Doing Good for Its Own Sake

I find that perfection is grasped in more than one way, always with reference to the one who surpasses in every virtue. One man is made perfect as a godly man, another as a patient man, another in self-control, another as a worker, another as a martyr, another as a man of knowledge. But I know of no one among men who is perfect in all of these at once while he is still a man — not even by the bare letter of the law — except him alone who clothed himself with our humanity for our sake. Who, then, is perfect? The man who makes it his profession to keep away from what is bad. That is the road to the good news and to doing good. But for a man living under the law, the perfection that belongs to knowledge is the acceptance of the good news, so that the man who is under the law may be made perfect. For Moses, who was himself under the law, foretold that we would have to listen to another, so that we might, as the apostle says, receive Christ, who is the fullness of the law. But now, in the good news, the man of knowledge makes his progress not merely by using the law as a step up, but by understanding it and taking it in whole, in the way the Lord who gave the covenants handed it on to the apostles. [a]

Now suppose such a man conducts himself rightly — and it is certainly impossible to arrive at knowledge by bad conduct. Suppose, further, that he makes an outstandingly good confession and becomes a martyr out of love, winning considerable fame among men. Not even then will he be called perfect in the flesh ahead of time, since it is the close of a life that claims that title: when the martyr who has knowledge has first displayed the perfect work, and shown it rightly, and has poured out his blood with thanksgiving and given up his spirit. Then he will be blessed, and truly declared perfect, “so that the surpassing power may be God’s and not ours,” as the apostle says. Only let us hold on to free choice and to love: “pressed hard on every side, but not crushed; at a loss, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”

For those who reach after perfection must, as the same apostle says, “put no stumbling block in anyone’s way, but in everything commend themselves” — not to men, but to God. And it follows from this that they ought to give way to men as well; that is only reasonable, given the abusive slanders thrown at them. Here is the itemized list: “in great endurance, in afflictions, in hardships, in tight places, in beatings, in imprisonments, in riots, in hard work, in sleepless nights, in days without food; in purity, in knowledge, in patience, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in love without pretense, in the word of truth, in the power of God” — so that we may be God’s temples, cleansed “from every defilement of flesh and spirit.” And God says, “I will welcome you, and I will be a Father to you, and you will be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.” “So let us bring holiness to completion in the fear of God,” he says.

For even though fear gives birth to pain, he says: “I am glad — not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow moved you to repentance. For you were made sorry in God’s way, so that you would suffer no loss at all from us. Sorrow of God’s kind produces a repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but the world’s sorrow produces death. Look what this very thing — being made sorry in God’s way — produced in you: what earnestness, what clearing of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishing of the wrong! At every point you showed yourselves clean in this matter.” These are the warm-up exercises in the discipline that leads to knowledge.

And since the all-powerful God himself “gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as bringers of good news, some as shepherds and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of service, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all arrive at the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, at a full-grown man, at the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” — since he did that, we are to press on toward the full growth that befits a man of knowledge, and to be as perfect as we can while we still remain in the flesh. We are to make it our study here, in perfect harmony, to agree with the will of God, so that we are restored to the nobility and the kinship that are truly perfect, restored to the fullness of Christ — the fullness that hangs perfectly on our being made perfect.

And now we can see where the divine apostle speaks of the perfect man, and how, and when, and in what way he sets out the differences among perfect men. Here he is again, from the other side: “The manifestation of the Spirit is given for our benefit. To one is given a word of wisdom through the Spirit; to another a word of knowledge, according to the same Spirit; to another faith, by the same Spirit; to another gifts of healing, by the one Spirit; to another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another the telling of spirits apart; to another different kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues. And one and the same Spirit works all of these, distributing to each one as he wills.” That being so, the prophets are perfect in prophecy, the righteous in righteousness, the martyrs in confession, and others in preaching — not that they have no share in the virtues everyone has, but that they are advanced in the ones they were appointed to. For what man in his right mind would say that a prophet was not righteous? Come now: did not righteous men like Abraham prophesy?

Homer says:

And “each has his own gift from God” — one in one way, another in another. But the apostles were made perfect in all of them. You will find, if you like, in what they did and what they wrote: knowledge, life, preaching, righteousness, purity, prophecy. We ought to know, then, that although Paul is recent as far as time goes — he came into his own right after the Lord’s ascension — his writings still hang on the old covenant; they breathe it and speak out of it. For faith in Christ and the knowledge of the good news are the law’s explanation and its fulfillment. That is why it was said to the Hebrews, “If you do not believe, neither will you understand” — meaning that unless you believe what is prophesied in the law and delivered as an oracle through the law, you will not understand the old covenant, which he opened up by his coming.

