The Origin of Sin

Two brothers in their youth, a digger and a shepherd, the first sons whom the first of women bore, stand at the altar with the fruits of their labors, first-fruits of gifts to be consecrated to God: this one offers earthy things, that one living things. With rival vows they sacrifice unlike offerings: one the young of a sheep, the other the yield of the furrow. God approved the victim of the younger and rejected the one the elder had prepared. See, a voice sent from the highest throne rings out: “Cain, be still; for if you offer rightly but do not divide the offerings by right law, your perverse vows will have drawn black guilt.” Then the brother, jealous of the holiness that was approved, arms his parricidal hand; he breaks his brother’s neck with a curved hoe and stains the new world with impious slaughter, a world to be expiated late, when already growing old, by the sacred blood of Christ, through which the slayer fell. Death first began with the wound of an innocent man; born through crime, it was undone by crime, because it struck Abel first, and Christ thereafter; and it too came to its end, attacking one who has no end. So the ancient story began from things to come, and the last event was signified by the first deed. As that rustic beginner of death, bringing the tasteless offerings of the earth and assigning to God things of dead matter, believed that what the rake gathered was worthy of sacred rites, a savage rival of the living victim,

I recognize, of course, whom this figure denotes, who is the fratricide, who the envious slayer, while he reckons that he sacrifices his vows more rightly. Marcion, figure of that most corrupted field, teaches a doctrine of two gods, at odds with the Spirit, worshipping the eternal godhead in separate parts; if he would be still and not neglect the one who warns him, a peaceful brotherhood would love peace, confessing one living God of the living. He, devoting himself to a perishing mystery, profanely divides the supreme substance; separating evil and good, when he separates the kingdom of two gods, he entrusts two sceptres, believing that one is God whom he declares the worst. He is blood-stained Cain, envious of unity, tiller of the world, squalid sacrificer, whose offering is foul and smacks of earth, the earth of the perishing body, a rotten vein, balled together of thick moisture and dust; whose nature flowers with fertile deceit, fruitfully pouring out the crimes of the guilty, and kills the life of the soul with the stain of the flesh. The flesh aims its weapons at the mind, its sister; the mind is tossed about in a drunken brain, from which it gathers juicy frenzies, soaked in the maddening poison of the body. It dares to cut the uncuttable godhead. The faith that denies one God falls slain: Cain triumphs, forgetting his brother’s death.

Where does your madness hurl you headlong, faithless Cain, blasphemous divider of God? To you the one Creator is not plain, and the clouds of a two-forked light are dark. Your impure sight is always scattered along two diverging paths, its vision cheated by twin figures. The double form of the world deceives you, so that, senseless, you believe a divided God reigns above the heavens. This filthy world gathers up twofold distinctions of good and evil; but heaven obeys one Lord. Heaven does not hold two kings because there are two kinds of work that stir human cares. It is the outward, earthly man who, seeing such things, guesses that there are two divine powers over the varied things, while he thinks there is a God who once fashioned evil things and one who likewise, creating right things, brought them in; he declares both to be supreme gods of unequal nature. What nature, after all, can stand as double, or reign long, when a source divided from the citadel separates it and cuts it down by alternating rule of the summits? Either God is one, to whom belongs supreme power over things, or those that are now two are lessened by an unequal sum. Further, nothing is supreme unless it is one, with full powers; for when they stand apart, while each claims its own torn-off empire, they can be neither supreme nor all. Whatever has a counterpart, division plucks from its fullness. We bear witness to God full, without parts, and one, in whom Christ is, himself likewise full and one, who flourishes and has flourished above all things, and will flourish, and has suffered no partner joined to him by compact: supreme of powers, single dominion over things,

lofty head of the powers, sole fountain of the world, summit of nature, author of kind and of origin, from whom all things flow, light and times and years and number: he who afterward granted that something should be second. For one is the beginning of number, and one alone cannot be counted out. So, since there is no other Father and God, and likewise Christ is not second to his Begetter, he who, himself one, has one only Son is prior to number. He is God, and rightly God, because he is first and one: first in his own power, and then first in him whom he begot; for what does a simple begetting divide? The Begetter will always be one, and one from one was begotten before chaos, free of number and of time. Who would dare to call two a reality that reigns under one majesty, its own, and everlasting from of old, and to split the powers of a single nature? Did the Begetter take an adopted son for himself, so that another, of foreign stock, should make up the number two and bring in a twin and separate godhead? The true Son stands as the form of the true Father, and duly proves himself one, while he keeps the same form. No adopted love joins them, nor does a sworn loyalty unite the two; but a sure fatherly bond, and one kind, which is God, is called back to a single sum. This way displeases you, Marcion; your sect condemns this faith, having divided heaven between two lords. What clouds confound you? What sleep lies heavy on your sluggish

wit, so that through phantoms [you see God as] double? If dull stupor besets the strength of your mind, look at least at the elements that meet earthly eyes, signs by which the hidden reality of God has deigned to show itself. The Father’s foreknowledge long ago foresaw this heresy [of one who] would split [God] into parts, doubling him into a separate kingdom. Therefore he set a visible pattern and example before our eyes, so that no one should believe that two divine powers rule over the shifting forms through the void of the world. One flame, through the immense vault of heaven, brings round the revolving days; one sun weaves the year. Yet that sun, threefold without division, flourishes, resting on a threefold principle: it shines, it flies, it burns; it is driven by motion, consumes with heat, and gleams with light. There are three things together: light, heat, and quickening force; yet one and the same wheel of the star performs these undivided, keeps so many offices in one course, and one substance underlies the three things, blended. I would not dare to compare anything to God as if it were his equal, nor to set a servant sign beside the Lord; but the Father himself willed that humans, who cannot see high things, should infer his greatness from the smallest things. In the mirror of small things we mark what is not understood, and it is granted to seek the hidden truth through what is near. No one has seen two suns except with glaucoma, or when a dark mantle has overspread the clear sky, whenever a cloud set against the darts of the rays scatters them, the fire reflected, into false orbs. Minds too have their own clouds and thick air;

