Philo of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
"And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the face of the Lord God in the midst of the tree of the garden" (Gen. 3:8). This introduces a doctrine that teaches that the worthless person is a fugitive. For if virtue is the native city of the wise, then whoever cannot share in it has been banished from the city the worthless person is unable to share in; the worthless person alone, then, has been banished and exiled. And the one who is a fugitive from virtue is at once hidden from God; for if the wise are visible to God, since they are his friends, it is clear that all the worthless hide and submerge themselves, as being enemies and hostile to right reason.
That the worthless person is without a city and without a home is attested in the case of Esau, whose vice is shaggy and versatile, when it says: "Esau was skilled in hunting, a man of the field" (Gen. 25:27). For the predatory vice of the passions is not suited to dwell in the city of virtue, pursuing rusticity and lack of education along with great insensibility. But Jacob, full of wisdom, is both a citizen and dwells in a house, virtue; at any rate it says of him: "But Jacob was an unfeigned man, dwelling in a house" (ibid.).
That is why also "the midwives, because they feared God, made houses for themselves" (Exod. 1:21); for those who search out the hidden mysteries of God, which is "to keep the males alive," build up the works of virtue, in which they have chosen also to dwell. Through these passages, then, it has been shown how the worthless person is without city and without home, being a fugitive from virtue, while the person of worth has been allotted wisdom as both city and house to possess.
Let us next see how someone is also said to hide from God. Unless one allegorizes, it is impossible to accept the passage before us; for God has filled all things and has passed through all things, and has left nothing empty or void of himself. What place, then, will someone occupy in which God is not? This too is attested elsewhere, where it says: "God is in heaven above and on earth below, and there is none besides him" (Deut. 4:39). And again: "Here I stand before you" (Exod. 17:6); for God exists before everything that has come into being, and he is found everywhere, so that no one could possibly hide from him.
And why do we marvel at this? Even the most cohesive of the things that have come into being we could not escape or hide from, even if we tried: let someone flee earth, or water, or air, or heaven, or the whole universe — it is necessary that we be contained within these, for no one will be able to flee outside the universe.
Then, if one who cannot hide from the parts of the universe, nor from the universe itself, could such a person have the power to escape God's notice? By no means. What then does "they hid themselves" mean? The worthless person imagines that God exists in a place, not as containing but as being contained; and this is why he thinks he can hide, as though the cause were not present in that part where he has resolved to lurk.
But it should be understood this way: in the worthless person the true opinion about God has been overshadowed and hidden, for he is full of darkness, having no divine radiance by which he might survey the things that exist. Such a person has been banished from the divine choir, like the leper and the man with a discharge: the one bringing God and becoming — opposite natures represented by two colors — together as if they were both causes, when there is only one cause, the one who acts; the other, the man with the discharge, tracing all things from the universe and back to the universe, thinking that nothing has come to be by God, a companion of Heraclitus's opinion, introducing satiety and want, and "the one is all," and "all things in exchange" —
— that is why the divine word also says: "Let them send out of the holy soul every leper and every man with a discharge and everyone unclean in soul, male or female" (Num. 5:2), and the emasculated and those cut off in the generative parts of the soul, and the fornicators who flee from the rule of the One — for these it is expressly forbidden to come into the assembly of God (Deut. 23:2).
But the reasonings of the wise are not hidden — quite the contrary, they long to be visible. Do you not see that Abraham "was still standing before the Lord, and drawing near he said, 'Will you destroy the righteous with the impious?'" (Gen. 18:22-23) — he who is visible and known to you, standing beside the one who flees and hides from you? For the latter is impious, but righteous is the one who stands facing you and does not flee; for it is right, Master, that you alone be honored.
But just as an impious person is found, so also is a pious one found — though it is only something to be grateful for, if he is righteous, on account of which it says: "Will you destroy the righteous with the impious?" For no one honors God worthily, but only justly; since it is not even possible to repay parents with equal favors — for one cannot beget them in return — how is it not impossible to repay or praise as he deserves God, who established the whole of things out of what did not exist? For he supplied every virtue.
Be visible to God always, then, O soul, at the three seasons — that is, throughout the whole threefold division of time — not dragging along the female, perceptible passion, but offering up as incense the masculine reasoning, trained in endurance; for the sacred word commands that every male be seen before the Lord God of Israel at three seasons of the year (Deut. 16:16).
That is why Moses too, when he becomes visible to God, flees the dissolute character of Pharaoh, who boasts that he does not know the Lord: "Moses withdrew," it says, "from the face of Pharaoh and settled in the land of Midian" (Exod. 2:15) — that is, in the judgment of the things of nature — "and sat down by the well," waiting to see what good, drinkable thing God would rain down for the thirsting and longing soul.
He withdraws, then, from Pharaoh, the godless opinion that rules over the passions, and he withdraws into Midian, that is, judgment, weighing whether he ought to remain quiet or again render judgment against the worthless person for his destruction; he considers whether, by attacking, he will have the strength to win the victory. This is why he is held back and waits, as I said, to see whether God will supply, for the deep and not shallow reasoning, a spring sufficient to overwhelm the onrush of the king of the Egyptians — that is, his passions.
Yet he is deemed worthy of grace; for having taken up the campaign on behalf of virtue, he does not cease from warring, until he sees the pleasures thrown down flat on their faces and rendered powerless. That is why Moses does not flee from Pharaoh — for then he would have run away without ever turning back — but he withdraws, that is, he makes a truce in the war, in the manner of an athlete who takes a breather and gathers his strength, until, having roused the alliance of prudence and the rest of virtue by means of divine words, he attacks with the most vigorous force.
But Jacob — for he is "the supplanter" — acquiring virtue by devices and skills, not without a struggle (for he had not yet been renamed Israel), flees from the affairs concerning Laban, that is, from colors and shapes and, in general, bodies, which by nature wound the mind through the senses; for since he was unable, by staying, to defeat them completely, he flees, fearing defeat at their hands; and he is greatly worthy of praise for this: for Moses says, "You shall make the sons of the seer cautious" (Lev. 15:31), not bold and
loving these things on their own account. "And Jacob hid it from Laban the Syrian, so as not to tell him that he was fleeing. And he fled, he and all that was his, and crossed the river and set out for Mount Gilead" (Gen. 31:20-21).
It is altogether natural to hide the fact that one is fleeing, and not to announce it to Laban, the reasoning that is tied to the objects of sense — as for instance, if you have seen some beauty and been captivated by it, and are about to stumble over it, flee unnoticed from its appearance and no longer report it to the mind, that is, do not reconsider it again or dwell on it; for repeated recollections engrave sharp impressions that damage the understanding and often overturn it against its will. The same reasoning applies to all things that draw us by way of any sense whatever; for in these cases secret flight is what saves, while being reminded and reporting and dwelling on the memory overpowers and violently enslaves the reasoning. Never, then, O understanding, if you are about to be captured by it, report to yourself the perceptible object that has appeared, nor dwell on it, so that you not be overpowered and made wretched; but, setting out unrestrained, flee, preferring an untamed freedom to a docile slavery.
Why, then, does it now speak as though Jacob did not know that Laban was a Syrian, saying, "Jacob hid it from Laban the Syrian"? This too has a meaning that is not beside the point; for Syria is interpreted as "lofty things." So the mind Jacob, the one in training, when he sees the passion lowly, waits, reckoning that he will defeat it by force; but when it is lofty and stiff-necked and swollen, then the mind in training flees first, and then all the parts of his training as well — his readings, his exercises, his practices, his remembrance of noble things, his self-control, his performance of duties — and he crosses the river of sense-perception that floods and submerges the soul with the onrush of the passions, and having crossed, he sets out for the lofty and elevated — the reasoning of perfect virtue.
"For he set out for Mount Gilead" — which is interpreted "migration of testimony," God having made the soul migrate from the passions represented by Leah, and having testified to it that the migration is profitable and advantageous, and leading it up from the evils that render the soul lowly and grovelling to the height and greatness of virtue.
That is why Laban, the friend of the senses, acting according to them and not according to the mind, is indignant and pursues, and says: "Why did you flee secretly?" (Gen. 31:26) — "Why did you not remain to enjoy the body, and the doctrine that judges both the goods within and the goods without? But even in fleeing from this opinion you have robbed me of my very intelligence, both Leah and Rachel; for these, so long as they remained with the soul, produced good sense in it, but once they had migrated away, they left it ignorance and lack of education." That is why it adds: "You have stolen from me" (ibid.) — that is, you have stolen good sense.
What, then, was this "good sense"? It will explain; for it adds: "And you have led away my daughters like captives; and if you had told me, I would have sent you away" (ibid.). You would not have sent away things that fight against each other; for if you had truly sent the soul away and set it free, you would have stripped from it all the bodily and sense-perceptible clamor; for this is how the understanding is redeemed from vices and passions. But as it is, you say that you send it away free, while by your actions you admit that you would have detained it in prison; for if you had sent it forth "with music and tambourines and lyre" and the pleasures belonging to each sense, you would not truly have sent it away.
For it is not only you, Laban, companion of bodies and colors, that we flee, but all that is yours as well, among which are also the voices of the senses that resound together with the activities of the passions; for we have practiced — if indeed we are trainees in virtue — the necessary practice that Jacob too practiced, of destroying and doing away with the gods foreign to the soul, the molten gods, which Moses has forbidden anyone to fashion (Lev. 19:4); for these are the dissolution of virtue and well-being, but the constitution and solidifying of vice and the passions —
for what has been poured out, once dissolved, congeals again. It speaks thus: "And they gave Jacob the foreign gods that were in their hands, and the earrings that were in their ears, and Jacob hid them under the terebinth that is in Shechem" (Gen. 35:4). These are the gods of the worthless. And Jacob is not said to take them, but to hide and destroy them — with complete precision; for the person of true worth will take nothing for his own gain from the things that come from vice, but will hide and secretly make them disappear.
Just as Abraham too, when the king of Sodom devised to make an exchange of the irrational nature for the rational — a horse for men — said he would take nothing that belonged to that man, but would "stretch out" — his word, by way of symbol, for "hand" — his soul's action "to God Most High" (Gen. 14) — for he would take nothing "from a thread to a sandal strap" from all that belonged to that man, so that he might not say he had made rich the one who beholds — giving in exchange, instead, the poverty of a rich virtue.
The passions are always hidden and kept in check at Shechem — which is interpreted "shoulder," for the one who labors over pleasures is one who keeps guard over pleasures — but they are destroyed and done away with in the case of the wise, not for some short time, but "until this very day" — that is, forever; for the whole of eternity is measured by "today," since the measure of all time is the daily cycle.
This is why Jacob gives Shechem to Joseph as a special portion (Gen. 48:22) — Shechem, the bodily and sense-perceptible things, to the one who labors over them — while to Judah, who confesses, he gives not gifts but praise and hymns and songs worthy of God from his brothers (Gen. 49:8). Jacob takes Shechem not from God but "by sword and bow" (Gen. 48:22) — by arguments that cut and defend; for the wise man subjects even the second-rank things to himself, by force of reasoning.
But having subdued them, he does not keep them for himself; he gives them freely to the one whose nature fits them. Do you not see that even when he seemed to be receiving the gods, he did not in fact receive them, but hid them away and made them disappear and destroyed them for all time thereafter? To whom, then, was it given to hide and make vanish vice, except to the soul to whom God has been made manifest, and whom he has judged worthy even of the unspeakable mysteries? For he says: Shall I hide from Abraham my servant what I am doing? (Gen. 18:17). Well done, Savior, that you display your own works to the soul that longs for what is good, and hide none of your works from it. Because of this it has the strength to flee vice and to hide it and cover it in shadow and destroy forever that harmful passion.
We have shown, then, in what way the base person is a fugitive and hides from God; let us now consider where he hides. "In the middle," it says, "of the tree of the garden" (Gen. 3:8) — that is, in the middle of the mind, which is itself situated in the middle, as it were the garden of the whole soul. For the one who runs away from God takes refuge in himself.
For there being two minds — that of the universe, which is God, and one's own — the man who flees from his own mind takes refuge in the mind of all things (for the one who abandons his own private mind confesses that nothing belonging to the human mind truly exists, and attributes everything to God), while the one who runs away from God, conversely, says that God is the cause of nothing, but that he himself is the cause of everything that comes to be.
It is said, indeed, by many, that all things in the world move of their own accord, without a guide, and that it is the human mind alone that has established arts, pursuits, laws, customs, and rules of justice, both political and private, common to men and to irrational creatures alike.
But you see, O soul, how these opinions differ. The one soul, abandoning the particular, generated, and mortal, ascribes true being to the universal, ungenerated, and imperishable; the other, in turn, rejecting the God who is not even able to help himself...
...draws to itself the mind as an ally, wrongly. This is why Moses too says: "If the thief is found breaking in, and is struck and dies, there is no bloodguilt for him; but if the sun has risen upon him, he is guilty, and shall be put to death in turn" (Exod. 22:1–2). For if anyone cuts through and divides the argument that stands firm, sound, and upright — the argument that testifies that God alone can do all things — and is found breaking in, that is, in what is pierced through and divided, since he knows only his own mind at work and not God, he is a thief, taking for himself what belongs to another.
For all things are the possessions of God, so that whoever assigns anything to himself is embezzling what belongs to another, and bears a wound most grievous and hard to heal — self-conceit, a thing akin to ignorance and lack of education. But the text leaves the one who strikes him at rest, for he is no different from the one struck; rather, just as the one who rubs himself is himself rubbed, and the one who stretches himself is himself stretched — for he receives in himself both the power of the agent and the passion of the one who undergoes it — so too the one who steals the things of God and inscribes them to himself is tormented by his own godlessness and self-conceit.
Would that, however, being struck, he might die — that is, might remain forever inactive; for then he would seem to sin less. For vice is contemplated in one aspect as a settled state, in another as a motion; and the vice that consists in motion tends toward the fulfillment and completion of its effects, and is for this reason worse than the vice that is merely a state.
If, then, the reasoning faculty dies — the faculty that regards itself, rather than God, as the cause of what comes to be, that is, if it grows still and contracts — there is no bloodguilt for it; it has not utterly destroyed the living doctrine that ascribes all powers to God. But if the sun rises — that is, if the mind that shines brightly within us rises, and seems to see through all things and adjudicate all things and think that nothing escapes it — it is guilty, and shall be put to death in turn, for the living doctrine it destroyed, according to which God alone is the cause; and it will be found itself inactive and truly dead, having become the introducer of a soulless, mortal, and discordant...
...doctrine. This is why the sacred word curses the one who sets up in secret a carved or molten image, the work of a craftsman's hands (Deut. 27:15). For why do you store up and treasure within yourself, O reasoning faculty, these base opinions — that God has qualities, as the carved image has none; that he is perishable, like the molten image, when he is in fact imperishable — instead of bringing them out into the open, so that you may be taught what is needful by those who train themselves in truth? For you think yourself skilled, because you have practiced tasteless plausibilities against the truth, but you will be found unskilled, having discovered instead a grievous disease of the soul — ignorance that refuses to be healed.
That the base person sinks down into his own scattered mind in fleeing from him who truly is, Moses will bear witness — Moses, who "struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand" (Exod. 2:12). What this meant was that he reasoned against the one who claims to be master of the body and reckons the soul its slave, and who takes pleasures to be the end of life.
For having observed the toil that the king of Egypt — vice, the ruler of the passions — imposes upon the one who sees God, the mind sees the Egyptian man, the human and perishable passion, striking and abusing the one who sees; and having looked all around the whole soul, this way and that, and having seen nothing standing firm except him who truly is, but all else shaken and tossed about, it strikes down the pleasure-loving passion and, having reasoned it through, hides it in the scattered and dispersed mind, which has been deprived of kinship and union with the good.
This one, then, has hidden himself away within himself; but the one opposite to him flees from himself, and takes refuge in the God of all that is. This is why it says: "He brought him outside and said, Look up to heaven and count the stars" (Gen. 15:5) — stars which we would wish to encompass and survey in full, being insatiable in our love of virtue, yet we are unable to measure the wealth of God.
But nevertheless, thanks be to the giver of gifts, that he says he has sown in the soul such seeds, far-shining and bright and wholly intellectual, like the stars in heaven. And it is not by accident that "outside" is added to "he brought him"; for who is brought out from within? But perhaps what is meant is this: he brought him out into the outermost region, not into something external that can be encompassed by others. For just as in houses the men's quarters are outside the bedchamber, but inside the courtyard, and the outer gate is outside the courtyard but inside the entrance-passage, so too in the soul it is possible for what is outside one thing to be inside another.
This, then, is how it must be understood: he brought the mind out into... For what benefit would there be in leaving the body behind, only to take refuge in sense-perception? What benefit in casting off sense-perception, but shrinking back before articulate reason? For the mind that is about to be brought out and set free in liberty must escape from everything — bodily necessities, the organs of sense-perception, sophistic arguments, plausibilities, and last of all...
...even from itself. This is why elsewhere he boasts, saying: "The Lord, God of heaven and God of earth, who took me from the house of my father" (Gen. 24:7). For it is not possible for one who dwells in a mortal body, as such, to keep company with God, but only for the one who has flowed forth out of it.
For this reason too the joy of the soul, Isaac, whenever he converses alone with God in solitude, goes out, leaving behind himself and his own mind: "Isaac went out," it says, "to converse alone in the field toward evening" (Gen. 24:63). And Moses too, the prophetic word, says: "When I go out from the city" — the soul, for the soul too is a city, giving laws and customs to the living creature — "I will spread out my hands" (Exod. 9:29), and I will open wide and lay out flat all my actions, calling God as witness and overseer of each one — God, from whom vice cannot by nature hide itself, but must be spread open and seen in plain sight.
Whenever, indeed, the soul is spread open through all its words and deeds and is made divine, the voices of the senses fall silent, along with all the troublesome and ill-named sounds. For the visible thing calls out and summons sight to itself, sound calls hearing, vapor calls smell, and in general the sense-object summons sense-perception to itself; but all these cease, once the reasoning faculty, going out from the city of the soul...
...consecrates its own actions and thoughts to God. For indeed, "the hands of Moses are heavy" (Exod. 17:12); since the deeds of the base person are windy and light, the deeds of the wise would be heavy, unmoving, and not easily shaken. They are steadied by Aaron, who is speech, and Hur, who is light; for nothing among these things is trivial to the truth. Through these symbols, then, it means to show you that the deeds of the wise are steadied by the most necessary things, speech and truth. This is why, when Aaron dies — that is, when he is perfected — he ascends to Hur, who is light (Num. 20:25); for the end of speech is truth, which shines more brightly than light, and it is to this that speech is eager to come.
Do you not see that when he received the tent from God (Exod. 33:7) — that is, wisdom, in which the wise man dwells and makes his home — he pitched it and made it firm and set it fast, not within the body, but outside it? For he likens the body to a camp, an army-camp full of wars and all the evils that war produces, having no share of peace. "And it was called the tent of witness" — wisdom, witnessed to by God; for indeed "everyone who sought the Lord would go out" — most beautifully said.
For if you seek God, O reasoning faculty, go out from yourself and seek him; but if you remain within bodily masses or within the mind's own conceits, you have no part in seeking the divine, even if you pretend that you are seeking it. Whether, in seeking, you will find God, is uncertain; for to many he has not made himself manifest, but their zeal has remained incomplete to the end. Yet even the bare act of seeking, by itself, is enough for a share in good things; for impulses toward what is good, even if they fail of their end, bring joy beforehand to those who feel them.
Thus the base person, fleeing virtue and hiding from God, takes refuge in a weak helper, his own mind; but the good person, on the contrary, runs away from himself and turns back toward the knowledge of the One — winning thereby a noble race and the best contest of all.
"And the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, Where are you?" (Gen. 3:9). Why is Adam alone called, when the woman too is hidden along with him? It must first be said that the mind is called back to where it was, whenever it receives conviction and a check upon its turning aside; and it is not only the mind itself that is called, but all its powers as well, for without its powers the mind by itself is found naked and scarcely even existing. And one of these powers is sense-perception, which is the woman.
The woman, sense-perception, is therefore called along with Adam, the mind; but she is not called by herself. Why? Because, being irrational, she cannot receive conviction from herself; for neither sight nor hearing nor any of the other senses can be taught, so that none of them is able to grasp things by comprehension. For the one who fashioned sense-perception made it capable only of distinguishing bodies; but the mind is the part that can be taught, and it is for this reason that it...
But it was not perception that he summoned. Now "where are you" can be understood in several ways. In one sense it is not a question but a statement, equivalent to "you are in a place" — reading "where are you" with the accent thrown back. For since you supposed that God walks in the garden and is contained by it, learn that you have not thought well of this, and hear from God a most true saying: that God is not anywhere — for he is not contained, but contains the universe — whereas that which has come into being is necessarily in a place, since it must be contained and cannot contain.
The second sense of what is said is equivalent to this: Where have you come to, O soul? For what goods have you chosen such evils? When God called you to share in virtue, you pursue vice instead, and though he offered for your enjoyment the tree of life — that is, the wisdom by which you might live — you have gorged yourself on ignorance and corruption, preferring the misery that is the soul's death to the happiness of true life.
The third sense is a genuine question, to which two answers might be given. One, to the questioner "where are you," is "nowhere" — for the soul of that sort has no place on which it might set foot or on which it might be established; and for this reason the base person is said to be "out of place," for what is out of place is an evil hard to set right. Such is the person who is not of noble character: forever tossed and shaken, carried about like an unsteady wind, companion to no firm judgment whatsoever.
There might be another answer of this kind, the one Adam himself uses: hear where I am — where those are who are unable to see God, where those are who do not listen to God, where those are who hide the Cause, where those are who flee virtue, where those are who are naked of wisdom, where those are who fear and tremble from cowardice and faintheartedness of soul. For when he says, "I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I am naked, and I hid myself" (Gen. 3:10), he sets forth all these confinements, as we have also shown at greater length earlier.
And yet Adam is not naked now; it was said a little earlier that "they made themselves loincloths." But through this too he wishes to teach you that he does not mean the nakedness of the body, but that state in which the mind is found stripped and bare of virtue.
"The woman," he says, "whom you gave to be with me — she gave me from the tree, and I ate" (Gen. 3:12). It is well said not "the woman whom you gave to me" but "with me": for you did not give perception to me as a possession, but let it go free and unrestrained, in a certain way not submitting to the commands of my own understanding. At any rate, if the mind should wish to command sight not to see, sight will nonetheless see what lies before it; and hearing, when a sound falls upon it, will certainly take hold of it, even if the mind, in its stubbornness, orders it not to hear; and smell, too, will smell the vapors that reach it, even if the mind forbids it to perceive them.
For this reason God did not give perception to the living being, but with the living being. And this is what it means: perception recognizes everything together with our mind, and at the same time as it. For instance, sight fastens on the visible object at the same moment as the mind: the eye sees the body, and at once the mind grasps what has been seen — that it is black or white or yellow or red, triangular or square or round, or has some other color or shape. Again, hearing is struck by a sound, and the mind along with it; and the proof is that it judges the sound at once — whether it is faint or has volume, whether it is melodious and well-measured, or again whether it is discordant and unharmonious.
And the same thing is found in the case of the other senses as well. It is very finely put, too, that he adds "she gave me from the tree": for no one gives the mind the wooden and perceptible mass except perception. For who gave the understanding the means to recognize the body, or its whiteness? Was it not sight? And who gave it the sound? Was it not hearing? And who the vapor? Was it not smell? And who the flavor? Was it not taste? And who the rough and the soft? Was it not touch? Rightly, then, and very truly has it been said by the mind: that perception alone gives me the apprehensions of bodies.
"And God said to the woman, 'What is this you have done?' And 'The serpent deceived me, and I ate'" (Gen. 3:13). God inquires about one thing from perception, but she answers about another: for he inquires about something concerning the man, while she speaks not about him but about herself, saying "I ate," not "I gave."
Perhaps, then, by reading allegorically we shall resolve the difficulty and show that the woman answers the question directly. For it is necessary that, once she has eaten, the man too should eat; for whenever perception, fastening upon the perceptible object, is filled with the impression of it, at once the mind too has grasped it, taken hold of it, and in a certain way been filled with nourishment from it. This, then, is what she means: I gave to the man unknowingly; for when I laid hold of the object before me, he, being quick to move,
...received the impression and was imprinted by it. Observe that the man says the woman gave, while the woman says not that the serpent gave, but that it deceived: for it is proper to perception to give, but to pleasure — the manifold and serpentine kind — to deceive and lead astray. For instance, nature's white and black, hot and cold, are given by perception to the mind not by way of deception but truthfully; for the underlying things are such as the impression that strikes from them also is, according to most of those who study nature without proper insight. But pleasure does not present the underlying thing to the understanding as it actually is; rather it falsifies it by artifice, bringing what is harmful into the rank of the beneficial.
Just as one can see hideous courtesans painting themselves and lining their eyes, so as to conceal the ugliness about them, so too the man without self-control, bent toward the pleasure of the belly: he welcomes strong wine in quantity and lavish preparation of food as a good, while being harmed in both body and soul by them.
Again, one can often see lovers utterly infatuated with the ugliest of women, pleasure deceiving them and all but proclaiming that beauty of form, fine complexion, good flesh, and proportion of parts belong to women who possess exactly the opposite of these; at any rate they overlook women who possess a beauty genuinely beyond reproach, and melt with longing for those I have described.
All deception, then, belongs most properly to pleasure, and all giving to perception. For pleasure devises and leads the mind astray, showing not what the underlying things actually are but what they are not; whereas perception gives bodies purely as they are by nature, without fabrication or artifice.
"And the Lord God said to the serpent, 'Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the cattle and above all the wild beasts of the earth. On your breast and belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust 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 your head, and you shall watch his heel'" (Gen. 3:14-15). For what reason does he curse the serpent without a defense, though elsewhere he bids it as fitting that "the two between whom there is a dispute should stand" (Deut. 19:17), and that one should not simply believe one party in advance?
And indeed you see that in the case of Adam he did not believe in advance against the woman, but gave her an opportunity for defense when he asked, "What is this you have done?" (Gen. 3:13); and she confesses her fault, laid low by the deception of the serpentine and manifold pleasure. What, then, prevented him, once the woman had said "the serpent deceived me," from questioning the serpent as to whether it had indeed deceived her, rather than cursing it without judgment and without a defense?
We must say, then, that perception belongs neither to the base nor to the excellent, but is something intermediate and common to both the wise and the foolish; and coming to be in a fool it becomes base, but in a person of good character it becomes excellent. Reasonably so, since it does not have a wicked nature of its own, but, being poised between the two, inclines toward either the better or the worse; and so it is not condemned before it has confessed that it has followed the worse.
But the serpent — pleasure — is wicked in itself; for this reason it is not found at all in the person of good character, and only the base person enjoys it. In keeping with what is proper to it, then, God curses it without granting it a defense, since it has no seed of virtue, but is always and everywhere culpable and defiled.
For this reason too God, without any evident cause, knows Er to be wicked (Gen. 38:7) and puts him to death: for he is not ignorant that our body, this leathern mass — for Er is translated "leathern" — is wicked and a plotter against the soul, and dead and always in a state of death. For you must think of each of us as doing nothing other than carrying a corpse, the soul raising the dead body from within itself and bearing it without weariness. Consider, if you will, the soul's own vigor.
The most powerful athlete would not have the strength to carry even a statue of himself for a short time, yet the soul, sometimes for as much as a hundred years, carries the statue that is a human being, lightly and without growing weary; for it is not now that it kills the body, but from the beginning it made the body a corpse.
It is wicked by nature, then, as I have said, and a plotter against the soul, but it does not appear so to everyone — only to God, and to whoever is a friend of God. For it says, "Er was wicked before the Lord." For whenever the mind soars aloft and is initiated into the mysteries of the Lord, it judges the body wicked and hostile; but whenever it withdraws from the search for divine things, it regards the body as a friend, kin, and brother to itself, and takes refuge, in fact, in the things that are dear to it.
For this reason the soul of the athlete differs from that of the philosopher: the athlete refers everything to the good condition of the body, and being a lover of the body, would give up the soul itself on its behalf; but the philosopher, being a lover of the beauty that lives within himself, cares for the soul, and disregards the truly dead body, aiming only that it should not
...be discordant, bound to an evil and dead companion, and so mar the soul, which is the best part of us. You see that it is not the Lord who kills Er, but God: for it is not insofar as he rules and governs, exercising the authority of sovereign power, that he destroys the body, but insofar as he exercises goodness and kindness — for "God" is the name of the Cause in its goodness — so that you may know that even lifeless things he has made not by sheer authority but by goodness, just as he made living things also; for it was necessary, for the demonstration of the better things, that the coming-into-being of the worse things too should be brought about by the power of that same goodness of the Cause, which is God.
When, then, O soul, will you suppose yourself to be carrying a corpse in the fullest sense? Is it not when you have been made perfect and judged worthy of prizes and crowns? For then you will be a lover of God, not a lover of the body; and you will attain the prizes, if the bride of Judah, Tamar, becomes your wife — she whose name is translated "palm tree," a symbol of victory. And here is the proof: when Er took her, he was at once found to be wicked and was put to death. For it says, "Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, whose name was Tamar" (Gen. 38:6), and immediately adds, "and Er was wicked before the Lord, and God killed him" (ibid. 7). For whenever the mind has carried off the prizes of victory, it condemns the dead body to death.
You see that he curses the serpent too without a defense, for it is pleasure; and he kills Er without any evident cause, for it is body. And if you consider it, noble friend, you will find that God has made natures that are in themselves culpable and blameworthy in the soul, and others in all respects excellent and praiseworthy, just as is also the case among plants and animals.
Don't you see that the Craftsman made some plants tame, beneficial, and life-preserving, but others wild, harmful, and the cause of disease and destruction — and animals in the same way? Take the serpent, for instance, which is now our subject: it is by its very nature a destructive and death-dealing creature. What the serpent does to a man, pleasure does to the soul, and that is why the serpent has been made a likeness of pleasure.
Just as God has hated pleasure and the body without stating his reasons, so too he has advanced certain refined natures without any evident cause, acknowledging no prior deed of theirs as grounds for the praise. For if someone should ask why he says that Noah “found favor before the Lord God” (Gen. 6:8) even though, as far as we can tell, Noah had done nothing distinguished beforehand, we will answer, rightly, that this attests the excellence of his constitution and origin. Noah is interpreted as “rest” or “just,” and one who has ceased from wrongdoing and sin, resting in what is good and living together with justice, must necessarily find favor with God.
“To find favor” is not, as some suppose, simply equivalent to “to be well-pleasing”; it is something more. The just man, in searching out the nature of things, discovers this as the single best discovery: that the universe, in its entirety, is a favor of God, and that no part of coming-into-being is a gift bestowed on its own account — since it is not even a possession in its own right, but everything belongs to God as his possession. That is why favor belongs to him alone. So to those who ask what is the source of coming-into-being, the most correct answer would be: the goodness and favor of God, which he bestowed on the race that came after him. For everything in the cosmos, and the cosmos itself,
is a gift, a benefaction, and a favor of God. And God made Melchizedek, king of peace — for that is what “Salem” means — his own priest (Gen. 14:18), without having outlined beforehand any deed of his, but rather having made him such a king from the start: a lover of peace and worthy of his own priesthood. For he is called a just king, and a king is the enemy of a tyrant, since the one is a champion of laws, the other of lawlessness.
The tyrant-mind, then, issues commands to soul and body that are violent, harmful, and productive of intense pains — I mean the deeds done in accordance with vice and the enjoyments of the passions. The king, by contrast, does not so much command as persuade, and the commands he gives are of a kind that let the living creature, like a ship, enjoy fair sailing through life, steered by the good pilot and craftsman, who is right reason.
Let the tyrant, then, be called the leader of war, and the king the leader of peace, Salem, and let him bring to the soul food full of gladness and joy — for he brings bread and wine, which the Ammonites and the Moabites refused to offer to the one who sees, for which reason they are barred from the assembly and the divine congregation. For the Ammonites are those born of sense-perception, our mother, and the Moabites those born of mind, our father — two characters who suppose that mind and sense-perception are what hold reality together, without grasping any conception of God. “They shall not enter,” says Moses, “into the assembly of the Lord… because they did not meet us with bread and water” (Deut. 23:3–4), as we came out from the passions of Egypt.
But let Melchizedek offer wine instead of water, and give the souls to drink, and make them drunk, that they may be possessed by a divine intoxication more sober than sobriety itself. For he is a priest, the Logos, who has Being as his portion, and who reasons about him in lofty, exalted, and magnificent terms. For he is priest of the Most High (Gen. 14:18) — not that there is some other god who is not Most High, for God, being one, “is above in heaven and below on earth, and there is none besides him” (Deut. 4:39) — but rather because to think of God not in a lowly and groveling way, but in terms immeasurably great, immaterial, and lofty, evokes the sense of “Most High.”
What good deed, then, had Abram already accomplished, that God commands him to leave his homeland and this kindred and to dwell in a land that God himself will give him (Gen. 12:1)? It is a good city, great and altogether blessed — for the gifts of God are great and precious — and by this method too God has begotten a pattern worthy of study. For Abram is interpreted as “exalted father,” and by both names he is praiseworthy. For the mind, whenever it does not command
the soul in the manner of a despot, but rules as a father — not granting it what is pleasant, but bestowing what is beneficial even against its will — and altogether withdraws from lowly things that lead toward the mortal, and roams the heights instead, spending its time on contemplations concerning the cosmos and its parts, and rising even further, searches out the divine and its nature through an unspeakable love of knowledge, then it cannot remain fixed on its original opinions but seeks migration, always bettering itself toward what is better.
Some, moreover, God shapes and disposes well even before their birth, and has chosen for them the best portion in advance. Don't you see what he says to Abraham about Isaac — when Abraham had not hoped that he would become the father of such offspring, but had even laughed at the promise and said, “Shall a child be born to one who is a hundred years old, and shall Sarah, who is ninety, bear a child?” (Gen. 17:17) — God affirms and assents, saying, “Yes, behold, Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac, and I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant” (ib. 19).
What, then, is it that made this child, too, be praised before his birth? Some good things benefit us once they have come to be and are present — health, for instance, keenness of perception, wealth (should it come our way), reputation, though these are called “goods” only in a loose sense. But others benefit us not only once they have come to be, but even when merely foretold that they will come to be — as with joy, which is a good disposition of the soul. For joy delights us not only when it is present and actively at work, but even when it is merely hoped for, it gladdens us in advance. And this too is a distinctive feature it has: other goods each operate in their own private sphere, but joy is both a private and a common good. For it comes upon everything: we rejoice at health, at freedom, at honor, and at all the rest — so that, properly speaking, nothing can be called good if joy is not attached to it.
But we do not rejoice only over other goods that have already come to be and are present; we rejoice also over things that are yet to come and are anticipated — as when we hope to grow wealthy, or to hold office, or to be praised, or to find release from sickness, or to share in vigor and strength, or to become knowledgeable in place of ignorant — we are glad beyond measure. Since, then, joy, whether present or merely hoped for, floods and gladdens the soul, it was fitting that God should deem Isaac worthy of a name and a great gift even before his birth. For “laughter of the soul,” “joy,” and “gladness” is what
this name means. Again, of Jacob and Esau, while they were still in the womb, God declares that the one will be ruler, leader, and master, and the other, Esau, subject and slave. For God, the molder of living things, knows well his own creations even before he has fully chiseled them into shape — the powers they will later exercise, and, in short, their deeds and passions. For when the soul of patient endurance, Rebecca, went to inquire of God, he answered her: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples shall be separated from your body; and one people shall be stronger than the other, and the greater shall serve the lesser” (Gen. 25:23).
For in God's sight what is base and irrational is by nature a slave, while what is refined, rational, and better is fit to lead and is free — and this holds not only once each has come to full completion in the soul, but even while it is still uncertain. For in general, even the slightest breath of virtue reveals the beginning of leadership, not merely of freedom, and conversely, the mere onset of vice enslaves the reasoning power, even before its offspring has fully emerged.
And what did this same Jacob do when Joseph brought forward his two sons, the elder Manasseh and the younger Ephraim? He crossed his hands and laid his right hand on the younger, Ephraim, and his left on the elder, Manasseh; and when Joseph took this as a serious matter and thought his father had unwittingly erred in the placing of his hands, Jacob said: I did not err, but “I know, child, I know; this one too shall become a people, and this one too shall be exalted, but his younger brother shall be greater than he” (Gen. 48:19).
What then must we say except this: that two natures, utterly necessary, were fashioned by God in the soul — memory and recollection? Memory is the better, recollection the inferior. For memory holds its perceptions fresh and vivid, so that it cannot even go astray through ignorance, whereas recollection is invariably preceded by forgetfulness, a maimed and blind condition.
Recollection, the inferior faculty, turns out to be older than memory, the better one … continuous and unbroken. For those who are first introduced to the arts are at once unable to master the theorems belonging to them; so, being at first subject to forgetting, we recollect again and again, until, through much forgetting and much recollecting, memory becomes at last secure and prevails — which is why recollection, though later-born, is in fact the younger sibling of memory.
Symbolically, then, Ephraim is called memory — for the name is interpreted as “fruitfulness” — since the soul that loves learning has brought forth its own proper fruit, whenever it has memory to make its perceptions secure. Manasseh, by contrast, is recollection, for by translation he is said to be “out of forgetfulness,” and one who escapes forgetfulness must always be recollecting. Most fittingly, then, Jacob, the supplanter of the passions and practitioner of virtue, favors with his right hand Ephraim, fruit-bearing memory, and grants second place to Manasseh, recollection.
Moses, too, of those who sacrifice the Passover, praises most highly those who sacrifice it the first time, because they persisted in the crossing away from the passions of Egypt and did not rush back toward them again; but those who sacrifice it the second time he judges worthy only of second place (Num. 9:6ff.), since, having turned aside, they ran back into their turning, and, as if forgetting what needed to be done, rushed again to do it, whereas the former group remained unturning to the end. It seems, then, that Manasseh, “out of forgetfulness,” resembles those who sacrifice the Passover the second time,
while fruit-bearing Ephraim resembles those who sacrifice it the first time. This is why God calls Bezalel by name and says he will grant him wisdom and knowledge, and will show him to be the craftsman and master-builder of all the works of the tabernacle — that is, of the works of the soul (Exod. 31:2ff.) — without having shown beforehand any deed of his that one might praise. We must say, then, that God has stamped this pattern too upon the soul, the way one stamps a genuine coin. What, then, is this character? We shall know, if we first work out precisely the meaning of the name.
Bezalel, then, is interpreted “in the shadow of God”; and the shadow of God is his Logos, which he used as an instrument when he was making the cosmos. And this shadow, this image as it were, is itself the archetype of other things. For just as God is the model for the image, which he has here called a shadow, so the image becomes the model for other things, as Moses showed at the very beginning of the Law-giving when he said, “And God made man according to the image of God” (Gen. 1:27) — meaning that the image was modeled after God, while man
received the power of a model by taking on the image. Let us then consider what character results. The first inquirers asked how we come to conceive of the divine, and those who seemed to philosophize best said that we form our apprehension of the Cause from the cosmos and its parts and the powers residing within them.
For just as, if someone were to see a house carefully built with gatehouses, colonnades, men's quarters, women's quarters, and other structures, he would form a notion of the craftsman — for he would not suppose the house had been completed without art and a craftsman — and in the same way with a city, a temple, and every construction, smaller or greater,
so too, when someone enters, as it were, this vast house or city that is the cosmos, and observes the heaven revolving in a circle and encompassing everything within it, the planets and fixed stars moving in the same unchanging and harmonious way, beneficial to the whole, and the earth allotted the middle region, with masses of water and air arranged in between, and further, living creatures both mortal and immortal, and varieties of plants and fruits, he will reckon, surely, that these things have not come to be without complete artistry, but that the craftsman of this universe both was and is God. Those who reason in this way apprehend God through a shadow, coming to understand the craftsman through his works.
But there is a more perfect and more purified mind, initiated into the great mysteries, who does not come to know the Cause from the things that have come to be, as one would infer a permanent object from its shadow, but who rises above the created realm and receives a clear impression of the uncreated, so as to apprehend him from himself, and his shadow along with him — which was the Logos and this cosmos.
This is Moses, who says, "Show yourself to me, that I may know you clearly" (Exod. 33:13) -- that is: do not show yourself to me through heaven or earth or air or anything at all that belongs to the realm of becoming, and let me not glimpse your form mirrored in anything else, but only in you, God yourself. For the reflections found in things that have come to be dissolve, while those found in the unbegotten remain fixed, secure, and everlasting. It is for this reason that God has called Moses apart and spoken with him.
God has also called Bezalel, but not in the same way: the one receives the impression of God directly from the cause itself, while the other, like someone reasoning from a shadow, comes to understand the craftsman only by inference from the things that have come to be. This is why you will find that the tabernacle and all its furnishings are constructed first by Moses and afterward by Bezalel. Moses fashions the archetypes; Bezalel fashions their copies. Moses works under God's own direction, as it says, "According to the pattern shown to you on the mountain, so shall you make everything" (Exod. 25:40); Bezalel works under Moses' direction -- and rightly so.
For indeed, when Aaron -- reason -- and Miriam -- sense-perception -- rose up against him, they are told plainly, "If there is a prophet of the Lord, he will be made known to him in a vision," and God will appear to him in shadow, not clearly; but to Moses, who is "faithful in all his house," God "will speak mouth to mouth, in visible form and not through riddles" (Num. 12:6-8).
Since, then, we have found two natures that have come to be, shaped and finely wrought by God -- the one harmful in itself, culpable, and accursed, the other beneficial and praiseworthy, the one bearing a counterfeit stamp, the other a genuine one -- let us pray the fitting and fine prayer that Moses himself prayed: that God may open for us his own treasury (Deut. 28:12) -- the lofty reason, pregnant with divine lights, which he has called heaven -- and seal shut the treasuries of evils.
For with God there are treasuries of evils just as there are of good things, as he says in the great song: "Are not these things stored up with me, and sealed among my treasuries, for the day of vengeance, when their foot shall slip?" (Deut. 32:34-35). You see, then, that there are treasuries of evils. And the treasury of good things is one -- since God is one, the treasury of good things is also one -- but the treasuries of evils are many, since evils too are unlimited in number. But observe the goodness of the One Who Is even in this: he opens the treasury of good things, but seals shut the treasuries of evils. For it belongs to God's nature to offer good things freely and even to anticipate the giving of them, but not readily to bring on evils.
Moses, intensifying still further this generosity and graciousness of God, says not merely that the treasuries of evils are sealed for the ordinary run of time, but even when the soul stumbles from the footing of right reason, at the very moment when it would deserve to be brought to justice. For, he says, it is on the day of vengeance that the treasuries of evils are sealed -- the sacred word thereby showing that God does not proceed at once against those who sin, but grants time for repentance, for the healing of the fault, and for its correction.
"And the Lord God said to the serpent, 'Cursed are you above all cattle and above all wild beasts of the earth'" (Gen. 3:14). Just as joy, being a good state of feeling, is worthy of prayer, so pleasure -- the passion -- deserves a curse, since it shifts the boundaries of the soul and remakes it, turning it from a lover of virtue into a lover of passion. Moses says among the curses that the one who moves the boundary markers of his neighbor is accursed (Deut. 27:17); for God set virtue as a boundary marker and law for the soul, the tree of life, but the one who shifts it fixes in its place another boundary marker, vice, which is the boundary of death.
"Cursed too is the one who leads the blind astray on the road" (Deut. 27:18), "and the one who strikes his neighbor in secret" (ib. 24). These too are the work of that most godless thing, pleasure. For sense-perception is blind by nature, being irrational, since it is reason that gives sight; by reason alone do we truly grasp things, no longer by sense-perception, for through sense-perception we form images only of bodies.
It has deceived maimed sense-perception in its grasp of things -- since, though able to turn toward mind and be guided by it, pleasure has prevented this, leading it instead toward the external object of sense and making it greedy for the very thing that ought to have been its own product -- so that sense-perception, being maimed, follows the blind object of sense as its guide, while the mind, guided by two things that cannot see, is thrown headlong and loses mastery of itself.
For if there were any natural order to be followed, the maimed part ought to follow the seeing reason, since that would lighten the harm done; but as it is, pleasure has set up so great a contrivance against the soul that it has forced it to use blind guides, deceiving and persuading it to exchange virtue for evils and to give up innocence in return for wickedness. The sacred word forbids just such an exchange, when it says, "You shall not exchange the good for the bad" (Lev. 27:33). For these reasons, then, pleasure is accursed.
Let us see how fitting are the things it is cursed for. It is said to be cursed "above all cattle" (Gen. 3:14). Now the irrational and sentient is cattle-like, and each sense-perception curses pleasure as its bitterest and most hostile enemy -- and indeed it truly is hostile to sense-perception. The proof: whenever we have been glutted with immoderate pleasure, we can no longer see, hear, smell, taste, or touch with clear perception, but our contact with these objects becomes dim and feeble. So much for that point.
Whenever we restrain the use of a sense, we suffer for it; but when we are wholly given over to the enjoyments of pleasure, we lose the capacity to perceive through the cooperating senses, so that we seem to have been maimed. How, then, would it not be fitting
for sense-perception to lay curses on the pleasure that maims it? Pleasure is cursed too above all the wild beasts -- I mean the passions of the soul -- for by these the mind is wounded and destroyed. Why, then, does pleasure seem worse than the other passions? Because it lies beneath nearly all of them, like a foundation and starting point. For desire arises from longing for pleasure, grief arises from the loss of it, and fear in turn is born from apprehension of its absence; so it is clear that all the passions are launched from pleasure, and probably none of them could ever have come into being at all if the capacity to bear them, pleasure, had not first been laid down.
"On your breast and belly you shall go" (Gen. 3:14). For it is around these parts, the breast and the belly, that passion lurks: around the belly and what follows it, when pleasure has the means and materials to hand; around the breast, where anger dwells, when pleasure is lacking. For lovers of pleasure, when deprived of their pleasures, grow angry and embittered.
Let us look still more precisely at what is being shown here. Our soul, it turns out, is threefold: one part is the rational, a second the spirited, and a third the desiring. Now some philosophers have distinguished these parts from one another only in power, others by location as well; and they have assigned to the rational part the region around the head, saying that where the king is, there too are his bodyguards -- and the bodyguards are the senses of the mind, stationed around the head, so that the king too would be there, having settled, as it were, on the citadel of a city. To the spirited part they assign the breast, which is why nature has fortified this part with the density and strength of closely packed bones, arming it like a good soldier with breastplate and shield for defense against opponents. To the desiring part they assign the region of the lower belly and stomach, for there desire dwells, irrational appetite.
If, then, you ever ask, my mind, what region has been allotted to pleasure, do not look for it in the region around the head, where the rational part is -- you will not find it there, since reason is at war with passion and the two cannot remain in the same place: when reason prevails, pleasure vanishes, and when pleasure conquers, reason flees. Look instead in the breast and belly, where anger and desire are, the parts of the irrational; for it is there that our judgment and our passions are both to be found.
Nothing, then, prevents the mind, once it has stepped outside the objects of thought and its own proper concerns, from being handed over to the worse part; and this happens whenever war gets the upper hand within the soul, for the reasoning within us, if it is not warlike but peaceable, is bound to be taken captive.
The sacred word, knowing full well how powerful is the impulse of each of these two passions, anger and desire, curbs each of them, setting reason over them as charioteer and helmsman. And first, concerning anger -- treating and healing it -- it speaks as follows: "And you shall put upon the oracle of judgments the Manifestation and the Truth, and it shall be on the breast of Aaron whenever he goes into the sanctuary before the Lord" (Exod. 28:26).
The "oracle," then, is within us the organ of speech, which is uttered reason; and this is either ill-considered and unapproved, or well-judged and approved. It leads us to conceive of reason as a thing of discrimination: for it says the oracle is not the undiscriminating or counterfeit kind, but the kind that belongs to judgments -- equivalent, that is, to the discriminated and tested.
Of this approved reason he says there are two supreme virtues, clarity and truthfulness, and quite rightly. For reason's first task is to make things clear and evident to one's neighbor, since we are unable to display to others, or set before them as it truly is, the passion that has arisen within the soul; hence we have been forced to resort to the symbols conveyed by voice, nouns and verbs, which must be entirely familiar to all, so that our neighbor may grasp our meaning clearly and plainly. Its second task is to report these things truthfully.
For what good is it to make an interpretation vivid and clear, but false? In that case the hearer is bound to be deceived and to reap the greatest misfortune -- ignorance compounded with lack of instruction. What use is it, for instance, if I tell a child, showing him vividly and clearly, that the letter alpha is gamma, or that eta is omega? Or if a music teacher tells a beginner that the enharmonic genus is the chromatic, or the chromatic the diatonic, or that the hypate is the mese, or the conjunct tetrachord the disjunct, or the hyperbolaion the proslambanomenos?
He will perhaps speak vividly and clearly, but not truthfully, and in this way he will produce a defect in his account. But whenever he achieves both clarity and truthfulness together, he will make his account useful to the learner, employing its two virtues, which together are almost the only virtues
it happens to have. He says, then, that the well-judged reason, possessing its own proper virtues, is stationed on the breast -- clearly meaning Aaron's breast, that is, on anger -- so that anger may first be guided by reason and not be harmed by its own irrationality, and then by clarity, for anger is not by nature a friend of clarity: in those who are angry, not only the thought but even the words are full of confusion and disorder. It was fitting, then, that the obscurity of anger be corrected by clarity,
and after that, by truthfulness; for besides its other traits, anger has this one of its own: falsehood. Of those, at least, who indulge this passion, hardly anyone speaks the truth, mastered as he is by a drunkenness not of the body but of the soul. These are the remedies for the spirited part: reason, the clarity of reason, and its truth -- for the three are in effect one thing, reason together with the virtues of truthfulness and clarity, healing the grievous sickness
of the soul that is anger. To whom, then, does it belong to bear these things? Not to my understanding, nor to that of just anyone, but to the consecrated understanding, that of Aaron -- and not even to his at every moment, for it often turns aside, but only when it proceeds without turning, when it enters the sanctuary, when reasoning enters together with holy resolves and does not run away from them.
But often the mind enters with holy and pure and cleansed judgments into sacred and hallowed opinions—but these are merely human ones, such as those concerning what is fitting, those concerning right actions, those concerning what is lawful by convention, those concerning human virtue. Not even one so disposed is fit to bear the oracle upon his breast along with the virtues, but only the one who goes in before the Lord—that is, the one who does everything for God's sake and holds nothing that comes after God in the highest honor, but who, while granting to these lesser things what is due to them, does not stop at them, but presses on to the knowledge and understanding and honor of the One.
