Love Trains Its Athlete

About the universe he thinks truly and on a grand scale, because he has taken in teaching that comes from God. He begins with wonder at the creation, and by that wonder gives proof of his own capacity for receiving knowledge; so he becomes an eager student of the Lord. The moment he heard of God and of providence he believed, out of the wonder he felt. Carried by the impulse that came from it, he throws all his energy into learning, and does everything by which he may come to know what he longs for. Desire mixed with inquiry grows up in him as faith advances. This is what it means to become worthy of contemplation of such a kind and of such importance. And so the one who truly knows will taste the will of God. [a]

For it is not his ears that he hands over to what the words point at, but his soul. Taking hold of the realities themselves through the words, he brings his soul, as he should, to what is real: he takes the commands “Do not commit adultery” and “Do not kill” in the particular way they are spoken to a man of knowledge, and not the way the rest of people understand them. So he trains himself in that contemplation, and goes on to exercise himself on larger questions and grander subjects, knowing perfectly well that, as the prophet says, “the one who teaches a man knowledge” is the Lord — the Lord acting through a man’s mouth. That is how he took flesh as well.

As you would expect, then, he never prefers what is pleasant to what is useful — not even if a beautiful woman, when circumstances have caught him, should try to entice him with shameless urging. Joseph’s master’s wife could not shake him loose from his steadiness. She had hold of his coat by force, and he stripped it off and left it: bare of sin, but clothed with decency of character. For even if his master’s eyes — the Egyptian’s, I mean — did not see Joseph, the eyes of the Almighty were watching. We hear a voice and we see bodies; God examines the thing itself, the source that the speaking and the looking come out of.

So when sickness comes on the one who truly knows, or an accident, or death, the most terrible thing of all, he stays unbent in soul. He knows that everything of that sort belongs to the way creation is made, and that by God’s power such things become a medicine that saves, doing good by discipline to people who are hard to reform, dealt out as each deserves by providence, which is truly good. He uses created things when the Word tells him to, and as far as it tells him to, giving thanks to the Creator; and in that way he becomes master of the enjoyment of them.

He never nurses resentment or holds a grudge against anyone, even against a man whose behavior deserves to be hated. He worships the Maker, and he loves the man who shares this life with him, pitying him and praying for him because of his ignorance. He does share in the body’s feelings, since he is bound to a body, and a body by its nature can suffer; but he is not what the feeling primarily happens to. So when things come on him that he did not choose, he pulls back out of the trouble into what really belongs to him, and is not swept away by what is foreign to him. He accommodates himself only to what is necessary, and only so far as the soul is kept unharmed. For he does not want to be faithful in appearance and by other people’s guesswork, but in knowledge and truth — that is, in solid action and in a word that holds. So he does not only praise what is fine; he works to become fine himself, changing by love from a good and faithful servant into a friend, through the perfecting of habit that he has gained, in purity, from true teaching and long discipline.

He strains, then, toward the summit of knowledge. He is well ordered in character, composed in his bearing, and has everything that belongs to a man who truly knows. He keeps his eye on fine models: on the many patriarchs who lived rightly, on the many more prophets, on angels past counting, and above all on the Lord, who taught that highest life of all and showed that a man can reach it. That is why he does not love the good things of this world that lie within his reach — he does not want to stay on the ground — but the things hoped for, or rather the things already known, and hoped for only in the sense that they are still to be laid hold of.

So he goes through hard labor and testing and affliction, and not in the way of those philosophers who are counted brave, who endure in the hope that their present troubles will stop and they will have their share of what is pleasant again. Knowledge has given him the firmest conviction that he will receive what he hopes for in the future. That is why he despises not only this world’s pains but all its pleasures.

They say that when the blessed Peter saw his own wife led out to be executed, he was glad that she had been called and was going home, and that he called out to her by name, to hearten her and comfort her: “Remember the Lord.” Such was the marriage of those blessed people, and such was their disposition toward the ones dearest to them, carried through to the end. This is what the apostle means too when he says that a man who marries should be “as though he had not married,” counting his marriage free of excessive passion and inseparable from love for the Lord — which is exactly what that true husband urged his wife to hold on to as she left this life for the Lord. Was not faith in the hope that comes after death plain to see in people who gave thanks to God at the very worst of their punishment? Firm, in my opinion, was the faith they had, and works that matched their faith followed it. In every circumstance, then, the soul of the one who truly knows is strong, in a condition of complete health and strength, like an athlete’s body.

He is sensible in human affairs, judging what a just man ought to do. He has his first principles from God above, and he has acquired, so as to grow like God, a measured attitude toward the body’s pains and pleasures. He stands up to fear boldly, trusting God. Certainly the soul that truly knows, decked out with complete virtue, is the earthly image of the divine power; it is brought to its full growth by nature, by training and by reason, all working together. This beauty of the soul becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit when it takes on, through the whole of a life, a disposition that matches the good news. Such a man stands up against every fear of everything frightening — not of death only, but of poverty and disease and disgrace and whatever is like them — unbeaten by pleasure and master of the desires that have no reason in them. For he knows well what is to be done and what is not, and he is perfectly clear about what really is to be feared and what is not. So he bears intelligently whatever the Word indicates to him is required and necessary, telling apart with intelligence what is really safe — that is, good — from what only looks so, and what is really to be feared from what only seems so, such as death, disease and poverty, which are frightening by people’s opinion rather than in truth.

