The Slow Cure

Suppose the sun let out a voice and said, “I melt, and I dry up.” Melting and drying are opposite things, and yet the sun would not be speaking falsely, as far as the facts underneath go: it is by one and the same heat that wax is melted and mud is dried. In the same way, the single work done through Moses convicted Pharaoh of a hardness that came from his own wickedness, and at the same time showed the mixed crowd of Egyptians who set out with the Hebrews to be men who could be won over. [a]

And the record that Pharaoh’s heart was, little by little, as it were softened — when he said, “But you will not go far: you will go a three days’ journey, and leave your wives behind,” and everything else he said as he gave way bit by bit before the wonders — shows that the signs did work something even on him, though they did not accomplish the whole. And not even this much would have happened if what most people take to be the meaning of “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart” were being worked by him, that is, by God.

It is not out of place, either, to soften expressions of this kind by appealing to ordinary speech. Good masters often say to household slaves who have been spoiled by their kindness and patience, “I made you bad,” and “I am the one who has caused you to sin so badly.” We have to listen for the character of a saying and for the force it carries, and not turn prosecutor by refusing to hear what the words intend.

So Paul, having examined all this clearly, says to the sinner: “Do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God is leading you to repentance? But by your hardness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath and revelation and righteous judgment of God.”

Now let what the apostle says to the sinner be said to Pharaoh, and what was announced to him will be understood as fitting him exactly — a man who by his hardness and unrepentant heart was storing up wrath for himself. His hardness would not have been exposed like this, or made plain, if the signs had not happened; or if they had happened, but not so many of them and not so great.

But since accounts of this kind win assent slowly and are thought forced, let us see from the prophetic writings as well what those people say who have known God’s great kindness, and have not lived well, but have sinned afterward. “Why did you make us wander, Lord, from your way? Why did you harden our heart, so that we do not fear your name? Turn back for the sake of your servants, for the sake of the tribes of your inheritance, so that we may inherit a little of your holy mountain.” And in Jeremiah: “You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived; you overpowered me, and you prevailed.” [g]

For “Why did you harden our heart, so that we do not fear your name?” — said by people who are begging to be shown mercy, and said in character — comes to this: “Why did you spare us so long, not visiting us for our sins, but leaving us alone until our failures had grown to a great size?”

God leaves the greater number of people unpunished: so that each one’s character may be examined out of what is up to us, and so that the better sort may be made plain by the testing that comes. Meanwhile the rest, who escape the notice not of God — he knows all things before they come to be — but of the reasoning creatures and of themselves, may afterward find a way to be healed. They would never have known the benefit if they had not first condemned themselves. And it is to everyone’s advantage to perceive what is properly his own and what is the grace of God.

For the man who does not perceive his own weakness and the divine grace, even when good is done to him, will suppose — since he has never been put to the test and has never condemned himself — that what heavenly grace supplied to him was his own achievement. And that conceit, once it has bred a swelling of pride, will be the cause of a fall. We think this is what happened in the case of the devil, who credited to himself the advantages he had while he was still blameless. “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,” as “everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.”

And notice that this is why divine things have been hidden from the wise and the understanding — so that, as the apostle says, “no flesh may boast in the presence of God” — and have been revealed to babies: to those who have come after infancy to better things, and who remember that they have arrived at the greatest possible measure of blessedness not so much by anything of their own doing as by an unspeakable kindness.

So the man who is abandoned is abandoned by a divine judgment, and God is patient with certain sinners — not without reason, but because it will be to their advantage, with a view to the immortality of the soul and to the age that has no limit, not to be helped quickly into salvation, but to be brought to it more slowly, after they have gone through many evils. [m]

Physicians are sometimes able to cure a man quickly; but when they suspect that a hidden poison is in the body, they do the opposite of curing, and they do it precisely because they want the cure to hold. They judge it better to keep a patient a long while in inflammation and sickness, so that he may get his health back more securely, than to seem to set him on his feet quickly and then have the trouble break out again, so that the faster cure lasts only for a time.

In the same way God, who knows the hidden things of the heart and knows beforehand what is to come, allows things through his patience, and by means of what happens from outside draws out the evil that is in hiding. He does it to cleanse the man who through carelessness has taken in the seeds of sin, so that when they have come to the surface he may vomit them up, and afterward — even if he has been deeply in evils — may obtain cleansing and be built up again from the ground up after his wickedness.