there is a glaucoma that veils the sight with a watery film, so that free meditation may not pierce the subtle heaven nor grasp the one God with swift senses. An unsound attention is scattered into two-forked lights and builds double altars to twin authors. If, then, there are two, why should there not be many thousands of gods? Why is deity content with a twin number? Would it not have been better to pour out swarms of gods scattered among the peoples, and to fill the capacious world everywhere, without distinction, with demigod monsters, to whom fierce barbarism sacrifices honors doomed to perish? If discordant powers hold a divided heaven, it is fitting to assign their own gods to the clouds, the springs, the resounding ocean, the woods, the hills, the caves, the rivers, winds, furnaces, and metals, each with its own rights. Or, if it disgusts you to worship the shades of the pagans, and you prefer that there be two, equal in shared sceptres, come, tell me: which of them holds the lands by the lot of rule? Who governs the storms of the sea by eternal law? Set out the distinct rights of the co-heir lords. “One,” he says, “sits aloft in a gloomy citadel, the author of wickedness, God of crimes, harsh and unjust, who sowed whatever evil seethes in the vicious world and, steeping new seeds in snake’s venom, drew the beginning of things from the kindling of death. He himself is the maker of the world; he made the earth, the sea, the stars; he himself founded man and compacted his muddy limbs, shaping what would yield to death, what with much crime

should be foul, which the grave would dissolve in shapeless rot. But the other has love of goodness and a gentle mind for healing, refreshing men and saving mortal things. Two Testaments have flowed from the two rulers: the better one gave the New; the harsh one gave the Old. This, Marcion, is your weighty, dialectical saying. We know there is a father of crimes; but we know that he himself is by no means God; rather, he is the chattel of hell, to be condemned to Stygian Avernus. The Marcionite God is gloomy, savage, a lurker in ambush; his lofty head, crowned with snakes and girt with black clouds, is thronged with smoke and fire; envy suffuses his livid eyes with burnt-up gall, for he cannot bear the joys of the righteous. A thick mane of straying serpents covers his shaggy shoulders, and green horned snakes lick his face. With his own hand he draws back into a knot snares looped along slippery threads, and with fine cord he ties twisted fetters, and stretches sinews into bonds. His art is to catch wild beasts, to entangle dumb animals in nets, and finally to set traps, undetected in hidden places, before wandering prey. This is that savage hunter, Nimrod, who with constant slaughter never ceases to strike down unwary souls; who with crafty cunning goes round the world, bristling with winding turns and wooded crags, setting out to snare some by fraud and hidden tricks, and to break others in wrestling with giant arms, and to celebrate deadly triumphs far and wide. Wicked death, to what do you not drive mortal hearts?

Man himself (alas, the shame!), despising the Prince of life, worships his own destruction; he himself reveres the bloody executioner and, about to have his throat cut, adores the sword’s edge. To such a degree is death sweet to the wretches caught by the nectar of sin! Is there such delight in darkness from a plague? He who begot evil at the beginning is thought to be God, he who stained good things with vices, and white with black. Equal is the madness of those who, report says, consecrated the goddesses Fever and Itch in dedicated shrines. God is not the inventor of vice: that was an angel, who once shone as a majestic star, and a vast splendor made from nothing, blazing with the honor bestowed on him: for all things before were from nothing, and whatever has been made anywhere. But God is not from nothing, nor the true Wisdom, nor the Holy Spirit: a reality always living, never begun, which also fashioned the airy ministers. One of their number, most beautiful of face, fierce in majesty, while, increased in excessive powers, he is puffed up, while, swelling grandly, he lifts himself higher and displays his fires more boastfully than was allowed, persuaded [some] that he was born by his own powers, that from himself he had taken for himself the matter by which he first began to be, and that his birth had begun without a beginner. [That is the error] which teaches that a tyrant suddenly flashed out of darkness, one who, as if lurking in eternal night, from the beginning

lived and always reigned in a hidden age. As they tell it, he, a rival bent on suddenly corrupting the divine works, brought forth his head from black darkness. But our reason denies this, for it may not weaken the one faith that is handed down in the sacred book. “Nothing,” it says, “was made without God, but all things through him, all things; nor is there anyone else except one made by him.” But he was made good in his stock, brought forth for the service of goodness, and clear from the first source of his kind; soon he became worse of his own will, while envy discolored him and stained him, and goaded him with bitter spurs; for a spark of hatred blazed up from the tinder of jealousy, and sudden resentment kindled an unjust spirit. He had seen the clay, the image fashioned, grow warm with the breath of God; he had seen a lord set over creation as well, and the nature of land, sea, and sky so ordered that, serving man, it would know how to pour out rich increase and give what it poured out to its earthly king, who would govern the whole world by his own rule. The beast puffed up its swelling with the leaven of a resentful mind and, embittered, drew strength from its sour marrow: the beast, free of filth, whose straight wisdom then kept the youth of its long body without knots, see, now folds new coils in its winding breast, wrapping its gleaming belly in twisting spirals. Its tongue, simple before, now flickers with a varied art of speech, and, split by deceit, resounds with three-forked talk. Hence came the birthplace and head of vices; from that prince flowed the origin of evil: he who learned first to corrupt himself,

