Miscellanies 5.14.120–6.1.3

And again Menander, paraphrasing that Scripture, “Offer a sacrifice of righteousness and hope in the Lord,” writes thus: “Do not ever, dearest friend, covet even a needle belonging to another; for God delights in just works and not in unjust ones, and he lets the one who toils raise up his own livelihood, plowing the land night and day. Sacrifice to God by being just throughout, bright not in your cloaks so much as in your heart. … If you hear thunder, do not flee, if you are conscious of nothing against yourself, master; for God sees you, being near.” “While you are still speaking,” says the Scripture, “I will say: Behold, I am here.”

Again Diphilus the comic poet discusses the judgment in terms like these: “Do you think, Niceratus, that the dead, who have partaken of every luxury in life, have escaped the divine as though unnoticed? There is an eye of Justice, which sees all things. For in Hades too we think there are two paths, one the way of the righteous, the other the way of the ungodly.” And: “If the earth will cover both for all time, go off, snatch, steal, rob, make trouble. Do not be deceived; there is judgment in Hades too, which God, the master of all, will execute, whose name is fearful, and I would not name him; who grants to sinners a long life. But if any mortal thinks that, doing some evil day by day, he escapes the notice of the gods, he thinks wickedly, and in thinking so he is caught, when Justice happens to have leisure. Look, you who think there is no God. For there is, there is. And if anyone who is by nature bad fares well, let him make the most of the time; for in time he will pay the penalty later.” And tragedy agrees with these in these words: “For there shall come, there shall come that season of time, when the golden-faced ether shall let loose its treasure full of fire, and the flame, fed full, shall rage and burn all things on earth and on high.”

And a little later he adds again: “And when the whole universe fails, the whole depth of the waves will be gone, and the earth empty of dwellings; nor will the air, set on fire, bear the winged tribes any longer; and then it will save all that it destroyed before.” We shall find things like these in the Orphic writings too, written thus: “For having hidden all, he brought them up again into the joyful light from his holy heart, doing mighty deeds.” And if we live holily and justly, we are blessed here, and more blessed after our departure from here, not having happiness for a time, but able to rest in eternity, “sharing hearth with the other immortals, at table with them, free from human woes, unwearied,” as the philosophic poetry of Empedocles says. No one, even according to the Greeks, will be so great as to be above justice, nor so small as to escape its notice.

And the same Orpheus also says this: “Looking to the divine Word, attend closely to it, directing the intelligent vessel of your heart; walk well upon the path, and look only to the immortal king of the world.” And again, about God, saying that he is invisible, he says that he was known only to one, a Chaldean by race, meaning either Abraham or his son, in these words: “except a certain only-begotten one, an offshoot of the race of the Chaldeans from of old; for he was skilled in the course of the star, and how the motion of the sphere goes round the earth in a circle, evenly, on its own axis; and he guides the winds around the air and the stream of water.”

Then, as if paraphrasing “Heaven is my throne, and the earth the footstool of my feet,” he adds: “But he himself again is firmly set above the great heaven on a golden throne, and the earth stands beneath his feet. His right hand he has stretched out around the ends of the ocean; the foundation of the mountains trembles within at his wrath, and cannot bear his mighty strength. He is everywhere heavenly himself, and on earth he brings all things to their end, having himself the beginning, the middle, and the end. Otherwise it is not lawful for you to speak; and I tremble in my limbs, in my mind. From on high he rules,” and what follows. For through these words he has indicated all those prophetic sayings: “If you open heaven, trembling will seize the mountains from you, and they will melt, as wax melts before fire”;

and the words through Isaiah, “Who has measured the heaven with a span and all the earth with a handful?” Again, when he says: “Ruler of ether and of Hades, of sea and of earth, who with thunders shake the strong house of Olympus; before whom daemons shudder, and the throng of gods is afraid; whom the Fates obey, relentless though they are; imperishable, mother-father, by whose wrath all things are shaken; who move the winds, and cover all things with clouds, splitting the broad ether with lightning-blasts; yours is the order among the stars, running by unchangeable commands; beside your fiery throne stand angels of many labors, whose care it is how all things are accomplished for mortals; yours is the spring, shining new with purple flowers; yours the winter, coming on with cold clouds; yours are the autumn fruits that Bromius the reveler once distributed.”

