Letter 842: The spiritual life is a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Humanity is in danger, for the most part, of being temperate in adversity but running riot in prosperity. And this is shown most clearly from what the Hebrews suffered. For they passed through the Red Sea and endured nothing dangerous; but when they came to the land, they were shipwrecked. To Lampetius the Bishop. One must think about the divine essence and authority in a manner befitting God, with grandeur of mind, or rather transcendently, and piously and usefully — and as far as is possible regarding things hard to grasp and hard to express, or rather inexpressible — to declare them to those who hear through the tongue, if need calls, maintaining firmly from the works of Providence that God exists, without prying into what He is. For the former is attainable and graspable, but the latter is unattainable and beyond capture. To Heron the Scholasticus. Those who by the art of words obscure the truth seem to me far more wretched than those who have not grasped it. For those who through slowness of mind have been left behind in the hunt are perhaps pardonable. But those who through sharpness of mind have captured it yet wickedly conceal it are guilty of greater offenses than those deserving pardon. To Palladius the Deacon. On the passage, "If anyone aspires to the office of bishop." Those who have not understood the apostolic meaning — people simple and ignorant of causes, who do not endure yielding to better things — are altogether culpable and commit graver offenses. For both those who seek what is better and strive for it acquire it through excess; and those who shrink from it commit far graver sins. Since the ambitious judge more severely than is just, therefore they also devise graver things. Wherefore, vicious affections must be cut off at the very root, lest at some point we be charged with laboring at an incurable disease.