CHAPTER I

What most harms the fortunate

Among all of those things that important men are used to confronting, none of them may be thought more pernicious than that delightful allurement of fortune which turns one aside from the vision of truth. In so far as the world showers its riches and delights – those which renew and inflame the vicious eagerness for sensuous pleasure – the soul is tricked by a multiplicity of allurements into a captivity in which, alienated from itself, inner goodness decays as the desires are extended to the deceptions of various external things. If indeed virtue is hostile to prosperity, then wealth applauds its own in order to injure them; and this unhappy success follows in the path of fortune, so that in the end catastrophe occurs. Initially they accept a drink at the banquet and, when they have become inebriated, a lethal venom or something worse is intermixed. The more their appearance is illuminated, the denser is the fog that spreads across their stupefied eyes; the prevalence of darkness is therefore the disappearance of truth, and the virtues are cut down at the root, the vices yield a crop, the light of reason is extinguished, and the whole man is carried headlong into miserable misfortune.

In this way the rational creature is rendered brutish; the image of the Creator is distorted into something resembling the character of a beast; and man degenerates from his condition of dignity, acts in a conceited fashion, puffs up because of the honours collected, and by arrogance destroys understanding.