“And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone, let us make for him a helper corresponding to him” (Gen. ii. 18). Why, prophet, is it not good that the man should be alone? Because, he says, it is good that the Alone should be alone: but God, being One, is alone and unique, and there is nothing like God. Hence, since it is good that He Who is should be alone—for indeed the statement “it is good” can be made about Him alone—it follows that it would not be good that the man should be alone. There is another way in which we may understand the statement that God is alone. It may mean that there was nothing with God before creation, and that, now the universe has come into being, nothing takes its place with Him; for there is absolutely nothing which He needs. A yet better interpretation is the following. God is alone, a Unity, in the sense that His nature is simple not composite, whereas each one of us and of all other created beings is made up of many things. I, for example, am many things in one. I am soul and body. The soul has rational and irrational parts, and the body, again, has different properties, warm and cold, heavy and light, dry and moist. But God is not a composite Being, consisting of many parts, nor is He mixed with anything else. For whatever is added to God, is either superior or inferior or equal to Him. But there is nothing equal or superior to God. And no lesser thing is resolved into Him. If He does so assimilate any lesser thing, He also will be lessened. And if He can be made less, He will also be capable of corruption; and even to imagine this would be blasphemous. The “one” and the “monad” are, therefore, the only standard for determining the category to which God belongs. Rather, we should say that the One God is the sole standard for the “monad.” For, like time, all number is subsequent to the universe; and God is prior to the universe, and is its Maker. It is not good that any man should be alone. For there are two races of men, the one made after the (Divine) Image, and the one moulded out of the earth. It is not good for the man made after the Image to be alone, because he yearns for the Image. For the image of God is a pattern of which copies are made, and every copy longs for that of which it is a copy, and its place is at its side. It is far less good for the man moulded of the earth to be alone. Indeed, it is impossible. For senses, passions, vices and ten thousand other presences are linked in closest fellowship with the mind so formed. With the second man a helper is associated. To begin with, the helper is a created one, for it says, “Let us make a helper for him”; and, in the next place, it comes after the one who is to be helped, for He had formed the mind before and is about to form its helper. In these details again, while using terms of outward nature, he is conveying a deeper meaning. For sense and the passions are helpers of the soul and come after the soul. We shall see how they help; let us fix our attention on their coming later than the soul. In the view of the best physicians and natural philosophers the heart is thought to be formed before the whole body, as a foundation, or like the keel of a ship, with the rest of the body built on it; and they assert that accordingly it still beats even after death, and decays after the body, as it came into existence before it. In just the same way, it is thought, the princely part of the soul is older than the soul as a whole, and the irrational portion younger. The prophet has not yet related the creation of this portion, but he is going to describe it. The irrational portion is sense and the passions which are the offspring of sense, unquestionably so if they are not the result of any choice of our own. This helper, then, is born later and is of course created. Now let us consider the point which we deferred, how the help is given. How does our mind apprehend the fact that an object is white or black, except by using sight as a helper? How does it become aware that the musician’s voice is sweet or on the other hand out of tune, except by using the sense of hearing as a helper? How does it recognize that perfumes are pleasant or disagreeable, except by using as an ally the sense of smell? How does it distinguish flavours, except by using taste as its helper? And how does it recognize things smooth and rough, except by touch? Moreover, there are, as I have said, helpers of another kind, namely the passions. For pleasure and desire contribute to the permanence of our kind: pain and fear are like bites or stings warning the soul to treat nothing carelessly: anger is a weapon of defence, which has done great favours for many: and so it is with the other passions. This also shows that the prophet was perfectly right in saying that the helper must be one “corresponding to him.” For this helper is truly intimately allied to the mind, like a brother of the same blood: for sense-perception and passions are parts and offspring of one soul with it. There are two species of this helper: the one has its sphere in the passions, the other in sense-perception. For now He will produce only the former, for he says, “And God moulded moreover out of the earth all the wild beasts of the field, and all the birds of the heaven, and led them to Adam, to see what he would call them: and whatever Adam called a living soul, this was its name” (Gen. ii. 19). You see who are our helpers, the wild beasts, the soul’s passions: for after saying, “Let us make a helper corresponding to him,” he adds the words, “He moulded the wild beasts,” implying that the wild beasts are our helpers. They are called our helpers not properly but only by a stretch of language; in reality they are found to be our actual enemies, just as the allies of states sometimes turn out to be traitors and deserters, and in private friendships flatterers turn out to be enemies instead of comrades. He uses the terms “heaven” and “field” as synonyms, meaning the mind. For the mind is like the field in having countless sproutings and upgrowths, and like heaven in having brilliant and god-like and blessed natures. The passions he likens to wild beasts and birds, because, savage and untamed as they are, they tear the soul to pieces, and because like winged things they land on the understanding; for the assault of the passions is violent and irresistible. The addition of “further” to “formed” is by no means superfluous. How do we see this? Because earlier, too, he mentions the forming of the wild beasts before the creation of man, as we see from these words referring to the sixth day: and He said, “Let the earth bring forth the living soul after its kind, four-footed animals and creeping things and wild beasts” (Gen. i. 24). Why, then, does He form other wild beasts now, and not rest satisfied with the earlier ones? From the ethical point of view what we must say is this. In the realm of created things the class or kind of wickedness is abundant. It follows that in this realm the worst things are always being produced. From