For God manages souls not with an eye to, let us say, the fifty years of life here, but with an eye to the age that has no end. He made the thinking nature imperishable and akin to himself, and the reasoning soul is no more shut out from being healed than it is in the life we live here.

Come now, and let us use this image too, from the Gospel. There is a rock with a little soil on its surface, and whatever seed falls on it comes up quickly; but once up, since it has no root, it is scorched and withered when the sun rises. This rock is a human soul, hardened by carelessness and turned to stone by wickedness — for God creates a heart of stone in no one; it becomes such through wrongdoing. [p]

Suppose someone found fault with the farmer for not sowing his seed sooner on the rocky ground, because he saw some other rocky ground that had taken the seed and was in flower. The farmer would answer: “I will sow this ground more slowly, putting on it what can hold the seed that is to be sown. The slower and safer way will be better for this ground than the ground that took the seed quickly and near the surface.” We would be persuaded that the farmer had spoken with good reason and had acted with skill. So too the great Farmer of all nature puts off the kindness that might have been reckoned quicker, so that it may not turn out shallow.

But it is likely that someone will object to us here: “Then why does any of the seed fall on the soul that has soil only on the surface, the soul that is a rock?” To this we must say that it was better for such a soul — which had wanted the better things too rashly, and not by the road that travels toward them — to get what it wanted, so that, condemning itself for this, it might afterward be patient enough to receive, long after, the farming that goes with its nature.

For souls are, one might say, past counting, and past counting are their characters, and their movements are very many, and their purposes and their attempts and their impulses. Of all this there is one manager only, and he is the best: he knows the seasons, and the helps that fit, and the ways of leading, and the roads — the God and Father of all things, who knows how he leads even Pharaoh through events so great, and through a drowning, and his management of Pharaoh does not come to an end there. For Pharaoh was not dissolved when he was drowned: “For in the hand of God are both we and our words, and all understanding and knowledge of workmanship.”

Let this stand as a moderate defense of the statement that “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened,” and of “He has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills he hardens.”

Let us look also at what is said in Ezekiel: “I will take their hearts of stone away from them and put in hearts of flesh, so that they may walk in my statutes and keep my instructions.” [t]

For if God, when he wills, takes away the hearts of stone and puts in hearts of flesh, so that his instructions are kept and his commands observed, then putting wickedness away is not up to us. Taking away the hearts of stone is nothing other than taking the wickedness — the wickedness by which a man is hardened — away from the man from whom God wills to take it. And the coming of a heart of flesh, so that a man walks in the instructions of God and keeps his commands, what else is it than to become pliable and no longer stiff against the truth, and able to practice the virtues?

And if God promises to do these things, and if we do not lay the stony hearts aside before he takes them away, then plainly putting wickedness away does not lie with us. And if we do nothing toward the heart of flesh coming to be in us, but it is God’s work, then living by virtue will not be our work either, but wholly divine grace. That is what will be said by the man who does away with what is up to us on the strength of the bare words.

But we will answer that these passages have to be heard in this way. Take a man who happens to be ignorant and untaught. He becomes aware of his own faults, either because his teacher urged him or in some other way out of himself, and he hands himself over to the man he thinks able to lead him by the hand into education and virtue. When he has handed himself over, his instructor promises to take away his ignorance and to put learning in — not as though the man’s bringing himself to be healed counted for nothing toward his being taught and escaping ignorance, but because the instructor is promising to improve a man who wants improving.

In the same way the divine Word promises to take away the wickedness of those who come to it, the thing it named a heart of stone — not from people who are unwilling, but from people who have handed themselves over to the physician of the sick, as in the Gospels the sick are found coming to the Savior and asking to obtain healing, and are healed. And, to put it this way, the recovery of sight by the blind is the work of the sufferers, so far as their asking goes, since they believed they could be healed; but so far as the restoring of sight goes, it is the work of our Savior.

So then the Word of God promises to put knowledge into those who come to it, taking away the stony and hard heart, which is wickedness, so that a man may walk by the divine commands and keep the divine instructions.

After this there was the passage from the Gospel, where the Savior said that this was why he speaks to those outside in parables: “so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand, in case they turn back and it be forgiven them.” [w]

And our opponent will say: “If certain people do quite surely turn back when they hear words that are plainer, and turn back in such a way that they become worthy of the forgiveness of sins; and if hearing those plainer words is not up to them but up to the one who teaches, and if for this reason he does not announce them more plainly, in case they should see and understand — then being saved is not up to them. And if that is so, we are not free to choose for ourselves where salvation and destruction are concerned.”

