khazarzar-clement-of-alexandria-paedagogus

What the Tutor promises. A foundation of truth has been laid, O you who are our children, an unbreakable base of knowledge for a great and holy temple of God, a noble exhortation, through reasonable obedience a desire for eternal life, cast into the intellectual soil. For since there are three things concerning man—character, actions, and passions—the hortatory discourse has taken charge of his character, being the guide to piety; the discourse placed like a keel for the building up of faith, at which we greatly rejoice and, renouncing our old opinions, grow young for salvation, singing in harmony with the prophetic utterance that God is good to Israel, to those upright in heart; and the prescriptive discourse oversees all actions; while the consolatory discourse heals the passions, all being one and the same discourse, which snatches man from his ingrained and worldly habit and tutors him into the singular path of salvation through faith in God. So when the heavenly guide, the Word, used to call to salvation, it was specially called the hortatory discourse—this stimulating discourse, named from a part for the whole; for the whole of piety is hortatory, engendering in the kindred reason a desire for the present and the future life. But now, being both therapeutic and prescriptive at once, following itself, it exhorts the one who has been exhorted, promising the healing of the sum of the passions within us. Let this be fittingly called by us with one name: the Tutor, who is practical, not methodical; for his end is to improve the soul, not to teach, and to guide a temperate, not a scientific, life. And yet the same Word is also instructive, but not at present.

For the one is declarative and revelatory in matters of doctrine, the teacher; while the tutor, being practical, first exhorted toward a disposition of character formation, and now also calls to the actual performance of duties, prescribing pure counsels and displaying images of those who previously went astray for those who come later. Both are most beneficial: the hortatory form for obedience, and that which is taken in the manner of an image, itself twofold similarly to the former pair, one part so that we may imitate, choosing the good, the other so that we may turn away, rejecting the evil of the image. Healing of the passions follows from this, as the tutor strengthens the souls through the consolations of the images and, as with gentle remedies, through humane counsels tends the ailing toward the complete knowledge of truth. Health and knowledge are not equal, but the one is acquired by learning, the other by healing. No one who is still sick would learn anything of the teacher's lessons before being completely healed; nor, likewise, is each of the precepts always spoken to those who are learning or to those who are ailing, but to some for knowledge, to others for healing. Just as those whose body is sick need a physician, so also those whose soul is weak need a tutor, that he may heal our passions, and then a teacher who will guide, preparing the soul, pure and fit for knowledge, so that it may be capable of receiving the revelation of the Word.

Hastening then to perfect us by a saving step, the all-philanthropic Word uses a fitting economy for education, effective in the good, urging from above, then tutoring, and finally teaching thoroughly. 1 That the tutor presides because of our sins. Our tutor, O children, resembles his own father, God, whose son he is, sinless, blameless, and passionless in soul, a god in human form, undefiled, servant of the paternal will, Word God, he who is in the father, he who is at the right hand of the father, also god in form; he is for us the unblemished image; by every strength we must try to make the soul like him; but he is free from human passions to the full, for this reason he alone is judge, because he alone is sinless; we, however, as far as possible, try to sin as little as possible; for nothing presses so much as first the removal of passions and diseases, and then the prevention of easy falling into the habit of sins. The best is not to sin at all in any way, which we say is of God; second is never to touch any intentional wrongdoing, which is proper to the wise; third is not to fall into very many involuntary errors, which is characteristic of those nobly tutored; and let the last be not to linger long in sins; but even this is salvific for those called back to repentance to fight back.

And it seems to me that the tutor speaks most excellently through Moses: "If someone dies suddenly upon him, his head of prayer will be immediately defiled and he will be shaved," calling involuntary sin a sudden death. He says that it defiles him, staining the soul; therefore he prescribes the remedy as quickly as possible, advising to shave the head immediately, urging to wipe away the hairs of ignorance that overshadow reason, so that reason, left bare of thick matter—that is, vice—is enthroned in the brain, to run back to repentance. Then, after saying a few things, he adds: "But the previous days are irrational," by which it is clear that sins are indicated that have not occurred according to reason. And he called the involuntary "sudden," and sinning "irrational." For this reason the Word, the tutor, has received the oversight for the prevention of irrational sin. Observe from this, from the Scripture: "For this reason the Lord says this." The sin that existed before is shown in a refutatory manner by the following statement, in that the just judgment follows, and this is clearly manifested through the prophets, as when they say, "If you had not sinned, he would not have threatened this," and for this reason "Thus says the Lord," and "Because you did not listen to these words, for this reason the Lord says this," and "For this reason, behold, the Lord says." For prophecy exists for this reason: for obedience and disobedience—for the former that we may be saved, for the latter that we may be disciplined. Therefore our tutor is the Word, who through exhortations heals the unnatural passions of the soul.

Properly, the assistance for bodily diseases is called medicine, a teachable art of human wisdom. But the paternal Word alone is the Paeonian physician of human infirmities and the holy healer of the ailing soul. "Save your servant," he says, "my God, who hopes in you; have mercy on me, Lord, for I will cry out to you all the day." For medicine, according to Democritus, heals the diseases of the body, while wisdom removes the passions from the soul. But the good tutor, wisdom, the Word of the Father, who fashioned man, cares for the whole creature, and heals both body and soul, the all-healing physician of humanity. The Saviour says to the paralytic, "Rise, take your pallet on which you lie and go home." And immediately the sick man was strengthened. And to the dead Lazarus he said, "Come forth"; and he came out of the tomb, the corpse, as he was before suffering, having practiced the resurrection. And indeed he heals the soul itself by commandments and graces, but by the precepts he perhaps delays; by graces he is rich, and they are released.

you the sins to us sinners, he says. But we have become children in understanding together with the thought, receiving the best and most steadfast order from his good order, which first occupies itself with the cosmos and the heaven and the solar revolutions and the circuits and the movements of the remaining stars for the sake of man, and then with man himself, about whom all earnest effort is employed; and considering this the greatest work, it directed his soul with prudence and temperance, and blended his body with beauty and good rhythm, and concerning the actions of humanity it inspired in them both correctness and its own good order. 1 That the paedagogus is philanthropic. The Lord benefits all and helps all, both as man and as God, forgiving sins as God, and as man educating them not to sin. Reasonably, then, man is a friend to God, since he is also his creation. And the other things he made only by commanding, but man he fashioned with his own hands and breathed into him something of his own. Therefore, that which is imaged by him and toward him is either chosen for its own sake by God, having been created by God himself, or it is formed as chosen for the sake of another. If, then, man is chosen for his own sake, being good, he loved the good, and the affection is within man, which is called the breath of God.

If it is for the sake of others that man has become choiceworthy, God had no other reason for making him than that without him, being such as he is, the one might become a good creator, and the other might attain to knowledge of God. For God would not otherwise have made that for the sake of which man came to be, unless man had come to be; and the power he had hidden within, the will, God filled up from the external power of having made, taking from man what he had made man and what he had, he saw and became what he willed; and nothing is beyond God's power. Therefore the man whom God made is choiceworthy for his own sake, and what is choiceworthy for its own sake is proper to that for which it is choiceworthy for its own sake, and to that it is also welcome and beloved. But is something beloved to someone, yet not loved by him? Man has been shown to be beloved, therefore man is loved by God. For how is he not loved, for whose sake the only-begotten is sent down from the Father's bosom, the Word of faith? Faith itself clearly is the Lord himself, confessing and saying, "For the Father loves you, because you have loved me," and again the same, "And you loved them, as you loved me." What then the Pedagogue wishes and what he promises, being disposed in deed and word, and prescribing what is to be done, and forbidding the opposite, is already clear. And it is evident that the other kind of discourse, the didactic, is both slender and spiritual, adhering to precision, the epoptic, which indeed is to be set aside for now.

It is our duty to love in return the one who lovingly guides us toward the best life, and to live according to the ordinances of his choice, not only fulfilling what is commanded or guarding against what is forbidden, but also, by turning away from some images and imitating others as closely as possible, to accomplish the works of the pedagogue in likeness, so that the image and likeness may be fulfilled. For as we wander in deep darkness through life, we need a guide who is unerring and precise. The best guide is not the blind one, as scripture says, leading the blind into the abyss, but the one who sees clearly and discerns the heart, the word. Just as there is no light that does not illuminate, no mover that does not move, no lover that does not love, so there is no good that does not benefit and lead to salvation. Therefore let us love the Lord's commandments through works, for the word itself, having become flesh, clearly displays the same virtue, both practical and theoretical, and, considering the word as law, let us recognize his commandments and exhortations as short and direct paths to eternity; for his precepts are full of persuasion, not fear. That the word is pedagogue equally for men and women. Therefore, having embraced this good obedience, let us give ourselves over to the Lord, having fastened the most secure cable of his faith, having understood that the same virtue belongs to man and woman. For if God is one for both, the pedagogue is also one for both.

One church, one self-control, one modesty, food in common, marriage in wedlock, breath, sight, hearing, knowledge, hope, obedience, love—all things alike. For those whose life is common, whose grace is common, whose salvation is common, their virtue and their training are also common. For in this age, it is said, they marry and are given in marriage, in which alone the female is distinguished from the male, but in that age no longer, where the rewards of this communal and holy life from wedlock are reserved not for male and female, but for the human being separated from the desire that divides him. Therefore the name "human" is common to men and women. For this reason, it seems to me, the Attic writers have called a child, in a common sense, not only the male but also the female, if the comic poet Menander in The Girl Who Is Slapped is trustworthy, speaking somewhere thus: "my daughter... for the child is by nature very fond of people." And "lambs" is a common name of simplicity for the male and female animal; and the Lord himself shepherds us for the ages, amen. Without a shepherd, neither sheep nor any other flock can be lived with, nor indeed children without the pedagogue, nor yet servants without the master. For all who are engaged in the truth are children in the sight of God. That pedagogy is the training of children is clear from the name; it remains then to examine the children whom Scripture hints at, and then to set the pedagogue over them. We are the children; and Scripture hymns us in many ways and allegorizes us in manifold terms, varying the simplicity of the faith with diverse names. In the Gospel, at least:

He stood, it is said, on the shore before the disciples—and they happened to be fishing—and called out, "Children, do you have any fish?" addressing as children those who were already in the state of being his acquaintances. And the children, it is said, brought to him infants for the laying on of hands for blessing, and when the acquaintances tried to prevent them, Jesus said, "Let the children come, and do not hinder them from coming to me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." What this saying means, the Lord himself will clarify by saying, "Unless you turn and become like these children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven," not allegorizing rebirth here, but setting before us the simplicity found in children as a model for imitation. The prophetic spirit also understands us as children: "Plucking branches of olive or palm," it says, "the children went out to meet the Lord and cried out, saying, 'Hosanna to the son of David, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord, light and glory and praise with supplication to the Lord'"; for this is what "Hosanna" means when interpreted in the Greek language. And it seems to me that the scripture, alluding to this prophecy, reproaches the negligent as a matter of reproach: "Have you never read that from the mouths of infants and sucklings praise was perfected?" This indeed the Lord also does in the Gospel.

He sharpens the perception of his acquaintances, urging them to pay attention to him as he hastens to the Father, making his hearers more eager, foretelling that he will soon depart, indicating that they must more freely harvest the truth, since the Word has not yet departed to heaven. So again he calls them children; for he says, "Children, I am still with you a little while." And again he likens the kingdom of heaven to children sitting in marketplaces and saying, "We played the flute for you and you did not dance, we sang a dirge and you did not beat your breasts," and whatever else he added in keeping with these. And not only does the Gospel hold this view, but prophecy agrees with it. For David says, "Praise, children, the Lord, praise the name of the Lord." And he says through Isaiah, "Behold, I and the children whom God has given me." Do you wonder to hear the men among the nations called children by the Lord? You do not seem to me to understand the Attic tongue, from which it is possible to learn that beautiful and comely, and also free, young women are called *paidiskai*, while *paidiskaria* are slaves, and they too are young women, honored by a diminutive for the bloom of childhood. And when he says, "My lambs, stand on the right," he hints at the simple ones, children as lambs, not men as sheep by kind, and he deemed the lambs worthy of privilege, preferring the tenderness and simplicity of mind in humans, their innocence. And again when he says, "like suckling calves," he allegorizes us once more, and as "a harmless and guileless dove," again us.

He also commands through Moses that two young doves or a pair of turtledoves be offered for sin, saying that the sinlessness of the tender and innocent and unforgetting young is acceptable to God, and teaching that like is purified by like. Moreover, the timidity of the turtledoves prefigures caution with regard to sins. That he means us by the young, Scripture bears witness: "As a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, so we are the chicks of the Lord," the Word wonderfully and mystically depicting the simplicity of the soul as of childish age. For sometimes he calls us children, sometimes chicks, sometimes infants, and elsewhere sons, and often children, and a new people, and a new nation. "And to my servants," he says, "a new name will be given," meaning by "new name" the new and eternal, undefiled and simple and infantile and true, which will be blessed on earth. Again, allegorizing, he calls us colts, those unyoked to vice, those untamed by wickedness, but simple and frisky only toward the Father himself, not horses neighing after the wives of neighbors, those under the yoke and mad for females, but the free and newborn, those proud because of faith, those swift in running toward truth, those quick for salvation, those trampling and prancing on worldly things. Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion; proclaim, daughter of Jerusalem; behold, your king comes to you, righteous and saving, and he himself is gentle and mounted on a beast of burden and a young colt.

It was not enough to have said "foal" only, but he also added "young" to it, indicating the youth of humanity in Christ and its ageless eternity with simplicity. And our divine foal-tamer raises us, the infants, as such young foals. But even if the young one in scripture is a donkey, nevertheless it is a foal of a donkey. And he says, he tied the foal to a vine, having bound this simple and infant people to the Word, which he allegorizes as a vine; for the vine bears wine, as the Word bears blood, and both are drink for the salvation of men, wine for the body, blood for the spirit. And as he calls us lambs, the Spirit is a trustworthy witness through Isaiah: as a shepherd will shepherd his flock and with his arm will gather the lambs, allegorizing the still more tender of the sheep as lambs for the sake of simplicity. Indeed, we also, having honored the most beautiful and most perfect of the possessions in life with the appellation of childhood, have called them education and pedagogy. And we acknowledge pedagogy to be a good upbringing from childhood toward virtue. And revealing the meaning more clearly to us from the appellation of child, when a question arose among the apostles as to which of them was greater, Jesus placed a child in the midst and said: whoever humbles himself like this child, that one is greater in the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, he has not misused the appellation of children as referring to an age of unreason, as some have thought, nor, if he says "unless you become like these children, you will not enter the kingdom of God," is it to be understood ignorantly.

