Book 2

1.1. Next it would be in place to take up — since the Scripture called the Greeks thieves of the barbarian philosophy — how this is to be shown in brief. For we shall set forth that they not only record, by imitating, the marvellous things of those things recorded among us, but that they fabricate and falsify the most authoritative of the doctrines, our Scriptures being older, as we have demonstrated; and we shall convict them in the matters concerning faith, and concerning wisdom and knowledge and science and hope and faith, and concerning repentance and self-control, and indeed the fear of God (a very swarm of the virtues of truth, of which as many as the present treatment of the subject requires will be taken in); and that especially the hidden part of the barbarian philosophy, this symbolic and enigmatic kind, was emulated by those who in earnest philosophized the things of the ancients, as a thing most useful, or rather most necessary, to the knowledge of the truth.

1.2. Upon this it is fitting, I think, to make a defence concerning the things for which the Greeks run us down, using a few Scriptures — if perhaps the Jew too, listening quietly, may be able to turn from the things in which he believed to him in whom he did not believe. And there will fittingly follow, for the noble of the philosophers, a refutation made in love, both of their life and of the discovery of their new doctrines — we not requiting our accusers (far from it, who have learned to bless those who curse, even if they vainly bring blasphemous words against us), but for the turning of those very men, if perhaps the all-wise might be ashamed, brought to soberness by a barbarian refutation, so as to be able, late at least, to discern what those studies are, on account of which they undertake their journeys overseas. For of what they are thieves — and indeed these things too must be demonstrated, once their self-love is taken away — and of what they, having searched, boast that they themselves found out — the refutation of these. And, as a consequence, we must run over also the so-called cyclic education, in how far it is useful, and over astrology and mathematics and magic and sorcery. For the all-Greeks pride themselves on these too as the greatest sciences. But he who reproves with frankness makes peace.

1.3. We have said already many times that we have neither studied nor practise speaking elegant Greek; for this is enough to lead the many away from the truth. But the true philosophizing will profit those who attend to it, not in the tongue but in the judgment. And one must, I think, who cares for truth, not compose his phrasing by design and pains, but try only to name, as he can, what he wishes. For from those who cling to the phrases and busy themselves about these, the matters slip away. It belongs to the husbandman to take, unharmed, the rose that grows among thorns, and to the craftsman to find out the pearl buried in the flesh of the oyster. And they say that birds too have the most pleasant quality of flesh when, no plentiful food being set before them, they themselves, scratching with their feet, pick out their food with toil. So if anyone, a contemplator of the like, longs that the true should be found, hidden among the many plausible and Greek things — as the true face beneath the masks — he will hunt it down by busying himself. For the power that appeared to Hermas in the vision says: "Whatever can be revealed to you will be revealed."

2.4. "And be not lifted up in your own wisdom," the Proverbs say, "but in all your ways make her known, that she may set straight your ways; and your foot shall not stumble." For by these things it wishes to show that the works must be in accordance with the word; but also that we must show that we have the useful, chosen out of all education. And the ways of wisdom are various that set straight toward the way of truth, and the way is faith. "And let not your foot stumble" — it speaks of certain things that seem to oppose the one and divine providential administration. Whence it adds: "Be not prudent in your own eyes" — according to the godless reasonings that set themselves against the dispensation of God — "but fear the only powerful God," upon which it follows that nothing is opposed to God. And besides, the addition teaches plainly that the divine fear is a turning away from evil; for it says: "And turn away from every evil." This is the discipline of wisdom; "for whom the Lord loves he disciplines," making him grieve unto understanding, but restoring him to peace and incorruption.

2.5. The barbarian philosophy, then, which we follow, is in truth perfect and true. So it says in Wisdom: "For he himself gave me an unerring knowledge of the things that are, to know the constitution of the world," and the rest, down to "and the powers of roots." In all these it has comprehended the natural contemplation, that concerning the world of sense, of all the things that have come to be. And next it hints also at the intelligible things, by what it adds: "And whatever is hidden and manifest I came to know; for wisdom, the artificer of all things, taught me." You have, in brief, the promise of our philosophy. And the learning of these things, practised together with right conduct of life, leads up, through the wisdom that is the artificer of all things, to the Ruler of the universe — a thing hard to catch and hard to hunt, ever retreating and standing far off from the pursuer. Yet the same, being far off, has come very near — an unspeakable wonder. "I am a God who draws near," says the Lord — far off in essence (for how could the generated ever come near the ungenerated?), but very near in power, by which all things are enfolded in his bosom. "If anyone does anything in secret," he says, "shall I not see him?" And indeed the power of God is ever present, touching us by the power that beholds and benefits and educates.

2.6. Hence Moses, persuaded that God would never be known by human wisdom, says: "Show me yourself," and forces his way into the darkness where the voice of God was — that is, into the unapproachable and formless conceptions concerning Being. For God is not in darkness or in a place, but above both place and time and the property of the things that have come to be. Wherefore he is never found in a part, neither containing nor contained, either by some limit or by cutting off. "For what kind of house will you build me?" says the Lord. But he did not build even for himself, being uncontainable; and though heaven be called his throne, not even so is he contained, but he rests, delighting in his creation. It is plain, then, that the truth has been hidden from us — which has already been shown from one example, and a little later we shall present it through more.

2.7. And how are they not worthy of acceptance, both those who wish to learn and those who are able, according to Solomon, "to know wisdom and discipline, and to understand words of prudence, and to receive turnings of words, and to understand true righteousness" (as though there were also another not taught according to the truth, by the laws of the Greeks and the other philosophers) "and to set judgments straight" — not the judicial, but he indicates that we must have the criterion within us sound and unwandering — "that he may give to the harmless cunning, and to the young child perception and notion." For having heard these things, the wise man — the one persuaded to obey the commandments — will be wiser in knowledge, "and the man of understanding will gain guidance, and will understand a parable and a dark saying, the words of the wise and riddles." For the discourses inspired from God are not counterfeit, nor are those who traffic from them, nor yet are they snares, with which the many of the sophists entangle the young, busying themselves about nothing true. Rather, those who possess the Holy Spirit "search the depths of God" — that is, they become partakers of the hidden meaning concerning the prophecies. But to give the holy things to the dogs is forbidden, so long as they remain beasts; for it is never fitting to pour out for the envious and disturbed and still unbelieving characters, shameless in their barking inquiry, the divine and pure stream, the living water.

2.8. "Let not waters overflow for you outside your spring, but let your waters pass through into your streets." "For the many do not understand such things as they meet with, nor, having learned, do they know them, but seem so to themselves," according to the noble Heraclitus. Does it not seem to you that he too blames those who do not believe? "But my just man shall live by faith," the prophet has said. And another prophet too says: "Unless you believe, neither will you understand." For how could the soul ever hold the contemplation of these things, surpassing nature, with the unbelief about learning fighting within? But faith — which the Greeks slander, reckoning it empty and barbarian — is a voluntary anticipation, an assent of godliness, "the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," according to the divine Apostle; "for by this especially the elders were witnessed to." And "without faith it is impossible to please God."

2.9. And others have rendered faith to be an assent of the mind to an unseen matter, just as, of course, demonstration is a manifest assent to a matter that was unknown. If, then, faith is a choice, being a kind of appetite for something, the appetite is here intellectual; and since choice is the beginning of action, faith is found to be the beginning of action, the foundation of an intelligent choice, when someone demonstrates beforehand to a man, through faith, the demonstration. And to follow willingly what is advantageous is the beginning of understanding. So an undistracted choice gives a great inclination toward knowledge. Indeed, the practice of faith becomes knowledge, propped upon a firm foundation. For the sons of the philosophers define knowledge as a state not to be shaken by reason. Is there, then, any other such state of true godliness itself, of which the Word alone is the teacher? I think not. And Theophrastus says that perception is the beginning of faith; for from this the beginnings extend toward the reason in us and the understanding. He, then, who has believed the divine Scriptures, having a firm judgment, receives as an irrefutable demonstration the voice of God who has granted the Scriptures. So faith is no longer fortified by demonstration. "Blessed, then, are those who have not seen and yet have believed." For the enchantments of the Sirens, displaying a superhuman power, astounded those who came near them, making them ready, almost against their will, for the reception of what was said.

3.10. Here those about Basilides hold faith to be natural, in which sense they also set it down under the head of election, as finding the studies without demonstration by an intellectual apprehension. But those from Valentinus, assigning faith to us, the simple, but knowledge to themselves, wish it to be inherent, by the advantage of a superior seed, in those who are saved by nature — knowledge far separated from faith, as they say the spiritual is from the natural. Further, those from Basilides say that faith, together with election, is proper to each interval; and that, as a consequence of the supramundane election, the worldly faith of every nature follows, and that the gift of faith is correspondent to the hope of each.

3.11. So faith is no longer a right achievement of choice, if it is an advantage of nature; nor will he who has not believed, being without responsibility, meet with a just recompense, nor he who has believed be responsible; and the whole property and difference of faith and unbelief would fall under neither praise nor blame, for those who reckon rightly, since it has, as its primary cause, a natural necessity that has come from the One who is able to do all things. And, we being drawn like puppets, after the manner of lifeless things, by natural activities, the voluntary and the involuntary are dragged along, and the impulse that leads these. And I, for one, no longer conceive of this as a living being, whose impulse has been allotted necessity, moved by a cause from outside. And where, any more, is the repentance of the once unbelieving, through which is the forgiveness of sins? So that neither is baptism any longer reasonable, nor the blessed seal, nor the Son, nor the Father; but God, I think, is found by them to be the distribution of natures, not having the foundation of salvation, the voluntary faith.

4.12. But we, who have received, through the Scriptures, that choice and avoidance have been given to men with a self-determining authority from the Lord, let us rest upon faith as an unwavering criterion, having shown the spirit ready, in that we have chosen life and have believed God through his voice. And he who has believed the Word knows the matter to be true; for the Word is truth. But he who has disbelieved the one who speaks has disbelieved God. "By faith we understand that the ages were framed by the word of God, so that what is seen has not come from things that appear," says the Apostle. "By faith Abel offered a fuller sacrifice than Cain, through which he was witnessed to be just, God bearing witness over his gifts; and through it, having died, he yet speaks" — and the rest, down to "than to have the temporary enjoyment of sin." These, then, even before the Law, faith justified and made heirs of the divine promise.

4.13. Why, then, should I still set out testimonies of faith, gathering them from the history among us? For the time would fail me to recount Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, and David and Samuel and the prophets, and what follows upon these. And of the four things in which the true resides — perception, mind, knowledge, assumption — by nature the mind is first, but to us and in relation to us perception is first; and out of perception and mind is constituted the essence of knowledge, and the evident is common to mind and perception. But perception is a stepping-stone of knowledge, while faith, having journeyed through the things of sense, leaves behind assumption, and hastens toward the unerring things and abides in the truth. And if anyone should say that knowledge is demonstrative with reason, let him hear that the first principles too are indemonstrable; for they are known neither by art nor by prudence. For the one is concerned with things that can be otherwise, and the other is productive only, not also contemplative.

4.14. By faith alone, then, is it possible to reach the principle of the universe. For all knowledge is teachable; and the teachable is from what is foreknown. But the principle of the universe was not foreknown to the Greeks — neither to Thales, who took water for the first cause, nor to the other natural philosophers in succession; since even if Anaxagoras first set mind over things, yet not even he preserved the efficient cause, depicting certain senseless whirls together with the inactivity and senselessness of mind. Wherefore the Word says: "Call no one your teacher upon the earth." For knowledge is a demonstrative state, but faith is a grace that brings up, from the indemonstrable, to the universal the simple — which is neither with matter, nor matter, nor under matter.

