Take Hold of the Plank

On Repentance

Repentance, so far as nature can reach on its own, men understand to be a stirring of the mind that comes of being disgusted with some worse opinion they once held — I mean the sort of men we ourselves used to be, blind, without the Lord’s light. But they are exactly as far from the reason of repentance as they are from the Author of reason himself. Reason is a thing belonging to God, since there is nothing that God the Maker of all has not provided, arranged and appointed by reason — nothing he has not willed should be handled and understood by reason. So everyone who does not know God is bound to be ignorant of a thing that is God’s, because no strongroom is open to strangers. And so, sailing the whole voyage of life without the rudder of reason, they do not know how to steer clear of the storm hanging over the world. [b]

How unreasonably they go about repentance, one fact is enough to show: they practice it even over their good deeds. They repent of good faith, of love, of plain-heartedness, of patience, of mercy — exactly so far as anything prompted by these has fallen on ungrateful ground. They curse themselves for having done good. And it is that kind of repentance above all, the kind applied to the best things they have done, that they fix in their hearts, taking care to remember never to do a kindness again. On repentance for evil deeds, by contrast, they lay a lighter weight. In short, they make the same thing a means of sinning more readily than a means of doing right.

But if they behaved as men who had some share in God, and so in reason too, they would first weigh what repentance is worth, and would never use it in a way that convicts them of mending themselves backwards. They would set a limit to their repenting, in fact, because they would reach a limit in sinning as well — by fearing God, I mean. Where there is no fear there is likewise no mending; and where there is no mending, repentance is necessarily wasted, because it lacks the fruit God sowed it for, which is a man’s salvation. [d]

For God — after so many and such great sins of human recklessness, begun by the first of the race, Adam; after the condemning of man together with the dowry of the world; after his expulsion from paradise and his subjection to death — hurried back to his own mercy, and from that time on began repentance in himself, cancelling the sentence of his first anger and undertaking to pardon his own work and image. And so he gathered a people for himself and fed them with many generous gifts; and finding them, again and again, utterly ungrateful, he never stopped urging them to repentance, and sent out the voices of the whole company of the prophets to prophesy.

Then, freely promising the kindness he meant in the last times to pour out like a flood of light over the whole world through his Spirit, he sent the baptism of repentance on ahead, so as to make ready beforehand, by the sign and seal of repentance, those he was calling by that kindness into the promise made once for all to Abraham. John does not keep quiet about it: “Enter into repentance, for now salvation is about to come near the nations” — the Lord, that is, bringing salvation as God had promised. To him John, as his herald, directed the repentance he preached, and its business was the scouring of men’s minds: whatever filth long-settled error had left, whatever contamination ignorance had bred in a man’s heart, repentance was to sweep and scrape away and throw out of doors, and so make the house of the heart ready, by cleaning it, for the Holy Spirit who was about to arrive — that he might come in gladly and bring his heavenly blessings in with him. Those blessings go under one short title, the salvation of man, and the wiping out of former sins is the first step toward it. That is what repentance is finally for; that is her work, taking in hand the business of God’s mercy. What is useful to man does God a service.

The rule of repentance, though, which we learn when we come to know the Lord, keeps a fixed shape: that no violent hands, so to speak, are ever laid on good deeds or good thoughts. God never approves the condemning of good deeds, since they are his own; being their author, he is bound to be their defender too, and in the same way he is the one who accepts them — and if he accepts them, he also rewards them. So let men’s ingratitude look to itself, if it attaches repentance even to good works; and let their gratitude look to itself as well, if the wish to be paid in thanks is what drives them to do good. Both are earthly, mortal things. How small your gain is if you do good to a grateful man, and how small your loss if to an ungrateful one! A good deed has God for its debtor, and so does an evil one, for a judge is the one who repays every case.

Now since God as Judge presides over the exacting and the upholding of justice, which is the thing dearest to him, and since it is with justice in view that he lays out the whole sum of his discipline, is there any room to doubt that in repentance, as in everything else we do, justice must be rendered to God? And that duty can only be carried out on one condition: that repentance be brought to bear on sins and nothing else. No deed but an evil one deserves the name of sin, and nobody goes wrong by doing right. But if he is not going wrong, why does he trespass on repentance, which is the private ground of the people who do go wrong? Why does he lay on his goodness a duty that belongs to wickedness? And this is how it comes about that when a thing is called into play where it does not belong, it is neglected where it does.

