Orations (other than the Theological Orations) 6.3–6.15

[3] These men made me brilliant when they were present, my abundance, my good delight; and when absent they humbled me. These things gripped my soul, these troubled it. Because of these I went about mourning and gloomy; for these I shook off speech too, along with my other pleasures: because the beloved kicked, and turned their backs to me and not their faces, and became a flock more free than its shepherd, not to say more headstrong; because the true vine was turned to bitterness for me, though most beautifully pruned by the good husbandman, and producing a fine crop for the divine winepresses; because my friends and my neighbours drew near and stood against me, and my nearest stood far off; because we divided Christ, we who are so very God-loving and Christ-loving, and lied against one another for the sake of the truth, and practised hatred for love’s sake, and were broken apart for the sake of the cornerstone, and shaken for the sake of the rock; because we fought for peace more than was right, and were brought down for the sake of him who was lifted up on the tree, and put to death for the sake of him who was buried and rose again. [4] So it was before; and why should anyone, in a time of brightness, scratch open the unpleasantness, dwelling on painful things, whose experience is to be prayed against and whose memory is to be fled? Silence is better than speech, covering the wound that befell us in the depths of forgetfulness; unless one should stir up the memory of painful things for this reason alone, that we may be taught by the example, and, as in diseases, flee the causes that brought us into them. But now, when pain and grief and groaning have fled away; when we who belong to the One have become one, and we who belong to the Trinity are of one nature, one soul, and equal honour; we who belong to the Word, outside unreason; we who belong to the Spirit, boiling not against one another but with one another; we who belong to the Truth, thinking and saying the same; we who belong to Wisdom, of good understanding; we who belong to the Light, walking becomingly as in the day; we who belong to the Way, all going straight; we who belong to the Door, all inside; we who belong to the Lamb and the Shepherd, gentle, of the same fold and of one shepherd, who does not shepherd with the instruments of an unskilled shepherd, nor destroy the sheep of the pasture, nor give them up to wolves and precipices, but is most circumspect and skilled; when we have become sympathetic with him who suffered for us, and bear one another’s burdens; we who belong to the Head, fitted and joined together into one body by every joint in the Spirit; when he who makes all things and transforms them to what is more profitable has turned our mourning into joy for us, and given gladness in place of sackcloth: then I put off silence along with the past, and bring speech to the present time …, or rather to God as a most fitting thank-offering, a gift purer than gold, more precious than costly stones, more valuable than costly fabrics, holier than the sacrifice of the law, more sacred than the first-fruits of the firstborn, more pleasing to God than a young calf putting forth horns and hoofs, senseless as it is, more than incense, more than whole burnt offering, more than ten thousands of fat lambs, by which the elementary law held Israel, still an infant, sketching the truth in bloody sacrifices. [5] This I offer to God, this I dedicate, the one thing I have left for myself, the only thing in which I am rich. For the other things I gave up to the commandment and to the Spirit; I exchanged all I once had for the pearl of great price, and became a great merchant, or rather I pray to become one, having bought with small things, sure to perish, the great things that do not perish. But I cling to the word alone, as a servant of the Word, and would never willingly neglect this possession; I honour it and embrace it and rejoice in it more than in all the other things together in which the many rejoice; and I make it the partner of my whole life, my good counsellor and companion, my guide on the way upward, and my eager fellow contestant. And since I disdain every pleasure that stays below, all my love after God has been poured out on this; or rather on Him, because the word leads to God with understanding, by which alone God is truly grasped, kept, and increased in us. I have said that Wisdom is my sister; and I honoured her and embraced her, as far as was possible for me; and I seek for my head the crown of graces and of delight, which are the gifts of wisdom, illuminating the ruling part in us and enlightening our steps according to God.

With this I bridle temper when it is carried away, with this I lull the envy that wastes me away, with this I give rest to grief, the bond of the heart, with this I chasten the spreading of pleasure, with this I measure hatred, but not friendship; for the one must be measured, while the other must know no limit. This makes me moderate when I prosper and great-souled when I am poor; this persuades me to run with one who runs well, to stretch out a hand to one who falls, to be weak with the weak and to rejoice with the strong. With this, my fatherland and a foreign land are equal to me, and changes of place are equally strange to me, but nothing of mine. This divides the worlds for me, leading me away from the one and joining me to the other; this leads me through the weapons of righteousness on the right hand without elation, and philosophizes with me in those on the left hand, the harsher ones, joining to them the hope that does not put to shame and lightening the present by the future. With this too I now welcome my friends and brothers, and set before them a table of the word and a spiritual, ever-flowing bowl; not with the things by which the table below flatters the belly, which is being brought to nothing and cannot be cured.

