Exhortation 1 part 6/7

nor will you justly call Doom, nor Destiny, nor the Fates, goddesses.

And if Strife and Battle are not gods, then neither is Ares nor Enyo.

Furthermore, if lightnings and thunderbolts and rainstorms are not gods, how can fire and water be gods? And how are shooting stars and comets, which come into being through an affection of the air? And let him who calls Fortune a god call Action a god too.

If, then, not one of these is reckoned to be a god, nor indeed any of those handmade and senseless figures, while a certain providence of divine power over us is plainly manifest, nothing else remains but to confess this: that there truly is, and subsists, the one and only truly existing God.

But indeed you senseless ones are like men who have drunk mandrake or some other drug;

may God grant that you may one day sober up out of this sleep, and understand God, and no longer imagine gold or stone or tree, or action or passion or sickness or fear, to be God.

For 'thrice ten thousand are they truly, upon the bounteous earth,' demons neither immortal nor yet mortal (for they have no share in sensation, and so none in death either), but stone and wooden masters of men, who by means of custom outrage life and trample upon its sacred bonds.

'The earth is the Lord's,' it says, 'and the fullness thereof.'

Then how do you dare to luxuriate in what belongs to the Lord, yet be ignorant of the Master? 'Leave My land,' the Lord will say to you, 'touch not the water that I give forth, partake not of the fruits that I cultivate;

render back, O man, the nurture you owe to God;

acknowledge your Master;

you are a peculiar creature of God.

But how could what belongs to Him justly become alien? For that which is estranged, being deprived of its proper relation, is deprived of the truth.

For do you not in a sense turn to insensibility like Niobe—or rather, to speak to you more mystically, after the manner of that Hebrew woman (the ancients called her Lot's wife)? We have received the tradition that this woman was turned to stone for her love of Sodom.

And the Sodomites are the godless, and those who turn toward impiety, the hard-hearted and the foolish.

Consider that these utterances are spoken to you from God;

do not suppose that stones and wood and birds and serpents are sacred, but men are not;

but quite the contrary—reckon men to be the ones truly sacred, and the beasts and stones to be just what they are.

They set about inhumanly to butcher the one who instructs them with love of mankind, who calls them to righteousness—neither awaiting the grace from above nor turning aside from the punishment to come.

For they do not believe God, nor do they learn His power.

But He whose love of mankind is unspeakable—His hatred of evil is unbounded.

His wrath nourishes punishment upon sin, but His love of mankind does good upon repentance.

And the most pitiable thing of all is to be deprived of the help that comes from God.

Now the blinding of the eyes and the deafening of the hearing are more grievous than the rest of the wicked one's encroachments;

for the one has been robbed of the heavenly vision, and the other deprived of divine instruction.

But you, being maimed toward the truth—blind in mind and deaf in understanding—do not grieve, do not chafe; you have not longed to see heaven and the Maker of heaven, nor have you sought to hear and to learn of the Creator and Father of all things, joining your purpose to salvation;

for nothing stands in the way of one who presses on to the knowledge of God—not lack of education, not poverty, not obscurity, not want of possessions;

nor does anyone pray to barter away the truly true wisdom for bronze or iron;

for this, above all else, has been well said:

the good man is everywhere a bringer of salvation;

for the zealot for righteousness, being a lover of the One who lacks nothing, has few needs, having laid up his blessedness in nothing other than in God Himself—where there is no moth, no robber, no pirate, but the eternal Giver of good things.

Truly, then, you have been fittingly likened to those serpents whose ears are stopped against the charmers.

'For their fury,' says the Scripture, 'is after the likeness of the serpent, like the deaf asp that stops her ears, which will not hearken to the voice of the charmers.' But do you allow your savagery to be charmed away, and receive our gentle and kindly Word, and spit out the deadly venom, so that, as far as possible, it may be granted you to put off corruption, as the serpents put off their old age.

Hear me, and do not stop your ears nor block your hearing, but lay up in your mind the things spoken.

