"And it came to pass when there began to be many men upon the earth, that daughters also were born to them." I think it worthwhile here to ask why, after the birth of Noah and his sons, our race grew so greatly in number. But perhaps the cause of this is not difficult to explain; for whenever anything appears rare, its contrary is always found in great numbers. Therefore, the good disposition of one displays the evil disposition of myriads, and the fewness of the things done in accordance with art, and science, and virtue, and beauty shows how incalculable a number of things devoid of art, and of science, and of justice, and, in short, utterly worthless, lie concealed beneath. Do you not see that in the universe, too, the sun, though only one body, by shining forth dispels the thick and dense darkness which is shed over earth and sea? Very fittingly, therefore, the birth of the just Noah and his sons is represented as bringing into existence a great number of unjust persons; for it is the nature of contraries to be known above all through their contraries. And no unjust man ever implants masculine offspring in the soul; such men, being unmanly, and broken, and effeminate in their minds, naturally become the parents of female children, having planted no tree of virtue, whose fruit would necessarily have been beautiful and wholesome, but only trees of wickedness and of the passions, whose shoots are womanlike. For this reason these men are said to have become the fathers of daughters, and not one of them is said to have fathered a son; for since the just Noah had male children, since he was a man who followed reason, perfect, and upright, and masculine, this very fact proves the injustice of the multitude to be wholly the parent of female children. For the same things cannot be born of opposite parents; opposite parents must necessarily have opposite offspring. "And when the angels of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, they took as wives any of them whom they chose." Those beings, whom other philosophers call demons, Moses usually calls angels; and they are souls hovering in the air. And let no one suppose that what is stated here is a fable, for the universe must necessarily be filled with living things in all its parts, since each of its primary and elementary parts contains its own proper animals, those consistent with its nature; --the earth containing terrestrial animals, the sea and the rivers containing aquatic animals, and the fire those that are born in fire (though it is said that these last are found chiefly in Macedonia), and the heaven containing the stars: for these also are entire souls pervading the universe, being unadulterated and divine,⁠a since they move in a circle, which is the kind of motion most akin to the mind, for each of them is mind in its purest form. So the air too must be full of living beings. And these beings are invisible to us, since the air itself is not visible to mortal sight. But it does not follow that, because our sight cannot perceive the forms of souls, there are no souls in the air; rather, they must necessarily be grasped by the mind, in order that like may be contemplated by like. For what shall we say? Must we not say that the animals of land and water live in air and spirit? What? Do pestilential afflictions not usually arise when the air is tainted or corrupted, as if the air were the cause of life in all such creatures? Again, when the air is free from all taint and harmless, as it especially tends to be when the north wind prevails, does breathing a purer air not make life more vigorous and more lasting? Is it natural, then, that the medium which gives life to all other animals, whether aquatic or terrestrial, should itself be empty and destitute of souls? On the contrary, even if all other animals were barren, the air by itself would still be bound to produce life, having received the seeds of life from the great Creator by his special favour. So some souls have descended into bodies, and others have not thought it worthy to approach any part of the earth; and the Creator has been accustomed to employ these, once hallowed and surrounded by the ministrations of the father, as hand-maidens and servants in the administration of mortal affairs. And having descended into the body as into a river, they are at times carried away and swallowed up by a most violent and voracious whirlpool; at other times, striving with all their power to resist its force, they first swim on its surface and afterwards fly back to the place from which they started. These, then, are the souls of those who have been taught some kind of sublime philosophy, meditating from beginning to end on dying to the life of the body, in order to obtain an inheritance of the incorporeal and imperishable life, which is to be enjoyed in the presence of the uncreated and everlasting God. But those swallowed up in the whirlpool are the souls of those other men who have disregarded wisdom, giving themselves up to the pursuit of unstable things regulated by fortune alone, none of which relates to the most excellent part of us, the soul or the mind, but all rather to the dead corpse bound up with us, that is, to the body, or to things even more lifeless than that, such as glory, and money, and offices, and honours, and all the other things which those who do not keep their eyes fixed on what is truly beautiful fashion and endow with an appearance of life through the deceit of vain opinion. If, therefore, you consider that souls, and demons, and angels are things differing