Philo of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
The oracles given through the prophet Moses fall, as it happens, into three kinds: one concerns the making of the world, the second is historical, and the third is legislative. The making of the world is set forth in a manner altogether beautiful and worthy of God, beginning from the birth of heaven and ending with the fashioning of man. The one is the most perfect of imperishable things, the other of mortal things. In weaving together the immortal and the mortal in this creation, the Maker fashioned the world, making some things to rule and others to be subject and to come into being.
The historical part is a record of the lives, both virtuous and wicked, of men, and of the penalties and rewards appointed for each in every generation. Of the legislative part, one division has a more general subject matter, while the other consists of particular commandments: the ten chief pronouncements, which are said to have been delivered as oracles not through an interpreter but shaped in the very heights of the air and possessing an articulate, rational structure, and the remaining specific provisions proclaimed through the prophet.
Concerning all these matters, I have gone through as much as the occasion allowed in earlier treatises, and I have likewise treated the virtues which he assigned to peace and to war. I now proceed, in due sequence, to the subjects proposed, namely the rewards set before the good and the penalties set before the wicked.
For after training those who lived under his constitution, by means of instructions and gentler exhortations, and again by sterner threats and admonitions, he summoned them to a demonstration of what they had been taught. They came forward as though into a sacred contest and laid bare their own moral choice, exposing it to the clearest possible test of truth.
Then those who were athletes of virtue in reality were found not to have proved false to the good hope placed in them by the laws that had trained them, whereas the unmanly and ignoble, because of an innate softness of soul, collapsed before anything stronger could even press against them, and became a source of shame and laughter to the onlookers.
For this reason the former received prizes, proclamations, and all else that is given to victors, while the latter went away not merely uncrowned but bearing a defeat more disgraceful, and harder to bear, than any suffered in athletic contests. There, only the bodies of athletes fall, and these can easily be raised up again; but here whole lives fall, and once overturned they are scarcely able to be set upright again.
Concerning privilege and honor, and, on the other side, punishment, he sets forth an ordered and harmonious arrangement, by individuals, by households, by cities, by countries and nations, and by the great regions of the earth. We must first examine what concerns honors, since this is both more profitable and pleasanter to hear, taking as our starting point each particular case in turn.
The Greeks say that the ancient Triptolemus was lifted up into the air on winged serpents and sowed the fruit of grain over the whole earth, so that instead of eating acorns the human race might have gentle, beneficial, and most pleasant food. This story, like many others fashioned by those accustomed to telling marvels, is a fiction of myth, and we may leave it to those who have cultivated sophistry ahead of wisdom and deception ahead of truth.
For from the beginning, at the very first coming-into-being of the universe, God prepared beforehand what was needed for all living creatures, bringing it up out of the earth, and especially for the human race, to which he granted dominion over all earthborn things. For none of the divine works is left unfinished from birth; rather, even those things that seem later to be perfected by arts and by careful attention were laid down beforehand, already half-complete, by the forethought of nature—so that it may not be said, without reason, that acts of learning are really acts of recollection.
Let these matters, then, be set aside for now, and let us examine the most necessary sowing, which the Maker planted in a fertile field, that is, in the rational soul.
Of this the first seed is hope, the spring from which lives flow. It is by hope of gain that the merchant strips himself for action amid the manifold forms of moneymaking; it is by hope of a safe voyage that the ship's captain crosses the vast seas; it is by hope of glory that the ambitious man chooses a public career and the management of civic affairs; it is because of hope for prizes and crowns that those who train their bodies contend in the athletic games; and it is hope of happiness that lifts up the zealots of virtue to philosophy, in the belief that through it they will be able to see the nature of what exists and to do what follows from that vision, toward the perfection of the best lives, both contemplative and active—and whoever attains these is at once happy.
Some, then, have kindled the seeds of hope like enemies and have burned up the vices in their own soul, or, careless as farmers, have let them rot through idleness. And there are others who, though they seem to have taken care of them, have embraced self-love ahead of piety and have attributed the causes of their successes to themselves.
All these are culpable; only the one who has attributed his hope to God, both as the cause of its very existence and as the only power capable of keeping it unharmed and undestroyed, is worthy of approval. What prize, then, is set before the one crowned in this contest? It is the creature composed of a mortal and an immortal nature—man—no longer the same, yet not another, than the one who received the prize.
This one the Chaldeans call Enosh, which, when translated into the Greek tongue, is 'man'—receiving as his own name the common name of the whole race, an exceptional prize, as though no one should be reckoned a man at all who does not hope in God.
After the victory of hope comes a second contest, in which repentance competes—repentance which has no share in that unchanging, immutable nature that is always the same and in the same condition, but which, through zeal and love for what is better, suddenly and eagerly hastens to abandon the greed and injustice with which it has grown up, and to change its anchorage toward self-control, justice, and the other virtues.
Here too a double prize is set before a double achievement: for abandoning shameful things, and for choosing the most excellent things. And the prizes are emigration and solitude. For scripture says of one who fled the innovations of the body and deserted to the soul:
"He was not found, because God moved him elsewhere" (Genesis 5:24). By this transfer scripture clearly hints at the emigration, and by his not being found, at the solitude—and most fittingly so. For if a man has truly come to despise pleasures and desires, and has resolved, without deceiving himself, to stand above the passions, let him make himself ready for departure, fleeing without a backward glance from home, homeland, kinsfolk, and friends.
For habit is a dragging force, so that there is danger, if one does not depart, of being caught, held fast in a circle by so many charms, whose images will stir up again the calm that has settled over shameful practices, and will engrave fresh memories of things it would have been good to forget.
Many, at any rate, have been brought to their senses by travel abroad, cured of frenzied and raging passions, once the sight was no longer able to supply the phantom images that fed their pleasure. For once the separation occurs, the passion must beat against emptiness, since what would stir it up is no longer present.
Yet even if such a person emigrates, he must turn away from the crowds of the many and embrace solitude instead; for in a foreign land too there naturally exist snares like those at home, on which those who are careless and who delight in the company of the many must inevitably be impaled. Whatever is disorderly, unruly, discordant, culpable—that is the mob, and it is most unprofitable for one newly settled toward virtue to be carried along with it.
For just as, in those recovering from a long illness, the body is somehow easily susceptible, not yet set firm in a stronger vigor, so too in those whose soul is now healing for the first time, the powers of the mind are still loose and unsteady, so that there is danger the passion may again break out—the passion which is by nature stirred up by living together with people of a more careless sort.
After the contests of repentance, a third set of prizes is set before justice, whose adherent receives a double reward: safety amid a universal destruction, and appointment as steward and guardian, from every kind of animal, paired together, for a second creation in place of the one that was destroyed.
For the Maker judged it fitting that the same man should become both the end of the condemned generation and the beginning of the guiltless one, teaching by deeds, not by words, those who say the world is without providence, that in accordance with the law he had established in the nature of the universe, all the countless myriads of men who lived in injustice were not worth as much as one man who lived his life together with justice. This man the Greeks call Deucalion, the Chaldeans Noah, in whose time the great flood occurred.
