Liber Primus, Caput II. Vis consuetudinis ad inducendos pravos mores, et duritiam cordis.

Liber Primus, Caput II. Vis consuetudinis ad inducendos pravos mores, et duritiam cordis.

Don't put too much trust in your current emotional state. Nothing is so firmly fixed in the soul that neglect and time won't wear it down. A callus grows over a wound that is old and left untreated, and the very thing that makes it numb is what makes it incurable. In short, a pain that is constant, bitter, and long-lasting is not something that can simply be endured. For if it isn't driven out from somewhere else, it has to give way — either on its own or within you. Indeed, a person will quickly find consolation from some remedy, or else grow numb from sheer persistence. What can't habit overturn? What won't constant repetition harden? What doesn't yield to habit? How many things that people once shrank from because of their bitterness have, through the very habit of doing them wrongly, been transformed into something sweet?¹ Listen to what the just man laments about this: "The things my soul once refused to touch are now my food because of my distress." At first, something will seem unbearable to you; as time goes on, if you get used to it, you'll judge it not so heavy; a little later you'll feel it's light, and a little later you won't feel it at all; a little later it will even delight you. So, little by little, the path leads to hardness of heart, and from that to aversion. So a severe and unrelenting pain will, as I said, have a swift outcome: either healing, without a doubt, or insensibility.² This is exactly why I've always been afraid for you, and still am: that with the remedy put off, unable to bear the grief, you'll plunge yourself into danger, beyond all hope of recovery. I'm afraid, I tell you, that in the middle of your many occupations — and there are many — while you distrust the outcome, you'll harden your brow and so gradually deprive yourself, in a way, of the feeling that comes from righteous and profitable grief. It's far more prudent to withdraw yourself from them, even temporarily, than to let yourself be dragged along by them and led — certainly, gradually — where you don't want to go. You ask where? To a hard heart. And don't keep asking what that is: if it hasn't terrified you, it's yours. It's only a hard heart that doesn't shudder at itself, because it doesn't even feel. Why do you ask me? Ask Pharaoh. No one with a hard heart has ever attained salvation, unless perhaps God in mercy took away from him, as the prophet says, the heart of stone and gave a heart of flesh.^✦ What, then, is a hard heart? It's one that isn't torn by compunction, isn't softened by piety, isn't moved by prayers; it doesn't yield to threats, and is hardened by scourges. It's ungrateful for benefits, faithless in the face of counsel, savage toward judgments, shameless toward shameful things, fearless before dangers, inhuman toward human beings, reckless with divine matters, forgetting what's past, neglecting what's present, and not foreseeing what's to come. It's the kind of heart to which, beyond past injuries alone, nothing of the past ever truly passes away; nothing of the present ever truly perishes; and of future things there is no foresight or preparation, except perhaps for exacting revenge. And to sum up all the horrors of this evil briefly: it's what neither fears God nor respects any person. See where these cursed occupations drag you: if, however, you continue as you've begun, giving yourself wholly to them and leaving nothing of yourself behind. You're wasting your time: if it's allowed now to set before you another Jethro, you too are consumed in this foolish labor — which is nothing but affliction of the soul, gutting of the mind, and emptying out of grace.³⁴ For what is the fruit of these things if not spiders' webs?