Miscellanies 4.16.99–4.20.129

“For with the heart one believes for righteousness, and with the mouth one confesses for salvation. For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.’ This is the word of faith that we preach: that if you confess the word with your mouth, that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” He plainly describes perfect righteousness, filled out with both deed and contemplation. We must bless, then, those who persecute: “Bless and do not curse.” “For this is our boast, the testimony of our conscience, that we have known God in holiness and sincerity,” showing the work of love through this small pretext, “that we have conducted ourselves in the world not in fleshly wisdom but in the grace of God.”

So much the apostle says about knowledge; and in the second letter to the Corinthians he has called the common teaching of the faith “the fragrance of knowledge.” “For to this very day the same veil remains” for the many “at the reading of the old covenant,” not being lifted by the turning to the Lord. That is why he also showed a resurrection, to those who can see it, while still in the flesh, from the life that creeps on its belly. From this he also called such people “offspring of vipers,” the lovers of pleasure, those enslaved to belly and genitals, who cut off one another's heads because of worldly desires. “Little children, let us not love in word or tongue,” says John, teaching them to be perfect, “but in deed and truth. By this we will know that we are of the truth.” And if “God is love,” godliness too is love: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” “This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.” And again it is written to the one who longs to become one who knows: “But be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity”; for the perfection of faith, I think, is distinguished from common faith.

And the divine apostle sets forth the rule of the one who knows in these words. On the one hand he writes: “For I have learned in whatever state I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound; in everything and in all things I have been initiated, both to be filled and to be hungry, both to abound and to be in need; I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” On the other hand, speaking to others to shame them, he does not hesitate to say: “But remember the former days, in which, after you were enlightened, you endured a great contest of sufferings, partly being made a spectacle by reproaches and afflictions, and partly becoming sharers with those so treated. For you sympathized with my bonds, and accepted joyfully the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you have for yourselves a better and lasting possession. Do not throw away, then, your boldness, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that having done the will of God you may receive the promise. For yet a very little while, and the one who is coming will come and will not delay. But my righteous one will live by faith; and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith for the preservation of the soul.”

Then he sets before you a swarm of divine examples. “For was it not by faith,” he says, “through endurance, that they succeeded, who experienced mockings and scourgings, and also bonds and prison? They were stoned, they were tested, they died by the sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, destitute, afflicted, mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and the holes of the earth. And all of them, having been attested through faith, did not receive the promise of God.” What remains is to understand what is said by leaving it unsaid: “alone.”

He adds, at any rate: “God having foreseen something better concerning us (for he was good), so that apart from us they should not be made perfect. Therefore we too, having so great a holy and transparent cloud of witnesses surrounding us, laying aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, let us run with endurance the contest set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of the faith.” That he speaks of one salvation in Christ, of the righteous and of us, he has said clearly before; and no less, speaking about Moses, he adds: “considering the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the anger of the king; for he endured as seeing the one who is invisible.” The divine Wisdom says about the martyrs: “They seemed in the eyes of the foolish to have died, and their departure was reckoned an affliction, and their going from us a ruin; but they are in peace. For even if in the sight of men they are punished, their hope is full of immortality.”

Then it adds, teaching that martyrdom is a glorious purification: “And having been disciplined a little, they will be greatly benefited, because God tested them,” that is, for proof and for the shaming of the tempter he allowed them to be tested, “and found them worthy of himself,” clearly to be called sons. “Like gold in the furnace he tried them, and like a whole burnt offering he accepted them. And in the time of their visitation they will shine forth and run like sparks through the stubble. They will judge nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever.”