What things they are, then, for which repentance is right and owed — that is, what is to be set down under the heading of sin — the occasion demands that I write out; but it may well be unnecessary. For when the Lord is known, our spirit, having been looked back upon by its own Author, comes up unbidden into the knowledge of the truth; and once it is admitted to the divine commands, it is taught by them straight away that whatever God tells us to keep away from is to be counted sin. Since it is agreed on all sides that God is some great substance of good, of course nothing but evil could displease what is good — between things that are contraries there is no friendship. [g]

Still, it will be no trouble to touch briefly on this, that of sins some are fleshly, that is, of the body, and some are of the spirit. Man is put together out of a combination of two substances, so the sources of his sins are simply the sources of his make-up. But the fact that body and spirit are two things is not what makes their sins differ from each other; if anything it makes them equal, because the two make one — and this so that nobody may scale the difference between their sins to the difference between their substances, and reckon the one lighter or the other heavier. Flesh and spirit are both creatures of God: the one made by his hand, the other finished by his breath. Since they belong to the Lord equally, whichever of them sins offends the Lord equally. Is it for you to draw a line between the acts of the flesh and the acts of the spirit, when their partnership and their joining in life, in death, and in resurrection are so close that at that time they are raised together, either for life or for judgment, precisely because they have sinned together or lived innocently together? We say this once for all, so that we may understand that no less need of repentance falls on either part of a man, if it has sinned in anything, than falls on both.

The guilt of the two is shared; the Judge is shared, God to wit; and so the healing medicine of repentance is shared too. The reason sins are named “of the spirit” and “of the body” is that every sin is a matter either of act or of thought. What is in the deed is of the body, because a deed, like a body, can be seen and touched; what is in the mind is of the spirit, because spirit is neither seen nor handled. Which shows that sins of the will, and not only sins of deed, are to be shunned and scoured off by repentance. If our human smallness judges only sins of deed, because it is not up to piercing the hiding places of the will, let us not on that account make light of crimes of the will in God’s sight. God is enough for everything. Nothing that any sin whatever comes out of is out of his sight, because he is neither ignorant of it nor fails to appoint it for judgment. He does not dissemble about his own clear sight, and he does not collude against it.

And what of the fact that the will is where the deed begins? If any sins are put down to chance, or to necessity, or to ignorance, let those look to themselves; take those out and there is no sinning except by will. Since, then, the will is where the deed begins, is it not liable to penalty in the same measure as it is first in guilt? Nor, if some difficulty gets in the way of carrying it out in full, is it let off even then; it is charged to its own account. Having done the work that lay within its own power, it will not be excused because the finishing miscarried. How, in fact, does the Lord show himself building on top of the Law, except by forbidding sins of the will as well? He defines as an adulterer not only the man who has actually invaded another man’s marriage, but the man who has defiled a woman by the craving of his look.

So it is dangerous enough for the mind to set before itself what it is forbidden to do, and to run rashly through the doing of it in the will. And since the power of this will is such that it stands for a deed even without fully feeding itself, it will be punished as a deed. It is entirely useless to say, “I wanted to, but I did not do it.” You ought rather to carry the thing through, since you want it — or else not to want it, since you do not carry it through. But by your own conscience’s confession you pass sentence on yourself. If you had eagerly wanted a good thing, you would have been anxious to carry it through; and in the same way, since you do not carry an evil thing through, you ought not to have wanted it eagerly. Wherever you take your stand, you are held fast by guilt, because you have either willed evil or else failed to do good.

