Miscellanies 2.20.103–2.21.131

Endurance too presses on toward likeness to God, reaping freedom from passion through patience, if the story of Hananiah and his companions still rings in anyone's ears, one of whom was Daniel the prophet, filled with divine faith. Daniel lived in Babylon, as Lot lived in Sodom, and Abraham, soon to be the friend of God, in the land of the Chaldeans. The king of the Babylonians, then, cast Daniel down into a pit full of beasts; but the King of all, the faithful Lord, brought him up unharmed.

The one who knows, insofar as he knows, will acquire this patience. He will bless when tested, like the noble Job; like Jonah, he will pray when swallowed by the sea monster, and faith will restore him to prophesy to the Ninevites; and even if he is shut up with lions, he will tame the beasts; and if he is thrown into fire, he will be bedewed and not burned up. He will bear witness by night, he will bear witness by day; in word, in life, in manner he will bear witness. Dwelling with the Lord, he will remain his familiar friend and companion at table according to the Spirit, pure in flesh, pure in heart, sanctified in word. “The world,” it says, “has been crucified to him, and he to the world.” Carrying the Savior's cross, he follows the Lord, “stepping in the footprints as of a god,” having become holy among the holy.

The divine law, then, mindful of every virtue, trains man above all for self-control, laying this down as the foundation of the virtues; and it trains us beforehand for the acquiring of self-control from our use of animals, forbidding us to partake of those that are naturally fat, like the race of pigs, which is the fleshiest; for such use is supplied to the luxurious. It is said, at any rate, that one of the philosophers, deriving the name, said that the pig (hys) is thys, as being fit only for sacrifice (thysis) and slaughter; for a soul was given to this animal for no other reason than to keep its flesh fresh. Likewise it forbade us to eat fish that have neither fins nor scales, restraining our desires for them; for these excel the other fish in fleshiness and fatness.

From this, I think, the one who founded the mysteries also not only forbade touching certain animals, but there are also parts of the sacrificed animals that he excluded from use for reasons the initiates know. If, then, the belly and what is below the belly must be mastered, it is clear that we have received from above, from the Lord through the law, the command to cut out desire. And this would be done perfectly if we should sincerely condemn the kindling of desire, I mean pleasure. They say that its concept is a smooth and gentle motion with some sensation. Serving this, they say, Menelaus, after the capture of Troy, rushed to kill Helen as the cause of so many evils, yet was not able to do it, overcome by her beauty, through which he came to remember pleasure.

That is why the tragic poets, mocking him, cried out in reproach: “But you, when you saw her breast, threw away your sword and received her kiss, fawning on the traitorous bitch.” And again: “Have swords been blunted by beauty?” And I approve of Antisthenes, who said, “I would shoot Aphrodite if I could catch her, because she has corrupted many of our good and noble women.” And he says that love is a vice of nature; those overcome by it, the wretched, call the disease a god. For by these words it is shown that the more ignorant are overcome through ignorance by pleasure, which must not be admitted, even if it is called a god, that is, even if it has been given by God for the need of begetting children. And Xenophon, plainly calling pleasure vice, says: “Wretched one, what good do you know, or what noble thing do you consider? You who do not even wait for the desire for pleasant things, eating before you are hungry and drinking before you are thirsty; and to eat with pleasure you contrive cooks, and to drink with pleasure you provide costly wines and run about seeking snow in summer; and to sleep with pleasure you provide not only soft beds but also supports for the beds.”

Hence, as Ariston said, against the whole tetrachord, pleasure, grief, fear, desire, there is need of much training and fighting; “for these, these go within the entrails and stir up the heart of men.” For pleasure makes wax of the spirits even of those who think themselves serious, according to Plato, because each pleasure and pain nails the soul to the body of the one who does not separate and crucify himself from the passions. “He who loses his life,” says the Lord, “will save it,” either by giving it up at risk for the Savior, as he himself has done for us, or by releasing it from its fellowship with ordinary life. For if you are willing to release, withdraw, and separate (for this is what the cross signifies) your soul from the delight and pleasure of this life, you will have it found and at rest in the expected hope.

