Hamartigenia

Preface

Two brothers, young men, a digger and a shepherd, the first sons whom the first of women bore, set at the altar, from the fruits of their labours, the firstfruits of their gifts to be consecrated to God. The one offers things of the earth, the other living things; with rival vow, discordant, they sacrifice, the one the young of a sheep, but the other of the furrow. God approved the offering of the younger, and rejected that which the elder had prepared. Behold, a voice sent from the supreme throne resounds: "Cain, be still; for if you offer rightly, yet do not divide the offerings by a right rule, your perverse vows will have drawn down dark guilt." Then the brother arms his parricidal hand, envious of the approved holiness; he breaks his brother's neck with a bent hoe, and stains the new-made world with impious slaughter, to be atoned at last, when it had grown old, by the sacred blood of Christ, by which the murderer fell. The first death began with the wound of the innocent, and then gave way, the guiltless one being wounded. Risen through crime, it was dissolved by crime, because what struck Abel first, struck Christ thereafter; and it too was ended, seeking one who had no share in its end. Therefore the ancient tale began from things to come, and by the first deed the last was foreshadowed, so that that rustic, the initiator of death, bearing to God the insipid offerings of the earth, and reckoning the God of dead things, believed that what the rake had gathered was worthy of the rites, the cruel rival of a living victim. I recognize, indeed, whom this figure marks, who is the fratricide, who the envious murderer who wickedly divides the discipline of the sacred, while he judges that he sacrifices his vows more rightly. Marcion, image of the most corrupt field, teaches that the Duality differs from the Spirit, offering the gifts of contaminated flesh and worshipping the eternal godhead apart. Who, if he were still and did not neglect the one who warns, quiet brotherhood would love peace, having confessed one and living God of the living. This man, dedicating himself to a perishable mystery, profane, divides the supreme substance; as if of two gods he gives over the realm of evil and good, the two sceptres to two Gods, believing him to be God whom he confesses worst. Bloody Cain, envious of unity, tiller of the world, squalid sacrificer, whose offering is foul and savours of earth, the earth of the perishable body, the rotting vein, clotted with thick moisture and dust, whose nature flourishes by fertile fraud, fruitful, pouring out the crimes of the harmful, and slays the soul's life by the stain of the flesh. The flesh directs its weapons, its mind, against the sister; the mind is winnowed in the drunken brain, whence it gathers up sodden frenzies, soaked with the maddening poison of the body. He cleaves the eternal God into two Gods, he dares to cut the indivisible godhead. She falls slain, denying one God, Cain triumphs over the breath by the death of his brother.

The Origin of Sin

Whither does your madness drive you, treacherous Cain, blasphemous divider of God? Is one founder not clear to you, and do the clouds of a cloven light grow dim? The insincere sight is ever scattered through two divisions, its vision deceived in twin figures. The twofold form of the earth deceives you, so that, witless, you believe a divided God reigns above the upper air. This sordid world heaps up the twin distinctions of good and evil, but heaven obeys one Lord. The heavenly things do not hold two kings for the reason that there are two works that drive human cares. The outer man is earthly, who, beholding such things, infers that there are two godheads of varied things. While he thinks him God who once fashioned the depraved, and him who likewise, founding, brought in the right, he supposes both to be supreme Gods of unlike nature. What nature, after all, can stand twofold or reign for long, which a fount divided from the height separates, and cuts back by an alternating sway of summits? Either there is one God, to whom belongs the supreme power of things, or what are now two are diminished by an unequal sum, since nothing is supreme save the one in full strength; because, standing apart, while each claims his own authority by a torn-off rule, they can do neither all nor the whole. A varied right is not full, since the one does not have whatever the unlike has; division plucks at the sum. We testify that God is full, without part, and one, in whom Christ is, himself also full and one, who thrives and has thriven above all things and will thrive, having allowed no partner by a shared covenant. The Father is the sum of powers, the dominion of things, the lofty head of virtues, the sole fount of the world, the natural apex, author of race and of origin; from whom all things flow, both light and times and years and number, which after something gave being to a second; for one is the prince of number, nor can one alone be numbered. So, since the Father is, and there is no other God, likewise Christ is not second to his Begetter, he is prior to number, whose only Son is to him alone. He is God, and rightly God, because first and one, first in his own power, then first in him whom he begot — for what does a simple begetting differ? There will ever be one who begets, and one from one begotten before chaos, free of number and of time. Who would dare to have said that two reign in one majesty, a thing reigning each its own and perennial backward, and to cut away the strength of a single nature? Did the Begetter take to himself an adopted one, that the other should supply the number of two of an alien race and bring in a twin and distinct godhead? The form of the true Father, the true Son stands, and rightly proves himself one while he keeps the same form; no adopted love unites them, nor does a sworn faith join the two, but sure affection and one race, which is God, is recalled to one sum. This way, Marcion, displeases you; this faith your sect condemns, having parted heaven between two lords. What clouds confound you? What sleep broods over your idle wit, to which through phantoms a double appearance comes, scattered from above by a forked path? If dull stupor besets the force of your mind, look at least upon the elements before your earthly eyes, by which the hidden thing of God has deigned to reveal itself in signs. This heresy the foreseeing majesty of the Father had foreseen of old: that there would be one to cleave the ruler of light and the world into parts, doubled by a divided realm. Therefore he set a visible token and example before our eyes, lest anyone believe in two godheads. . . . Through the immense vault of heaven one flame affords the revolving days, one sun has woven the year; yet it is threefold, by no distinction, three-fold, upheld by a triple principle: it thrives, shines, flies, burns, is driven by