powers which are the housemates
of the soul, and which the Parable names her neighbours for this
occasion [1421] , when so be that the image of the mighty King is
revealed in all its brightness at last (that image which the Fashioner
of each individual heart of us has stamped upon this our Drachma
[1422] ), will then be converted to that divine delight and festivity,
and will gaze upon the ineffable beauty of the recovered one. "Rejoice
with me," she says, "because I have found the Drachma which I had
lost." The neighbours, that is, the soul's familiar powers, both the
reasoning and the appetitive, the affections of grief and of anger,
and all the rest that are discerned in her, at that joyful feast which
celebrates the finding of the heavenly Drachma are well called her
friends also; and it is meet that they should all rejoice in the Lord
when they all look towards the Beautiful and the Good, and do
everything for the glory of God, no longer instruments of sin [1423] .
If, then, such is the lesson of this Finding of the lost, viz. that we
should restore the divine image from the foulness which the flesh
wraps round it to its primitive state, let us become that which the
First Man was at the moment when he first breathed. And what was that?
Destitute he was then of his covering of dead skins, but he could gaze
without shrinking upon God's countenance. He did not yet judge of what
was lovely by taste or sight; he found in the Lord alone all that was
sweet; and he used the helpmeet given him only for this delight, as
Scripture signifies when it said that "he knew her not [1424] " till
he was driven forth from the garden, and till she, for the sin which
she was decoyed into committing, was sentenced to the pangs of
childbirth. We, then, who in our first ancestor were thus ejected, are
allowed to return to our earliest state of blessedness by the very
same stages by which we lost Paradise. What are they? Pleasure,
craftily offered, began the Fall, and there followed after pleasure
shame, and fear, even to remain longer in the sight of their Creator,
so that they hid themselves in leaves and shade; and after that they
covered themselves with the skins of dead animals; and then were sent
forth into this pestilential and exacting land where, as the
compensation for having to die, marriage was instituted [1425] . Now
if we are destined "to depart hence, and be with Christ [1426] ," we
must begin at the end of the route of departure (which lies nearest to
ourselves); just as those who have travelled far from their friends at
home, when they turn to reach again the place from which they started,
first leave that district which they reached at the end of their
outward journey. Marriage, then, is the last stage of our separation
from the life that was led in Paradise; marriage therefore, as our
discourse has been suggesting, is the first thing to be left; it is
the first station as it were for our departure to Christ. Next, we
must retire from all anxious toil upon the land, such as man was bound
to after his sin. Next we must divest ourselves of those coverings of
our nakedness, the coats of skins, namely the wisdom of the flesh; we
must renounce all shameful things done in secret [1427] , and be
covered no longer with the fig-leaves of this bitter world; then, when
we have torn off the coatings of this life's perishable leaves, we
must stand again in the sight of our Creator; and repelling all the
illusion of taste and sight, take for our guide God's commandment
only, instead of the venom-spitting serpent. That commandment was, to
touch nothing but what was Good, and to leave what was evil untasted;
because impatience to remain any longer in ignorance of evil would be
but the beginning of the long train of actual evil. For this reason it
was forbidden to our first parents to grasp the knowledge of the
opposite to the good, as well as that of the good itself; they were to
keep themselves from "the knowledge of good and evil [1428] ," and to
enjoy the Good in its purity, unmixed with one particle of evil: and
to enjoy that, is in my judgment nothing else than to be ever with
God, and to feel ceaselessly and continually this delight, unalloyed
by aught that could tear us away from it. One might even be bold to
say that this might be found the way by which a man could be again
caught up into Paradise out of this world which lieth in the Evil,
into that Paradise where Paul was when he saw the unspeakable sights
which it is not lawful for a man to talk of [1429] .
Footnotes
[1410] Gen. i. 27.
[1411] hupenantios; i.e. even as a sub-contrary.
[1412] argein.
[1413] skotous energeian
[1414] 1 Tim. iv. 4; Gen. i. 31.
[1415] katemelanthe
[1416] Cf. Prov. xx. 6, mega anthropos; and Ambrose (de obitu
Theodosii), "Magnum et honorabile est homo misericors;" and the same
on Ps. cxix. 73, "Grande homo, et preciosum vir misericors, et vere
magnus est, qui divini operis interpres est, et imitator Dei."
[1417] tes politeias: used in the same sense in "On Pilgrimages."
[1418] S. Luke xvii. 21.
[1419] ho logos, i.e. Scripture. So to logion in Gregory passim, and
Clement. Alex. (Stromata).
[1420] S. Luke xv. 8
[1421] nun.
[1422] enesemenato he ?n te drachme.
[1423] Rom. vi. 13.
[1424] Gen. iv. 1.
[1425] Gen. iii. 16.
[1426] Philip. i. 23.
[1427] 2 Cor. iv. 2.
[1428] Gen. ii. 17.
[1429] 2 Cor. xii. 4.
Chapter XIII.
But seeing that Paradise is the home of living spirits, and will not
admit those who are dead in sin, and that we on the other hand are
fleshly, subject to death, and sold under sin [1430] , how is it
possible that one who is a subject of death's empire should ever dwell
in this land where all is life? What method of release from this
jurisdiction can be devised? Here too the Gospel teaching is
abundantly sufficient. We hear our Lord saying to Nicodemus, "That
which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the
Spirit is spirit [1431] ." We know too that the flesh is subject to
death because of sin, but the Spirit of God is both incorruptible, and
life-giving, and deathless. As at our physical birth there comes into
the world with us a potentiality of being again turned to dust,
plainly the Spirit also imparts a life-giving potentiality to the
children begotten by Himself. What lesson, then, results from these
remarks? This: that we should wean ourselves from this life in the
flesh, which has an inevitable follower, death; and that we should
search for a manner of life which does not bring death in its train.
Now the life of Virginity is such a life. We will add a few other
things to show how true this is. Every one knows that the propagation
of mortal frames is the work which the intercourse of the sexes has to
do; whereas for those who are joined to the Spirit, life and
immortality instead of children are produced by this latter
intercourse; and the words of the Apostle beautifully suit their case,
for the joyful mother of such children as these "shall be saved in
child-bearing [1432] ;" as the Psalmist in his divine songs thankfully
cries, "He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful
mother of children [1433] ." Truly a joyful mother is the virgin
mother who by the operation of the Spirit conceives the deathless
children, and who is called by the Prophet barren because of her
modesty only. This life, then, which is stronger than the power of
death, is, to those who think, the preferable one. The physical
bringing of children into the world--I speak without wishing to
offend--is as much a starting-point of death as of life; because from
the moment of birth the process of dying commences. But those who by
virginity have desisted from this process have drawn within themselves
the boundary line of death, and by their own deed have checked his
advance; they have made themselves, in fact, a frontier between life
and death, and a barrier too, which thwarts him. If, then, death
cannot pass beyond virginity, but finds his power checked and
shattered there, it is demonstrated that virginity is a stronger thing
than death; and that body is rightly named undying which does not lend
its service to a dying world, nor brook to become the instrument of a
succession of dying creatures. In such a body the long unbroken career
of decay and death, which has intervened between [1434] the first man
and the lives of virginity which have been led, is interrupted. It
could not be indeed that death should cease working as long as the
human race by marriage was working too; he walked the path of life
with all preceding generations; he started with every new-born child
and accompanied it to the end: but he found in virginity a barrier, to
pass which was an impossible feat. Just as, in the age of Mary the
mother of God, he who had reigned from Adam to her time found, when he
came to her and dashed his forces against the fruit of her virginity
as against a rock, that he was shattered to pieces upon her, so in
every soul which passes through this life in the flesh under the
protection of virginity, the strength of death is in a manner broken
and annulled, for he does not find the places upon which he may fix
his sting. If you do not throw into the fire wood, or straw, or grass,
or something that it can consume, it has not the force to last by
itself; so the power of death cannot go on working, if marriage does
not supply it with material and prepare victims for this executioner.
If you have any doubts left, consider the actual names of those
afflictions which death brings upon mankind, and which were detailed
in the first part of this discourse. Whence do they get their meaning?
"Widowhood," "orphanhood," "loss of children," could they be a subject
for grief, if marriage did not precede? Nay, all the dearly-prized
blisses, and transports, and comforts of marriage end in these agonies
of grief. The hilt of a sword is smooth and handy, and polished and
glittering outside; it seems to grow to the outline of the hand [1435]
; but the other part is steel and the instrument of death, formidable
to look at, more formidable still to come across. Such a thing is
marriage. It offers for the grasp of the senses a smooth surface of
delights, like a hilt of rare polish and beautiful workmanship; but
when a man has taken it up and has got it into his hands, he finds the
pain that has been wedded to it is in his hands as well; and it
becomes to him the worker of mourning and of loss. It is marriage that
has the heartrending spectacles to show of children left desolate in
the tenderness of their years, a mere prey to the powerful, yet
smiling often at their misfortune from ignorance of coming woes. What
is the cause of widowhood but marriage? And retirement from this would
bring with it an immunity from the whole burden of these sad taxes on
our hearts. Can we expect it otherwise? When the verdict that was
pronounced on the delinquents in the beginning is annulled, then too
the mothers' "sorrows [1436] " are no longer "multiplied," nor does
"sorrow" herald the births of men; then all calamity has been removed
from life and "tears wiped from off all faces [1437] ;" conception is
no more an iniquity, nor child-bearing a sin; and births shall be no
more "of bloods," or "of the will of man," or "of the will of the
flesh [1438] ", but of God alone. This is always happening whenever
any one in a lively heart conceives all the integrity of the Spirit,
and brings forth wisdom and righteousness, and sanctification and
redemption too. It is possible for any one to be the mother of such a
son; as our Lord says, "He that doeth my will is my brother, my
sister, and my mother [1439] ." What room is there for death in such
parturitions? Indeed in them death is swallowed up by life. In fact,
the Life of Virginity seems to be an actual representation of the
blessedness in the world to come, showing as it does in itself so many
signs of the presence of those expected blessings which are reserved
for us there. That the truth of this statement may be perceived, we
will verify it thus. It is so, first, because a man who has thus died
once for all to sin lives for the future to God; he brings forth no
more fruit unto death; and having so far as in him lies made an end
[1440] of this life within him according to the flesh, he awaits
thenceforth the expected blessing of the manifestation [1441] of the
great God, refraining from putting any distance between himself and
this coming of God by an intervening posterity: secondly, because he
enjoys even in this present life a certain exquisite glory of all the
blessed results of our resurrection. For our Lord has announced that
the life after our resurrection shall be as that of the angels. Now
the peculiarity of the angelic nature is that they are strangers to
marriage; therefore the blessing of this promise has been already
received by him who has not only mingled his own glory with the halo
of the Saints, but also by the stainlessness of his life has so
imitated the purity of these incorporeal beings. If virginity then can
win us favours such as these, what words are fit to express the
admiration of so great a grace? What other gift of the soul can be
found so great and precious as not to suffer by comparison with this
perfection?
Footnotes
[1430] hupo ten hamartian should perhaps be restored from Rom. vii.
14; though the Paris Edit. has hupo tes hamartias.
[1431] S. John iii. 6
[1432] 1 Tim. ii. 15.
[1433] Ps. cxiii. 9.
[1434] dia mesou ou gegonen. So Codd. Reg. Vat.; but the ou is
manifestly a corruption arising from mesou.
[1435] emphuomene; cf. the Homeric en d'ara hoi phu cheiri, k. t. l
[1436] Gen. iii. 16.
[1437] Is. xxv. 8.
[1438] S. John i. 13
[1439] S. Matt. xii. 50.
[1440] sunteleian. Cf. S. Matt. xiii. 39; and Heb. ix. 15.
[1441] epiphaneian; Tit. ii. 13.
Chapter XIV.
But if we apprehend at last the perfection of this grace, we must
understand as well what necessarily follows from it; namely that it is
not a single achievement, ending in the subjugation of the body, but
that in intention it reaches to and pervades everything that is, or is
considered, a right condition of the soul. That soul indeed which in
virginity cleaves to the true Bridegroom will not remove herself
merely from all bodily defilement; she will make that abstension only
the beginning of her purity, and will carry this security from failure
equally into everything else upon her path. Fearing lest, from a too
partial heart, she should by contact with evil in any one direction
give occasion for the least weakness of unfaithfulness (to suppose
such a case: but I will begin again what I was going to say), that
soul which cleaves to her Master so as to become with Him one spirit,
and by the compact of a wedded life has staked the love of all her
heart and all her strength on Him alone--that soul will no more commit
any other of the offences contrary to salvation, than imperil her
union with Him by cleaving to fornication; she knows that between all
sins there is a single kinship of impurity, and that if she were to
defile herself with but one [1442] , she could no longer retain her
spotlessness. An illustration will show what we mean. Suppose all the
water in a pool remaining smooth and motionless, while no disturbance
of any kind comes to mar the peacefulness of the spot; and then a
stone thrown into the pool; the movement in that one part [1443] will
extend to the whole, and while the stone's weight is carrying it to
the bottom, the waves that are set in motion round it pass in circles
[1444] into others, and so through all the intervening commotion are
pushed on to the very edge of the water, and the whole surface is
ruffled with these circles, feeling the movement of the depths. So is
the broad serenity and calm of the soul troubled by one invading
passion, and affected by the injury of a single part. They tell us
too, those who have investigated the subject, that the virtues are not
disunited from each other, and that to grasp the principle of any one
virtue will be impossible to one who has not seized that which
underlies the rest, and that the man who shows one virtue in his
character will necessarily show them all. Therefore, by contraries,
the depravation of anything in our moral nature will extend to the
whole virtuous life; and in very truth, as the Apostle tells us, the
whole is affected by the parts, and "if one member [1445] suffer, all
the members suffer with it," "if one be honoured, all rejoice."
Footnotes
[1442] The text is here due to the Vatican Codex: kai ei di'henos
tinos moluntheie, k. t. l.
[1443] to merei. This is the reading of Cod. Morell. and of the
fragment used by Livineius; preferable to to meriko salo
sunkumatoumenon, as in Cod. Reg.
[1444] kukloteros, Plutarch, ii. 892, F.
[1445] melos (not as Galesinius, meros), 1 Cor. xii. 26.
Chapter XV.
