“And the heaven and the earth and all their world were completed” (Gen. ii. 1). He had already told of the creation of mind and sense-perception; he now sets out in full the completion of both. He does not say that either the individual mind or the particular sense-perception have reached completion, but that the originals have, the original of mind and the original of sense-perception. For, using symbolic language, he calls the mind heaven, since heaven is the home of natures discerned only by the mind, but sense-perception he calls earth, because sense-perception has a more earthly and bodily composition. “World,” in the case of mind, means all incorporeal things, things discerned by the mind alone: in the case of sense-perception it denotes things in bodily form and generally whatever sense perceives. “And God finished on the sixth day His works which He had made” (Gen. ii. 2). It is quite foolish to think that the world was created in six days or in a space of time at all. Why? Because every period of time is a series of days and nights, and these are produced only by the movement of the sun as it goes over and under the earth: but the sun is a part of heaven, so that time is admittedly younger than the world. It would therefore be correct to say that the world was not made in time, but that time was formed by means of the world, for it was the movement of heaven that revealed the nature of time. So when Moses says, “He finished His work on the sixth day,” we must understand him to be citing not a number of days, but a perfect number, namely six, since it is the first that is equal to the sum of its own fractions ½, ⅓, and ⅙, and is produced by the multiplication of two unequal factors, 2×3; and note that the numbers 2 and 3 have left behind the incorporeal character that belongs to 1, 2 being an image of matter, parted and divided as matter is, while 3 is the image of a solid body, for the solid is capable of a threefold division. What is more, the number 6 is akin to the movements of animals provided with instrumental limbs, for the body equipped with such instruments is so constituted by nature that it can move in six directions, forwards and backwards, upwards and downwards, to the right and to the left. Moses wishes, therefore, to show both the mortal things created and the incorruptible ones as formed in a way that corresponds to their proper numbers. As I have just said, he makes mortal things parallel with the number six, the happy and blessed things with the number seven. First of all, then, on the seventh day the Creator, having finished forming mortal things, begins to shape others that are more divine. For God never leaves off making, but even as it is the property of fire to burn and of snow to chill, so it is the property of God to make: indeed far more so, since He is the source of action for all other things. Moses, moreover, does well to say “caused to rest” and not “rested”; for He causes to rest what appears to be making but is not actually at work, but He Himself never ceases making. For this reason Moses adds after “He caused to rest” the words “from what He had begun.” For while things produced by human arts stand still when finished and remain as they are, the products of divine skill, when completed, begin to move again; for their endings are the beginnings of other things, as the end of day is the beginning of night, and the beginnings of a month and of a year must naturally be regarded as the limits that close the months and years just past: birth, again, comes about through the decay of other things, and decay through fresh births, showing the truth of the saying: Nothing born will ever die, Its severed parts together fly, And yield another shape. Nature takes delight in the number seven. Thus there are seven planets, the counterweight to the uniform movement of the fixed stars. The bear is complete in seven stars, and it gives rise not only to commerce but to fellowship and unity among men. The changes of the moon, too, occur in sevens: the moon is the heavenly light most in sympathy with earthly matters. And the changes that Nature produces in the atmosphere she brings about mainly through the influence of figures governed by seven. Indeed, all that concerns us mortals has a divine origin drawn from heaven and is for our good when its movement is ruled by seven. Who does not know that seven-month infants are born alive, while those that have taken a longer time, remaining in the womb eight months, are as a rule still-born? And they say that man becomes a reasoning being during his first seven years, by which time he is already capable of expressing ordinary nouns and verbs because he has acquired the reasoning faculty; and that during his second period of seven years he reaches full consummation, by which is meant the power to reproduce his like; for at about the age of fourteen we are able to produce offspring like ourselves. The third period of seven years, again, is the end of growth, for until the age of twenty-one men grow in height, and many call this time a man’s prime. Furthermore the unreasoning side of the soul consists of seven parts: the five senses, the organ of speech, and the genital organ. The body, again, has seven movements, six mechanical, the seventh circular. The internal organs are also seven: stomach, heart, spleen, liver, lung, two kidneys. The divisions of the body are the same in number— head, neck, breast, hands, belly, abdomen, feet. And the face, the living creature’s noblest part, is pierced by seven openings: two eyes, two ears, as many nostrils, and the mouth, which make up seven. The excrements are seven—tears, mucus, spittle, seed, the waste discharged by two ducts, and the sweat that oozes from all over the body. Again, in illness the seventh day is the most critical. And women’s monthly purgings last seven days. The power of this number also extends to the most beneficial of the arts: in grammar, for instance, the best and most effective of the letters, namely the vowels, are seven in number: in music we may fairly call the seven-stringed lyre the best of instruments, because the enharmonic genus, which as we know is the most dignified of those used in melodies, is best brought out when played on that instrument. The modulations in pronunciation are sevenfold—acute, grave, circumflex, aspirated and unaspirated, long, short. Further, seven is the first number after the perfect number six, and in some way identical with the number one. While the other numbers within the decade are either produced by or produce those within the decade and the decade itself, the number seven neither produces any of the numbers within the decade nor is produced by any. For this reason the Pythagoreans, indulging in myth, liken seven to the motherless and ever-virgin Maiden, because she was not born of a womb and will never bear a child. “He rested therefore on the seventh day from all His works which He had made” (Gen. ii. 2). This amounts to saying that God stops moulding mortal masses, whenever He begins to make those that are divine and in keeping with the nature of seven. But interpreted for its bearing on human life and character, the statement means this: whenever the holy Reason of which Seven is the keynote comes upon the soul, six comes to a stop, together with all the mortal things that the soul seems to make with it. “And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it” (Gen. ii. 3). God both blesses and at once makes holy the dispositions set in motion in harmony with the seventh and truly Divine light, for the character charged with blessing and the character that is holy are closely akin. That is why, when dealing with the man who has vowed the great vow, he says that, if a change suddenly comes over him and defiles his mind, he shall no longer be holy, but “the preceding days are not counted.” And rightly so, for the character that is not holy is vile, of no account, so that the character well thought of is holy. He was right, then, to say that God both blessed and hallowed the seventh day, “because in it He ceased from all His works which God began to make” (Gen. ii. 3). But the reason the man who guides himself by the seventh and perfect light is both of good understanding and holy is that the formation of mortal things ceases with this day’s advent. For this is how the matter stands: when that most brilliant and truly divine light of virtue has dawned, the creation of what is contrary in nature comes to a stop. But we pointed out that God, when ceasing, or rather causing to cease, does not stop making, but begins the creating of other things, since He is not a mere craftsman, but also Father of the things that are coming into being. “This book is the book of the origin of heaven and earth, when it came into being” (Gen. ii. 4). (That is to say): “This perfect Reason, moving in accord with the number 7, is the first origin both of the mind ordering itself by the original patterns, and of sense-perception in the domain of mind (if the expression is permissible) ordering itself by those originals.” “Book” is Moses’ name for the Reason of God, in which the formation of everything else has been inscribed and engraved. But so that you may not suppose that the Deity makes anything in definite periods of time, but may know that to mortals the process of creation is unobserved, unseen, incomprehensible, he adds, “When it came into being,” not defining “when” by a determining limit, for the things that come into being under the hand of the First Cause come into being with no determining limit. So much, then, for the notion that the universe came into being in six days. “In the day in which God made the heaven and the earth and every green thing of the field before it appeared upon the earth and all grass of the field before it sprang up; for God had not sent rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the earth” (Gen. ii. 4, 5). Earlier he called this day a book, for he describes the creation of heaven and earth as taking place in both: for by His own supremely manifest and far-shining Reason God makes both of them, both the original of the mind, which in symbolic language he calls “heaven,” and the original of sense-perception, which he figuratively named “earth.” And he compares the original of the mind and the original of sense-perception to two fields; for they bear fruit, the mind all that is done in thinking, sense-perception all that is done in perceiving. What he means is something like this. Just as before the particular and individual mind there exists a certain original as an archetype and pattern of it, and again before the particular sense-perception, a certain original of sense-perception related to the particular as a seal that makes an impression is to the form it makes; so, before the individual objects of intellectual perception came into being, there existed as a genus the ‘intellectually-perceptible’ itself, by participation in which the members of the genus have received their name; and before the individual objects of sense-perception came into existence, there existed as a genus the ‘sensibly-perceptible’ itself, by sharing in whose being all other objects of sense have become objects of sense. “Green of the field,” then, is his term for the “intellectually-perceptible” of the mind; for just as green things spring up and bloom in a field, so the ‘intellectually-perceptible’ is a growth springing from the mind. Before, then, the particular ‘intellectually-perceptible’ came into being, the Creator produces the solely abstract ‘intellectually-perceptible,’ as a generic existence. He rightly calls this “all,” for the particular ‘intellectually-perceptible,’ being a fragment, is not all, but the generic is, being a complete whole. “And all the grass of the field” he says, “before it sprang up,” that is to say, before the particular objects of sense sprang up, there existed by the Maker’s forethought the generic ‘sensibly-perceptible,’ and it is this that he again calls “all.” His comparison of the ‘sensibly-perceptible’ to grass is natural enough. For as grass is the food of a creature devoid of reason, so the ‘sensibly-perceptible’ has been assigned to the unreasoning part of the soul. Otherwise why, after first saying “green of the field,” does he go on to say, “and all grass,” as if it were impossible for green of the field to come up as grass? The fact is, “the green of the field” is the ‘intellectually-perceptible,’ an outgrowth of the mind, but the “grass” is the ‘sensibly-perceptible,’ itself in turn a growth of the unreasoning part of the soul. He goes on “for God had not rained upon the earth, and there was no man to work the ground.” These words reveal a deep knowledge of the laws of being. For if God does not shower upon the senses the means of apprehending objects presented to them, neither will the mind have anything to “work” or take in hand in the field of sense-perception. For the mind by itself is without employment when the Cause of all things does not pour down, like rain and moisture, colours on the sight, sounds on the hearing, savours on the taste, and their proper objects on the other senses. But as soon as God has begun to water sense with objects of sense, at that moment the mind too is found to be a tiller of rich soil, so to speak. The original of ‘sense-perception’ has no need of nourishment; but the nourishment of ‘sense-perception,’ which he figuratively calls “rain,” is the particular objects of sense, which of course are bodies; whereas an original has nothing to do with bodies. Thus before the creation of particular concrete substances, God did not rain on the original idea of sense-perception, which Moses calls “earth,” and this means that He supplied it with no food: for it had absolutely no need of any sensible object of perception. The meaning of the words, “and there was not a man to work the ground,” is this: the original idea of the mind did not work the original idea of sense-perception: for my mind like yours works the sense-perception through the objects of the senses, but the original idea of the mind, since of course no particular body proper to it existed, does not work the original idea of ‘sense-perception’: for if it were working it, it would be doing so by means of the objects of sense, but among original ideas there is no such thing as an object of sense. “And a spring went up out of the earth and watered all the face of the earth” (Gen. ii. 6). He calls the mind a “spring” of the earth, and the senses its “face,” because Nature, exercising forethought in all things, assigned them this place, out of the whole body, as the most suitable for their special activities: and the mind like a spring waters the senses, sending to each of them the streams suitable to it. See then, how, like links in a chain, the powers of the living creature hold on to each other; for of the three, mind, ‘sense-perception’ and object of sense, ‘sense-perception’ is in the middle, while mind and object of sense occupy each extreme. But neither does the mind have the power to work, that is, to put forth its energies by way of ‘sense-perception,’ unless God sends the object of sense as rain upon it; nor is any benefit gained from the object of sense when it is rained down in this way, unless, like a spring, the mind, extending itself to reach the ‘sense-perception,’ stirs it out of its repose to grasp the object presented to it. Thus the mind and the object of sense are always practising a reciprocity of giving, the one lying ready for sense-perception as its material, the other, like a craftsman, moving sense-perception in the direction of the external object, to produce an impulse towards it. For the living creature excels the non-living in two respects, in the power of receiving impressions and in the active impulse towards the object producing them. The impression is produced by the drawing near of the external object, as it stamps the mind through sense-perception; while the active impulse, closely akin to the power already mentioned, comes about by way of the mind’s power of self-extension, which it exercises through sense-perception, and so comes into touch with the object presented to it, and goes towards it, striving to reach and seize it. “And God formed the man by taking clay from the earth, and breathed into his face a breath of life, and the man became a living soul” (Gen. ii. 7). There are two types of men; one a heavenly man, the other an earthly one. The heavenly man, being made after the image of God, has no share at all in corruptible and terrestrial substance; but the earthly one was put together out of the matter scattered here and there, which Moses calls “clay.” For this reason he says that the heavenly man was not moulded, but was stamped with the image of God; while the earthly is a moulded work of the Craftsman, but not His offspring. We must regard the man made out of the earth as mind mingling with, but not yet blended with, body. But this earthlike mind would in reality also be corruptible if God did not breathe into it a power of real life; when He does so, it no longer undergoes moulding, but becomes a soul, not an inefficient and imperfectly formed soul, but one endowed with mind and actually alive; for he says, “man became a living soul.” One might ask why God thought the earthly and body-loving mind worthy of divine breath at all, but not the mind which had been created after the original, and after His own image; in the second place, what “breathed in” means; thirdly, why the breathing is “into the face”; fourthly, why, though he shows his knowledge of the word ‘spirit’ when he says “and the Spirit of God was borne above the water” (Gen. i. 2), he now says “breath” not “spirit.” In answer to the first question, one thing to say is that God loves to give, and so bestows good things on all, even those who are not perfect, at the same time encouraging them to a zeal for virtue, and a participation in it, by displaying His own overflowing wealth, and how there is abundance even for those who will derive no great benefit from it. This characteristic He shows very clearly in other instances also. For when He rains upon the sea, and causes springs to gush forth in the depths of the desert, and waters the poor and rough and barren soil, pouring on it rivers with their overflowings, what else does He prove but the exceeding greatness of His own wealth and goodness? This is why He created no soul barren of virtue, even if the exercise of it is to some impossible. A second thing to say is this. It is His will to make compliance with positive ordinances part of duty. Someone, then, into whom real life had not been breathed, and who had no experience of virtue, would have said when punished for his transgressions that he was being unjustly punished, since it was through inexperience of the good that he failed in it, and that the blame lay with Him who had failed to breathe into him any conception of it. More than that, he will perhaps say that he does not sin at all, if (as some say) involuntary acts and acts done in ignorance do not count as wrong deeds. “Breathed into,” we note, is equivalent to “inspired” or “be-souled” the soulless; for God forbid that we should be infected with such monstrous folly as to think that God uses organs such as a mouth or nostrils for inbreathing; for God is not only not in the form of man, but belongs to no class or kind. Yet the expression clearly brings out something that accords with nature. For it necessarily implies three things, what inbreathes, what receives, and what is inbreathed: what inbreathes is God, what receives is the mind, and what is inbreathed is the spirit or breath. What, then, do we infer from these premises? A union of the three comes about, as God projects the power that proceeds from Himself through the intermediate breath until it reaches the subject. And for what purpose, if not so that we may form a conception of Him? For how could the soul have conceived of God, if He had not breathed into it and mightily laid hold of it? For the mind of man would never have ventured to soar so high as to grasp the nature of God, if God Himself had not drawn it up to Himself, as far as it was possible for the mind of man to be drawn up, and stamped it with the impress of the powers that are within the scope of its understanding. The breathing “into the face” is to be understood both physically and ethically: physically, because it is in the face that He set the senses; for this part of the body is endowed with soul beyond the other parts: but ethically, in this way. As the face is the dominant element in the body, so the mind is the dominant element of the soul: God breathes into this alone, while He does not see fit to do so with the other parts, whether senses or organs of utterance and of reproduction; for these are secondary in capacity. What, then, inspired these too? By the mind, evidently. For the mind imparts to the portion of the soul that is devoid of reason a share of that which it has received from God, so that the mind was be-souled by God, but the unreasoning part by the mind. For the mind is, so to speak, God of the unreasoning part. In the same way he does not hesitate to speak of Moses as “a God to Pharaoh” (Exod. vii. 1). For of the things which come into being some come into being both by God’s power and through God’s agency, while others come into being by God’s power but not by His agency. The most excellent things were made both by God and through God. For example, he will shortly say, “God planted a garden” (Gen. ii. 8): the mind belongs to these; but the part devoid of reason was made by God’s power but not by God’s agency, but by the agency of the reasonable power which rules and holds dominion in the soul. He uses the word ‘breath’ not ‘spirit,’ implying a difference between them; for ‘spirit’ is conceived of as connoting strength and vigour and power, while a ‘breath’ is like an air or a peaceful and gentle vapour. The mind that was made after the image and original might be said to partake of spirit, for its reasoning faculty possesses robustness; but the mind that was made out of matter must be said to partake of the light and less substantial air, as of some exhalation, like those that rise from spices: for even if they are kept and not burned as incense, they still give off a sweet perfume. “And God planted a garden in Eden toward the sun-rising, and placed there the man whom He had formed” (Gen. ii. 8). By using many words for it Moses has already made it clear that the sublime and heavenly wisdom has many names; for he calls it “beginning” and “image” and “vision of God”; and now by the planting of the garden he brings out the fact that earthly wisdom is a copy of this as its archetype. May human reasoning never fall victim to so great an impiety as to suppose that God tills the soil and plants gardens. We would at once be at a loss to say what motive He could have for doing so. It could not be to provide Himself with pleasant refreshment and comfort. Let such fables not even enter our mind. For not even the whole world would be a place fit for God to make His abode, since God is His own place, and He is filled by Himself, and sufficient for Himself, filling and containing all other things in their destitution and barrenness and emptiness, but Himself contained by nothing else, since He is Himself One and the Whole. Well then, God sows and plants earthly excellence for the race of mortals as a copy and reproduction of the heavenly. For, pitying our race and noting that it is made up of a rich abundance of ills, He caused earthly excellence to strike root, to bring relief and aid to the diseases of the soul. It is, as I said before, a copy of the heavenly and archetypal excellence, to which Moses gives many names. Virtue is figuratively called “garden,” and the locality specially suited to the garden “Eden,” which means “luxury”; excellence of course has peace and welfare and joy as its fitting companions, in which true luxury consists. Again the planting of the garden is “towards the sun-rising,” for right reason neither sets nor is quenched, but its nature is always to rise, and, I take it, just as the sun when it has risen fills the gloom of the atmosphere with light, so virtue also, when it has risen in the soul, illumines its mist and disperses its deep darkness. “And He placed there” it says, “the man whom He had formed.” For God, being good and training our race to virtue as the operation most proper to it, places the mind amid virtue, evidently so that as a good gardener it may spend its care on nothing else but this. Now one might ask, “Why, since imitating God’s works is a pious act, am I forbidden to plant a grove by the altar, while God plants the garden?” For it says, “You shall not plant yourself a grove: you shall not make