Alethia (Genesis in verse, with a prayer)

Highest and holy God, origin of all power, almighty, whom human minds are not permitted to grasp in understanding by subtle inquiry into things, and whom it is wrong not to know; for by deep reason we believe you to be God in three, yet the three so to be one that the undivided substance gives each its proper form of its kind, keeping the covenant in a holy bond: you, without beginning, likewise everlasting without end, alone always the same and subject to no age; you surpass the extent of things, wherever the recess of the mind stretches, and are bounded by no extent; there is no place, with the things it nurtures, that could contain you, nor are you yourself more a place; nor may the mind attain what your image is, since, restrained by no limit, your form escapes the senses, nor what motion quickens you with blessed power, since you are always wholly everywhere: you are mind, and the very substance of sacred mind, you are reason and the prudent origin of full reason, you are power, the summit of power, and assuredly you are life itself and begetter of life and of deep light, you are the true light, O God, you the cause and vigor of things. From you took its beginning whatever suddenly flashed forth from nothing and, filled by so great an author, either has the force of mind or has received its form in a mind.

Nature, preserved in its perishable parts, proves you Lord, and the order given confesses the sequence you commanded: you, distinguishing docile numbers, weighing weights, varying measures, governing measures and motion, bid things keep their alternating turns and stand in perpetual recurrence, and bid the world, full of the image of mind, moved by you in the ether, now roll on the ages. You were not content to endow what you created with one gift, whatever it is that comes into use through you: something more has been made, and all things are better in the part where they lie hidden, and an inner cause too makes them please, welcome in themselves; some sharpen their vigor from others; certain contraries, if they contend, have more of peace. So, rich Creator, you bind all things, making even opposing elements kin, and fill them with powers poured out from the whole. And yet, though these things are within the majesty of your creating, you need none of the things you beget; and the work of the world, completed and remaining through you in the stable frame of things, does not run for your sake, and it is plain in your gift to us

that you can do all things: nor does your glory lie only in this, that as a good author you make what is to be given, but that you make the things themselves able to give, and you wrap secondary causes within the first, so that whoever feels your gifts is himself also your gift. You have shown by clear reason that the only cause for you, O God, to bid all things be begotten was goodness, when to spirits first bidden to live and to enjoy the world which you bore in your mind, it was given to things suddenly made to exist and to spread far and wide into heaven and earth together, and to provide a glittering seat for the angelic flock. To them with kindly mind you granted free hearts and choice of their own, so that there might be a work of virtue, and so that you might confer this also on the merits of the pious: that by giving you would become a debtor. Nor, because one of the first beings you created to reign, while he envies the Lord of light and life and his own author and covets this title, preferred to be the author of evil and to bring death upon the earth, cast down from high Olympus with his partners in crime, is it right to dictate anything to sacred power, for which it is enough to have made what is good: nor was it right that anyone should lack the gift of God, and this contains the sum of his kindly praise; nor was it right to deny life and sense to the ungrateful, and the mind's own rule over all its affairs. For what fruit is there for creatures, unless the mind is free?

No one at all has a free mind unless he may perish. That this was granted no one would have proved except by sinning. To this I add that all things, diverse, in turn hold their balance when compared, and that hence the power to perish was given to all, so that to live might be sweeter, and the equal measure of alternating peril on both sides might go to merit, when, under a severe judge, the punishment of the wicked would double the worthy rewards of the saints; or else that (may it be permitted to one trembling to say it, having first asked your leave, Father) perhaps it counts for more with you that the good have not sinned through the slippery times of life than that the wicked have sinned to their misery. But let your majesty see to these things, and how the judgment of the future stands: this is enough for us, that through you, breathing into earth the noble work of reason from vile dust, so that such a creature might conquer the enemy ungrateful to his Lord, you raised up man; and him, snatched by the deceit of savage venom into the snares of death and to impious Tartarus, you soon, deigning to take a body, with your own blood sought out from the seats of Erebus with greater care than when he was made, and you restore him and give him back to everlasting life and carry him with you into heaven, the enemy subdued.

Now let no one rashly accuse father Adam because, by breaking the light command and violating the law, he opened the way to death. That punishment of our parent was the beginning of so great a gain, because it is more to conquer death than never to have known how to die. Now, glad, from his Father's hall he looks down on the ethereal poles and treads the stars underfoot, and calls the ministers appointed for the kingdoms to come, whom he formed again by water and taught to be reborn: he, the Wisdom of the Father's Word, which begot the whole. In him, kindly God, I pray you, who with favoring power give minds to perceive and compel hearts to speak the truth even when the poet does not know it: grant me, as I pray, to know, while I prepare to form tender minds and hearts for the true way of virtue in their boyish years, what the famous book-chests of lawgiving Moses unfold, what the origin of the sky is, or what the first beginnings of the world, and what plague, grown strong, shook the secret faith out of the whole world, and how error sank deep into morals, and by what way the truth returns again, drives out profane rites and unlocks the mystic rites of eternal life. Grant too a mind, grant fit times for the mind, grant zeal, so that care may not be lacking for so great a labor, and a good sense for the study, and that which by right runs over all that is known and encloses it in a strong mantle, so that you may not condemn me because, guilty as I am, I dare so great a task.

Kindly forgive all the crimes I have committed; you have given strength and sense to souls, and merit too. But if the order should offend at all against the law of meter, if an improper word should offend, or a wavering sense (let it be permitted here and there to run on in careless verse), let no danger to the faith arise from this measure, through Christ, who, your only Son, with you, flourishing in majesty equally with the kindly Spirit, lives, beyond the grasp of minds, for ages of ages, and reigns: which the solemn Amen consecrates to you.

Before the poles and the daylight of heaven and the darkness of the world, before the forms of works, or things, or the seeds of things, there was one God, to whom being always belongs, eternal without end backward and without end in what is to come; with him lived God the begotten Word and at the same time the kindly Spirit, the sum of hidden, life-giving vigor. By this bond the one substance of the three, quickening itself, unbegotten, always blessed itself by its power and reigned in might; in the majesty of creating seeing already things, and the causes of things, and future events, and what was to be made and begotten, surveying the ages with capacious mind, and always holding as present whatever the times roll on. Immense in blessed greatness, he was his own kingdom, nor did he lack a witness of his kingdom, God, threefold power, who first, from no seed, giving bodies to things as he compels things to exist, so as to make our gift, which he alone possessed, alone knew the work: he begot all things at once, completing a rich world, but, distinguishing what he brought forth into parts by a fixed limit, brought them out each in its own origin, so that order might now set times in a sequence of motion. For neither did chance, lacking mind, as the tongue of sacrilegious madness thought, while it rolled unknowing seeds, twist together so prudent a work, nor may one say that what was born existed before the day, since things born in time are moved and then there was no time, nor believe that the world always held, backward, an eternal and stable vigor;

for what consists of bodies must be confessed to have begun. For a body, which a blow wears down, which times dissolve and abolish by the very end that tends toward the last things, shows a beginning, since things shown to have received their lot must fittingly be believed either made or born. For since things that are born are carried along in motion with time, and times that run after the mass of the world are born, what is prior, and what must consist of bodies, they prove could not have been eternal, and confess could have been made. It is agreed, then, that the world was made, to which everyone, compelled, assents, and, convinced by true doctrine, believes; he has granted that God made it, who, powerful by the might of the Word and by his power, arranged, commanded and directed whatever is thought to be nature, and sustains his created gift, always re-forming fleeting things in successive turns, and, drawing it back, rolls round the swift globe. And if he should wish to dissolve the whole in a moment, he could take existence from things, and not only this existence, but take from past things the very ground by which he knows that they were. O how great the power of the Father, O how great the glory of the Word! What measure is there in the whole, what sum in the gift, of which the vaults of the high pole and the lands that lie below are the first part of the work? But the sea had covered the lands, and the blind shadow of the pole pressed with dense darkness the air between, wet with filthy cloud,

and the holy Spirit hovering over the outstretched waves. He was quickening the nourishing waters, and was giving the seeds of things to be instilled, to be poured out into shoots when the lands were not yet ordered, when light sent from above flashed forth at God's compelling, and the shadow, separated, drawing back its black robe, departed from highest Olympus, set the waters between, and, fleeing the light that followed, was soon behind its back. So the limit of day set a name on the spaces of light, and the darkness, cut off, made night, poured back over the world, equal to it. Again a new morning: the first evening now driven off, light returned and shone, when a most firm mass, stretching itself out from the midst of the waves with solid body, rose up and, made solid far and wide with hard rigidity, hung the divided waters and set the cold deep against the hot axes, and, resting on the enclosed water, spread itself over the things which it closed in a vast circuit, and stripped the ancient sky of its name. Perhaps someone here may argue with himself in skilled error: so that fuel may not be lacking to the ethereal flames, and too great a heat, seeking the lowest depths in pursuit of nourishment, may not burn up the mortal race, and the earthly things may not be unable to bear the glittering sky, the firm frame of the pole has been set beneath, which, while it protects us with shade, is also veiled with waters. But, my mind, flee far from seeking such causes: let it count more with you always to believe that God can do whatever is thought impossible.

and prove that the great sea is carried above the stars and constellations by the reasoning of those very people who refuse to believe it and would have the world hang, which the Creator himself, governing it always by incomprehensible reason, carries, and rolls round, steady in its immense weight. The third light was astonished to see the swelling waves depart, when God, driving back the waters of the remaining flood, opened a great void in the spaces of the air. Then first the dry land, the lowest part of the world, showed its face uncovered, and the blue seas, made to tremble by the power of the Word, encircled the bared lands. These, bidden to grow green at once with varied offspring, luxuriant shoots covered from the new mud, and the raw forest, bursting from the tender turf, tossed itself with glad foliage and with its very fruits, and each, bearing its own seed, bore witness to its sower. Now, three days completed, the first day of the sun, kindled with rapid motion, was bidden to gather itself into flames and a globe of fire, and the seeds of light, founded, scattered crimson tresses from a rosy tinder, and the moon, the glory of the night, whether she shone with her own light or, struck by the oncoming globe, poured back its rays, hung beneath the sun on a lower path; and the blue night was astonished that the stars, painting the world in distinct zones, flashed varied colors with heavenly flowers, and that the sky shone the more with darkness adorned, while the darts poured out in ruddy flames flash and the new stars press on in their eager throws.

the moon, which veils the radiance with its rays and covers it with a kind of night of deep light, and, dividing times marked by a fixed limit, having completed its fixed station, bidden to return in the numbered turn of the headlong pole, to go its course once, completes the revolving year and confesses the sacred craftsman by the marvelous frame. The fifth day set breathing bodies in motion in the sea, which the liquid readily begot and scattered in the deep, the delights of the sea, which nature, bidden to create, formed from varied seed in wonderful ways; nature compels parts of things to live also for themselves instead of for the whole, and gave the soul to pass into brute shapes, creatures that would raise their scaly backs from the swelling salt flood without end, stuffed with soft fat, unless a swift limit of life were prescribed for the huge ones. The begetting liquid itself favors the bodies of its nurslings, the liquid that also nourishes the shoots of the earth, and rather dissolves limbs heaped up, which the moisture had stretched further. From it the birds too, a soft race, drew their vigor. While life, sent in, shapes the liquid waters and enters the sea, the swelling seas seethe again with offspring not born for themselves, and now the scaly crowd, sent forth from the deep, while it rises from the salt into the topmost waves, the creature that was flitting on the waters gradually swims in pure air, and teaches that this animal, which is born again from bright waves, can reach the ethereal recesses.