But the ways in our life which turn aside towards sin are innumerable;
and their number is told by Scripture in divers manners. "Many are
they that trouble me and persecute," and "Many are they that fight
against me from on high [1446] "; and many other texts like that. We
may affirm, indeed, absolutely, that many are they who plot in the
adulterer's fashion to destroy this truly honourable marriage, and to
defile this inviolate bed; and if we must name them one by one, we
charge with this adulterous spirit anger, avarice, envy, revenge,
enmity, malice, hatred, and whatever the Apostle puts in the class of
those things which are contrary to sound doctrine. Now let us suppose
a lady, prepossessing and lovely above her peers, and on that account
wedded to a king, but besieged because of her beauty by profligate
lovers. As long as she remains indignant at these would-be seducers
and complains of them to her lawful husband, she keeps her chastity
and has no one before her eyes but her bridegroom; the profligates
find no vantage ground for their attack upon her. But if she were to
listen to a single one of them, her chastity with regard to the rest
would not exempt her from the retribution; it would be sufficient to
condemn her, that she had allowed that one to defile the marriage bed.
So the soul whose life is in God will find her pleasure [1447] in no
single one of those things which make a beauteous show to deceive her.
If she were, in some fit of weakness, to admit the defilement to her
heart, she would herself have broken the covenant of her spiritual
marriage; and, as the Scripture tells us, "into the malicious soul
Wisdom cannot come [1448] ." It may, in a word, be truly said that the
Good Husband cannot come to dwell with the soul that is irascible, or
malice-bearing, or harbours any other disposition which jars with that
concord. No way has been discovered of harmonizing things whose nature
is antagonistic and which have nothing in common. The Apostle tells us
there is "no communion of light with darkness [1449] ," or of
righteousness with iniquity, or, in a word, of all the qualities which
we perceive and name as the essence of God's nature, with all the
opposite which are perceived in evil. Seeing, then, the impossibility
of any union between mutual repellents, we understand that the vicious
soul is estranged from entertaining the company of the Good. What then
is the practical lesson from this? The chaste and thoughtful virgin
must sever herself from any affection which can in any way impart
contagion to her soul; she must keep herself pure for the Husband who
has married her, "not having spot or blemish or any such thing [1450]
."
Footnotes
[1446] Ps. lvi. 3 (from LXX. according to many mss.: others join apo
upsous hemeras ou phobethesomai, ab altitudine diei non timebo). But
Aquila has hupsiste, agreeing with the Hebrew; so also Jerome.
[1447] oudeni aresthesetai. The Vatican Cod. has erathesetai, which
would require the genitive.
[1448] Wis. i. 4.
[1449] 2 Cor. vi. 14.
[1450] Eph. v. 27.--Origen (c. Cels. vii. 48, 49), comparing Pagan and
Christian virginity, says, "The Athenian hierophant, distrusting his
power of self-control for the period of his regular religious duties,
uses hemlock, and passes as pure. But you may see among the Christians
men who need no hemlock. The Faith drives evil from their minds, and
ever fits them to perform the service of prayer. Belonging to some of
the gods now in vogue there are certainly virgins here and
there--watched or not I care not now to inquire--who seem not to break
down in the course of chastity which the honour of their god requires.
But amongst Christians, for no repute amongst men, for no stipend, for
no mere show, they practise an absolute virginity; and as they `liked
to retain God in their knowledge,' so God has kept them in that liking
mind, and in the performance of fitting works, filling them with
righteousness and goodness. I say this without any depreciation of
what is beautiful in Greek thought, and of what is wholesome in their
teachings. I wish only to show that all they have said, and things
more noble, more divine, have been said by those men of God, the
prophets and apostles."
Chapter XVI.
There is only one right path. It is narrow and contracted. It has no
turnings either on the one side or the other. No matter how we leave
it, there is the same danger of straying hopelessly away. This being
so, the habit which many have got into must be as far as possible
corrected; those, I mean, who while they fight strenuously against the
baser pleasures, yet still go on hunting for pleasure in the shape of
worldly honour and positions which will gratify their love of power.
They act like some domestic who longed for liberty, but instead of
exerting himself to get away from slavery proceeded only to change his
masters, and thought liberty consisted in that change. But all alike
are slaves, even though they should not all go on being ruled by the
same masters, as long as a dominion of any sort, with power to enforce
it, is set over them. There are others again who after a long battle
against all the pleasures [1451] , yield themselves easily on another
field, where feelings of an opposite kind come in; and in the intense
exactitude of their lives fall a ready prey to melancholy and
irritation, and to brooding over injuries, and to everything that is
the direct opposite of pleasurable feelings; from which they are very
reluctant to extricate themselves. This is always happening, whenever
any emotion, instead of virtuous reason, controls the course of a
life. For the commandment of the Lord is exceedingly far-shining, so
as to "enlighten the eyes" even of "the simple [1452] ," declaring
that good cleaveth only unto God. But God is not pain any more than He
is pleasure; He is not cowardice any more than boldness; He is not
fear, nor anger, nor any other emotion which sways the untutored soul,
but, as the Apostle says, He is Very Wisdom and Sanctification, Truth
and Joy and Peace, and everything like that. If He is such, how can
any one be said to cleave to Him, who is mastered by the very
opposite? Is it not want of reason in any one to suppose that when he
has striven successfully to escape the dominion of one particular
passion, he will find virtue in its opposite? For instance, to suppose
that when he has escaped pleasure, he will find virtue in letting pain
have possession of him; or when he has by an effort remained proof
against anger, in crouching with fear. It matters not whether we miss
virtue, or rather God Himself Who is the Sum of virtue, in this way,
or in that. Take the case of great bodily prostration; one would say
that the sadness of this failure was just the same, whether the cause
has been excessive under-feeding, or immoderate eating; both failures
to stop in time end in the same result. He therefore who watches over
the life and the sanity of the soul will confine himself to the
moderation of the truth; he will continue without touching either of
those opposite states which run along-side virtue. This teaching is
not mine; it comes from the Divine lips. It is clearly contained in
that passage where our Lord says to His disciples, that they are as
sheep wandering amongst wolves [1453] , yet are not to be as doves
only, but are to have something of the serpent too in their
disposition; and that means that they should neither carry to excess
the practice of that which seems praiseworthy in simplicity [1454] ,
as such a habit would come very near to downright madness, nor on the
other hand should deem the cleverness which most admire to be a
virtue, while unsoftened by any mixture with its opposite; they were
in fact to form another disposition, by a compound of these two
seeming opposites, cutting off its silliness from the one, its evil
cunning from the other; so that one single beautiful character should
be created from the two, a union of simplicity of purpose with
shrewdness. "Be ye," He says, "wise as serpents, and harmless as
doves."
Footnotes
[1451] tas hedonas i.e.the whole class.
[1452] Ps. xix. 6, 7, 8.
[1453] S. Matt. x. 16
[1454] According to the emendation of Livineius: mete to kata ten
haploteta dokoun epaineton
Chapter XVII.
Let that which was then said by our Lord be the general maxim for
every life; especially let it be the maxim for those who are coming
nearer God through the gateway of virginity, that they should never in
watching for a perfection in one direction present an unguarded side
in another and contrary one; but should in all directions realize the
good, so that they may guarantee in all things their holy life against
failure. A soldier does not arm himself only on some points, leaving
the rest of his body to take its chance unprotected. If he were to
receive his death-wound upon that, what would have been the advantage
of this partial armour? Again, who would call that feature faultless,
which from some accident had lost one of those requisites which go to
make up the sum of beauty? The disfigurement of the mutilated part
mars the grace of the part untouched. The Gospel implies that he who
undertakes the building of a tower, but spends all his labour upon the
foundations without ever reaching the completion, is worthy of
ridicule; and what else do we learn from the Parable of the Tower, but
to strive to come to the finish of every lofty purpose, accomplishing
the work of God in all the multiform structures of His commandments?
One stone, indeed, is no more the whole edifice of the Tower, than one
commandment kept will raise the soul's perfection to the required
height. The foundation must by all means first be laid but over it, as
the Apostle says [1455] , the edifice of gold and precious gems must
be built; for so is the doing of the commandment put by the Prophet
who cries, "I have loved Thy commandment above gold and many a
precious stone [1456] ." Let the virtuous life have for its
substructure the love of virginity; but upon this let every result of
virtue be reared. If virginity is believed to be a vastly precious
thing and to have a divine look (as indeed is the case, as well as men
believe of it), yet, if the whole life does not harmonize with this
perfect note, and it be marred by the succeeding [1457] discord of the
soul, this thing becomes but "the jewel of gold in the swine's snout
[1458] " or "the pearl that is trodden under the swine's feet." But we
have said enough upon this.
Footnotes
[1455] 1 Cor. iii. 12.
[1456] Ps. cxix. 127, LXX. (chrusion kai topazion).
[1457] te loipon
[1458] For the gold, see Prov. xi. 22; for the pearl, S. Matt. vii. 6
Chapter XVIII.
If any one supposes that [1459] this want of mutual harmony between
his life and a single one of its circumstances is quite unimportant,
let him be taught the meaning of our maxim by looking at the
management of a house. The master of a private dwelling will not allow
any untidiness or unseemliness to be seen in the house, such as a
couch upset, or the table littered with rubbish, or vessels of price
thrown away into dirty corners, while those which serve ignobler uses
are thrust forward for entering guests to see. He has everything
arranged neatly and in the proper place, where it stands to most
advantage; and then he can welcome his guests, without any misgivings
that he need be ashamed of opening the interior of his house to
receive them. The same duty, I take it, is incumbent on that master of
our "tabernacle," the mind; it has to arrange everything within us,
and to put each particular faculty of the soul, which the Creator has
fashioned to be our implement or our vessel, to fitting and noble
uses. We will now mention in detail the way in which any one might
manage his life, with its present advantages, to his improvement,
hoping that no one will accuse us of trifling [1460] , or
over-minuteness. We advise, then, that love's passion be placed in the
soul's purest shrine, as a thing chosen to be the first fruits of all
our gifts, and devoted [1461] entirely to God; and when once this has
been done, to keep it untouched and unsullied by any secular
defilement. Then indignation, and anger, and hatred must be as
watch-dogs to be roused only against attacking sins; they must follow
their natural impulse only against the thief and the enemy who is
creeping in to plunder the divine treasure-chamber, and who comes only
for that, that he may steal, and mangle, and destroy. Courage and
confidence are to be weapons in our hands to baffle any sudden
surprise and attack of the wicked who advance. Hope and patience are
to be the staffs to lean upon, whenever we are weary with the trials
of the world. As for sorrow, we must have a stock of it ready to
apply, if need should happen to arise for it, in the hour of
repentance for our sins; believing at the same time that it is never
useful, except to minister to that. Righteousness will be our rule of
straightforwardness, guarding us from stumbling either in word or
deed, and guiding us in the disposal of the faculties of our soul, as
well as in the due consideration for every one we meet. The love of
gain, which is a large, incalculably large, element in every soul,
when once applied to the desire for God, will bless the man who has
it; for he will be violent [1462] where it is right to be violent.
Wisdom and prudence will be our advisers as to our best interests;
they will order our lives so as never to suffer from any thoughtless
folly. But suppose a man does not apply the aforesaid faculties of the
soul to their proper use, but reverses their intended purpose; suppose
he wastes his love upon the basest objects, and stores up his hatred
only for his own kinsmen; suppose he welcomes iniquity, plays the man
only against his parents, is bold only in absurdities, fixes his hopes
on emptiness, chases prudence and wisdom from his company, takes
gluttony and folly for his mistresses, and uses all his other
opportunities in the same fashion, he would indeed be a strange and
unnatural character to a degree beyond any one's power to express. If
we could imagine any one putting his armour on all the wrong way,
reversing the helmet so as to cover his face while the plume nodded
backward, putting his feet into the cuirass, and fitting the greaves
on to his breast, changing to the right side all that ought to go on
the left and vice versa, and how such a hoplite would be likely to
fare in battle, then we should have an idea of the fate in life which
is sure to await him whose confused judgment makes him reverse the
proper uses of his soul's faculties. We must therefore provide this
balance in all feeling; the true sobriety of mind is naturally able to
supply it; and if one had to find an exact definition of this
sobriety, one might declare absolutely, that it amounts to our ordered
control, by dint of wisdom and prudence, over every emotion of the
soul. Moreover, such a condition in the soul will be no longer in need
of any laborious method to attain to the high and heavenly realities;
it will accomplish with the greatest ease that which erewhile seemed
so unattainable; it will grasp the object of its search as a natural
consequence of rejecting the opposite attractions. A man who comes out
of darkness is necessarily in the light; a man who is not dead is
necessarily alive. Indeed, if a man is not to have received his soul
to no purpose [1463] , he will certainly be upon the path of truth;
the prudence and the science employed to guard against error will be
itself a sure guidance along the right road. Slaves who have been
freed and cease to serve their former masters, the very moment they
become their own masters, direct all their thoughts towards themselves
so, I take it, the soul which has been freed from ministering to the
body becomes at once cognizant of its own inherent energy. But this
liberty consists, as we learn from the Apostle [1464] , in not again
being held in the yoke of slavery, and in not being bound again, like
a runaway or a criminal, with the fetters of marriage. But I must
return here to what I said at first; that the perfection of this
liberty does not consist only in that one point of abstaining from
marriage. Let no one suppose that the prize of virginity is so
insignificant and so easily won as that; as if one little observance
of the flesh could settle so vital a matter. But we have seen that
every man who doeth a sin is the servant of sin [1465] ; so that a
declension towards vice in any act, or in any practice whatever, makes
a slave, and still more, a branded slave, of the man, covering him
through sin's lashes with bruises and seared spots. Therefore it
behoves the man who grasps at the transcendent aim of all virginity to
be true to himself in every respect, and to manifest his purity
equally in every relation of his life. If any of the inspired words
are required to aid our pleading, the Truth [1466] Itself will be
sufficient to corroborate the truth when It inculcates this very kind
of teaching in the veiled meaning of a Gospel Parable: the good and
eatable fish are separated by the fishers' skill from the bad and
poisonous fish, so that the enjoyment of the good should not be spoilt
by any of the bad getting into the "vessels" with them. The work of
true sobriety is the same; from all pursuits and habits to choose that
which is pure and improving, rejecting in every case that which does
not seem likely to be useful, and letting it go back into the
universal and secular life, called "the sea [1467] ," in the imagery
of the Parable. The Psalmist [1468] also, when expounding the doctrine
of a full confession [1469] , calls this restless suffering tumultuous
life, "waters coming in even unto the soul," "depths of waters," and a
"hurricane"; in which sea indeed every rebellious thought sinks, as
the Egyptian did, with a stone's weight into the deeps [1470] . But
all in us that is dear to God, and has a piercing insight into the
truth (called "Israel" in the narrative), passes, but that alone, over
that sea as if it were dry land, and is never reached by the
bitterness and the brine of life's billows. Thus, typically, under the
leadership of the Law (for Moses was a type of the Law that was
coming) Israel passes unwetted over that sea, while the Egyptian who
crosses in her track is overwhelmed. Each fares according to the
disposition which he carries with him; one walks lightly enough, the
other is dragged into the deep water. For virtue is a light and
buoyant thing, and all who live in her way "fly like clouds [1471] ,"
as Isaiah says, "and as doves with their young ones"; but sin is a
heavy affair, "sitting," as another of the prophets says, "upon a
talent of lead [1472] ." If, however, this reading of the history
appears to any forced and inapplicable, and the miracle at the Red Sea
does not present itself to him as written for our profit, let him
listen to the Apostle: "Now all these things happened unto them for
types, and they are written for our admonition [1473] ."