The man of understanding and sharp discernment, then, is the man of knowledge. And his business is not merely keeping away from what is evil — that is only a step toward the highest perfection — nor is it doing good out of fear. For it is written, “Where shall I flee, and where shall I hide myself from your presence? If I go up into heaven, you are there; if I go away to the furthest parts of the sea, your right hand is there; if I go down into the depths, your Spirit is there.” Nor is he to do good out of hope for a promised recompense. For it is said, “Look, the Lord — and his reward is before his face, to give to each one according to his deeds”; and, “What no eye has seen and no ear has heard, and what has not come up into the heart of man — that is what God has prepared for those who love him.” The only thing the man of knowledge is to choose is doing good out of love, for the sake of the goodness of the thing itself. [m]

Now God, speaking in his own person, says to the Lord, “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance” — teaching him to ask a request truly fit for a king: the salvation of men, free of charge, so that we may inherit and possess the Lord. To want knowledge about God for some practical end, so that this may be done or that avoided, does not belong to the man of knowledge. The knowledge itself is reason enough for contemplation. I will go so far as to say this: the man who gives himself to knowledge for the sake of the divine science itself does not choose knowledge because he wants to be saved. For the mind’s effort, kept up by exercise, stretches out into an unbroken effort; and the mind’s unbroken effort is the very being of a thinking creature. It comes about by a mixing that is never interrupted, and it stays what it is: eternal contemplation, a living substance.

Suppose, then, that someone put it to the man of knowledge whether he would choose the knowledge of God or everlasting salvation; and suppose the two, which are in fact entirely one and the same, could be pulled apart. He would choose the knowledge of God without a moment’s hesitation, judging that this property of faith — the one that rises from love to knowledge — is worth having for its own sake. So this is the perfect man’s first form of doing good: he does it not for any advantage in what concerns himself, but because he judges that doing good is right. His energy, pressed hard into everything, becomes good in the very act of doing — not good in some things and not good in others, but settled into the habit of doing good; not for glory, nor, as the philosophers say, for reputation, nor for any reward from men or from God, but so as to live out his life after the image and likeness of the Lord.

And if, in doing good, he meets with something hostile, he will let what comes back to him go by without resentment, as though it were good, since he himself is just and good “to the just and the unjust.” To men like that the Lord says, “Be perfect, as your Father is.” For him the flesh is dead; he himself lives alone, having made the tomb into a holy temple for the Lord, having turned the old sinful soul toward God.

Such a man is no longer merely self-controlled. He has come through into a state free of passion, waiting to put on the divine image. “When you give to the poor,” it is said, “let no one know it; and when you fast, anoint yourself, so that God alone may know” — and not one single human being. Not even the man showing mercy ought to know that he is showing it; for if he knows, he will be merciful at some times and not at others. But when he does good by habit, he will be copying the nature of the good, and his settled disposition will be at once his nature and his practice. There is no need to shift those who have already been lifted up on high, but those who are still walking do need to reach the goal set for them, by going the whole length of the narrow road. For this is what being drawn by the Father means: to become fit to receive from God the power of his grace, and so to run without anything in the way. And if some hate the chosen, such a man knows it is ignorance in them, and he pities their minds for the foolishness of it.

So, as is right, knowledge itself loves the ignorant and teaches them, and trains the whole creation to honor God Almighty. And if such a man teaches others to love God, he will not treat virtue as something that can be lost in any circumstance — awake, in a dream, or in any vision — since a settled habit never steps outside itself by ceasing to be a habit. Whether knowledge is called a habit or a disposition, no contrary feelings ever get in; the ruling part of the soul remains unaltered, and admits no alteration of the appearances, framing no dream-fantasies out of its movements by day. That is why the Lord commands us to stay awake: so that our soul may never be stirred up by passion, even in dreams, and so that the life of the night may be kept pure and unstained, as though it were spent in daylight. For becoming like God, as far as we are able, is keeping the mind in its relation to the same things — and that is what the relation of mind as mind is.

But the variation in a man’s disposition comes from an excessive attachment to material things. And that, I think, is why they called night euphronē: because then the soul, released from what the senses perceive, turns back on itself and gets a truer hold on good sense. This is also why the mysteries are for the most part celebrated at night: they point to the withdrawal of the soul from the body, which happens at night. “So then, let us not sleep as the rest do; let us stay awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation.”

