The Fire Under the Mountains

And what if, on top of the shame they care most about, people also dread the bodily discomfort — that they must go unwashed and shabbily dressed, cut off from any cheerfulness, spending their time in rough sackcloth, in the ugliness of ashes, with their faces sunken from fasting? Is it fitting, then, that we should plead about our sins in scarlet and purple? [a]

Hurry up, then, with the pin for parting the hair, and the powder for polishing the teeth, and some forked tool of steel or bronze for cleaning the nails. Whatever false glitter, whatever counterfeit red can be had, let him work it carefully onto his lips or his cheeks. Let him go looking, besides, for baths at a milder temperature at some garden villa or seaside retreat. Let him spend more freely. Let him hunt out the rarest delicacy in fattened birds. Let him strain his old wine clear. And when someone asks him, “Who is all this being lavished on?” let him answer, “I have sinned against God and am in danger of perishing forever. So now I am drooping, and wasting and torturing myself, in order to reconcile God to me — the God I offended by sinning.”

Look at the men who go around canvassing to obtain public office. They do not find it degrading or tiresome to fight for what they want through every annoyance it costs body and soul — and not annoyances only, but insults of every kind. What shabby clothes will they not put on? What houses will they not lay siege to with visits early and late? They bow to every important man they meet. They go to no banquets and join in no entertainments, exiles by their own choice from the pleasure of being free and enjoying themselves — and all of it for the fleeting satisfaction of a single year. When eternity is at stake, do we hesitate to endure what a candidate for consul or praetor puts up with? Are we going to be slow about offering the Lord we have offended a discipline in food and clothing that pagans take on themselves when they have offended nobody at all? These are the people Scripture mentions: “Woe to those who bind their own sins, as it were, with a long rope.”

If you shrink back from exomologesis, take to heart the hell that exomologesis will put out for you. Picture the size of the penalty first, so that you will not hesitate about taking the remedy. What do we suppose that storehouse of eternal fire must be, when small vents of it stir up such blasts of flame that the towns nearby are either already gone or expect the same fate any day? The proudest mountains split apart in the birth pangs of the fire bred inside them; and — which proves to us how lasting the judgment is — though they split apart, though they are eaten away, they never come to an end. Who will not count these occasional punishments inflicted on the mountains as samples of the judgment that hangs over people who will not repent? Who will not agree that such sparks are only a few missiles, playful darts thrown out from some immeasurably vast center of fire? [e]

So then: since you know that after the first defenses of the Lord’s baptism a second reserve of help against hell still remains for you in exomologesis, why do you desert your own salvation? Why are you slow to go to the thing you know will heal you? Even dumb animals, which have no reason, recognize in their time of need the medicines assigned to them by God. The stag, shot through by an arrow, knows that to force out the iron and the barbs that will not come loose, he must heal himself with dittany. The swallow, if she blinds her young, knows how to give them their eyes back by means of her own swallow-wort. Will a sinner, then, who knows that the Lord set up exomologesis for his restoration, pass by the very thing that restored the king of Babylon to his kingdom?

For a long time that king had been offering the Lord his repentance, working out his exomologesis through seven years of squalor, his nails growing wild after the fashion of an eagle, his unkempt hair wearing the shagginess of a lion. Hard handling! But the man people were shuddering at was the man God was taking back. The ruler of Egypt, on the other hand, went the opposite way. He pursued the people of God, whom he had afflicted and long withheld from their Lord, and he rushed into battle; and after so many warning plagues he perished in the parted sea — which was allowed to be passable for that People alone — under the backward roll of the waves. He had thrown away repentance, and her servant exomologesis along with her.

Why should I say any more about these two planks, so to speak, of human salvation — as if I cared more for the business of the pen than for the duty of my own conscience? For I am a sinner of every brand, born for nothing but repentance, and I cannot easily keep quiet about a thing that even the very head and fountain of the human race, and of human offense, does not keep quiet about: Adam, restored by exomologesis to his own paradise.