教牧守則·對話錄與書信 第 97 章

GREGORY: Compunction is divided into many species, when each single fault is bewailed by the penitent. Whence out of the voice of the penitents Jeremiah also says: 'My eye has sent down divisions of waters' (Lamentations 3:48). But principally there are two kinds of compunction, because the soul that thirsts for God is first pricked with fear, afterward with love. For first it afflicts itself in tears, because, while it recalls its own evils, it dreads to suffer eternal punishments for them; but when the fear has been consumed by a long anguish of grief, a certain security is now born from the presumption of pardon, and the mind is inflamed with the love of heavenly joys;

and he who before wept lest he be led to punishment, afterward begins to weep most bitterly because he is deferred from the kingdom. For the mind contemplates who are those choirs of angels, what is that very society of the blessed spirits, what the majesty of the eternal vision of God; and it laments more because it is absent from the eternal goods, than it before wept when it feared the eternal evils. And so it comes to pass that the perfect compunction of fear draws the soul to the compunction of love. This is well described in sacred and true history by a figurative narration, which says that Achsah the daughter of Caleb sighed as she sat upon the ass. To whom her father said: 'What have you?' But she answered: 'Give me a blessing; you have given me a south land and a dry one; join to it also a watered one.'

And her father gave her the upper watered land and the lower watered land (Joshua 15 and following). Achsah indeed sits upon the ass, when the soul presides over the irrational motions of its own flesh. She, sighing, asks of her father the watered land, because from our Creator the grace of tears is to be sought with great groaning. For there are some who have already received in gift to speak freely for justice, to protect the oppressed, to bestow their possessions on the needy, to have the ardor of faith; but they do not yet have the grace of tears.

These indeed have the south land and the dry one, but they still lack the watered lands, because, being set among good works, in which they are great and fervent, it is fitting—exceedingly fitting—that either through fear of punishment or through love of the heavenly kingdom they should bewail even those evils which they before committed. But because, as I said, there are two kinds of compunction, her father gave her the upper watered land and the lower watered land. The soul indeed receives the upper watered land, when it afflicts itself in tears through desire of the heavenly kingdom. But it receives the lower watered land, when, weeping, it dreads the punishments of hell. And indeed first the lower is given, and afterward the upper watered land. But because the compunction of love excels in dignity, it

was necessary that the upper watered land should be commemorated first, and the lower watered land afterward. PETER: What you say pleases me. But since you have said that this Eleutherius of venerable life was of this merit, I am pleased to inquire whether it is now to be believed that there are any such in the world.