This would be the practice of death: if we were willing to be content with the appetites measured by nature alone, which do not go beyond what is natural to excess or against nature, where sinfulness springs up. We must, then, “put on the whole armor of God, so that we may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil,” since “the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, but powerful before God for the pulling down of strongholds, pulling down reasonings and every height raised up against the knowledge of God, and taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” says the divine apostle. There is need, then, of a man who will use without admiration or confusion the things from which the passions arise, such as wealth and poverty, glory and disgrace, health and disease, life and death, toil and pleasure. For in order to use indifferent things indifferently, we need much discernment, since we have been corrupted beforehand by great weakness and by the distortion of bad upbringing and nurture, having indulged ourselves in ignorance.

The simple account of our philosophy, then, says that all the passions are impressions on the soft and yielding soul, and as it were seal-marks of the spiritual powers against which our wrestling is. For it is the business, I think, of the evil-working powers to try at every point to produce something of their own state, so as to overcome and make their own those who have renounced them. Naturally, it follows that some are thrown in the wrestling; but those who carry on the contest more like athletes, fighting the whole fight and going on to the crown, then the powers mentioned, covered in much gore, give up, admiring the victors. For of things that move, some move by impulse and impression, like animals, others by transference, like lifeless things. And they say that among lifeless things plants too move by transition toward growth, if one will grant them that plants are lifeless.

Stones, then, share in cohesion, plants in nature, and irrational animals in impulse and impression, as well as in the two already mentioned. But the rational power, being proper to the human soul, ought not to be moved in the same way as the irrational animals, but should also discern impressions and not be carried away with them. The powers we have spoken of, then, hold out beauties, glories, adulteries, pleasures, and such enticing impressions to souls that are easily swayed, like those who drive cattle by shaking branches at them; then, having deceived those unable to distinguish true pleasure from false, and perishable and insolent beauty from holy beauty, they lead them away enslaved. And each deception, pressing continually on the soul, stamps its impression on it. And the soul, without knowing it, carries about the image of the passion, the cause coming both from the bait and from our assent.

The followers of Basilides are accustomed to call the passions “appendages,” saying that these are in substance certain spirits attached to the rational soul through some original disturbance and confusion; and that other spurious and alien natures of spirits grow on to these again, such as those of a wolf, an ape, a lion, a goat; and they say that their characteristics, appearing around the soul, make the desires of the soul like those of the animals. For they imitate the deeds of those whose characteristics they bear; and they are assimilated not only to the impulses and impressions of irrational animals, but also emulate the movements and beauties of plants, because they bear the characteristics of plants attached to them,

and also characteristics of cohesion, such as the hardness of adamant. But we will argue against this doctrine later, when we treat of the soul. For now only this must be noted: that the man according to Basilides preserves the image of a Trojan horse, as in the poetic myth, holding in the fold of one body an army of so many different spirits. At any rate Isidore himself, the son of Basilides, in his work On the Attached Soul, perceiving the problem with the doctrine, writes word for word as though accusing himself: “For if you persuade anyone that the soul is not undivided, but that the passions of the worse come about by the force of the appendages, the wicked among men will have no small excuse to say: ‘I was forced, I was carried away, I did it unwillingly, I acted without wishing to,’ though they themselves led the desire for evil and did not fight against the forces of the appendages.

We must, becoming stronger in the reasoning part, show ourselves masters of the lower creation within us.” For he too supposes two souls in us, like the Pythagoreans; we will examine them later. But Valentinus too, writing to certain people, writes in these very words about the appendages: “There is one who is good, whose free manifestation is the one through the Son; and through him alone could the heart become pure, every evil spirit being driven out of the heart. For the many spirits dwelling in it do not allow it to be pure; each of them carries out its own works, insulting it in many ways with unfitting desires. And the heart seems to me to experience something like an inn: for an inn is bored through and dug up and often filled with dung by men who stay in it licentiously and take no forethought for the place, since it belongs to someone else. In this way too the heart, as long as it receives no forethought, is unclean, being the dwelling place of many demons; but when the only good Father visits it, it is sanctified and shines with light; and so the one who has such a heart is blessed, for he will see God.”