Excellent is the medicine of immortality.

Halt at last your serpentine crawlings.

'For the enemies of the Lord shall lick the dust,' says the Scripture;

lift up your heads from the earth into the upper air, look up to heaven, marvel, and cease lying in wait for the heel of the righteous and hindering the way of the truth;

become prudent and harmless;

perhaps the Lord will grant you the wing of simplicity (for He has purposed to give wings to the earth-born), that you may forsake your dens and dwell in the heavens.

Only let us repent with our whole heart, so that we may be able with our whole heart to contain God.

'Hope in Him,' it says, 'all you congregation of the people; pour out before Him all your hearts.' He speaks to those emptied of wickedness;

He has mercy and fills with righteousness;

believe, O man, in Him who is both man and God;

believe, O man, in Him who suffered and is worshiped; you slaves, believe in the living God who died;

all men, believe in the only God of all men;

believe, and receive salvation as your reward;

seek out God, and your soul shall live. He who seeks out God is busy about his own salvation;

you have found God; you have life.

Let us seek, then, that we may also live.

The reward of the finding is life with God.

'Let all who seek You be glad and rejoice in You, and let them say continually, Let God be magnified.' A beautiful, immortal hymn of God is the man built up in righteousness, in whom the oracles of the truth are engraved.

...that those who have turned to any pursuit whatever of life should regard that same wisdom as the calm harbor of salvation;

through whom good fathers of children are those who have run to the Father, and good sons to their parents are those who have understood the Son, and good husbands to their wives are those who remember the Bridegroom, and good masters to their servants are those who have been ransomed from the uttermost slavery.

Oh, more blessed than the error among men are the beasts!

They graze upon ignorance, as you do, yet they do not feign the truth;

there are no tribes of flatterers among them, the fishes are not superstitious, the birds do not worship idols; they marvel at one thing only—the heaven, since they cannot conceive God, being deemed unworthy of reason.

Are you not ashamed, then—you who have made yourselves more irrational than the irrational beasts, you who through so many ages have worn out your lives in godlessness? You became children, then youths, then young men, then men—but never good.

Even now reverence your old age; come to your senses at the setting of life; even at life's end come to know God, that the end of your life may take up the beginning of salvation.

You grew old in superstition; come young to the worship of God;

God will reckon you among guileless children.

Let the Athenian, then, follow the laws of Solon, and the Argive those of Phoroneus, and the Spartan those of Lycurgus; but if you enroll yourself as God's, heaven is your fatherland, and God your Lawgiver.

And what are these laws? 'You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not corrupt boys; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; you shall love the Lord your God.' And there are also the fulfillments of these—eloquent laws and holy words inscribed in the very hearts:

'You shall love your neighbor as yourself; and to the one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and you shall not covet, for by lust alone you have committed adultery.' How much better, then, is it for men, rather than attaining their desires, not even to wish to desire the things they ought not? But you cannot endure the austerity of salvation; just as we delight in the sweetness of food, preferring it for the smoothness of its pleasure, though the bitter things that roughen the sense heal and restore us to health, and the harshness of medicines strengthens the weak stomach—so too custom delights and tickles, but the one (custom) thrusts into the abyss, while the other (truth) leads up to heaven, harsh indeed at first, yet a good nurse of the young;

and stately is this women's chamber, and chaste this council of elders;

and it is neither hard of access nor impossible to lay hold of, but it dwells very near as our indweller, as the all-wise Moses hints when he says that it has its habitation in the three parts that pertain to us—hands and mouth and heart. This is a genuine symbol of the truth, which is fulfilled in all three: in counsel and deed and word. Do not fear this either—that the many delightful things presented to your imagination might rob you of wisdom;

you yourself will willingly transcend the trifling of custom, just as children, when they have become men, cast away their playthings.

With unsurpassable swiftness, then, and with kindness easy of access, the divine power, shining forth upon the earth, filled the whole with the seed of salvation.