motion, scorches with heat, then gleams with light. There are three things, surely, at once — light and heat and quickening — yet one and the same wheel of the star fulfils these undivided, keeps so many offices in one drawing, and one substance underlies, mingled, the three things. I would not dare to set anything before God as if comparable, nor to compare a servant sign with the Lord; but from the least the Father himself willed men to conjecture his greatness, who cannot behold the lofty. We mark in the mirror of small things what is not understood, and it is granted to seek the hidden truth through what is near. No one ever saw two suns save under a cataract, or, if a dusky veil has spread over the serene sky, as often as the opposing cloud scatters the darts of rays, the fire struck back, into counterfeit orbs. Minds too have their own clouds and a thick air, there is a cataract that veils the sight with a watery covering, lest free meditation pierce the tender heaven and grasp the one God with swift senses; the unsound intent is scattered into forked lights, and builds double altars to twin authors. If there are two, then why are there not many thousands of Gods? Why is the Godhead content with a twin number? Was it not better to pour swarms of Gods, dispersed among the peoples, and to fill the capacious world everywhere with demigod monsters, with no distinction, to which fierce barbarism sacrifices honours soon to perish? If discordant godheads hold a divided heaven, it is fitting too to assign their own Gods to clouds and founts and to the resounding ocean and forests and hills and caves, to rivers, winds, furnaces, and metals, each its own rights. Or, if it is foul to worship the heathen shades and it pleases that there be two, equal with allied sceptres, say, come, who holds the lands by the lot of his sway, who rules the sea-storms by eternal law, declare the distinct right of the co-heir lords. "One," you say, "sits sublime in a grim citadel, author of wickedness, God of crimes, harsh, unjust, who sowed whatever evil seethes in the vicious world, and, doctoring new seeds with serpent sap, drew the beginning of things from the kindling of death. He, the maker of the world, made the earth, sea, stars, he founded man and compacted his muddy limbs, fashioning what disease should eat, what should be foul with much crime, what the tomb should dissolve in shapeless decay. But the other has love of piety and a calm genius for healing, restoring men, saving mortal things. Two Testaments flowed from each prince: the better one handed down the new, the harsh one that old." This, Marcion, is your grave and dialectical speech, nay, this is the manifest frenzy of a stunned brain. We know there is a father of crimes, but we know that he is by no means God; nay rather, a bondman of Gehenna, who is to be condemned to Stygian Avernus, the Marcionite God, grim, fierce, a plotter, lofty of crown, whose serpent-bearing head, girt with black clouds, is crowded with smoke and fire, who suffuses his livid eyes with burnt gall, envy, unable to bear the joys of the just. A thick mane covers his shaggy shoulders with wandering water-snakes, and green horned vipers lick his mouth. He himself, with his hand, recalls the nooses bent back through slippery threads into a knot, and with easy binding ties the twisted fetters and stretches the cords into bonds. His art is to catch wild beasts, to ensnare the brute animals with nets, in short to set the unseen toils in dark places against the wandering prey. This is that fierce hunter, who with frequent slaughter does not cease to strike the unwary souls, Nimrod, who circles the world, bristling with curved windings and wooded crags, with crafty cunning, attacking to ensnare some by fraud and hidden wiles, and others, wrestling with giant arms, to break, and to wage funereal triumphs far and wide. Wicked death, to what do you not force mortal breasts? Man himself — alas, the shame! — the prince of life despised, worships his own ruin, himself reveres the bloody executioner, and, to be slaughtered, adores the sword's edge, so far, to wretches caught by the nectar of sin, is it sweet to die, so great in the darkness is pleasure of that plague! He who begot evils at the beginning is thought to be God, and he who infected the good with vices, the bright with black! Equal is the madness of those whom report hands down to have consecrated the goddesses Fever and Scab in dedicated shrines. The inventor of vice is not God: a degenerate angel created that, conceived in an infamous mind, who once shone, an august star, and a vast splendour out of nothing burned with nourished honour. For all things backward are out of nothing, and what is made anywhere; but not out of nothing is God and true Wisdom and the Holy Spirit, a thing ever living and never begun, but which also fashioned airy ministers. Of their number a certain one, most beautiful of face, fierce in majesty, while, swollen with excessive powers, he is puffed up, while, vastly swelling, he lifts himself higher and displays his fires more boastfully than was allowed, persuaded himself that he, born of his own powers, had taken material from himself, by which first he might begin to be, and that his own beginning was born without a source. Hence a school meditates begetting a hushed sect, which teaches that a sudden tyrant flashed from the darkness, who, as if lurking under eternal night, backward had lived and ever reigned in a hidden age. A rival, as they tell, suddenly to corrupt the divine works, brought forth his head from the black gloom. But our reason denies this, to which it is not allowed to weaken the one faith, which is handed down in the sacred book. "Nothing," it says, "was made apart from God, but all through him, all, nor is there any other except one made by him." But, made good of stock, brought forth for the use of goodness and serene from the first fount of his race, he soon became worse of his own accord, while discoloured envy infects him and goads him with bitter stings. For a spark of hatred blazed from the kindling of jealousy, and a sudden grief inflamed his wicked genius. He had seen the clay image and the structure grow warm by the breath of God, and the lord too set over the creation, that the nature of soil and sea and sky, serving man, might know how to pour a rich offspring and to assign what was poured forth to the earthly king. The beast puffed up the swelling with the leaven of a churning mind, and, embittered, drew strength from his sour marrow; the beast, free of filth, to whom then wisdom of a long body, upright, kept a smooth youth, behold, folds new coils in his winding breast, wrapping his gleaming belly in twisting spires. The tongue, simple before, now flickers with varied art of speaking, and, split with deceits, resounds in three-forked speech. Hence the natal head of vices; from that prince flowed the origin of