That the present life is like a shadow. I. By the Lord's gift we have said concerning human life, that it is a likeness of a way, in which each one, making his journey toward eternal things, ought to be secure from the desires of another's goods, content as it were with only the poverty of provision for the journey, so that, clinging to no enticements, he may understand all earthly things to be foreign to him. Now let us show that same life to be a shadow, as we have already said before. Does not the life of man upon the earth seem to you to be a shadow and an image? which is so doubtful, as long as it lasts, and uncertain, that the matter is made equal to a shadow. For you see and do not see; let us say, it is itself, and not itself: what it was, you do not see; what it will be, neither can you see that. You see only what it is, what stands for a while: take away what it is, you see nothing;
Thus it is unseen, as though it did not exist: therefore each one sees his own life as a shadow, and from morning until evening he surveys, as in a kind of mirror, the emptiness of his life. But whatever other such things he sees, he sees them only in dreams: for likewise he beholds false things in place of true, and is shut up in vain things instead of the image of the true. For what difference is there, I ask, between what you saw yesterday and what is dreamed at night? Do they not today appear to you to be equally empty? For truly, those things which flee while I look at them do not satisfy me any more, as if they were real, than those which are shut up to be dreamed: for I find both to be empty. For what I am, I have not been, and I shall not be, and at every single hour I am something else, and I never stand still.
For I am always running from the day of my birth until the day of my death, and through each single day of my life I am changed; and whatever things are changed, or in what manner they are changed, I do not see; and I can never see my whole life at once in one moment; and what I was yesterday, today I am not; so what I am today, tomorrow I shall not be; and thus I shall ever be moving and changeful through the outward spaces of my life, so that from moment to moment, from moments into hours, from hours into days, I run with the uncertain spans of my age toward death, that there I may see things sure and true, and all at once in one, which here is impossible for me. O wretched me! if there I shall not see that life which here I never see as true; for it is necessary that it be true there, where eternity holds sway.
Flee then, flee, O you shadow of mortal life; flee you from us, and we from you: do you flee as you are doing; for you ever flee, that the true life may come quickly: let us flee from you, lest you deceive us; for you are wont, slow as you are, to deceive with flattering hindrances. Flee, I say, and hasten, you who have seduced many, and press to seduce us also, and will lead others after us, and consign them to death. O how blind you are, how seductive, O uncertain life! you wait for me, that you may snatch me; you provoke me, that you may persuade; you ask of me, that you may seduce; you persuade me, that you may deceive. Who is so foolish as to trust you, who deceive those who love you, and seduce those who believe you? For those who love you have been deceived; and those who trust you have been seduced: but those who neglect you have been enriched;
and those who flee you have been saved. They seek God who despise you. Let us therefore flee from you, before you flee from us: and because you are thus mortal, brief, frail, uncertain, unstable, changeable, mutable, and turnable; let us rather be reckoned lovers and dealers of God and of eternal life, than yours, and let us flee you who flow and flee, lest you punish us along with your lovers. For we must flee that which flees, and so must live in it as though we must die daily. For what does it matter to us whether we die today or tomorrow? For since we must die, death must be so regarded by us as though it were already long past;
and since nothing endures before death, we must hasten toward death, that we may be able to see things true and eternal after death. Wherefore we must not delay, but must hasten from the shadow of imagined life to the truth of the true life. And because one is the way of carnal life, another the way of spiritual progress; let the soul run by its advances, as life runs by its courses, and so let the maturity of the soul increase, as the fullness of age; and as the circles of life are diminished, so let the number of our vices decrease, that with the world we may leave behind what is its own, and carry nothing of its ways with us to the Lord, through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be glory unto the ages of ages. Amen.