4.15. But the unbelievers, as it seems, drag all things down from heaven and the invisible to earth, "simply grasping rocks and oaks with their hands," according to Plato. For laying hold of all such things, they affirm that this alone is, which offers some collision and contact, defining body and essence as the same. But those who dispute against them defend themselves very cautiously from above, from some invisible quarter, contending that certain intelligible and incorporeal forms are the true essence. "Behold, I make new things," says the Word, "which eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has come up upon the heart of man" — with a new eye, a new hearing, a new heart, all that is visible and audible and apprehensible through faith and understanding, the disciples of the Lord speaking, hearing, doing spiritually. For there is an approved coin and another counterfeit, which deceives the laymen no less, but not the money-changers, who know, having learned, to separate and distinguish the counterfeit from the approved. So the money-changer says to the layman only this of the coin, that it is counterfeit; but the how, the why, only the banker's familiar and the one trained for this learns. And Aristotle says that the judgment that follows upon knowledge — that this thing is true — is faith. Faith, then, is more authoritative than knowledge and is its criterion.

4.16. And conjecture counterfeits faith, being a weak assumption, as the flatterer counterfeits the friend and the wolf the dog. But since we see that the carpenter, having learned, becomes a craftsman, and the pilot, educated in the art, will be able to steer — reckoning that to wish to become noble and good is not enough — it is necessary, then, being persuaded, to learn. And to be persuaded by the Word, whom we proclaimed teacher, is to believe in him in nothing opposing. For how is it possible to set oneself against God? Faithful, then, is knowledge, and knowable is faith, by a certain divine sequence and reciprocal sequence. Indeed, even Epicurus, who especially preferred pleasure to truth, supposes faith to be an anticipation of the mind; and he renders anticipation an application to something evident and to the evident conception of the thing; and that no one can either inquire or be at a loss, or even form an opinion, nor indeed refute, without an anticipation.

4.17. And how could anyone, not having an anticipation of what he reaches after, learn about what he inquires into? And he who has learned makes the anticipation already an apprehension. And if the learner does not learn without an anticipation receptive of the things said, he himself has ears that can hear the truth. And "blessed is he who speaks into the ears of those who hear"; just as, of course, blessed is also he himself, of his obedience. And to hearken is to understand. If, then, faith is nothing other than an anticipation of the mind concerning the things said, and this is called both obedience and understanding and persuasion, no one will learn without faith, since neither without anticipation. And, being true beyond anything, that is demonstrated which was said by the prophet: "Unless you believe, neither will you understand." This too Heraclitus of Ephesus, paraphrasing the oracle, has said: "Unless he hope for the unhoped-for, he will not find it out, it being unsearchable and without passage."

4.18. But Plato the philosopher too, in the Laws, says that the man who is to become blessed and happy must, from the very beginning, be a partaker of the truth, that he may live as long a time as possible being true; for he is faithful. But the unfaithful is he to whom voluntary falsehood is dear; and he to whom it is involuntary is without sense; and neither of these is to be envied. For everyone who is unfaithful and unlearned is without a friend. And perhaps it is this that he calls, in a hidden way, the "kingly wisdom" in the Euthydemus. So in the Statesman he says, word for word: "So that the science of the true king is kingly, and he who possesses it, whether he be a ruler or a private man, will, at all events, according to the art itself, be rightly called kingly." So those who have believed in Christ both are and are called good (chrestoi), as those who are truly kingly are those cared for by a king. For as the wise are wise by wisdom, and the lawful lawful by law, so by Christ the king the Christians, the kingly ones of Christ. Then, going on, he adds clearly: "The right would be lawful, and law, being by nature, is right reason, and not in writings nor in other things." And the Eleatic stranger declares the kingly and statesmanlike man a living law.

4.19. And such is he who fulfils the law and does the will of the Father, but is plainly inscribed upon a certain lofty wood, set forth as an example of divine virtue to those able to discern. And the Greeks know the dispatch-staves of the ephors in Lacedaemon, on which the law was inscribed on wood; but my law, as has been said, is both kingly and living, and is right reason: "Law, the king of all, both mortals and immortals," as the Boeotian Pindar sings. For Speusippus, in the first book against Cleophon, seems to write the like to Plato through this: "For if kingship is a serious thing, and the wise man alone is king and ruler, then the law, being right reason, is serious" — which it indeed is. With these the Stoic philosophers dogmatize in agreement, attaching kingship, priesthood, prophecy, legislation, wealth, true beauty, nobility, and freedom to the wise man alone — who, however, is very exceedingly hard to find, as is confessed even by them.

5.20. All the aforesaid doctrines, then, appear to have been handed down to the Greeks from Moses the great. That all things belong to the wise man, he teaches through these: "And because God has had mercy on me, I have all things." And he shows him to be dear to God, saying: "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob." For the one is found called outright a friend, and the other is shown renamed as one who sees God; and Isaac, allegorized as a consecrated victim, he chose out for himself as a type to be for us of the saving dispensation. And among the Greeks too Minos is sung as "the nine-year king, the familiar of Zeus," they having heard how God conversed with Moses "as if one were to speak to his own friend."

5.21. Moses, then, was wise, king, legislator; but our Saviour surpasses all human nature. He is beautiful, so as to be loved by us alone who long for the true beauty, for he was "the true light"; and king he is shown to be, proclaimed both by children still untaught and by Jews unbelieving and ignorant, and heralded by the prophets themselves; and rich to such a degree that he disdained all the gold above and below the earth, together with all the glory, given to him by the adversary. Why need it be said that he alone is high priest, the only one who knows the service of God, the king of peace, Melchizedek, the most competent of all to lead the race of men? And legislator, in that he gives the law in the mouth of the prophets, most clearly enjoining and teaching what is to be done and what not.

5.22. And who could be of nobler birth than he, whose only father is God? Come, let us present Plato too, lighting upon the same doctrines. He has called the wise man rich in the Phaedrus, saying: "O dear Pan, and whatever other gods are here, grant me to become beautiful within; and as for what I have without, let it be friendly to what is within. And may I count the wise man rich." And the Athenian stranger, blaming those who think that the rich are those who have acquired much money, says thus: "But that those should be both very rich and good is impossible — those, that is, whom the many reckon rich; and they call rich those who have, among few of mankind, possessions worth the most money, which even a bad man may have acquired." "To the faithful belongs the whole world of riches," says Solomon, "but to the unfaithful not even an obol." Much more, then, must we be persuaded by the Scripture which says that a camel will pass through the eye of a needle sooner than a rich man philosophize; and, on the contrary, it blesses the poor, as Plato understood, saying: "Poverty is to be reckoned not the making of one's substance less, but the making of one's insatiability more. For it is never the smallness of property, but insatiability, from which the good man, being free, would also be rich." And in the Alcibiades he calls vice slavish, and virtue freeman-like. "Take from yourselves the heavy yoke," it says, "and take the gentle one," says the Scripture, just as the poets too call a yoke "slavish." And the "You were sold for your sins" agrees with what was said before. "Everyone, then, who does sin is a slave; and the slave does not abide in the house forever. But if the Son frees you, you will be free," and "the truth will free you." And again, that the wise man is beautiful, the Athenian says thus: "As if one should affirm that the just, even if they happen to be ugly in their bodies, are, by their most just character, in this respect altogether beautiful — scarcely would anyone speaking thus seem to speak amiss." And "his form was failing beyond all the sons of men," the prophecy foretold. And Plato has called the wise man king, in the Statesman, and the passage lies before us.

5.23. These things, then, being shown, let us run back again to the discourse concerning faith. Indeed, with all demonstration Plato presents that there is everywhere need of faith, somewhat thus, while at the same time hymning peace: "For a man faithful and sound in factions could not come to be without the whole of virtue. But of the mercenaries there are very many who are warlike and willing to die in war, of whom most become rash and unjust, insolent and senseless, except, indeed, some very few. If, then, these things are rightly said, every legislator who is of even small use will lay down his laws looking above all to the greatest virtue. And this is faithfulness, of which we have need at every time, both in peace and in every war and in the whole of the rest of life. For it seems, having gathered them, to contain the others." And the best is neither war nor faction; for it is to be deprecated to have need of these; but peace toward one another, and at the same time kindliness, is the strongest. From these it appears that the greatest prayer is to have peace, according to Plato, and that the greatest mother of the virtues is faith.

5.24. With reason, then, it is said in Solomon, "wisdom is in the mouth of the faithful," since Xenocrates too, in his work On Prudence, says that wisdom is the knowledge of the first causes and of the intelligible essence, holding prudence to be twofold, the one practical, the other contemplative, which last is human wisdom. Wherefore wisdom is prudence, but not all prudence is wisdom. And it has been shown that the knowledge of the principle of the universe is faith, but not demonstration. For it is absurd that the emulators of Pythagoras of Samos, declining the demonstrations of the things inquired into, should hold the "He himself said it" to be faith, and be content with this voice alone for the confirmation of what they have heard; but that the lovers of beholding the truth, undertaking to disbelieve a trustworthy teacher, the only Saviour God, should demand from him tests of what is said. But "he that has ears to hear, let him hear," he says. And who is this? Let Epicharmus tell: "Mind sees and mind hears; the rest is deaf and blind." That some are unbelieving Heraclitus says, rebuking them: "Not knowing how to hear or how to speak" — helped, no doubt, by Solomon: "If you love to hear, you will receive; and if you incline your ear, you will be wise."

6.25. "Lord, who has believed our report?" says Isaiah. "For faith is from hearing, and hearing through the word of God," says the Apostle. "How, then, will they call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how will they believe him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without one preaching? And how will they preach, unless they are sent? As it is written: 'How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good tidings of good things.'" You see how he brings faith up, through hearing and the preaching of the apostles, to the word of the Lord and the Son of God? Do we not yet understand that the word of the Lord is a demonstration? Just as playing at ball does not depend only on the one who, by skill, sends the ball, but also needs the one who receives it gracefully, that the exercise may be carried out according to the rules of ball-play, so it has come about that teaching too is trustworthy, when the faith of the hearers — being, so to speak, a kind of natural art — contributes toward the learning.

6.26. So earth too, being fruitful, works together toward the casting in of the seeds. For there is no use in the best education without the receiving of the learner, nor indeed of prophecy, when the ready obedience of the hearers is not present. For the dry chips, being ready to receive the burning power, are the more easily kindled; and the much-talked-of stone draws iron through kinship, as the amber too attracts chips and the electron stirs up bits of chaff; and the things drawn obey them, drawn by an unspeakable breath, not as causes but as joint causes. Vice, then, being twofold in kind — the one leading on with deceit and by stealth, the other forcing and carrying off — the divine Word has cried out, calling all together, knowing well, indeed, even those who will not be persuaded; yet, since it lies with us to be persuaded or not, that none may have ignorance to plead, it has made the calling just, and demands from each according to his power. For to some, together with the willing, the being able is present, who have increased this by exercise and are cleansed; and others, even if they cannot yet, already have the willing. And to will is the work of the soul, but to do is not without the body. Nor are matters measured by the end alone, but are judged also by each man's choice — whether he chose readily, whether he repented of the things in which he sinned, whether he gained understanding of the things in which he stumbled, and changed his mind, which is to know afterward; for repentance is a slow knowing, but the first knowledge is sinlessness.

6.27. Repentance, then, is also a right achievement of faith. For unless one believes that what he was held by before is a sin, he will not change; and unless he believes that punishment hangs over the offender, but salvation over the one who lives according to the commandments, he will not, even so, change. And hope too is composed of faith. So those from Basilides define faith as an assent of the soul to something of those things that do not move the perception because they are not present. And hope is the expectation of the acquisition of a good; and the expectation must be faithful. And faithful is he who keeps inviolably the things entrusted; and there are entrusted to us the discourses concerning God and the divine words, the commandments, together with the carrying out of the precepts. This is the faithful servant, the one praised by the Lord. And when one says "God is faithful," he indicates that one ought to believe him when he declares; and his Word declares, and God himself would be faithful. How, then, if to believe is to suppose, do the philosophers think the things from them firm? For an assumption is not a voluntary assent before demonstration, but an assent to something strong.

