Exhortation to the Greeks 10.105

Blindness of the eyes and deafness of the ears are more painful than the evil one's other assaults; for the one takes away the sight of heaven, the other deprives us of divine learning. But you, crippled toward the truth, blind in mind and deaf in understanding, do not grieve, are not indignant; you have not desired to see heaven and the maker of heaven, nor have you sought to hear and learn the Creator and Father of all things, joining your choice to salvation. For nothing stands in the way of one who hastens to the knowledge of God, not lack of education, not poverty, not obscurity, not want of possessions; nor does anyone pray to obtain the truly real wisdom by “slaying with bronze” or with iron. For this, more than anything, is well said: “The good man is everywhere a savior.” For the one who is zealous for righteousness, as a lover of him who needs nothing, needs little himself, having stored up his blessedness in nothing else but in God himself, where there is no moth, no robber, no pirate, but the eternal Giver of good things. Rightly, then, you have been likened to those snakes whose ears are shut against the charmers. “Their wrath,” says the Scripture, “is like that of a serpent, like a deaf asp that stops its ears, which will not listen to the voice of the charmers.”