Indeed, in the letter to the Corinthians the apostle Clement too, sketching for us a type of the one who knows, says: “For who has stayed among you and not proved your all-virtuous and firm faith? Who has not admired your self-restrained and gentle godliness in Christ? And who has not proclaimed the magnificent character of your hospitality? And who has not called blessed your perfect and secure knowledge? For you did all things without partiality, and walked in the ordinances of God,” and so on. Then more clearly: “Let us fix our eyes, then, on those who have served his magnificent glory perfectly. Let us take Enoch, who, found righteous in obedience, was translated; and Noah, who, believing, was saved; and Abraham, who through faith and hospitality was called friend of God and father of Isaac. Through hospitality and godliness Lot was saved out of Sodom; through faith and hospitality Rahab the harlot was saved. Through endurance and faith they went about in goatskins, sheepskins, and garments woven of camel's hair, preaching the kingdom of Christ; we mean Elijah and Elisha, Ezekiel and John, the prophets.”

“For Abraham, called the friend of God through free faith, was not puffed up by glory, but with moderation said, ‘I am earth and ashes.’ And about Job it is written thus: ‘Job was righteous and blameless, true and God-fearing, abstaining from every evil.’” He who conquered the tempter through endurance, and both bore witness and was borne witness to by God, holds to humility and says: “No one is pure from filth, not even if his life is one day.” “Moses, the faithful servant in all his house,” said to the one who gave oracles from the bush: “Who am I, that you send me? I am weak-voiced and slow of tongue,” to serve the Lord's voice with a human tongue. And again: “I am vapor from a pot.” “For God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

Indeed David too, of whom the Lord bears witness, saying, “I have found a man after my heart, David the son of Jesse; with holy oil I anointed him”; yet he himself says to God: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your great mercy, and according to the multitude of your compassions blot out my transgression. Wash me thoroughly from my lawlessness, and cleanse me from my sin; for I know my lawlessness, and my sin is before me always.” Then, hinting at the sin that does not fall under the law, he adds with the moderation of knowledge: “Against you alone have I sinned and done evil before you.” For Scripture says somewhere, “The spirit of the Lord is a lamp searching the storerooms of the belly”; and the more one becomes knowing by doing justly, the nearer to him is the enlightening spirit. So the Lord draws near to the righteous, and none of the thoughts and reasonings we make escapes him: I mean the Lord Jesus, by the almighty will the overseer of our heart, whose blood was consecrated for us.

“Let us, then, respect those who lead us and be reverent; let us honor the elders; let us instruct the young in the instruction of God.” For blessed is the one who teaches and does the Lord's things worthily; and this belongs to a magnanimous mind that contemplates the truth. “Let us direct our wives toward the good. Let them show,” he says, “the lovely character of purity; let them display the sincere will of their gentleness; let them make manifest the forbearance of their tongue through silence; let them show their love not by partiality, but equally to all who fear God in holiness. Let our children share in the instruction that is in Christ; let them learn what humility can do with God, what pure love can do with God, how the fear of the Lord is good and great, saving all who live in it holily with a pure heart. For he is a searcher of thoughts and intentions; his breath is in us, and when he wills he will take it away.”

“All these things faith in Christ confirms: ‘Come, children,’” says the Lord, “‘listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Who is the man who desires life, who loves to see good days?’” Then he adds the knowing mystery of the seventh and eighth: “‘Stop your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit; turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.’” For by these words he hints at knowledge, with abstaining from evils and doing good things, teaching us to be perfected in deed and word. “‘The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears toward their prayer; but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to destroy their memory from the earth.’”

“‘The righteous cried out, and the Lord heard and rescued him from all his afflictions.’ ‘Many are the scourges of sinners, but mercy will surround those who hope in the Lord.’” He says that the one who hopes genuinely is surrounded by a multitude of mercy. For in the letter to the Corinthians it is written: “Through Jesus Christ our foolish and darkened understanding blossoms again into the light. Through him the Master willed that we should taste immortal knowledge.” And showing more expressly the characteristic of knowledge, he added: “Since these things are clear to us, and we have looked into the depths of divine knowledge, we ought to do in order all that the Master has commanded us to perform at appointed times. Let the wise man, then, show his wisdom not in words only but in good works; let the humble not bear witness to himself, but let himself be borne witness to by another; let the one pure in the flesh not boast, knowing that it is another who supplies him with self-control. See, brothers, the more knowledge we have been counted worthy of, the more we are exposed to danger.”

