Miscellanies 1.10.46–1.14.65

That is why the Savior, taking bread, first spoke and gave thanks; then, breaking the bread, he set it before them, so that we might eat rationally and, recognizing the Scriptures, live in obedience. And as those who use evil speech are no different from those who do evil deeds (for slander is the servant of the sword, and blasphemy causes grief, from which come the overturnings of life; these would be the works of evil speech), so those who use good speech draw near to those who accomplish good deeds. At any rate, speech restores the soul and urges it to goodness; and blessed is the one who is skillful with both hands. So neither should the doer of good be reviled by the one able to speak well, nor should the one able to speak well be disparaged by the one fitted to do good; let each act according to his nature. What the one shows by deed, the other speaks, as it were preparing the way for good deeds and leading the hearers to beneficence. For there is saving speech as there is a saving deed. Righteousness, at any rate, is not constituted without the word.

As receiving benefit is removed if we take away doing good, so obedience and faith are destroyed if neither the commandment nor the one who explains the commandment is received. As it is, we are well supplied with words and deeds for the sake of one another. But the eristic and sophistic art must be rejected completely, since the very words of the sophists not only bewitch and rob the many, but, using force, sometimes win a Cadmean victory. For that psalm is truer than anything: “The righteous will live to the end, for he will not see corruption, when he sees the wise dying.” Which wise does he mean? Hear from the Wisdom of Jesus: “The knowledge of wickedness is not wisdom.” He means the wisdom that the arts of speech and dialectic invented. “You will seek wisdom among the wicked and will not find it.” And if you ask again, “What kind is this?” “The mouth of the righteous,” it will tell you, “will drip wisdom.” The sophistic art is called wisdom only by sharing the name with the truth.

For me, I think, it is fitting to live according to reason and to understand what is meant, never striving for eloquence but content only to hint at what is understood. By what word what I wish to present is shown matters nothing to me. For I know well that to be saved and to help those eager to be saved is best, not to compose little phrases like ornaments. “And if you guard against being serious about names,” says the Pythagorean in Plato's Statesman, “you will appear richer in wisdom in old age.” And in the Theaetetus you might find again: “Ease with names and words and not examining them with exactness is mostly not ignoble; rather the opposite is unworthy of a free man, though sometimes it is necessary.” Scripture expressed this as briefly as possible, saying, “Do not be abundant in words.” For style is like clothing on the body, while the substance is flesh and sinews. One must not, then, care for the clothing before the health of the body. For the one who has undertaken the true life must practice not only a frugal diet but also a speech that is unadorned and not elaborate, if indeed we reject luxury as treacherous and prodigal, as the ancient Spartans rejected perfume and purple, rightly considering and calling the garments treacherous and the ointments treacherous; since neither is that preparation of food good which has more seasonings than nourishment, nor is that use of speech elegant which can delight the hearers more than benefit them. Pythagoras advises us to consider the Muses sweeter than the Sirens, teaching us to practice wisdom not with pleasure, and exposing the other kind of attraction as deceitful. One man is enough who sailed past the Sirens, and another one who answered the Sphinx; and, if you like, not even one.

So we must never broaden our phylacteries out of zeal for vainglory; for the one who knows, it is enough if even a single hearer is found. We can hear Pindar the Boeotian too, writing: “Do not blurt out the ancient word before all; sometimes the paths of silence are most trustworthy, and the word that prevails is a goad to battle.” So the blessed apostle insists very strongly, exhorting us not to fight about words, to no profit, to the ruin of the hearers, and to avoid profane empty chatter. “For they will advance further in ungodliness, and their word will spread like gangrene.”

This “wisdom of the world,” then, “is foolishness with God,” and of these wise “the Lord knows the reasonings, that they are futile.” So let no one boast, priding himself on human thought. For it is well written in Jeremiah: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, and let not the strong man boast in his strength, and let not the rich man boast in his riches; but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows that I am the Lord who does mercy and judgment and righteousness on the earth; for in these is my will, says the Lord.” “So that we may not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead,” says the apostle, “who delivered us from so great a death, so that our faith may not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” “For the spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is judged by no one.” I also hear those words of his: “I say this so that no one may deceive you with persuasive speech,” nor may the one who carries off as spoil creep in. And again: “See that there be no one who carries you off as spoil through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the elements of the world, and not according to Christ.” He does not mean all philosophy, but the Epicurean, which Paul also mentions in the Acts of the Apostles, disparaging it, since it abolishes providence and deifies pleasure; and any other that has honored the elements without setting the efficient cause over them and has not even imagined the Creator.