This is the man who is really good, and free of passion, having risen above the whole life of passion by the settled habit of a soul furnished with virtue. Everything he needs for reaching the goal depends on himself. The accidents people call terrible do not frighten a good man, because they are not evil; and the things that really are to be feared have no place in the Christian who truly knows, since they stand at the opposite pole from what is good, being evil, and opposites cannot be in the same person at the same time. So the man who plays without a fault the drama of life that God gave him to act knows both what he must do and what he must endure.

Is it not out of ignorance of what is to be feared and what is not that cowardice comes? So the only man of courage is the one who truly knows: he knows the good things that are here and the good things to come, and along with them, as I have said, the things that in reality are not to be feared. Knowing that vice alone is hateful and destroys what leads to knowledge, he makes war on it under the armor of the Lord. Now if something is brought about by folly and by the devil’s working — or rather his working alongside — that thing is not on that account the devil, or folly itself. No action is wisdom: wisdom is a settled state, and no action is a settled state. So an action that comes out of ignorance is not already ignorance; it is an evil that comes through ignorance, but it is not ignorance. Disturbances of the mind and sins are not vices either, though they come out of vice.

No one, then, whose bravery has no reason in it truly knows. On that showing you could call children brave, who go through frightening things because they do not know what to be afraid of — they will even put a hand in the fire. And wild animals that run straight onto the spear points, having a brute’s courage, could be called gallant. People like that might even call acrobats brave, who tumble over swords with a certain skill, practicing a dangerous trade for a miserable fee.

But the man who is truly brave keeps in view the danger that comes from the crowd’s ill will, and waits with courage for whatever comes. This is what marks him off from others who are called martyrs. Some of those manufacture the occasion themselves and throw themselves into the middle of the danger — how, I do not know; it is right to use mild language. The others guard themselves, as right reason requires; then, when God really does call them, they hand themselves over at once and confirm the call, knowing in themselves that they were in no rush, and offering the man himself to be tested in true, reasoning courage. They do not hold to the confession their calling requires because they are enduring a smaller danger out of fear of a greater one, the way other people do, nor because they dread being blamed by their equals and by those who think as they do. They obey the call willingly, out of love for God, with no other aim in view than to please God, and not for any reward for their labors.

For some suffer out of love of glory, some out of fear of some other and sharper punishment, some for the sake of the pleasures and delights that come after death. These are children in faith — blessed, certainly, but not yet grown men in love for God, as the one who truly knows is. For in the church, as in the athletic games, there are crowns for men and crowns for boys. But love is to be chosen for itself and for nothing else. So in the one who truly knows, courage is brought to perfection along with knowledge, out of the discipline of his life, since he has always practiced mastering the passions.

Love, accordingly, makes its own athlete fearless and undaunted and confident in the Lord, oiling him and training him, just as righteousness secures for him truthfulness throughout his whole life. For it was righteousness in a sentence to say, “Let your yes be yes, and your no, no.”

It is the same with self-control. It is not practiced out of love of honor, the way athletes practice it for crowns and reputation; nor, on the other hand, out of love of money, the way some men make a show of self-control while chasing what is good for them through appalling hardship; nor out of love of the body, for the sake of health. And a man is not truly self-controlled when his temperance comes of being a boor who has never tasted pleasure at all. Men who have lived a life of hard labor break down the rigidity of their temperance into pleasure the moment they get a taste of pleasures. That is the sort who are held back by law and by fear: as soon as they find a convenient opportunity they cheat the law and give the good the slip. But self-control that is wanted for its own sake, brought to completion through knowledge, and lasting always, makes a man lord and master of himself. So the one who truly knows is temperate and free of passion, not to be dissolved by pleasures or by pains, any more than adamant, as they say, is dissolved by fire.

The cause of all this is love, the most holy and most sovereign of all knowledge. For by its service of what is best and highest, whose mark is oneness, love makes the one who truly knows both friend and son at once, grown in truth into “a full-grown man, up to the measure of full stature.” Further: agreement about the same thing is consent, and what is the same is one. Friendship is completed in likeness, and what is held in common lies in being one. So the one who truly knows, just because he loves the one true God, is the man who is really complete, and God’s friend, and is set in the rank of a son. These are names of nobility and of knowledge and of completeness in the contemplation of God — the crowning step forward that the soul which truly knows receives when it has become entirely pure, counted worthy to look forever on God Almighty, “face,” as it says, “to face.” For it has become wholly spiritual, and having gone, in the spiritual church, to what shares its own nature, it stays at rest in God.