Exhortation to Martyrdom 13

And according to certain deeper meanings Isaiah says: “I have given Egypt and Ethiopia and Syene as an exchange for you, in your place; since you became precious in my sight.” But if, loving learning in Christ and wishing at last to pass beyond learning “through a mirror” and “in a riddle,” you hasten to him who called you, you will very soon know the exact account of this and of the rest “face to face,” as friends of the Father and Teacher in heaven. For friends learn by sight and not through riddles, or by wisdom stripped of sounds, words, symbols, and types, coming into contact with the nature of intelligible things and the beauty of truth. If you believe that Paul was caught up “to the third heaven” and “was caught up into paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not permitted for a man to speak,” you will know as a consequence that you will at once know more and greater things than the inexpressible words then revealed to Paul, after which he came down from the third heaven; and after that knowledge you will not come down, if, taking up the cross, you follow Jesus, whom we have as “a great high priest who has passed through the heavens.” And you yourselves, not falling away from those who follow him, will pass through the heavens, passing beyond not only earth and the mysteries of earth but also the heavens and what concerns them. For there are stored up in God sights far greater than these, which no nature in a body can contain unless it has first been freed from every body. For I am persuaded that God reserves and keeps with himself things far greater than those which the sun and moon and the chorus of stars have seen, and even the holy angels, whom God made “spirit” and “a flame of fire,” so that he may reveal them when the whole “creation” is set free “from the bondage of the enemy into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”