6.28. And who would be stronger than God? But unbelief is a weak, negative assumption of the opposite, just as distrust is a state hard to receive faith. And faith is a voluntary assumption and a kindly anticipation before apprehension, and an expectation of what is to come; while the expectation of other things is an opinion of the uncertain; and confidence is a firm conviction about something. Wherefore we believe in him in whom we have placed confidence, unto divine glory and salvation; and we have placed confidence in the only God, whom we know that he will not transgress the things well promised to us, and made and granted to us by him out of goodwill. And goodwill is the willing of good things for another for that one's own sake. For the one is without need; but to us the beneficence and the favour from the Lord come down, being divine goodwill, and goodwill that is toward doing good. And if to Abraham, believing, it was reckoned for righteousness, and we are the seed of Abraham through hearing, then we too must believe. For we are Israelites who are obedient not through signs, but through hearing. "Therefore be glad, you barren one who do not bear; break forth and cry," it says, "you who do not travail; for many are the children of the desolate, more than of her who has the husband." "You lived within the enclosure of the people; your children were blessed into the tents of the fathers." And if the same dwellings are announced by prophecy to us and to the patriarchs, one God is shown for both covenants.

6.29. So it adds more clearly: "You have inherited the covenant of Israel" — speaking to the calling from the nations, once barren of this husband, who is the Word, once desolate of the bridegroom. "But the just shall live by faith" — the faith according to the covenant and the commandments — since these two, in name and in time, given according to age and advance dispensationally, being in power one, the one old, the other new, are supplied through the Son from one God. So the Apostle too, in the Epistle to the Romans, says: "For the righteousness of God is revealed in it from faith to faith" — teaching the one salvation, perfected from prophecy into the Gospel through one and the same Lord. "This charge I commit to you, child Timothy, according to the prophecies that went before upon you, that you may war in them the good warfare, having faith and a good conscience, which some, having thrust away, have made shipwreck concerning the faith," because they defiled with unbelief the conscience that came from God.

6.30. With reason, then, faith is no longer to be slandered as ready-to-hand, easy, and common, and besides of chance people. For if it were a human pursuit, as the Greeks supposed, it would have been quenched; but it grows, and there is no place where it is not. I say, then, that faith — whether it was founded by love or even by fear, as the accusers say — is something divine, neither torn apart by another worldly friendship nor dissolved by fear when present. For love makes the faithful by the friendship that is toward faith; and faith, the seat of love, brings in beneficence in return, when even the schoolmaster fear of the law is believed in by those who believe. And it is believed that fear too is; for if in acting the being is shown, then he who is to come and threatens, but does not act or come present, is believed even to be; and, being believed to be, he is not himself the begetter of faith, being judged trustworthy by it.

6.31. Divine, then, is so great a change, that one becomes faithful out of unfaithful and believes by hope and by fear. And indeed the first inclination toward salvation appears to us as faith, after which fear and hope and repentance, together with self-control and endurance, advancing, lead us on both to love and to knowledge. With reason, then, the Apostle Barnabas says: "From what I received I was eager to send to you a part, little by little, that together with your faith you might have also perfect knowledge." "The helpers of our faith, then, are fear and endurance; and the things that fight with us are long-suffering and self-control. While these," he says, "abide in purity toward the Lord, there rejoice together with them wisdom, understanding, science, knowledge." Since, then, knowledge has as its elements the aforesaid virtues, it has come about that faith is more elementary still — being as necessary to the gnostic as breathing is to living for the one who lives in this world; and as without the four elements it is not possible to live, so without faith it is not possible for knowledge to follow. This, then, is the foundation of truth.

7.32. But those who accuse fear run down the law; and if the law, then plainly the God too who gave the law. For these three things necessarily exist about the subject matter: the administrator, the administration, the thing administered. If, then, by hypothesis they should take away the law, then necessarily each man who is led by desire, gratifying pleasure, will neglect what is good, despise the divine, and be at once impious and unjust, leaping away fearlessly from the truth. "Yes," they say, "fear is an irrational avoidance and a passion." What do you say? And how could this definition still hold for you, the commandment having been given me through reason? And the commandment forbids, hanging fear over us, for the education of those who can thus be admonished. Fear, then, is not irrational, but rather rational; for how is it not, when it advises, "You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness"? But if they quibble about the names, let the philosophers call the fear of the law "caution."

7.33. As being a reasonable avoidance. These men Critolaus of Phaselis, not amiss, called "word-fighters." Already, then, the commandment has appeared elegant and most noble to those who accuse us, when understood by a change of name. Caution, then, is shown to be rational, being an avoidance of what harms, from which springs the repentance of former sins. "For the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and good understanding is to all who do it." He calls "doing" of wisdom that which is the fear of God paving the way to wisdom. And if the law is productive of fear, the beginning of wisdom is the knowledge of the law, and there is no wise man without law. Without sense, then, are those who decline the law, upon which it follows that they are reckoned godless. "And education is the beginning of wisdom. But the impious will despise wisdom and education," says the Scripture.

7.34. Let us see what fearful things the law announces. If they are the things between virtue and vice — such as poverty and disease and ill repute and low birth, and the like — these the laws of the city too are praised for setting forth; and to the men of the Peripatos, who introduce three kinds of goods and reckon their opposites to be evils, this opinion is harmonious. But to us the given law commands to flee the things that are truly evil — adultery, lasciviousness, pederasty, ignorance, injustice, disease of soul, death — not the death that dissolves soul from body, but that which dissolves soul from truth; for these vices and the activities from them are truly terrible and fearful. "Not unjustly are nets stretched out for the winged," say the divine oracles; "for they themselves, sharing in blood, treasure up evils for themselves." How, then, is the law any longer said not to be good, by certain heresies that cry out the Apostle's saying, "for through the law is knowledge of sin"? To whom we say: the law did not make, but showed, the sin; for, having commanded what is to be done, it convicted what is not to be done. And it belongs to the good both to teach the saving thing and to point out the poisonous, and to counsel the use of the one and command the avoiding of the other.

7.35. So the Apostle, whom they do not understand, said that knowledge of sin was made manifest through the law, not that it received its existence. And how is the law that educates not good, the schoolmaster given for Christ, that we may turn, being directed by fear in educative fashion toward the perfecting that is through Christ? "I do not wish the death of the sinner," he says, "so much as his repentance." And the commandment makes repentance, being preventive of the things not to be done, and promising the beneficences. By "death," I think, he means ignorance. And "he who is near the Lord is full of scourges" — that is, he who draws near to knowledge enjoys dangers, fears, griefs, afflictions, on account of the longing for the truth. "For an educated son turned out wise, and a son of understanding was saved from burning; and a son of understanding will receive commandments." And Barnabas the Apostle, having set first, "Woe to those who are prudent in themselves and knowing in their own eyes," added: "Let us become spiritual, a perfect temple to God. As far as is in us, let us practise the fear of God and strive to keep his commandments, that we may rejoice in his ordinances." Whence "the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom" is divinely said.

8.36. Here those about Basilides, expounding this saying, say that the Archon himself, hearing the utterance of the ministering Spirit, was struck with astonishment both at the hearing and at the sight, having beyond hope received good tidings; and that his astonishment was called fear, becoming the beginning of a wisdom that distinguishes by classes, and discerns, and perfects, and restores. For not only the world, but also the election, the One over all, having distinguished, sends forth. And Valentinus too, in a certain letter, seems to have had such things in mind, writing in these very words: "And as though there came to be fear upon that creature among the angels, when it spoke greater things than its formation, on account of the one who had invisibly given in it a seed of the essence from above and who spoke with frankness; so too in the generations of worldly men the works of men became fears to those who made them — such as statues and images and all that hands accomplish in the name of God. For Adam, formed in the name of Man, gave fear of the pre-existing Man, as though he himself stood in him; and they were astounded, and quickly made the work vanish."

8.37. But there being one principle, as will be shown later, these men will appear to be inventing twitterings and warblings. And since it seemed good to God that men should be educated beforehand, through the Lord, from the law and the prophets, "the fear of the Lord is said to be the beginning of wisdom" — given by the Lord through Moses to the disobedient and hard-hearted; for those whom reason does not take, fear tames. Which the educating Word too, foreseeing from above, fitted as an instrument, in each of the two ways, cleansing fittingly toward godliness. Astonishment, then, is a fear from an unaccustomed impression, or at an unexpected impression — as also of a message; and fear is as at something that has come to be or is, or an excessive marvelling. They do not, then, perceive that they make passible, through astonishment, the greatest God, the one hymned even by them, and one who, before the astonishment, came to be in ignorance. And if ignorance preceded the astonishment, and the astonishment and the fear became the beginning of the wisdom of God, then ignorance is in danger of preceding causally the wisdom of God and the whole world-making, and indeed the restoration of the election itself.

8.38. Is the ignorance, then, of good things or of base? But if of good things, why does it cease at astonishment? And the minister is superfluous to them, and the proclamation and the baptism. But if of base things, how is the evil the cause of the noblest things? For unless ignorance had pre-existed, the minister would not have come down, nor would astonishment have taken the Archon, as they themselves say, nor would he have received a beginning of wisdom from the fear, for the distinguishing of the election and of the worldly things. And if the fear of the pre-existing Man made the angels plotters against their own creature — as though the seed of the essence from above were invisibly seated in the work — either by an empty supposition they were jealous, which is implausible, that angels should become slayers of a creation entrusted to them, like some child, being condemned of all ignorance; or, held in foreknowledge, they were moved, but then they would not have plotted, through what they attempted, against him whom they foreknew, nor would they have been astounded at their own work, having from foreknowledge perceived the seed from above; or, lastly, trusting in knowledge, they dared — which is itself impossible, that those who had learned the superior thing in the Man of the Fullness should plot against it, and further against that according to the image, in which they had received both the archetype and the incorruptible together with the rest of the knowledge.

8.39. To these very men, then, and to certain others, but especially to those from Marcion, the Scripture cries out, though they do not hear: "But he who hears me shall rest in peace, trusting, and shall be at ease without fear from every evil." What, then, do they wish the law to be? Evil, indeed, they will not say, but just, distinguishing the good from the just. But the Lord, commanding to fear the evil, does not put away the evil by evil, but dissolves the contrary by the contrary. And evil is contrary to good, as just to unjust. If, then, he has called the abstinence from evils "fearlessness," which the fear of the Lord works, the fear is a good; and the fear from the law is not only just but also good, doing away with vice. And, by fear introducing fearlessness, not by passion impassivity, but by education it produces moderation of passion. When, then, we hear, "Honour the Lord, and you shall be strong; but besides him fear no other," we take it that to fear sinning, and to follow the commandments given by God, is the honour of God.

8.40. And dread is a fear of the divine. But even if fear is a passion, as some wish, because fear is a passion, not all fear is a passion. Superstition, at any rate, is a passion, being a fear of demons, both passion-ridden and passionate; but, on the contrary, the fear of the impassible God is impassible; for one fears not God, but the falling away from God; and he who dreads this — the falling into evils — fears and dreads the evils; and he who dreads the fall wishes himself to be incorruptible and impassible. "The wise man, fearing, turned away from evil; but the fool, trusting, mingles with it," says the Scripture; and again, "In the fear of the Lord is hope of strength," it says.