There would have been a plausible defense against this, if the clause “in case they turn back and it be forgiven them” had not been added — namely, that the Savior did not want people who were not going to turn out good and honorable to understand the more mysterious parts of what he taught, and that this is why he spoke to them in parables. But as things stand, with “in case they turn back and it be forgiven them” lying there in the text, the defense is harder.

First of all, then, the passage should be marked down against those who hold a different teaching. They go hunting for phrases of this kind out of the Old Testament, wherever there appears — as they themselves have the boldness to say — the cruelty of the Maker, the settled choice to avenge and to pay back the worse sort, or whatever else they wish to call such a thing, provided only that they can say goodness does not exist in the one who created. But they do not read the New in the same way, or fairly. They pass over the places in it that are like the ones they consider blameworthy in the Old.

For plainly, and according to the Gospel, the Savior is shown — on their own account of the earlier words — not to be speaking clearly, and for this reason: so that people should not turn back and, turning back, become worthy of the forgiveness of sins. Taken by itself, that is no smaller a thing than the passages out of the Old that they bring charges about.

And if they look for a defense of the Gospel, we must ask them whether they are not doing something blameworthy in taking unlike stands on like problems: not stumbling over the New but seeking a defense of it, while over closely similar matters in the Old they bring charges, when they ought to defend those in the same way as the ones from the New. From this let us bring them, by way of the resemblances, to hold that all of it is the writing of one God. Come then, and let us provide, as far as we can, a defense of the question before us.

We were saying, when we were looking into the matter of Pharaoh, that being cured quickly is sometimes not for the good of those who are cured — if, having fallen through their own fault into hard troubles, they should easily be rid of what they have fallen into. For then, despising the evil as an easy thing to cure, and not guarding themselves a second time against falling into it, they will be in it again. And so, with people of this sort, the eternal God — the one who knows what is hidden, who knows all things before they come to be — in keeping with his kindness puts off the swifter help to them, and, so to speak, in helping them does not help; and that is what is to their advantage. [aa]

It is likely, then, that those “outside” whom we are speaking of were seen by the Savior, on the supposition before us, as people who would not be steady in their turning back if they were to hear what was said more distinctly. So it was arranged by the Lord that they should not hear the deeper things more plainly — in case, turning back quickly and being healed by obtaining forgiveness, they should despise the wounds of their wickedness as slight and easy to cure, and fall into them again, and fast.

And perhaps too they were paying the penalties for their earlier offenses against virtue, committed when they had abandoned her, and had not yet filled out the time that fits. So they are left by the divine oversight, and eat their fill, to a greater degree, of their own evils which they sowed; and afterward they are called to a steadier repentance, so as not to fall quickly back into the things they had fallen into before, when they treated the worth of what is good with contempt and gave themselves over to worse things.

Now those who are called “outside” — plainly by comparison with those inside — are not altogether far from those inside. While those inside hear clearly, they themselves hear unclearly, because it is spoken to them in parables; but they do hear. There are others outside, though, the ones called Tyrians. It was foreknown of them that they would long ago have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes, if the Savior had come near their borders; and they do not hear even the things that those outside hear, being, as is likely, much further off from what those outside deserve. This is so that at another time — after it has become more bearable for them than for those who did not receive the word, among whom he mentioned the Tyrians as well — they may hear at a fitter moment and repent more steadily.

But see whether we are not, alongside our examining, struggling in every way to keep reverence toward God and toward his Christ, trying by every means to make the defense that in matters so great and of such a kind, concerning the varied providence of God, he is providing for an immortal soul.

Suppose then that someone were to inquire about the things that are held against us — that people who saw wonders and heard divine words got no benefit from them, while the Tyrians would have repented if such things had happened and been said among them — and were to ask: “Why ever did the Savior make such a proclamation to these people, to their own harm, so that their sin should be reckoned heavier?” This is what we must say to him.

God understands the dispositions of all who find fault with his providence — who allege that it is because of his providence that they have not believed, since it did not grant them to see what it granted others to look at, and did not arrange for them to hear the words that others heard and were helped by. Wanting to expose their defense as unreasonable, he grants the very things that the men who blame his administration were asking for. Then, once they have received them and are convicted all the same of the deepest irreverence, in that not even so did they hand themselves over to be helped, they may give up such presumption; and, set free on this very point, they may learn that God sometimes puts off and delays in doing good to certain people, not granting them the sight and hearing of things which, once seen and heard, convict the sin of those who did not believe, after things so great and of such a kind, as heavier and harder.