Therefore we infants no longer roll on the ground nor crawl as before on the earth like serpents, writhing with our whole body after mindless desires, but stretching upward in thought, having renounced the world and sins, touching the ground with only a small part of the foot, so as to seem to be in the world, we pursue holy wisdom; but this seems folly to those trained in cunning. So children are rightly those who have God alone as father, simple and infantile and pure, lovers of the horns of unicorns. To those advanced in the Word, at any rate, he proclaimed this voice, bidding them to disregard the things of this world and exhorting them to attend only to the father, imitating children. Hence also in the sayings he says, Do not be anxious about tomorrow; for its own evil is sufficient for the day. Thus he commands that, having laid aside the cares of life, we cling only to the father. And the one who fulfills this commandment is truly an infant and a child to God and to the world, to the former as beloved, to the latter as deceived. But if there is one teacher in the heavens, as scripture says, then by common consent all on earth would rightly be called disciples. For the truth is this: perfection belongs to the Lord, who always teaches, while the childish and infantile belongs to us, who always learn. Thus prophecy has honored perfection with the appellation "man," and through David it says of the devil, "The Lord abhors a man of blood," calling him a man as perfect in wickedness; and the Lord is also called a man because he is perfect in righteousness.

Immediately, then, the apostle, writing to the Corinthians, says: "For I betrothed you, a pure virgin, to one man, to present to Christ," whether as infants and holy ones, but only to the one Lord. And most clearly, writing to the Ephesians, he revealed what is sought, speaking somewhat as follows: "Until we all arrive at the unity of faith and knowledge of God, at the perfect man, at the full measure of the stature of Christ, so that we may no longer be infants, tossed about and carried around by every wind of teaching in the dice-game of men, in cunning against the artifice of error, but speaking truth in love, we may grow into him in all things." Saying these things for the edification of the body of Christ, which is the head and the man who alone is perfect in righteousness. And we, the infants, having guarded against the winds of heresies that blow to puff us up, and not trusting others who legislate fathers for us, are then perfected when we are the church, having received Christ as the head. Here it is right to attend to the appellation "infant," that "infant" is not assigned to the foolish; for "nepytios" is that, but "nepios" is the "neepios," as "epios" is the gentle-minded, as it were newly and gently in character become "epios." This the blessed Paul most clearly indicated, saying: "Being able to be in gravity as apostles of Christ, we became gentle among you, as a nurse cherishes her own children." Gentle

Therefore the infant is especially tender, soft, simple, guileless, and unfeigned, straight in mind and upright; this is the substance of simplicity and truth. "For upon whom," he says, "shall I look, but upon the gentle and tranquil?" For such is the virginal word, tender and unformed; hence it is customary for the virgin to be called a tender bride and the child tender-minded, and we are tender, pliant to persuasion and easily wrought for goodness, free from bile and unmixed with evil-mindedness and crookedness. For the old generation is crooked and hard-hearted, but the band of infants, the new people, is we, delicate as a child. The apostle confesses that he rejoices in the hearts of the innocent in the Epistle to the Romans, and indeed he gives a kind of definition of infants, so to speak, saying: "I wish you to be wise for good, but innocent for evil." For the name "infant" is not understood by us as a privation, since the grammarians' children legislate that "ne" is privative. For if those who revile infancy call us foolish, see how they blaspheme against the Lord, supposing those who have fled to God to be foolish; but if, as is rather to be understood, they themselves interpret "infants" as referring to the simple, let us rejoice in the appellation. For infant minds are the new minds, in old foolishness the recently intelligent, those that have arisen according to the new covenant. For only recently has God been known through the coming of Christ. For no one knew God except the Son and the one to whom the Son reveals him.

Therefore the people who are new are the new people, in contradistinction to the older people, having learned the new good things. And for us the udder of age is this ageless youth, in which we are always at our peak for understanding, always young and always gentle and always new; for it is necessary that those who have partaken of the new word be new. And that which has partaken of eternity loves to be made like the incorruptible, so that for us the name of the age of childhood is the spring of the whole of life, because the truth in us is ageless and our character is suffused with truth. Wisdom is ever-blooming, always remaining the same and in the same way and never changing. Their children, it says, will be lifted onto shoulders and comforted on knees; as if a mother will comfort someone, so I will comfort you. The mother brings the children forward, and we seek the mother, the church. Now everything that is both weak and tender, since it is in need of help because of its weakness, is both pleasing and sweet and delightful, God not withholding his help from such an age; for just as fathers and mothers more gladly look upon the foals of horses, the little calves of cattle, the cub of a lion, the fawn of a deer, and the child of a man, so also the father of all welcomes those who have fled to him and, having regenerated them by the Spirit into adoption, knows them as gentle and loves only these and helps and fights for them and for this reason calls them child. I also refer Isaac to the child; Isaac is interpreted as laughter. The meddlesome king saw him playing with his wife and helper, Rebecca.

It seems to me that the king, Abimelech by name, is some supracosmic wisdom, observing the mystery of the play; and Rebecca they interpret as endurance. O the wise play, laughter aided even through endurance, and the king as overseer. The spirit of the children in Christ who live their lives in endurance rejoices, and this is the divine play. Heraclitus says that Zeus plays some such play. For what other seemly work is there for a wise and perfect being than to play and to rejoice together with the endurance of good things and the administration of good things, celebrating the festival together with God? It is also possible to understand otherwise what is indicated by the prophecy, that we rejoice and laugh at salvation like Isaac. And he laughed, released from death, playing and rejoicing with his bride, the helper for our salvation, the church; to which the name endurance has been firmly set, either because she alone remains forever always rejoicing, or because she is constituted from the endurance of the faithful, who are members of Christ; and the testimony of those who have endured to the end, and the thanksgiving for these things, this is the mystic play and the salvation that aids with seemly cheerfulness. So the king, Christ, oversees our laughter from above, and having looked through the window, as the scripture says, he beholds the thanksgiving and the blessing, the exultation and the cheerfulness, and also endurance working together, and their interweaving, the church, his own, only showing his own face, which the church lacks, completed as a kingdom with a head. And where then was the window through which the Lord was shown? The flesh, through which he was manifested.

Isaac himself—for it is possible to understand him in another way—is a type of the Lord: a child as a son, for he was the son of Abraham as Christ is the son of God, and a sacrificial victim as the Lord. But he was not consumed by fire as the Lord was; Isaac only carried the wood of the sacrifice, as the Lord carried the wood. He laughed mystically, foretelling that the Lord would fill us with joy, we who are redeemed from corruption by the blood of the Lord. He did not suffer, not only because Isaac fittingly yields the first place of suffering to the Word, but also because he hints at the divinity of the Lord by not being slaughtered; for Jesus rose after his burial, not having suffered, just as Isaac was released from the sacrifice. I will also set forth another very strong point in support of the argument. The Spirit, through Isaiah, prophesies that the Lord himself is called a child: "Behold, a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us, whose beginning is upon his shoulder, and his name was called the angel of great counsel." What then is the infant child, in whose image we are infants? Through the same prophet, his greatness is described: "a wonderful counselor, a powerful god, an eternal father, a prince of peace, who multiplies instruction; and of his peace there is no end." O the great God, O the perfect child: son in father, and father in son. And how is the instruction of that child not perfect, which extends to all of us children, educating us, his infants? He stretched out his hands to us, hands that are clearly trusted. John, the greatest prophet among those born of women, also bears witness to this child: "Behold the lamb of God.

For since Scripture calls the children who are infants "lambs," and since God the Word, who became man for our sake, wishing to be likened to us in all respects, has called the Son of God, the infant of the Father, a "lamb of God"—against those who suppose that the appellation "children" and "infants" hints at the teaching of elementary lessons. And it is possible for us, out of abundance, to strip for action against the quarrelsome: for we are not called "children" and "infants" with reference to the childishness and contemptibility of learning, as those puffed up with knowledge have slanderously alleged; but having been reborn, we immediately received the perfection, for the sake of which we hastened. For we were enlightened; and that is to know God. Therefore, one who has known the perfect is not imperfect. And do not take hold of me for confessing to have known God. For somehow the Word thought to speak thus: and he is free. At any rate, when the Lord was being baptized, a voice from heaven resounded as a witness: "You are my beloved son, the beloved; today I have begotten you." Let us then ask the wise: is Christ, having been reborn today, already perfect, or—which is most absurd—deficient? And if this latter, he must learn something more. But it is likely that he, being God, learns not even one thing. For no one would be greater than the Word.

Nor is he the teacher of the only teacher. Will they then, perhaps unwillingly, acknowledge the Word, born perfect from the perfect Father, to have been reborn perfectly according to the economic prefiguration? And if he was perfect, why was the perfect one baptized? They say it was necessary to fulfill the human promise. Excellently. For I say: at the same time as he was baptized by John, does he become perfect? Clearly. Did he then learn nothing from him? No. Is he perfected by the bath alone and sanctified by the descent of the Spirit? So it is. And the same thing happens also in our case, for whom the Lord became a pattern: being baptized, we are illuminated; being illuminated, we are adopted as sons; being adopted, we are perfected; being perfected, we are made immortal. "I," he says, "said, 'You are gods and sons of the Most High, all of you.'" This work is called by many names: grace, illumination, perfection, and bath. Bath, because through it we wash away our sins; grace, because through it the penalties for sins are remitted; illumination, because through it that holy, saving light is beheld—that is, through it we see the divine keenly; and perfection, we say, is that which lacks nothing. For what further remains for one who has known God? Indeed, it would be truly absurd for a gift of God to be called incomplete; but being perfect, he will surely bestow perfect gifts. And just as everything happens at his command, so, when he merely wills to bestow grace, it follows that the grace is fulfilled. For the future of time is anticipated by the power of his will. Moreover, deliverance from evils is the beginning of salvation.

Only those who have first begun the terms of life are already perfect, and we who are separated from death already live. Salvation, therefore, is to follow Christ. For what has come to be in him is life. "Truly, truly I say to you," he says, "he who hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and does not come to judgment, but has passed from death to life." Thus, merely to believe and to be reborn is perfection in life; for God is never weak. For just as his will is a work and this is called the world, so also his purpose is the salvation of men and this is called the church. He knows, therefore, whom he has called, and those whom he has called he has saved; he has called and saved at the same time. "For you yourselves," says the apostle, "are taught by God." It is not, therefore, permissible for us to consider what is taught by him as imperfect; and the learning is the eternal salvation of the eternal savior, to whom grace is for the ages, amen. And he who is only reborn, as indeed the name indicates, having been enlightened, is at once freed from darkness and receives the light immediately. Just as those who shake off sleep are at once inwardly awake, or rather, just as those who try to remove the cataract from their eyes do not supply light to themselves from outside, which they do not have, but by lowering the obstacle to their vision leave the pupil free, so also those who are baptized, having wiped away the sins that darken the divine spirit like a mist, possess a free, unimpeded, and luminous eye of the spirit, by which alone we contemplate the divine, the holy spirit flowing into us from heaven.

This mixture of eternal radiance is capable of seeing the eternal light, since like is friendly to like, and the holy is friendly to that from which the holy comes, which is properly called light; for you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Hence I believe that man was called "lights" by the ancients. But not yet, they say, has he received the perfect gift. I agree with that, yet he is in light, and darkness does not overtake him; there is nothing between light and darkness; the end is reserved for the resurrection of the faithful; and that is nothing other than to obtain the promised pledge. For we do not say that both arrive at the same time, the arrival at the end and the anticipation of the arrival; for eternity and time are not the same, nor are impulse and end the same; but both are concerned with one thing, and the one is concerned with both. There is, so to speak, an impulse, which is faith born in time, and an end, which is the attainment of the promise confirmed for eternity. The Lord himself most clearly revealed the equality of salvation when he said: "For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." Therefore, as far as is possible in this world, which he hinted at as the last day reserved for when it will cease, we believe that we become perfect. For faith is the perfection of learning; therefore he says that the one who believes in the Son has eternal life. If, then, we who have believed have life, what further remains beyond possessing eternal life?

Nothing is lacking in faith, which is perfect and complete in itself. If something is lacking in it, it is not entirely perfect nor is it faith, being lame in some respect; nor after the departure from here do other things await those who have believed, who have been betrothed here without distinction, but we receive after the resurrection that which we have already anticipated by believing, so that the saying may be fulfilled: let it be according to your faith. Where faith is, there is the promise, and the fulfillment of the promise is rest. Thus knowledge is in the illumination, and the end of knowledge is rest, which is conceived as the ultimate object of desire. Just as inexperience is dissolved by experience and lack of resource by resource, so darkness must be obliterated by illumination; ignorance is darkness, through which we fall into sins, being dim-sighted concerning the truth. Illumination, therefore, is knowledge, which obliterates ignorance and implants the power of discernment. But the rejection of worse things is also the revelation of better things. For what ignorance bound together badly, these things are dissolved well through knowledge. And these bonds are loosed as quickly as possible by human faith and divine grace, the transgressions being released by one healing remedy, the rational baptism. We wash away all sins, and we are no longer evil at once. This is the one grace of illumination: that one is not the same in character as before being washed. And knowledge arises together with illumination, shining around the mind, and we immediately become disciples, we who were ignorant, that learning having been added previously.

