Teaching Christianity (continued)
shakes us with thoughts of our mortality and of our death to come, and so to say nails our flesh and fixes all the stirrings of pride to the wood of the cross. What is needed next is to grow modest with piety, and not to contradict the divine scripture, whether we have understood it when it lashes our vices, or whether we have not understood it, as though we could have better ideas and make better rules ourselves. Instead, we should rather think and believe that what is written there is better and truer, even if its meaning is hidden, than any good ideas we can think up for ourselves.
10. After these two stages of fear and piety, we come to the third stage of knowledge, which I have undertaken to deal with here and now. Because it is with this stage that every serious student of the scriptures has to occupy himself; and he is not going to find anything else in them but that God is to be loved on God's account, and one's neighbor on God's account; to love God, indeed, with one's whole heart, with one's whole soul, with one's whole mind, but one's neighbor as oneself,[7] that is to say, that one must refer all the love of one's neighbor, as of oneself, to God. We discussed these two commandments in the previous book, when we were dealing with things.
So one first has to discover oneself, in the scriptures, as tied up in love of this world, that is of temporal things, and far removed from such love of God and such love of neighbor as scripture itself prescribes. Then, however, that fear by which one reflects on the judgment of God, and that piety by which one cannot help believing in and yielding to[8] the authority of the sacred books, oblige one to mourn for oneself. Because this knowledge, filled with good hope, leads one to bewail oneself, not to vaunt oneself; and in this frame of mind one begs with assiduous prayer for the consolation of divine help, to prevent one from being crushed with despair, and one begins to reach the fourth stage, that of fortitude or courage, in which one is hungry