That the present life should not be called a life, but a way. I. O you, life, how many have you deceived, how many led astray, how many blinded! who, while you flee, are nothing; while you are seen, are a shadow; while you are exalted, are smoke; who daily flee, and daily come; in coming you flee, you who in fleeing come; unlike in outcome, like in rising; unlike in luxury, like in flux; sweet to fools, bitter to the wise. Those who love you do not know you; and those who despise you, they themselves understand you. Therefore you are not truthful, but deceitful: you show yourself true, you bring yourself back as deceitful. What then are you, human life? You are a way of mortals, and not a life; beginning from sin even unto death;
for you would indeed be true, if the sin of the first human transgression had not interrupted you; and then you became fleeting and mortal, when you assigned all your wayfarers to death. You are therefore a way to life, and not a life: for you are not true; a way, but not level, to some long, to some short, to some broad, to some narrow, to some glad, to some sad, alike hastening for all, and irrevocable. A way you are, I say, a way you are, but not manifest to all: for many see you, and few understand you to be a way. For you are so subtle and so seductive that few perceive you to be a way. You are therefore to be questioned and not yielded to, nor claimed as a possession; to be passed through, not dwelt in, O wretched human life:
for no one dwells in the way, but walks; so that those who walk in the way may dwell in the homeland. II. Why then are you, mortal life, dwelt in, loved, claimed? You are loved and claimed by the foolish and the lost, despised by the sensible, guarded against by those who are to be saved. You are therefore to be feared, O human life, and much to be guarded against, you who are so fugitive, so slippery, so perilous, so brief, so uncertain, that you are dissolved like a shadow, or an image, or a cloud, or nothing, or emptiness.
Since therefore you are nothing, O mortal life, whether an image, fugitive as a bird, as an uncertain cloud, and frail as a shadow, as a dream, so the journey is to be made through you, so solicitously, so cautiously, so expeditiously, that after the manner of wayfarers, by all who understand, there must be a hastening to the true homeland. Secure about what is past, solicitous about what remains: for it profits you nothing to have ascended what you have ascended, unless you escape what remains: for this life is to be reckoned a way and a kind of ascent. Let us not seek in the way what is to be in the homeland: for labor and fatigue are involved in the journey; in the homeland rest and security are prepared.
We must therefore beware, lest perchance we be secure along the way, and not arrive at our true homeland. For there are indeed some on this journey who are slothful, secure, envious, so that they seem to be not so much on the way as in the homeland: and they go to the homeland not so much willingly as unwillingly—the homeland already, to be sure, lost. For here on the way they have used up the homeland beforehand, and have purchased eternal death in exchange for a brief life. Unhappy, they are glad over a frustrated bargain; they have loved the perishable things of another, and have neglected their own eternal things. Wherefore, although they be glad, although alluring, although they be comely, let us shun the earthly things of another, that we may not lose our own eternal things:
let us be found faithful in another's things, that we may be made heirs in our own and proper things, our Lord Jesus Christ granting it, to whom be glory unto the ages of ages. Amen.