Exhortation to Martyrdom 47

Further, can a man still love life once he has become persuaded that the rational soul in its being has something akin to God? For both are intellectual and invisible and, as the prevailing argument demonstrates, incorporeal. And why would the one who fashioned us have implanted in us a longing for piety toward him and communion with him—a longing that even in those who have gone astray preserves some traces of the divine will—if it were not possible and attainable for rational beings to lay hold of what they naturally long for? And it is clear that, just as each of our members is naturally fitted to something akin to it, the eyes to what is visible and the ears to what is audible, so the mind is fitted to intelligible things and to God, who is beyond intelligible things. Why, then, do we shrink and hesitate to lay aside the hindering “corruptible body,” which weighs down the soul and burdens “the anxious mind,” this “earthly tent,” to be set free from its bonds and to depart from the waves that come with flesh and blood, so that with Christ Jesus we may rest the rest that belongs to blessedness? There we shall contemplate the Word himself, wholly and throughout alive, be nourished by him, grasp the most manifold wisdom in him, be formed by the very Truth, and have our minds illumined by the true and unceasing light of knowledge, so as to see what by nature is seen through that light by eyes enlightened by the commandment of the Lord.