For you could not name the time. For catechesis leads to faith, and faith is educated together with holy baptism by the Spirit; since, indeed, the one universal salvation of humanity is faith, and the equality and communion of the just and philanthropic God is the same toward all, the apostle most clearly explained, speaking somewhat as follows: Before faith came, we were guarded under the law, being confined toward the faith that was to be revealed; so that the law became our pedagogue leading to Christ, that we might be justified by faith; but when faith came, we are no longer under a pedagogue. Do you not hear that we are no longer under that law which was with fear, but under the word of free choice, the pedagogue? Then indeed he added the voice free from all partiality: For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus; for all of you who were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Therefore there are not some who are gnostics and others who are psychics in the Word itself, but all, having put aside fleshly desires, are equal and spiritual before the Lord. And elsewhere again he writes: For we have all been baptized into one body in one Spirit, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free; and

All of us have drunk from one cup. It is not out of place to use even their own words, who say that the memory of better things is a straining of the spirit. And they understand straining as the separation of the worse from the better by the recollection of the better; and from this it necessarily follows that the one who has been reminded of the better feels repentance for the worse; indeed, they confess that the spirit itself repented and ran back. In the same way, then, we also, having repented of our sins, having renounced our faults, being strained through baptism, run back to the eternal light, children to the father. Rejoicing, then, in the spirit, Jesus says, "I confess to you, Father, God of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent, and revealed them to infants." The pedagogue and teacher calls us infants, as being more fit for salvation than the wise of the world, who, considering themselves wise, are puffed up. And he cries out, rejoicing and exulting greatly, as if lisping together with the infants: "Yes, Father, because such was the good pleasure before you." Therefore, the things hidden from the wise and intelligent of the present age have been revealed to infants. Infants, then, are fittingly the children of God, who have put off the old man and stripped off the garment of wickedness, and have put on the incorruption of Christ, so that, having become new, a holy people, reborn, we may keep the man pure and be infants, like a child of God cleansed of fornication and wickedness.

Most clearly, then, the blessed Paul has freed us from the inquiry in his first epistle to the Corinthians, writing something like this: "Brothers, do not become children in your minds, but be infantile in wickedness, and become mature in your minds." The phrase "when I was a child, I thought as a child, I spoke as a child" hints at the upbringing according to the law, according to which he, no longer as a simple person, but as one still foolish, while thinking childish things pursued them, and while speaking childish things blasphemed the Word. For "child" signifies two things. "Since I have become a man," Paul says again, "I have abolished the things of the child." It is not an incomplete measure of age, nor a fixed measure of time, nor does it hint at other secret teachings of manly and more perfect disciplines, sending childhood beyond the borders, the apostle who confesses to abolishing it. Rather, he calls those in the law "children," who are disturbed by fear, just as children are by bogeymen, and he has called "men" those who are obedient to reason and self-determined, who are saved by voluntary choice, being wisely, not foolishly, frightened by fear. The apostle himself will bear witness concerning this, saying that the Jews are heirs according to the former covenant, but we are heirs according to the promise. "I say," he says, "that for as long as the heir is a child, he differs in no way from a slave, though he is lord of all, but he is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by his father." Thus also we, when we were children, were enslaved under the elements of the world.

When the fullness of time came, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under law, in order to ransom those under law, in order that we might receive adoption through him. See how he acknowledged that those under fear and sins were infants, while calling those under faith sons, he made them men in contrast to the infants in the law. For no longer, he says, are you a slave, but a son; and if a son, then also an heir through God. What then is lacking for the son after the inheritance? It is fitting, therefore, to interpret in this way the phrase "when I was an infant," that is, when I was a Jew, for he was a Hebrew from the beginning, I thought as an infant, since I followed the law; but when I became a man, I no longer think the things of the infant, that is, the things of the law, but the things of the man, that is, the things of Christ, whom alone Scripture calls man, as we have previously said, and I have abolished the things of the infant. But infancy in Christ is perfection, as compared to the law. Here, having arrived at our infancy, we must plead for it. Moreover, the saying of the apostle must be further explained: "I gave you milk, as infants in Christ, not solid food; for you were not yet able; but not even now are you able." For it does not seem to me that the saying should be understood in a Jewish manner. For I will set alongside it that other scripture: "I will lead you into the good land, flowing with milk and honey." Thus a very great difficulty arises from the comparison of these scriptures, as to what they mean.

If the beginning of faith in Christ is the infancy through milk, and this is disparaged as childish and imperfect, how is the rest of the perfect and gnostic after eating again honored with milk for an infant? Does the "as," being indicative of a comparison, then signify something of this sort, and indeed must the saying be read here in this way: "I gave you milk in Christ," and after a brief pause we add "as to infants," so that by the pause in reading we may accept this meaning: "I catechized you in Christ with simple, true, and natural spiritual food"? For such is the life-nourishing substance of milk, flowing from loving breasts; so that the whole is understood thus: just as nurses nourish newborn children with milk, so I, with the milk of Christ, the Word, instill spiritual nourishment in you. Thus, indeed, milk is perfect food, the perfect, and leads the unceasing to its end. Therefore, even in the rest, this same milk and honey are promised. Reasonably, the Lord again promises milk to the righteous, so that the Word may clearly be shown as both, alpha and omega, beginning and end, the Word allegorized as milk. Something of this sort even Homer, unwittingly, prophesies, calling the righteous of men milk-eaters. It is also possible to understand the scripture in this way: "And I, brothers, was not able to speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to fleshly men, as to infants in Christ," so that the fleshly may be understood as those recently catechized and still infants in Christ.

For he called those who already believe in the Holy Spirit spiritual, and the newly catechized and not yet purified he called fleshly, whom he fittingly calls fleshly, since they still think fleshly things equally with the gentiles. For where there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly and do you not walk according to man? Therefore he says, "I gave you milk to drink," meaning, "I poured knowledge into you," the knowledge from catechesis that nourishes toward eternal life. And the word "I gave to drink" is a symbol of perfect participation. For the perfect are said to drink, while infants suckle. "For my blood," says the Lord, "is true drink." So when he said "milk," did he not hint at the perfect joy in the milk of the word, the knowledge of truth, by saying "I gave to drink"? And what follows next—"not food, for you were not yet able"—can hint at the clear revelation in the future age, like food, face to face. For we see now as through a mirror, the same apostle says, but then face to face. Therefore he added this: "But not even now are you able, for you are still fleshly, thinking fleshly things, desiring, loving, being jealous, being angry, envying." Not because we are still in the flesh, as some have supposed; for with it, having a face equal to angels, we will see the promise face to face.

How, then, if that promise truly exists after departure from here, which no eye has seen nor has entered into the mind of man, do they claim to know it, not having conceived it by the Spirit, but having received from learning what no ear ever heard, except that which was snatched into the third heaven? But even that was commanded to keep silence then. But if it is human wisdom, which remains to be understood, the boastfulness of knowledge, hear the law of Scripture: let the wise man not boast in his wisdom, and let the strong man not boast in his strength, but let him who boasts boast in the Lord. But we are taught by God and boast in the name of Christ. How then must we not suppose that the apostle understands the milk of infants in this way, whether we are shepherds who preside over the churches in the image of the good shepherd, and we are the sheep, does not the Lord, calling the milk of the flock, preserve the sequence by allegorizing? And indeed the literal text must again be applied to the meaning: I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able, not understanding the solid food as something other than milk, but the same in substance; for likewise the Word is either relaxed and gentle like milk, or congealed and compacted like solid food. Moreover, even for us understanding it in this way, milk can be understood as the proclamation which is mostly diffused, and solid food as faith compacted into a foundation from catechesis, which, being more solid than hearing, is likened to solid food, being embodied in the soul itself.

Such nourishment the Lord also elsewhere in the Gospel according to John expressed differently through symbols, saying, "Eat my flesh" and "Drink my blood," allegorizing the visible food and drink of faith and of the promise. Through these, the Church, like a human being composed of many members, is watered and grows, is compacted and consolidated from both—from the body of faith and the soul of hope, just as the Lord is from flesh and blood. For truly, hope is the blood of faith, by which faith is held together, as by a soul. But when hope is breathed out, like blood flowing out, the life-giving power of faith is relaxed. If, however, some wish to contend that the first lessons indicate milk, as if first foods, and that solid food indicates spiritual knowledge, raising themselves up to knowledge, let them know that, in calling solid food "food" and "flesh and blood of Jesus," they are carried away by their own boastful wisdom from true simplicity. For blood is found to be the firstborn in a human being, which some have dared to call the substance of the soul. This blood, turned by natural digestion when the mother has conceived, blooms with sympathetic affection and ages toward the fearlessness of the child. And blood is more fluid than flesh, being like a moist flesh, while milk is more nourishing and finer than blood.

Whether the blood supplied to the embryo and previously sent through the maternal navel, or the menstrual blood itself, when shut off from its proper flow, is commanded by the natural law of the all-nourishing and generative God to proceed to the already swelling breasts and, altered by the warm breath, is prepared as desirable nourishment for the infant, it is blood that undergoes change. For the breasts are more sympathetic to the womb than all other members. When, therefore, at the time of birth the vessel through which blood was carried to the embryo is severed, the passage is closed, and the blood takes its course to the breasts; and when a great influx occurs, they are distended, and the blood changes into milk, analogous to the change of blood into pus in the case of an ulcer. Or again, whether from the veins lying in the breasts, which are opened during the distensions of pregnancy, the blood is transferred into the natural ducts of the breasts, and the breath sent down from the neighboring arteries is mixed with it, while the underlying substance of the blood remains intact, it is churned and whitened, and by such agitation is changed through foaming, having undergone something similar to the sea, which, according to the poets, under the impacts of the winds spits forth the foam of salt. Nevertheless,

Blood has its substance. In this way, rivers, borne with a roar, when the encompassing air is caught up and carded, bubble up foam, and the moisture in our mouth is whitened by the breath. What then is the caprice of not admitting that blood too is changed by the breath into something most luminous and white? It undergoes the change in quality, not in substance. At any rate, you would find nothing more nourishing, nor sweeter, nor whiter than milk. Spiritual food is entirely like this: sweet because of grace, nourishing as life, white as the day of Christ, and the blood of the Word has been manifested as milk. Thus, in childbirth, milk is supplied to the infant, being administered for this purpose, and the breasts, which until then looked straight at the man, now incline toward the child, taught to provide the nourishment prepared by nature, easily taken, for the nurture of salvation. For the breasts are not full like springs with milk flowing in ready-made, but by transforming the food within themselves they produce milk and exude it. This suitable and appropriate nourishment for a newly formed and newly born child is prepared by God, the nourisher and father of those who are born and reborn, just as manna flowed from heaven to the ancient Hebrews, the celestial food of angels. Indeed, even now nurses call the first flow of milk by the same name as that food, manna. But women who are pregnant, having become mothers, produce milk.

The Lord Christ, the fruit of the virgin, did not bless women’s breasts nor judge them to be nourishers, but rather, when the loving and humane father poured forth the Word like rain, He Himself became spiritual nourishment for the temperate. O mysterious wonder: one is the father of all, one is the Word of all, and the Holy Spirit is one and the same everywhere, and there is one only virgin mother—I love to call her the Church. This mother alone had no milk, because she alone did not become a woman, but is both virgin and mother, pure as a virgin, loving as a mother, and she calls her own children to her and nurses them with holy milk, the infantile Word. Therefore she had no milk, because this child was itself milk, beautiful and proper, the body of Christ, nourishing the youth with the Word, whom the Lord himself conceived in a fleshly birth-pang, whom the Lord himself swaddled in precious blood. O holy childbed, O holy swaddling clothes: the Word is everything to the infant, both father and mother and pedagogue and nourisher. “Eat my flesh,” He says, “and drink my blood.” These familiar foods the Lord supplies to us, and offers flesh and pours out blood; and nothing is lacking for the growth of the children. O paradoxical mystery: He commands us to strip off the old and fleshly corruption, just as the old food, and partaking of another, new regimen of Christ, taking Him, if possible, into ourselves, to lay Him down and embrace the Savior, so that we may abolish the passions of our flesh.

But you do not wish to understand it in this way, perhaps more commonly. Listen also to this: the Holy Spirit allegorizes flesh for us, for flesh has been created by it; blood for us hints at the Word, for the Word has been poured out over life like rich blood; the mixture of both is the Lord, the nourishment of infants; the Lord is spirit and Word. The nourishment, that is, the Lord Jesus, that is, the Word of God, spirit made flesh, sanctified heavenly flesh. The nourishment is the milk of the Father, by which alone we infants are nursed. Indeed, the beloved Word himself, our nourisher, poured out his own blood for us, saving humanity; through him, having believed in God, we flee to the care-dispelling breast of the Father, the Word, which alone, as it seems, supplies the milk of love to us infants, and truly blessed alone are those who suckle this breast. For this reason Peter also says: laying aside all wickedness and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander, as newborn babes, yearn for the rational milk, so that you may grow in it unto salvation, if you have tasted that the Lord is good. But if one should also concede to them that the food is something other than milk, then how will they not be impaled on themselves, not having understood nature? For food in winter, when the surrounding air thickens and does not give passage to the heat confined within, being boiled and digested, passes out into the veins, turned into blood; and the veins, not obtaining ventilation, being filled, are especially stretched and throb.

Therefore, nurses become most full of milk at that time. It has been demonstrated by us a little earlier that blood changes into milk in pregnant women by transformation, not by substance, just as, of course, blond hair in the aging changes into gray. In summer, on the contrary, since the body is more rarefied, it provides nourishment that is more easily distributed, and milk is least abundant, because blood is also not abundant; for not all nourishment is retained. If, then, the processing of nourishment becomes blood, and blood becomes milk, blood is a preparation for milk, as seed is for a human and a grape seed for a vine. Therefore, with milk, the Lord's nourishment, we are nursed immediately after birth, and immediately after being reborn we have been honored with the hope of rest, proclaiming the good news of the heavenly Jerusalem, where it is recorded that honey and milk rain down, through material nourishment also courting the holy nourishment. For foods are abolished, as the apostle himself says, but nourishment through milk leads to the heavens, having raised citizens of the heavens and fellow dancers of angels. Since the Word is a gushing spring of life and is called a river of oil, Paul, allegorizing and naming it milk, fittingly adds "I gave to drink"; for the Word is drunk, the nourishment of truth. Indeed, drink is also called liquid nourishment. It is possible for the same thing to be both food and drink in some way, being understood in relation to one thing and another, just as cheese is a coagulation of milk or solidified milk. For I am not concerned now with verbal precision, except that both nourishments are served by one substance.

