Miscellanies 5.14.89

(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.”