Abraham goes up from Egypt

Cyril went on: The Church is the lodging of the holy ones, which the righteous inhabit, and also as many as refuse the penalty through fire.

Palladius said: How well the word stands for us, my good man! And I for my part would wish the exercise to go for us also through as many other proofs as you will. For to love to know richly what makes for profit, I would think worth everything.

Cyril: And yet, Palladius, you say what is likely. For the thing would be a fruit of a mind in us most loving of learning, and the word from us will be better than reluctance, not seeming to me the same as practicing an untimely silence running in upon narratives so bright and worth loving. So then, that we must fence ourselves off wholly and in every way, as far as it is possible, from the disposition and sharing toward what is cheap; and also that being able to look up toward virtue would be added in no other way than according to this same manner, we shall see without toil, putting the eye of the mind in well, both to the things according to divine Abraham, and to the things accomplished beyond word at the going-out of those from Israel, which they made in the times of the Egyptians' greed, having broken the bonds.

Palladius: Speak then in parts. For know well that you gladden us richly, if you should choose to do these things.

Cyril: We were saying, then, that divine Abraham, once pressed out by an unbearable famine and by wants of the needed things, made the descent into Egypt not wished, and gave the necessities the rule. And being a stranger and an incomer, Pharaoh maltreated him with griefs and greeds. For he wished to disable the woman who lived with him, burned with unmixed pleasures into a longing for shameful work. But God did not allow this to be accomplished. 'For he tested,' it says, 'Pharaoh with great testings concerning Sarah, Abraham's wife.' And Pharaoh is an image and type of diabolic incontinence. For that one's aim, and of the things most eagerly pursued, is to love to put into the understandings of the holy ones also the seeds of the uncleanness in him, so that they may choose to bear fruit the things dear to him and according to pleasure. And these would be, I think, the charges into a many-formed sin. And everyone then would be caught, and will lie unwilling under that one's greeds. For the nature is sick with the lack of strength, yet God does not allow it, drawing back as it were the attempts against the holy ones, and the plots of the evil one. And it has happened that divine Abraham escaped the harms in no other way, except, having left the Egyptians' land, he went up again toward the place at the beginning and given by God, where, having also arrived, he was a quiet caretaker of good pursuits. And it is written thus: 'And Abraham went up from Egypt, he and his wife, and all that was his, and Lot with him, into the wilderness. And Abraham was very rich, with cattle and silver and gold, and he went where he had gone out into the wilderness as far as Bethel.'