After this triad, another triad, more sacred and more beloved of God, arises from a single kinship. For father, son, and grandson hastened toward the same end of life: to please the Maker and Father of all, having laughed at the things the many admire—glory, wealth, and pleasure—and laughed too at vanity, which is forever woven together out of falsehoods and embroidered with color to deceive those who look upon it.
This is the sorcerer, the one who molds lifeless things into gods, the great and hard-to-capture fortification, by whose contrivances and stratagems every city is lured, since it seizes beforehand upon the souls of the young; for having taken up residence from earliest age, it settles in until old age, except in those upon whom God has shone the light of truth. Vanity is truth's rival, and though it yields only with difficulty, it does give way at last before the stronger power.
This class is small in number but great and greatest in power, so that not even the whole circuit of the earth can contain it, but it reaches on to heaven; for, gripped by an unspeakable longing to contemplate and to be forever in the company of things divine, once it has searched out and traversed the whole of visible nature it passes at once to the incorporeal and intelligible, bringing along none of the senses, but letting go whatever in the soul is irrational and employing only that which is called mind and reasoning.
The leader of this God-loving persuasion, the first to migrate from vanity to truth, having through virtue acquired by teaching arrived at perfection, wins as his prize faith toward God; the one who, by good fortune of nature, has gained virtue self-taught, self-heard, and self-instructed, is given joy as his reward; and for the one who trains himself and has won the good through toils unwearied and unbending, the crown is the vision of God. What could anyone conceive more beneficial or more solemn than believing in God, and rejoicing throughout the whole of life, and forever beholding the One who is?
Let us examine each of these more precisely, not led astray by the names, but peering within and probing deeply with our minds. The one, then, who has truly believed God has, beginning from the two powerful faculties within himself — reasoning and sense-perception — disbelieved everything else that is generated and perishable; for to each of these a court and tribunal of its own has been allotted, to the one for the examination of intelligible things, whose end is truth, to the other for that of visible things, whose end is opinion.
That opinion is unstable and errant is clear from this: it relies on images and probabilities, and every image, by a beguiling likeness, misrepresents its archetype. Reasoning, the guide of sense-perception, supposing that its judgments are fastened upon things intelligible and constant and unchanging, is instead caught faltering over many things; for whenever it makes its assaults upon particulars, which are countless, it grows powerless and weak and gives up, like an athlete thrown to the ground by a stronger force.
But whoever has been able to look beyond and rise above all bodies and all incorporeal things, and to lean and stand firm on God alone, with a reasoning of unbending resolve and unwavering and most steadfast faith — this man is truly happy and thrice blessed.
After faith, joy was set before the man who acquired virtue from nature without a struggle and won the victory effortlessly; for this reward was named, as the Greeks would say, laughter, but as the Chaldeans call it, Isaac; and laughter is the bodily sign, visible, of an invisible joy in the mind.
And it turns out that joy is the best and finest of the good emotions, by which the whole soul, through and through, is filled with cheerfulness — rejoicing over the Father and Maker of all things, God, and rejoicing also over deeds done without any vice, even when they do not happen to be pleasant, on the ground that they occur rightly and for the preservation of the whole.
For just as a physician, in cases of great and dangerous disease, sometimes removes parts of the body, aiming at the health of the rest of the body, and a helmsman, when storms arise, jettisons cargo out of forethought for the safety of those sailing with him, and no blame follows the physician for the mutilation nor the helmsman for the loss, but on the contrary praise follows each, since each has looked to what is advantageous rather than what is pleasant, and has acted rightly,
in the same way one must always marvel at the nature of the whole and be well pleased with everything done in the world, apart from voluntary vice, examining not whether something has turned out contrary to one's own pleasure, but whether the world is driven and steered, in the manner of a well-governed city, unto its own preservation.
This man too, then, is blessed no less than the former, having no share in gloom or dejection, reaping a life free of pain and free of fear, never having touched even in a dream the harsh and dry life, because his soul in its every part is possessed beforehand by joy.
After the self-taught man who made use of a rich nature, third comes the man of practice, brought to perfection and receiving as his special prize the vision of God. For having laid hold of everything pertaining to human life and having engaged with all of it, not superficially, and having passed by no toil or danger, in the hope that he might somehow be able to track down truth, so worthy of love, he found among the race of mortal things great darkness — in earth and water and air and ether; for even the ether and the whole heaven presented to him the appearance of night, since all perceptible nature is indeterminate, and the indeterminate is brother and kin to darkness.
So, having closed the eye of his soul to the age gone before through his continuous contests, he barely began to open it and to discern and cast off the mist that had overshadowed it; for a radiance purer than incorporeal ether, suddenly shining forth, revealed the intelligible world with its charioteer.
The charioteer, shining round about with unmixed brilliance, was hard to see and hard to make out, the eye's vision being dimmed by the flashing rays; yet the soul, though much fire poured in upon it, held out with an extraordinary longing to behold him.
And the Father and Savior, seeing his genuine yearning and longing, took pity and, granting strength to the impact of his vision, did not begrudge him a sight of himself, so far as it was possible for a generated and mortal nature to receive it — not a vision manifesting what he is, but that he is.
For that which is better than the good, and older than the monad, and purer than the one, is impossible to be beheld by anyone else, because it is fitting for him alone to be apprehended by himself. But that he is — a name of existence that is comprehensible — either not everyone comprehends, or not everyone by the better road; rather, some have declared outright that the divine does not exist at all, others have wavered, holding both views at once as being unable to say whether it is or is not, and others, having received their notions about the existence of God from those who raised them by custom rather than by reasoning, have supposed they were being pious with good aim, though they have actually traced piety's outline as superstition.
But if some have also had the strength, through knowledge, to form an image of the Maker and Ruler of the universe, they have advanced, as the saying goes, from below upward. For just as men who have entered a well-governed city and observed the land, flourishing both in its hill country and its plain, full of crops and trees and fruits, and moreover full of every kind of living creature, and upon it seas and lakes poured out and rivers, both native and winter-torrents, and the temperate blending of air and winds, and the harmonious changes of the yearly seasons, and over all these the sun and moon and the wandering and fixed stars and the whole heaven fitted together in ranks with its own army — a true world revolving within the world —
marveling and struck with awe, they arrived at a notion consistent with what had appeared to them: that such great beauties and such surpassing order had not come to be of their own accord, but through some craftsman and world-maker, and that providence must necessarily exist; for it is a law of nature that what has made a thing should care for what has come to be.
But these men, divinely inspired and distinguished from the rest, as I said, advanced from below upward, as though by some heavenly ladder, conjecturing the craftsman from his works by a plausible reasoning. But if some have been able to apprehend him from himself, using no other reasoning as a co-worker toward the vision, let them be enrolled among holy and genuine worshippers and truly God-loving men.
Among these is the one called in Chaldean Israel, but in Greek, one who sees God — not what God is, for that is impossible, as I have said, but that he is — having learned this not from anyone else, not from things on earth, not from things in heaven, not from any of the elements or their compounds, whether mortal or immortal in turn, but summoned by God himself alone, who willed to reveal his own existence to his suppliant.
How this impact of vision came about is worth seeing by way of an image. Do we behold this perceptible sun by anything other than the sun? Do we behold the stars by anything other than stars? And in general, is not light seen by light? In the very same way, God too, being his own radiance, is beheld through himself alone, no other thing assisting or being able to assist toward the pure apprehension of his existence.