evil, who learned to corrupt himself first, then man, with no master teaching him. Last, the world, its guardian overthrown, draws by lot its ruin, and all the world's furniture is undermined, no otherwise than when a robber, by chance attacking to despoil an unwary traveller, first heedless of plunder, strikes the master himself with his sword, the knot and delay of the fight, that, he perishing, the victor may carry off the captive garments, the plunderer now rich from the body that no longer resists. So the household subject to man, the richest world, indeed, the lord sinning, fell into an easy ruin, and, already then corruptible, drank in its master's evil. Then to bear darnel and the light burrs through the adulterated tilth the malignant field dared, with badly-rich clods, and violated the wheaten crop with empty oat-grass; then too the fierce lions, the shepherd slain, learned to feed on the harmless blood of calves, and now with their jaws to tear the bullocks tamed to the yoke; and the wolf, provoked by the complaining bleatings, strove to break by night into the full sheepfolds; every animal, skilled in the cunning of dire theft, was steeped, and craft sharpened the twisted senses. Though a wall surround the flowering gardens, and the vineyard fields be hedged with thick fences, either the ravaging caterpillar eats the gemming buds, or the grape, torn by fierce birds, is mangled. Why should I tell that the fibres of herbs, dyed with healing poison, poured forth the perils of death-bearing sap? A harmful savour, behold, seethes in the tender shrubs, though nature first bore harmless hemlocks, and the dewy flower that clothes the green oleander gave pure pasture to the wanton she-goats. The very elements too, the sure covenant destroyed, overstep the set bound, and snatch and rush, all things shaking the world with law-breaking force. The battles of the north winds break the shadowy groves, and the forest, uprooted by excessive storms, falls. In another part the river, violent with rushing waters, leaps the opposing banks, the appointed barriers, and, wandering, holds wide sway over the overturned fields. Yet not so great a madness for these, at their birth, did the founder himself appoint, but the loose licence of things troubled the calm laws, the rein of order broken. Nor is it a wonder if the limbs of the world, shaken, are whirled, if the worldly machine, driven by its own vices, labours, if a plague's incentive wearies the lands: the life of men gives the example by which the rest sin, the life of men, to whom whatever madness and error do supply, that wars may roar, that fluid pleasure may dissolve, that lust may seethe with impure fire, that the gulf of avarice with its wide jaws may swallow heaps of coins, which no end of having tempers, adding vows to the heaped-up talents; for the hunger of gold grows greater from the gold won. Hence the harvest of crimes, the sole root of evils, while it strains out all the gushings of rivers and the hidden metals, adornment, the procurer of chastity to be sold, while ambition, foolish, scrutinizes the veins of the squalid earth, scratching at the secrets of lurking nature, if perchance, having probed, it may find shining gems in some pits — for not content with its inborn beauty, the woman counterfeits an external form, and, as if the hand of the Lord, the craftsman, gave an unfinished face, which still some pearl or jacinth must paint, on the height of her brow girt with sewn gems, or to gird her pure neck with fiery garlands, or to hang green pearls from her heavy ears, and the white pebble of shells is knotted in her gleaming hair, and her braided locks stiffen with golden chains. It wearies me to run through the sacrilegious cares of mothers, who stain the creatures of God, dowered with his gifts, with dye, so that the skin, smeared with pigments, may lose what it was, not to be recognized in its false colour. This the sex, ill-strong, does, in whose narrow breast the frail mind floats on the easy tide of vices. What of this, that the very head and king of the woman's body, who rules the weak particle cut from his own flesh, who governs the tender vessel by his sway, dissolves into luxury? You might see grown soft with finery old heroes, whose harsh limbs the maker had shaped and stiffened, their joints hardened with bones, but they are ashamed to be men; they seek all the vainest things by which they may gleam, that the smooth may loose their inborn strength, and rejoice to take, not from the fleece of sheep, but from the spoils of branches sought from the Eastern world, their flowing garments, and to drench the hard body in chequered patterns. Art is added, that threads, saturated with recooked herbs, may mock varied forms in the distinct warp, and whatever down of a beast is softest to the touch is combed. This one you might see hunting wanton tunics in swift course, and weaving feathered coverings of party-coloured birds too with new looms; that one foully sprinkling the airs with feminine, fragrant pigments and with foreign powder. Luxury has all the quickenings of our life, fixing in the five senses what the author founded; in ears and eyes, then nostrils and palate, a corrupt use, infected with vicious arts, is sought; even touch itself, which prevails over the whole body, seeks a tender caress from soothing comforts. O grief! that the noble laws of nature should be overthrown, and the gifts dragged captive while lust reigns! Every perverse right thrives, while what the Almighty had given to be held they turn to contrary pursuits. Is it for this, I ask, that the watchful pupil is set beneath a soft eyelid, that it may see the base limbs of half-men borne in theatrical whirling, defiling the wretched eyes with foul delight? Or is it for this that the nostrils breathe, and from the middle height of the brain send down their twin joined holes, that ill-reconciled pleasure may drink in the allurements which the wicked harlot casts from her pigmented hair? Did God add open ears for the sake of the empty modulations of a lyre-playing girl, the sounds of strings, and the convivial song of heating wickedness, and bid the way of the voice penetrate through the cavernous passages? Does the savour placed in the moist mouth live for this cause, that doctored dishes may bait the sluggish gullet and the lively throat of the glutton, that the meal, furnished through various tastes, may draw on into the night, and its own surfeit weary the heavy belly? What was hard, what soft, what smooth, what rough, what hot or cold, God willed us to know by touch, with the sense of feeling as interpreter, but we spread the delicacies of feathers and linen webs and polish the skin with a cushion that softens. Happy he who could use the granted gifts moderately and keep a sparing measure of enjoyment, whom the rich appearance of the world and its pleasant grace and the abundance flowing