to yourself any wood by the side of the altar of the Lord your God” (Deut. xvi. 21). What then are we to say? That it is fitting for God to plant and to build virtues in the soul, but that the mind shows itself to be without God and full of self-love, when it considers itself on a par with God; and, though passivity is its true part, regards itself as an agent. When God sows and plants noble qualities in the soul, the mind that says “I plant” is guilty of impiety. You shall not plant, therefore, whenever God is tending His plants. But if you do set plants in the soul, mind, set only fruit-bearing plants. Do not set a grove, for in a grove there are both wild and cultivated trees. And to plant in the soul barren wickedness by the side of cultivated and fruit-yielding virtue is like leprosy with its twofold growths and blending of discordant hues. If, however, you do bring into the same place things that are heterogeneous and cannot be mixed, let them be separate and distinct from the pure and unsullied growth that offers up fruits free from blemish to God. And it is such a growth that is meant by the altar of sacrifice: for it is a violation of this to say that anything is the (independent) work of the soul, since there is nothing there that does not refer to God. To say that is to mingle the barren with the fruit-bearing. And this is a blemish, whereas only things without blemish are offered to God. If then you transgress in any of these respects, soul, you will injure yourself, not God; that is why it says “you shall not plant to yourself”; for no one does such tillage for God, above all when the plants are bad ones; and it goes on to say, “you shall not make to yourself.” It also says in another case, “You shall not make together with Me gods of silver, and gods of gold you shall not make to yourselves” (Exod. xx. 23). For whoever thinks either that God belongs to a type, or that He is not one, or that He is not unoriginate and incorruptible, or that He is not incapable of change, wrongs himself, not God; for it says, “to yourselves you shall not make”; for we must hold that He belongs to no type, and that He is One and incorruptible and unchangeable. Whoever does not conceive of Him in this way infects his own soul with a false and godless opinion. Do you not see that, even if He brings us into virtue and even if, when brought in, we plant no fruitless thing but “every tree good for food,” He still commands us “thoroughly to cleanse its uncleanness” (Lev. xix. 23)? And this means the notion that we are planting, for it is the cutting away of self-conceit that He demands, and self-conceit is in its nature unclean. Speaking here of the man whom God moulded, it merely says that He “placed him in the garden.” Who, then, is the man of whom it says later on “The Lord God took the man whom He had made, and placed him in the garden to till it and to guard it” (Gen. ii. 15)? It would seem then that this is a different man, the one that was made after the image and archetype, so that two men are introduced into the garden, the one a moulded being, the other “after the image.” The one made according to the original, then, has his sphere not only in the planting of virtues but is also their tiller and guardian, and that means that he is mindful of all that he heard and practised in his training; but the “moulded” man neither tills the virtues nor guards them, but is only introduced to the truths by the rich bounty of God, soon to be an exile from virtue. For this reason in describing the man whom God only places in the garden, Moses uses the word “moulded,” but he does not speak of the man whom He appoints both tiller and guardian as “moulded,” but says “whom He had made”; and the one He receives, and the other He casts out. And He confers on the one He receives three gifts, which constitute natural ability, facility in apprehending, persistence in doing, tenacity in keeping. Facility in apprehending is the placing in the garden, persistence in doing is the practice of noble deeds, and tenacity in keeping is guarding the holy precepts and retaining them in memory. But the “moulded” mind neither keeps in mind nor carries out in action the things that are noble, but has facility in apprehending them and no more than this. Accordingly after being placed in the garden he soon runs away and is cast out. “And God caused to spring out of the ground every tree beautiful to see and good for food, and the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. ii. 9). Moses now indicates what trees of virtue God plants in the soul. These are the several particular virtues, and the corresponding activities, and the complete moral victories, and what philosophers call καθήκοντα or common duties. These are the plants of the garden. He describes the character of these very plants, showing that what is good is also most fair to be seen and enjoyed. For some of the arts and sciences are indeed theoretical but not practical, such as geometry and astronomy, and some are practical, but not theoretical, as the arts of the carpenter and coppersmith, and all that are called mechanical; but virtue is both theoretical and practical; for clearly it involves theory, since philosophy, the road that leads to it, involves it through its three parts, logic, ethics, physics; and it involves conduct, for virtue is the art of the whole of life, and life includes all kinds of conduct. But while virtue involves theory and practice, it is also of surpassing excellence in each respect; for indeed the theory of virtue is perfect in beauty, and the practice and exercise of it a prize to be striven for. Therefore he says that it is both “beautiful to look upon,” an expression signifying its aspect as theory, and “good to eat,” words which point to its excellence in exercise and practice. The tree of life is virtue in the most comprehensive sense, which some call goodness. From it the particular virtues derive their existence. That is why it is also set in the middle of the garden, occupying the central, all-embracing position, so that, like a king, it may be attended by those on either side as by bodyguards. But some say that it is the heart that is called the tree of life, since it is the cause of life and has been allotted the central place in the body, as it naturally would, being in their view the dominating principle. But these people should remember that they are putting forward a view worthy of a physician rather than a philosopher, while we, as we have said, maintain that virtue in its most generic aspect is called the tree of life. He expressly says that this tree is in the middle of the garden, but as for the other tree, the tree of knowing good and evil, he has not made it clear whether it is inside or outside the garden, but immediately after the words, “and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” he comes to a stop without making it clear where it was. He is silent because he wants to keep the man untrained in natural philosophy from marvelling at the spot where that knowledge dwells. What, then, must we say? That this tree is both in the garden and outside it: literally in it, virtually outside it. How so? Our dominant part is all-receptive and resembles wax that receives every impression, beautiful and ugly; so Jacob the supplanter acknowledges this, saying, “Upon me came all these things” (Gen. xlii. 36); for the countless impressions of all things in the universe are borne upon the soul, though it is only one. Whenever, then, it has received the stamp of perfect virtue, it at once becomes the tree of life, but when it receives the stamp of wickedness, it at once becomes the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But wickedness has been exiled from the divine choir. So the ruling part in us that has received it is actually in the garden, for it also has in it the stamp of virtue, which properly belongs to the garden; but on the other hand it is virtually not in it, because the impress of wickedness is alien to a place of divine sun-rising. You may grasp what I mean in this way. At this moment my ruling part is literally in my body, but virtually in Italy or Sicily when it is thinking about these countries, and in heaven, when it is considering heaven. Accordingly it often happens that people who are actually in unconsecrated spots are really in most sacred ones, when they are forming images of everything that belongs to virtue. Others, on the other hand, who are in consecrated spots are profane in mind, because their mind admits bad impressions and inclinations toward what is unworthy. So wickedness is neither in the garden nor not in it, for it can be there actually, but virtually it cannot. “A river goes forth from Eden to water the garden: from there it is separated into four heads; the name of the one is Pheison; this is the one that encircles all the land of Evilat, there where the gold is; and the gold of that land is good; and there is the ruby and the emerald. And the name of the second river is Geon; this encompasses all the land of Aethiopia. And the third river is Tigris; this is the one whose course runs in front of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates” (Gen. ii. 10-14). By these rivers he means to indicate the particular virtues. There are four of them: prudence, self-mastery, courage and justice. The largest river, of which the four are effluxes, is generic virtue, which we have called “goodness.” The four effluxes are the four virtues. Generic virtue takes its start from Eden, the wisdom of God, which is full of joy, and brightness, and exultation, glorying and taking pride only in God its Father; but the specific virtues, four in number, are derived from generic virtue, which like a river waters the perfect achievements of each of them with an abundant flow of noble doings. Let us also look at the particular words used. “A river,” it says “issues forth from Eden to water the garden.” “River” is generic virtue, goodness. This issues forth out of Eden, the wisdom of God, and this is the Reason of God; for generic virtue has been made after that. And generic virtue waters the garden, that is, it waters the particular virtues. He takes “Heads” in the sense not of locality but of sovereignty. For each of the virtues is truly a sovereign and a queen. “Is separated” means the same as “has boundaries to define it.” Prudence, concerned with things to be done, sets boundaries around them; courage around things to be endured; self-mastery around things to be chosen; justice around things to be awarded. “The name of the one is Pheison. This is the one that encompasses all the land of Evilat, there where the gold is; and the gold of that land is good; and there is the ruby and the emerald.” One species of the four virtues is prudence, which he has called “Pheison” because it is “sparing” and guards the soul from wrongdoing. And it encircles the land of Evilat in its ring; that is to say, it carefully cherishes the kindly, gentle and gracious disposition; and just as gold is the most excellent and most approved of all smelted substances, so prudence is the most approved virtue of the soul. And the words, “there where (or ‘whose’) the gold is” are not a mere piece of local information, there where the gold is, but mean there (is He) whose the treasure is, namely prudence, gleaming like gold, tried by the fire, and precious; and prudence is acknowledged to be God’s fairest treasure. And where prudence dwells there are two corresponding concrete embodiments: the man who is prudent and the man who exercises prudence. He likens these to the ruby and the emerald. “And the name of the second river is Geon; this encircles all the land of Ethiopia.” This river figuratively represents courage; for the word Geon means ‘breast’ or ‘butting’; and each of these indicates courage; for it dwells in men's breasts, where the heart also is, and it is fully equipped for self-defence; for it is the knowledge of things that we ought to endure and not to endure, and of things that fall under neither heading. And it encompasses and beleaguers Ethiopia, whose name, when interpreted, means ‘lowness’; and cowardice is a low thing, while courage is an enemy to lowness and cowardice. “And the third river is Tigris; this is the one whose course runs opposite the Assyrians.” Self-mastery is the third virtue, and takes its stand against pleasure, which thinks that it can direct the course of human weakness; for in the Greek language “Assyrians” means ‘directing.’ He further compares desire, with which self-mastery is occupied, to a tiger, the animal least capable of being tamed. It is worth inquiring why courage is mentioned in the second place, self-mastery in the third, and prudence in the first, and why he has not given the virtues in a different order. We must observe, then, that our soul is threefold, and has one part that is the seat of reason, another that is the seat of high spirit, and another that is the seat of desire. And we discover that the head is the place and abode of the reasonable part, the breast of the passionate part, the abdomen of the lustful part; and that to each of the parts a virtue proper to it has been attached; prudence to the reasonable part, for it belongs to reason to know the things we ought to do and the things we ought not to do; courage to the passionate part; and self-mastery to the lustful part. For it is by self-mastery that we heal and cure our desires. As, then, the head is the first and highest part of the living creature, the breast the second, and the abdomen the third, and again in the soul the reasoning faculty is first, the high-spirited second, the lustful third: so too among the virtues prudence is first, since it has its sphere in the first part of the soul which is the domain of reason, and in the first part of the body, namely the head; courage is second, for it has its seat in high spirit, the second part of the soul, and in the breast, the corresponding part of the body; and self-mastery is third, for its sphere of action is the abdomen, which is of course the third part of the body, and the lustful faculty, which has been assigned the third place in the soul. “The fourth river,” he says, “is Euphrates.” “Euphrates” means ‘fruitfulness,’ and is a figurative name for the fourth virtue, justice, a truly fruitful virtue that brings gladness to the mind. When, then, does it appear? When the three parts of the soul are in harmony. For them, harmony is the dominance of the more excellent part; for instance, when the two, the high-spirited and the lustful, are guided by the reasoning faculty as horses by their driver, then justice emerges; for it is justice for the better to rule always and everywhere, and for the worse to be ruled: and the reasoning faculty is better, the lustful and the high-spirited are inferior. Whenever, on the other hand, high spirit and desire turn restive and get out of hand, and by the violence of their momentum drag the driver, that is, the reason, down from his seat and put him under the yoke, and each of these passions gets hold of the reins, injustice prevails. For when the driver is bad and unskilled, the team cannot help being swept down precipices and gullies, just as experience and skill must necessarily bring it safely through. Let us go on to look at our subject in this way. “Pheison” signifies ‘alteration of mouth,’ and “Evilat” ‘in labour’: and these plainly indicate prudence. For while most people consider a man prudent if he can find sophistical arguments and is clever at expressing his ideas, Moses knows that such a man is indeed a lover of words, but by no means a prudent man. For prudence is discerned in “alteration of the mouth,” that is, in the word of utterance undergoing a transformation. This comes to the same thing as saying that prudence is not seen in speech but in action and earnest doings. And prudence surrounds Evilat, or “folly in labour,” with an encircling wall, to besiege and overthrow it. “Labouring” is a name strictly appropriate to folly, because the foolish mind, being enamoured of things out of its reach, is always in labour pangs. This is so whether it is enamoured of money, of glory, of pleasure or of anything else. But, though in labour, it never brings to birth, for the soul of the worthless man does not by nature have the power to bring forth any offspring. What it seems to produce turns out to be wretched abortions and miscarriages, devouring half of its flesh, an evil tantamount to the death of the soul. Accordingly Aaron, the sacred word, begs Moses, the beloved of God, to heal the change in Miriam, so that her soul may not be in labour with evils; and so he says “Let her not become as one dead, as an abortion coming forth from the womb of a mother; consuming half of her flesh” (Num. xii. 12). To resume. “There,” it says, “where (or ‘whose’) the gold is” (Gen. ii. 11). It does not merely say that the gold is there, but “there (is He) ‘whose’ it is.” For prudence, which he has likened to gold, a substance free from alloy and pure and cleansed by fire and tested and precious, is there in the wisdom of God, but, being there, is not a possession of wisdom, but of Him to whom wisdom itself also belongs, namely God, Who created it and makes it His. “Now the gold of that land is good.” “Is there, then, other gold that is not good?” Yes, indeed, for there are two kinds of prudence, one universal, the other particular. The prudence that is in me, being particular, is not good, for when I perish, it perishes together with me. But the universal prudence, whose abode is the wisdom of God and His dwelling-place, is good, for, being imperishable itself, it abides in an imperishable dwelling-place. “And there is the ruby and the greenstone” (ibid.), the two concrete embodiments of this virtue, the man who has good sense, and the man who exercises good sense: in the one the determining quality is potential good sense, in the other it is good sense exercised. For it was for the sake of these concretes that God sowed in the earth-born man good sense (in particular) and virtue (in general). For what benefit would there have been in virtue if the activities of reason had not been ready to welcome it and receive its impressions? So, naturally, where good sense is, there are both the man who has good sense and the man who exercises good sense, the two precious stones. Judah and Issachar seem to be these. For the man who exercises himself in the practical wisdom of God gratefully acknowledges Him who gave good things without limit; while the representative of the other aspect is furthermore engaged in noble and worthy works. Judah is the symbol of the man who makes confession of thankfulness, with whose birth Leah leaves off bearing (Gen. xxix. 35); but Issachar is the figure of him who is engaged in noble deeds, “for he submitted his shoulder to labour and became a tiller of the soil” (Gen. xlix. 15). In his case, as Moses says, when he has been sown and planted in the soul “there is a reward” (Gen. xxx. 18), that is to say his labour is not in vain, but crowned by God and awarded a recompense. He shows elsewhere that he is referring to these patriarchs, when he says of the high-priestly garment, “And you shall weave together in it precious stones in fourfold order: there shall be a row of precious stones, sardius, topaz, smaragdus, making the one row”—Reuben, Simeon, Levi—“and the second row” it says “ruby and sapphire” (Exod. xxviii. 17 f.): but the sapphire is a green stone. Now Judah is engraved in the ruby, for he is fourth in order, and Issachar on the sapphire. Why then, while saying “a green stone,” does he not also say, “a ruby stone”? Because Judah, the disposition prone to make confession of praise, is exempt from body and matter. For indeed the very word denoting confession (of praise) vividly portrays the acknowledgement that takes a man out of himself. For whenever the mind goes out from itself and offers itself up to God, as Isaac or “laughter,” does, then it makes confession of acknowledgement to the Existent One. But so long as the mind supposes itself to be the author of anything, it is far away from making room for God and from confessing or making acknowledgement to Him. For we must take note that the very confession of praise itself is the work not of the soul but of God who gives it thankfulness. Judah with his confession of praise is certainly incorporeal. But Issachar, who has advanced through labour, accordingly needs a material body. For how can the keen endeavourer read without eyes? How can he hear the words of encouragement without ears? How can he eat food and drink without a stomach and its wonderful processes? That is why he is likened to a stone. Yes, and the colours differ. The hue of the ruby belongs to him who makes confession of praise, for he is permeated by fire in giving thanks to God, and is drunk with a sober drunkenness. But the hue of the green stone suits him who is still labouring, for men in exercise and training are pale, both because of the wearing labour and because of the fear that they might not obtain the result they pray for. It is worth inquiring why, while the two rivers Pheison and Geon encompass countries, the one Evilat, the other Ethiopia, neither of the others does so; but the Tigris is said to be opposite the Assyrians, and the Euphrates is not said to be opposite anything; and yet as a matter of fact the Euphrates both flows around many countries and has many facing it. But the subject of the passage is not the river, but amendment of character. We must observe, then, that prudence and courage are able to construct an enclosing wall against the opposite vices, folly and cowardice, and capture them; for they are both of them weak and easy to take, for the foolish man falls easy victim to the prudent man, and the coward is at the mercy of the brave man; self-mastery on the contrary is powerless to encircle desire and pleasure; for they are hard to wrestle with and difficult to overthrow. Do you not notice that even the most self-controlled men, compelled by the mortal element in them, resort to food and drink, out of which the pleasures of the appetite develop? So we must be content to face and fight lust as a principle. That is why the river Tigris is opposite the Assyrians: self-mastery is opposite pleasure. Justice, however, the characteristic of the river Euphrates, neither besieges and encircles anyone with a palisade, nor withstands anyone in conflict. Why? Because it is the function of justice to assign to each what he deserves, and justice plays the part not of prosecutor or defendant but of judge. Just as the judge, therefore, makes it his business neither to conquer anyone nor to wage war on anyone and oppose them, but pronounces a judgement and awards what is just, so too justice, being nobody’s opponent, accords to each matter what it merits. “And the Lord God took the man whom He had made, and placed him in the garden to till and to guard it” (Gen. ii. 15). “The man whom God made” differs, as I have said before, from the one that “was moulded”: for the one that was moulded is the more earthly mind, the one that was made is the less material, having no part in perishable matter, endowed with a constitution of a purer and clearer kind. This pure mind, then, God takes, not allowing it to go outside of Himself, and, having taken it, sets it among the virtues that have roots and put forth shoots, so that he may till them and guard them. For many, after beginning to practise virtue, have changed in the end: but on the man to whom God affords secure knowledge, He grants both advantages: tilling the virtues, and never giving them up but always tending and guarding each one of them. So “tilling” represents practising, while “guarding” represents remembering. “And the Lord God commanded Adam saying: From every tree that is in the garden you shall feedingly eat, but of the tree of knowing good and evil you shall not eat of it: and in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. ii. 16, 17). We must ask which Adam He is commanding and who he is; for the writer has not mentioned him before, but has named him now for the first time. Perhaps, then, he means to give us the name of the man that was moulded. “Call him earth” he says, for that is the meaning of “Adam,” so that when you hear the word “Adam,” you must understand that it is the earthly and perishable mind; for the mind that was made after the image is not earthly but heavenly. And we must ask why, when Adam assigned names to all the other creatures, he did not assign one to himself. What, then, are we to say? The mind that is in each one of us can apprehend other objects, but is incapable of knowing itself. For just as the eye sees other objects but does not see itself, so the mind too perceives other objects, but does not apprehend itself. Can