Footnotes
[1459] to me sunermosthai tini dia ton katallelon ton bion
[1460] adoleschian tou logou tis kataginoskoi
[1461] hosper ti anathema; so Gregory calls the tongue of S. Meletius
the anathema of Truth.
[1462] Gregory seems to allude to S. Matt. xi. 12.
[1463] epi matai& 251; laboi. Gregory evidently alludes to Ps. xxiv.
4, and agrees with the Vulgate "in vano acceperit."
[1464] Gal. v. 1.
[1465] S. John viii. 34.
[1466] S. John xiv. 6
[1467] S. Matt. xiii. 47, 48.
[1468] Ps. lxix. 1.
[1469] didaskalian exomologeseos huphegoumenos
[1470] Exod. xv. 10.
[1471] Is. lx. 8. The LXX. has peristeran sun neossois.
[1472] Zech. v. 7. "this is a woman that sitteth in the midst of the
ephah:" epi meson tou metrou (LXX.). Origen and Jerome as well as
Gregory make her sit upon the lead itself. Vatablus explains that the
lead was in an amphora.
[1473] 1 Cor. x. 11; Rom. xv. 6.
Chapter XIX.
But besides other things the action of Miriam the prophetess also
gives rise to these surmisings of ours. Directly the sea was crossed
she took in her hand a dry and sounding timbrel and conducted the
women's dance [1474] . By this timbrel the story may mean to imply
virginity, as first perfected by Miriam; whom indeed I would believe
to be a type of Mary the mother of God [1475] . Just as the timbrel
emits a loud sound because it is devoid of all moisture and reduced to
the highest degree of dryness, so has virginity a clear and ringing
report amongst men because it repels from itself the vital sap of
merely physical life. Thus, Miriam's timbrel being a dead thing, and
virginity being a deadening of the bodily passions, it is perhaps not
very far removed from the bounds of probability [1476] that Miriam was
a virgin. However, we can but guess and surmise, we cannot clearly
prove, that this was so, and that Miriam the prophetess led a dance of
virgins, even though many of the learned have affirmed distinctly that
she was unmarried, from the fact that the history makes no mention
either of her marriage or of her being a mother; and surely she would
have been named and known, not as "the sister of Aaron [1477] ," but
from her husband, if she had had one; since the head of the woman is
not the brother but the husband. But if, amongst a people with whom
motherhood was sought after and classed as a blessing and regarded as
a public duty, the grace of virginity, nevertheless, came to be
regarded as a precious thing, how does it behove us to feel towards
it, who do not "judge" of the Divine blessings [1478] "according to
the flesh"? Indeed it has been revealed in the oracles of God, on what
occasion to conceive and to bring forth is a good thing, and what
species of fecundity was desired by God's saints; for both the Prophet
Isaiah and the divine Apostle have made this clear and certain. The
one cries, "From fear of Thee, O Lord, have I conceived [1479] ;" the
other boasts that he is the parent of the largest family of any,
bringing to the birth whole cities and nations; not the Corinthians
and Galatians only whom by his travailings he moulded for the Lord,
but all in the wide circuit from Jerusalem to Illyricum; his children
filled the world, "begotten" by him in Christ through the Gospel
[1480] . In the same strain the womb of the Holy Virgin, which
ministered to an Immaculate Birth, is pronounced blessed in the Gospel
[1481] ; for that birth did not annul the Virginity, nor did the
Virginity impede so great a birth. When the "spirit of salvation
[1482] ," as Isaiah names it, is being born, the willings of the flesh
are useless. There is also a particular teaching of the Apostle, which
harmonizes with this; viz. each man of us is a double man [1483] ; one
the outwardly visible, whose natural fate it is to decay; the other
perceptible only in the secret of the heart, yet capable of
renovation. If this teaching is true,--and it must be true [1484]
because Wisdom is speaking there,--then there is no absurdity in
supposing a double marriage also which answers in every detail to
either man; and, maybe, if one was to assert boldly that the body's
virginity was the co-operator and the agent of the inward marriage,
this assertion would not be much beside the probable fact.
Footnotes
[1474] Exod. xv. 20.
[1475] di' hes oimai kai ten Theotokon prodiatupousthai Marian. These
words are absent from the Munich Cod. i.e. the German; not from Vat.
and Reg. Ambrose, Ep. 25, has "Quid de alterâ Moysi sorore Mariâ
loquar, quæ foeminei dux agminis pede transmisit pelagi freta," when
speaking "de gloriâ virginitatis."
[1476] tou eikotos...apeschoinistai
[1477] Exod. xv. 20.
[1478] S. John viii. 15. "Ye judge after the flesh." It is Gregory's
manner to make such passing allusions to Scripture, and especially to
S. Paul.
[1479] Gregory here quotes from LXX. Cf. Is. xxvi. 18, and also below,
etekomen pneuma soterias sou, ho epoiesamen epi tes ges.
[1480] 1 Cor. iv. 15; Philemon 10.
[1481] S. Luke xi. 27
[1482] Is. xxvi. 18 (LXX.). See above. But R.V. "We have as it were
brought forth wind: we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth."
[1483] 2 Cor. iv. 16.
[1484] pantos de alethes, k. t. l. So Codd. Reg. and Morell., for
panton. Gregory alludes to 2 Cor. xiii. 3.
Chapter XX.
Now it is impossible, as far as manual exercise goes, to ply two arts
at once; for instance, husbandry and sailing, or tinkering and
carpentering. If one is to be honestly taken in hand, the other must
be left alone. Just so, there are these two marriages for our choice,
the one effected in the flesh, the other in the spirit; and
preoccupation in the one must cause of necessity alienation from the
other. No more is the eye able to look at two objects at once; but it
must concentrate its special attention on one at a time; no more can
the tongue effect utterances in two different languages, so as to
pronounce, for instance, a Hebrew word and a Greek word in the same
moment: no more can the ear take in at one and the same time a
narrative of facts, and a hortatory discourse; if each special tone is
heard separately, it will impress its ideas upon the hearers' minds;
but if they are combined and so poured into the ear, an inextricable
confusion of ideas will be the result, one meaning being mutually lost
in the other: and no more, by analogy, do our emotional powers possess
a nature which can at once pursue the pleasures of sense and court the
spiritual union; nor, besides, can both those ends be gained by the
same courses of life; continence, mortification of the passions, scorn
of fleshly needs, are the agents of the one union; but all that are
the reverse of these are the agents of bodily habitation. As, when two
masters are before us to choose between, and we cannot be subject to
both, for "no man can serve two masters [1485] ," he who is wise will
choose the one most useful to himself, so, when two marriages are
before us to choose between, and we cannot contract both, for "he that
is unmarried cares for the things of the Lord, but he that is married
careth for the things of the world [1486] ," I repeat that it would be
the aim of a sound mind not to miss choosing the more profitable one;
and not to be ignorant either of the way which will lead it to this, a
way which cannot be learnt but by some such comparison as the
following. In the case of a marriage of this world a man who is
anxious to avoid appearing altogether insignificant pays the greatest
attention both to physical health, and becoming adornment, and
amplitude of means and the security from any disgraceful revelations
as to his antecedents or his parentage; for so he thinks things will
be most likely to turn out as he wishes. Now just in the same way the
man who is courting the spiritual alliance will first of all display
himself, by the renewal of his mind [1487] , a young man, without a
single touch of age upon him; next he will reveal a lineage rich in
that in which it is a noble ambition to be rich, not priding himself
on worldly wealth, but luxuriating only in the heavenly treasures. As
for family distinction, he will not vaunt that which comes by the mere
routine of devolution even to numbers of the worthless, but that which
is gained by the successful efforts of his own zeal and labours; a
distinction which only those can boast of who are "sons of the light"
and children of God, and are styled "nobles from the sunrise [1488] "
because of their splendid deeds. Strength and health he will not try
to gain by bodily training and feeding, but by all that is the
contrary of this, perfecting the spirit's strength in the body's
weakness. I could tell also of the suitor's gifts to the bride in such
a wedding [1489] ; they are not procured by the money that perishes,
but are contributed out of the wealth peculiar to the soul. Would you
know their names? You must hear from Paul, that excellent adorner of
the Bride [1490] , in what the wealth of those consists who in
everything commend themselves. He mentions much else that is priceless
in it, and adds, "in chastity [1491] "; and besides this all the
recognized fruits of the spirit from any quarter whatever are gifts of
this marriage. If a man is going to carry out the advice of Solomon
and take for helpmate and life-companion that true Wisdom of which he
says, "Love her, and she shall keep thee," "honour her, that she may
embrace thee [1492] ," then he will prepare himself in a manner worthy
of such a love, so as to feast with all the joyous wedding guests in
spotless raiment, and not be cast forth, while claiming to sit at that
feast, for not having put on the wedding garment. It is plain moreover
that the argument applies equally to men and women, to move them
towards such a marriage. "There is neither male nor female [1493] ,"
the Apostle says; "Christ is all, and in all [1494] "; and so it is
equally reasonable that he who is enamoured of wisdom should hold the
Object of his passionate desire, Who is the True Wisdom; and that the
soul which cleaves to the undying Bridegroom should have the fruition
of her love for the true Wisdom, which is God. We have now
sufficiently revealed the nature of the spiritual union, and the
Object of the pure and heavenly Love.
Footnotes
[1485] S. Matt. vi. 24
[1486] 1 Cor. vii. 32.
[1487] See Eph. iv. 22, 23.
[1488] See S. Matt. viii. 11; S. Luke xiii. 29. The same expression
(eugenes ton aph' heliou anatolon) is used of Meletius, in Gregory's
funeral oration on him.
[1489] ta hedna tou gamou, i.e. given by the bridegroom. The
Juris-consults called it Donatio propter nuptias, or simply Donatio.
The human soul here espouses Wisdom, i.e. Christ, as its Bride. See
below, where Prov. iv. 6 is quoted.
[1490] numphostolou
[1491] 2 Cor. vi. 6.
[1492] Prov. iv. 6.
[1493] Gal. iii. 28.
[1494] Col. iii. 11.
Chapter XXI.
It is perfectly clear that no one can come near the purity of the
Divine Being who has not first himself become such; he must therefore
place between himself and the pleasures of the senses a high strong
wall of separation, so that in this his approach to the Deity the
purity of his own heart may not become soiled again. Such an
impregnable wall will be found in a complete estrangement from
everything wherein passion operates.
Now pleasure is one in kind, as we learn from the experts; as water
parted into various channels from one single fountain, it spreads
itself over the pleasure-lover through the various avenues of the
senses; so that it has been on his heart that the man, who through any
one particular sensation succumbs to the resulting pleasure, has
received a wound from that sensation. This accords with the teaching
given from the Divine lips, that "he who has satisfied the lust of the
eyes has received the mischief already in his heart [1495] "; for I
take it that our Lord was speaking in that particular example of any
of the senses; so that we might well carry on His saying, and add, "He
who hath heard, to lust after," and what follows, "He who hath touched
to lust after," "He who hath lowered any faculty within us to the
service of pleasure, hath sinned in his heart."
To prevent this, then, we want to apply to our own lives that rule of
all temperance, never to let the mind dwell on anything wherein
pleasure's bait is hid; but above all to be specially watchful against
the pleasure of taste. For that seems in a way the most deeply rooted,
and to be the mother as it were of all forbidden enjoyment. The
pleasures of eating and drinking, leading to boundless excess, inflict
upon the body the doom of the most dreadful sufferings [1496] ; for
over-indulgence is the parent of most of the painful diseases. To
secure for the body a continuous tranquillity, unstirred by the pains
of surfeit, we must make up our minds to a more sparing regimen, and
constitute the need of it on each occasion not the pleasure of it, as
the measure and limit of our indulgence. If the sweetness will
nevertheless mingle itself with the satisfaction of the need (for
hunger knows how to sweeten everything [1497] , and by the vehemence
of appetite she gives the zest of pleasure to every discoverable
supply of the need), we must not because of the resulting enjoyment
reject the satisfaction, nor yet make this latter our leading aim. In
everything we must select the expedient quantity, and leave untouched
what merely feasts the senses [1498] .
Footnotes
[1495] S. Matt. v. 28
[1496] ananken hempoiousi ton abouleton kakon, plesmones hos ta polla
ektiktouses, k. t. l., removing the comma from plesmones (Paris Edit.)
to kakon.
[1497] Cf. Cicero, 2 De Fin. Bon.: "Socratem audio dicentem cibi
condimentum esse famem; potionis sitim;" so Antiphanes (apud Stobæum),
hapanth' ho limos glukea, plen hautou, poiei.
[1498] kata to proegoumenon, principaliter. Cf. Clem. Alexand. Strom.,
ta onomata sumbola ton noematon kata to proegoumenon, i.e. of general
concepts.
Chapter XXII.
We see how the husbandmen have a method for separating the chaff,
which is united with the wheat, with a view to employ each for its
proper purpose, the one for the sustenance of man, the other for
burning and the feeding of animals. The labourer in the field of
temperance will in like manner distinguish the satisfaction from the
mere delight, and will fling this latter nature to savages [1499]
"whose end is to be burned [1500] ," as the Apostle says, but will
take the other, in proportion to the actual need, with thankfulness.