and soon man, with no teacher instructing him. The world receives destruction last, when its ruler was overthrown, and all the furniture of the world is shaken. Just as when a robber sets out to plunder an unwary traveler, heedless at first of the booty, he strikes the owner himself with the sword, the knot and the delay of the fight, so that when he dies the victor may drag off the captive clothing: so the house subject to man, the richest world, fell, of course, into easy ruin when its lord sinned, and, already corruptible then, drank in its master’s evil. Then the malicious field, daring to bear darnel and light burrs through adulterated crops, with soils wrongly rich, spoiled the wheat harvest with empty wild oats. Then too fierce lions learned to feed on the innocent blood of calves, once the shepherd was slain; and the wolf, provoked by plaintive bleating, strove at night to break into the full folds. … guile tinged them and sharpened their twisted senses. Though a wall surround the flowering gardens, and the vineyards be fenced with thick hedges, … or the grape will be torn, plucked by wild birds. Why should I tell how the fibers of herbs, tinged with healing poison, have poured out the dangers of deadly juice? See, a harmful taste seethes in tender shrubs, though nature formerly bore harmless hemlock, and the dewy flower that clothes the green oleander gave wholesome fodder to the frisking goats. The elements themselves too, their sure compact destroyed, overstep their opposing limit, seize and rush upon all things, shaking the world with law-breaking force.

The battles of the north winds break the shady groves, and the forest falls, uprooted by boundless storms. Elsewhere a river, violent with torrent waters, leaps the banks set against it, its prescribed barriers, and, wandering, lords it far and wide over the overturned fields. Yet the Creator himself did not establish such fury in these things at their birth; but the loose license of things, its restraint broken, threw their peaceful laws into confusion. No wonder, then, if the members of the world are shaken and whirled, if the machine of the world labors, driven by its own faults, if the incitement of plague wears out the lands. Human life gives the example by which the rest may sin: human life, to which madness and error supply whatever it does, so that wars roar, that loose pleasure flows out, that lust boils with impure fire, that the whirlpool of avarice swallows heaps of coins in its wide jaws, avarice which no limit of having restrains, adding new wishes to talents piled up. For hunger for gold grows greater from gold gained. Hence the harvest of crimes, the one root of evils; while the bawd of ornament, who loosens modesty, melts down all the springs of rivers and the hidden metals; while foolish ambition searches the veins of the rough ground, scratching at the secrets of hidden nature, in case, probing, it may chance to find gleaming gems in some pits; for, not content with her inborn beauty, woman counterfeits a foreign form, as if the hand of the Lord, the craftsman, had given her an unfinished face, which the matter still demanded, or [as if she must] paint with sewn-on jacinths the citadel of her garlanded brow,

or to bind her pure neck with fiery garlands, or to hang green pearls from her weighed-down ears. The white stone of shells is also bound into her gleaming hair, and her braided locks are stiff with golden chains. I am weary of running through the sacrilegious cares of matrons, who stain with dye the forms God endowed with his gifts, so that the skin, smeared with paint, loses what it was, unrecognizable under a false color. This the sex that is weak in strength does, whose fragile mind in a narrow breast is tossed by the easy surge of vices. What of this, that even the head and king of the woman’s body, who rules the frail little part cut from his own flesh, who governs the tender vessel by his authority, is dissolved in luxury? You may see old heroes grow soft with grooming, whose rugged limbs the Maker had shaped and whose stiff joints he had hardened with bones. But they are ashamed to be men; they seek all the vainest things to shine with: light-minded, so as to undo their natural strength, they take flowing garments, not of sheep’s fleece, but of the spoils of branches sought from the Eastern world. … Art is added, so that threads soaked in boiled-down dyes … is combed. This one you may see chasing wanton tunics at a headlong pace, and weaving the feathered clothing of many-colored birds on new looms; that one shamefully sprinkling the air, in a womanish way, with fragrant perfumes and foreign powder. Luxury holds all the quickening powers of our life; … for ears and eyes, then for nostrils and palate, a use tainted by vicious arts is sought. Even touch itself, which is strong throughout the body,

seeks tender caresses from soft warmings. O grief, that nature’s noble laws should fall and her gifts be dragged captive, while lust reigns! Every perverted right flourishes, while men turn to contrary pursuits whatever the Almighty gave to be had. Was it for this, I ask, that the watchful pupil was set beneath the soft eyelid, to watch the shameful limbs of half-men carried about in theatrical whirling, defiling its wretched sight with foul delight? Or do the nostrils breathe for this, and do their paired openings come down joined from the mid-citadel of the brain, so that ill-gained pleasure may drink in the allurements that the shameless harlot casts from her perfumed hair? Was it for the vain melodies of a girl with a lyre, for the sounds of strings and the banquet song of heated wickedness, that God added open ears and ordered the path of the voice to pass through cavernous channels? Does the taste put into the moist mouth live for this reason, that seasoned dishes may bait the sluggish gullet and lively throat of the glutton? that furnished luncheons may lead, through varied tastes, into the night, and his own debauch may weary his heavy belly? God willed that we should know by touch what is hard, what soft, what smooth, what rough, what hot or cold, with the sense of feeling as interpreter. But we spread soft feathers and woven linens, and polish our skin on a softening couch. Happy the man who could use moderately the gifts granted him, and keep a sparing measure of enjoyment! whom the rich beauty of the world and its pleasant charm,