Then he adds, expressly naming God the Almighty: “imperishable, immortal, speakable only to immortals. Come, greatest of all the gods, with mighty necessity, dread, invincible, great, imperishable, whom the ether crowns.” By “mother-father” he has not only indicated coming into being from what is not, but has also given occasion to those who introduce emanations to think perhaps of a consort of God as well. And he paraphrases those prophetic Scriptures: the one through Hosea, “I am he who makes the thunder firm and creates the wind,” whose hands founded the host of heaven; and the one through Moses: “See, see that I am, and there is no other god besides me; I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal; and there is none who will deliver out of my hands.” “And he himself, from good, plants evil for mortals, and chilling war and tearful pains,” according to Orpheus.

Archilochus of Paros too says such things: “O Zeus, father Zeus, yours is the power of heaven, and you see the deeds of men, wicked and lawless.” Again let the Thracian Orpheus sing to us: “His right hand he has stretched out on every side over the end of the ocean, and the earth stands beneath his feet.” These things have plainly been taken from there: “The Lord will save inhabited cities, and will take hold of the whole inhabited world in his hand like a nest”; “the Lord who made the earth by his strength,” as Jeremiah says, “and set up the inhabited world by his wisdom.” Besides these, Phocylides, calling the angels daemons, shows that some of them are good and others bad, in these words (for we too have received that some are apostates): “But there are daemons over men, at one time some, at another others; some to set men free from coming evil.”

Well, then, does Philemon the comic poet too cut down idolatry in these words: “For us there is no god Fortune, no; but what happens by itself, as it falls out for each, is called fortune.” And Sophocles the tragic poet says: “Not even for the gods do all things happen by their own choice, apart from Zeus; for he holds the end and the beginning.”

And Orpheus: “One might, one god arose, the great heaven blazing; and one thing all things have become, in which all these things revolve, fire and water and earth,” and what follows. And Pindar the lyric poet, as though in Bacchic frenzy, says plainly: “What is God? What the All is.” And again: “God, who makes all things for mortals.” And when he says, “Why do you expect wisdom? Little does one man have beyond another. It is hard to search out the counsels of the gods with a mortal mind; one is born of a mortal mother,” he has drawn his thought from there: “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” And Hesiod too, in what he writes, agrees with what has been said: “There is no seer among men on earth who could know the mind of aegis-bearing Zeus.” Fittingly, then, Solon the Athenian in his elegies, himself following Hesiod, writes: “Everywhere the mind of the immortals is hidden from men.”

Again, when Moses had prophesied that because of the transgression the woman would give birth in toil and pain, a poet of no small note writes: “Never by day will they cease from labor and woe, nor at night, worn down as they are; and the gods will give them grievous cares.” Further, Homer, saying, “And the Father himself stretched out the golden scales,” indicates that God is just; and Menander the comic poet, interpreting God as good, says: “A daemon stands beside every man as soon as he is born, a good guide into the mysteries of life; for one must not think that there is an evil daemon, harming a good life.” Then he adds: “that God is good in all respects,” saying either that every god is good, or, which is more likely, that God is good in all things.

Again, Aeschylus the tragic poet, setting out the power of God, does not hesitate to call him Most High, in these words: “Distinguish God from mortals, and do not think that he is made of flesh like yourself. You do not know him: at one time he appears as fire, an unapproachable rush, at another as water, at another as thick darkness; and he becomes like wild beasts, like wind, and cloud, and lightning, thunder, rain. Sea serves him, and rocks, and every spring and gathering of waters. Mountains tremble, and earth, and the monstrous deep of the sea, and the great height of mountains, whenever the fierce eye of the Master looks upon them. For all-powerful is the glory of the Most High God.” Does it not seem to you that he is paraphrasing the saying, “The earth trembles before the face of the Lord”?

Besides these, most prophetic Apollo, bearing witness to the glory of God, is compelled to say of Athena, when the Medes were marching against Greece, how she begged and entreated Zeus for Attica. The oracle runs thus: “Pallas cannot appease Olympian Zeus, though she entreats him with many words and close-woven counsel; many temples of immortals he will give to raging fire, which now stand, I think, streaming with sweat, trembling with fear,” and what follows.

Thearidas, in his work On Nature, writes: “The first principle of beings, the truly true principle, is one; for it is in the beginning one and alone.” “Nor is there any other apart from the great King,” says Orpheus. Persuaded by him, the comic poet Diphilus says most sententiously: “Him who is the Father of all, honor him alone continually, the discoverer and creator of so many good things.” Fittingly, then, Plato too trains the best natures to arrive at the study that we said before is the greatest, to see the Good and to make that ascent. “And this, it seems, would not be the turning of a shell, but the turning around of a soul from a day that is a kind of night to the true ascent to being, which we shall say is true philosophy.” And he judges those who share in this to be of the golden race, saying, “You are all brothers,” but that those of the golden race are to judge most accurately and in every respect. All things, then, of every kind, lay hold of the Father and Maker of the universe, innately and untaught: lifeless things by sympathy with the living; of living things, those that are already immortal, working day by day; of those still mortal, some in fear, even while still carried in their mother's womb, and others by free will; and of human beings, all, Greeks and barbarians. And no race anywhere, whether of farmers, or of nomads, or of city-dwellers, can live without being possessed beforehand by faith in the higher power. Therefore every nation of the east, and every nation touching the western shores, the north, and all toward the south, has one and the same preconception about the one who established the rule of the world, since the most universal of his activities have passed equally through all things.