Those, then, who from the things that have come to be hasten to behold the unbegotten one who begot all things are mere conjecturers, doing something like those who, starting from the dyad, investigate the nature of the monad, when instead they ought, starting from the monad — for this is the origin — to consider the dyad; but
those who pursue truth behold God by means of God, light by means of light. The greatest prize, then, has been described. In addition to these, the man of practice receives a reward not pleasant to mention but excellent to understand: the reward is named, symbolically, the numbness of the broadness (Genesis 32:25); for arrogance and haughtiness are shown through the broadness, when the soul pours itself out beyond measure toward what it should not, while through the numbness of what is puffed up and swollen — self-conceit — a contraction is shown.
And nothing is so beneficial as for the impulses, when slackened and let loose, to be checked and made numb, the spiritual sinews relaxed, so that the immoderate strength of the passions, once weakened, may afford breadth of soul to the better part.
One must further examine that the prize most fitting to each of the three was assigned. For the one brought to perfection through teaching, faith was assigned, since the learner must believe the teacher regarding what he expounds; for it is difficult, or rather impossible, for one who disbelieves to be instructed.
But for the one who, by good fortune of nature, arrived at virtue, joy was assigned; for a well-formed nature and the gifts of nature are a cause for rejoicing, when the mind, gladdened by its own quickness and by well-aimed insights, finds without labor what it seeks, as though a prompter were whispering from within; for the swift discovery of what is sought is a matter for rejoicing.
But for the one who has acquired practical wisdom through discipline, the reward is sight. For after the active life in youth, the contemplative life is best and holiest; sending him to the stern as a pilot, God entrusted him with the tiller, as one competent to steer earthly affairs. For without scientific contemplation, nothing done is good.
Recalling one further man, and aiming not to speak at length, I will turn to what follows in my argument. This man was proclaimed victor, crowned in one sacred contest after another. I mean not those contests reckoned sacred by the many — for these are in fact unholy, offering prizes and honors for violence, insolence, and injustice in place of the utmost punishments — but those which the soul is naturally suited to contest, driving out folly and villainy by prudence, prodigality and stinginess by self-control, rashness and cowardice by courage, and, by the other virtues, the vices opposed to them, which benefit neither themselves nor others.
Now all the virtues are virgins, but piety is the most beautiful, having received the leadership as if in a chorus — piety, which Moses the theologian obtained as his special portion; through it, along with the countless other things recorded in the writings concerning his life, he obtains four exceptional prizes: kingship, legislation, prophecy, and the high priesthood.
For he became king — not by the customary means, with an army and weapons, and naval, infantry, and cavalry forces — but appointed by God, by the willing consent of those he ruled, whose voluntary choice God himself had wrought in them. He alone is recorded among us as a king without a voice, without possessions, without wealth, having embraced the wealth that sees in place of the wealth that is blind, and — if I must speak without holding anything back — regarding God's portion as his own estate.
The same man becomes a lawgiver as well; for the king must command and forbid, and law is nothing other than reason commanding what must be done and forbidding what must not be done. But since what is beneficial in each case is often unclear — for through ignorance we often command what should not be done and forbid what should be done — it was fitting that he receive a third gift, prophecy, so that he might be free from error. For the prophet is an interpreter, sounding from within the things God would have said, and with God there is nothing blameworthy.
The fourth is the high priesthood, through which, prophesying with expert skill, he will serve the Existent, and will offer up thanksgivings on behalf of his subjects when they act rightly, or, if they err, will make prayers and supplications of propitiation. These, being of a single form, ought to cohere with one another, bound together in the bonds of harmony and examined with reference to the same end, since whoever falls short in any one of the four is incomplete for leadership, having taken up a lame stewardship of the common affairs.
Enough, then, of the prizes assigned to individual men; prizes are assigned also to whole households and to populous kindreds. For instance, when the nation was divided into twelve tribes, there are leaders equal in number to the tribes, related not merely by a single house or kinship, but by a more genuine intimacy; for they are all brothers by the same father, and their grandfather and great-grandfather, together with their father, became the founders of the nation.
The first of these, who turned from delusion toward truth and looked beyond the trickery of the Chaldean sciences for the sake of a more perfect vision — a vision which, once he beheld it, drew him, and he followed the appearance, just as they say iron is drawn by the magnet stone — became, instead of a sophist, wise through instruction, and had many children, all of them culpable except one, who fastened securely the cables of his lineage and came safely into harbor.
To his son in turn, who had acquired wisdom self-taught and untutored, it happened that two sons were born: one wild and untamable, full of anger and desire, and in general having fortified the irrational part of the soul against the rational part; the other gentle and humane, a lover of nobility, of equality, and of freedom from vanity, ranked in the better order, a champion of reason, an adversary of folly.
This is the third of the founders, the one with many children and the only one blessed with good children, unharmed in every part of his household — like some fortunate farmer who sees his whole planting safe, tame, and fruitful.
Each of the three has a literal narrative that is a symbol of a hidden meaning, which must be examined. To begin with, it happens to everyone being taught that, as he advances toward knowledge, he leaves ignorance behind; and ignorance is prolific. For this reason the first is said to have many children, yet he judges none of the others worthy to be called his son except one; for in a sense the one who learns disowns the offspring of ignorance and rejects them as hostile and ill-disposed.
By nature, indeed, all of us, before the reason within us is brought to completion, lie on the border between vice and virtue, inclining as yet toward neither; but when the mind, having taken wing, forms an image of the good with the whole soul, through all its parts, it rushes toward it unrestrained and winged, leaving behind the evil born together with it as a brother — an evil it also flees, taking the opposite road, never turning back.
This is what he hints at in saying that twin sons were born to the one who had obtained a fortunate nature; for at the very beginning, together with its birth, every human soul bears twins in its womb, evil and good, as I said, forming an image of each. But when it obtains a blessed and happy portion, it inclines with a single pull toward the good, never once tipping the other way, nor wavering toward an equal balance.
But the soul that has obtained both a good nature and a good education, and, thirdly, has been trained in the doctrines of virtue, so that none of them remains merely superficial and loose but all are firmly fixed and stamped in, as if joined by sinews — this soul acquires health, and acquires strength; from these a good complexion arises out of reverence, and good condition and beauty follow.
This soul, having become a fullness of virtues through the three best things — nature, learning, and practice — leaving nothing empty within itself for the entry of anything else, brings forth a perfect number: two sets of six sons, an image and likeness of the zodiac circle, for the improvement of things here below. This is the unharmed household, complete and continuous both in the literal scriptures and in the allegories understood through deeper meaning, which received, as I said, the prize of leadership over the tribes of the nation.
From this household, as time passed and it grew into a great multitude, well-governed cities were founded, schools of prudence, justice, and holiness, in which the acquisition of the other virtues too is magnificently investigated.
The prizes long ago apportioned to the good, both in common and individually, have now been described in outline; from these one could most easily discern also what has been omitted. Next we must again examine, in a more general way, the punishments set before the wicked, one by one — since this is not the occasion to record them in every particular.
