On Intellectual Error and the Four Virtues

A word, producing contempt easily; for the rational soul will not equal the pain of being condemned for its ignorance.

Saint Paul, treating the body as a slave, says: do not neglect your diet in your life, and do not despise impassibility in a body that has been humbled by suffering. Do not worry about food or clothing, but remember the Levite Abner who, having received the ark of the Lord, became rich from the poor and glorious from the worthless.

Every proposition or genus has either a predicate, or a difference, or a species, or a property, or an accident, or a composition of these; but nothing of the said things can be grasped regarding the Holy Trinity. Let the unspeakable be worshipped in silence.

A temptation of the knower is a false opinion standing regarding the existing as if it were not existing, the non-existing as if it were existing, and the existing as if it were something else.

We have learned from the righteous Gregory that there are four virtues and their contemplation: prudence and courage, temperance and justice; and he said the work of prudence is to contemplate the noetic and holy powers without words, for wisdom alone has handed them over to be made manifest; courage is to hold fast to the truths and to fight, and not to step into non-entities; temperance he defined as receiving the seeds from the first farmer and repelling the sower; justice, again, is to render to each according to his due, some announcing darkly, some signifying through riddles, and some even making things manifest for the benefit of...