and the abundance that flows around him, deceiving with glittering things, does not take captive like a boy, nor bind to foolish love; who detects a grim poison lurking under a shadowy sweetness, in the covering of a lying good. But this was once holy and good for us, at the beginning of things, when Christ founded the world. For God saw that it was good, as Moses himself, the historian of the world’s birth, has testified; “God saw,” he says, “that whatever he created was good.” This I will follow, this I will hold, conceived in a steadfast mind, what the holy prophet, by God’s inspiration, handed down, recalling the beginnings of the ancient light: that whatever God and Wisdom made is good. The Father, then, is the Creator of good, and Christ with the Father. For God and God, Father and Son, are one: since one nature makes them one, which in both consists of one will, right, power, and love. Yet there are not, for that reason, two divine powers, nor two makers of things; since there is no discord of kind, and so there is no difference of work, none of mind: the one Creator brought forth all good things. Nothing muddy flows from the fountain, no turbid water is born, nor is the first vein defiled at its source; but while the uncorrupted water laps the dark sands, it grows foul amid rotting contagion. Did the horse, iron, the bull, the lion, the rope, olive oil, have in themselves the force of crime when they were formed? When a man’s throat is cut, the iron is not the cause of the fury, but the hand; nor does the hot madness of the Circus have the horse as the author of its frivolity or its rabid uproar.

It is the mind of the crowd, lacking reason, not the running of horses, that rages: a useful gift perishes by infamous zeal. So we know that the Spartan wrestling-grounds dripped with oil, and that the gentle juice served crimes. Hence daring, hanging on a rope in the air, climbs the steep stage with fearless feet. Hence reckless bodies leap over wild beasts with a flying bound and play amid the perils of death. Public consent puts on spectacles of human blood, and the laws order a punishment to be provided for sale, in which human limbs, torn by bloody bites, may delight a crowd made merry by a death. I am loath to review a thousand other reveling joys of the stupid world, which, forgetting the true Thunderer, roll the age of mankind along in wretched errors. No one rouses on high a mind mindful of the supreme Father; no one sends sighs to heaven; nor, recalling the summit of the throne of his birth, does he look back to his Maker himself, nor poise his hope above the air; but he subjects a mind content to snore amid heavy cares to an unworthy master, and, stooping to perishing things, [he admires] as beautiful what the earth brings forth, what slippery glory confers, what destructive pleasure commends, what passes by like a wind roused when the dust is blown about, what flies past like a thin shadow. The mighty robber, whom, poured in by silent powers, the hearts of men drink in: he sows all wickedness to the marrow and spreads his ministers through the limbs. For there a numerous cohort serves under such a prince and besieges souls with dreadful arms:

anger, superstition, grief, discord, luxury, black thirst for blood, thirst for wine, and thirst for gold, envy, adultery, deceit, slander, theft. Their shapeless faces bristle, menacing in their bearing: windy ambition swells, learning is proud, eloquence resounds, hidden fraud ties knots. Hence doglike eloquence barks through the whole forum. Hence cheap philosophy carries the club of Hercules and shows off its naked sages in every street. Idolatrous religion waxes smoke-stained stones and, pale, grovels before deaf altars. Alas, with what great armor-bearers the wicked enemy presses the mortal race! What wars the ironclad leader wages with his guard! With what dominion he triumphs over the conquered! The Canaanite rises to help and thickens the ranks, terrible in his helmet, shaking a weight of bristles on his chin and brandishing his right hand with a heavy spear. From another side the raging army of the Amorite king burns; then thousands of Girgashites pour out their line, darting over the whole plain: these strike from afar, those clash hand to hand. See, the Jebusite squadrons seethe for battle, whose golden weapons, dipped in a dragon’s blood, flash with deadly splendor, and gleam and kill; and you, Hittite, delight in arming your terrifying bands with javelins; but the Perizzite nation attacks with arrows, with equal courage but different steel. The king of the Hivites brings forward the last wedge, wearing a scaly breastplate of serpent’s skin. Here the perverse power of crimes, supported by these men,

subdues weak minds, which, untaught in their simplicity and raw in war, at first believe under the false treaty of a grim friendship that the ranks are allies, and follow Mammon’s pledge out of love for peace. Soon, easily dragged into chains, willingly they bow their devoted necks to hard yokes, and choose to serve the fierce commands of worthless spirits. He who gapes at his neighbors’ little fields, scorning the boundary, is led bound in manacles and a thousand chains before the triumphal chariots, his hands tied behind his back, and does not feel himself handed over to barbarian reins. This man, who climbs the summits of windy fame and is puffed up by the hollow honor of popular display, who thinks it the highest and most solid good to grow by the success of ambition, to terrify trembling defendants with the herald’s voice, to break the rods on the bodies of the wretched, to wield the terrible axes of the laws: he has already put his neck into the noose, already he is bound with a hard fetter, and wears servile chains on his feet. Believe me, mortal captives, whom the enemy’s workhouses already hold condemned, whom a power of punishments, not understood, keeps in servitude: this is that Babylon, this is the deportation of our nation, and the dreadful victory of the prince of Assyria, which Jeremiah lamented in a mournful song, wailing for the city bereft of its own citizens. Is it hidden or doubtful that the souls of Jacob’s seed suffer a pagan exile, which the Persian kingdoms

