Three Books on the Death of Christ and Self-Reflection, and Two Books on the Study of Divine and Human Philosophy

often, by adhering to them more ardently than it should, it is deceived and shaken from the true good. It is worth the labor to exert ourselves so that we may separate the pestiferous from the salutary. We shall achieve this best if we have chosen and assigned some place to the soul where it can betake itself after the anxieties arising daily, nay, at every moment, as into a most safe harbor and its own proper seat. If it has not attained it, it should mourn; having attained it, it should rest, like natural things that rest in their own place. When they are led away from it, as if having suffered violence, they strive to transfer themselves there; but each one also exercises its proper operation flowing from the principles of its species. For brutes (as we said just now) have appetites implanted and inscribed by nature for avoiding the harmful and pursuing the healthy. The will of man also has its own
Augustine. Love is my weight

inclination, namely, love, which Augustine called his weight, by which he was carried wherever he was carried. The proper place of the soul (for we use the metaphors of corporeal things to indicate spiritual ones) is that from which it proceeded by creation, since its happiness is nothing other than a return and rest in God, the supreme good. For it is blessed in Him by understanding and loving. While it dwells in a mortal body, weighed down by earthly mass, and also corrupted by the filth of sins, it cannot enter its proper seat. It needs some other place, one closer to its own than is possible, from which it will procure for itself some relief and peace, and meanwhile will rejoice in hope, until that most ardent desire for blessedness is fulfilled. For it will think it is being treated excellently if it is gifted with this benefit of divine grace: that, since it cannot be happy in this life, nay, perhaps not even free from a great suspicion of unhappiness, it may attain a certain shadow and image of blessedness, and first of all, set before itself an object by which it can be helped both in contemplating and loving God and in avoiding the snares of demons. For the soul, while it wanders in this body, seems to me like a little bird which a thousand fowlers seek to ensnare if only it leaves the aerial tracts and the regions of the sky inaccessible to mortals. For just as if it seeks the earth, it is easily caught by birdlime, snares, or nets; no differently, when it leaves its own proper object, descending, that is, to these worldly things—gold, estates, ambition—lured by bodily pleasures, it enters the snares of the devil or escapes them only with great difficulty.