The Instructor 1.1.1–1.4.11

My children, we have laid a foundation of truth for ourselves: an unbreakable foundation of knowledge for the holy temple of the great God, a noble exhortation, a longing for eternal life through reasonable obedience, laid down in the ground of the mind. There are three things in the human being: character, actions, and passions. The Word who exhorts has taken character as his province: he is the guide to godliness, lying beneath, like a ship's keel, for the building up of faith. Rejoicing greatly in him and renouncing our old opinions, we grow young again for salvation, singing with the prophecy that sings, “How good is God to Israel, to the upright in heart.” Over all our actions the Word who counsels presides, and the passions the Word who consoles heals. Yet it is one and the same Word throughout, snatching the human being from the custom of the world in which he was brought up, and training him in the one salvation of faith in God. So the heavenly guide, the Word, when he was calling us to salvation, had the name “Exhorter” (this word of encouragement is properly called by the name of the whole from a part, for all godliness is exhortation, begetting in the reason that is akin to it a longing for the life that now is and for the life to come). But now, being both healer and counselor at once, following on from himself, he advises the one he has already converted, and, most important of all, promises the healing of the passions within us. Let us give him one fitting name: the Instructor, a guide to practice, not to method, since his aim is to improve the soul, not to teach, and to lead us to a life of self-control, not of knowledge.

Yet the same Word is also a teacher, but not now. In matters of doctrine the Teacher explains and reveals; but the Instructor, being practical, first exhorted us to a disposition of good character, and now calls us also to the practice of our duties, giving us pure precepts and showing those who come later the examples of those who went astray before. Both are most useful: the one, the kind that advises, leads to obedience; the other, taken in the form of example, is itself twofold, like the previous pair: in the one part, that we may imitate it by choosing the good; in the other, that we may turn away from it by rejecting the opposite.

Healing of the passions, then, follows from this, as the Instructor strengthens souls with the consolations of examples, and, as with gentle medicines, treats the sick with his kindly precepts, leading them to the complete knowledge of the truth. Health and knowledge are not the same: the one is gained by learning, the other by healing. No one who is still sick would learn any of the lessons of teaching before being fully healed. For not every precept is spoken in the same way to those who are learning and to those who are sick: some are addressed to some for knowledge, others to others for healing. Just as those sick in body need a physician, so those who are weak in soul need an Instructor, to heal our passions; and then he will lead us to the Teacher, preparing the soul pure and fit for knowledge, able to receive the revelation of the Word. So the all-loving Word, eager to perfect us by a saving gradation, uses a fine plan suited to effective education: first he exhorts, then he trains, and finally he teaches.

Our Instructor, my children, is like God his Father, whose Son he is: sinless, blameless, and without passion in soul; God undefiled in the form of man, minister of the Father's will, the Word who is God, who is in the Father, who is at the Father's right hand, God with the form as well. He is our spotless image; to him we must try with all our strength to make our soul like. He is entirely free from human passions, and that is why he alone is judge, because he alone is sinless; but we, as far as we can, try to sin as little as possible. For nothing is so urgent as, first, to be set free from passions and diseases, and then to be kept from easily falling into the habit of sin. Best of all is not to sin at all in any way, which we say belongs to God; second, never to touch any deliberate wrongdoing, which is proper to the wise man; third, not to fall into very many involuntary sins, which is characteristic of those who are nobly instructed; and let the last place be given to not remaining very long in our sins. But even this is saving for those who are called back to repentance, to renew the fight.

(… to renew the fight.) And it seems to me that the Instructor speaks very beautifully through Moses: “If anyone dies suddenly beside him, the head of his vow will immediately be defiled, and he shall be shaved,” calling involuntary sin a “sudden death.” He says it defiles, because it stains the soul; so he prescribes the cure as quickly as possible, advising that the head be shaved at once, that is, urging that the locks of ignorance that overshadow the reason be cut off, so that the reason (which is enthroned in the brain), stripped of the thick growth of wickedness, may run back to repentance. Then, after a few words, he adds: “But the former days were irrational,” by which it is clear that sins are meant, those that were not done according to reason. He called the involuntary “sudden,” and sinning “irrational.” For this reason the Word, the Instructor, has been given charge of preventing irrational sin. See this from the Scripture: “Therefore thus says the Lord.” The sin that came before is shown, by way of reproof, in the saying that follows, since just judgment follows; and this appears plainly through the prophets, as if they were saying, “If you had not sinned, he would not have made these threats”; and “Therefore thus says the Lord,” and “Because you did not hear these words, therefore thus says the Lord,” and “Therefore behold, says the Lord.” For this is why there is prophecy: because of obedience and disobedience; because of the one, that we may be saved, and because of the other, that we may be disciplined.

