Losing What You Learned

To show what falling away really is — what happens to people who go about their lives carelessly — it will not be out of place to use a comparison. Think of a man who has come to know a craft or a science little by little, geometry, say, or medicine, until he has it perfectly: he has trained himself over a long stretch of time in its principles and its practice, so that he has complete command of it. It could never happen to such a man that he lay down to sleep holding his skill and woke up ignorant. We are not bringing in here the sort of accidents that come from an injury or an illness; those have nothing to do with the comparison before us. [a]

As we see it, then, so long as that geometer or that doctor keeps working at his subject and practicing its principles, the knowledge of his profession stays with him. But if he withdraws from the practice of it and lays aside his habits of hard work, then by that neglect a few things will slip away from him at first, and then more and more, until in time everything is forgotten and wiped clean out of his memory. It is possible, of course, that at the very beginning of the slide, while he is only just giving in to the corrupting pull of a neglect that is still small, he may be shaken awake and come quickly to his senses; and then he can make good the losses, which are still recent, and recover the knowledge, which so far has only been faintly rubbed out of his mind.

Now let us apply this to those who have given themselves to the knowledge and the wisdom of God — a training whose learning and hard work no other training comes anywhere near. Following the shape of the comparison, let us consider what it is to gain that knowledge and what it is to lose it, especially when we hear from the apostle what is said of those who are mature: that they will look face to face on the glory of the Lord as his hidden things are unveiled.

But in wanting to show the divine gifts given to us by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — the Trinity that is the spring from which all holiness flows — we have wandered, in what we have been saying, into a digression. The subject of the soul came up along the way, and we judged that it ought to be touched on, however hurriedly, since we were handling a related matter, our nature as reasoning creatures. But if God allows, through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, we will take up the subject of all reasoning beings, which fall into three classes and kinds, in the place where it more suitably belongs. [e]