For to one so disposed, spirited anger will be reined in both by reason that has been purified, which strips away its irrational element, and by clarity, which heals what is unclear and confused, and by truthfulness, which cuts away falsehood.
Aaron, then—for he is second to Moses in excising the breast, which is spirited anger—does not allow it to be carried off by unjudged impulses, fearing lest, once let loose, it rear up like a horse and trample the whole soul; instead he tends and bridles it, first by reason, so that, using an excellent charioteer, it may not run wildly out of control, and then by the virtues of reason, clarity and truth. For if anger is so trained that it yields to reason and to clarity and practices freedom from falsehood, it will free itself from much of its boiling and will render the whole soul more settled.
But this man, as I have said, having the passion, tries to heal it with the saving remedies I have mentioned, whereas Moses thinks it necessary to cut out and remove anger from the soul entirely, cherishing not moderation of passion but complete freedom from passion altogether.
The most sacred oracle bears witness to my argument: 'Moses,' it says, 'took the breast and set it aside as a portion before the Lord, from the ram of consecration, and it became Moses' share' (Lev. 8:29). Very well said—for it was the work of one who loves virtue and is loved by God, having beheld the whole soul, to take hold of the breast, which is spirited anger, and remove and cut it away, so that, once the warlike part is excised, the rest may live in peace. And he takes it not from just any animal, but from the ram of consecration, even though a calf too had been sacrificed; but passing over that, he came to the ram, because the ram is by nature a butting, spirited, and impulsive creature—for which reason engineers construct most of their siege engines as rams.
The ram-like, impulsive, and unjudging element in us, then, is the contentious kind; and strife is the mother of anger—which is why the more quarrelsome are quickest to grow angry, both in disputes and in other conversations. From the contentious and quarrelsome soul, then, he fittingly cuts out anger, its faulty offspring, so that, once made barren, it may cease bearing harmful things, and there may come to be a portion fitting for the lover of virtue—not the breast, nor the anger, but the removal of them. For God has allotted to the wise the noblest of portions: the ability to cut out the passions. Do you see how the perfect man is always practicing perfect freedom from passion?
But he who is only advancing, being second to Aaron, practices moderation of passion, as I said, for he is not yet able to cut out the breast and the anger; instead he brings to bear upon it, as charioteer, reason together with its inborn virtues—the oracle, in which lies clarity
and truth. He will make the difference still clearer through this as well: 'For I have taken the breast of the portion and the shoulder of the offering from the sons of Israel, from the sacrifices of your deliverance, and I have given them to Aaron and his sons' (Lev. 7:34).
You see that these men are not able to take the breast alone, but only together with the shoulder, whereas Moses takes it without the shoulder. Why? Because the perfect man thinks nothing small or lowly, nor does he wish merely to moderate the passions, but out of his abundance he has cut off the passions entirely and completely; whereas the others set out against the war of the passions only in a small and modest way, and instead come to terms and make a truce with them, offering reconciling reason as a mediator, so that, like a charioteer, it may check their excessive rush.
The shoulder is also a symbol of toil and hardship; and such is the attendant and minister of holy things, one who makes use of practice and toil. But free of toil is the one to whom God grants, out of great abundance, goods that are already perfect; and one who acquires virtue through toil is found to be lesser and less complete than one who, like Moses, receives it from God without toil and with ease. For just as toiling itself is a lesser and smaller thing than freedom from toil, so too the incomplete is less than the complete, and the one who is learning is less than the one who is taught by himself. For this reason Aaron takes the breast together with the shoulder, but Moses takes it without the shoulder.
He calls the breast a 'portion' for this reason: reason must lie upon anger and be seated firmly over it, like a charioteer guiding a stiff-necked and unruly horse; but he no longer calls the shoulder a 'portion' but an 'offering,' for this reason: the soul must not draw to itself the toil expended for virtue, but must remove it from itself and refer it up to God, confessing that it was not her own strength or power that secured the good, but the one who granted even the love of it as a gift.
Neither the breast nor the shoulder is taken except from the sacrifice of deliverance—and reasonably so; for the soul is delivered only when anger, too, is reined in by reason, and toil does not build up self-conceit but instead yields the credit to God the benefactor.
That pleasure travels not only upon its breast but also upon its belly, we have already said, showing that the belly is the region most proper to pleasure; for it is, in effect, the vessel that holds nearly all pleasures. For when the belly is filled, the appetites for the other pleasures too grow intense; but when it is emptied, they grow calm and more settled.
That is also why he says elsewhere: 'Everyone that goes upon its belly, and everyone that goes always upon four feet, and has many feet, is unclean' (Lev. 11:42). Such is the lover of pleasure, always making his way toward the belly and the pleasures that follow it. And he has joined the creature that crawls on its belly with the one that walks on four feet—reasonably so; for there are four passions belonging to pleasure, as a particular account, taken separately, records. Unclean, then, is both the one who indulges the single pleasure
and the one who rushes after all four. Having said this, observe again the difference between the perfect man and the one who is advancing. Just as before we found that the perfect man cuts out the whole of the anger belonging to the contentious soul, making it tame and manageable and peaceable and gentle toward everyone in both deed and word, while the one who is advancing, unable to remove the passion entirely—for he still bears the breast—trains it instead by judged reason, possessing the two virtues of clarity and truth: so now too we will find that the wise and perfect man, Moses, wipes away and shakes off pleasures altogether, while the one who is advancing does not reject every pleasure, but admits the necessary and simple kind while refusing the elaborate and excessive kind found in fancy side dishes.
For of Moses it says: 'And he washed the belly and the feet with the water of the whole burnt offering' (Lev. 9:14). Very fittingly—for since the whole soul is worthy to be brought before God, having neither voluntary nor involuntary blemish, the wise man consecrates it entirely; and being so disposed, he washes and cleanses and scours away the entire belly and the pleasures belonging to it and following after it—not merely a part—but has come to hold it in such contempt that he does not even take the necessary food or drink, being nourished instead by the contemplation of divine things.
That is why it is also attested of him elsewhere: 'For forty days he ate no bread and drank no water' (Exod. 34:28), when he was on the divine mountain listening to God's oracles as he legislated. But he not only renounces the whole belly, but also has its feet scoured away together with it—that is, the paths of approach to pleasure.
The paths of approach to pleasure are the things that produce it. For the one who is advancing is said to wash the inward parts and the feet (Lev. 1:9), but not the whole belly; he is not capable of driving off every pleasure, but it is enough if he washes its inward parts, that is, its rich side dishes, which lovers of pleasure call refinements upon the basic pleasures, produced through the elaborate skill of relish-makers
and fastidious bakers. And he further intensifies the moderation of the one who is advancing by this: that the one man renounces the whole pleasure of the belly without any command, while the one who is advancing does so only under command. For of the wise man it is said thus: 'he washed the belly and the feet with water' (Lev. 9:14)—unprompted, by his own voluntary judgment; but of the priests it says: 'the inward parts and the feet'—not 'they washed,' but 'they shall wash' (Lev. 1:9)—very precisely observed, for the perfect man must be moved to actions of virtue from himself, while the one still in training needs the guidance of reason to instruct him in what must be done.
and it is good for him to obey when it commands. One must not fail to notice that Moses, in renouncing the whole belly—that is, the filling of the stomach—thereby renounces almost all the other passions as well, since the lawgiver, by dealing with one single part, is clearly setting forth the whole, and through the most all-embracing thing is describing by implication the others too, concerning which he kept silent. For the filling of the belly is the most all-embracing thing, and, as it were, a foundation of the other passions; for none of them can be established at all except by resting upon the belly, upon which nature has grounded everything.
For this reason, once the goods of the soul born of Leah had first come into being and had come to rest upon the confession of Judah (Gen. 29:35), God, being about to fashion also the advances of the body, prepares Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid, to bear children even before her mistress. Bilhah means 'swallowing down'; for he knew that nothing bodily can come into being without swallowing and the belly, but that the belly rules and governs the whole body and the bare mass that belongs to mere living.
Observe every fine point, for you will find nothing said carelessly. Moses removes the breast, but does not remove the belly—he washes it instead (Lev. 8:29; 9:14). Why? Because the perfect man has the strength to renounce and cut off anger entirely, rising up against wrath, but he is unable to cut out the belly; for nature compels even the man who needs least and holds the necessities in contempt, and who practices abstaining even from them, to make use of necessary food and drink. Let him wash it, then, and cleanse it of superfluous and unclean preparations; for even this is a sufficient gift from God to the lover of virtue.
That is why, concerning the soul suspected of having been corrupted (Num. 5:27), he says that if she is found to have abandoned right reason—which is a lawful husband—and to have gone over to the passion that defiles the soul, 'her belly will swell'—which is to say, she will have the pleasures and appetites of the belly unfillable and insatiable, and, through lack of discipline, she will never cease being greedy, but as countless things flow in upon her she will have the passion forever.
I know, indeed, many who stumble so badly over the appetite of the belly that, after resorting to vomiting, they rush again toward strong wine and everything else; for the desire of a soul without self-mastery is not proportioned to the bulk of the body. Bodies, being vessels of a measured capacity, admit nothing beyond measure, but expel what is superfluous; whereas desire is never filled, but remains forever in want and athirst.
That is why the consequence added to the swelling of the belly is the falling away of the thigh; for at that time there also falls away from the soul the upright reason that is generative and productive of noble things. 'If,' it says, 'she has not been defiled and is pure, she shall be free and shall bear seed' (Num. 5:28)—meaning that if she has not been defiled by passion but remains pure toward her lawful husband, the sound and guiding reason, she will have a soul fruitful and bearing fruit, carrying offspring of prudence and righteousness.
And consistent with this, the swelling of the belly is followed by "the thigh falling away": for then the seed-bearing and generative right reason of noble things falls away in the soul. At any rate, he says, "if she has not been defiled, and is pure, she shall be free of guilt, and shall bear seed" (Num 5:28)—meaning, if the soul has not been defiled by passion but keeps herself pure for her lawful husband, the sound and ruling reason, she will have a soul fertile and fruitful, bearing offspring of prudence and justice
and of virtue entire. Is it possible, then, for us who are bound to a body, not to make use of the body's necessities? How could it be? But observe: the hierophant lays down the manner in which the one led by bodily need is to make use of only what is necessary. First he says, "Let there be a place for you outside the camp" (Deut 23:12), calling virtue the camp in which the soul has taken up its station; for prudence and the enjoyment of bodily necessity cannot hold the same ground.
Then he says, "you shall go out" there, outside. Why? Because the soul, while it remains with prudence and abides in the house of wisdom, cannot make use of any of the body's friends; for then it is nourished on more divine food, in the sciences, on whose account it also neglects the flesh. But whenever it goes out of the sacred houses of virtue, then it turns to the matters that offend and oppress the body.
How then shall I make use of them? "Let there be a peg for you upon your girdle," he says, "and you shall dig with it" (Deut 23:13)—that is, let reason dig into the passion and hold it back and strip it bare; for the passions want us girded up, not worn loose and slack.
This is why, at the crossing over that is called Passover, he commands that "the loins be girded" (Exod 12:11)—that is, that the desires be drawn in. Let the peg, that is, reason, then follow upon the passion, preventing it from being let loose; for so we shall make use
of necessities alone, and abstain from what is superfluous. And even when we are at gatherings and about to come to the enjoyment and use of what has been prepared, if we come armed with reason as with a defensive weapon, we shall neither gorge ourselves on food beyond measure, gull-like, nor, once glutted with unmixed wine beyond measure, give ourselves over to the drunkenness that compels folly; for reason will muzzle and bridle the rush and onset of passion.
I know this from having suffered it myself many times: for when I have come to an unruly gathering and lavish dinners, whenever I did not arrive together with reason, I became a slave of what had been prepared, led about by untamed masters—spectacles and sounds and whatever produces pleasures through the nostrils and the taste. But whenever I came with reason as my guide, I became master instead of slave, and won by main force a noble victory of endurance and self-control, resisting and contending against all that unleashes uncontrolled desires.
"You shall dig," he says, "with the peg" (Deut 23:13)—that is, whatever nature each of these things has, eating, drinking, using what comes after the belly, you shall lay bare and distinguish with reason, so that by discerning you may know the truth; for then you will know that the good lies in none of these things, but only the necessary and useful.
"And having covered it over, you shall conceal your shame" (ibid.). Very well said: for bring reason to bear, O soul, upon everything, by which all the shamefulness of flesh and passion is covered, overshadowed, and hidden away; for all that is without reason is shameful, just as all that is with reason is decorous.
Accordingly, the lover of pleasure walks upon his belly, while the perfect man washes out the belly entirely; the one making progress deals with what is in the belly, while the one just beginning to be trained goes forth outside, whenever he is about to bring reason to bear upon the necessities of the belly, to muzzle the passion which is symbolically called the peg.
