Miscellanies 5.11.67–5.14.90

The sacrifice acceptable to God is an unswerving separation from the body and its passions. This is true piety indeed. And is it not fittingly for this reason that philosophy was called by Socrates a practice of death? For the one who neither sets sight alongside his thinking nor drags in any of the other senses, but meets things with pure mind itself, pursues the true philosophy. This, then, is what Pythagoras too means by the five years' silence that he prescribes for his pupils: that, turned away from sensible things, they might contemplate the divine with the mind alone. It was from Moses that the foremost of the Greeks learned to philosophize in this way. For he commands that the whole burnt offerings be flayed and divided into their limbs, since the soul that knows must be stripped of its material hide, without the body's triviality and all the passions that empty and false suppositions produce, and, having put off the fleshly desires, must be consecrated to the light.

But most people, clothing themselves in what is mortal like snails, and rolled up in a ball around their own lack of self-control like hedgehogs, hold such opinions about the blessed and incorruptible God as they hold about themselves. It has escaped them, even though they happen to be near us, that God has given us countless things in which he himself has no share: birth, though he is unbegotten; food, though he has no need; growth, though he is always the same; a good old age and an easy death, though he is immortal and ageless. Therefore let no one suppose that hands and feet and mouth and eyes and comings in and goings out and angers and threats are spoken of among the Hebrews as passions of God. By no means; rather, certain things are expressed allegorically, more reverently, by these names, which we shall explain as the discussion proceeds, at the proper time. “Truly wisdom is a remedy that cures all things,” writes Callimachus in his Epigrams. “One is wise from another, both of old and now,” says Bacchylides in his Paeans; “for it is not easiest to find the gates of unspoken words.”

Well, then, did Isocrates in the Panathenaicus, having first asked, “Whom, then, do I call educated?”, continue: “First, those who deal well with the affairs that befall them each day, and who have a judgment that hits the right moment and is able for the most part to aim at what is advantageous; next, those who always behave fittingly and justly toward those who come near them, bearing the unpleasantness and harshness of others with good temper and ease, while showing themselves as light and moderate as possible to their companions; further, those who master their pleasures and are not overly defeated by misfortunes, but conduct themselves bravely in them and worthily of the nature we happen to share; fourth, and this is the greatest, those who are not corrupted by success, nor put out of themselves, nor made arrogant, but remain in the ranks of the sensible.” Then he adds the finishing touch to his discourse: “Those who have the disposition of their soul well attuned not to one only of these but to all of them, these I declare to be wise and perfect men, possessing all the virtues.” Do you see how even the Greeks extol the life of the one who knows, although they do not know it as one ought to understand it? What knowledge is, they do not know even in a dream.

If, then, it has been agreed that knowledge is our rational food, truly “blessed,” according to the Scripture, “are those who hunger and thirst” for the truth, “for they shall be filled” with everlasting food. Quite wonderfully Euripides, the philosopher of the stage, is found in harmony with what we have said, in these lines, in which he hints, I know not how, at the Father and the Son together: “To you, the ruler of all, I bring a libation and a cake, whether you love to be named Zeus or Hades; but you, receive from me a fireless sacrifice of all fruits, a full offering poured out.” For Christ is a whole offering of all fruits for us, a fireless victim. And that he speaks of the Savior himself without knowing it, he will make clear by adding: “For you, among the heavenly gods, wield the scepter of Zeus, and share with Hades the rule of those beneath the earth.” Then he says outright: “And send into the light the souls of the dead, for those who wish to learn beforehand of the struggles: whence they sprang, what is the root of evils, which of the blessed ones they must appease with sacrifice to find respite from toils.” Not unreasonably, then, among the mysteries of the Greeks too, purifications come first, as the washing does among the barbarians.

