The human soul was not satisfied with the invention of evil, but little by little began to lead itself into worse things. Having learned the varieties of pleasures and girded itself with forgetfulness of divine things, taking pleasure in bodily passions and looking only at present things and the opinions about them, it supposed that nothing existed beyond what is seen, but that only temporary and bodily things were good.
Turning away and forgetting that it was made in the image of the good God, it no longer sees, through the power within itself, God the Word, after whose likeness it was made. Having gone outside itself, it thinks about and forms images of things that have no being. For it covered over the mirror, as it were, within itself with the entanglements of bodily desires—the mirror through which alone it had been able to see the Image of the Father. It no longer sees what a soul ought to perceive, but is carried around by everything and sees only what strikes the senses. Thus, filled with every fleshly desire and disturbed by those same opinions, it imagines in bodily and sensory things the God whom it had forgotten in its mind. It assigns the name of God to visible things and glorifies only the things it wants and sees as pleasant.
Evil, then, comes first as the cause of idolatry. For after human beings learned to imagine for themselves evil that has no being, they likewise fashioned for themselves gods that have no being.
It is like someone who dives into the depths and no longer sees the light or the things visible in the light, because his eyes are turned downward and the water lies over him. Sensing only the things in the depths, he supposes that nothing exists beyond them, but that the things visible to him are the chief realities among all that exists. In the same way, people of old, having lost their reason, plunged into the desires and imaginings of the flesh and forgot their conception of God and His glory. With their reasoning dim—or rather, using irrationality—they fashioned visible things into gods, glorifying creation rather than the Creator and deifying the works rather than God, their cause, Creator, and Master.
And just as, in the example already given, those who dive into the depths rush into darker and deeper places the farther down they go, so it has happened to the human race. They did not keep idolatry in a simple form, nor did they remain with the things with which they began. The longer they persisted in the first practices, the more novel superstitions they invented for themselves. Not satisfied with the first evils, they filled themselves again with others, advancing in the most shameful things and outdoing themselves in impiety. Divine Scripture also bears witness to this when it says, “When the ungodly person reaches the depths of evil, he despises.”
The human soul was not satisfied with the invention of evil, but little by little began to lead itself into worse things. Having learned the varieties of pleasures and girded itself with forgetfulness of divine things, taking pleasure in bodily passions and looking only at present things and the opinions about them, it supposed that nothing existed beyond what is seen, but that only temporary and bodily things were good.
Turning away and forgetting that it was made in the image of the good God, it no longer sees, through the power within itself, God the Word, after whose likeness it was made. Having gone outside itself, it thinks about and forms images of things that have no being.
For it covered over the mirror, as it were, within itself with the entanglements of bodily desires—the mirror through which alone it had been able to see the Image of the Father. It no longer sees what a soul ought to perceive, but is carried around by everything and sees only what strikes the senses. Thus, filled with every fleshly desire and disturbed by those same opinions, it imagines in bodily and sensory things the God whom it had forgotten in its mind. It assigns the name of God to visible things and glorifies only the things it wants and sees as pleasant.
Evil, then, comes first as the cause of idolatry. For after human beings learned to imagine for themselves evil that has no being, they likewise fashioned for themselves gods that have no being.
It is like someone who dives into the depths and no longer sees the light or the things visible in the light, because his eyes are turned downward and the water lies over him. Sensing only the things in the depths, he supposes that nothing exists beyond them, but that the things visible to him are the chief realities among all that exists. In the same way, people of old, having lost their reason, plunged into the desires and imaginings of the flesh and forgot their conception of God and His glory. With their reasoning dim—or rather, using irrationality—they fashioned visible things into gods, glorifying creation rather than the Creator and deifying the works rather than God, their cause, Creator, and Master.
And just as, in the example already given, those who dive into the depths rush into darker and deeper places the farther down they go, so it has happened to the human race. They did not keep idolatry in a simple form, nor did they remain with the things with which they began. The longer they persisted in the first practices, the more novel superstitions they invented for themselves. Not satisfied with the first evils, they filled themselves again with others, advancing in the most shameful things and outdoing themselves in impiety. Divine Scripture also bears witness to this when it says, “When the ungodly person reaches the depths of evil, he despises.”