Wisdom 17

¹ Your judgements are indeed great and inexpressible, which is why undisciplined souls have gone astray.

² When impious men imagined they had the holy nation in their power, they themselves lay prisoners of the dark,[*a] in the fetters of long night, confined under their own roofs, banished from eternal providence.

³ While they thought to remain unnoticed with their secret sins, curtained by dark forgetfulness, they were scattered in fearful dismay, terrified by apparitions.

⁴ The hiding place sheltering them could not ward off their fear; terrifying noises echoed round them; and gloomy, grim-faced spectres haunted them.

⁵ No fire had power enough to give them light, nor could the brightly blazing stars illuminate that dreadful night –

⁶ only a great blaze, burning of its own accord, that, full of dread, shone through to them; And in their terror, once that sight had vanished, they thought what they had seen more terrible than ever.

⁷ Their magic arts proved utterly unavailing, their boasted cunning was ignominiously confounded;

⁸ for those who professed to drive out fears and disorders from sick souls, themselves fell sick of a ridiculous terror.

⁹ Even when there was nothing frightful to scare them, the prowling of beasts and the hissing of reptiles terrified them; they died convulsed with fright, refusing so much as to look at the air, which cannot be eluded anyhow!

¹⁰ Wickedness is confessedly very cowardly, and it condemns itself; under pressure from conscience it always assumes the worst.

¹¹ Fear, indeed, is nothing other than the abandonment of the supports offered by reason;

¹² the less you rely within yourself on these, the more alarming it is not to know the cause of your suffering.

¹³ And they, all locked in the same sleep, while that darkness lasted, which was in fact quite powerless and had issued from the depths of equally powerless Hades,

¹⁴ were now chased by monstrous spectres, now paralysed by fainting of their souls; for a sudden, unexpected terror had swept over them.

¹⁵ And thus, whoever it might be that fell there stayed clamped to the spot in this prison without bars.

¹⁶ Whether he was ploughman or shepherd, or someone working by himself, he was still overtaken and suffered the inevitable fate, for all had been bound by the one same chain of darkness.

¹⁷ The soughing of the wind, the tuneful noise of birds in the spreading branches, the measured beat of water in its powerful course, the harsh din of the rocky avalanche,

¹⁸ the invisible, swift course of bounding animals, the roaring of the savagest wild beasts, the echo rebounding from the clefts in the mountains, all held them paralysed with fear.

¹⁹ The whole world was shining with brilliant light and, unhindered, went on with its work;

²⁰ over them alone there spread a heavy darkness, image of the dark that would receive them. But heavier than the darkness, the burden they were to themselves.