9.41. Such fear, then, leads up both to repentance and to hope. And hope is the expectation of good things, the good hope of an absent good. Indeed, even . . . readiness-to-fall is taken into hope, which we have learned to lead by the hand toward love. And love would be a concord of the things according to reason and life and manner — or, to speak briefly, a fellowship of life, or an intensity of friendship and tender affection, with right reason, about the use of a companion. And the companion is a second self; whence we call brothers those reborn by the same word. And beside love lie hospitality, being a kind of fond skill about the use of strangers; and strangers are those to whom worldly things are strange. For we understand as worldly those who hope toward earth and the fleshly desires. "Be not conformed," says the Apostle, "to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, that you may approve what is the will of God, the good and well-pleasing and perfect." Hospitality, then, busies itself about what is profitable to strangers; and strangers are guests, and guests are friends, and friends are brothers: "dear brother," says Homer. And love of mankind, through which is tender affection too, being a friendly use of men; and tender affection, being a kind of fond skill about the cherishing of friends or kindred, accompany love.

9.42. And if the true man in us is the spiritual, then love of mankind is brotherly love toward those who have shared the same spirit. And cherishing, again, is the keeping of goodwill or of fondness; and fondness is a complete acceptance, and to love is to be pleased with the character, being led toward and away. And men are led into sameness through concord, which is the science of common goods; for concord too is a harmony of judgments. And "let love be unfeigned among us," he says, "and let us ourselves, abhorring the evil, become joined to the good in brotherly love," and the rest, down to "if possible, as far as in you lies, being at peace with all men." Then he says, "Be not overcome by the evil, but overcome the evil in the good." And the same Apostle confesses to bear witness of the Jews that "they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge; for, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to the righteousness of God." For they neither knew nor did the will of the law, but what they themselves supposed, this they thought the law too wished; nor did they believe the law as prophesying, but followed it by bare word and fear, not by disposition and faith. "For the end of the law is Christ unto righteousness" — the one prophesied by the law — "to everyone who believes."

9.43. Whence it is said to these by Moses: "I will provoke you to jealousy over what is no nation; over a nation without understanding I will anger you" — meaning, of course, the nation made ready for obedience. And through Isaiah he says: "I was found by those who did not seek me; I became manifest to those who did not ask after me" — before the coming of the Lord, that is; after which those prophesied things too are now fittingly said of Israel: "I stretched out my hands all the day to a disobedient and gainsaying people." You see the cause of the calling from the nations plainly stated by the prophet — the disobedience and gainsaying of the people? Then the goodness of God is shown even in these things; for the Apostle says: "But by their falling away salvation came to the nations, to provoke them to jealousy and to make them wish to repent." And the Shepherd, having put the saying simply about those who have fallen asleep, knows certain just men among the nations and among the Jews, not only before the coming of the Lord, but also before the law, according to their pleasing of God, like Abel, like Noah, like any other just man.

9.44. So he says that the apostles and teachers who preached the name of the Son of God and fell asleep, in power and faith, preached to those who had fallen asleep before. Then he adds: "And they themselves gave them the seal of the preaching. They went down, then, with them into the water, and again came up. But these went down living and again came up living; while those who had fallen asleep before went down dead and came up living. Through these, then, they were made alive and came to know the name of the Son of God. For this reason they also came up together with them and were fitted together into the building of the tower, and were built in unhewn; for they fell asleep in righteousness and in great purity, only this seal they had not." "For when the nations that do not have the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves," according to the Apostle.

9.45. That the virtues follow one another reciprocally, what need is there to say, since it has already been shown that faith is upon repentance and hope, and caution upon faith, and that the abiding in these and the exercise, together with learning, are brought to completion in love, which in turn is perfected by knowledge? But this must of necessity be noted: that the divine alone must be conceived as wise by nature; wherefore wisdom too is the power of God that has taught the truth; and here, somewhere, the perfecting of knowledge has been taken. And the philosopher loves and is fond of the truth, being, from a genuine servant, already reckoned a friend through love. And the beginning of this is to wonder at the things that are, as Plato says in the Theaetetus, and as Matthias too, in the Traditions, advises: "Wonder at the things present," laying this down as the first step toward the knowledge beyond. So in the Gospel according to the Hebrews too it is written: "He who has wondered will reign, and he who has reigned will rest." It is impossible, then, for the unlearned, so long as he remains unlearned, to philosophize — at least the man who has not received a notion of wisdom, philosophy being a reaching after the truly existing and after the studies that tend toward this. And even if doing well is practised by some, yet the knowing how one must use and do must be worked out together, in respect of which one is also made like to God — to God, I mean, the Saviour — serving the God of the universe through the high-priestly Word, through whom are beheld the things that are truly noble and just. Reverence . . . is an action that follows and is consequent upon God.

10.46. Three things, then, does our own philosopher hold to: first, contemplation; second, the fulfilling of the commandments; third, the equipping of good men — which, coming together, complete the gnostic. And whatever of these is lacking, the things of knowledge go lame. Whence divinely the Scripture says: "And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them: I am the Lord your God. According to the pursuits of the land of Egypt, in which you dwelt, you shall not do; and according to the pursuits of the land of Canaan, into which I bring you there, you shall not do; and in their customs you shall not walk. My judgments you shall do, and my ordinances you shall keep, to walk in them: I am the Lord your God. And you shall keep all my ordinances and do them. The man who does them shall live in them: I am the Lord your God."

10.47. Whether, then, Egypt and the land of Canaan are a symbol of the world and of deceit, or of passions and vices, from which one must abstain, and what things are to be practised as divine and not worldly, the oracle shows us. And when it says, "The man who does them shall live in them," it calls life both the correction of the Hebrews themselves and the joint-exercise and advance of those near, of our very selves. For "those dead in trespasses are made alive together with Christ" through our covenant. And the Scripture, often repeating "I am the Lord your God," most turningly puts us to shame, teaching us to follow the God who gave the commandments; and it gently reminds us to seek God and to attempt to know him so far as may be — which would be the greatest contemplation, the higher vision, the science in truth, that which comes to be unwavering by reason. This alone would be the knowledge of wisdom, from which right action is never separated.

11.48. But the knowledge of the reputed wise — whether they be barbarian heresies or the philosophers among the Greeks — "puffs up," according to the Apostle. But faithful is the knowledge which is a scientific demonstration of the things handed down according to the true philosophy. And we would say that it is a reasoning which furnishes faith for the things in dispute out of the things agreed upon. And faith being twofold, the one scientific, the other based on opinion, nothing hinders us from naming demonstration twofold, the one scientific, the other based on opinion — since knowledge too, and foreknowledge, are called twofold, the one having its own nature made exact, the other deficient. And surely the demonstration that is among us would alone be true, as being supplied from the divine Scriptures, the sacred writings, and the God-taught wisdom, according to the Apostle. Learning, at any rate, is also the obeying of the commandments, which is to believe God. And faith is a certain power of God, being a strength of the truth.

11.49. So it says: "If you have faith as a grain of mustard, you will remove the mountain"; and again, "According to your faith be it to you"; and the one is healed, having received the cure through his faith, and the other, who is dead, is raised through the strength of him who believed that he would rise. But the demonstration based on opinion is human, and comes from rhetorical arguments or dialectical syllogisms. For the highest demonstration, which we hinted to be scientific, sets faith in the souls of those who long to learn, through the setting-out and opening of the Scriptures — which would be knowledge. For if the things taken up toward the thing inquired are taken as true, as being divine and prophetic, it is plain that the conclusion drawn from them will, in consequence, be brought in as true; and rightly would knowledge be a demonstration for us.

11.50. So when the memorial of the heavenly and divine food was commanded to be consecrated in a golden jar, "the gomor," it says, "was the tenth of the three measures." For in us ourselves three measures, three criteria, are indicated: perception of things of sense; of things said, both names and words, reason; and of things of thought, mind. The gnostic, then, will abstain from the sins that are according to reason and according to thought and according to perception and activity, having heard how "he who looked toward desire committed adultery," and having taken to mind that "blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," and knowing that too, that "not the things that enter into the mouth defile the man, but those that come out through the mouth, these defile the man; for out of the heart come the reasonings." This, I think, is the true and just measure according to God, by which the things measured are measured — the decad that holds the man together, which, in summary, the aforesaid three measures showed. And it would be body and soul, and the five senses, and the vocal power and the seminal, and the rational or spiritual — or however you wish to call it.

11.51. And one must, so to speak, mounting up above all the others, stand upon the mind — just as, indeed, in the world, having leaped over the nine portions, the first being that of the four elements set in one region because of their equal change, and then the seven wandering and the eighth unwandering — coming to the perfect number above the nine, the tenth portion, to arrive at the knowledge of God, longing, in a word, after the Maker, after the creation. For this reason the tithes both of the ephi and of the victims were brought to God, and the feast of the Passover began from the tenth, being a passing over from every passion and every thing of sense. The gnostic, then, is fixed in faith; but the man of conceited wisdom willingly does not touch the truth, using unstable and unsettled impulses. With reason, then, it is written: "And Cain went out from the face of God and dwelt in the land of Naid over against Eden"; and Naid is interpreted "tossing," Eden "delight." And faith and knowledge and peace are the delight, from which the man who disobeys is cast out; but the man of conceited wisdom from the beginning does not even wish to hear the divine commandments, but, like a self-taught one who has thrown off the rein, willingly removes into the surging tossing, going down to mortal and generated things from the knowledge of the ungenerated, holding now one opinion, now another. "And those who have no guidance fall like leaves." Reason and the governing part, remaining unstumbling and leading the soul, is called its pilot; for in truth the approach to the unchangeable is by the unchangeable.

11.52. So Abraham was "standing before the Lord, and, drawing near, said"; and to Moses it is said, "But you, stand here with me." But those about Simon wish to be made like in their manner to the "Standing One" whom they revere. Faith, then, and the knowledge of the truth ever make the soul that has chosen them to be in the same condition and after the same manner. But akin to falsehood are change and turning aside and departure, as to the gnostic belong stillness and rest and peace. As, then, conceit and self-opinion have slandered philosophy, so too false knowledge — called by the same name — has slandered knowledge; concerning which the Apostle, writing, says: "O Timothy, keep the deposit, turning away from the profane empty talkings and oppositions of the falsely-named knowledge, which some, professing, have missed the mark concerning the faith." Convicted by this saying, those from the heresies reject the Epistles to Timothy. Come, then: if the Lord is truth and wisdom and the power of God, as indeed he is, it would be shown that the man who has known him, and the Father through him, is in truth a gnostic; for he perceives along with the one who says: "The lips of the just know lofty things."

12.53. And faith, like time, being twofold, we would find two virtues dwelling with both. For of time, to the past belongs memory, to the future hope; and we believe that the past has come to be and that the future will be; and again we love, persuaded by faith that the past is so, and awaiting the future by hope. For through all things love has gone forth to the gnostic who knows one God; and, "behold, all things which he has made are very good," he knows and marvels at. And "godliness adds length of life, and the fear of the Lord adds days." As, then, the days are a portion of the life that is by ascent, so too fear is the beginning of love, becoming, by increase, faith, then love — but not as I fear the wild beast and hate it (fear being twofold), but as I dread the father too, whom I both fear and love at once. Again, fearing lest I be punished, I love myself, choosing the fear; but he who fears to offend the father loves him. Blessed, then, is he who becomes faithful, mingled of love and fear; for faith is strength unto salvation, and power unto eternal life.

12.54. Again, prophecy is foreknowledge, and knowledge is the understanding of prophecy — that is, knowledge of the things foreknown to those men by the Lord who makes all things plain beforehand. The knowledge of the things foretold, then, shows their issue to be threefold: either having come to pass long ago, or already present, or to be in the future. Then the extremes have fallen under faith — of things accomplished or of things hoped for; but the present activity furnishes conviction for the confirmation of both extremes. For if, prophecy being one, the one part is now accomplished and the other fulfilled, from this both the hoped-for is trustworthy and the past is true. For first it was present, then it has passed for us, so that the faith of past things is an apprehension of a past thing, and the hope of future things an apprehension of a future thing. And the assents — not only those from Plato, but also those from the Stoa — say are in our power.

