Letter 1216: If riches, beauty, strength, glory, power, everything we find beautiful, are soon consumed and dissipate like smoke,...
If riches, beauty, strength, glory, power, everything we find beautiful, are soon consumed and dissipate like smoke, who is insane enough to put his self-satisfaction and his pride in just one of these advantages, when we see that he who has them all at the same time being stripped and deprived of them, sometimes even of his life, in any case at his death? If someone doesn’t have them all — in fact, it’s impossible to have all of them together at the same time! (1) — how will he avoid being laughed at if he prides himself on shadows, dreams and vague illusions? The priest Athanasius obviously wondered why human beings are not blessed with being all-knowing. Isidore merely imagines what effect such a ‘blessing’ would have on people like you and I:
Human translation - Roger Pearse (additional translations)
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Original text not yet available in this corpus.
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- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from Roger Pearse / Tertullian.org.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2009/03/07/a-few-more-letters-of-isidore-of-pelusium/
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