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| The Image of the Beast in Man.
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Chapter 11.—The Image of the Beast in Man.
16. For as a snake does not creep
on with open steps, but advances by the very minutest efforts of
its several scales; so the slippery motion of falling away [from
what is good] takes possession of the negligent only gradually, and
beginning from a perverse desire for the likeness of God, arrives
in the end at the likeness of beasts. Hence it is that being naked
of their first garment, they earned by mortality coats of skins.771
For the true
honor of man is the image and likeness of God, which is not
preserved except it be in relation to Him by whom it is impressed.
The less therefore that one loves what is one’s own, the more one
cleaves to God. But through the desire of making trial of his own
power, man by his own bidding falls down to himself as to a sort of
intermediate grade. And so, while he wishes to be as God is, that
is, under no one, he is thrust on, even from his own middle grade,
by way of punishment, to that which is lowest, that is, to those
things in which beasts delight: and thus, while his honor is the
likeness of God, but his dishonor is the likeness of the beast,
“Man being in honor abideth not: he is compared to the beasts
that are foolish, and is made like to them.”772
By what path, then, could he pass
so great a distance from the highest to the lowest, except through
his own intermediate grade? For when he neglects the love of
wisdom, which remains always after the same fashion, and lusts
after knowledge by experiment upon things temporal and mutable,
that knowledge puffeth up, it does not edify:773
so the mind is overweighed and
thrust out, as it were, by its own weight from blessedness; and
learns by its own punishment, through that trial of its own
intermediateness, what the difference is between the good it has
abandoned and the bad to which it has committed itself; and having
thrown away and destroyed its strength, it cannot return, unless by
the grace of its Maker calling it to repentance, and forgiving its
sins. For who will deliver the unhappy soul from the body of this
death, unless the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord?774
of which
grace we will discourse in its place, so far as He Himself enables
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