על השכר והעונש ג׳On Rewards and Punishments 3
א׳
1[15] After the victory of hope comes the second contest, in which repentance is the champion. Repentance has nothing of that nature which remains ever in the same stay without movement or change. It has been suddenly possessed with an ardent yearning for betterment, eager to leave its inbred covetousness and injustice and come over to soberness and justice and the other virtues.
ב׳
2[16] Repentance also has two rewards assigned to its double achievement in abandoning the base and choosing the excellent. These rewards are a new home and a life of solitude; for he says of him who fled from the insurgency of the body to join the forces of the soul “he was not found because God transferred him.”
ג׳
3[17] By “transference” he clearly signifies the new home and by “not found” the life of solitude. Very pertinently too. For if a man has really come to despise pleasures and desires and resolved in all sincerity to take his stand above the passions, he must prepare for a change of abode and flee from home and country and kinsfolk and friends without a backward glance.
ד׳
4[18] For great is the attraction of familiarity. We may fear that if he stays he may be cut off and captured by all the love charms which surround him and will call up visions to stir again the base practices which had lain dormant and create vivid memories of what it were well to have forgotten.
ה׳
5[19] Many persons in fact have come to a wiser mind by leaving their country and have been cured of their wild and frenzied cravings when sight can no longer minister to passion the images of pleasure. For when thus dissociated it must needs be treading on empty space since the stimulus of pleasure is no longer present.
ו׳
6[20] And further if he changes his abode he must shun great gatherings and welcome solitude. It cannot but be that even in the foreign soil there are many snares like those at home on which the shortsighted who delight in large assemblies are sure to be pinned. For a crowd is another name for everything that is disorderly, indecorous, discordant, culpable, and to be carried along with the crowd is very detrimental to the virtue of the settler on his first arrival.
ז׳
7[21] For just as when men are beginning to recover from a long illness their bodies easily give way because their increase of strength is not yet firmly established, so in those whose soul is now for the first time becoming healthy the sinews of the mind are flabby and rickety, so that there is a danger that passion, which is naturally stimulated by association with the thoughtless, may break out afresh.