round, deceiving with gleaming things, does not take, like a boy, nor consign to foolish love, who, beneath the shadowed sweetness, detects the grim poison lurking in the cover of a lying good. But this was once for us holy and good at the beginning of things, when Christ founded the world, for God saw that it was good, as Moses himself, the historian of the new-born world, has testified: "God saw," he says, "that whatever he created was good." This I will follow, this conceived I will hold with steadfast mind, which, God inspiring, the holy seer declared, recalling the beginnings of the ancient light: that whatever God and Wisdom made is good. The founder of good, then, is the Father, and with the Father Christ, for it is God, and the Father is God and the Son are one; indeed, nature makes them one, which stands for both one in will, in right, in power, in love, yet not for that reason two godheads nor two craftsmen of things, since there is no dissension of race, and therefore there is no distance of work, none of genius; one founder bore all good things. Nothing of clay flows from the fount, nor is a turbid humour born, nor is it violated by the origin of the first vein, but while the uncorrupt liquor fore-licks the livid sands, it grows foul amid rotting contagions. Did the horse, iron, bull, lion, rope, oil have in themselves the force of crime when they were formed? That a man is slaughtered, the iron is not the cause of the madness but the hand; nor does the fervid frenzy of the circus have the horse as the author of its levity or its rabid uproar: the mind of the crowd, void of reason, not the racing of the horses, rages utterly: by an infamous zeal a useful gift perishes. So we know that the Lacedaemonian wrestling-grounds were soaked with oil, and the calm liquor served for crimes; thence, hanging by an airy rope, audacity climbs the lofty stages with axe-bearing soles, thence rash bodies will cross the wild beasts in winged leap and sport amid the perils of death. Public consent gives spectacles of human blood, and the laws bid a venal punishment be prepared, by which the limbs of men, torn with bloody bites, may delight the crowd glad at death. A thousand other reveling joys of the foolish world it wearies me to recount, which, forgetful of the true Thunderer, roll on the human age with wretched errors. No one rouses his mind, mindful of the supreme Begetter, on high, no one sends sighs to heaven, nor, recalling the height of his natal throne, looks back to the author himself, nor weighs his hope above the air, but, subjecting his mind, content to snore in heavy cares, to an unworthy lord, prone he loves things doomed to perish and seeks earthly things with his bent sense. This fair thing which the earth bears, which slippery glory confers, which ruinous pleasure commends, which, like a wind stirred by scattered dust, passes by, which flits like a thin shadow's likeness, with these the mighty plunderer presses the sick souls with the plagues of diseases, whom, infused with silent powers, the hearts of men drink in; he sows to the marrow all wickednesses and scatters his ministers through the limbs. For there a numerous cohort under such a prince makes war and besieges souls with dreadful arms: Anger, Superstition, Mourning, Discord, Grief, the black Thirst of Blood, the Thirst of wine and the Thirst of Gold, Envy, Adultery, Guile, Detraction, Theft, of shapeless faces they bristle and are menacing in mien. Windy Ambition swells, Learning grows proud, Eloquence resounds, hidden Fraud ties its knots. Thence dog-like Glibness barks through the whole forum, hence cheap Wisdom wields a Herculean club, and displays its gymnosophists street by street; Idolatrous Religion waxes the smoky stones and, pale, grovels before deaf altars. Alas, with how many armour-bearers the wicked foe presses the mortal race, with how great a henchman, iron-clad, the leader wages war, with how great a sway he triumphs over the conquered! The Canaanite rises to his aid and thickens the ranks, terrible with his helmet, shaking the weight of bristles on his chin and brandishing his right hand with its heavy point. But from another part the raging army of the Amorite king burns; then the thousands of the Girgashites pour out their line, flitting over the whole field; these strike from afar, those clash hand to hand. Behold, the Jebusite squadrons seethe to the battle, whose golden weapons, dyed with the blood of the dragon, gleam with deadly splendour and shine and slay. And it pleases you, Hittite, to arm with javelins the terrific bands; but the Perizzite nation with arrows leaps on, with equal valour, but with unequal iron. Last the king advances the company of the Hivites, wearing a scaly breastplate of serpent's skin. Propped on these men, the perverse power of crimes tames the weak minds, which, untaught by their simplicity and rude in war, under the false covenant of grim friendship first believe the bands their allies, and follow the Mammon-faith under the love of peace. Soon, easy to be snatched into chains, willing the hard yokes, they go beneath them with surrendered necks, and choose to serve the fierce commands of the rascal spirits. That man, enlarging his patrimony with superfluous estates and gaping for the neighbouring fields, the boundary scorned, is led, bound with manacles and a thousand chains, revinced behind his back, before the triumphal cars, nor does he feel himself given over to barbarian reins. This man, who climbs the heights of windy fame and is puffed up by the hollow honour of popular pomp, who thinks the highest and solid good is to grow by the success of ambition — to make the trembling guilty die at the heralds' voice, to break the fasces upon the bodies of the wretched, to wield the terrible axes of the laws — has now given his neck to the noose, now is tied with hard fetters and files servile bonds with his feet. Believe it, captive mortals, whom now hostile prison-houses confine condemned, whom, in the servitude of punishments, virtue, not understood, restrains: this is that Babylon, this the transmigration of our race, and the horrible victory of the prince of Assyria, which Jeremiah, weeping with mournful song, wailed as a city bereaved of its own citizens. Is it hidden, or is it doubtful, that the souls from the seed of Jacob suffer a heathen exile, which the Persian realms hold captive and force into their own covenants? There they grow unaccustomed to live by their native rite, and, stripped of their fathers' manners into barbarian laws, degenerate, and follow a new tongue and dress, and learn to grow foul from a profaned worship, and abolish from their wanton breast their nurse Zion. Now it irks them to remember their homeland, now they break the mystic instruments and praise the anathemas of a foreign realm. Was it not better that the fathers had borne the savage rule of the Memphian court, and had sat deeply by