For the Lord would never have accomplished so great a work in so short a time without divine care—He who is despised in appearance but worshiped in deed, the purifying and saving and gracious One, the divine Word, the truly most manifest God, made equal to the Master of all things, because He was His Son and the Word was in God; who was neither disbelieved when first He was proclaimed beforehand, nor, when He took on the mask of man and molded Himself in flesh and enacted the saving drama of humanity, was He unrecognized.

He Himself, presenting both what He was—through the things He taught and showed forth—the Word, our truce-bearer and reconciler and Savior, a life-giving and peaceful fountain poured out over the whole face of the earth, through whom, so to speak, all things have already become a sea of good things.

Now consider, if you will, the divine beneficence a little from the beginning.

The first man, when he played in Paradise, unbound and free, was still a child of God;

but when, succumbing to pleasure (the serpent is allegorically pleasure, crawling upon its belly, an earthly wickedness, turned toward matter), he was led astray by lusts, the child, playing the man through disobedience and refusing to heed the Father, was put to shame before God.

The man who had been set free through simplicity was found bound by sins.

The Lord willed again to loose him from his bonds; and being bound in flesh (this is a divine mystery), He subdued the serpent and enslaved the tyrant, namely Death; and—most wondrous of all—that man who had been led astray by pleasure, who had been bound by corruption, He showed to be set free, with hands outstretched.

The Lord was laid low, but man arose; and he who had fallen from Paradise receives, as a greater prize of obedience, the heavens.

Therefore it seems to me that, since the Word Himself has come to us from heaven, we ought no longer to resort to human teaching—to Athens and the rest of Greece, and to Ionia besides—busying ourselves with such things.

For if our teacher is the One who has filled all things with holy powers—by creation, salvation, beneficence, lawgiving, prophecy, teaching—this teacher now instructs us in all things, and the whole world has already become Athens and Greece through the Word.

For surely you would not believe a poetic myth that records Minos the Cretan as Zeus's confidant, yet disbelieve us who have become disciples of God, who have taken up the truly true wisdom—the wisdom which the foremost of philosophers only hinted at darkly, but which the disciples of Christ have both grasped and proclaimed abroad.

And indeed the whole Christ, so to speak, is not divided;

He is neither barbarian nor Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female;

but a new man, refashioned by the Holy Spirit of God.

Then again, all the other counsels and admonitions are paltry and concern particular matters—whether one ought to marry, whether to engage in public life, whether to beget children;

but the one universal exhortation—the one plainly pertaining to the whole of life, in every season, in every circumstance, straining toward the most sovereign end, namely life—is godliness;

according to which alone it is necessary to live, in order that we may live forever;

but philosophy, as the elders say, is a long-drawn-out counsel, wooing the eternal love of wisdom;

but the commandment of the Lord is radiant, enlightening the eyes.

Receive Christ, receive sight, receive your light, 'that you may well discern both God and man.'

Sweet is the Word that has enlightened us—above gold and precious stone;

He is more to be desired than honey and the honeycomb. For how should He not be desirable, who made clear the mind buried in darkness and sharpened the light-bearing eyes of the soul? For just as, were there no sun, all things would, for all the other stars, be night, so too, had we not come to know the Word and been illumined by Him, we would be in no way better off than the fowls fattened for slaughter, growing plump in darkness and nourished for death.

Let us make room for the light, that we may make room for God;

let us make room for the light and become disciples of the Lord.

This, indeed, He has promised to the Father: 'I will declare Your name to My brethren;

in the midst of the assembly I will sing Your praise.'

Sing praise and declare to me Your God, the Father;

Your narrations will save, the song will instruct me;

since You were not ashamed of the brother.

Let us put away, then—let us put away—the forgetfulness of the truth;

having dispelled the ignorance and the darkness that stand in the way, like a mist over the sight, let us gaze upon the truly existing God, first chanting this acclamation to Him: 'Hail, O Light!'