But for infants at the breast, milk alone suffices as both drink and food. "I," says the Lord, "have food to eat which you do not know; my food is to do the will of him who sent me." You see another food allegorized similarly to milk: the will of God. And he has also called the completion of his own passion a cup, by a misuse of terms, because he had only to drink it up and accomplish it. Thus for Christ, the food of the paternal will was its fulfillment, but for us, Christ himself is the food for the infants, for those who milk the word of the heavens; hence seeking is called "mastication," because for the infants seeking the word, the paternal breasts of philanthropy supply the milk. Moreover, the Word confesses himself also the bread of the heavens. "For Moses," he says, "did not give you the bread from the heaven of the mind, but my father gives you the true bread from the heaven; for the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. And the bread which I will give is my flesh for the life of the world." Here the mystical meaning of the bread must be noted: that he calls it flesh, and as if rising through fire, just as wheat rises from decay and sowing, and indeed constituted through fire for the joy of the church, like baked bread. But then, more clearly to us,

This will be made clear in the treatise On the Resurrection. Since he also said, "The bread which I give is my flesh," and flesh is watered by blood, and blood is allegorized as wine, it must be understood that, just as bread crumbled into a mixture absorbs the wine and leaves behind the watery part, so also the flesh of the Lord, the bread of the heavens, drinks up the blood, nourishing the heavenly among men to incorruption, while leaving behind only those carnal desires for corruption. Thus the Word is allegorized in many ways: as food, flesh, nourishment, bread, blood, and milk—all of which the Lord provides for our enjoyment, we who have believed in him. Let no one, then, be surprised that we say the blood of the Lord is allegorized as milk; for is not wine also allegorized? "He who washes his garment in wine," it says, "and his covering in the blood of the grape"—he means that he will adorn the body of the Word with his own blood, just as he will nourish with his own spirit those who hunger for the Word. That the blood is the Word is witnessed by the blood of the righteous Abel crying out to God; for blood would never utter a voice, unless the Word is understood as the blood. For the righteous man of old is a type of the new righteous man, and the blood that cries out, the old, intercedes on behalf of the blood of the new. The blood, the Word, speaks to God, since it signified the Word that was to suffer. But also the flesh itself and the blood in it are watered and grow by milk, as if by a reciprocal feeding.

The formation of the conceived being occurs when the seed is mixed with the pure residue left over from the monthly cleansing; for the power in this, curdling the nature of the blood in the way that rennet coagulates milk, produces the substance of formation. The mixture flourishes, but excess leads to childlessness. Indeed, even in the earth itself, the seed is washed away by flooding when drenched, and dried up by drought when lacking moisture, while a viscous fluid holds the seed together and makes it grow. Some suppose that the seed of the animal is, in substance, foam of the blood, which, stirred up by the innate heat of the male during intercourse, is fanned and foamed, and deposited in the spermatic veins; hence Diogenes of Apollonia wishes the term "aphrodisia" to be derived. It is therefore evident from all this that the substance of the human body is blood. Moreover, the embryo is at first a fluid, milk-like consistency; then this consistency, becoming bloodied, is fleshed out, and, being solidified in the womb by the natural and warm breath, by which the embryo is shaped, it is brought to life. And even after birth, the child is again nourished by the same blood; for the flow of milk is the nature of blood, and milk is the source of nourishment, by which indeed a woman is manifestly truly a mother, and through which she also gains a bond of affection. Therefore, mystically, the Holy Spirit in the Apostle, using the Lord's voice, says, "I have given you milk to drink." For if we have been reborn into Christ, the one who rebirthed us nourishes us with his own milk, the Word.

Every parent seems immediately to provide nourishment to the offspring. And just as regeneration occurs, so analogously has nourishment become spiritual for man. Therefore we are wholly appropriated to Christ in all things, both to kinship through his blood, by which we are redeemed, and to sympathy through the nurture from the Word, and to incorruption through his training; for among mortals, providing nurture often supplies more affection than begetting children. The same blood and milk, therefore, is a symbol of the Lord's passion and teaching. It is permitted, then, for each of us infants to boast in the Lord, uttering: "I pray to be from a good father and of his blood." That milk comes from blood by transformation is already clear, but it is also possible to learn from flocks and herds. For these animals, during the season we call spring, when the surrounding air has become more moist, and the grass and pastures are at that time juicy and full of sap, become filled with blood first, as is shown by the distention of the veins, the vessels swelling; and from the blood milk flows more abundantly. In summer, on the contrary, the blood, burned and dried up by the heat, stops the transformation, and accordingly less milk is drawn. Indeed, milk has a most natural kinship with water, just as, of course, spiritual washing has with spiritual nourishment; for those who sip a little cold water with the aforementioned milk are immediately benefited.

For the milk is not allowed to be separated by its mixture with water, not by any antipathy, but by a ripening through sympathy. And the relation that the Word has to baptism, this same relation does milk have in its exchange with water. For milk alone among liquids both admits mixture with water and is taken for purification, just as baptism is for the remission of sins. It is also naturally mixed with honey, and this again for purification together with sweet nourishment; for the Word, when mingled with philanthropy, both heals the passions and cleanses the sins; and the phrase "sweeter than honey flowed his voice" seems to me to be said of the Word, which is honey; and in many places prophecy extols it above honey and the honeycomb. Moreover, milk is also mixed with sweet wine, and the mixture is beneficial, just as passion is blended into incorruption; for the milk is separated and divided by the wine, and whatever is spurious in it is drained away. In the same way, the spiritual communion of faith with the passible human being, draining away the carnal desires, contracts the human being into eternity, immortalizing him with divine things. But many also misuse the fatty part of milk, which they call butter, for a lamp, thus making clear through an evident enigma the richly oiled Word, as the only one that justly both nourishes and increases and enlightens the infants.

For this reason also the Scripture says concerning the Lord: he fed them with the produce of the fields, they sucked honey from the rock and oil from the solid rock, butter of cows and milk of sheep with the fat of lambs, and he gave them these things besides. But also the prophet, speaking of the birth of the child, says he will eat butter and honey. And I am moved to wonder how some dare to call themselves perfect and gnostics, thinking themselves above the apostle, puffed up and arrogant, when Paul himself confesses about himself: not that I have already received or am already perfected, but I pursue, and if I should overtake, on which account I was overtaken by Christ. Brethren, I do not yet consider myself to have attained; but one thing: forgetting what is behind, stretching out toward what is before, I pursue the goal for the prize of the higher calling in Christ Jesus. And he considers himself perfect in that he has been set free from his former life, and clings to the better, not as perfect in knowledge, but as one desiring the perfect; therefore he adds: all of us who are perfect think this, meaning by perfection clearly the having renounced sins and having been reborn into faith in the only perfect one, having utterly forgotten the sins behind.

Who is the Pedagogue, and concerning his pedagogy. Since we have shown that we are all called children by Scripture, and that we who have followed Christ are allegorically called infants, and that only the father of all is perfect—for in him is the son and in the son the father—it is now time for us, following the order, to say who our Pedagogue is. He is called Jesus. Sometimes, then, he calls himself shepherd and says, "I am the good shepherd," by a metaphor from shepherds who lead sheep; the leader of children is understood as Pedagogue, the caring shepherd of infants. For infants are allegorically simple as sheep. And it is said, "All will become one flock and one shepherd." The Pedagogue, then, is fittingly the Word who leads us children to salvation. Most clearly, then, the Word has said concerning himself through Hosea, "I am your instructor." Pedagogy is piety, being the learning of the service of God and training for the knowledge of truth, and the right guidance that leads to heaven. Pedagogy is called by many names: for it is both that of the one being led and learning, and that of the one leading and teaching, and thirdly the guidance itself, and fourthly the things taught, such as the commandments. Pedagogy according to God is the direction of truth toward the contemplation of God and the outline of holy actions in eternal continuance.

Just as the general directs the phalanx, providing for the safety of the mercenaries, and as the pilot steers the ship, choosing to save those sailing in it, so also the Pedagogue leads the children to the saving regimen for the sake of our own care. And in general, whatever we might reasonably ask of God to be done for us, these things will befall those who obey the Pedagogue. In the same way that the pilot does not always yield to the winds, but sometimes with the prow turned directly against them resists even entire gales, so the Pedagogue never yields to the winds that blow in this world, nor does he allow the child, like a ship, to be dashed against a bestial and licentious regimen. But, borne only by the wind of truth, he firmly clings to the child’s rudders—I mean the ears—until he brings the child safely to anchor in the harbor of the heavens. For what is called ancestral custom among men does not yet pass away, but divine education is a possession that remains forever. They say that Phoenix was the Pedagogue of Achilles, Adrastus of Croesus’s children, Leonidas of Alexander, and Nausithous of Philip. But Phoenix was a womanizer, Adrastus was a fugitive, Leonidas did not remove the arrogance of the Macedonian, nor did Nausithous cure the one from Pella of his drunkenness. Nor was Zopyrus the Thracian able to restrain the debauchery of Alcibiades, but Zopyrus was a purchased slave, and the Pedagogue of Themistocles’s children, Sicinnus, was a lazy household slave; they say he invented dancing and the sicinnis.

We are not unaware of those called royal pedagogues among the Persians, whom the Persian kings, selecting four in number from the best of all Persians, appointed over their own children. But the children learn from them only to shoot arrows, and when they come of age they consort with sisters, mothers, wives both wedded and countless concubines, trained like boars for intercourse. But our Pedagogue, the holy God Jesus, the Word who is the guide of all humanity, is himself the philanthropic God, the Pedagogue. And somewhere the Holy Spirit says through the Song concerning him: He sufficed for the people in the desert, in the thirst of the heat, in the waterless place; he surrounded them and educated them and guarded them as the apple of an eye. As an eagle shelters its nest and yearns over its young, spreading its wings, he received them and took them up on his back; the Lord alone led them, and no foreign god was with them. Clearly, I think, the scripture indicates the Pedagogue.

describing his upbringing. And again, when he speaks in his own person, he confesses himself to be the pedagogue: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt." Who then has the authority to lead in and out? Is it not the pedagogue? This one appeared to Abraham and said to him: "I am your God; be pleasing before me." And most pedagogically he prepares a faithful child, saying, "Become blameless, and I will place my covenant between me and you and your seed." Here there is a communion of supervisory friendship. And of Jacob he most clearly appears to be the pedagogue. For he says to him: "Behold, I am with you, guarding you on every road wherever you go; and I will bring you back to this land, for I will not abandon you until I have done all that I spoke to you." And he is said to wrestle with him. "Jacob was left alone," it says, "and a man wrestled with him, the pedagogue, until morning." This was the man who led and carried, who trained together with and anointed the ascetic Jacob against the evil one. And that the Word was the anointer together with Jacob and the pedagogue of humanity, "he asked him," it says, "and said to him: 'Tell me what your name is.' And he said: 'Why do you ask my name?'" For he was keeping the new name for the new people, the infant people; and the Lord God was still nameless, not yet having become man. But nevertheless Jacob called the name of that place "Face of God"; for "I saw," he says, "God face to face, and my soul was saved." And the face of God is the Word, by whom God is illuminated and made known.

Then Israel was so named when it saw the Lord God. This is God, the Word, the pedagogue, who later said to him again, "Do not fear to go down into Egypt." See how the pedagogue follows the righteous man, and how he also anoints the ascetic, teaching him to trip up his opponent. Indeed, this same one also teaches Moses to be a pedagogue; for the Lord says, "If anyone has sinned before me, I erase him from my book. But now go and lead this people to the place I told you." Here he is a teacher of pedagogy; for truly, through Moses the Lord was the pedagogue of the old people, and through himself he is the leader of the new people, face to face. "Behold," he says to Moses, "my angel goes before you," having set the power of the Word as the gospel and guiding force; and, preserving the Lordly dignity, he says, "On whatever day I inspect, I will bring upon them the penalty for their sin," that is, "On whatever day I sit as judge, I will render the just deserts for their sins." For the same pedagogue and judge judges those who disobey him, and the philanthropic Word does not pass over their sin in silence but rebukes them so that they may repent; for the Lord desires the repentance of the sinner rather than his death. And we, having received the sins of others through hearing as children, let us refrain from similar transgressions out of fear of the threat of suffering the same. What then was their sin? That in their anger they killed men, and in their lust they hamstrung a bull.

Cursed is their wrath. Who, then, would educate us more kindly than this one? Now formerly, for the older people, there was an older covenant, and law educated the people with fear, and the Word was an angel; but for a new and young people, a new and young covenant has been given, and the Word has been born, and fear has been transformed into love, and that mystic angel Jesus is born. For this same pedagogue then said, "You will fear the Lord God," but to us he exhorted, "You will love the Lord your God." Therefore he also commands us: "Cease from your works, from your old sins; learn to do good." "Turn away from evil and do good; you have loved righteousness, you have hated lawlessness." This is my new covenant inscribed in an old letter. So the youth of the Word is not to be reproached. But also in Jeremiah the Lord says: "Do not say that I am young; before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you came forth from the womb I sanctified you." These things the prophecy can hint to us, who were known to God for faith before the foundation of the world, but are now infants because of the recently fulfilled will of God, in that we have become newborns for calling and salvation. Hence it also adds: "I have set you as a prophet among the nations," saying that he must not think the appellation "younger" is a reproach to those called infants. And the law is an old grace given through Moses by the Word. Therefore Scripture says: "The law was given through Moses, not by Moses," but by the Word, through Moses his servant.

Therefore it was temporary, while eternal grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Observe the words of Scripture: under the law, it says, it was given only, but truth, being the grace of the Father, is the eternal work of the Word and is no longer said to be given, but to come into being through Jesus, without whom nothing came into being. For instance, Moses, prophetically yielding to the perfect pedagogue, the Word, both the name and the pedagogy he foretells, and he entrusts the pedagogue to the people, having given them commands of obedience. God will raise up for you, he says, a prophet like me from among your brothers, hinting at Jesus the son of Nun, and at Jesus the son of God; for the name Jesus proclaimed in the law was a sketch of the Lord. Then he adds, advising what is beneficial for the people, you will listen to him, he says, and he threatens the man who does not listen to this prophet. Such a name of a saving pedagogue he prophesies for us. For this reason prophecy places a rod in his hand, a rod of discipline, of authority, of power, so that those whom the persuasive word does not heal, threat will heal; those whom threat does not heal, the rod will heal; those whom the rod does not heal, fire consumes. A rod will come forth, it says, from the root of Jesse. Observe the care, the wisdom, and the power of the pedagogue: he will not judge according to opinion, he says, nor will he convict according to speech, but he will judge with a humble judgment and will convict the sinners of the earth. And through David: the Lord, disciplining, disciplined me and did not deliver me to death.