hold captive and force into their own covenants? There they lose the habit of living by their native rite, and, stripped of their fathers’ ways, they degenerate into barbarian laws, follow a new tongue and new dress, and learn to grow foul from profane worship; they blot Zion, their nurse, from their wanton breasts, and praise the instruments and the offerings of a foreign kingdom. Would it not have been better for the fathers to have endured the cruel rule of the Memphian court, and to have sat on by the hearths of ill omen, set beneath the feet of unjust Pharaoh, ready to serve with mud and straw, and gorged with the foul belching of immoderate meat? To what end did the Lord pour out such help through wondrous signs, while he saved, it may be, a rebellious people with undeserved aid, while he loosed their necks bowed under chains and curbed Egypt with the serpent-rod? What good is it to have trodden the depths of the sea on a dusty road as the ocean gave way, when the rocks, witnesses of the sea, lay open, betrayed under an unknown sky, and the mud dried up, thirsty in the middle of the flood, if the army, once victorious by God’s power, splitting the darkness with the light of the pillar, has lost the rich valley of the cluster that it found? if it does not know how to turn the soil of a land whose clods, flowing with everlasting honey, mingle snowy streams of milk? if it lets Jericho, subdued by trumpets and resounding bronze, rise again into its ancient walls? if it is driven back again from the banks of Jordan, and now abandons the lot assigned to it, measured out in acres? And finally, if it cannot defend the city built with such sweat,

and the summits that rise above the cloud-born rain? if it does not know who that stone is, which stands against the enemy as the impregnable guard of a tower, which no engine charging with its bronze beak can batter, nor iron blows shake? This is the corner at the head of the gate; this holds the whole course of stones and makes the built threshold firm. Whoever knows that it is duly set into his walls along the ramparts, and girds himself and his fortifications with a triple rampart, standing on the high citadel far off, trusting in love of the rock, and watchful in chaste arms, him the queen of Tyre will not carry off, nor the Parthian who dwells by the great Euphrates, nor the dark Indian, his black temples crowned with feathered arrows. No, even if a foreign tyrant, gathering thunderbolt giants to war, should wish to destroy your camp, you will be safe; nor will Charon of the world himself, Marcion’s god, move you from your firm post: he who rules the empty darkness beneath the airy sun. For empty is whatever the sun looks upon: all things consist of elements that dissolve and of a fleeting creation. I am mistaken unless the Apostle, our teacher, beginning to speak of all creation subjected unwillingly to vain labors, groaned in pity that it served a perjured robber. “He errs,” he says, “who thinks our struggle is with blood and flesh and burning veins and vicious gall, and that the soul sins from hot marrow.” Its limbs do not press down the mind, nor does earthly strength attack the clear senses or provoke them to war; but with dark spirits, night and day,

we join battle, to whose dominion this moist air, thick with sluggish clouds, is obedient. For this middle region, which lies open between heaven and the lowest parts of earth and hangs the clouds in an empty gap, bears the reins of various powers, and under Belial, their prince, bristles with unjust rulers. With these robbers we wrestle, as the sacred saying of the Apostle’s mouth bears witness to us. Let no one, when he sins, accuse the condition of nature or the provocations of the body: it is easy to bridle the rebel passions of the flesh, to blunt the excessive impulses of frail matter, and to tame the conquered vitals. For the mind, far more excellent, sent down as it is from the highest heaven, if it chooses to shake the subject limbs with stern command and give them over to severe orders, no force will resist its reigning lordship. Greater is that force within man which injects an airy poison and strikes the subtle mind with subtle air. The Parthian arrow does not cross the winds so swiftly, whose path no sight can follow; for while it flies on wings through the winged breezes, it comes unforeseen, and no whistle announces the coming of death before it bursts into the secret places of the breast, piercing a life secure with a poisoned wound. But more winged and more poisoned is the arrow that the slippery dominion of the shadowy world shoots, eluding the eyes when it is loosed, and with the swift passage of the flying shaft piercing the inner chambers of the heart. Yet the nature of the soul is not sluggish or slow to guard against the wound, since God has put into it a fiery

a mind that is pure, wise, subtle, serene, mobile, careful, swift, quick to stir, and sharp; only let it, chaste, worship its Maker and serve as his soldier, and, sober, trample the conquered world, tasting nothing, with foolish delight, of pestilent wealth or of the counterfeit spoils of the earth; so that it will not, lying under a burden and given over to another’s rule, be unable to escape the enemy’s cunning arrows. But why do I twist all the evil of the world and of men into a grudge against the malignant enemy, when our evils, grown together out of our own souls, take their origin, head, and force, what they are and what they can do, from the heart that bears them? He is indeed the tinder and cause of our evils; but he can disturb or deceive only as much as we will, who supply weapons to the decrepit lion; the beast grows cold, gnashing to no purpose, unless he swells through the votes of the human race. We beget all our evil from our own body: as David, otherwise the best of fathers, begot one crime, Absalom: that father was grievous, but one who dared to draw the sword against the author of his stock. Ah, filial love! if anyone has carried standards against his father’s and joined in arms of one blood. Likewise our hearts give birth to dreadful offspring of a burning breed, who, turning their bites on us at once, grow used to living on the pains of those who bore them; for they lay waste the too fruitful vitals of their parents and are fed by the death of the stock that bore them. But that king, as the supreme king he was, the prophet of God and ancestor of the Virgin who would bear,

had varied his offspring with sad and with dutiful sons, so that Absalom, Solomon’s brother, sowed his crimes among righteous children and troubled a sweet house with bitter things. So there is nothing worthy of Solomon: degenerate Absalom alone fills us, tearing the dutiful vitals with the sword. If one may take anything from pagan writers, or some example from the natural philosophers: so the viper, they say, dies by the teeth of the offspring poured through her vitals. The mother is fertile by her own death, not by her sex, nor is her womb swollen from intercourse; but when she grows hot, stirred by female fire, she thirsts obscenely with gaping mouth for her husband, who is about to die; he thrusts his three-tongued head into his mate’s throat and, burning, enters her kisses, instilling the begetting poison by union of the mouth. The bride, wounded by the force of pleasure, bites and breaks her lover’s throat as he drinks, amid their caressing pact, and drinks the poured-in spittle as her mate perishes. By these allurements the father is consumed; but the shut-in brood kills the mother: for when, the seed grown, the little bodies begin to creep in their warm hiding place and, wriggling, strike the stirring womb, the mother burns with the inward crime against natural love and, aware of her condemned sex, groans over her offspring as an executioner, breaking through the barriers of the enclosed birth. For since no outlet for birth lies open, the belly, tortured by the young straining toward the light, is torn, and opens a way through her lacerated flanks. At last, by the death of the one who nourished it, that brood of sorrows comes forth,

