Caput VII
The Misery of Bodily Existence
All labor for this life's well-being is riddled with punishment and misery, as the corrupt flesh endlessly demands remedies for cold, hunger, heat, and disease, and even restored health remains uncertain.
But why should I say much about evils of this kind that do harm? Since if you consider carefully, you'll find that even everything we do for the sake of this life's well-being is riddled with punishments and miseries. Isn't it misery for the corruption of the flesh to serve necessary and permitted things? Because the same flesh makes demands, so that against cold, clothing; against hunger, food; against heat, cold remedies must be sought. The safety of the body is guarded with great caution, and even when guarded it is lost, and once lost it is restored with great effort. And yet restored health is always uncertain, since the body produces so many diseases from within itself that not even all of them can be named in physicians' books, and some of those can scarcely be cured without bitterness.
The Insecurity of Human Bonds
Even friendship is shadowed by suspicion and offense, and enemies must be courted with feigned speech, so that our very caution against deception becomes a deeper deception and misery.
Isn't this too a misery: that a beloved friend can be offended by suspicion? We fear our enemies, and we are not secure from them. Lest we seem suspicious, we talk to them so often, as if to friends. And then, while we try to be cautious, we take the sincere words of our neighbors, who perhaps care deeply about us, as if they were the words of an enemy. And so we, who never wish to be deceived or to deceive, because of our own caution, are harmed more seriously. What is this, if not the misery of human life?
Accustomed to Affliction, Blind to Exile
The fallen soul grows so accustomed to its own afflictions that it mistakes troubles for pleasures, delights in its exile from the heavenly homeland, is suffocated by multiplied cares, and clings to inner blindness rather than seek the light.
For a person is so accustomed to his own afflictions that he considers them not troubles but pleasures. Having lost the heavenly homeland, he takes delight in the exile into which he was driven. He is weighed down by cares, yet does not think how serious it is that the sheer multiplicity of those cares suffocates his mind, as it is written: 'The earthly dwelling weighs down the mind that thinks of many things' (Wis. 9:15). 9:15). He is deprived of the inner light, and yet in this life he wants to endure his blindness for a long time.
Preferring Death-in-Life to Life Beyond Death
Though innumerable daily accidents threaten death at every moment, the soul prefers prolonged fear under those threats rather than one final death that ends all fear, because having placed creaturely delight before the Creator, it now feels as trouble what it once foolishly called pleasure.
And while innumerable deaths threaten him daily in the accidents of each day, he nevertheless prefers to live so long under the fear of so many deaths rather than die once and fear nothing thereafter. For because he presumed to transgress the command of the Creator, he justly came to this weakness of his own, so that because he placed his own delight, which he had in external things, before the Creator himself, now both in those very things and in himself he feels the troubles that he, having despised God, foolishly thought were pleasures.
Read the original Latin
Ut quid autem multa de ejusmodi malis quae laedunt dicam? Quando quidem si subtiliter consideres etiam cuncta quae pro salute gerimus hujus vitae, poenis et miseriis intermista reperies. An non miseria est corruptioni carnis ad necessaria atque concessa deservire? quod eadem caro exigitur, ut contra frigus vestimenta, contra famem alimenta, contra aestum frigora requirantur. Quod multa cautela custoditur salus corporis: quod etiam custodita amittitur, amissa cum gravi labore reparatur. Et tamen reparata semper in dubio est: quippe cum corpus tot ex se morbos gignat, ut nec medicorum quidem libris cuncti nominentur, quorum aliqui vix sine amaritudine curantur. An non et hoc miseria est, quod amatus amicus suspectione offendi valet? Formidamus namque inimicos, atque de eis securi non sumus.
Ne vero suspiciosi videamur, sic eis frequenter loquimur, quasi amicis. Et rursus dum cauti esse nitimur, pura verba proximorum, multumque nos fortasse diligentium, quasi verba plerumque suscipimus inimici: et qui falli nunquam vel fallere volumus, ex cautela nostra gravius er- Quid itaque hoc est, nisi humanae vitae miseria? Nam et ipse homo ita suis afflictionibus assuetus est, ut eas non molestias, sed voluptates putet. Amissa namque coelesti patria, suo exsilio, in quo repulsus est, delectatur: gravatur curis, et tamen non cogitat quam grave sit quod ipsarum curarum multiplicitas mentem ejus suffocat, ut scriptum est: Deprimit terrena inhabitatio sensum multa cogitantem (Sap. IX, 15). Privatus est interno lumine, et tamen in hac vita diu vult perpeti caecitatem suam. Et cum interim quotidianis casibus innumerabiles ei mortes immineant, vult tamen sub timore tot mortium diu magis vivere, quam semel moriendo nullam deinceps timere. Nam quia praeceptum Conditoris trangredi praesumpsit, ad hunc suimet defectum jure devenit, ut quia suam delectationem, quam in rebus exterioribus habuit, eidem Conditori praeposuit, nunc et in ipsis rebus et in seipso molestias sentiat, quas voluptates esse contempto Deo stultus putavit.
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