But the Stoics too, whom he also mentions, say, not rightly, that God, being body, pervades the most dishonorable matter. And by “human tradition” he means logical hair-splitting. That is why he also writes: “Flee youthful questions”; for such contentions are childish. “And virtue is not a lover of boys,” says the philosopher Plato; and our contest, according to Gorgias of Leontini, “needs two virtues, daring and wisdom: daring to endure the danger, wisdom to know the riddle.” For the word, like the proclamation at Olympia, calls whoever wishes, but crowns whoever is able. The Word does not wish the believer to be unmoved toward truth and truly idle; for it says, “Seek and you will find”; but it brings seeking to the goal of finding, driving out empty babble and approving the contemplation that fortifies our faith. “This I say, so that no one may deceive you with persuasive speech,” says the apostle, meaning for those who have learned to distinguish what these people say and have been taught to meet what they put forward.

“As, then, you received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in him, rooted and built up in him and confirmed in the faith”; and persuasion is the confirmation of faith. “See that there be no one who carries you off as spoil” from faith in Christ “through philosophy and empty deceit,” which abolishes providence, “according to the tradition of men.” For the philosophy that follows the divine tradition establishes and confirms providence; if providence is abolished, the plan of salvation concerning the Savior appears a myth, as we are carried along “according to the elements of the world and not according to Christ.” For the teaching that follows Christ both honors the Creator as divine and carries providence down to particulars, knows that the nature of the elements is changeable and created, teaches us to live so as to be made like God as far as possible, and to accept the plan of salvation as the governing principle of all education. The elements are worshiped: air by Diogenes, water by Thales, fire by Hippasus, and by those who propose atoms as first principles, who put on the name of philosophy, some godless and pleasure-loving little men.

“That is why I pray,” he says, “that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all perception, so that you may approve what is excellent”; since “when we were infants,” says the same apostle, “we were enslaved under the elements of the world.” “And the infant, though he is heir, differs in nothing from a slave until the time appointed by the father.” The philosophers too, then, are infants, unless they are made men by Christ. For if “the son of the slave woman will not inherit with the son of the free woman,” yet he is at any rate the seed of Abraham, having received his own gift not by promise. “But solid food is for the perfect, who through practice have their senses exercised to distinguish good and evil. For everyone who partakes of milk is inexperienced in the word of righteousness,” being an infant and not yet knowing the word by which he has believed and acts, nor able to give the reason in himself. “But test all things,” says the apostle, “and hold fast what is good,” speaking to the spiritual, who judge everything said according to truth, whether it merely seems or truly holds to the truth.

“Instruction without reproof goes astray,” and “stripes and reproofs give the instruction of wisdom,” reproofs, clearly, given with love. For “an upright heart seeks knowledge,” since “the one who seeks God will find knowledge with righteousness,” and “those who have sought him rightly have found peace.” “And I will know,” he says, “not the word of those who are puffed up, but their power,” writing to rebuke those who think themselves wise and suppose they are, but are not. “For the kingdom of God is not in word,” not the true word, but the one plausible according to opinion, “but in power,” he said; for only the truth is powerful. And again: “If anyone thinks he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.” For truth is never conceit; but the supposition of knowledge puffs up and fills with pride, while love builds up, being occupied not with conceit but with truth. Hence he says, “If anyone loves, he is known.”

Since the tradition is not common and public, at least for one who perceives the majesty of the Word, the wisdom spoken in a mystery, which the Son of God taught, must be hidden. Already the prophet Isaiah has his tongue cleansed with fire, so as to be able to tell the vision; and not only the tongue, but the ears too must be purified by us, if we try to be partakers of the truth. These things hindered me from writing, and even now I am cautious, as it says, of casting the pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn and tear you. For it is difficult to show words that are truly pure and transparent about the true light to hearers who are swinish and uneducated; for there are hardly any teachings more ridiculous to the many than these, nor, on the other hand, more wonderful and inspiring to the gifted.

