A Mind Nothing Shakes

The one who truly knows is subject only to the feelings that keep the body going — hunger, thirst, and the rest. But in the Savior’s case it would be absurd to suppose that the body, as a body, needed the usual supports in order to last. He ate, not for the body’s sake, since a holy power held it together, but so that it would not enter the minds of the men with him to hold some other opinion about him — just as, in fact, some did suppose afterward that he had appeared only in seeming. But he was entirely free of passion: no movement of feeling could reach him, neither pleasure nor pain. The apostles, meanwhile, had mastered anger and fear and craving through the Lord’s teaching, and mastered them as men who know; so they were not open even to the movements of feeling that look good — courage, zeal, joy, desire. Their minds were in a settled condition, not shifting in the least, but staying unvarying in a state of training after the Lord’s resurrection. [a]

Grant that the feelings just named are good when reason produces them: even so, they have no place in the perfect man, who cannot exercise courage. He does not meet what inspires fear, since he counts nothing that happens in life as a thing to dread, and nothing can dislodge him from the love he has toward God. He has no need of good cheer either, since he never falls into pain, being persuaded that everything happens well. He is not angry, since there is nothing to move him to anger: he loves God always and is turned wholly toward him alone, and therefore hates none of God’s creatures. Nor does he envy, since nothing he needs is missing — nothing that would make him like God, excellent and good. And so he does not love anyone with the affection everyone else has; he loves the Creator in the creatures. Nor, then, does he fall into any desire or eagerness, nor does he want anything belonging to another, so far as his soul goes, now that he keeps company by love with the One he loves, joined to him by his own free choice and by the habit that comes of training, coming nearer to him, and made blessed by the abundance of good things.

So on these grounds he is compelled to become like his Teacher in freedom from passion. For the Word of God is of the nature of mind, in that the image of mind is seen in man alone; and in the same way the good man is godlike in form and likeness as far as his soul goes. And, the other way around, God is like man. For what marks each of us out is the mind by which we are characterized. That is why men who sin against a man are unholy and irreligious.

It would be ridiculous, the argument runs, to say that the man who knows, the perfect man, must root out anger and courage: without these he will not struggle against circumstances or stand up to what is terrible. And if we take desire away from him, he will be swamped by troubles and will leave this life very basely. Unless he has it, as some suppose, he will never conceive a longing for what is like the excellent and the good. If, then, every alliance with what is good comes with desire, how — it is asked — does he stay free of passion while he desires what is excellent?

But these people, it seems, do not know what is divine about love. Love is not desire on the part of the man who loves. It is a relation of affection, restoring the one who truly knows to the unity of the faith, and it needs neither time nor place. A man who is already, by love, in the middle of what he is destined to be, and who has run ahead of hope by knowledge, desires nothing: he has, as far as it can be had, the very thing that would be desired. So, as you would expect, he stays in the exercise of that knowing love, in the one unvarying state. He will not be eager, then, to be made like what is beautiful, since he possesses beauty already by love. What further need has he of courage or of desire — a man who by love has come into kinship with the God whom nothing moves, and who by love has had his name entered among the friends of God?

We must therefore set the man who knows, the perfect man, free of every passion of the soul. Knowledge produces practice, practice produces habit and settled disposition, and a state like that produces freedom from passion — not passion kept within measure. Rooting desire out altogether reaps freedom from passion as its harvest. And he has no share even in the feelings everyone praises as good, the good feelings that stand next to the passions: gladness, which stands next to pleasure; dejection, which is joined to pain; caution, which comes under fear. Nor has he a share in high spirit, which takes its place alongside wrath — though some say these are no longer bad but already good. For a man once made perfect by love, who feasts forever and never has enough of the boundless joy of contemplation, cannot possibly take pleasure in small and grovelling things. What reason is left to a man who has reached “the light no one can approach” for turning back to the good things of the world? It is not yet true as to time and place; but through that knowing love, by which the inheritance and the full restoration follow, the giver of the reward makes good in deed what the man who knows had already reached out and taken by love, in his knowing choice.

For in going away to the Lord out of the love he bears him, he does not withdraw himself from life, though his tent is still in view here on earth; that is not permitted him. What he has withdrawn is his soul from the passions; that is granted him. And on the other side he goes on living, having put his cravings to death, using the body no longer but only allowing it what it must have, so as not to give occasion for its coming apart.

How, then, does he need bravery any more, when he is not in the middle of dangers, since he is not here at all but already wholly with the one he loves? And what need of self-control has a man who does not need it? To have the kind of desires that call for self-control to hold them down belongs to a man who is not yet pure, but still open to passion. Bravery is taken up because of fear and cowardice; and it would no longer be fitting for the friend of God, whom “God chose beforehand, before the foundation of the world,” to be enrolled in the highest “adoption,” to fall into pleasures or fears and spend himself holding the passions down.

For I will venture to say this: just as he is marked out beforehand by what he will do and what he will obtain, so he has also marked himself out beforehand, by what he knew and whom he loved. The future is not vague to him, as it is to the crowd, who live by guessing at it; he has grasped by knowing faith what is hidden from other men. And through love, the future is already present for him. He has believed, on the strength of prophecy and of the coming, in the God who does not lie; and what he believes he possesses, and he keeps his hold on the promise. The one who made the promise is truth; and by the trustworthiness of the one who promised, he has laid firm hold, by knowledge, of the end of the promise. The man who knows how surely the future is contained in the circumstances he stands in goes out by love to meet it. So a man persuaded that he will obtain the things that are really good will not pray to obtain what is here, but that he may always cling to the faith that hits the mark and reaches it. Besides that, he will pray that as many as possible may become like him, to the glory of God, which is brought to completion through knowledge. For the man made like the Savior gives himself to saving as well, carrying out the commands without a slip, as far as human nature can take on the image. And this is what it is to worship God by deeds and by knowledge of the true righteousness. The Lord will not wait for this man’s voice in prayer. “Ask, and I will do it; think, and I will give.”

