Miscellanies 5.14.91–5.14.119

From these things it follows that the soul is immortal. For what is punished or corrected, being in a state of perception, lives, even if it is said to suffer. What then? Does not Plato know of rivers of fire and of the depth of the earth, calling poetically Tartarus what the barbarians call Gehenna, and bringing in Cocytus and Acheron and Pyriphlegethon and other such places of punishment that correct and bring people to their senses? And pointing to the angels of the little and least ones, according to the Scripture, who behold God, and also to the oversight that reaches us through the angels set over us, he does not hesitate to write: “When all the souls had chosen their lives, in the order of their lots they went up to Lachesis; and she sent with each the daemon he had chosen, as guardian of his life and fulfiller of what had been chosen.” Perhaps Socrates' daemon too hinted at something of this kind.

Yes, and the philosophers took over from Moses the teaching that the world has come into being. And Plato said plainly: “Was it always, having no beginning of coming to be, or has it come to be, having begun from some beginning? It has come to be; for it is visible and tangible, and being tangible it has a body.” And again, when he says, “Now, the Maker and Father of this universe it is a task to find,” he not only showed that the world came into being, but also indicates that it came into being from him as a son, and that he is called its Father, since it came into being from him alone and came to exist from what was not. The Stoics too hold that the world came into being. And the devil, so much spoken of by the barbarian philosophy, the ruler of the demons, Plato in the tenth book of the Laws calls an evil-working soul, in these words: “Since soul governs and dwells in all things that move in any way, must we not say that it governs heaven too? Certainly. One soul or more? More, I shall answer for you both. Let us assume no fewer than two: the one that does good, and the one able to work the opposite.”

Similarly he writes this in the Phaedrus too: “There are indeed other evils, but some daemon has mixed with most of them a pleasure of the moment.” And in the tenth book of the Laws he plainly shows that apostolic saying, “Our wrestling is not against blood and flesh, but against the principalities, against the authorities, against the spiritual forces in the heavenly places,” writing thus: “For since we have agreed among ourselves that heaven is full of many good things, and also of their opposites, but more of those that are not good, such a battle, we say, is undying and needs wonderful vigilance.” Again, the barbarian philosophy knows one world as intelligible and another as sensible, the one the archetype, the other the image of what is called the pattern; and it assigns the one, as intelligible, to the monad, and the sensible to the hexad; for among the Pythagoreans the hexad is called marriage, as a generative number. And in the monad it establishes an invisible heaven and an unformed earth and intelligible light; for it says: “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth; and the earth was invisible.”

Then it adds: “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” And in the creation of the sensible world he makes a solid heaven (and what is solid is sensible), a visible earth, and light that is seen. Does it not seem to you that it is from here that Plato leaves ideas of living beings in the intelligible world, and makes the sensible species according to the intelligible kinds? Fittingly, then, Moses says that the body was formed from the earth, what Plato calls the “earthly tent,” but that the rational soul was breathed in from above by God into the face. For there, they say, the ruling faculty is seated, and they interpret the entrance of the soul through the sense organs in the first-formed man as its entry; for this reason also man is said to have come into being “according to the image and likeness.” For the image of God is the divine and royal Word, the man free from passion, and the image of the image is the human mind. And if you wish to take up “likeness” under another name, you would find it called in Moses “following” God; for he says: “Walk after the Lord your God and keep his commandments.” And all the virtuous, I think, are followers and servants of God.

Hence the Stoics have said that the end of philosophy is to live following nature, and Plato, likeness to God (as we showed in the second Miscellany); and Zeno the Stoic, taking it from Plato, as Plato took it from the barbarian philosophy, says that all good people are friends of one another. For Socrates says in the Phaedrus that it is not fated for a bad man to be a friend to a bad man, nor for a good man not to be a friend to a good man; and he showed this sufficiently in the Lysis too, that friendship could never be preserved in injustice and wickedness. And the Athenian Stranger likewise says that the action that is dear to God and follows him is one, and has one ancient principle: that like is dear to like when it is measured, but things without measure are dear neither to the unmeasured nor to the measured.

