The Word Who Trains Us

My children, the groundwork of truth has been laid for us: the unbreakable foundation of knowledge for the holy temple of the great God — a fine exhortation, a longing for eternal life through reasonable obedience, laid down in the ground of the mind. There are three things in a human being: habits, actions, and passions. Habits fall to the word of exhortation, the guide to reverence for God, which is laid down underneath, like a ship’s keel, so that faith can be built up on it. In that faith we rejoice greatly, renounce the opinions we were raised on, and through salvation grow young again, singing along with the prophet’s hymn: “How good God is to Israel — to those who are upright in heart!” Actions, in turn, all belong to the word that lays down rules, while the word that persuades sets itself to heal the passions. Yet it is one and the same Word that rescues a person from the customs of the world he was reared in and trains him in the one salvation, which is faith in God. [a]

So when the heavenly guide, the Word, was calling people to salvation, the title “exhortation” was rightly given to him, and that same word of his was called the rousing — the whole named from one of its parts. For the whole of reverence for God is exhortation, since it breeds in the reasoning power akin to it a longing for true life, the life now and the life to come. But now, being at once healer and rule-giver, and following in his own steps, he gives counsel to the one he has already urged on, promising above all to cure the passions inside us. Let us then give this Word the one name that fits him: Instructor.

The Instructor is practical, not theoretical. His aim is to improve the soul, not to inform it — to train it up for a life of virtue, not a life of ideas. The same Word does teach, but not in this role. Teaching belongs to the word whose business is to explain and uncover matters of doctrine. Our Instructor is practical: first he urges us toward the right dispositions and character, then he persuades us to put our duties into vigorous practice, laying pure commands on us and holding up, for those who come after, portraits of people who went astray in the past. Both are extremely useful — the advice that calls for obedience, and the example set before the eyes. And example is of two kinds, matching that same pair: one so that we will choose the good and copy it, the other so that we will refuse the opposite and turn away from it.

This is how the healing of our passions follows: those examples take the edge off them. The Instructor strengthens our souls, and by his kind commands, as by mild medicines, he guides the sick to the full knowledge of the truth. Health and knowledge are two very different things. Knowledge is produced by learning, health by being healed. A man who is ill will not learn any subject until he is quite well. The same instruction is not put the same way to a learner and to a patient: to the one it is put so as to lead to knowledge, to the other so as to lead to health. So, just as those of us who are diseased in body need a physician, those who are diseased in soul need an instructor to cure what ails us — and then a teacher, to train the soul and lead it on to all the knowledge it needs, once it is able to take in what the Word discloses. Because he is eager to perfect us by a series of steps that lead to salvation and are fitted for effective discipline, the Word, who is kind through and through, keeps a beautiful order: first he urges, then he trains, and last of all he teaches.

Now then, my children, our Instructor is like his Father, God, whose Son he is: without sin, without fault, his soul untouched by passion — God in human form, spotless, the servant of his Father’s will, the Word who is God, who is in the Father, who is at the Father’s right hand, and who, being in the form of God, is God. He is our flawless image, and it is to him that we must strain with all our strength to make our souls alike. He is entirely free of human passions; that is why he alone is judge, because he alone is without sin. [e]

Still, as far as we can, let us try to sin as little as possible. Nothing is more urgent than this: first to be delivered from the passions and the disorders, and then to check our tendency to fall into the sins that have become habit with us. Best of all is not to sin at all, in any way — which we say belongs to God alone. Next is to keep clear of deliberate wrongdoing, which is the mark of a wise man. Third, not to fall into many unintentional faults, which belongs to those who have been excellently trained. Last of all, rank this: not to stay long in one’s sins. But even that is healthy for people who are being called back to repentance, so that they take up the contest again.

And the Instructor, I think, says something very beautiful through Moses: “If anyone beside him dies suddenly, the head of his consecration is defiled on the spot and must be shaved.” By “sudden death” he means unintentional sin. And he says that it pollutes, because it stains the soul; so he prescribes the cure at top speed, ordering the head shaved at once. That is, the locks of ignorance that shade the reason are to be shorn clean away, so that reason — whose seat is in the brain — may be left bare of the dense growth of vice and run to repentance. Then, after a few remarks, he adds, “The days before are not counted; they are without reason” — by which he plainly means sins that are contrary to reason. The unintentional act he calls “sudden”; the sin he calls “without reason.” That is why the Word, the Instructor, has taken charge of us: to prevent sin, which is contrary to reason.

So notice how Scripture puts things: “Therefore these things says the Lord.” The sin committed earlier is what is being condemned, and the word “therefore” that follows shows it, since the righteous judgment comes with it. The prophets make this unmistakable when they say, “If you had not sinned, he would not have spoken these threats.” “Therefore thus says the Lord.” “Because you have not listened to these words, therefore these things the Lord says.” And, “Therefore, look, the Lord says.” For prophecy is given on account of both obedience and disobedience: for obedience, so that we may be saved; for disobedience, so that we may be corrected.