Now the sixth day was shining on bright Olympus, the third after the begetting gifts of the hot sun, and now the warm earth had relaxed her pregnant limbs, when God, intending greater things, bade the earth bring forth every animal that the faculty of moving alone quickens, to which it was given to serve where the need of things requires. No delay: from the pregnant lands burst forth living offspring, each allotted the shapes of its own kind, now in need of a master, for whose sake he prepared all things, he who alone can create even what is still to be made. From here let me be allowed to touch on some things briefly, to pass over some entirely in anxious, hurried course, and to tell some things I passed over in a changed order. After the given order had brought forth all things kind by kind, which, at God's command, the almighty Son, full of the Father's mind, would make, and the holy Spirit would approve as full of true goods and filled with rich endowment, and would cherish to remain in a long succession, a nearer cause is given to the world, which in its turn has a just prior cause. Now there was a world, now stars and risings, and ether and the glassy sea and green lands: unless a beholder is present whom the glory of so great a mass may fill and lead, eager, through each thing with his eyes, what could they contribute to God? There is no possession if the possessor of things is absent. Then the ruler of Olympus: “The sum of the work is given; good are all the things I have created.

Now let us make man,” he says, “to reign in the world and to be the image of God. It is fitting that he be like his Creator, who, free in his choice, enjoys created things with a mind.” He had said this, and man was made, whether in his whole body, without soul and shape, perhaps in the way in which he makes things to come, in which he makes things yet to be made, in which he always held what was made already as almost past, though it had not yet come in time. And soon he bade him, set over things, with his wife, increase through offspring and fill the empty lands. Now, as God spoke thus well, the nature of begetting was placed in all things that move of themselves alive. The seventh light saw the great Parent cease, but cease only from creating the numbers of kinds, and keep his rest; and deservedly it was hallowed, since it saw a different work; for this too is full of power, that God ceased and laid down his labors. That it was enough for the Lord to have looked for twice three days on the form of what he had begotten, by which they might prepare worthy rewards: the seventh light taught a venerable example of rest, which he bids peoples hope for as the reward of life, always to be given after the works of the pious. This too is that light on which Christ loosed dread Tartarus and opened a way back from conquered Avernus, while he rests in the ground, about to return to his Father's hall.

So God knows how to cease, how to take leisure, so as to do more by ceasing. Resting alike without end and working without end, and mingling sequence and times, by ceasing he completes the work, whatever he had created, so as to make the first man and now to endow him with a body, him who was last (for to found the causes of things is not the same as to give limbs); or, while the seventh day thus runs, so that the sixth day also remains, because the sixth is surely to God what the first is, to him who always has present all the things that escape us, after any amount of time the supreme Author still fashions man thus in the sixth light; or, to teach that we, whom he makes with his own hand, deservedly surpass created things, he sets forth more plainly now that man was made, and declares this to the whole world: “All things that move by a soul were brought forth at God's command; you, by God's working.” Who could bring to so great a parent worthy offerings of praise, who unfolded the world and all things in a moment by command and, while he commands, accomplished their being? Us a delay makes to be; around us he deigns to spend the care of sacred zeal, and he persuades himself to carry out almost a work of labor; for he takes the easy clay that yields and bends and follows the form to which it is led by art, and unfolds it into the shape that he already bore in his holy mind, and life, sent in by a warm breath, watered the ground. The earth, softened by the moisture, became flesh in part: blood, which is a slippery fluid, filled the soft veins through the known openings:

and now man is full of mind, and, pushed off from the earth, he leaps up and, wise, adores the Lord of reason. Not otherwise does true faith hold that bodies, at the command, will rise again from broken tombs, when majesty, descending from the open heaven, unlocks the hollow womb of the pregnant earth. For since, when God formed it thus from the surface of the dust, it brought forth what it did not have, lacking any power of its own, it is easy for it, with the same one as judge, to give back when commanded what it received. So all that was begotten first is a figure of what is to come, and while Adam himself is so made that the narrative, repeated, doubles the sacred gift, it is usefully sown beforehand that peoples will one day be reborn. Their source and highest origin being given already then, where the happy land opens its eastern recesses, on a higher rise the paradise of a pleasant grove is planted and set out in the order of a rounded wood. Here, where the course of the sun is already divided into equal spaces and spring tempers eternity with equal hours, there each tree stands rich with its own fruits, and ripe fruits are driven off by fruits that follow them, which are alluring to the eyes and full of wonderful vigor, and cherish and feed limbs and spirits with taste and smell.

The earth, adorned, flashes starry colors, always with new flowers; and plants which, with a dry covering, now release their fragile reeds, quickened by the vigor of an ambrosial gift pour out fragrant cinnamon; nor do the scent of the Mede, or of the Achaemenian with his loosened hair, or of the Assyrian rich in soft amomum, and the Mareotic harvest red with nard, or the Tartessian shrubs, or the Sabaean twig, or what the Palestinian branch weeps from its torn wound, fail to pour into the air their differing savors. For here God gathered together all the things which nature received one by one in fixed places, and heaped them in one: and while the grove, stirred, quivers in a gentle breeze's passage, it mingles one nectar out of diverse fragrances, and there arises a new gift, which no tree may claim as its own; and where, trembling, gradually tossed with a soft rustling, it quivers with stirred leaves, the wood sounds in every tree a hymn to God, and the breeze whistles measured songs: nor does an empty motion shake the air in vain, since with the Author, who, binding things to things in one mass, holds them in by alternating law, nothing is idle, nor does any appearance hold an empty shape. And perhaps the grove itself and the glittering woods are tokens of works and seedbeds of things, and what comes into human use with a bare name has there a definite body and flowers on its own stem.

glory, simplicity, zeal, vigilance, sleep, care, salvation, terror, eloquence, grace, the motions and passions of the soul, its goads, watchfulness, virtue, and all that the world has: because it is born there, it flourishes here and stirs minds and serves the senses. But this is enough for faith: that, rising from a glad seed, on this side the tree of life seeks the air with lofty fruits, on that side knowledge, harmful with its different fruit, has hung the testing of things on the tree of the law. But the bosom of the holy grove, which the forest crowns, a spring waters, and weds its offspring with rich power, gladly releasing its swelling head in a fourfold river, richer than the ocean; for, ready with its unceasing flood, the spring gives its own waters, the ocean receives all and does not feel the waters. Less is he who cannot grow when such floods are poured in than he who cannot diminish when rivers are poured out. But in the first stream Pishon leaps forth exulting, the fourth part of the blessed spring, bringing the gifts that nature bestows as prudence, and fills the peoples of the Ganges and swells the kingdoms of Havilah with its mud, and, rolling lands and seeds, sows the fields that it makes. Where it lies rough with bare sands, among the golden flakes of gleaming metal the carbuncle flashes, glowing with lightning fire, and the emerald shines, gleaming with green light.

Nor less is the Gihon, which follows, but milder with calm waves, it raises the waters of the Nile and covers with a kindly flood the fields that would otherwise burn far and wide, and, resisting the sky, tempers the air of the Ethiopians with its refluent pools. Third from there, running forth with rapid flood, the Tigris goes as companion to the Euphrates; these, rushing in one joined mass, the conquered earth, opening, swallows in a hollow chasm, until into the glades of Armenia and the Median pastures it vomits out the rivers it could not hold and no longer contains. But the Tigris, as if indignant at black Avernus, leaps forth with greater motion under the breezes of the sky and again goes beneath caverns, and, sunk in hollows, roars within and, made stronger by the barrier, is multiplied in its waters, and, faster from the narrow cave, comes out and cuts the Assyrian plains with swift column. More just is the Euphrates, which, generous with rich flood, waters the dry fields of Persia below, drawn out in soft streams, and serves all equally, and offers itself wholly to human uses, until, dry of waters, prodigal, it spends even its very name in the lands, which it owed to the waves of the sea.

These kingdoms, then, rich with every offspring of nature, delights filled with so many and so great endowments of virtues, are the first possession of the first man, into which he had been led and bidden to exult as a dweller in everlasting life: and now, among the first gifts, while he becomes still worthy and learns by labor to deserve what he possesses, having obtained the fruit of full virtue, he lived free of cares and not knowing what it was to wish. So great is the merit with the Author, instead of the highest title, not yet to have deserved any evil. How much, then, do we think the Father can pay for the life that will return in the times to come, with whom, already then, paradise was for his servants a first largess, not a wage? And in that he brought in the decrees of a severe law and restrained their freedom, he still pledges greater things to the good and keeps rewards in store, he who established the ground for merits when he said: “Eat of all the trees: remember only to dread this one, which, bearing the testing of diverse things, will make you, who then knew good, know evil when it is wounded by a profane bite, and the penalty of death will follow.” By giving such a law, the deep reasoning of the Father teaches that he willed man not to be made mortal but to be worthy to live, and that a slight observance would make him worthy. O how great is the kindness of the great God!

He desires that what he bestows on his servants of his own kindly will should become the work of our praise; he desires it to be the fruit of our labor, and prefers that what he gives should seem owed by him. But you, whom the custody of the sacred law binds, do not complain that your liberty, shut within narrow bounds, is robbed of a part of itself: nothing is cut off from you by this law. Before, you had obtained power only over earth and sea; now you have power over the kingdom and everlasting life, and now over death as well. Then, so that the inexperienced inhabitant of the world might believe that the kindly Parent had granted him all things, God bade every animal which the earth, bidden to give, had so far created and poured out by silent seed, springing up in body, to come and obey its own ruler, and Adam, after the highest names of the kinds, to speak the names of the parts, by which to fix them on things as on servants: he who, at the Lord's prompting, among such great gifts of life, gave each its own name as well. No delay: nature sets before God every kind, from whatever part of the new world it was created. Creatures so different in motion gather within one moment of time: those the Father had equipped, strong in effort, or slow with soft step, or most ready in rapid course, to glide with headlong onrush through the air, or, supported on the seas, to be carried slippery by their weight, endowing them with different gifts, and armed them with hand, horn, foot, tooth, venom,

and others, whose compact frame, lacking art and of lesser spirit, he fortified. But none of the living creatures flourished with appearance, face and bearing equal to man, and, set beside him, each rather added to his honor; and among so many creatures that brighten life with a double sex he alone was unmatched, he who for a long while, unaware, held in himself the fit material for begetting a wife. So God undertakes the work he knew, and, swiftly striking the man's heart, loosens it, languid, in so deep a sleep that he might, in his might, take away a rib from one bereft of mind, while the flesh rises, bidden to follow, and the skin, drawing back, does not let the bone mingle with the gap between, and might take it with the limbs unharmed and the body sound. The rib, unfolding, soon distributed through various limbs, received form and, animated by warm marrow, drew on the work of life, now pleasing in the second sex, and, given to her husband, was called Eve. Here now, most stupid crowd, stop at last judging anything to take precedence over the sacred Parent: why indeed was the first woman formed thus from the limbs of her man, when she could have been fashioned from soft dust, and could have been made from nothing? This is surely the true cause: lest the natural order should rather claim this for itself, or because man is from man and it should be clear to the world that all things were then made at once, so that a certain kinship might mingle mutual love with care for one's own, * compelling each to recognize himself in the limbs of the other.