Light from heaven has shone forth upon us who were buried in darkness and shut up in the shadow of death—a light purer than the sun, sweeter than the life here below.

That light is life eternal, and whatever partakes of it lives; but night fears the light, and, sinking down for fear, gives place to the day of the Lord;

all things have become unsleeping light, and the setting has turned about into a rising.

This is what the new creation has willed;

for the Sun of righteousness, who rides over all things, makes His circuit equally over mankind, imitating the Father, 'who makes His sun to rise upon all men,' and besprinkles the dew of the truth.

He transformed the setting into a rising, and crucified death into life; and having snatched man away from destruction, He hung him aloft in the upper air, transplanting corruption into incorruption and changing earth into heaven—He, God's husbandman, 'giving favorable signs and rousing the peoples to good work,' calling to mind the true life; and graciously bestowing on us the truly great and divine and inalienable inheritance of the Father, He makes man divine by heavenly teaching, 'putting His laws into their mind and writing them upon their heart.' What laws does He write? 'That all shall know God, from the least to the greatest;' and 'I will be merciful to them,' says God, 'and their sins I will remember no more.' Let us receive the laws of life; let us be persuaded by God who exhorts us; let us learn Him, that He may be merciful; let us render to Him—though He has no need of it—the grateful recompense of glad obedience, as a kind of rent paid to God for our dwelling here.

'Gold for bronze, the worth of a hundred oxen for that of nine'—for a little faith He gives you this great earth to till, water to drink, the sea besides to sail, air to breathe, fire to serve you, a world to dwell in;

from here He has permitted you to dispatch a colony into the heavens;

these great and so manifold works of creation and gifts He has leased to you for a little faith.

Then, while those who have trusted in sorcerers accept their amulets and incantations as supposedly bringing safety, will you not consent to gird on the heavenly One Himself, the saving Word, and, having believed in the incantation of God, to be freed from the passions which are the soul's diseases, and to be torn away from sin? For sin is everlasting death.

Are you utterly toothless and blind, like moles, doing nothing but eat as you live out your life in the dark, wallowing about in corruption?

But there is—there is—the truth that has cried out: 'Light shall shine forth out of darkness.'

Let the light, then, shine in the hidden part of man, in the heart, and let the rays of knowledge rise up, revealing and making to glisten the man hidden within—the disciple of the light, the familiar friend and joint-heir of Christ—especially when the most precious and most reverend name of a good Father comes to the knowledge of a pious and good child, the Father commanding gentle things and enjoining upon the child the things that bring salvation.

And he who obeys Him gains the advantage in every respect;

he follows God, he is persuaded by the Father, he came to know Him while wandering, he loved God, he loved his neighbor, he fulfilled the commandment, he seeks the prize, he claims the promise.

And it lies ever before God to save the flock of mankind.

For this also the good God sent the good Shepherd;

and the Word, having unfolded the truth, showed to men the height of salvation, that either by repenting they might be saved, or by disobeying they might be judged.

This is the proclamation of righteousness: to those who obey, good news; to those who disobey, judgment.

The loud-clamoring trumpet, when it sounded, gathered soldiers together and announced war;

but Christ, having breathed forth a peaceful strain to the ends of the earth, will He not then gather His own peaceful soldiers? Indeed He has gathered the bloodless army by blood and by the Word, and has put into their hands the kingdom of heaven.

The trumpet of Christ is His gospel, which He has sounded, and we have heard.

Let us arm ourselves peaceably, putting on the breastplate of righteousness, taking up the shield of faith, placing on our heads the helmet of salvation, and let us whet the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Thus the apostle marshals us peaceably;

these are our invulnerable weapons;

armed with these, let us draw up against the evil one;

let us quench the fiery darts of the evil one with those watery points that have been dipped by the Word, requiting good deeds with grateful blessings and honoring God with the divine Word.

'For while you are yet speaking,' it says, 'He will say, Behold, I am here.' Oh, this holy and blessed power, by which God shares citizenship with men!

