Quail cholera; sow to flesh; graves of desire; take up the cross

from Egypt?’ For this was grieving the Redeemer very much—that Israel should also disregard even the slavery itself, and count as nothing the toils in Egypt, for the sake of the most foul-smelling meats and vegetables. And us ourselves also warm and sharp pleasures often persuade to count the slavery under the devil as bearable, and for the sake of corruptible and more earthy desires to be bound down in the yokes of sin. Yet he was giving even then the flesh-eating, not unto one, nor unto ten perhaps, but unto thirty days, through which the extension of the anger upon them is signaled. And even now he allows those who have turned aside ungovernably into worldly pleasures both to share, if they should choose, the fleshly things, and unto times sometimes long. For thus some are said to be handed over into an unapproved mind, to do the things not fitting. Yet for those ones the eating came to be unto cholera, and for those who love the fleshly things and prefer before the intelligible manna, which is God’s utterance, the corruptible and earthly, the undertaking will end toward death; and this is, I think, the: ‘The one sowing unto the flesh will from the flesh harvest corruption.’ And the loosing perhaps of such a weakness: ‘Walk by Spirit, and you will not fulfill desire of flesh. For the flesh campaigns against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; for these are set opposite one another.’ As if those from Israel had wished to count sufficient luxury the supply of the manna, which is intelligible bread of angels, and a type of sweetness through the Spirit, they would not have fulfilled desire of flesh, nor would they have harvested the corruption from it.’ And most conspicuous are the people’s memorials; for there, it says, they buried the people the desirer, according to the: ‘They will be unto a seeing for all flesh;’ and the people that suffered those things has been named desirer-people, according to that, I think somewhere, said concerning some: ‘Whose glory is in their shame;’ for from the sin is the naming; and endless was being inscribed upon those who died pitiably the reproach upon the unmanlinesses, and from what they were being condemned the conspicuousness.

Palladius: True.

Cyril: Therefore it must especially be declined by those who have truly chosen to love learning—the not-enduring in toils, and weak murmuring, and ungrateful empty-talk, and what is somehow more unholy than the others, reaching for the pollutions from baseness and flesh-love. For such a one wavers both ways, and has the mind’s tendon limping. For it has been written that ‘Woe to timid hearts, and hands let slack, and to a sinner stepping upon two paths.’ And I think those counting worthy of every word the endurance-loving and the steadfast unto patience must remember Christ saying: ‘If someone wishes to come behind me, let him deny himself, and lift his cross, and follow