Few Understand What Sin Is

On the other hand there are those who make the sum of all their joy and delight and happiness consist in the contemplation of divine and spiritual things alone. If thoughts force themselves on them and draw them away from it against their will, even for a short time, they punish this as though it were a kind of sacrilege in them, and avenge it with immediate chastisement. They grieve that they have preferred some worthless created thing, to which their mind’s gaze was turned aside, to their Creator, and they charge themselves with what I had almost called the guilt of ungodliness. Although they turn the eyes of their heart back with the greatest speed to behold the brightness of God’s glory, they cannot bear even for a very short time the darkness of fleshly thoughts, and they loathe whatever holds back their soul’s gaze from the true light. So when the blessed apostle John wants to instill this feeling in everyone, he says: “Little children, do not love the world or the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of God is not in him. For everything that is in the world is the craving of the flesh and the craving of the eyes and the pride of life, which is not of the Father but of the world. And the world perishes, and its craving with it; but whoever does the will of God remains forever.” [a]

The saints, then, scorn all the things on which the world depends. But it is impossible for them never to be carried off toward those things by a brief straying of their thoughts. Even now no man except our Lord and Savior can keep his naturally wandering mind always fixed on the contemplation of God, so that he is never carried away from it by love of something in this world. As Scripture says: “Even the stars are not clean in his sight”; and again, “If he puts no trust in his saints, and finds wickedness in his angels”; or, as the more accurate translation has it: “Look, among his saints none is unchangeable, and the heavens are not pure in his sight.”