“But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him.” The wise do not utter with their mouth what they reason out in council. “But what you hear in the ear,” says the Lord, “proclaim on the housetops,” commanding us to receive the secret traditions of true knowledge, interpreted loftily and excellently, and, as we heard them in the ear, so to hand them on to whom it is right, not to give out freely to all what was said to them in parables. But the sketch of these notes is truly … having the truth sown scattered and dispersed, so that it may escape those who, like jackdaws, pick up seeds; but when it meets with a good farmer, each of them will sprout and show forth the wheat.

Since, then, truth is one (for falsehood has countless byways), just as the Bacchants tore apart the limbs of Pentheus, so the schools of philosophy, both barbarian and Greek, each boasts that the part it obtained is the whole truth; but at the rising of the light, I think, all things are illuminated. All, then, Greeks and barbarians, who have reached out for the truth, would be shown to have, some not a little, others some part, if indeed any, of the word of truth. Eternity, at any rate, instantly unites in itself the future and the present, and indeed the past; but much more powerful than eternity is truth to gather its own seeds, even if they have fallen in a foreign land. For we would find very many of the opinions held by the schools (those which have not become completely deaf, nor cut off the natural sequence, as the women cut off the man, cutting off reason), even if they seem unlike one another, agreeing in kind and with the whole truth; for they are joined into one either as limb, or part, or species, or genus. Thus the highest string is opposite to the lowest, yet both make one harmony; and in numbers the even differs from the odd, yet both agree in arithmetic, as in shape do the circle, the triangle, the square, and all the shapes that differ from one another. And in the whole universe all the parts, even if they differ from one another, preserve their kinship with the whole. So, then, barbarian and Greek philosophy has torn off a fragment of the eternal truth, not from the mythology of Dionysus, but from the theology of the ever-existing Word. And the one who puts together again what has been divided and makes the Word one and complete, be sure, will behold the truth without danger.

At any rate it is written in Ecclesiastes: “And I added wisdom beyond all who were before me in Jerusalem; and my heart saw many things, wisdom and knowledge; I knew parables and understanding. And this too is a choice of the spirit, that in abundance of wisdom is abundance of knowledge.” The one experienced in wisdom of every kind would properly be the one who knows. Thus it is written: “The abundance of the knowledge of wisdom will give life to the one who has it.” And again this saying confirms more clearly what has been said: “All things are plain to those who understand” (and all things are Greek and barbarian; the one without the other is no longer all), “and right to those who wish to receive perception. Choose instruction and not silver, and knowledge above tested gold; choose also perception rather than pure gold; for wisdom is better than precious stones, and nothing of value is worthy of it.”

The Greeks say that after Orpheus and Linus and their most ancient poets, the first to be admired for wisdom were the seven called the Wise Men. Of these four were from Asia: Thales of Miletus, Bias of Priene, Pittacus of Mitylene, and Cleobulus of Lindus; two from Europe: Solon of Athens and Chilon of Sparta. The seventh some say was Periander of Corinth, others Anacharsis the Scythian, others Epimenides the Cretan (whom he knows as a Greek prophet, and whom the apostle Paul mentions in the letter to Titus, speaking thus: “One of them, a prophet of their own, said: Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies; and this testimony is true.” You see how he gives some truth even to the prophets of the Greeks, and is not ashamed, in speaking for the edification and shaming of some, to use Greek poems. At any rate, to the Corinthians too (not only here), discussing the resurrection of the dead, he uses a tragic iambic line, saying: “What is the benefit to me? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Do not be deceived: bad company corrupts good morals”). Others have listed Acusilaus of Argos among the Seven Wise Men, and others Pherecydes of Syros. Plato, instead of Periander, whom he considered unworthy of wisdom because he had been a tyrant, puts in Myson of Chen.

That the wise men of the Greeks lived somewhat later than the age of Moses will be shown a little later. But the manner of their philosophy, as Hebrew and enigmatic, must be examined now. They welcomed a brevity of exhortation, the most useful. Thus Plato says that this manner was pursued of old, by all Greeks in common, but especially by the Spartans and Cretans, the best governed. “Know yourself” some have supposed to be Chilon's, Chamaeleon in his work On the Gods attributes it to Thales, and Aristotle to the Pythia. It can exhort us to pursue knowledge. For it is not possible to know the parts without the substance of the whole; one must investigate the origin of the world, through which one can also learn the nature of man.