After these come the lesser mysteries, which have a certain foundation of teaching and of preparation for what is to come; and then the great mysteries, which concern the whole universe, where nothing more remains to be learned, but only to contemplate and comprehend nature and things. We may take the purifying mode through confession, and the contemplative mode through analysis, advancing to the first conception: we make our beginning by analysis from the things that underlie it, abstracting from the body its physical qualities, taking away the dimension of depth, then that of breadth, and after these that of length. For the point that remains is a unit, so to speak, having position; and if we take away its position, it is conceived as a unit. If, then, having abstracted all that belongs to bodies and to the things called incorporeal, we cast ourselves into the greatness of Christ, and from there advance in holiness into the immensity, we might in some way approach the conception of the Almighty, knowing not what he is, but what he is not. And form and motion, or standing, or a throne, or a place, or right or left, are not to be conceived at all of the Father of the universe, although these too are written; but what each of them is meant to show will be demonstrated in its proper place. The first cause, then, is not in a place, but above place and time and name and thought. For this reason Moses too says, “Show yourself to me,” most clearly hinting that God cannot be taught by human beings or expressed in words, but is known only by the power that comes from him. For the search is formless and invisible, but the grace of knowledge comes from him through the Son.

Solomon will bear us witness most clearly, speaking thus: “Human prudence is not in me, but God gives me wisdom, and I know holy things.” So Moses, speaking allegorically of divine prudence, named it the tree of life planted in paradise; and this paradise may also be the world, in which all the things of creation have grown. In it the Word too blossomed and bore fruit, having become flesh, and gave life to those who had tasted his goodness; for not without the tree did he come to our knowledge either, since our life was hung up for our faith. And Solomon again says: “She is a tree of immortality to those who lay hold of her.” For this reason it says: “Behold, I set before your face life and death: to love the Lord God, and to walk in his ways, and to hear his voice, and to believe in life. But if you transgress the ordinances and the judgments that I have given you, you shall utterly perish. For this is life and the length of your days: to love the Lord your God.”

Again: “Abraham, coming to the place which God had told him, on the third day, looking up, sees the place from afar.” For the first day is the longing for beautiful things that comes through sight; the second is the soul's desire for the best things; on the third the mind discerns spiritual things, the eyes of the understanding having been opened by the Teacher who rose on the third day. The three days might also be the mystery of the seal, through which the true God is believed in. It is consistent, then, that he sees the place from afar; for the region of God is hard to reach, the region Plato called the region of ideas, having learned from Moses that God is a place, as containing all things and the universe. But fittingly it is seen by Abraham from afar, because he is in the realm of becoming, and he is initiated at once through an angel.

Hence the apostle says: “We see now as through a mirror, but then face to face,” by means only of those pure and incorporeal apprehensions of the understanding. It is possible also in dialectic to divine something of God, if one attempts, without any of the senses, to press on through reason to what each thing is in itself, and does not stand back from the things that are until, climbing up to what lies above, he grasps by thought itself what the good is in itself, arriving at the very end of the intelligible, according to Plato. Again Moses, not allowing altars and sacred precincts to be built in many places, but establishing one temple of God, proclaimed both the only-begotten world, as Basilides says, and the one God, as Basilides no longer thinks. And because Moses, the one who knows, does not enclose the unenclosable in a place, he set up no image in the temple, showing that God is to be worshiped as invisible and uncircumscribed, while leading the Hebrews in some way to a conception of God through the honor given to the name in the temple. Moreover the Word, forbidding the building of temples and all sacrifices, hints that the Almighty is not contained in anything, by these words: “What house will you build for me? says the Lord. Heaven is my throne,” and so on. And likewise about sacrifices: “The blood of bulls and the fat of lambs I do not want,” and whatever else besides the Holy Spirit forbids through the prophet.

Most beautifully, then, Euripides too agrees with these things, writing: “What house fashioned by builders could enclose the divine form within the folds of its walls?” And about sacrifices he says likewise: “For God, if he is truly God, needs nothing; these are the wretched tales of singers.” For God did not make the world out of need, so that he might reap honors from human beings and from the other gods and daemons, as Plato says, exacting, as it were, a kind of revenue from creation: from us smoke, from gods and daemons their proper services. Most instructively, then, Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles: “The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he served by human hands as if he needed anything, since he himself gives to all breath and life and all things.”

