Works Follow Knowledge

He never holds against people the wrongs they have done him; he forgives them. That is why he can rightly pray, “Forgive us, since we too forgive.” This is one of the things God wants: to covet nothing, to hate no one. All people are the work of one will. And is it not the Savior — the one who wants the man who truly knows to be perfect as “the heavenly Father” is, that is, as he himself is — who says, “Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord”? He wants him to need no more help from angels, but to receive it from himself, having become worthy of it, and to have his protection from himself by obedience. A man like this claims from the Lord; he does not merely ask. And when his brothers are in need, the one who truly knows will not ask for himself for a great deal of money to hand out. He will pray that they be supplied with what they need. In that way he gives his prayer to the people who are in need, and by his prayer they are supplied — without his knowing it, and with no room for vanity. Poverty and disease and trials of that kind are often sent as a warning: to correct what is past and to make a man careful about what is ahead. Such a man prays that they be lifted, and he does it by the privilege that knowledge gives him, not out of vanity. Simply by being a man who truly knows, he does good, having become an instrument of God’s goodness. [a]

It is said in the traditions that Matthew the apostle used to say again and again: “If a chosen man’s neighbor sins, the chosen man has sinned. For if he had conducted himself as the Word directs, his neighbor too would have been filled with such reverence for the life he led that he would not have sinned.”

What, then, are we to say about the man who truly knows himself? “Do you not know,” says the apostle, “that you are God’s temple?” So the one who truly knows is divine, and already holy — carrying God and carried by God. And Scripture, showing that sinning is foreign to him, hands over to strangers the men who have fallen away, when it says, “Do not look at a woman who belongs to another, to want her.” It plainly declares that sin is foreign to the nature of God’s temple, and against it. Now the temple is large, as the church is, and small, as the man is who keeps the seed of Abraham. So the man who has God resting in him will want nothing else. Leaving every hindrance at once, and thinking nothing of all the matter that distracts him, he cuts his way through heaven by knowledge. He passes through the spiritual beings, and through every rule and authority, and touches the highest thrones, hurrying on to that one thing for the sake of which alone he came to know. So, mixing “the serpent with the dove,” he lives at once completely and with a good conscience, mixing faith with hope so as to look forward to what is coming. He is aware of the gift he has received, having become worthy to obtain it, and knowledge carries him over from slavery to the standing of an adopted son. He knows God — or rather, he is known by God — and that is the end; so the work he puts out matches the worth of the grace he was given. For works follow knowledge as a shadow follows a body.

Rightly, then, nothing that happens upsets him, and he is not suspicious of the things that come about for good by God’s arrangement. He is not ashamed to die either: his conscience is good, and he is fit to be looked at by the Powers. Cleansed, so to speak, of every stain on the soul, he knows perfectly well that things will be better for him after he departs. That is why he never puts pleasure or profit ahead of God’s arrangement. He trains himself by the commands, so that in everything he may please the Lord and be well spoken of in the world, since everything depends on the one sovereign God. The Son of God, it is said, came to his own, and his own did not receive him. So in his use of the things of the world he not only gives thanks and praises the creation; using them rightly, he is himself praised. For the end he has in view finishes in contemplation, reached by the activity of knowledge and in keeping with the commandments.

From there, gathering by knowledge the materials that will be food for contemplation, and having nobly taken in how great knowledge is, he moves on to the holy reward of being carried away from here. For he has heard the psalm that says, “Go around Zion and encircle her; count her towers.” It points, I think, to the men who have taken the Word in on a grand scale, so as to become high towers themselves and to stand firm in faith and knowledge. Let this much be said to the Greeks about the man who truly knows — the seeds of the matter, in the fewest words possible. But let it be understood that if the man who only believes does one or two of these things rightly, still he will not do them all, nor with knowledge at its height, as the one who truly knows does.

Now about what I may call the freedom from passion that we attribute to the one who truly knows — the state in which the believer’s perfection, “advancing by love, arrives at a mature man, at the measure of full stature,” by being made like God and becoming truly angelic — many other testimonies from Scripture come to mind that I might bring forward. But because of how long the discussion would run, I think it better to hand that honor over to people who are willing to take the trouble, and to leave it to them to work the teachings out by selecting the passages themselves. One passage, though, I will touch on in the briefest terms, so as not to leave the subject unexplained. In the first letter to the Corinthians the divine apostle says: “When one of you has a case against another, does he dare to go to law before the unrighteous, and not before the holy ones? Do you not know that the holy ones will judge the world?” — and so on. The passage is very long, so we will bring out what the apostle means by taking up those words of his that bear on it most, in the briefest language and in a rapid sort of way, reading through the argument in which he describes the perfection of the man who truly knows. For he does not merely present such a man as one who would rather suffer wrong than do it. He teaches that the man does not keep the injury in mind, and he does not even allow him to pray against the man who wronged him. He knows that the Lord expressly ordered us to pray for our enemies. [n]