For to be disciplined and educated by the Lord is deliverance from death. And through the same prophet he says: "You will shepherd them with an iron rod." Moved by this, the apostle says in the letter to the Corinthians: "What do you wish? Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love and a spirit of gentleness?" But also, through another prophet, he says: "The Lord will send forth a rod of power from Zion." And another said: "This rod of yours, this staff of yours, has comforted me." This is the power of the pedagogue, the august, the comforting, the saving power. To those who claim that the righteous one is not good. Here some object, saying that the Lord is not good because of the rod and the threat and the fear, and, as it seems, having misheard the Scripture which says somewhere: "And he who fears the Lord turns to his heart," and having forgotten his greatest philanthropy, that he became man for our sake. And indeed the prophet prays to him more intimately with these words: "Remember us, for we are dust," that is, have compassion on us, because you have personally experienced the weakness of the flesh. Therefore the Lord is the best and blameless pedagogue, in the

...an excess of philanthropy, being compassionate by nature. For there is nothing that the Lord hates; for he does not hate something and yet wish it to exist, that which he hates, nor does he wish something not to exist and yet become the cause of its existence, that which he wishes not to exist, nor does he wish something not to exist and yet it exists. If, therefore, the Word hates anything, he wishes it not to exist; but there is nothing for which God does not provide the cause of existence; therefore nothing is hated by God, nor by the Word; for both are one, God, because he said in the beginning the Word was in God, and the Word was God. But if he hates none of the things that have come into being by him, it remains that he loves them. Much more, then, will he love man, reasonably, the most beautiful of his creations and the God-loving creature. Therefore God is philanthropic, therefore the Word is philanthropic. And he who loves something wishes to benefit it, and that which benefits would certainly be better than that which does not benefit, and nothing is better than the good; therefore the good benefits; and God is agreed to be good, therefore God benefits. But the good, inasmuch as it is good, does nothing other than benefit; therefore God benefits all. And surely he does not benefit man in some respect but not also care for him, nor care for him but not also take thought for him. For that which benefits according to intention is better than that which does not benefit according to intention, and nothing is better than God. And benefiting according to intention is nothing other than taking thought for man; therefore God cares for and takes thought for man. And this he shows in deed by educating him with the Word, who is the genuine fellow-combatant of God's philanthropy.

The good is said to be good not because it possesses virtue, just as justice is said to be good not because it possesses virtue—for it is itself virtue—but because it is good in itself and for itself. It is also called good in another sense, that which is beneficial, not because it pleases but because it profits. All these things justice is: both as virtue and as choiceworthy for its own sake, good, and as not giving pleasure; for it does not judge to curry favor, but is distributive of what is due to each, and the profitable follows the beneficial. Therefore, in all the respects in which the good is examined, justice is also characterized, both equally partaking of the same things; and things characterized by equals are equal to each other and alike; hence justice is good. How then, they say, if the Lord is philanthropic and good, does he become angry and punish? It is necessary, therefore, to discuss this also as briefly as possible, since this kind of management is somehow beneficial for the correct education of children, having the rank of a necessary aid. Many passions are cured by punishment and by the prescription of stricter commands, and indeed also through the teaching of certain doctrines. Rebuke is, as it were, a surgery of the passions of the soul, and the passions are a defection from the truth, which must be refuted by cutting them apart with the incision. Reproach resembles a medication, dissolving the calluses of the passions and cleansing the sordidness of life, the lusts, and also smoothing out the excrescences of pride, refashioning man into the healthy and true one.

Admonition, then, is like a regimen for a sick soul, advising what must be taken and forbidding what must not; and all things tend toward salvation and eternal health. But also the general, inflicting fines of money and tortures extending to the bodies themselves, with bonds and the utmost dishonor, upon those who have done wrong, and sometimes even punishing some with death, has the good as his end, for the admonition of the soldiers under his command. Likewise that great general of ours, the leader of all, the Word, admonishing those who rebel against his own law, for the sake of deliverance from slavery and error and from captivity by the adversary, in order to quell the passions of the soul, leads them peacefully toward the sacred concord of the commonwealth. Just as, then, alongside the deliberative speech lies the protreptic and paraenetic type, so also alongside the encomiastic lies the vituperative and reproachful and encomiastic. And this type is an art of censure, and to censure is a sign of goodwill, not of hatred. For both reproach, both the friend and the one who is not, but the enemy does so with mockery, the friend with goodwill. Not, therefore, out of hatred does the Lord revile men, whom he could also destroy beyond their own deserts, and he who suffered for us; for as a good pedagogue, he skillfully insinuates blame through vituperation, rousing the sluggishness of the mind with blasphemy as with a whip, and again in turn attempts to exhort the same persons in part.

Those whom praise did not impel, blame provoked; and those whom blame did not summon to salvation, as if they were dead, blasphemy rouses toward truth. For whips and discipline are at every time of wisdom. Gluing a potsherd and teaching a fool, leading to perception, it says, the earth and the one given up as hopeless, sharpening toward understanding. Therefore it clearly added: rousing a sleeper from deep sleep, which most of all resembles death. And indeed the Lord himself reveals most clearly about himself, allegorizing the manifold and beneficial therapy, when after saying "I am the true vine, and my father is the farmer," he then added again: "Every branch on me that does not bear fruit, he removes, and every fruit-bearing one he prunes, so that it may bear more fruit." For the vine runs to wood if not pruned, and so also does man; the Word, the knife, prunes his insolent offshoots, having compelled the appetites to bear fruit, not to desire. And rebuke toward those who sin has salvation as its aim, the Word being musically adapted according to the particular characters of each, now tightening itself, now relaxing. Most clearly, then, it is said through Moses: "Take courage; God came for the sake of testing you, so that his fear might be in you, that you might not sin." From this, Plato also learned well, for he says: "All who pay the penalty truly suffer good things; for they are benefited, since their soul becomes better for them when they are justly punished.

If those who are corrected suffer good things at the hands of the just, even according to Plato, the just is agreed to be good. Fear itself, at any rate, benefits and has been devised for the good of men, because a spirit that fears the Lord will live; for hope is placed in the one who saves them. This same word, when imposing punishment, is a judge, concerning whom even Isaiah says, "The Lord delivered him to our sins," clearly as a corrector and director of sins. For this reason, this one alone is able to forgive transgressions, having been appointed by the father of all as our paedagogus, the only one capable of distinguishing obedience from disobedience. But the one who threatens is manifestly unwilling to do any evil nor to carry out what he threatens; having instilled fear, he has checked the impulse toward sins and displays his philanthropy, intending still and making clear what they will suffer if they remain sinners, not like a serpent that, having fastened itself, bites immediately. Therefore God is good. And the Lord indeed makes much use of speech before the deed. For, he says, "My arrows will destroy them; wasting away with hunger and as food for birds, and a backward-bending incurable; I will send the teeth of wild beasts against them, dragging them with fury on the ground. Outside, the sword will make them childless, and from the storerooms, fear." So the divine is not angry, as some have thought, but for the most part threatens, and has exhorted humanity in all things and pointed out how they should act. And this art is good.

to frighten us so that we do not sin; for the fear of the Lord repels sins, and without fear one cannot be justified, says Scripture. And God does not inflict punishment out of anger, but looks to what is just, since it is not beneficial for justice to be neglected on our account. Each of us chooses the punishments himself, willingly sinning; the cause lies with the one who chooses, and God is blameless. But if our injustice establishes the justice of God, what shall we say? Is God unjust, who inflicts the anger? Far from it. Indeed, He says in threatening: I will sharpen my sword, and my hand will hold judgment, and I myself will exact justice from enemies and from those who hate; I will drench my arrows with blood, and my sword will eat flesh from the blood of the wounded. For it is clear here that those who are not hostile to the truth nor hate the Word would not hate their own salvation, but would escape the penalties of enmity. Therefore, the crown of wisdom, as wisdom says, is the fear of the Lord. Very clearly, then, through the prophet Amos, the Word has revealed His own economy, saying: I overturned you, as God overturned Sodom and Gomorrah, and you became like a brand snatched from the fire, and you did not even then turn back to me, says the Lord. Do you see how God, out of love for goodness, seeks repentance, and alongside the economy of the threat, quietly displays His own philanthropy? I will turn my face away from them, He says, and I will show what will become of them. For where the face of the Lord looks, there is peace and rejoicing; but where it is turned away, evil creeps in. Therefore, He does not wish to look upon evils.

For he is good; but if he overlooks it willingly, evil arises due to human faithlessness. See then, says Paul, the kindness and severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, kindness toward you, if you persist in kindness, that is, in faith in Christ. Hatred of evil follows the good, because he is good by nature. Therefore I would admit that he punishes the unbelievers, for punishment is for the good and for the benefit of the one punished, since it is a correction of one who resists, but he does not wish to take vengeance. Vengeance is a requital of evil sent back for the benefit of the one avenged. He who teaches us to pray for those who abuse us would not desire to take vengeance. But that God is good, all confess even unwillingly; and that the same God is also just, I need no further words, having set forth the evangelical saying of the Lord: he says one thing: that all may be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, so that they also may be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. And I have given them the glory which you gave me, that they may be one as we are one; I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected into one; and one is God, and beyond the one and above the monad itself. Therefore the particle "you," having a demonstrative force, indicates the truly only existing one, who was and is and will be, God, for which three times one name is set: the one who is.

That the same God, who alone exists, is also just, the Lord will testify in the same Gospel, saying: "Father, those whom you gave me, I wish that wherever I am, they also be with me, so that they may behold my glory, which you gave me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world. Righteous Father, and the world did not know you, but I knew you, and they knew you, because you sent me; and I made known to them your name, and I will make it known." This is the one who repays the sins of fathers upon children to those who hate, and shows mercy to those who love. For the one who places some on the right and others on the left, insofar as he is understood as father, being good, is called good by that very fact alone; but insofar as he is son, his word being in the father, he is called just from the mutual relation of love, a name measured by equality of power. "He will judge a man," it says, "according to his works," the face of a good balance having made known to us Jesus as righteousness from God, through whom we have also known God, as from an equal-weighted scale. Concerning this, Wisdom also explicitly says: "For mercy and wrath are with him; for he alone is lord of both: a ruler of propitiations, pouring forth wrath." According to his great mercy, so also is his reproof; for the aim of mercy and reproof is the salvation of those reproved. Indeed, that God himself, the father of our Lord Jesus, is good, the same word will again confess, that he is kind even to the ungrateful and wicked, and further says, "Become compassionate, just as your father is compassionate." Not only that, but also when he explicitly says, "No one is good except my father who is in heaven.

On these matters, my father, he says, shines his own sun upon all. It must be noted here that he acknowledges his own father to be good and the creator, and it is not disputed that the creator is just. And again, my father, he says, rains upon the just and the unjust. Insofar as he rains, he is the creator of waters and clouds; insofar as he rains upon all, he is justly balanced and impartial; and as good, he rains alike upon the just and the unjust. Most clearly, then, we reason that there is one and the same God in this way: that I will see the heavens, works of your fingers, and the one who created the heavens dwells in the heavens, and the heavens are your throne, the Holy Spirit sang; and the Lord says in the prayer, "Our Father who is in the heavens"; and the heavens belong to the one who created the world. It is therefore indisputable that the Lord is also the son of the creator. And if the creator is acknowledged by all to be just, and the Lord is the son of the creator, then the Lord is the son of the just one. For this reason Paul says, "But now, without the law, the justice of God has been revealed," and again, "So that you may more fully understand God as just, and the justice of God through faith in Jesus Christ, for all who believe; for there is no distinction," and further, bearing witness to the truth, he adds shortly after, "in the forbearance of God," as an indication that he is just and that he justifies Jesus through faith. And knowing that the just is good, he appears somewhere saying, "Thus the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good," and he assigns both names to the same power.

But no one is good except his father; therefore his father is the same, the one who is, manifested in many powers. And this was the meaning of "no one knew the father," who is everything, before the son came; so that it is clearly evident in truth that the god of all is only one, good, just, creator, son in father, to whom is glory for ever and ever, amen. But it is not foreign to the salvific word to be rebuked in a caring manner. For indeed this too is a remedy of divine philanthropy, from which the blush of modesty blooms and shame at sinning steals in. For if it is necessary to censure, it is also necessary to revile, where it is time to wound the callous soul, not fatally, but salvifically, gaining eternal death for a little pain. Great is the wisdom concerning his pedagogy, and the manner of his economy is varied for salvation. For the pedagogue bears witness to the good, summons the called to better things, and turns those eager to do wrong from their impulse, urging them to change to a better life. For neither is left without witness when the other is testified to; the grace from testimony is greatest, but also the passion of anger, if indeed one must call his admonition anger, is philanthropic, as the god descends into passions for the sake of man, for whose sake the word of god also became man.

That the same power both benefits and punishes justly, in which lies the manner of the pedagogy of the Word. With all his might, therefore, the pedagogue of humanity, our divine Word, employing every device of wisdom, has set out to save the infants, admonishing, reproving, rebuking, convicting, threatening, healing, promising, granting favors, binding the irrational impulses of humanity with many, as it were, bridles. To put it concisely, the Lord is to us as we are to our children. Do you have children? Educate them, wisdom exhorts, and bend them from their youth. Do you have daughters? Watch over their bodies, and do not brighten your face toward them. Yet we love our children, both sons and daughters, exceedingly and above all else. But since those who speak to please love little what they do not grieve, while those who are severe for the sake of benefit, even if painful for the moment, yet benefit for the age to come, the Lord has not considered immediate pleasure, but future delight. Let us now also go through the manner of his philanthropic pedagogy with prophetic testimony. Admonition, then, is a caring censure, productive of understanding. Such is the pedagogue when admonishing, as he says in the Gospel: How often I wished to gather your children, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you did not wish it. And again Scripture admonishes, saying, "They committed adultery with wood and stone, and they burned incense to Baal.