For in short it is impossible for what does not change to take on firmness and consistency in what does. The ruling part of the soul is in perpetual change and therefore unstable, and the force of habit is not kept up in it. How can a man who is changed all the time by outside events and accidents ever come to have habit and settled disposition — in a word, a grasp of exact knowledge? The philosophers, too, count the virtues as habits, dispositions and sciences. And since knowledge is not born in a man but acquired, and the acquiring of its elements calls for application and training and progress, and then from unbroken practice it passes into a habit — so, once it has been perfected in the habit that belongs to the mysteries, it stays, and love makes it incapable of failing. For he has not only grasped the first Cause, and the Cause produced by it, and is sure of them, holding firmly to reasons that are firm, that cannot be refuted and cannot be moved. He has also learned, from the truth itself, the most exact truth about what is good and what is evil, about all coming into being, and — to put it all in one word — about everything the Lord has spoken of, from the foundation of the world to the end. He does not prefer to the truth itself what merely looks plausible, or what Greek reasoning calls necessary; what the Lord has spoken he accepts as clear and evident, though it is hidden from others. He has received already the knowledge of all things. And the oracles we have deliver their word about what exists as it is, about what is to come as it will be, and about what is past as it was.

In matters of exact knowledge, then, as the one man who has such knowledge, he will hold first place. He will carry on the discussion about the good, his mind always on the things only the mind can reach, tracing out his course in human affairs from the patterns above, as sailors steer a ship by a star. He keeps himself ready for every fitting action. He is used to thinking nothing of hardships and dangers when they have to be gone through. He never does anything hasty or out of keeping, either with himself or with the common good. He sees what is coming. And he cannot be bent by pleasures, waking or in dreams. Being accustomed to plain living and thrift, he is moderate, active and serious; he needs few things for life and busies himself with nothing beyond what is needed. Even these he does not want as the chief thing, but because he shares the common life and they are necessary for his stay here — necessary, and no further.

For knowledge is the chief thing for him. So he applies himself to the subjects that are a training for knowledge, taking from each branch of study whatever it contributes to the truth. In music he pursues the proportion of the harmonies. In arithmetic he notes how numbers increase and decrease, and how they stand to one another, and how most things fall under some proportion of numbers. In geometry, which deals with being in the abstract, he perceives a continuous distance and an unchanging being that is different from these bodies. By astronomy, again, lifted off the earth in his mind, he is carried up with the heavens and turns with their turning, forever studying the divine things and the harmony they have with one another — the study Abraham started from when he climbed to the knowledge of the one who made them. Further, the one who truly knows will make use of dialectic, fastening on the division of kinds into species, and will master the distinctions between the things that exist until he comes to what is primary and simple. [n]

But the crowd are frightened of Greek philosophy the way children are frightened of masks, afraid it will lead them astray. If the faith they have — I cannot call it knowledge — is the sort that can be dissolved by a plausible speech, then by all means let it be dissolved, and let them admit that they will not hold on to the truth. For truth cannot be moved; false opinion dissolves. We pick out one purple by holding it against another purple. So if a man admits that his heart has not been set right, he has neither the money-changers’ table nor the test of words. And how is he a money-changer any longer, if he cannot examine counterfeit coin and tell it apart — and do it on the spot?

Now David cried out, “The righteous will never be shaken” — not by deceiving speech, then, and not by pleasure that leads astray; so he will never be shaken out of his own inheritance. “He will not be afraid of bad news” — so not of slander with nothing behind it, and not of the false opinion around him. Neither will he dread clever arguments, since he can tell them apart and can answer questions rightly. Dialectic is that kind of wall: the truth cannot be trampled underfoot by the Sophists. For those who praise in the holy name of the Lord, as the prophet says, ought “to rejoice in heart, seeking the Lord. Seek him, then, and be strong. Seek his face continually, in every way.” Since “he spoke at many times and in many ways,” it is not in one way only that he is known.

It is not, then, by using these studies as though they were virtues that our man who truly knows will be deeply learned. He uses them as helps for telling what is shared from what belongs to a thing alone, and so he lets the truth in. For the cause of all error and false opinion is the inability to distinguish in what respect things are shared and in what respects they differ. Unless a man watches speech closely where things are distinct, he will confuse what is shared with what belongs to a thing alone, and never notice; and where that happens he must of necessity fall into trackless country and go wrong.

Distinguishing names and things in the Scriptures themselves also produces a great light in men’s souls. One has to understand expressions that mean several things, and several expressions when they mean one thing; and the result of that is accurate answering. But the great futility that busies itself with matters beside the point must be avoided. The one who truly knows uses the branches of learning as auxiliary exercises to prepare him: to pass the truth on accurately, as far as it can be done and with as little distraction as possible, and to defend it against arguments that plot to put the truth out. So he will not be lacking in what makes for proficiency in the course of studies and in Greek philosophy — but not as his chief business: necessarily, in second place, and because of the circumstances. For what the men who labor in the sects use wickedly, he will use rightly.

The truth that shows up in Greek philosophy, then, is only partial; but the real truth, like the sun falling on colors both white and black, shows what each of them is like. In the same way it exposes every sophistical plausibility. So it was rightly proclaimed among the Greeks as well: “Truth the queen is the beginning of great excellence.”