There arose, right at the beginning, when the human race had not yet multiplied, a fratricide. This is the first man to come under a curse, the first to cast upon the still-pure earth the unaccustomed defilement of human blood, the first to check the flourishing and budding of the kinds of animals and plants and of all things that thrive in fruitful abundance, checking their fruitfulness, the first to fortify destruction against birth, and death against life, and mourning against joy, and evils against goods.
What, then, must he have suffered to pay a fitting penalty — he who, through a single act, left out none of the deeds of violence and impiety? Perhaps someone would say: being put to death. This reasoning belongs to a man who does not see the great tribunal; for men think death is the limit of punishments, but in the divine tribunal it is scarcely even the beginning.
Since, then, the deed was unprecedented, its punishment too had to be found unprecedented. What, then, is this punishment? To live always dying, and in a sense to endure a death that is immortal and unending. For death is of two kinds: the one consisting in being dead, which is a good, or at least indifferent; the other consisting in the process of dying, which is altogether an evil, and the longer it lasts, the heavier it is.
Consider, then, how death is made to last on with him forever. There are four passions in the soul: two concerned with the good, present or future — pleasure and desire; two concerned with evil, present or expected — pain and fear. Of these, he cut away, root and all, the pair concerned with the good, so that not even by chance should he ever take delight in, or desire, anything pleasant; but the pair concerned with evil alone he implanted in him, pain unmixed with any cheerfulness, and fear unmingled with anything else.
For it says that he cursed the fratricide with a curse, that he should “groan and tremble always” (Gen. 4:12), and set upon him a sign that he should not be killed by anyone (ibid. v. 15), so that he should not die once and be done with it, but should live on forever, as I said, dying amid pains and griefs and unbroken misfortunes; and — hardest of all — that he should perceive his own evils, be weighed down by what is at hand, and, foreseeing the onrush of what is to come, be unable to guard against it, since hope has been cut away from him — the hope that God sowed into the human race, so that, having this kindred consolation, even those who have done irremediable things might find their griefs made lighter.
Just as, for the man swept away by a torrent, the nearby current that drags him along is fearful, but still more fearful is what comes bearing down from above, which presses on with unrelenting, unbroken force and, rising up, overwhelms and floods him — in the same way, among evils, those at hand are painful, but those that flow from fear are still more grievous; for fear supplies, as if from a spring, all that is painful.
These, then, are the things determined against the first man who became a fratricide. But other things were also determined against households that had joined together in a shared wrongdoing. There were certain temple-wardens and sacred servants appointed to the office of gatekeepers; these, filled with irrational arrogance, rose up against the priests, claiming the right to seize their honors for themselves.
Having set up as leader of their conspiracy the eldest among them, who together with a few accomplices had also been the instigator of the daring act, they abandoned the outer courts and the outer precincts and advanced upon the inner sanctuary, displacing those who had been deemed worthy of the priesthood by oracles.
Confusion, as one would expect, took hold of the whole multitude, since things immovable were being moved, the laws were being violated, and the order surrounding the sanctuary was thrown into disarray by dreadful lawlessness.
At this the guardian and protector of the nation was indignant. At first, using a rather grave manner but without anger — for he was by nature free from anger — he tried by argument to teach them to change their minds, and not to overstep the boundaries that had been set nor to introduce innovations into the consecrated holy things on which the hopes of the nation hang.
But when he accomplished nothing — for they were deaf to everything, supposing that, overcome by love of his own family, he had appointed his brother high priest and entrusted the priesthood to his nephews — he did not consider this the terrible thing, terrible though it was; rather he judged that thing altogether grievous, namely, if the choice of the priests, made according to the oracles, should seem to be disregarded.
Clear testimony to this is laid up in the sacred writings. Speak first of the prayers, which he is accustomed to call "blessings." "If," he says, "you keep the divine commandments, becoming obedient to the ordinances, and do not merely receive by hearing the things proclaimed but accomplish them through the actions of your life, you shall have as your first gift victory over your enemies.
For the commands are not excessive nor heavier than the strength of those who are to use them, nor is the good far distant, either beyond the sea or at the ends of the earth, so that one would need a long and toilsome journey abroad; nor did it suddenly dispatch a migration from here to heaven, so that one lifted up on high and winged could scarcely attain it. Rather it is near and very close at hand, established in three parts of each of us: mouth, heart, and hands" — that is, more figuratively, in word, in thought, and in action.
For if our counsels are of this kind, and our words are such as our sayings, and our deeds are such as these, and these follow one another bound by the unbreakable bonds of harmony, happiness prevails — that is, the truest wisdom and prudence: wisdom for the service of God, and prudence for the management of human life.
Now as long as the precepts of the laws are merely spoken, they meet with little or no acceptance; but when there are added actions that follow and accompany them in all the pursuits of life, then, as if led up out of deep darkness into light, they will be illuminated with glory and good report.
For who, even among those envious by nature, would not say that this alone is a wise and most intelligent race, to which it has been granted not to leave the divine exhortations empty and bereft of deeds proper to them, but to fill out its words with praiseworthy actions?
This race has not been settled far from God, always forming images of the beauties of heaven and being guided by a heavenly longing, so that if one were to ask what great nation this is, some would fittingly answer: the one to whom God listens when it offers its most sacred prayers, and draws near to its invocations made from a pure conscience.
Since there are two kinds of enemies — the one, of men, arising from a practiced habit of greed, the other, of beasts, employing a natural hostility without any such habit — each must be discussed in turn, and first that concerning the beasts that are enemies by nature. For these are hostile not to one city or one nation but to the whole human race, not for a fixed length of time but for an unbounded and unlimited age.
Of these beasts, some, fearing man as a master, crouch down in cowering hatred; others, bolder and more daring, attack first, watching for their opportunity — from ambush, if they happen to be weaker, or openly, if they are stronger.
For this is a single war without truce and without herald, as of wolves against lambs, and of all wild beasts against all men, both those in water and those on land — a war that no mortal is able to bring to an end, but only the Uncreated, whenever he judges some worthy of salvation: those peaceable in character, who embrace concord and fellowship, in whom envy has either never dwelt at all or has swiftly departed, since they have resolved to bring their own goods into the common stock for shared participation and enjoyment.
For if this good should ever shine upon our life, and we should be able to see that time in which the untamed creatures will at last become tractable — and long before that, the wild beasts within the soul will be tamed, than which no greater good can be found — or is it not foolish to suppose that we shall escape the harm done by beasts outside us, while we continually stir up within ourselves the beasts that make for dreadful savagery? Hence one must not despair that, once the things of the mind have been made gentle, the animals too will be made tame.
At that time, it seems to me, bears and lions and leopards, and the creatures found among the Indians, elephants and tigers, and all the others whose strength and might are unconquerable, will change from their solitary and isolated way of life to a gregarious one; and by a brief imitation of herd animals they will grow tame toward the image of man, no longer provoked as before, but, once reconciled, will hold their ruler and natural master in reverent awe. And some, in rivalry with the tractable and master-loving, will even, like little Maltese dogs, fawn with their tails in a more cheerful motion.
