The Apostle's high aim and the soul's unshaken joy

What do we say, then? The Apostle is looking toward other things and trying to lift our souls from the ground to the height and transfer them to the heavenly citizenship. But those who do not reach the lawgiver's greatness of mind crawl around earth and flesh like worms in the mire, in the body's passions, and demand that the apostolic ordinances be possible on their own terms. Yet he summons to rejoice always not just anyone, but the kind of person he himself was: no longer living in the flesh, but having Christ living in himself, so that the union with the highest of goods in no way admits the sympathy that comes from the body's troubles. Even if the flesh is cut, the breaking of its continuity remains in the part of the body that suffered, because the spread of what grieves cannot reach through to the intellectual part of the soul. For if we have put to death the members that are on the earth, according to the Apostle's instructions, and we carry about the deadness of Jesus in the body (2 Corinthians 4:10), then necessarily the blow from the body that has been put to death will not reach to the soul that has been released from its connection to it. Dishonors and losses and the deaths of loved ones will not rise up to the mind, nor will they turn the soul's height down toward sympathy with things here. For if those who have fallen into difficulties think the same way as the earnest person, they will not cause grief to another, since they themselves do not bear what happens in a grieving way. But if they live according to the flesh, they will not cause grief even so; rather, they will be judged pitiable, not so much because of their circumstances as because they do not choose what is right. In general, a soul that has once been bound to the longing for its Creator and has become accustomed to being brightened by the beauties there will not have its exceeding gladness and cheerfulness changed by the varied shifting of the body's sufferings. Instead, it will make for itself an increase of gladness out of the things that grieve others. Such was the Apostle, taking pleasure in weaknesses, in afflictions, in persecutions, in necessities, making his wants his boasts: in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness, in persecutions and distresses—the very things at which others are indignant and give up on life, in these he was exulting. Those, then, who are untrained in the apostolic mind and do not understand that he is summoning us to the gospel life dare to accuse Paul of prescribing impossible things for us. But let them be taught how many reasonable grounds for rejoicing are set before us through God's great gift. We were brought into being when we did not exist. We were made according to the image of our Creator. We have mind and reason completing our nature, through which we have come to know God. And as we study with skill the beauties of creation, through them, as through certain letters, we read God's great providence and wisdom over all things. We are able to distinguish good from evil. We have been taught by nature itself to choose what is beneficial and turn away from what is harmful. Having been alienated from God through sin, we were called back again to kinship with him, rescued from dishonorable slavery by the blood of the Only-Begotten. There are hopes of resurrection, enjoyments of angelic goods, the kingdom in the heavens, the good things promised, surpassing the power of mind and reason.