To say that the man who has been wronged goes to law before the unrighteous is nothing but another way of saying that he shows a wish to get even, and a desire to injure the other man in return — which is to do wrong himself, in the same way. And when the apostle says that he wants “some to go to law before the holy ones,” he is pointing at the people who ask in prayer that the men who wronged them be paid back for their injustice. He means that this second group is better than the first — but they are still not obedient, if they have not become entirely free of resentment and do not pray even for their enemies. It is good for them, then, to receive the right frame of mind from repentance, which issues in faith. For even if the truth seems to acquire enemies who bear it ill will, it is hostile to nobody. “God makes his sun shine on the just and on the unjust,” and he sent the Lord himself to just and unjust alike. And the man who works hard at being made like God, practicing a great absence of resentment, forgives seventy times seven times — as it were all his life long — and through his whole course in this world (that being what the counting of sevens indicates) shows consideration to anyone at all, if anyone wrongs the man who truly knows during his whole time in the flesh. For he not only thinks it right that the good man should give up his property, and only his property, to others, who are among the men who have wronged him. He also wants the righteous man to ask those judges to forgive the offenses of the men who have wronged him. And with reason: the men who try to wrong him get the better of him only in what is outward and has to do with the body, even if it goes as far as death — and none of that truly belongs to the man who truly knows.

And how will a man “judge” the “angels” who deserted their place, when he has himself deserted the forgetting of injuries that the good news calls for? “Why not rather suffer wrong?” he says. “Why not rather be cheated? Instead, you do wrong and cheat” — plainly, by praying against people who go astray in ignorance, and by depriving the men you pray against, as far as it lies with you, of God’s kindness toward people and of his goodness — “and this to your brothers.” He does not mean only those in the faith, but converts as well. For we do not yet know whether the man who is hostile now will believe later. From that the conclusion clearly follows: if not everyone is our brother yet, everyone ought to be regarded that way. And even now it is only the man of knowledge who recognizes that all people are the work of one God, and are clothed with one image in one nature, though some may be muddier than others; and in the creatures he recognizes the working, and through it, again, he worships the will of God. “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” The man who pays a wrong back acts unrighteously — whether by what he does, or by what he says, or by so much as forming the wish; and after the law’s training, the good news rules that out.

“And such were some of you” — such, plainly, as the people you refuse to forgive still are. “But you were washed” — not simply as the rest were, but with knowledge. You threw off the passions of the soul in order to become as like as possible to the goodness of God’s providence, by patience and by forgiveness “toward the just and the unjust,” throwing the gleam of your kindness over them in word and in deed, as the sun does. The one who truly knows will manage this either by greatness of mind or by imitating what is better. And there is a third reason as well: “Forgive, and you will be forgiven” — the command as good as forcing men into salvation by an excess of goodness. “But you were made holy.” For the man who has come to this state is in a condition to be holy, falling into none of the passions in any way, but as good as out of the body already, and already made holy apart from this earth. “And so,” he says, “you were counted righteous in the name of the Lord.” You are made by him, so to speak, righteous as he is righteous, and are blended as far as possible with the Holy Spirit. For “are not all things permitted to me? Yet I will not be brought under the power of anything” — so as to do, or think, or say anything against the good news. “Food for the stomach, and the stomach for food, and God will do away with both” — that is, the people who think and live as though they were made for eating, and who do not eat in order to live as a result, and to apply themselves to knowledge as their first end. And does he not say that these are, as it were, the fleshy parts of the holy body? For the Lord’s church, the spiritual and holy choir, is pictured as a body. So the men who are merely called, but do not live according to the word, are the fleshy parts. “Now” this spiritual “body,” the holy church, “is not for sexual immorality.” Nor are the things that belong to the life of the nations to be taken up by deserting the good news. For the man who behaves in the church as the nations do — in deed, in word, or even in thought — commits sexual immorality against the church and against his own body. The man who in this way “is joined to the prostitute,” that is, to conduct contrary to the covenant, becomes another “body,” not a holy one, “and one flesh,” and has the life of the nations and a different hope. “But the one who is joined to the Lord in spirit” becomes a spiritual body by a different kind of joining.

A man like this is wholly a son: holy, free from passion, knowing, complete, shaped by the teaching of the Lord — so that in deed, in word, and in his very spirit he may be brought close to the Lord and receive the dwelling place owed to a man who has come of age in this way. Let this sample be enough for those who have ears. There is no need to unfold the mystery, only to point out as much as will remind the men who share in knowledge — men who will also grasp how it was said by the Lord, “Be perfect as your Father is, perfectly,” by forgiving sins, forgetting injuries, and living in the settled habit of freedom from passion. For just as we call a doctor perfect and a philosopher perfect, so too, in my view, we call a man who truly knows perfect. But not one of those points, important as they are, is taken up in order to make him like God. We do not say, as the Stoics most irreverently do, that virtue is the same thing in a man and in God. Ought we not, then, to be perfect as the Father wills? For it is utterly impossible for anyone to become perfect as God is. What the Father wants is that we be perfect by living blamelessly, in the obedience the good news asks for. If, then, the statement being elliptical, we understand what is missing and so complete the passage for those who cannot make out what has been left unsaid, we will both know the will of God and walk at once reverently and with greatness of soul, as suits the dignity of the command.