Teaching Christianity (continued)
sense, I am who I am; and, You shall say, He who is has sent me to you (Ex 3:14), which means that everything else that is, not only could not be unless it came from him, but also can only be good insofar as it has received its being so from him.
The use, therefore, by which God is said to make use of us is directed to our benefit and not to his, but only to his goodness. But when we, on the other hand, feel sorry for people and care about them, we do it for their benefit, and that is what we have in mind. But in some way or other we also benefit ourselves, because God does not leave unrewarded the compassion we show to those in need. And the supreme reward is that we should enjoy him and that all of us who enjoy him should also enjoy one another in him.
33, 36. Because if we do that in ourselves, we are standing still on the road, and placing all our hopes of bliss in human beings, or angels. This is a position proud people and proud angels arrogate to themselves, and they are delighted when others place all their hopes in them. But holy people and holy angels, even when we are longing out of weariness to stay still and find our rest in them, prefer rather to provide us simply with refreshment, whether from the fare for the journey they have received for us, or even from what they have received for themselves—but "received" is the word. And so they urge us, thus refreshed, to continue on the way toward the one by enjoying whom we will share their bliss on equal terms.
After all, the apostle also exclaims, Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? (1 Cor 1:13); and again, Neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but the one who gives the growth, namely God (1 Cor 3:7). And the angel warns the man who is on the point of worshiping him to worship rather the Lord under whom he himself is also a fellow servant.[36]
37. But when you enjoy a human being in God, you are really enjoying God rather than the human being. You will be enjoying the one, after all, in whom you find your bliss, and you will be delighted to have reached the one in whom you now hope, in order to come to him at last. It is in this sense that Paul writes to Philemon. In this way, brother, he says, let me enjoy you in the Lord (Phlm 20). But if he had not added in the Lord, and had merely said let me enjoy you, he would have been placing his hopes of bliss in Philemon.
Although, as a matter of fact, there is a closely related sense of "enjoy," meaning "to use with delight." [37] When something that is loved, after all, is available to you, delight is also bound to accompany it; but if you pass through this and refer it to that end where you are to remain permanently, you are really using it, and are said by a figure of speech, and not in the proper sense of the word, to enjoy it.[38] If, however, you cling to it and remain fixed in it, placing in it the end of all your joys, then you can be said really and truly to enjoy it. But this should not be done except with that divine Trinity, that is with the supreme and unchangeable good.
34, 38. Notice how Truth itself, and the Word through whom all things were made, became flesh in order to dwell amongst us;[39] and yet the apostle can say, Even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer (2 Cor 5:16). Christ, of course, is the one who wished to offer himself not only to be possessed by those who have arrived, but also to be the way there for those who have come to the beginning of the ways; that is, he wished to take flesh to himself. That is the meaning of the text, The Lord created me in the beginning of his ways (Prv 8:22); that is where those who wish to arrive must begin from. So then the apostle, though he was still walking along the way and following God who was calling him to the prize of the call up above, all the same forgetting what lay behind and stretching out to what lay ahead (Phil 3:12–14) had already passed through the beginning of the ways; that is to say, he no longer needed it, even though it is the point from which all those who desire to attain to the truth and to abide in eternal life must commence their undertaking of the arduous journey thither.[40]
That, after all, is what the Lord meant by saying, I am the way, and the truth, and the life (Jn 14:6); that is, "It is along me that you come, at me that you arrive, in me that you abide." For when you reach him, you also reach the Father, because it is through his equality that the one to whom he is equal can be recognized, with the Holy Spirit binding and so to say gluing us in there, so that we may abide for ever in that supreme and unchangeable good. From this it can readily be understood how nothing must be allowed to hold us back on the way, when even the Lord himself, insofar as he was prepared to be the way for us, did not wish us to hold onto him, but to pass along him. He did not wish us to cling feebly to any temporal things, even those he took to himself and carried for our salvation, but rather to run eagerly along and through them, and so deserve to be swiftly and finally conveyed to him himself, where he has deposited our nature, freed from all temporal conditions, at the right hand of the Father.[41]
Love of God and neighbor is the sum of what scripture teaches
35, 39. So what all that has been said amounts to, while we have been dealing with things, is that the fulfillment and the end of the law and of all the divine scriptures is love (Rom 13:8; 1 Tm 1:5); love of the thing which is to be enjoyed, and of the thing which is able to enjoy that thing together with us, because there is no need for a commandment that we should love ourselves. So in order that we might know how to do this and be able to, the whole ordering of time was arranged by divine providence for our