And what they say about sleep is to be understood in exactly the same way about death, since each of them shows the departure of the soul, the one more and the other less. We can get this from Heraclitus too: “A man touches night in himself when he is dead and his light is quenched; and alive, when he sleeps he touches the dead; and awake, when he shuts his eyes, he touches the sleeper.” “For blessed are those who have seen the Lord,” according to the apostle, “for the hour has already come for you to wake up out of sleep. Our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is far along, the day has come close. So let us throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” By ‘day’ and ‘light’ he is figuratively naming the Son, and by ‘the armor of light’ he means, by a metaphor, the promises.

So it is said that we ought to come to sacrifices and prayers washed, clean and bright, and that this outward tidiness and cleansing are practiced as a sign. Purity is thinking holy thoughts. There is also the picture of baptism, which came down to the poets from Moses as well. It runs like this:

It is Penelope, on her way to pray. And again:

It was a custom of the Jews, too, to wash often after being in bed. So it was well said:

For holiness, as I understand it, is complete purity of mind and of deeds and of thoughts, and of words as well, and at its furthest reach freedom from sin even in dreams. And a sufficient purification for a man, I reckon, is thorough and settled repentance: if we condemn ourselves for what we did before and then go forward, taking thought after these things, and stripping our mind both of what pleases us through the senses and of the wrongs we did before. If, then, we are to give the derivation of epistēmē, knowledge, its meaning is to be traced to stasis, a standing still; for our soul, which used to be carried now this way and now that, is by knowledge set down and settled on its objects. Faith is to be explained by the same derivation: the settling of our soul on what really is.

But what we want to learn about is the man who is righteous always and in everything: the man who stays righteous without dreading the penalty that comes from the law, without fearing the hatred of evil felt by those who live with him and who take up the cause of the injured, and without dreading danger from the hands of wrongdoers. For the man who keeps away from anything wrong on account of these considerations is not willingly kind; he is good out of fear. Even Epicurus says that the man he counts wise “would not wrong anyone for the sake of gain, since he could not convince himself that he would escape detection.” So that if he knew he would not be detected, then on Epicurus’ account he would do the evil. Such are the teachings of darkness. And if a man abstains from doing wrong because he hopes for the recompense God gives for righteous deeds, then on that showing he is not spontaneously good either. Fear makes the first man just; reward makes this one — or rather, makes him appear to be just.

But the hope that comes after death — a good hope for the good, the reverse for the bad — is known not only to those who follow the barbarian wisdom, but to the Pythagoreans as well; for they too set hope before those who philosophize as an end. Socrates, meanwhile, says in the Phaedo that “good souls depart from here with a good hope” — and again, denouncing the wicked, he sets against it the statement, “For they live with an evil hope.” Heraclitus plainly agrees with him, in what he writes about men: “There await men after death things they neither hope for nor imagine.”

So Paul writes, with a divine plainness, “Affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces tested character, and tested character produces hope; and hope does not put us to shame.” For the endurance is on account of the hope set on what is to come. And here ‘hope’ means the same thing as the recompense and the restoring of what was hoped for — which does not put us to shame, since it is no longer treated with contempt.

But the man who obeys the bare call simply as a call, neither for fear nor for enjoyments, is on his way to knowledge. He does not weigh up whether some outside profit or enjoyment will follow for him. He is drawn by love for the one who is truly worth loving, is led to what he ought to do, and practices godliness. So suppose we imagined him receiving leave from God to do forbidden things and go unpunished. Suppose he were given the promise that he would receive the good things of the blessed as his reward. Suppose, on top of that, he could convince himself that God could be hoodwinked about what he was doing — which is impossible. Not even then would he ever wish to do anything contrary to right reason, having once made his choice of what is truly good and worth choosing on its own account, and therefore to be loved. For we have not heard that the good is situated in the food of the belly. He has heard instead that “food will not commend us” — and neither will marriage, nor abstaining from marriage in ignorance; what commends us is the virtuous conduct of a man of knowledge. A dog, after all, is an animal without reason, and yet it can be called self-controlled: it dreads the raised stick, and so it keeps away from the meat. But take away the promise that was held out, cancel the dread that was threatened, remove the danger that hangs over them, and the real disposition of such people will show itself.