The dignified and pure conduct of our philanthropy, then, according to Clement, seeks the common good, whether it bears witness or teaches by deed and word, and this word is twofold, unwritten and written. This is love: to love God and one's neighbor; this leads up to the indescribable height. “Love covers a multitude of sins; love bears all things, is patient in all things; love joins us to God, does all things in concord. In love all the elect of God were perfected; without love nothing is pleasing to God. Of its perfection there is no explanation,” he says. “Who is able to be found in it, except those whom God himself counts worthy?” For example, the apostle Paul says: “If I give up my body, but have not love, I am a sounding brass and a clanging cymbal”; if I bear witness, he says, not from a chosen disposition, through knowing love, but from fear.

If, then, I confess the Lord for the sake of an expected reward, moving my lips for witness to the Lord, I am an ordinary man, sounding the Lord without knowing him. For there is the people that loves with its lips, and there is another who gives up the body to be burned. “And if I give away all my possessions,” he says, not according to the principle of loving fellowship, but according to that of requital, either from the man benefited or from the Lord who has promised; “and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains,” and to cast off the passions that darken, but am not made faithful to the Lord through love, “I am nothing,” reckoned as of no account in comparison with the one who bears witness in the way of knowledge, counted among the multitude. “All the generations from Adam to this day have passed away; but those perfected in love according to the grace of God have the place of the godly, who will be made manifest at the visitation of the kingdom of Christ.”

Love does not allow one to sin; and if one should fall unwillingly into such a situation through the intrusions of the adversary, imitating David he will sing: “I will confess to the Lord, and it will please him more than a young calf bearing horns and hoofs. Let the poor see it and rejoice.” For he says: “Offer to God a sacrifice of praise, and pay your vows to the Lord; and call on me in the day of your affliction, and I will deliver you, and you will glorify me.” “For a sacrifice to God is a broken spirit.” God, then, is called love, being good. His love “does no wrong to the neighbor,” neither wronging nor ever wronging in return, but doing good to all without exception, according to the image of God. So “love is the fulfillment of the law,” as Christ is, that is, the coming of the Lord who loves us, and our loving teaching and conduct according to Christ. By love, at any rate, not committing adultery and not desiring the neighbor's wife is perfected, which was formerly prevented by fear. The same deed, then, differs according to whether it is done through fear or accomplished through love, and whether it is worked through faith or in the way of knowledge.

Fittingly, then, their prizes too differ. For the one who knows are prepared “what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered the heart of man”; but to the one who has simply believed he testifies a hundredfold of what he has left, a promise that happens to fall within human understanding. Having reached this point, I remembered someone who claimed to be one who knows. Explaining “But I say, the one who looks at a woman with desire has already committed adultery,” he held that desire alone is not judged, but only if, through desire, the deed corresponding to it, going beyond the desire, is accomplished in it; for if it is in a dream, in imagination, it already makes use of the body too.

The historians tell of a judgment of Bocchoris the just. A young man in love with a courtesan persuaded the girl, for a fixed fee, to come to him the next day. His desire, anticipating the girl in a dream, sated him unexpectedly; and when his beloved came as arranged, he barred her from entering. She, learning what had happened, demanded her fee, saying that she had in a way fulfilled her lover's desire. They came, then, to the judge. He ordered the young man to hold out the purse with the fee, but in the sun, and told the courtesan to take hold of its shadow, wittily ordering the image of a fee to be paid for the image of an embrace.

One dreams, then, when the soul assents to the imagination; and the one who looks with desire dreams while awake, not only, as that so-called knower said, if at the sight of the woman he conceives the intercourse in thought (for this is already the work of desire as desire), but, as the Word says, if one looks at bodily beauty and the flesh seems to him beautiful according to desire, having looked fleshly and sinfully, he is judged by what he has admired. Conversely, the one who looks at beauty through pure love considers not the flesh but the soul beautiful, admiring the body, I think, like a statue, through whose beauty he sends himself on to the Craftsman and to what is truly beautiful, showing the enlightening mark of righteousness as a holy token to the angels who watch over the ascent: I mean the anointing of good pleasure, the quality of disposition lying on the soul made glad by the coming of the Holy Spirit.