I have kept silence; shall I keep silence for ever? I have endured like a woman in labour; shall I endure always? For Zechariah, John at his birth looses the silence; for it was not fitting that the father of the voice should keep silent when the voice had come forth; but as, when disbelieved, it bound his tongue, so, when manifested, it gave the father his freedom; and the voice and lamp, the forerunner of the Word and the light, was announced and born. And for me the present benefit looses the tongue and lifts up the voice like a trumpet, and this most beautiful spectacle: the scattered children of God gathered into one and resting under the same wings, going to the house of God in concord, and tuned to the one harmony of the good and of the Spirit; now that we no longer carry off and drive away one another, as we did when so robbed or forced by the evil one, and shot at in the dark night of the mind which he raised up against us, so that (I do not know what to call it) we even rejoiced at one another’s evils, and did not think the destruction of one another a loss to the whole; now that Judah and Israel appoint for themselves one head, and Jerusalem and Samaria are gathered to the one Jerusalem above, and we are no longer of Paul and Apollos and Cephas, for and against whom there was puffing up, but we have all become Christ’s.

But since you have me, and my word, having tyrannized over me, not unwilling, through love, I will speak, even if with difficulty, since you bid me; and I will speak words of thanksgiving and of admonition. The thanksgiving is this: “Who shall speak the mighty acts of the Lord? Who shall make all his praise heard” in every ear? For both have become one, and the middle wall of the partition has been broken down; you have stopped our being a byword among the nations, a shaking of the head among the peoples; you afflicted us so much as to make known the good of peace through division, and having made us suffer, you restored us again. O the strangeness of the healing! You taught us peace through the hatred, which was very quickly dissolved, and managed opposite by opposite, and parted us so far that we ran to one another the more warmly; as plants forcibly bent aside by hands, when let go, spring back to themselves and to their first nature, and show what is their own, being bent aside by force but straightened again not by force. For the hand no longer despises the eye, nor the eye the hand; the head no longer rises against the feet, nor are the feet estranged from the head, harming no more than they are harmed by the disorder and anarchy, which is the confusion and dissolution of the whole; but the members have the same care for one another by the order and law of nature, which binds and preserves all things through one another; and we have appeared as one body and one spirit, even as we were called in one hope of our calling.

Therefore the poor people shall praise you, made rich out of destitution; for you have made wonderful your mercies toward us, and something has been added to the ancient tales. For where sin abounded, grace superabounded; for I sowed a grain and reaped an ear; mourning for sheep, I have gained shepherds besides. And I will add, I well know, the most precious of the shepherds, even if for certain spiritual reasons he puts off his shepherding: he has been entrusted with the Spirit, with the working of the talents, and with the care of the flock, and anointed with the anointing of priesthood and perfection, yet in his wisdom he puts off the oversight and keeps the lamp under the bushel (which he will soon set on the lampstand, to shine round the whole soul of the church and to be a light for our paths); he is still surveying the glens and mountains and streams, and devising snares for the wolves that snatch souls, so that in due time he may receive the staff and shepherd this rational flock together with the true Shepherd, encamping in a place of green pasture, in the evergreen words of God, and nourishing it by the water of rest, that is, by the Spirit. This, then, we hope and pray; but now it is time for me to add the exhortation to the thanksgiving; and I will make this too as brief as possible, since you have anticipated most of the admonition by your very deeds, and those who have been taught by experience have no need of longer words.

We ought, brothers, neither to have been divided at all, nor to have had our ancient dignity and ornament destroyed, by which, although our flock was small and not worthy even to be named among the flocks that are counted, I held it equal to the greatest and broadest, and in some cases even set it before them in the power of the Spirit. For so it was: each flock has some ornament of its own, small or greater, but most proper to our flock was its unbroken and peaceful unity; so that it was often called Noah’s ark, which alone escaped the flood of the whole world and preserved the seeds of piety within it. But since we were shown to be men, and did not entirely escape the envy of the evil one, nor prove stronger than the disease that holds all things, but ourselves took part in the common misfortune, and did not keep to the end the fair inheritance of our fathers, the good of concord, we still had no small advantage over the others even here (if we may boast against our enmity, trusting in Christ): that we suffered these things last and were set right first. For to fall ill belongs to our common nature and to human weakness, which touches all, even those very strong in body and in mind; but to be healed and to return to one another belongs to reason and to grace, which arbitrated for us well and justly, and better than our prayers and the hopes of others.

For we, on our side, received in grace the heads given to the schism, as having been newly set up for piety’s sake and to help the right doctrine when it was in distress; and we did not turn away from them as enemies, but embraced them as brothers who had quarrelled a little over the ancestral inheritance in a brotherly way, but not in a wicked one. We did not praise the enmity, but we accepted the zeal; for division for the sake of piety is better than a concord that comes from passion; and for this reason we made the loss an addition to ourselves, stealing away by love the design against us, and so far reversing the order that the grace did not follow the vote, but the vote the grace, and we used the hands of others for this, having been a little anticipated by the Spirit. And you, letting go your suspicion of the written words, ran to the spirit, not praising the simplicity shown in the surface meaning of the words, yet not supposing impiety; knowing that with us the Trinity is unfallen and unshaken, no less than in its very nature, and that to cut off any of the three or to make it foreign to us is to destroy the whole, and to go bareheaded against the whole Godhead. And these things we defended on one another’s behalf even in the midst of our division, sometimes even before outsiders; which is indeed the greatest proof of the truth, which was not overcome by the time, nor did the enmity altogether put out the spark of love in us; because the greatest thing remained with us even in our faction: sameness of belief, and the knowledge that we were not unequally yoked concerning the truth, nor contrarily disposed, but shaped by the same stamp of the faith, and of our first …