And it is well said further, "you shall go upon your breast and belly" (Gen 3:14); for pleasure belongs not to what stands still but to what is in motion and full of turmoil: for as flame is in motion, so passion, moving in the soul after the manner of a blaze, does not allow it to be at rest. Hence it does not agree with those who say pleasure is a settled state; for stillness belongs to stone and wood and everything soulless, but is foreign to pleasure, which craves titillation and spasm, and in some cases has need not of stillness but of intense and violent motion.
"And you shall eat earth all the days of your life" (Gen 3:14)—this is fittingly said; for the pleasures of bodily nourishment are earthly. And perhaps rightly so: for we are composed of two things, mind and body. The body has been fashioned out of earth, but the soul is of ether, a divine fragment; for "God breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul" (Gen 2:7). Reasonably, then, the body, molded from earth, has kindred nourishment which the earth yields up, while the soul, being a portion of ethereal nature, has in turn ethereal and divine nourishment; for it is fed on sciences, not on food
or drink, of which the body has need. And that the soul's nourishments are not earthly but heavenly, the sacred word will testify at greater length: "Behold, I shall rain down for you loaves from heaven, and the people shall go out and gather each day's portion for that day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not" (Exod 16:4). You see that the soul is nourished not on earthly and perishable things, but on whatever words God rains down out of that lofty and pure nature which he has called heaven.
Let the people, then—the whole constitution of the soul—go out and gather, and begin upon knowledge, not all at once, but "each day's portion for that day"; for first, taken all at once, it will not be able to contain the great wealth of God's graces, but will be flooded like a torrent's onrush; and further, it is better, having received sufficient and measured goods, to think God the steward of the rest.
But the one who pursues everything all at once acquires despair and disbelief along with great folly: he becomes despairing if he hopes that God will rain down good things now only and not again; disbelieving, if he has not believed that God's graces are bestowed ungrudgingly on the worthy both now and always; and senseless, if he thinks himself able to be a sufficient guardian of what has been gathered without God's will; for a small tilt is enough to render null and insecure, through his own vainglory, everything of which the mind that fastens security and certainty upon itself supposed it was guardian.
Gather then, O soul, what is sufficient and fitting, neither more than enough so as to overreach, nor again less so as to fall short, that using just measures you may do no wrong. For indeed the soul that is practicing the crossing over from the passions and sacrificing the Passover—the progress that is the sheep—must take it without excess; for "each one," he says, "shall be counted for the sheep according to what suffices him" (Exod 12:4).
So too with the manna, and with every gift that God gives to our race, it is good to take the measured and numbered amount, not more than falls to us; for that would be greed. Let the soul, then, gather "each day's portion for that day" (Exod 16:4), so that it may show not itself but the gift-loving God to be the guardian of good things.
And for this reason, I think, the passage before us is stated as it is: day is a symbol of light, and the light of the soul is education. Many, then, have acquired the lights within the soul unto night and darkness, not unto day and light—such as all the preliminary studies, the so-called general education, and philosophy itself, pursued for luxury's sake or for advancement with rulers. But the man of worth acquires the day for the day's sake, and the light for the light's sake, and the noble for the sake of the noble alone, not for the sake of anything else. Hence he adds, "that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not" (Exod 16:4); for this is a divine law, that virtue for its own sake—right reason tests its practitioners like a coin,
to see whether they are debased, referring the soul's good to something external, or whether, as approved coin, they keep it distinct, guarding it in the understanding alone. It falls to such as these to be nourished not on earthly but on heavenly sciences.
He makes this clear also through other words, when he says: "It came to pass in the morning, as the dew ceased round about the camp, that behold, upon the face of the wilderness there was a fine thing like coriander seed, white like frost upon the ground. And when they saw it, they said to one another, 'What is this?' for they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, 'This is the bread which the Lord has given us to eat. This is the word which the Lord has ordained'" (Exod 16:13ff). You see what the soul's food is like: the continuous word of God, resembling dew, encompassing everything round about and leaving no part without a share in itself.
This word, however, does not appear everywhere, but in the wilderness of the passions and vices; and it is fine to think and to be thought, and exceedingly translucent and pure to behold, and it is like coriander seed. Farmers say that the seed of coriander, divided into countless pieces and cut, sprouts in each of its parts and sections just as the whole was able to do; such too is the word of God, beneficial through the whole and through every part, even the smallest.
Perhaps too it resembles the pupil of the eye: for as this, though the smallest part, sees the whole zones of existing things, the boundless sea, the vastness of the air, and all of heaven that the rising and setting sun marks out, so too the word of God is most keen-sighted, able to oversee all things... by which those things worthy of contemplation will be beheld; wherefore it is also white: for what could be brighter or more far-shining than the divine word, by participation in which other things too drive off mist and gloom, longing to share in the light of the soul?
A peculiar effect attends this word: for whenever it calls the soul to itself, it rouses a firmness against everything earthy, bodily, and given to sense-perception; hence it is said to be "like frost upon the ground" (Exod 16:14); for indeed, when the one who sees God practices flight from the passions, the waves are frozen fast—that is, their onrush and swelling and vaunting are stilled; for "the waves were congealed in the midst of the sea" (Exod 15:8), so that the one who beholds Being might cross over the passion.
So the souls that have already experienced the word, but are not yet able to say "what it is" (Exod 16:15), inquire of one another; for indeed, when sweetened, we are often ignorant of what stirred the taste, and smelling sweet fragrances we do not know what they are; so too the soul, often gladdened, cannot say what it is that has gladdened it. But it is taught by the hierophant and prophet Moses, who will say, "This is the bread" (ibid.)—the food which God has given the soul—to partake of his own word and his own reason; for this is the bread which he has given us to eat, "this word."
And he says also in Deuteronomy: "and he afflicted you, and made you hunger, and fed you with the manna, which your fathers did not know, that he might announce to you that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that goes forth through the mouth of God" (Deut 8:3). This affliction is a propitiation; for indeed on the tenth day he propitiates our souls for our evils (Lev 16:30); for whenever we are stripped bare, we suppose we are being afflicted, but in truth this is to have God gracious toward us.
Let God, then, announce to the soul: "Man shall not live by bread alone," but "by every word that proceeds through the mouth of God" — that is, the soul will be nourished both by the whole of the Word and by a part of it. For the mouth is a symbol of the Word, and the utterance a part of it. The more perfect souls are nourished by the whole Word; but we ourselves would be content
if we were nourished even by a part of it. Yet these pray to be nourished by God's Word. Jacob, however, rises even above the Word itself, and says that he is nourished by God directly, speaking thus: "God, in whose sight my fathers Abraham and Isaac were well-pleasing, the God who has nourished me from my youth until this day, the angel who rescues me from all evils, may he bless these children." This is a beautiful way of putting it: he regards God, not the Word, as his nourisher, but the angel — who is the Word — as a physician of evils. This is entirely fitting, for it pleases him that the primary goods should be given by Being itself, in its own person, but the secondary goods through his angels and words; and secondary are all those that consist in deliverance from evils.
For this reason, I think, plain health, which is not preceded by disease in our bodies, God grants through himself alone, while the recovery that comes by escape from disease he grants also through art and medicine, crediting both the science and the physician with the appearance of healing, while in truth he himself heals both through these means and without them. The same holds also for the soul: the goods, the nourishments, he grants through himself alone, but whatever consists in deliverance from evils, through angels and words.
Jacob offered this prayer while finding fault with the statesman Joseph, who had dared to say, "I will nourish you there." For he says, "Hasten and go up to my father, and say to him, Thus says..." and so forth, and then, "Come down to me and do not remain; for I will nourish you there in every respect, for there are five years of famine left." So, at once reproaching and instructing the man who fancied himself wise, Jacob says: know, sir, that the nourishments of the soul are the sciences, which not sense-perceptible speech but God bestows — he who nourishes me from youth and earliest prime, and who himself will fill me to the end.
Joseph, then, suffered the same thing as his mother Rachel. For she too thought that something created could accomplish this, and so she says, "Give me children." But the Supplanter, rebuking her, will say: you have wandered into great error, for I am not in the place of God, who alone is able to open the wombs of souls and sow virtues in them and make them pregnant and bring forth what is good. Consider, indeed, your sister Leah, and you will find that she receives her seed and offspring from no created thing, but from God himself: "For the Lord, seeing that Leah was hated, opened her womb; but Rachel was barren."
But observe again the fine workmanship in this passage: it is virtue's womb that God opens, sowing in it good actions; and the womb, having received virtue from God, does not bear children for God — for he who is has need of nothing — but for me, Jacob: for it was for my sake, it seems, that God sowed in virtue, not for his own. So then, one man turns out to be the husband of Leah, who lies quietly by, and another the father of Leah's children: the husband is the one who opens the womb, but the father is the one to whom the children are said to be born.
"And I will put enmity between you and between the woman." Pleasure truly is an enemy to sense-perception, although to some it seems to be its closest friend. But just as no one would call a flatterer a companion — for flattery is a disease of friendship — nor call a courtesan well-disposed toward her lover, since her affection attaches to the gifts given, not to the man himself, so too, if you examine pleasure, you will find it assuming a counterfeit intimacy with sense-perception.
At any rate, whenever we are sated with pleasure, our sense-organs collapse from their proper tension. Do you not observe that those who are drunk with wine or with love, though seeing, do not see, and though hearing, do not hear, and are deprived of the precise operation of their other senses as well? And sometimes, too, through an immoderate quantity of food, all the tensions of the senses are relaxed as sleep takes hold — a state which indeed took its very name from this relaxation. For then the sense-organ goes slack, whereas in waking it is drawn taut, no longer receiving the impacts from without as muffled, but as loud and vivid, transmitting their reverberation all the way to the mind; for the mind must, once struck, recognize the external thing and receive a clear impression of it.
Notice, too, that he did not say, "I will put enmity between you and the woman," but "between you and between the woman." Why is this? Because the war between these two takes place around the middle ground, as it were lying on the boundary between pleasure and sense-perception. And the middle ground common to both is the drinkable, the edible, whatever is fitted for such purposes — each of which is both perceptible by sense and productive of pleasure. So whenever pleasure gorges itself insatiably on these things, it at once inflicts harm on sense-perception.
And the phrase "between your seed and her seed" is likewise spoken with an eye to nature: for every seed is a beginning of generation; and the beginning of pleasure is not passion but irrational impulse, while the beginning of sense-perception is the mind. For from the mind, as from a kind of spring, the perceptive faculties are extended — especially according to the most sacred Moses, who says that woman was fashioned out of Adam, that is, sense-perception out of mind. So then, what pleasure is to sense-perception, passion is to mind, so that,
since the former pair are enemies, these too would be at war. And the war between them is quite plain to see: whenever the mind gains the upper hand — when it turns to the intelligible and incorporeal realities — passion is put to flight; and conversely, whenever passion wins an evil victory, the mind yields, being prevented from attending to itself and to all its own works. Elsewhere, indeed, Moses says that whenever Moses lifted up his hands, Israel prevailed, but whenever he let them down, Amalek prevailed — showing by this that whenever the mind lifts itself above mortal things and is raised on high, that which sees God — which is Israel — grows strong; but whenever it relaxes its own tensions and grows weak, passion at once grows strong, that is, Amalek, whose name is translated "a people that licks up": for it truly devours the whole soul and licks it clean, leaving in it no seed or spark of virtue.
For this reason it is also said, "the beginning of the nations is Amalek," because over the mixed, motley, and confused rabble, passion rules and holds sway without deliberation. Through this the entire war of the soul is kindled. To those minds, then, to whom God grants peace, he promises that he will blot out the memorial of Amalek from under heaven.
The phrase "he will watch your head, and you will watch his heel" is, in its wording, a solecism, but in its meaning, correct. For it is said to the serpent concerning the woman, yet the woman is not "he" but "she." What, then, must we say? The statement has passed from the discourse about the woman to her seed and its origin; and the origin of sense-perception was the mind. This is masculine, and of it one must properly say "he" and "his" and the like. Rightly, then, it is said to pleasure that your mind will watch its chief and governing doctrine, and you will watch his — the mind's — footholds and settlings-in of what pleases it, to which the heels have fittingly been compared.
The word "will watch" indicates two things: one, as it were, to guard and preserve; the other, equivalent to "will keep watch" with a view to destruction. Now the mind must be either base or excellent. The foolish mind would become pleasure's guardian and steward, for it delights in it; but the excellent mind is its enemy, watching for the moment when, by attacking, it will have strength to overthrow it utterly. And conversely, pleasure preserves its foothold in the foolish man, but in the wise man it strives to undo and destroy his resistance, considering that the wise man is practicing its own dissolution, while the foolish man is practicing, by every means, its own preservation.