At that time too the tribes of scorpions and snakes and the other reptiles will have their venom rendered powerless. The Egyptian river also produces, along with the inhabitants of that land, man-eating creatures, the so-called crocodiles and hippopotamuses; the seas too produce countless forms of the most savage creatures. Among all of these the person of worth will become sacred and inviolable, since God has honored virtue
and granted to it as its prize immunity from harm. Thus the older war, the one that exists by both time and nature, will be dissolved, when the beasts have been tamed and have changed toward gentleness. But the newer war, the one that arose from greed through practiced habit, will be dissolved easily, since men, as it seems to me, will be put to shame if they are to be found more savage than irrational animals, once they have escaped the penalties and harm coming from those very animals.
For it will appear most shameful, as one would expect, that creatures venomous and man-eating and unsociable and incapable of fellowship should have changed and come into a covenant of peace, while man, an animal gentle by nature and akin to fellowship and concord, should be murdering his own kind without truce.
"Or rather," he says, "war will not pass through the land of the pious at all, but will collapse of itself and be shattered against itself, once the adversaries perceive against what sort of contest they would be engaged, seeing that the pious enjoy the unopposable alliance of justice. For virtue is magnificent and most august, and alone, by remaining at rest, is sufficient to render easy the bearing of great evils."
"Or even if some, in a kind of madness, should rush forward, possessed by an uncontrollable and inconsolable desire for war, then while they are still forming up they will boast and bluster with bravado, but when they come to the test of arms they will find that their boasting was empty, since they are unable to win; overpowered by a mightier force, they will flee headlong, hundreds before mere fives and tens of thousands before hundreds — they who advanced by many roads scattering before those who came by a single one."
"And some, though no one at all is pursuing them except fear, will turn their backs to their adversaries as an easy target for well-aimed blows, so that it will be a simple matter for all of them, from youth upward, to be cut down and fall. For 'a man shall come forth,' says the oracle, and, commanding armies and waging war, he shall subdue great and populous nations, God sending the aid that befits the holy — that is, undaunted courage of soul and mightiest strength of body, of which either alone is fearsome to enemies, but both together, if they should combine, are altogether irresistible."
"And some of the enemies, he says, will be judged unworthy even to be defeated by men, against whom he will array swarms of wasps instead, to fight on behalf of the pious, to their most shameful ruin."
"These men will not only hold firm victory in war without bloodshed, but also unopposed mastery of rule, for the benefit of their subjects — a rule that will come about through goodwill, or fear, or reverence. For they cultivate the three greatest qualities that contribute to an unshakeable leadership: dignity, formidable power, and beneficence, from which the effects already named are produced. For dignity produces reverence, formidable power produces fear, and beneficence produces goodwill; and these, blended and fitted together in the soul, render subjects obedient to their rulers."
These, then, he says, will be the first things to befall those who follow God and who always and everywhere cling to his commandments and fit them to each part of life, so that nothing wanders astray in sickness from the proper regimen; and second, wealth, which of necessity accompanies peace and rule.
Of wealth, that which belongs to nature is inexpensive: nourishment and shelter. Nourishment is bread and running water, which is poured out everywhere in the inhabited world; shelter is of two kinds, clothing and housing, on account of the harm that follows from cold and heat. Each of these, if one is willing to strip away the excessive and superfluous extravagance, is very easy to procure.
Those who emulate the wealth just described, welcoming the gifts of nature rather than those of empty opinion, and practicing contentment with little and self-restraint, will possess, in great abundance, even the wealth of luxurious nourishment, without having pursued it — for it will leap toward them as toward men most fit and most reverent in the proper use of it, gladly fleeing the company of the licentious and insolent, so that it may not, in passing them by, provide for those who live to the harm of their neighbors, the men of benefit to the community.
For it is an oracle that for those who keep the sacred commandments, the sky will rain down timely showers, and the earth will bear a harvest of every kind of fruit — the plain a harvest of sown crops, the hill country a harvest of tree-fruits — and that no season will be left empty of benefit, but through the continuous and overlapping succession of God's graces, "harvest will overtake vintage, and vintage will overtake sowing"
(Lev. 26:5), so that without failure and without interruption people are always at once gathering in one crop and looking ahead to the next, each waiting upon the other, so that the ends of the earlier crops, joining with the beginnings of the later ones, complete a kind of circle and dance, wanting nothing good.
For the abundance of what is produced will suffice both for immediate use and enjoyment and for the ungrudging surplus of what is to come, as the new crops flourish alongside the old and make up for their want; and there are times when, because of unspeakable fertility, no one will give any thought at all to what was gathered long before, but people will leave it unstored and untreasured for anyone who wishes to make free use of it.
For those whose true wealth lies stored in heaven, cultivated through wisdom and holiness, for them the wealth of possessions also abounds on earth, since the providence and care of God keep their storehouses forever full — because the impulses of their mind and the undertakings of their hands are never hindered from bringing to success whatever good things they are always eager to pursue.
But for those whose portion is not heavenly, because of their impiety and injustice, the possession of earthly goods likewise cannot by nature go well for them; even if it comes their way, it slips away again very quickly, since from the start it came not for the benefit of those who received it but to weigh their distress down all the more heavily — the distress that necessarily follows from being deprived.
"Then indeed," he says, "out of sheer overabundance and superfluity you will do what you now endure; for now, showing no respect for the laws or for the customs of your ancestors, but disregarding everything all at once, you fall short of your basic needs and court the houses of moneylenders and usurers, borrowing at high interest; but then, as I said, you will do the opposite."
For out of your ungrudging surplus you yourself will lend to others, and not a little to a few, but much to many — to whole nations, since everything prospers for you, both in the city and in the countryside: in the city through offices, honors, and good repute won by justice, good counsel, and public service in word and deed; in the country through abundance of necessities — grain, wine, oil — and of everything needed for a life of comfort. These are the countless kinds of tree-fruit, and further the good breeding of herds of cattle, of goats, and of the other flocks.
But what use is all this, someone might say, to a man who is not going to leave behind heirs and successors? For this reason, sealing his benefits, he says: no one will be childless, nor any woman barren, but all the genuine servants of God will fulfill nature's law concerning the begetting of children.
For men will become fathers, and fathers of fine children, and women will become mothers, and mothers of fine children, so that every household will be filled with a numerous kinship, with nothing lacking, neither in relation nor in name, of all that is attributed to one's kin — both upward, toward parents, uncles, grandparents, and likewise downward, toward sons, brothers, nephews, grandsons, granddaughters, cousins — all who share the same blood.
No one governed by the laws would die too soon or incomplete, nor be deprived of any of the ages of life that God has allotted to the human race; but rising step by step from infancy as though by a staircase, and fulfilling in each age, in due order of time, the numbers of years appointed for it, he will arrive at the last stage, which borders on death — or rather on immortality — the man who in truth grows old well, leaving behind him a household rich in fine and numerous children in his place.
This is what he foretold when he said somewhere, "you shall fulfill the number of your days" (Exod. 23:26) — with words at once fitting and proper. For the man without learning and without law is, as they say, reckoned neither in account nor in number, but for the one who lays claim to education and to the sacred laws, the first grace, once he has shown himself accounted worthy and approved, is to share in number and in rank.