[12] For among those who are genuine in their relation to God nothing is so strong for concord as agreement about God, and nothing so ready to bring division as disagreement about him. For the man who is gentlest in other things is hottest on this, and the meek truly becomes a fighter when he sees God harmed by long-suffering, or rather sees himself harming God by his own fall, God who is rich and makes us rich. So, as I said, we handled even the division more moderately, so that the concord might become more conspicuous than the separation, and the space between almost … ; but since speed in making peace is not enough for its safety, unless some reasoning appears that holds it fast, and God comes as ally to the reasoning, from whom every good thing begins and in whom it comes to its end, come, let us strengthen it by prayers and by reasonings as far as we can. Let us consider first that the most beautiful and loftiest of beings is God, unless one prefers to lead him even beyond being, or to place all being in him, from whom it comes to the others too; and second, those beings that are first from God and around God, I mean the angelic and heavenly powers, which, being the first to draw from the first light and made clear by the reason of the truth, are themselves light and radiances of the perfect light. And nothing is so proper to these as freedom from strife and faction. For there is no faction in the Godhead, since there is no dissolution either, dissolution being the offspring of faction; but so great is its concord, both with itself and with the beings second to it, that among the other names by which God delights to be called, and before them, this excellence has become a name for God. For he is named Peace and Love and the like, giving us through the names to lay claim to these virtues as God’s. [13] Of the angels, the one who dared to revolt, and stiffened his neck to be raised above his dignity against the Lord Almighty, and planned to set his seat above the clouds, as the prophet’s word says, paid a penalty worthy of his madness, condemned to be darkness instead of light, or, to say it more truly, made so by himself; but the rest remain in their own dignity, of which the first part is peace and freedom from faction, having received their being one from the praised and holy Trinity, from which they also have their illumination. For the Trinity too is one God and is believed to be so, no less because of its concord than because of its identity of essence. So those are near God and divine things who appear to embrace the good of peace and, conversely, hate and loathe faction; while of the opposite portion are those who are warlike in character, who hunt for reputation by novelty and pride themselves on their own shame. For he too both revolts against himself, and by his many shapes and by the passions works this same thing in others, being a murderer from the beginning and a hater of the good, so as to shoot down the common body of the church in the dark night, hiding himself in the gloom of faction, I think; and he approaches each person for the most part sophistically and very cunningly, and as it were opens up a space in us for himself by his art, so as to burst in wholly, like a champion into an army through the breach in a wall or battle line.

This, then, is one reason, and so great a one, that compels goodwill and agreement: the imitation of God and divine things, to which alone it is safe for the soul made according to the image of God to look, so that its nobility may be best preserved through its inclination toward them and its likeness to them, as far as is attainable. Second, let us look up to heaven above and down to the earth beneath, having heard the divine voice, and let us learn the laws of creation: that heaven and earth and sea and this whole world, the great and famous element of God, by which God is shown, proclaimed in silence, as long as it … and is at peace with itself, remaining within its own bounds of nature, and no part rises against another, nor goes outside the bonds of goodwill by which the artist Word bound the universe together, is a world (kosmos), as it is called, an unsurpassable beauty, and no one could ever conceive anything more brilliant or magnificent than this. But as soon as it ceases to be at peace, it ceases also to be a world. Or does it not seem to you that heaven, sharing in an orderly way with air and earth, giving light to the one and rain to the other, is held fast by goodwill …? And that earth and air, granting food and breath to all living things, and thereby holding their life together, imitate the affection of parents?

And the seasons, gently blended and passing little by little into one another, and taming the harshness of the extremes by the mean, are they not fittingly arbitrated by peace for pleasure and use at once? What of day and night, which have received equal shares and a measured alternation, the one rousing us to work, the other giving us rest? What of the sun and the moon and the beauty and number of the stars, appearing and withdrawing in order? Do not sea and land, mingling gently with each other, giving out kindly and receiving humanely, nourish man and supply him richly and generously with their own goods? And the rivers, drawn through mountains and plains, which do not overflow except for use, nor turn back to cover the earth? The mixings and blendings of the elements, and the proportions and harmonies of the members? The foods and births and dwellings of animals, divided out among them; and the ruling and the ruled, and those yoked to us and those free? All these things, being so ordered, and directed and governed according to the first causes of harmony, or rather of their flowing and breathing together, what else should one think them but proclamations of friendship and concord, legislating oneness of soul to men by their own example? [16] … choruses and armies and households, and ships’ crews, and marriages and fellowships, which are held together by peace and dissolved by faction, I will come in my discourse to Israel; and reminding you of its sufferings, its dispersion and its wandering, which they have now and will have for a very long time (for I trust the prophecies about them), I will then ask you, who know it accurately, what is the cause of these misfortunes, so that we may be taught concord by the evils of others.