sinister hearths, set beneath the feet of unjust Pharaoh, ready to serve in clay and chaff, raw with the foul belching of immoderate flesh? For this how much aid through prodigious signs the Lord poured out, while perchance he saves the rebel people by undeserved help, while he looses from chains the subjected necks and curbs Egypt with the serpent rod? What does it profit to have trodden, the sea giving way, the watery deep by a dusty road, when the rocks, conscious of the sea, lay open, betrayed beneath an unknown sky, and the thirsty mud dried in the midst of the gulf, if the army, victor by the power of God, once cleaving the midmost darkness with the pillar of light, has lost the rich valley of the cluster it found, if it knows not how to turn the soil whose loamy clod, flowing with perennial honey, mingles snowy streams, if it suffers Jericho, tamed by clarions and ringing bronze, to rise again into its ancient walls, if it is driven from the banks of the refluent Jordan and now deserts the lot allotted, measured into acres, in short if it cannot defend the city built with so much sweat, and the roofs that overtop the cloud-born storms, if it knows not what that stone is which withstands the foes, the inexpugnable defence of the tower, which no engine with brazen beak batters, leaping on, nor do iron blows shake? This corner is at the head of the gate, this holds the whole course of the stones and makes firm the built thresholds, which whoever rightly knows to have been set in his own walls through the bulwarks, and girds himself and his ramparts with a triple wall, standing afar in a lofty citadel, trusting in the love of the rock, with chaste and ever-watchful arms, him neither the queen of Tyre, nor the Parthian, dweller by the great Euphrates, shall snatch, nor the dark Indian, his black temples wreathed with feathered arrows, nay, if, driving the lightning-giants to war, the alien tyrant should wish to destroy your camp, you will be safe, nor will he move you from your firm station, that very Charon of the world, the godhead of Marcion, himself, who rules the empty shadows beneath the airy sun, for whatever the sun beholds is empty; of dissoluble elements all things consist, of a fluid creation. I am wrong, unless the teacher apostle, beginning that every creature is subjected, not of its own will, to vain labours, groaned, pitying that it serves a perjured robber: "He errs," he says, "who thinks that the struggle for us is with blood and flesh and seething veins and vicious gall, and that the soul sins in the hot marrow. His own limbs do not press the mind, nor does an iron force assail the liquid senses or provoke them to war, but with the dark spirits night and day we contend, to whose dominions this humid air, thick with sluggish mists, obeys." That is, this middle space, which lies open between heaven and the depths of earth, and hangs the clouds in an empty gap, holds the reins of various powers, and under the prince Belial bristles with unjust governors. With these plunderers we wrestle, as the sacred sentence of the apostolic mouth reveals to us as witness. Let no one, sinning, accuse the state of nature, or the provocations of the body; it is easy to bridle the rebellious passions of the flesh and to blunt the excessive impulses of the frail matter and to tame the conquered vitals. For the mind, far more excellent, as being sent down from the supreme upper air, if it wills to shake the subject limbs by a heavy rule and to give them over to stern commands, no force will resist the reigning lord. A greater force is in man, which casts in the breath-borne poison and strikes the slender mind with slender air. The Parthian reed does not so equally run across the winds, whose path no sight can grasp; for while, swift, it flies across the airy gusts with its wings, it comes unforeseen, nor does its hiss announce the coming of death before it breaks the hidden parts of the breast, penetrating the untroubled life with a doctored wound; but more winged and more doctored is the arrow which the slippery domination of the shadowy world casts, eluding the eyes when shot, and driving the inmost recesses of the heart with the swift course of the flying shaft. Nor is the nature of the soul sluggish or slow to beware a wound, since God put in it a fiery genius, pure, wise, subtle, serene, mobile, anxious, swift, restless, keen, provided that, chaste, it worship its maker and fight for him and, sober, trample the conquered world, offering nothing of the pestilent riches or the falsified spoils of the lands for foolish delight, lest, lying beneath an alien burden and given over to a foreign realm, it cannot avoid the keen arrows of the foe. But why do I twist every evil of the world and of the malignant foe of men to its envy, when our evils, compacted from our own minds, take their kind and head and force, what they are, what they can do, from the parent heart? He indeed is the kindling and the cause of our evils, but he can trouble or deceive only so much as we will, who give heaped-up weapons to a decrepit lion: the beast, gnashing in vain, grows cold, unless it swells by the suffrages of the human race. We beget every evil of our own from our own body, as David, an excellent father otherwise, begot one crime, Absalom; that father begot a foul, but one, parricide among innocent offspring, who dared to draw the sword against the author of his race — alas, the piety! — and led standards against his father's standards and joined the arms of one blood. Likewise our breasts, the offspring burning, bring forth grim sons, who, their bites straightway turned upon us, grow wont to live by the punishments of those who begot them; for they ravage the too fruitful vitals of their parents and are nourished by the destruction of their begetting stock. But he, as supreme king and prophet of God and author of the virgin who should bear, had varied his own progeny with grim and pious ones, so that Solomon's brother Absalom might sow his crimes among just pledges, and trouble the sweet house with bitter ones. Nothing worthy of Solomon fills us; the degenerate Absalom alone fills us, tearing the pious vitals with iron. If it is allowed to take anything from morals, or if some example from natural philosophy, so the viper, as they say, dies by the teeth of her offspring poured through her vitals, the mother by her own death, fertile not by sex or by intercourse, her womb distended, but when she burns with fire, roused by feminine ardour, she thirsts for her doomed mate with open obscene mouth; he inserts his three-tongued head into his wife's jaws, and, fervid, enters with kisses, instilling by the union of mouths the generative venom, the bride, wounded by the force of pleasure, biting, breaks the throat of her lover amid the soothing covenants and drinks the infused salivas with the flesh perishing. By these allurements the father is consumed, but