12.55. Every opinion, then, and judgment and assumption and learning, by which we live and are ever in company with the race of men, is an assent; and this would be nothing other than faith. And unbelief too, being a departure from faith, shows assent and faith to be possible; for a privation of a non-existent thing could not be spoken of. And if anyone considers the truth, he will find man by nature ill-disposed toward assent to falsehood, but having occasions toward faith in the truth. The virtue that holds the Church together, as the Shepherd says, is faith, through which the elect of God are saved; and that which plays the man is self-control. And there follow upon these simplicity, knowledge, harmlessness, gravity, love. And all these are daughters of faith. And again: "Faith leads the way, fear builds up, and love perfects." "One must fear the Lord, then," he says, "unto building up, but not the devil unto overthrow." And, on the contrary: "the works of the Lord — that is, the commandments — must be loved and done, but the works of the devil feared and not done"; for the fear of God educates and restores to love, but the works of the devil have hatred as their housemate. And the same author says that repentance is great understanding; for he who repents of what he has done no longer does or says it, but, torturing his own soul for the things in which he sinned, works good. Forgiveness of sins, then, differs from repentance, but both show the things in our power.

13.56. He who has received the forgiveness of sins, then, must no longer sin. For upon the first and only repentance of sins (this would be of the sins that pre-existed in the gentile and first life, the one in ignorance, I mean) there is set forth at once, to those called, the repentance that cleanses the place of the soul from offences, that faith may be founded. And the Lord, being a knower of hearts and foreknowing the things to come, both the changeableness of man and the shiftiness and craftiness of the devil, foresaw from the very beginning above how the devil, being jealous over the forgiveness of the man's sins, would fasten certain causes of sins upon the servants of God, working evil prudently, that they too might fall away together with him.

13.57. He gave, then, yet another repentance, a second, to those who, even in the faith, fall into some offence, being very merciful, that, if anyone be tempted after the calling, but forced and over-reached by craft, he may receive still one repentance not to be repented of. For "if we sin willingly after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there is no longer left a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a zeal of fire that is about to devour the adversaries." But the continual and repeated repentances upon sins differ in nothing from those who have not believed at all, except only in the perceiving that they sin; and I do not know which of the two is worse — to sin knowingly, or, having repented of the sins, to offend again. For by either way the sin is shown by conviction: the one condemned at the doing by the worker of lawlessness, the other by the man who, foreknowing the thing to be done as base, attempts it. And the one perhaps gratifies anger and pleasure, not ignorant whom he gratifies; but the other, repenting of what he gratified, then running back again to pleasure, is joined to the one who from the beginning willingly sins; for he who does again that of which he repented, doing what he has condemned,

13.58. does it willingly. He, then, who from the nations and from that former life rushed to faith, once obtained forgiveness of sins; but he who, even after these things, has sinned, then repents, even if he meet with pardon, ought to be ashamed, no longer washing himself unto forgiveness of sins. For he must leave behind not only the idols which he formerly deified, but also the works of his former life — the man not of bloods, nor of the will of the flesh, but reborn in spirit; which would be not to repent of the same offence into which he has been carried. For to repent often is, on the contrary, a practice of sins, and an aptitude toward readiness, from want of training.

13.59. To ask pardon often for the things in which we often offend is, then, a semblance of repentance, not repentance. "But righteousness cuts straight blameless ways," cries the Scripture. And again: "The righteousness of the harmless will set straight his way." Indeed, "as a father pities his sons, so the Lord pitied those who fear him," David writes. "Those, then, who sow in tears," of those who in repentance make confession, "will reap in gladness; for blessed are all who fear the Lord." You see the blessing that resembles those in the Gospel? "Fear not," it says, "when a man becomes rich, and when the glory of his house is multiplied; for in his dying he will not take all things, nor will his glory go down with him. But I, in your mercy, will enter into your house; I will worship toward your holy temple in your fear. Lord, lead me in your righteousness." Now impulse is a movement of the mind toward something or away from it; and passion is an excessive impulse, or one overstraining the measures according to reason, or an impulse carried away and disobedient to reason. So passions are a movement of the soul contrary to nature, in the disobedience toward reason. (And the departure and the standing-out and the disobedience are in our power, as obedience too is in our power; wherefore the voluntary things are judged.) And indeed if one should go through each of the passions one by one, one would find them irrational appetites.

14.60. The involuntary, then, is not judged (and this is twofold: the one coming about with ignorance, the other by necessity); for how could you give judgment about the things said to be sinned according to the involuntary modes? For either a man was ignorant of himself, as Cleomenes and Athamas who went mad; or of the thing he does, as Aeschylus, who, having uttered the mysteries on the stage, was judged in the Areopagus and so released, having shown himself not initiated; or one might be ignorant of the person about whom it is done, as the man who let go the adversary and killed his own instead of the enemy; or of that wherein it is done, as the man who, exercising with spears tipped with balls, and killing someone when the spear cast off its ball; or of the manner — as the man in the stadium who killed his antagonist (for he contended not for death but for victory); or of that for the sake of which it is done — as the physician who gave a wholesome antidote and killed, yet gave it not for this, but to save.

14.61. The law of that time held even the involuntary slayer, as it held the involuntary one with an issue, but not on a par with the voluntary. And yet he too will be punished as for a voluntary thing, if one transfer the passion to the truth; for in truth he is to be punished who cannot control the seminal reason. Which is itself an irrational passion of the soul, going near to babbling; but the faithful man has chosen to hide matters with discretion. The things of choice, then, are judged; "for the Lord searches hearts and reins"; and "he who looked toward desire is judged." Wherefore "You shall not even desire," it says; and "This people honours me with the lips," it says, "but their heart is far from me." For God looks to the very judgment, since he left Lot's wife too, who turned, willingly only, toward the worldly vice, without perception, having shown her as a pillar of salt and fixed her so as not to advance — not a foolish and useless image, but one to season and to give pungency to the man able to discern spiritually.

15.62. And the voluntary is either according to appetite, or according to choice, or according to thought. So these stand somehow beside one another: error, mishap, wrongdoing. And there is error — say, to live luxuriously and licentiously; mishap — to strike a friend as an enemy through ignorance; and wrongdoing — grave-robbing or sacrilege. And erring is constituted from not knowing how to judge what one must do, or from being unable to do it; just as, indeed, a man falls into a pit either through ignorance or through being unable to leap over it because of weakness of body. But in our power, at all events, are both our standing toward our education and our obedience toward the commandments.

15.63. And if we should not wish to share in these, giving ourselves over to anger and desire, we shall err, or rather we shall wrong our own soul. For that Laius in the tragedy says: "None of these things of which you admonish me has escaped me; yet, though I have judgment, nature forces me" — that is, his having become given over to the passion. And Medea too likewise cries out on the stage: "And I understand what evils I am about to do, but my anger is stronger than my counsels." Nor is Ajax silent, but, about to slay himself, cries out: "No grief so gnaws the soul of a free man as dishonour. So have I suffered, and a deep stain, welling up from the depths, turns me back, goaded with the bitter spurs of madness."

15.64. These, then, anger sets in tragedy; but desire, ten thousand others — Phaedra, Antheia, Eriphyle, "who received precious gold for her dear husband." For that comic Thrasonides, another stage says: "A cheap little slave-girl has enslaved me." Mishap, then, is an error contrary to reason; and error is an involuntary wrongdoing, but wrongdoing a voluntary vice. Error, then, is mine, involuntary. Wherefore he says: "For sin shall not have lordship over you; for you are not under law but under grace" — speaking to those who have already believed, that "by his stripe we were healed." And misfortune is an involuntary action of another upon me; but wrongdoing alone is found voluntary, whether mine or another's.

15.65. These differences of sins the Psalmist hints at, calling blessed those whose lawlessnesses God has wiped out, and whose sins he has covered, and the others he has not reckoned, and the rest he has forgiven. For it is written: "Blessed are those whose lawlessnesses are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not reckon sin, nor is there guile in his mouth." This blessing came upon those chosen by God through Jesus Christ our Lord. For love covers a multitude of sins; but he wipes them out who chooses the repentance of the sinner rather than his death.

15.66. And those sins are not reckoned which are not constituted according to choice; for "he who desired has already committed adultery," it says. And the enlightening Word forgives sins; and "in that time," says the Lord, "they will seek the iniquity of Israel, and it shall not be, and the sins of Judah, and they shall not be found; for who is like me? And who shall stand against my face?" You see one God announced, good, both apportioning according to worth and forgiving sins. And John too, in the greater Epistle, plainly teaches the differences of sins in these words: "If anyone sees his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and he will give him life" — speaking of those who sin not unto death; "for there is a sin unto death; not concerning that do I say that anyone should ask." "All unrighteousness is sin,"

15.67. and there is a sin not unto death. But David too, and before David Moses, show forth the knowledge of the three doctrines in these words: "Blessed is the man who walked not in the counsel of the impious" — as the fishes go in darkness into the depths; for those that have no scales, which Moses forbids to touch, feed at the bottom of the sea — "nor stood in the way of sinners" — as those who seem to fear the Lord sin like the pig; for, when hungry, it cries out, but when filled does not recognize its master — "nor sat in the seat of the pestilent" — as the winged creatures ready for plunder. And Moses advised: "You shall not eat the pig, nor the eagle, nor the sharp-winged, nor the raven, nor any fish that has not a scale in itself." This is from Barnabas. But I, for one, have heard a wise man interpret such things, saying that the "counsel of the impious" is the nations, and taking the "way of sinners" to be the Jewish supposition, and the "seat of the pestilent" the heresies.

15.68. But another said, more authoritatively, that the first blessing is set upon those who did not follow after the wicked judgments — those that apostatized from God; the second upon those who do not abide in the broad and wide way — whether those reared in the law, or those from the nations who have repented; and the "seat of the pestilent" would be the theatres and the law-courts; or, rather, the following after the wicked and ruinous authorities, and the fellowship in their works. "But his will is in the law of the Lord" — Peter, in the Preaching, called the Lord both law and Word. And the legislator seems, in another way too, to teach the abstinence from sin in three modes: from those in word, through the voiceless fishes (for there is in truth a place where silence is better than word; there is also a guerdon of silence, free of danger); from those in deed, through the rapacious and flesh-eating birds; . . . the pig delights in mire and dung;

15.69. and one must not even have the conscience defiled. With reason, then, the prophet says: "Not so the impious, not so, but as the chaff which the wind drives from the face of the earth. For this reason the impious shall not rise in judgment" (those already condemned, since "he who does not believe is already judged"), "nor sinners in the counsel of the just" (those already condemned not to be united with those who have lived unstumbling), "for the Lord knows the way of the just, and the way of the impious shall perish." Again the Lord shows plainly that both the trespasses and the offences are in our power, laying down modes of cure corresponding to the passions, wishing us to be set right by the shepherds, through Ezekiel, blaming certain of them, I think, for the things in which they did not keep the commandments: "The weak you did not strengthen," and the rest, down to "and there was none who sought after nor who turned back"; "for there is great joy with the Father over one sinner saved," says the Lord. By this Abraham is the more praiseworthy, that "he went as the Lord spoke to him."

