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| Chapter XXXIX
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Chapter
XXXIX.
Now let us hear what it is that he invites us to
learn, that we may ascertain from him how we are to know God, although
he thinks that his words are beyond the capacity of all
Christians. “Let them hear,” says he, “if they
are able to do so.” We have then to consider what the
philosopher wishes us to hear from him. But instead of
instructing us as he ought, he abuses us; and while he should have
shown his goodwill to those whom he addresses at the outset of his
discourse, he stigmatizes as “a cowardly race” men who
would rather die than abjure Christianity even by a word, and who are
ready to suffer every form of torture, or any kind of death. He
also applies to us that epithet “carnal” or
“flesh-indulging,” “although,” as we are wont
to say, “we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth
we know Him no more,”4773
and although we are
so ready to lay down our lives for the cause of religion, that no
philosopher could lay aside his robes more readily. He then
addresses to us these words: “If, instead of exercising
your senses, you look upwards with the soul; if, turning away the eye
of the body, you open the eye of the mind, thus and thus only you will
be able to see God.” He is not aware that this reference to
the two eyes, the eye of the body and the eye of the mind, which he has
borrowed from the Greeks, was in use among our own writers; for Moses,
in his account of the creation of the world, introduces man before his
transgression as both seeing and not seeing: seeing, when it is
said of the woman, “The woman saw that the tree was good for
food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to
make one wise;”4774
and again not
seeing, as when he introduces the serpent saying to the woman, as if
she and her husband had been blind, “God knows that on the day
that ye eat thereof your eyes shall be opened;”4775
and also when it is said, “They did
eat, and the eyes of both of them were opened.”4776
The eyes of sense were then opened,
which they had done well to keep shut, that they might not be
distracted, and hindered from seeing with the eyes of the mind; and it
was those eyes of the mind which in consequence of sin, as I imagine,
were then closed, with which they had up to that time enjoyed the
delight of beholding God and His paradise. This twofold kind of
vision in us was familiar to our Saviour, who says, “For judgment
I am come into this world, that they which see not, might see, and that
they which see might be made blind,”4777
—meaning, by the eyes that see not, the
eyes of the mind, which are enlightened by His teaching; and the eyes
which see are the eyes of sense, which His words do render blind, in
order that the soul may look without distraction upon proper
objects. All true Christians therefore have the eye of the mind
sharpened, and the eye of sense closed; so that each one, according to
the degree in which his better eye is quickened, and the eye of sense
darkened, sees and knows the Supreme God, and His Son, who is the Word, Wisdom, and
so forth.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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