Let them tell us, then, what is the reason why such a soul is not cared for from the beginning. Either it is not worthy (and then how does providence come to it as if from repentance?), or it is a nature that is saved, as he would have it, and then, being cared for from the beginning because of its kinship, it necessarily gives no entry to the unclean spirits, unless it were forced and shown to be weak. For if he grants that it repented and chose the better things, he will unwillingly say what the truth among us teaches: that salvation comes from an obedient change, not from nature. For as exhalations from the earth and from marshes gather into mists and cloudy masses, so the vapors of fleshly desires bring an ill condition on the soul, spreading the images of pleasure before the soul.

At any rate they darken the light of the mind, the soul drawing in the vapors of desire and thickening the masses of the passions by continual pleasures. A lump of gold is not lifted from the earth, but is boiled and strained, and then, having become pure, it is called gold, earth purified. For “ask and it will be given to you” is said to those who are able to choose the best things of themselves. And as for how we say that the energies of the devil and the unclean spirits sow themselves in the sinner's soul, I need no more words, setting forth as witness the apostolic Barnabas (he was one of the Seventy and a fellow worker of Paul), who says word for word something like this: “Before we believed in God, the dwelling place of our heart was corrupt and weak, truly a temple built by hand; for it was full of idolatry and was a house of demons, because it did whatever was contrary to God.”

So he says that sinners carry out the energies corresponding to the demons, but he does not say that the spirits themselves dwell in the unbeliever's soul. That is why he adds: “Take heed, that the temple of the Lord may be built gloriously. How? Learn: having received the forgiveness of sins and having hoped on the Name, let us become new, created again from the beginning.” For it is not the demons that are driven out from us, he says, but the sins are forgiven, which we committed like them before we believed. Fittingly, then, he set against this what follows: “Therefore in our dwelling place God truly dwells in us. How? His word of faith, his calling of promise, the wisdom of the ordinances, the commandments of the teaching.” I know of meeting a certain heresy, and its leader said that he fought pleasure with pleasure by using it, this noble knower deserting to pleasure through a feigned battle (for he claimed to be one who knows, too); since, he said, it is no great thing to abstain from pleasure without having tried it, but, when one is in it, not to be mastered by it; and therefore one should train oneself through it and in it.

But the wretch did not notice that he was deceiving himself by the pleasure-loving art. Aristippus of Cyrene, clearly, held this opinion too, the sophist who boasted of the truth. Reproached, at any rate, for constantly consorting with the Corinthian courtesan, he said, “I have Lais, and I am not had by her.” Such too are those who claim to follow Nicolaus, bringing forward a saying of the man, by a distortion, that one must “abuse the flesh.” But the noble man showed that one must cut back pleasures and desires and by this discipline wither the impulses and assaults of the flesh. They, however, pouring themselves into pleasure like goats, as though insulting the body, live in luxury, not knowing that the body wears out, being by nature fluid, while their soul is buried in the mire of vice, since they follow the teaching of pleasure itself, not of an apostolic man. For in what do they differ from Sardanapalus, whose life the epitaph shows: “I have what I ate and my wanton deeds and the delights I had with love; but those many prosperous things are left behind. For I too am dust, who ruled great Nineveh.” For in general the passion of pleasure is not necessary, but a consequence of certain natural needs: hunger, thirst, cold, marriage.

If, at any rate, it were possible without it to drink, take food, or beget children, it would be shown that there is no other need for it. For pleasure is neither an activity nor a disposition, nor indeed any part of us, but it entered life as a helper, as they say salt did, for the digestion of food. But it, throwing off the reins and taking control of the house, … first begets desire, which is an irrational longing and appetite for what gratifies it; and it persuaded even Epicurus to set pleasure as the goal of the philosopher. He deifies, at any rate, a stable condition of the flesh and the confident hope about it. For what else is luxury but pleasure-loving gluttony and a superfluous excess for the self-indulgence of the dissolute? Diogenes writes expressively in a tragedy: “Those whose hearts are crammed with the pleasures of unmanly and filthy luxury, not willing to toil even a little,” and what follows, which is said shamefully but worthily of lovers of pleasure.

That is why it seems to me that the divine law necessarily hangs fear over us, so that by caution and attention the philosopher may acquire and keep freedom from care, remaining unfailing and sinless in all things. For peace and freedom are gained in no other way than by unceasing and untiring struggle against our passions. For these opponents, stout and Olympic, are, so to speak, sharper than wasps, and pleasure most of all, plotting and stinging enticingly with witchcraft not only by day but also by night in our very dreams. How, then, can the Greeks justly still run down the law, when they themselves teach that pleasure is enslaved by fear? Socrates, at any rate, bids us guard against what persuades us to eat when not hungry and drink when not thirsty, and against the glances and kisses of the beautiful, as by nature injecting a poison more dangerous than scorpions and spiders.