For the greatest proof of his love for humanity is that, although he clearly knew the shamelessness of the people who kicked out and rebelled, he nevertheless calls them to repentance and says through Ezekiel: "Son of man, you dwell among scorpions, yet speak to them, if perhaps they will listen." And also to Moses he says: "Go and tell Pharaoh to let the people go, but I know that he will not let them go." For he manifests both: the divine foreknowledge of what will happen, and his own love for humanity, granting to the free will of the soul opportunities for repentance. He also admonishes through Isaiah, caring for the people, when he says: "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." This is a reproach of censure; they vainly worship me, teaching the precepts of human doctrines. Here, care, having revealed the sin, shows salvation by contrast. A rebuke is a censure for shameful things, reclaiming toward the good. This he indicates through Jeremiah: "They became mares in heat, each neighed at his neighbor's wife." "Shall I not visit them for these things?" says the Lord. "Or shall my soul not take vengeance on such a people?" He everywhere interweaves fear, because fear of the Lord is the beginning of perception. And again through Hosea: "Shall I not visit them?" he says, "because they consorted with prostitutes and sacrificed with the initiated, and the people who understood consorted with a harlot." He shows their sin more clearly, acknowledging that they understand, as those who sin willingly. And understanding is the vision of the soul.

Therefore Israel, which sees God, that is, understands God. Blame is a reproach for those who are negligent or careless. He uses this method of pedagogy through Isaiah, saying: "Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken: I begot sons and raised them high, but they rejected me. The ox knew its owner, and the donkey its master's manger, but Israel did not know me." For is it not terrible, if the one who knows God will not know the Lord, but the ox and the donkey, the sluggish and foolish animals, will know their feeder, while Israel is found more irrational than these? And through Jeremiah, after many reproaches against the people, he adds: "And they abandoned me," says the Lord. Rebuke is a reprimand that strikes or a stinging reproach. The pedagogue also uses this treatment through Isaiah, saying: "Woe, rebellious children, thus says the Lord: You made a plan without me, and covenants without my spirit." He employs fear as the harshest astringent at every turn, simultaneously opening and turning the people through it toward salvation, just as wool that is dipped likes to be treated with a mordant, being prepared for the secure reception of the dye. Accusation is a verbal charge that brings sin into the open. He uses this mode of pedagogy especially as necessary, because of the laxity of the faith of the many. For he says through Isaiah: "You abandoned the Lord and provoked the holy one of Israel." And he also says through Jeremiah: "Heaven was astonished at this, and the earth shuddered greatly, because this people did two evil things.

They abandoned me, a spring of living water, and dug broken cisterns, which will not be able to hold water. And again through the same: Jerusalem has sinned; therefore it has been tossed in turmoil; all who glorified her have dishonored her, because they saw her shame. And the severity of rebuke and reproach, he softens through Solomon, speaking in a veiled manner, with the implicit tenderness of pedagogy: My son, do not neglect the discipline of the Lord, nor be disheartened when reproved by him; for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines, and he scourges every son whom he accepts, because sinful man shuns reproof. Accordingly, then, let a righteous man reprove me, Scripture says, and let him discipline me, but let the oil of a sinner not anoint my head. Phrenosis is a censure that instills prudence. He has not refrained from this mode of pedagogy either, but says through Jeremiah: How long shall I cry out and they not listen? Behold, their ears are uncircumcised. O blessed forbearance! And again through the same: All the nations are uncircumcised, but this people is uncircumcised in heart. Because the people are disobedient, the sons, he says, in whom there is no faith. Episcope is a vehement reproof. He has used this form in the Gospel: Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her. And the repetition of the name has made the reproof forceful. For how can one who knows God persecute the servants of God? Therefore he says: Your house is left desolate, for I tell you: from now on you will not see me, until you say:

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. For if you do not accept philanthropy, you will come to know authority. Reviling is intensified blame. He has used reviling in the manner of a drug through Isaiah, saying: Woe, sinful nation, lawless sons, a people full of sins, evil seed; and in the Gospel through John: serpents, he says, offspring of vipers. Accusation is blame of those who do wrong. He has used this pedagogical measure through David, saying: A people whom I did not know served me and obeyed me to the hearing of the ear; alien sons lied to me and went lame from their paths; and through Jeremiah: And I gave her a bill of divorce, and the faithless Judah was not afraid; and again: And the house of Israel rejected me, and the house of Judah lied to the Lord. Complaint is secret blame, itself also managing salvation through technical aid under a veil. He has used it through Jeremiah: How did the city, once full of people, sit alone? It became like a widow; ruling over regions, it was reduced to tribute; weeping, it wept in the night. Mockery is derisive blame. And the divine pedagogue has used this aid through Jeremiah, saying: A harlot's face has come to you; you have become shameless before all. And did you not call me a house, and a father, and the ruler of your virginity? And

a beautiful and charming prostitute, a mistress of potions. Having very skillfully insulted the virgin with the name of prostitution, he then recalls her to modesty, turning her back. Censorship is a lawful rebuke or a rebuke of sons who are unduly exalted. With this he educated through Moses, saying, "blameworthy children, a crooked and perverse generation, do you repay these things to the Lord? This people is foolish and not wise. Did not this same father acquire you?" And through Isaiah he says: "your rulers are disobedient, companions of thieves, loving gifts, pursuing recompense, not judging for orphans." In general, the technology concerning his fear is a source of salvation, and it is good to save; the mercy of the Lord is upon every flesh; he reproves and educates and teaches as a shepherd his flock. He has mercy on those who accept education and those who hasten to adhere to him; and with this training he preserved six hundred thousand foot soldiers, those gathered together in their hardness of heart, flogging, having mercy, striking, healing, in compassion and discipline. For according to his great mercy, so also is his reproof. For it is good not to sin, but it is also good for the sinner to repent, just as it is best to be always healthy, but it is also good to recover from illness. Thus also through Solomon it is commanded: "you strike the son with a rod, but rescue his soul from death." And again: "do not refrain from educating a child, but correct him with a rod, for he will not die.

Censure and rebuke, as indeed the name itself hints, are blows of the soul, chastening sins and warding off death, and leading those who are carried away into licentiousness toward temperance. For this reason Plato, knowing that censure is the greatest power of correction and the most authoritative purification, consistently with his argument maintains that the one who is most impure, uneducated, and shameful has become so through being uncensured, whereas the one who is truly to be happy ought to be most pure and beautiful. For if rulers are not a fear to the good deed, how will God, who is good by nature, be a fear to the one who does not sin? But if you do evil, fear, as the apostle says. For this reason the apostle himself also frequently rebukes the churches in the image of the Lord, and being aware of his own frankness and the weakness of his hearers, he says to the Galatians: Have I become your enemy by speaking the truth to you? And just as the healthy have no need of a physician, insofar as they are strong, while the sick require the art, so also we who are sick in life with regard to shameful desires, blameworthy intemperance, and other inflammations of the passions have need of the Savior; and he applies not only mild remedies but also astringent ones. The bitter roots of fear, at any rate, check the spread of sins; therefore fear is also salutary, even if bitter.

Naturally, then, we who are sick need a savior, we who have gone astray need one who will guide us, we who are blind need one who will lead us to the light, we who are thirsty need the life-giving spring, from which those who partake will thirst no more, and the dead need life, and the sheep need the shepherd, and the children need the pedagogue; indeed, all humanity needs Jesus, so that we may not, being undisciplined and sinful, fall ultimately into condemnation, but be separated from the chaff and be gathered into the paternal storehouse; for the winnowing fan is in the hand of the Lord, with which the chaff, which is destined for the fire, is separated from the wheat. And if you wish, it is possible for us to learn the supreme wisdom of the all-holy shepherd and pedagogue, the almighty and paternal Word, where he speaks allegorically, calling himself a shepherd of sheep; but he is a pedagogue of children. For he says through Ezekiel, addressing the elders and setting before them a saving pattern of reasonable care: "I will bind up the lame, I will heal the afflicted, I will turn back the wandering, and I will pasture them on my holy mountain." These are the promises of a good shepherd: pasture us, the children, as sheep. Yes, Lord, fill us with your pasture, which is righteousness; yes, pedagogue, shepherd us to your holy mountain, to the church, the elevated one, the one above the clouds, the one that touches the heavens. "And I will be," he says, "their shepherd, and I will be near them as the tunic is to their skin"; he wishes to save my flesh, having wrapped me in the garment of incorruption, and he has anointed my skin. "They will call me," he says, "and I will answer.

Behold, I am here. You have obeyed more quickly than I expected, Master; and if they cross over, they will not slip, says the Lord. For we who cross over into incorruption will not fall into corruption, because he himself will hold us fast; for he himself spoke and he himself willed it. Such is our pedagogue, good with justice. I did not come, he says, to be served, but to serve. For this reason he is introduced in the Gospel as weary, he who labors for us and promises to give his own soul as a ransom for many. For he alone acknowledges himself to be a good shepherd; therefore he is generous, giving the greatest thing for us, his own soul, and great in benefit and philanthropic, because, although it is possible for him to be Lord, he has chosen to be brother of men; and he is so good that he even dies for us. But his justice also cries out: if you come straight to me, I also am straight to you; if you go crookedly, I also am crooked, says the Lord of the powers, hinting at the crooked ways of the reproofs of sinners. For the straight and natural way, which the iota of Jesus hints at, is his goodness, immovable and unwavering toward those who have believed out of obedience. Because I called and you did not obey, says the Lord, but you made my counsels invalid, and you did not attend to my reproofs. Thus the Lord's reproof is most beneficial. Concerning these things he also says through David: a crooked and embittering generation, a generation which did not direct its heart, and its spirit was not confirmed with God. They did not guard the covenant of God and did not wish to walk in his law.

These are the causes of bitterness, for which the judge comes to bring judgment upon those who have not chosen to live well. For this reason, he has dealt with them more harshly here, if somehow he might check their rush toward death. So he says through David the clearest reason for the threat: they did not believe in his wonders. When he slew them, they sought him and turned back and hastened at dawn to God and remembered that God is their helper and that God the Most High is their deliverer. Thus he knows that they turn back through fear, having despised his philanthropy. For the good, when always gentle, is generally neglected, but it is tended to when it reminds through the philanthropic fear of justice. Now the form of fear is twofold, of which one kind arises with reverence, which citizens use toward good rulers and we toward God, just as prudent children use toward their fathers; for an untamed horse, it is said, turns out harsh, and an undisciplined son turns out headstrong. The other kind of fear arises with hatred, which slaves use toward harsh masters and Hebrews who made God a master, not a father, have used. Much, I think, and entirely does the voluntary and according to choice differ from the compulsory in piety. For he himself, it is said, is merciful; he will heal their sins and will not destroy; and he will multiply to turn away his wrath and will not kindle all his anger. See how the

The justice of the pedagogue is shown in his reproofs, and the goodness of God in his mercies. For this reason David—that is, the Spirit speaking through him—embracing both, sings of the same God: “Justice and judgment are the preparation of your throne; mercy and truth shall go before your face.” He acknowledges that both judging and doing good belong to the same power; for the authority of both is the judgment of the just, which distinguishes opposites. And the same God is both just and good, the true God, who is himself all things and all things are himself, because he is God, the only God. For just as the mirror is not evil to the ugly man because it shows him as he is, and just as the physician is not evil to the sick man who announces the fever to him—for the physician is not the cause of the fever, but is a revealer of the fever—so neither is the one who reproves ill-disposed toward the one sick in soul; for he does not implant the faults, but reveals the sins that are present, for the turning away from similar practices. Thus God is good for his own sake, but just for our sake, and this because he is good. And he shows us justice through his own Word from above, from the place where he became Father. For before he became Creator, he was God, he was good, and for this reason he wished to be both Creator and Father; and the disposition of that love became the beginning of justice, as he shines forth his own sun and sends down his own Son; and this one first proclaimed from the heavens the good justice, saying, “No one knows the Son except the Father,” nor the Father except the Son.

This knowledge, which balances in equal measure, is a symbol of ancient justice. Then justice descended to humanity, both in letter and in body, in word and in law, compelling humanity to saving repentance by force; for it was good. But you do not obey God; blame yourself, for you are drawing the judge upon yourself. That the same God, through the same Word, both restrains from sins by threats and saves humanity by exhortation. If, therefore, we have demonstrated that the economy of restraining humanity, being good and saving, is necessarily undertaken by the Word, and is well suited for repentance and for the prevention of sins, it would next be fitting to examine the gentleness of the Word; for this has been shown to be just, and it sets forth its own opinions, which are hortatory toward salvation, through which it wishes to make known to us both the good and the advantageous by paternal will. Observe these: the good belongs to the encomiastic, the advantageous to the deliberative; for indeed, the relation of the deliberative is protreptic and apotreptic, while that of the encomiastic becomes laudatory and censorious. How the deliberative disposition, when it is in a certain state, becomes protreptic, and how, when in another state, apotreptic. Likewise, how the encomiastic, when in one state, becomes censorious, and when in another, laudatory; with these matters the just pedagogue, who has our advantage in view, is especially concerned.

But the censuring and dissuasive form has already been indicated by us earlier; now, however, the protreptic and commendatory form must be taken up, and, as on a balance, we shall counterpoise the equal scales of justice. Now, for the exhortation to what is beneficial, the Pedagogue, through Solomon, uses something like this: "I call you, men, and I send forth my voice to the sons of men; hear me, for I shall speak of holy things," and so forth. He counsels what is salvific, because counsel is suited to choice and avoidance, as he does through David, saying: "Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the impious and in the way of sinners, nor stood, nor sat in the seat of plagues; but his will is in the law of the Lord." Now, counsel has three parts: one, taking examples from past times, such as what the Hebrews suffered when they worshipped the golden calf, and what they suffered from fornication and the like; another, observed from present times, grasped perceptibly, as when it was said to those who asked the Lord whether he himself is the Christ, or whether we await another: "Go and tell John: the blind see, the deaf hear, lepers are cleansed, the dead rise, and blessed is he who is not scandalized in me." This, then, was what David, prophesying, said, as we have heard: "Thus we have also seen." The third part of counsel consists of future things, by which it commands to guard against what will happen; hence that also is said: "But those who fall into sins will be cast into the outer darkness.