Many, however, slide into the very opposite kind of excess, and
unconsciously to themselves, in their over-preciseness, laboriously
thwart their own design; they let their soul fall down the other side
from the heights of Divine elevation to the level of dull thoughts and
occupations, where their minds are so bent upon regulations which
merely affect the body, that they can no longer walk in their heavenly
freedom and gaze above; their only inclination is to this tormenting
and afflicting of the flesh. It would be well, then, to give this also
careful thought, so as to be equally on our guard against either
over-amount [1501] , neither stifling the mind beneath the wound of
the flesh, nor, on the other hand, by gratuitously inflicted
weakenings sapping and lowering the powers, so that it can have no
thought but of the body's pain [1502] ; and let every one remember
that wise precept, which warns us from turning to the right hand or to
the left. I have heard a certain physician of my acquaintance, in the
course of explaining the secrets of his art, say that our body
consists of four elements, not of the same species, but disposed to be
conflicting: yet the hot penetrated the cold, and an equally
unexpected union of the wet and the dry took place, the
contradictories of each pair being brought into contact by their
relationship to the intervening pair. He added an extremely subtle
explanation of this account of his studies in nature. Each of these
elements was in its essence diametrically [1503] opposed to its
contradictory; but then it had two other qualities lying on each side
of it, and by virtue of its kinship with them it came into contact
with its contradictory; for example, the cold and the hot each unite
with the wet, or the dry; and again, the wet and the dry each unite
with the hot, or the cold: and so this sameness of quality, when it
manifests itself in contradictories, is itself the agent which affects
the union of those contradictories. What business of mine, however, is
it to explain exactly the details of this change from this mutual
separation and repugnance of nature, to this mutual union through the
medium of kindred qualities, except for the purpose for which we
mentioned it? And that purpose was to add that the author of this
analysis of the body's constitution advised that all possible care be
taken to preserve a balance between these properties, for that in fact
health consisted in not letting any one of them gain the mastery
within us. If his doctrine has truth in it, then, for our health's
continuance, we must secure such a habit, and by no irregularity of
diet produce either an excess or a defect in any member of these our
constituent elements. The chariot-master, if the young horses which he
has to drive will not work well together, does not urge a fast one
with the whip, and rein in a slow one; nor, again, does he let a horse
that shies in the traces or is hard-mouthed gallop his own way to the
confusion of orderly driving; but he quickens the pace of the first,
checks the second, reaches the third with cuts of his whip, till he
has made them all breathe evenly together in a straight career. Now
our mind in like manner holds in its grasp the reins of this chariot
of the body; and in that capacity it will not devise, in the time of
youth, when heat of temperament is abundant, ways of heightening that
fever; nor will it multiply the cooling and the thinning things when
the body is already chilled by illness or by time; and in the case of
all these physical qualities it will be guided by the Scripture, so as
actually to realize it: "He that gathered much had nothing over; and
he that had gathered little had no lack [1504] ." It will curtail
immoderate lengths in either direction, and so will be careful to
replenish where there is much lack. The inefficiency of the body from
either cause will be that which it guards against; it will train the
flesh, neither making it wild and ungovernable by excessive pampering,
nor sickly and unstrung and nerveless for the required work by
immoderate mortification. That is temperance's highest aim; it looks
not to the afflicting of the body, but to the peaceful action of the
soul's functions.
Footnotes
[1499] tois alogoterois. Fronto Ducæus translates "bardis objiciat,"
i.e. "savages," not "beasts."
[1500] Heb. vi. 8. "The Apostle" here is to be noticed. The same
teaching, as to there being no necessity for pleasure, is found in
Clement of Alexandria. He says it is not our skopos, 2 Pæd. c. i. and
2 Strom., katholou gar ouk anankaion to tes hedones pathos,
epakolouthimon de chreiais tais phusikais, k. t. l.
[1501] epimetrias. Cf. en epimetro, Polyb., "into the bargain."
[1502] kai peri tous somatikous ponous escholemenon (i.e. "busied,"):
Galesinius' translation must here be wrong, "ad corporis labores
prorsus inutilem."
[1503] Cold can unite with Wet or Dry which "lie on each side of" it,
and are "kindred" to it: and so through one or the other (which are
also "kindred" to Hot) can come "in contact with" Hot. (So of all.) A
wet thing becomes the medium in which both cold and heat can be
manifested.
[1504] elattonese (for LXX. Exod. xvi. 18, and also 2 Cor. viii. 15,
have elattonesen), not elattose with Livineius.
Chapter XXIII.
Now the details of the life of him who has chosen to live in such a
philosophy as this, the things to be avoided, the exercises to be
engaged in, the rules of temperance, the whole method of the training,
and all the daily regimen which contributes towards this great end,
has been dealt with in certain written manuals of instruction for the
benefit of those who love details. Yet there is a plainer guide to be
found than verbal instruction; and that is practice: and there is
nothing vexatious in the maxim that when we are undertaking a long
journey or voyage we should get an instructor. "But," says the Apostle
[1505] , "the word is nigh thee;" the grace begins at home; there is
the manufactory of all the virtues; there this life has become
exquisitely refined by a continual progress towards consummate
perfection; there, whether men are silent or whether they speak, there
is large opportunity for being instructed in this heavenly citizenship
through the actual practice of it. Any theory divorced from living
examples, however admirably it may be dressed out, is like the
unbreathing statue, with its show of a blooming complexion impressed
in tints and colours; but the man who acts as well as teaches, as the
Gospel tells us, he is the man who is truly living, and has the bloom
of beauty, and is efficient and stirring. It is to him that we must
go, if we mean, according to the saying [1506] of Scripture, to
"retain" virginity. One who wants to learn a foreign language is not a
competent instructor of himself; he gets himself taught by experts,
and can then talk with foreigners. So, for this high life, which does
not advance in nature's groove, but is estranged from her by the
novelty of its course, a man cannot be instructed thoroughly unless he
puts himself into the hands of one who has himself led it in
perfection; and indeed in all the other professions of life the
candidate is more likely to achieve success if he gets from tutors a
scientific knowledge of each part of the subject of his choice, than
if he undertook to study it by himself; and this particular profession
[1507] is not one where everything is so clear that judgment as to our
best course in it is necessarily left to ourselves; it is one where to
hazard a step into the unknown at once brings us into danger. The
science of medicine once did not exist; it has come into being by the
experiments which men have made, and has gradually been revealed
through their various observations; the healing and the harmful drug
became known from the attestation of those who had tried them, and
this distinction was adopted into the theory of the art, so that the
close observation of former practitioners became a precept for those
who succeeded; and now any one who studies to attain this art is under
no necessity to ascertain at his own peril the power of any drug,
whether it be a poison or a medicine; he has only to learn from others
the known facts, and may then practise with success. It is so also
with that medicine of the soul, philosophy, from which we learn the
remedy for every weakness that can touch the soul. We need not hunt
after a knowledge of these remedies by dint of guess-work and
surmisings; we have abundant means of learning them from him who by a
long and rich experience has gained the possession which we seek. In
any matter youth is generally a giddy [1508] guide; and it would not
be easy to find anything of importance succeeding, in which gray hairs
have not been called in to share in the deliberations. Even in all
other undertakings we must, in proportion to their greater importance,
take the more precaution against failure; for in them too the
thoughtless designs of youth have brought loss; on property, for
instance; or have compelled the surrender of a position in the world,
and even of renown. But in this mighty and sublime ambition it is not
property, or secular glory lasting for its hour, or any external
fortune, that is at stake;--of such things [1509] , whether they
settle themselves well or the reverse, the wise take small
account;--here rashness can affect the soul itself; and we run the
awful hazard, not of losing any of those other things whose recovery
even may perhaps be possible, but of ruining our very selves and
making the soul a bankrupt. A man who has spent or lost his patrimony
does not despair, as long as he is in the land of the living, of
perchance coming again through contrivances into his former
competence; but the man who has ejected himself from this calling,
deprives himself as well of all hope of a return to better things.
Therefore, since most embrace virginity while still young and unformed
in understanding, this before anything else should be their
employment, to search out a fitting guide and master of this way,
lest, in their present ignorance, they should wander from the direct
route, and strike out new paths of their own in trackless wilds [1510]
. "Two are better than one," says the Preacher [1511] ; but a single
one is easily vanquished by the foe who infests the path which leads
to God; and verily "woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he
hath not another to help him up [1512] ." Some ere now in their
enthusiasm for the stricter life have shown a dexterous alacrity; but,
as if in the very moment of their choice they had already touched
perfection, their pride has had a shocking fall [1513] , and they have
been tripped up from madly deluding themselves into thinking that that
to which their own mind inclined them was the true beauty. In this
number are those whom Wisdom calls the "slothful ones [1514] ," who
bestrew their "way" with "thorns"; who think it a moral loss to be
anxious about keeping the commandments; who erase from their own minds
the Apostolic teaching, and instead of eating the bread of their own
honest earning fix on that of others, and make their idleness itself
into an art of living. From this number, too, come the Dreamers, who
put more faith in the illusions of their dreams [1515] than in the
Gospel teaching, and style their own phantasies "revelations." Hence,
too, those who "creep into the houses"; and again others who suppose
virtue to consist in savage bearishness, and have never known the
fruits of long-suffering and humility of spirit. Who could enumerate
all the pitfalls into which any one might slip, from refusing to have
recourse to men of godly celebrity? Why, we have known ascetics of
this class who have persisted in their fasting even unto death, as if
"with such sacrifices God were well pleased [1516] ;" and, again,
others who rush off into the extreme diametrically opposite,
practising celibacy in name only and leading a life in no way
different from the secular; for they not only indulge in the pleasures
of the table, but are openly known to have a woman in their houses
[1517] ; and they call such a friendship a brotherly affection, as if,
forsooth, they could veil their own thought, which is inclined to
evil, under a sacred term. It is owing to them that this pure and holy
profession of virginity is "blasphemed amongst the Gentiles [1518] ."
Footnotes
[1505] Rom. x. 8: ellus sou to rh& 210;ma estin, en to stomati sou kai
en te kardi& 139; sou. Cf. Deut. xxx. 14.
[1506] kata ton erounta logon (Codd. Reg. and Mor. hairounta). This
alludes to Prov. iii. 18, rather than Prov. iv. 6.
[1507] ou gar enarges esti to epitedeuma touto, hoste kat' ananken,
k.t.l. The alternative reading is en archais. It has been suggested to
read, hote gar...tote (for touto), and understand an aposiopesis in
the next sentence; thus--"For when our undertaking is clear and
simple, then we must entrust to ourselves the decision of what is
best. But when the attempt at the unknown is not unattended with
risk--(then we want a guide)." Billius. But this is very awkward.
[1508] Livineius had conjectured that episphales must be supplied,
from a quotation of this passage in Antonius Monachus, Sententiæ,
serm. 20, and in Abbas Maximus, Capita, serm. 41; and this is
confirmed by Codd. Reg. and Morell.
[1509] hon kai kata gnomen kai hos heteros dioikoumenon oligos tois
sophronousin ho logos. The Latin here has "quas quidem res ego sane
despicio, exiguamque harum tanquam extrinsecus venientium)" &c.;
evidently katagnoien must have been in the text used.
[1510] anodias tinas kainotomesosin (anodi& 139;, anodiais, is
frequent in Polybius; the word is not found elsewhere in other cases).
[1511] Ecclesiastes iv. 9.
[1512] Ecclesiastes iv. 10. Gregory supports the Vulgate, which has
"quia cum ceciderit, non habet sublevantem se."
[1513] hetero ptomati, euphemistically.
[1514] Prov. xv. 19.
[1515] The alternative reading is ton therion; but oneiron is
confirmed by three of the Codd. Cf. Theodoret, lib. 4, Hæretic. fab.,
of the Messaliani; and lib. 4, Histor. c. 10, hupno de sphas autous
ekdidontes tas ton oneiron phantasias propheteias apokalousi
[1516] Heb. xiii. 16.
[1517] See Chrysostom, Lib. Pros tous suneisaktous echontas.
[1518] ton exothen. Cf. Rom. ii. 24
Chapter XXIV.
It would therefore be to their profit, for the young to refrain from
laying down [1519] for themselves their future course in this
profession; and indeed, examples of holy lives for them to follow are
not wanting in the living generation [1520] . Now, if ever before,
saintliness abounds and penetrates our world; by gradual advances it
has reached the highest mark of perfectness; and one who follows such
footsteps in his daily rounds may catch this halo; one who tracks the
scent of this preceding perfume may be drenched in the sweet odours of
Christ Himself. As, when one torch has been fired, flame is
transmitted to all the neighbouring candlesticks, without either the
first light being lessened or blazing with unequal brilliance on the
other points where it has been caught; so the saintliness of a life is
transmitted from him who has achieved it, to those who come within his
circle; for there is truth in the Prophet's saying [1521] , that one
who lives with a man who is "holy" and "clean" and "elect," will
become such himself. If you would wish to know the sure signs, which
will secure you the real model, it is not hard to take a sketch from
life. If you see a man so standing between death and life, as to
select from each helps for the contemplative course, never letting
death's stupor paralyze his zeal to keep all the commandments, nor yet
placing both feet in the world of the living, since he has weaned
himself from secular ambitions;--a man who remains more insensate than
the dead themselves to everything that is found on examination to be
living for the flesh, but instinct with life and energy and strength
in the achievements of virtue, which are the sure marks of the
spiritual life;--then look to that man for the rule of your life; let
him be the leading light of your course of devotion, as the
constellations that never set are to the pilot; imitate his youth and
his gray hairs: or, rather, imitate the old man and the stripling who
are joined in him; for even now in his declining years time has not
blunted the keen activity of his soul, nor was his youth active in the
sphere of youth's well-known employments; in both seasons of life he
has shown a wonderful combination of opposites, or rather an exchange
of the peculiar qualities of each; for in age he shows, in the
direction of the good, a young man's energy, while, in the hours of
youth, in the direction of evil, his passions were powerless. If you
wish to know what were the passions of that glorious youth of his, you
will have for your imitation the intensity and glow of his godlike
love of wisdom, which grew with him from his childhood, and has
continued with him into his old age. But if you cannot gaze upon him,
as the weak-sighted cannot gaze upon the sun, at all events watch that
band of holy men who are ranged beneath him, and who by the
illumination of their lives are a model for this age. God has placed
them as a beacon for us who live around; many among them have been
young men there in their prime, and have grown gray in the unbroken
practice of continence and temperance; they were old in reasonableness
before their time, and in character outstripped their years. The only
love they tasted was that of wisdom; not that their natural instincts
were different from the rest; for in all alike "the flesh lusteth
against the spirit [1522] ;" but they listened to some purpose to him
who said that Temperance "is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon
her [1523] ;" and they sailed across the swelling billows of existence
upon this tree of life, as upon a skiff; and anchored in the haven of
the will of God; enviable now after so fair a voyage, they rest their
souls in that sunny cloudless calm. They now ride safe themselves at
the anchor of a good hope, far out of reach of the tumult of the
billows; and for others who will follow they radiate the splendour of
their lives as beacon-fires on some high watch-tower. We have indeed a
mark to guide us safely over the ocean of temptations; and why make
the too curious inquiry, whether some with such thoughts as these have
not fallen nevertheless, and why therefore despair, as if the
achievement was beyond your reach? Look on him who has succeeded, and
boldly launch upon the voyage with confidence that it will be
prosperous, and sail on under the breeze of the Holy Spirit with
Christ your pilot and with the oarage of good cheer [1524] . For those
who "go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great
waters" do not let the shipwreck that has befallen some one else
prevent their being of good cheer; they rather shield their hearts in
this very confidence, and so sweep on to accomplish their successful
feat. Surely it is the most absurd thing in the world to reprobate him
who has slipped in a course which requires the greatest nicety, while
one considers those who all their lives have been growing old in
failures and in errors, to have chosen the better part. If one single
approach to sin is such an awful thing that you deem it safer not to
take in hand at all this loftier aim, how much more awful a thing it
is to make sin the practice of a whole life, and to remain thereby
absolutely ignorant of the purer course! How can you in your full life
obey the Crucified? How can you, hale in sin, obey Him Who died to
sin? How can you, who are not crucified to the world, and will not
accept the mortification of the flesh, obey Him Who bids you follow
after Him, and Who bore the Cross in His own body, as a trophy from
the foe? How can you obey Paul when he exhorts you "to present your
body a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God [1525] ," when you
are "conformed to this world," and not transformed by the renewing of
your mind, when you are not "walking" in this "newness of life," but
still pursuing the routine of "the old man"? How can you be a priest
unto God [1526] , anointed though you are for this very office, to
offer a gift to God; a gift in no way another's, no counterfeited gift
from sources outside yourself, but a gift that is really your own,
namely, "the inner man [1527] ," who must be perfect and blameless, as
it is required of a lamb to be without spot or blemish? How can you
offer this to God, when you do not listen to the law forbidding the
unclean to offer sacrifices? If you long for God to manifest Himself
to you, why do you not hear Moses, when he commands the people to be
pure from the stains of marriage, that they may take in the vision of
God. [1528] If this all seems little in your eyes, to be crucified
with Christ, to present yourself a sacrifice to God, to become a
priest unto the most high God, to make yourself worthy of the vision
of the Almighty, what higher blessings than these can we imagine for
you, if indeed you make light of the consequences of these as well?