it say what it is and what kind of thing it is: breath or blood or fire or air or anything else? Can it even say whether it is a body or incorporeal? Are they not simpletons, then, who inquire about God’s substance? For how could those who do not know the substance of their own soul have accurate ideas about the soul of the universe? For we may conceive of God as the soul of the universe. Quite naturally, therefore, Adam, that is, the Mind, though he names and apprehends other things, gives no name to himself, since he is ignorant of himself and his own nature. It is to this being, and not to the being created after His image and after the original idea, that God gives the command. For the latter, even without urging, possesses virtue instinctively; but the former, without instruction, could have no part in wisdom. There is a difference between these three—injunction, prohibition, command accompanied by exhortation. For prohibition deals with wrongdoings and is addressed to the bad man, injunction concerns duties rightly done, and exhortation is addressed to the neutral man, the man who is neither bad nor good: for he is neither sinning, so that anyone should forbid him, nor doing right as right reason commands, but needs exhortation, which teaches him to refrain from evil things, and incites him to aim at things noble. There is no need, then, to give injunctions or prohibitions or exhortations to the perfect man formed after the (Divine) image, for the perfect man requires none of these. The bad man needs injunction and prohibition, and the child of exhortation and teaching. In the same way the perfect master of music or letters requires none of the directions that apply to those arts, whereas the man who stumbles over the subjects of his study does require what we may call laws or rules with their injunctions and prohibitions, while one who is now beginning to learn requires teaching. Quite naturally, then, God gives the commandments and exhortations before us to the earthly man who is neither bad nor good but midway between these. To enforce the exhortation, both Divine titles are employed, both “Lord” and “God,” for it says “God the Lord commanded him.” This is so that, if he obeys the exhortations, he may be judged worthy by God of His benefactions; but that, if he rebels, he may be driven from the presence of the Lord who has a Master’s authority over him. For this reason again, when he is being cast out of the garden, the sacred writer has introduced the same titles, for he says, “And the Lord God sent him forth out of the garden of delight, to till the ground, out of which he was taken” (Gen. iii. 23). This is to show that, since “the Lord” as Master and “God” as Benefactor had issued the commands, so in both capacities He inflicts punishment on the one who had disobeyed them. For he dismisses the disobedient by exercising the very powers He had exercised in urging him to obedience. The charge which he gives is this: “From every tree that is in the garden you shall eat feedingly on it” (Gen. ii. 16). He moves the soul of the man to benefit, not from a single tree or from a single virtue but from all the virtues: for eating is a figure of soul-nourishment: and the soul is nourished by the acquisition of things noble, and the practice of right things. And He does not merely say “shall eat,” but also “feedingly,” that is, chewing and masticating the nourishment, not like an ordinary person, but like an athlete, so that you may gain strength and power: for, as we know, the trainers charge the athletes not to bolt their food, but to masticate it slowly, in order that they may grow stronger. For the athlete and I take nourishment with different aims: I just to sustain life, the athlete also to grow brawny and strong; and so mastication of food is a special point in training. Such is the meaning of “you shall eat feedingly on it.” Let us try to form a yet more precise conception of it. To honour our parents is something eatable and nutritious: but good and bad sons honour them differently, the bad ones in compliance with custom, and these do not “eat feedingly,” but simply eat. When, then, do they eat feedingly too? When, after exploring the precept and searching for the grounds on which it rests, they freely determine that such conduct is noble. The grounds for it are such as these: they gave us birth, nurtured us, educated us, have been authors of all good things to us. Again, honour shown to the Existent One is something eatable; it is shown “feedingly,” when the honour we show is coupled with close search into the precept, and with a due appreciation of its motives. “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat” (Gen. ii. 17). Therefore this tree is not in the garden: for if He tells them to eat of every tree in the garden, but not to eat of this one, it is evident that it is not in the garden: and this is quite naturally so: for actually, as I have said, it is there, and virtually it is not. For as all the impressions are virtually in the wax, but actually only the one that has been made, so in the soul, whose nature is waxlike, all the types are contained virtually, but not in actual execution, and the single one engraved in it holds possession as long as it has not been obliterated by another seal which has made over it a clearer and bolder impression. Next, there is a further question to raise. When He is giving the charge to eat of every tree of the garden, He addresses the command to a single person, but when He issues the prohibition against making any use of what causes evil and good, He speaks to more than one: for in the former case He says, “You shall eat from every tree” [singular]; but in the latter, “you shall not eat, and in the day that you eat” [plural] not “that you eat,” [singular] and “you shall die” [plural] not “you shall die.” [singular]. We must accordingly remark in the first place that the good is scarce, the evil abundant. Hence it is hard to find a single wise man, while inferior men are a countless multitude. Quite fittingly, therefore, He tells a single man to find nourishment in the virtues, but many to abstain from evil-doing, for myriads practise this. In the second place, for the acquisition and practice of virtue a single thing only, namely our understanding, is required: but the body not only fails to co-operate to this end, but is an actual hindrance; for we may almost make it an axiom that the business of wisdom is to become estranged from the body and its cravings: but for the enjoyment of evil it is necessary not only that the mind be in a certain condition, but also the power of perception and of speech, in fact the body; for the inferior man requires all these for the full satisfaction of his particular form of wickedness. For how can he divulge sacred and hidden truths unless he has an organ of speech? And how is he to indulge in pleasures, if he lacks a stomach and the organs of taste? So it is in accordance with the necessities of the case that He addresses the understanding alone about gaining virtue; for, as I said, it alone is needed for its acquisition; whereas in the pursuit of evil several faculties are needed, soul, speech, senses, body, for wickedness employs all these in displaying itself. And further he says, “In the day that you eat of it, you shall die the death” (Gen. ii. 17). And yet after they have eaten, they not only do not die, but they beget children and become authors of life to others. What, then, can we say to this? That death is of two kinds, one the death of the man in general, the other the death of the soul in particular. The death of the man is the separation of the soul from the body, but the death of the soul is the decay of virtue and the bringing in of wickedness. It is for this reason that God says not only “die” but “die the death,” indicating not the death common to us all, but that special death properly so called, which is the death of the soul as it becomes entombed in passions and wickedness of all kinds. And this death is practically the antithesis of the death which awaits us all. The latter is a separation of combatants that had been pitted against one another, that is, body and soul. The former, on the other hand, is a meeting of the two in conflict. And in this conflict the worse, the body, overcomes, and the better, the soul, is overcome. But observe that wherever Moses speaks of “dying the death,” he means the penalty-death, not the death that takes place in the course of nature. Death in the course of nature is the one in which the soul is parted from the body; but the penalty-death takes place when the soul dies to the life of virtue, and is alive only to the life of wickedness. Heracleitus, who on this point followed Moses’ teaching, has an excellent saying: “We live,” he says, “their death, and are dead to their life.” He means that now, when we are living, the soul is dead and has been entombed in the body as in a sepulchre; whereas, if we die, the soul at once lives its own proper life, and is released from the body, the baneful corpse to which it was tied.
“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; 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, 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.
“And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God in the midst of the forest of the garden” (Gen. iii. 8). He introduces a doctrine showing that the bad man is an exile. For if virtue is a city belonging to the wise, the man who has no capacity to share in virtue has been driven away from the city, in which the bad man is incapable of taking part. Accordingly, only the bad man has been driven away and sent into exile. But by incurring such exile, the exile from virtue has hidden himself from God. For if the wise, as His friends, are in God’s sight, it is evident that all bad men slink away and hide from Him, as is to be expected in men who cherish hatred and ill-will towards right reason. The prophet, moreover, finds proof that the bad man is without city or dwelling-house, in the account of Esau, the hairy man, crafty in wickedness, when he says, “Esau was skilled in hunting, a countryman” (Gen. xxv. 27); for vice, which hunts after the passions, is by nature unfit to dwell in the city of virtue. Rather, in utter senselessness, it follows rustic grossness, the life of the untrained. Jacob, the man full of wisdom, belongs to a city, and he occupies virtue as his dwelling-house. The prophet says of him: “But Jacob was a simple man dwelling in a house” (ibid.). In keeping with this, too, the midwives, since they feared God, made houses for themselves (Exod. i. 21); for those (souls) that search out God’s hidden mysteries—and this is what is meant by “saving the males’ lives” or “bringing the males to the birth”—build up the cause of virtue, and they have chosen to make their abode in it. These instances have made clear how the bad man is without a city or home, since he is an exile from virtue, while the good man has received wisdom as his lot for both city and dwelling. Let us see next how a man is actually said to hide himself from God. If one did not take the language as figurative, it would be impossible to accept the statement, for God fills and penetrates all things, and has left no spot void or empty of His presence. What place, then, could a man occupy where God is not? The prophet bears witness to this elsewhere, saying, “God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath and there is none other but He” (Deut. iv. 39). And again, “Here I stand before you (were made)” (Exod. xvii. 6); for God is before every created thing, and is found everywhere, so that no one could possibly hide himself from God. And why should we marvel at this? Whatever happens, we could never escape or hide ourselves from those things, even among created things, that are essential elements of creation. For instance, let a man flee, if he can, from earth or water or air or sky or the world at large. A man must necessarily have all these around him, for no one shall ever be able to escape out of the world. Then, since a man is powerless to hide himself from the parts of the world or from the world itself, would he be able to escape the eye of God? By no means. Why then does it say “they hid themselves”? The bad man thinks that God is in a place, not containing but contained; and for this reason he imagines that he can hide from Him, fancying that God, the Author of all things, is not in the part that he has chosen for his lurking-place. It can be taken in this way. In the bad man the true opinion about God is hidden in obscurity, for he is full of darkness, with no divine radiance in him by which to investigate realities. Such a man is banished from the divine company, like the leper and the man with an issue. The former combines God and creation as joint causes, though they are mutually hostile natures, for he shows two different colours, whereas there is one single Cause, namely He who does all. The man with an issue, on the other hand, deriving everything from the world, and making it return into the world, imagines that nothing has been created by God, siding with the opinion of Heracleitus in advocating such tenets as “fullness and lack,” “the universe one,” and “all things interchange.” So the divine word says, “Let them send forth out of the holy soul every leper, and everyone that has an issue, and everyone that is unclean in soul, both male and female” (Numb. v. 2), and eunuchs with the generative organs of the soul cut away, and fornicators, deserters from the rule of One, to whom entrance into the assembly of God is absolutely forbidden (Deut. xxiii. 2). But wise reasonings, far from hiding themselves, are keenly eager to be manifest. Do you not see that Abraham “was still standing before the Lord and drew near and said, ‘Do not destroy the just man together with the impious one’” (Gen. xviii. 22 f.), the one that is manifest and known to You together with the one who shuns and avoids You? For this one is impious, but the one who stands before You and does not avoid You is just. For the only justice is that You, Master, should be honoured. A pious man is not found as easily as an impious one. We have to be content with a just man. This is why he says, “Do not destroy a just together with an impious man.” For no one honours God as He deserves but only as is just. It is impossible to repay even our parents with favours equal to those we have received from them—for we cannot repay them by becoming their parents. How much more impossible must it be to repay or to praise as He deserves the One who brought the universe out of non-existence? For that was an exercise of every virtue towards us. Through three seasons, then, soul, that is, throughout the whole of time with its threefold divisions, always make yourself manifest to God, not dragging after you the weak feminine passion of sense-perception, but giving forth as incense the manly reasoning schooled in fortitude. For the sacred word (Deut. xvi. 16) commands that at three seasons of the year every male must show himself before the Lord the God of Israel. For this reason Moses also, when he is being established as one standing open before God, avoids Pharaoh, the symbol of dispersion, for he boasts saying that he does not know the Lord (Exod. v. 2). “Moses,” we read, “withdrew from Pharaoh’s presence and settled in the land of Midian” (Exod. ii. 15), or in the examination of the things of nature, “and sat on the well,” waiting to see what draught God would send to quench the thirst of his soul in its longing for that which is good. So he withdraws from the godless opinion of Pharaoh, which the passions follow as their leader, and withdraws into Midian, the sifting-place, to find out whether he should keep still or contend again with the evil man for his destruction; he considers whether, if he attacks him, he will prevail and win the victory, and so he is kept there waiting on God, as I have said, to see whether He will give a deep reasoning faculty, free from shallowness, a stream large enough to drown the onrush of the king of the Egyptians, the onrush, that is, of his passions. And he is found worthy of the favour: for, having taken the field in the cause of virtue, he does not abandon the warfare until he sees the pleasures prostrate and out of action. This is why Moses does not flee from Pharaoh, for that would have been to run away and not return, but, like an athlete taking an interval to regain his breath, “withdraws,” that is, brings about a cessation of arms, until by divine words he has raised forces of wisdom and every other virtue to aid him in renewing the attack with irresistible power. But Jacob, the “Supplanter,” who acquires virtue with great toil by wiles and artifices, and whose name has not yet been changed to “Israel,” runs away from Laban and all his belongings, tints and shapes and material bodies generally, which by nature inflict wounds on the mind through the objects of sense. For since he was not able to vanquish them completely when facing them, he flees, fearing defeat at their hands. And in doing so he thoroughly deserves praise; for Moses says, “You shall make the sons of the seeing one cautious” (Lev. xv. 31), not bold and aiming at what is beyond their capacity. ‘And Jacob stole away unawares to Laban the Syrian, in that he did not tell him that he fled. So he fled with all that he had; and passed over the river, and set his face toward the mountain of Gilead’ (Gen. xxxi. 20f.). It is entirely in keeping with true principles that he is said to have hidden the fact that he is running away and not to have told Laban, who represents the way of thinking governed by objects of sense. For instance, if you have caught sight of beauty and been captivated by it, and if it is likely to be a cause of stumbling to you, flee secretly from the sight of it, and give no further report of it to your mind, that is to say, do not give it another thought or ponder it: for to keep on recalling anything is the way to engrave on the mind distinct outlines of it, which injure the mind and often bring it to ruin against its will. The same principle holds for every kind of attraction, through whatever sense it may reach us; for here safety lies in secret flight; but recalling the attractive object in memory, telling of it, turning it over, spells conquest and harsh slavery for our reasoning faculty. If, therefore, my mind, you are in imminent danger of falling prey to some object of sense that has shown itself, never report it to yourself, never dwell on it, so that you are not overcome and plunged into misery. Instead, rush out into the open, make your escape, choose the freedom of the wild rather than the slavery of the tame. Now (let us ask) why, as though Jacob did not know that Laban was a Syrian, does he say, “Jacob kept Laban the Syrian in the dark”? This too has a pertinent point. For “Syria” means “Highlands.” Jacob, therefore, the mind in training, when he sees passion grovelling low before him, awaits its onset calculating that he will master it by force, but when it appears lofty, stately, weighty, the mind in training is the first to run away, followed by all his belongings, which are portions of his discipline, readings, ponderings, acts of worship, and of remembrance of noble souls, self-control, discharge of daily duties; he crosses the river of objects of sense, which swamps and drowns the soul under the flood of the passions, and, when he has crossed it, sets his face toward the lofty highland, the principle of perfect virtue: “for he set his face towards the mountain of Gilead.” The meaning of this name is “migration of witness”; for God caused the soul to migrate from the passions that are represented by Laban, and bore witness to it how greatly its removal was to its advantage and benefit, and led it on away from the evil things that make the soul low and grovelling up to the height and greatness of virtue. For this reason Laban, the friend of the senses and the man whose actions are regulated by them and not by the mind, is vexed, and pursues him, and says, “Why did you run away secretly” (Gen. xxxi. 26), and not remain in the company of bodily enjoyment and of the teaching that gives preference to bodily and external good things? But besides fleeing from this view of life, you also carried off my soundness of sense, that is, Leah and Rachel. For these, while they remained with the soul, produced in it sound sense, but when they moved elsewhere they left it ignorance and indiscipline. This is why he adds the words “you robbed me” (ibid.), that is, you stole my good sense. He is going to explain, then, what his good sense was; for he adds “and carried away my daughters as prisoners of war: and if you had told me, I would have sent you away” (ibid.). You would not have sent away those at variance with one another; for if you had really sent away and freed the soul, you would have stripped from it all voices belonging to the body and senses: for it is in this way that the understanding is delivered from vices and passions. But as it is, you say that you are ready to send her away free, but by your actions you admit that you would have kept her in prison; for if you had sent her on her way with “music and timbrels and harp” and the pleasures that suit each separate sense, you would not really have sent her away at all. For it is not from you only, Laban, friend of bodies and of tints, that we are running away, but from everything that is yours too: and this includes the voices of the senses sounding in harmony with the operations of the passions. For, if indeed we are under virtue’s training, we have made our own an absolutely vital study, which was also Jacob’s study: to consign to death and destruction the gods that are alien to the soul, the gods moulded in metal, whose making Moses has forbidden (Lev. xix. 4); and these are a means of dissolving virtue and well-being, and a means of forming and giving fixity to wickedness and passions, for what is moulded, if dissolved, grows fixed and firm again. We read as follows: “And they gave Jacob the strange gods, which were in their hands, and the ear-rings which were in their ears, and Jacob hid them under the terebinth that was in Shechem” (Gen. xxxv. 4). These are bad men’s gods. And Jacob is not said to receive them, but to hide and destroy them. This is in every point perfectly accurate. For the man of sterling worth will take nothing to make him rich in the products of evil, but will hide them secretly and do away with them. Similarly, when the king of Sodom is craftily trying to exchange creatures without reason for reasonable beings, of horses for men, Abraham says that he will take none of the things that are his but will “stretch out” his soul’s operation, which he figuratively called his “hand,” “to the Most High God” (Gen. xiv. 22), since he would take nothing of all that was the king’s “from a cord even to a shoelace,” so that he may not say that he has enriched the man whose eyes were open, by giving him poverty in return for his wealth of virtue. The passions are always hidden away and placed under guard in Shechem— “shoulder” is the meaning of the name—for he who devotes toil to pleasures tends to keep pleasures well guarded. But in the case of the wise man the passions perish and are destroyed, not for some short period but “even to this day,” that is, always. For the whole age of the world is made commensurate with today, for the daily cycle is the measure of all time. For this reason too Jacob gives Shechem to Joseph as a special portion (Gen. xlviii. 22), the things of the body and of the senses, since he is busy toiling at these things, but to Judah who openly acknowledges God he gives, not presents, but praise and hymns and hallowed songs from his brothers (Gen. xlix. 8). Jacob receives Shechem not from God, but by means of “sword and bow,” words that pierce and parry. For the wise man subjects to himself the secondary as well as the primary objects, but, having subjected them, does not keep them, but bestows them on the one to whose nature they are akin. Do you not see that, with the gods too, though he apparently received them, he did not really do so, but hid them and did away with them and “destroyed” them for ever from himself? What soul, then, succeeded in hiding away wickedness and removing it from sight, if not the soul to which God manifested Himself, and which He deemed worthy of His secret mysteries? For He says: “Shall I hide from Abraham My servant that which I am doing?” (Gen. xviii. 17). It is fitting, Saviour, that You display Your own works to the soul that longs for all beautiful things, and that You have concealed none of Your works from it. That is why it is strong to shun evil and always to hide and becloud and destroy passion that works cruel havoc. We have shown, then, how the bad man is in banishment and hiding himself from God; let us now consider where he hides himself. “In the midst,” it says, “of the wood of the garden” (Gen. iii. 8), that is, in the centre of the mind, which in its turn is the centre of what we may call the garden of the whole soul: for he who runs away from God takes refuge in himself. There are two minds: the mind of the universe, which is God, and the individual mind. He who flees from his own mind flees for refuge to the Mind of all things. For he who abandons his own mind acknowledges as nothing everything that takes the human mind as its standard, and he refers all things to God. On the other hand, he who runs away from God declares Him to be the cause of nothing, and himself to be the cause of all things that come into being. The view, for instance, is widely current that all things in the world rush along automatically, with no one to guide them, and that the human mind by itself established arts, professions, laws, customs, and rules of right treatment both of men and animals on the part of the state and in our conduct whether as individual persons or as members of communities. But you perceive, my soul, the difference between the two opinions; for the one turns its back on the particular being, created and mortal mind, and whole-heartedly puts itself under the patronage of the universal Mind, uncreated and immortal; the other opinion, on the contrary, rejects God, and by a grievous error calls in to share its warfare the mind that is insufficient even to help itself. This is the reason for Moses’ words, “If the thief is found where he has just broken through and is struck and dies, there is no blood-guiltiness for him”: “but if the sun has risen upon him, (then he) is liable, he shall die in requital” (Exod. xxii. 2 f.). For if a man cleaves and breaks through the tenet that stands firm in its soundness and uprightness, testifying that unlimited power belongs to God alone, and he is found where he has broken through, that is, in the pierced and cloven doctrine that is conscious of a man’s own mind at work but not of God, he is a thief taking what belongs to another; for all things are God’s possessions, so that he who assigns anything to himself is appropriating what is another’s, and he receives a grievous blow, hard to heal, namely self-conceit, a thing akin to boorish ignorance. Moses does not mention the man who strikes separately, for he is none other than the man who is struck; just as the man who rubs himself is also rubbed, and the man who stretches himself is also stretched; for in his own person he is at the same time active and passive, employs the force and submits to its effect. In the same way, he who steals what is God’s and assigns it to himself is the victim of the outrage inflicted by his own impiety and self-conceit. It would be a good thing if he died when struck, that is to say, if he permanently failed to accomplish his purpose; for he must then be held to be less of a sinner. For wickedness presents itself sometimes as stationary, sometimes as moving. It is wickedness in motion that is ripe for filling up its full measure by carrying its designs to completion, and so it is worse than stationary wickedness. If, therefore, the understanding which fancies itself and not God to be the cause of all that comes into existence dies, that is, shrinks into inactivity, there is no blood-guiltiness on it; it has not gone so far as to abolish the living doctrine which ascribes to God the totality of powers. But if the sun has risen, that is, the mind that shines so brilliantly in us, and has conceived the notion that it discerns all things, and decides all things, and that nothing ever escapes it, he is guilty, he shall die in requital for the living doctrine which he destroyed, which acknowledges God as the sole Cause. For in himself he is found to be futile and truly dead; he has come forward as the author of a lifeless, mortal, and erroneous doctrine. In keeping with this the sacred word pronounces a curse on anyone who sets up in secret a graven or molten image, the work of the hands of the craftsman (Deut. xxvii. 15). Why, mind, do you hoard and treasure in yourself those wrong opinions: that God, the Being who is without kind, is of this or that kind, like the graven images, and that He, the incorruptible, is corruptible, like the molten images? Why do you not rather bring them forth into the open, so that you may be taught the things which you ought to learn from those who study the truth? For you fancy yourself versed in science because you have gone over methods of persuasion unworthy of an educated man, with which to combat the truth. But your science proves to be no science, since you refuse to submit to healing treatment for your soul’s grievous malady of ignorance. We shall learn from Moses, who “struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Exod. ii. 12), that the bad man sinks down into his own incoherent mind as he strives to avoid Him who is. This means that he took full account of the man who maintains that the things of the body have pre-eminence and holds the things of the soul to be nothing, and regards pleasures as the end and aim of life. For having noted the toil imposed by the king of Egypt on him who sees God—and the king is wickedness whose lead the passions follow—he sees the Egyptian man, that is, human and perishable passion, beating and outrageously abusing the one who sees; and having looked around the whole soul in this direction and that, and seen no one standing except God who is, but all other things tossing in wild confusion, after striking and thoroughly reckoning up the lover of pleasure, he hides him in his mind, which is a congeries of disconnected grains, devoid of cohesion and union with the beautiful and noble. So this man has been hidden away in himself. But the man whose character is the reverse of his does flee from himself, but takes refuge in the God of those that are. And for this reason he says, “He led him forth abroad and said, Look up to heaven and count the stars” (Gen. xv. 5). We would gladly take these in at one all-encompassing view, since we are insatiable in our love of virtue, but we are powerless to measure the riches of God. Yet thanks be to the Lover of Giving, for telling us in this way that He has set for Himself in the soul seeds far-shining, radiant, fully charged with meaning, as he has set the stars in heaven. But is not “abroad” a superfluous addition to “led him forth”? For who is ever led forth within? But perhaps this is what he means: He led him forth to outermost space, not just to one of the outside spaces, one that can be encompassed by others. For just as in our houses the women’s apartments have the men’s quarters outside them and the passage inside them, and the courtyard door is outside the court but inside the gateway, so too in the soul, what is outside one part can be inside another part. We must understand what he says in this way: He led forth the mind to the outermost bound. For what advantage would it have been for it to leave the body behind and take refuge in sense-perception? What would it gain by renouncing sense-perception and taking shelter under the uttered word? For the mind that is to be led forth and set free should withdraw itself from the influence of everything, the needs of the body, the organs of sense, specious arguments, the plausibilities of rhetoric, last of all itself. For this reason elsewhere he glories, saying “The Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, who took me out of my father’s house” (Gen. xxiv. 7); for it is not possible for one who lives in the body and the mortal race to attain to being with God; this is possible only for him whom God rescues from the prison. For this reason Isaac also, the soul’s gladness, when he meditates and is alone with God, goes forth, leaving himself and his own mind behind; for it says, “Isaac went forth into the plain to meditate as evening was drawing near” (Gen. xxiv. 63). Yes, and Moses, the word of prophecy, says, “When I go forth out of the city,” that is, the soul (for this too is the city of the living being giving him laws and customs), “I will spread out my hands” (Exod. ix. 29), and I will spread open and unfold all my doings to God, calling Him to be witness and overseer of each one of them, from whom evil cannot hide itself, but is forced to remove all disguises and be plainly seen. When the soul has attained perfect sincerity and godlikeness in all its words and actions, the voices of the senses cease, and so do all those abominable sounds that used to trouble it. For the visible calls and summons the sense of sight to itself, and the voice calls the sense of hearing, and the perfume calls the sense of smell, and everywhere the object of sense invites the sense to itself. But all these cease when the mind goes forth from the city of the soul and finds in God the spring and aim of its own doings and intents. Truly “the hands of Moses” are “heavy” (Exod. xvii. 12); for since the bad man’s doings are light and windy, those of the wise man will be weighty and immovable and not easily shaken. Accordingly they are steadied by Aaron, the Word, and Hor, which is “Light”; and life has no clearer light than truth. The prophet’s aim therefore is to show you by means of symbols that the doings of the wise man are upheld by the most essential of all things, the Word and Truth. And so, when Aaron dies, that is, when he is made perfect, he goes up into Hor, which is “Light” (Numb. xx. 25); for the end of the Word is Truth, which casts a beam more far-reaching than light. This is what the Word earnestly strives to attain. Do you not see that when he had received from God (Exod. xxxiii. 7) the Tent, namely, wisdom, in which the wise man tabernacles and dwells, he fixed and made it fast and strongly established it, not in the body, but outside it? For to represent the body he uses the figure of a camp, the quarters of an army full of wars and all the evils that war produces, a place that has no part in peace. And it was called “the tent of testimony,” wisdom testified to by God. Yes, for “everyone that sought the Lord went out to it.” This is very finely said. For if you are seeking God, mind, go out from yourself and seek diligently; but if you remain amid the heavy encumbrances of the body or the self-conceits with which the understanding is familiar, though you may have the semblance of a seeker, the quest for the things of God is not yours. But whether you will find God when you seek is uncertain, for He has not manifested Himself to many, but their zeal has been unsuccessful all along. And yet the mere seeking by itself is sufficient to make us partakers of good things, for it is always the case that endeavours toward noble things, even if they fail to attain their object, gladden in their very course those who make them. Thus it is that while the bad man, who shuns virtue and hides himself from God, takes refuge in his own mind, a sorry resource, the good man, on the other hand, who runs away from himself, returns to the apprehension of the One, thus winning a noble race and proving victor in this grandest of all contests. “And the Lord God called Adam and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” (Gen. iii. 9). Why is Adam alone called, when his wife had hidden herself with him? Well, first of all we must say that the mind is called even where it was, when it receives reproof and its defection is checked. But not only is the mind itself called, but all its faculties as well, for without its faculties the mind by itself is found naked and not even existing; and one of the faculties is sense-perception, which is woman. The call of Adam, the mind, then includes the call of sense-perception, the woman; but God does not call her separately. Why? Because, being irrational, she has no capacity of her own to receive reproof. For neither sight nor hearing nor any of the senses is capable of instruction, so none of them can apprehend subjects. But He who made sense-perception made it capable of distinguishing between material forms only: but it is the mind that receives instruction, and that is why He challenged it but not sense-perception. The words ποῦ εἶ, “Where are you?” can be explained in many different ways: first, as declarative rather than interrogative, equivalent to “you are in a place,” with ποὺ taking the grave accent. For whereas you thought that God walked in the garden and was contained by it, learn that you were wrong to think this, and listen to a most true utterance from the mouth of God who knows, which says that God is not somewhere (for He is not contained but contains the universe), but what has come into being is in a place, for it must necessarily be contained and not contain. A second account is this: What is said is equivalent to “Where have you arrived, soul?” What evils have you chosen for yourself in place of such great goods? When God had invited you to participate in virtue, are you going after wickedness, and when He had provided for your enjoyment the tree of life, that is of wisdom, by which you might have the power to live, did you gorge yourself with ignorance and corruption, preferring misery, the soul’s death, to happiness, the real life? Thirdly, there is the interrogative sense, to which two answers might be made. One answer to the question, “Where are you?” is “Nowhere,” for the soul of the bad man has no place to find footing or to settle on. Because of this the bad man is said to be “placeless”—“placeless” is used of an evil that defies placing (in any known category). Such is the man who is not good, always restless and unstable, drifting this way and that like a chopping wind, attaching himself to no fixed principle at all. A second answer might be given along these lines. Adam in fact gave it. “Hear where I am; where those are who are incapable of seeing God; where those are who do not listen to God; where those are who hide themselves from the Author of all things; where those are who shun virtue, where those are who are destitute of wisdom, where those are who, owing to unmanliness and cowardice of soul live in fear and trembling.” For when Adam says, “I heard Your voice in the garden and was afraid, because I am naked, and I hid myself” (Gen. iii. 10), he reveals all the traits just enumerated, as I have fully shown in earlier sections. Nevertheless Adam is not naked now: the words “they made for themselves girdles” occur a little earlier. By this too the prophet wishes to teach you that by nakedness he means not the nakedness of the body, but the nakedness in which the mind is found unprovided with virtue and not clothed with it. “The woman,” he says, “whom You gave with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate” (Gen. iii. 12). It is good that he does not say, “the woman whom You gave to me,” but “with me”; for You did not give sense to me as a possession, but You left it too free and at large, in some respects not subservient to the commands of my understanding. For instance, if the mind chooses to tell the sight not to see, the sight will nonetheless see what lies before it. Again, when a sound has reached the hearing, it will certainly let it in, even if the mind resolutely commands it not to hear. And the sense of smell, when odours have found their way in to it, will smell them, even though the mind forbids it to welcome them. Because of this God did not give sense-perception to the living being, but with the living being. What “giving with” means is this. Sense becomes aware of all things with our mind and simultaneously with it. For instance, the visible object arrests the attention of the sight and of the mind simultaneously; for the eye caught sight of the material substance, and at once the mind took in the thing that had been seen, took in that it was black or white or yellow or red or triangular or square or round, or some other colour or shape. Again, the hearing received the impression of the sound, and the mind with it: as proof that it did, the mind immediately judged the sound, pronouncing it weak or loud, tuneful and rhythmical, or on the other hand out of tune and discordant. We find the same thing in the case of the other senses. The addition of the words “she gave me of the tree” is quite excellent. For no one, except sense-perception, ever gives to the mind the tree with its sensibly-discerned bulk. For who gave to the mind the possibility of recognizing the body or whiteness? Did not sight? Who gave it the sound? Did not the hearing? Who the odour? Did not the sense of smell? Who the savour? Did not the taste? Who the rough and the soft? Did not the touch? The mind said rightly and with perfect truth, ‘sense-perception alone gives me opportunities of apprehending bodies.’ “And God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ And she said, ‘The serpent beguiled me and I ate’” (Gen. iii. 13). God asks sense-perception about one point, and she answers about another: for God asks something about the man; she does not speak about him, but says something about herself, for her words are “I ate,” not “I gave.” Perhaps, then, if we read the passage figuratively, we shall solve the puzzle and show that the woman gives a very pertinent answer to the question put to her. For when she ate, the man necessarily ate too. For when sense-perception, meeting with the object of sense, is filled with the presentation of it, at once the mind also is in contact, takes hold and in a way absorbs the sustenance which it provides. This, then, is what she says: I did not give it to the man by any act of will, for as soon as I came upon the object, he (so swift is he to move) received the image and impression of it himself. Now observe that, whereas the man says that the woman gave, the woman does not say that the serpent gave but that he beguiled; for to give is characteristic of sense-perception, but to cheat and beguile is characteristic of pleasure with its serpent-like subtlety. For instance, sense-perception gives to the mind what is by nature white and what is black, what is hot and what is cold, quite truthfully and with no deception. For, in the opinion of most people who do not overdo precision in their natural philosophy, objects are just as they appear to the eye. But pleasure does not report the object to the mind as it is, but artfully falsifies it, representing as something advantageous what is of no benefit at all: just as one can see repulsive courtesans applying pigments to their faces and painting under their eyes to conceal their ugliness. We can also note the immoderate man inclined to gluttony: this man welcomes as a good thing the abundance of strong drink and the well-spread table, though they harm him in both body and soul. Again we may see those who are in love, often quite crazy about women who are most hideous to look at, while pleasure beguiles them; you might almost say that she assures them of the beauty of form and colouring, the fullness and symmetry, that mark those who are characterized by traits the very reverse of these. Indeed they overlook those endowed with really faultless beauty, and pine for those whom I have mentioned. All kinds of consummate deception, then, belong most properly to pleasure, while giving is the characteristic of sense-perception: pleasure outwits and misleads the mind, showing objects not as they are, but as they are not, whereas sense-perception simply gives the material forms just as nature has made them, without trickery or counterfeit. “And the Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you from among all cattle and from among all the beasts of the earth. Upon your breast and your belly you shall go, and earth you shall eat all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall watch for your head, and you shall watch for his heel’” (Gen. iii. 14 f.). For what reason does He curse the serpent without giving it the opportunity to defend itself, though elsewhere, as seems reasonable, He commands that “the two parties between whom the dispute is should stand forth” (Deut. xix. 17) and that one party not be believed until the other is heard? Yet you see, no doubt, that He did not simply believe Adam and prejudge the case against the woman, but gives her the opportunity to defend herself, when He inquires “What is this that you have done?” (Gen. iii. 13), and she acknowledges that she failed owing to the deception practised on her by subtle serpent-like pleasure. When, then, the woman said “the serpent beguiled me,” what was there to stop Him from asking the serpent here too whether he had beguiled her, instead of prejudging the case and pronouncing the curse without listening to any defence? We have to say, then, that sense-perception belongs neither among bad things nor among good things, but is an intermediate thing common to a wise man and a fool, and when it finds itself in a fool it proves bad, when in a sensible man, good. Reasonably, then, since it has no evil nature of its own, but wavers between good and evil, inclining to either side, it is not pronounced guilty until it has admitted that it followed evil. But the serpent, pleasure, is bad of itself; and therefore it is not found at all in a good man, and the bad man alone suffers all the harm of it. So God quite appropriately pronounces the curse without giving pleasure an opportunity of defending herself, since she has in her no seed from which virtue might spring, but is always and everywhere guilty and foul. For this reason also, in the case of Er, God knows him to be wicked and puts him to death without bringing an open charge against him (Gen. xxxviii. 7). For He is well aware that the body, our “leathern” bulk (“leathern” is the meaning of “Er”), is wicked and a plotter against the soul, and is even a corpse and a dead thing. For you must make up your mind that each of us is nothing but a corpse-bearer, the soul raising up and carrying without toil the body which of itself is a corpse. And note, if you will, how strong the soul is. The most muscular athlete would not have the strength to carry his own statue for a short time, but the soul, sometimes for as long as a hundred years, easily carries the statue of the human being without getting tired; for it is not now (at the last) that God kills Er; rather, the body which He made and which Er represents was a corpse to begin with. By nature, as I have said, it is wicked and a plotter against the soul, but this is not evident to all, only to God and to anyone who is dear to God; for we read “Er was wicked in the sight of the Lord.” For when the mind soars aloft and is being initiated in the mysteries of the Lord, it judges the body to be wicked and hostile; but when it has abandoned the investigation of things divine, it considers it friendly to itself, its kinsman and brother. The proof of this is that it takes refuge in what is dear to the body. This is why there is a difference between the soul of an athlete and the soul of a philosopher. For the athlete refers everything to the well-being of the body, and, being a lover of the body, would sacrifice the soul itself on its behalf; but the philosopher, in love with the noble thing that lives in him, cares for the soul, and pays no regard to that which is really a corpse, the body, concerned only that the best part of him, his soul, may not be hurt by an evil thing, a very corpse, tied to it. You see that Er is killed not by the Lord, but by God. For it is not as Ruler and Governor employing the absolute power of sovereignty that He destroys the body, but in the exercise of goodness and kindness. For “God” is the name of the goodness pertaining to the First Cause, and is used so that you may know that He has made the inanimate things too, not by exercising authority but by goodness, just as He has made the living creatures by goodness. For, so that the superior beings might be clearly manifested, an inferior creation also had to exist, due to the same power, namely the goodness of the First Cause. And that goodness is God. When, then, soul, will you most fully realize that you are a corpse-bearer? Will it not be when you are perfected, and counted worthy of prizes and crowns? For then you will be no lover of the body, but a lover of God. And you will win the rewards if Judah’s daughter-in-law becomes your wife: Tamar, whose name means a palm-tree, the sign of victory. Here is a proof of it. As soon as Er has married her, he is found to be wicked and is killed. For we read, “And Judah took for Er his first-born a wife whose name was Tamar” (Gen. xxxviii. 