But nevertheless, though it seems to supplant and deceive the man of worth, pleasure itself will be supplanted by Jacob, who has been trained in wrestling — not a wrestling of the body, but that in which the soul wrestles against its adversary dispositions, fighting against passions and vices. And it will not release the heel of its adversary, passion, until it has forced it to renounce itself and confess that it has been supplanted and defeated twice: both in the matter of the birthright and in the matter of the blessing.
"Justly," he says, "was his name called Jacob, for he has now supplanted me a second time: the first time he took my birthright, and now he has taken my blessing." The base man regards the things of the body as senior, but the man of worth regards the things of the soul as senior — and these are, in truth, senior and genuinely first, not in time but in power and worth, just as a ruler is senior in a city; and the soul is the guiding element
of the composite being. So the one who is first in virtue has taken the first things, which indeed belonged to him by right: for he has taken good judgment too, together with perfect prayers. But foolish and self-conceited is the one who says, "He has taken my blessings and my birthright": for it is not your things, sir, that he takes, but their opposites: for yours are fit for slavery, but his have been deemed worthy of mastery.
And if you are willing to become a slave of the wise man, you will share in admonition and correction, casting off ignorance and lack of discipline, the banes of the soul; for the father, in his prayer, says to you, "You will serve your brother" — but not now, for he will not tolerate you while you are unruly — but "when you loosen the yoke from your neck," once you have cast off the arrogance and swagger which you acquired by yoking yourself to the chariot of the passions, with folly as your charioteer.
At present you are a slave to harsh and unbearable masters within yourself, whose law it is to allow nothing free. But if you take flight and abandon them, a master fond of slaves will receive you, with good hopes of freedom, and will no longer hand you back to your former masters, having learned from Moses a necessary teaching and doctrine: "not to hand over to his master a servant who has been added to him by his master; for he shall dwell with him in
every place that pleases him." But so long as you have not fled, and are still bridled by the reins of those former masters, you are unworthy to serve the wise man; you give the greatest proof of an illiberal and slavish character whenever you say, "my birthright" and "my blessings": for these are the words of one who has gone off into boundless ignorance, since it befits God alone to say "mine," for all things are truly his possessions alone.
And to this he will himself bear witness, whenever he says, "my gifts, my presents, my offerings you shall keep," for gift differs from present: the one signifies the magnitude of perfect goods, which God bestows on the perfect, while the other is directed toward what is very small, in which the well-natured, striving beginners who are just glimpsing the goal have a share.
For this reason Abraham too, in following the will of God, keeps the possessions that were his from God, but sends back the horses of the king of Sodom, as well as the possessions belonging to the concubines. Moses, moreover, deems it right that the greatest matters be judged by himself, even in the greatest cases, while he entrusts the small matters of judgment to those of secondary rank to consider.
But whoever dares to say that something is his own will be enrolled a slave for all eternity, like the one who says, "I have loved my master and my wife and my children; I will not go away free." Well said, to confess his own slavery to himself! For how could the one who says "the Lord is not my slave" fail to see that mind is lord of itself and self-ruling; that sense-perception too is mine, a self-sufficient judge of bodies; and that the offspring of these are mine as well — of mind, the intelligibles, and of sense-perception, the perceptibles; for thinking and perceiving are within my own power.
But let him not merely testify against himself, but, condemned also by God, let him endure a slavery eternal and most sure, God commanding that his ear be pierced, so that he may not admit the words of virtue, and that he serve mind and sense-perception forever — evil and pitiless masters.
"And to the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your griefs and your groaning." Grief is a passion peculiar to the woman, who was sense-perception; for that in which pleasure occurs is the very thing in which pain occurs as well. We feel pleasure through the senses, so that of necessity we feel pain through them too. But the excellent and purified mind feels the least pain, for the senses assail it least of all; whereas in the fool passion abounds without measure, since he has no antidote in his soul with which to ward off the plagues that come from the senses and sense-objects.
For the athlete and the slave are struck in different ways: the slave submits under compulsion and yields to the blows, while the athlete resists and holds his ground; and the shearer shears a man and a sheep in different ways, for the sheep is examined only in what it undergoes, whereas the man reacts and, so to speak, does something in return, adapting himself to being shorn.
So too the irrational person, like a slave, submits to another and falls beneath his pains as though they were unbearable mistresses, unable even to look them in the face, since he cannot muster manly and free reasoning; and this is why an endless mass of grief is poured over him through the senses. But the person of understanding, in the manner of an athlete, stands against every pain with strength and stubborn vigor and breathes back against it, so as not to be wounded by it but to treat each pain with indifference. And I think that, in his young man's spirit, he might cry out to pain the words of the tragedian: "Burn, char my flesh, glut yourself drinking my dark blood; sooner shall the stars go down beneath the earth, and earth rise up into the heavens, than you shall hear from me a flattering word."
And just as God has increased and multiplied all painful things for sense-perception, so he has given an unstinting abundance of good things to the virtuous soul. He says, for instance, of the perfect Abraham in these words: "By myself I have sworn, says the Lord; because you have done this thing and have not spared your beloved son for my sake, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your seed as the stars of heaven and as the sand on the seashore" (Genesis 22:16-17). It is fitting that he confirmed the promise with an oath, and with an oath worthy of God; for you see that God does not swear by another, since nothing is greater than he, but by himself, who is best of all.
Some have said that it was improper for God to swear an oath, since an oath is taken for the sake of establishing trust, and only God is trustworthy, and whoever is a friend of God, as Moses is said to have become "faithful in all his house" (Numbers 12:7). Besides, the words of God are oaths, and the laws of God are the most sacred of ordinances; and proof of his strength is that whatever he says comes to pass, which is the very thing most proper to an oath. So it would follow to say that all the words of God
are oaths, confirmed by the accomplishment of deeds. Yet they say an oath is God's testimony concerning a disputed matter; if then God swears, he testifies on his own behalf, which is absurd, for the one who gives testimony must be different from the one on whose behalf it is given. What then must we say? First, that it is not blameworthy for God to testify on his own behalf, for who else could be a sufficient witness for him? Second, he himself is, for himself, all that is most precious — kinsman, intimate, friend, virtue, happiness, blessedness, knowledge, understanding, beginning, end, whole, all, judge, judgment, counsel, law, action, sovereignty.
Moreover, if we take "by myself I have sworn" in the way we ought, we shall stop being over-clever sophists about it. Perhaps it means this: nothing capable of giving assurance can give firm assurance about God, for he has shown his nature to no one, but has made it invisible to the whole created order. Who could have the strength to declare firmly whether the cause of all things is bodiless or a body, of a certain quality or without quality, or in general to pronounce with certainty about his substance, quality, relation, or motion? But about himself alone he can affirm with strength, since he alone has known his own nature accurately and without falsehood.
God, then, is the strongest guarantor first of himself, and then, alone, of his own works; so it was fitting that he swore by himself, giving assurance of himself, which no one else could do. For this reason those who claim to swear by God might rightly be thought impious; for no one can rightly swear by him, since no one can know his nature with certainty. Instead we should be content if we are able to swear by his name, that is, by the interpretive word; for this would be our God, we who are imperfect, while for the wise and perfect it is the first and highest God.
And indeed Moses, marveling at the surpassing greatness of the Uncreated, says: "and you shall swear by his name" (Deuteronomy 6:13), not by him himself; for it is enough for a created being to be given assurance and testimony by the divine word, but let God be his own trust and his own most certain testimony.
"Because of which you did this thing" (Genesis 22:16) is a symbol of piety; for to do everything for God's sake alone is piety. This is why we do not spare even our beloved child, virtue, or its happiness, but yield it to the Creator, judging the offspring worthy to be reckoned the possession of God rather than of any created being.
It is well said, "blessing I will bless" (ibid.); for many people do many praiseworthy things, but not out of a settled disposition to bless, since even a base person sometimes does what is fitting, not from a fitting disposition; and one who is drunk or mad may at times speak and act soberly, but not from a sober mind; and even quite small children, not yet from a rational disposition — for nature has not yet trained them to be rational — do and say many things that rational people do. But the lawgiver wants the wise person to seem praiseworthy not by circumstance, easily, or as if by chance, but from a settled habit and disposition of being praiseworthy.
It was not enough, then, for ill-fated sense-perception to indulge richly in griefs, but also in "groaning"; groaning is intense and heightened grief, for often we feel pain without groaning, but when we groan we handle our griefs with distress and with a veritable downpour. Groaning is of two kinds: one occurs in those who desire and reach after wrongdoing and do not attain it, and this is base; the other occurs in those who repent and are troubled at their former turning, saying, "Wretched are we, for how long a time we lay unaware, sick with the sickness of folly and mindlessness and unjust practices."
But this does not happen unless the king of Egypt — the godless and pleasure-loving disposition — comes to an end and dies out of the soul; for "after those many days the king of Egypt died." Then immediately, once vice has died, the one who sees God groans also over his own turning: "for the sons of Israel groaned because of their bodily and Egyptian labors" (Exodus 2:23); since while the pleasure-loving disposition still lives in us, it persuades the soul to rejoice in the wrongs it commits, but when it dies, the soul groans.
This is why the soul also cries out, imploring the Master that it may no longer turn back nor receive an incomplete perfecting; for God has not permitted many souls, though they wished to make use of repentance, but they were carried back again, as though by a returning tide, in the manner of Lot's wife (Genesis 19:26), who was turned to stone because she loved Sodom and the natures overturned by God
But now, in fact, it says that "their cry went up to God" (Exodus 2:23), bearing witness to the grace of the Existent One; for had he not powerfully called the suppliant reason to himself, it would not have gone up — that is, it would not have been raised and grown and begun to soar aloft, fleeing the lowliness of earthly things. This is why, further on, he says: "behold, the cry of the sons of Israel has come to me" (Exodus 3:9).
It is a fine thing that supplication reaches all the way to God; but it would not have reached him had not the one who calls been good. To some souls he comes to meet even beforehand: "I will come to you and I will bless you" (Exodus 20:24). You see how great is the grace of the Cause, who outruns our slowness to act and comes to meet the soul beforehand for its complete benefit. And what is said here is a doctrinal oracle; for if the concept of God enters the mind, at once the mind becomes sound in judgment and all its sicknesses are healed.
Sense-perception, however, is always in grief and groans, and gives birth to the act of perceiving amid pain and incurable distress, as it itself says: "in pain you shall bear children" (Genesis 3:16); sight gives birth to seeing, hearing to hearing, taste to tasting, and sense-perception in general to perceiving; but for the fool none of these is done without harsh distress, for he sees, hears, tastes, smells, and perceives in general, all with grief.
But virtue, by contrast, you will find bearing its child with surpassing joy, and the virtuous person begetting it with laughter and good cheer, and the offspring of both being laughter itself. That the wise man begets in joy and not in grief, the divine word itself will testify, saying: God said to Abraham, "Sarah your wife shall no longer be called Sarah, but Sarrah shall be her name; I will bless her and give you a child from her" (Genesis 17:15-16); and then it adds: "Abraham fell upon his face and said, Shall a child be born to a man a hundred years old, and shall Sarrah, being ninety years old, bear a child?" (ibid. 17).
This man, it seems, was glad and laughing, because he was about to beget happiness, that is, Isaac; and virtue, Sarrah, also laughs, as the same text will testify, saying: "It had ceased to be with Sarrah after the manner of women, and she laughed within her mind and said, Has not happiness come to me even until now? But my lord" — the divine word — "is old" (Genesis 18:11-12), to whom this quality must belong of necessity, and it is good to trust one who promises what is good. And the offspring is laughter and joy; for this is what Isaac means when translated.
Let sense-perception, then, grieve, but let virtue always rejoice; for indeed, once happiness has been born, she says with solemn pride: "the Lord has made laughter for me; for whoever hears will rejoice with me" (Genesis 21:6). Open your ears wide, then, initiates, and receive these most sacred mysteries: laughter is joy, and "made" is equivalent to "begot," so that what is being said is this: the Lord begot Isaac; for he himself is the father of the perfect nature, sowing happiness in souls and begetting it.
"And your turning shall be toward your husband" (Genesis 3:16). There are two husbands of sense-perception, the lawful one and the seducer; for in the manner of a husband, the visible object moves sight, sound moves hearing, and flavor moves taste, and so with each of the other senses. These things turn irrational sense-perception toward themselves, calling it, and overpower and rule it; for beauty has enslaved sight, sweet flavor has enslaved taste, and likewise each of the other sensible objects enslaves the sense-perception proper to it.
Consider the glutton, how he is enslaved to whatever elaborate preparations cooks and bakers can contrive by their craft, and the person swept away by melody, how he is mastered by the lyre or the flute or by anyone skilled in singing. But for the sense-perception that has turned back toward its lawful husband, the mind, the benefit is very great.