And Zeno too, the founder of the Stoic school, says in his book the Republic that one should make neither temples nor statues, for no construction is worthy of the gods; and he is not afraid to write these very words: “There will be no need to build temples; for one must not consider anything a temple that is not of great worth and holy; and nothing that is the work of builders and craftsmen is of great worth and holy.” Fittingly, then, Plato too, knowing the world to be God's temple, assigned to the citizens a place in the city where their images were to be set up, but forbade anyone to possess images of gods privately. “Let no one, then,” he says, “dedicate sacred things to the gods in any other way. For gold and silver, in other cities, both in private and in temples, is a possession that provokes envy; ivory, from a body that the soul has left, is not a pure offering; iron and bronze are instruments of war; but of wood let anyone dedicate whatever he wishes, provided it is made of a single piece, and likewise of stone, for the common temples.”

Fittingly, then, in the long letter he says: “For it can in no way be put into words like other lessons, but after long association with the matter itself, and living with it, suddenly, like a light kindled from a leaping fire, it comes to be in the soul and from then on nourishes itself.” Are not these things like what was said by the prophet Zephaniah? “And the Spirit took me up and carried me up into the fifth heaven, and I beheld angels called lords, and their diadem was set on them in the Holy Spirit; and the throne of each of them was seven times brighter than the light of the rising sun; they dwelt in temples of salvation and hymned the ineffable God Most High.”

“For to find the Father and Maker of this universe is a task, and, having found him, to declare him to all is impossible. For it can in no way be put into words like other lessons,” says the truth-loving Plato. For he had heard very well how the all-wise Moses, going up the mountain (for holy contemplation, to the summit of the intelligible), necessarily gives orders that the whole people should not go up with him. And when the Scripture says, “And Moses entered into the thick darkness where God was,” this shows to those who can understand that God is invisible and ineffable, and that the unbelief and ignorance of the many is truly a thick darkness set before the radiance of the truth. And again Orpheus the theologian, having profited from this, says: “He is one, complete in himself; all things have been made as offspring of the one” (or “are born,” for it is written this way too), and he adds: “Nor does any mortal behold him, but he beholds all.” And more clearly he says further: “But him I do not see; for a cloud is fixed around him. For all mortals have mortal pupils in their eyes, small, since flesh and bones have grown in them.”

The apostle will bear witness to what has been said, saying: “I know a man in Christ caught up to the third heaven, and from there into paradise, who heard unspeakable words, which it is not permitted for a man to speak.” In this way he hints at the ineffability of God, adding “not permitted” not because of a law or fear of some commandment, but showing that the divine cannot be uttered by human power, if indeed it begins to be spoken, as is right, above the third heaven, by those who there initiate the chosen souls into the mysteries. For I know that in Plato too (for my writing now puts off the many examples from the barbarian philosophy, awaiting the proper time according to my first promises) many heavens are thought of. At any rate, in the Timaeus, when he is in doubt whether one should think there are more worlds or only this one, he makes no difference between the names, calling it world and heaven synonymously. The wording is as follows: “Have we, then, rightly spoken of one heaven, or would it have been more correct to speak of many, even infinite? One, if it is to have been made according to the pattern.”

But in the Letter of the Romans to the Corinthians too it is written: “an ocean boundless to human beings, and the worlds beyond it.” Consistently, then, the noble apostle again exclaims: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” And was not this what the prophet hinted at when he ordered cakes of unleavened bread to be made hidden in the ashes, showing that the truly sacred word, initiated into the mysteries of the Unbegotten and his powers, must be kept hidden? Confirming this, the apostle said openly in the letter to the Corinthians: “But we speak wisdom among the perfect, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are being brought to nothing; but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom.” And again elsewhere he says: “to the knowledge of the mystery of God in Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Our Savior himself sets his seal on these things, saying: “To you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of heaven.” And again the Gospel says that our Savior spoke the word to the apostles in a mystery; for the prophecy too says of him: “He will open his mouth in parables and will utter things hidden from the foundation of the world.” And the Lord also shows the concealment through the parable of the leaven; for he says: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, until the whole was leavened.” For either the three-part soul is saved through obedience, by the spiritual power hidden in it through faith; or the strength of the Word given to us, being intense and powerful, draws to itself, secretly and invisibly, everyone who has received it and taken it within himself, and gathers his whole being into unity.