Much more did the inquisitive philosophers among the Greeks, starting from the barbarian philosophy, give first place to the invisible, the only, the most powerful, the most skillful, and the highest cause of the most beautiful things; though they did not know what follows from these things unless they were instructed by us, nor indeed how God is by nature to be conceived, but only, as we have often said, by true periphrasis. Fittingly, then, the apostle says: “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not also of Greeks?” not only saying prophetically that those of the Greeks who believe would know God, but also indicating that in power the Lord is God of all and truly Almighty, but in knowledge he is not the God of all. For they do not know what he is, nor how he is Lord and Father and Maker, nor the rest of the dispensation of the truth, unless they are taught by the truth itself.

Likewise the prophetic words have the same force as the apostle's saying. For Isaiah says: “But if you say, We have trusted in the Lord our God, now join yourselves to my lord the king of the Assyrians.” And he adds: “And now, have we come up against this land to make war on it without the Lord?” And Jonah, himself also a prophet, hints at the same thing in these words: “And the captain came to him and said to him: Why are you snoring? Get up, call upon your God, that God may save us and we may not perish.” For he said “your God” to one who knew him with full knowledge, and by “that God may save us” he showed the awareness of the nations who had directed their mind to the Almighty but had not yet believed. And again the same: “And he said to them: I am a servant of the Lord, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven.”

And again the same: “And they said: By no means, Lord; let us not perish on account of the life of this man.” And the prophet Malachi plainly shows God saying: “I will not accept sacrifice from your hands; for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place sacrifice is offered to me.” And again: “For I am a great king, says the Lord Almighty, and my name is manifest among the nations.” What name? Among those who have believed, the Son, who reveals the Father; among the Greeks, “God the Maker.” And Plato indicates free will in these words: “Virtue has no master; each will have more or less of it as he honors or dishonors it. The responsibility is the chooser's; God is not responsible.” For God is never the cause of evils. “O Trojans dear to Ares,” says the lyric poet, “Zeus who rules on high, who sees all things, is not the cause of great woes for mortals; but in the midst lies, for all men to reach, holy Justice, the attendant of pure Good Order and of wise Law; happy are the children of those who have found her to share their house.”

And Pindar plainly brings in Zeus the Savior living with Themis, interpreting him as King, a righteous Savior, thus: “First the Fates led heavenly Themis of good counsel, with golden horses, from the springs of Ocean up the holy stair along the shining road of Olympus, to be the ancient wife of Zeus the Savior; and she bore the golden-crowned, glorious-fruited, truthful Seasons.” He, then, who does not obey the truth, but is puffed up by human teaching, is ill-fated and wretched, and, according to Euripides, is one “who, seeing these things, does not perceive God and cast far away the crooked deceits of the star-gazers, whose baneful tongue shoots at random about things unseen, having no share of understanding.”

Whoever wishes, then, having arrived at true learning, let him hear Parmenides of Elea promising: “You will know the nature of the ether, and all the signs in the ether, and the unseen works of the pure, holy torch of the sun, and whence they came to be; and you will learn the wandering works of the round-eyed moon and its nature; and you will know also the heaven that holds them around, whence it sprang, and how Necessity led and bound it to keep the limits of the stars.” And let him hear Metrodorus, who, though he became an Epicurean, said this at least as if inspired: “Remember, Menestratus, that, being born mortal and having received a limited life, you went up in soul as far as eternity and the infinity of things, and saw ‘what will be and what was before.’” Then, with a happy chorus, according to Plato, we shall behold a blessed sight and spectacle, we following with Zeus, others with other gods, being initiated into the most blessed of mysteries, as is right to say, which we celebrate, ourselves whole and untouched by the evils that awaited us in later time, being initiated into and beholding whole and unshaken visions in pure light, pure ourselves and without the mark of this which we now carry about and call the body, bound to it like an oyster to its shell.

The Pythagoreans call heaven the “counter-earth,” the earth of which it is said through Jeremiah: “I will place you among the children, and I will give you a chosen land, an inheritance of God Almighty,” which those who inherit it will reign over the earth. And thousands upon thousands upon thousands of things flow in for me to cite; but for the sake of due proportion the discussion must now be brought to a stop, so that we too may not suffer what the tragic poet Agathon describes, “treating the side-work as though it were the work, and laboring at the work as though it were a side-work.”

Now that it has been clearly shown, I think, how we are to understand the Lord's calling the Greeks thieves, I willingly pass over the doctrines of the philosophers. For if we were to go through their very words, we would never finish, collecting a vast mass of notes to show that all the wisdom current among the Greeks came from the barbarian philosophy. We shall nonetheless take up this study again as far as necessary, when we collect the opinions on first principles current among the Greeks. But this too quietly presents itself to us for consideration from what has been said: how the books of the Greeks should be approached by one who is able to swim through the waves in them. “Happy,” then, it seems, according to Empedocles, “is he who has gained the wealth of divine understanding; wretched he whose care is a dark opinion about the gods.” He divinely showed that knowledge and ignorance are the boundaries of happiness and unhappiness. For “men who love wisdom must be inquirers into very many things,” according to Heraclitus; and truly “one who seeks to be good must wander much.”

It is already clear to us from what has been said that God's beneficence is everlasting, and that his natural justice is, from a beginning without beginning, simply equal toward all, given according to the worth of each race, never having begun. For God did not take a beginning of being Lord and good, being always what he is; nor will he ever cease doing good, even though he brings each thing to its end. And each of us partakes of his beneficence as far as he wills, since it is the choice and the diligent practice of a soul that has become worthy that has made the difference in election. Here, then, let the fifth Miscellany of our notes of knowledge according to the true philosophy be brought to an end.

Now the sixth, and together with it the seventh, Miscellany of our notes of knowledge according to the true philosophy, having sketched as far as possible the ethical account that is being brought to completion in these books, and having shown what the one who knows is like in his life, proceeds to show the philosophers that he is by no means godless, as they have supposed, but alone truly reverent toward God. It sets out in summary the manner of the knower's worship, as much at least as may be engraved without danger in a written memorandum. For the Lord commanded us to work for the food that remains to eternity; and somewhere the prophet says: “Blessed is he who sows upon every water, where calf and donkey tread”: that is, the people gathered from the law and from the nations into the one faith. “But the weak man eats vegetables,” according to the noble apostle. The Instructor, divided into three books, has already set out for us the upbringing and nourishment from childhood, that is, the way of life that grows together with faith from catechesis and prepares beforehand the soul of those who are being enrolled among grown men, endowed with virtue, for receiving the understanding that belongs to knowledge. When, then, the Greeks have clearly learned from what we are about to say here that in persecuting the one dear to God so unholily they are themselves the impious, then at last, as the notes proceed in the manner of the Miscellanies, we must resolve the difficulties raised against us besides, by Greeks and by barbarians, concerning the Lord's coming.

In a meadow the flowers blooming in variety, and in a garden the planting of fruit trees, are not separated each by its kind from those of other kinds (in this way some have composed learned collections, variously culled, which they titled Meadows, Helicons, Honeycombs, and Robes). So too the outline of our Miscellanies has been made many-colored like a meadow, with things that came to memory just as they happened, cleaned up neither in order nor in expression, but deliberately scattered and mixed together. And being of this sort, they would be for me notes to rekindle the embers of memory; and for anyone fit for knowledge, if he should happen upon them, the search will turn, with sweat, to his advantage and profit. For it is right that toil should go before not only food but much more knowledge, for those who are escorted by the truly narrow and afflicted way of the Lord to eternal and blessed salvation. Our knowledge and our spiritual garden is the Savior himself, into whom we are planted, having been transferred and transplanted from the old life into the good land; and the change of planting contributes to good fruit. The Lord, then, into whom we have been transferred, is light and the true knowledge.

Knowledge is also spoken of as twofold in another way. One kind is common: the understanding and perception found alike in all people, which shows itself universally in recognizing each of the things that lie before us; not only rational powers but perhaps even irrational ones will share in it. I at least would never call it knowledge, since it is by nature able to grasp things also through the senses. The other, called knowledge in a special sense, is marked out by judgment and reason; by it only rational powers become knowledges, those that apply themselves with purity to intelligible things by the bare activity of the soul. “A good man,” says David, is the one who has pity on those perishing through error, and “lends” by imparting the word of truth, not at random, but “he will order his words with judgment,” with deep reflection. “He has scattered, he has given to the poor.”