Save your soul; do not stand in the country round

Cyril went on: 'Save your own soul; do not look round behind, and do not stand in all the country round; save yourself to the mountain, lest you be taken along.' In the, 'Save your own soul,' I say it is clearly spoken: 'Keep yourself pure; and do not share in others' sins.' And be better than the hindrances in the world; for there is no exchange at all for a soul. 'For what will a man be profited, when he gains the whole world, and loses his soul?' And the need to say that the walking must be made without turning back signifies, I think, perhaps this: not to choose, by turnings-about into a cheap and low life, to think again the equal things with those brought under the penalty of fire from incontinence ('For no one,' he says, 'having put his hand to a plow and turned back is fit for the kingdom of the heavens'); but that we must hold the road toward salvation, not being distracted this way and that, and keeping in ourselves a mind light and easy to scatter by stale fantasies of worldly desires, but complete and sleepless, and having practiced always to look toward the straight. And I will say the still greater thing; for the angel says not only that he must already make the walking without turning back; he also added usefully, 'Do not stand in all the country round. Save yourself to the mountain, lest you be taken along.'

Palladius said: And what would 'Do not stand in all the country round' wish to show?

Cyril: The sluggish, I think, and weak toward the need to fly out of the evil, which is perilous and damaging.

Palladius: Tell how.

Cyril: A prophetic word said: 'Woe, those who do the work of the Lord carelessly. — And run that you may grasp,' the divine Paul himself also says somewhere. For not wishing to do most strongly and in eagerness the running-away from the more shameful things, the mind having itself hard to tear away toward the ancient things, and as it were setting out sullenly from each of the cheap and low, and shifting most reluctantly toward what is of a nature to help — this would be nothing else than to stand at last in a country round of vice, though one ought to go out at a run. For it would be of the things possible, before coming outside the bounds of evil, always delaying and drawing back, to be caught by the penalty, before the stain is thoroughly cleansed, before the defilement melted into the soul from the ancient slackness is washed off, before the charges are unloaded, and one runs under the saving yoke, to rest through Christ. Best then of exhortations is, 'Do not stand in all the country round,' that is: Be not caught having delayed in any manner of a cheap and low life, but go up rather, as to a mountain, into some exceptional and conspicuous life, having nothing thrown on the ground, but shining in a high and lifted-up virtue, and set free from the lowest mind, that is, the earthly and fleshly. For it is written that 'The strong ones of God of the earth have been lifted up very much.' For the mind proper to holy things is highest of the earthly things.