On Prayer 17.2

And whoever has considered what the beauty is of the bride whom the “bridegroom,” being the Word of God, loves—the soul blossoming with a beauty above heaven and above the world—will be ashamed to honor with the same name of beauty the bodily beauty of a woman or a child or a man. For flesh does not contain beauty in the proper sense, being all ugliness. For “all flesh is as grass,” and its “glory,” which appears in what is called the beauty of women and children, is compared to a flower according to the prophetic word, which says: “All flesh is as grass, and all its glory as the flower of grass. The grass withered and the flower fell; but the word of the Lord abides for ever.” And who will still properly call nobility what is commonly so called among men, when he has understood the nobility of the sons of God? And how will the mind that has contemplated the “unshakable kingdom” of Christ not despise every earthly kingdom as worth nothing? And having seen clearly, as far as a human mind still bound to a body can, and grasped the army of angels, and among them the chief captains of the Lord's hosts, and archangels and thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities above the heavens, and that it is possible to obtain from the Father equal honor with them, how will he not despise these things admired by the foolish as most obscure and worth nothing in comparison, even if he is feebler than a shadow, and, even if all these were given, disregard them so as not to fail to obtain the true rulers and more divine authorities? We must pray, then, we must pray for the things that are principally and truly great and heavenly; and the matter of the shadows that follow the principal things must be entrusted to God, who knows “what” we “need” because of our perishable body “before” we “ask him.”