And the consequence of being crucified with Christ is that we shall
live with Him, and be glorified with Him, and reign with Him; and the
consequence of presenting ourselves to God is that we shall be changed
from the rank of human nature and human dignity to that of Angels; for
so speaks Daniel, that "thousand thousands stood before him [1529] ."
He too who has taken his share in the true priesthood and placed
himself beside the Great High Priest remains altogether himself a
priest for ever, prevented for eternity from remaining any more in
death. To say, again, that one makes oneself worthy to see God,
produces no less a result than this; that one is made worthy to see
God. Indeed, the crown of every hope, and of every desire, of every
blessing, and of every promise of God, and of all those unspeakable
delights which we believe to exist beyond our perception and our
knowledge,--the crowning result of them all, I say, is this. Moses
longed earnestly to see it, and many prophets and kings have desired
to see the same: but the only class deemed worthy of it are the pure
in heart, those who are, and are named "blessed," for this very
reason, that "they shall see God [1530] ." Wherefore we would that you
too should become crucified with Christ, a holy priest standing before
God, a pure offering in all chastity, preparing yourself by your own
holiness for God's coming; that you also may have a pure heart in
which to see God, according to the promise of God, and of our Saviour
Jesus Christ, to Whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Footnotes
[1519] The negative (me nomothetein) is found in Codd. Reg. and
Morell.
[1520] ten zoen. So bios also is used in Greek after 2nd century.
"They (the monks) make little show in history before the reign of
Valens (a.d. 364). Paul of Thebes, Hilarion of Gaza, and even the
great Antony, are only characters in the novels of the day. Now,
however, there was in the East a real movement towards monasticism.
All parties favoured it. The Semi-arians were busy inside Mt. Taurus;
and though Acacians and Anomoeans held more aloof, they could not
escape an influence which even Julian felt. But the Nicene party was
the home of the ascetics." Gwatkin's Arians.
[1521] Ps. xviii. 25, 26 (LXX.).
[1522] Gal. v. 17.
[1523] Prov. iii. 18; but said of Wisdom.
[1524] to pedali& 251; tes euphrosunes
[1525] Rom. xii. 1, 2; vi. 4.
[1526] Gregory alludes to Rev. i. 16: epoiesen hemas basileis kai
hiereis to theo kai patri autou.
[1527] Eph. iii. 16.
[1528] Exod. xix. 15.
[1529] Dan. vii. 10.
[1530] S. Matt. v
.
On Infants' Early Deaths. [1531]
Every essayist and every pamphleteer will have you, most Excellent, to
display his eloquence upon; your wondrous qualities will be a broad
race-course wherein he may expatiate. A noble and suggestive subject
in able hands has indeed a way of making a grander style, lifting it
to the height of the great reality. We, however, like an aged horse,
will remain outside this proposed race-course, only turning the ear to
listen for the contest waged in celebrating your praises, if the sound
of any literary car careering in full swing through such wonders may
reach us. But though old age may compel a horse to remain away from
the race, it may often happen that the din of the trampling racers
rouses him into excitement, that he lifts his head with eager looks,
that he shows his spirit in his breathings, and prances and paws the
ground frequently, though this eagerness is all that is left to him,
and time has sapped his powers of going. In the same way our pen
remains outside the combat, and age compels it to yield the course to
the professors who flourish now; nevertheless its eagerness to join
the contest about you survives, and that it can still evince, even
though these stylists who flourish now are at the height of their
powers [1532] . But none of this display of my enthusiasm for you has
anything to do with sounding your own praises: no style, however
nervous and well-balanced, would easily succeed there; so that any
one, who attempted to describe that embarrassing yet harmonious
mixture of opposites in your character, would inevitably be left far
behind your real worth. Nature, indeed, by throwing out the shade of
the eyelashes before the glaring rays, brings to the eyes themselves a
weaker light, and so the sunlight becomes tolerable to us, mingling as
it does, in quantities proportionate to our need, with the shadows
which the lashes cast. Just so the grandeur and the greatness of your
character, tempered by your modesty and humbleness of mind, instead of
blinding the beholder's eye, makes the sight on the contrary a
pleasurable one; wherein this humbleness of mind does not occasion the
splendour of the greatness to be dimmed, and its latent force to be
overlooked; but the one is to be noticed in the other, the humility of
your character in its elevation, and the grandeur reversely in the
lowliness. Others must describe all this; and extol, besides, the
many-sightedness of your mind. Your intellectual eyes are indeed as
numerous, it may perhaps be said, as the hairs of the head; their keen
unerring gaze is on everything alike; the distant is foreseen; the
near is not unnoticed; they do not wait for experience to teach
expedience; they see with Hope's insight, or else with that of Memory;
they scan the present all over; first on one thing, then on another,
but without confusing them, your mind works with the same energy and
with the amount of attention that is required. Another, too, must
record his admiration of the way in which poverty is made rich by you;
if indeed any one is to be found in this age of ours who will make
that a subject of praise and wonder. Yet surely now, if never before,
the love of poverty will through you abound, and your ingotten wealth
[1533] will be envied above the ingots of Croesus. For whom has sea
and land, with all the dower of their natural produce, enriched, as
thy rejection of worldly abundance has enriched thee? They wipe the
stain from steel and so make it shine like silver: so has the gleam of
thy life grown brighter, ever carefully cleansed from the rust of
wealth. We leave that to those who can enlarge upon it, and also upon
your excellent knowledge of the things in which it is more glorious to
gain than to abstain from gain. Grant me, however, leave to say, that
you do not despise all acquisitions; that there are some which, though
none of your predecessors has been able to clutch, yet you and you
alone have seized with both your hands; for, instead of dresses and
slaves and money, you have and hold the very souls of men, and store
them in the treasure-house of your love. The essayists and
pamphleteers, whose glory comes from such laudations, will go into
these matters. But our pen, veteran as it now is, is to rouse itself
only so far as to go at a foot's pace through the problem which your
wisdom has proposed; namely, this--what we are to think of those who
are taken prematurely, the moment of whose birth almost coincides with
that of their death. The cultured heathen Plato spoke, in the person
of one who had come to life again [1534] , much philosophy about the
judgment courts in that other world; but he has left this other
question a mystery, as ostensibly too great for human conjecture to be
employed upon. If, then, there is anything in these lucubrations of
ours that is of a nature to clear up the obscurities of this question,
you will doubtless welcome the new account of it; if otherwise, you
will at all events excuse this in old age, and accept, if nothing
else, our wish to afford you some degree of pleasure. History [1535]
says that Xerxes, that great prince who had made almost every land
under the sun into one vast camp, and roused with his own designs the
whole world, when he was marching against the Greeks received with
delight a poor man's gift; and that gift was water, and that not in a
jar, but carried in the hollow of the palm of his hand. So do you, of
your innate generosity, follow his example; to him the will made the
gift, and our gift may be found in itself but a poor watery thing. In
the case of the wonders in the heavens, a man sees their beauty
equally, whether he is trained to watch them, or whether he gazes
upwards with an unscientific eye; but the feeling towards them is not
the same in the man who comes from philosophy to their contemplation,
and in him who has only his senses of perception to commit them to;
the latter may be pleased with the sunlight, or deem the beauty of
stars worthy of his wonder, or have watched the stages of the moon's
course throughout the month; but the former, who has the soul-insight,
and whose training has enlightened him so as to comprehend the
phenomena of the heavens, leaves unnoticed all these things which
delight the senses of the more unthinking, and looks at the harmony of
the whole, inspecting the concert which results even from opposite
movements in the circular revolutions; how the inner circles of these
turn the contrary way to that in which the fixed stars are carried
round [1536] ; how those of the heavenly bodies to be observed in
these inner circles are variously grouped in their approachments and
divergements, their disappearances behind each other and their flank
movements, and yet effect always precisely in the same way that
notable and never-ending harmony; of which those are conscious who do
not overlook the position of the tiniest star, and whose minds, by
training domiciled above, pay equal attention to them all. In the same
way do you, a precious life to me, watch the Divine economy; leaving
those objects which unceasingly occupy the minds of the crowd, wealth,
I mean, and luxury [1537] and vainglory--things which like sunbeams
flashing in their faces dazzle the unthinking--you will not pass
without inquiry the seemingly most trivial questions in the world; for
you do most carefully scrutinize the inequalities in human lives; not
only with regard to wealth and penury, and the differences of position
and descent (for you know that they are as nothing, and that they owe
their existence not to any intrinsic reality, but to the foolish
estimate of those who are struck with nonentities, as if they were
actual things; and that if one were only to abstract from somebody who
glitters with glory the blind adoration [1538] of those who gaze at
him, nothing would be left him after all the inflated pride which
elates him, even though the whole mass of the world's riches were
buried in his cellars), but it is one of your anxieties to know,
amongst the other intentions of each detail of the Divine government,
wherefore it is that, while the life of one is lengthened into old
age, another has only so far a portion of it as to breathe the air
with one gasp, and die. If nothing in this world happens without God,
but all is linked to the Divine will, and if the Deity is skilful and
prudential, then it follows necessarily that there is some plan in
these things bearing the mark of His wisdom, and at the same time of
His providential care. A blind unmeaning occurrence can never be the
work of God; for it is the property of God, as the Scripture says
[1539] , to "make all things in wisdom." What wisdom, then, can we
trace in the following? A human being enters on the scene of life,
draws in the air, beginning the process of living with a cry of pain,
pays the tribute of a tear to Nature [1540] , just tastes life's
sorrows, before any of its sweets have been his, before his feelings
have gained any strength; still loose in all his joints, tender,
pulpy, unset; in a word, before he is even human (if the gift of
reason is man's peculiarity, and he has never had it in him), such an
one, with no advantage over the embryo in the womb except that he has
seen the air, so short-lived, dies and goes to pieces again; being
either exposed or suffocated, or else of his own accord ceasing to
live from weakness. What are we to think about him? How are we to feel
about such deaths? Will a soul such as that behold its Judge? Will it
stand with the rest before the tribunal? Will it undergo its trial for
deeds done in life? Will it receive the just recompense by being
purged, according to the Gospel utterances, in fire, or refreshed with
the dew of blessing [1541] ? But I do not see how we can imagine that,
in the case of such a soul. The word "retribution" implies that
something must have been previously given; but he who has not lived at
all has been deprived of the material from which to give anything.
There being, then, no retribution, there is neither good nor evil left
to expect. "Retribution" purports to be the paying back of one of
these two qualities; but that which is to be found neither in the
category of good nor that of bad is in no category at all; for this
antithesis between good and bad is an opposition that admits no
middle; and neither will come to him who has not made a beginning with
either of them. What therefore falls under neither of these heads may
be said not even to have existed. But if some one says that such a
life does not only exist, but exists as one of the good ones, and that
God gives, though He does not repay, what is good to such, we may ask
what sort of reason he advances for this partiality; how is justice
apparent in such a view; how will he prove his idea in concordance
with the utterances in the Gospels? There (the Master) says, the
acquisition of the Kingdom comes to those who are deemed worthy of it,
as a matter of exchange. "When ye have done such and such things, then
it is right that ye get the Kingdom as a reward." But in this case
there is no act of doing or of willing beforehand, and so what
occasion is there for saying that these will receive from God any
expected recompense? If one unreservedly accepts a statement such as
that, to the effect that any so passing into life will necessarily be
classed amongst the good, it will dawn upon him then that not
partaking in life at all will be a happier state than living, seeing
that in the one case the enjoyment of good is placed beyond a doubt
even with barbarian parentage, or a conception from a union not
legitimate; but he who has lived the span ordinarily possible to
Nature gets the pollution of evil necessarily mingled more or less
with his life, or, if he is to be quite outside this contagion, it
will be at the price of much painful effort. For virtue is achieved by
its seekers not without a struggle; nor is abstinence from the paths
of pleasure a painless process to human nature. So that one of two
probations must be the inevitable fate of him who has had the longer
lease of life; either to combat here on Virtue's toilsome field, or to
suffer there the painful recompense of a life of evil. But in the case
of infants prematurely dying there is nothing of that sort; but they
pass to the blessed lot at once, if those who take this view of the
matter speak true. It follows also necessarily from this that a state
of unreason is preferable to having reason, and virtue will thereby be
revealed as of no value: if he who has never possessed it suffers no
loss, so, as regards the enjoyment of blessedness, the labour to
acquire it will be useless folly; the unthinking condition will be the
one that comes out best from God's judgment. For these and such-like
reasons you bid me sift the matter, with a view to our getting, by
dint of a closely-reasoned inquiry, some firm ground on which to rest
our thoughts about it.
