The Soul Can Turn Back to God

We repeat, then, what we said before. Just as people denied God and worship things without a soul, so also, in thinking that they have no rational soul, they at once receive the punishment of their folly: to be counted among the creatures without reason. And so, since they superstitiously worship soulless gods, as though they lacked a soul of their own, they deserve pity and guidance. But if they claim to have a soul and pride themselves on their reason, and rightly so, why do they dare to go against reason as though they had no soul, and think not as they ought, making themselves out to be higher even than God? For though they have a soul that is immortal and invisible to them, they make a likeness of God out of things that are visible and mortal. Or why, in the same way that they departed from God, do they not return to him again? For just as they turned their understanding away from God and invented as gods things that did not exist, so they are able to rise up again with the mind of their soul and turn back to God. [a]

And turn back they can, if they lay aside the filth of every craving that they have put on, and wash it away persistently, until they have got rid of everything foreign that has clung to their soul and can show it in its simplicity, as it was made. Then they will be able by it to behold the Word of the Father, in whose likeness they were made in the beginning. For the soul is made after the image and likeness of God, as divine Scripture also shows when it says, speaking as God, “Let us make man after our Image and likeness.” That is why, when the soul gets rid of all the filth of sin that covers it and keeps only the likeness of the Image in its purity, then surely, once this likeness is made thoroughly bright, the soul beholds as in a mirror the Image of the Father, that is, the Word, and through him arrives at a conception of the Father, whose Image the Savior is.

Or, if the soul’s own teaching is not enough, because of the outside things that cloud its mind and keep it from seeing what is higher, it is still possible to reach the knowledge of God from the things that are seen. For creation, as though in written letters, proclaims its own Lord and Creator in a loud voice by its order and harmony.