the philosophical point of view our answer must be that on the earlier occasion, when He was engaged in the Work of the six days, He made the genera or kinds and the originals of the passions, whereas now He is fashioning the species as well. This is why he says, “He fashioned moreover.” That the things created in the first instance were genera is evident from the words used, “Let the earth bring forth the living soul,” not according to species but “according to kind.” And we find Him in every instance working in this way. He completes the genera before the species. He does so in the case of man. Having first fashioned man as a genus, in which the prophet says that there is the male and the female genus, He afterwards makes Adam, the finished form or species. The prophet has now dealt with helpers of this sort; he defers the other sort, I mean sense-perception, until the Creator undertakes to fashion woman. Having deferred that subject, he goes on to a systematic treatment of the giving of names. Here both his literal statement and his symbolic interpretation deserve our admiration. What we admire in the Lawgiver’s literal statement is his ascription to the first man of the fixing of names. Indeed Greek philosophers said that those who first assigned names to things were wise men. Moses did better than they did, first of all in ascribing it not to some of the men of old but to the first man created. His purpose was that, as Adam was formed to be the beginning from which all others drew their birth, so too no one but he should be regarded as the beginning of the use of speech: for even language would not have existed, if there had not been names. Again, if many people had given names to things, the names would inevitably have been incongruous and ill-matched, different persons imposing them on different principles, whereas the naming by one man was bound to bring about harmony between name and thing, and the name given was sure to be a symbol, the same for all men, of any object to which the name was attached or of the meaning attaching to the name. In the domain of ethics, what he says amounts to this. We often use “τί” (= “what”) for “διὰ τί” (“by reason of what”), as “what (i.e. why) have you bathed?” “What (i.e. ‘why’) are you walking?” “What (i.e. ‘why’) are you conversing?” In all these cases “what” stands for “because of what.” When the prophet says “to see what he would call them” you should understand something equivalent to ‘why the mind would call and invite to it and greet’ each of these objects, whether only for the sake of what it cannot do without, seeing that all that is mortal is necessarily bound up with passions and vices, or also for the sake of what is in excess of reasonable needs; and whether to satisfy the needs of flesh and blood, or because it deems them good and admirable above all things. For example. A created being cannot help making use of pleasure. The worthless man will use it as a perfect good, but the man of worth simply as a necessity, remembering that apart from pleasure nothing in mortal kind comes into existence. Again, the worthless man counts the acquisition of wealth a most perfect good; the man of worth regards it as just necessary and serviceable and no more. No wonder then that God wishes to see and ascertain how the mind invites and welcomes each of these, whether as good, or as indifferent, or as bad but at all events as serviceable. So it came about that whatever he called to himself and greeted as living soul, counting it equal in worth to the soul, became the name not only of the thing called but of him who called it. For example, if he welcomed pleasure, he was called pleasure-loving; if desire, desire-ridden; if licence, licentious; if cowardice, cowardly; and so on. For, just as the man whose quality is determined by the virtues is from them called wise or sober-minded or just or brave, so from the vices he is called unjust and foolish and unmanly, whenever he has invited to himself and given a hearty welcome to the corresponding dispositions. “And God brought a trance upon Adam, and he fell asleep; and He took one of his sides” and what follows (Gen. ii. 21). Taken literally, these words have the nature of a myth. For how could anyone admit that a woman, or a human being at all, came into existence out of a man’s side? And what was there to hinder the First Cause from creating woman, as He created man, out of the earth? For not only was the Maker the same Being, but the material too, out of which every particular kind was fashioned, was practically unlimited. And why, when there were so many parts to choose from, did He form the woman not from some other part but from the side? And which side did he take? For we may assume that only two are indicated, as there is in fact nothing to suggest a large number of them. Did he take the left or the right side? If He filled up with flesh (the place of) the one which He took, are we to suppose that the one which He left was not made of flesh? In fact our sides are twins in all their parts and are both made of flesh. What then are we to say? “Sides” is a term of ordinary life for “strength.” To say that a man has “sides” is equivalent to saying that he is strong, we say of a powerful athlete “he has stout sides,” and to say that a singer has “sides” is the same as saying that he has great lung power in singing. Having said this, we must go on to remark that the mind, while still unclothed and unconfined by the body, (and it is of the mind when not so confined that he is speaking) has many powers. It has the power of holding together, of growing, of conscious life, of thought, and countless other powers, varying both in species and genus. Lifeless things, like stones and blocks of wood, share with all others the power of holding together, which the bones in us, not unlike stones, also share. “Growth” extends to plants, and there are parts in us, such as our nails and hair, resembling plants; “growth” is coherence capable of moving itself. Conscious life is the power to grow, with the additional power of receiving impressions and being the subject of impulses. This is shared also by creatures without reason. Indeed our mind contains a part that is analogous to the conscious life of a creature without reason. Again, the power of thinking is peculiar to the mind; it may well be shared by beings more akin to God, but among mortal beings it is peculiar to man. This power or faculty is twofold. We are rational beings on the one hand because we partake of mind, and on the other because we are capable of discourse. Well, there is also another power or faculty in the soul, closely akin to these, namely that of receiving sense-impressions, and it is of this that the prophet is speaking. For his immediate concern is just this, to indicate the origin of active sense-perception. And logical sequence leads him to do so. For the creation of the mind had to be followed immediately by the creation of sense-perception, to be its helper and ally. Having finished the