Let us turn, then, to where the voice of unison is the voice of our self-caused ills and consider it in its turn. Our soul, we are told, is tripartite, having one part assigned to the mind and reason, one to the spirited element and one to the appetites. There is mischief working in them all, in each in relation to itself, in all in relation to each other, when the mind reaps what is sown by its follies and acts of cowardice and intemperance and injustice, and the spirited part brings to the birth its fierce and raging furies and the other evil children of its womb, and the appetite sends forth on every side desires ever winged by childish fancy, desires which light as chance directs on things material and immaterial. For then, as though on a ship crew, passengers and steersmen had conspired through some madness to sink it, the first to perish with the boat are those who planned its destruction. It stands alone as the most grievous of mischiefs and one almost past all cure—this co-operation of all the parts of the soul in sin, where, as when a nation is plague-stricken, none can have the health to heal the sufferers, but the physicians share the sickness of the common herd who lie crushed by the pestilential scourge, victims of a calamity which none can ignore. We have a symbol of this dire happening in the great deluge described in the words of the lawgiver, when the “cataracts of heaven” poured forth the torrents of absolute wickedness in impetuous downfall and the “fountains from the earth,” that is from the body (Gen. 7:11), spouted forth the streams of each passion, streams many and great, and these, uniting and commingling with the rainpour, in wild commotion eddied and swirled continually through the whole region of the soul which formed their meeting-place. “For the Lord God,” it runs, “seeing that the wickednesses of men were multiplied on the earth, and that every man carefully purposed in his heart evil things every day,” determined to punish man, that is the mind, for his deadly misdeeds, together with the creeping and flying creatures around him and the other unreasoning multitude of untamed beasts (Gen. 6:5–6). This punishment was the deluge. For the deluge was a letting loose of sins, a rushing torrent of iniquity where there was naught to hinder, but all things burst forth without restraint to supply abundant opportunities to those who were all readiness to take pleasure therein. And surely this punishment was suitable. For not one part only of the soul had been corrupted, so that it might be saved through the soundness of others, but nothing in it was left free from disease and corruption. For “seeing,” as the scripture says, that “everyone,” that is every thought and not one only, “purposed,” the upright judge awarded the penalty which the fault deserved.
On the Confusion of Tongues 7
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