Chapter 4: Death is lighter than sorrow
A ...and did he not appoint this as the final punishment in the Law for those who commit great offenses? Or was it not because of the fear of this that the patriarch was so terrified that he brought himself, nature itself being overcome, to surrender his wife to barbaric lust and Egyptian tyranny, and even to frame this drama of insolence himself, and to beg his wife to play this heavy and tragic role with him? And he is not even ashamed to offer the reason for such a scene: "For I say," he says, "when the Egyptians see you, endowed with outstanding beauty and surpassing in the grace of your face, they will kill me and save you. Say, therefore, that you are my sister, that it may be well with me because of you, and my soul may live for your sake" (Gen. 12. 12-13). Do you see the fear, do you see the trembling shaking that high and philosophical soul? Do you see the adamant broken by terror? He lies about his lineage, and puts one person forward for another as his wife, and exposes the lamb to the wolves as prey; and—what is most unbearable to men of all evils—to see his wife defiled, or even to suspect it—this, and what is much harsher than this (for it was not mere suspicion, but the defilement was actually attempted), he not only sees, but he even acts to ensure it is carried out; and this seems light and bearable to him. For indeed, passion was overcoming passion—the more severe the more severe—and the terror of death was defeating jealousy.
The great Elias also, because of the fear of death, merely fearing the threats of a lecherous and wicked woman, took to flight and changed his soil (3 Kings 19); and he who had closed the heavens, and had done so many miracles, did not endure the terror of words. Indeed, panic so struck that high and heaven-reaching soul that after that confidence, after such freedom of speech, after such a display of virtue, he suddenly abandoned his home, his country, and so great a people, for whose sake he had boldly encountered so many dangers, and traversed a forty-day journey alone, and moved to the wilderness. B For the nature of this thing is vehemently horrible, and therefore making an assault upon our race every day, it so strikes and consterns us—until every dead person appears—that it disturbs and contracts us with fear, such that it appears unexpectedly. Nor did meditation on time, or daily custom and exercise in this contemplation, have any power to provide consolation; nor does such grief and terror grow old with the length of time, but it is perpetually rejuvenated and flourishes, bringing a fresh and blooming fear every day. And not undeservedly. For who would not be disturbed and consterned when he sees one who yesterday, or a few days before, was walking, was managing six hundred household affairs, was undertaking the care of his wife, children, servants, and often even of entire cities, was threatening, terrifying, and partly fulfilling punishments, partly inflicting them, was accomplishing countless things both in cities and in regions, suddenly appear more mute and prostrate than a stone? And when countless men weep, and all his closest friends mourn, and his wife is distorted by pain, beats her cheeks, tears her hair, and with a great cry surrounds herself with flocks of handmaids, while he feels none of these things? When he sees all things suddenly taken from the midst—reason, talent, soul, the flower and grace of the face, the movement of the limbs? And that unpleasant things have succeeded them—namely silence, stupor, corruption, gore, worms, ash, dust, stench, complete ruin, and the entire body rushing toward the point where it ends in vile, deformed, and ignoble bones?
C This is terrifying, but that it is shown by the dread of those holy men, death is far lighter than grief. For I have traversed these long courses of arguments for the sake of this, that you might learn from me how great a punishment you pay, and that you might look for a reward of goods equal to it, or indeed in many parts greater. And that you may understand that these things are so, I will now take refuge with those who are captured by that affection, to which our speech was previously hastening. The people of the Hebrews, upon Moses coming and announcing liberty and the end of the Egyptian captivity, could not even bear to hear him. And explaining the cause, the legislator said: "And Moses spoke to the people, and the people did not listen to Moses because of pusillanimity" (Exod. 6. 9). Furthermore, when God threatens grave things to the Jews because of their many sins, after the captivity and dwelling in a foreign region, after slavery, famine, plague, and the eating of human flesh, he added this punishment, using these words: "I will give them a grieving heart, and failing eyes, and a consuming soul" (Deut. 28. 65). But why do I mention the Jews, a lecherous and ungrateful people, addicted to the servitude of the flesh, and not knowing how to philosophize, when I may take the argument for this thing from great and high men? D For the chorus of the apostles, when they had already had three years of association with Christ, and had learned many things about immortality and other secret matters from him, and had produced signs that were admirable and remote from human senses, and had beheld him performing wonders for so long a time, and had been participants of the same table and conversation, and of such excellent sermons, and had been instructed in every kind of doctrine—after they heard words that brought grief, those who previously held him perpetually and hung upon him like nursing infants, and ceased not from asking, "Where do you go?"—they themselves were again so oppressed by the tyranny of this grief, and resigned themselves so entirely to anguish, that they no longer asked him these things. For which reason Christ, rebuking them, said: "You have heard that I go to him who sent me, and I come to you, and no one among you asks me, 'Where do you go?' But because I have spoken these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart" (John 16. 5-6). Do you see how the tyranny of grief cast darkness upon love, and reduced them to captivity, and made them its own? Again, that Elias (for I will not even now depart from him), after his flight and secession from Palestine, not bearing the bitterness of grief (if indeed he was occupied in great grief and anguish—which even he who committed that history to writing declares with these words, "He went away according to his soul").