This glory, which shone on the face of Moses, the people could not look at; that is why he took a veil over the glory for those who looked in a fleshly way. For those who demand the toll hold back those who bring any worldly things, weighed down by their own passions; but the one who is bare of what is subject to the toll, and full of knowledge and of the righteousness of works, they send on with their prayers, blessing the man together with his work. “And his leaf will not fall off,” the leaf of the living tree nourished by the streams of water. And the righteous man is compared to fruit-bearing trees, not only those for the sacrifice of the lofty ones; and in the offering of sacrifices under the law there were inspectors of blemishes in the victims. Those skilled in these matters distinguish appetite from desire, and assign the one to pleasures and licentiousness, as irrational, but appetite for natural necessities as a rational movement.

This perfection, then, may be shared equally by man and equally by woman. For example, not Moses alone, having heard from God, “I have spoken to you once and twice, saying: I have seen this people, and behold, it is stiff-necked. Let me destroy them, and I will blot out their name from under heaven and make you a great and marvelous nation, much more than this one,” answers, praying, not considering his own interest but the common salvation: “By no means, Lord; forgive this people their sin, or blot me too out of the book of the living.” How great the perfection of one who wished to die with the people rather than be saved alone! But Judith too, perfected among women, when the city was besieged, having asked the elders, went out into the camp of the foreigners, despising all danger, giving herself up to the enemy for her country in faith in God; and at once she received the reward of her faith, a woman who excelled against the enemy of faith, becoming master of the head of Holofernes.

And again Esther, perfect in faith, rescuing Israel from tyrannical power and the cruelty of the satrap, a woman alone, afflicted with fasts, set herself against countless armed hands, undoing a tyrant's decree through faith; and she tamed the one and checked Haman, and kept Israel unharmed by her perfect prayer to God. I pass over Susanna and the sister of Moses: the sister of Moses shared command with the prophet, leading all the women among the Hebrews esteemed for wisdom; Susanna, by the height of her modesty, going even to death, condemned by licentious lovers, remained an unwavering martyr of chastity.

Indeed Dio the philosopher relates that a certain woman, Lysidice, through excess of modesty, bathed in her tunic; and that Philotera, when she was about to enter the bath, would quietly draw up her tunic as far as the water covered her nakedness, and then, gradually coming out again, put it back on. And did not Leaena of Attica bear tortures bravely? She knew of the plot of Harmodius and Aristogeiton against Hipparchus and revealed nothing at all, though severely racked. They say too that the Argive women, led by Telesilla the poetess, merely by appearing turned the brave Spartans from war and won for themselves freedom from the fear of death.

The author of the Danaid says similar things about the daughters of Danaus, thus: “And then the daughters of Danaus quickly armed themselves before the fair-flowing river, lord Nile,” and so on. The other poets sing of Atalanta's swiftness in the hunt, Anticlea's affection, Alcestis's love for her husband, and the courage of Macaria and the Hyacinthides. What then? Did not Theano the Pythagorean reach such a height of philosophy that to one who looked at her curiously and said, “A lovely arm,” she answered, “But not public”? To the same modesty belongs that saying too: asked on what day after intercourse with a man a woman may go down to the Thesmophorion, she said, “From her own husband, at once; from another's, never.” Indeed Themisto of Lampsacus, daughter of Zoilus and wife of Leonteus of Lampsacus, philosophized in the Epicurean way, as Myia the daughter of Theano in the Pythagorean way, and Arignote, who wrote about Dionysus; and the daughters of Diodorus called Cronus all became dialecticians, as Philo the dialectician says in his Menexenus, who gives their names as follows: Menexene, Argeia, Theognis, Artemisia, Pantaclea. I remember too a Cynic woman, called Hipparchia of Maroneia, the wife of Crates, with whom he celebrated the dog-wedding in the Painted Porch.