creation of the mind, then, He fashions the product of creative skill that comes next to it in both order and power, namely active sense-perception, with a view to the completeness of the whole soul, and with a view to its apprehension of objects presented to it. How, then, is it produced? As the prophet himself again says, it is when the mind has fallen asleep. As a matter of fact it is when the mind has gone to sleep that perception begins, for conversely when the mind wakes up perception is quenched. This is proved by the fact that whenever we wish to get an accurate understanding of a subject we hurry off to a lonely spot; we close our eyes; we stop our ears; we say “good-bye” to our perceptive faculties. So then, we see that, when the mind is astir and awake, the power of perception is suppressed. There is another point to notice. Let us see what happens to the mind in sleep. When the perceptive faculty has been set astir and aflame, owing to the eye contemplating the masterpieces of painters or sculptors, does not the mind remain inactive, and cease to exercise itself on objects of thought? And when the ear is intent on the tunefulness of a voice, can the mind be employing its reasoning power upon any of the subjects belonging to its sphere? Of course not. And the mind is even more completely out of work when the sense of taste has fully roused itself and is gorging itself with all that delights the appetite. And this is the reason why Moses, fearing that the mind would not only go to sleep but absolutely die, says in another place, “And you shall have a shovel upon your belt; and it shall be, when you sit down abroad, you shall dig with it and cover over your unseemliness” (Deut. xxiii. 13). He uses the term “shovel” figuratively for reason, which digs out hidden matters. And he tells the man to wear it upon his passion, which must be bound up and which he must not allow to be loose and slack. And this girding must be put into practice whenever the mind, relaxing from the strain of its own objects, lowers itself to the passions, and “sits down abroad,” giving itself up to be drawn by bodily necessity. And this is how the matter stands. Whenever the mind forgets itself amid the luxuries of a festive gathering and is mastered by all that leads to pleasure, we are in bondage and we leave our “unseemliness” uncovered. But if the reason proves strong enough to purge the passion, we neither go on drinking till we are drunk, nor eat so greedily as to grow wanton, but we banish folly and take our food soberly. Thus the wakefulness of the senses means sleep for the mind, and the wakefulness of the mind a time of leisure for the senses; just as, when the sun has risen, the lights of the other heavenly bodies are invisible; when it has set, they appear. The mind, like the sun, when awake, throws the senses into the shade, but if it goes to sleep, it causes them to shine out. Having said this, we must show how the terms used agree with it. “God cast,” he says, “a trance upon Adam, and he went to sleep” (Gen. ii. 21). He is quite right to use this language. For the mind’s trance and change is its sleep, and it falls into a trance when it ceases to be engaged with the objects appropriate to it; and when it is not at work at these, it is sleeping. He is also right to say that this change or turning which he undergoes is not of his own doing but of God’s; that it is God who “casts it on him,” that is, brings and sends it on him. The fact is this. For if the change were in our hands I would resort to it when I wished, and when I did not deliberately choose it I would remain unturned. But as it is, the change is actually repugnant to me, and many times, when I wish to entertain some fitting thought, I am drenched by a flood of unfitting matters pouring over me; and conversely, when I am on the point of admitting a conception of something vile, I have washed the vile thing away with wholesome thoughts, God having by His grace poured upon my soul a sweet draught in place of the bitter one. Now every created thing must necessarily undergo change, for this is its property, even as unchangeableness is the property of God. But while some, once changed, remain so until they are entirely destroyed, others remain so only long enough to experience what all flesh is liable to, and these recover at once. This is why Moses says, “He will not permit the destroyer to come into your houses to strike you” (Exod. xii. 23): for He does indeed permit the destroyer—(“destruction” being the change or turning of the soul)—to enter into the soul, so that He may make it evident that what is peculiar to created things is there; but God will not let the offspring of “the seeing” Israel be changed in such a way as to receive his death-blow by the change, but will force him to rise and emerge as though from deep water and recover. “He took one of his sides” (Gen. ii. 21). Of the many faculties of the mind He took one, the faculty of perception. “Took” must not be understood as equivalent to “removed,” but as equivalent to “enrolled,” “registered,” as we find it used elsewhere: “take the sum of the spoils of the captivity” (Numb. xxxi. 26). What idea is it, then, that he wants to convey? The word “perception” is used in two ways, first in the sense of a condition, in which sense it is ours when we are asleep, secondly in the sense of an activity. From perception in the former sense, as it is a state, we derive no benefit, for it does not enable us to apprehend the objects about us. It is from the second kind of perception, as an activity, that we get benefit, for this makes possible our apprehension of the objects of sense-perception. Having, then, brought into being the former sort of perception as a quiescent condition, at the time when He was bringing the mind itself into being—for He made the mind with many faculties lying dormant—now He wishes to produce perception as an activity. Active perception comes about when quiescent perception has been set in motion and extended to reach the flesh and the perceptive organs. For just as growth comes about when seed is set in motion, so activity or actuality comes about when a quiescent condition is set in motion. “And he filled up flesh in its stead” (Gen. ii. 21), that is to say He fulfilled perception that was only a state by leading it on to be an activity, and extending it till it reached the flesh and the whole surface of the body. And so he adds the words, “He built it to be a woman” (Gen. ii. 22), proving by this that the most proper and exact name for sense-perception is “woman.” For just as the man shows himself in activity and the woman in passivity, so the province of the mind is activity, and that of the perceptive sense passivity, as in woman. It is easy to learn this from what is before our eyes. Sight is in a passive relation to the objects of sight that set it moving, white, black, and the rest. Hearing, again, is affected by sounds, the sense of taste by flavours, the sense of smell by odours, and the sense of touch by things rough