15.70. From this one of the sages among the Greeks drew the "Follow God." "And the godly," says Isaiah, "took intelligent counsel." And counsel is an inquiry about how we might carry ourselves rightly in present matters, and good counsel is prudence toward deliberations. And what? Does not God too, after the pardon over Cain, in consequence, not much later bring in Enoch the penitent, showing that repentance naturally begets pardon? And pardon is constituted not according to forgiveness, but according to cure. And the same thing happens also in the calf-making of the people under Aaron. From this one of the sages among the Greeks uttered, "Pardon is better than punishment" — just as, indeed, the "Give a pledge, and ruin is at hand" is from the voice of Solomon, which says: "My son, if you give surety for your friend, you will hand over your hand to an enemy; for a man's own lips are a strong snare to him, and he is caught by the words of his own mouth." And more mystically still, the "Know yourself" is taken from there: "You have seen your brother, you have seen your God."

15.71. In this sense, somehow, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbour as yourself"; "on these commandments," he says, "the whole law and the prophets hang and depend." In harmony with these are those words too: "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be fulfilled. And this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." "For the Lord is merciful and compassionate, and good is the Lord to all." And more clearly, commending the "Know yourself," Moses says often: "Take heed to yourself." By alms, then, and by faith are sins cleansed away; and "by the fear of the Lord everyone turns away from evil." And "the fear of the Lord is education and wisdom."

16.72. Here again the accusers fasten on, calling joy and grief passions of the soul. For they render joy a reasonable elation, and to exult, to rejoice over noble things; and pity, grief over one suffering ill undeservedly; and they say that such things are changes and passions of the soul. But we, as it seems, do not cease understanding the Scriptures in a fleshly way, and, raising ourselves from our own passions, awaiting the will of the impassible God in likeness to our own motions; supposing that, as we are able to hear, so it is with the Almighty, we wander godlessly. For it was not possible to speak of the divine as it is; but as it was possible for us, fettered in the flesh, to hear, so the prophets spoke to us, the Lord bearing himself with us in a saving way toward the weakness of men.

16.73. Since, then, it is the will of God that the man obedient to the commandments be saved, and the man who repents of his sins, and we rejoice over our salvation, the Lord, who spoke through the prophets, made our gladness his own, just as in the Gospel he says, lovingly toward mankind: "I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I thirsted, and you gave me to drink; for what you did to one of these least, you did to me." As, then, he is fed without being fed, because the one whom he wishes has been fed, so he rejoiced without being changed, because the one who repented has come to be in joy, as he wished. And since God, being good, has mercy richly — giving the commandments through the law, . . . through the prophets, and now more closely through the coming of the Son, saving and having mercy, as has been said, on those who have obtained mercy — and properly the greater has mercy on the lesser; and man would not be greater than man, in so far as he is man by nature, but God is greater than man in all things; if, then, the greater has mercy on the lesser, God alone will have mercy on us. For man becomes social through righteousness and shares what he received from God, both through natural goodwill and relation, and through the commandments which he obeys;

16.74. but God has no natural relation toward us, as the founders of the heresies wish (neither if he should make us from things that are not, nor if he should fashion us from matter — since the one is not at all, and the other is in all respects other than God) — unless one should dare to call us a part of him and of the same essence as God. And I do not know how anyone who has known God will endure to hear this, when he looks at our life, in how many evils we are entangled. For in this way God would be — what it is not even lawful to say — sinning in part, if indeed the parts of the whole are parts and complementary of the whole; and if they are not complementary, neither would they be parts. But, being by nature rich in mercy, through his own goodness God cares for us, though we are neither portions of him nor by nature his children.

16.75. And indeed this is the greatest proof of the goodness of God, that, we being so disposed toward him and by nature wholly estranged, he yet cares for us. For the tender affection toward children is natural to the animals, and the friendship from custom toward those of like mind; but the mercy of God toward us is rich, who belong to him in nothing — I mean by our essence or nature, or by the power proper to our essence — but only by our being the work of his will. And indeed the man who, willingly, with exercise and teaching, has taken up the knowledge of the truth, he calls into adoption, the greatest advance of all. "But lawless deeds hunt down a man, and each is bound fast by the cords of his own sins"; and God is without responsibility. And in truth "blessed is the man who is afraid of all things through caution."

17.76. As, then, knowledge is a state that makes one know, from which the knowing comes about, and the apprehension by it is unwavering by reason, so too ignorance is a yielding impression, changeable by reason; and the changeable, like the thing trained by reason, is in our power. And beside knowledge lie experience and acquaintance, understanding and conception and knowledge. And acquaintance would be a knowledge of universals according to kind; experience a comprehensive knowledge, so as to busy oneself with what each thing is; conception a knowledge of the intelligible; and understanding a knowledge of the comparable, or an unwavering comparison, or a comparative power of the things of which prudence and knowledge are — both of one and of each and of all the things that come into one account; and knowledge a science of the being itself, or a science in harmony with the things that come to be; and truth a knowledge of the true, and the state of the truth a knowledge of true things.

17.77. And knowledge is constituted through reason and is unwavering by another reason. The things we do not do, we either do not do through not being able, or through not wishing, or through both. We do not fly, then, since we neither can nor wish; and we do not, say, swim just now, since we can but do not wish; and we are not as the Lord, since we wish but cannot. For "no disciple is above the teacher; and it is enough if we become as the teacher" — not in essence, for it is impossible for what is so by position to be equal in existence to what is so by nature, but in having become eternal, and in having known the contemplation of the things that are, and in being called sons, and in beholding the Father from the things proper to himself alone. To will, then, leads before all things; for the rational powers are by nature ministers of willing. "Will," it says, "and you will be able." And of the gnostic, the will and the judgment and the exercise are the same. For if the purposes are the same, the doctrines too and the judgments are the same, so that his words and his life and his manner are in keeping with his stand. "And an upright heart seeks out knowledge" and attends to those things. "God has taught me wisdom, and I have known the knowledge of holy things."

18.78. Plain, then, are all the other virtues too, recorded in Moses, that furnished to the Greeks the beginning of the whole ethical sphere — I mean courage and temperance and prudence and justice, and steadfastness and endurance, and gravity and self-control, and the reverence that is upon these. But reverence is plain to everyone, teaching to reverence and honour the highest and most ancient cause. And the law itself presents justice, educating prudence both through the abstinence from the idols of sense and through the allotment to the Maker and Father of the universe, from which opinion, as from a spring, all understanding grows.

18.79. "For the sacrifices of the lawless are an abomination to the Lord, but the prayers of those who walk straight are acceptable with him." Since such too are the things in Isaiah: "What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?" says the Lord, and the whole passage. "Loose every bond of injustice"; "for this is a sacrifice acceptable to God, a contrite heart that seeks its Maker." "Deceitful balances are an abomination before God, but a just weight is acceptable to him." From this Pythagoras advises not to step over the balance. And the profession of the heresies is called a deceitful justice; and "the tongue of the unjust will be utterly destroyed, but the mouth of the just distils wisdom." Yet they call the wise and prudent base. But it would be a long matter to set out testimonies concerning these virtues, since all the Scripture hymns them. Since, then, they define courage as the knowledge of things terrible and not terrible and the things between, and temperance as a state preserving, in choice and avoidance, the judgments of prudence, there lie beside courage both endurance, which they call steadfastness, a knowledge of things to be abided in and not to be abided in, and magnanimity, a knowledge that rises above the things that befall; and beside temperance lies caution, being an avoidance with reason.

18.80. And the keeping of the commandments, being a harmless observance of them, is the gaining of safety in life. And it is not possible to be steadfast without courage, nor self-controlled without temperance. And the virtues follow one another reciprocally; and in whom are the sequences of the virtues, in him is also salvation, being the keeping of the good condition. With reason, then, having further treated of these virtues, we would have considered all of them, since he who has one virtue gnostically has all through the reciprocal following. So self-control is a disposition not to be overstepped of the things that appear according to right reason. And he is self-controlled who holds back the impulses that are against right reason, or who holds himself so as not to be impelled against right reason. And this temperance is not without courage, since it comes about from the commandments, following upon what is ordained . . . by God — prudence and the justice that imitates the divine disposition, according to which, being self-controlled, we are arrayed, pure, toward reverence and the action that consequently follows God, being made like to the Lord so far as is possible for us who are by nature perishable.

18.81. And this is to become just and holy with prudence. For the divine is without need and impassible; whence it is not, properly speaking, self-controlled, for it never falls under passion, that it should master it. But our nature, being passionate, needs self-control, through which, being trained toward the condition of small need, it tries to draw near in disposition to the divine nature. For the earnest man is of small need, on the borderland of immortal and mortal nature, having neediness both through the body and through generation itself, but having been taught to need few things through rational self-control. For what reason has it that the law forbids a man to put on the covering of a woman? Or does it not wish us to be manly, made effeminate neither in body and works nor in thought and reason? For it wishes the man who is at leisure for truth to be made masculine in endurances and steadfastnesses, in life and manner and reason and exercise, by night and by day, and, if there should overtake him the need of a martyrdom that goes through blood.

18.82. Again, if anyone, it says, having lately built a house, has not had time to dwell in it, or, having worked a newly-planted vineyard, has not yet partaken of the fruit, or, having betrothed a virgin, has not yet married her, the law that loves mankind orders these to be released from the campaign — in a generalship-like way, that we may not, distracted toward our desires, serve the war unwillingly (for those are free in their impulses who, without pretext, strip for the dangers); and in a way that loves mankind, since the things of wars are uncertain, having reckoned it unjust that the one should not enjoy his own labours, while another should take, without toil, the things of those who have laboured.

18.83. And the law seems also to show forth the courage of the soul, legislating that the planter should enjoy the fruit, and the builder should dwell, and the betrothed should marry; for it will not make the hopes incomplete to those who have exercised themselves according to the gnostic reason. For of a good man, dead or living, the hope does not perish. "I," it says, "love those who love me," wisdom says; "and those who seek me will find peace," and the rest. And what? Did not the women of the Midianites, warring against the Hebrews by their own beauty, bring them out of temperance, through incontinence, into godlessness? For, having made them their companions out of the grave exercise into harlot-pleasures, and lured them by beauty, they drove them mad toward the sacrifices of the idols and toward foreign women; and, overcome at once by women and by pleasure, they departed both from God and from the law; and well-nigh the whole people had become subject to the enemy by a woman's stratagem, until fear, admonishing, reined them in as they were in danger.

18.84. So those who were left, taking up, in love of danger, the contest for reverence, became masters of the enemy. "The beginning of wisdom, then, is the reverence of God, and the understanding of holy things is forethought, and to know the law belongs to a good understanding." Those, then, who supposed the law to be productive of a passionate fear neither understood as good men nor truly conceived the law. "For the fear of the Lord makes life. But the wanderer will be pained in toils which knowledge does not inspect." Indeed, mystically, Barnabas: "But God, who is Lord of the whole world," he says, "may he give to you too wisdom and understanding, science, knowledge of his ordinances, endurance. Become, then, taught of God, seeking out what the Lord seeks from you, that you may find it in the day of judgment." Those who attain these things he called gnostically children of love and of peace. And concerning sharing and fellowship, there being many discourses, it is enough to say only this: that the law forbids lending to a brother (calling "brother" not only one sprung from the same parents, but anyone who is of the same nation and of like mind and has shared the same reason), thinking it not just to exact interest on money, but to give to those in need with open hands and judgments. For God is the Creator of such a grace; and indeed the man who shares receives notable interest too — the most precious things among men: gentleness, kindness, magnanimity, good report, good fame.

18.85. Does not this precept seem to you to be of love for mankind, as does that one too — to pay the wage of the poor man the same day? It teaches that the wage for services must be paid without delay; for the eagerness of the poor man, who has gone without food, is paralyzed, I think, toward the morrow. Again, it says, let not the creditor stand at the door of the debtor's house, to take a pledge by force, but let the one bid the pledge be brought outside, and let the one who has it not refuse. And in the harvest it forbids the owners to gather up the sheaves that fall, just as in the reaping it advises that something be left uncut, by this very well training the owners toward fellowship and magnanimity, through letting go some of their own to those in need, and furnishing to the poor an occasion of nourishment.

