XLIII. (156) Perhaps now that which is intimated by the expression, “If thou castest me out this day from off the face of the earth, from thy face I shall be hidden,” may be this, if thou dost not bestow on me the good things of the earth, I will not receive those of Heaven; and if no use and enjoyment of pleasure is afforded me, I have no desire for virtue, and if thou dost not allow me to participate in human advantages, thou mayest retain the divine ones to thyself. (157) Now the things which among us are accounted necessary and valuable and genuine real goods are these; to eat, to drink, to be clothed in favourite colours and fashions; by means of the faculty of sight, to be delighted with pleasant sights; by means of one’s faculty of hearing to be delighted with melodies of all sorts of sounds; to be gratified through our nostrils with fragrant exhalations of odours; to indulge in all the pleasures of the belly and of the parts adjacent to the belly to satiety; not to be indifferent to the acquisition of silver and gold; to be invested with honours and post of authority, and all other things which may tend to man’s reputation; but as for prudence, or fortitude, or justice, austere dispositions which only make life laborious, those we pass by, and if we are forced to admit them into one calculation we must do so, not as perfect goods in themselves, but only as efficients of good. (158) Do you therefore, O ridiculous man, affirm that if you are deprived of a superfluity of bodily advantages and external good things, you will not come into the sight of God? But I tell you that even if you are so deprived of them, you will by all means come into his sight; for when you have been released from the unspeakable bonds of the body and around the body, you will attain to an imagination of the uncreated God.
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