Arete of Cyrene, daughter of Aristippus, educated Aristippus, called “the Mother-taught.” With Plato there philosophized Lastheneia of Arcadia and Axiothea of Phlius. For of Aspasia of Miletus, about whom the comic poets write much, Socrates made use for philosophy and Pericles for rhetoric. I pass over the others because of the length of the discussion, not listing the poetesses, Corinna and Telesilla, Myia and Sappho, nor the painters, such as Irene, daughter of Cratinus, and Anaxandra, daughter of Nealces, of whom Didymus speaks in his Symposiaca.

And the daughter of Cleobulus, the sage and monarch of the Lindians, was not ashamed to wash the feet of her father's guests; since the blessed Sarah too, Abraham's wife, herself prepared the loaves for the angels, and royal daughters among the Hebrews tended sheep; whence too Homer's Nausicaa went to the washing places. The self-restrained woman, then, would choose first to persuade her husband to become her partner in what leads to happiness; but if that is impossible, let her hasten to virtue alone, obeying her husband in everything, so as never to do anything against his will, except what is thought to contribute to virtue and salvation. But if someone should hinder from such a disposition either a wife or a maidservant sincerely striving for it, such a man plainly does nothing else at that time than choose to lead them away from justice and self-restraint, and wish to make his own house unjust and licentious.

It is not possible, then, for a man or a woman to become distinguished in anything without using learning, practice, and training; and we say that virtue rests not with others but with us most of all. Other things one can hinder by making war, but what rests with us not at all, not even if one opposes it most strongly; for the gift is given by God and subject to no one else. So licentiousness would be thought the evil of no one but the licentious man, and self-restraint the good of the one able to be self-restrained.

Euripides describes a wife who loves her husband with dignity, advising: “She must think that he speaks well whenever he says anything, even if he does not, and must strive to say what will please her partner.” And again somewhere, similar things: “It is sweet, if her husband fares badly, for the wife to share his gloom, and to have a share in common of grief and pleasure.” And showing her gentleness and affection even in misfortunes, he adds: “And I, if you are sick, will bear being sick with you, and will share your ills, and nothing is bitter to me; for with friends one must fare well and ill; for what else is friendship but this?”

Marriage, at any rate, when accomplished according to reason, is sanctified, if the union is subject to God and is conducted “with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having hearts purified from an evil conscience and bodies washed with pure water, and holding the confession of hope; for he who promised is faithful.” A happy marriage must never be judged by wealth or beauty, but by virtue. “Beauty,” says the tragedy, “has helped no woman with the husband yoked to her; but virtue has helped many; for every good wife who melts toward her husband knows how to be self-restrained.” Then, as though giving advice, she says: “First of all this holds: even if the husband is ugly, he must seem handsome to the woman who has sense. For it is not the eye that judges, but the mind that sees,” and what follows. For Scripture very properly said that the woman was given by God to the man as a helper.

It is clear, then, I think, that she will choose to treat with reason and persuasion each of the troubles that befall her from her husband in the management of the home; and if he does not listen, then she will try, as far as is possible for human nature, to lead a sinless life, whether she must die with the Word or live, believing God to be the helper and partner in such conduct, the true champion and Savior for the present and for the future, making him the general and leader of every action, considering self-restraint and justice her work, and making God's friendship her goal.

Gracefully, then, in the letter to Titus the apostle says that older women should be reverent in behavior, “not slanderers, not enslaved to much wine, so that they may train the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be self-restrained, pure, workers at home, good, submissive to their own husbands, so that the word of God may not be blasphemed.” “But rather,” he says, “pursue peace with all, and sanctification, without which no one will see the Lord, seeing to it that there is no sexually immoral or profane person like Esau, who for one meal sold his birthright, and that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and through it the many be defiled.”

Then, as though putting a finishing touch on the question of marriage, he adds: “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled; but God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers.” One aim and one end having been shown for man and woman, Peter in his letter says what the perfect is: “Though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, much more precious than gold that perishes though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ; whom, not having seen, you love; in whom, though you do not now see him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and glorified, receiving the end of your faith, the salvation of souls.” That is why Paul too boasts that for Christ's sake he has been “in labors more abundantly, in beatings beyond measure, in deaths often.”