18.86. You see how the legislation announces at once the justice and the goodness of God, who supplies the nourishment to all ungrudgingly? And again, in the vintage, it has forbidden going over again to gather the things left, and to collect the grapes that fall; and the same things it ordains for those who gather olives. Indeed, the tithes too of both the fruits and the flocks taught reverence toward the divine, and not to be wholly lovers of gain, but to share love of mankind with the neighbours too. For from these first-fruits, I think, the priests too were nourished. Do we now understand that we are educated by the law toward reverence and toward fellowship and toward justice and toward love of mankind? Is it not so? Does it not, through the seventh year, command the land to be left idle, and bid the poor freely use the fruits that grow up according to God, nature farming for those who wish? How, then, is the law not good and a teacher of justice? And again, in the fiftieth year, it commands the same things to be accomplished as in the seventh, restoring to each his own, if anyone in the meantime, through some circumstance, was deprived of a plot — limiting the desire of those who long to acquire by a measured time of enjoyment, and having mercy on those who paid the penalty of long poverty and were punished through life. "Alms and faiths are kingly safeguards, and a blessing is upon the head of him who shares"; and "he who has mercy on the poor will be blessed," because he shows love toward his like, through the love toward the Creator of the race of men.

18.87. The aforesaid things have also other, more natural interpretations, concerning rest and the receiving back of the inheritance, but they are not to be told at present. And love is conceived in many ways: through gentleness, through kindness, through endurance, through ungrudgingness and freedom from jealousy, through freedom from hatred, through freedom from remembering wrongs. It is undivided in all things, undiscriminating, social. Again, if you see, it says, the beast of burden of your kindred or friends, or in general of men whom you know, wandering in the desert, lead it away and restore it. And if the master happens to be far off, keep it safe with your own until he recovers it, and restore it. Through natural fellowship it teaches to reckon the find as a deposit, and not to remember wrongs against the enemy.

18.88. "The command of the Lord is a spring of life," truly, "making one turn away from the snare of death." And what? Does it not command us to love the sojourners, not only as friends and kindred, but as ourselves, both in body and in soul? Indeed, it has honoured the nations too, and does not remember evil against those who have done evil. Plainly, then, it says: "You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in Egypt" — calling "Egyptian" either the gentile or the whole worldly man. And the enemies, even if they are already standing at the walls trying to take the city, are not yet to be reckoned enemies, until, sending heralds, they summon them to peace. Indeed, with the captive woman too it commands one to consort not for outrage, but, having allowed her to mourn whom she wishes for thirty days, and afterward changing her clothes, "come together with her by law as with a wife"; for it deems that intercourse should come about neither for outrage nor for hire, as with a harlot, but only for the begetting of children.

18.89. You see love of mankind with self-control? To the man who has fallen in love, become master of the captive, it does not permit gratifying his pleasure, but checks the desire by a measured interval, and besides shaves off the captive's hair too, that it may put to shame the outrageous love; for if reasoning persuades to marry, he will hold to her even when she has become unsightly. Then, if anyone, having become sated with the desire, no longer deems it worthy to consort with the captive, it ordains that it is not permitted to sell her, nor even to have her any longer as a handmaid, but wishes her to be free and to be released from servitude, lest, another woman coming in, she suffer something incurable from jealousy.

18.90. And what? Does it command us to help lift and raise up the burden-bearing beasts of enemies too, the Lord teaching us from afar not to welcome rejoicing over evil, nor to take pleasure in the misfortunes of enemies, that, having exercised ourselves in these things, he may teach us to pray for the enemies? For it befits us neither to envy nor to grieve over the goods of the neighbour, nor yet to reap pleasure over the evils of the neighbour. "And if you find a wandering beast of some enemy," it says, "leaving aside the fuel of the quarrel, lead it away and restore it." For upon the forgetting follows nobility, and upon this the dissolution of the enmity. From this we are fitted toward concord, which leads by the hand to happiness. And if you suppose someone an enemy from habit, and overtake him reasoning unreasonably, whether through desire or also through anger, turn him toward nobility.

18.91. Does it now appear that the law is loving of mankind and good, the schoolmaster toward Christ, and that the God who is the same is good with justice, having dealt fittingly, from beginning to end, with each race unto salvation? "Have mercy," says the Lord, "that you may obtain mercy; forgive, that it may be forgiven you; as you do, so it will be done to you; as you give, so it will be given to you; as you judge, so you will be judged; as you show kindness, so kindness will be shown to you; with what measure you measure, it will be measured back to you." Further, it forbids those who serve for food to be dishonoured, and to those enslaved by debts it gives, in the seventh year, a release from everything. But it also forbids handing over suppliants to punishment. So more than anything that oracle is true: "As gold and silver are tried in the furnace, so the Lord chooses the hearts of men." And "the merciful man is long-suffering, and in everyone who takes thought there is wisdom; for thought will fall upon the man of understanding, and, being thoughtful, he will seek life"; and "he who seeks God will find knowledge with righteousness, and those who have rightly sought him found peace."

18.92. And it seems to me that Pythagoras too took the gentleness toward the irrational animals from the law. So he forbade abstaining from the immediate enjoyment of the young born among the flocks and the herds of goats and oxen — not even taking them on the pretext of sacrifices — both for the sake of the offspring and of the mothers, rearing man toward gentleness from below, from the irrational animals. "Grant, then," it says, "to the mother her offspring, even the first seven days." For if nothing comes about without cause, and milk is showered upon those who have given birth for the nourishment of the offspring, the man who drags the newborn away from the dispensation of the milk dishonours nature. Let the Greeks, then, be put to shame, and anyone else who runs down the law, if the one shows kindness even toward irrational animals, while they expose even the offspring of men, though the law, from afar and prophetically, reins in their savagery through the aforesaid commandment. For if it forbids the offspring of the irrational to be separated from the mother before the giving of milk, much more, in the case of men, does it heal beforehand the cruel and untamed mind, that, even if not nature, they may at least not despise learning.

18.93. For to take one's fill of kids and lambs is permitted, and there is perhaps some excuse for the man who separated the offspring from the mother; but what cause has the exposing of a child? For he ought not to have married at all who neither longs to beget children, nor, through incontinence of pleasure, to have become a child-killer. Again, the good law forbids sacrificing offspring and mother on the same day. Hence the Romans too, even if some pregnant woman is condemned to death, do not allow her to undergo the punishment before she has given birth. Plainly, then, of those animals too that are pregnant the law does not permit the slaughtering until they have given birth, restraining from afar the readiness of those who do wrong toward man. Thus it extended the fairness even to the irrational animals, that, having exercised ourselves among the kinds unlike us, we may use, with much abundance of love of mankind, toward the kinds like us.

18.94. But those who, kicking the bellies of certain animals before the birth, that they may feast on flesh mixed with milk, have made the womb, created for generation, a grave of the things carried in it, though the legislator plainly commands: "But you shall not boil a lamb in the milk of its mother"; for, it says, let not the nourishment of the living thing become a seasoning of the slain animal, nor let the cause of life become a co-worker in the consuming of the body. And the same law ordains not to muzzle the ox that threshes; for the worker too must be deemed worthy of food. And it forbids yoking together for the ploughing of the earth an ox and an ass, perhaps aiming at what is unsuited in the animals, but showing at the same time that one must wrong none of the other nations and bring them under the yoke, having nothing to charge except the difference of race, which is without responsibility, springing neither from vice nor from vice. And it seems to me that the allegory also indicates that one must not share the husbandry of the Word equally with the clean and the unclean, the faithful and the unfaithful, because the one is clean, the ox, but the ass has been reckoned among the unclean.

18.95. And, lavishing love of mankind, the good Word teaches that it is not fitting to cut down even those trees that are of cultivated stock, nor to reap the ear unto ruin before the harvest, nor at all to destroy cultivated fruit, neither that of the earth nor that of the soul; for it does not even allow cutting down the country of the enemy. Indeed, husbandmen too have been benefited by the law in these things; for it commands that the newly-planted trees be tended for three years in succession, cutting off the superfluous growths, that they be not weighed down and pressed, and that the nourishment, being not broken up into pieces, not become weak through want, and to mound them up and dig round them, that nothing growing beside hinder the increase. And it does not allow the fruit to be gathered incomplete from the incomplete, but, after three years, in the fourth, to consecrate the first-fruits to God, after the tree has been perfected.

18.96. And this type of husbandry would be a manner of teaching, teaching that one must cut off the side-growths of the sins, and the vain weeds of thought that spring up beside the fruitful fruit, until the shoot of faith be perfected and become firm. For in the fourth year — since there is need of time too for the one securely catechized — the tetrad of the virtues is consecrated to God, the third dwelling now joining on toward the fourth foundation of the Lord. "And a sacrifice of praise is above whole burnt-offerings. For he," it says, "gives you strength to do power. And if matters be enlightened for you, having received and acquired strength in knowledge, do power." For it shows by these things that the good things and the gifts are supplied from God, and that we must, having become ministers of the divine grace, sow the well-doings of God and equip those near us to be noble and good, that as much as possible the temperate man may render the self-controlled, and the courageous the noble, and the prudent and just the understanding and just.

19.97. This is the man according to the image and likeness, the gnostic, who imitates God so far as is possible, leaving out nothing of what tends to the attainable likeness — being self-controlled, enduring, living justly, reigning over the passions, sharing what he has, doing good both in word and in deed so far as he can. "This man," it says, "is greatest in the kingdom, who shall do and teach," imitating God by giving graces like his own; for the gifts of God are for the common benefit. "But whoever undertakes to do anything with arrogance, provokes God," it says; for boastfulness is a vice of the soul, from which, and from the other vices, it commands men to repent, fitting their life out of disharmony toward the better change, through these three: mouth, heart, hands.

19.98. And these would be a symbol: the hands of action, the heart of counsel, and the mouth of speech. Well, then, was that oracle spoken concerning the penitent: "You have chosen God today to be your God, and the Lord has chosen you today to become a people to him." For God makes his own the man who hastens to serve the Being, being a suppliant. And even if he be one in number, he is honoured on a par with the people; for, being a part of the people, he becomes a completion of it, restored from that whence he was; and the whole is also named from a part. And this nobility is shown in the choosing and the joint-exercise of the noblest things. For what did his so great nobility profit Adam? And his father is no mortal; for he himself is the father of men in generation. The shameful things he eagerly chose, following the woman, but the true and noble he neglected; for which he changed a mortal for an immortal life — yet not unto the end.

19.99. But Noah, who did not become as Adam, is saved by divine oversight; for, bringing himself, he offered himself up to God. And Abraham, who begot children by three women, not for the enjoyment of pleasure, but, I think, for the hope of multiplying the race in the beginning — one alone succeeds as heir of the ancestral goods, while the others were settled apart from the kindred. And of twins born from him, the younger inherits, having become well-pleasing to the father, and receives the prayers, while the elder serves him; for the greatest good for the base man is not to be his own master. And this dispensation is both prophetic and typical. And that all things belong to the wise man, he plainly indicates, saying: "Because God has had mercy on me, I have all things." For he teaches that one must reach after one thing, through which all things have come to be, and who apportions the promised things to the worthy.

19.100. He records, then, the earnest man, who has become heir of the kingdom, as a fellow-citizen, through the divine wisdom, of the just men of old too, who lived lawfully both under the law and before the law, whose actions have become laws for us. And again, teaching that the wise man is king, he makes those not of the same nation say to him: "You are a king from God among us" — the ruled, by willing judgment, obeying the earnest man through zeal for virtue. And Plato the philosopher, setting happiness as the end, says it is likeness to God so far as possible — whether running together somehow with the doctrine of the law (for great natures, bare of passions, somehow hit upon the truth, as the Pythagorean Philo says, expounding the things of Moses), or being instructed by certain learned men of that time, as one ever thirsting for learning. For the law says: "After the Lord your God shall you walk, and my commandments shall you keep." For the law names the being-made-like "following"; and such following makes like according to power. "Become," says the Lord, "merciful and compassionate, as your heavenly Father is compassionate."

