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| Of the Beauty of the Universe, Which Becomes, by God’s Ordinance, More Brilliant by the Opposition of Contraries.
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Chapter 18.—Of the Beauty of the
Universe, Which Becomes, by God’s Ordinance, More Brilliant by
the Opposition of Contraries.
For God would never have created
any, I do not say angel, but even man, whose future wickedness He
foreknew, unless He had equally known to what uses in behalf of
the
good He could turn him, thus embellishing, the course of
the ages, as it were an exquisite poem set off with antitheses.
For what are called antitheses are among the most elegant of the
ornaments of speech. They might be called in Latin
“oppositions,” or, to speak more accurately,
“contrapositions;” but this word is not in common use among
us,488
| 488 Quintilian uses it commonly in the
sense of antithesis. | though the
Latin, and indeed the languages of all nations, avail themselves of
the same ornaments of style. In the Second Epistle to the
Corinthians the Apostle Paul also makes a graceful use of
antithesis, in that place where he says, “By the armor of
righteousness on the right hand and on the left, by honor and
dishonor, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet
true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, behold, we
live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always
rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and
yet possessing all things.”489
As, then, these oppositions of
contraries lend beauty to the language, so the beauty of the course
of this world is achieved by the opposition of contraries,
arranged, as it were, by an eloquence not of words, but of
things. This is quite plainly stated in the Book of
Ecclesiasticus, in this way: “Good is set against evil, and
life against death: so is the sinner against the godly. So look
upon all the works of the Most High, and these are two and two, one
against another.”490
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