and smooth; and the faculties of perception are all dormant, until what is to set each of them in motion approaches it from outside. “And he led her to Adam; and Adam said, This is now bone out of my bones and flesh out of my flesh” (Gen. ii. 22, 23). God leads active perception to the mind, knowing that its movement and apprehensive power must revert to the mind as their starting-point. When the mind sees what it had before as a potentiality and a dormant state now become a finished product, an activity, and in motion, it marvels at it, and cries aloud, declaring that it is not foreign to it but in the fullest sense its own, for it says, “This is bone out of my bones,” that is, power out of my powers, for “bone” is here used as “power and strength”, “and feeling out of my feelings”; “and flesh,” he says, “out of my flesh”; for the perceptive faculty bears nothing that it feels without the mind, for the mind is to it a fountain-head and a basis on which it rests. It is worthwhile to consider why the word “now” was added: for what he says is, “This is now bone out of my bones.” Perception by itself is now, subsisting only in relation to the present time. For whereas past, present, and future are within the scope of the mind, as it grasps things present, remembers things past, and looks forward to things future, perception, on the other hand, has no power to reach out to future things by experiencing something corresponding to hope or expectation, and it does not remember things past; it is so constituted as to be affected only by what is present and sets it in motion at the moment. For instance, the eye has a sensation of white now under the influence of the white that is present, but it feels no effect from what is not present. The mind, on the contrary, is set in motion by what is not present as well: if it is past, by way of memory; if future, by building hopes and expectations on it. “To this one shall be given the title ‘woman’” (Gen. ii. 23), which amounts to saying that perception shall be called “woman” for this reason, because “this one is taken” out of the man that sets it in motion. Why, then, is “this one” added? Because there is another perception, not taken from the mind, but brought into being together with it. For there are, as I have said already, two perceptions, one existing as a quiescent condition, the other as an activity. The one that exists as a quiescent condition, then, is not taken out of the man, that is to say the mind, but comes into being with it. For the mind, as I have pointed out, when it came into existence, came into existence in association with many potentialities and conditions, those of reason, animal life, and growth, and so also with the potentiality of perception. But the one that exists as an activity comes out of the mind. For it was extended out of the perception which is in the mind as a condition, so that it might become an activity. Thus the second one, the one that is characterized by movement, has been produced out of the mind itself. But anyone who supposes that, strictly speaking, anything at all derives its birth from the mind or from himself is a shallow thinker. Do you not see that perception in the person of Rachel who sits upon the teraphim, is rebuked by “the seeing one,” when she imagines that movements have their source in mind? For she says, “Give me children; if you do not, I shall die” (Gen. xxx. 1); but he answers, “Woman, full of false fancies, the mind is the origin of nothing, but God who is antecedent to the mind is the only cause”; and so he adds, “Am I in the place of God who deprived you of the fruit of the womb?” (ibid. 2). But Scripture will give evidence in the case of Leah that it is God who brings about birth, when it says, “And the Lord seeing that Leah was hated opened her womb, but Rachel was barren” (Gen. xxix. 31). The opening of the womb is man’s proper function. But mortal kind is by nature prone to hate virtue, and so God has bestowed honour on it and allows the hated one to bear the first-born. He says elsewhere, “If a man has two wives, one of them beloved and one of them hated, and they shall bear children to him and the first-born son be the son of the hated wife... he shall not be able to give the right of the first-born to the son of the beloved wife, overlooking the son of the hated one who is the first-born” (Deut. xxi. 15, 16): for the offspring of the hated virtue are first of all and most perfect of all, while the offspring of the well-loved pleasure are last of all. “For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cling to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh” (Gen. ii. 24). For the sake of sense-perception the Mind, when it has become her slave, abandons both God the Father of the universe, and God’s excellence and wisdom, the Mother of all things, and clings to and becomes one with sense-perception and is resolved into sense-perception so that the two become one flesh and one experience. Observe that it is not the woman that clings to the man, but conversely the man to the woman, Mind to Sense-perception. For when that which is superior, namely Mind, becomes one with that which is inferior, namely Sense-perception, it resolves itself into the order of flesh which is inferior, into sense-perception, the moving cause of the passions. But if the inferior Sense follows the superior Mind, there will no longer be flesh, but both of them will be Mind. The man the prophet speaks of, then, is the one just described; he prefers the love of his passions to the love of God. But there is a different man, one who has made the opposite choice, namely Levi, who “said to his father and his mother ‘I have not seen you,’ and did not know his brothers, and disclaimed his sons” (Deut. xxxiii. 9). This man forsakes father and mother, his mind and material body, for the sake of having as his portion the one God, “for the Lord Himself is his portion” (Deut. x. 9). Passion becomes the portion of the lover of passion, but the portion of Levi the lover of God is God. Do you not see again that he prescribes that on the tenth day of the seventh month they should bring two goats, “one portion for the Lord and one for the averter of evil” (Lev. xvi. 8). For the portion of the lover of passion is truly a passion that needs an averter. “And the two were naked, Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed.” “Now the serpent was the most subtle of all the beasts that were upon the earth, which the Lord God had made” (Gen. ii. 25, iii. 1). The mind that is clothed neither in vice nor in virtue, but absolutely stripped of either, is naked, just as the soul of an infant, since it has no part in either good or evil, is bared and stripped of coverings: for these are the soul’s clothes, by which it is sheltered and concealed. Goodness is the garment of the worthy soul, evil the garment of the worthless soul. Now there are three ways in which a soul is made naked. One is when it continues without change and is barren of all vices, and has divested itself of all the passions and flung them away. For this reason “Moses fixes his tent outside the camp, a long way from the camp, and it was called the tent of testimony” (Exod. xxxiii. 