There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth and the like; from these it is evident that the Lord, proceeding through every kind of therapy, summons humanity to salvation. With consolation he soothes the sins, diminishing desire while at the same time instilling hope for salvation. For he says through Ezekiel: If you turn from your whole heart and say, Father, I will hear you as a holy people. And again he says: Come to me, all who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest, and the things after these, which the Lord speaks in person. Most clearly he calls to goodness through Solomon, saying: Blessed is the man who has found wisdom, and the mortal who has found prudence. For the good is found by the one who seeks it and is wont to be seen by the one who finds it. Indeed, also through Jeremiah he explains prudence: We are blessed, Israel, he says, because what is pleasing to God is known to us, and it is known through the Word, through which we are blessed and prudent. For prudence is knowledge, as is indicated through the same prophet saying: Hear, Israel, the commandments of life; give ear to know prudence. Through Moses he further promises a gift because of the existing philanthropy to those hastening toward salvation. For he says: And I will lead you into the good land, which the Lord swore to your fathers; and also, I will lead you into the holy mountain and gladden you, he says through Isaiah. There is also another form of his pedagogy, the beatitude.

their sins, and blessed is that one, as David says, who does not sin, and he will be like a tree planted by the channels of waters, which will give its fruit in its season and its leaf will not fall off. These things he hinted at also concerning the resurrection, and everything that he does will be successful for him. He wishes us to become such, that we may be blessed. On the other hand, showing the counterbalance of the scale of justice, he says, "But not so the impious, not so, but rather like the chaff, which the wind scatters from the face of the earth." Having shown the penalty of sinners and their instability and their windblown nature, the Pedagogue turned them away from the cause through the penalty, and having threatened the punishment according to merit, he displayed the beneficence of his kindness, most skillfully calling us to the use and possession of good things through this. Indeed, he also exhorts to knowledge through Jeremiah, saying, "If you had walked the way of God, you would have dwelt in peace forever." For here, by indicating the reward of knowledge, he summons the intelligent to love of it, and granting forgiveness to the one who has gone astray, he says, "Turn back, turn back," as the grape-gatherer says to his basket. Do you see the goodness of justice counseling repentance? Further, through Jeremiah he illuminates the truth for those who are wandering: "Thus says the Lord: Stand on the roads and see and ask the paths.

of the Lord eternal, what is the good path, and walk in it, and you will find purification for your souls. It leads to repentance, the grace of salvation for us. Therefore it says: if you repent, the Lord will cleanse your heart and the heart of your offspring. It was possible, then, to summon as advocates for this inquiry philosophers who say that only the perfect one is praiseworthy, while the base one is blameworthy. But since some misrepresent the blessed as having no reality either in itself or as provided to another, misunderstanding its philanthropy, it is for these and for those who still do not attach justice to the good that this discourse of ours has been requested. For it followed that we should assert that the admonitory and reproachful form of pedagogy is suitable for human beings, since they say all human beings are base; wise is God alone, from whom wisdom comes, and perfect alone, therefore also alone praiseworthy. But I do not avail myself of this argument; rather I say that praise or blame, or something resembling praise and especially blame, are the most necessary remedies for human beings. Now the incurable, like iron by fire, hammer, and anvil—that is, by threat, reproof, and rebuke—are driven; those who attend to faith itself, as if self-taught and voluntary, grow by praise; for a virtue praised grows like a tree. And it seems to me that the Samian Pythagoras, understanding this, commands: if you have done cowardly deeds, reproach yourself; if noble, delight.

To rebuke and to admonish is called, and the term "admonition" is etymologized as the implanting of mind, so that the rebuking form is productive of mind. But countless precepts have been devised for the acquisition of goods and the avoidance of evils; for the impious have no peace, says the Lord. Therefore, through Solomon, he commands the children to beware: "Son, let not sinners lead you astray, nor walk with them on the roads, nor go if they invite you, saying: 'Come with us, share innocent blood, and let us hide in the earth a just man unjustly, let us make him vanish like Hades while alive.'" This, then, is also prophesied concerning the Lord's passion. And through Ezekiel, life also prescribes the commandments: "The soul that sins will die. But the man who will be just, who practices justice, will not eat on the mountains, and will not set his eyes on the designs of the house of Israel, and will not defile his neighbor's wife, and will not approach a woman in her menstruation, and will not oppress a man, and will return a pledge to a debtor, and will not seize plunder, and will give his bread to the hungry and clothe the naked, and will not lend his money at interest and will not take increase, and will turn his hand from injustice, and will render just judgment between a man and his neighbor, and has walked in my ordinances and has kept my statutes to perform them—this man is just, he will live in life," says the Lord.

These things contain a pattern of Christian conduct and a notable exhortation to a blessed life, a reward of good living, eternal life. That through law and prophets the Word was educating. The manner of his philanthropy and pedagogy has been indicated by us as far as was possible. Therefore, very beautifully, interpreting himself, he likened himself to a grain of mustard, and by the sharpness he hinted at both the spiritual and the manifold nature of the sown Word and the magnificence together with the easy growth of its rational power, and also that the stinging and purifying aspect of rebuke is beneficial. Through the smallness of the allegorized grain, at any rate, he bestows salvation, very abundantly, upon all humanity. Now honey, being very sweet, is productive of bile, just as the good is productive of contempt, which is the cause of sinning; but mustard reduces bile, that is, anger, and cuts through phlegm, that is, pride; from which Word the true health of the soul and eternal good temperament result. Long ago, then, through Moses the Word was educating, and afterwards also through the prophets; and Moses is also a prophet; for the law is a pedagogy for unruly children. Having been filled, it says, they rose up to play, calling the irrational fullness of food "fodder," not "food." Since, having been irrationally sated, they played irrationally, for this reason both law and fear followed them for the checking of sins and the encouragement of right actions, preparing them for obedience to the true pedagogue, that is, ready compliance, the one and the same Word adapting itself to what is urgent.

Paul says that the law was given as a pedagogue leading to Christ, so that from this it is evident that there is only one true, good, just one, the son Jesus in the image and likeness of the father, the Word of God, who is our pedagogue, to whom God entrusted us, as a loving father entrusts his children to a genuine pedagogue, expressly commanding us: This is my beloved son, listen to him. The divine pedagogue is trustworthy, adorned with the three finest qualities: knowledge, goodwill, and frankness. With knowledge because he is the wisdom of the father, all wisdom is from the Lord and with him forever. With frankness because he is God and creator, for all things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be. With goodwill because he alone offered himself as a sacrifice for us, for the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, and indeed he laid it down. Goodwill is nothing other than a wish for good toward the neighbor, for his own sake. That the pedagogue employs severity and kindness in proportion to the father’s disposition. These things having now been accomplished, it would follow that our pedagogue Jesus should outline for us the true life and educate the human being in Christ. The characterization of him is neither too fearful nor excessively lax from kindness. He both commands and characterizes the commandments so that we are able to fulfill them.

And it seems to me that this same one formed man from earth, regenerated him by water, increased him by spirit, and educated him by word, guiding him by holy commandments to adoption and salvation, so that, having transformed the earthborn man into a holy and heavenly one by approach, he might especially fulfill that divine utterance: "Let us make man in our image and likeness." And indeed Christ has become this fullness, which God spoke, while the other man is conceived only according to the image. But we, children of a good father, nurslings of a good pedagogue, let us fulfill the will of the father, let us listen to the word and truly take upon ourselves the saving life of our savior; from here already practicing the heavenly citizenship, according to which we are deified, let us anoint ourselves with the ever-blooming ointment of joy and the pure ointment of fragrance, having the life of the Lord as a clear example of incorruption and pursuing the footprints of God; to whom alone it belongs to consider and indeed to care how and in what way the life of men might become healthier. But also for self-sufficiency of life and freedom from excess, and further for a light and unencumbered readiness for the journey to eternity of good living, it prepares, teaching each of us to be his own storehouse. For do not be anxious about tomorrow, he says, meaning that one enrolled to Christ must be self-sufficient, self-serving, and moreover living for the day.

to adopt a way of life. For we are educated not in war, but in peace. War, then, requires much preparation, and luxury needs abundance; but peace and love, simple and unmeddlesome sisters, have no need of arms or prodigal preparation; their food is the word, the word that has been allotted the demonstrative and educative leadership, from which we learn frugality and humility and the whole spirit of freedom and philanthropy and love of beauty, in a word, being assimilated to God through the intimacy of virtue. But labor and do not grow weary; for you will become such as you neither hope nor could imagine. And just as there is one kind of training for philosophers, another for rhetoricians, and another for wrestlers, so there is a noble disposition corresponding to a choice of beauty, resulting from the pedagogy of Christ, and the solemn practices of conduct, reclining, food, sleep, bed, regimen, and the rest of education are distinguished by their training; for this kind of training of the word is not overstrained, but well-strained. Therefore the word is also called savior, who discovered these rational remedies for men for right perception and salvation, watching for the right opportunity, exposing harm and explaining the causes of passions, cutting out the roots of irrational desires, prescribing what must be abstained from, and offering all the antidotes of salvation to the sick; for this is the greatest and most kingly work of God, to save humanity.

Now, patients are annoyed with a physician who gives them no advice conducive to health; so how should we not acknowledge the greatest gratitude to the divine Pedagogue, who does not keep silent nor overlook the disobediences that lead to ruin, but both refutes them and checks the impulses that tend toward them, and teaches the instructions appropriate for right conduct? We must therefore acknowledge the greatest gratitude to him. For do we not say that the rational animal—I mean man—must contemplate the divine? And I say that he must also contemplate human nature and live as truth directs, loving exceedingly both the Pedagogue himself and his commandments, since they are mutually fitting and harmonious; in accordance with which image we too must harmonize ourselves to the Pedagogue, making our word consonant with our deeds, so as truly to live. For just as right action occurs according to right reason, so conversely error occurs contrary to reason. Everything contrary to right reason is error. Indeed, the philosophers deem it proper to define the most generic passions somewhat as follows: desire is appetite disobedient to reason, fear is aversion disobedient to reason, pleasure is an elation of the soul disobedient to reason, and grief is a contraction of the soul disobedient to reason. If, then, disobedience to reason is generative of sin, how is it not of necessity that obedience to reason—which we call faith—will be productive of what is called duty? For virtue itself is a disposition of the soul in harmony with reason concerning the whole of life.

Indeed, the most eminent point: they define philosophy itself as the practice of correctness of reason, so that necessarily every error, occurring due to a failure of reason, is fittingly called a sin. For instance, when the first man sinned and disobeyed God, he was likened, it is said, to the beasts. The man who errs against reason, being reasonably considered irrational, is compared to beasts. Hence Wisdom also says: the pleasure-lover and the adulterer is a horse for mounting, likened to an irrational beast, and therefore it adds: he neighs beneath every rider. No longer does the man speak, it says; for he who sins against reason is no longer rational, but an irrational beast, given over to desires, upon whom all pleasures sit. What is done rightly according to obedience to reason the Stoic children call fitting and proper. Now the proper is fitting, and obedience is founded on commandments; these, being the same as the precepts, have truth as their aim, and guide toward the ultimate object of desire, which is conceived as the end; and the end is the eternal rest in God of piety, and the beginning of eternity is our end. The achievement of piety, however, accomplishes the proper through works; hence fittingly the proper concerns actions, not words; and action is the activity of the Christian’s rational soul, performed through the body, which is innate and a fellow combatant, according to a noble judgment and desire for truth; and the proper is a consequence in life, a single will with God and Christ, accomplished in eternal life.

For the life of Christians, in which we are now being educated, is a kind of system of rational actions, that is, an unerring activity of the things taught by reason, which we have called faith. And the system is the Lord's commandments, which, being divine opinions, have been recorded for us as spiritual precepts, suitable both for ourselves and for our neighbors; and these in turn reflect back upon us, just as a ball thrown against a wall rebounds due to its resistance. Hence the duties necessary for divine education are also necessary, as they have been commanded by God and provided for salvation. And since among necessary things, some are only for living here, while others from here wing us toward living well there, so analogously among duties, some are arranged for living, others for living well. Now, those things that are commanded for living in a national sense have been made common among the many, but those that pertain to living well, from which that eternal life results, let it be permitted for those who gather them from the scriptures themselves to examine them as a matter of outline.

How one ought to conduct oneself with regard to food. Holding fast, then, to our aim and selecting the scriptures for the life-benefiting purpose of the pedagogy, we must outline in summary what sort of person the one called Christian ought to be throughout the whole of life. We must therefore begin from ourselves and how we ought to comport ourselves. Aiming, then, at the symmetry of the treatise, we must speak of what sort of conduct each of us ought to adopt toward his own body, or rather how he ought to direct it. For when someone, led by reason from external things and even from the regimen of the body itself to the contemplation of what happens in man according to nature, has accurately learned this, he will know not to be zealous about externals, but to cleanse the proper part of man, the eye of the soul, and also to purify the flesh itself. For he who has been cleanly released from those things through which he is still dust, what else more urgent would he have than to come by the way to the apprehension of God? Other men, indeed, live in order to eat, just as, of course, the irrational animals do, for whom life is nothing but the belly; but our pedagogue commands us to eat in order that we may live. For food is neither our work nor is pleasure our aim; rather, for the sake of our continuance here, which reason educates toward incorruption, food is admitted. And this food is simple and unelaborate, corresponding to truth, suitable for simple and unelaborate children, as being serviceable for living, not for luxury. And this living consists of two things, health and strength, to which the easiness of food is especially suited, both for digestion and for the body's

lightness, from which come growth, health, and just strength—not unjust, dangerous, and wretched strength like that of athletes from forced feeding. The manifold varieties of food are to be spat out, since they produce various harms: bad bodily conditions, stomach upsets, as taste runs riot through some ill-starred art of cookery and the vain craft of pastry-making. For they dare to call food that pursuit of luxury which slides into harmful pleasures. Antiphanes of Delos, a physician, said that this variety of foods is one of the causes of disease, since those who are discontent with the truth, through vain and varied ostentation, forswear the moderation of diet and busy themselves with foods from across the sea. I myself feel pity for this disease, but they are not ashamed to hymn their own pleasures, busying themselves with the eels of the Sicilian Strait, the Maeander eels, the kids of Melos, the mullets of Sciathus, the Pelorian cockles, the Abydene oysters, not omitting the maenides of Lipara, the Mantinean turnip, nor the beets of the Ascraeans; they seek out the combs of Methymna, the Attic flatfish, the Daphnian thrushes, and the Chelidonian figs, for which the ill-fated Persian sent five hundred thousand to Greece. In addition to these, they buy birds from the Phasis, Egyptian francolins, and the Median peacock.