having barely struggled its way into life, carving out its birth through a crime. The crawling young lick the corpse that gave them birth, an orphaned brood even as it is born, never having known the day except as posthumous children of their wretched mother. The conception of our mind is not unlike this: so it drinks in the poison poured from the viper’s mouth by its husband, the son of Belial; so it devours his kisses in a draught and seizes them deeper within; so, burning with the gall of lust, it is filled with vices, mingled with a husband doomed to die. Then, pregnant with a deadly brood, it bears the conceived works of a malignant mind, from the seed of its accomplice serpent; whose deeds must first be paid for with punishments, for the defilement of the corrupted soul and for the world destroyed. Then cruel wounds tear the soul itself in a thousand births, while it brings forth from itself offspring begotten against nature, that is, frequent sins, children fed on their mother’s death. Hence that just rebuke of Christ the Lord: “Did not the devil, your father, I rebuke you, sinners, thirsting for wicked seed through union with the flesh, beget you?” Read through the holy Book, reader: you will find that what I say the Lord said to profane mortals, casting true charges in their teeth: “For love itself,” he says, “and the work of love would prove that you were begotten of my Father.” O blind lust! What is this? That when the good mind knows that she is betrothed to a lawful marriage, and is called to wed the bed of the King, of the King who is ever young, who drives away old age and keeps divine beauty in his eternal face, she should prefer adultery, and sell herself cheaply for a tawny gift

to the filthy embraces of a night-dwelling Indian, scorning the offspring of God poured through the limbs of a virgin, and calling the children of the brothel sweet? I perceive what suit seductive deceit raises against this, with what tooth thorny slander strains to fight. “If God does not want evil to be,” it says, “why does he not forbid it? It makes no difference whether he was the author and maker of evils, or whether he allows his most beautiful works to be turned into the vice of crime when he could prevent it. If the Almighty wished that all should live innocently, no holy will would degenerate, nor would any hand defile itself by any deed. So the Lord created evil, which he watches from on high, and permits, and approves its being done, as if he himself had created it. For he did create it, since, though he could shut it out, he does not abolish it, and lets it rampage in long practice.” Condemn my ears, kind Father, and close the passages of my head, gone dull, so that its open winding may not take in such sounds: it is worth losing so much, the office of life extinguished in a part of the brain. Only let the soul keep itself free and without share in impious hearing, happy with a dull ear. Who could bear these insults hurled at God, who remembers that he excels, ennobled by divine gifts? To say nothing of many things, this alone [shows him] kind: he raises men from their tombs and bids them share in his kingdom for ever. If he were the author and preserver of evil, never, after salvation was lost and sinners had died, [would he have willed] to bring a life-restoring remedy. The fall is man’s; to save is God’s: this one perishes by his deserts;

he abolishes the work of the one who perishes and cancels his deserts. It is a great proof that the Lord, who grants such things, does not want evil, nor approves beforehand what he afterward washes away. “Can anyone sin against the will of the Thunderer, for whom it is easy to arrange in the heart of man the feelings he pleases, to quicken all its fibers with chaste impulses, and to pour all that is honorable into its veins?” Do you not know, fool, that the force of your freedom was given by the Maker himself? Do you not know how great a power was granted you from the beginning over a world that serves you, and over your own mind, and by the unbound right of a free will: you, who may will, and follow what you please, and bind your mind to no chain? Or, when he set you as lord over all that he had created and ordered the world to serve your commands, and when he handed over the fields, the sky, the sea, the rivers, the winds, would he grudgingly refuse to entrust you with the decision about yourself, as one unworthy, and deny you freedom? What would it have been, to be chosen king of the great world and not king of oneself, disgraced by a curtailed honor? For what honor has a lord whose mind is not free, but serves one decision of an imposed law? And what praise is there for a man, or what merit, in living justly without a real choice between the two ways? No one becomes good of his own accord who has no ready power to will otherwise and to turn the bent feelings of his mind. Yet he is neither good nor praiseworthy who is not good of his own accord; for from forced uprightness no glory comes, and inglorious virtue is worthless. Nor is it virtue, unless it shines out by refusing the worse and seeks the right way with a better disposition.

“Go,” said the Parent himself, the maker and founder of Adam; “go, man, most noble by the breath of our mouth, subject to none, powerful, arbiter of things, and likewise arbiter and judge of your own mind: submit to me alone of your own will, so that your very submission may be free, with judgment unbound. I do not compel, nor demand by force, but I warn you to flee the unjust and follow the just. Light is the companion of the just; dreadful death is the companion of the unjust. Choose the way of life; let your virtue carry you on for ever, or in turn let your guilt condemn you eternally. Let the freedom granted you bring about one lot or the other.” Free by this kindness, and abounding in so great a gift, he passes beyond the right set before him and knowingly chooses deadly things, and willingly thinks more useful what the cunning serpent persuaded, though God forbade it. He persuaded, certainly, by urging, not drove by harsh command. This the woman, guilty of the crime, answered to the Lord when he reproached her: that, enticed by ill-working persuasion, she persuaded her husband; and the husband himself gladly consented. Was it allowed him to spurn the tempter by the freedom of an upright mind? It was; for God too had urged him before to will the better and follow it; but he, spurning the counsel, put more trust in the cruel enemy. Now he stands in the middle between the Lord of life and the master of death: God calls him from this side, the tyrant from that, as he wavers and swings to and fro with his own impulses. Hear the notable records of things done, by which history foreshadowed a visible sign. Lot, fleeing as Sodom burned, was hurrying, his home abandoned, to take with him all the dear pledges of his house,