Let us next consider, then, what is said about the mind itself when it is moved contrary to right reason. "To Adam God said: Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat, from it you have eaten, cursed is the earth in your labors" (Genesis 3:17). It is most unprofitable to hear of a mind belonging to sense-perception rather than a sense-perception belonging to the mind; for the better must always rule and the worse be ruled, and the mind is better than sense-perception.
Just as, when a charioteer is in control and drives the animals with the reins where he wishes, the chariot is carried along well, but when those animals have thrown off restraint and gained the upper hand, the charioteer is often dragged along, and the animals themselves are sometimes carried by the impetus of their rush into a pit, and everything proceeds in disorder; and a ship sails a straight course when the pilot takes the helm and steers it accordingly, but capsizes when a contrary wind blows over the sea and the swell takes hold of it,
so too, whenever the mind, the charioteer or pilot of the soul, governs the whole living being like the ruler of a city, life is guided rightly; but whenever irrational sense-perception carries off the first place, terrible confusion takes hold, as when slaves have set themselves over their masters; for then, to tell the truth, the mind is set ablaze and burns, since the senses stir up the flame by presenting sensible objects as fuel.
And indeed Moses points to this sort of conflagration, which comes about through the senses, of the mind, when he says: "and the women further kindled a fire in Moab" — for this name is translated "from a father," and our father is the mind — "then," he says, "the riddle-makers will say, Come to Heshbon, that the city of Sihon may be built and prepared."
"For fire went out from Heshbon, a flame from the city of Sihon, and it consumed as far as Moab and swallowed up the pillars of the Arnon. Woe to you, Moab; you have perished, people of Chemosh. Their sons were given up to be saved, and their daughters were captives to the king of the Amorites, Sihon, and their seed shall perish, from Heshbon as far as Dibon, and the women kindled a further fire against Moab" (Num. 21:27–30). Heshbon is translated "reckonings"; these are riddles full of obscurity. The physician's reckoning pours down like rain: I will purge the sick man, I will nourish him, I will heal him with drugs and with diet, I will cut, I will cauterize — but often nature, even without these, has healed, and with these has destroyed, so that all the physician's calculations are found to be dreams, full of obscurity and riddles.
Again the farmer says: I will cast seeds, I will plant, the plants will grow, they will bear fruits which will be useful not only for the necessary enjoyment but will also suffice for abundance; then suddenly a blaze or a storm or continuous downpours destroy everything; and sometimes the crops are brought to completion, but the one who reckoned on them gains no benefit, but dies beforehand, and vainly prophesies enjoyment from the fruits of his labors.
It is best, then, to have put one's trust in God and not in obscure reckonings and unstable conjectures. "Abraham indeed trusted God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness" (Gen. 15:6); and Moses at the outset is attested to be "faithful in the whole house" (Num. 12:7). But if we distrust God and put our trust instead in our own reckonings, we shall construct and build the city of the mind that corrupts truth; for Sihon is translated "one who corrupts."
Wherefore also he who arose — he in whom the dreams were — found that all the motions and stretchings of the fool are dreams having no share in truth (for the mind itself was found to be a dream), because it is a true doctrine to trust in God, but a falsehood to trust in empty reckonings. And an irrational impulse goes out and ranges abroad from both — from the reckonings and from the mind that corrupts truth; wherefore he also says, "fire went out from Heshbon, a flame from the city of Sihon" (Num. 21:28); for it is equally irrational to trust either in plausible reckonings or in
that which corrupts the truth. It "consumes even as far as Moab," that is, as far as the mind; for whom else does false opinion deceive but the wretched mind? It consumes and devours, and indeed also swallows down the pillars within it — that is, the particular notions, which have been stamped and engraved as on a pillar. And the pillars belong to the Arnon, which is translated "their light," since each of these matters is made clear by reasoning.
He begins, then, to lament the self-willed and self-loving mind thus: "Woe to you, Moab, you have perished"; for if you attend to riddles that follow the impulse of plausibilities, you have destroyed the truth. "The people of Chemosh" — that is, your people and your power — is found maimed and blinded; for Chemosh is translated "a groping," and this is properly the work of one who does not see.
Of these, the sons are the particular reckonings, fugitives, while the daughters, who possess the capacity that belongs to them, are captives to the king of the Amorites — that is, to the sophist of those who speak; for the Amorites are translated "speakers," being a symbol of uttered speech. And their leader is the sophist, clever at hunting out the arts of words, by whom those who transgress the boundary of truth are outwitted.
Sihon, then, is the one who corrupts the sound rule of truth, and his seed shall perish, and Heshbon — the sophistic riddles — as far as Dibon, which is called "judgment"; very fittingly, for plausibilities and probabilities have no knowledge of truth, but lawsuit and dispute and contentious rivalry and love of strife and all such things.
But it was not enough for the mind to have its own intelligible destructive powers; the women too kindled a further fire, the senses adding a great conflagration upon it. See indeed what is meant. Often at night, when none of the senses is active, we conceive absurd notions about many different things, since the soul is ever in motion and admits countless changes. What she herself generated from herself was, then, already sufficient for her own corruption.
But now the crowd of the senses has also brought in upon her, as an added scene, a countless multitude of destructive powers — some from things seen, some from sounds, and then from tastes and from the vapors of smell; and the flame that arises from these disposes the soul more harshly than the flame that arises from the soul itself alone, without the added participation of the organs of sense.
One of these women is the wife of Potiphar, Pharaoh's chief cook (Gen. 39:1). How it is that, being a eunuch, he has a wife, must be examined; for those who deal with the words of the law before turning to allegory will meet with what seems to be a difficulty. For the eunuch and chief cook is in reality the mind that makes use not only of simple but also of superfluous pleasures, and is called a eunuch, barren of wisdom — a eunuch of none other than Pharaoh, the scatterer of noble things. Since indeed, on another argument, it would be best to become a eunuch, if our soul, having escaped vice, could unlearn passion.
Wherefore also Joseph, the temperate disposition, when pleasure says to him, "Lie with me" (Gen. 39:7) — "and, being a man, feel as a man feels, and enjoy the pleasant things of life" — opposes her, saying: "I shall sin against God, the lover of virtue, if I should become a lover of pleasure; for this is a wicked deed."
And at first she skirmishes at long range, but presently she also fights strenuously, whenever the soul enters her own house and, running back to her own proper powers, renounces the things of the body and performs her own works as works of the soul: "neither into the house of Joseph nor of Potiphar, but into the house" — and it does not add whose, so that you may allegorize with due caution — "to do his works" (Gen. 39:11).
The house, then, is the soul, into which he runs back, leaving behind external things, so that, as the saying goes, he may come to be within himself; and the works of the temperate man are, perhaps, done by the will of God, for indeed no reasoning alien to those accustomed to dwell within the soul was present there. Yet pleasure does not withdraw but continues the struggle, and taking hold of his garments says, "Lie with me." And just as garments are coverings of the body, so food and drink are coverings of the living creature.
This, then, is what she says: why do you refuse pleasure, without which you cannot live? See, I take hold of the things that produce her, and I say that you could not endure unless you made use of one of the things that produce her. What, then, does the temperate man say? If I am to be enslaved to passion because of the matter that produces it, he says, then I will go forth outside the passion; for leaving the garments in her hands
he fled and went outside" (Gen. 39:12). But who, one might ask, goes outside from within? Are there not many such? Or have not some, fleeing from committing sacrilege, instead stolen from a private house, and, though not strikers of their own fathers, done outrage to another's property? Such men go out from one sin, but enter into others; but the man who is perfectly temperate must flee all sins, both the greater and the lesser, and be tested in none of them whatsoever.
But Joseph — for he is young, and was not strong enough, in an Egyptian body, to contend against and conquer pleasure — flees. But Phinehas the priest, who was zealous with zeal on behalf of God, did not procure his own safety by flight, but, taking the "javelin" (that is, the zealous word), did not draw back until he had "pierced the Midianite woman" — the nature chosen out from the divine company — "through her womb" (Num. 25:7–8), so that never again might a plant or seed of vice be able to spring up. Wherefore, folly having been cut away, the soul receives a double prize and portion: peace and priesthood (ibid. 12–13), virtues akin and sisterly to one another.
To such a woman, then, one must not listen — I mean depraved sense-perception — since indeed "God dealt well with the midwives" (Exod. 1:20), because they disregarded the commands of Pharaoh the scatterer, "keeping alive the males" of the soul, which he wished to destroy, being a lover of the female matter, and ignorant of the cause, saying, "I do not know him" (Exod. 5:2).
But one must obey another woman, such as Sarah proved to be, ruling virtue. And the wise Abraham indeed obeys her when she counsels what is needful; for earlier, when he had not yet become perfect, but while, before his name was changed, he still philosophized about things on high, she — knowing that he could not beget from a fuller virtue — advises him to have children from the handmaid, that is, from encyclical education, Hagar (Gen. 16:2ff.), whose name means "sojourning"; for the one who practices dwelling in perfect virtue, before being enrolled as a citizen of her city, sojourns among the encyclical branches of learning, so that through these he may set out unhindered toward perfect virtue.
Then, when she sees him made perfect and now able to sow ... and if he, being grateful toward the branches of learning through which he was established in virtue, thinks it hard to dismiss them, he will be soothed by the oracle of God, who commands: "Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice" (Gen. 21:12). Let it be a law for each of us, what seems good to virtue; for if we are willing to listen to everything virtue advises, we shall be happy.
The words "and you ate from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat, this alone," are equivalent to "you consented to vice, which you ought to have resisted with all your strength"; for this reason it is not "you" who are cursed, but "the earth, in your works" (Gen. 3:17). What, then, is the cause of these things? It was the serpent, pleasure, the irrational uplifting of the soul; this is accursed of itself, and comes upon the base man alone, upon none who is good. Adam is the intermediate mind, which is examined now as better, now as worse; for insofar as it is mind, it is by nature neither base nor good, but is accustomed to change toward the better or the worse through virtue and through vice.
Reasonably, then, he himself is not cursed of himself, as being neither vice nor an action in accordance with vice, but the earth is cursed "in his works"; for the actions performed through the whole soul, which he has called earth, are censurable and blameworthy according to the wickedness of each one who performs them. Wherefore he adds also that "you shall eat it in grief," which is equivalent to "you shall enjoy your soul with grief"; for the base man passes his whole life painfully in the use of his own soul, having nothing that is a cause of joy, which justice and prudence and the virtues enthroned alongside these are by nature apt to produce.
"Thorns, then, and thistles it shall bring forth for you" (Gen. 3:18). But what grows and sprouts in the soul of the fool, except the passions that prick and wound it? These he has called, by way of symbol, thorns, which the irrational impulse, after the manner of fire, first encounters, and, once kindled with these, burns up and destroys all that belongs to it. For he speaks thus: "If fire goes out and finds thorns, and sets fire also to a threshing floor or standing grain or a field, he who kindled the fire shall make restitution" (Exod. 22:6).
You see that the fire that goes out, the irrational impulse, does not set the thorns on fire, but finds them; for being in search of the passions, it finds what it desired to seize; and when it finds them, it burns up these three things: perfect virtue, progress, and a good natural disposition. Perfect virtue, then, he has compared to the threshing floor, for just as the crop is gathered there, so too in the soul of the wise man the noble things are gathered together; progress he compares to standing grain, since each of these is incomplete, still reaching toward its end; and good natural disposition to a field, because it is well suited to receive the seeds of virtue.
Each of the passions he has called "thistles," since it is threefold — the passion itself, that which produces it, and the result that comes from these — for instance: pleasure, the pleasant, to feel pleasure; desire, the desirable, to desire; grief, the grievous, to grieve; fear, the fearful, to fear.
And you shall eat the grass of the field; in the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread (Gen. 3:18-19). He calls grass and bread by the same name, as though they were one and the same thing. Grass is food for an irrational creature; and the base person is irrational, having cut himself off from right reason -- and the senses too are irrational, being a part of the soul. When the mind reaches for objects of sense-perception through the irrational senses, it does not reach for them without toil and sweat; for the life of the fool is exceedingly painful and burdensome as he pursues and licks after the things that produce pleasures, and all that vice loves to bring about. And for how long?
Until, he says, you return to the earth from which you were taken (Gen. 3:19). For is he not now examined among earthly and unstable things, having abandoned heavenly wisdom? In what way, then, does he still turn back -- this must be considered. But perhaps what is meant is this: the foolish mind has always turned away from right reason, and has been taken not from the aetherial nature but from the more earthly matter; and whether it stays still or moves, it remains the same, reaching for the same things.
This is why he adds, for you are earth, and to earth you shall return (ibid.), which amounts to the same as what was said before. And this too it shows: your beginning and your end are one and the same; for you began from the perishable bodies of earth, and you will end again in those same things, having worn down the road of life between -- not a highway, but a rough path, full of briers and thorns that are apt to prick and wound.