6), and the next words are, “And Er was wicked before the Lord, and God killed him” (ibid. 7). For when the mind has carried off the rewards of victory, it condemns the corpse-body to death. You see that God both curses the serpent without allowing him to defend himself—for he is pleasure—and kills Er without bringing an open charge against him; for he is the body. And if you consider it, my friend, you will find that God has made some natures in the soul faulty and blameworthy in themselves, and others excellent and praiseworthy in every respect, just as is the case with plants and animals. Do you not see that among the plants the Creator has made some that repay cultivation and are useful and wholesome, and others that are wild and harmful and cause disease and destruction, and the same with animals? So, no doubt, He has made the serpent, our present subject, for the creature is in itself destructive of health and life. What a serpent does to a man, pleasure does to the soul, and that is why the serpent was taken to represent pleasure. Just as God, then, has conceived a hatred for pleasure and the body without giving reasons, so too he has promoted fine natures without any evident reason, praising them before pronouncing any action of theirs acceptable. For if anyone asks why the prophet says that Noah found grace in the sight of the Lord God (Gen. vi. 8) when, as far as we know, he had not yet done any good deed, we will give a suitable answer: he is shown to have an excellent nature from his birth, for Noah means “rest” or “righteous.” But he who rests from sinful and unrighteous acts, rests upon what is noble and lives in fellowship with righteousness cannot fail to find favour with God. Finding favour is not, as some suppose, merely the same as being well-pleasing; it also means something like this. The righteous man, exploring the nature of existing things, makes one surprising discovery: that all things are a grace of God, and that creation has no gift of grace to bestow, for it has no possession either, since all things are God’s possession, and for this reason grace too belongs to Him alone as His very own. So to those who ask what the origin of creation is, the right answer would be that it is the goodness and grace of God, which He bestowed on the race that stands next after Him. For all things in the world, and the world itself, are a free gift and an act of kindness and grace on God’s part. God has also made Melchizedek both king of peace, for that is the meaning of “Salem,” and His own priest (Gen. xiv. 18). He has not first fashioned any deed of his, but brings him forward from the outset as such a king, peaceable and worthy of His own priesthood. For he is called “the righteous king,” and a “king” is the enemy of a despot: the one is the author of laws, the other of lawlessness. So the mind that plays the despot issues harsh and hurtful decrees for both soul and body that bring grievous woes: I mean the conduct that wickedness prompts, and free indulgence of the passions. But the king first resorts to persuasion rather than decrees, and then issues directions that enable a vessel, I mean the living being, to make life’s voyage successfully, piloted by the good pilot, who is right principle. So let the despot’s title be ruler of war, and the king’s prince of peace, of Salem, and let the king offer the soul food full of joy and gladness; for he brings bread and wine, which Ammonites and Moabites refused to supply to the seeing one, and for this reason they are excluded from the divine congregation and assembly. These characters, the Ammonites, who derive their nature from their mother, sense-perception, and the Moabites, who derive theirs from their father, mind, hold that all things owe their coherence to these two things, mind and sense-perception, and take no thought of God; and they “shall not enter,” says Moses, “into the congregation of the Lord, because they did not meet us with bread and water” (Deut. xxiii. 3 f.) when we came out from the passions of Egypt. But let Melchizedek offer wine instead of water, and give souls strong drink, so that they may be seized by a divine intoxication, more sober than sobriety itself. For he is a priest, namely Reason, who has as his portion Him who is, and all his thoughts of God are high and vast and sublime: for he is priest of the Most High (Gen. xiv. 18), not that there is any other who is not Most High—for God being One “is in heaven above and on earth beneath, and there is none beside Him” (Deut. iv. 39)—but to conceive of God not in low earthbound ways but in lofty terms that transcend all other greatness and all else that is free from matter, calls up in us a picture of the Most High. What good thing had Abram already done, that he tells him to cut himself off from his fatherland and the kindred there and to live in whatever land God Himself may give him? (Gen. xii. 1). And that is a good, large and very prosperous city, for God’s gifts are great and precious. But God created this character too in a shape that merits esteem, for “Abram” means “father high-soaring,” and both epithets are grounds for praise. For when the mind does not, like a master, frighten the soul with threats, but governs it as a father, not granting it the things that are pleasant to it, but giving it even against its will the things that are good for it; when, turning away in all matters from what is base and from all that draws it to things mortal, it soars aloft and spends its time in contemplation of the universe and its different parts; when, mounting yet higher, it explores the Deity and His nature, urged by an ineffable love of knowledge; it cannot go on holding the principles it first absorbed, but in its desire to improve itself seeks to change its abode for a better one. God endows some with a fine form and equipment even before their birth, and has determined that they will have a most excellent portion. Do you not see what He says to Abraham about Isaac, when Abraham could not trust that he would ever become the father of such offspring, and indeed actually laughed at the promise and said, “Shall it come to pass to him that is a hundred years old, and shall Sarah who is ninety years old bear a child?” (Gen. xvii. 17). He ratifies and confirms it saying, “Yes, Sarah your wife shall bear you a son and you shall call his name Isaac, and I will establish My covenant with Him for an everlasting covenant” (ibid. 19). What is it, then, that has caused this one too to be praised before his birth? Some good things benefit us when they have reached us and are present, such as health, excellence of the bodily senses, perhaps wealth, and fame—for even these may be loosely called “good things”;—others not only when they have come, but also when their coming has been foretold. For instance, joy, a happy condition of the soul, gladdens not only when it is present and actively at work, but even while it is still only hoped for brings an anticipatory brightness. For here again it possesses an advantage all its own. While other good things take effect only by virtue of their own particular goodness, joy is both a particular and a general good. See how it comes to add to and enrich them all. We rejoice over health, and over liberty, and over honour, and over the other good things, so that we say with literal truth that nothing is good unless Joy is attached to it. But we rejoice over the other good things not only when they have already come about and are present, but also when they are looked for in the future, for when we hope that we will grow rich, or obtain office, or win praise, or discover a way of getting rid of disease, or obtain our share of health and strength, or no longer be ignorant but be men of knowledge, we are glad in no small measure. Since, then, joy causes the soul to overflow with gladness not only when present but also when hoped for, God fittingly held Isaac, even before he was conceived, worthy of his great name and, in it, of a vast endowment: for “Isaac” means laughter of soul and joy and gladness, Again, God declares of Jacob and Esau, while they are still in the womb, that the one is a ruler and leader and master, but that Esau is a subject and a slave. For God the Maker of living beings knows well the different pieces of his own handiwork, even before He has thoroughly chiselled and completed them, and the faculties they will display later: in a word, their deeds and experiences. And so when Rebecca, the soul that waits on God, goes to inquire of God, He tells her in reply, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples shall be separated from your belly, and one people shall be above the other people, and the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. xxv. 23). For in God’s judgement what is base and irrational is by nature a slave, but what is of fine character, endowed with reason and better, is princely and free. And this holds not only when either is full-grown in soul, but even when their development is still uncertain. For it is always the case that even a slight breath of virtue is evidence not merely of liberty but of leadership and sovereignty, and on the other hand that the most casual beginning of wickedness enslaves the reasoning faculty, even if its offspring have not yet come forth fully developed. What led this same Jacob, when Joseph brought to him his two sons, the elder Manasseh and the younger Ephraim, to cross his hands and place his right hand on Ephraim the younger son and his left hand on Manasseh the elder; and when Joseph was distressed by it and imagined that his father had made an unintentional mistake in placing his hands that way, to say it was no error, but “I know, my child, I know, this one too shall be a people, this one too shall be exalted, but his younger brother shall be greater than he”? (Gen. xlviii. 19). What, then, should we say but this: that God created two exceedingly necessary faculties in the soul, memory and recollection? Of these, memory is the better and recollection the inferior. For while the former keeps everything that it has apprehended fresh and distinct, so that it goes wrong in nothing through ignorance, recollection is always preceded by forgetfulness, a maimed and blind affair. But the inferior of the two, recollection, turns out to be older than the superior, memory: [while recollection has many gaps of forgetfulness, memory is] unbroken and uninterrupted. For when we are first being introduced to the various arts we are unable to master their principles at once; so, finding ourselves liable to forgetfulness at the outset, we afterwards recollect, until, as the result of repeated forgetting and repeated recollecting, an unfailing memory eventually wins the day. So memory, being born later, is formed as recollection’s younger sister. So Ephraim is the figurative name for Memory, meaning “fruit-bearing,” for the soul of the student has borne its proper fruit when it is able by means of memory to hold securely the principles of the art that is being learned. Manasseh, however, represents recollection, for the name, when translated, is said to mean “out of forgetfulness”, and he who escapes from forgetfulness necessarily recollects. So Jacob, the overthrower of the passions and the trained seeker of virtue, very rightly lays his right hand on Ephraim as fruitful memory, and counts Manasseh, who is recollection, worthy of the second place. Moses also, to take another case, awards special praise among the sacrificers of the Passover to those who sacrificed the first time, because when they had separated themselves from the passions of Egypt by crossing the Red Sea they kept to that crossing and no longer hankered after them, but to those who sacrificed the second time he assigns the second place, for after turning back they retraced the wrong steps they had taken and, as though they had forgotten their duties, set out again to perform them, while the earlier sacrificers held on without turning. So Manasseh, who comes “out of forgetfulness,” corresponds to those who offer the second Passover, the fruit-bearing Ephraim to those who offer the earlier one. This, moreover, is the reason why God proclaims Bezalel by name, and says that He has given him wisdom and knowledge, and that He will appoint him artisan and chief craftsman of all the works of the Tabernacle, that is of the soul (Exod. xxxi. 2 ff.), though He has so far pointed to no work or deed of Bezalel’s that would win him even commendation. We must say, then, that here too we have a form which God has stamped on the soul as on the tested coin. We will know what image is impressed on it if we first determine the exact meaning of the name. Bezalel means, then, “in the shadow of God”; but God’s shadow is His Word, which he used like an instrument, and so made the world. But this shadow, and what we may describe as the representation, is the archetype for further creations. For just as God is the Pattern of the Image, to which the title of Shadow has just been given, even so the Image becomes the pattern of other beings, as the prophet made clear at the very outset of the Law-giving by saying, “And God made the man after the Image of God” (Gen. i. 27), implying that the Image had been made as a representation of God, but that the man was made after the Image when it had acquired the force of a pattern. Let us observe, therefore, what character is impressed. The first men sought to find how we came to conceive of the Deity. Then those whose philosophy was reputed to be the best declared that it was from the world and its constituent parts and the forces subsisting in these that we gained our apprehension of the First Cause. If a man sees a house carefully constructed with a gateway, colonnades, men’s quarters, women’s quarters, and the other buildings, he will get an idea of the craftsman, for he will judge that the house never reached that completeness without the skill of the craftsman; and likewise in the case of a city and a ship and every smaller or greater construction. In just the same way, anyone who enters this world, as if it were some vast house or city, and sees the sky circling around and embracing all things within it, and planets and fixed stars moving without any variation in rhythmical harmony and with advantage to the whole, and the earth with the central space assigned to it, water and air flowing in set order as its boundary, and over and above these, living creatures, mortal and immortal beings, plants and fruits in great variety, he will surely argue that these have not been made without consummate art, but that the Maker of this whole universe was and is God. Those who base their reasoning in this way on what is before their eyes apprehend God by means of a cast shadow, discerning the Craftsman by means of His works. There is a mind more perfect and more thoroughly cleansed, which has undergone initiation into the great mysteries, a mind which gains its knowledge of the First Cause not from created things, as one may learn the substance from the shadow, but, lifting its eyes above and beyond creation, obtains a clear vision of the uncreated One, so as to apprehend from Him both Himself and His shadow. To apprehend that was, we saw, to apprehend both the Word and this world. The mind I am speaking of is Moses, who says, “Manifest Yourself to me, let me see You that I may know You” (Exod. xxxiii. 13); ‘for I would not want You to be manifested to me by means of heaven or earth or water or air or any created thing at all, nor would I find the reflection of Your being in anything other than You Who are God, for the reflections in created things are dissolved, but those in the Uncreate will remain abiding, sure and eternal.’ This is why God has expressly called Moses and why He spoke to Him. He has also expressly called Bezalel, but not in the same way. One receives the clear vision of God directly from the First Cause Himself. The other discerns the Craftsman, as if from a shadow, from created things through a process of reasoning. Hence you will find the Tabernacle and all its furniture made first by Moses and afterwards by Bezalel, for Moses is the craftsman of the archetypes, and Bezalel of the copies of these. For Moses has God for Instructor, as He says “you shall make all things according to the pattern that was shown to you in the mount” (Exod. xxv. 40), but Bezalel is instructed by Moses. And all this is just as we should expect. For likewise, on the occasion of the rebellion of Aaron, Speech, and Miriam, Perception, they are expressly told “If a prophet is raised up to the Lord, God shall be known to him in a vision” and in a shadow, not manifestly; but with Moses, the man who is “faithful in all His house, He will speak mouth to mouth in manifest form and not through dark speeches” (Numb. xii. 6-8). Since, then, we have found two natures created, moulded and chiselled into full relief by God’s hands, the one essentially hurtful, blameworthy, and accursed, the other beneficial and praiseworthy, the one stamped with a counterfeit impression, the other with a genuine one, let us offer the noble and suitable prayer that Moses offered before us, “that God may open to us His own treasury” (Deut. xxviii. 12) and that sublime reason pregnant with divine illumination, to which He has given the title of “heaven”; and that He may close up the treasuries of evil things. For with God there are treasuries of good things and also of evil things, as He says in the great Song, “Are not these laid up in store with Me, sealed up in My treasuries in the day of vengeance, when their foot shall have slipped?” (Deut. xxxii. 34f.). You see that there are treasuries of evil things. And the treasury of good things is one, for since God is One, there is likewise one treasury of good things. But there are many treasuries of evil things, for those who sin are countless too. But here too observe the goodness of Him who is. He opens the treasury of good things, and closes those of evil things. For it is God’s way to hold out good things and to be the first to bestow them, but to be slow to inflict evil things. But Moses, magnifying God’s love of giving gifts and granting favours, says that the treasuries of evil things are sealed up not only at other times, but also when the soul fails to direct its steps in keeping with the right principle; though at such a time it might justly have been judged worthy of punishment. For he says that the treasuries of evil things were sealed in the day of vengeance, the sacred word showing in this way that God will not proceed at once even against those who sin, but gives time for repentance and for healing the one who had slipped and setting him on his feet again. “And the Lord God said to the serpent, Cursed are you from among all cattle and from among all the beasts of the earth” (Gen. iii. 14). Just as joy, being a good condition of soul, deserves prayer, so pleasure, the passion par excellence, deserves cursing; it shifts the standards of the soul and makes it a lover of passion instead of a lover of virtue:—“Accursed,” says Moses in the Curses, “is he who removes his neighbour’s landmarks” (Deut. xxvii. 17):—for God set virtue, the tree of life, as a landmark and law for the soul. This landmark is removed by the man who has fixed wickedness, the tree of death, as a landmark in its place. “Cursed again is he who causes a blind man to go astray in the way” (Deut. xxvii. 18), “and he that strikes his neighbour craftily” (ibid. 24). And these also are acts of pleasure, the utterly godless one; for sense by itself is a blind thing, since it is irrational, for it is the reasoning faculty that confers sight. So it is only with reason that we apprehend matters; sense does not take us that far; for by means of sense we gain impressions only of the material forms of things. Pleasure, then, has cheated poor maimed sense of the power of apprehending matters, since, when sense could have turned to mind and secured it as its charioteer, pleasure has prevented it, leading it only to what can be perceived externally, and giving it a craving for what produces pleasure, so that sense, being a maimed thing, may follow a blind guide, namely what sense can perceive, and that the mind, led by this pair of blind guides, may be brought to the ground and robbed of self-control. For if things had corresponded at all to what nature prescribes, the maimed faculties would have been bound to follow the reasoning faculty, which has eyes, for in this way the damage incurred would have been diminished. As it is, pleasure has contrived so shrewd a device against the soul that it has compelled it to use blind guides, inducing it by deceptive wiles to exchange virtue for evil things, and to surrender its innocence and receive wickedness in its place. The holy word also forbids such an exchange, when it says, “You shall not change good with evil” (Lev. xxvii. 33). On these grounds pleasure is accursed. Let us see how appropriate the curses are that He pronounces on it. He says that it is cursed from all cattle (Gen. iii. 14). Our irrational faculty of sense-perception, then, belongs to the cattle kind, and each of our senses curses pleasure as a most deadly enemy: for it is truly hostile to sense, as is proved by the fact that, when we have glutted ourselves with immoderate pleasure, we cannot see or hear or smell or taste or feel clearly, but our contact with objects of sense is dim and feeble. This is what we experience when we have stopped indulging in pleasure; but when we are in the very midst of the enjoyments it affords, we find ourselves utterly deprived of the support that we obtain through the co-operation of the senses, to such an extent that we seem to have been maimed. How, then, could sense not rightly lay curses on the pleasure that maims it? It is also cursed beyond all the wild beasts. By these I mean the passions of the soul, for by these the mind is wounded and destroyed. Why, then, is it considered worse than the other passions? Because it is, we may say, at the bottom of them all, like a kind of starting-point and foundation. Lust comes into play through love of pleasure; pain arises as pleasure is withdrawn; fear, again, arises from a dread of being without pleasure. It is clear, then, that all the passions depend on pleasure, and these would perhaps never have taken shape at all, if what produces them, pleasure, had not first been laid down. “On your breast and belly you shall go” (Gen. iii. 14). For passion has its lair in these parts of the body, the breast and the belly. When pleasure has the materials it needs to produce it, it haunts the belly and the parts below it. But when it is at a loss for these materials, it occupies the breast where anger is; for lovers of pleasure when deprived of their pleasures grow bitter and angry. Let us look still more carefully at what is signified. Our soul consists of three parts, and has one part given to reasoning, a second to high spirit, a third to desire. Some philosophers have distinguished these parts from each other by function, others also by the places they occupy. These have gone on to assign to the reasoning part the region of the head, saying that, where the king is, there are also his body-guards, and that the senses which are in the region of the head are body-guards of the mind, and that it follows that the king must be there too, since it has been allotted to him as his dwelling, like a castle in a city. To the spirited part they assign the breast, pointing out that nature has given that part firmness by means of a strong and solid array of continuous bones, as though she were arming a good soldier with shield and breastplate for defence against opponents. To the lustful portion of the soul they assign the region around the abdomen and the belly, for it is there that lust, irrational craving, has its abode. If, therefore, mind, you ever ask what quarter pleasure has as her portion, do not consider the place occupied by the head, where the reasoning faculty resides, for you will assuredly not find it there, since reason is at war with passion, and cannot remain in the same place with it. For when reason prevails pleasure is gone, and when pleasure conquers, reason is an exile. But look for it in the breast and belly, where high spirit and desire are, portions of the irrational: for both our faculty of choice and the passions are found in the irrational. Well, there is nothing to prevent the mind from going out from the purely intellectual interests which are proper to it and giving itself up to its inferior. This happens when war prevails in the soul; for then reason, which is in us not as a combative but as a peaceful resident, cannot fail to become a prisoner of war. For look: the Sacred Word, knowing how strong the impulse of each passion is, of both high spirit and lust, puts a curb on each of them by setting reason over them as charioteer and pilot. And first, this is how it speaks about high spirit, aiming to cure and heal it: “And you shall put on to the oracle of the judgements the Showing and the Truth, and it shall be upon Aaron’s breast, whenever he enters into the Holy Place before the Lord” (Exod. xxviii. 