For my part, in view of the difficulties of the subject proposed, I
think the exclamation of the Apostle very suitable to the present
case, just as he uttered it over unfathomable questions: "O the depth
of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how
unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out! For who
hath known the mind of the Lord [1542] ?" But seeing on the other hand
that that Apostle declares it to be a peculiarity of him that is
spiritual to "judge all things [1543] ," and commends those who have
been "enriched [1544] " by the Divine grace "in all utterance and in
all knowledge," I venture to assert that it is not right to omit the
examination which is within the range of our ability, nor to leave the
question here raised without making any inquiries, or having any ideas
about it; lest, like the actual subject of our proposed discussion,
this essay should have an ineffectual ending, spoilt before its
maturity by the fatal indolence of those who will not nerve themselves
to search out the truth, like a new-born infant ere it sees the light
and acquires any strength. I assert, too, that it is not well at once
to confront and meet objections, as if we were pleading in court, but
to introduce a certain order into the discussion and to lead the view
on from one point to another. What, then, should this order be? First,
we want to know the whence of human nature, and the wherefore of its
ever having come into existence. If we hit the answer to these
questions, we shall not fail in getting the required explanation. Now,
that everything that exists, after God, in the intellectual or
sensible world of beings owes that existence to Him, is a proposition
which it is superfluous to prove; no one, with however little insight
into the truth of things, would gainsay it. For every one agrees that
the Universe is linked to one First Cause; that nothing in it owes its
existence to itself, so as to be its own origin and cause; but that
there is on the other hand a single uncreate eternal Essence, the same
for ever, which transcends all our ideas of distance, conceived of as
without increase or decrease, and beyond the scope of any definition;
and that time and space with all their consequences, and anything
previous to these that thought can grasp in the intelligible
supramundane world, are all the productions of this Essence. Well,
then, we affirm that human nature is one of these productions; and a
word of the inspired Teaching helps us in this, which declares that
when God had brought all things else upon the scene of life, man was
exhibited upon the earth, a mixture from Divine sources, the godlike
intellectual essence being in him united with the several portions of
earthly elements contributed towards his formation, and that he was
fashioned by his Maker to be the incarnate likeness of Divine
transcendent Power. It would be better however to quote the very
words: "And God created man, in the image of God created He him [1545]
." Now the reason of the making of this animate being has been given
by certain writers previous to us as follows. The whole creation is
divided into two parts; that "which is seen," and that "which is not
seen," to use the Apostle's words (the second meaning the intelligible
and immaterial, the first, the sensible and material); and being thus
divided, the angelic and spiritual natures, which are among "the
things not seen," reside in places above the world, and above the
heavens, because such a residence is in correspondence with their
constitution; for an intellectual nature is a fine, clear,
unencumbered, agile kind of thing, and a heavenly body is fine and
light, and perpetually moving, and the earth on the contrary, which
stands last in the list of things sensible, can never be an adequate
and congenial spot for creatures intellectual to sojourn in. For what
correspondence can there possibly be between that which is light and
buoyant, on the one hand, and that which is heavy and gravitating on
the other? Well, in order that the earth may not be completely devoid
of the local indwelling of the intellectual and the immaterial, man
(these writers tell us) was fashioned by the Supreme forethought, and
his earthy parts moulded over the intellectual and godlike essence of
his soul; and so this amalgamation with that which has material weight
enables the soul to live on this element of earth, which possesses a
certain bond of kindred with the substance of the flesh. The design of
all that is being born [1546] , then, is that the Power which is above
both the heavenly and the earthly universe may in all parts of the
creation be glorified by means of intellectual natures, conspiring to
the same end by virtue of the same faculty in operation in all, I mean
that of looking upon God. But this operation of looking upon God is
nothing less than the life-nourishment appropriate, as like to like,
to an intellectual nature. For just as these bodies, earthy as they
are, are preserved by nourishment that is earthy, and we detect in
them all alike, whether brute or reasoning, the operations of a
material kind of vitality, so it is right to assume that there is an
intellectual life-nourishment as well, by which such natures [1547]
are maintained in existence. But if bodily food, coming and going as
it does in circulation, nevertheless imparts a certain amount of vital
energy to those who get it, how much more does the partaking of the
real thing, always remaining and always the same, preserve the eater
in existence? If, then, this is the life-nourishment of an
intellectual nature, namely, to have a part in God, this part will not
be gained by that which is of an opposite quality; the would-be
partaker must in some degree be akin to that which is to be partaken
of. The eye enjoys the light by virtue of having light within itself
to seize its kindred light, and the finger or any other limb cannot
effect the act of vision because none of this natural light is
organized in any of them. The same necessity requires that in our
partaking of God there should be some kinship in the constitution of
the partaker with that which is partaken of. Therefore, as the
Scripture says, man was made in the image of God; that like, I take
it, might be able to see like; and to see God is, as was said above,
the life of the soul. But seeing that ignorance of the true good is
like a mist that obscures the visual keenness of the soul, and that
when that mist grows denser a cloud is formed so thick that Truth's
ray cannot pierce through these depths of ignorance, it follows
further that with the total deprivation of the light the soul's life
ceases altogether; for we have said that the real life of the soul is
acted out in partaking of the Good; but when ignorance hinders this
apprehension of God, the soul which thus ceases to partake of God,
ceases also to live. But no one can force us to give the family
history [1548] of this ignorance, asking whence and from what father
it is; let him be given to understand from the word itself that
"ignorance" and "knowledge" indicate one of the relations of the soul;
[1549] but no relation, whether expressed or not, conveys the idea of
substance; a relation and a substance are quite of different
descriptions. If, then, knowledge is not a substance, but a perfected
[1550] operation of the soul, it must be conceded that ignorance must
be much farther removed still from anything in the way of substance;
but that which is not in that way does not exist at all; and so it
would be useless to trouble ourselves about where it comes from. Now
seeing that the Word [1551] declares that the living in God is the
life of the soul, and seeing that this living is knowledge according
to each man's ability, and that ignorance does not imply the reality
of anything, but is only the negation of the operation of knowing, and
seeing that upon this partaking in God being no longer effected there
follows at once the cancelling of the soul's life, which is the worst
of evils,--because of all this the Producer of all Good would work in
us the cure of such an evil. A cure is a good thing, but one who does
not look to the evangelic mystery would still be ignorant of the
manner of the cure. We have shown that alienation from God, Who is the
Life, is an evil; the cure, then, of this infirmity is, again to be
made friends with God, and so to be in life once more. When such a
life, then, is always held up in hope before humanity, it cannot be
said that the winning of this life is absolutely a reward of a good
life, and that the contrary is a punishment (of a bad one); but what
we insist on resembles the case of the eyes. We do not say that one
who has clear eyesight is rewarded as with a prize by being able to
perceive the objects of sight; nor on the other hand that he who has
diseased eyes experiences a failure of optic activity as the result of
some penal sentence. With the eye in a natural state sight follows
necessarily; with it vitiated by disease failure of sight as
necessarily follows. In the same way the life of blessedness is as a
familiar second nature to those who have kept clear the senses of the
soul; but when the blinding stream of ignorance prevents our partaking
in the real light, then it necessarily follows that we miss that, the
enjoyment of which we declare to be the life of the partaker.
Now that we have laid down these premisses, it is time to examine in
the light of them the question proposed to us. It was somewhat of this
kind. "If the recompense of blessedness is assigned according to the
principles of justice, in what class shall he be placed who has died
in infancy without having laid in this life any foundation, good or
bad, whereby any return according to his deserts may be given him?" To
this we shall make answer, with our eye fixed upon the consequences of
that which we have already laid down, that this happiness in the
future, while it is in its essence a heritage of humanity, may at the
same time be called in one sense a recompense; and we will make clear
our meaning by the same instance as before. Let us suppose two persons
suffering from an affection of the eyes; and that the one surrenders
himself most diligently to the process of being cured, and undergoes
all that Medicine can apply to him, however painful it may be; and
that the other indulges without restraint in baths [1552] and
wine-drinking, and listens to no advice whatever of his doctor as to
the healing of his eyes. Well, when we look to the end of each of
these we say that each duly receives in requital the fruits of his
choice, the one in deprivation of the light, the other in its
enjoyment; by a misuse of the word we do actually call that which
necessarily follows, a recompense. We may speak, then, in this way
also as regards this question of the infants: we may say that the
enjoyment of that future life does indeed belong of right to the human
being, but that, seeing the plague of ignorance has seized almost all
now living in the flesh, he who has purged himself of it by means of
the necessary courses of treatment receives the due reward of his
diligence, when he enters on the life that is truly natural; while he
who refuses Virtue's purgatives and renders that plague of ignorance,
through the pleasures he has been entrapped by, difficult in his case
to cure, gets himself into an unnatural state, and so is estranged
from the truly natural life, and has no share in the existence which
of right belongs to us and is congenial to us. Whereas the innocent
babe has no such plague before its soul's eyes obscuring [1553] its
measure of light, and so it continues to exist in that natural life;
it does not need the soundness which comes from purgation, because it
never admitted the plague into its soul at all. Further, the present
life appears to me to offer a sort of analogy to the future life we
hope for, and to be intimately connected with it, thus; the tenderest
infancy is suckled and reared with milk from the breast; then another
sort of food appropriate to the subject of this fostering, and
intimately adapted to his needs, succeeds, until at last he arrives at
full growth. And so I think, in quantities continually adapted to it,
in a sort of regular progress, the soul partakes of that truly natural
life; according to its capacity and its power it receives a measure of
the delights of the Blessed state; indeed we learn as much from Paul,
who had a different sort of food for him who was already grown in
virtue and for the imperfect "babe." For to the last he says, "I have
fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to
bear it [1554] ." But to those who have grown to the full measure of
intellectual maturity he says, "But strong meat belongeth to those
that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their
senses exercised... [1555] " Now it is not right to say that the man
and the infant are in a similar state however free both may be from
any contact of disease (for how can those who do not partake of
exactly the same things be in an equal state of enjoyment?); on the
contrary, though the absence of any affliction from disease may be
predicated of both alike as long as both are out of the reach of its
influence, yet, when we come to the matter of delights, there is no
likeness in the enjoyment, though the percipients are in the same
condition. For the man there is a natural delight in discussions, and
in the management of affairs, and in the honourable discharge of the
duties of an office, and in being distinguished for acts of help to
the needy; in living, it may be, with a wife whom he loves, and ruling
his household; and in all those amusements to be found in this life in
the way of pastime, in musical pieces and theatrical spectacles, in
the chase, in bathing, in gymnastics, in the mirth of banquets, and
anything else of that sort. For the infant, on the contrary, there is
a natural delight in its milk, and in its nurse's arms, and in gentle
rocking that induces and then sweetens its slumber. Any happiness
beyond this the tenderness of its years naturally prevents it from
feeling. In the same manner those who in their life here have
nourished the forces of their souls by a course of virtue, and have,
to use the Apostle's words, had the "senses" of their minds
"exercised," will, if they are translated to that life beyond, which
is out of the body, proportionately to the condition and the powers
they have attained participate in that divine delight; they will have
more or they will have less of its riches according to the capacity
acquired. But the soul that has never felt the taste of virtue, while
it may indeed remain perfectly free from the sufferings which flow
from wickedness having never caught the disease of evil at all, does
nevertheless in the first instance [1556] partake only so far in that
life beyond (which consists, according to our previous definition, in
the knowing and being in God) as this nursling can receive; until the
time comes that it has thriven on the contemplation of the truly
Existent as on a congenial diet, and, becoming capable of receiving
more, takes at will more from that abundant supply of the truly
Existent which is offered.
Having, then, all these considerations in our view, we hold that the
soul of him who has reached every virtue in his course, and the soul
of him whose portion of life has been simply nothing, are equally out
of the reach of those sufferings which flow from wickedness.
