But all these are descended from the depravity which is ever dying and never dead, whose name is Cain. Is not Cain, when he had begotten a son whom he called Enoch, described as founding a city to bear his son’s name (Gen. 4:17), and thus in a sense raising a building of created and mortal things to subvert those to which has fallen the honour to be the work of a diviner architect? For Enoch is by interpretation “thy gift,” and each of the unholy thinks that his understanding gives him his apprehension and reflections, that his eyes give him sight, his ears hearing, his nostrils smell, and the other senses the functions that belong to themselves severally, and again that the vocal organs give him speech, but God, he thinks, is either not the cause in any sense or not the first cause. And therefore Cain retained in his own keeping the firstlings of the fruits of his husbandry and offered, as we are told, merely the fruits at a later time, although he had beside him a wholesome example. For his brother brought to the altar the first-born younglings of the flock, not the after-born, thus confessing that even the causes which come higher in the chain of causation owe their existence to the Cause which is highest and first of all. The impious man thinks the opposite, that the mind has sovereign power over what it plans, and sense over what it perceives. He holds that the latter judges material things and the former all things, and that both are free from fault or error. And yet what could be more blameworthy or more clearly convicted of falsehood by the truth than these beliefs? Is not the mind constantly convicted of delusion on numberless points, and all the senses judged guilty of false witness, not before unreasoning judges who may easily be deceived, but at the bar of nature herself whom it is fundamentally impossible to corrupt? And surely if the means of judgement within us, supplied by mind and sense, are capable of error, we must admit the logical consequence, that it is God who showers conceptions on the mind and perceptions on sense, and that what comes into being is no gift of any part of ourselves, but all are bestowed by Him, through whom we too have been made.
On the Confusion of Tongues 25
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.