Miscellanies 6.16.133–6.16.148

As an example, in passing, for the knower's clarity, let the Decalogue be set before us. That ten is a holy number it is superfluous to say at present. If the tablets that were written are the work of God, they will be found to display natural creation. For the finger of God is understood as the power of God, through which the creation of heaven and earth is completed, and the tablets will be understood as symbols of both. For God's writing and forming of shapes set in the tablet is the creation of the world. And the Decalogue, as a heavenly image, includes sun and moon, stars, clouds, light, wind, water, air, darkness, and fire. This is the natural decalogue of heaven. And the image of the earth includes men, cattle, reptiles, wild beasts, and, of creatures in the water, fishes and sea monsters; likewise, of birds, those that eat flesh and those that use gentle food; and of plants likewise the fruit-bearing and the fruitless. This is the natural decalogue of the earth. And the ark that contains these would be the knowledge of things divine and human, and wisdom. Perhaps these two tablets are a prophecy of two covenants.

They were renewed, then, in a mystical way, as ignorance and sin increased together. The commandments, it seems, are written twice, for two spirits, the ruling one and the subject one, since “the flesh desires against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh.” There is also a certain decad in man himself: the five organs of sense, the power of speech, and that of reproduction; and eighth, the spiritual element that comes with his formation; ninth, the ruling part of the soul; and tenth, the distinctive mark of the Holy Spirit that comes to him through faith. Besides these, the legislation appears to give orders to ten human parts: to sight, hearing, and smell, to touch and taste, and to the organs that serve them, which are double, hands and feet. For this is how man is formed.

The soul is introduced afterward, and the ruling part, by which we reason, is introduced in addition; it is not generated with the casting of the seed, so that even without it the number ten is made up, through which all the activity of man is carried out. For man, as soon as he is born, receives in due order the beginning of life from the passive parts. We say, then, that the reasoning and ruling part is the cause of the living creature's constitution, and also of the irrational part's being ensouled and being a portion of it. For instance, the vital power, in which are contained the nutritive, the growing, and in general the motive powers, has fallen to the fleshly spirit, which is quick-moving and passes everywhere through the senses and the rest of the body and is the first to be affected through the body. But the ruling part has the power of choice, the sphere of inquiry, learning, and knowledge. Yet the reference of all these is ordered toward the one ruling part, and through it man lives, and lives in a certain way.

Through the bodily spirit, then, man perceives, desires, feels pleasure, becomes angry, is nourished, and grows; and indeed through it he proceeds to actions in accordance with thought and reasoning; and when it masters the desires, the ruling part reigns. The commandment “You shall not desire,” then, says: you shall not be a slave to the fleshly spirit, but shall rule over it; since “the flesh desires against the spirit” and rises up to disorder contrary to nature, “and the spirit against the flesh” prevails, for the conduct of man according to nature. Is it not, then, fitting that man is said to have been made in the image of God, not in the shape of his constitution, but because God creates all things by the Word, and man, when he has become a knower, accomplishes good actions by his reasoning faculty? Fittingly, then, the two tablets are said elsewhere to indicate the commandments given to the two spirits, to the one that was formed and to the ruling one, those handed down before the law; and the movements of the senses are both imprinted in thought and made manifest in the activity that comes from the body; for apprehension comes from both.

And again, as sensation is to the sensible, so intellection is to the intelligible. And actions too are twofold, some in thought, others in deed. The first commandment of the Decalogue shows that there is one only God Almighty, who led the people out of Egypt through the desert to their ancestral land, so that they might grasp his power, as far as they could, through the divine works, and withdraw from the idolatry of created things, putting all their hope in the true God. The second word indicated that we must not take or apply the majestic might of God (which is the name; for this alone they were able to learn, as the many still are now)—must not apply its invocation to created and vain things, which human craftsmen have made, among which “He who is” is not ranked; for He who is, himself alone, is in unbegotten sameness. The third word is the one that indicates that the world was made by God and that he gave us the seventh day as rest because of the hardship of life. For God is untiring, impassible, and without need, but we who bear flesh need rest.

The seventh day, then, is proclaimed as rest, preparing by abstention from evils for the primal day, our true rest, which is indeed truly the first creation of light, in which all things are seen together and all things are inherited. From this day the first wisdom and knowledge shine upon us. For the light of truth is true light, without shadow, the Spirit of the Lord divided without division among those sanctified through faith, holding the place of a lamp for the knowledge of what exists. Following it, then, through our whole life, we become free from passion; and that is to rest. That is why Solomon too says that wisdom came into being for the Almighty before heaven and earth and all things that exist; participation in it (by power, I mean, not by essence) teaches one to understand things divine and human with a firm grasp. Having come to this point, we must mention these things too in passing, since the discussion has turned to the seven and the eight. For the eight may well be the seven in the proper sense, and the seven, to all appearance, a six; the one properly the Sabbath, the seven a working day. For the creation of the world is completed in six days, and the sun's motion from solstice to solstice is completed in six months, in which plants shed their leaves at one time and sprout at another, and seeds come to maturity.

They say too that the embryo is completed precisely in the sixth month, that is, in one hundred and eighty-two and a half days, as Polybus the physician relates in his work On the Eighth-Month Child, and Aristotle the philosopher in his work On Nature. And the Pythagoreans, I think, taking their start from here, from the creation of the world according to the prophet, consider six a perfect number and call it “mid-straight” and “marriage,” because it is in the middle of the straight line, that is, of ten and two; for it appears equally distant from both. And as marriage generates from male and female, so six is generated from three, the odd number, called male, and two, the even number, considered female; for twice three makes six. So many again are the most general motions, according to which all generation moves: up and down, to the right and to the left, forward and backward.

Fittingly, then, they regard the number seven as motherless and childless, interpreting the Sabbath and allegorizing the form of the rest in which “they neither marry nor are given in marriage” any longer. For seven neither comes from any number multiplied by another, nor, multiplied by any, produces another number within the decad. And they call the eight a cube, counting the fixed sphere together with the seven planets, through which the great year comes about, as a kind of period of the recompense of the promises. In this way the Lord, who went up the mountain as the fourth, becomes the sixth and is illumined all around with spiritual light, laying bare the power that comes from him as far as it was possible for those chosen to see it, and is proclaimed through the seventh, the voice, to be the Son of God; so that they might rest, persuaded about him, while he, through birth, which the six signified, being the episemon, might appear as the eight, showing forth God in flesh, numbered as a man but hidden as to who he was. For in the order of numbers the six is counted among the rest, but the sequence of the letters recognizes the episemon, which is not written.

Here, according to the numbers themselves, each unit keeps its order up to seven and eight; but according to the count of the letters, zeta becomes the sixth and eta the seventh. And since the episemon has somehow slipped into the writing, if we follow it this way, the seven becomes sixth and the eight seventh. That is why man is said to have been made on the sixth day, the man who became faithful to the episemon, so as at once to receive the rest of the Lord's inheritance. Something of this kind the sixth hour of the saving dispensation also shows, the hour at which man was perfected. Moreover, of eight terms the intervals between them are seven, and of seven the intervals appear to be six. For that is another account, when the seven glorifies the eight and “the heavens declare to the heavens the glory of God.” The sensible types of these are our vowels. So too the Lord himself is called Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, “through whom all things came to be, and without him not one thing came to be.” God, then, has not ceased making, as some understand the rest of God. For since he is good, if he were ever to cease doing good, he would also cease to be God, which it is not lawful even to say.

To have rested, then, is to have ordained that the order of things created be kept inviolate for all time, and to have brought each of the creatures to rest from the ancient disorder. For the creations on the different days followed in the greatest sequence, so that all things created would have their honor from priority, and their order, though created together in a single thought, yet not equally honored. Nor could the generation of each have been shown in speech if creation had been said to have been made all at once; for it was necessary to name something first. That is why the first things were proclaimed first, from which came the second, all things having come into being together from one substance by one power; for the will of God, I think, is one, in one sameness. How could creation come to be in time, when time itself came into being together with the things that exist? And already the whole world of all living and growing things revolves in sevens.

Seven are the first-born rulers of the angels, who have the greatest power; seven too, say the mathematicians, are the planets, stars that carry out the government of the region around the earth, by which the Chaldeans think everything in mortal life comes about through sympathy, and on that ground they also promise to foretell something of the future. Of the fixed stars, the Pleiades are seven, and the Bears have seven stars each, by which agriculture and navigation are carried out; and the moon undergoes its changes of shape in periods of seven days. In the first week it becomes a half-moon, in the second full, in the third, after waning, half again, and in the fourth it disappears. Moreover, as Seleucus the mathematician relates, it changes its shape seven times. For from being without light it becomes crescent, then half, then gibbous and full; and in waning, gibbous again, and likewise half and crescent.

“With the seven-toned lyre we shall sing new hymns,” writes a poet of no obscurity, teaching that the ancient lyre had seven notes. Seven too are the organs of the senses set on our face: two of the eyes, two of the ear passages, two of the nostrils, and seventh that of the mouth. And that the changes of life's ages happen by sevens the elegies of Solon show, somewhat as follows: “A child, still an infant and not yet grown, sheds the fence of teeth he first grew within seven years. When God completes another seven years, he shows the signs of coming youth. In the third, while his limbs are still growing, his chin grows downy, the bloom of his skin changing. In the fourth seven every man is at his best in strength, which men hold as the signs of excellence. In the fifth it is time for a man to be mindful of marriage and to seek a line of children after him. In the sixth a man's mind is trained in all things, and he no longer wishes to do foolish deeds as before. In seven sevens he is at his best in mind and tongue, and in eight, fourteen years in both together. In the ninth he still has power, but his body and strength are weaker for great excellence. When God completes the tenth seven years, he would not be untimely if he met his portion of death.”

Again, in illnesses the seventh and the fourteenth days are critical, on which nature struggles against the causes of disease. And Hermippus of Berytus, in his work On the Number Seven, cites countless such things, hallowing the number. But the blessed David plainly hands on to those who know the mystical account of the seven and the eight, singing thus: “Our years were spent like a spider's web. The days of our years in them are seventy years; and if in strength, eighty years. † May it be that we reign.” So that we may be taught that the world was created, but not suppose that God makes in time, the prophecy added: “This is the book of the generation, also of the things in them, when they came to be; on the day on which God made the heaven and the earth.” For “when they came to be” indicates an indefinite and timeless production, while “on the day on which God made,” that is, in which and through which he made all things, without which “not one thing came to be,” shows the activity through the Son, of whom David says: “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it,” that is, let us feast at the divine banquet handed on according to the knowledge given through him. For the Word who illumines hidden things is called day, the one through whom each created thing came into light and into being. And in general the Decalogue, through the letter iota, shows the blessed name, presenting Jesus as the Word.

The fifth word, next, is about honoring father and mother. It clearly calls God father and lord. That is why it also proclaims those who have come to know him sons and gods. The Maker of all, then, is lord and father; and the mother is not, as some say, the substance from which we have come, nor, as others have explained it, the church, but divine knowledge and wisdom, as Solomon says, calling wisdom the mother of the righteous. And it is to be chosen for its own sake. And again, all that is good and holy is known from God through the Son. Next comes the word about adultery. Adultery is when someone, abandoning the church's true knowledge and his understanding of God, goes over to a false opinion that is not fitting, either deifying some created thing or making an idol of something that does not exist, in excess—or rather departure—from knowledge. False opinion is alien to the one who knows, just as true opinion is his own and his spouse.

That is why the noble apostle calls idolatry one of the forms of sexual immorality, in agreement with the prophet who says: “She committed adultery with wood and stone. To the wood she said, ‘You are my father,’ and to the stone, ‘You gave me birth.’” Then follows the word about murder. Murder is a violent removal. The one, then, who wishes to remove the true word about God and his eternity so as to put falsehood in its place, saying either that the universe is without providence, or that the world is uncreated, or anything else against the firm points of the true teaching, is most destructive. After this is the word about theft. As, then, the one who steals what belongs to others does great wrong and rightly meets the evils he deserves, so the one who appropriates God's works through the art of sculpture or painting and says that he is the maker of animals and plants; and likewise those who imitate the true philosophy are thieves. Whether someone is a farmer or the father of a child, he is a servant of the sowing of seed; but God, who provides the growth and completion of all things, brings what comes into being to its natural state.

Most people, together with the philosophers, attribute growth and change to the stars as the primary cause, depriving the Father of the universe, as far as lies in them, of his tireless power. But the elements and the stars, that is, the administering powers, were commanded to carry out what is suited to the divine ordering, and they obey and are led by those set over them, wherever the word of the Lord leads, since the divine power by its nature works all things in a hidden way. The one, then, who says that he has devised or made any of the things that belong to creation will be called to account for his impious daring. The tenth is the word about all desires. As, then, the one who desires what is not fitting is called to account, in the same way it is not permitted to desire false things, nor to suppose that, among things that come to be, animate things of themselves are able, and inanimate things are not able at all, to save or to harm. And if someone says that the antidote cannot heal or that hemlock cannot destroy, he is unknowingly a sophist. For none of these acts without the one who uses the herb or the drug, just as the axe does not act without the one who cuts, nor the saw without the one who saws. And as they do not act of themselves, yet have certain natural qualities that contribute, with the craftsman's activity, to accomplishing the proper work, so by the universal providence of God, through the things moved more immediately, the effective activity is passed down by degrees to the particulars.