Most wisely, then, Solon has written this about God: “Hardest of all to perceive is the unseen measure of judgment, which alone holds the limits of all things.” “For the divine,” says the poet of Acragas, “cannot be approached so as to be reached by our eyes, or grasped with our hands, which is the greatest highway of persuasion falling into human minds.” And John the apostle: “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,” calling the invisible and ineffable the bosom of God. From this some have called him the Depth, as having encompassed and embosomed all things, unreachable and boundless. Yes, indeed, this is the most difficult of all discussions, the one about God. For since the first principle of every matter is hard to discover, surely the first and oldest principle is hard to demonstrate, which is the cause of all other things coming to be and, once they have come to be, of their being. For how could that be expressed which is neither genus, nor difference, nor species, nor individual, nor number, nor even an accident, nor that to which an accident belongs? Nor would anyone rightly call him a whole; for “whole” belongs to the category of magnitude, and he is the Father of the whole. Nor indeed are any parts of him to be spoken of; for the One is indivisible, and for this reason also infinite, not in the sense of being impossible to traverse, but in the sense of being without dimension and without limit, and therefore without form and without name.

And if we sometimes name it, calling it, though not properly, the One, or the Good, or Mind, or Being itself, or Father, or God, or Maker, or Lord, we do not speak as though uttering his name; but for lack of anything better we use fair names, so that the mind may have these to lean on and not wander about among other things. For none of them singly shows what God is, but all of them together indicate the power of the Almighty. For the things we say of anything are said either from what belongs to it or from its relation to other things, and none of these can be applied to God. Nor is he grasped by demonstrative knowledge; for that is built from what is prior and better known, and nothing exists before the Unbegotten. It remains, then, that we understand the Unknown by divine grace and by the Word alone that comes from him, as Luke too records in the Acts of the Apostles, where Paul says: “Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I went about and looked at the objects of your worship, I found also an altar on which was inscribed, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.”

Everything, then, that falls under a name is begotten, whether they like it or not. Whether, then, the Father himself draws to himself everyone who has lived purely and has advanced to the conception of the blessed and incorruptible nature, or whether our free will, having come to the knowledge of the good, leaps and bounds beyond the pit, as the trainers say, yet it is not without special grace that the soul grows wings and rises and is lifted above the things that lie above, laying aside all that weighs it down and giving it back to what is akin to it. Plato too says in the Meno that virtue is given by God, as these words show: “From this reasoning, then, Meno, virtue appears to come by divine dispensation to those to whom it comes.” Does it not seem to you that he hinted that the disposition of knowledge, which does not come to all, is a divine dispensation? And he adds more clearly: “But if we have inquired well in this whole discussion, virtue would be neither by nature nor taught, but comes by divine dispensation, not without intelligence, to those to whom it comes.” Wisdom, then, given by God, being the power of the Father, stirs our free will, receives faith, and rewards the attentiveness of the elect with the highest fellowship.

And now I will present Plato himself to you, plainly requiring belief in the children of God. For after discussing the visible and generated gods in the Timaeus, he says: “To speak about the other daemons and to know their origin is beyond us; but we must trust those who have spoken before, who were, as they said, offspring of gods, and surely knew their own ancestors. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve the children of gods, even though they speak without probable or necessary demonstrations.” I do not think that the Greeks could more clearly bear witness to our Savior, and to those anointed for prophecy (these proclaimed children of God, and the Lord being his true Son), that they are true witnesses about divine things; that is why he added that we must believe them, as being inspired. And if someone should say, rather in the manner of tragedy, that he does not believe (“for it was not Zeus who proclaimed these things to me”), let him know that it was God himself who proclaimed the Scriptures through the Son. And the one who announces what is his own is trustworthy, since “no one,” says the Lord, “has known the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son reveals him.”

He must be believed, then, even according to Plato, even if he is proclaimed and spoken of through the old and the new covenant without probable and necessary demonstrations. “For if you do not believe,” says the Lord, “you will die in your sins”; and conversely: “He who believes has eternal life.” “Blessed, then, are all who trust in him.” Trust is more than faith; for when someone understands that the Son of God is our teacher, he trusts that his teaching is true. And as learning, according to Empedocles, increases the mind, so trust in the Lord increases faith. At any rate we say that it belongs to the same people to find fault with philosophy and to disparage faith, to praise injustice, and to call the life of desire happy.

