Commentary on the Catholic Epistles 1 part 2/2

For such a man is rarely found, since many are those who, being without earnest works, have a dead faith, which is not faith at all.

He who has so believed as to be born of God has eternal life, as the Saviour says:

'He who believes in Me has eternal life.'

If then anyone is born of God by accomplishing the things spoken of, being worthy of acceptance, one must love him, yet even before him the One who begot him.

He says that the substance and, so to speak, the matter of the love one must have toward God is the keeping of the divine commandments;

which commandments refer back to God the one who acts according to them;

wherefore they are neither burdensome nor heavy.

But if anyone, coming to them not in the way he ought, should call them heavy, he has blamed his own weakness;

for it is common for those who have utterly lost their strength to reckon as heavy even things that are altogether light and easy to bear.

His commandments are light; but

they are not heavy—not for anyone alone, nor for every one who grasps their upward-leading power, who justly pursues justice and has learned by experience that the yoke of Christ is light, possessing much kindness;

he who is so disposed is born of God, and having attained this, he despises the material life and the pleasures of the world;

and thereby he overcomes the world, passing from it into a supramundane citizenship.

Such progress will belong to the faith that is active and reckoned unto righteousness;

which also, showing it to be subsisting and abiding, he named, saying:

'For this is the victory that has overcome the world—

our faith'—we who have accepted that Jesus is the Son of God.

Those who have learned by skilled experience how each of the good things they strive after is to be accomplished become full of good hope of achieving these also at another time;

since then the holy apostles, and the blessed John among them, knew by their very deeds that, having many times asked of God what was dear and pleasing to Him, they obtained it, they are confident that whenever they ask thus they will attain the things they long for, God granting it.

'He who asks receives'—the universal proposition meaning not simply all who ask even things that are not profitable, but those who ask according to the will of God, which the proposition comprehends;

such boldness arises in the one who has a blameless life;

for who shall boast that he has a pure heart? For few, so to speak, are those who are thus established in virtue;

'If I had beheld iniquity in my heart, let the Lord not hearken to me;

for this cause He hearkened to me, since I beheld no iniquity.'

But he passed it over in silence out of fear lest it be thought concerning him as of the one who said:

'But I am not thereby justified.'

You may add to the foregoing also the saying:

'If our heart does not condemn us, we have boldness toward God.'

For if being of God comes from doing righteousness, as we have often said, and at the same time it is impossible to sin and to do righteousness, it is therefore evident that one so disposed and so acting is righteous and does not sin;

then, safeguarding the point that man is a son of God by choice and not by nature, he fittingly added the saying:

'But he keeps himself, and the evil one does not touch him.'

For if the evil one does not touch him for this reason—that he keeps himself—then he has his not-sinning not from constitution but from watchfulness;

and one who keeps himself, what does he also pray to be preserved from God for? That he may remain wholly untouched by the evil one.

Having learned through many passages that wicked men are what is signified by the word 'world,' we are not superstitiously fearful, as the heretics are, lest the creation of God, being a 'world,' should be set in the evil one;

the word 'world' is applied to men, as I said before, both here and in the Gospels:

'Marvel not if the world hates you.'

It is plain to everyone possessing understanding that in speaking of the world hating the saints He signifies wicked men;

'They are of the world, and the world hears them';

for in saying that the world hears those who speak deceitfully, He signifies not the creation but men enslaved to passions.

The understanding which He gave, by which the true Son of God who has come is known, is the same as the saying:

'But we have the mind of Christ';

he who has this understanding and this mind knows Him who is true according to essence, and is in Him, being united to Him in reality, having a real apprehension of Him.

But how is it that, having throughout the whole epistle borne witness to the perfection of those to whom he writes, he now exhorts them to keep themselves from idols? We answer, then:

since it was written to the whole church, and it was likely that in such an assembly there were some who had only recently departed from idolatry, it was for the sake of those that he inscribed the expression.

The present passage agrees with what was said in the first epistle, which runs thus:

'And we know that he who loves God keeps the commandments';

'If anyone loves Me, he will keep My commandments';

to walk according to the commandments is the same as to keep them;

for since the virtues that are practiced according to the commandments are active, he who has not gone outside of them walks according to them;

and in this the keeping of them is the same thing;

wherefore he who has ceased from acting according to virtue no longer keeps the commandments, nor does he any longer walk according to them;

for he who advances in virtue walks according to the commandments, 'to walk' signifying progress, while 'to keep' them signifies the one who, having been perfected, keeps them after having walked according to the commandments;

with this agrees what was said in an enigma, how Adam was placed in paradise to till it and to keep it—'to till' signifying progress in activity, and 'to keep' signifying the abiding in perfection.