Hence it is that Adam, unknowing, felt that he had received back part of himself: a new grace touched his mind, and affection, received through his eyes, rushed into his own inmost parts and penetrated his bones with such warmth that it now gave him to know that a wife has the name of spouse, that sweet children and parents are to be put after one's spouse. What then? Now the two would remain in one flesh, leading together an eternal life (for while they lacked the vices and stain of the earth, they flourished with divine minds, needing none of the riches the world gave: for they did not bear bodies subject to diseases, or the nurslings of a greedy belly; food was only among their delights, and what need demands was not yet a support of life, and the soul's own immortality flourished), had not the dire serpent, goaded by the venom of a greater evil, persuaded the incautious Eve with such deceits to break the law: “O race of men, lacking the better life and ignorant of good things! For he who cannot distinguish how diverse things differ from good ones does not know good things either. And therefore God did not wish it lawful for man to pluck the august fruits, lest, the cloud removed from the mind, they should give eyes to souls, and the other part of things, teaching what is best, should make those who are expert in all secrets like gods.” Here now let it be right to digress a little and lament the shameful ruins of the ancients.

Ah, too wretched Gentiles, whom madness drove into various rites! It is plain in what death the profane perished utterly. The plural name of gods the impious voice of the dire serpent first sounded, he who was then the cause of death. For after credulous Eve broke the command with sacrilegious bites, now taught by the experience of evil, she seeks consolation for her guilt and, to drag her compliant husband into the crime, attacks him by the art by which she herself had perished first. So, overcome by the enemy, wretched Adam yields to a twin crime and tasted the fruits, most alluring with sacred juice. But since beneath them lay the decrees of a severe law, bound to bring death more surely than a viper's venom, as soon as they had violated their limbs with the forbidden taste, at once they felt the wickedness, and the crime they had done grew and struck their breasts with an unknown sense. Hence fear, thence shame: for before it had been given them to live naked and not know it; whether because, untaught men, with hearts full of kindly vigor, aware of lofty things, bearing breasts intent only on heaven and the world, always turned toward the exalted Father, while they observed the marvels of the divine secrets with the splendor of an almost bodiless mind, they had not yet come to care for their own limbs, unaware of them through a better soul; or because the motion that would make them know whatever is needful could not penetrate bodies that were not to be dissolved into old age by any delay.

After that everlasting vigor of life had deserted the now mortal creature, at last cold and heat, the changes of the air, came upon them, and the human pair felt themselves in need of clothing and secretly blushed at their own sex. Lamenting pitiably with silent tears, they weave new coverings from the leaves of the shady fig, joined together, to strip away by covering the body the shame that their mind had taken on after the guilt. Nor is this enough for the trembling pair. What are they to do, how flee the branded crime and themselves? They would wish, if perhaps it opened, to hide themselves in the earth: so close to its punishment is guilt, that now, as the wretches fear what is mortal, the very image of death pleases them. They draw woods and shady haunts over themselves, the false comfort of an empty hiding place. For where may you, timid one, withdraw your body, you, you, I say, Adam, who are soon to be dragged back first? The living power of the Father, most hidden, present, fills the world and, spread abroad, goes out beyond its immense recesses. But truly it is wrong for the fearful to be cheated by a hiding place. Only he can escape the highest Lord in fleeing who flees to the Lord; leaving him in mind alone, in how vast a darkness you lie, and still you cannot hide! Calling with his voice, 'Where are you?', he testifies to both together.

For why does God, seeing you, seek you, and why does he, to whom you will always be present, from whom not even death itself, which you underwent through a frail mind, can steal you away, ask where you are, unless because he declares that you, fallen of your own will in the manner of grief, are not with him and have fallen from sacred heaven? But the holy kindness of the Father forbids despair, whose clemency (let it be right for me to have said it, right also to have proved what I said) exceeds his justice. Nor does he, rebuking me with severe voice, “Where are you, what are you turning over in your trembling breast?”, so much frighten me as restore me, because, after the crimes, he still calls out and calls back one who has fallen, sunk in fear in hiding places and almost buried. Lest long examples be sought: the very pardoning of the guilt proves the Lord gentle. After the questioning, sifting the matter, had picked out the chief culprits, the Almighty begins (heaven, sea and earth tremble at the speaker, and, shaken, lay open their vast recesses, and while the sentence punishes the guilty, it created Tartarus): “Since you have thought it safe to depart from our commands, in the same order in which the guilt ran through the sequence of the crime, in that order a just sentence of mine will strike the new offenders. Among all the creatures which we bade enjoy the whole world, you will be cursed and worse than what you hide within, envious mind, serpent, who cast down men created to enter heaven, and, for those whom your fraud drove to touch the forbidden fruits, are the origin of a very hard death.

so that a measure of punishment worthy of the wickedness may follow: you plunged men into the earth: you too, your limbs stretched on the hostile ground, will furrow the hard earth with your breast; you made them sin through food: for such daring you too will always eat the squalid inward parts of the earth. And because it pleased you, as worthy of you, to be the first inventor of death, you will die by a bloody punishment, and, arming the hatred of the human race especially against all your kind, steeped in cruel venoms, I will make you always feared, so that you may be killed the more. And of this woman, whom you rejoice to have overcome by your first fraud, living lower than her feet and prone on your breast, you will lie in wait only for the very soles, so that she, trembling, may set her footprints even on your head.” He spoke, and thus began upon the pale Eve: “But you, who thought it the least of crimes to destroy yourself alone by the fruit, and, in your wretched mind, then lay in wait to harm your husband and gained the mastery by so great a crime, will bear a servant's yoke, and, subject, you will feel the will of a harsh husband and suffer labors in constant mishaps, so that you who first dared to multiply the wickedness once begun may be tossed about in many perils, and in childbearing you will be so tortured by frequent children that those whom your guilt will cause to be born mortal will sometimes be the cause of death to their torn mother.”

“You too, who dared to put our warnings and the first bonds of salvation after a woman's deceits, and chose of your own will to die, guilty, receive such a lot: let the earth which you will furrow with the plough be cursed for your crimes. Tilled, let it bear thorns and threatening thistles, and let wicked hope cheat your wish. You ceased to serve me with a faithful mind: let the earth not keep faith with you either. You of your own will refused to live glad in these delights and to live through all ages: now live in hard labor, live in miseries, until slow old age makes you earth, which you rather are, and pours you back to the earth.” He spoke, and in pity covered with the skins of beasts the limbs that could not defend themselves against the sky, and taught them to protect their life. But lest Adam, driven by fear of death, should again dare the crime that he bore in mind, if, ignorant of things, after the extremity of his cause, he should seek again the proud help of the tree of life, which he had by first right, and should live redeemed by no art of the Father, and the mystic order should now totter for the world, and heavier punishments should await the wretched and ever guilty: at once the winds, which the forest of the deep grove stirs, carry them off, bidden to depart from the sacred groves (but a breeze, carrying them, holds them bound in a balancing whirlwind, and the wind seizes the whole air as nature inclines), and, bringing them back to the lands from which their body was given, sets them down with softened blast, without feeling so great a distance and without feeling danger, but not without the grief that agitates the heart.

where they had fallen, what they had lost, what life would follow, what it had been: the sad comparison torments the mind, which heaps up the differences all the more, and they turn over within themselves how far they are now other, how far each of them, changed, seeks himself, uncertain whether to ascribe this to the first guilt and punishment, whether error forced them to know the power of evil, or whether this is what it is to die, or, if heavier things remain, whether a return is granted to the wretched, or whether by an everlasting end they lose what remains, or whether, since the way of bitter death has fallen upon the world and future peoples through a tree, some life may yet return through a tree.

So far I have run without deceit through the hidden sequence, the beginnings of the world, as sincere faith has made them plain, while earthly things were still free of the vices that deserve death. Now let the poet, having entered upon the ways of men and upon mortal things, be permitted to mingle them with truth in verse. After both, bidden to depart from the hallowed seats and kingdoms, reached the fields of their birth and stood as exiles on their own soil (pitiable!), with what looks the inexperienced settlers then stare at the wild countryside, which does not bloom, set off with fruitful trees. No beauty of the soil delights them, but brute heaps of compacted weight lie there, set in no chosen order. The heights are stiff with rock, the hollows labor under woods, the plains lie hidden in grass, the uplands bristle with brambles. Alas, with what eyes they look on these things, with what heart they see them, they in whose minds paradise lives! Nor is there only one cause of grief, that the face of all evils now lies open in its fullness, but that they remember the good. Now that glory of the sacred grove shines with greater brightness, now the blessed wood brings forth its riches more abundantly, now the enjoyment of its fruits is sweeter and their taste like nectar, now the earth breathes with living flowers and touches the sad pair with a fragrance that is absent. O paradise, how unlike their deserts is what you now repay them!

The comparison with worse things exalts you the more, and you make worse the things that alone remain to the wretched. Here the kindly love of life perishes; the lack of all things already whispers that it is sweet to die, unless a greater want comes to the rescue with a heavier evil; for, kindling their bowels with the madness of eating, hunger leads them through all the voracious feasts that the barren forest gives, and forces them to try here and there doubtful foods among the harmful roots of plants, and hunger itself, which made them wish it, makes them unable to escape such a life. At last the final extremity taught them, in need of everything that use requires and destitute of all things, to hope for the help of the highest Father: both lay prostrate, their limbs on the ground, capable only of tears and mute grief, while shame withdraws words from unjust complaints, and they waste away in torpor. But after his mind returned, Adam, rising at last, prays with this petition: “Almighty author of the world and creator of things, woe is me for the stain of evil! While happy life remained and it was given to follow with swift spirit above the stars by sight, I saw with these eyes (as though they beheld the secrets of the mind) you, spread far around and through all things always, and veiling sight with the splendor poured upon it: to say it properly, I saw that you cannot be seen.

Now too, after the guilt, robbed of sacred light, though the better mind, free to range through the whole, has fled, and, in the closed cave of the earthly prison, nothing of truth remains to know except mortal things, this alone remains: to feel that all things are full of you. And therefore, Almighty, who are always wholly everywhere, we flee to you, praying with trembling mind: hear the wretched, whom you always see and hear. When he wished to bind me to the condemned side, he, the head of crimes, guilty before the world and his own enemy, dared nothing by himself alone, lest he be defeated and yield; the unforeseen fraud of the craftsman of crimes subdued the wretched woman, whose mind was incautious, by the serpent's art, and me by the affection which both sexes feel; and when I was condemned with just punishment for the crime, I so repented of the guilt, my mind, struck with such grief, was so indignant with itself, that I thought that you, most gentle judge, were then granting me vengeance on myself. Therefore I denied myself groans and tears in my cause, because I, the guilty one, judged myself unworthy of pardon; and, embracing in my mind the sweet consolations of punishment, placing this very thing hereafter among your sacred gifts, I will count it as pardon for my crime that I was condemned.