Nevertheless we do not conceive of the employment of their lives as on
the same level at all. The one has heard those heavenly announcements,
by which, in the words of the Prophet, "the glory of God is declared
[1557] ," and, travelling through creation, has been led to the
apprehension of a Master of the creation; he has taken the true Wisdom
for his teacher, that Wisdom which the spectacle of the Universe
suggests; and when he observed the beauty of this material sunlight he
had grasped by analogy the beauty of the real sunlight [1558] ; he saw
in the solid firmness of this earth the unchangeableness of its
Creator; when he perceived the immensity of the heavens he was led on
the road towards the vast Infinity of that Power which encompasses the
Universe; when he saw the rays of the sun reaching from such
sublimities even to ourselves he began to believe, by the means of
such phenomena, that the activities of the Divine Intelligence did not
fail to descend from the heights of Deity even to each one of us; for
if a single luminary can occupy everything alike that lies beneath it
with the force of light, and, more than that, can, while lending
itself to all who can use it, still remain self-centred and
undissipated, how much more shall the Creator of that luminary become
"all in all," as the Apostle speaks, and come into each with such a
measure of Himself as each subject of His influence can receive! Nay,
look only at an ear of corn, at the germinating of some plant, at a
ripe bunch of grapes, at the beauty of early autumn, whether in fruit
or flower, at the grass springing unbidden, at the mountain reaching
up with its summit to the height of the ether, at the springs on its
slopes bursting from those swelling breasts, and running in rivers
through the glens, at the sea receiving those streams from every
direction and yet remaining within its limits, with waves edged by the
stretches of beach and never stepping beyond those fixed boundaries of
continent: look at these and such-like sights, and how can the eye of
reason fail to find in them all that our education for Realities
requires? Has a man who looks at such spectacles procured for himself
only a slight power for the enjoyment of those delights beyond? Not to
speak of the studies which sharpen the mind towards moral excellence,
geometry, I mean, and astronomy, and the knowledge of the truth that
the science of numbers gives, and every method that furnishes a proof
of the unknown and a conviction of the known, and, before all these,
the philosophy contained in the inspired Writings, which affords a
complete purification to those who educate themselves thereby in the
mysteries of God. But the man who has acquired the knowledge of none
of these things and has not even been conducted by the material cosmos
to the perception of the beauties above it, and passes through life
with his mind in a kind of tender, unformed, and untrained state, he
is not the man that is likely to be placed amongst the same
surroundings as our argument has indicated that other man, before
spoken of, to be placed; so that, in this view, it can no longer be
maintained that, in the two supposed and completely opposite cases,
the one who has taken no part in life is more blessed than the one who
has taken a noble part in it. Certainly, in comparison with one who
has lived all his life in sin, not only the innocent babe but even one
who has never come into the world at all will be blessed. We learn as
much too in the case of Judas, from the sentence pronounced upon him
in the Gospels [1559] ; namely, that when we think of such men, that
which never existed is to be preferred to that which has existed in
such sin. For, as to the latter, on account of the depth of the
ingrained evil, the chastisement in the way of purgation will be
extended into infinity [1560] ; but as for what has never existed, how
can any torment touch it?--However, notwithstanding that, the man who
institutes a comparison between the infantine immature life and that
of perfect virtue, must himself be pronounced immature for so judging
of realities. Do you, then, in consequence of this, ask the reason why
so and so, quite tender in age, is quietly taken away from amongst the
living? Do you ask what the Divine wisdom contemplates in this? Well,
if you are thinking of all those infants who are proofs of illicit
connections, and so are made away with by their parents, you are not
justified in calling to account, for such wickedness, that God Who
will surely bring to judgment the unholy deeds done in this way. In
the case, on the other hand, of any infant who, though his parents
have nurtured him, and have with nursing and supplication spent
earnest care upon him, nevertheless does not continue in this world,
but succumbs to a sickness even unto death, which is unmistakably the
sole cause of it, we venture upon the following considerations. It is
a sign of the perfection of God's providence, that He not only heals
maladies [1561] that have come into existence, but also provides that
some should be never mixed up at all in the things which He has
forbidden; it is reasonable, that is, to expect that He Who knows the
future equally with the past should check the advance of an infant to
complete maturity, in order that the evil may not be developed which
His foreknowledge has detected in his future life, and in order that a
lifetime granted to one whose evil dispositions will be lifelong may
not become the actual material for his vice. We shall better explain
what we are thinking of by an illustration.
Suppose a banquet of very varied abundance, prepared for a certain
number of guests, and let the chair be taken by one of their number
who is gifted to know accurately the peculiarities of constitution in
each of them, and what food is best adapted to each temperament, what
is harmful and unsuitable; in addition to this let him be entrusted
with a sort of absolute authority over them, whether to allow as he
pleases so and so to remain at the board or to expel so and so, and to
take every precaution that each should address himself to the viands
most suited to his constitution, so that the invalid should not kill
himself by adding the fuel of what he was eating to his ailment, while
the guest in robuster health should not make himself ill with things
not good for him [1562] and fall into discomfort from over-feeding
[1563] . Suppose, amongst these, one of those inclined to drink is
conducted out in the middle of the banquet or even at the very
beginning of it; or let him remain to the very end, it all depending
on the way that the president can secure that perfect order shall
prevail, if possible, at the board throughout, and that the evil
sights of surfeiting, tippling, and tipsiness shall be absent. It is
just so, then, as when that individual is not very pleased at being
torn away from all the savoury dainties and deprived of his favourite
liquors, but is inclined to charge the president with want of justice
and judgment, as having turned him away from the feast for envy, and
not for any forethought for him; but if he were to catch a sight of
those who were already beginning to misbehave themselves, from the
long continuance of their drinking, in the way of vomitings and
putting their heads on the table and unseemly talk, he would perhaps
feel grateful to him for having removed him, before he got into such a
condition, from a deep debauch. If our illustration [1564] is
understood, we can easily apply the rule which it contains to the
question before us. What, then, was that question? Why does God, when
fathers endeavour their utmost to preserve a successor to their line,
often let the son and heir be snatched away in earliest infancy [1565]
? To those who ask this, we shall reply with the illustration of the
banquet; namely, that Life's board is as it were crowded with a vast
abundance and variety of dainties; and it must, please, be noticed
that, true to the practice of gastronomy, all its dishes are not
sweetened with the honey of enjoyment, but in some cases an existence
has a taste of some especially harsh mischances [1566] given to it:
just as experts in the arts of catering desire how they may excite the
appetites of the guests with sharp, or briny, or astringent dishes.
Life, I say, is not in all its circumstances as sweet as honey; there
are circumstances in it in which mere brine is the only relish, or
into which an astringent, or vinegary, or sharp pungent flavour has so
insinuated itself, that the rich sauce becomes very difficult to
taste: the cups of Temptation, too, are filled with all sorts of
beverages; some by the error of pride [1567] produce the vice of
inflated vanity; others lure on those who drain them to some deed of
rashness; whilst in other cases they excite a vomiting in which all
the ill-gotten acquisitions of years are with shame surrendered [1568]
. Therefore, to prevent one who has indulged in the carousals to an
improper extent from lingering over so profusely furnished a table, he
is early taken from the number of the banqueters, and thereby secures
an escape out of those evils which unmeasured indulgence procures for
gluttons. This is that achievement of a perfect Providence which I
spoke of; namely, not only to heal evils that have been committed, but
also to forestall them before they have been committed; and this, we
suspect, is the cause of the deaths of new-born infants. He Who does
all things upon a Plan withdraws the materials for evil in His love to
the individual, and, to a character whose marks His Foreknowledge has
read, grants no time to display by a pre-eminence in actual vice what
it is when its propensity to evil gets free play. Often, too, the
Arranger of this Feast of Life exposes by such-like dispensations the
cunning device of the "constraining cause" of money-loving [1569] , so
that this vice comes to the light bared of all specious pretexts, and
no longer obscured by any misleading screen [1570] . For most declare
that they give play [1571] to their cravings for more, in order that
they may make their offspring all the richer; but that their vice
belongs to their nature, and is not caused by any external necessity,
is proved by that inexcusable avarice which is observed in childless
persons. Many who have no heir, nor any hope of one, for the great
wealth which they have laboriously gained, rear a countless brood
within themselves of wants instead of children, and they are left
without a channel into which to convey this incurable disease, though
they cannot find an excuse in any necessity for this failing [1572] .
But take the case of some who, during their sojourn in life, have been
fierce and domineering in disposition, slaves to every kind of lust,
passionate to madness, refraining from no act even of the most
desperate wickedness, robbers and murderers, traitors to their
country, and, more execrable still, patricides, mother-killers,
child-murderers, mad after unnatural intercourse; suppose such
characters grow old in this wickedness; how, some one may ask, does
this harmonize with the result of our previous investigations? If that
which is taken away before its time in order that it may not
continuously glut itself, according to our illustration of the
banquet, with Life's indulgences, is providentially removed from that
carouse, what is the special design in so and so, who is of that
disposition, being allowed to continue his revels [1573] to old age,
steeping both himself and his boon companions in the noxious fumes of
his debauchery? In fine, you will ask, wherefore does God in His
Providence withdraw one from life before his character can be
perfected in evil, and leave another to grow to be such a monster that
it had been better for him if he had never been born? In answer to
this we will give, to those who are inclined to receive it favourably,
a reason such as follows: viz. that oftentimes the existence of those
whose life has been a good one operates to the advantage of their
offspring; and there are hundreds of passages testifying to this in
the inspired Writings, which clearly teach us that the tender care
shown by God to those who have deserved it is shared in by their
successors, and that even to have been an obstruction, in the path to
wickedness, to any one who is sure to live wickedly, is a good result
[1574] . But seeing that our Reason in this matter has to grope in the
dark, clearly no one can complain if its conjecturing leads our mind
to a variety of conclusions. Well, then, not only one might pronounce
that God, in kindness to the Founders of some Family, withdraws a
member of it who is going to live a bad life from that bad life, but,
even if there is no antecedent such as this in the case of some early
deaths, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that they would have
plunged into a vicious life with a more desperate vehemence than any
of those who have actually become notorious for their wickedness.
That nothing happens without God we know from many sources; and,
reversely, that God's dispensations have no element of chance and
confusion in them every one will allow, who realizes that God is
Reason, and Wisdom, and Perfect Goodness, and Truth, and could not
admit of that which is not good and not consistent with His Truth
[1575] . Whether, then, the early deaths of infants are to be
attributed to the aforesaid causes, or whether there is some further
cause of them beyond these, it befits us to acknowledge that these
things happen for the best. I have another reason also to give which I
have learnt from the wisdom of an Apostle; a reason, that is, why some
of those who have been distinguished for their wickedness have been
suffered to live on in their self-chosen course. Having expanded a
thought of this kind at some length in his argument to the Romans
[1576] , and having retorted upon himself with the counter-conclusion,
which thence necessarily follows, that the sinner could no longer be
justly blamed, if his sinning is a dispensation of God, and that he
would not have existed at all, if it had been contrary to the wishes
of Him Who has the world in His power, the Apostle meets this
conclusion and solves this counter-plea by means of a still deeper
view of things. He tells us that God, in rendering to every one his
due, sometimes even grants a scope to wickedness for good in the end.
Therefore He allowed the King of Egypt, for example, to be born and to
grow up such as he was; the intention was that Israel, that great
nation exceeding all calculation by numbers, might be instructed by
his disaster. God's omnipotence is to be recognized in every
direction; it has strength to bless the deserving; it is not
inadequate to the punishment of wickedness [1577] ; and so, as the
complete removal of that peculiar people out of Egypt was necessary in
order to prevent their receiving any infection from the sins of Egypt
in a misguided way of living, therefore that God-defying and infamous
Pharaoh rose and reached his maturity in the lifetime of the very
people who were to be benefited, so that Israel might acquire a just
knowledge of the two-fold energy of God, working as it did in either
direction; the more beneficent they learnt in their own persons, the
sterner by seeing it exercised upon those who were being scourged for
their wickedness; for in His consummate wisdom God can mould even evil
into co-operation with good. The artisan (if the Apostle's argument
may be confirmed by any words of ours)--the artisan who by his skill
has to fashion iron to some instrument for daily use, has need not
only of that which owing to its natural ductility lends itself to his
art, but, be the iron never so hard, be it never so difficult to
soften it in the fire, be it even impossible owing to its adamantine
resistance to mould it into any useful implement, his art requires the
co-operation even of this; he will use it for an anvil, upon which the
soft workable iron may be beaten and formed into something useful. But
some one will say, "It is not all who thus reap in this life the
fruits of their wickedness, any more than all those whose lives have
been virtuous profit while living by their virtuous endeavours; what
then, I ask, is the advantage of their existence in the case of these
who live to the end unpunished?" I will bring forward to meet this
question of yours a reason which transcends all human arguments.
Somewhere in his utterances the great David declares that some portion
of the blessedness of the virtuous will consist in this; in
contemplating side by side with their own felicity the perdition of
the reprobate. He says, "The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the
vengeance; he shall wash his hands in the blood of the ungodly [1578]
"; not indeed as rejoicing over the torments of those sufferers, but
as then most completely realizing the extent of the well-earned
rewards of virtue. He signifies by those words that it will be an
addition to the felicity of the virtuous and an intensification of it,
to have its contrary set against it. In saying that "he washes his
hands in the blood of the ungodly" he would convey the thought that
"the cleanness of his own acting in life is plainly declared in the
perdition of the ungodly." For the expression "wash" represents the
idea of cleanness; but no one is washed, but is rather defiled, in
blood; whereby it is clear that it is a comparison with the harsher
forms of punishment that puts in a clearer light the blessedness of
virtue. We must now summarize our argument, in order that the thoughts
which we have expanded may be more easily retained in the memory. The
premature deaths of infants have nothing in them to suggest the
thought that one who so terminates his life is subject to some
grievous misfortune, any more than they are to be put on a level with
the deaths of those who have purified themselves in this life by every
kind of virtue; the more far-seeing Providence of God curtails the
immensity of sins in the case of those whose lives are going to be so
evil. That some of the wicked have lived on [1579] does not upset this
reason which we have rendered; for the evil was in their case hindered
in kindness to their parents; whereas, in the case of those whose
parents have never imparted to them any power of calling upon God,
such a form of the Divine kindness [1580] , which accompanies such a
power, is not transmitted to their own children; otherwise the infant
now prevented by death from growing up wicked would have exhibited a
far more desperate wickedness than the most notorious sinners, seeing
that it would have been unhindered. Even granting that some have
climbed to the topmost pinnacle of crime, the Apostolic view supplies
a comforting answer to the question; for He Who does everything with
Wisdom knows how to effect by means of evil some good. Still further,
if some occupy a pre-eminence in crime, and yet for all that have
never been a metal, to use our former illustration, that God's skill
has used for any good, this is a case which constitutes an addition to
the happiness of the good, as the Prophet's words suggest; it may be
reckoned as not a slight element in that happiness, nor, on the other
hand, as one unworthy of God's providing.
Footnotes
[1531] This treatise is written for Hierius, in Gregory's old age. It
has been thought to be spurious (Oudin, p. 605), because of Fronto
Ducæus' insertion (p. 374) about the Purgatorial Fire. But Tillemont,
Semler, and Schroeckh have shown that there are no grounds for this
opinion. Anastasius Sinaita mentions it (Quæst. xvi.).
[1532] eiper hebosin hoi kata tous nun tois logois akmazontes. The
Latin translator Laurent. Sifanus, I. U. Doct. (Basle, 1562), must
have had a different text to this of the Paris Edit.: "si quidem ita
floreret ut qui nunc eloquentiâ vigent."
[1533] plinthotes, playing upon plinthon just above; a word seemingly
peculiar to Gregory. We cannot help thinking here of Plato's
definition of the good man, tetragonos aneu psogou: though the idea
here is that of richness rather than shape.
[1534] i.e.Er the Armenian. See Plato, Repub. x. §614, &c.
[1535] An anecdote resembling what follows, but not quite the same, is
told of Xerxes in Ælian's Var. Hist. xii. 40. Erasmus also refers to
it in his Adagia.
[1536] te aplanei periphora. This is of course the Ptolemaic system
which had already been in vogue two centuries. Sun, and moon, and all,
were "planets" round the earth as a centre: until the 8th sphere, in
which the stars were fixed, was reached; and above this was the
crystalline sphere, under the primum mobile. Cf. Milton, Par. Lost,
iii. 481: "They pass the planets seven, and pass the fix'd:" and see
note p. 257.