And it is a marvel too that the fulfillment spoken of is not of months or years but of days, implying that every single day of the good man's life ought to be left empty and void of nothing, giving no room for sins to creep in, but that every part and interval of it should be filled full with goodness. For virtue and the good are judged not by quantity but by quality; hence he reckoned that even a single day, lived rightly, is equal in worth to the whole good life of the wise man.
This is also what he hints at elsewhere, saying that such a man will deserve blessing both coming in and going out, because the good man is praiseworthy in every motion and in every condition, within and without, a statesman and a household manager at once, so that he sets right what is within by household management and what is without by statesmanship, correcting whatever is expedient.
If, then, one man happens to be of this kind in a city, he will appear superior to the city itself; if a city, superior to the surrounding country; if a nation, he will rise above all nations, as a head does over a body, for the sake of being conspicuous — not so much for the sake of glory as for the benefit of those who behold him. For the constant sight of good examples imprints on souls that are not utterly hard and unyielding impressions much like themselves.
Hence it is said to those willing to imitate excellent and admirable beauties that they should not despair of a better change, nor of the return — as though from a scattering of the soul that vice has brought about — to virtue and wisdom; for when God is gracious, everything is made easy.
And he is gracious to those who feel shame and who change their moorings from lack of self-control to self-mastery, who condemn their former culpable life and abhor whatever shameful images they have imprinted on their souls, while they long for calm from the passions, and for stillness, and pursue eagerly a peaceful life.
Just as one might easily gather with a single command men settled at the ends of the earth, bringing them from the farthest bounds to whatever place he wished, so too the Savior, taking pity, could easily lead the mind — after it has wandered every which way for a long time, straying and being harmed by pleasure and desire, mistresses held in high esteem — out of pathlessness onto the road, once the mind has determined to flee without turning back, in a flight not the disgraceful kind so called, but the saving kind, than which one could not err in calling it better than any homecoming.
The external goods, then, have been spoken of — victories over enemies, mastery in wars, the securing of peace, and the abundance of the goods that come with peace: riches, honors, offices, and the praises that attend those who fare well, praised by every mouth, both of friends and of enemies, the latter out of fear, the former out of goodwill. But we must also speak of goods more closely one's own — those concerning the body.
He says, then, that for those who labor at virtue and who set the sacred laws as leaders over the words and deeds of their life, both privately and in common, there will be complete freedom from disease; and even if some sickness should occur, it would not come to do harm, but to remind the mortal that he is mortal, so as to bring down overweening pride and improve his character. Health will be accompanied by keen perception and by wholeness and completeness in every part, for the unhindered service of each toward the purpose for which it was made.
For God judged it right, as a prize, to grant a house well built and well fitted together from foundation to roof — and the house most closely akin to the soul is the body — both for the sake of the many things necessary and useful for life, and above all for the sake of this: that the mind, purified by perfect purifications,
having become an initiate of the divine mysteries and a fellow-traveler with the choruses and revolutions of the heavenly bodies, God honored with stillness, wishing it to have no share, sickening over none of the passions that the necessities of the body generate when they impose, through the excess of the passions, their tyranny; for the heavens either chilled something through or scorched it, and made it parched, or on the contrary made it flow — through all of which the mind is unable to keep straight the course of its own life.
But dwelling in a healthy body, it will linger and take its leisure with great ease among the contemplations of wisdom, having obtained a blessed and happy life; this is the man who has drawn deep and unmixed draughts of God's beneficent power, and been feasted on sacred words and doctrines.
This is the man of whom the prophet says that God "walks about" in him as in a royal palace; and indeed the mind of the wise man truly is a royal palace and a house of God; his God is called, in a special sense, the God of all things; and he too is called a chosen people — not of one of the rulers who govern only in part, but of the One who alone in truth rules, holy of the Holy.
This is the man who, a short time before, was yoked to many pleasures, many desires, and countless compulsions of vices and passions; whose evils of slavery God shattered, rescuing him into freedom; this is the man whose benefaction was not obtained without proclamation, but was made known and announced everywhere, because of the authority of the one who shielded him, by which he was not dragged down toward the tail but was conveyed upward toward the head.
These things are allegorized, expressed figuratively; for just as in a living creature the head is the first and best part, and the tail the last and most trivial — not even a part that completes the number of limbs, but only a fly-whisk against what flits about it — in the same way he says that the head of the human race will be the good man, whether a single man or a people, while all the others are, as it were, parts of the body, animated by the powers in the head and above.
These are the prayers on behalf of good men, those who fulfill the laws in their deeds; Moses says they will be brought to completion by the grace of the gift-loving God, who makes what is good august and honors it out of his likeness to it. Next we must examine the curses laid down against the lawless and unruly. On Curses.
As the first curse, he records, as the lightest evil, poverty and want and scarcity of necessities and complete destitution: for the seed, he says, while still unripe enemies will ravage, and when it has ripened they will suddenly fall upon it and reap it, working a double disaster—famine for its owners, abundance for their enemies.
for the goods of one's enemies grieve no less than one's own misfortunes. And even while the enemy is quiet, harsher afflictions by nature will not be quiet: for you will sow the deep, rich soil of the plain, but a cloud of locusts will suddenly swoop down and mow it clean, and what is left for gathering will be the merest fraction of what was sown; and you will plant vineyards with unstinting expense and untiring toil, such as farmers are likely to undertake, but when the grapes have ripened and are budding and hanging heavy with plenty, worms will appear and harvest them instead.
When you see the olive groves flourishing with an abundant mass of fruit, you will rejoice, naturally, in hope of a fortunate harvest; but when you begin to gather it in, you will perceive your misfortune more than your impiety: the oil, all the richness, will drain away invisibly, and the outer husk itself, empty, will be left behind to deceive the soul with emptiness. And in general, whatever is sown or whatever trees bear fruit
will be consumed utterly by blight. And other calamities besides those mentioned lie in wait, engineers of want and destitution. For that through which nature supplied good things to men will be made barren—earth and sky alike: the one miscarrying and unable to bring its fruits to term, the other turned to sterility, none of the year's seasons—not winter, not summer, not spring, not autumn—rising in their proper order, but all forced apart into a shapeless, disordered mixture at the command of a despotic power; for no rain, no
shower, no fine drizzle, no small trickle, no dew, nothing capable of nourishing growth will come; instead only what is destructive to growing things and ruinous to fruits, once they have ripened, will occur—prepared precisely so that nothing reaches completion. "I will make," he says, "the sky over you bronze, and the earth iron" (Lev. 26:19; cf. Deut. 28:23), hinting that neither will accomplish the works proper to it, the works for which it came to be.
For where has iron ever borne ears of grain, or bronze brought rain—things which living creatures need, above all man, that perishable being deficient in so much? He signifies not only barrenness and the ruin of the year's seasons, but also the birth of wars and the unbearable, unspeakable evils that attend them; for bronze and iron are the materials of weapons of war.
And the earth, too, will bear dust, and soot will be brought down from the sky above, bringing a most crushing harvest that leads to destruction by suffocation, so that nothing might be left out of what serves ruin. Populous kindreds will be laid waste, cities will suddenly be emptied of their inhabitants, left standing as monuments of a former prosperity and a passing wretchedness, for the instruction of those still capable of being brought to their senses.