the mother the enclosed offspring slays; for after, the seed matured, the little bodies begin in their hot hiding-places to creep and to strike the stirred womb with quivering motion, the mother seethes with the inward crime of her affection and groans, conscious of her condemned sex, at the executioner offspring, breaking the barriers of the enclosed birth, for since no way of birth lies open, the womb, tortured by the offspring straining into the light, is plucked apart and opens a way through the torn flanks; at last, at the death of the nurse, that flock of sorrows comes forth, hardly having struggled out the entrance of life and its rise, carving out a way through crime; the crawling whelps lick the natal corpse, while the bereaved brood is born, not having known the day, except of its wretched, posthumous mother. Not unlike is the conception of our mind: from the viperous mouth she thus drinks in the instilled poison, her spouse a son of Belial, thus she devours the kisses with a draught and snatches them within, thus, burning with the gall of lust, she is filled with vices, mingled with her doomed husband, then pregnant, conceived, she bears a deadly race, the work of the malignant's genius, from the seed of the partner serpent; which it is needful first to pay for with punishments, her deeds, for the defilement of the corrupted soul and for the world destroyed. The soul itself, moreover, cruel wounds tear with a thousand childbirths, while she brings forth offspring from herself begotten against nature, frequent sins, that is, and sons fed by the death of their mother. Hence is that just rebuke of the Lord Christ: "Is not the demon your father, you sinners, I reproach, did the iniquitous seed of thirsting flesh, by intercourse, beget you?" Reader, scan the holy volume: what I say, you will find that the Lord said to the profane, charging true things against mortals: "For that you are born of my Father, piety itself," he says, "would prove, and the work of piety." O blind lust! What is this, that, though the good mind knows itself betrothed to a just marriage-bed, and is called, about to wed, into the bed of the King — the King ever young, old age driven off, keeping divine beauty in his eternal face — it prefers adultery, and for tawny gift sells itself cheap to the foul embraces of the night-dwelling Indian, having spurned the offspring of God poured through the virgin's limbs, and calling its sweet sons in a brothel? I feel how the snare moves a quarrel against me, with what tooth thorny calumny, struggling, fights, and calls us, the truth provoked, to the wrestling. "If God does not wish there to be evil, why does he not forbid it?" he says. "It is no matter whether he were author and maker of evils, or whether the fairest works are turned to the vice of crime, when, though he could forbid it, he allows it; who, if the Almighty willed, could make all innocent, nor would the holy will degenerate, nor would the hand stain itself with any deed. The Lord, then, founded the evil which he beholds from on high and suffers and approves to be done, as if he himself created it; for he himself created what, when he could shut it out, he does not abolish, and suffers to spread by long use." Stop my ears, kind Father, and close the passages of my brutish head, lest, passable, such windings should conceive these sounds; it is worth so much to lose an extinguished office of life from a part of the brain, if only the happy soul, unscathed and free of the unspeakable hearing, may keep itself from the stupid ear. Who could bear these insults cast at God, who remembers that he excels, ennobled with divine gifts? To pass over much, even this one thing proves God kindly, that men slain by love of the forbidden he raises from the tombs and bids to be partakers of his kingdom forever. Who, if he were the author and preserver of evil, would never, after the loss of salvation and the death of sinners, wish to bring a reviving cure and restore the lost by a second help. For man to fall is man's, to save is God's: that one perishes by his deserts, the other abolishes the work of the perishing and dissolves his desert, a mighty argument that the Lord, who affords such things, does not wish evil, nor approves before what he afterward washes away. "Can anyone sin against the Thunderer's will, to whom it is easy to compose in the heart of man what senses he pleases, and to quicken all the fibres with chaste pulses and to pour the whole honourable into the veins?" You know not, fool, that the force of your liberty was given by the Former himself? You know not from the origin how great a power was granted to you, a servant, over the world, and over your own genius, free, loosed from the law of an unrestrained will, to whom it is allowed to wish and to follow what is pleasing, and to subject the mind to no chain? Or, when he made you lord of all, whatever he had created, and bade the world serve your commands, and when he gave you the fields, the sky, the sea, the rivers, the winds, would he, grudging, refuse to entrust to you the judgment of yourself, as to one unworthy, and deny you liberty? What sort of thing was it, that one chosen to be king of the great world should not be king of himself, disgraced with a curtailed honour? For what honour is there of a lord whose mind is not free, but one sentence serves the imposed law? What praise, moreover, of a man, or what merit, to live justly without a sure distinction between the two ways? He does not become good willingly to whom there is no ready power to will another thing and to turn the bent senses of the mind, and yet neither good nor praiseworthy is he who is not good willingly, since from forced uprightness no glory comes, and inglorious virtue is foul; nor yet is it virtue, unless, refusing the worse things, it flash forth and seek the right way with a better disposition. "Go," says the very parent and craftsman and founder of Adam, "go, man, most noble by the breath of our mouth, unsubjected, mighty, arbiter of things, the same arbiter and judge of your own mind, to be subject to me alone of your own accord, that subjection itself, by a free judgment loosed, may be free; I do not force nor exact by violence, but I warn you to flee the unjust and follow the just. Light is the companion of the just, grim death the companion of the unjust; choose the thing of life; let your virtue bear you forward into eternity, let your fault in turn condemn you forever, and let the licence permitted afford either lot." By this affection wandering and abounding in so great a gift, he transgresses the appointed right, and, prudent and willing, chooses the deadly, while he believes more useful to himself what, God forbidding, the cunning serpent persuaded. He persuaded, surely, by exhortation, not drove him by harsh command; this the woman, guilty of the crime, answered to the reproaching Lord: that, enticed