7). This is what it means. The soul that loves God, having disrobed itself of the body and the objects dear to the body and fled far away from them, gains a fixed and assured settlement in the perfect ordinances of virtue. So God also bears witness to it that it loves noble things; “for,” he says, “it was called the tent of witness.” He does not mention who calls it so, in order that the soul may be stirred up to consider who it is that bears witness to virtue-loving minds. This is why the high priest shall not enter the Holy of Holies in his robe (Lev. xvi. 1 ff.), but laying aside the garment of opinions and impressions of the soul, and leaving it behind for those that love outward things and value semblance above reality, shall enter naked with no coloured borders or sound of bells, to pour as a libation the blood of the soul and to offer as incense the whole mind to God our Saviour and Benefactor. Nadab and Abihu, too, who had drawn near to God and had forsaken the mortal life and become partakers of the life immortal are seen naked of vain and mortal glory. For those who carried them away would not have borne them in their coats (Lev. x. 5), had they not become naked by bursting every bond of passion and of bodily constraint, in order that their nakedness and freedom from the body should not be debased by the irruption of impious thoughts. For leave to contemplate the secret things of God must not be given to all, but only to those who are able to hide and guard them. And so Mishael and Elzaphan do not take them up in their own coats, but in those of Nadab and Abihu, who had been devoured by fire and been taken up (into heaven). For having stripped themselves of all that covered them, they offered their nakedness to God, but their coats they left behind for Mishael and Elzaphan. Now coats are those parts of the irrational by which the rational was hidden. Abraham too becomes naked when the words have been spoken to him, “Go forth out of your country and your kindred” (Gen. xii. 1). Isaac, for his part, does not become naked, but is always naked and without body, for an injunction has been given him not to go down into Egypt (Gen. xxvi. 2), and “Egypt” is the body. Jacob, again, loves nakedness of the soul, for his smoothness signifies nakedness. “For Esau,” we read, “was a hairy man, but Jacob a smooth man” (Gen. xxvii. 11), and accordingly he has “Leah” as wife. This is one form, the noblest form, of stripping or becoming naked. The second is of the opposite nature, a deprivation of virtue due to a turning or change of condition, when the soul becomes foolish and deranged. This kind of stripping is experienced by Noah, who is made naked when he has drunk wine. But, thanks be to God, the change of condition and the stripping of the mind which followed the deprivation of virtue did not spread abroad and reach those outside, but stayed in the house, for what is said is “he was made naked in his house” (Gen. ix. 21): for the wise man, if he does commit sin, does not run riot, as the bad man does. The evil of the one has spread abroad; the evil of the other has been held in check; so he becomes sober again, that is to say, he repents and recovers as from an illness. Let us consider in more detail the fact that the stripping takes place in the house. When the soul in its perversion only intends some outrage, but does not follow it up so as to complete it in action, the sin has been committed in the soul’s abode and house. But if, in addition to designing the bad deed, it goes on to carry out its design and do the thing, the unrighteous act has been spread out of doors as well. This is why a curse is pronounced on Canaan: he reported the change of the soul abroad. This means that he gave it fuller scope and worked it out further, adding a further evil to the evil wish, namely its accomplishment in deeds. Shem and Japhet on the other hand receive praise for not joining in the soul’s act but covering over its sad change. For this reason also the vows and determinations of the soul are annulled, when they have been made in the house of father or husband (Numb. xxx. 4 ff.), if the reason and reflection do not keep silent and so add their weight to the soul’s failure, but remove the offence; for in that case the Lord of all also “shall cleanse her.” But he does not remove the vow of a widow or of a woman who has been cast off; “for whatever vows she shall have vowed,” he says, “against her soul, abide for her” (Numb. xxx. 10). And this is reasonable. For if she has been cast off and gone forth to the parts outside, not merely turning but sinning by overt deeds, she remains incurable, with no part in a husband’s admonition and deprived of her father’s persuasion. A third form of producing nakedness is the middle or neutral one. Here the mind is irrational and has no part as yet either in virtue or in vice. It is of this form that the prophet is speaking. The infant, too, shares in this. Accordingly the words, “The two were naked, both Adam and his wife,” amount to this: neither mind nor sense was performing its functions, the one being bare and barren of mental action and the other of the activity of sense-perception. Let us look again at the words, “they were not ashamed.” The words suggest three points for consideration: shamelessness, and modesty, and absence of both shamelessness and modesty. Shamelessness, then, belongs to the worthless man, modesty to the man of worth, and feeling neither modesty nor shamelessness to the man who is incapable of right apprehension and of due assent to it, and this man is the prophet’s subject at this point. For someone who has not yet come to apprehend good and evil cannot possibly be either shameless or modest. Examples of shamelessness are all those improper actions in which the mind uncovers shameful things that it ought to hide from view, and boasts of them and prides itself on them. Even in the case of Miriam, when she spoke against Moses, it is said, “If her father had only spat in her face, would she not feel shame for seven days?” (Numb. xii. 14). For sense-perception was truly shameless and bold in daring to decry and find fault with Moses for the very thing for which he deserved praise. In comparison with him, who was “faithful in all God’s house” (ibid.), the God and Father counted sense-perception as nothing; and it was God Himself who wedded Moses to the Ethiopian woman, who stands for resolve that is unalterable, intense, and fixed. Moses deserves high praise for taking the Ethiopian woman to himself, that is, the nature that has been tried by fire and cannot be changed. For just as the part of the eye that sees is black, so the soul’s power of vision is given the title of woman of Ethiopia. Why then, since the results of wickedness are many, has he mentioned only one, the one that attends disgraceful conduct, saying “they were not