Again, they attribute “Nothing in excess” to Chilon of Sparta; Strato in his work On Inventions attaches the saying to Sodamus of Tegea, and Didymus assigns it to Solon, as indeed “Measure is best” to Cleobulus. “Give surety, and ruin is near” Cleomenes in his work on Hesiod says was said earlier by Homer in these words: “Poor are the sureties even for the poor to be given.” Aristotle's followers think it Chilon's, and Didymus says the advice is Thales'. Next, “All men are bad” or “Most men are bad” (for the same saying is given in two ways), the followers of Sotades of Byzantium say is Bias's; and “Practice masters everything” they wish to be Periander's; likewise the advice “Know the right moment” to be Pittacus's. Solon gave laws to the Athenians, Pittacus to the Mitylenaeans. Later Pythagoras, the pupil of Pherecydes, was the first to call himself a philosopher.

After the men already named, there have been three successions of philosophy, named after the places where they spent their time: the Italian, from Pythagoras; the Ionian, from Thales; and the Eleatic, from Xenophanes. Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, was a Samian, as Hippobotus says; but according to Aristoxenus in his Life of Pythagoras, and … Aristarchus and Theopompus, he was a Tyrrhenian; according to Neanthes, a Syrian or Tyrian; so that according to most, Pythagoras was a barbarian by race. And Thales too, as Leander and Herodotus relate, was a Phoenician, or, as some have supposed, a Milesian. He alone seems to have met with the prophets of the Egyptians; no teacher of his is recorded, as none is for Pherecydes of Syros, whose pupil Pythagoras was.

The Italian philosophy of Pythagoras grew old at Metapontum in Italy. Anaximander of Miletus, son of Praxiades, succeeded Thales; Anaximenes of Miletus, son of Eurystratus, succeeded him; and after him Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, son of Hegesibulus. He moved the school from Ionia to Athens. Archelaus succeeded him, whom Socrates heard. “From these turned aside the stone-cutter, the prater about laws, the enchanter of the Greeks,” says Timon in his Silloi, because he turned aside from natural philosophy to ethics. Of those who heard Socrates, Antisthenes became a Cynic, and Plato withdrew to the Academy. Aristotle, having studied philosophy with Plato, moved to the Lyceum and founded the Peripatetic school. Theophrastus succeeded him, then Strato, then Lycon, then Critolaus, then Diodorus. Speusippus succeeded Plato; Xenocrates him, and Polemo him. The hearers of Polemo were Crates and Crantor, in whom the Old Academy of Plato ended. Arcesilaus studied with Crantor, and from him until Hegesinus the Middle Academy flourished.

Then Carneades succeeded Hegesinus, and those after him. Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school, became a pupil of Crates. Cleanthes succeeded him, then Chrysippus and those after him. Xenophanes of Colophon founded the Eleatic school; Timaeus says he lived in the time of Hiero, the ruler of Sicily, and of Epicharmus the poet, while Apollodorus says that, born about the … fortieth Olympiad, he lived on to the times of Darius and Cyrus. Parmenides was a hearer of Xenophanes, Zeno of him, then Leucippus, then Democritus. The hearers of Democritus were Protagoras of Abdera and Metrodorus of Chios, whose pupil was Diogenes of Smyrna; his was Anaxarchus, and his Pyrrho, and his Nausiphanes. Some say that Epicurus was his pupil. This, then, is the succession of the philosophers among the Greeks in summary; the dates of the founders of their philosophy must be given next, so that we may show by comparison that the philosophy of the Hebrews is many generations older.

Xenophanes, who began the Eleatic philosophy, has been discussed. Eudemus in his Astronomical Histories says that Thales foretold the eclipse of the sun that occurred at the time when the Medes and Lydians joined battle with each other, when Cyaxares, father of Astyages, ruled the Medes and Alyattes, father of Croesus, the Lydians. Herodotus too agrees with him in his first book. These times are about the fiftieth Olympiad. Pythagoras is found to be in the time of Polycrates the tyrant, about the sixty-second Olympiad. Mnesiphilus is recorded as a follower of Solon, and Themistocles spent time with him; Solon therefore flourished about the forty-sixth Olympiad. Heraclitus, son of Bloson, persuaded Melancomas the tyrant to lay down his rule. He disdained King Darius when he invited him to come to Persia.