He who thinks and acts according to the evangelical teaching abides in it, but he who acts and holds opinions contrary to it draws himself away from it;

'I am your God'—he who is outside the right faith and the keeping of Christ's commandments is godless, having severed himself from having God; and since he who has drawn himself away from the divine instruction in the said manner is godless,

he who abides in it has both the Father and the Son;

for concerning the one who keeps His word, the Son said that He would come together with the Father to abide with him, since he has become a holy temple, built up out of the keeping of the divine commandments;

for 'having God' is twofold: the one is common to all creatures, signifying the same as 'having a Creator'; the other is left to those alone who serve Him through nobility of character, in which sense He is called the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and in general of the Hebrews;

attend also to the things that shall be thus spoken:

'He who has the Son,' he says, 'has the Father also,' and conversely, so that from this one is persuaded of the consubstantiality of the Godhead;

for since the Father is in the Son, he who has the Son has the Father also;

but again it also is convertible:

he who has the Father has also the Son, who is in the Father;

if anyone, wishing to raise an objection, should say:

'He also who has the disciples has the Son, and he who has the Son has the Father, according to the saying:'

'He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me' — though not in the manner one who resists it supposes;

for these words were spoken concerning teaching;

since he who received the apostles, by assent to their teaching, received through them the Son and the Father as teachers.

For inasmuch as he who abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son, and the apostles abode in the teaching so as even to proclaim it, he who received them, they being a temple of God, has, through the very act of receiving them, the Son and the Father who are in them.

(...) Since there is no fellowship of light with darkness, nor concord of Christ with Belial, he who does good both in deed and in contemplation, having Christ as God who is the true Light, is far from the darkness and from Belial;

but since doing evil is contrary to doing good, the evildoer, by the very fact of so acting, being of Belial and of the darkness, has not seen God, nor has he any measure of knowledge of him;

for everyone who sins has not seen God, nor known him;

and since seeing or not seeing a body is recognized by the use or non-use of sight — the sensible object being visible even to the evildoer, if he possesses sight, but unseen by one deprived of sight, even if he be a doer of good — it follows incontrovertibly that in those to whom he is at once revealed, if indeed he is beheld by the doer of good because of his having a pure heart even though he lacks sight, he is nonetheless unseen by the evildoer, however sharp-sighted the latter may be.

It is evident that these are contraries, and therefore cannot coexist — I mean doing good and doing evil — and this also from the text:

'Turn away from evil and do good,' and from passages written to like effect.

(...) Certain impious men, employing flattery together with sorcery in dealing with the divine teaching, crept in by feigning it — men foreordained, that is, foreknown, unto this judgment, which they incurred against themselves, being given over to a reprobate mind;

these, through their surpassing impiety being licentious men, turned the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ into lasciviousness, and by the very act of their lewdness denied the only Master, Jesus Christ, the Lord of those who were called through the gospel;

then, in order to turn the faithful away from such wicked and impious men, he shows, so far as it is possible, the greatness of the Master whom they denied, by declaring that it is he who led the people out of Egypt, so as even to hold out salvation to them;

but since some of them were fickle and inconstant, still bearing the harm they had contracted in Egypt, he destroyed them in the wilderness when they disbelieved, although they had been saved out of Egypt through faith;

may it not be, then, that these are the hypocrites of the divine teaching, the leaders of the heresy of the Nicolaitans, who overlook no form of licentiousness?

For the followers of Simon Magus too perform shameful — nay, exceedingly shameful — things, supposedly in a mystical manner;

and besides these, the followers of Marcion and of Valentinus, and the Sethians.

(...) And since they practice shameful deeds under the pretext of religion, he said that they change the grace of the Lord into lasciviousness, by which lasciviousness and its works they deny the only Master and Lord of us, Jesus Christ.

(...) It has, at any rate, been said before this concerning him, that he is true God, this only Master and Lord Jesus Christ, who brought up the people out of Egypt through Moses;

it follows that the God of Moses is no other;

for neither is there any other beside the Trinity;

wherefore Moses is seen to minister to him, according to the text:

'He wrote concerning me';

'We have found Jesus, of whom Moses wrote';

on which account also, foreseeing the cross spiritually, he counted the reproach of Christ to be the greatest wealth — none other than he who says:

'Far be it from me to glory save in the cross of the Lord Jesus.'

(...) Now the phrase 'foreordained unto this judgment' he uses in the sense of 'foreknown.'

(...) That is, 'foreknown,' just as, to be sure, the things concerning Judas were also written beforehand.

(...) He called them, then, 'waterless clouds' because they do not have the word of the Spirit which waters the God-loving souls, becoming in them a fountain of water springing up unto eternal life.

(...) He says this because, again, the righteous are compared to shady olive trees and indeed to fruit-bearing vines;

he says, therefore, that these are certain fruitless and autumn trees, that is, bare of both leaves and fruits.

(...) Having put the soul to death by a licentious life and impiety, and by wicked doctrines;

for since before their faith they had died in impiety, and then, coming to the gospel, they lived, but again, giving themselves over to impiety and pleasure, they died;

on this account, then, he says that they have died twice.

(...) Even if, imitating their own leader Satan, who fashions himself into an angel of light, they too wish to transform themselves into teachers of truth — concerning whom it is said:

'among whom ye shine as luminaries in the world, holding forth the word of life';

yet nonetheless they are deceivers, falsifying the truth with the licentiousness of their blasphemies, and afterward they shall be punished with gloom and murk and darkness — which is the outer darkness — that which has been prepared for Satan and for his angels.