“And God would be for us the measure of all things.” Then, a little further on, he adds again: “For every good man is like a good man, and in this way, being like God, he is a friend both to every good man and to God.” Having got this far, I remembered that too: at the end of the Timaeus he says that one must make the thinking part like what it thinks, according to its ancient nature, and having made it like, attain the end of the best life set before humanity by the gods, both for the present and for the time to come. For those words have the same force as these: “He who seeks will not stop until he finds; and having found, he will be amazed; and having been amazed, he will reign; and having reigned, he will rest.” What then? Do not those sayings of Thales also depend on these? He plainly interprets what we say, that God is glorified to the ages of ages and is called the Knower of hearts. When Thales was asked what the divine is, he said, “That which has neither beginning nor end.” And when another asked whether a man escapes the notice of the divine when he does something, he said, “How could he, when he does not even when he is thinking?” Yes, and the barbarian philosophy knows that only the noble is good, and that virtue is sufficient for happiness, when it says: “Behold, I have set before your eyes good and evil, life and death; choose life.” For it calls the good “life,” and the choice of it noble, and the choosing of the opposite evil. And the one end of good and of life is to become a lover of God; for “this is your life and length of days,” to love what is in accord with truth.

Those words are still clearer. For the Savior, having commanded us to love God and our neighbor, says that on these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets. The Stoics keep repeating these doctrines, and before them Socrates in the Phaedrus, praying: “O Pan and you other gods, grant me to be beautiful within.” And in the Theaetetus he says expressly: “For he who speaks beautifully is beautiful and good.” And in the Protagoras he admits to Protagoras' companions that he has met someone more beautiful than Alcibiades, if indeed what is wisest is most beautiful; for he said that virtue is the beauty of the soul, and conversely vice is the ugliness of the soul. Antipater the Stoic, then, who wrote three books on the thesis that according to Plato only the noble is good, shows that according to Plato too virtue is sufficient for happiness, and he cites many other doctrines in agreement with the Stoics. And Aristobulus, who lived in the time of Ptolemy Philometor, and whom the author of the epitome of the Maccabean history mentions, wrote books enough to show that the Peripatetic philosophy depended on the law of Moses and the other prophets.

Let these things stand so. That we are brothers, as belonging to the one God and one Teacher, Plato too seems to say, calling us so in these words: “For you are all brothers in the city,” as we shall say to them in telling the myth, “but God, in fashioning you, mixed gold into the birth of those of you who are fit to rule, which is why they are most honored; silver into the auxiliaries; and iron and bronze into the farmers and the other craftsmen.” Hence, he says, it must be that the first welcome and love the things in which there is knowledge, and the others the things in which there is opinion. For perhaps he divines this chosen nature that longs for knowledge; unless, positing three natures, he describes three polities, as some have supposed: the silver one of the Jews, the third of the Greeks, and that of the Christians, into which the royal gold has been mixed, the Holy Spirit. And depicting the life of the Christians he writes word for word in the Theaetetus: “Let us speak, then, of the leaders; for why would anyone speak of those who spend their time in philosophy poorly? These, I suppose, do not know the way to the marketplace, nor where the law court is, or the council chamber, or any other public assembly of the city; written laws and decrees they neither see nor hear. The eager pursuits of political clubs, and meetings, and revels with flute girls, do not occur to them to engage in even in a dream. Whether anyone in the city is well or badly born, or what evil has come to anyone from his ancestors, escapes them more than, as the saying goes, the pints of the sea. And he does not even know that he does not know these things; but in truth only his body lies and resides in the city, while he himself flies, according to Pindar, measuring the stars beneath the earth and above the heaven, and searching out every nature everywhere.”

Again, with the Lord's saying, “Let your yes be yes and your no no,” this is to be compared: “But it is by no means lawful for me to concede a falsehood and to suppress the truth.” And with the prohibition of swearing this passage in the tenth book of the Laws agrees: “Let praise and oath be absent in every matter.” And, in general, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, when they say that they hear the voice of God as they contemplate the structure of the universe, made precisely by God and held together unceasingly, had heard Moses saying, “He spoke, and it came to be,” describing the Word of God as a deed. And dwelling on the forming of man from dust, the philosophers at every turn proclaim the body earthly; and Homer does not hesitate to put it in the form of a curse: “But may all of you become water and earth,” as Isaiah too says, “And trample them like clay.”