So our Instructor, the Word, cures the soul’s unnatural passions by urging us. It is entirely fitting that the help given for bodily disease is called the healing art, a skill picked up by human effort. But the Father’s Word is the only physician of the healing god’s own kind for human weakness, the holy charmer of the sick soul. “Save your servant, my God, who trusts in you. Have mercy on me, Lord, for I will cry out to you all day long.” The physician’s art, Democritus said, “heals the diseases of the body, and wisdom frees the soul from passion.” But the good Instructor — the Wisdom, the Word of the Father, who made the human being — cares for the whole nature of what he made. He is the all-sufficient physician of humanity, the Savior, and he heals body and soul alike. “Get up,” he said to the paralyzed man, “pick up the bed you are lying on and go home” — and at once the sick man had his strength. And to the dead man he said, “Lazarus, come out” — and the dead man came out of his tomb exactly as he had been before he died, having gone through resurrection. Further, he heals the soul itself by commands and by gifts — by commands over time, but being generous with his gifts, he says to us sinners, “Your sins are forgiven you.”

As for us, we became his children the moment he conceived the thought of us, and by his own ordering we were assigned the best and most secure rank. That ordering first circles the world, the heavens, and the sun’s circuits, and occupies itself with the movements of the other stars for our sake; then it busies itself with the human being himself, on whom all its care is concentrated. Regarding him as its greatest work, it regulated his soul with wisdom and self-restraint, and tempered his body with beauty and good proportion. And whatever in human action is right and well ordered is the result of that same rightness and order breathing into us.

The Lord supplies every good thing and every help, both as man and as God: as God, forgiving our sins; as man, training us not to sin. So a human being is rightly dear to God, being his handiwork. The rest of creation he made by a word of command alone, but the human being he shaped himself, with his own hand, and breathed into him what belonged to himself. Now what he shaped himself, and after his own likeness, was either created by God as something wanted for its own sake, or formed as something wanted for the sake of something else. [m]

If a human being is wanted for his own sake, then the good God loved what is good, and the love-charm is inside the man himself — it is that very thing which is called the inbreathing of God. But if a human being was wanted for the sake of something else, then God had no other reason for creating him than this: that unless he came into being, God could not be a good Creator, and man could not arrive at the knowledge of God. For God could not have brought about the purpose man was made for in any other way than by making him. What power God held hidden in his willing, he carried out fully by putting his might forth in the act of creating, receiving back from man the very thing for which he made man. What he had, he saw; what he wished, came to pass; and there is nothing God cannot do. So the human being, whom God made, is wanted for his own sake; and what is wanted for its own sake is akin to the one who wants it, and is welcome and lovable to him.

But what is lovable and is not also loved by him? And the human being has been shown to be lovable; so the human being is loved by God. How could he fail to be loved, when it is for his sake that the only Son is sent from the Father’s side — the Word of faith, faith poured out beyond measure? The Lord himself says it plainly: “For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me,” and again, “and you have loved them as you loved me.” What the Instructor wants and declares, how he is disposed in deed and word, how he commands what is to be done and forbids the opposite — all that has already been shown.

Clearly, then, the other kind of speech, the teaching kind, is subtle and spiritual, exact in its precision, taken up with the contemplation of mysteries. But let it wait for now. What falls to us now is to love him back — the one who lovingly guides us to the best life — and to live by the directions of his will: not merely doing what is commanded or avoiding what is forbidden, but also turning away from some examples and copying others as far as we can, and so doing the Instructor’s works after his likeness, fulfilling what Scripture says about our being made in his image and likeness.

For as we wander through life as through deep darkness, we need a guide who cannot stumble or lose the way; and our guide is the best of guides, not blind — as Scripture speaks of the blind “leading the blind into a pit.” The Word is keen-sighted, and he scans the hidden places of the heart. Just as there is no light that does not give light, no movement that does not move, no loving that does not love, so there is no good that does not do good and guide to salvation. Let us then love the commands, through the Lord’s own works; for the Word himself, when he openly became flesh, displayed the same virtue in both its forms, the practical and the contemplative. So let us treat the Word as our law, and his commands and counsels as the short, straight roads to immortality — for his instructions are full of persuasion, not of fear.

So let us take hold of this good obedience more and more and give ourselves to the Lord, clinging to the surest cable there is, faith in him, and understanding that the virtue of a man and the virtue of a woman are the same. For if the God of both is one, the Instructor of both is one as well: one church, one self-restraint, one modesty; their food is shared, marriage is a yoke pulled equally; breathing, seeing, hearing, knowledge, hope, obedience, love — all alike. And people whose life is shared have grace in common and salvation in common; virtue and training are common to them. “In this world,” he says, “they marry and are given in marriage” — and that is the only place where the female is marked off from the male — “but in that world it is no longer so.” There the rewards of this shared and holy life, founded on the union of husband and wife, are stored up not for male and female but for the human being, with the desire that splits humanity in two taken away. [q]

“Man,” therefore, is a name common to men and women alike. That, I think, is why the Athenians used paidarion, “child,” not of boys only but of girls too, treating it as a word of common gender — if Menander the comic poet is authority enough for anyone, who in The Girl Who Is Slapped says this:

And arnes, the word for lambs, is likewise one plain name for the male and the female animal.

Now the Lord himself will feed us as his flock forever. Amen. But without a shepherd neither sheep nor any other animal can live; nor can children live without an instructor, or household slaves without a master.