Our Instructor, then, is the Word, who by his counsels heals the unnatural passions of the soul. Strictly speaking, the help given for the diseases of the body is called medicine, an art taught by human wisdom; but the Father's Word is the only healer of human infirmities, the physician and holy charmer of the sick soul. “Save your servant,” it says, “my God, who hopes in you; have mercy on me, Lord, for I will cry to you all the day long.” “Medicine,” according to Democritus, “heals the diseases of the body, but wisdom rids the soul of passions.” But the good Instructor, Wisdom, the Word of the Father, who made the human being, cares for the whole of his creature; the all-healing physician of humanity heals both its body and its soul. The Savior says to the paralytic, “Rise, take the couch on which you lie, and go home”; and at once the sick man was made strong. And to the dead man he said, “Lazarus, come out”; and the dead man came out of the coffin, just as he had been before he suffered, having rehearsed the resurrection. Indeed, he heals the soul by itself too, by commandments and by gifts: by his counsels, perhaps, he takes time; but, rich in gifts, he says to us sinners, “Your sins are forgiven you.” And in the same instant we have become children, receiving from his good order the best and most secure order, which is concerned first with the world and the heavens, the courses of the sun and the circuits and movements of the other stars, for the sake of the human being; and then with the human being himself, on whom all its care is spent. Considering him its greatest work, it directed his soul by wisdom and self-control, blended his body with beauty and proportion, and breathed into human actions its own rightness and good order.

The Lord helps us in all things and benefits us in all things, both as man and as God: as God he forgives our sins, and as man he trains us not to sin. Naturally, then, the human being is dear to God, since he is his creature. The other things he made by command alone, but the human being he shaped with his own hands and breathed into him something of his own. So what was fashioned by him and in his likeness was made by God either because it is desirable to God for its own sake, or it was formed as desirable for the sake of something else. If the human being is desirable for his own sake, then God, being good, loved what is good; and the love charm is within the human being, that very thing which is called God's breath. But if the human being was made desirable for the sake of other things, God had no other reason for making him than that without him God could not have become a good Creator, nor could man have come to the knowledge of God (for God would not otherwise have made that for which the human being was made, had the human being not been made). And the power which God had hidden within himself, his will, he fulfilled by the power of making that was outside him, receiving from man that for which he made man; and he saw what he had, and what he willed came to be.

There is nothing that God cannot do. The human being, then, whom God made, is desirable for his own sake; and what is desirable for its own sake is akin to the one for whom it is desirable for its own sake, and to him it is also welcome and lovable. But can something be lovable to someone and not be loved by him? The human being has been shown to be lovable; so the human being is loved by God. For how can he not be loved, for whose sake the only-begotten is sent down from the bosom of the Father, the Word of faith, faith in abundance? The Lord himself confesses it plainly, saying, “For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me”; and again, “And you loved them, as you loved me.” What the Instructor wants and what he promises, then, being engaged in both deed and word, prescribing what is to be done and forbidding the opposite, is by now clear.

It is clear that the other kind of discourse, the teaching kind, is subtle and spiritual, attending to precision: it is the discourse of the higher mysteries, and let it be postponed for now. It is our duty to love in return him who lovingly guides us to the best life, and to live according to the ordinances of his will, not only doing what is commanded and guarding against what is forbidden, but also turning away from some examples and imitating others as closely as possible, so as to do the works of the Instructor in his likeness, that the words “in the image and likeness” may be fulfilled. For wandering in life as in deep darkness, we need a guide who cannot stumble and is accurate. The best guide is not a blind one, who, as the Scripture says, leads the blind by the hand into the pit; but the Word, who sees keenly and discerns the secrets of the heart. Just as there is no light that does not give light, nor mover that does not move, nor lover that does not love, so there is no good that does not benefit and lead to salvation. Let us love, then, the commandments through the works of the Lord (for the Word himself, clearly made flesh, displayed the same virtue as both practical and contemplative); and, taking the Word as law, let us recognize his commandments and counsels as short and swift roads to eternity; for his precepts are full of persuasion, not of fear.

Embracing, then, this good obedience still more, let us give ourselves to the Lord, holding fast to the most secure cable of faith in him, and recognizing that the virtue of man and woman is the same. For if the God of both is one, the Instructor of both is also one. One church, one self-control, one modesty; their food is common, marriage a yoke of two; breathing, sight, hearing, knowledge, hope, obedience, love, all are alike. Those whose life is common, whose grace is common, whose salvation is common, have virtue and training in common too. “For in this age,” he says, “they marry and are given in marriage,” in which alone female is distinguished from male; “but in that age no longer.” There the rewards of this shared and holy life of marriage are laid up not for male and female, but for the human being, separated from the desire that divides him.

(… separated from the desire that divides him.) So the name “human being” is common to men and women. This is why, it seems to me, the Athenians called not only the boy but also the girl by the common name paidarion (“little child”), if the comic poet Menander is to be trusted, who says in The Girl Who Was Slapped: “my little daughter … for the little child (paidarion) is very loving by nature.” And “lambs” is a name for simplicity common to male and female animals; and the “Lord himself shepherds” us forever, amen. “Neither sheep nor anything else should live without a shepherd, nor children without an instructor, nor servants without a master.”