[56] And how striking is the frank truthfulness of that soul who, discoursing with herself, confesses that she cannot rise up against apparent goods, but stands amazed before each of them, and honours them and continues to prefer them almost to her own self.
[57] For which of us stands up to oppose riches? Who prepares himself to wrestle with glory? How many of those who still live in the mazes of empty opinions have come to despise honour and office? Not a single one.
[58] So long, indeed, as none of these things is with us, we talk loftily as though our hearts were given to that frugal contentment which is the secret of a life completely self-sufficient and righteous, the life which befits the free and nobly born. But when we feel upon our cheeks the breath of hope for such things, though it be but the slightest breath and nothing more, we are shewn in our true colours, we straightway submit and surrender and can make no effort of resistance. Betrayed by the senses which we love, we abandon all comradeship with the soul; we desert and that no longer secretly, but without concealment.
[59] And surely that is natural. For the customs of women still prevail among us, and we cannot as yet cleanse ourselves from them, or flee to the dwelling-place where the men are quartered, as we are told that it was with the virtue-loving mind, named Sarah.
[60] For the oracles represent her as having left all the things of women (Gen. 18:11), when her travail was at hand and she was about to bring forth the self-taught nature, named Isaac.
[61] She is declared, too, to be without a mother, and to have inherited her kinship only on the father’s side and not on the mother’s, and thus to have no part in female parentage. For we find it said, “Indeed she is my sister, the daughter of my father but not of my mother” (Gen. 20:12). She is not born of that material substance perceptible to our senses, ever in a state of formation and dissolution, the material which is called mother or foster-mother or nurse of created things by those in whom first the young plant of wisdom grew; she is born of the Father and Cause of all things.
[62] And so, soaring above the whole world of bodily forms, and exulting in the joy that is in God, she will count as a matter for laughter those anxious cares of men which are expended on human affairs, whether in war or peace.