Now faith, even if it is a voluntary assent of the soul, is nevertheless a worker of good things and the foundation of right conduct. And if Aristotle draws a technical distinction, teaching that “making” is said also of irrational animals and of lifeless things, while “doing” belongs to humans alone, let him correct those who call God the Maker of the universe. What is done, he says, is done either as good or as necessary. Now doing wrong is not good (for no one does wrong except for the sake of something else), and nothing necessary is voluntary; doing wrong, then, is voluntary, and so it is not necessary either. The good differ from the bad most of all in their choices and their noble desires. For all wickedness of soul goes with lack of self-control, and the one who acts through passion acts through lack of self-control and wickedness. It comes over me, then, at every point to wonder at that divine saying: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the sheepfold, but climbs in by another way, that one is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep; to him the doorkeeper opens.” Then the Lord explains and says: “I am the door of the sheep.”

It is, then, by learning the truth through Christ that people must be saved, even if they happen to have practiced Greek philosophy. For now it has been shown clearly: “what was not made known to the sons of men in other generations has now been revealed.” For there was always a natural perception of the one God, the Almighty, among all right-thinking people, and most people, those who had not entirely lost their shame before the truth, laid hold of his everlasting beneficence according to divine providence. At any rate, Xenocrates of Chalcedon does not wholly despair of a conception of the divine even in irrational animals; and Democritus, even if unwilling, will admit it by the consequence of his doctrines; for he has made the same images, coming from the divine being, fall upon human beings and upon irrational animals. Far indeed is man from having no share in the conception of the divine, since he is recorded in Genesis to have received the in-breathing as well, partaking of a purer essence than the other animals.

Hence the Pythagoreans say that mind comes to human beings by divine dispensation, as Plato and Aristotle also agree. But we say that the Holy Spirit is breathed in besides upon the one who has believed, while the Platonists place mind in the soul as an emanation of divine dispensation, and the soul in the body. For it has been said openly through Joel, one of the twelve prophets: “And it shall be after these things that I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” But the Spirit is not in each of us as a part of God. How this distribution takes place, and what the Holy Spirit is, will be shown by us in the works On Prophecy and On the Soul. But “to hide the depths of knowledge is a good distrust,” according to Heraclitus; “for through distrust it escapes being known.”

(Chapter 14.) What follows must now be added, and the Greek theft from the barbarian philosophy must now be set out more clearly. For the Stoics say that God is a body, and spirit in essence, just as, of course, the soul is. All these things you will find plainly in the Scriptures. For do not think, for now, of the allegorical senses of the Scriptures as the true tradition of knowledge hands them down, in case, like skilled wrestlers, they show one thing and mean another. But the Stoics say that God pervades all being, whereas we call him Maker only, and Maker by the Word. What misled them was the saying in Wisdom: “It pervades and passes through all things because of its purity,” since they did not understand that this is said of Wisdom, the first created by God. “Yes,” they say, “but the philosophers, the Stoics and Plato and Pythagoras, and Aristotle the Peripatetic too, posit matter among the first principles, and not one principle.” Let them know, then, that what is called matter is said by them to be without quality and without form, and was said by Plato, more boldly still, to be non-being. And did he not, most mystically, knowing the one principle that truly is, say in the Timaeus in these very words: “Now let our view be put thus: the principle of all things, or principles, or whatever one thinks about them, must not be spoken of now, for no other reason than that it is difficult, in the present manner of exposition, to make plain what we think.”

Moreover, that prophetic saying, “And the earth was invisible and unformed,” gave them their starting points for a material substance. Yes, and Epicurus' introduction of chance arose from this, because he did not follow the saying: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” And it occurred to Aristotle to bring providence down only as far as the moon from this psalm: “Lord, your mercy is in heaven, and your truth reaches to the clouds.” For the disclosure of the prophetic mysteries had not yet been revealed before the coming of the Lord. Again, the punishments after death and the retribution by fire were stolen from the barbarian philosophy by all the poetic Muse, and by Greek philosophy as well. Plato, at any rate, in the last book of the Republic, says in these very words: “Then wild men, fiery to look at, standing by and understanding the sound, took some away separately; but Aridaeus and the others they bound hand and foot and head, threw them down and flayed them, and dragged them along the road outside, carding them on thorns.” For by the fiery men he means to indicate angels, who seize and punish the unjust: “who makes,” it says, “his angels spirits and his ministers flaming fire.”