And Callimachus writes expressly: “That was the year in which the winged creature, and the one in the sea, and the four-footed spoke just like the clay of Prometheus.” And again the same poet: “If Prometheus fashioned you, and you are not from some other clay.” And Hesiod says of Pandora: “And he commanded famous Hephaestus as quickly as possible to mix earth with water, and to put into it the voice and mind of a human being.” The Stoics define nature as a craftsmanlike fire proceeding methodically to generation; and God and his Word are called fire and light allegorically by the Scripture. What then? Does not Homer too, paraphrasing the separation of the water from the earth and the visible uncovering of the dry land, say of Tethys and Ocean: “For already for a long time they have kept apart from each other's bed and love.” Again, the most learned among the Greeks ascribe power over all things to God: Epicharmus (he was a Pythagorean) saying: “Nothing escapes the divine; this you must know; he himself is our overseer, and for God nothing is impossible.”

and the lyric poet: “But it is possible for God to raise up undefiled light out of black night, and to cover the pure radiance of day with dark-clouded darkness” (he alone who can make night while it is day, he says, is God). And Aratus, in the work entitled Phaenomena, having said, “From Zeus let us begin, whom we men never leave unspoken; full of Zeus are all the streets, all the marketplaces of men, and full the sea and the harbors; and everywhere we all have need of Zeus,” adds: “For we are also his offspring” (that is, by creation), “and he, kindly to men, gives favorable signs and rouses the peoples to work. … For he himself fixed these signs in heaven, distinguishing the constellations, and planned for the year stars that would most of all give men well-ordered signs of the seasons, so that all things might grow steadily. Therefore they always propitiate him first and last: Hail, Father, great wonder, great blessing to men.” And before him Homer, on the shield made by Hephaestus, describing the making of the world as Moses does, says: “On it he made the earth, on it the heaven, on it the sea, and on it all the constellations with which heaven is crowned.” For the Zeus celebrated in poems and prose writings lifts the thought up to God.

And now, so to speak, in broad daylight, Democritus writes that there are a few men who, stretching out their hands toward what we Greeks now call air, say: “Zeus speaks all things, and he knows all things, and gives all things and takes them away, and he is king of all.” And more mystically the Boeotian Pindar, since he was a Pythagorean, teaches that “one is the race of men, one of gods, and from one mother we both breathe” (that is, matter), and that there is one Maker of these, whom he calls “father, supreme artificer,” who also granted advances toward divinity according to merit. I say nothing of Plato. He plainly, in the letter to Erastus and Coriscus, appears to indicate the Father and the Son, from the Hebrew Scriptures, I do not know how, exhorting them in these words: “swearing, with an earnestness that is not unrefined and with learning, the sister of earnestness, by the God of all, the cause, and by the Lord, the Father of the leader and cause, whom, if you philosophize rightly, you will know.” And the speech in the Timaeus calls the Maker Father, speaking thus: “Gods of gods, of whom I am Father and Maker of works.”

So that when he says, “Around the king of all are all things, and for his sake are all things, and he is the cause of all good things; and the second around the second things, and the third around the third,” I understand nothing else than that the holy Trinity is indicated; for the third is the Holy Spirit, and the Son is the second, through whom all things came to be according to the will of the Father. The same Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, mentions Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by race, who is Zoroaster. At any rate Zoroaster himself writes: “These things I, Zoroaster son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by race, having died in war, wrote, whatever I learned from the gods when I was in Hades.” This Zoroaster, Plato says, came back to life on the twelfth day as he lay on the pyre. Perhaps, then, he hints at the resurrection; or perhaps at this, that the way for souls to their ascent is through the twelve signs of the zodiac, and he himself says that the descent into birth takes place by the same way. In this sense we must understand that the labors of Heracles were twelve, after which the soul attains release from this whole world. I do not pass over Empedocles either, who, speaking as a natural philosopher, mentions the taking up of all things, as there is to be at some time a change into the substance of fire.

Most clearly Heraclitus of Ephesus holds this opinion, judging that there is one world that is everlasting and another that perishes, and knowing that the world in its ordered arrangement is not other than that one when it is in a certain state. But that he knew the world composed of the whole substance, with its individual character, to be everlasting, he makes plain by saying this: “This world, the same for all, no one of gods or men made; but it always was and is and will be: ever-living fire, kindled in measures and quenched in measures.” And that he also taught that it is generated and perishable is shown by what follows: “The turnings of fire: first sea; and of sea, half is earth, half fiery whirlwind.” For he says in effect that fire, by the Word and God who governs all things, is turned through air into moisture, the seed, as it were, of the world's ordering, which he calls sea; and from this in turn come earth and heaven and what they contain. How it is taken up again and set on fire he shows clearly in these words: “Sea is poured out and measured to the same proportion as it was before it became earth.” And the same holds likewise for the other elements.

Much like this the most distinguished of the Stoics also teach, in their treatment of the conflagration and of the governance of the world, of the individual character of the world and of man, and of the survival of our souls. And again Plato, in the seventh book of the Republic, has called the day here “nocturnal” (because of the world-rulers of this darkness, I think), and the descent of the soul into the body sleep and death, in the same way as Heraclitus. And did not the Spirit foretell this of the Savior, saying through David: “I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the Lord will help me”? For it speaks allegorically not only of the resurrection of Christ as waking from sleep, but also of the Lord's descent into flesh as sleep.

So the Savior himself exhorts: “Watch”; that is, practice how to live, and try to separate the soul from the body. And Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, divines the Lord's day in these words: “When seven days had passed for each of those in the meadow, they must rise up from there on the eighth and set out, and arrive on the fourth day.” The meadow, then, is to be understood as the fixed sphere, a gentle and pleasant place and the region of the holy; and the seven days as each motion of the seven planets, and all the working art hastening toward its end in rest. And the journey beyond the wandering stars leads to heaven, that is, to the eighth motion and day. And he says that the souls depart on the fourth day, indicating the journey through the four elements.

But not only the Hebrews but the Greeks too know that the seventh day is holy, the day by which the whole world of all living and growing things revolves. Hesiod speaks of it thus: “First the new moon, the fourth, and the seventh, a holy day.” And again: “And on the seventh again the bright light of the sun.” And Homer: “And then on the seventh came the holy day.” And: “The seventh was holy.” And again: “It was the seventh day, and by it all things had been completed.” And again: “On the seventh dawn we left the stream from Acheron.” Yes, and the poet Callimachus writes: “On the seventh dawn all things had been made for him.” And again: “The seventh is among the good things, and the seventh is the birth.” And: “The seventh is among the first, and the seventh is perfect.” And: “All seven were made in the starry heaven, appearing in their circles as the years come round.”

And the elegies of Solon too greatly exalt the number seven. What then? Is not Plato, all but prophesying the saving dispensation, saying something very like the Scripture that says, “Let us take away the righteous one from among us, for he is troublesome to us,” when he speaks thus in the second book of the Republic: “Being so disposed, the righteous man will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes put out, and finally, after suffering every evil, will be impaled”? And Antisthenes the Socratic, paraphrasing that prophetic saying, “To whom have you likened me? says the Lord,” says that God is like no one; therefore no one can come to know him from an image. And Xenophon the Athenian says similar things word for word: “At any rate he who shakes all things and keeps them still is manifest as someone great and mighty; but what he is like in form is unseen. Nor does the sun, which seems all-bright, allow itself to be seen; but if anyone gazes at it shamelessly, it takes away his sight.” “For what flesh can see with eyes the heavenly and true God, the immortal, who dwells in the heavens? Not even against the rays of the sun can men stand, born mortal as they are,” the Sibyl foretold.

Well, too, does Xenophanes of Colophon, teaching that God is one and incorporeal, add: “One God, greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in body or in thought.” And again: “But mortals suppose that gods are born, and have their own clothing, voice, and body.” And again: “But if oxen or lions had hands, so as to draw with their hands and make works as men do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and would make their bodies such as each of them had.”

Let us hear again Bacchylides the lyric poet speaking about the divine: “They are unsubdued by shameful diseases and unharmed, in no way like men.” And Cleanthes the Stoic, who wrote this about God in a certain poem: “You ask me what the good is like? Listen, then: ordered, just, holy, pious, master of itself, useful, noble, fitting, austere, straightforward, always advantageous, fearless, painless, profitable, without grief, helpful, well-pleasing, safe, friendly, honored, consistent, glorious, without conceit, caring, gentle, strong, enduring, blameless, ever-abiding.”

And the same poet, by implication finding fault with the idolatry of the many, adds: “Unfree is everyone who looks to opinion, as if he would obtain something good from it.” We must no longer, then, think of the divine according to the opinion of the many. “For I do not think that Zeus, imitating the form of an evil-doing man, came secretly to your bed like a human being,” says Amphion to Antiope. And Sophocles writes outright: “For it was this man's mother that Zeus married, not in the form of gold, nor clothed in swan's plumage, as when he got the Pleuronian girl with child, but wholly a man.” Then, going on, he added: “And swiftly the adulterer stood at the bridal steps.” And after this he relates the incontinence of the Zeus of the myths still more plainly, thus: “He, touching neither feast nor water for washing, went to bed, his heart stung; and all that night he mounted her.” Let these things be left to the follies of the theaters. But Heraclitus says plainly: “Though this word is always, men are without understanding, both before they hear it and when they have first heard it.”

And the lyric poet Melanippides says in song: “Hear me, O father, wonder of mortals, ruler of the ever-living soul.” And the great Parmenides, as Plato calls him in the Sophist, writes about the divine thus: “Very many are the signs that, being unbegotten, it is also imperishable, whole, only-begotten, unshaken, and without beginning.” And Hesiod too says: “For he himself is king and lord of all the immortals; no other has vied with your might.” Yes, and tragedy too, drawing people away from idols, teaches them to look up to heaven.

Sophocles, as Hecataeus, who composed the histories, says in his work On Abraham and the Egyptians, cries out plainly on the stage: “One in truth, one is God, who made the heaven and the long earth, and the sea's gleaming swell, and the might of the winds. But we many mortals, straying in heart, set up as a comfort for our woes images of gods of stone, or figures of bronze, or wrought of gold, or of ivory; and crowning these with sacrifices and evil festivals, we think that so we are pious.”

And Euripides, writing tragedy on the same stage, says: “Do you see this boundless ether on high, holding the earth around in its moist embraces? Consider this Zeus, hold this to be God.” And in the drama Pirithous the same poet also writes this tragic passage: “You, the self-begotten, who in the whirl of the ether have woven the nature of all things, around whom light, and around whom dark, spangled night and the countless throng of stars dance unceasingly.” For here he has called the Maker, Mind, the self-begotten, while what follows applies to the world, in which there are also the opposites of light and darkness. And Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, says very solemnly of God: “Zeus is ether, Zeus is earth, Zeus is heaven; Zeus is all things, and whatever is higher than these.”

I know that Plato too bears witness to Heraclitus, who writes: “The one thing that alone is wise is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.” And again: “It is law too to obey the counsel of one.” And if you wish to refer that saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” you would find it expressed by the Ephesian thus: “Hearing without understanding, they are like the deaf; the saying bears witness to them: present, they are absent.” But do you long to hear plainly of one first principle from the Greeks too? Timaeus of Locri, in his work on nature, will bear witness for me word for word thus: “There is one principle of all things, unbegotten; for if it had come into being, it would no longer be a principle, but that would be from which the principle came to be.” For the true opinion flowed from there: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one, and him only shall you serve.” “Behold, he is clear to all, unerring,” as the Sibyl says.

And now Homer too appears to speak of the Father and the Son in these words, as if hitting on a well-aimed divination: “If, then, no one is harming you, alone as you are, there is no way to escape sickness from great Zeus.” “For the Cyclopes do not care for aegis-bearing Zeus.” And before him Orpheus, carried toward the same subject, has said: “Son of great Zeus, father of aegis-bearing Zeus.” And Xenocrates of Chalcedon, calling one Zeus the highest and another the lowest, leaves an indication of Father and Son. And, most paradoxical of all, Homer, who brings in gods with human passions, appears to know the divine; and even so Epicurus does not respect him.

At any rate he says: “Why, son of Peleus, do you pursue me with swift feet, being yourself a mortal, me an immortal god? Not yet have you recognized that I am a god.” For he has shown that the divine cannot be caught or grasped by a mortal, not by feet or hands or eyes, nor by the body at all. “To whom have you likened the Lord? Or with what likeness have you likened him?” says the Scripture. “Has a craftsman made an image, or has a goldsmith melted gold and gilded him over?” and what follows.

And the comic poet Epicharmus speaks clearly about the Word in the Republic, thus: “Human life needs reckoning and number very much; we live by number and reckoning; for these save mortals.” Then he adds expressly: “Reason steers human beings and duly saves them.” Then: “If man has reckoning, there is also a divine Reason. The one is born in man to deal with the turns of life; but the divine Reason accompanies all the arts, itself always teaching them what they must do that is profitable. For it was not man who discovered art; it is God who brings it. And the reason of man is born from the divine Reason.”

Yes, and when the Spirit cried out through Isaiah, “What is the multitude of your sacrifices to me? says the Lord. I am full of whole burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of lambs and the blood of bulls I do not want,” and a little later adds, “Wash yourselves, become clean, remove the wickedness from your souls,” and what follows, Menander the comic poet writes in these very words: “If anyone, Pamphilus, offering sacrifice, a multitude of bulls or kids, or, by Zeus, other such things, or works of craft, making golden or purple cloaks, or figures of ivory or emerald, thinks he is making God kindly, he is mistaken and has a light mind. For a man must be useful, not seducing virgins and committing adultery, stealing and killing for money. Do not covet even the thread of a needle, Pamphilus; for God sees you, being near.” “I am a God near at hand and not a God far off. Will a man do anything in secret places and I not see him?” he says through Jeremiah.