[1537] Reading truphen. The Paris Edit. has tuphon.
[1538] ten muesin.
[1539] Ps. civ. 24.
[1540] eleitourgese to dakruon
[1541] There is introduced at these words in the text of the Paris
Edition the following "Explicatio," in Greek. "Here it is manifest
that the father means by the `purging fire' the torments and agonies
suffered by those who having sinned have not completed a worthy and
adequate repentance, according to the Gospel parable of the Rich Man
and Lazarus. For it is clear that he is thinking of this parable when
he says, `either purged in fire' (i.e. the Rich Man), `or refreshed
with the dew of blessing' (i.e. Lazarus). But that sentence of the
Judgment, `They shall go, these into everlasting punishment, but the
just into life everlasting,' has no place as yet in these sufferings."
In other words, the commentator sees here the doctrine of Purgatory,
as held by the Roman Church. And when we compare the other passages in
Gregory about the "cleansing fire," especially that De Animâ et
Resurrectione, 247 B, we shall see that he contemplates the judgment
("the incorruptible tribunal") as coming not only after the
Resurrection, but also after the chastising process. Not till the
Judgment will the moral value of each life be revealed; the chastising
is a purely natural process. But then the belief in a Judgment coming
after everything rather contradicts the Universalism with which he has
been charged, for what necessity would there be for it, if the
chastising was successful in every instance? With regard to the nature
of this "fire," it is spiritual or material with him according to the
context. The invisible natures will be punished with the one, the
visible (i.e. the World) with the other: although this destruction is
not always preserved by him. See E. Moeller (on Gregory's Doctrine on
Human Nature), p. 100.
[1542] Rom. xi. 33, 34.
[1543] 1 Cor. ii. 15.
[1544] 1 Cor. i. 5.
[1545] Gen. i. 27.
[1546] ton ginomenon. The Latin has overlooked this; "Hæc autem omnia
huc spectant ut," &c. (Sifanus).
[1547] he phusis, i.e. the intellectual phusis mentioned above. If
this were translated "Nature," it would contradict what has just been
said about the body. It is plain that phusis contains a much larger
meaning always than our sole equivalent for it; phusis is applied even
to the Divine essence.
[1548] genealogein
[1549] ton pros ti pos echein ten psuchen.
[1550] peritte. Sifanus must have had peri ti in his Cod.; "sed mentis
circa aliquam rem actio."
[1551] S. John i. 4
[1552] For an explanation of such a restriction, see Bingham, vol.
viii. p. 109 (ed. 1720).
[1553] epiprosthouses
[1554] 2 Cor. iii. 2.
[1555] Heb. v. 14.
[1556] para ten proten (i.e. horan).
[1557] Ps. xix. 1.
[1558] This mysticism of Gregory is an extension of Origen's view that
there are direct affinities or analogies between the visible and
invisible world. Gregory here and elsewhere proposes to find in the
facts of nature nothing less than analogies with the energies, and so
with the essence, of the Deity. The marks stamped upon the Creation
translate these energies into language intelligible to us: just as the
energies in their turn translate the essence, as he insists on in his
treatise against Eunomius. This world, in effect, exists only in order
to manifest the Divine Being. But the human soul, of all that is
created, is the special field where analogies to the Creator are to be
sought, because we feel both by their energies alone; both the soul
and God are hid from us, in their essence. "Since," he says (De Hom
Opif. c. xi.) "one of the attributes we contemplate in the Divine
nature is incomprehensibility of essence, it is clearly necessary that
in this point `the image' should be able to show its resemblance to
the Archetype. For if, while the Archetype transcends comprehension,
the essence of `the image' were comprehended, the contrary character
of the attributes we behold in them would prove the defect of `the
image'; but since the essence of our Mind eludes our knowledge, it has
an exact resemblance to the Supreme essence, figuring as it does by
its own unknowableness the incomprehensible Being." Therefore, Gregory
goes to the interior facts of our nature for the actual proof of
theological doctrine. God is "spirit" because of the spirituality of
the soul. The "generation" of the Son is proved by the Will emanating
from the Reason. Gregory follows this line even more resolutely than
Origen. He was the first Father who sought to explain the Trinity by
the triple divisions of the soul which Platonism offered. Cf. his
treatise De eo quod sit ad immutabilitatem, &c., p. 26.
[1559] S. Matt. xxvi. 24.
[1560] eis apeiron parateinetai. Such passages as these must be set
against others in Gregory, such as the concluding part of the De Animâ
et Resurrectione,in arriving at an exact knowledge of his views about
a Universal 'Apokatastasis
[1561] pathe.
[1562] Read with L. Sifanus, me katallelo trophe.
[1563] eis plethoriken aedian ekpipton.
[1564] theorema.
[1565] Reading en to atelei tes helikias.
[1566] Reading sumptomaton (for sumpomaton. Morell).
[1567] tuphou (tou stuphou, Paris Edit. i.e. "of their astringency")
[1568] dia tes aischras apotiseos ton emeton anekinesan
[1569] ten sesophismenen tes philargurias ananken.
[1570] peplanemeno
[1571] epiplatunesthai
[1572] ouk echontes pou ten ananken tes a& 207;rhostias tautes
epanenenkosi
[1573] emparoinei
[1574] kephalaion; lit. "a sum total:" cf. below, epi kephalai& 251;
sunapteon, "we must summarize."
[1575] The text is in confusion here: but the Latin supplies: "Nothing
reasonable fails in reason; nothing wise, in wisdom; neither virtue
nor truth could admit of that which is not good," &c.
[1576] Rom. iii. 3-9; iv. 1, 2; ix. 14-24; xi. 22-36.
[1577] This sentence is not in the Greek of the Paris Edition, and is
not absolutely necessary to the sense.
[1578] Ps. lviii. 10.
[1579] epibionai tinas ton kakon: or, "That some have lived on in
their sins."
[1580] i.e.as letting them live, and mitigating the evil of their
lives.
.
On Pilgrimages. [1581]
Since, my friend, you ask me a question in your letter, I think that
it is incumbent upon me to answer you in their proper order upon all
the points connected with it. It is, then, my opinion that it is a
good thing for those who have dedicated themselves once for all to the
higher life to fix their attention continually upon the utterances in
the Gospel, and, just as those who correct their work in any given
material by a rule, and by means of the straightness of that rule
bring the crookedness which their hands detect to straightness, so it
is right that we should apply to these questions a strict and flawless
measure as it were,--I mean, of course, the Gospel rule of life [1582]
,--and in accordance with that, direct ourselves in the sight of God.
Now there are some amongst those who have entered upon the monastic
and hermit life, who have made it a part of their devotion to behold
those spots at Jerusalem where the memorials of our Lord's life in the
flesh are on view; it would be well, then, to look to this Rule, and
if the finger of its precepts points to the observance of such things,
to perform the work, as the actual injunction of our Lord; but if they
lie quite outside the commandment of the Master, I do not see what
there is to command any one who has become a law of duty to himself to
be zealous in performing any of them. When the Lord invites the blest
to their inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, He does not include a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem amongst their good deeds; when He announces
the Beatitudes, He does not name amongst them that sort of devotion.
But as to that which neither makes us blessed nor sets us in the path
to the kingdom, for what reason it should be run after, let him that
is wise consider. Even if there were some profit in what they do, yet
even so, those who are perfect would do best not to be eager in
practising it; but since this matter, when closely looked into, is
found to inflict upon those who have begun to lead the stricter life a
moral mischief, it is so far from being worth an earnest pursuit, that
it actually requires the greatest caution to prevent him who has
devoted himself to God from being penetrated by any of its hurtful
influences. What is it, then, that is hurtful in it? The Holy Life is
open to all, men and women alike. Of that contemplative Life the
peculiar mark is Modesty [1583] . But Modesty is preserved in
societies that live distinct and separate, so that there should be no
meeting and mixing up of persons of opposite sex; men are not to rush
to keep the rules of Modesty in the company of women, nor women to do
so in the company of men. But the necessities of a journey are
continually apt to reduce this scrupulousness to a very indifferent
observance of such rules. For instance, it is impossible for a woman
to accomplish so long a journey without a conductor; on account of her
natural weakness she has to be put upon her horse and to be lifted
down again; she has to be supported [1584] in difficult situations.
Whichever we suppose, that she has an acquaintance to do this yeoman's
service, or a hired attendant to perform it, either way the proceeding
cannot escape being reprehensible; whether she leans on the help of a
stranger, or on that of her own servant, she fails to keep the law of
correct conduct; and as the inns and hostelries and cities of the East
present many examples of licence and of indifference to vice, how will
it be possible for one passing through such smoke to escape without
smarting eyes? Where the ear and the eye is defiled, and the heart
too, by receiving all those foulnesses through eye and ear, how will
it be possible to thread without infection such seats of contagion?
What advantage, moreover, is reaped by him who reaches those
celebrated spots themselves? He cannot imagine that our Lord is
living, in the body, there at the present day, but has gone away from
us foreigners; or that the Holy Spirit is in abundance at Jerusalem,
but unable to travel as far as us. Whereas, if it is really possible
to infer God's presence from visible symbols, one might more justly
consider that He dwelt in the Cappadocian nation than in any of the
spots outside it. For how many Altars [1585] there are there, on which
the name of our Lord is glorified! One could hardly count so many in
all the rest of the world. Again, if the Divine grace was more
abundant about Jerusalem than elsewhere, sin would not be so much the
fashion amongst those that live there; but as it is, there is no form
of uncleanness [1586] that is not perpetrated amongst them; rascality,
adultery, theft, idolatry, poisoning, quarrelling, murder, are rife;
and the last kind of evil is so excessively prevalent, that nowhere in
the world are people so ready to kill each other as there; where
kinsmen attack each other like wild beasts, and spill each other's
blood, merely for the sake of lifeless plunder. Well, in a place where
such things go on, what proof, I ask, have you of the abundance of
Divine grace? But I know what many will retort to all that I have
said; they will say, "Why did you not lay down this rule for yourself
as well? If there is no gain for the godly pilgrim in return for
having been there, for what reason did you undergo the toil of so long
a journey?" Let them hear from me my plea for this. By the necessities
of that office in which I have been placed by the Dispenser of my life
to live, it was my duty, for the purpose of the correction which the
Holy Council had resolved upon, to visit the places where the Church
in Arabia is; secondly, as Arabia is on the confines of the Jerusalem
district, I had promised that I would confer also with the Heads of
the Holy Jerusalem Churches, because matters with them were in
confusion, and needed an arbiter; thirdly, our most religious Emperor
had granted us facilities for the journey, by postal conveyance, so
that we had to endure none of those inconveniences which in the case
of others we have noticed; our waggon was, in fact, as good as a
church or monastery to us, for all of us were singing psalms and
fasting in the Lord during the whole journey. Let our own case
therefore cause difficulty to none; rather let our advice be all the
more listened to, because we are giving it upon matters which came
actually before our eyes. We confessed that the Christ Who was
manifested is very God, as much before as after our sojourn at
Jerusalem; our faith in Him was not increased afterwards any more than
it was diminished. Before we saw Bethlehem we knew His being made man
by means of the Virgin; before we saw His Grave we believed in His
Resurrection from the dead; apart from seeing the Mount of Olives, we
confessed that His Ascension into heaven was real. We derived only
thus much of profit from our travelling thither, namely that we came
to know by being able to compare them, that our own places are far
holier than those abroad. Wherefore, O ye who fear the Lord, praise
Him in the places where ye now are. Change of place does not effect
any drawing nearer unto God, but wherever thou mayest be, God will
come to thee, if the chambers of thy soul be found of such a sort that
He can dwell in thee and walk in thee. But if thou keepest thine inner
man full of wicked thoughts, even if thou wast on Golgotha, even if
thou wast on the Mount of Olives, even if thou stoodest on the
memorial-rock of the Resurrection, thou wilt be as far away from
receiving Christ into thyself, as one who has not even begun to
confess Him. Therefore, my beloved friend, counsel the brethren to be
absent from the body to go to our Lord, rather than to be absent from
Cappadocia to go to Palestine; and if any one should adduce the
command spoken by our Lord to His disciples that they should not quit
Jerusalem, let him be made to understand its true meaning. Inasmuch as
the gift and the distribution of the Holy Spirit had not yet passed
upon the Apostles, our Lord commanded them to remain in the same
place, until they should have been endued with power from on high.
Now, if that which happened at the beginning, when the Holy Spirit was
dispensing each of His gifts under the appearance of a flame,
continued until now, it would be right for all to remain in that place
where that dispensing took place; but if the Spirit "bloweth" where He
"listeth," those, too, who have become believers here are made
partakers of that gift; and that according to the proportion of their
faith, not in consequence of their pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Footnotes
[1581] The modern history of this Letter is curious. Its genuineness
though suspected by Bellarmine, is admitted by Tillemont, and even by
Cæsar Baronius. After having been edited by Morel in Greek and Latin,
1551, it was omitted from his son's edition of the works of Gregory by
the advice of Fronto Ducæus, lest it should seem to reflect upon the
practice of pilgrimages. But in 1607 it was again edited (Hannov.) by
Du Moulin, with a defence of it, and a translation into French by R.
Stephen: this is the only instance of a vernacular version of Gregory
at this time, and shows the importance attached to this Letter. It
appears in the second Paris Edition, but with the vehement protests,
printed in the notes, of the Jesuit Gretser, against Du Moulin's
interpretation of its scope, and even against its genuineness. He
makes much of its absence from the Bavarian (Munich) Cod., and of the
fact that even "heretical printers" had omitted it from the Basle
Edition of 1562: and he is very angry with Du Moulin for not having
approached the Royal Library while in Paris, and while he had leisure
from his "Calvinistic evening communions." But why should he, when the
Librarian, no less a person than I. Casaubon (appointed 1598), had
assured him that the Letter was in the Codex Regius? It is in Migne
iii. col. 1009. See Letter to Eustathia, &c.
[1582] politeian, "vivendi rationem." Cf. Basil, Homil. xiii.
[1583] he euschemosune
[1584] parakratoumene; cf. Epict. (cited by Diosc.) tas trichas
rheousas parakratein, "to stop the hair from falling off."
[1585] thusiasteria, the sanctuaries (with the Altar), into which at
this time no layman except the Emperor might enter (Balsamon's note to
decrees of Council of Laodicæa).
[1586] Cyril's Catecheses in the year 348 had combated the practical
immorality of the Holy City.
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