Against Pride of Birth

Be careful not to love human glory in any way, or your lot too may be counted among those to whom it was said, “How can you believe, who seek glory from one another?” and of whom it is said through the prophet, “Add evils to them; add evils to the boastful of the earth”; and elsewhere, “You are put to shame by your boasting, by your reproaching in the sight of the Lord.” For I do not want you to look to those who are virgins of the world and not of Christ. Forgetting their purpose and the profession they made, they delight in delicacies, take pleasure in riches, and boast of their descent from a merely fleshly nobility. If they truly believed themselves to be daughters of God, they would never, after so divine an ancestry, admire mere human nobility or take pride in any honored father on earth. If they felt that they had God for their Father, they would not love any nobility that belongs to the flesh. [a]

Why, you foolish woman, do you flatter yourself about your noble descent and take delight in it? In the beginning God created two human beings, and from them the whole multitude of the human race has descended. So it is not the fairness of nature but the ambition of evil desire that has given rise to worldly nobility. Without question, we are all made equal by the grace of the divine bath, and there can be no difference among those whom the second birth has brought forth. Through it the rich man and the poor man, the free man and the slave, the nobly born and the lowly born, each alike is made a son of God. So mere earthly rank is overshadowed by the brilliance of heavenly glory and from then on counts for nothing, while those who were once unequal in worldly honors are now equally clothed in the glory of a heavenly and divine nobility. Among such people there is no longer any place for low birth, and no one whom the majesty of the divine birth adorns is inferior to another, except in the judgment of those who do not think that the things of heaven are to be preferred to the things of earth. There can be no worldly boasting among them if they reflect how empty a thing it is to rank themselves, in smaller matters, above those they know to be their equals in greater matters, and to regard as beneath them on earth those whom they believe to be their equals in what belongs to heaven. But you, who are a virgin of Christ and not of the world, flee from all the glory of this present life, so that you may reach the glory that is promised in the world to come.