It is therefore more profitable and better to become at once the imitator and the worshiper of the best of all beings;

for no one will be able to imitate God except through serving Him in holiness, nor again to serve and revere Him except by imitating Him.

That heavenly and truly divine love comes to men in this way: when, somewhere within the soul itself, that which is truly beautiful, rekindled by the divine Word, is able to shine forth;

and—the greatest thing—at the very moment of genuine willing, salvation runs alongside it, since purpose and life are, so to speak, yoked together.

Therefore this exhortation of the truth alone is like the most faithful of friends, abiding to one's very last breath, and proving a good escort, for the whole and perfect spirit of the soul, to those who set out for heaven.

To what, then, do I exhort you? I am eager that you be saved.

In a word, He freely bestows life upon you.

And who is this? Learn briefly:

the Word of truth, the Word of incorruption, who regenerates man by bringing him up into truth, the goad of salvation, who drives out corruption, who chases away death, who has built a temple among men, that He may establish God among men.

Purify the temple, and leave your pleasures and your idle habits to wind and fire, like a flower that lasts but a day; cultivate prudently the fruits of self-control, and present yourself as a firstfruit offering to God, so that you may be not only His work but also His grace;

and both are fitting for one who is Christ's familiar—both to appear worthy of the kingdom and to be deemed worthy of the kingdom.

Let us flee, then, from custom; let us flee it as some dangerous headland, or the menace of Charybdis, or the Sirens of the myths;

it throttles a man, it turns him away from the truth, it leads him away from life; custom is a snare, it is an abyss, it is a pit, it is a wicked gluttony;

'Keep your ship clear of that smoke and surge.'

Let us flee, O fellow voyagers, let us flee this wave; it belches forth fire; it is a wicked island, heaped with bones and corpses, and in it sings a fair little harlot, Pleasure, delighting in vulgar music.

'Come hither, far-famed Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans; bring your ship to rest, that you may hear a more divine voice.'

She praises you, O sailor, and calls you much-hymned, and the harlot appropriates the glory of the Greeks;

let her be, to feed upon the dead—a heavenly spirit comes to your aid;

sail past Pleasure, she beguiles you:

'Let no fair-decked woman deceive your mind, coaxing with wheedling words, while she seeks out your dwelling.'

Sail past the song; it works death;

if only you will it, you have conquered destruction, and, bound fast, you shall be loosed from all corruption; the Word of God will steer you, and the Holy Spirit will bring you to anchor in the harbors of the heavens;

then you shall behold my God, and shall be initiated into those holy mysteries, and shall enjoy the things hidden in the heavens, the things reserved for me, 'which neither ear has heard, nor has it entered into anyone's heart.'

'And indeed I seem to see two suns, and a double Thebes'—so said one, reveling in his idols, drunk with unmixed ignorance; but I would pity him in his drunken folly, and would call one so out of his mind back to a sober salvation, since the Lord too welcomes the repentance of the sinner, and not his death.

Come, O madman, no longer propping yourself on the thyrsus, no longer wreathed with ivy; cast off the headband, cast off the fawn-skin, come to your senses;

I will show you the Word, and the mysteries of the Word, expounding them according to your own imagery.

There is a mountain beloved of God—not, like Cithaeron, lying open for tragedies, but consecrated to the dramas of truth—a sober mountain, shaded with chaste woods;

and reveling on it are not the sisters of thunder-stricken Semele, the maenads, who celebrate that unholy carving of flesh, but the daughters of God, the fair lambs, who proclaim the solemn rites of the Word, gathering a sober choir.

The choir is the righteous, the song is a hymn to the King of all;

the maidens make melody, the angels glorify, the prophets speak, the sound of music is sent forth, at a run they pursue the festal band, those who are called hasten, longing to receive back the Father.