Those who vary their dishes with seasonings have gaped open-mouthed at their foods, gluttons that they are, procuring for their own voracity everything that the land, the depths of the sea, and the boundless expanse of the air nurture. These greedy and meddlesome men seem to be trawling the whole world for pleasure, surrounded by the sizzling of frying pans, grinding away their entire life around the mortar and pestle, these omnivores clinging to matter like fire. They even emasculate easy bread, sifting out the nutritious part of the wheat, so that the necessity of food becomes a reproach of pleasure. Gluttony has no limit among men. For it has drifted into pastries and honey-cakes, and also into desserts, inventing a multitude of after-dinner treats, hunting after all kinds of qualities. And such a man seems to me to be nothing but a jaw. "Do not desire," says Scripture, "the dishes of the rich; for these belong to a false and shameful life." For some cling to foods, which the dung heap soon receives, but for us who hunt after the heavenly food, it is necessary to rule over the belly under the sky, and even more over the things dear to it, which God will abolish, as the apostle says, rightly cursing gluttonous desires. For foods for the belly, from which this truly fleshly and destructive life depends—

If some dare to call love-feasts certain dinners that reek of savor and sauces, using a frivolous tongue, and thus insult the beautiful and saving work of the Word, the sanctified love, by pots and streams of sauce, blaspheming the name with drink and luxury and smoke, they are mistaken in their understanding, having expected to purchase the promise of God with dinners. For while we might reasonably call the gatherings for festivity, and these dinners and lunches and banquets themselves, a convocation following the Word, the Lord has not called such feasts love-feasts. He says, on the one hand: When you are invited to weddings, do not recline in the first seat, but when invited, recline in the last place; on the other hand: When you prepare a lunch or dinner; and again: But when you prepare a banquet, call the poor, for which especially a dinner must be made; and further: A certain man prepared a great dinner and invited many. But I perceive whence the

The fair name of dinners has flowed from the gullets and from the madness of a fellow traveler for dinner, as the comic poet says. For truly, for the many, most things are for the sake of dinner. For they have not learned that God prepared for his creation, I mean for man, food and drink for the sake of preservation, not for pleasure; since bodies are not naturally benefited by the extravagance of foods; on the contrary, those who use the cheapest foods are stronger, healthier, and more noble, as servants compared to masters and farmers compared to landowners; and not only more robust, but also more prudent, as philosophers compared to the wealthy; for they have not clogged their mind with foods nor deceived it with pleasures. Love, however, is truly a heavenly food, a rational feast: It endures all, it bears all, it hopes all; love never falls. Blessed is he who will eat bread in the kingdom of God. But the most grievous of all falls is for the unfallen love to be cast down from above, from the heavens, onto the sauces. And do you think I consider dinner to be that which is being abolished? For if, he says, I distribute my possessions but do not have love, I am nothing. The whole law and the Word depend on this love; and if you love the Lord your God and your neighbor, this heavenly banquet is in the heavens, while the earthly one is called dinner, as has been shown from Scripture, for dinner occurs because of love, but dinner is not love, but a token of communal goodwill and liberality. Therefore let our good not be blasphemed.

For the kingdom of God is not food and drink, says the apostle, that the daily meal might be understood, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. He who partakes of this meal will possess the best of all things, the kingdom of God, having practiced here a holy gathering of love, a heavenly church. Love, then, is a pure thing worthy of God, and its work is sharing. The care of education is love, wisdom says, and love is the observance of its laws. These festivities have some spark of love from the common food, accustomed to lead to eternal food. Love, then, is not a dinner, but the entertainment of love should be attached. Let your sons, whom you have loved, learn, O Lord, that it is not the produce of fruits that nourishes man, but your word preserves those who trust in you; for the righteous will not live by bread alone. But let the dinner be simple and light for us, suitable for wakefulness, unmixed with various qualities, not undisciplined in this either; for good child-rearing is self-sufficiency, having as a rich provision for communion in love, self-sufficiency, which, presiding over food in a just quantity measured for salvation, governs the body and distributes something from itself to neighbors, while a diet that overflows self-sufficiency harms man, making the soul sluggish and the body prone to disease. Indeed, the pleasures of seasoning incur unbearable reproaches: gluttony, greed, daintiness, insatiability, voracity.

Flies are akin to these names, and weasels, flatterers, and gladiators, and the wild tribes of parasites, who have sold their reason, their friendship, or their life for the pleasure of the belly, crawling on their stomachs, man-shaped beasts, in the image of their father, the gluttonous beast. Those who first called them "prodigal" seem to me to hint well at their end, understanding them as "unsaved" by the suppression of the sigma element. For are not these the ones busy about dishes and the foolish refinements of seasonings, the low-minded, the base-born, pursuing the ephemeral life as if they would not live? The Holy Spirit laments them through Isaiah, gently somehow excepting the name of love, since the feasting was not according to reason: "But they made merry, slaughtering calves and sacrificing sheep, saying, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'" And that it considers such luxury a sin, it adds: "And this sin of yours will not be remitted until you die," judging not the remission of sin as insensible death, but the retribution of sin as death of salvation. "Do not rejoice in small luxury," says Wisdom. Here it must be recalled also concerning the so-called meat offered to idols, how it is commanded that one must abstain from these. Those things seem to me polluted and abominable, over whose bloods flit souls from the darkness of the dead. "For I do not want you to become partakers of demons," says the Apostle, since apart from the saved and the dead are the foods.

We must therefore abstain from these, not out of fear—for there is no power in them—but because of our own conscience, which is holy, and because of the abomination of the demons after whom they are named, which we loathe, and further because of the instability of those who take many things in a slippery way, whose weak conscience is polluted. For food will not present us to God; nor do the things that enter defile a person, but the things that come out of the mouth, as it is said. The natural use of food is therefore indifferent; for whether we eat, we do not exceed, it is said, nor if we do not eat, are we lacking. But it is not reasonable for those deemed worthy to partake of divine and spiritual food to share a table of demons. For do we not have the authority to eat and drink, says the apostle, and to take wives about? But clearly, by mastering the pleasures, we restrain the desires. See therefore that this authority of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak. We must not, then, like the prodigal son in the gospel parable of the rich young man, misuse the gifts of the father, but use them, as rulers, without inclination; for we were appointed to rule and to have dominion, not to be slaves to foods. It is indeed desirable, having looked up to the truth, to cling to the divine nourishment above and to be filled with the insatiable vision of that which truly is, tasting the stable, constant, and pure pleasure; for this love, which the eating of Christ indicates, must be received.

It is utterly irrational, useless, and inhuman to feed on death like cattle being fattened, always looking down to the earth, those from the earth forever bent over tables, pursuing a gluttonous life, having buried the good somewhere here concerning the life that will not be, flattering only the gullet, for which cooks have become more valuable than farmers. For we do not remove social intercourse, but we suspect the slippery slope of habit as a misfortune. Therefore gluttony must be renounced, partaking of only a few necessary things; and if one of the unbelievers invites us and we decide to go—for it is good not to mix with the disorderly—he commands us to eat everything set before us, inquiring into nothing because of conscience, and likewise to buy from the market without fuss. So we must not entirely abstain from varied foods, but we must not be zealous about them; we must partake of what is set before us, as is fitting for a Christian, honoring the host in the harmless and unoffensive fellowship of company, considering the extravagance of what is brought in as indifferent, despising the dishes as soon not existing. Let the one who eats not despise the one who does not eat, and let the one who does not eat not judge the one who eats. A little further on he will explain the reason for the commandment, saying that the one who eats eats for the Lord and gives thanks to God, and the one who does not eat does not eat for the Lord and gives thanks to God, so that the just food is thanksgiving; and he who always gives thanks does not

is occupied with pleasures. But if we were to exhort some of our fellow diners to virtue, we must all the more abstain from these gluttonous foods, presenting ourselves as a clear example of virtue, as we ourselves have Christ. For if any such food scandalizes the brother, I will not eat it, he says, for all time, so that I may not scandalize my brother, gaining the man through a little self-control. Do we not have the authority to eat and drink? And we have recognized the truth, he says, that there is no idol in the world, but only one true God of ours, from whom all things come, and one Lord Jesus. But the brother who is weak, for whom Christ died, perishes, he says, by your knowledge. Those who wound the conscience of weak brothers sin against Christ. Thus the apostle, being cautious about us, distinguishes the meals, saying not to mix with them, if a so-called brother is found to be a fornicator or adulterer or idolater, not even to eat with him, either the word or the dish, suspecting the defilement from that, just as with the tables of demons. It is good, then, not to eat meat nor to drink wine, as he himself admits and the followers of Pythagoras; for this is more characteristic of beasts, and the exhalation from them, being more turbid, darkens the soul. But if someone partakes of these, he does not sin, only let him partake temperately, not clinging to them nor being dependent on them nor gulping down the dish; for a voice will sound to him, saying, do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food.

It is indeed the height of folly to marvel at and be stupefied by the dishes set out at public feasts after the luxury of discourse, and it is even more foolish to have enslaved one’s eyes to the relishes, with intemperance, so to speak, being transferred along with them by the servers. And is it not useless to rise up from the couches, all but throwing one’s face into the pots, peeping out from the couch as from a nest—that oft-repeated saying—in order to catch the wandering steam through inhalation? And is it not irrational to smear one’s hands with seasonings or to keep reaching for the food without tasting, but snatching it like beasts, gorging themselves immoderately and indecorously? For one can see such persons likened to swine or dogs by their voracity rather than to men, hurrying to stuff themselves, so that both jaws are swollen at once as the vessels around the face are distended, and sweat pours over them as they are gripped by insatiability and pant from intemperance, the food being thrust with unsocial urgency into the belly, as if storing the victuals for a journey, not for digestion. In every case excess is an evil, but it is especially exposed in matters of food. For opsophagia is nothing other than excess in the use of relish, and laimargia is madness concerning the throat, and gastrimargia is intemperance regarding food, as indeed the name implies—madness concerning the belly, since margos means mad. Therefore the apostle, checking those who practice injustice at a feast, says: For each one anticipates his own dinner in eating, and one hungers, another gets drunk.

Do you not have homes in which to eat and drink? Or do you despise the church of God and put to shame those who have none? Among those who have, those who eat without restraint, the insatiable, put themselves to shame; both act badly, the one party burdening those who have not, the other exposing their own intemperance among those who have. Necessarily, therefore, the apostle, addressing those who have grown shameless and use their dinners too lavishly, the insatiable, for whom nothing is enough, again for the second time uttered an indignant cry: "So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. But if someone is hungry, let him eat at home, so that you may not come together for judgment." One must therefore abstain from all servility and intemperance, touching the dishes set before them in an orderly manner, keeping both hand and couch and chin unstained, preserving the comeliness of the face undistorted, not behaving unseemly even in swallowing, but extending the hand at intervals with order. For one must also beware of speaking at all while eating; for the voice becomes unseemly and indistinct, being cramped by full cheeks, and the tongue, pressed by the food, hindered from its natural function, gives forth a constrained utterance. But it is not even fitting to eat and drink at the same time; for it is of the greatest intemperance to confuse the times, whose uses are incompatible.

And whether you eat or drink, he says, do everything to the glory of God, aiming at true simplicity, which I think the Lord also intimated when he blessed the loaves and the baked fish with which he feasted the disciples, setting a good example of unpretentious food. That fish, which Peter caught at the Lord's command, itself hints at an easy, God-given, and temperate food; for it suggests removing from those that rise from the water to the bait of righteousness both profligacy and avarice, like the coin from the fish, so that one may separate vainglory, and having given the stater to the tax collectors, render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and keep for God what is God's. The stater may also have other interpretations not unknown, but the present time is not suitable for their elaboration. It is enough to recall, as we have often done, that we are using these things together in a way not discordant with the flowers of the discourse, drawing the beneficial stream to irrigate the plants of the word, in accordance with the urgency of the inquiry. For even if it is permitted to me to partake of everything, not everything is beneficial; for those who do everything that is permitted quickly fall into doing what is not permitted. Just as righteousness does not come about through greed, nor temperance through licentiousness, so the Christian's diet is not acquired through self-indulgence; for the table of truth is far from passionate foods. For even if everything came into being for the sake of human beings, it is not good to use everything, nor always.

For both the occasion and the time and the manner and the purpose give no small weight to the benefit of the one being educated, and what is suitable has the power to abolish the life of gluttony, whose wealth is ecclesiastical, not seeing sharply, but the abundance that is blind concerning gluttony. No one is poor in necessities, nor is any human ever overlooked; for the one who nourishes the birds and the swimming creatures and, in a word, the irrational animals is one, God; and nothing whatsoever is lacking to them, though they do not worry about food. We are better than these, inasmuch as we are masters, and more akin to God, inasmuch as we are more temperate. We have come into being not in order to eat and drink, but in order to have come into being for the knowledge of God. For the righteous man, it is said, when eating is filled in the soul, but the bellies of the impious are needy, reaching for insatiable greed. Extravagance is not for solitary enjoyment, but is suitable for communal sharing. Therefore one must guard against foods that persuade us to eat when not hungry, bewitching our appetites. For is there not, even in frugal temperance, a healthy variety of foods? bulbs, olives, some vegetables, milk, cheese, and seasonal fruits, and all sorts of boiled dishes without sauces. And if roasted or boiled meat is needed, it should be shared. "Do you have anything edible here?" said the Lord to the disciples after the resurrection. And they—having been taught by him to practice frugality—offered him a portion of roasted fish; and he ate in their presence.

He said to them, as Luke says, what he said. In addition, those who dine according to reason must not be left without share of desserts and honeycombs. For the most suitable foods are those which can be used directly without fire, since they are also more ready, and second are the cheaper ones, as we have said before. But of those who stoop over inflamed tables, nursing their own passions, a most gluttonous demon is the guide, whom I would not be ashamed to call a belly-demon, the worst and most pernicious of demons. This one is exactly like the so-called ventriloquist. It is far better to become happy by having a demon as a housemate; happiness is examined in the use of virtue. Now Matthew the apostle partook of seeds, nuts, and vegetables without meat, while John, extending his self-control, ate locusts and wild honey. And Peter also abstained from swine; but a trance fell upon him, it is written in the Acts of the Apostles, and he sees the heaven opened and a vessel bound by four corners to the earth; all the quadrupeds and reptiles of the earth and the birds of the sky are in it; and a voice came to him: "Arise and sacrifice and eat." But Peter said: "By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything common and unclean." And the voice again to him a second time: "What God has purified, do not you defile." And for us, then, the use is indifferent. For it is not what enters the mouth that defiles a person, but the empty opinion about intemperance. For God, having fashioned man, said to you all: "Everything will be for food.