To all sins, then, committed whether by flesh or by spirit, whether by deed or by will, the same God who has appointed a penalty by judgment has also undertaken to grant pardon by repentance. He says to the people, “Repent, and I will save you”; and again, “I live, says the Lord, and I want repentance rather than death.” Repentance, then, is life, since it is preferred to death. [k]

Sinner that you are, like me — no, less than me, for I admit that first place in sinning is mine — hurry to that repentance, take hold of it the way a shipwrecked man takes hold of some plank and trusts his weight to it. It will draw you out when you have gone under in the waves of your sins, and carry you forward into the harbor of God’s mercy. Seize this chance of unlooked-for happiness. You who in God’s sight were once nothing but “a drop from a bucket,” and “dust from the threshing floor,” and “a potter’s pot,” may from now on become that “tree planted beside the waters, never out of leaf, bearing its fruit at its own season” — and will see neither “the fire” nor “the axe.” Now that you have found “the truth,” repent of your errors; repent of having loved what God does not love. Even we ourselves do not let the slave boys in our houses go on liking the things that offend us, for obedience given willingly comes of minds being alike.

To count up the good that repentance does is a wide subject, and ought to be handed over to great eloquence. But let us, in proportion to our narrow ability, press one point: what God commands is good, and best. I hold it to be sheer nerve to argue about the goodness of a divine command. It is not the fact that a thing is good that binds us to obey; it is the fact that God has commanded it. To require obedience, the majesty of divine power has the first right; the authority of the one who commands comes before any usefulness to the one who serves. “Is it good to repent, or not?” Why do you weigh it? God commands — and not only commands, but urges. He invites us by offering a reward, salvation; and by an oath, saying “I live,” he asks that he may be believed. How blessed we are, that God swears for our sake! How wretched, if we do not believe the Lord even when he swears! What God commends so highly, then, and even attests on oath after the human fashion, we are bound of course to come to and to guard with the utmost seriousness, so that by staying settled in the solemn pledge of God’s kindness we may be able to keep on likewise in its fruit and its benefit.

For what I am saying is this: that the repentance which has been shown us and commanded us by God’s kindness, and which calls us back into favor with the Lord, ought never afterward, once we have learned it and undertaken it, to be cancelled by going back to sin. No plea of ignorance is left to speak for you now, since it is after acknowledging the Lord, after accepting his commands — in short, after taking up repentance for past sins — that you take yourself back to sinning. However far you are removed from ignorance, that far you are glued fast to defiance. [r]

If the reason you repented of sinning was that you had begun to fear the Lord, why have you chosen to tear up what you did out of fear, unless because you have stopped fearing? There is nothing but defiance that overturns fear. And since there is no exception that shields even those who do not know the Lord from liability to punishment — because ignorance of God is not possible, openly as he is set before men and comprehensible as he is even from his gifts out of heaven — how dangerous it is for him to be despised when he is known!

And that man does despise him who, after coming by his help to an understanding of good and evil, offers an insult to his own understanding — that is, to God’s gift — by taking up once more what he understands ought to be shunned, and what he had already shunned. He rejects the Giver by throwing away the gift; he denies the Benefactor by not honoring the benefit. How can a man be pleasing to him whose gift is not pleasing to himself? So he shows himself not only defiant toward the Lord but ungrateful as well.

Besides, that man commits no light sin against the Lord who, after renouncing by repentance the Lord’s rival the devil, and by that very name put him under the Lord, raises him up again by his own return to the enemy, and makes himself something for the enemy to gloat over, so that the Evil One, with his prey recovered, rejoices against the Lord all over again. Does he not — and it is dangerous even to say it, but it has to be put forward for the building up of others — does he not put the devil in front of the Lord? He seems to have made the comparison, since he has known both, and to have delivered a verdict that the better one is the one whose servant he has chosen to be again. So the man who had begun, through repentance for sins, to make amends to the Lord will, through another repentance — a repentance of his repentance — make amends to the devil, and will be the more hateful to God in proportion as he is the more acceptable to God’s rival.

But some say that God is satisfied if he is looked to with the heart and the mind, even when it is not done in outward act, and that so they sin without damage to their fear and their faith. That is to say: they break a marriage without damage to their chastity; they mix poison for a parent without damage to their family devotion! So then they will be thrust down into hell themselves without damage to their pardon, while they sin without damage to their fear! Here is a first-rate specimen of perversity: they sin because they are afraid. I suppose that if they were not afraid, they would not sin! Let the man who does not want God offended, then, not revere him at all, if fear is the excuse for offending. But dispositions of this sort are used to sprouting from the seed of hypocrites, whose friendship with the devil cannot be divided, and whose repentance is never faithful.