Therefore, amid the shadows of this life in which “we are absent from the Lord” as long as “we walk by faith and not by sight,” the Christian soul should consider itself desolate and should not cease from praying and from attending with the eye of faith to the word of the divine and sacred Scriptures.
If, then, the Lord counts the natural beauty of the body inferior to that of the soul, what thinks He of spurious beauty, rejecting utterly as He does all falsehood? "For we walk by faith, not by sight.".
"For we walk by faith, not by sight"
For we walk by faith, not by sight. For we do not yet behold the nature and beauty of God face to face. So Chrysostom, Theodoret, Theophylact, and Å’cumenius. Therefore they are wrong, whoever they be, that say that the Blessed see God, not directly in His Essence, but by means of some appearance which represents His Essence, in the same way that the appearance of colour received on the retina represents to the eye the colour of the wall. It is no such kind of sight that the Apostle here means, but that by which an object is plainly seen in itself. For faith is opposed to sight; but by faith we do not see, but darkly believe what is future and absent.
Nevertheless, when we hear at the same time of the justified and the glorified, let us not assign both the work of justification and glorification to the same moment in the present time. For the grace of justification is given in the present time, but the grace of glorification is saved as a future grace. The one is of faith, the other of sight. Paul says that now “we walk by faith, not by sight.” What the saints believe now, then they will see. .
That which is greater than all he has put last, for to be with Christ is better, than receiving an incorruptible [body.] But what he means is this: 'He quenches not our life that wars against and kills us; be not afraid; be of good courage even when hewn in pieces. For not only does he set you free from corruption and a burden, but he also sends you quickly to the Lord.' Wherefore neither did he say, while we 'are' in the body: as of those who are in a foreign and strange land. Knowing therefore that while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: we are of good courage, I say, and willing to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord. Do you see how keeping back what was painful, the names of death and the end, he has employed instead of them such as excite great longing , calling them presence with God; and passing over those things which are accounted to be sweet, the things of life, he has expressed them by painful names, calling the life here an absenc...
For the "house in heaven "with which we desire to be "clothed "is immortality; with which, when we are clothed, every weakness and mortality will be entirely "swallowed up "in it, being consumed by endless life. "For we walk by faith, not by sight; "
By faith we hope in God, for his form is not visible to us. But we believe that we shall dwell with him and that we shall see him as far as it is possible for a human being to see him. For Moses saw him when he was still in the body, and the angels see him in the way that is possible for them. .
