Letters

To Ctesiphon

1. In acquainting me with the new controversy which has taken the place of the old you are wrong in thinking that you have acted rashly, for your conduct has been prompted by zeal and friendship. Already before the arrival of your letter many in the East have been deceived into a pride which apes humility and have said with the devil: “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will be like the Most High.” Can there be greater presumption than to claim not likeness to God but equality with Him, and so to compress into a few words the poisonous doctrines of all the heretics which in their turn flow from the statements of the philosophers, particularly of Pythagoras and Zeno the founder of the Stoic school? For those states of feeling which the Greeks call πάθη and which we may describe as “passions,” relating to the present or the future such as vexation and gladness, hope and fear—these, they tell us, it is possible to root out of our minds; in fact all vice may be destroyed root and branch in man by meditation on virtue and constant practice of it. The position which they thus take up is vehemently assailed by the Peripatetics who trace themselves to Aristotle, and by the new Academics of whom Cicero is a disciple; and these overthrow not the facts of their opponents— for they have no facts— but the shadows and wishes which do duty for them. To maintain such a doctrine is to take man's nature from him, to forget that he is constituted of body as well as soul, to substitute mere wishes for sound teaching. For the apostle says:— “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” But as I cannot say all that I wish in a short letter I will briefly touch on the points that you must avoid. Virgil writes:—

Thus mortals fear and hope, rejoice and grieve,
And shut in darkness have no sight of heaven.

For who can escape these feelings? Must we not all clap our hands when we are joyful, and shrink at the approach of sorrow? Must not hope always animate us and fear put us in terror? So in one of his Satires the poet Horace, whose words are so weighty, writes:

From faults no mortal is completely free;
He that has fewest is the perfect man.