ashamed,” but not saying “they did not commit injustice,” or “they did not sin,” or “they did not err”? The reason is easy to find. By the only true God, I consider nothing so shameful as supposing that I exert my mind and senses. My own mind the author of its exertion? How can it be? Does it even know about itself, what it is or how it came into existence? Sense-perception the origin of the perceiving by sense? How could it be said to be so, since it lies beyond the knowledge both of itself and of the mind? Do you not see that the mind that thinks it exercises itself is often found to be without mental power in scenes of gluttony, drunkenness and folly? Where does the exercise of mind show itself then? And is perceptive sense not often robbed of the power of perceiving? There are times when, though seeing, we do not see, and though hearing, do not hear, whenever the mind, breaking off its attention for a moment, is brought to bear on some other mental object. As long, then, as they are naked, the mind without self-exertion and the perceptive sense without perceiving, there is nothing shameful in them: but when they have begun to apprehend, they fall into shameful and wanton conduct, for they will often be found showing silliness and folly rather than healthy knowledge, not only in times of loathsome surfeit and depression and mad fooling but also in the rest of their life. For when bodily sense is in command, the mind is enslaved and heeds none of its proper objects; but when the mind is in the ascendant, the bodily sense is seen to have nothing to do and to be powerless to lay hold of any object of sense-perception. “Now the serpent was the most subtle of all the beasts on the earth, which the Lord God had made” (Gen. iii. 1). Since two things, mind and bodily sense, had already come into being, and these were naked in the way described above, there had to be a third subsistence, namely pleasure, to bring both of them together to apprehend the objects of mental and of bodily perception. For neither could the mind apart from bodily sense apprehend an animal or a plant or a stone or a log or any bodily shape whatever, nor could the bodily sense apart from the mind maintain the act of perceiving. Since, then, both of these had to come together to apprehend the objects around them, what brought them together but a third thing, a bond of love and desire, under the rule and dominion of pleasure, to which the prophet gave the figurative name of a serpent? God the Framer of living beings arranged the order in which they were created exceedingly well. First He made mind, the man, for mind is most venerable in a human being, then bodily sense, the woman, then after them in the third place pleasure. But they differ in age only potentially, as objects of thought; in actual time they are equal in age. For the soul brings all together with herself, some parts by virtue of actual existence, others by virtue of the potential to arrive, even if they have not yet reached their consummation. The reason pleasure is likened to a serpent is this. Like the serpent’s movement, the movement of pleasure is tortuous and variable. To begin with, it glides along in five ways, for pleasures are occasioned by sight and by hearing and by taste and by smell and by touch; but those connected with sexual intercourse prove the most violent and intense of all, and this is the method ordained by Nature for the reproduction of the type. Furthermore, the fact that pleasure works its way around all the organs of the irrational portion of the soul is not the only reason we call her variable; we also call her so because she glides with many coils around each part. For instance, varied pleasures come through sight: those given by every kind of painting and sculpture, and by all the other artistic creations that charm the eye in one art after another; by the changes, too, that plants go through as they shoot up, bloom, and bear fruit; by the beauty of animals seen in so many forms. Similarly the ear gets pleasure from the flute, from the harp, from every kind of instrument, from the tuneful voices of creatures without reason, swallows, nightingales, other birds which Nature has made musical; from the euphonious speech of beings endowed with reason, from musicians as they exercise their histrionic powers in comedy, tragedy, and all that is put on the stage. What need is there to illustrate my point from the pleasures of the table? There are, roughly speaking, as many varieties of pleasure as there are dishes set before us, stirring our senses with their delicious flavours. Since pleasure, then, is so variable a thing, was it not fitting to compare it to a tortuous animal, the serpent? For this reason, too, when the part of us that corresponds to the turbulent mob of a city pines for the dwellings in Egypt, that is, in the corporeal mass, it encounters pleasures which bring death, not the death which severs soul from body, but the death which ruins the soul by vice. For we read, “And the Lord sent among the people the deadly serpents, and they bit the people, and many people of the children of Israel died” (Numb. xxi. 6). Indeed, nothing brings death on a soul as surely as immoderate indulgence in pleasures. What dies is not the ruling part in us, but the part that is under rule, the part that is like the vulgar herd. And it will incur death for as long as it fails to repent and acknowledge its fall. For they came to Moses saying, “We have sinned because we spoke against the Lord, and against you. Pray therefore to the Lord, and let Him take away the serpents from us” (ibid. 7). They do well to say, not “We spoke against, we sinned” but “We sinned, we spoke against.” For it is when the mind has sinned and ceased to cling to virtue that it blames God’s ways, fastening its own defection on God. How, then, is their suffering healed? By making another serpent, opposite in kind to the serpent of Eve, namely the principle of self-mastery. For self-mastery runs counter to pleasure, a variable virtue to a variable affection, and a virtue that defends itself against its enemy, pleasure. So then God tells Moses to make the serpent that expresses self-mastery, and says: “Make for yourself a serpent and set it upon a standard” (ibid. 8). Notice that Moses makes this serpent for no one else but himself, for God’s bidding is “Make it for yourself.” This is so that you may know that self-mastery is not the possession of every man, but only of the man beloved by God. We must consider why Moses makes a serpent of brass, when he was given no direction about the material. These may be the reasons. In the first place, matter is not an element in God’s gifts that makes them this or that sort; but the gifts of us mortals are always seen as embodied in matter. A second reason: Moses loves excellences without bodily form, whereas our souls, being unable to get out of our bodies, crave excellence in bodily shape. But the principle of self-mastery, being forcible and unyielding, is likened to the strong and firm substance