So great a scarcity of necessities will hold sway that, alienated from these, men will turn to eating one another—not only strangers with no claim of kinship, but their own nearest and dearest: father will lay hands on his son's flesh, mother on her daughter's inward parts, brothers on brothers, children on parents; and always the weaker will be the accursed, evil food of the stronger—the feast of Thyestes itself will pale beside the extremities of disaster that these times will work on so grand a scale.
For along with everything else—just as, in times of prosperity, life is desired for the enjoyment of good things, so too in those grim times a great longing will be implanted to go on living amid a share of measureless and unceasing evils, all beyond cure. For it is a lesser hardship for those past feeling to cut short their griefs by death, as is the custom of those not utterly out of their minds; but those out of their wits, from sheer derangement, would wish to live to the greatest possible age, insatiably and unquenchably clinging to the depths of their own wretchedness.
Such is the nature of what seems the lightest of evils, destitution, to bring on further evils, once the judgment driven by God is set in motion: for although cold, thirst, and lack of food are hard, they would be most welcome in such times, if only they brought a swift and final death; but lingering on, wasting away soul and body together, they produce sufferings heavier than those recounted in tragedies, sufferings which, because of their extremity, seem to belong to myth.
Slavery is the most unbearable thing to free men, for the sake of avoiding which the prudent are eager to die, striving with love of danger against those who threaten to impose mastery over them; and an unconquerable enemy is likewise unbearable; but if the same person should become both at once—master and enemy together—who could withstand it? The power to do wrong, from despotic authority, combined with the readiness to forgive nothing, born of implacable hostility?
He says, then, that those who disregard the sacred laws will be treated by their enemy masters without mercy, having been brought under subjection not only by their enemies' attack, but also by their own willing choice, for the sake of avoiding the unwanted things which famine and scarcity of necessities produce; for some consider the lesser evils preferable, as an escape from greater ones, if indeed anything of what has been described could be called slight.
For in their servitude they will undertake the bitter services commanded of their bodies, and, worn down in their souls by the anguish of yet more bitter sights, they will give up: for they will see those whom they raised in their households, or planted with their own hands, or acquired as their own, become the heirs, turned into enemies, enjoying goods that are no longer theirs but stand ready for others; they will see the choicest of their own flocks feasted upon, sacrificed and dressed for the most pleasant enjoyment, by those who took them from the ones now deprived; they will see too the wives they married in lawful wedlock for the begetting of legitimate children,
who, thought to be chaste, keepers of the house, and devoted to their husbands, will behave like courtesans; and though they will rush to defend themselves, beyond mere flailing they will be able to accomplish nothing, every strength cut away and sinews severed. For they will stand as targets set up for those wishing to lead them off, plunder, seize, insult, wound—for injury, for outrage, for utter destruction—so that not one shot goes wide, but all find their mark and strike true.
Accursed will they be in cities and villages, accursed in houses and farmsteads; accursed the plain and whatever seed was sown in it, accursed the deep soil of the hill country and whatever kinds of cultivated trees grow there; accursed the herds of livestock, for they will be made barren and sterile; accursed all the fruits, for at the very moment of their prime they will be blasted by the wind.
The storerooms full of food and money will be emptied; no path to profit will prosper; every craft, every manifold undertaking, every one of the countless forms of livelihood will bring no benefit to those who pursue them; for the hopes of the diligent will come to nothing, and, in short, whatever anyone touches through wicked pursuits or deeds—deeds whose head and end is abandonment of the service of God—these are the wages of impiety and lawlessness.
And besides these, bodily diseases will attack each limb and member separately, eating away at it, and again wasting the whole body through and through, with fevers, chills, consumptions, savage scabs, jaundice, gangrenous eyes, festering sores that creep like serpents over the skin, disorders of the inward parts, upheavals of the stomach, blockages of the passages in the lungs that prevent easy breathing—paralysis of the tongue, deafness of the ears, blinding of the eyes, dimming and confusion of the other senses, all terrible in themselves, yet appearing not so terrible when set beside still heavier afflictions—
as the blood in the veins loses whatever life-force was in it, and the breath in the arteries no longer receives, as before, a saving blend from the outer air akin to it, and the sinews go slack and are loosed—
upon which follows the collapse of the harmony and concord of the limbs, once a stream of salty and thoroughly bitter fluid has first done its damage by seeping in, and, whenever it is shut up in narrow channels that have no easy outlet, being compressed and itself compressing, gives rise to sharp and hard-to-bear pains, from which arise gout and arthritic afflictions and diseases for which no saving remedy has ever been devised, but which remain incurable by any human contrivance.
Seeing these things, some will be struck with astonishment at how those who a moment before were plump, well-fleshed, and flourishing in the height of good condition have so suddenly wasted away, become shriveled, nothing but sinew and thin skin, and how women delicately reared and utterly soft, through the luxury that grew up with them from earliest age, have had both their bodies and their souls made savage together by a terrible affliction.
Then, then indeed, enemies will pursue and the sword will exact its penalty, and those who flee to the cities, when they think themselves to have reached safety, deceived by a false hope, will perish by the thousands, having plunged straight into their enemies' ambush.
And if even after this they are not brought to their senses, still veering off course and turning away from the straight roads that lead to truth, fear and terror will be implanted in their souls, and they will flee though no one pursues, and, as is the way with false rumors, they will fall headlong at mere reports; the lightest rustle of a leaf carried on the air will produce as much agony and panic as the harshest war waged by the mightiest enemies—so that children will disregard their parents, and parents their children, and brothers their brothers, each expecting capture rather than help from the others, and looking for safety only in fleeing on his own.
But the hopes of wicked men come to nothing: those who think they have escaped will be caught no less, indeed more, than those seized beforehand. And even if some do slip away unnoticed, they will still lie in ambush from their natural enemies; and these are the most savage of beasts, armed from within themselves, which God fashioned at the very first creation of the universe—to be, for those capable of being admonished, a fear, and for those beyond cure, an inexorable penalty.
Those who look upon cities razed to their very foundations will disbelieve that they were ever inhabited at all; and they will make proverbial the sudden reversals of fortune from splendid prosperity to calamity, cases as numerous as those that have actually been recorded—and there are unrecorded ones too.
Those who see the cities destroyed down to their foundations will not believe that they were ever inhabited at all; and they will turn into a kind of proverb the sudden reversals from splendid prosperity into misfortune, as many as were recorded—indeed, even those that were never written down.
Wasting sicknesses will penetrate even to the depths of the body, breeding despondency and distress along with anguish. Successive fears, shaking the soul up and down by day and by night, will make life unsettled and hanging as if from a noose, so that in the morning they will pray for evening, and in the evening for dawn, because of the afflictions plainly visible to those awake and the horrifying visions that come in dreams to those asleep.
The convert, lifted up on high by good fortune, will be looked upon by all, admired and counted blessed for two most excellent things: for having deserted to God, and for receiving as his most fitting reward a secure rank in heaven, which it is not permitted to describe; while the man of noble birth who has counterfeited the true coinage of good breeding will be dragged down to the very depths, carried off to Tartarus and profound darkness—so that all men, seeing these examples, may be brought to their senses, learning that God embraces virtue that springs up out of low birth, letting the roots go their own way and instead welcoming the shoot that has grown from the stock, because it has been tamed and transformed into fruitfulness.
