Euripides: know good, not do; inequality under God

Already somehow otherwise in night’s long time I have thought of mortals, how life has been corrupted. And they seem to me not according to nature of judgment to practice worse; for the thinking well is for many. Yet one must look at this thus: The useful things we understand and know, yet we do not work them out—some from idleness, and others having set before the beautiful some other pleasure. And there are many pleasures of life, both long chats, and leisure, a delightful evil. Do you understand how it does not seem to the more ancient ones to accuse Fortune, not Genesis, not Fate, as thrusting us out with force from the known uprightness, and from as many useful things as we should learn? For the life of those upon the earth has been corrupted, he says, not according to nature of judgment—that is, not because they have by nature a wicked judgment; but because they are not willing to work out the known useful things. And what is the pretext of this? Either hesitation, he says, bound them unto idleness, or some of the pleasures according to the life having run in against, he says, and rising up against the advantageous, was carrying away from the hunt of the necessary things, and was leading the mind off as a herd, showing the path unto carelessness smoother. And we would have heaped countless things of those beside them upon these, and most easily. Yet the sufficient thing—that it is sweet to those hearing—who would doubt? Therefore we will also thrust away the crowd of the word.

Palladius: You have spoken rightly. Yet if you wish, they say, leave these things aside. And reason how you will defend wisely, if somehow some should ask what the account of the inequality in us would perhaps be understood to be, and of the up and down beside worth sometimes. For one would behold the wicked prospering and being rich, yet the fair one having often come to be in the opposite things, and full of praises having come unto a limit.

Cyril: Truly hard to spy and altogether hard to reach is the matter, O Palladius, and I myself would say that the wishing to be busy about these things is beyond and highest of humanity’s measures. For it is necessary to yield to divine judgments; and if we should choose to think rightly, hanging the knowledge of the economy upon the highest and undefiled mind alone, alone, we will walk toward the things in hands, which are also found from us scarcely with force, according to the Scriptures. And since I think we must help the word according to what is possible, come let us ourselves also go upon that. Just now we were proving stale the glory of the godless, not using out-of-the-contest reasonings, but showing from necessary thoughts that genesis does not have the rudders of a human’s understanding, nor has a hard and hard-to-flee yoke of Fate been thrown upon us, but that each one’s judgment is lady of the things to be done in choice, and it is upon us ourselves to choose to do what seems—whether good, or base. For I myself would reckon of the prosperity