of brass, perhaps also because, whereas the self-mastery found in the man beloved by God is most precious and like gold, the self-mastery found in the man who has absorbed wisdom by gradual progress holds second place. Everyone, then, “whom a serpent has bitten, when he looks at it, shall live” (ibid.). This is quite true. For if the mind, when bitten by pleasure, the serpent of Eve, succeeds in seeing with the soul the beauty of self-mastery, the serpent of Moses, and through seeing this sees God Himself, he shall live;⁠a only let him look and take careful note. Do you not notice that Sarah, that is, dominant wisdom, says: “For whoever shall hear of it shall rejoice with me” (Gen. xxi. 6)? Just suppose that someone has succeeded in hearing that Virtue has given birth to Happiness (Isaac). At once he will sing a hymn of sympathetic joy. As, then, fellowship in joy belongs to the one who has heard of Isaac’s birth, so escape from death belongs to the one who has looked with clear vision on self-mastery and God. But many souls, after falling in love with endurance and self-mastery and being stripped of passions, nevertheless experience the power of God and are turned toward the lower way, the Master making a sharp distinction between Himself and His creation. He Himself always stands steadfast, while His creation wavers and inclines in opposite directions. For the prophet says: “Who led you through that great and terrible wilderness, where there was biting serpent and scorpion and drought, where there was no water, who brought out a spring of water for you from the hard rock, who fed you with manna in the wilderness, which your fathers did not know” (Deut. viii. 15 f.). You see that it is not only when attracted by the passions of Egypt that the soul encounters the serpents; in a wilderness, too, it is bitten by pleasure, that subtle and snake-like passion. And pleasure’s mode of action has received a most appropriate name, for it is here called a bite. But it is not only those in a wilderness who are bitten by pleasure, but also those who are prey to scattering. For many times I myself have left friends and kinsfolk and country and gone into a wilderness to give my attention to some subject that demanded contemplation, and gained nothing from doing so; instead my mind, scattered or bitten by passion, has gone off to matters of the opposite kind. Sometimes, on the other hand, in the middle of a vast crowd I have a collected mind. God has dispersed the crowd that besets the soul and taught me that favourable and unfavourable conditions are brought about not by differences of place but by God, who moves and leads the chariot of the soul in whatever way He pleases. To return to what I was saying, the soul encounters a scorpion, which is “scattering,” in the wilderness, and the drought of the passions seizes it, until God sends forth the stream from His strong wisdom and quenches with unfailing health the thirst of the soul that had turned from Him. For the flinty rock is the wisdom of God, which He marked off from His powers as highest and chief,⁠b and from which He satisfies the thirsty souls that love God. And when they have been given water to drink, they are filled also with the manna, the most generic of substances, for the manna is called “somewhat,” and that suggests the summum genus. But the primal existence is God, and next to Him is the Word of God; all other things subsist in word only, and in their active effects some of them are as good as non-subsisting. Now note a difference between the one who turns aside in the wilderness and the one who does so in Egypt. The one experiences deadly serpents, that is, insatiable pleasures that inflict death; but the disciplined one is only bitten and scattered by pleasure, not put to death. And while the one is cured by self-mastery, that is, the serpent of brass made by the wise Moses, God makes the other drink a most excellent draught, namely wisdom from the fountain that He drew out of His own wisdom. Pleasure, the serpent-like one, does not keep away even from Moses, most beloved of God; this is what we read: “If therefore they say, ‘God has not appeared to you,’ and do not believe me and do not listen to my voice, what shall I say to them? And the Lord said to Moses, ‘What is that in your hand?’ And he said, ‘A rod.’ And He said, ‘Throw it on the ground.’ And he threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent, and Moses fled from it. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand and take hold of its tail’ (and he stretched out his hand and took hold of its tail, and it became a rod in his hand): that they may believe you” (Exod. iv. 1 ff.). How should one come to believe God? By learning that all other things change but He is unchangeable. Therefore God asks the wise man what is in his hand, or in the active life of his soul, for the hand represents activity; and he answers, “Schooling,” giving it the name of a rod. So Jacob too, the supplanter of the passions, says, “For in my rod I crossed this Jordan” (Gen. xxxii. 10). The meaning of Jordan is “descent” or “coming down.” And all that is done under the impulse of vice and passion belongs to the nature that is down below, earthly and corruptible. Mind, the disciplined One, crosses over these in schooling himself. To take the words to mean that he crossed the river with a staff in his hand would be tame. The reply of Moses, beloved of God, is therefore good; for in truth the conduct of the virtuous man leans on discipline as on a rod, settling and allaying the tumult and tossing of the soul. This rod becomes a serpent when it is thrown away, and naturally so; for if the soul casts away discipline, it at once becomes a lover of pleasure in place of a lover of virtue. And so Moses flees from it; for the lover of virtue runs away from passion and pleasure. But note, God does not applaud his flight. For while it suits you well, my mind, since you are not yet made perfect, to get practice by fleeing and running away from the passions, it is fitting for Moses, the perfect one, not to give up the warfare against them, but to resist them and fight it out. Otherwise, finding nothing to alarm or to stop them, they will make their way up to the very citadel of the soul, and storm and plunder the whole soul like a lawless ruler. That is also why God tells him to “lay hold of the tail.” This means, “Do not let pleasure’s opposition and her savagery daunt you. That is the very part to make for. Grip it fast and quell it; for then there shall be once more a rod instead of a serpent; that is, there shall be discipline in your hand instead of pleasure.” But it is “in the hand,” in the doing of the wise man, that this will happen. This is quite true. It would be impossible to lay hold of pleasure and master it if the hand were not first stretched out, that is, if the soul did not first acknowledge that all its achievements and successes are due to God’s impelling force and refer nothing to itself. The man whose eyes are open determines to