Thus, just as when cities have been consumed by fire and the land laid waste, so the land—which has been thoroughly worked and worn down by the unbearable violence of inhabitants who banished the virgin sabbaths beyond the borders both of the land and of their own thinking—will one day begin to breathe again and lift up its head. For nature has shown the sabbaths of days and of years to be the only, or to put it more safely, the first festivals: for men, the sabbaths of days, as a rest, and for the land, the sabbaths of years.
But those who have veiled over this whole law—the sacred rites, the treaties, the altar of mercy, the common hearth from which friendship and concord were joined together (for everything proceeds by sevens and sabbaths)—the more powerful of them oppressed the weaker with continuous and unremitting demands, and they oppressed the fields too, always pursuing homeless gains born of greed, setting upon their desires unbridled and unjust impulses toward the insatiable.
For instead of granting to men—who, in the truest sense, are brothers, since common nature is their one mother—the truces prescribed after every six days, and instead of granting to the land as well the reliefs due after every six years, refraining from burdening it with sowing or planting, so that it should not be worn out by unbroken labors,
neglecting these beneficial exhortations that called them to gentleness, they oppressed with unrelenting compulsions the bodies and souls of all whom they could, and they cut away the strength of the deep soil too, insatiably exacting yields beyond its capacity and, through tributes not only yearly but even daily, wearing it down and breaking its neck entirely.
For these things, they will pay in full the curses and penalties described; but the land, its sinews cut and having endured countless afflictions, will be relieved once it has thrown off the burden of its impious inhabitants, and it will grow lighter. And when, looking about on every side, it sees none of those who tore down its greatness and dignity, but sees its marketplaces empty of tumult, wars, and wrongdoing, and full instead of quiet, peace, and justice, it will grow young again and flourish, and it will keep the seasons of the sacred sabbaths as festivals in stillness, gathering its strength to rest, like an athlete who has trained beforehand.
Then, like an affectionate mother, it will grieve for the sons and daughters it lost, who became a source of pain to their parents whether dead or—even more—while still alive; but growing young once more, it will bear fruit and give birth to a blameless generation, a restoration of the former one. For, as the prophet says, the desolate woman is rich in children and abounds in offspring—a saying that is also allegorized concerning the soul.
For whenever the soul is populous, it is filled to overflowing with passions and vices, as if surrounded by its own children—pleasures, desires, folly, licentiousness, injustice—and it is weak, sick, and, in its precarious state, dying; but once it has been made barren and childless of these, or has cast them off all at once, it becomes, by this transformation, a pure virgin,
and, having received the divine seed, it molds and brings to life natures worth fighting for, wonders of beauty—prudence, courage, self-control, justice, holiness, piety, the other virtues and good feelings—whose birth is a blessing rich in offspring, and whose very expectation, even before the birth, already brightens its weakness with hope.
Hope is a joy before joy—even though it falls short of the complete joy that comes after, it is nonetheless better than it in two ways: because it loosens and enriches the parched dryness of our anxious cares, and because, running ahead of what is to come, it brings the good news of the full good yet to arrive.
As for the curses and punishments, then, which those deserve to undergo who despise the justice and piety of the sacred laws and are led astray by polytheistic opinions—whose end is atheism—through forgetting the teaching native and ancestral to them, which they were taught from their earliest years, namely to regard the nature of the One as the supreme God, to whom alone those who pursue unfeigned truth instead of fabricated myths must be devoted—all this I have set forth without holding anything back.
If, however, they receive these powers not for their own destruction but for correction, and, filled with shame, change with their whole soul—first reproaching themselves for their wandering, and then confessing and acknowledging in a purified mind, before the truthful and guileless witness of their own conscience, all the wrongs they have committed against themselves, and afterward with their tongue as well, for the improvement of those who hear them—they will meet with the kindness of the Savior and merciful God, who has granted to the human race an exceptional and greatest gift: kinship with his own Logos, from which, as from an archetype, the human mind has come into being.
For even if they are in the farthest ends of the earth, enslaved among the enemies who carried them off as captives, they will all be set free in a single day, as if at one signal, since their sudden transformation toward virtue will strike their masters with astonishment; for out of reverence, their masters will release them
from ruling over their betters. And when they obtain this unexpected freedom, those who, only shortly before, were scattered throughout Greece and barbarian lands, on islands and on continents, will rise up and, with a single impulse, hasten from every direction toward one appointed place, each guided there by some vision more divine than is natural to man—invisible to others, but manifest only to those who are being brought to safety,
employing three intercessors for their reconciliation with the Father: first, the fairness and kindness of him who is being entreated, who always sets forgiveness before punishment; second, the holiness of the founders of the nation, because their souls, released from their bodies, display an unfeigned and unadorned devotion toward the Ruler, and are accustomed to make their supplications on behalf of their sons and daughters not without effect, the Father granting them, as a special honor, a hearing in their prayers;
and third—the reason on account of which especially the goodwill described above hastens forth to meet them—the improvement of those who are being brought into treaties and covenants, who have at last managed to come from a trackless waste onto the road, whose destination is nothing other than to please God, as sons please a father.
And when they arrive, the cities that had shortly before become ruins will be rebuilt, the desolate land will be resettled, and the barren earth will be transformed into fruitfulness; and the good fortunes of their fathers and forebears will be reckoned a small thing beside the abundant resources at hand, which, flowing like the ever-running springs of God, will secure deep wealth, both for each individually and for all in common, greater than envy can touch.
And the reversal of everything will happen all at once: for God will turn the curses onto the enemies of those who have repented, the enemies who took pleasure in the nation's downfall, mocking and jeering at it, supposing that they themselves would hold an unshakeable inheritance of good fortune which they hoped to leave to their children and descendants in succession, while they would forever look upon their rivals kept in a fixed and unwavering misfortune stored up for future generations as well—
failing, out of derangement of mind, to understand that even the brilliance they had shortly before enjoyed came about not for their own sake but as a warning to others—for whom, once they had abandoned their ancestral ways, a saving remedy was found: grief, at feeling the pain of their enemies' prosperity. So then, having wept and groaned over their own reversal, those to whom it did not happen to run wholly aground will run the double course back to their former, ancestral good fortune.
But those who laughed at their lamentations, who voted to hold public festivals on their days of ill omen, who feasted sumptuously through their mourning, and who, in short, made merry over the misfortunes of others—when they begin to receive the wages of their cruelty, they will realize that they were not sinning against people obscure and disregarded, but against men of noble birth who retained sparks of their good breeding, sparks which, once fanned into flame, made the glory that had been quenched only a short time before shine out again.
For just as, when the trunks of trees are cut down but the roots are not removed, new shoots spring up, by which the old, decaying timber is outdone and surpassed, in the same way, when in souls the smallest seed toward virtue has been left behind, even though all else has been stripped away, none the less from that small remnant grow the most honored and beautiful things found among men—through which cities, once again full of vigorous men, are resettled, and nations increase toward a great multitude of people.