out of the city-burning clouds, when the air, set on fire, was already weaving the sky beneath with stormy sulphur. The angel guest, sent by the power of God in double likeness, had prescribed this law for them: that the whole household should go out from the gates, keep its eyes fixed steadily on the open country, and not, turning its gaze behind, look at the fires reigning through the walls. Let no one, remembering Sodom, which is the figure of the world that is to be burned, once he has stepped out of its walls, turn his face behind him and look back at the funeral of things. Lot wisely obeys the warnings; but his fickle wife, with her shifting mind, twisted her womanish disposition backward and clung, recalled, to her Sodom. Eve had drawn her husband into partnership in dreadful guilt; this woman, sinning, perishes alone: hardened into a brittle mineral, she stiffened and became a stone that melts. The woman stands as she had stood before, keeping everything, shaped in a crag of moulded salt for long ages: her grace and her dress, her brow, her eyes, her hair, her face turned backward, and her chin drawn back a little, stiffened records of the ancient guilt. She does indeed melt, wet with salty sweat, but she feels no loss of her full form from the flowing moisture: as much as the herds, eager for the savor, wear down the stone, so much moisture is supplied to those who lick, and it restores her worn skin through its losses. By this title the sinful woman deserved to be set up, loosening her weak and fluid mind through slippery counsels, and through a vow fragile toward the heavenly commands.

Lot, on the other hand, keeps his purpose unchanged once he has set out, and does not look back at the walls collapsed into ash on the high pyre, nor at the burnt-up people, the people’s ways, their record-offices, laws, and forum, baths, hucksters, brothels, temples, theatres, the circus with its crowd, and the reeking taverns. Whatever men do, the burning of Sodom wraps in just fires and condemns, with Christ as judge. It is enough to have fled these things once; our Lot looks back no more; but his fragile wife looks back, and, changeable, revisits with turned face what she had fled, and stands hardened among her native ashes. Here is a sealed proof of freedom for you, by which God willed us to know that whatever is to be followed lies within our own control, and that leave is given to everyone to tread one way or the other. Two were ordered to depart from Sodom; one hurries away, the other mutters. He quickens his step in flight; she, on the contrary, refuses. Both had a free mind, but each a different will. Each one’s own desire divides them, seizing them this way and that. Many a track in the Sacred Books marks such a pattern. Look at Ruth, of the Moabite nation, and Orpah with her. The one accompanies her mother-in-law Naomi with faithful love; the other deserts her. Yet both, released from their marriages and the law of wedlock, free of their Hebrew beds and their rites, enjoyed their own right. But Orpah’s old rite of the shrines persuaded her to prefer barbarian foreskins and to nurse the stock of the half-savage Goliath. Ruth, while she is scorched by the field’s heat among the stubble, won the couch of Boaz and, taken into a chaste bed,

fruitful, she brought forth the house from which Christ was born, the kingdom of David, and joined mortal birth with God. I myself remember how often twin brothers, in wavering youth, came together to a gaping fork in the road and long hesitated at the forked path which was the better way: since on the right a thorny wood narrowed the way with brambles, and a rough path led far up a lofty track along a steep edge; but on the left a shady grove, through pleasant greenery, was adorned with rich fruit, and a broad plain offered a gently lying road: the one, content with the rough thorns, crept up through steep rocks; the other indulged himself in the field on the left; the one mingled his head with the stars nearby, the other suddenly sank into muddy marshes. All have one nature beneath, but not all come to one end, since the forms of their choices are apart. Just as when a milk-white cloud of doves, gliding through the clear sky, comes down perhaps onto the field of a fruitful farm, where a cunning fowler has stretched snares and smeared the twigs with sticky lime, and laid his ambush with pods or deceitful grain: the deceiving grains lure some, and the bonds of twisted horsehair entangle their greedy throats, or the soft glue binds their entangled wings; but others, whom no love of eating entices, walk about with harmless steps in the barren grass and take care not to turn their eyes to the suspect bait. Soon, when it is time to fly back to the sky, some make for the starry

heaven, free, clapping their wings above the air; some lie captive and, wounded, their feathers torn, struggle on the ground and look up in vain at the flying breezes. So nature pours souls of one color, from the fountains of heaven, onto the earth; but there, bound by sweet allurements, they are held fast, and few climb back to the upper air; a sticky bait ensnares many and does not let them run through to the higher breezes. So the foreknowing Father set gloomy Tartarus on fire with molten lead, and dug pitch-black trenches of infernal water, thick with bitumen, beneath dark Avernus, and decreed that in the gulf of Phlegethon devouring worms should breed for the everlasting punishment of crimes. For he knew that a quickening force from his own breath was in our bodies, and that the soul, formed from his everlasting mouth, cannot die, nor, on the other hand, defiled by vices, return upward to the vault of heaven, but must be plunged deep into the pit of the boiling abyss. To the worms and flames and torments he gave an immortal age, so that the punishment should not perish with age while the soul does not perish. The torments consume and keep alive the matter given them without end: death itself forsakes the eternal groans and forces the weeping to live. But in far different regions of Paradise the Majesty that knows the future has set rewards for pure spirits, removed from every stain: those who did not look back at the ruins of Gomorrah, but, their eyes rightly turned away, left behind them the darkness, the wretched dangers of a world to be fled. And first they are borne back with easy flight to the stars,

