Marah’s bitter water; wood sweetens; askesis before war on powers

feet, and still sick with the unmanliness, to train the practiced one harshly with toils and fears, as if already somehow being carried off from necessity at last into the endurance-loving and well-obedient.

Palladius: You think most excellently.

Cyril: And the matter is not unclear, if we should wish to busy ourselves with the things that typically befell the ancients. For it has been written thus: ‘And Moses led out the sons of Israel from the Red Sea, and led them into the desert of Sur; and they journeyed three days in the desert, and they were not finding water so as to drink. And they came into Merra, and they were not able to drink water from Merra; for it was bitter. On account of this he named the name of that place Bitterness; and the people were murmuring against Moses, saying: What shall we drink? And Moses cried out toward the Lord; and the Lord showed him a wood, and he cast it into the water, and the water was sweetened.’ For just now departing from the Egyptians’ land those from Israel, and casting off the hard-to-bear and intolerable yoke of the service under them, were eager—God calling—to change harbor into the land long ago promised to the fathers. And first a toil meets them opposite—the scarcity of waters, which were found barely for those who had labored through a long time, yet not having the enjoyment without hardship; for they were bitter, according as it has been written. Yet by mixture of a wood it was being remade toward the pleasant and sweet, God having shown the way of the matter to divine Moses. For being trained by divine law toward the need to choose to follow along with God who draws them out of slavery from passions, and to be freed from the demons’ tyranny, it is necessary that those being tested sweat, and be crowned with the crown of being well-approved, melting down the things of the flesh by the toils from askesis, and as it were bewitching some terrible wild beast—the untamed movement that always looks toward pleasure—by thirst and by fastings. For the first battle for us who wish to set right self-control is toward flesh and its things; and I do not think anyone would practice out virtue otherwise. A type therefore of the toils in askesis is the thirst that befell those of old according to the desert; and firstfruits of trainings, the bodily things. For watch how they do not at the beginnings at once attack with war (for not for those who have just begun to manfully master the passions and set right virtue is the wrestling at once toward the rulers and authorities, because of those being tested still being ignoble and not yet very secure), but they are tested with the flesh’s toils, God measuring out the hard-to-bear of the toil to the habits of those being tried. And this is, I think somewhere, the: ‘Temptation has not taken you except a human one; yet faithful, he says, is God, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but will make with the temptation also the way out of being able to endure.’ And the sweats for virtue being very bitter, he remolds into the pleasant and sweet