run away from this serpent, and he fashions another, the principle of self-mastery, that serpent of brass, so that the man who has been bitten by pleasure may live the real life when he sees self-mastery. Jacob prays that Dan may become such a serpent, and speaks in this way: “Dan shall judge his people, As if indeed one tribe of Israel,” and “Let Dan become a serpent in the way, Seated on the beaten track, biting the horse’s heel, And the horseman shall fall backward, Waiting for the salvation of the Lord.” (Gen. xlix. 16-18.) Of the sons born to Leah, Issachar is Jacob’s fifth genuine son, or the seventh if Zilpah’s two sons are counted in. But Jacob’s fifth son is Dan, by Bilhah, Rachel’s handmaid. We shall discover the occasion of this remark in my special treatise on the subject. The subject of Dan demands further study. The soul bears two kinds of offspring, the one divine, the other perishable. She has already conceived the better kind, and with it she stops bearing. For once the soul had come to make full submission and acknowledgement to God, there was no better possession for it to go on to gain. This is why she ceased when she had borne Judah, the spirit of praise and acknowledgement. The soul now goes on to fashion the mortal race. The mortal subsists by swallowing. For taste, like a foundation, is what causes living creatures to go on living. And Bilhah means “swallowing.” From this woman springs Dan, whose name signifies sifting or distinguishing: for this race distinguishes and separates things immortal from those that are mortal. So his father prays that he may prove a lover of self-mastery. But for Judah he will offer no such prayer, for Judah already has the property of praising and pleasing God. So he says, “Let Dan become a serpent on the road.” The soul is our road; for just as on the roads one can see the distinctions among existences: lifeless, living; irrational, rational; good, bad; slave, free; young, or older; male, female; foreign, or native; sickly, healthy; maimed, entire; so in the soul too there are lifeless, incomplete, diseased, enslaved, female, and countless other movements full of disabilities; and on the other hand, movements that are living, entire, male, free, sound, elder, good, genuine, and, in a real sense, of the fatherland. Let the principle of self-mastery, then, become a serpent on the soul whose road lies through all the circumstances of life and let it seat itself on the well-worn track. What does this mean? The path of virtue is unworn, for few tread it, while that of vice is well worn. He calls on him to surround it with his ambush and lie in wait on the beaten road of passion and vice, on which reasoning powers that flee from virtue wear out their life. “Biting the horse’s heel.” It is quite fitting that the character that upsets the stability of created and perishable life attacks the heel. The passions are likened to a horse. For passion, like a horse, is a four-legged creature, impulsive, full of wilfulness, and naturally restive. But the principle of self-mastery loves to bite and wound and destroy passion. When passion has stumbled with its heel bitten, “the horseman shall fall backwards.” We must understand by “the horseman” the mind that is mounted on the passions, which falls off the passions when they are brought to a reckoning and overthrown. It is good that the soul does not fall forwards: he must not get ahead of the passions but stay behind them, and he shall learn self-control. And what is said here rests on sound principle. For if the mind, after starting out to do wrong, drops behind and falls backwards, it will not do the wrong deed; and if, after experiencing an impulse to an irrational passion, it does not follow it up, but stays behind, it will reap the fairest reward, namely exemption from passion. That is why the prophet, understanding the falling backwards to be escape from the passions, adds the words, “waiting for the salvation of the Lord”: for the one who falls away from the passions and falls short of carrying them out in act is indeed saved by God. May my soul have such a fall, and never mount the beast of passion, wild like a bounding capering horse, so that, having waited for God's salvation, it may attain bliss. This explains why Moses in the Song praises God because “He cast horse and rider into the sea” (Exod. xv. 1). He means that God cast to utter ruin and the bottomless abyss the four passions and the wretched mind mounted on them. This is indeed practically the chief point of the whole Song, to which all else is subsidiary. And it is true; for if the soul is won by exemption from passion, it will have perfect bliss. But we must ask why Moses sings of the drowning of horse and rider, while Jacob says, “the horseman shall fall backwards” (Gen. xlix. 17). We must note, then, that the one who is to perish by drowning is the Egyptian character, which, even if it flees, flees under the water, that is, under the current of the passions, whereas the horseman who falls backwards does not belong to the lovers of the passions. A proof of this is that he is called “horseman,” whereas the other is called “rider.” A horseman’s business is to subdue his horse and use the bit when it disregards the rein, whereas a rider’s business is to be carried wherever the animal takes him. On the sea, too, the helmsman’s business is to guide the boat and keep it upright and in its course, but it is for the passenger to experience all that the ship undergoes. Accordingly the horseman who subdues the passions is not drowned but, dismounting from them, awaits the salvation that comes from the Master. Now the sacred word in Leviticus directs them to feed “on creeping things that go upon all four, which have legs above their feet, so as to leap with them” (Lev. xi. 21). These are the locust, the wild locust, the grasshopper, and fourth, the cricket. And this is as it should be. For if serpent-like pleasure is an un-nourishing and injurious thing, self-mastery, the nature that is in conflict with pleasure, must be wholesome and full of nourishment. You too, my mind, must contend against all passion and above all against pleasure, for indeed “the serpent is the most subtle of all beasts upon the earth, which the Lord God made” (Gen. iii. 1); for pleasure is the most cunning of all things. Why is this? Because all things are enslaved to pleasure, and the life of bad men is under the dominion of pleasure. The things that yield pleasure are obtained by means of cunning of every kind; gold, silver, glory, honours, offices, the materials of objects of sense, the mechanical arts, and all other arts in great variety that minister to pleasure. It is for the sake of pleasure that we do wrong, and wrong deeds are always associated with desperate cunning. Therefore set judgement, the serpent-fighter, against it, and contend to the end in this noblest contest, and strive earnestly, by defeating pleasure, which conquers all others, to win the noble and glorious crown, which no human assembly has ever bestowed.