Caput XXX
Hardened Against the Founder
Those enslaved to worldly desires harden themselves against divine precepts, persecute the good, trust in themselves, and indulge in deceit and retaliation.
Those whose pursuits are these harden themselves against the precepts of the Founder, inflamed with depraved desires, and do not even spare their own deaths. They seek empty glory even at the cost of their lives. The good they persecute in word and deed — and even with swords. They place their hope in themselves; they are insensible to the scourges of the Founder. They do not think of mortal things in a mortal way; they set no limit to their desire for possessing by any heap of gains. Amid whatever hardships they return to the pleasure of carnal desire; they nourish the body as much as they can with varieties of feasts, and soothe the sadness of places with allurements. Lest they be looked down on, they exalt themselves with dignities; they long to surpass everyone in power. Those who are more cunning learn to cover their own hearts with machinations, to veil their meaning with words, to return the evils inflicted on them with greater abundance, and to mock the simple.
The Old Self Loved as Homeland
Worldly shrewdness blinds people to their heavenly loss so that they love their exile, bury their minds in carnal rest, and are shown by their actions to belong to the city of the devil.
This is the cunning of the old self: it's learned at a price in childhood, strengthened by practice in youth. Those who have it look down on everyone else; those who don't see it in others and call it sophistication.1 These people have lost the things of heaven, and they neither grieve nor reflect on the loss. They don't remember the freedom they were born with; they abandon themselves to the very things they've been cast down into.2 They love the exile they endure as though it were their homeland, and though they are wretched, they love their very miseries — and think of themselves as thriving among them.3 So from the beginning of life right to the end, persisting in wickedness, they redouble the blows against themselves at every moment through their growing malice — blows by which, cut down, they rush headlong into eternity. They don't love their eternal homeland, because they believe they have enough for themselves if the temporal goods they desire are available to them. And if they flourish in these things, they consider themselves happy and secure. And so where they find rest in the flesh, there they bury their mind by extinguishing it.45 So whoever recognizes these things — and many others we pass over for the sake of brevity — in themselves, let that person acknowledge that they have not yet put off the old self with its ways of thinking. And even if they refuse to hear it said, by the evidence of their actions they are shown to belong to that city whose king is the devil.✦67
Read the original Latin
Quorum studia haec sunt, contra praecepta Conditoris indurescunt, pravis desideriis succensi, nec suis mortibus aliquando parcunt. Inanem gloriam etiam cum vitae detrimento quaerunt. Bonos vero dictis et factis persequuntur, et etiam gladiis. Spem in semetipsis ponunt; contra flagella Conditoris insensibiles existunt. Mortalia non mortaliter cogitant; habendi cupiditatem nullo congestu lucrorum finiunt. Inter quaslibet amaritudines ad voluptatem carnalis desiderii recurrunt; corpus quantum possunt epularum diversitatibus nutriunt, moestitiam locorum blandimentis demulcent. Ne despecti videantur, dignitatibus se inaltant; potestatibus cunctos transcendere gestiunt. Qui vero astutiores sunt, corda sua discunt machinationibus tegere, sensum verbis velare, irrogata mala multiplicius reddere, simplices irridere.
Haec veteris hominis prudentia est, quae a pueris pretio discitur, in juvenibus usu roboratur: hanc qui sciunt, caeteros despiciunt; qui nesciunt, in aliis urbanitatem putant. Hi superna quae amiserunt, nec plangunt, nec recogitant; ingenitam libertatem non recolunt, semetipsos in his, ad quae projecti sunt, deserunt. Exsilium quod patiuntur more patriae diligunt, et cum miseri sint ipsas miserias amant, seque inter eas in bonis esse putant. Ita ab exordio vitae usque ad finem in iniquitate perdurantes omni tempore per augmentum malitiae contra semetipsos ictus ingeminant, quibus succisi in aeternum ruant, qui aeternam patriam non amant, quia sufficere sibi credunt, si eis suppetant bona temporalia quae cupiunt: et si in his succrescunt, felices se et munitos putant: et ita ubi carne requiescunt, ibi mentem exstinguendo sepeliunt. Quisquis itaque haec et alia quamplura, quae ob prolixitatem omittimus, in se deprehendit, veterem hominem cum suis rationibus necdum se deposuisse cognoscat, sed ad illam civitatem, cujus rex diabolus est, etiam si audire non patitur, factis prodentibus pertinere probatur.
Scripture echoes
- ↩Eph.4.22;Col.3.9 — you were taught to put off your former way of life, the old self, which is being corrupted according to the desires of deceit; Col.3.9 — Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old self with its practices,
Notes
- 1 ↩Urbanitas can mean urbanity, refinement, or social cleverness; here it carries the sense of worldly polish that the undiscerning mistake for wisdom.
- 2 ↩Ingenitam libertatem (innate freedom) refers to the original liberty of the soul before it became enslaved to worldly desires — a key theme in the old-self/new-self contrast.
- 3 ↩The exile/homeland reversal is a central image: those who belong to the world treat their banishment from God as home, and their suffering as prosperity.
- 4 ↩The sentence traces a complete arc from birth to eternal destruction, showing how persistent wickedness compounds self-destruction.
- 5 ↩Mentem exstinguendo sepeliunt: the image is of burying the mind (mens) by quenching or extinguishing it — the spiritual faculty is smothered by carnal rest.
- 6 ↩The 'city whose king is the devil' contrasts with the heavenly Jerusalem (Civitas Dei), echoing Augustine's two-cities framework.
- 7 ↩Veterem hominem (old self) is a Pauline image (Eph 4:22, Col 3:9) for the unregenerate nature; rendered here as 'old self' to preserve the theological resonance.
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