30). The “oracle,” then, is the organ of speech in us, which is the uttered word: and this may either be rejected as spoken at random or may be approved as well-judged: but the sacred writer is leading us to think of the word spoken with judgement and discernment; for he tells us that the oracle is not the untested or counterfeit one, but “the oracle of the judgements,” an expression equivalent to “well tested and examined.” He says that the two highest possible virtues, clearness and truthfulness, belong to this approved word. He is quite right to say so. For reason at the outset fell short of making matters clear and evident to another, since we have no power to display the affection that external things call up in the soul, or to convey an idea of its character. Therefore we were compelled to resort to signs given by means of the voice, nouns and verbs, which cannot fail to be intelligible, so that the other may get a clear and unmistakable idea of our meaning. (This was reason’s first inadequacy.) In the second place, it was inadequate to report things truly. For what good is a clear and distinct expression if it is false in other respects? For under these circumstances the hearer must necessarily be deceived and incur a very great misfortune, being not merely ignorant but badly taught as well. For what if I point to the letter alpha and tell the boy clearly and distinctly that it is gamma, or point to eta and tell him that it is omega? Or what if the music-master tells the beginner as he points to the enharmonic genus that it is the chromatic, or says of the chromatic that it is the diatonic, or of the note on the highest string that it is the central, or of the conjunct that it is the disjunct tetrachord, or of the highest tone in the tetrachord scale that it is the lowest? He may speak clearly and distinctly, but not truly. But in this way he will be a doer of evil—of the evil that belongs to speech. But when he attains both of these requisites, both clearness and truthfulness, he will make the word beneficial to the pupil, bringing into play its two virtues, perhaps the only virtues indeed which it possesses. It says, then, that the tested word, having the virtues that are peculiarly its own, was enthroned on the breast (namely Aaron’s), that is, on the spirited element, so that this might first of all be guided by reason, and not injured by its own irrationality; in the next place by clearness, for it is not the nature of anger to be a friend of clearness. Do we not see how, in those who are enraged, not only their understanding but also their words are full of disturbance and confusion? It was appropriate therefore that anger’s lack of clearness should be set right again by clearness. Third, it must be guided by truthfulness, for along with its other faults anger has this one too as peculiarly its own: lying. Experience shows that hardly one of those who give way to this passion speaks the truth. They are victims of an intoxication not of body but of soul. These are the antidotes for the region of anger: reason, clearness of speech, truth of speech. For the three are virtually one, since reason, accompanied by the two virtues of truthfulness and distinctness, acts as a healer of anger, that grievous sickness of the soul. To whom, then, does it belong to bear these? Not to my understanding or to the understanding of any chance comer, but to the understanding that exercises its priesthood and offers sacrifices in purity, the understanding of Aaron, and not always even to this, for it often turns and fails, but when it remains free from turning, when it enters into the Holy Place, when the reasoning faculty enters in together with holy resolves and does not abandon these. But very often the mind does enter with these into sacred and holy and purified opinions, but these are mere human opinions, for instance, those concerning simple duties, those concerning high-standard actions, those concerning usages resting on human enactment, those concerning virtue conforming to human standards. Not even one who is in this state is fit to bear the oracle upon his breast with the virtues that belong to it, but only he who goes in, in the sight of the Lord, that is he who does all things for God’s sake, and overvalues none of the things that are of less importance than God, but gives these too all they deserve, not, however, stopping at them, but mounting up in the effort to become acquainted with, know and honour the One. For he who is in this state will have his spirited element charioteered by purified reason, which will abolish all that is irrational in him, and by clearness, which will heal all that is uncertain and confused, and by truthfulness, which will eliminate falsehood. Aaron, then, being inferior to Moses, who cuts the breast, that is, the spirited element, clean out, does not allow it to be carried away by random impulses, for he is afraid that, if it is given free rein, it may some day become unmanageable, as a horse does, and trample down the whole soul. No, he curbs and controls it, first by reason, so that, driven by an excellent charioteer, it may not grow too restive; next he employs the virtues of speech, distinctness, and truth. For if high spirit is trained in this way, so as to yield to reason and distinctness, and also to train itself to shun falsehood, it will not only rid itself of much ferment, but will also make the whole soul gentle. Well, Aaron, as I have said, has this passion and attempts to cure it with the saving medicines already mentioned. Moses, on the other hand, thinks it necessary to use the knife on the seat of anger in its entirety, and to cut it clean out of the soul, for no moderation of passion can satisfy him; he is content with nothing but a complete absence of passion. Holy Scripture testifies that what I say is true, for it says, “Moses took the breast and removed it as a crowning offering before the Lord from the ram of consecration and it became Moses’ portion” (Lev. viii. 29). Rightly so; for it was the task of the man who loved virtue and was loved by God, once he had contemplated the whole soul, to seize the breast, which is the spirited element, and to cut it off and take it away, in order that, through the excision of the warlike part, the remainder might have peace. He removes it, not from just any animal, as chance might have it, but from the ram of consecration, although a heifer was offered too. But he passed this by and went to the ram, because it is a creature naturally prone to butt, since it is full of spirit and ready for a fight. This is why engineers make most engines of war in the shape of rams. The part of us, then, that resembles a ram in its reckless readiness for a fight is the wrangling kind; and wrangling is the mother of anger; accordingly it is those who contend most eagerly in debates and other gatherings that most easily lose their tempers. So Moses, as he must, cuts out anger, the discordant offspring of the soul that loves wrangling and contention. He does this so that she may become barren and stop bearing harmful offspring, and so that this may become a portion fit for the lover of virtue, not the breast nor the seat of high spirit, but the removal of these: for God assigned to the wise man a share of surpassing excellence, namely the power to cut out the passions. You see how the perfect man always makes perfect freedom from passion his aim. But Aaron, the man making gradual progress, who holds a lower position, practises moderation, as I have said; for his power does not reach far enough for him to cut out the breast and the high-spirited element, but he brings to it, as charioteer and guide, reason with the virtues attached to it, and this is the oracle that bears Clear-showing and Truth. But he will bring out the difference more clearly with the following words: “The breast of the offering put on, and the shoulder of the part removed, I have taken at the hands of the children of Israel from the sacrifices of your salvation, and have given to Aaron and his sons” (Lev. vii. 34). You see that these cannot take the breast by itself, but must take it with the shoulder, whereas Moses takes it without the shoulder. Why is this? Because he, being perfect, has no small or petty aims, nor any desire to moderate his passions, but goes so far as to cut off all passions everywhere; while those others set out to wage war on the passions on a small scale, not a grand one, but seek to come to terms and arrange a truce with them, putting forward the word of pacification, so that it, like a charioteer, may curb their excessive impetuosity. Furthermore the shoulder is a symbol of toil and hardship; and this is the character of the one who attends to and ministers in holy things, subject to toil and discipline. But the man on whom God bestows his good things in perfection and in overflowing measure is free from toil. He who acquires virtue by toil falls short of full achievement, as compared with Moses, who received it easily and without toil from the hands of God. For, as toiling itself falls short of the toilless achievement and is inferior to it, so the imperfect falls short of the perfect, and the one who learns falls short of the one who is self-taught. This is why Aaron takes the breast with the shoulder, but Moses without the shoulder. The reason why he calls it the breast of “the special offering put on” is that reason must be put and set firmly on the seat of anger, as though it were a kind of charioteer keeping straight a stiff-necked and restive horse. But when he comes to the shoulder he does not speak of it, as he does of the breast, as belonging to “the offering put on,” but as belonging to “that which was removed.” The reason he does so is this. The soul must not ascribe its toil for virtue to itself, but must take it away from itself and refer it to God, confessing that it was not its own strength or power that acquired nobility, but He who freely bestowed the love of it as well. Neither breast nor shoulder is taken except from the sacrifice of salvation. That is fitting. For only then does the soul begin to be saved, when the seat of anger has received reason as its charioteer, and toil has come to create in it, not self-satisfaction, but a readiness to yield the honour to God, the Bestower of the favour. We have already mentioned that pleasure goes not only on its breast but also on its belly, and pointed out that the stomach is the most appropriate place for pleasure, for we may almost describe it as a reservoir of all the pleasures. For when the belly has been filled, cravings for the other pleasures also grow intense, but when it has been emptied, these quiet down and grow calmer. And so the prophet says in another passage, “Whatever goes upon the belly, and whatever goes all the time upon four feet, which has many feet, is unclean” (Lev. xi. 42). The lover of pleasure fits this description, always going after the belly and the pleasures of the adjoining parts. With what creeps after the belly he has paired what walks on four feet; and quite naturally; for the passions that belong to the realm of pleasure are four in number, as has been mentioned in a treatise specially devoted to that subject. Accordingly, the man who is given up to the one thing, pleasure, is unclean, and so is the man who relies on all four passions. Now that we have said this, note once more how a perfect man differs from one making gradual progress. We have already found the perfect man cutting out the seat of anger entirely from the wrangling soul, and so rendering it gentle and submissive and peaceable, and cheerfully ready to face every demand both in act and word; while the man of gradual improvement was found powerless to cut away the passion, for the breast is Aaron’s portion, but was found schooling it with well-tested speech, accompanied by two virtues, clearness and truth. In the same way we shall now find Moses, the wise man, in his perfection, scouring away and shaking off pleasures, but the man of gradual improvement not treating pleasure as a whole in this way, but welcoming simple and unavoidable pleasure while declining the excessive and overelaborate kind found in delicacies. For of Moses he says this: “And he washed with water the belly and the feet of the whole burnt-offering” (Lev. ix. 14). That is excellently said; for the wise man consecrates his whole soul as being worthy to be offered to God, since it is free from voluntary or involuntary blemish; and, in this condition, he washes out and bathes away and scours off the whole belly and the pleasures that it and the parts adjoining it yield, not dealing in this way with only part of it, but so filled with contempt for the whole that he rejects even necessary food and drink, being fed by the contemplation of things divine. And so testimony is given about him in another place too: “for forty days he ate no bread and drank no water” (Exod. xxxiv. 28), when he was in the holy mount and listened to the divine communications made by God as He declared His laws. He not only renounces the whole belly, but scours away the feet with it, that is, the supports of pleasure; these supports are the things that give rise to pleasure, for the man of gradual improvement is said to wash the inwards and the feet (Lev. i. 9), not the whole belly: for he is not able to thrust pleasure away from him completely, but is content if he can get rid of its inwards, that is, of the delicacies, produced by the elaborate skill of dainty cooks and confectioners, which the epicures tell us serve, so to speak, as a means of giving succulence to the principal pleasures. He further stresses the mere moderating of passion in the man of gradual advance, by representing the wise man as declining all the pleasures of the belly without being told to, while the man of gradual advance acts under orders; for in the wise man’s case the text says “he washed with water the belly and the feet” (Lev. ix. 14), spontaneously and unbidden, but in the case of the priests it reads like this: “the inwards and the feet,” not “they washed” but “they shall wash” (Lev. i. 9). This is said with great precision. For it must be that while the perfect man moves of his own accord towards virtuous actions, the man who is in training does so with the aid of reason, which guides him in what he should do, and to obey its directions is a noble thing. We must not fail to notice that Moses, when he refuses the entire belly, that is, the filling of his stomach, practically renounces the other passions too. The lawgiver uses one portion to present the whole clearly; and having mentioned the most essential matter, he in effect deals with the rest, about which he has said nothing. For the filling of the belly is the most essential matter, and the foundation, so to speak, of the other passions. None of them, as we see, can take shape unless it has the belly to support it, for nature has made the belly the basis of all things. This is why, when Leah’s sons, the good things of the soul, had been born before Jacob’s other sons, and had ceased with Judah, who is “praise” (Gen. xxix. 35), God, intending to create representatives of the forward striving of the body as well, causes Bilhah, Rachel’s handmaid, to bear children even before her mistress. Now Bilhah means “swallowing.” For the prophet knew that no part or organ of the body can subsist without “swallowing” and the belly, but this holds sway and sovereignty over the whole body and over the whole material frame, whose concern is mere living. Do not let any subtle point escape your notice, for you will not find a single pointless expression. Moses removes the breast; he does not remove the belly, but washes it (Lev. viii. 29, ix. 14). Why is this? Because the perfect wise man can, by wholly renouncing anger, utterly avert and drive off the uprising of the spirited element in him, but he is powerless to cut out the belly. Even the man of fewest needs, who scorns the very necessities of life, and trains himself in abstinence from them, is forced by nature to take necessary food and drink. Let him therefore wash the belly and cleanse it of superfluous and unclean provisions; for this too is a sufficiently great gift from God to the lover of virtue. This is why, when dealing with the soul suspected of adultery, he says (Num. v. 27), that if it has forsaken the right principle, which is the lawful husband, and is discovered to have had intercourse with soul-defiling passion, “it will swell up in the belly,” which means that it will always have the pleasures and desires of the belly unfilled and insatiable, and will never stop being insatiable because of gross stupidity, but, with a countless throng of them pouring in, will keep its passion for ever. For instance, I know many who have been brought to such disaster by the craving of the belly that after resorting to emetics they rush straight back to strong drink and all the rest. For the craving of the soul that is out of control is not limited by size, as the bodily organs are. These are vessels of a fixed capacity that admit nothing beyond it and eject all that is superfluous. Desire is never filled up, but continues always thirsty and in need of more. This explains why “the breaking up of the thigh” is added as the sequel to the swelling of the belly. For it is then that the soul experiences the breaking up of the right principle, the principle that is the seed from which all noble things are begotten. We see this from the words that follow, “If she has not been defiled and is pure, she shall be free and shall conceive seed” (Numb. v. 28), if she has not been defiled by passion, but has been chaste and faithful to her lawful husband, the princely and wholesome principle, she will have a fruitful and productive soul, yielding the offspring of sound sense and righteousness and all excellence. Is it possible, then, for us, tied as we are to a body, not to comply with bodily requirements? How could it be? But look. The sacred guide tells the man who feels the pressure of bodily necessity how to deal with it: to comply with it only as far as he actually must. First he says, “Let there be to you a place outside the camp” (Deut. xxiii. 12), meaning by “the camp” virtue, in which the soul has pitched its camp. For good sense and indulgence of a bodily necessity cannot occupy the same quarters. Next he says, “You shall go forth there without.” Why go forth? Because the soul cannot have dealings with any of the body’s friends while it remains with good sense and spends its days in the house of wisdom. For then it is nourished by food more divine, which it finds in all knowledge, and for the sake of this it actually disregards the flesh. For it is when it has gone forth from the sacred dwellings of virtue that it turns to material things, which treat the body badly and weigh it down. How then shall I deal with them? “Let there be to you, he says, a shovel upon your girdle, and you shall dig with it” (Deut. xxiii. 13), that is to say, reason shall be upon the passion digging it out, tucking it up, not allowing it to wrap itself around you. For God wants us to gird up our passions, not wear them flowing and loose. So at the crossing over from them, which is called Passover, He commands that their “loins should be bound up” (Exod. xii. 11), in other words, that their desires be restrained. Let a shovel then, that is, reason, follow the passion, preventing it from spreading abroad, for in this way we shall comply only with urgent demands and abstain from all that goes beyond them. When we attend entertainments and are about to take and enjoy the food provided, if we take our places at table with reason like some weapon to parry blows, we shall neither gorge ourselves with food beyond measure like cormorants, nor, overloaded with unlimited strong drink, shall we succumb to intoxication and the foolish talk that follows it; for reason will curb and bridle the impetuous rush of the passion. To cite myself as proof of what I say, I know from frequent experience how true it is. Many times I have been present at gatherings with little that was sociable about them, or at costly suppers. When I did not arrive with reason as my companion, I found myself the slave of the enjoyments provided, at the mercy of harsh masters, entertainments for eye and ear and all that brings pleasure by way of taste or smell. But whenever I arrive with convincing reason at my side, I find myself a master, not a slave, and, putting forth all my strength, win the noble victory of endurance and self-mastery, in a vigorous and pertinacious encounter with everything that excites the unruly desires. “You shall dig,” he says, you see, “with the shovel” (Deut. xxiii. 13), that is, you shall lay bare and distinguish by means of reason the nature of each passion, eating, drinking, sexual indulgence, that you may discern them and learn the truth about them. For then you will know that none of these contains the good, only what is useful and necessary. “And bringing the shovel to bear on it then you shall cover your indecency” (ibid.). It is well said. So, soul, bring reason to bear on all things, by which all indecency of flesh and passion is covered, and hidden, and put out of sight. For all that is unaccompanied by reason is unsightly, just as all that reason accompanies is beautiful. This is the result. The lover of pleasure moves on the belly; the perfect man washes out the entire belly; the man who is making gradual progress washes out the contents of the belly, the man who is just beginning his training will go forth without, when he intends to curb passion by bringing reason (figuratively called a shovel) to bear upon the demands of the belly. There is an excellent point in the next words too: “You shall go upon your breast and your belly” (Gen. iii. 14). For pleasure does not belong to the category of things becalmed and stationary, but to that of things moving and full of turmoil. For just as a flame is in motion, so passion, much like a blazing thing, moves in the soul and does not allow it to be calm. Thus the prophet does not agree with those who say that pleasure is tranquil. For stillness belongs to a stone and a log and to everything without life, but it is alien to pleasure. For pleasure hankers after an excitement that is actually convulsive, and in some people, far from being an experience of tranquillity, it is an indulgence in intense and violent movement. The sentence “Earth you shall eat all the days of your life” (Gen. iii. 14) is an apt one. For the food of the body brings pleasures of earth; and fittingly so, it would seem. For we consist of two things, soul and body. The body, then, has been formed out of earth, but the soul is of the upper air, a particle detached from the Deity: “for God breathed into his face a breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Gen. ii. 7). It is reasonable, therefore, that the body, fashioned out of earth, has food akin to it, which the earth yields, while the soul, being a portion of an ethereal nature, has by contrast ethereal and divine food; for it is fed by knowledge in its various forms and not by food and drink, which the body needs. We shall find abundant evidence in the Sacred Word that the food of the soul is not earthly but heavenly. “See, I rain upon you bread out of heaven, and the people shall go out and they shall gather the day’s portion for a day, that I may test them whether they will walk by My law or not” (Exod. xvi. 4). You see that the soul is fed not with things of earth that decay, but with whatever words God pours like rain out of that lofty and pure region of life to which the prophet has given the title of “heaven.” To proceed. The people, and all that goes to make the soul, is to go out and gather and make a beginning of knowledge, not all at once but “the day’s portion for a day.” For to begin with it will be unable to contain all at once the abundant wealth of the gracious gifts of God, but will be overwhelmed by them as by the rush of a torrent. In the second place it is better, when we have received good things sufficient in themselves, duly measured out to us, to think of God as Dispenser of those that still remain. Whoever wants everything at once earns for himself a lack of hope and trust, as well as great lack of sense. He lacks hope if he expects God to shower good things on him only now and not in the future too; he lacks faith, if he does not believe that the good gifts of God are lavishly bestowed, both now and always, on those worthy of them; he lacks sense, if he imagines that, even without God willing it, he will be a sufficient guardian of what he has gathered together; for the mind that vaingloriously ascribes to