by the craftily-wrought persuasions, she had persuaded the man; and the man himself willingly consented. Was it not allowed to spurn the one who urged, by the freedom of an upright mind? It was allowed; for God before had persuaded him to follow the better, willing it; but he, spurning the counsel, trusted more in the savage foe. Now between the Lord of life and the master of death he stands in the middle; hence God calls, thence the tyrant, him doubtful and alternating with his own motions. Receive the notable monuments of deeds done, with which history fore-played a remarkable sign. Lot, fleeing the burning Sodom, was hastening to withdraw with himself all the dear pledges of his house, his seat left, from the city-burning clouds, when now the air, fired with stormy brimstone, wove beneath the heaven and the crackling shower kindled the flaming day. The angel-guest had prescribed this law to them, sent out by the power of God under a double image, that the whole household should go from the gates and into the open should direct their eyes, steadfast, nor, the light turned back behind, behold the fires reigning through the walls: "Let no one, mindful of Sodom — which is the form of the world to be burnt — once he has moved his step from the walls, with face turned backward, look back at the funerals of things." Lot, wise, obeys the warnings, but his light wife, by the mobility of her mind, turned her womanish wit backward, and, recallable, clung to her own Sodom. Eve had drawn her husband to the fellowship of dire guilt: this one, sinning, perishes for herself alone; solidified to metal she stiffened, and, made fragile, a meltable stone, the woman stands, as she had stood before, keeping all things, warily moulded for long in stamped salt, both her beauty and her finery and brow and eyes and hair, and her face bent backward, and her chin a little drawn back, the stiffening monuments of the ancient fault. She indeed melts, moist with salt sweats, but feels no loss to her full form from the flowing of the dissolution, and as much as the herds of savours thin the stone, so much moisture suffices for those who lick, and reforms the worn skin through its losses. By this title the sinning woman deserved to be set, loosing her infirm and fluid mind through slippery counsels, and frail at the heavenly commands. But, against this, the unchangeable purpose of his vow Lot keeps, having entered on his way, nor does he look back at the walls fallen into ash on the high pyre, nor the people burnt and the manners of the people, the record-offices, the laws and forum, the baths, the hucksters, the lodging-houses, temples, theatres, and the circus with its crowd, and the dripping cook-shops. Whatever men do, the burnings of Sodom wrap in just fires and condemn, with Christ as judge. To have fled these once is enough; our Lot does not look back further, but his frail wife looks back, and what she had fled she revisits, changeable, her face turned about, and stands fast, hardened among her native ashes. Behold for you a marked proof of liberty, by which God willed us to know that whatever is to be followed is set under our sway, and freely left to tread either way. Two were bidden to depart from Sodom; one rushes forth, the other mutters, he hastens his step in flight, she on the contrary refuses. The mind of each is free, but the will of each unlike. Each one's own lust divides them, snatching this way and that. Many a track in the sacred books marks such an image. Look at Ruth of the Moabite nation, and Orpah at the same time: the one accompanies her mother-in-law Naomi with faithful love, the other deserts her. And yet, stripped of marriage and the wedded law and the Hebrew couches, and free for the sacred rites, they were enjoying their own right; but the former rite of the shrines persuaded Orpah to prefer the barbarian foreskins and to nurse the stock of half-wild Goliath; Ruth, while she is scorched among the stubble by the rustic heat, deserved the couch of Boaz, and, taken to a chaste bed, fruitful, brought forth a Christ-bearing house, the Davidic realms, and mingled mortal births with God. Often I myself remember that twin brothers came together to a gaping crossroads, their youth wavering, and long doubted beneath the forked track, which was the better way; when on the right a thorny wood narrowed it with brambles, and a rocky path far off led the airy track by a steep margin, but the left, a shadowy grove through pleasant green places, adorned it with rich fruits, and a broad plain gave a way lying gentle: that the one, content with squalid thorns, crept over the steep rocks, but the other indulged himself in the leftward plain; that the one mingled his head with the neighbouring stars, this one suddenly fell into the miry marshes. One nature underlies all, but the issue does not bring all to one end, by the divergent form of their choices, no otherwise than if once through the clear sky a milky cloud of doves should chance to fall, descending into the field of a fruitful country, where the cunning fowler spreads his snares and smears the twigs with clinging birdlime, and has scattered his ambushes with pods or treacherous grain, the deceiving seeds entice some, and the twisted threads' bonds ensnare the greedy gullet, or the soft glue binds round the entangled wings, but others, whom no love of eating lures, range with innocent steps in the barren grass and warily avoid to turn their eyes to the suspect food; soon, when now they must fly back to heaven, part seeks the sky, free, clapping its wings over the starry air, part lies captive and, wounded with torn feathers, fights on the ground and looks up in vain at the flying airs; so nature pours the souls, of one colour, from the founts of heaven into the soil, but there, bound by sweet allurements, they are held, and few climb the upper air, returning; many the sticky pasture baits and suffers not to run up to the higher airs. Foreseeing this, the Father kindled the livid Tartarus with liquid lead, and dug out the pitchy trenches of the infernal water with dark bitumen beneath gloomy Avernus, and ordained that beneath the Phlegethontean gulf the devouring worms should grow with perpetual punishments of crimes, for he knew that from his own breath the quickening is in our bodies, and that the soul, formed from his eternal mouth, cannot die, cannot in turn, polluted with vices, return again to the vaults of heaven, but is to be plunged deeply in the pit of the seething abyss. To worms and flames and torments he gave an immortal age, lest the punishment perish through old age, the soul not perishing; the torments pluck and feed the material given without end; death itself abandons the eternal groans and forces the weeping to live. But far off, in the regions of paradise, the rewards, the majesty knowing the future has appointed for the pure spirits and those removed from every stain, and