The Soul’s Dizziness
There are two different roads, one broad and easy, the other hard and narrow. And there are two guides vying with each other to attract the traveler’s attention.
Now that we are grown to years of discretion we see that life is an amalgam of vice and virtue. The soul by casting its gaze first on one and then on the other can calculate the consequences of each.
The life of the sinner presents all the pleasures of the present moment; the life of the righteous points to future benefits.
The easy undisciplined way of life leads to pleasure to be enjoyed now, not later; the way of salvation is hard in the present, but promises a beautiful future.
The soul is confused and dithers in its calculations. It prefers pleasure when it is looking at the present; it chooses virtue when its eye is on eternity.
Basil the Great, Commentary on Psalm I, S (PG29, 221ff.)
Only I can do Evil to Myself
Was it an altogether evil fate that befell Abel? He was felled by the hand of his brother and underwent a premature and violent death. Yet he benefited from it; he received his due reward.
Was it an altogether evil fate that befell Jacob, who was persecuted by his brother and went wandering to distant lands and even fell into slavery?
Was it an altogether evil fate that befell Joseph? He too was an exile without a home, a prisoner and a slave, exposed to the gravest dangers, reckoned a stranger by his own family, the victim of slanders.
Was it an altogether evil fate that befell Moses who was stoned by an enormous crowd, and that on account of the good he had done them?
Was it an altogether evil fate that befell Job, who was attacked by the devil with a thousand stratagems?
And the three young men? And Daniel robbed of his liberty and face to face with death?
Was it an altogether evil fate that befell Elijah, who was reduced to extreme poverty, always on the run, compelled to live in the desert?
And was it an altogether evil fate that befell David, who had to endure harsh treatment at the hands of Saul and later at the hands of his own son? His virtues stood out more clearly in the midst of such miseries than if his life had been passed peacefully.
And was the fate of the martyrs an altogether evil one? They were tormented by a thousand trials, but is it not perhaps because of this that their light shines so brightly?
John Chrysostom, On Providence, 16 (SC79, p.221)
~Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain: A Patristic Breviary, Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
