Блага земные

Let me have bread for poverty and water for a rare drink, let me, like Adam and Eve of old, be covered with fig leaves and my home be a cleft in a stone or a hollow in a beech tree, my life is simple and no better than that of an animal, or, burdening the earth, like a beggar and a new Lazarus, thrown at the gates of a proud man, I drag out a miserable life and a sick body - all this is now, but there is an abyss and a terrible reward for all the pleasures here. You have satiety, but I have sorrow - it is short-lived, and then everything is forgotten. Behind the grave we will all become one, we will all be one dust. There is only one place for slaves and kings; no one has an advantage in the underworld. Therefore, do not be captivated by the present blessings, and do not occupy your thoughts too much with the sorrows of this life. Along with pleasures, you will leave all sorrows, and soon. For what lasts in one day's life (2)? How long can we be puffed up about something that is unimportant and crawls on the earth? How long does it take to play with dolls with children and be delighted with applause? Let's move on from here; Let's become men, let's give up dreams, let's not dwell on the shadows, let's leave to others the pleasures or, more often, the sorrows of life. Let others be mocked, others be played with and tossed around by envy, time and chance, as they call the impermanence and irregularity of everything human. Away from us high ranks, power, wealth, splendor, exaltation, fall - this worthless and despised glory, the one extolled by which suffers more disgrace than the one ridiculed! Away from us these children's games and acting on this great disgrace! We will adhere to the Word and in return for everything we will desire to have God - the only eternal good that is characteristic of us - in order to earn us approval even here for the fact that, while still so small, we are looking for something so great, or certainly there. Since the reward of virtue is to become god, to be illuminated by the purest light contemplated in the Trinity Unit, from which we now have barely a few rays, then move towards this, succeed in this, be inspired by thought, take up eternal life. Do not stop your hopes at anything until you reach the desired and blissful peak. And I know very well that you won’t praise me much now, but soon you will praise me incomparably more, when you see yourself in the state that I promise, and you find that this is not empty bliss, not fictions of the mind, but reality itself (2). What was the point of receiving a benefit if it was not meant to stay with us forever? Everything pleasant does not amuse us so much when it is with us as it saddens us when it moves away from us (2). You might be interested in: