Who is the Heir of Divine Things

Philo of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

In the treatise before this one we went through the subject of rewards as precisely as we could. Now our task is to inquire who the heir of divine things is.

For when the wise man heard the oracle proclaimed to him — "Your reward will be very great" — he asks, saying: "Master, what will you give me? I am departing childless. This son of Masek, my house-born slave, is Damascus Eliezer," and "since you have given me no offspring, my house-born slave will be my heir" (Genesis 15:1-3).

Now who would not have been struck dumb and speechless at the majesty and greatness of the one uttering the oracle, if not from fear then at least from overwhelming joy? For excessive griefs silence the mouth, and so too do excessive joys.

That is why Moses too confesses that he became slow of speech and heavy of tongue from the moment God began to converse with him (Exodus 4:10). And the prophet's testimony is truthful, for it is likely that at that time the organ of the voice was held in check, while the reasoning that follows the course of thought, unrestrained in its rush, was philosophizing in an unbroken succession of beauties — of thoughts, not of words — with a swift and lofty power.

But wonderful too are courage and outspokenness exercised, when it is fitting, toward one's betters, so that even the comic line seems to be spoken more truly than comically: "If the slave learns to keep silent about everything, he will turn out wicked; give him a share of frank speech." When, then, does a household servant properly exercise frank speech toward his master?

Is it not when he is conscious of no wrong done by himself, and does and says everything on behalf of the one who owns him?

When, then, is it fitting for even God's servant to speak freely before the one who is ruler and master both of himself and of the universe, except when he is pure of transgressions and judges from his own conscience that he is devoted to his master — enjoying greater joy at having become a servant of God than if he had reigned over the whole human race, having fastened upon himself, without a struggle, mastery over both land and sea?

The devoted services and ministrations of Abraham toward his master are set forth by the closing words of the oracle delivered to his son: "I will give to you and to your seed all this land, and in your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed, because Abraham your father obeyed my voice, and kept my precepts and my commandments and my ordinances and my statutes" (Genesis 26:3-5).

It is the greatest praise to neglect nothing that one's master commands, but to strive tirelessly and diligently, with a favorable disposition, to accomplish everything beyond one's power.

There are, then, those for whom it is fitting to listen rather than to speak — those of whom it is said, "Be silent and" (Deuteronomy 27:9) — an altogether excellent precept. For ignorance is most bold and most talkative, and its first remedy is quiet, and its second is attention to those things worth hearing that are put forward.

Yet let no one suppose that this alone is signified by "be silent and listen," but something else, more powerful still: for it counsels not merely to be silent with the tongue and to listen with the ears, but for the soul as well to undergo both of these.

For many who have come to hear someone have not come with their minds present, but wander outside and go through countless matters about countless things with themselves — family affairs, foreign affairs, private affairs, public affairs — of which it would have been fitting not to be mindful at the present time, numbering through virtually everything in succession, and because of the great din within themselves they are unable to listen to the speaker; for he speaks as though not to living beings but to lifeless statues, which have ears but no hearing within them.

If, then, the mind deigns to consort with none of the things that visit it from outside or are stored up within, but achieving calm and stillness stretches itself out toward the speaker, having fallen silent in accordance with the precept of Moses, it will be able to listen with the whole of its attention; otherwise it will not have the strength to do so.

For the ignorant, then, quiet is advantageous, but for those who reach after knowledge and are at the same time devoted to their master, frank speech is a most necessary possession. It is said, at any rate, in the Exodus: "The Lord will fight for you, and you shall be silent," and immediately following this an oracle is set down: "And the Lord said to Moses, Why do you cry out to me?" (Exodus 14:14-15) — as though those who have nothing worth hearing to say ought to be silent, while those who have entrusted themselves to a divine love of wisdom ought to speak, and not merely speak with quietness, but cry aloud with a still greater shout, not with mouth and tongue, by which speech makes the air take a spherical shape perceptible to hearing, but with the all-musical and most loud-voiced instrument of the soul, of which no mortal at all is a hearer, but only the one who is unborn and imperishable.

For only a mind capable of intelligible things can grasp the well-tuned and harmonious melody of intelligible harmony, and not one of those confused among things of sense-perception can do so. When the whole instrument of the understanding sounds forth in concord through the octave or the double octave, the hearer, as it were, inquires — though in truth not inquiring, for all things are known to God — "Why do you cry out to me?" Is it in supplication to avert something, or in thanksgiving for a share in good things, or both together?

The one who seemed slow of speech and heavy of tongue and without reason is found to be so talkative that in one place he is represented not merely speaking but crying out, while elsewhere he uses an unceasing and unbroken torrent of words.

For it says, "Moses was speaking, and God was answering him with a voice" (Exodus 19:19) — he did not speak to completion, but kept speaking in an extended, drawn-out manner, and God did not teach to completion, but answered continuously and without pause. And wherever there is an answer, there is, in every case, a question.

Now each person asks what he does not know, judging it worthwhile to learn, and knowing that the most beneficial task for the attainment of knowledge is to seek, to ask, to inquire — to suppose that one knows nothing, and to think that one has grasped nothing firmly.

The wise, then, employ God as their guide and teacher, while those less complete employ the wise man. That is why they say, "You speak to us, and do not let God speak to us, lest we die" (Exodus 20:19). But the man of true worth uses such frank speech that he not only speaks and cries out, but even now cries out against, taking courage from genuine faith and from a sincere passion.

For the words "If you will forgive them their sin, forgive it; but if not, blot me out of your book which you have written" (Exodus 32:32), and "Did I conceive all this people, or did I give birth to them, that you say to me, Take them into your bosom as a nurse carries a suckling child?" (Numbers 11:12), and "From where am I to get meat to give to all this people, since they weep before me? Shall sheep and cattle be slaughtered, or shall all the fish of the sea be gathered together, and will that be enough?" (Numbers 11:13, 22), and "Lord, why have you afflicted this people? And why have you sent me, and from the time I went before Pharaoh to speak in your name he has afflicted the people, and you have not delivered your people" (Exodus 5:22-23) — these words and others like them, one would have feared to speak even to one of the particular kings of this world; but he took courage to declare them even to God.

This, then, was the culmination not simply of daring but of a noble courage in him, because all the wise are friends of God, and above all according to the most sacred lawgiver — and frank speech is akin to friendship, since toward whom would one speak freely if not toward one's own friend? Most beautifully, then, in the oracles Moses is celebrated as a friend (Exodus 33:11), so that whatever bold and hazardous things he goes through may be seen to proceed from friendship rather than from self-will. For boldness belongs to the self-willed man, but courage is proper to a friend.

But observe again that his boldness is tempered with reverence. For the words "What will you give me?" (Genesis 15:2) show boldness, while "Master" shows reverence. Though he is accustomed to use above all two forms of address for the Cause — "God" and "Lord" — he has now taken up neither, but rather that of "Master," a term at once most reverent and most strictly proper; and yet these — Lord and Master — are said to be synonyms.

But even if the underlying reality is one and the same, the names differ in their conception. "Lord" is spoken from "authority" (kuros), which is a firm and settled thing, in opposition to what is unstable and without authority; "Master" (despotes) is from "bond" (desmos), from which, I think, comes fear — so that the master is a lord, and, as it were, a lord to be feared, one who has not only authority and power fastened over all things, but is also capable of instilling awe and fear — and perhaps too because he is the bond of the universe, holding it together indissolubly and binding tight things that are of themselves dissoluble.

The one, then, who says "Master, what will you give me?" is in effect saying this: I do not fail to know your surpassing power; I understand the fearsomeness of your dominion; in fear and trembling I approach you, and yet again I take courage.

For you yourself have decreed that I should not be afraid; you yourself gave me a tongue of instruction, that I might know when it is necessary to speak; you yourself loosed my mouth that had been sewn shut; you yourself, having opened it further, gave it articulate speech; you yourself have put together the things that must be said, confirming that oracle: "I will open your mouth, and instruct you in what you are to say" (Exodus 4:12).

For it was you who ordained that I should not be afraid; it was you who gave me the tongue of instruction, to know when I must speak; it was you who loosed my sewn-shut mouth; it was you who, opening it further, gave it articulate speech; it was you who put together the very things I must say, confirming that oracle: "I will open your mouth, and I will instruct you in what you are to say" (Exodus 4:12).

For who was I, that you should give me a share of reason, that you should promise me a wage more perfect than any good of grace and gift? Am I not an exile from my homeland? Have I not been driven out from my kinship? Have I not been made a stranger to my father's house? Do not all call me a banished man and a fugitive, solitary and without honor?

But you, Master, are my homeland to me, you are my kinship, you are my father's hearth, you are my honor, my freedom of speech, the great, celebrated, and unstealable wealth.

Why then should I not be bold to say what I think? Why should I not ask, deeming myself worthy to learn something more? But I who say I am bold confess again that I am afraid and struck with terror, and the fear and the boldness in me do not wage an unmixed war, as someone might perhaps suppose, but rather form a blended harmony. So I feast insatiably on the mixture, which has persuaded me neither to speak freely without caution nor to be cautious without freedom of speech.

For I have learned to measure my own nothingness and to look all around at the surpassing heights of your benefactions; and whenever I perceive myself to be "earth and ashes" and whatever is more contemptible still, then I take courage to approach you, having become humble, cast down into dust, reduced, as far as concerns my own substance, to the very verge of seeming not even to exist. And this passion of my soul Moses the overseer inscribed as on a monument, in my own memorial.

For he says: "Abraham drew near and said: now I have begun to speak to the Lord, though I am earth and ashes" (Genesis 18:27), since that is the moment for a created thing to approach its Maker, when it has come to know its own nothingness. And the words "what will you give me?" are the voice not of one at a loss, but rather of one giving thanks for the multitude and greatness of the good things he has enjoyed.

"What will you give me?" For is there still something greater left to expect? Boundless, O lover of giving, are your graces, without limit, having neither boundary nor end, welling up like springs with more than is ever drawn from them.

But it is worth considering not only the ever-flooding torrent of your benefactions, but also the fields that we irrigate with them; for if the stream should be poured out to excess, the plain, instead of fruit-bearing earth, will become a marsh and a swamp. What I need, then, for fruitfulness, is an inflow that is measured, not unmeasured.

Therefore I will ask "what will you give me?" though you have given things beyond telling, and virtually everything that mortal nature was capable of containing. For what I still seek to learn and to acquire is this: who might become a worthy heir of your benefactions?

Or shall I say, "I shall depart childless" (Genesis 15:2), having received a short-lived, ephemeral, swiftly-perishing good, when I pray for the opposite — one of many days, long-lasting, unspoiled, and immortal, so that it might be able both to cast seeds and to extend roots for the sake of firmness, and to raise its stalk on high, lifting it up toward heaven?

For human virtue must walk upon the earth but reach as far as heaven, so that there, feasted upon incorruption, it may remain forever unharmed.

For I know that you, who bring into being what does not exist and beget all things, have hated a soul that is childless and barren, since you gave to the clear-sighted race the exceptional grace of never becoming barren or failing to bring forth; and I, too, having been allotted a share in that race, rightly long to be its heir. For, beholding it to be unquenchable, I consider it most shameful to look on while my own nature is stripped of the good.

I therefore become a suppliant and implore, that out of the seeds and smoldering embers the saving light of virtue may be kindled and blaze up, a light which, handed on like a torch through successive generations, will become coextensive in time with the universe.

You have given zeal also to those who practice the discipline, for children born and begotten of the soul, and, overcome by joy, they have burst out saying: "the children with whom God has shown mercy to your servant" (Genesis 33:5) — children whose nurse and foster-mother is innocence, whose souls are tender and well-formed, ready to receive the wholly beautiful and most godlike stampings of virtue.

But teach me this too: whether "the son of Masek, my house-born servant," is fit to become heir of your graces; for up to now I have not received the one I hoped for, and the one I have received, I do not hope for.

Who Masek is, and who her son, must not be examined carelessly. Masek, then, is interpreted "from a kiss." But a kiss differs from loving; for the one seems to show a union of souls fitted together by goodwill, while the other seems to display only a superficial and cold greeting brought about by some need that draws people together for the moment.

For just as in "looking up" there is no "stooping," nor is "drinking down" wholly the same as "drinking," nor is a "horse" contained in a "wallet," so too "loving" is not contained in "kissing," since even among enemies countless people, yielding to the harsh necessities of life, extend a greeting.

Who, then, is she who has been established with us from a kiss but not from a genuine friendship? I will say it, holding nothing back: it is life together with sense-perception, fortified in every way, which no one fails to love, whom the many consider a mistress but the refined consider a handmaid — not a foreigner or a bought slave, but house-born and in a manner of the same stock; these latter have also been trained to kiss her, not to love her, while the former love her exceedingly and hold her to be thrice-desired.

But Laban, the hater of virtue, will not even be able to acknowledge the powers allotted to the one in training; rather, having hung his whole life upon pretense and false fabrications, as though aggrieved — though not in truth pained — he says: "I was not deemed worthy to kiss my children and my daughters" (Genesis 31:28 [cf. 28]); and rightly and fittingly so, for we have been trained to hate irony.

Love the virtues, then, and embrace them with your very soul, and truly love them, and you will least of all wish to do that counterfeit of friendship, mere kissing. "For do they still have a share or an inheritance in your house? Have they not been reckoned by you as strangers? Have you not sold them, and devoured their silver?" (Genesis 31:14–15), so that not even afterward will you be able to give back what you have already devoured as ransom and redemption price? Pretend now that you wish to kiss them, you who are implacable toward every judgment. But Moses will not kiss a son-in-law in that fashion; rather he will love from a genuine passion of the soul: "he kissed him," it says, "and they embraced" (Exodus 18:7).

Now there is a threefold kind of life: one directed toward God, one toward becoming, and one in between, a mixture of both. The life directed toward God has not come down to us, nor come under the necessities of the body. The life directed toward becoming has never risen at all, nor sought to rise, but lurking in the recesses of Hades, delights in a life not worth living.

But the mixed life is one which, often led by the better order, becomes divine and is possessed by God, but often, dragged back by the worse order, turns aside. This life, whenever, as on a scale, the portion belonging to the better life weighs down the whole, the counterweight of the opposite life, being dragged along with it, is rendered a most trifling burden.

Moses, having crowned without contest the kind of life directed toward God, leads the remaining kinds forward for judgment, likening them to two women, of whom he calls the one "loved" and the other "hated," fitting the names most aptly to each.

For who does not welcome the pleasures and delights that come through the eyes, who does not welcome those that come through the ears, who does not welcome those that come through taste, smell, and touch? And who has not hated their opposites — frugality, self-control, a stern and disciplined life empty of laughter and play, full of earnestness, cares, and toils, a friend of contemplation, an enemy of ignorance, superior to money and reputation and pleasures, yet inferior to prudence, good repute, and a wealth that sees rather than one that is blind?

The offspring of the hated virtue are always the elder. But Moses, even though they are younger in time, judges these too by nature worthy of the elder's privilege, giving them a double share and taking away half from the others. For he says: if a man has two wives, one loved and one hated, and both bear him children, when he is about to distribute his property he will not be permitted to give the elder's privilege to the son of the loved wife, of pleasure — for this son is young, even if he should become gray-haired with time — but to the son of the hated wife, of prudence, who from childhood is the elder, so as to assign him a double portion (Deuteronomy 21:15–17).

"But Rachel was barren" (Gen. 29:31). Is it not the case that whenever the soul begins to bear the offspring proper to soul, then whatever is perceptible to the senses, itself becoming barren, ceases to bear—things which receive only the welcome given by a kiss, not the welcome that comes through genuine friendship?

Of this life according to sense-perception, then, which he calls Masek, each of us is a son, honoring and admiring the nurse and foster-mother of the mortal race, sense-perception—which the earthly mind too, named Adam, when he saw it fashioned as his own venomous death, called "life." For he says, "Adam called his wife's name Life,

because she is the mother of all the living" (Gen. 3:20)—that is, of those who live, presumably, a life that is dead to the soul. But those who are truly alive have Wisdom for their mother, and sense-perception as a slave, fashioned by nature for the service of knowledge.

The name of the one born from Life, whom we came to know through the kiss, is composed as "Damascus"—which, translated, means "blood of a sack"—very forcefully and aptly hinting, by "sack," at the body, and by "blood," at the life of the blood.

For since "soul" is spoken of in two senses—the whole soul, and its ruling part, which properly speaking is the soul of the soul, just as with the eye there is both the whole orb and the most sovereign part by which we see—the lawgiver held that the substance of soul is likewise twofold: blood for the whole, and divine spirit for the most sovereign, ruling part.

At any rate he says outright, "The soul of all flesh is blood" (Lev. 17:11). How well he assigns the flowing of blood to the mass of flesh, kindred to kindred! But the substance of the mind he made dependent on nothing created; rather, he brought it in as something breathed by God: "for the maker," he says, "breathed into his face the breath of life that comes from the God of all things, and man became a living soul" (Gen. 2:7)—by which also, according to the image

of the maker, reason is said to have been stamped, so that there are two kinds of human beings: the one living by divine spirit and reason, the other living by blood and the pleasure of the flesh. This latter kind is a thing molded from earth; that former is a faithful impression bearing the likeness of the divine image.

Our clay, molded with no small care and kneaded through with blood, stands in great need of help from God; wherefore this one is called "Damascus Eliezer"—translated, Eliezer means "God is helper"—since the blooded mass, being in itself dissoluble and dead, holds together and is kindled to life by the providence of God, who stretches out his hand and shields it, since our race by itself could not remain firmly established for a single day.

Do you not see that the second of Moses' sons bears this very name? "For the name of the second," he says, "carries with it its own reason: 'for the God of my father is my helper, and he delivered me from the hand of Pharaoh'" (Exod. 18:4).

And upon those who are still companions of the blooded, sense-perceptible life, there falls that formidable way of life whose business is to scatter piety, named Pharaoh, whose dominion, full of lawlessness and cruelty, it is impossible to escape without Eliezer being born within the soul,

and without one's placing hope in the help that comes from God, the only savior. And it was altogether fitting that he traced the descent of Damascus not from a father but from a mother, Masek, in order to teach that the blooded soul, by which even the irrational animals live, belongs to the maternal, female kind, and has no share in male generation.

But virtue is not Sarah in that sense: for she lays claim to descent from men alone, being a motherless origin, born from the Father of all things alone—for he says, "she is my sister, on my father's side, but not on my mother's" (Gen. 20:12).

What it was necessary to hear beforehand, then, we have now set forth; for the proposition contained an enigmatic obscurity. But what the lover of learning is seeking must now be interpreted more precisely: is it not perhaps this—whether it is possible for one who still desires the blooded life and still lays claim to things of sense-perception to become an heir of the bodiless and divine things?

Of these things only he is deemed worthy who has been breathed upon from above and has obtained a portion of heavenly and divine allotment—the purest mind, one who takes no account not only of the body but even of the other part of the soul, which, being irrational, is smeared with blood, kindling boiling tempers and inflamed desires.

At any rate he inquires in this fashion: "Since you have not given me that intelligible seed, the self-taught, the god-formed, will my house-born slave be my heir?" (Gen. 15:3)—the offspring of the blooded life? Then God, hastening, arrived even before the venom could speak, having sent ahead, so to speak, instruction preceding the utterance.

"For immediately," he says, "the voice of God came, saying: this one shall not be your heir" (Gen. 15:4)—none of those who come forward for display to sense-perception; for it is bodiless natures that are heirs of intelligible things.

It has been observed with the utmost precision that he did not say "he said" or "he spoke," but "the voice of God came"—of one crying out vigorously and resounding unbrokenly, so that the voice, distributed into every soul, might leave no part deserted and empty of right instruction, but that all things throughout might be filled with sound learning.

Who then shall be the heir? Not the reasoning that remains, by its own deliberate choice, within the prison of the body, but the reasoning that has been loosed from its bonds and set free, and has gone forth beyond the walls, and has left behind—if one may put it so—its very self. "For he who shall come forth from you"—"this one shall be your heir" (Gen. 15:4).

If, then, any longing enters the soul to inherit the divine goods, do not leave behind only "your land"—the body—and "your kindred"—sense-perception—and "your father's house" (Gen. 12:1)—speech—but flee also from yourself and step outside yourself, like those possessed and driven into Corybantic frenzy, seized by Bacchic and god-borne inspiration under some prophetic rapture.

For when the mind is filled with god and is no longer in itself, but is roused and driven to distraction by a heavenly love, and is led by him who truly is and drawn up toward him, with truth going before it and clearing away the obstacles in its path, so that it may walk along the highway of the road—this is the inheritance. How then did you migrate from those former things?

"Speak to us boldly, O mind, you who resound to those trained to hear things intelligible, ever declaring that I removed myself from the body, when already I disregarded the flesh; and from sense-perception, when I came to regard all sensible things as mere appearances, not truly existing—having condemned its criteria as adulterated and bribed and infected with false opinion, and having condemned also the things judged by it, as things equipped to entice and deceive and snatch truth away from the very midst of nature. And I migrated also from speech, when I condemned its great irrationality, for all its soaring and self-inflation.

For it dared no small daring: to show me bodies through shadows, and realities through mere words—things which were impossible; yet, though it stumbled, it babbled on and ran in circles, unable, through the mere commonness of names, to represent with clear distinctness the particular properties of the things underlying them.

But having suffered this, like a foolish and infant child, I learned how much better it truly was to withdraw from all these things, and to dedicate the powers of each to God, who gives the body its bodily form and holds it together, and equips sense-perception to perceive, and furnishes speech with the power to speak.

In just the way, then, that you have withdrawn from the others, withdraw also and migrate from yourself. And what does this mean? Do not keep for yourself, as your own private store, the acts of understanding and thinking and comprehending; rather, take these too and dedicate them to the Cause of understanding with precision and of comprehending without being deceived.

The dedication will be received by the more sacred of the two most holy precincts; for there appear to be two: the one intelligible, the other sensible. Of sensible natures, this cosmos is the temple; but of invisible things, the truly intelligible cosmos is the shrine of all the gods.

That by stepping outside our own faculties of understanding and longing to be a follower of God he becomes heir of a wealth that the nature of things itself sings of, he testifies when he says: "He brought him outside and said, Look up to heaven" (Gen. 15:5), since that is the treasury of divine things—"for the Lord will open to you," it says, "his treasury, the heaven" (Deut. 28:12), from which the giver pours out, without pause, the most perfect joys. And "look up" serves also to expose the blindness of the common herd of men, who suppose they see but are in fact maimed.

How could they not be maimed, when they have chosen evils instead of goods, disgraceful things instead of noble ones, unjust things instead of just, passions instead of good feeling, mortal things instead of immortal, and when they run from those who would admonish and correct them, from reproof and instruction, but welcome flatterers and speeches aimed at pleasure, craftsmen of idleness, ignorance, and self-indulgence?

The virtuous person alone truly sees—which is why the ancients called the prophets "seers" (1 Sam. 9:9). And the one who advanced outside was called not merely one who sees, but one who sees God: Israel, that is, "one who sees God." But the others, even when they do open their eyes, bow toward the earth, pursuing earthly things and keeping company with the dwellers in Hades. For the one drinks in his vision toward the upper air and the circuits of heaven,

and has been trained to fix his sight on the manna, the divine Word, the imperishable food of the soul that loves contemplation, while the others look to onions and garlic, which sting the eyes and harm them and make them shut tight, and to the other foul smells of leeks and dead fish, the native foods of Egypt.

"We remember," they say, "the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, the garlic; but now our soul is dried up, our eyes see nothing but the manna" (Num. 11:5-6).

It also bears on character-formation that "he brought him outside" — words that some, out of a tasteless disposition, are accustomed to laugh at, saying: is a person led inside, or does he conversely enter outside? Yes, I would say, you ridiculous and altogether too flippant men: you have not learned to track the ways of the soul, but investigate only the movements of bodies from place to place. That is why it seems paradoxical to you that anyone should go out inward or come in outward; but to us who are disciples of Moses none of this is discordant.

Would you not say that the high priest who has not yet attained perfection, when he performs the ancestral rites of his fathers in the innermost sanctuary, is both within and without—within in his visible body, but without in his soul, which wanders and roams; while conversely someone who does not even belong to the priestly family, but is a lover of God and beloved by God, though he stands outside the sprinkling-vessels, dwells in the innermost place, regarding his whole bodily life as an exile abroad, and supposing that whenever he is able to live by the soul alone, he remains in his homeland?

For indeed every fool is outside the door, even if he spends every day with others and is never absent from them for a moment; and every wise man is within, even if he happens to be settled apart, not merely in different lands but in the far quarters of the earth. According to Moses, the friend is so near that he makes no difference from one's own soul; for he says:

"The friend, who is as your own soul" (Deut. 13:6). And of the priest too it is said: "No man shall be with him when he enters the holy of holies, until he comes out" (Lev. 16:17)—not in the bodily sense, but with respect to the soul's affairs. For the mind, when it serves God in purity, is no longer human but divine; but when it turns to something merely human, it has come down from heaven, or rather it has fallen to earth and gone outside, even while the body still remains within it.

Rightly, then, is it said: "He brought him outside" — outside the prison-houses of the body, the dens of the senses, the sophistries of deceitful reasoning, and beyond all these, outside of himself and outside the illusion of thinking and grasping things by his own independent and self-governing judgment.

Having led him forward outside, it says: "Look up to heaven and count the stars, if you can number them. So shall your offspring be" (Gen. 15:5). It is beautifully said "shall be," not merely equal in number to the stars. For God means to signify not that one thing alone, but countless other things bearing on complete and perfect happiness.

"So shall it be," he says, like the visible heavenly realm—ethereal, heavenly, full of unshadowed and pure radiance (for night is banished from heaven, and darkness from the upper air), most star-filled, well ordered, governed by an unswerving order that remains constant and unchanging.

For he means to show the soul of the wise man as an imitation of heaven, or, to put it even more boldly, as an earthly heaven, containing within itself, as if in the upper air, pure natures, movements, harmonious dances, divine circuits, the most starlike and radiant brightnesses of the virtues. And if it is impossible to find the number of the visible stars, how much more impossible is it to find the number of the intelligible ones?

For to the degree, I think, that the judging faculty is better or worse than the thing judged—mind being better than sense-perception, sense-perception being duller than understanding—to that same degree the things judged also differ; so that intelligible things surpass sensible things by an immeasurable multitude. For the eyes of the body are the smallest fraction of the eye of the soul: the one is like the sun, while these practice only kindling and going out, like lamps in their sockets.

It is therefore necessary that it goes on to say: "Abraham believed God" (Gen. 15:6), in praise of the one who believed. And yet, someone might perhaps ask: do you judge this worthy of praise? Who would not pay heed to God when he speaks and makes a promise, even if he happened to be the most unjust and impious of all men?

To such a person we shall say: noble sir, do not thoughtlessly strip the wise man of the praise that is his due, nor bear false witness against the most perfect of the virtues, faith, by crediting it to unworthy men, nor accuse our understanding of these matters of error.

For if you were willing to make a deeper inquiry, and not a wholly superficial one, you would clearly recognize that it is no easy thing to believe in God alone, apart from anything else, because of our kinship with the mortal nature to which we are yoked—a kinship that persuades us to place our trust instead in wealth, reputation, office, friends, health, and bodily strength, and in many other things besides.

But to wash oneself clean of every one of these, and to distrust created being, which of itself is wholly untrustworthy, and to trust in God alone, who alone is truly trustworthy, is the work of a great and Olympian understanding, one no longer enticed by anything among the things that belong to us.

It is well said, too, that his faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness" (Gen. 15:6). For nothing is so just as to make use of unmixed and unadulterated faith in God alone.

This, though just and consistent with nature, has been thought paradoxical because of the general faithlessness of the many, whom the sacred word rebukes by declaring that to be moored firmly and unswervingly to Being alone is a marvel among men, for whom the possession of unmixed goods does not exist, but is no marvel in the sight of truth, which awards the prize—it is simply the work of righteousness alone.

"He said to him," it says, "I am the God who brought you out of the land of the Chaldeans, so as to give you this land" (Gen. 15:7). This signifies not merely a new promise, but the confirmation of an old one.

The good bestowed long ago was the exodus from the astrology of the Chaldeans, which taught one to suppose that the world was not God's work but God himself, and that good and ill for all existing things are apportioned by the movements and fixed circuits of the stars, and that from these the origin of good and evil depends—beliefs which the smooth and orderly motion of the heavenly bodies persuaded the more credulous to elaborate into marvels. And indeed the very name "Chaldeans," translated, is akin in meaning to "smoothness"—

while the new good was to inherit wisdom, which sense-perception cannot receive but which is grasped by the purest mind alone, through which the best of migrations is confirmed, as the soul changes its home from astronomy to the study of nature, from unstable conjecture to firm apprehension, and, to put it properly, from the created to the uncreated, from the world to its Maker and Father.

For those whose minds are Chaldean-minded have put their trust in heaven, but the one who has migrated from there has put his trust, the oracles say, in him who is above heaven and charioteer of the whole universe, God. A fine inheritance indeed—perhaps greater than the capacity of the one who receives it, yet worthy of the greatness of the one who gives it.

But it is not enough for the lover of wisdom to hope for good things and to look forward to such wonders as are foretold by the oracles; unless he also comes to know the manner by which he will attain succession to the inheritance, he considers himself no better off, thirsting as he is for knowledge and insatiable for it. That is why he asks, saying: "Master, by what shall I know that I shall inherit?" (Gen. 15:8).

Perhaps someone might say this conflicts with having believed: for to be perplexed belongs to one who doubts, but to no longer seek is the mark of one who has believed. It must be said, then, that he both is perplexed and has believed, yet not about the same thing — far from it. For he has believed that he will be heir of wisdom, but seeks only the manner in which this might come about; that it will come about he has grasped with complete certainty, in accordance with the divine promises.

The teacher, then, having praised the longing with which he pursues learning, begins his instruction from an elementary introduction, in which the first and most necessary thing written is "Take for me" (Gen 15:9). The expression is brief, but it signifies much — for it reveals no small matters.

First, he says, you possess nothing good of your own, but whatever you suppose you have, another has supplied it. From this it is gathered that all possessions belong to God who gives, and not to created being, which is a beggar stretching out its hands to receive.

Second, even if you receive, receive it not for yourself, but consider what is given a loan or a deposit belonging to the one who deposited and lent it, repaying an earlier favor with a later one, justly and fittingly requiting the favor that came first with the gratitude that answers it.

For countless people have become deniers of sacred deposits, misusing what belongs to another as their own through boundless greed. But you, noble friend, strive with all your strength not only to keep unharmed and unadulterated what you have received, but also to deem it worthy of every care, so that the one who made the deposit may have no charge to bring against your keeping of it.

The Maker of living things deposited with you soul, reason, and sense-perception — things named symbolically in the sacred writings as heifer, ram, and goat (Gen 15:9). Some appropriated these at once out of self-love, while others stored them up for the most opportune moment of repayment.

Of those who misappropriate them, one cannot find the number; for which of us does not say that soul and sense-perception and reason — all these together — are his own possessions, supposing that perceiving, speaking, and comprehending rest on himself alone?

But of those who genuinely preserve their trust as sacred and truly inviolable, the number is small. These have dedicated these three things to God — soul, sense-perception, reason; for they received them not for themselves but for him, all of them, so that they rightly confessed that the activities of each belong to him: the thoughts of the mind, the interpretations of reason, the impressions of sense-perception.

Those, then, who inscribe these things to themselves have obtained a lot worthy of their own wretchedness: a soul treacherous, mixed up with irrational passions and overtaken by a multitude of vices, at one time outraged by gluttony and lust as though in a brothel, at another confined by a multitude of wrongdoings as though in a prison together with criminals — not people, but practices — which have become liable to every judge; a reason glib-mouthed, sharpened against truth, harmful to those who meet it, bringing shame to those who possess it; and a sense-perception insatiable, always gorging itself on sensible things, yet, being under the mastery of unrestrained desire, never able to be filled, paying no heed to those who would correct it, so as to overlook and mishear and spit out whatever is spoken for its benefit.

But those who received these things not for themselves, but dedicated each of them to God himself, kept them truly holy and sacred for their owner — the mind, so that it should think of nothing else but God and his virtues; reason, so that with unbridled mouth it might honor the Father of all with praises and hymns and proclamations of blessedness, mustering all the virtues that serve interpretation for this one work alone and displaying them; and sense-perception, so that, forming images of the whole perceptible world — heaven and earth and the natures between them, living things and plants, their activities and powers, and all their motions and states — it might report these to the soul without deceit and in purity.

For God has granted to the mind to apprehend the intelligible world through itself, and the visible world through sense-perception. If, then, one could live with every part of oneself for God rather than for oneself — peering through the senses into sensible things for the sake of discovering truth, and through the soul pursuing philosophy concerning the intelligible things that truly are, and through the instrument that produces voice, hymning both the world and its craftsman —

then one will enjoy a happy and blessed life. I think these things are implied in "Take for me." Wishing, moreover, to send down from heaven to earth an image of divine virtue, out of pity for our race, so that it might not miss its share in the better lot, he constructs, symbolically, the sacred tabernacle and the things within it — a likeness and imitation of wisdom.

For the oracle says that the tabernacle was set up in the midst of our uncleanness, so that we might have something by which to be purified, washing and cleansing away the things that defile our wretched life, so full of ill repute. Let us, then, see in what manner he ordered the materials contributing to its construction to be brought in.

"The Lord spoke," he says, "to Moses, saying: to the sons of Israel, and take for me first-fruits from all whose heart inclines them; you shall take my first-fruits" (Exod 25:1-2). Here too, then, is an exhortation to take not for themselves but for God, examining who the giver is and not damaging what has been given, but keeping it unharmed, blameless, complete, and whole. And he dedicated the "beginnings" to him in the most doctrinally significant way; for in truth the beginnings both of bodies and of affairs are examined only in relation to God.

Search, if you wish to know, into each thing — plants, animals, arts, sciences. Are, then, the first seed-sowings of plants works of farming, or are they the invisible works of invisible nature? And what of the origins of humans and other animals? Do they not have their parents as contributing causes, but nature as the highest, most venerable, and truly the cause?

For arts and sciences, is not nature the spring and root and foundation, and whatever other name of a more venerable origin there may be, on which all the particular theorems of each are built up? And if nature does not exist beforehand as a foundation, all things are incomplete. From this, it seems to me, someone was moved to say, "the beginning is half of the whole," hinting at nature as the beginning, which, like a root, is laid down for the growth of each thing, and to which he assigned half of the whole.

Rightly, then, has the oracle dedicated beginnings to God the guide. And elsewhere too it says, "The Lord spoke to Moses: consecrate to me every firstborn, first-produced, that opens every womb among the sons of Israel, from man to beast; it is mine" (Exod 13:1-2).

So that it is agreed also through these words that things belong to God both in time and in power, and especially the first-born. For since every kind is imperishable, it will rightly be assigned to the Imperishable One; and if one is to speak of opening a womb altogether — from man, that is reasoning and reason, to beast, that is sense-perception and body.

For the one who opens the womb of each thing — of the mind for its intelligible apprehensions, of reason for its activities through speech, of the senses for the impressions that arise in them from underlying objects, of the body for its own proper states and motions — is the invisible, seed-bearing, and skillful divine Word, which will fittingly be dedicated to the Father.

Moreover, just as beginnings belong to God, so also do ends. Moses bears witness to this, commanding that the "end" be set apart and acknowledged to the Lord (Num 31:28ff). The things in the world also bear witness.

How so? The beginning of a plant is seed, its end is fruit; each is a work not of farming but of nature. Again, the beginning of a science is nature, as has been shown, but its limit has never yet come to human beings. For no one is complete in any pursuit, but completeness and the heights of perfection belong, without deceit, to one alone. We, then, are carried along for the rest in the borderland between end and beginning — learning, teaching, farming, laboring at each of the other pursuits as though sweating, so that whatever comes to be may seem to accomplish something.

More clearly, however, he confessed that beginnings and ends belong to God, when speaking of the coming-to-be of the world: "In the beginning God made" (Gen 1:1), and again, "God completed the heaven and the earth" (cf. Gen 2:1-2).

For the present, then, he says, "Take for me" (Exod 25:2), giving what is his own and urging that what has been given not be adulterated, but kept in a manner worthy of the giver; while again elsewhere, he who needs nothing, and for this reason takes nothing, will not admit to taking anything, but does so for the sake of anointing us toward piety and instilling eagerness for holiness and sharpening our own service to him, as one who welcomes and receives the soul's willing acts of goodwill and genuine service.

For he says, "Behold, I have taken the Levites instead of every firstborn that opens the womb from the sons of Israel; they shall be their ransom" (Num 3:12). So we take, yet we are said to give — properly speaking we take, but by an extension of usage we are said to give, for the reasons I have stated. And fittingly he named the Levites "ransoms." For nothing so releases the mind into freedom as becoming a suppliant and refugee of God. This is what the consecrated tribe of the Levites professes.

Having, then, said what is fitting concerning these matters, let us run back to our starting point; for we passed over many things that ought to have been treated with precision. "Take for me," he says, "a heifer" unyoked and unharmed, tender, young, and vigorous — a soul able readily to receive the reins, discipline, and oversight; "take for me a ram" — reason, a perfect contender, able both to dissect and refute the sophistries of adversaries, and able also to secure safety together with good order for the one who uses it.

“Take for me” also the darting sense-perception directed at the world of the senses, “a goat,” wholly “three years old,” having its consummation in the perfect number, the middle term; and besides these, “a turtledove and a pigeon” (Gen 15:9), that is, divine wisdom and human wisdom — both winged, and both trained to leap upward, yet differing from one another as a genus differs from a species, or an archetype from its imitation.

For divine wisdom loves solitude, because of the one God whose possession it is, and cherishes being alone — this is symbolically called the turtledove — while the other kind is tame, domesticated, and gregarious, circling the cities of men and taking pleasure in a way of life shared with mortals.

The pigeon is likened to this latter kind. It is these virtues, I think, that Moses is hinting at when he names the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah (Exod 1:15): the one is interpreted as “little bird,” and Puah as “red.” It is proper to divine knowledge, like a bird, always to soar aloft; it is proper to human knowledge to instill modesty and self-control, of which blushing at what deserves it is the clearest evidence.

“And he took for himself all these things” (Gen 15:10). This is praise of the one who, having received the sacred deposit entrusted to him — soul, sense-perception, reason, divine wisdom, human knowledge — kept it purely and without deceit, not for himself, but only for the one who had entrusted it.

Then he adds: “he divided them in the middle,” without adding who did it, so that you may understand it is the God who cannot be pointed to who fits and unites, by the word that is the divider of all things, all the natures of bodies and of affairs that seem to follow one upon another in sequence — a word whetted to the sharpest edge, which never ceases dividing.

For all sensible things, when this divider has proceeded as far as the atoms and so-called indivisible parts, then in turn begins from these to divide the objects of reason into portions countless and undelineable. And “the leaves of gold are cut into hairs” (Exod 36:10), as Moses says — cut so fine as to resemble incorporeal lines.

So he divided each of the three in the middle: the soul into the rational and the irrational, reason into the true and the false, and sense-perception into apprehensive impression and non-apprehensive. These divisions he immediately “set facing one another,” irrational against rational, true against false, apprehensible against inapprehensible — but he left the birds undivided (Gen 15:10); for it is impossible to cut incorporeal and divine things into warring opposites.

This is a long and necessary line of argument concerning division into equal parts and concerning opposites, and while we will not pass over it, neither will we draw it out, but abridging it as it deserves we shall content ourselves with only the essential points. For just as the Craftsman divided our soul and our limbs down the middle, so too he divided the substance of the universe, when he was fashioning the world.

Taking it in hand, he began to divide as follows: first he made two sections, the heavy and the light, separating the coarse-textured from the fine-textured; then he divided each of these again, the fine-textured into air and fire, the coarse-textured into water and earth, which he laid down as the perceptible elements of the perceptible world, like foundations.

Again he cut the heavy and the light by other distinctions: the light into cold and hot — he named the cold air, and the hot, by nature, fire — and the heavy in turn into moist and dry; he called the dry earth, and the moist water.

Each of these in turn admitted further divisions: earth was divided into continents and islands; water into sea and rivers and whatever is drinkable; air into the turnings of summer and winter; and fire into the destructive kind — which is insatiable and corrupting — and, by contrast, the preserving kind, which was allotted to the constitution of heaven.

And just as he divided the wholes, so he divided the parts, some of which were inanimate and some animate; and of the inanimate, some remain in the same state, held together by cohesion, while others move not by change of place but by growth, which unseen nature has endowed with life; and of these, some bear the wild produce of wild matter, which serves as food for beasts, while others bear the produce of cultivated matter, whose oversight and care has fallen to farming, and which brings forth fruits for the enjoyment of the gentlest of all living things, man.

And just as he divided the inanimate things, so he divided the things that have a share of soul — among these he distinguished one kind irrational, one kind rational — and taking each in turn he divided it further: the irrational into the untamed kind and the domesticated kind, and the rational into the imperishable and the mortal.

And of the mortal he made two portions, naming the one male and the other female. And in another way too he divided the living creature into male and female; and it admitted still other necessary divisions, which distinguished the winged from the land-dwelling, the land-dwelling from the water-dwelling, and the water-dwelling from both of the other extremes.

In this way God, having whetted the word that is the divider of all things which is his own, divided the shapeless and qualityless substance of the universe, and the four elements of the world separated out from it, and the animals and plants in turn formed by means of these.

Since he says not only “he divided” but also “he divided them in the middle,” it is necessary to recall a few points about equal divisions as well. For what is divided exactly down the middle produces equal portions.

Now no human being could ever divide anything into perfectly equal parts, but of necessity one of the portions must fall short or exceed the other, and if not by a large amount, at least by some small part — one that perhaps escapes the perception of those whose senses, by nature and by habit, engage only with the coarser masses, and are unable to grasp what is atomic and indivisible.

Of equality no created thing is found, by an incorruptible account of the truth, to be the cause. It appears, then, that God alone is exactly just, and that he alone is able to divide bodies and affairs down the middle, in such a way that none of the portions, not even by the smallest and most indivisible fraction, becomes greater or less than the other, but is able to share in the highest and most perfect equality.

Now if the equal had but a single form, what has been said would suffice; but since there are several, we must not shrink from adding what is fitting. For equality is spoken of, in one sense, in numbers, as two is equal to two and three to three and so on; in another sense, in magnitudes, which have length, breadth, and depth as their dimensions — for a handbreadth is equal to a handbreadth and a cubit to a cubit in size, but there are other things equal in power, as in weights and measures.

There is also a necessary form of equality that operates by proportion, according to which the few are reckoned equal to the many, and the small to the great; and cities are accustomed to use this kind at critical times, requiring each citizen to contribute the equal share of his substance — not, of course, in number, but in proportion to the assessed value of his estate, so that the man who contributes a hundred drachmas

would seem to have given the same as the man who contributes a talent. With these points laid down beforehand, see how, in dividing down the middle, he divided into equal parts according to every form of equality, in the generation of the whole heaven. In number, then, he divided the heavy things equal to the light: two to two, earth and water, which have weight, against air and fire, which are light by nature; and again one to one, the driest to the moistest, earth to water, and the coldest to the hottest, fire to air; and in the same way darkness to light, day to night, winter to summer, autumn to spring, and all things akin to these.

In magnitude he made equal, in heaven, the parallel circles: the equinoctial circles, the spring and autumn ones, and the tropical circles, the summer and winter ones. And on earth the zones: two equal to one another, which lie near the poles and are frozen and for that reason uninhabited, and two which border both these and the scorched zone, which are said to be inhabited because of their temperate climate, the one lying toward the south, the other toward the north.

Equal too in length are the intervals of time: the longest day to the longest night, and again the shortest to the shortest, and the middling to the middling. The equinoxes seem best to disclose the equal magnitudes of the other days and nights as well.

For from the spring equinox to the summer solstice the day gains and the night loses, until the longest day and the shortest night are brought about; and from the summer solstice the sun, turning back on the same path, neither faster nor slower, but keeping to the same and like intervals, moving with equal speeds, comes round to the autumn equinox, and having made the day equal to the night begins to increase the night and diminish the day until the winter solstice;

and when it has made the night longest and the day shortest, turning back again along the same intervals it arrives at the spring equinox. Thus the intervals of time, which seem unequal, achieve equality in magnitude not within the same seasons of the year but across different ones.

and when it brings about the longest night and the shortest day, and then again, turning back through the same intervals, arrives at the spring equinox. In this way the intervals of time, though they appear unequal, exchange their equality of magnitude, not within the same seasons of the year but across different ones.

The same thing may be observed too in the parts of living creatures, and especially of human beings. For foot corresponds to foot, and hand to hand, and almost everything else is equal in size, the parts on the right to those on the left; and things equal in capacity are extremely numerous both among dry things and moist things, and the assessment of these is made by measures and scales and similar means.

By analogy, indeed, virtually all things are equal, both the small and the great, throughout the whole cosmos. For those who have examined the workings of nature most exactly say that the four elements are equal by analogy, and that the whole cosmos too, having been blended by analogy, was constituted by allotting an equal share to each part, and having been so constituted persists forever in this condition.

And indeed the four elements affecting us — dry, moist, cold, and hot — have been fitted together by blending an equality achieved through analogy, and we ourselves are nothing other than a mixture of these four powers blended in an equality of analogy.

If one went through each case in turn, one could in principle extend the account to infinite length. For one would find the smallest living creatures equal by analogy to the greatest — the swallow to the eagle, the red mullet to the sea-monster, the ant to the elephant. Indeed body and soul and passions, pains and pleasures, and further affinities and aversions, and whatever else the nature of living creatures embraces, are almost all alike in kind, made equal by the rule of analogy.

In this way some have been bold enough to declare that even the smallest living creature, man, is equal to the whole cosmos, having observed that each of the two consists of a body and a rational soul; so that, interchanging the terms, they said that man is a small cosmos, and the cosmos a great man.

And they do not teach this at random, but because they recognized that the art of God, by which he fashioned the universe, admits neither intensification nor relaxation, but remaining ever the same in its consummate excellence, has fashioned each of the things that exist to perfection, God having made use, in his creating, of every number and every form

conducive to perfection. “For according to the small and according to the great,” as Moses says, he judged (Deut. 1:17), and in shaping each thing he neither, on account of the obscurity of the matter, withheld anything of his skill, nor, on account of its brilliance, added anything beyond what was fitting.

since even those craftsmen who are held in esteem, whatever materials they take in hand, whether costly or of the humblest kind, wish to work them in a manner deserving of praise. And indeed some, out of special devotion to beauty, have produced in the cheaper materials work more skillful than that in the costly ones, wishing by the addition of their knowledge to make up for what was lacking in the material.

But nothing in matter is precious in the sight of God; therefore he imparted the same art equally to all things. Hence too it is said in the sacred writings: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31); and things that share in the same excellence are, in the judgment of the one who praises them, altogether equal in honor.

But God praised not the matter that had been fashioned — the lifeless, flawed, dissoluble matter, in itself corruptible, uneven, and unequal — but his own works of skill, each brought to completion by one equal and uniform power and by a knowledge that is alike and the same in every case. For this reason it was held that, by the standards of analogy, all things are equal and alike to all, in keeping with the principle of his art and knowledge.

And if anyone else has ever been a praiser of equality, Moses has been, first by hymning, always and everywhere, justice as well, whose peculiar property — as its very name somewhere shows — is to divide bodies and affairs into equal portions; and then by censuring injustice, the artisan of that most hateful thing, inequality.

Inequality gave birth to the twin wars, the foreign and the civil, just as, conversely, equality gave birth to peace. And his praises of justice and his censures of injustice he sets forth most vividly when he says: “You shall do no injustice in judgment, in measures, in weights, in scales; you shall have just scales and just weights and just measures and a just quart-measure” (Lev. 19:35–36), and again in the supplementary law: “There shall not be in your bag two weights, a large and a small; there shall not be in your house two measures, a large and a small; a true and just weight shall you have, that you may live long upon the land that the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, because everyone who does these things, everyone who does what is unjust, is an abomination to the Lord” (Deut. 25:13–16).

God, then, who loves justice, abominates and hates injustice, the origin of faction and of evils. And where does the lawgiver not embrace equality as the nurse of justice, beginning from the very creation of the whole heaven? “God,” he says, “separated the light from the darkness, and God called the light Day and the darkness Night” (Gen. 1:4–5); for it was equality that assigned to the things that exist their day and their night, their light and their darkness.

Equality also divided the human being into man and woman, two portions unequal in strength, but, with a view to that toward which nature was hastening — the generation of a third thing resembling them both — equal in the highest degree. For he says: “God made man; according to the image of God he made him; male and female he made” — no longer “him” but “them,” he adds, in the plural (Gen. 1:27), fitting the species, once divided by kind,

into equality, as I have said. Cold too, and heat, and summer, and spring he recorded (Gen. 8:22), the yearly seasons again divided by that same divider. And indeed the three days before the sun came into being were equal in number to those after the sun (Gen. 1:5ff.), the six being honored with equality so as to signify eternity and time; for the three days before the sun he assigned to eternity, and those after the sun to time, which is an image of eternity.

As for the primary powers of the Existent — the beneficent power, by which he formed the cosmos, which is called God, and the punitive power, by which he rules and governs what has come to be, which is called Lord — he says that these are set apart by him as he stands above, in the middle: “For I will speak to you,” he says, “from above the mercy-seat, from between the two cherubim” (Exod. 25:21), in order to show that the most venerable powers of the Existent, the bestowing power and the punitive power, are equal, using him as their common divider.

What then? Are not the tablets of the ten general laws, which he calls the tables, two in number, equal to the parts of the soul, the rational and the irrational, which need to be instructed and disciplined — divided again by the lawgiver alone? “For the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved upon the tables” (Exod. 32:16).

And indeed of the ten words upon them, which are properly the ordinances, an equal division has been made into two sets of five, of which the first contains the just claims owed to God, and the other those owed to human beings.

Of the just claims owed to God, the first ordinance is the one opposed to the belief in many gods, teaching that the cosmos has but a single ruler; the second is the one concerning not fashioning gods out of things that are not causes, by the conniving arts of painters and sculptors, arts from which Moses banished, as their own peculiar exile, all those who practice them from his commonwealth, casting his vote against them, so that the one God alone, and in truth, might be honored.

the third is the one concerning the name of the Lord — not the name of the one who has not even come into being, for the Existent is ineffable — but of the name given to his powers, since it is ordained that this name not be taken in vain; the fourth is the one concerning the ever-virgin, motherless seventh day, so that creation, by practicing its own inactivity, may come to remember him who accomplishes all things invisibly; the fifth is the one concerning honor to parents;

for this too is a sacred ordinance, having its reference not to human beings but to the cause of all sowing and generation, on whose account mother and father were thought to beget, though in truth they do not beget but are instruments of generation.

This ordinance was written as a boundary-marker between the set of five tending toward piety and the set that contains the prohibitions of wrongs against one's fellows, since mortal parents are the terminus of immortal powers, which, generating all things in accordance with nature, granted also to the last and mortal race, in imitation, the art of begetting by sowing; for God is the beginning of generation, while the mortal form, the last and least honored thing, is its end.

The other set of five is the prohibition of adultery, murder, theft, false witness, and desire. These are, in effect, the general rules covering virtually all sins,

to which each of the particular offenses is referred back. But you may also see the continual sacrifices divided into equal parts — that of fine flour which the priests offer on their own behalf, and that on behalf of the nation, of the two lambs which they are ordained to offer. For the law commanded that half of what has been mentioned be sacrificed in the morning and the other half in the evening (Lev. 6:20; Exod. 29:38–39), so that God might be thanked by all, both for the goods enjoyed by day and for those enjoyed by night.

You also see the two emerald stones on the long robe, divided with equality between the right side and the left, on which are engraved, six to each, the names of the twelve tribal fathers, letters divine and set up like monuments, records of divine natures (Exod. 28:9-12). What further need is there to say?

Did he not, taking two mountains as symbols of two kinds, and again dividing them with a corresponding equality, assign the one to those who bless and the other, in turn, to those who curse, setting six tribal fathers over each (Deut. 27:11-13), so as to show those in need of admonition that the curses are equal in number to the blessings and, if one may say so, nearly equal in honor?

For in the same way both the praises of the good and the censures of the wicked are beneficial, since among those of sound mind, fleeing evil has been reckoned similar to, and the same as, choosing the good.

I am struck also by the judgment made concerning the two goats brought for propitiation, and by their allotment, divided by an obscure and untraceable divider: the lot. For of the two goats, the one whose business concerns matters of divine virtue is consecrated and dedicated to God, while the other, which has aspired to the concerns of human ill-fortune, is dedicated to fugitive becoming; and indeed the lot that falls to this one the oracles call the "one sent away" (Lev. 16:8), because it emigrates, is settled apart, and is driven far from wisdom.

Just as there are, among coins, those that bear a stamp and those that do not, so too, among the many things that exist in nature, does it not seem to you that the unseen divider divides them all into equal portions, assigning the stamped and approved to the lover of learning, but the unformed and unstamped to the ignorant? For it says, "the unmarked belonged to Laban, and the marked to Jacob" (Gen. 30:42).

For the soul too is, as one of the ancients said, a waxen tablet: when it is hard and resistant it pushes away and shakes off the impressions brought to it and necessarily remains unshaped, but when it is pliable and yields moderately it receives deep impressions, and having taken the stampings, preserves with the utmost care the ineffaceable forms

that have been imprinted upon it. Wonderful too is the equal division of the blood of the sacrifices, which Moses the high priest, using nature as his teacher, carried out. For it says, "taking half of the blood, he poured it into bowls; and the other half he poured out at the altar" (Exod. 24:6), so as to teach that the sacred kind of wisdom is twofold, the one divine, the other human;

and the divine kind is unmixed and unblended, and for this reason it is poured out as a libation to God, who, in his solitary unity, is unmixed, unblended, and a monad; while the human kind is mixed and blended, and this is scattered over the mixed, composite, and blended kind that is ours, producing concord and fellowship, and — what else could one call it? — a blending of parts and characters.

But indeed, of the soul too, the unmixed and unblended part is the purest mind, which, breathed in from above out of heaven, when it is kept free of disease and unharmed, is fittingly given back whole, transformed into the elements of a sacred libation, to the one who breathed it in and kept it free from every affliction; while the mixed kind, in turn, is that of the senses, for which nature has fashioned its own proper bowls.

The bowls are: for sight, the eyes; for hearing, the ears; and the nostrils for smell, and the fitting receptacles for the others. Into these bowls the sacred word pours the blood, deeming it right that the irrational part of us be given soul and become, in a certain manner, rational, following the circuits of admonition and keeping itself pure from the deceitful power of the sensible objects that drag it down.

Was it not in this same manner that the sacred half-shekel too was divided, so that the half of it, the drachma, we might consecrate, laying it down as ransom for our own soul (Exod. 30:12-13) — the soul which God alone, the only one who is truly free and who makes others free, releases with all his power when entreated from the harsh and bitter tyranny of the passions and wrongdoings, and sometimes even without entreaty — while the other part we should leave to the servile and slavish kind, which the one who says has come to share: "I have loved my master" — the mind that rules within me — "and my wife" — sense-perception, the beloved keeper of the house of the passions — "and my children" — their evil offspring — "I will not go out free" (Exod. 21:5).

For it is necessary that to such a kind too a lot without inheritance and cast out be given from the half-shekel, opposed to the drachma and the monad that has been consecrated; and it is the nature of the monad to admit neither addition nor subtraction, being an image of the God who alone is complete.

For all other things are, of themselves, loose and slack, and if at any point they are made compact, it is by the divine word that they are bound together. For this is the glue and the bond that has filled all things full of substance; but he who has bound and woven each thing together is himself, in the proper sense, full of himself, having no need whatsoever of anything else.

Fittingly, then, Moses will say: "the rich man shall not add, and the poor man shall not subtract from the half of the half-shekel" (Exod. 30:15), which is, as I said, the drachma and the monad; of which every number might say that line of poetry: "in you I will end, and from you I will begin."

For the number infinite upon infinite that arises through composition ends, when it is resolved, in the monad, and again begins from the monad, being composed up into an unbounded multitude. For this reason they called this not a number but the element and origin of number — those, that is, whose concern it is to inquire into such things.

Further, then, the heavenly food of the soul — it is wisdom — which he calls manna, the divine word distributes equally to all who are to use it, having taken particular care for equality. Moses bears witness to this, saying: "he who gathered much had no excess, and he who gathered little had no lack" (Exod. 16:18), when they made use of that wonderful and highly contested measure, proportion; by which it came to be understood that each person gathered for himself "according to what was fitting" (Exod. 16:16) not so much men as reckonings and characters; for what fell to each was allotted by providence, so that he should neither fall short

nor again have any excess. Something similar to this equality according to proportion is also to be found in what is called the Passover. Now Passover occurs whenever the soul practices unlearning the irrational passion, and willingly undergoes the reasonable good-passion; for it has been laid down, "if there are too few in

the household to be sufficient for the lamb, he shall take in his neighbor next door, according to the number of souls, so that each is counted for as much as is enough for him" (Exod. 12:4), each finding the portion for which he is fit and which he needs.

And when he wishes to distribute virtue, in the manner of land, to those who dwell in it, he directs that possession be increased for the more numerous and diminished for the fewer (Num. 35:8), holding it just that the greater should not be deemed worthy of the lesser portions — for they would then be empty of knowledge — nor the lesser worthy of the greater; for they would be unable to contain their magnitude.

The clearest proof of equality according to number is the sacred gifts of the twelve rulers (Num. 7:10 ff.), and further the portions distributed from the gifts to the priests; for it says, "to each of the sons of Aaron the portion shall be equal" (Lev. 6:40 [6:33 LXX]).

Very beautiful too is the equality found in the composition of the substances burned as incense; for it is said: "take for yourself spices, stacte, onycha, and sweet galbanum, and pure frankincense, equal weight for equal weight, and they shall make of it an incense, a perfumer's compound, the work of a pure blending, a holy work" (Exod. 30:34-35). For it says that each of the parts must be joined to each in equal measure, for the blending of the whole.

These four ingredients, I think, from which the incense is compounded, are symbols of the elements from which the whole universe was made. For he likens stacte to water, onycha to earth, galbanum to air, and the transparent frankincense to fire; for stacte, named from its drops, is watery, while onycha is dry and earthy; and to galbanum was added the quality of fragrance in reference to the manifestation of air — for that which is sweet-smelling is in the air — while to frankincense was added transparency, as an indication of light.

For this reason he also kept apart the heavy substances from the light ones, uniting some by a connective conjunction and setting forth others disjointedly; for he said, "take for yourself spices, stacte, onycha" — these without a connective, symbols of the heavy things, water and earth — and then, from a fresh beginning, joined together, "and sweet galbanum, and transparent frankincense" — these again by themselves, signs of the light things, air and fire.

And it has come about that the harmonious composition and blending of these is, in truth, the most venerable and most perfect holy work: the universe, for which, through the symbol of the incense, he thinks it right to give thanks to its Maker, so that in word the compound prepared by the perfumer's art is burned as incense, while in deed the entire universe, fashioned by divine wisdom, is offered up, consumed as a whole burnt offering, morning and evening.

For a life befitting the universe is to give thanks continually and without interruption to the Father and Maker, all but burning oneself as incense and dissolving oneself into one's elements, in token that one lays up nothing in store for oneself, but...

A life fitting for the world is to give thanks continually and without interruption to the Father and Maker, all but consuming itself like incense and dissolving itself into its elements, as a demonstration that it stores nothing up for itself, but

dedicates itself wholly as a votive offering to the God who begot it. I also marvel at the one who ran the sacred word swiftly and without pausing for breath, with such urgency, "that he might stand between the dead and the living"; for Moses says, "immediately the destruction was checked" (Num. 16:47-48). But it was not going to be checked, and the forces crushing and breaking and shattering our soul were not going to be lightened, unless the one dear to God had distinguished and walled off, by a partition of reasonings, the holy - who truly live - from the unholy, who are in truth dead.

For often, by mere nearness to the sick, even those in the soundest health, having caught their disease, have come near to death. But it was impossible for this still to happen to those separated by a boundary fixed between them, of the greatest power, which would repel the assaults and incursions of the worse part against the better.

And I have marveled still more, whenever, listening closely to the sacred sayings, I am taught anew in what manner the cloud entered between the Egyptian army and the Israelite (Exod. 14:20). For it no longer allowed the self-indulgent and godless part to pursue the self-controlled race dear to God - the cloud, a weapon that was a shelter and salvation for its friends, but a defense and instrument of punishment against its enemies.

For upon minds that flourish in virtue it gently sprinkles wisdom, wisdom that by nature is untouched by any evil, but upon those that are barren and unfruitful of knowledge it pours down, all at once, punishments like heavy snow, bringing a flood, a most pitiable destruction.

But to the archangel, the eldest Word, the Father who begot all things gave a special gift, that standing on the boundary he might separate the created from the Creator. And this same being is a suppliant of mortal humanity, forever wasting away in longing toward the incorruptible, and an ambassador of the Ruler to those under his rule.

He exults in this gift and, magnifying it, describes it, saying, "and I stood between the Lord and you" (Deut. 5:5) - being neither uncreated as God is, nor created as you are, but midway between the two extremes, a hostage to both: to the one who planted him, a pledge that the created order would never wholly rebel and revolt, choosing disorder in place of order; and to the offspring, a ground for good hope that the merciful God will never overlook his own work. "For I stand as herald," he says, "proclaiming peaceable things to creation, on behalf of that God who has resolved to abolish wars and who forever keeps the peace."

Having taught us, then, about division into equal parts, the sacred word leads us also to the knowledge of opposites, saying that the divided pieces "he placed facing one another" (Gen. 15:10). For indeed, virtually everything in the world is by nature composed of opposites; and one must begin from the first things.

Hot is the opposite of cold, dry of moist, light of heavy, darkness of light, night of day; and in heaven the fixed stars are opposite to the wandering ones in their motion, while in the air clear weather is opposite to cloud, calm to wind, summer to winter, spring to autumn - for in the one, things on earth bloom, while in the other they wither. Again, the sweetness of water is opposite to bitterness, and barren earth to fruitful.

And the other oppositions are equally plain: bodies and things without body, ensouled and soulless, rational and irrational, mortal and immortal, perceptible and intelligible, comprehensible and incomprehensible, elements and their products, beginning and end, coming-to-be and passing away, life and death, sickness and health, white and black, right and left, justice and injustice, prudence and folly, courage and cowardice, self-control and license, virtue and vice, and every form of the one set matched against every form of the other.

Again, literacy and illiteracy, musical skill and its lack, education and its lack, and in general skill and unskill; and within the arts, vowel sounds and consonants, high and low notes, straight lines and curved.

And among animals and plants, barren and fertile, prolific and sparing in offspring, egg-bearing and live-bearing, soft-bodied and shelled, wild and tame, solitary and gregarious.

And again poverty and wealth, reputation and disrepute, low birth and noble birth, want and abundance, war and peace, law and lawlessness, natural aptitude and its lack, effortlessness and toil, youth and old age, incapacity and capacity, weakness and strength. And what need is there to gather up each particular instance, since they are without limit and beyond counting in their multitude?

Most beautifully, then, does the interpreter of the facts of nature, taking pity on our idleness and lack of practice, teach us abundantly on every occasion, as he does now, that the position of each pair facing one another belongs not to whole things but to divided portions; for the two opposites together form a single whole, and it is by the cutting of this whole that the opposites become recognizable.

Is this not what the Greeks say the great Heraclitus, celebrated among them, made the chief point of his own philosophy, and boasts of it as though it were a new discovery? For it is an ancient discovery of Moses, that opposites are produced by dividing a single thing that contains the principle of both, as has been clearly shown.

These points we shall pursue with more precision elsewhere. But it is worth not passing over this either: the so-called half-pieces of the three animals, once each was divided in two, came to six, so that the seventh, the divider, is the Word, which sets the two triads apart, itself established in the middle.

The same thing seems to me to be signified most clearly also in the sacred lampstand. For it was fashioned with six branches, three on each side, and a seventh, itself the middle one, dividing and separating the two triads. For it is hammered work, a skillful and approved work of God, made from a single piece of pure gold (Exod. 25:30; 38:13-14); for the one thing that is truly single and pure has of itself alone begotten the motherless number seven, without making any use at all of matter.

Those who sing the praises of gold list many other points in its favor, but two stand above the rest: first, that it does not admit rust; second, that, remaining unbroken, it can be beaten and poured out into the thinnest of sheets. It has fittingly become, then, a symbol of a greater nature, one that, stretched and poured out and having reached everywhere, is wholly full through and through, harmoniously weaving all other things together as well.

Speaking again about the lampstand mentioned above, the craftsman of these words says, "from the branches there project shoots, three on each side, equal to one another; and their lamp-cups, which are on the tips, are almond-shaped, from them; and the flower-ornaments upon them, so that the lamps may rest on them, and the seventh flower-ornament at the tip of the lamp-cup on the very top, entirely solid gold; and seven golden lamps upon it" (Exod. 38:15-17).

So it has now been established through many considerations that the six is divided into two triads by the seventh, middle Word, just as it now stands; for the whole lampstand, together with its most general parts, is six - so it was constructed - having seven lamp-cups, seven flower-ornaments, seven lamps.

They are divided, the lamps by the seventh, and likewise the flower-ornaments by the middle one, and the lamp-cups in the same way by the seventh and middle one, and the six branches and the shoots growing out from them, equal in number,

by the very stem of the seventh. But the argument concerning each point, being lengthy, must be deferred to another time. This much alone must be recalled: that the sacred lampstand and its seven lamps are a copy of the dance of the seven planets in heaven. How so?

Someone might perhaps ask; we shall answer that just as the lamps do, so too does each of the planets give light; for being the brightest of bodies, they send their most radiant rays all the way to earth, and especially the one in the middle of the seven, the sun.

And I call it the middle one not only because it occupies the middle position, as some have thought fitting, but also because it deserves, on every ground, to be attended and escorted by those stationed on either side as bodyguards, on account of its dignity and its magnitude and the benefits it provides to all things upon earth.

Since human beings have not firmly grasped the order of the planets - and indeed what else among the things of heaven have they been able to comprehend with certainty? - they offer conjectures; but those seem to me to guess best who have assigned the middle position to the sun, saying that three lie above it and an equal number below it: above it, Phainon, Phaethon, and Pyroeis, then the sun, and below it, Stilbon, Phosphoros, and the moon, neighbor of the air.

Wishing, then, that there should exist among us an earthly copy of the seven-shining archetype, the heavenly sphere, the craftsman ordered that this most beautiful work, the lampstand, be made. And its resemblance to the soul has also been shown: for the soul has three parts, and each of these parts, as has been shown, is divided in two, so that six portions come to be, and the seventh, fittingly, was the divider of them all, the sacred and posited Word.

It is worth pausing over one further point. Of the three sacred furnishings — the lampstand, the table, and the incense altar — the incense altar, as we showed earlier, refers to thanksgiving for the elements, since it too contains a portion of each of the four: earth in its wood, water in the aromatic gums (for these first melt into liquid drops and are then dissolved again), air in the rising smoke, and fire in what is kindled; and the blended incense of frankincense, galbanum, onycha, and myrrh (Exod. 30:34) is a symbol of the elements. The table refers to thanksgiving for the products that sustain mortal life — for loaves and libations are set upon it (Num. 4:7), which all things that need nourishment must use. And the lampstand refers to thanksgiving for everything in the heavens, so that no part of the cosmos should be found guilty of ingratitude, but that we should know that every part of it gives thanks — the elements and their products, not only those on earth but those in heaven as well.

It is worth asking why, having stated the measurements of the table and the incense altar, he recorded none for the lampstand. Perhaps it is because the elements and the mortal products, of which the table and the incense altar are symbols, are measured, being bounded by heaven — for that which contains is always the measure of what it contains — whereas heaven, of which the lampstand is the symbol, is unbounded in magnitude.

For it is contained by no body, neither one equal to it in size nor one infinite, nor even — according to Moses — by a void, on account of the mythical doctrine of a sale of the elements at the world's conflagration. Its boundary is God, its charioteer and pilot.

Just as Being itself cannot be comprehended, so too what is bounded by it is not measured by measures that reach our understanding, and perhaps this is because, being spherical and turned with utmost precision into a globe, it has no share in length or breadth.

Having said what was fitting about these matters, he adds: "But the birds he did not divide" (Gen. 15:10), calling by the name of birds the two winged reasons that by nature range the heights — one the archetype above us, the other the copy existing within us.

Moses calls the one above us the image of God, and the one within us the impression of the image. For he says: "God made man," not as the image of God, but "according to the image" (Gen. 1:27) — so that each of our individual minds, which is properly and truly what "man" means, is a third impression from the Maker, while the middle term is the pattern of this one and the copy of that. By nature our mind has come into being undivided.

For the irrational part of the soul the Craftsman divided sixfold, fashioning seven portions — sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, voice, and the generative faculty — but the rational part, which is called mind, he left uncut, in likeness to the whole of heaven.

For in heaven too reason keeps the outermost, fixed sphere undivided, while it makes the inner sphere, divided sixfold, into the seven circles of the so-called planets; for what the soul is in a human being, that heaven is in the cosmos. So it comes about that the two intelligent and rational natures, the one in man and the one in the universe, are entire and undivided. That is why it says: "But the birds he did not divide."

Our mind is likened to the dove, since that creature is tame and lives familiarly among us, whereas its archetype is likened to the turtledove; for the Logos of God loves solitude and lives apart, not mingling with the crowd of things that come into being and will perish, but accustomed always to travel on high and trained to follow only the One. So the two natures — the reasoning within us and the divine Logos above us — are undivided, and being undivided, they divide countless other things.

For the divine Logos has divided and apportioned all that is in nature, and our mind, whatever objects and bodies it grasps intelligibly, divides into parts endlessly multiplied, and never ceases dividing.

This comes about because of its likeness to the Maker and Father of all. For the divine, though unmixed, unblended, and utterly without parts, has become for the whole cosmos the cause of mixture, blending, division, and multiplicity — so that, fittingly, the things made like it, the mind within us and the mind above us, being themselves without parts and undivided, will be able vigorously to divide and distinguish each of the things that exist.

Having spoken, then, of the undivided and indivisible birds, he goes on to say: "And birds came down upon the divided bodies" (Gen. 15:11) — using a play on the same word, but pointing out most clearly, to those able to see, the real conflict at issue; for it is contrary to nature for birds, winged in order to range the heights, to come down.

For just as earth is the most fitting place for land creatures, and especially for reptiles, which cannot bear even to crawl above it but seek burrows and lairs, shunning the upper region because of their kinship with what lies below, in the same way air is the natural dwelling for winged creatures, light things suited by their feathers to the naturally light element. So whenever creatures meant to travel the upper air come down and reach the earth, they are unable to live the life that accords with their nature.

Moses, on the contrary, approves without reserve of those reptiles that are able to leap upward. He says: "These you may eat, of the winged creeping things that go on four feet, which have legs above their feet, so that with them they can leap from the ground" (Lev. 11:21). These are symbols of souls that, though rooted like reptiles to the earthly body, are able, once purified, to range the heights, exchanging earth and corruption for the immortality of heaven.

One must consider those souls utterly weighed down with misfortune that, having been nurtured in the purest air and ether, have migrated downward, unable to bear their fill of divine blessings, to the region of mortal and evil things. But countless notions visit us concerning countless matters, some voluntary, some arising through ignorance, no different from birds — to which he likens the notions that come down.

Of these notions, the upward flight has been allotted the better rank, virtue traveling with it and leading it to the divine and heavenly choir, while the downward, worse flight is led and dragged by force by vice. Their very names reveal the opposition of these two regions no less clearly; for virtue (aretē) is named not only from choice (hairesis) but also from being lifted up (arsis) — for it is raised and elevated, since it forever loves the Olympian realm — while vice (kakia) is named from having gone downward (kato) and from forcing those who practice it to fall (katapiptein).

The hostile notions of the soul, then, that hover and flit about, themselves come down, and shamefully drag the mind down with them, since they attach themselves to bodies and to sense-perceptible things, not intelligible ones — to things incomplete, not whole, to things corrupted, not living. For they visit not only bodies but also fragments of bodies cut apart; and things thus divided cannot possibly receive harmony and union, once the spiritual

bonds, which were the most natural ties, have been severed. He introduces here a most true opinion, teaching that righteousness and every virtue are in love with the soul, while injustice and every vice are in love with the body, and that what is dear to the one is altogether hostile to the other — just as here; for hinting at the enemies of the soul, he brought in birds eager to entangle and fasten themselves upon bodies and glut themselves on flesh, and wishing to check their attacks and assaults, the good man is said to have sat down beside them (Gen. 15:11), like some presiding officer or counselor.

For since even his own kindred creatures were split apart by civil strife, and the hostile ranks were at odds with one another, he gathered a council of them all and deliberated about their differences, in order, if he could, by using persuasion, both to put an end to the foreign war and to remove the civil disturbance; for it was expedient to scatter those who had massed together like a storm-cloud in a spirit of irreconcilable hostility, but to reconcile the others to their ancient kinship.

The hostile parties, then, that are utterly unappeasable and irreconcilable, are written down as the follies and intemperances of the soul, its cowardices and injustices, and all the other irrational appetites that tend to spring from excessive impulse — leaping, throwing off the yoke, checking the mind's straight course, and often tearing apart and casting down its whole form as well.

But the clashes of those capable of being reconciled are of the sort that occur in the dogmatic disputes of the sophists; for insofar as they incline toward one goal, the contemplation of the things of nature, they might be called friends, but insofar as they do not agree in their particular inquiries, they engage in civil strife — as, for instance, those who say the universe is uncreated against those who maintain it came into being; or again, those who hold it will be destroyed against those who hold that, though destructible by nature, it will never in fact be destroyed, because it is held together by a stronger bond, the will of its Maker; and those who affirm that nothing exists but everything is only becoming, against those who hold the opposite; and those who declare that man is the measure of all things, against those who distinguish the criteria of sense-perception from those of thought; and, in general, those who maintain that all things are unknowable, against those who claim that a great many things can be known.

Indeed the sun and moon and the whole of heaven, earth and air and water, and virtually everything derived from them, have furnished the skeptics with disputes and contentions, as they investigate their substances and qualities, their changes and turnings and comings-to-be, and further their corruptions; and concerning the magnitude and motion of the heavenly bodies too, making their inquiry no idle matter, they hold conflicting opinions and cannot agree — until the man who is both midwife and judge, sitting down among them, examines the offspring born of each soul, and casts away what is unworthy of nourishment, while preserving what is fit and deeming it worthy of the appropriate care.

The matters of philosophy have become full of discord, since truth flees the plausible, conjecturing mind; for its being so hard to find and hard to hunt down has, I think, given birth to these logical factions.

"About the setting of the sun," he says, "a trance fell upon Abraham, and behold, a great, dark fear falls upon him" (Gen. 15:12). Trance is of several kinds: one is a raving madness producing derangement, brought on by old age or melancholy or some similar cause; another is violent consternation at things that happen suddenly and unexpectedly; another is stillness of mind, if indeed it is ever its nature to be at rest; and the best of all is inspired possession and madness,

The second kind occurs often. For it says, "Isaac was struck with great amazement and said: 'Who, then, is he who hunted game for me and brought it to me, and I ate of all of it before you came, and I blessed him? And blessed let him be'" (Gen 27:33). And concerning Jacob, who did not believe those who told him that "Joseph is alive and rules all the land of Egypt," it says: "he was amazed in his mind, for he did not believe them" (Gen 45:26). And at the exodus, concerning the assembly: "for the mountain," it says, "Sinai, was all smoking, because God had come down upon it in fire, and smoke went up like the vapor of a furnace, and all the people were greatly amazed" (Exod 19:18). And in Leviticus, at the consecration of the priests, on the eighth day, when "fire went out from heaven and consumed what was on the altar, both the whole burnt offerings and the fat" — for it says immediately: "and all the people saw, and were amazed, and fell on their faces" (Lev 9:24) — for such amazement produces terror and dreadful consternation. But it is not surprising also in the case of Esau,

that although he knew how to hunt, he is always the one hunted and outwitted, having acquired his skill to his own harm, not his benefit, while never earnestly devoting himself to hunting; and in the case of Jacob, that he hunts without having learned it, but moved by nature to this experience, and brings the game to the one who will test it, who will discern whether it is genuine — hence "he ate of all of it" (Gen 27:33).

For all the foods of ascetic training consist of these: inquiry, reflection, reading, listening, attentiveness, self-control, indifference to indifferent things. Of all these he certainly ate the firstfruits, but not all of them; for something had to be left even for the one in training, as prizes — food proper to himself.

"Before you came" is said with natural fitness; for if the passion comes into the soul, we shall not enjoy self-control. It also convicts the base person as slow, hesitant, and procrastinating toward the works of education, but never toward those of licentiousness.

Egypt, then, has taskmasters who hasten men on to the enjoyment of the passions, but Moses, on the contrary, earnestly commands that the Passover be eaten in haste, that the crossing away from these things be celebrated as a feast. And Judah says: "for if we had not delayed, we would already have returned twice" (Gen 43:10) — he does not say, "we went down into Egypt," but, "from there we were brought back to safety."

It is fitting, too, that Jacob marveled that the mind still in the body, Joseph, lives toward virtue and rules over the body rather than being ruled by it (Gen 45:26). And going through the other examples one could track down the truth in them as well. But it is not our purpose now to give a precise account of these matters, so we must turn to what follows. The third kind is found in the passages where he philosophizes about the woman's origin —

"For God cast," it says, "a trance upon Adam, and he fell asleep" (Gen 2:21), taking the trance to mean the mind's quiet and stillness; for sleep of the mind is the waking of sense-perception, and indeed the waking of the intellect is the inactivity of sense-perception —

and the fourth kind is what we are now examining: "about sunset a trance fell upon Abraham" — the passion of one inspired and possessed by God. But it is not this alone that establishes him as a prophet, but also a written text, set up like an inscription in the books, on the occasion when someone attempted to separate from him Sarah, virtue that rules by nature, as though she were not the private possession of the wise man alone but of anyone who merely puts on the appearance of prudence. "Restore," it says, "the woman to the man, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you, and you shall live" (Gen 20:7).

To every excellent person the sacred word bears witness of prophecy; for the prophet declares nothing of his own, but everything he utters belongs to another who is prompting him from within; and it is not permitted for a base person to become an interpreter of God, so that, properly speaking, no wicked person is ever inspired — this applies only to the wise man, since he alone is an instrument of God, a resonant one, struck and played invisibly by him.

At any rate, all whom he has recorded as righteous he has represented as possessed and prophesying. Noah was righteous — was he not immediately also a prophet? Or did he not, without being possessed, pronounce the blessings and curses he made concerning the generations to come (Gen 9:25ff), which were confirmed by the truth of events?

And what of Isaac? What of Jacob? For these too are acknowledged to have prophesied, both through many other things and especially through their addresses to their descendants. For the words "Gather together, that I may tell you what will happen to you in the last days" (Gen 49:1) were the words of one inspired; for grasping the future is not proper to man. And what of Moses? Is he not everywhere celebrated as a prophet?

For he says: "If there is a prophet of the Lord among you, I will be known to him in a vision, but to Moses in visible form, and not through riddles" (Num 12:6,8); and again, "There has not arisen since a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face" (Deut 34:10).

Excellently, then, does he indicate the one who is inspired when he says, "about sunset a trance fell" upon him (Gen 15:12), calling our mind, by way of symbol, the sun; for what reason is within us, the sun is in the cosmos, since each of the two gives light — the one sending forth perceptible light to the whole universe, the other sending to us the intelligible rays of our apprehensions.

So then, as long as our mind shines round about and circles overhead like a midday light, pouring itself out over the whole soul, we remain within ourselves and are not possessed; but when it comes to its setting, naturally trance and divine possession and madness fall upon us. For whenever the divine light shines, the human sets; and whenever that sets, this rises and dawns.

This is what tends to happen to the prophetic kind: our mind is evicted at the arrival of the divine spirit, and at its departure it moves back in again; for it is not lawful for what is mortal to dwell together with what is immortal. For this reason the setting of reason and the darkness surrounding it produce trance and God-inspired madness.

What follows, he weaves into the text with the words, "it was said to Abraham" (Gen 15:13); for truly the prophet, even when he seems to be speaking, is in truth silent, and another uses his organs of speech, his mouth and tongue, to declare whatever he wishes; and by an invisible and consummately skillful art, striking upon them, he produces sounds that are melodious, entirely harmonious, and full of the fullness of concord.

It is good to hear what things were said, foretold in advance. First, that God does not allow the lover of virtue to dwell in the body as in a native land, but permits him only to sojourn there as in a foreign country. "You shall surely know," it says, "that your seed shall be a sojourner in a land not its own" (Gen 15:13). But for every base person the region of the body is kin, and there he intends to dwell, not merely to sojourn.

This, then, is one lesson; and there is another: that slavery, ill-treatment, and, as he himself said, dreadful humiliation are inflicted on the soul by the little dwellings that belong to earth; for the passions of the body are truly bastard and alien to the mind, having grown out of the flesh in which the mind has taken root.

The slavery lasts four hundred years (Gen 15:13), corresponding to the powers of the four passions. For when pleasure rules, the intellect is lifted up and puffed up, exalted by a hollow lightness; and when desire prevails, longing arises for things that are absent, and it hangs the soul, as it were, from the noose of an unfulfilled hope; for it is forever thirsty but unable to drink, enduring a torment like that of Tantalus.

And under the dominion of grief the soul contracts and shrivels, in the manner of trees shedding their leaves and withering; for its vigor and richness waste away. And when fear tyrannizes, no one is willing to remain in place, but resorts to flight and escape, expecting that only in this way will he be saved; for desire, having a drawing power, compels one to pursue the desired thing even when it flees, while fear, on the contrary, produces alienation, separates a person, and drives him far

from what appears before him. And the dominations of the passions just mentioned impose a heavy slavery on those they rule, until God, the umpire and judge, distinguishes the one wronged from the one who wrongs, and takes the one out into complete freedom while rendering to the other the wages of his wrongdoing.

For it is said: "And the nation to whom they are enslaved I will judge; and after this they shall go out with much baggage" (Gen 15:14). For it is necessary that, being mortal, one be oppressed by the nation of the passions and take on the misfortunes proper to one who has come into being, but it is God's will to lighten the evils innate to our race; so that we too, at the beginning,

shall suffer what belongs to us, becoming slaves to harsh masters, while God will do what belongs to himself, having proclaimed in advance release and freedom for the souls that supplicate him, providing not only release from bonds and an exodus from the closely guarded prison, but also giving provisions for the journey, which he called "baggage."

And what is this? When the mind, having come down from heaven above, is bound by the necessities of the body, and then, without being lured by any of them, like a man turned woman or a woman turned man, into embracing pleasant evils, but remains true to its own nature, truly a man, able rather to master than to be mastered, having been nurtured in all the studies of general education — from whose contemplation it acquires a longing for self-control and endurance, sturdy virtues — then, migrating and finding its way home to its fatherland, it brings with it all the things of education, which are called "baggage."

Having said so much also about these things, he adds: "But you shall go to your fathers in peace, nourished to a good old age" (Gen 15:15). Therefore we who are imperfect are at war and enslaved, and scarcely find release from the fears hanging over us, but the perfect kind is unenslaved, unwarred-upon, nurtured in the most secure peace and freedom.

In this doctrine, Moses represents the good person not as dying but as departing, so that the race of a soul purified to the utmost degree may be shown to be inextinguishable and immortal, making its journey from here to heaven not by dissolution and decay, which death seems to bring about.

After 'you shall go' it is written 'to your fathers.' What fathers are meant is worth examining. He would not mean those who had lived in the land of the Chaldeans, the only kinsmen he had made use of, because by the divine oracle he had been separated from all his blood relations. For it says, 'The Lord said to Abraham: Go out from your land and from your kindred and from your father's house to the land I will show you, and I will make you into a great nation' (Genesis 12:1-2).

For how could it be reasonable that one alienated by divine providence should again be made a member of the household of the very people from whom he had been estranged? And how could one destined to become the founder of a different nation and race be assigned a share in the old one? For God would not have graciously given him, in some new and unprecedented way, a nation and race of his own, unless he had entirely severed him from the ancient one.

For this man is in truth an ethnarch and a founder of a race, from whom, as from a root, there sprang the shoot that observes and contemplates the things of nature, named Israel. Since it has also been decreed that 'old things should be brought forth from before new ones' (Leviticus 26:10). For what use is there any longer in ancient lore and old, well-worn customs, on those to whom, suddenly and beyond their expectation,

new goods poured down in abundance? The fathers, then, to whom the soul that has migrated returns, are not those buried in the tombs of the Chaldeans, but, as some say, the sun and moon and the other stars — for the account holds that the generation of all earthly things is brought about through these — or, as others suppose, the archetypal Forms, those intelligible and invisible patterns of these sensible and visible things, toward which the wise man's mind migrates.

But some have supposed that the fathers meant are the four principles and powers out of which the cosmos is composed: earth, water, air, and fire. For into these, they say, each of the things that come to be is properly resolved.

Just as nouns and verbs and all the parts of speech are composed of the elements of grammar, and are in turn resolved back into those ultimate elements, so too each of us, being compounded out of the four elements and having borrowed small portions from each substance, at appointed periods of time pays back the loan — if it is something dry, restoring it to earth, if moist, to water, if cold, to air, if hot, to fire.

These are the corporeal elements; but the intelligent and heavenly kind belonging to the soul will arrive at the purest ether as its father. For there is, as the account of the ancients has it, a fifth substance, moving in a circle, superior to the four by virtue of its excellence, out of which the stars and the whole heaven are thought to have come to be, and in accordance with this it must be supposed that the human soul too

is a fragment. The phrase 'nurtured in peace' has not been added without purpose, but because nearly the greatest part of the human race is nurtured amid war and all the evils that come from war. And war is of two kinds: one comes from external things — the war that disrepute, poverty, low birth, and their like bring on; the other comes from within, from one's own community — as regards the body, weaknesses, mutilations, complete disablements, and a heap of countless other afflictions; as regards the soul, passions, sicknesses, infirmities, and, through folly and injustice and the doings of fellow tyrants, harsh and heaviest uprisings and dominions that cannot be overthrown.

'Nurtured in peace,' then, means having acquired a calm and fair-weathered life, truly happy and blessed. When, then, will this come about? When outward things go well toward abundance and good repute, when the body's affairs go well toward health and strength, and when the soul's affairs go well toward the enjoyment of the virtues.

For each of these requires its own bodyguards. The body is guarded by good repute, abundance, and plenty of wealth; the soul, by the body's being whole and healthy in every respect; and the mind, by the theorems found in the sciences. Since it is clear to those who read the sacred scriptures that Moses is not speaking of the peace that cities observe: Abraham took on great and heavy wars, which he is shown to have overcome.

And indeed the leaving behind of his ancestral land was a heavy war for one who had migrated and could not settle again, but was carried here and there, wandering along deserted and untrodden paths, for one who had not put his trust in divine pronouncements and oracles. But it was also necessary that a third of the fearsome things be added in generous measure: famine, an evil worse than migration and war. What peace, then, did he bring about?

For, I think, to be a migrant and unsettled, to stand opposed to the irresistible powers of kings, and to be oppressed by famine, seems to indicate not one war but many wars of many kinds.

But in the interpretations that proceed by way of deeper meaning, each of these turns out to be evidence of unmixed peace. For want of the passions, and famine, and the destruction of the wrongs done by enemies, and migration from the Chaldean opinion to the God-loving one — that is, from the created realm of sense-perception to the intelligible and creative cause — bring about good order and stability.

To one who leads such a peace, a good old age is promised — not, of course, a long-lived one, but a life lived with wisdom. For a good day is better than many years, by as much as a shorter light is better than everlasting darkness. For a certain prophetic man said he would rather live one day rightly, with virtue, than ten thousand years 'in the shadow of death' (Psalm 22:4 [LXX numbering]), thereby hinting at the death that constitutes the life of the worthless.

Moses now establishes this same point by deeds rather than words. For the man he records as attaining a good old age he introduces as, of nearly all those before him, the shortest-lived, philosophizing and teaching us who it is that in truth grows old well — so that we should not accept the great conceit that clings to the visible body, full of shame and many reproaches, but that, seeing good counsel and steadiness of soul — which is old age's kin and namesake — we should call this a good old age and bear witness to it.

Hear, then, in this doctrine, that according to the lawgiver only the good person grows old well and lives longest, while the worthless person is shortest-lived, always learning to die, or rather already having died to the life of virtue.

It is said next: 'In the fourth generation they shall return here' (Genesis 15:16), not merely so that a length of time might be indicated, in which they will dwell in the sacred land, but also in order to represent the complete restoration of the soul. It comes about, as it were, in a fourth generation; and the manner of this is worth examining together.

The infant, once born, up to the first seven years, is allotted a childlike age of the soul, most like smooth wax, not yet stamped with the impressions of good and evil things;

for even what seems to be written on it is blotted out and confused because of its moistness. This, then, is the first generation, as it were, of the soul. The second is that which, after the age of childhood, begins to live together with evils — both those the soul is accustomed to generate from itself, and those it gladly receives from others. For there are countless teachers of wrongdoing: nurses, tutors, parents, and the written and unwritten laws established city by city, which admire what ought to be laughed at; and, even without teachers, the soul is self-taught toward blameworthy things, so that it is always weighed down by an abundance of evils.

For Moses says, 'The mind of man is intently set upon wicked things from his youth' (Genesis 8:21). This is the most accursed generation, symbolically speaking, but properly it is an age of life, in which the body reaches puberty and the soul comes into full growth, while the smoldering passions are fanned into flame, setting fire to threshing floor and standing corn and fields (Exodus 22:6) and whatever else they happen to consume.

This diseased generation, or age, must be healed by a certain third thing, as if by the medical art of philosophy, charmed by healthful and saving words, through which it will receive a purging of the immoderate surfeit of its sins, and a filling of the famished emptiness left by its right actions and its dreadful desolation.

After this treatment, then, in the fourth generation there grows in the soul both power and strength, in accordance with the most secure recovery of good sense, and an unswerving and stable firmness in all the virtues. This is what is meant by the saying: 'In the fourth generation they shall return here.' For in accordance with the fourth number just shown, the soul, having turned away from sinning, is shown to be the heir of wisdom.

For the first number is that according to which one can grasp the notion neither of good things nor of evil things, the soul being still unstamped; the second is that according to which we are carried along by our sins; the third is that in which we are healed, driving away the sickly things and outgrowing the prime of our passions; and the fourth is that in which we lay claim to complete health and vigor, when, turning away from base things, we seem to set our hand to noble ones — before which it is not

possible. As to how far this extends, he himself will make plain, saying: 'For the iniquities of the Amorites are not yet full' (Genesis 15:16). Such statements give the weaker-minded an occasion to suppose that Moses introduces fate and necessity as the causes of all that comes to be.

But one must not be ignorant that he, being a philosopher and a man who speaks of God, knows the sequence and chain and interweaving of causes, yet he does not fasten the causes of what happens to these. For he had a vision of something older still, riding upon the whole like a charioteer or a pilot; for it steers the common vessel of the cosmos, in which all things sail, and it drives, as a winged chariot, the whole heaven, exercising a sovereign and self-ruling kingship. What, then, must be said about these things?

"Amorites" is interpreted as "talkers," and the greatest good given to man by nature, reason, countless of those who received it have corrupted, treating the one who gave it with ingratitude and faithlessness. These are the sorcerers, the flatterers, the inventors of persuasive sophistries, who know only how to cheat and deceive, having no concern for truthfulness. They cultivate obscurity as well, and obscurity is deep darkness in speech, and darkness is an accomplice to thieves.

For this reason Moses adorned the high priest with Manifestation and Truth [Exodus 28:26], deeming it right that the speech of the virtuous person be perfectly clear and true. The many pursue what is unclear and false, and to it subscribes the whole deceived crowd of herd-like and neglected men.

So then, as long as "the sins of the Amorites are not fulfilled" - that is, the sophistic arguments, because they remain unrefuted but still possess an alluring power that draws us in by their plausibilities - we, unable to turn away and abandon them, remain, being enticed.

But if all the false plausibilities are refuted by true convictions, and their sins are shown to be full and brimming over, we will flee without turning back, and, all but weighing anchor from land, we will set sail out of the country of falsehoods and sophistries, hastening to anchor in the safest roadsteads and harbors of truth.

Such, then, is what is signified by the proposition: it is impossible to turn away from, hate, and abandon a plausible falsehood, unless the sin attached to it is shown to be full and complete; and it will be shown to be so by being carefully refuted through opposition to, and confirmation of, the truth.

He goes on to say: "And when the sun was at its setting, a flame arose" [Genesis 15:17], showing that virtue is a thing that comes late - indeed, as some have said, it becomes secure only at the very setting of life. He compares virtue to a flame: for just as the flame burns up the fuel laid before it but illuminates the neighboring air, in the same way virtue burns up sins but fills the whole mind with radiance.

But while the undivided and unpartitioned arguments still prevail through their plausibilities - the ones he calls Amorites - we are unable to see the most manifest and shadowless light; instead, we are in the condition of an oven that does not have pure fire but, as he himself says [Genesis 15:17], is smoking - we are smoldering with the sparks of knowledge, but not yet able to be tested and strengthened by clear fire.

Great is the gratitude owed to the one who sowed these sparks, so that the mind might not be chilled by the passions like the bodies of the dead, but rather, being warm and gently heated by the kindling-materials of virtue, might be fanned into flame until it undergoes transformation into sacred fire, as did Nadab and Abihu [Leviticus 10:2].

Smoke arises before fire, and forces those who draw near to weep. It is likely that both of these happen to us: for as we approach the rays of virtue we hope for perfection, and even if we are not yet able to attain it, we spend our time grieving, not without tears. For when great longing has melted into the soul, it hastens toward the capture of the desired object and compels one to be downcast until it is seized.

He has now likened to an oven the soul of the one who loves learning and has hope of perfection, since each vessel serves to solidify food as it is cooked - the one, food of perishable grain; the other, food of imperishable virtues. And the torches of fire, kindled as by a torch-bearer, are the judgment of God, the bright and radiant torches whose custom it is to pass through the midst of the divided portions - I mean, of the opposites out of which the entire cosmos is composed.

For it is said: "torches of fire, which passed through the midst of the divided portions" [Genesis 15:17], so that you may know that the divine powers, passing through the midst of both things and bodies, destroy nothing at all - for the divided portions remain unaffected - but they divide and distinguish, most excellently, the natures of each.

Rightly, then, the wise man is shown to be the heir of the knowledge just described; for it says: "On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying: To your offspring I will give this land" [Genesis 15:18].

What land does he mean, if not the one previously mentioned, to which he makes reference? Its fruit is the secure and certain apprehension of the wisdom of God, according to which he preserves all things, by his own divisions, keeping the goods unaffected by evil, in accordance with what belongs to those things whose coming-to-be is imperishable.

Then he adds: "from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates" [Genesis 15:18], showing that those who are perfect have their beginnings from the body and sense-perception and the instrumental parts, without which it is not possible to live - for these are useful for the education proper to life together with the body - but their ends rest in the wisdom of God, the truly great river, overflowing with joy and gladness and the goods from above.

For he did not mark out the boundaries of the land from the river Euphrates to the river of Egypt - for he would not have brought virtue down to the bodily passions - but on the contrary, "from Egypt to the great Euphrates." For improvements proceed from mortal things toward the imperishable.

← All of Philo of Alexandria: The Complete Works