CAPUT LXIII. Ad quam impudentem evagationem nimius timor mentem prostituit
The Allegory of Reuben and Bilhah
Reuben's corruption of Bilhah illustrates how the imagination, when unchecked, leads to disordered thoughts.
Certainly, while Reuben was still a little child and living out his boyhood years, he didn't presume to defile his father's bed—either because he couldn't, or because he barely dared. Once he was grown, though, he became so bold—as we read of him—that he corrupted his father's concubine, Bilhah, that is, Rachel's maidservant.1 But if by Bilhah we understand the imagination, how do we think a maidservant of this kind is corrupted?2 But what is Bilhah's corruption, if not the disordered and shameless wandering of thought, or of the imagination?
Excessive Fear Prostitutes the Imagination
Excessive fear causes the mind to dwell on worldly cares even in prayer, leading to a reckless wandering of thoughts that merits divine rebuke.
For sometimes excessive fear so thoroughly—I won't say corrupts, but prostitutes—the imagination that in the time of prayer it can barely keep itself from its fornications, or cannot at all.3 For when, out of too much anxiety, the mind often takes in even while praying the phantasms of worldly affairs through the imagination, what else is Bilhah doing but opening her lap to Reuben's fornications? Think now, then, how unfit it is that at the very time when you ought to plead with the Lord to have eternal evils taken away, you begin to keep only temporal dangers before your eyes, and to turn over those alone in your heart—forgetting the things for which you had come, and remembering only the things you ought to have forgotten. This is why the mind often, which used at first to set before itself through the imagination only the goods or evils of the future at every hour, is afterward so overpowered by excess fear that it cannot shut out even for a little while the assaults of worldly cares from the secret chamber of the heart.4 So, because excessive fear often leads the imagination into such a reckless wandering of thoughts, Reuben's father is right to rebuke him for the corruption of Bala. You've poured yourself out like water; you will not grow, because you went up to your father's bed and defiled his couch.✦
Read the original Latin
Certe cum Ruben adhuc parvulus esset, et annos pueriles ageret, patris sui cubile incestare non praesumpsit, vel quia non potuit, vel quia minime ausus fuit. Adultus tamen in tantam, ut de ipso legitur, prorupit audaciam ut patris sui corrumperet concubinam, Balam videlicet Rachelis ancillam. Sed si per Balam imaginatio intelligitur, quomodo putamus hujusmodi ancilla corrumpitur? Sed quae est Balae corruptio, nisi cogitationis, vel imaginationis inordinata et impudens evagatio? In tantum enim quandoque timor superfluus imaginationem, non dicam, corrumpit, sed prostituit ut in tempore quidem orationis a suis se fornicationibus temperare vix, aut omnino non possit. Cum enim prae nimia sollicitudine inter orandum etiam saepe mundanorum negotiorum phantasias mens per imaginationem recipit, quid aliud Bala quam ad fornicationes Ruben sinum suum expandit? Cogita nunc ergo quam sit ineptum, ut eo tempore quo debes pro aeternis malis removendis Domino supplicare, incipias temporalia tantum pericula prae oculis habere, et illa sola corde revolvere, illorum propter quae veneras oblivisci, illa quorum oblivisci debueras sola reminisci. Hinc est quod mens saepe, quae prius solebat per imaginationem sola sibi futurorum bona vel mala omni hora anteponere, postmodum per superfluum timorem subacta non possit vel ad modicum curarum saecularium incursus a cordis secretario excludere.
Quia igitur saepe imaginatio per superfluum timorem ad tam imprudentem cogitationum evagationem deducitur, recte ad Ruben pater suus de corruptione Balae ei improperando loquitur. Effusus es sicut aqua, non crescas, quia ascendisti cubile patris tui, et maculasti stratum ejus.
Scripture echoes
- ↩Gen.49.4 — Unstable as water, you shall not excel, because you went up to your father's bed; then you defiled it. He went up to my couch.
Notes
- 1 ↩Latin Balam/Balae rendered as Bilhah, the standard English form of Rachel's maidservant (Gen 35:22).
- 2 ↩Latin has putamus + finite corrumpitur rather than the expected accusative-and-infinitive; sense rendered as a deliberative question about the mode of corruption.
- 3 ↩prostituit / fornicationibus keep the sexual allegory of Reuben and Bilhah applied to the mind's illicit coupling with distracting images in prayer.
- 4 ↩cordis secretario rendered as 'secret chamber of the heart' (the mind's private inner room), not as a modern 'secretary'.
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