And Antisthenes chooses to go mad rather than to feel pleasure; and Crates of Thebes says, “Master these things, a soul rejoicing in character, neither enslaved by gold nor by loves that melt with longing, nor by anything that goes with insolence.” And he concludes the whole: “Unenslaved and unbent by slavish pleasure, they love an immortal kingdom and freedom.” He writes elsewhere, plainly, that the plaster for an uncontrollable urge toward sexual pleasures is hunger, and if not, the noose. And the comic poets bear witness to the teaching of Zeno the Stoic, though mocking him, in this way: “For this man philosophizes a new philosophy: he teaches hunger and gets disciples; one loaf, a dried fig for relish, water to drink after.”

All these, then, are not ashamed to confess plainly the benefit of caution. But true and not irrational wisdom, trusting not in bare words and oracles but in invulnerable defenses and effective mysteries, the divine commandments, practicing in training and exercise together with them, receives divine power in the part of it inspired by the Word. Indeed they even describe the aegis of the poets' Zeus as terrible: “around which Fear is set as a crown on every side, and in it is Strife, in it Strength, in it chilling Pursuit; and in it the Gorgon's head of the dread monster, dread and terrible, a portent of aegis-bearing Zeus.”

But to those who can rightly discern what is saving, I do not know whether anything will appear dearer than the dignity of the law and its daughter, caution. But when someone is said to sing too high, as the Lord does toward some, so that some who emulate him may not sing out of tune and off the string, I understand it so: not that he is too high, but that to those unwilling to take up the divine yoke, to these he is too high. For to the slack and weak the moderate seems too high, and to the unjust what is due seems excessively just. For those whom pardon enters because they are friendly toward sins suppose the truth to be harshness, and strictness to be severity, and the one who does not sin with them and is not dragged down with them to be merciless.

The tragedy, at any rate, writes well about Hades: “To what a god you will come … who knew neither fairness nor grace, but loved only justice pure and simple.” For even if you are not yet able to do what is not commanded by the law, yet, perceiving that the finest examples are set out for us in it, we can nourish and increase the love of freedom; and in this way we would be helped, as far as we can, more eagerly, being challenged by some, imitating others, and shamed by others. For the righteous of old who lived according to the law were not “from an oak of ancient story, nor from a rock.” At any rate, by their willingness to philosophize genuinely, they offered themselves wholly to God, and it was “counted to them as faith.”

Zeno spoke very finely about the Indians: that he would rather see one Indian being burned than learn all the demonstrations about pain. But we have abundant springs of martyrs every day before our eyes, being burned, impaled, beheaded. The fear that comes from the law, leading them all like a schoolmaster to Christ, trained them to show their reverence even by their blood. “God stood in the assembly of gods; in the midst he judges gods.” Who are these? Those who are stronger than pleasure, who rise above the passions, who know each thing they do, those who know, those greater than the world. And again: “I said, you are gods, and all sons of the Most High.” To whom does the Lord say this? To those who reject, as far as possible, everything human. And the apostle says: “For you are no longer in the flesh, but in the Spirit.” And again he says: “Though we are in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh.” “For flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption.” “But behold, you die like men,” the Spirit has said, reproving us.

We must, then, train ourselves to caution about what falls under the passions, banishing, as true philosophers do, the foods that excite, and the loose indulgence in bed, and luxury, and the passions that lead to luxury; for others let this be a heavy contest, but for us no longer; for self-restraint is the greatest gift of God. For he himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” judging one worthy because of a genuine choice. So the kind yoke of the Lord will receive us as we try to approach with caution, the one Charioteer driving each of us by advance “from faith to faith” to salvation, so that the fitting fruit of happiness may be gained. And training, according to Hippocrates of Cos, is not only of the body but also of the soul: “health: tirelessness in toil, not eating one's fill of food.”