indeed in name, but identical in reality, you will be able to throw off that heaviest of burdens, superstition. But as men in general speak of good and evil demons, and in the same way of good and evil souls, so also do they speak of angels, regarding some as worthy of a good name, and calling them ambassadors of man to God, and of God to man, and sacred and holy on account of this blameless and most excellent office; others, again, you will not be wrong to regard as unholy and unworthy of any title. And the words of the psalmist in the following verse testify to the truth of what I say, for he says, "He sent upon them His fierce anger, indignation, and rage, and affliction, and he sent evil angels among them." These are the wicked who assume the name of angels, who do not know the daughters of right reason, that is, the sciences and the virtues, but pursue the mortal descendants of mortal men, that is, the pleasures, which can confer no genuine beauty, the kind perceived by the intellect alone, but only a bastard sort of elegance of form that beguiles the outward sense; and they do not all marry all the daughters, but some of them have chosen some of that innumerable company as their wives; some choosing them by the sight, and others by the ear, others again being influenced by the sense of taste, or by the belly, and some even by the pleasures below the belly; many also have laid hold of those whose home lies far away, setting various desires in motion among one another.⁠b For the choices among the various pleasures are necessarily various, since different pleasures are seated in different places. And among all such things the spirit of God cannot remain and spend all its time, as the law-giver himself shows. "For," says Moses, "the Lord said, My spirit shall not remain among men for ever, because they are flesh." For at times it does remain, but it does not remain for ever and ever among most of us; for who is so destitute of reason or so lifeless as never, willingly or unwillingly, to form a notion of the all-good God? For very often a sudden appearance of the good hovers even over the most polluted and accursed beings, but they cannot take firm hold of it and keep it among them; for almost immediately it leaves its former place and departs, rejecting the inhabitants who come over to it and who live in defiance of law and justice, and it would never have come to them except to convict those who choose what is disgraceful instead of what is good. But in one sense the spirit of God is spoken of as the air flowing over the earth, bringing a third element in addition to water. Referring to this, Moses says in his account of the creation of the world, "The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." For the air, being very light, is raised and borne aloft, with water, as it were, for its foundation; and in another sense the spirit of God is said to be the unalloyed knowledge in which every wise man naturally shares. And Moses shows us this when he speaks of the creator and maker of the holy work of the creation, in these words: "And God summoned Bezaleel, and filled him with his Holy Spirit, and with wisdom, and understanding, and knowledge, to be able to devise every work." So these words define very clearly what the spirit of God is. Such also is the spirit of Moses, which came upon the seventy elders, to make them different from and superior to the rest of the Israelites, for they could not possibly be true elders unless they had partaken of that all-wise spirit. For it is said, "I will take of my spirit which is upon you, and I will pour it upon the seventy elders." But do not think that this taking away happens by cutting off or separation; it is like what happens with fire, which can light ten thousand torches without itself being diminished by the least atom or ceasing to be as it was before. The nature of knowledge is something like this too. For though it has made all its pupils, and all who have come to know it, learned, it is not diminished in the least itself, but very often even improves, just as fountains, they say, sometimes do when drained dry; for it is said that they sometimes become sweeter in this way. For continual association with others, engendering diligence and practice, gradually brings about complete perfection. If, then, the individual spirit of Moses, or of any other creature, were to be distributed to so great a multitude of pupils, it would be diminished by being divided into so many small portions. But in fact the spirit which is upon him is the wise, the divine, the indivisible, the undistributable, the good spirit, the spirit which is everywhere diffused, so as to fill the universe, which, while it benefits others, is not injured when a share in it is given to another, or when it is added to something else, whether in its understanding, its knowledge or its wisdom. For this reason the spirit of God can remain in the soul, but it cannot remain there for ever, as we have said. And why should we wonder? There is nothing else whatever whose possession is stable and lasting; but mortal affairs are continually wavering in the scale, and inclining first to one side, and then to the other, and liable at different times to different changes. And the greatest cause of our ignorance is the flesh, and our inseparable connection with the flesh. And Moses represents God as admitting this where he says that the spirit of God cannot abide in them, "Because they are flesh." And yet marriage and the rearing of children, and the furnishing of necessary things, and obscurity combined with a lack of money, and business both private and public, and countless other things make wisdom waste away before it begins to flourish vigorously. But nothing hinders its growth so much as the fleshly nature. For that nature is laid down firmly as the chief and most solid foundation of folly and ignorance, and each of the evils named above is then built upon it. For those souls which are free of flesh and of the body remain undisturbed in the theatre of the universe, occupied in seeing and hearing divine things, for which an insatiable desire has seized them, and they enjoy a pleasure that no one interrupts. But those which bear the heavy burden of the flesh, weighed down and oppressed by it, cannot look up to the revolutions of the heaven, but are dragged downwards, their necks forcibly pressed to the ground like so many four-footed beasts. For this reason the lawgiver, having resolved to put an end to all unlawful and illegitimate associations and unions, begins his denunciations as follows: "Man shall not come near to anyone who is akin to his own flesh, to uncover his nakedness: I am the Lord." How could anyone more forcibly exhort man to despise the flesh and what is akin to the flesh than in this way? And indeed he not only exhorts us to abandon such things, but shows plainly that he who is truly a man will never come of his own accord to the pleasures dear to and bound up with the body, but will always be planning to estrange himself from them entirely. For saying "Man, man," not once but twice, is a sign that what is meant here is not the man composed of body and soul, but only the man who possesses virtue. For such a person is truly a man, the one whom one of the ancient philosophers went in search of after lighting a lantern at midday, telling those who asked him that he was seeking a man. And as for the prohibition against every man coming near to anyone who is akin to his own flesh, this rests on necessary reasons. For there are some things we should accept, such as the useful things whose use lets us live free from disease and in good health; and there are other things we should reject, which so inflame the appetites that they burn up all goodness in one vast conflagration. So let us not allow our appetites to rush eagerly after all the things that are pleasant to the flesh, for the pleasures are often untameable: like dogs they fawn on us, then suddenly turn and bite us, inflicting incurable wounds. So by clinging to frugality, the friend of virtue, rather than to the pleasures akin to the body, we shall defeat the numerous and infinite multitude of irreconcilable enemies. And if any occasion tries to compel us to take more than is moderate or sufficient, let us not yield; for the scripture says, "He shall not come near to him to uncover his nakedness." It is worthwhile to explain what is meant by this. It has often happened that some who did not themselves provide for wealth have nevertheless had unlimited abundance. And others who were not eager in the pursuit of glory have been thought worthy of public praise and honours. Others again, who did not expect to gain even a little strength, have reached the greatest vigour and activity. Let all these men learn not to cling in their minds to any one of these qualities; that is to say, not to admire them and grasp at them in an immoderate degree, regarding them all, that is, riches, glory and bodily strength, not as intrinsically good at all, but as the greatest of evils. For the pursuit of money belongs to misers, the pursuit of glory to ambitious men, and the acquisition of bodily strength to men fond of athletic and gymnastic exercises. For they have abandoned the better part of themselves, namely the soul, as a slave to things inferior to themselves, namely inanimate things. But all who are masters of themselves show that all that brilliant prosperity, the object of so much contention, is subordinate to the mind, which is the principal part of them, receiving it when it comes, so as to make a good use of it, but not pursuing it if it stays away, since they can be happy even without it. But he who pursues it eagerly and follows on its track fills philosophy with base opinions, and for this reason he is said to uncover its nakedness, for how can anyone conceal or be ignorant of the reproaches justly earned by those men who profess to be wise but who trade in wisdom and bargain over its sale, as men are said to do in the market when they put up their wares for sale, sometimes for a slight gain, sometimes for sweet and caressing speeches, and sometimes for insecure hopes, founded on no sure ground, and sometimes even for promises no better than dreams. And the sentence which follows, "I am the Lord," is spoken with great beauty and the greatest fitness, "for," says the Lord, "set, my good man, the good of the flesh against the good of the soul and of the whole man;" therefore the pleasure of the flesh is irrational, but the pleasure of the soul and of the whole man is the mind of the universe, namely God; and the comparison is an admirable one, in which it is hard for anyone to be deceived by a close likeness, unless someone will say that living things are in reality the same as lifeless things, rational things the same as irrational things; well-adapted things the same as ill-adapted ones; odd numbers identical with even ones; light with darkness, and day with night; and in short everything that is contrary the same as its contrary. And yet even though these things have some kind of union and connection with one another because they were created, God is still in no respect like the very best of created beings, since these have been born and are subject to suffering; but he is uncreated, always acting and never suffering. It is good not to desert the ranks of God, in which all who are arrayed must inevitably be most excellent, and it would be shameful to quit those ranks and flee to unmanly and effeminate pleasure, which injures its friends and benefits its enemies, for its nature is a very strange one: it at once chastises and injures all those to whom it chooses to give a share of its special advantages, and it benefits as greatly as possible those whom it sees fit to deprive of its good things, for it injures them when it gives, but it benefits them when it takes away. So if any of the temptations of pleasure invites you, my soul, turn away, and directing your gaze elsewhere, look at the genuine beauty of virtue, and having surveyed it, stay until a desire for it has sunk into you, and draws you to it, like a magnet, and immediately leads you and attaches you to that which has become the object of your desire. And the expression, "I am the Lord," must be heard not only as equivalent to "I am the perfect, and incorruptible, and true good," and whoever is surrounded with this will reject all that is imperfect, and corruptible, and attached to the flesh; but also as equivalent to, "I am the ruler, and the king, and the master." And it is not safe for subjects to do wrong in the presence of their rulers, nor for slaves to err before their masters; for when those who punish are near, people whose nature is slow to accept admonition are kept in restraint and order by fear; and since God, having filled everything with himself, is near at hand, watching over everything and standing by, we, filled with a great and holy reverence, or if not with that, at least with a prudent fear of the might of his authority and of the fearful nature of his punishment, which cannot be avoided whenever he decides to exert his punishing power, shall refrain from doing wrong. This is so that the divine spirit of wisdom will not be inclined to leave our neighbourhood and depart, but will remain with us a very long time, as it did with the wise Moses; for Moses is a being of the most tranquil habits, either standing still or sitting still, and by nature not at all inclined to undergo turns and changes; for the scripture says, "Moses and the ark did not move," since the wise man cannot depart from virtue, or since virtue does not move, nor is the virtuous man inclined to change, but each of these things is established on the sure foundation of right reason. And again, the scripture says in another passage, "But stand here with Me." For this is an oracle of God given to the prophet, and his station was to be one of unmoved tranquillity by God, who always stands immovably; for all things placed beside him must necessarily be kept straight by so undeviating a rule. For this reason, it seems to me, excessive pride, named Jethro, marvelling at his unvarying and always equal choice of what was wise, a choice that always looked at the same things in the same way, was perplexed, and put this question to him, "Why do you sit by yourself?" For anyone who considers the continual war raging among men in the middle of peace, existing not merely among nations, and countries, and cities, but also within private houses, or rather, I might say, within every individual man, and the inexpressible and heavy storms which agitate the souls of men, which, by their evident impetuosity, throw into confusion all the affairs of life, may very naturally wonder whether anyone can enjoy tranquillity in such a storm and feel calm amid such a billowing, stormy sea. You see that even the high priest, that is to say, reason, who might remain and reside at all times in the holy dwelling of God, is not freely permitted to approach them at all times, but only once in each year; for whatever is associated with reason by utterance is not firm, because it is of a twofold nature. But the safest course is to contemplate the living God with the soul alone, without uttering any voice, because he exists as the indivisible unit. So among men in general, that is, among those who set themselves many goals in life, the divine spirit does not remain, even though it may abide among them for a very short time; it remains among one kind of men alone, namely those who, having put off all the things of creation and the inmost veil and covering of false opinion, come to God with minds unconcealed and naked. So too Moses, having pitched his tent outside of the tabernacle and outside of all the corporeal army, that is to say, having established his mind so that it should not move, begins to worship God, and having entered into the darkness, that invisible country, remains there, performing the most sacred mysteries; and he becomes, not merely an initiated man, but also a hierophant of mysteries and a teacher of divine things, which he will explain to those whose ears are purified; therefore the divine spirit is always standing by him, conducting him in every right way: but from other men, as I have said before, it very soon separates itself, and their life is completed at a hundred and twenty years. For God says, "their days shall be a hundred and twenty years;" but Moses, on reaching that number of years, departed from mortal life to another. How, then, can it be natural for guilty men to live as long as the all-wise prophet? For the present it is enough to say this: that things which bear the same name are not in all cases alike, but very often differ in their whole genus; and also that what is bad may share the same numbers and times as what is good, since both are represented as twofold, yet they still have their own powers, distinct from one another and as remote and different as possible. We shall later discuss this period of a hundred and twenty years more exactly, but we will postpone that until we come to examine the whole life of the prophet, when we have become fit to be initiated into it; at present we will discuss what comes next in order. "And there were giants on the earth in those days." Perhaps someone may think that the lawgiver is speaking enigmatically here and alluding to the fables handed down by the poets about giants, though he is a man as far removed as possible from any invention of fables, and one who thinks fit only to walk in the paths of truth itself; on this principle he has banished from the constitution he established those celebrated and beautiful arts of statuary and painting, because, by falsely imitating the nature of the truth, they contrive deceits and snares to beguile, through the eyes, souls that are easily won over. So he tells no fable whatever about the giants; rather, he wishes to set this fact before your eyes, that some men are born of the earth, and some are born of heaven, and some are born of God: those are born of the earth, who are hunters after the pleasures of the body, devoting themselves to the enjoyment and fruition of them, and eager to provide themselves with everything that contributes to each of them. Those born of heaven, again, are men of skill and science, devoted to learning; for the heavenly portion of us is our mind, and the mind of every one of those persons who are born of heaven studies the encyclical branches of education and every other art of every description, sharpening, and exercising, and practising itself, and making itself acute in all those matters which are the objects of intellect. Lastly, those who are born of God are priests and prophets, who have not seen fit to involve themselves in the constitutions of this world, and to become cosmopolites, but who having raised themselves above all the objects of the mere outward senses, have departed and fixed their gaze on that world which is perceptible only by the intellect, and have settled there, being inscribed in the state of incorruptible incorporeal ideas. Accordingly, Abraham, as long as he was living in the land of the Chaldaeans, that is to say, in opinion, before he received his new name, and while he was still called Abram, was a man born of heaven, investigating the sublime nature of things on high, and all that took place in those regions, and the causes of them, and studying everything of that kind in the true spirit of philosophy; and so he received a name corresponding to the pursuits to which he devoted himself: for the name Abram, when interpreted, means the sublime father, and is a name very fitting for the paternal mind, which in every direction contemplates sublime and heavenly things: for the mind is the father of our composite being, reaching as high as the sky and even farther. But when he had improved and was about to have his name changed, he became a man born of God, according to the oracle which was delivered to him, "I am your God, take care that you are approved before me, and be blameless." But if the God of the world, being the only God, is also by special favour the particular God of this individual man, then of necessity the man must also be a man of God; for the name Abraham, when interpreted, means "the elect father of sound," the reason of the good man: for he is chosen out of all, and purified, and the father of the voice by which we speak; and being of such a character, he is assigned to the one only God, whose minister he becomes, and so makes the path of his whole life straight, truly using the royal road, the road of the only king who governs all things, turning aside and deviating neither to the left hand nor to the right. But the sons of earth, turning their minds away from contemplation and becoming deserters who fled to the lifeless and immovable nature of the flesh, "for they two became one flesh," as the lawgiver says, adulterated the excellent coinage, and abandoned the better rank which had been allotted to them as their own, and deserted to the worse rank, which was contrary to their original nature, with Nimrod the first to set the example of this desertion; for the lawgiver says, "that this man began to be a giant upon the earth:" and the name Nimrod, when interpreted, means desertion; for it was not enough for the thoroughly miserable soul to stand on neither side, but having gone over to its enemies, it took up arms against its friends, and resisted them, and made open war upon them; and in reference to this Moses calls the seat of Nimrod's kingdom Babylon, and the interpretation of the word Babylon is "change;" a thing closely akin to desertion, the one name being akin to the other, and the one action to the other; for the first step of every deserter is a change and alteration of mind, and it would be true to say that, according to the most holy Moses, the bad man, being destitute of a home and of a city, without any settled habitation, and a fugitive, is naturally a deserter also; but the good man is the firmest of allies. Having said this much for now, and dwelt long enough on the subject of the giants, we will now proceed to what comes next in our subject, which is this.