Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 133

GREGORY. So it is; for the more the present world draws near to its end, the more the world to come is already, as it were, touched by its very nearness, and opened up by clearer signs. For because in this world we by no means see one another's thoughts in turn, whereas in that world we behold one another's hearts, what should I call this world but night, and what the world to come but day?

But just as, when the night is ending and the day begins to dawn, before the rising of the sun the darkness is in some manner mingled with the light, until the remnants of the departing night are perfectly turned into the light of the ensuing day: so the end of this world is now intermingled with the beginning of the world to come, and the very darkness of its remnants shines through with a certain intermingling of spiritual things. And we now discern many things of that world, but do not yet perfectly know them, because we see them as if in a certain twilight of the mind, as it were before the sun. PETER. What you say pleases me.

But concerning so great a man as Paschasius, this moves my mind to a question: that after death he was led to a place of punishment, whose bier's garment had such power that a malignant spirit was put to flight from a possessed man. GREGORY. In this matter the great and manifold dispensation of Almighty God ought to be recognized. By whose judgment it came about that this same man Paschasius should both himself within, for a certain time, receive what he had sinned, and yet after death should perform wonders through his own body before human eyes — he who before death, even to those who knew it, had done pious works;

so that neither should those who had seen his good works be deceived in their estimation of his almsgiving, nor should the fault be released to him without punishment — a fault which he did not even believe to be a fault, and therefore did not extinguish it with weeping. PETER. I weigh what you say; yet nevertheless, constrained by this reasoning, I am now compelled to dread in myself not only the sins which I understand, but even those very sins which I do not understand. But I ask, since a little above the discourse was about the penal places of hell, where do we think hell is? Is it to be believed to be above this earth, or beneath the earth?