Come also to me, O aged one, you too, leaving Thebes behind, and casting away your divination and your Bacchic frenzy, be led by the hand to truth;

behold, I give you the wood to lean upon;

hasten, Tiresias, believe;

Christ shines forth more brightly than the sun, through whom the eyes of the blind look up and see;

night shall flee from you, fire shall be afraid, death shall depart;

you shall see the heavens, O old man, you who cannot see Thebes.

Oh, the truly holy mysteries! Oh, the unsullied light!

I am led by the torch to gaze upon the heavens and upon God; I become holy as I am initiated; the Lord acts as hierophant and seals the initiate while leading him to the light, and presents to the Father the one who has believed, kept safe for the ages.

These are the revels of my mysteries;

if you will, be you also initiated, and you shall dance with the angels around the unbegotten and imperishable and only truly existing God, while the Word of God joins in our hymn.

This Jesus is eternal, the one great High Priest of the one God who is the same Father; He prays on behalf of men and gives charge to men: 'Hearken, you myriad tribes—or rather, all of mankind who are endowed with reason, both barbarians and Greeks;

I call the whole race of men, of whom I am the Creator by the Father's will.

Come to Me, that you may be marshaled under one God and the one Word of God; and do not merely surpass the irrational animals in reason, but I grant to you alone, of all mortal things, to reap immortality as your fruit.

For I am willing—yes, willing—to share even this grace with you, supplying in full the benefit: incorruption;

and I freely give you the Word, the knowledge of God; I freely give you Myself in full.

This is what I am; this is what God wills; this is concord; this is the harmony of the Father; this is the Son; this is Christ; this is the Word of God, the arm of the Lord, the power of all things, the will of the Father.'

Oh, all of you are images, but not all are true likenesses;

I wish to set you right toward the archetype, that you may become like Me as well.

I will anoint you with the ointment of faith, by which you cast off corruption, and I will display the form of righteousness laid bare, by which you ascend to God.

'Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest;

take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest for your souls.'

Let us hasten, let us run, O God-beloved and God-like statues of the Word;

let us hasten, let us run, let us take up His yoke, let us put on incorruption, let us love Christ, the good charioteer of men;

He led the colt as a beast of burden together with the old one;

and having yoked together the pair of men, He guides the chariot straight toward immortality, hastening toward God, to fulfill plainly what He had darkly foreshadowed—formerly riding into Jerusalem, but now riding into the heavens—a most beautiful spectacle to the Father: the eternal, victorious Son.

Let us therefore become men ambitious for noble things and beloved of God, and let us obtain the greatest of good things—God and life;

let us trust Him, and let there never come upon us so great a longing for silver and gold and glory as for the very Word of truth.

For neither is it pleasing to God Himself if we account things of the highest worth as of the very least, while we prefer the manifest outrages of folly and ignorance and idleness and idolatry, and the uttermost impiety, above all else.

For not without reason do the sons of the philosophers hold that all that the foolish do is unholy and impious; and, sketching out ignorance itself as a kind of madness, they confess nothing other than that the multitude are mad.

Reason, then, does not allow us to doubt which of the two is better, to be sober-minded or to be mad.

But, holding fast to the truth tooth and nail, we ought with all our might to follow God in sober-mindedness, and to reckon all things as His—as indeed they are; and, having learned that we ourselves are the fairest of His possessions, to entrust our very selves to God, loving the Lord our God, and regarding this as our task throughout the whole of life.

And if the things of friends are common, and man is beloved of God (for indeed he is a friend of God, the Word being the mediator), then all things become the man's, because all things are God's, and all things are common to the two friends, both God's and man's.

It is time, then, for us to declare that the Christian alone is God-fearing and rich and prudent and well-born, and in this way an image of God with His likeness; and to say and to believe that he has become just and holy together with understanding, through Christ Jesus, and to that degree already like even to God.

The prophet, at any rate, does not conceal this grace when he says, 'I have said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.' For us—yes, us—He has adopted, and He wills to be called the Father of us alone, not of the disobedient.

For indeed our affairs—we who are followers of Christ—are somewhat like this: