Made Fit for Virtue

This same line of thought settles the question the sects put to us: was Adam created perfect, or imperfect? If imperfect, how could the work of a perfect God be imperfect — above all when that work is a human being? And if perfect, how did he break the commands? They will hear from us that he was not perfect in his making, but fitted for receiving virtue. It matters a great deal, where virtue is concerned, to be made fit for reaching it; and the intention is that we should be saved by our own selves. This, then, is the nature of the soul: to move of itself. And since we are reasoning creatures, and philosophy is a matter of reasoning, we have some kinship with it. Now a fitness for virtue is a movement toward virtue, and not virtue itself. All of us, then, as I said, are made by nature for acquiring virtue. [a]

But one man puts less into learning and training, and another more. That is why some have proved able to reach virtue in its full form, while others have reached only a kind of it; and some, on the other hand, though well disposed in other ways, have turned to the opposite through carelessness. And the knowledge that goes beyond every branch of learning in greatness and in truth is much harder still to get, and comes only with a great deal of labor. “But, it seems, they did not know the mysteries of God. For God created the human being for immortality, and made him an image of his own nature.” And it is in keeping with that nature — the nature of the One who knows everything — that the man who truly knows, righteous and holy and with good sense, hurries on to reach the measure of the full-grown man. For with him not only actions and thoughts but words as well are clean. It says: “You have tested my heart; you have visited me by night. You have put me to the fire, and no unrighteousness was found in me, so that my mouth will not speak of the works of men.”

And why do I say “the works of men”? He recognizes sin itself — not sin brought forward in order to be repented of, since that is common to all believers, but what sin is. He does not condemn this sin or that one, but simply all sin; and what he brings up is not what a man has done badly, but what ought not to be done at all. So repentance too is of two kinds: the common kind, on account of having done wrong; and the kind that comes from learning what sin is, which persuades a man in the first place to keep from sinning, and whose result is that he does not sin.

So let them not say that the man who does wrong and sins is transgressing by the working of demons; for then he would be guiltless. It is by choosing the same things demons choose — by sinning, by being unsteady and light and shifting in his cravings, like a demon — that he becomes a demon-ridden man. Now the man who is bad, having through evil become sinful in his very nature, becomes corrupt: he has what he chose; and being sinful, he sins in his actions as well. And the good man, on the other hand, does what is right. That is why we call good not only the virtues but right actions too.

And of the things that are good, we know that some are wanted for their own sake — knowledge, for instance. When we have it we hunt nothing further out of it; we want only that it stay with us, and that we be in unbroken contemplation, and we strain toward it for its own sake. Other things are wanted for other reasons: faith, for escape from punishment and for the advantage of the reward that comes from it. For with many people fear is the reason they do not sin, and the promise is what makes them pursue obedience, and salvation comes by way of that. Knowledge, then, wanted as it is for its own sake, is the most perfect good, and so the things that follow by means of it are good as well. And punishment is the cause of correction to the man who is punished; and to those who can see what lies in front of them, that man becomes an example, to keep them from falling into the same thing.

Let us, then, receive knowledge without wanting its results, embracing it for the sake of knowing. For the first advantage is the settled state of knowing, which supplies harmless pleasures and rejoicing, both for now and for what is to come. And this rejoicing is said to be gladness — a reflection of the virtue that goes with truth, by way of a kind of cheerfulness and relaxing of the soul. And the acts that share in knowledge are good and beautiful acts.

For abundance in the acts that go with virtue is the true riches, and want of decent desires is poverty. The use and enjoyment of the things we need do no harm by their quality, but by their quantity, when there is too much of them. So the one who truly knows draws a boundary around his cravings, in owning and in enjoying alike, and does not go past the limit of what is needed. Counting life in this world, then, as necessary for the growth of understanding and the getting of knowledge, he will set the highest value not on living, but on living well. So he will not put children, or marriage, or parents ahead of love for God and righteousness in the way he lives.

To such a man his wife, once she has conceived, is as a sister, and is judged as if she were of the same father; she remembers her husband only when she looks at the children — since she is to become a sister in reality after she puts off the flesh, which separates and limits the knowledge of those who are spiritual by the particular marks of the sexes. For souls, taken by themselves, are equal. Souls are neither male nor female, when they no longer marry and are not given in marriage. And is a woman not carried over into a man, when she has become equally unwomanly, and manly, and perfect? Such, then, was Sarah’s laughter when she got the good news that a son would be born — not, in my opinion, because she disbelieved the angel, but because she was ashamed of the intercourse by which she was to become the mother of a son.

And did Abraham not rightly call Sarah his sister, when he was in danger with the king of Egypt on account of her beauty? She was of the same father, though not of the same mother.

To those, then, who have repented and have not firmly believed, God grants their requests through their prayers; but to those who live without sin and with true knowledge, he gives when they have merely entertained the thought. To Hannah, for instance, on her merely conceiving the thought, the conception of the child Samuel was granted. For as the Scripture says: “Ask, and I will do it; think, and I will give.” For we have heard that God knows the heart. He does not judge the soul by its movement, as we men do, nor yet by the outcome — it is ridiculous to think so. Nor was it as an architect praises the work when it is finished that God, after making the light and then seeing it, called it good. He knew before he made it what it would be, and praised what was made, having potentially made good from the first, by his purpose that had no beginning, what was going to be good in fact. What was still to come he had already called good beforehand, the phrasing hiding the truth by an inversion of the word order.

So the one who truly knows prays in thought at every hour, joined to God by love. First he will ask forgiveness of sins; then that he may sin no more; then the power of doing good, and of taking in the whole creation and the Lord’s ordering of it, so that, becoming pure in heart through the knowledge that comes by the Son of God, he may be brought into the blessed sight, face to face — having heard the Scripture that says, “Fasting with prayer is a good thing.”

Now fastings mean keeping away from every kind of evil — in action, in word, and in thought itself. So righteousness, as it appears, is four-square: equal and alike on every side, in word, in deed, in keeping away from evils, in doing good, in the perfection that comes with knowledge; nowhere and in no way limping, so that the man does not show up as unjust and uneven. As a man is righteous, so he is certainly a believer; but being a believer he is not yet also righteous — I mean by the righteousness of advance and completion, the righteousness by which the one who truly knows is called righteous.

For instance, when Abraham became a believer, it was reckoned to him as righteousness — he having advanced to the greater and more perfect degree of faith. For the man who merely keeps away from bad conduct is not just, unless he reaches doing good and knowledge besides; and that is why some things are to be kept away from and others are to be done. “By the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left,” the apostle says, the righteous man is sent on to the inheritance above — defended by some of the arms, putting out his strength with the others. For the shelter of his full armor by itself, and keeping away from sins, are not enough for perfection, unless he takes on in addition the work of righteousness: activity in doing good.

Then our right-hand man, the one who truly knows, is shown to be in righteousness already, even here — as Moses was, glorified in the face of the soul, as we said earlier; the body carries the stamp of the righteous soul. For as the mordant used in dyeing stays in the wool and gives it a certain quality, and a difference from other wool, so also in the soul: the pain is gone, but the good remains; the sweet is left, and the base is wiped away. These are the two qualities that belong to each soul, and by them the soul that is glorified and the soul that is condemned are known.

And as in Moses’ case a kind of glorified hue settled on his face, from his righteous conduct and from his unbroken company with God, who spoke with him — so too a divine power of goodness, clinging to the righteous soul in contemplation, in prophecy, and in the work of governing, stamps on it something like a radiance of mind, like a ray of the sun, as a visible sign of righteousness; and it unites the soul with light through unbroken love, love that carries God and is carried by God. From this the one who truly knows comes to be made like God the Savior, as far as human nature is allowed, being made perfect “as the Father who is in heaven.”

It is he himself who says: “Little children, a little while longer I am with you.” And God himself remains blessed and immortal, neither troubled nor troubling anyone else — not because he is good by nature, but because he does good in the way that is his own. Being in his very being both Father and good, and proving himself so in what he does, God stays unchangeably in that same goodness. For what use is a good that does not act and do good?

So the man who has first brought his passions under control and trained himself for freedom from passion, and has grown into the doing of good that goes with perfect knowledge, is here already equal to the angels. Shining already, and like the sun blazing in his doing of good, he speeds on by righteous knowledge, through love of God, to the holy dwelling — as the apostles did. Not that they became apostles because they were picked out for some distinguished peculiarity of nature: Judas too was chosen along with them. They were capable of becoming apostles because they were chosen by the One who foresees even final outcomes. And so Matthias, who was not chosen along with them, is put in Judas’ place, once he showed himself worthy of becoming an apostle. [z]

Those too, now, who have trained themselves in the Lord’s commands and have lived perfectly and with true knowledge according to the good news, may be enrolled in the chosen body of the apostles. Such a man is in reality an elder of the church, and a true servant of the will of God, if he does and teaches what belongs to the Lord — not as being appointed by men, nor thought righteous because he is an elder, but enrolled among the elders because he is righteous. And though here on earth he is not honored with the chief seat, he will sit down on the twenty-four thrones, judging the people, as John says in the Revelation.

For in truth the covenant of salvation, coming down to us from the foundation of the world through different generations and times, is one, though it is thought of as different in the gift it gives. It follows that there is one unchanging gift of salvation, given by one God through one Lord, doing good in many ways. That is why the middle wall that separated the Greek from the Jew is taken away, so that there might be a people of God’s own. And so both meet in the one unity of faith, and the selection out of both is one.

And the chosen of the chosen are those who, by reason of perfect knowledge, are called out of the church itself as the best, and are honored with the most august glory — the judges and the rulers — twenty-four of them, the grace being doubled, equally from Jews and from Greeks. For in my opinion the steps of promotion here in the church — overseers, elders, deacons — are copies of the angels’ glory, and of that arrangement which, the Scriptures say, waits for those who have followed in the footsteps of the apostles and have lived in the perfection of righteousness according to the good news. For these, the apostle writes, taken up in the clouds, will first serve as deacons, then be enrolled among the elders, by promotion in glory — for glory differs from glory — until they grow into “a perfect man.”