itself sureness and security has many times been made, by a slight turn of the scale, a feeble and insecure guardian of all that it looked on as in its safe-keeping. Gather together, therefore, soul, what is adequate of itself and suitable, and neither so much more than enough that it is excessive, nor so much less that it falls short, so that, dealing in right measures, you may do no wrong. For you are also required, when you make it your aim to cross over from the passions and when sacrificing the Passover, to take the forward step, whose symbol is the lamb, not without measure, for he says “each man shall reckon what suffices for him as a lamb” (Exod. xii. 4). So both with manna and with every favour that God confers on our race, it is good to take what is fixed by strict measure and reckoning and not that which is above and beyond us; for to do that is over-reaching. Let the soul, then, gather the day’s portion for a day (Exod. xvi. 4), so that it may declare the bountiful God, not itself, guardian of the good things. And the reason for the injunction we are considering seems to me to be this. The day is a symbol of light, and the light of the soul is training. Many, then, have acquired the lights in the soul for night and darkness, not for day and light; for example, all elementary lessons, what is called school-learning, and philosophy itself, when pursued with no higher motive than parading their superiority, or from a desire for office under our rulers. But the man of worthy aims sets himself to acquire day for the sake of day, light for the sake of light, the beautiful for the sake of the beautiful alone, not for the sake of something else. And this is why he goes on with the words: “that I may test them whether they will walk in My law or not” (Exod. xvi. 4); for this is the divine law, to value excellence for its own sake. The right principle, therefore, tests all aspirants as one does a coin, to see whether they have been debased by referring the soul’s good to something external, or whether, as tried and approved men, they distinguish and guard this treasure as belonging to thought and mind alone. Such men have the privilege of being fed not with earthly things but with the heavenly forms of knowledge. He explains this point further when he says, “in the early morning when the dew ceased it appeared all round the camp, and there, upon the face of the wilderness a fine thing as it were coriander seed, white like hoar-frost on the ground. And when they saw it, they said one to another, ‘What is this?’ for they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, ‘This bread, which the Lord has given us to eat, is this word, which the Lord has prescribed’” (Exod. xvi. 13 ff.). You see what kind of thing the soul’s food is. It is a word of God, continuous, resembling dew, embracing the whole soul and leaving no part of it without a share in itself. But this word does not show itself everywhere, only on the wilderness of passions and wickednesses, and it is fine and delicate both to conceive and be conceived, and surpassingly clear and transparent to behold, and it is as it were coriander seed. Tillers of the soil say that if you cut a coriander seed and divide it into countless pieces, each of the portions into which you cut it, if sown, grows exactly as the whole seed would have. Such too is the word of God, able to confer benefits both as a whole and through every part, indeed any part you happen upon. A resemblance between the word of God and the pupil of the eye may also be intended. For as the pupil of the eye is a very small part of it and sees the zones of the universe in their completeness, and the boundless ocean, and the vast expanse of air and of the infinite heaven, all that is bounded by the rising and the setting sun, so the word of God also has keenest sight, and is able to survey all things, [text missing] by which they shall clearly see all that is worth beholding. Accordingly it is also white; for what could be brighter or more far-shining than the divine word, through communion with which even other things dispel their mist and their gloom, eagerly desiring to become sharers in the light of the soul? This word produces an effect peculiar to it. When it has summoned the soul to itself, it brings about a congealment in all that part of us that is earthly, bodily, sense-bound; and this accounts for the words “as it were hoar-frost on the earth” (Exod. xvi. 14). For we also find that when he who sees God is intent on flight from the passions, the waves become fixed as if frozen, that is to say the rush and growth and vainglory of the passions; “for the waves became solid in the midst of the sea” (Exod. xv. 8), so that he who sees Him that is might pass beyond passion. The souls, therefore, that have indeed already had experience of the word, but are not able to answer the question, ask one another “What is it?” (Exod. xvi. 15). For it often happens that on finding a sweet taste in our mouths we are unsure of the flavour that produced it, and that when we catch the scent of pleasant odours we do not know what they are. In the same way then the soul, when it has been gladdened, is often unable to say what it is that gladdens it. But it is taught by the hierophant and prophet Moses: he will tell it, This bread (ibid.) is the food which God has given to the soul, for it to feed on His own utterance and His own word; for this bread, which He has given us to eat, is “this word.” He also says in Deuteronomy: “And He afflicted you and made you weak by hunger, and fed you with manna, which your fathers did not know, that He might proclaim to you, that not on bread alone shall man live, but on every word that goes forth through the mouth of God” (Deut. viii. 3). This afflicting is propitiation; for on the tenth day too He makes propitiation by afflicting our souls (Lev. xvi. 30). For when we are being deprived of pleasant things, we think we are being afflicted, but in reality this makes God propitious to us. He also brings famine on us, not a famine of virtue, but a famine of the creations of passion and wickedness. We have a proof of this in His feeding us with His own most “generic” word; for “manna” means “something,” and this is the most generic of all terms. And the word of God is above all the world, and is the eldest and most all-embracing of created things. This word “the fathers did not know.” This does not mean the real ancestors, but those grey with age who said, “Let us appoint a leader and let us return to Egypt,” that is, “to passion” (Numb. xiv. 4). Let God then proclaim to the soul, “Not on bread only shall men live, but on every utterance that goes forth through the mouth of God,” that is to say he shall be fed both by the whole word and by a part of it; for the mouth is a symbol of utterance or speech, and the statement is a part of speech. The soul of the most perfect is fed by the word as a whole; we may well be content if we are fed even by a portion of it. Now those we have been speaking of pray to be fed with the word of God. But Jacob, looking even higher than the word, says that he is fed by God Himself. He puts it this way: “The God to Whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac were well-pleasing, the God Who feeds me from my youth up to this day, the Angel who delivers me out of all my ills, bless these boys” (Gen. xlviii. 15 f.). How beautiful his tone and temper are! He looks on God as feeding him, not His Word; but the Angel, who is the Word, as healer of ills. This is the language of a true philosopher. He thinks it fitting and right that He that is should Himself in His own Person give the principal favours, while His Angels and Words give the secondary gifts; and the secondary gifts are those that involve deliverance from ills. For this reason, I think, God alone, by Himself, bestows health in the simplest sense, preceded by no illness in our bodies, but health that comes by way of escape from illness He bestows both through medical science and through the physician’s skill, letting both knowledge and practitioner enjoy the credit of healing, though it is He Himself that heals alike by these means and without them. He deals with the soul in the same way. He Himself bestows the good things, the food, with His own hand, but through Angels and Words He bestows those that involve deliverance from ills. In offering this prayer Jacob censured Joseph the statesman, who had ventured to say “I will nourish you there.” His words were, “Make haste and go up to my father and say to him ‘thus says’” and so on, and then “come down to me and do not delay,” finishing with “and I will nourish you there, for there shall be famine for five years” (Gen. xlv. 9, 11). So Jacob both rebukes and instructs the man wise in his own conceit when he says: “You must know, fine Sir, that the foods which nourish the soul are various forms of knowledge, and that these are not bestowed by the word of bodily sense but by God. He who reared me from youth and early prime to full-grown manhood (cf. Gen. xlviii. 15) will Himself satisfy my needs.” Joseph therefore went through the same experience as his mother Rachel. She too imagined that a created being has some power, for she says “Give me children” (Gen. xxx. 1). But the Supplanter will find fault with her and say, ‘You have greatly erred, for I am not in the place of God, who alone has power to open the wombs of souls, and to sow virtues in them, and to make them pregnant with noble things, and to give birth to them. Look at your sister Leah, and you will find her receiving seed and offspring out of no created being but by God’s own gift’; “for the Lord, when he saw that Leah was hated, opened her womb, but Rachel was barren” (Gen. xxix. 31). But note again the delicate subtlety here. God opens the wombs of virtue, sowing in them noble doings, but the womb, after receiving virtue at God’s hand, does not bear to God—for He that is needs no one—but bears sons to me Jacob; for it may well be that it was for my sake, not for His own sake that God sowed seed in virtue. Accordingly One is found to be husband to Leah, who is passed over in silence, and another to be father of the children born of Leah. For He that opens the womb is husband, but the father of the children is the one to whom she is said to bear them. “And I will put enmity between you and the woman” (Gen. iii. 15). In reality pleasure is an enemy to sense, although some think it a close friend. But just as no one would call the flatterer a comrade, since flattery is friendship diseased, and no one would say that the courtesan is kindly to her lover, since her tenderness is not for him but for his presents, so when you put pleasure to the test you will find that she is disguised under a counterfeit semblance of friendship with sense. You know how, when we have gorged ourselves on pleasure, our sense organs lose their vigour. Or have you not noticed how men intoxicated with wine or love, seeing, do not see and, hearing, do not hear, and how they lose the power to use their other senses with any precision? Sometimes, after heavy overeating, all the senses lose their vigour as sleep overtakes the man. Indeed sleep got its name from this relaxing of the senses. For at such a time the organ of perception grows slack, just as when we wake up its intensity is heightened, and the impressions which we receive from outside are no longer dull, but are clear and ringing, and carry the sound all the way to the mind; for the mind has to become aware of what is outside by receiving a blow, and so to gain a vivid impression of it. Notice that the words are not “I will set enmity for you and the woman,” but “between you and the woman.” Why is it put this way? Because the warfare of these two arises over what lies between pleasure and sense, over what lies on their boundary, so to speak. What lies between them is food and drink and whatever serves such purposes, each of which is both an object of sense and a source of pleasure. So when pleasure has indulged in these without restraint, it at once injures sense. The expression “between your seed and her seed” is also full of philosophical truth: for every seed is a starting-point of existence, but the starting-point of pleasure is passion, an irrational impulse, and the starting-point of sense is the mind; for from the mind as from a fountain the faculties of sense flow forth and extend. This is certainly taught by Moses, the holy prophet, who says that the woman was fashioned out of Adam, sense (that is) out of mind. Passion, then, is to mind what pleasure is to sense. So since the first pair are hostile to each other, the second pair must also be at war with each other. And their warfare is plain to see. When the mind is victorious, devoting itself to immaterial things, its proper object, passion leaves the scene: and on the other hand, when passion has won an evil victory, the mind gives in, kept from attending to itself and to all its own occupations. Moses elsewhere says, “Whenever Moses lifted up his hands, Israel prevailed, but when he dropped them, Amalek prevailed” (Exod. xvii. 11), showing that when the mind lifts itself up away from mortal things and is borne aloft, the one that sees God, which is Israel, gains strength, but when it has lowered its special powers and grown weak, immediately passion, named “Amalek,” which means “a people licking out,” will become strong: for it truly eats up the whole soul and licks it out, leaving behind in it no seed or spark of virtue. The words “Amalek the first of the nations” (Numb. xxiv. 20) are in keeping with this, because passion rules and lords it over promiscuous hordes that have drifted together without purpose or meaning. Through passion all the war of the soul is fanned into flame, and so God promises the minds to which He grants the gift of peace that He will blot out “the memorial of Amalek from under heaven” (Exod. xvii. 14). The sentence “he shall watch your head, and you shall watch his heel” (Gen. iii. 15) is a barbarism, but has a perfectly correct meaning. It is addressed to the serpent concerning the woman, but the woman is not “he” but “she.” What, then, are we to say? He has left off speaking about the woman and passed on to her seed and origin; but the mind is the origin of sense; and mind is masculine, so in speaking of it we should use the pronouns “he” and “his” and so on. So it is rightly said to Pleasure, “the Mind shall watch your chief and principal doctrine, and you shall watch it, the Mind, as it acts and rests upon its accepted tenets.” This basing of conduct and principle on tenets is naturally represented by the word “heels.” The word “shall watch” has two meanings, one like “shall guard and preserve,” the other equivalent to “shall watch in order to destroy.” The mind must necessarily be either bad or good. The foolish mind will show itself a guardian and steward of pleasure, since its delight is in pleasure; but the good mind will prove its enemy, watching eagerly for the moment when it can attack it and destroy it utterly. And notice this: Pleasure, for her part, watches over and preserves the procedure of the foolish mind, but endeavours to break up and destroy the way of life of the wise mind, believing that the wise mind is planning her ruin, while the foolish mind is devising the best means to preserve her. But although she expects to throw and cheat the good mind, she shall herself be thrown by Jacob, who is practised in wrestling, not bodily wrestling but the wrestling in which the soul engages against the dispositions that oppose her, fighting as she does against passions and vices. And Jacob shall not let go of the heel of his adversary, passion, until it has given in, and acknowledged that it has been twice thrown and vanquished, both in the matter of the birthright and in the blessing. For Esau says, “Rightly was his name called Jacob, for he has supplanted me twice already; then he took my birthright, and now he has taken my blessing” (Gen. xxvii. 36). The bad man regards bodily things as more worthy of reverence, the good man the things of the soul, which in reality are more worthy of reverence, not in age but in value and dignity, and are truly first, as a magistrate is first in a city; and it is the soul that is sovereign over our composite being. So the one who is first in virtue has received the things that are first, which were indeed his portion; for he has also received the blessing, accompanied by perfect prayers. But it is a man who vainly thinks himself wise who says, “My blessings and my birthright has he taken”: he does not take yours, man, but those that are the opposite of yours; for yours have been judged fit for slavery, but his for lordship. And if you consent to become a slave of the wise one, you shall throw off ignorance and boorishness, plagues of the soul, and share in admonition and correction. For in his prayer your father says to you, “To your brother you shall be a slave” (Gen. xxvii. 40); but this shall not be now, for he will not put up with your unruliness, but “when you shall have loosed the yoke from your neck” (ibid.), throwing off the boasting and insolence that you acquired by yoking yourself to a chariot of passions driven by folly. As it is, you are a slave of the harsh and insufferable masters within you, whose fixed law is to set no one free. But if you escape and abandon these, a master who holds his slaves dear shall welcome you, holding out bright hopes of liberty and shall not give you up again to your former masters. For he has learned from Moses an inviolable lesson and rule, “that a man should not hand over to his master a servant who has been handed over to him by the Lord; for he shall dwell with him in whatever place it pleases him best” (Deut. xxiii. 15 f.). But as long as you have not run away, but are still governed by the bit and bridle of your old masters, you are unworthy to be slave to a wise man. You give the surest proof of a servile character unworthy of a free man by saying “my birthright and my blessings” (Gen. xxvii. 36); for these are the words of men sunk in boundless ignorance, since to speak of “Mine” is fitting for God alone, for all things are in reality the property of Him alone. For this reason He shall also testify, when he says, “You shall preserve My gifts, My grants, My fruits” (Numb. xxviii. 2), that “gifts” excel “grants.” For the term “gifts” brings out the sense of great and perfect favours, which God bestows upon the perfect; “grants” are on a very meagre scale: these are for those of natural excellence who practise and make progress. For this reason Abraham, in harmony with the will of God, also retains the property which had come to him from God, but gets rid of the horses of the king of Sodom (Gen. xiv. 21 ff.), as well as of the possessions of the concubines. Moses, moreover, sees fit to judge the weightiest cases and issues, but the investigation of the insignificant questions he commits to inferior officers (cf. Exod. xviii. 26). Whoever dares to say that anything is his own will in this way have registered himself a slave for life, just like the man who says “I have come to love my master and my wife and my children: I decline to go away free” (Exod. xxi. 5). It is well that he acknowledged himself a slave; for how can a man be anything other than a slave when he says “mine is the master, even mind,” that is its own master and absolute lord; “mine also is sense-perception,” a means of judging material forms that depends on nothing else; “mine also are the offspring of these,” Mind’s proper objects being Mind’s offspring, and sensible objects the offspring of sense; “for in my power it is to exercise mind and to exercise the senses.” But let him not only give evidence against himself. Let him be condemned also by God, and submit to an eternal and inexorable slavery when God commands his ear to be pierced, so that it may not admit words of virtue, and commands him to be a slave for ever to Mind and to Sense, bad and pitiless masters. And to the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply your sorrows and your groaning” (Gen. iii. 16). Woman, who is, as we have seen, Sense, undergoes an experience peculiarly her own, namely grief, which is called “sorrow”; for gladness arises in a certain part of our being, and grief arises in that same part: but it is through the senses that we feel gladness, so that of necessity we feel grief also through them. But the excellent and cleansed Mind grieves least, for the senses assail him least. But the foolish Mind experiences grief abundantly, having no antidote in the soul, with which to repel the deadly ills that come from the senses and their objects. The athlete and the slave take a beating in different ways, the slave submissively giving in and yielding to the lashes, while the athlete opposes and withstands and shakes off the blows that are falling upon him. You crop a man one way and a (sheep’s) fleece another. The sheep has the role of mere passivity, whereas, in the man’s case, there is not only an active reciprocity, but his very submission is, so to speak, also reciprocal, as he adapts his position and posture to the process of being cropped. In just the same way the man who does not reason yields to another as slaves do, and submits to sorrows as intolerable mistresses, and is powerless to look them in the face, unable to summon up free and manly reasoning, and accordingly a vast mass of painful experiences pours in upon him through the senses. The man of knowledge on the contrary, stepping out like an athlete to meet all grievous things with strength and robust vigour, blows a counter-blast to them, so that he is not wounded by them, but regards each of them with absolute indifference; and, I think, he might with youthful spirit address to grief the proud boast in the play: Burn me, consume my flesh, drink my dark blood, Take fill of me; for sooner shall the stars go beneath the earth, and earth go up to the sky, Than you shall hear a fawning word from these lips. Just as God has appointed all sorrowful things in larger measure for sense, so He has generously bestowed an abundance of good things on the earnest soul. For example in the case of perfect Abraham He speaks in this way: “By Myself I have sworn, says the Lord, for Whose sake you have done this thing, and on My account have not spared your son, your only son, truly blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is by the sea shore” (Gen. xxii. 16 f.). It is good both that He confirmed the promise by an oath, and that He did so by an oath befitting God; notice that God does not swear by some other thing, for nothing is higher than He, but by Himself, who is the best of all things. Some have said that it was inappropriate for Him to swear; for an oath is added to assist faith, and only God and one who is God’s friend is faithful, even as Moses is said to have been found “faithful in all His house” (Numb. xii. 7). Moreover, the very words of God are oaths and laws of God and most sacred ordinances; and a proof of His sure strength is that whatever He says comes to pass, and this is especially characteristic of an oath. It seems to follow from this that all God’s words are oaths, confirmed by being carried out in action. They say indeed that an oath is a calling on God to witness a disputed point; so if it is God that swears, He bears witness to Himself, which is absurd, for the one who bears witness must necessarily be a different person from the one on whose behalf it is borne. What then must we say? First, that there is nothing wrong with God bearing witness to Himself. For who else would be capable of bearing witness to Him? Secondly He Himself is to Himself all that is most precious, kinsman, intimate, friend, virtue, happiness, blessedness, knowledge, understanding, beginning, end, whole, everything, judge, decision, counsel, law, process, sovereignty. Besides if we once take “by Myself have I sworn” in the right way, we shall give up this excessive quibbling. Probably then the truth of the matter is something like this. Nothing that can give assurance can give positive assurance regarding God, for He has shown His nature to no one, but has made it invisible to our whole race. Who can assert of the First Cause either that It is without body or that It is a body, that It is of such a kind or that It is of no kind? In a word who can make any positive assertion concerning His essence or quality or state or movement? No, He alone shall affirm anything regarding Himself since He alone has unerringly exact knowledge of His own nature. God alone therefore is the strongest security first for Himself, and in the next place for His deeds also, so that He naturally swore by Himself when giving assurance about Himself, something impossible for anyone else. It follows that men who say