who did not look back at the ruins of Gomorrah, but, their eyes rightly averted, behind their backs the wretched left the darknesses, the perils of the world to be fled in haste. And first they are borne to the stars in easy flight, whence the soul, flowing, had quickened the framed Adam. For because the downward weights of life do not press the slender nature, nor does an iron fetter delay it, retracing the dense air it cleaves it in swift gliding and overpasses the sky, a fervid spark, the pole remeasured, hating the prison-seats in which, an exile, it had clung. Then, returning by postliminy, hoary Faith receives her into her deep bosom and delights the nursling with tender joys, recounting with complaining mouth, after the many lodging-places of the flesh, what labours she suffered. There, her side stretched out on a purple couch, she sips fragrant odours from eternal flowers and drinks ambrosial dew from the rosy straw, and to the rich men, smoking at a long interval, thirsting for rivers and all the showers of heaven, implored, she refuses to dip her finger to the palate and to quench the points of the flames with a touch they dread. Nor wonder that, in regions far distant, the sights between the damned and the just souls run together, conspicuous, and the deserved turns are marked across the great intervals which the pole divides in the middle of the orb. He errs, whoever judges the souls of our kind by the limit of our eyes, whom the lucid veil wraps with a glassy barrier, for whom congealed humours weave a mirror and obstruct the wandering windows with overspread moisture. Are round drops rolled, with thick quickening, in the eyes of souls, or do they bristle outside with eyelid bristles, or are they covered by a shadowing lash? Theirs is a living sight, no small pupil, but a fire that pierces the cloud and penetrates the hidden of the vast. Nothing dusky or solid stands in the way of those who gaze, the nocturnal mists yield, the blackening clouds yield, the smooth field of the world stretched before yields, nor does the spirit transmit through sight only the airy gaps, but passes the opposing mountains with its light, the bounds of ocean and the last shore of Thule it drives through, and sends its flying eyes into Tartarus. For all our colours perish beneath the night to our sights, and forms are blotted out in the blind time; do souls too, stripped of limbs and flesh, lose the marks of things from their recognition, or wander in their steps? One face the souls always have, and one colour of the air, as each one's sum of merits is, of the left or right hand; nor does changeable time convert the alternate turns and vary them; long and perennial is whatever it is, one course rolls its own ages. You who have proved it, do you doubt that souls run through with sight things hidden from bodily eyes, when often, by the dew of rest, the living mind, lulled, discerns remote and distant places, stretching its sight through fields, through stars, through seas? For it does not separate itself before death from the living limbs, nor flees, an exile, the inmost parts of blood and flesh, nor strips itself from the marrow, or drives off the withdrawn life from the breast, but, remaining in its visceral seat, surveys all things with keen lights, and, where it has carried round the keen gaze of its light nature, unhindered by any barrier of things, disclosed, before its eyes it beholds the world set beneath and the squalid element placed beneath the world's mass. Meanwhile the earth lies before it, nor stands in the way of its sights. Nay, if it turn its face to the star-bearing axle, nothing running between hinders the fire of the gaze of the watchful soul, though dense clouds weigh it down and the heaven blacken with an opposing fleece. So bodily John, not yet loosed from the flesh, sees the hidden things covered with silent futures, but, by the gift of sleep, for a little while, the flesh set aside, free for the gaze, ranging with sense and eyes through the years disposed in order for the coming suns, sees the angelic array, the world now, now to be burnt, girded for its destruction, and perceives with his ear the grim bellowings of the heavy trumpets at the world's end. These things he, before the death of his limbs, hedged in the prison of his body, the soul withdrawing, not departing, saw. Will not the breath without the body mark all things the better, the body's wrappings laid up in the cold tomb? Sure faith holds that the swift furnaces of the nether night, which cook the polluted soul through long ages with perennial fire, lie exposed to the eyes of the far-removed poor man; nor less are the golden gifts of the just, the chaos dividing, and the ruddy crowns shown afar to those plunged in the prison of punishments. Hence the dweller of paradise, after the dire ulcers, blessed, is revealed; the unhappy spirit, howling in the plague of its guilt, and in turn they behold the mutual things of their merits. O all-parent God, giver of the soul, O God Christ, from whose mouth God subsists, one Spirit, by your governing I am ruled, with you as prince I lead my life, with you as judge I grow pale and tremble; with you the same judge I take hope that whatever I do will be pardonable before you, however unworthy of pardon I may do and say. I confess; dismiss it willingly and spare the confessor. Every evil I have deserved, but you, good arbiter, take away what I have deserved; favouring, grant better gifts to my soul one day, when of this body it shall have left the lodging — built of nerves, skin, blood, gall, and bones — which the corrupt inhabitant in luxury, alas, too much embracing, cherishes; when the tearful hour shall have closed these orbs, and the lamented matter shall lie, and the bare mind shall enjoy its own eyes, lest it behold some savage one of the robber race, pitiless, rabid, terrible in face and menacing voice, who may drag me, spotted with the sprinkling of my morals, headlong, like a plunderer, and plunge me, falling, into the black caverns, about to exact all, down even to the least farthing, the debts of a ruinous life. There is much dwelling in the treasures of the Father, O Christ, divided into unlike places; I do not ask a home in the blessed region; let there be the chaste bands of men, who, disdaining the dusty wealth, sought your riches; let bright virginity be there with perennial flower, its mind castrated and cut back. But for me it is enough if no face of the Tartarean minister meet me, nor the flame of greedy Gehenna devour this soul plunged in the lowest furnaces. Be it so — since thus, for the corporeal defilement, it must be — that the grim fire of Avernus swallow me in its cavern: yet at least let the slow burnings breathe mild vapours, and the heat grow lukewarm with languishing fervour; let measureless light glorify others, and times bound with crowns: let a light punishment, mercifully, scorch me.