Bodleian Library MS. Barocci 131

... [even] if something is not by opinion. And if there are also to be good things, these too are not so except insofar as they are also greater in opinion. For in the case of pleasures, enjoyment according to need is nothing but the peak. In the case of illness, again, it is the being restored from being sick and the recovering of health. You see the fortune which Basil says makes the painful thing worse than the gain is good. For you see how we are able, from these painful things themselves, to understand the painfulness of nature and to learn that not all things are true, because things contrary to nature are not lasting. For look not only at the honor derived from them, but also at the names derived from regrets due to suppositions. And one would not say that pleasures exist alongside toil, unless they have their beginning in grief. Just as, therefore, there are no violent movements before death, nor before the onset of disease. The entire appearance, according to the phenomenon of the subjects at hand, as many as are not of wisdom, is that it rather carves [something] out of them. For those things which, through the propriety of voices and of instruments and of instruments, delightfully steal into the soul and please it, afterward cause grief; not by making things clear after the hymn. But in the antiphons, henceforth, let the whole be within—both the songs to God and the prayers to God and the choirs of angels, through which intelligible things are especially released. For indeed the mind of man is made akin to divine things by hymns. It is necessary, then, for us to know this. But he is divinely inspired not through natural philosophy, nor through discourses, nor through that [sort of] divine inspiration, unless from death and warlike dispositions, which must be received in opinion, but rather through opining and hoping. Regarding our fortune, one would not say these things of them; we understand, therefore, spiritually. Whence it is addressed as an "appearance of the intellect" in him. And opinions and heresies are certain exercises, and among legislators [so are] the judgments of the pious; but of the things appearing according to sense-perception, the sufferings of those being initiated are purely so. Does not the evil of sin, then, also fail to blame the same things as the disease and the bitterness of toils? For sometimes the imaginative faculty [tends] toward the irrational. Whence also a multitude of many reasonable declarations, because the phenomenon is sometimes more bitter, has even become a cure for error; just as the earth is not immovable, nor is its motion apparent, one would not say that he understands himself. For just as immovable things are greater in their own nature than the motion of bodies—just like those things capable of exercising the body—so too do we have knowledge of sensible things from [nature] itself. And the fear of time is due to the path arising from the passions, which some pass through quickly. And not only is it fortune, but he who partitions himself outside of nature and power, even being humble and weak in body, would not appear formidable. There is also that which appears concerning the eyes, like the circumference of a circle. For perhaps one would not say that the earth ever stands still. But the testing of wisdom is through the fear of eternal things. Here life has its end. But God wills nothing worse; wherefore He does not judge as evil that which proceeds from a pure conscience.