Epicurus, placing godlike happiness in not being hungry, thirsty, or cold, uttered an impious saying, that in these things one could fight even with Father Zeus, as if laying down the blessed victory of dung-eating pigs and not of rational beings and philosophers. For among those who start from pleasure are the Cyrenaics and Epicurus; for these say expressly that the goal is to live pleasantly, and that pleasure alone is the perfect good. Epicurus also says that the removal of pain is pleasure; and he says that what is choiceworthy is that which first draws to itself from itself, being clearly entirely in motion. Dinomachus and Calliphon said that the goal was to do everything in one's power for the sake of attaining and enjoying pleasure; and Hieronymus the Peripatetic said that the goal was to live without disturbance, and that happiness alone is the final good. And Diodorus, from the same school, likewise declares that the goal is to live without disturbance and nobly.

Epicurus and the Cyrenaics, then, say that pleasure is the first thing proper to us; for virtue, they say, came in for the sake of pleasure and produced pleasure. According to Calliphon's followers, virtue entered for the sake of pleasure, but later, seeing its own beauty, made itself equal in honor to its origin, that is, to pleasure. Aristotle's followers declare that the goal is to live according to virtue, but that neither happiness nor the goal is present to everyone who has virtue; for the wise man who is tortured and falls into unwanted misfortunes, and for this reason gladly wishes to escape from life, is neither blessed nor happy. For virtue also needs some time; for it is not gained in one day, and it consists in a complete life, since, as they say, a child is never happy; and a complete time would be a human lifetime. Happiness, then, is completed from the three kinds of goods. So, according to them, neither the poor man nor the man without reputation, nor the sick man, nor anyone who is a slave, is happy.

Again, Zeno the Stoic considers the goal to be living according to virtue; Cleanthes, living in agreement with nature; Diogenes thought the goal lay in reasoning well, which he held lay in the selection of things according to nature. Antipater, his pupil, supposes the goal lies in continually and unswervingly selecting what is according to nature and rejecting what is against nature. Archedemus in turn explained the goal thus: to live selecting the greatest and most important things according to nature, which cannot be surpassed. In addition, Panaetius declared the goal to be living according to the starting points given us by nature; and last of all Posidonius, living in contemplation of the truth and order of the universe and forming himself accordingly as far as possible, being led in nothing by the irrational part of the soul. Some of the younger Stoics put it thus: the goal is to live consistently with the constitution of man. Why should I list Ariston for you? He said the goal was indifference, leaving the indifferent simply indifferent. Or should I bring forward the views of Herillus? Herillus sets living according to knowledge as the goal. Some think the younger Academics give as the goal a safe suspension of judgment toward impressions. Indeed, Lycon the Peripatetic said the goal was the true joy of the soul, as … Leucimus said, joy in noble things. And Critolaus, also a Peripatetic, spoke of the perfection of a life flowing well according to nature, meaning the threefold perfection completed from the three kinds.

We must not stop, then, content with these, but must be eager, as far as possible, to set out also what the natural philosophers have taught on the subject. They say that Anaxagoras of Clazomenae said the goal of life is contemplation and the freedom that comes from it; and Heraclitus of Ephesus, contentment. Heraclides of Pontus relates that Pythagoras taught that the knowledge of the perfection of the numbers of the soul is happiness. The Abderites too teach that there is a goal: Democritus, in his On the Goal, cheerfulness, which he also called well-being (and he often adds: “For delight and lack of delight are the boundary … of those past their prime”); Hecataeus, self-sufficiency; Apollodotus of Cyzicus, the delighting of the soul; as Nausiphanes, imperturbability, for he said this was called by Democritus “fearlessness.” Besides these, Diotimus declared the goal to be the complete possession of goods, which he says is called well-being. Again, Antisthenes set it as freedom from vanity; the so-called Annicereans, of the Cyrenaic succession, set no fixed goal for the whole of life, but said that each action has its own goal, the pleasure that results from the action. These Cyrenaics reject Epicurus's definition of pleasure, that is, the removal of pain, calling it the condition of a corpse; for we rejoice, they say, not only in pleasures but also in company and in honors. Epicurus thinks that every joy of the soul arises from a prior experience of the flesh.

And Metrodorus, in his work On the Cause of Happiness within Us Being Greater than That from Things, says: “What else is the good of the soul but the stable condition of the flesh and the confident hope about it?”