that they swear by God should be considered actually impious; for naturally no one swears by Him, seeing that he is unable to possess knowledge regarding His nature. No, we may be content if we are able to swear by His Name, which means (as we have seen) the interpreting word. For this must be God for us imperfect people, while for the wise and perfect the primal Being is their God. Moses too, let us observe, filled with wonder at the transcendency of the Uncreate, says, “and you shall swear by His Name” (Deut. vi. 13), not “by Him,” for it is enough for the created being to be accredited and to have witness borne to him by the Divine word: but let God be His own most sure guarantee and evidence. The words, “for Whose sake you have done this thing” (Gen. xxii. 16) are a token of piety; for it is pious to do all things for the sake of God only. That is why we do not spare that only child of virtue, the happiness we have attained, surrendering it to the Creator, judging such offspring fit to be counted a possession of God, and not of any created being. The words “blessing I will bless” (ibid. 17) are beautifully significant; for there are some people who do many things that are of the nature of benedictions, when their underlying character is not fraught with blessing. Even the bad man does some things that it is his duty to do without acting from a dutiful character. Yes, and the drunken man and the madman now and then utter sober words and do sober deeds, but not from a sober mind; and those who are still quite young children not from a fixedly rational state (for nature has not yet trained them to be rational), do and say many things that rational men do and say. But the lawgiver wishes the wise man to be regarded as a man of benediction not as the outcome of a passing mood, or of being easily led by others, or as though by chance, but as the result of a fixed state and disposition charged with benediction. To return to our text. It was not enough for ill-fated sense to experience sorrows in large measure; it must also indulge in “groaning.” Groaning is intense and excessive sorrow. For we often grieve without groaning; but when we groan over them, we let our sorrows bring a real storm of trouble and distress upon us. Now groaning is of two kinds. One kind is found in men who desire and long for opportunities of wrongdoing and cannot get them, and this is a bad kind. Another kind is seen in those who repent and are troubled over their past defection and cry “Wretched that we are, how long, as is now evident, we have been ill without knowing it with the illness of folly and senselessness and unrighteousness in our conduct.” But this does not come about unless the king of Egypt, the godless and pleasure-loving disposition, has met his end and died out of the soul: “for after those many days the king of Egypt died.” Then at once when wickedness has died, he that sees God groans over his own failure, “for the children of Israel groaned by reason of their material and Egyptian works” (Exod. ii. 23). For while the king and pleasure-loving temper is alive in us it induces the soul to rejoice over the sins it is committing, but when he has died, it groans. That is why it cries out to the Master, begging that it may not turn back again or receive its consummation imperfectly. For many souls have desired to repent and not been permitted by God to do so, but have gone away backward as though drawn by a change of current. This happened to Lot’s wife, who became stone because she was enamoured of Sodom and reverted to the characters that had been overthrown by God. Now, however, he says “their cry ascended to God” (Exod. ii. 23), in saying so bearing witness to the grace of the existent One; for had He not powerfully called to Himself the suppliant word, it would not have ascended, that is, it would not have been caused to mount, and have grown in volume and begun to soar on high after escaping from the baseness of the things of the earth. So in what follows He says, “See, the cry of the children of Israel has come to Me” (Exod. iii. 9). It is very beautiful that the entreaty reached as far as God; but it would not have reached so far without the kindness of the One who called. Some souls He anticipates and goes forth to meet: “I will come to you and will bless you” (Exod. xx. 24). You see how great the grace of the First Cause is, since He gets ahead of our hesitation, and anticipates and meets us, bringing unlimited gain to the soul. And what is said is a divine intimation full of instruction. For if a thought of God comes into the mind, He at once blesses it and heals all its sicknesses. Sense, however, is always sorrowing and groaning, and with pangs and incurable pain bringing forth perception, as God Himself says, “In sorrow you shall bring forth children” (Gen. iii. 16); sight brings forth seeing, the ear hearing, taste tasting, in a word sense perceiving: but she does none of these things without great distress to the foolish one, for to such a one pain is caused as he sees and hears and tastes and smells and generally exercises any sense. On the other hand, you will find virtue full of great joy at her pregnancy, and the good man begetting with laughter and a glad heart, and the offspring of them both laughter itself. The Divine word shall testify that the wise man begets with joy, not sorrow, in these words, “God said to Abraham, Sarai your wife shall not be called Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name: I will bless her and will give you a child of her” (Gen. xvii. 15 f.); then he says further, “And Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said, Shall he that is a hundred years old have a son, and shall Sarah who is ninety years old bear?” (ibid. 17). Abraham evidently rejoices and laughs, because he is to beget Isaac (who is), Happiness; and Sarah, who is Virtue, laughs also. The same book shall witness to this when it says, “It ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women, and she laughed in her mind and said, ‘Until now happiness has not come to me, but my Lord (the divine Word) is greater (Gen. xviii. 11 f.), to whom this must necessarily belong and whom I must believe when he promises good.’” Moreover, the offspring is laughter and joy, for that is what “Isaac” means. Let sense-perception therefore be sorrowful, but let virtue always rejoice: for again when Happiness has been born she says with pride “the Lord has made laughter for me; for whoever shall hear of it will rejoice with me” (Gen. xxi. 6). So, you who are initiated, open your ears wide and take in the holiest teachings. The “laughter” is joy, and “made” is equivalent to “beget,” so that what is said amounts to this: the Lord begot Isaac; for He is Himself Father of the perfect nature, sowing and begetting happiness in men’s souls. “And to your husband,” He says, “shall be your resort” (Gen. iii. 16). Sense has two husbands, the one lawful, the other a seducer. Like a seducing husband, the thing seen acts on the sight, the sound on the hearing, the flavour on the palate, and so with the rest one by one. And these turn away and invite to themselves the irrational sense and get the mastery of it and domineer over it. Beauty enslaves the sight, the pleasant savour the palate, and the several objects of sense enslave the sense corresponding to them. Look at that glutton and see what a slave he is to the dishes prepared by the skill of cooks and confectioners. Notice how that one, wild with excitement over music, is swayed and held spellbound by harp or flute, or perhaps by a good singer. But vast benefit comes to sense that has been turned from all else to Mind, her lawful husband. Let us next observe how he speaks about Mind itself when it is acted on in violation of the right principle. “To Adam God said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree, of which I commanded you not to eat [of it you have eaten], cursed is the ground in respect of your labours’” (Gen. iii. 17). It is most unprofitable for Mind to listen to Sense-perception, and not Sense-perception to Mind: for it is always right that the superior should rule and the inferior be ruled; and Mind is superior to Sense-perception. When the charioteer is in command and guides the horses with the reins, the chariot goes the way he wishes, but if the horses have become unruly and got the upper hand, it has often happened that the charioteer has been dragged down and that the horses have been plunged into a ditch by the violence of their motion, and that there is a general disaster. Again, a ship keeps to her straight course when the helmsman grasps the tiller and steers accordingly, but capsizes when a contrary wind has sprung up over the sea, and the surge has settled in it. Just so, when Mind, the charioteer or helmsman of the soul, rules the whole living being as a governor does a city, the life holds a straight course, but when irrational sense gains the chief place, a terrible confusion overtakes it, just as when slaves have risen against their masters; for then the mind truly is set on fire and is all ablaze, and that fire is kindled by the objects of sense which Sense-perception supplies. Moses, moreover, hints at this kind of conflagration of the mind, caused by the senses, when he says: “And the women kindled yet further a fire in Moab.” For “Moab” means “out of a father,” and our father is the Mind. His words are, “Then shall those who propound riddles say, Come to Heshbon that it may be built, and that the city of Sihon may be constructed. For a fire has gone forth from Heshbon and a flame from the city of Sihon, and it devoured as far as Moab and drank up the boundaries of Arnon. Woe to you, Moab, you are undone, people of Chemosh. Their sons were given up as fugitives, and their daughters as prisoners of war to Sihon, king of the Amorites, and their seed shall perish, from Heshbon to Dibon, and their women yet further kindled a fire against Moab” (Numb. xxi. 27-30). “Heshbon” means “reasonings”: and “reasonings” are riddles full of obscurity. Look at a doctor’s reasonings: “I will purge the patient, I will feed him up, I will prescribe medicines and put him on a diet that will make him well, I will operate, I will cauterize.” But nature has often either brought recovery without these means being used, or brought death when they have been used, proving all the doctor’s calculations to be vain dreams, nothing but guesswork in the dark. Again, the farmer says, “I will sow, I will plant, the plants will grow, seeds and plants will yield crops, not only useful in providing food that we cannot do without, but so abundant as to give us enough and to spare.” Then all of a sudden a fire, or a storm, or persistent rain spoils everything. Sometimes all that he had reckoned on comes to pass, but the one who reckoned dies first without having enjoyed the benefits, and his expectation of enjoying the fruits of his toil proves a vain one. So then it is best to trust God and not our dim reasonings and insecure conjectures: “Abraham believed God and was held to be righteous” (Gen. xv. 6); and the words that he is “faithful in all My house” (Numb. xii. 7) testify to the precedence Moses holds. But if we put our trust in our own reasonings, we shall construct and build up the city of Mind that corrupts the truth: for “Sihon” means “corrupting.” So the dreamer finds on waking that all the movements and exertions of the foolish man are dreams void of reality. Indeed Mind itself turned out to be a dream. This is because to trust God is a true teaching, but to trust our vain reasonings is a lie. An irrational impulse issues forth and goes its rounds, both from our reasonings and from Mind that corrupts the truth; and so he says, “There went forth a fire from Heshbon, a flame from the city of Sihon” (Numb. xxi. 28). In this way trust in plausible reasonings or in Mind that corrupts what is true, is irrational. “It devours even as far as Moab,” that is to say as far as Mind. For whom else does false opinion deceive but wretched Mind? It devours and eats up and indeed swallows down the boundary-stones in it, that is, each particular thought or judgement, which are engraved and chiselled as though upon a boundary-stone. The stones are Arnon, which means “their light,” since it is in reasoning that each matter is elucidated. This is how he begins the dirge over the headstrong and selfish Mind: “Woe to you, Moab: you are undone”; for if you heed guesses made according to what is probable, you have lost truth. “The people of Chemosh,” that is your people and its power has been found to be maimed and blinded; for “Chemosh” means “as a groping,” and groping is characteristic of one who cannot see. These find their sons, each particular reasoning, fugitives, while their judgements, corresponding to daughters, are captives of war to the king of the Amorites, that is “the lecturer of men fond of talking”; for the Amorites, if we translate the name, are “men fond of talking,” being a figure of the uttered word, and the prince of these is the lecturer or sophist clever at searching after verbal artifices, and those who transgress the boundary of truth place themselves at the mercy of his quibbling. Sihon, therefore, the corrupter of the healthy rule of the truth, “and his seed shall perish together with Heshbon” (that is) the quibbling riddles “as far as Dibon,” a name given to going to law, and quite appropriately, for probabilities and plausible arguments involve no knowledge concerning truth, but trial and disputation and wrangling conflict and contentiousness and everything of that sort. It was not, however, enough for Mind to have the troubles that are peculiar to it and belong to its own sphere, but over and above these the women, that is, the senses, lit a fire, a huge conflagration, to add to its disasters. Consider what I mean by this. It often happens in the night when we are not actively using a single one of our senses, that we entertain strange notions on many different subjects, for the soul is perpetually in movement and can turn ten thousand different ways. That being so, what it produces by itself would have been enough to corrupt it. But as it is, the mob of the senses has introduced into it from outside an untold host of mischiefs, drawn partly from visible objects, partly from sounds, as well as from savours and scents that touch the sense of smell; and we may say that the flame arising from them affects the soul more disastrously than the flame that is kindled in it by the soul itself without calling in the organs of sense to assist it. One of these women is the wife of Potiphar, Pharaoh’s head-cook (Gen. xxxix. 1 ff.). How he comes to have a wife when he is a eunuch is a point to consider: for those, who are occupied with the literal wording of the law rather than with its figurative interpretation, will find that it involves what appears to them a difficulty. For the Mind, that is really a eunuch and chief cook, dealing not in the simple pleasures only but in excessive ones also, deserves the title of eunuch as one who is incapable of begetting wisdom, since he serves as eunuch to none other than Pharaoh, the disperser of noble things. For you must bear in mind that from another point of view to become a eunuch would be a very good thing, if in that way our soul could escape wickedness and unlearn passion. So Joseph too, the self-controlling character, when pleasure says to him “Sleep with me” (Gen. xxxix. 7) ‘and being human indulge human passions and enjoy the delights that come in life’s course,’ refuses to comply, saying, ‘I shall be sinning against God the Lover of virtue, if I were to show myself a lover of pleasure; for this is a wicked deed.’ And now he is merely skirmishing, but before long he is stoutly fighting it out, when the soul has entered her own house and, falling back on her own energies, has renounced everything the body regulates and has set to work at the business that properly belongs to her, since these are activities of the soul. He goes neither into Joseph’s house nor into Potiphar’s house, but “into the house.” He does not go on to say whose house, so that you may think and interpret. He simply adds, “to do his business” (Gen. xxxix. 11). So the house is the soul, into which he retires, abandoning everything outside, so that he may, as we say, get within himself. The “business” of the man of self-control is, we may take it, done by God’s will; for among all the reasonings that usually dwell in the soul within, not one such uncongenial reasoning was found there. Meanwhile pleasure does not stop struggling, but seizes his garments and says “Sleep with me.” As clothes are coverings of the body, so food and drink are coverings of the living being. This is what she says: “Why do you decline pleasure, without which you cannot live? See, I seize and carry off part of what produces her, and I declare that you could not exist without using something that produces pleasure.” What does the man of self-control do? “If,” he says, “I am going to be a slave to passion for the sake of the matter that produces it, I will even leave passion behind and go forth outside”; for “leaving his garments in her hands he fled and went forth outside” (Gen. xxxix. 12). “Who,” — someone may ask, “goes forth within?” Do not many do so? Or have not some who avoided robbing temples stolen goods from a private house, and some who never beat their fathers committed violence against a stranger? These people do indeed come forth from the sins mentioned, but they come into others. But the one who exercises perfect self-control must shun all sins, both the greater and the lesser, and be found implicated in none at all. Joseph, however, being only a youth and lacking the strength to contend with the Egyptian body and conquer pleasure, runs away. But Phinehas the priest, who was zealous with the zeal for God, has secured his own safety not by flight but by grasping the “spear,” i.e. the spirit of zeal, and he will not stop until he has “pierced the Midianitish woman,” the nature that has been sifted out of the sacred company, “through her womb” (Numb. xxv. 7 f.), so that she may never be able to make any plant or seed of wickedness shoot up: in return for this, for cutting out folly, the soul obtains a twofold portion as its reward, peace and priesthood (ibid. 12 f.), virtues as closely related as sisters. So we must not listen to such a woman, by which I mean wicked sense. For “God dealt well with the midwives” (Exod. i. 20), because, disregarding the orders of Pharaoh, the scatterer, they “saved alive” the male offspring of the soul that he wanted to destroy; for, enamoured of what is material and female, he does not know the First Cause and says, “I do not know Him” (Exod. v. 2). Quite a different woman claims our obedience, a woman such as Sarah is seen to have been, namely supreme virtue. The wise Abraham complies with her when she recommends the course to follow. For earlier, when he had not yet become perfect but, before his name was changed, was still only inquiring into supramundane things, she, knowing that he could not beget seed from perfect virtue, advises him to beget children by the handmaiden, that is, school-learning, namely Hagar (Gen. xvi. 2 ff.). This name means “Sojourning,” for the one who is eager to make his home in perfect virtue, before he is registered as a citizen of her city, sojourns with the subjects learned in the schools, so that he may be led by these to apply his unfettered powers to virtue. Afterwards, when she sees him brought to perfection and now capable of begetting [text missing]. And if he, filled with gratitude towards the education through which he was brought into union with virtue, thinks it harsh to reject it, he will be brought to comply by an oracle of God telling him, “In all that Sarah says to you listen to her voice” (Gen. xxi. 12). Let whatever seems good to virtue be law for each one of us; for if we choose to listen to all that virtue recommends, we shall be happy. The words “and you ate of the tree of which alone I commanded you not to eat” are equivalent to “you consented to wickedness, which it is your duty to keep off with all your might”: because of this “cursed”—not “are you” but “is the earth in your works” (Gen. iii. 17). What, then, was the reason for this? The serpent, we saw, was pleasure, an irrational elation of soul. She is cursed on her own account, but note carefully that she attaches herself only to the worthless man, not to any good man. Adam is the neutral mind, which sometimes proves better, sometimes worse. For insofar as he is mind, his nature is neither bad nor good, but under the influence of virtue and vice he tends to shift towards good and bad. So it is just as we would expect that he is not cursed on his own account, since he is neither wickedness nor conduct ruled by wickedness, but that the earth is cursed in his works; for the actions of which the whole soul, here given the name “earth,” is the means and occasion are blameworthy and faulty in each case where he allows wickedness to regulate them. Accordingly he goes on “in sorrow you shall eat of it.” This amounts to “you shall sorrowfully get the benefit of being alive.” For all his life long the bad man makes use of his own vitality in pain. He has no motive for joy. In the nature of things, such a motive is supplied by righteousness and good sense and the virtues that share her throne. “Thorns therefore and burrs shall it cause to spring up for you” (Gen. iii. 18). Indeed, what grows and shoots up in the soul of a foolish man but the passions that goad and wound it? Speaking figuratively, he has given these the name of thorns. The irrational impulse, like a fire, meets these first and, ranging herself with them, burns up and consumes all the soul’s possessions. For this is what is said: “If a fire breaks out and finds thorns and goes on to burn threshing-floor or standing grain or field; he that kindled the fire shall make restitution” (Exod. xxii. 6). You see that the fire, the irrational impulse, once it has broken out, does not burn the thorns but finds them; for, as a searcher after the passions, it finds what it wanted; and when it has found them it burns up these three things, perfect virtue, gradual progress, goodness of natural disposition. Virtue he likens to the contents of the threshing-floor, for as the grain has been gathered together on it, so noble things have been gathered in the soul of the wise man. He likens gradual advance to the standing grain, since each is incomplete and earnestly strives for its completion. He likens goodness of natural disposition to the field, because it receives the seeds of virtue. He calls each of the passions “burrs” or “three-spiked caltrops,” because they are threefold, the passion itself, what produces it, and the finished result of the two. For instance, pleasure, the pleasant, feeling pleasure; desire, the desirable, desiring; sorrow, the sorrowful, feeling sorrow; fear, the fearful, fearing. “And you shall eat the grass of the field; in the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread” (Gen. iii. 18 f.). He uses the terms grass and bread as synonyms; the thing meant is the same. Grass is the food of an irrational creature, and a bad man with the right principle cut out of him is such a creature; the senses, a part of the soul, are irrational too. But when the mind strives to attain the objects of sense through the irrational senses, it does not do so without toil and sweat. For the life of the foolish man is exceedingly painful and burdensome, as he pursues with greedy desire everything that produces pleasures and everything that wickedness loves to bring about. And how long will this last? “Until,” He says, “you shall turn back into the earth, from which you were taken” (Gen. iii. 19). For, having forsaken the wisdom of heaven, is he not now ranked with earthly and chaotic things? We have to consider, then, how he turns back still further. But perhaps he means something like this: that the foolish mind has indeed always turned back from the right principle, but has been taken not from the sublime nature but from the more earthly substance, and, whether at rest or in motion, remains the same and devoted to the same interests. And that is why he goes on to say, “Earth you are and into earth you shall depart” (ibid.), which amounts to what I have already said. It also signifies this: “your origin and your end are one and the same, for you took your origin from earth’s decaying bodies, and into them you shall again come to your end, after treading the way of life that comes between, not along a high road but on a rough path, full of brambles and burrs whose nature is to prick and wound.”
Intertextual Commentary on Allegorical Interpretation
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