from where the soul, flowing out, had quickened Adam when he was fashioned. For since the downward weights of life do not hold back its fine nature, nor an iron fetter slow it, it cleaves the dense air, retracing its way in swift flight, and the burning spark rises above the sky, measuring its way back, hating the prison where it had clung as an exile. Then, as it returns home by right of recovery, hoary Faith takes it into her high bosom and delights her nursling with tender pleasures, as, after its lodging in the flesh, it recounts with plaintive voice the many labors it has suffered. There, stretched at its ease on a purple couch, it sips the breathing scents of everlasting flowers and drinks ambrosial dew from a bed of roses. To the rich, smoking at a long distance and thirsting for rivers and all the rains of heaven, it refuses, when implored, to put a finger to their palate and to quench the tips of the flames with a moist touch. Do not wonder that, in places far apart, the sight of condemned and of righteous souls meets in clear view, and that their deserved lots are observed across the great distances which the vault divides in the middle of the world. He errs who judges souls by the limits of our eyes, which a bright mantle wraps with a glassy barrier, whose mirror is woven of congealed humors, and which hinder the roving windows with a film of moisture. Do round drops of thick quickening fluid roll in the eyes of souls? or do they bristle outside with eyelid hairs, or are they covered by a shading lash? Theirs is a living sight, not a small pupil, but a fire that passes through the mist and pierces the vast unseen.

Nothing rusty or solid stands in the way of minds; the mists of night give way, the blackening clouds give way, the round expanse of the world stretched before them gives way. Nor does the spirit send its sight only through the gaps of the air; it passes with its light through mountains set against it, pierces the bounds of Ocean and the farthest shores of Thule, and sends its flying eyes into Tartarus. For our sight, all colors perish at night, and forms are blotted out in the blind time. Do they too, stripped of limbs and flesh, lose the marks of things from recognition, or wander in their steps? Souls always have one face, and one color of the air, according to each one’s sum of deserts, on the left or on the right; nor does changeable time turn and vary their alternate lots: long and everlasting is whatever it is; one course rolls on its ages. Do you, who have experienced it, doubt that souls survey things hidden from bodily eyes, when often, drowsed by the dew of rest, the living mind sees remote and distant places, directing its gaze through fields, through stars, through seas? For it does not separate itself from the living limbs before death, nor flee as an exile from the inner chambers of blood and flesh, strip itself of the marrow, or drive away the life withdrawn from the breast; but, staying in its seat in the flesh, it surveys all things with sharp eyes; and wherever it has turned the keen gaze of its light nature, shut in by no barrier of things, it looks out before its eyes on the world beneath, and on the foul element that lies under the world’s mass. Meanwhile the earth lies in the way, yet does not block its sight.

Indeed, if it turns its face toward the star-bearing heavens, nothing coming between its gazes hinders the fire of the ever-watchful soul, though the clouds are heavy and thick and the sky blackens with a fleece set against it. So John, still in the body and not released from the flesh, sees secrets covered by the silent future; but, by the gift of sleep, with the flesh set aside for a while, free to behold, and ranging with sense and eyes over the years arranged in order for the suns to come, he sees the angelic host girded for the destruction of a world that is about to burn, and hears with his ear the hoarse bellowing of the heavy trumpets at the end of the world. These things he saw before death, lulled in the prison of his limbs, while his soul withdrew but did not depart. Will not the breath, then, much more mark all things without the body, when the wrappings of the body are laid away in the cold tomb? It is a sure faith that the raging furnaces beneath the [nether] night, which cook the defiled soul through long ages with everlasting fire, are exposed to the eyes of the poor man far off across the long void; and no less, that the golden gifts of the righteous, with the chaos dividing them, and their glowing crowns are shown from afar to those plunged in the prison of punishments. Hence the unhappy spirit, howling in the plague of its guilt, is revealed to the blessed dweller in Paradise after his dreadful sores; and in turn they see each other’s deserts. O God, Parent of all, giver of the soul, O God Christ, from whose mouth the Spirit, one God, subsists: under your rule I am governed, under you as my prince I lead my life; with you as judge I tremble, pale; with you, the same judge, I take hope that whatever I do will be pardonable before you,

however unworthy of pardon what I do and say. I confess: forgive gladly, and spare one who confesses. I have deserved every evil; but you, good judge, take away what I have deserved; in your favor grant better things to one who prays. Grant to my soul, when at some time it has left the lodging of this body, built of sinews, skin, blood, gall, and bones, which its tenant, corrupted by luxury, alas, embraces and cherishes too much; when the mournful hour has closed these eyes, and the matter lies mourned with the last cry, and the mind, stripped bare, enjoys its own eyes: that it may not see some savage one of the race of robbers, merciless, rabid, terrible in face and in menacing voice, who, like a bandit, drags me headlong, stained with the spatterings of my ways, and plunges me, falling, into black caverns, to exact all the debts of a ruinous life down to the last farthing. There are many dwellings in the Father’s treasuries, Christ, set apart in different places: I do not ask for a home in the blessed region; let the chaste ranks of men be there, who, scorning dusty wealth, sought your riches; let white virginity be there in everlasting flower, which has cut off and gelded its passion. But for me it is enough if no face of a minister of Tartarus meets me, and if the greedy flame of hell does not devour this soul, plunged into the lowest furnaces. So be it: since this is necessary for the stain of the body, let the grim fire swallow me in cavernous Avernus; at least let the slow flames breathe out gentler vapors, and the heat grow lukewarm, its burning slackened. Let boundless light and temples bound with crowns glorify others; let a light punishment burn me mercifully.