Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 4

Often the assumed care of governance strikes the heart in diverse directions, and each man is found unequal to single things, while with confused mind he is divided among many. Hence a certain wise man providently forbids it, saying: Son, be not busy in many of your affairs (Eccli. XI, 10), because plainly one is by no means fully gathered into the reckoning of each single work, while the mind is parceled out among diverse things. And when it is drawn outward by an unaccustomed care, it is emptied of the solidity of inward fear: it becomes solicitous in the disposition of outward things, and ignorant only of itself; it knows how to think about many things, not knowing itself. For when it entangles itself more than is necessary in outward affairs, it forgets, as though occupied on a journey, whither it was tending;

so that, estranged from the study of self-examination, it does not even consider the very losses which it suffers, and is ignorant by how much it offends. For neither did Hezekiah believe himself to be sinning (2 Kings XX, 13), when he showed the storerooms of his spices to the foreigners who came to him; but he incurred the wrath of the Judge for the damnation of his coming offspring from the very thing which he supposed he might do lawfully (Isa. XXXIX, 4). Often, while many things are at hand, and while things can be done which his subjects admire because they are accomplished, the mind raises itself up in thought, and fully provokes against itself the wrath of the Judge, although it does not burst out through wicked deeds. For within is He who judges, within is that which is judged.

When, therefore, we sin in the heart, what we do within us is hidden from men, but yet we sin with that very Judge as witness. For neither was the king of Babylon then first guilty of elation (Dan. IV, 16 ff.) when he came to the words of elation; for he who by the prophetic mouth had even before kept silence concerning his elation, heard the sentence of reprobation. For he had already wiped away the fault of pride committed, who proclaimed to all the nations under him the Almighty God whom he found he had offended. But afterward, elated by the success of his power, while he rejoiced that he had done great things, he first in thought preferred himself to all, and afterward, still swollen, said:

Is not this great Babylon, which I have built as the house of the kingdom, in the strength of my might and in the glory of my splendor? (Ibid., IV, 27.) Which voice, of course, openly bore the vengeance of that wrath which the hidden elation had kindled. For the strict Judge first saw invisibly what afterward He reprehended by openly smiting. Hence too He turned this man into an irrational animal, separated him from human society, joined him in changed mind to the beasts of the field, so that by a strict and just judgment the one who had esteemed himself great beyond men might lose even his being as a man.

Bringing forward these things, then, we do not reprehend power, but we fortify the heart's weakness against the appetite for it, lest any imperfect men should dare to snatch the summit of governance, and those who, standing on level ground, totter, should set their foot on a precipice.