It is not, then, dire. But may you, with serene majesty, be willing to hear those who pray for nothing against your commands and who no longer ask with tears that, of your kindly will, you grant your servants that the sentence be relaxed, but that the whole sentence keep its full force. You commanded me to seek my food by moving the clod: so tools must be given for moving the condemned fields (they are to give barren brambles and clinging thorns instead of fruit: so pure seed must first be sown by me, so that the crop sought with labor may cheat my hopes); I must weave bread from the constant seed of plants: grant my mind to know which are the plants, what the form of labor, grant help, Father, in your pity, and instruct our senses. Then it will be that Eve, mistress of things and sure of salvation, will serve me and, having endured the cruel punishment of begetting, bear peoples who will be punished for our crime, and the succession of descendants, by their deaths, will purge the sins of the fathers, making the punishment eternal.” As they prayed thus, the image of the false serpent, seen (fear was the informer) carrying itself by a silent path gently toward soft tracts with quivering grass, turned the frightened pair toward itself and, roused from the torpor of sluggish grief, drew them into a rage against their kin.

And Eve first, to her husband: “If the supreme cause of our evils moves you, seize stones in your hand; look, the chance is given to give the author of death to death. She ought first to teach, by her own punishment and a bloody death, how sad it is to die, she who ruined me, and you, so badly.” She spoke, and as it slips away they pursue it at a run with missile weapons and hurl rocks, one of which, the arm drawn back higher for the effort, sure to give an easy throw, obeys their wishes, following their eyes and their will, and, with the serpent between, bounces onto bare flint and strikes a spark, which, fed on dry tinder, soon was flame, spreading its burning tresses far and wide, and now blooms, bright, with dry smoke. They shuddered and sought hiding places with trembling step, but stupor itself holds the frightened pair and reveals the inquisitive care of human weakness, that, though timid, they wish to see again what is to be feared, and, a little withdrawn on the ridge of the barren earth, they marvel that the shady foliage of the groves has fallen, that it is foul with ashes, that the day is darkened, that all the lands are shining and that there is a new light under the sun. Nor do they hear with a quiet mind the crackling as the woods hiss everywhere and the surging globes of flame are carried to the stars, while the devouring fire, sunk deep, stretches itself down to the lowest roots, and, overcome by the heat it has taken in,

the raw earth opens its veins for noble gifts and, when it has been dried of all its moisture, itself begins to become liquid and to pour out metals in streams, each its own. With tawny torrent flashes gold, the highest glory; gleaming like white milk silver flows out; the stiffness of copper wanders, slippery, and gathers, its body melted, into a soft mass, and iron, a livid clod. So Etna, its furnaces burst open, belches out hissing sulphur mingled with flames, while they seethe, slippery; but when they feel the coolness of breathable air, they stiffen, and swiftly the dry liquid, its fire frozen, is turned into a gleaming clod and becomes an inert body. So they marvel to see the various streams stop their courses, which, where the heat fails, they now watch with eager eyes, and they take the alluring color into their hands and pursue what they had feared. They felt God's help and rejoice that the first prayers of the guilty, though no virtue had followed their guilt, had been granted, and they give thanks to the highest Parent both for what the fire gave and for the fire, and for the mind to which he revealed what use there was. Both things I hold certain: that our parents explored the sacred gift, eagerly measuring all with their eyes, but that first they put their hands to the rich gold, which already strikes minds like lightning and subdues them with the gleam of a precious poison,

and does not satisfy them, until it overcomes them as they marvel at its great weight, and, slipping from their hands, wounds them as if with the edge of a hard rock, and teaches that it can easily take a blow and its body be marred. A new concern suddenly came upon the astonished pair and sharpened their minds, and admonished them to follow by art what chance had taught. Then with the weight of a hard stone they strike in turn and bend and draw out into various shapes the mass that yields to the blows. No labor shaped it lastingly, but, overcome, it quickly lost its shape, because the material, unequal to great efforts, receives their zeal but disappoints their use. So they look for something harder; but even so gold pleases, since it taught that a rigid metal is more useful. Then they pass to silver, whose beauty is next and whose vein is second, which, firmer than alluring gold, bears service better. But copper is stronger, though it is less conspicuous. Soon, with copper as teacher, their use passed to rigid iron and settled there. Perhaps our lyre could also run through in verse all the chances which opinion imagines as the supreme craftsmen of works: how, opened by silent heat, the richest earth, its clods baked, moved into varied offspring, which, giving birth with the rain as husband, it loosed through the fields in a crumbling course, by which the swelling furrows crackled and the harvest rose and stood up, and, surging, trembled with waving ears of grain, so that the new settler might learn what a cultivated crop looks like:

and how, running down eagerly from all sides to so rich a prey, the race of birds and of cattle and the black cohort of the smaller throng, thrusting the larger seeds into their bodies as food, taught them foods friendly to life from nearer material, and all the work that followed, which the care of teachable study took up. Meditation, always drawn from examples as teachers, would then have made the work of art. But the generous glory of the Father, well known, cries out against such falsehoods: let use claim nothing for itself in this, nor chance, lacking power: “I gave created beings, with the light, to know what things are good, and willed that whatever the greater world has should become known to the lesser by a holy sense, and that I should be known through these things.” And would that the mind had remained unimpaired as it was given to man, and liable to no guilt: neither the appearance nor the bodies of things, nor the measure of the stars, nor the number of the grains of sand would have deceived it. But by what great spaces the earth is stretched together with the great deep, what is the measure of the finished mass, what melodious harmony sounds from the motion of the sevenfold axis, these are now learned by practice and gained by constant study, and what remains inborn is thought to come from art. Nor does the mind, made dull by the cloud of evils, perceive that whatever each one believes he first comes to know, he is recognizing again. So let it cleave to this highest limit of truth. When Adam was driven from the august seats, he did no other duty before that which was worthy of a husband, and he spent loves he had not known before upon his children.

To one who, amid so many cares, was pleased to beget, it was sweet to live. He who found living sweet lived with God as guide: nor did the nurslings lack what would furnish life and equip them with the use of things. And the house, now full of children, had brought wonderful comfort to the inexperienced pair, and care, multiplied in the tender heart of the parents, relieved their heavy labors, and there was hope already of rejoicing in their own helpers in the work of the countryside; of these the eldest, Cain, was turning the rich fields with hard hoes; but Abel, most worthy to rejoice in a living gain, on bare hills or on the growth of the dry plain pastured innocent sheep, and his parents with their milk. After the joys of the awaited produce had satisfied them, and they were amazed that their hopes were crowned with sacred favor, justice reminded their minds to dedicate the first offerings of their works to God. The one loads the sacred altars first with new fruits, the other sacrifices more acceptably with a snowy lamb, the first image of priests, soon the impious victim of his brother, but already then imbued with a sign of what was to come and a token of piety. For when Cain noticed that his brother's sacrifice had been received, and that no approval was given to him when he sacrificed with fruits, whether because he had tasted beforehand the dedicated food and polluted it, or because, to One who sees all in one time, he who will one day be guilty in mind is guilty now, he drank (dread!) the poison from the spring from which the serpent and his mother drank, and slaughters in savage murder his brother, who did not know he needed to beware.

Alas the crime! What would raging lust, what fresh anger, old hatred, what the wicked contests of crimes that vex the nations not drive the wretched to, if he committed so great a crime who grieved only because his brother was holier than he? Now the parents' guilt is nothing. And lest anyone think that at least some complaint remains against the serpent because we die, we began to be killed before that. O how much the first offspring added to crime! It is hardly fitting to say that death was brought into the world under the name of punishment: impiety made it a new crime. The parents will pay for their sins only by death: you will pay penalties from which death is no release, and in place of death, worse than the unspeakable serpent. For he urged death, he did not inflict it: but you will be the first author of slaughter. You the public enemy, you the private robber follow, for you the armed will punish crimes with spears, with swords and avenging steel. All crime is your soldiery, and that future peoples will perish less by the death that was decreed than by slaughter returns in the end to you. Nor is this example wholly unfitting for morals, that human blood first began to be shed in a brother's blood, so that whoever commits an equal crime should feel that it is such, since it is agreed that whoever by such a crime has renewed the fratricidal wickedness, reason teaching that every death of a human being, slain not by the first sentence,

was a brother's murder. Then, as he was wet with such slaughter, God (so great is his clemency) does not disdain to count him worthy of address, and convicts him as he denies the crime, and punishes him lightly for so great a crime, taking the measure of the punishment from a part of the deed, so that, because, though forewarned, he did not fear to commit the dire crime, he should tremble: what he had refused to see as his desert should become his punishment; what his mind, refusing to take it in, had thought light, his violently shaken limbs would prove heavy; and, his mind struck (that deep torturer by which every wickedness avenges itself), the horror of the crime would break his body too and rush violently out into all his limbs, and his shaken limbs would be swept in headlong whirling, as when water enclosed by a rim catches the rays and breaks them, throwing back the light; a slippery gleam enters the halls, and, ranging through the whole, is nowhere and everywhere; and when it trembles, a line of dark blue shadow, woven in with the dim gleam, flickers without end. It was not the motion that cold moisture strikes into tightened nerves, when it so stiffens those filled with half a death that they cannot lose life entirely: but such as the wrath of God stirs, when a conscious force masters the mind and hearts are tortured with a sane madness.

… yet what, and how often, does such a sentence do? The whole of it is vengeance (now) for the crime against the murdered man, the most just punishment of the savage culprit, a terror to the race, an example set before future peoples, a present purging of guilt, and, as the sign promised, a protection of his life: so that no one should kill him and labor to destroy with iron one whom he sees to have paid the penalty. Nor is it enough … to mix severity with mildness in this punishment: he sends him far away and banishes him to vast regions. This too serves a purpose: that he may not pollute the fields of the pious; that his punishment may not stand as a witness proving to peoples yet to be born that such a crime could be done; that the condemned race may never mingle with the rest, may never come near the grieving parents; that it may not forever heap bitter griefs on the good, and that the unequal case of the brothers may not torture the bereaved with grief, as their eyes look for the one and see the other, in whom they must mourn even this, that he remains. The greatest evil is in the death of a son, of whatever kind he is; but in so great a crime, those afflicted with such a punishment are destroyed alive, worse than under any judge. And is it not more fitting for the condemned man himself to go far away from his father's lands, one who likes hidden places, and for whom the heavier punishment is to be seen among the happy and the blessed of pure mind?

To one who was to live on after punishment and shame for his deed, exile is a mercy. And that a faithful wife is given as companion to the guilty man, and that God's gift does not abandon the condemned, becomes a sure hope. Look, one is given who would soften the cares of his sick heart, who with her body would steady the broken man in her embrace, and, liable to no guilt, alone, by prayers and by worshipping God with a pure mind, would draw down whatever might be enough for two. O good Majesty, what may we not hope for! You yourself provide silent ways of pardon and a reason by which you may benefit the guilty man, whom, increasing him with offspring that follow, you multiply through a thousand names of descendants, and soon make him king of his own people, from the highest father. For he first taught how to gird cities with walls, which no one can do unless a people is gathered. And, confessing in fear what he deserved from his own race, he warned the Syrian avenger, and taught him to perish while he fears to be killed; by which slaughter, perhaps expiated, he washed away his deed, since he paid it back by a like death; and death itself is gain, since it became vengeance for the crime. Meanwhile Eve, pregnant again, had made up to her sad husband for the first loss with a holy pledge, and had again restored cares and hopes to the father.

The boy's name was Seth, whom the Almighty with favoring will granted to fill Abel's place, his virtues aided; and that gift the joy of the glad father did not keep silent, and the line that followed proved it. For from the seed of this man Enosh was born, who, first chosen as priest for his quiet virtue, hoped and deserved to be able to call upon God with pious prayers and by his true name, and taught the people who followed to keep the worship of the eternal Parent and to use his sacred help as life required, confessing what the Almighty bestowed by his majesty; and he gave them mind and merit, and for many years allowed the punishment of the ancient crime to be put off, so much so that Enoch, strong in all virtues, from the line of those whom this kindly lineage contains, was brought back to his father's seats and to the blessed world and lives still and already holds the kingdoms of the life to come. Indeed, for a world as yet wholly without the new worship, there was a contest among the living, who should prolong his years beyond thrice three hundred, filling out the number of a thousand, the sum of the tenth reckoning. But after crimes infected minds, and the guilt of the fathers was born in the stock that followed, and the offspring, worse than its elder, always added to vices something in which the heir might surpass him, the shortness of life came to the rescue, since the one way to set a limit to the growth of crime was to set a limit to life.

For when the young men of the better line, joined in profane marriages with the daughters of Cain's race, had condemned themselves, they fell into every kind of crime, deserted by sacred favor, and, laid open, let the enemy in by his ambushes, as God spoke thus: “Our Spirit will not always remain in these peoples, nor will guilty life put off any longer than twice six tens of years the times given for late death, since, following earthly things, they have more of flesh than of mind.” Whether, then, the severe sentence of the kindly Judge broke their nature, so as to convict each guilty one of having more of the brute mother from whom he was born, or whether, so that the generous grace of divine power, which in the first gift he had given to the servants he created with sacred power, might show that it had passed from the whole to the body alone, drawn down by the sins of the fathers, suddenly there were born monsters of men, giants of towering bulk of limb, fierce and swollen in mind. How much power dire souls have through their bodies, and how much they are bound to will, oppressed by the unjust servitude of so great a bulk! Nothing unlawful was profane to them to violate, nor anything lawful to their liking: their lust was kindled the more fiercely by forbidden things, and not beauty but crime set the price on things to be sought. No nights without blood, no days without slaughter; it was sweet to take food amid a kinsman's tears,

and to violate kinsmen themselves for food, unmindful of the law of fellowship, of humanity and of themselves, of sacred affection and of their own mothers and fathers and of the Author of the sky; and they advanced so far into the worst crimes that it grieved God to have formed all those to whom he had given life and light, and, because of the guilty, he preferred to overwhelm souls free of crime rather than not to sink the lands in a headlong sea, the world returning again to its ancient (shape). … … faithful had now spent five hundred years free of crime, and he had proved him living under the law laid down. To him God, opening his holy secrets, reveals them thus: since the lands were full of vices and men prone to crimes, virtue cast aside, he was preparing to remedy the evils by an end of things; since he foresaw that it would be cruel to punish every fault one by one, and lighter to blot out the guilty, he had resolved to sink the lands again by bringing in the sea, so that, as it rushes in and covers all and then, at his command, subsides, it may wash the polluted world with headlong flood and engulf in the ruin of the swelling deep the men and whatever had been bidden to live for men's sake.

“But since you alone, to whom our will is dear, spending your life devoted under sacred laws, always resist this evil with better merit, I will so moderate the rights of my decrees that, when the wicked have paid what is just, then the mortal race may begin more worthily from you, and the peoples who will enjoy our light may count you their highest parent. So let an ark be prepared for you, built of squared beams, to stretch three hundred cubits and open fifty in breadth, and rise in height only thirty; through … … let it be finished into one from above. But let a door be kept in the side, where the gathered structure rises to a peak with its slanting roof. Then let hot bitumen, breathing into the absorbent joints, search out and clothe on every side the thin cracks, poured on like a skin. Then let the greatest labor call you within: let the side be joined on either side with immense posts, and the frames of the finished stalls be laid down: and when a double floor has divided a threefold space, let the animals be kept apart in their own nests, lest, mixed together, they harm their kinds and, put together, fight and confuse their foods; of these it is fitting for you to store only the material; for that what is given out to those you take in should not fail, it is mine to provide.” These things he received with faithful mind (for God himself, supplying mind and senses, gave his servant both to will and to be able to do whatever he commanded), and sets about felling with iron the dense forests, grown for this purpose, with his sons and a gathered crowd of people.

The groves let in the sun's rays, the plain is relieved of shade, and the valleys are stripped of oaks as old as themselves, and the forests that will enclose the image of a lesser world. But when the whole of the work begun had been hastened with so much labor, it is put off for a hundred years, so that the peoples might repent of their crime and wrath be held back. O too wretched, whom the delay of so just a punishment makes more guilty! Now they will be punished not only for their crime, they who have abundant opportunity to seek pardon, but because they will be punished, as many as will enter dire Tartarus in the space of time granted, when God bears witness that he prefers to spare all. Now, the mass completed, there stood, framed with its capacious sides, the help which the Father himself had prepared as the last resort for your shipwrecks, Nature, and was calling up the cause, when God from high Olympus deigns to warn his servant Noah by his voice that the last moment is at hand to hide himself in his refuge, to snatch his wife, sons and daughters-in-law from imminent destruction and the darkness of death into a life-giving prison, and with himself all the animals which the earth nourishes as its own, which the air bears though they are not its own: seven of each sex, those which God approved as clean, in pairs, but of the unclean kind one of each sex.

No delay: whatever is born under the curving vault of heaven, unknown in the various parts of the world, what the East marvels at, what the pale Iberian shudders at, what rages in the hot sands of southern Libya, what cleaves the Hyperborean nights with wondrous light, rushes together trembling and plunges into the open ark. You would think they had sensed the flood; for since God the Author gives sense to brutes by which to bear witness to himself among his creatures, the beasts, moved by his will, have more reason, though they know nothing of themselves. So, as soon as God commands the ark, heavy with every seed of life, to be closed, night rushes in and sudden darkness covered the sky, and a storm, falling with the air poured out, strikes the lands headlong, like a brief one, but about to keep its course, and it rages and storms over the whole world alike as it usually does in one place, when a tempest, moved by a rapid whirlwind, follows or announces the savage fires of lightning, and heaven and earth cry back with thunder. Nor is the rain that flows from the clouds enough for the destruction: the ancient waters are loosed, and now, the heavens opened, the sky rains into empty clouds; the inmost parts of the earth, stretching out the breath that supplies the rivers, fill and open new springs equal to torrents.

And while all that the sky, that the earth vomits out, that the clouds pour down, mingled, swiftly joins in one flood, it engulfs the submerged fields together with their tillers and the flocks caught in their stalls; it overwhelms cities with their citizens: amid the waters peoples perished in ruins. No face of things remains, the wave covers all, and the rivers, as they grow, lose their names, soon their courses too. The ocean, never satisfied by any rivers, now feels the waters rushing in such a mass, and, greater with its increased flood, drives them back and forces them, returning, to rise into a heap, until, as the deep raises its tide and the shores are contracted on every side, the wave joins itself in one highest circle and the seas meet over the overwhelmed lands. And now the ark was carried fifteen cubits higher above all things; for this measure exceeded the highest mountains, when the fury of the rain had lasted forty days and a single night. After thrice fifty suns, the air now clear, when the level and measure of the sea remained the same, the Almighty, pitying those shut in, commanded the great sea to recede little by little, whether he wished to spare all the lands, which it could have overturned in a rapid flight, or those shut in, whom the wave, sliding back gently, would set down more safely on firm ground as it withdrew.

At last a mountain … level with its spreading summit, received the burden it was to carry. Now the highest ridges could be seen, and crags could mark off the level waves, and, as the sea subsided, the forest gradually broke forth and the hidden hills little by little rose. And now the black scout, sent from the wide ark, had betrayed that the air was calm, and, finding prey, was held back; but that they must still stay in the cell and enclosure the tired dove reports, which, sent again, brings back a small offering of the peace-bearing fruit of the olive. At this sign, with praise of the great Parent, there arises such weeping among those shut in (joy too shows itself in tears) as when a bitter victor insults the walls, if by chance sudden help is brought to the besieged; as when a sentence sent by a merciful judge restores the condemned to life again; as the weeping when life returns to one thought dead amid the tears and joys of the mourners. After the scout, sent a third time, announces that the fields lie open by the very fact that, captivated by the recovered lands, she did not return, they grow weary of enduring their idle hiding place, the nearer their hope is to breathe beneath the open sky and feed their freed souls with the sense of heaven.

But no one may go out into the shores of light, as no one may be born and come under sky and day, unless God calls; and he with his own voice commanded the trembling Noah to leave the sacred enclosure with his faithful wife, his sons and his chaste daughters-in-law, and to give new fields again to the settlers he led out, and all the creatures preserved together for future offspring, which the mighty Craftsman formed for human use. These, when the door is opened, rush out: some seek the air on wings, some the glades and woods, some, sinking into caverns, burrow into the open earth, some, free on the dry plains, exult and flourish in the open meadow. But their lord, allotted the kingdom of a second world, Noah, takes in all with rejoicing eyes and capacious mind, and cannot sate his spirit with filling it, and, quickly surveying all with eager gaze, marvels at them as new. The sun is brighter than at its familiar rising, and redder, the glad face of the sky smiles with greater serenity, and the fields once despaired of grow green with new offspring. But still the image of so great a ruin, ever to be remembered, turns before his eyes: what they endured amid the waters, what by sacred gift they did not endure, when the sea roared with savage blows and the ark scorned the storms dashed against it:

and with his family he reckons how widely the holy bounty of the highest Parent is shown, pouring itself around them, and he teaches them, astonished and ready to learn the truth, how food sufficed for so many through a whole year, and what drink; for this is certain: even if the other needs of life were supplied, those shut in could have died of thirst amid the waters while the ark floated, unless the ruler of Olympus had sustained them, laid low as they were and no longer fearing any extremity, by the same nod by which he founded all things. He, taking from souls that would have perished in the prison of the long night the longing for light, filled them with strength: he, so that they could endure such sluggish rest, poured in a calm love of sluggish torpor; he the Mighty One, who, if he pleases, by his severe power may swiftly make the wicked, plunged under an icy flood, burn, and the good, carried into the flames to come, feel cold; he who, as he has now taught the peoples that they can be killed in this way, will himself in a short time teach the peoples that they can be reborn by water.

Bearing such things in mind and discerning the ages to come, ancient Noah resolved to undertake no mortal task until he had paid sacred rites and thanks to God. Altars of snowy stone rise up: since no temple surrounded them with its walls, the world, with the curving path of heaven spread out on every side, was the temple. Victims stream headlong from the sevenfold flocks, those whom the soft air sustains, those whom the earth begets … … are strewn, from the East or from the woods of the Arabs. Fire, sent down from Olympus, tastes the fragrant honors which it devours with its tresses, and the burnt offerings breathe an ambrosial vapor to God. He, gentle and always good, accepting whatever he receives as our gift, and rejoicing in the services of pious men, of which he has no need, but by which he may redeem us, speaks thus with calm will: “Although it was a small vengeance for the name of so great a punishment to have condemned the guilty of so many crimes with avenging rains and a gentle flood, and rather to have renewed the lands, the seat of the guilty, with the deep poured out over them, yet we will not strike the mortal race again with such a blow, however offended, though I see human minds and profane nations about to rush again through every kind of wickedness and the old crimes.

For since mortals will never cease to commit what deserves punishment, it befits us to cease from always repaying them as they deserve. Grow, my glad nurslings, grow secure, and fill the fields with fruitful offspring and spread new flocks over all lands. The elements will keep their turns, and on all days the due harvest will be returned to its own seeds. The work of the world will run on, balanced in its discordant seasons: winter will contend with summer, and, balancing the seasons of spring and autumn, the fleeing year will turn round again. And you, to whom we have entrusted the kingdom of the solid world, before whom every kind of living creature trembles and knows you as lords, we bid you keep this point of law and always remember that you are bound by the precepts of a severe right: among so many kinds of creatures, which, moving their limbs freely with their souls, we now grant for your use a second time, let no one make livid limbs, with the blood mixed in, into foul food; this crime the sentence of a sharp judgment will one day punish no less than if some savage drains human blood with the sword, blood which I will always require as avenger, and require so strictly that not only the creature rich in reason shall pay me the penalty, but brute beasts as well: let human blood be equally sacred to all who enjoy our light.

And let there be signs by which, the sky shining, we may bear witness that the waters of the flood have been sent away: for when, in the dense air, light moisture is hung in thin mists and the cloud is already gathering black waters into its hollows, I will pour out my rays, and the curving image of the sun will adorn for me a beautiful bow in the highest circle, painting the vault of the sky; and, warming with its light, let it dry up the rains and scatter the showers into the air, so much so that the world in its other age may take beforehand from this sign a sample of the punishment to come, since the bow has more of glowing fire and now less of rain.” Astonished at such commands, at which all things tremble, and eager at the gracious promises, in which all things rejoice, Noah and his sons together, whose lives were sturdier, vie in cleaving with hoes the fields, glad with mud and sweet moisture, and wed the countryside with seed; now, in spring, the grass, very thick on the widely spread plains, turning from stalk to grain, its milk hardened, gives back a manifold harvest with heaped-up interest: and now the new vineyard, its shoots heavily laden, luxuriates with rich fruit, which, swelling it with sweet nectar, it brings forth, and cups are born from hard wood. It happened that, while Noah gladly celebrates the honors of the Lord, indulging in feasting and pouring sweet cups, he felt the living liquor and, overcome by heavy sleep, laid his limbs, careless of them, on the faithful couch:

and at the same time his garment, rolled back, uncovered the secret parts of his body, and the source and origin of yourself, most wicked Ham, moved your laughter, and you set about involving your brothers, Shem first and great Japheth, in the stain of your guilt. Learn what … with laughter you alone: the better judgment of the brothers thinks it an occasion for duty; for, snatching a covering and placing it behind their backs, retreating step by step, turned away, they covered their father's shame with their hands, and each of them snatched from his brother the palm of piety set between them. For after Noah's heart, freed from sleep, regained the messages of divine sense, he repays his sons' deserts with such reward: “Cursed Ham, slow to serve your father, you will be the slave of your brothers; you, Shem, eldest by birth, blessed of God, will live, and your younger brother (now by his seed) will spread as lord through the wide world, until his numerous offspring set up their seat in his brother's houses, and, mingled with kindred peoples, fill the neighboring cities and those they will build.” Having said this, the old man, when he had run through years fifty short of a thousand, which the full sum refuses, aware of the future, his breast released in death, departed and left this world and its cares to his sons:

for it was given to those free of guilt and far from vice, and, after the sin which is expiated by the first death, when God the Spirit had filled deeply the sanctuaries of a chosen mind and watered a friendly heart, to know all things at once and to behold them set before their eyes: the ages which fleeing time has snatched away, the age that is, and the age that will one day bring what later descendants will enjoy, and whatever the heavy earth, the liquid sea, the quickening air and greedy fire, which gives birth from too much fuel, pour out, conceived for the various uses of men. But after the condemned offspring lost so great a gift and nothing remained to the wretched except that their ancestors had known the secrets, each, mindful of his parents' warnings, recalling them, and turning over with himself all things, what was fitted to what ends, in what part of nature they would help, sought to store them up for this purpose in fixed letters of speech or in signs, entrusting words to a solid form. From this the arts took their beginning, which writing preserved and sent the inventions of the ancients down to late descendants, and, mingling the discoveries of the new with the studies of the old, gave hope to the astonished, and drew them, moved by vain desire, headlong to the forbidden search into the future:

whether the almighty Founder gave to the world (which some, in a fallen error, have called a bodily god) what he alone possessed, and scattered through all the members of things signs that move as messengers of the age to come, so that he may always bear witness to himself to his creatures through the whole mass, and the image of mind may confess its author, and it may be set plainly in things what the bountiful Ruler can grant to peoples, what he can take away, what he sometimes forbids his servants, for whom the kingdoms of heaven are prepared, to know; which the agate, Pyrrhus's gem, proves true as a witness, showing the Muses and Apollo enclosed within it, brought forth with the world (what should we not think God signified through all things, since he even betrayed the lies of the world in advance and marked what would later be feigned?); or whether rather the simple motion of the world brings all things; or whether the grievous inventor of death, not suffering matter that could serve fraud to lie idle, subjected all things to his malignant will, so as to bring fate upon the world. For while he counts the courses and the various returns of the stars and enjoys the wondrous diversity of the sky, he has set for himself fixed times of uncertain favor, and, producing a ready faculty and set bounds for harming with varied effect in varied conjunctions, (so as to) spread odium on the stars and lay crimes to the charge of sacred heaven and of the stars that adorn the world, since he feigns to the peoples as fated whatever he himself does.

From this comes the art of what the entrails' fibers tremble at, what the bird's wing flashes, what the lightning, as messenger, signals when the clouds are struck. For because the public enemy, having embraced with shrewd zeal all sudden motions and chances, remembers … to render, he persuaded the peoples to think the inventions of false poison divine. Not otherwise among the Ethiopians, (who) have dogs as kings, freedom is ruled by tyrants: when a judgment suited to definite matters is sought from the motion of an unknowing body, and they take chance for command. Nor does opinion, with strong conviction, presume these signs to be less on its own behalf; for Galba's Fortune refutes Pyrrhus's gem: she who could fashion a statue over so many years can also counterfeit a stone. Using these frauds he mocked those caught by the passion to know the future, and then, as the fear of overcoming fate goaded them, he brought on the anxious the crime of the magic art through their zeal, by which they would rather worship him and offer impious incense on dedicated altars, when the crowd had been betrayed by its parent. And soon Nimrod, born from an unsound stock, a giant in bulk and mind, master of the court of Babylon, an unjust hunter who captivated the minds of the Persians, led them away from the rites of the true Lord to the worship of fire.

Nor did he, the head of crimes, guilty before the world and his own enemy, mock the cares of men, too eager, only by such shrewd art, but he rushed upon their minds themselves and went down deep into all their senses, and soon into their affections too. For when a father's only child had dragged with him into bitter death the hope of the family, the unhappy father, spending nights and days in tears and drawing out his complaints in dull lamentation, while he rages and seeks his snatched-away son in everything, and holds the relics, sweet in boyish years, or, dutiful beyond death, consoles his grief with an image, so fed his love, inflamed by longing, that, setting up the whole form in Parian marble, he believed, mad, that it lived with sense shut up inside it and heard his complaints, and with dedicated altars transferred the worship of the supreme Author to shades. This man surpassed all the guilty in gravity, even that teacher of crimes who founded the magic arts. The one is guilty openly, by madness and a profane mind; the other does harm by piety. This crime defiles the more because it has the appearance of virtue; for at once all nations embraced this crime, endlessly sacrificing offerings to the shades, as the Alans now bear witness; each held their dear parents as their gods, and later their kings as well, under whose name lying

Greece, while it labors to work falsehoods in among truths, added obscure shades with vain reasonings, excusing tombs and the names buried in graves, until madness stretched even through all kinds of things and imagined that there were gods in the smallest things and in shameful members: for the inventor of death stood by in such places and, fostering errors, called forth oracles in wondrous parts of the world, using for his snares fire, or a hot spring, or caves. First Themis mocked the peoples with talkative winds as the earth breathed them out; afterwards false Apollo deceived the peoples, and then, forced to change his seats, he became the physician of the Leuci, and now, crossing the Gallic countryside as a fugitive, he troubles the German nations with harmful fraud and deceives barbarian (hearts). But I return to the main thread from which I digressed, to that line of ancestors. When Noah's offspring, multiplied by begetting, had filled all the eastern lands and saw the fields of Shinar grow too narrow, the young people, who were to be scattered through various parts of the world, broke out into these most sad words of complaint:

“Alas, how uncertain is the state of life that carries men along in the order begun, and how prosperity deceives the trust it created through changing courses, so that the sum of what we wished for turns to the opposite. Now, if it is right to say it, we are sorry that the numerous crowd of descendants, hoped for by our fathers' prayers, has grown; for the band we begot must be scattered through the world in exile: lost to its kin and losing them in turn, and, what is sharper grief, it will bring its own people a living death; and we wretched ones are condemned to a sad death, because, as old age hastens on, though the ancient age had gone beyond ten hundred years, we, already weary, scarcely reach three hundred, so that, exiled from our fatherland, we must give our bare and nameless limbs to unknown graves here and there for burial. So come, young men, while the crowd supplies strength that may survive you and not know a stern end, extend an eternal fame by deeds. Let us found a city, and in its name raise a tower so high that it breaks into the stars that paint the world and the vault of high Olympus, so that posterity, when we have left these lands, may think that we have moved to heaven.” So moved, the young men scorn rocks and whatever is cut from a cloven mountain: they bind with fire bricks shaped from the inward parts of the subdued earth, and prefer to owe the material of the future work to their own labor.

Bitumen, spread between, binds the bricks on both sides, so that the walls built around imitate solid rock. Now the tower, hurried on, rises, now with its top it leaps over the clouds and enjoys the nearer calm of heaven, when the Father speaks thus to the partners of his kingdom: “Look, what would this earthly phalanx in its madness not break open, which believes that a structure built by mortal hand can touch the lofty heavens and lead to the ether that is ours. No one clothed in an earthly body has ascended to heaven except he who descended from high heaven. But since (they are one people, with one form of speech too) the crowd followed the wicked persuaders with eager assent and did not consider what right would allow, daring lofty things which nature by itself forbade to be done, let them bear, with no further punishment, the loss of so vain a labor. Yet so that they may know that what was denied as impossible is also forbidden, let us now go down and confound hearts swollen with proud agreement with the voices of varied speech, so that what the crowd, united in crime, sinned, the better discord of confused tongues may condemn.” He spoke, and upon those intent on the work and raising the mass forgetfulness, slipped beneath, first enters their astonished minds, and there came upon them the full command of an unknown tongue.

The master builders, as zeal for the work fails, rebuke their lingering fellows: but no one answers words he does not understand, and if anyone tries to open his mouth, he hisses, or pants with the roar of broken speech, or shrieks and mimics threats with a sharp groan. So the baffled band abandons the vain labor undertaken with a perverse mind: now no one follows his kinsman, no one his father: each (joins) to himself the one he understands and gathers him to his side: all kinship perished, language makes the nation: they are scattered in equal bands and seek lands set apart under various stars. Not otherwise the birds on the soft plains of the field, which the carefree day persuaded to wander in mixed flocks and look for food, when night draws near and they seek their leafy roofs, at once each crowd follows its own kind, and they gather in rapid flight where like color or like voice has led them: so then the one people split into parts, each kind became a race, and in lands far apart they settle and fill the world with nations.

Yet this, though it is the punishment proper to the guilty, is not empty of a sacred gift; for although it was just vengeance that those whom reverence for heaven, which is the proper seat of the Parent of the world and of things, did not touch should not understand one another, such a punishment does more good to the guilty creatures: that what the persuasion to guilt of a few had brought in might not again infect all and make the wickedness common; that bloody wars and death, summoned by peoples in rabid fury, might not be forever; and that citizens, driven out, might find it grievous to leave their kin. For it is needful that the exiled crowd never long for its own, and even that it hate them: and therefore the variety of tongues sees to it that no one wishes to remember his own people. Yet the sound of the Hebrew speech and the ancient language remained among those who, free of the guilt, were a part not unjust, the sons whom Shem begot, whom the sacred care of the Parent helps (and) reverence for the true (God) touches. But after madness, stirred up through the whole world (to say nothing of the abominable crime of the magic monster), drove the mortal race to tree trunks and stones, and to hollow shapes of hard metal made by art, and figures void of light, and broke minds that looked to things above and bound them to the inert earth, the contagion of the foul stain engulfed these too.

Not otherwise do clouds of disease, stirred up from the burning lands of the Ethiopians along a corrupted path of the sky, envelop the marshes with a greedy, conquering plague, when whoever groaned, struck by the swift lightning of death, fell himself at once, and whoever saw another falling fell too, and the dire pestilence strewed heaped corpses everywhere on the plains and carried through a war: so then error, embracing all in the headlong mass of madness and going back for those it had passed over, had seized them, until the line, descending by successive steps, to which Shem had given its source and origin and its noble birth, came to Terah, who, leaving the chief seat of the Chaldean race with the whole stock of his kin, seeking another city and new ways and a new home, remained at last as a new settler in Assyrian Carrhae. And when he had completed five years beyond twice a hundred, he passed away in the manner of the fathers. But his son Abram, a man worthy of heaven, already from the very threshold of life worshipping the true God in his mind, had turned away from the rites of the Gentiles. After his father's death, when he was now free to follow God's commands without offense, the Lord deigned to approach his servant with these admonitions:

“Since we have found you alone in the whole world who delight in sincere faith and reverence for us, leave far behind your ancestral seats and the guilty lands and your polluted house: your whole kindred is profane and you must flee it. To the fields of a better land you will come with me as guide, lest you be part of an unjust race, you who can be the head of a holy one. Then I will establish sacred things which will remain for you, blessed one, and make your name great among all peoples, repaying all good things, or evil, as they deserve, to those whose will toward you has been different; through you blessing will be poured out and spread to all tribes and to the age reborn.” He spoke, and gives him a mind to serve his commands and to believe the gracious promises. No delay holds him back: with flocks of various kinds and his father's servants, with his faithful wife, with the dear child of his brother, whose name was Lot, departing by a straight path he sets out on a way unknown to him. Very soft fields offer glad paths, and the air, smiling sweetly with favoring south winds, is troubled by no storms, until he entered Canaan, the lands of the peoples whom Ham begot, and the most fertile countryside of Shechem. After he hears from God's voice that these are granted to him and to his future offspring, he raises devoted altars and, a new worshipper, renewing the old honors, increases them.

From there he goes to Bethlehem, a place chosen and hallowed by the hospitality of the blessed man, which surpassed all lands in its proud merits, since one day (to be named second only after the heavenly seat) it was seen to be more worthy to receive the pledge of God, sent into the world by the law of salvation, prepared to the world's great wonder, and to send man back to the stars. Here too father Abram raises solemn altars and sets up dwellings in the new fields that he must soon leave. For, forced by famine to change his home again, he moves camp and drives with him his whole house, servants and flocks, and, paying fair prices in trade for goods, enters Egypt. But his beautiful wife is protected by the name of sister, lest raging lust spur barbarian hearts to the murder of their holy guest. At last Pharaoh, soon drawn by the image of her radiant beauty, burns with desire and prepares marriage and fixed covenants by law; but dread, sunk wholly in terror, falls on him and suddenly shakes his wicked heart with turmoil, and black horror terrifies his mind and binds his limbs, so that the king of a sacrilegious people might perceive that God had condemned such sad wishes, God who indeed had inspired such counsel in his servants, so that the barbarian enemy might know that Abram was then safer as Sarah's husband, when he had learned by experience that he could not with impunity attack with profane iron one whom he might not even widow.

So of his own accord he restores her, unstained, to her husband, confesses his fault, and sends him back safe with a large escort and laden with much produce to Shechem and his Bethlehem: and gladly they work the fields they have regained and graze the rich pastures far and wide with their flocks mingled. But there were frequent quarrels between the shepherds; for the land lay open, divided by no boundary for anyone. So Abram, the elder, full of foresight but most observant of equal right, to settle the disputes and remove greedy quarrels, divides the fields granted to them. The younger chose the part where, with sweet waters poured out on every side, the Jordan weds the countryside, glides with shady banks and makes its rounded glades pleasant. Captivated by these, Lot, turning from his uncle's house and its just strictness, moves to the fields bordering Sodom, when God, strengthening the heart of saddened Abram with this hope, said: “Do not be troubled that, left by your brother's son, you have borne the loss of your holy father. You alone will be to me a countless people, you who will hold the kingdoms which you see toward the rising sun, which you look out on turned toward the North, and which you look back on lying under the warm south wind, and enclosed by the shore of the spreading sea. These I will grant to you and to your offspring and to the peoples of your line, living forever, for an eternal age.

so that you may now enjoy these lands far and wide, rise and survey first, as a stranger on foot, the wild lands that lie open.” So he spoke: Abram gladly obeys and, leaving his home, moves on and comes to Hebron, and under the spreading foliage of the dark oak of Mamre pitches his tents, and, a shrewd leader, adds strength to his new camp: here too he builds solemn altars to the Lord, to worship him. Meanwhile, as great tumult spreads all around, a greedy enemy is at hand, whom the land, full of all kinds of wealth, provokes: hooves pound the plains and rebound, and the plunderer roams with loosened reins. Lot bursts out with the king through the opened gates, and a neighboring band of kings bearing allied arms: they bring cavalry and infantry with them, the column extends, the lines clash, they strike down and fall alike. The invaders have help enough in this, that as they prepared to make war they had already foreseen in their minds their enemies falling in sudden defeat; the defenders are held up only by the appearance of the better cause. But the youth of Sodom, softened by shameful luxury, when the renewed war-cry blazed up again into fury, turn their backs in fear: some seek the walls at a run, some the mountains and woods, some, hemmed in by troops, stretch out cowardly hands to sad chains.

As soon as his uncle Abram learned that Lot was captured, not with weeping (for what would empty weeping avail?) but dutiful with reason, he chooses from his whole household three hundred and twice nine servants and equips them with arms, and follows gradually where he found the enemy heading, slow and heavy with plunder, and takes care to come upon them in the first night of their rest, when sweet sleep is already watering their languid hearts and binding their weary limbs. So, when the insane rage of a hungry lion has broken with a flying leap into the enclosures of cattle in a pasture, it kills them all with tooth and paw, and its wrath puts off its greedy hunger to devour, and the wondrous patience of fear shuts in the groans of bitter pain in the victims: such then was the bearing of the leader. Striking those buried in sleep and wine, they slaughter people and kings with silent wounds. No tumult throws the camp into confusion; no one hears a step, except one whom mind and voice are already leaving; no one hears the sound of slaughter, except one whom death awakens. All is wet with blood; the earth, loosened in the dry calm, clots with gore, and, as the blood slows their step, slippery footprints totter on the stained field. Yet not every age is cut down by the sword at once: some are spared as booty (so great is the moderation of the just victor), those whom it was now lawful for all to take without offense; shameful flight scattered the rest, and pressing fear pursued them as far as the fields of Hobah.

But the victor, not at all moved by the praise of so great a triumph, amid horses and herds of cattle and the people recovered or captured, and treasures that weigh down vanquished and victors with greedy weight, gentle amid such joys and pondering in his heart the fortunes of men, returns almost with the reward of the vanquished, and gives back the booty and prizes of war to the plundered peoples and to the king, showing that he had not fought for himself: yet he offers a tenth of the booty taken from the enemy, which is the true offering, to Melchizedek, who then had the dutiful care of the highest Parent, bearing witness that God had won the victory; and he deserved, already then forewarned, to receive the mystic libations of the sacrament to come. And, his course accepted for greater rewards, by the voice of so great a priest praying for all good things for him, the Lord also honors his servant with the gift of his address: “Since plunder has not subdued you, greedy, by any allurements, the price of your faith and the wage of your labors is full for you with me, and I will protect you and all that is yours to be kept for your heir, whom, born late of your own seed, from your own body, you will love as a dutiful father, whom you already long for in mind, in whose place this Damascene pleases you, adopted from among your servants, while the infancy of a sweet foster child kindles and stirs your fatherly feelings and cheats your eager love for children of your own.

Look up at the curving sky, how it glitters with dense light in the painted night, how the crowded stars are pressed together by so many stars and, set before you, refuse to be counted: take this as the pattern of your seed, and hold from here the form and merit of your future stock.” So he spoke: and Abram believed, and the sole assent of bare faith counted for virtue, and, adorned with the merits of labor by being reckoned so, it granted him the full crown of righteousness. And so here the noble virtue of holy Abram shows that it is good to believe the divine Christ, who, the living voice of the Father, spoke again thus to Abram: “I am the almighty Lord, who brought you and yours out of the Chaldean race and at last, freed from your father's vices, settled you in a better land, so that my people, begotten through you, may dwell in blessed fields and spread its line far and wide, the nations driven out whom profane rites, through the foul error of their parents, once made sacrilegious. And since you hesitate and, doubting, so sin in believing, take for me a three-year-old heifer, already fierce in brow, and with her let a she-goat of equal age, chosen from the gentle flock, (and) a ram of the same age be slain in our honor: and when a dove joined with a chaste turtledove has closed the rite and the order of sacrifice has completed the whole, let the birds offered feel no further knife.

But let the beasts be cut through the middle, their bellies opened, and let only the three bodies go into two parts each, which, divided thus, you will set apart on clean sand, so that a fourfold double row may set matching limbs against limbs on either side. Then (what) you are bidden to hope for will come of itself before your sight, and you will prove it with your eyes.” He spoke: and Abram, accustomed gladly to obey God's warnings, hastens at once to carry out his commands. But when he had laid out the pieces on the ground in the order commanded, suddenly a black flock of importunate birds swooped in, the prey inviting them. Anxious lest they violate the sacred things with profane contact, Abram guards them on every side and keeps watch all around. But when the great burden of the duty he had taken on did not overcome him, amazed at so great a work, even as the sun set, behold, black terror, horrid trembling and sleep come upon him, bearing messages commanded and shaping the ages to come. I believe he seemed to see the Nile hemmed in by the peoples of the Hebrew race, and late descendants, and to recognize crowds that count themselves up to the highest number: then fierce struggles and the camps of his people led out, the sea crossed on dry foot, columns sunk in the deep, the shipwreck, with no fleet, that came upon the army on land: then the whole kingdoms of blessed Palestine laid open to the returning people.

To him, astonished at such sights, a kindly interpreter was not lacking: “Know beforehand your own and the offspring of your own, which, born after you, will grow in foreign lands and feel the servile yoke of the tyrant of the Nile; and when it has filled four hundred years in hard servitude, I will rescue it, take vengeance on its unjust masters, and restore it to the lands which the Nile and the Euphrates enclose with their gentle flood, but only when the sins of the guilty race of the Amorites and of the peoples (that) hold these kingdoms have filled up the sum of their crimes and have become worthy to be driven from their fathers' seats. But you, before that, departing happily at the far limit of a long life, praised by your children, in peace and by our gift, will go to your holy ancestors.” So he spoke: and from on high, when night was already bringing dense shadows over the lands, he gave a sign from the mountain; for a furnace with bright fire flashed out suddenly and twisted its tresses downward and sought the divided pieces, and, carried into the middle prepared for it, the flame in its headlong course consecrated them as it tasted them. Not otherwise, hurling their bodies through the thick air, torches fly slantwise through the void and surge, flashing with nocturnal splendor, and a lying star drags its red tress, and clouds shaken by the winds shake out downward a fire to lash the earth. Meanwhile, sure of the kingdom and of future offspring,

Abram longs to hasten becoming a father, but his chaste wife refuses the duty, which her worn-out old age, the sign now having ceased, shows to be vain: but believing that her husband's sweet child and new hope, born from whatever concubine, would be hers, she puts in her place in the bed her maid, younger in age (Hagar was her name, the land of the Nile her origin), and, approaching her husband with entreaties, prevailed on him to entrust his offspring to a lowly womb. O servile wickedness! As soon as Hagar felt the burden of her womb come alive, swollen with proud disdain she despised her mistress, the mistress to whom she owed a mother's love and the cause of her own swelling, in her rage. Rightly, then, most just Abram handed her over to the lashes of his wife; driven more by shame at these, she hides herself, indignant, far off in the deserts and secret lairs of wild beasts; nor does she flee because of what she has suffered, but, feigning excessive fear of her mistress, despises her again in the only way she can, and would rather endure the perils of a hidden road, had not an angel sent from Olympus met her and restored the maid to her former duties under a gentle mistress, and, refreshing her with great encouragement, bidden her return and hope for better, and taught her the name of her son, his ways and his hand, and the countless throngs of people from the stock of her descendants.

She returns with greater hope, now sure of the future, and by giving birth was the first to make her lord a father, when he was completing six years beyond eighty in the happy spaces of his life's course. When he had added twice six summers and one more in the order begun, the kindly Father deigned to approach him again with his usual address and bade him, trembling, live in happiness: and at the same time he unfolds the promises, which were the reward of virtue (then Abram, prostrate with body bowed, adores the Lord in supplication), and after many things, in telling which he satisfied the hopes of his faithful servant, he commanded him to set himself apart from all peoples by a silent sign, so that, the superfluous flesh freely cut away, it might be readily and clearly evident that the Lord had commanded, with bodily vices cut away, the keeping of a new progeny and a future offspring. The thing itself, though silent, says this: that God gave warning to cut away the shameful parts, and that boys fresh from their mother, new to life, while the mind does not yet know pain, should be consecrated on the eighth day, stripped of the foreskin; and that whoever should dare to corrupt so holy a covenant, failing to serve the law required of him, would be disinherited of the kingdom and of the life to come. And at the same time, so that he might believe by a true proof that countless nations would be created from his own stock, he said, changing their names so that they might proclaim this very thing:

“Let a letter renew you, a full syllable refashion you, so that your wife may be called not Sara but Sarra, and you not Abram, but, brighter with your name enlarged, may be called Abraham by future peoples from now on. This promise you share with your true wife, since, as the ages roll on, she will be the mother of the race, and, when the sun has run its year round again, she will make you a father. Although you think laughable the promises of my power, to which your old age would set limits, it will be the glory of divine right that what I have accomplished should be thought to have been possible. But I will forgive the doubting, and on the boy to come I will put a name that may rebuke this fault: Isaac, who alone, with the whole stock of his line, will be my sure heir, the covenant of the pact being kept. Nor yet will Ishmael here, whom alone you embrace, be without a sacred dowry; for, upheld by our gift, he will produce many thousands of men, nations of strong stock, to be ruled likewise by twice six princes.” He spoke: and Abraham, eager to hasten the pact he had received, now knocking at a hundred years, his son now of age, sets apart from the world by the commanded sign first himself, then his son, and all his dependents and servants, and makes them a new people and the source of the pious, receiving and fulfilling God's law by one and the same act (so great is his devotion). What would such ready and swift faith not deserve? This is no longer fear, but sincere love and the full proof of a servant, to undertake any command with so calm a mind that God is pleased to have commanded it. For before he was accustomed only

to be heard, but after such merit in his minister he now allows himself to be seen, and, though just indignation spurs him to vengeance, he does not with his gentle divinity refuse mortal sight. For when he was preparing to condemn the crimes of the lands and to destroy the guilty with flames, either as he truly is or in such a form as he knew he could be seen, confessing to his creature both his divinity and his number, though he came accompanied by heavenly servants, he set himself before his eyes. For as Abraham sat by his dwelling, three suddenly stood before him, shining with august light. Abraham, stirred by the image of so great a sight, runs forward and, prostrate on the ground, adores the Lord, one, though he marvels at three, and, eager to please, prays that he may be allowed to serve with a pious mind, and that the servants will not disdain to be refreshed with tables and food as the hours stretch toward the midday heat. So far did he waver in doubt between sight and his living senses, because the form showed a man whom his mind knew to be God. Yet the Almighty nodded assent and does not scorn the service of his pious creature, and, seen to hallow the food and tables, so that his devoted minister might believe what had been granted, he meets him as the pure and clear image of a priest, to give proof that one day true man, in face and whole body, would be taken on by God, and to give signs of the Christ to come, and, unfolding wondrous promises, to utter them, and by his presence to forbid his servant to doubt.

Then, as they set out, the joyful host keeps close at the side of his departing guests, and venerable awe shakes his breast with sweet fear and draws him on, astonished. For he sees that God's silent faces and stern looks were turned toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and at the same time the servants sent out as ministers of peace and of wrath; and when he learned what God was preparing with such great force, God revealing his secrets and explaining the reason for his coming, so that he who had learned what rewards of life await the chosen might also beware of what is to be feared, he dared of his own accord to ask the Lord whether he would destroy a city of an erring people for all the crimes of the guilty, if perhaps it held fifty upright citizens. “I will not destroy it,” he said. Then a coaxing questioning, bringing the number down little by little and pressing for pardon humbly, reducing the sums as it went back over them, won the Father's answer down to ten; and, so as not to reveal the whole of his gentle clemency, the Lord left his servant in the middle of his speech, still pressing further, and withdrew into his own kingdom. Meanwhile those sent to Sodom find Lot sitting by chance before the gates of the city, as the sun was already nearing the earth. When he saw the angelic men radiant with wondrous splendor, thinking them come from heaven (for God himself gave him understanding), he falls prostrate and adores them, invites them home, and prevails by his entreaties on them to spend the night under his roof, persuades them to dine with him, and serves them innocent food and sparing cups.

Look: toward sunset and the return of night a foul band of the crowd, of males, if it is right to say it, bursts out, and boys and old men vie in sharpening the fury of the young: they shout Lot's name aloud, that he should hand over those he has taken in. Alas, it is shameful, and surely better to be silent about how great the wickedness was than to betray it in words, even while condemning it, since already then by perverse custom it was the law of the unspeakable city. Wishing to calm their rage, Lot offers his daughters, whose virginity remained as at their birth, for whatever uses the crowd might wish, meaning by their sex to commit a lesser wrong. But profane hearts think worthless whatever is lawful, and rejoice to be forbidden, so as to have something to desire. So they strive to assault the very author of faith, the teacher of morals and of justice. When the force was now greater than human effort could repel by strength, then both the guests reveal their angelic powers behind their feigned bodies, snatch Lot back inside, and blind the raging crowd. The sentence kept the custom of right law: what came before the punishment closed the eyes of those to be condemned.

Then to Lot, trembling and his mind scarcely recovered, the holy ministers, (not) concealing their condition, since he had already perceived in his mind what he (too) feared, confess who they are, why they have come, what their orders are, what they wish to do for him. Let Lot announce destruction to his sons-in-law, if they are worthy to believe, since he himself is ordered to escape and to gather his mixed household, whose name is spread among many, and his sons-in-law: but their shameful origin did not deserve to feel the fear of God. Yet let no one think these alone of hard faith, since Lot too hesitates to leave his home. When, as daylight drew near, the two guests see him lingering and dragging out sluggish delays without end, they seize him by the hand with his wife and his maiden daughters and lead them far outside the walls, and bid them hurry and escape to the high mountains, with this command: that no one, ill-advised, should look back behind him at what he had passed. But Lot, fearing that the swift wrath of punishment might overtake him in his slowness, himself asked with tears for Segor, and pleased them by asking, since he moved the Lord to save many together, and shared with more the special gift of salvation granted to him and made merit out of a gift.

And now the clouds, swiftly covering the sky, drawn together as God mingled them by his fatherly power, had thickened not the usual mists, but those which Etna rolls, which Inarime vomits, which Aponus breathes out with its hot waters, which the earth, shaken by neighboring Vesuvius, belches forth, which the savage mouth of the Lycian Chimaera pants out from the vast gulf of its threefold furnace, and wherever a swift breath, kindling hidden sulphur and poured through a narrow passage, flows out steaming into the light through the broken earth. Not that he could not turn rains into fires as well, he who could found the whole world from nothing: but the good judge prefers to condemn with greater preparation those whom, pitying the world and the ruin of morals, he punishes as an example. So all things from every shore run together in a surging mass, and, packed by the blast, each kind of fuel for flames gathers into one, and, like a solid body, a curved vault of sulphurous metal covers the guilty lands and cities; this a swift breath, gathering strength in a narrow passage, struck and forced to crackle with a mighty crash, and, as the thunder answered the frequent lightning, to dismay men's minds, so that Lot's wretched wife, trembling, turned back her eyes, which was forbidden, and swiftly suffered the punishment of the broken law, turned into a statue of salt: and, robbed of light, the unhappy woman so lost her soul together with her whole body that, though her form remained, no corpse was left.

Then, fear driving out grief, Lot enters Segor all the faster, stunned by the horrifying evil. And the sun rises, more fervent with all its fire, flashing with angry glare, and aims its stern rays at Sodom. After the flames had wrapped its light in their own, and the loosened sulphur hurled down the fires bound up with it, and the burnings, distributed in a dry liquid, drip from their beds, a storm of lightning falls headlong from the dense air, wraps the cities and rages through all the fields, and the fiery tempest thunders with mingled shrieking (and) drowns the cries; and when it had found fuel on the overwhelmed lands and settled on the very sands, it raises an immense cone of fire from the joined tinder, and flames go back from the earth to the stars, until the rocks and the rebounding earth pass into ashes and the sands, sunk deep, are dissolved, and the fields, the turf consumed, open hollow bays in the sunken plains, and the moisture which had bound the lands together, poured out through opened veins and joining its forces, begets a sea of its own. What are we to think it means, that suddenly there is a lake, filled with wondrous power, where before there was a pyre? Did the good judge will to destroy the condemned by all the elements, or does gentle clemency rather mark a silent end to punishment, in that it quenched the flames with water? And perhaps matter contrary to fire betrays the rest of the judgment to come, and so does the holy Jordan flooding the lake, the river which first deserved to wash away the sins of men.