The Instructor 1.5.20

In the letter to the Romans the apostle declares that he rejoices over “the hearts of the innocent,” and he gives something like a definition of infants when he says: “I want you to be wise as to what is good, and guileless as to what is evil.” For we do not understand the word nēpios (“infant”) as a privative, though the grammarians lay down that nē is privative. If those who disparage our infancy call us foolish, see how they blaspheme against the Lord, supposing that those who have fled to God are foolish. But if, as is rather to be understood, they themselves take “infants” to mean the simple, let us rejoice in the name. For the minds that are infant are new minds, newly made wise amid the old folly, which have dawned according to the new covenant. For God has been known only recently, at the coming of Christ: “No one has known God except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals him.” The new people, then, are young, in contrast to the older people, having learned the new good things. And we have this ageless youth as the fullness of our life, in which we are always in the prime of understanding, always young, always gentle, always new. For those who have shared in the new Word must be new.