19.101. From this the Stoics too dogmatized that the end is to live in accordance with nature, having unbecomingly renamed God into nature, since nature extends even to plants and to crops and to trees and to stones. Plainly, then, it is said: "Bad men do not understand law, but those who love law set up for themselves a wall. For the wisdom of the cunning will recognize its ways, but the folly of the foolish is in wandering." "For upon whom shall I look but upon the meek and quiet and him who trembles at my words?" the prophecy says. And we are taught three kinds of friendship; and of these the first and best is that according to virtue, for firm is the love from reason; the second and middle is that according to return — and this is social and giving and useful for life, for common is the friendship from grace; and the last and third we call that from custom, but others that according to pleasure, changeable and variable.

19.102. And it seems to me that Hippodamus the Pythagorean writes most nobly: "Of friendships, the one is from the knowledge of the gods, the one from the giving of men, the one from the pleasure of animals." So the one is the friendship of a philosopher, the one of a man, the one of an animal. For in truth man, doing good, is an image of God, in which he is himself also benefited; for as the pilot at once saves and is saved, so for this reason, when one happens to be asking, one does not say to the giver, "You have given well," but "You have received well." So the giver receives, and the receiver gives. "And the just pity and have mercy; and the kind will be inhabitants of the earth, and the harmless will be left upon it; but the lawless will be utterly destroyed from it." And it seems to me that Homer, foretelling the faithful man, said: "Give to a friend." One must share with a friend, that he may remain still more a friend; and one must aid an enemy, that he may not remain an enemy; for by aid goodwill is bound and enmity dissolved. But if eagerness is set forth, "it is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one has not." "For it is not that to others there be relief and to you affliction, but out of equality in the present time," and the rest. "He scattered, he gave to the poor; his righteousness abides forever," says the Scripture. For by the "according to the image and likeness," as we said before too, what is according to the body is not meant — for it is not lawful for a mortal to be made like to the immortal — but what is according to mind and reasoning, upon which the Lord fittingly seals the likeness both toward doing good and toward ruling; for rulings are set right not by the qualities of bodies, but by the judgments of the mind. For "by the counsels of holy men cities are well governed, and a house well ordered."

20.103. And steadfastness too itself forces its way toward the divine likeness, reaping, through endurance, impassivity — if anyone has ringing in his ears the things recorded about those around Ananias, of whom one was Daniel the prophet, filled with divine faith. Daniel dwelt in Babylon, just as Lot in Sodom, and Abraham, who a little after became the friend of God, in the land of the Chaldeans. The king of the Babylonians, then, brought down Daniel into a pit full of beasts, but the king of all, the faithful Lord, brought him up unharmed. This endurance the gnostic, as gnostic, will gain; he will bless when tested, like the noble Job; he will pray, like Jonah, when swallowed by the whale;

20.104. and faith will restore him, prophesying to the Ninevites; and if he be shut up with lions, he will tame the beasts; and if he be cast into fire, he will be bedewed and not be burned up. He will witness by night, he will witness by day; in word, in life, in manner he will witness; being a housemate of the Lord, a familiar and a table-companion according to the spirit, he will remain pure in the flesh, pure in the heart, sanctified in the word. "To this man," it says, "the world is crucified, and he himself to the world." This man, bearing about the cross of the Saviour, follows the Lord "in the track, as of a god," having become a holy one of the holy.

20.105. The divine law, then, making mention of every virtue, anoints man especially toward self-control, laying this down as the foundation of the virtues; and indeed it educates us beforehand toward the gaining of self-control by the use of the animals, forbidding us to partake of all that are by nature fat, like the race of swine, which happens to be very full-fleshed; for such use is supplied to those given to luxury. It is said, at any rate, that one of the philosophers, etymologizing, said the sow (hys) is "for sacrifice" (thyein), as fit only for slaughter and killing; for soul has been given to this animal for nothing else than that its flesh might be plump. Likewise it forbade partaking of the fishes, restraining our desires of those that have neither fins nor scales; for these differ from the other fishes in plumpness and fatness.

20.106. From this, I think, the one who found the rites too forbids touching not only certain animals, but there are also parts even of the sacrificed victims which he excludes from use, for reasons which the initiates know. If, then, one must master the belly and the parts below the belly, it is plain that from above we have received from the Lord, through the law, to cut out desire. And this would come about perfectly, if we should, without dissembling, condemn the fuel of desire — pleasure, I mean. And they say that the notion of it is a smooth and gentle motion with a certain perception. Enslaved to this, they say, Menelaus, after the capture of Ilium, having set out to kill Helen as having become the cause of so many evils, yet was not able to do it, overcome by her beauty, through which he came to the recollection of pleasure.

20.107. Whence, mocking, the tragic poets cried out reproachfully at him: "But you, when you saw the breast, casting away the sword, received a kiss, fawning on the traitorous bitch." And again: "Are swords, then, made dull by beauty?" But I welcome Antisthenes, who says: "Aphrodite I would even shoot down, if I caught her, because she has corrupted many noble and good women of ours." And he calls love a vice of nature; "and the wretched, being weaker than it, call the disease a god." For it is shown by these things that the more unlearned are overcome, through ignorance, by pleasure, which one must not welcome, even if it be called a god — that is, even if it happens to have been given from God toward the need of begetting children. And Xenophon too, plainly calling pleasure a vice, says: "O wretched one, what good do you know, or what noble thing do you regard? You who do not even await the desire of pleasant things, eating before you are hungry, drinking before you are thirsty; and, that you may eat pleasantly, contriving cooks; and, that you may drink pleasantly, preparing costly wines, and in summer running about seeking snow; and, that you may sleep pleasantly, preparing not only soft couches but also stools for the couches."

20.108. Whence, as Ariston said, against the whole tetrachord — pleasure, grief, fear, desire — there is need of much exercise and battle: "For these, these go within the entrails and disturb the heart of men." For even of those who are thought grave, pleasure makes the spirits "waxen," according to Plato, because "each pleasure and grief nails the soul to the body" of the man who does not separate and cross himself off from the passions. "He who has lost his own soul," says the Lord, "will save it" — either giving it over recklessly for the Saviour, as he himself has done for us, or releasing it from fellowship with the accustomed life. For if you should wish to release and remove and separate (for this is what the cross signifies) the soul from the delight and pleasure that is in this life, you will have it found and at rest in the expected hope.

20.109. And this would be the practice of death, if, with the appetites measured according to nature alone, defining nothing beyond the things according to nature toward the more or contrary to nature — where the sinful springs up — we should wish to be content. One must, then, put on the whole armour of God, that we may be able to stand against the methods of the devil, "since the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, but powerful with God for the pulling down of strongholds, casting down reasonings and every high thing that lifts itself up against the knowledge of God, and taking captive every thought into the obedience of Christ," says the divine Apostle. There is need of a man who will use, without marvelling and without confusion, the things from which the passions are set in motion — such as wealth and poverty, glory and ill repute, health and disease, life and death, toil and pleasure. For that we may use indifferently the indifferent things, we have need of much discrimination, as having been beforehand harmed by much weakness, and beforehand distorted by bad upbringing and nourishment together with ignorance.

20.110. The simple account, then, of our philosophy says that all the passions are imprints upon the soft and yielding soul, and, as it were, seals impressed by the spiritual powers, against which is our wrestling. For it is the work, I think, of the maleficent powers to try to effect, at each turn, something of their own state, toward overcoming and making their own those who have renounced them. And it follows fittingly that some are thrown down; but those who handle the contest in more athletic fashion, having contended in the all-in struggle and advanced even to the crown, the aforesaid powers, in much gore, then give out, marvelling at the victors. For of the things that move, some are moved by impulse and impression, as the animals, and some by transference, as the lifeless things. And they say that of the lifeless things too the plants are moved by transference toward growth, if one will grant the plants to be lifeless.

20.111. Of state, then, are the stones; of nature, the plants; and of impulse and impression, and again of the two aforesaid, the irrational animals too partake. But the rational power, being proper to the human soul, ought not to be impelled in the same way as the irrational animals, but to discern the impressions and not to be carried away together with them. The powers, then, of which we have spoken, hold out beauties and reputations and adulteries and pleasures and certain such alluring impressions to the easily-led souls, just as those who drive cattle shake green boughs before them; then, having over-reached those unable to discern the true from the false pleasure, and the perishable and outrageous from the holy beauty, they lead them away, having enslaved them. And each deceit, continually pressing upon the soul, imprints in it its image; and so the soul, unawares, bears about the image of the passion, the cause arising both from the bait and from our assent.

20.112. Those about Basilides are wont to call the passions "appendages," and to say that these are certain spirits existing in essence, appended to the rational soul according to a certain original disturbance and confusion; and that other bastard and heterogeneous natures of spirits grow upon these — such as of wolf, ape, lion, goat — whose properties, appearing about the soul, they say make the desires of the soul like to the animals. For of whatever properties they bear, the works of these they imitate; and they not only become akin to the impulses and impressions of the irrational animals, but they emulate even the motions and beauties of plants, because they bear the properties of plants too appended,

20.113. and further the properties of state too, such as the hardness of adamant. But against this doctrine we shall discourse later, when we treat of the soul; now only this must be noted, that the Basilidean man preserves the image of a certain Trojan horse, according to the poetic myth, having enfolded in one body an army of so many different spirits. Indeed, Isidore himself, the son of Basilides, perceiving the doctrine in his work On the Adventitious Soul, as though accusing himself, writes word for word thus: "For if you give anyone a conviction that the soul is not single-part, but that the passions of the worse come about by the violence of the appendages, the base among men will have no ordinary pretext to say: 'I was forced, I was carried off, I acted unwillingly, I worked without wishing it' — they themselves having led the desire of the evils, and not having fought with the violences of the appendages."

20.114. "But one must, having become superior by the reasoning part, appear to master the lesser creation in us." For he too supposes two souls in us, like the Pythagoreans, about whom we shall consider later. But Valentinus too, writing to certain ones, says in these very words concerning the appendages: "There is one good, whose frank manifestation is through the Son, and through him alone the heart can become pure, every wicked spirit being thrust out of the heart. For the many spirits dwelling in it do not allow it to be pure, but each of them accomplishes its own works, outraging it in many ways with desires not fitting. And it seems to me that the heart suffers something like the inn; for that too is bored through and dug up, and often filled with dung by men who lodge in it licentiously and take no forethought for the place, as being another's. In this way the heart too, so long as it has no forethought, is unclean, being a dwelling of many demons; but when the only good Father visits it, it is sanctified and shines with light; and so blessed is the man who has such a heart, for he will see God."

20.115. What, then, is the cause of such a soul's not being provided for from the beginning, let them tell us. For either it is not worthy (and how, then, does the providence approach it, as though from repentance?); or it happens to be a nature saved, as he himself wishes, and then it must from the beginning, being provided for through kinship, give no entrance to the unclean spirits, unless it be forced and convicted of weakness. For if he grants that, having repented, it chooses the better things, this is what he will say unwillingly, the very thing which the truth among us dogmatizes — that salvation comes from an obedient change, and not from nature. For as the exhalations both from the earth and from marshes are constituted into mists and cloudy gatherings, so the risings of the fleshly desires bring an ill state upon the soul, scattering the images of pleasure before the soul.

20.116. They darken, at any rate, the intellectual light, the soul drawing on the risings from desire and thickening the gatherings of the passions by the continuance of pleasures. But a lump of gold is not lifted from the earth, but, being boiled down, is filtered; then, having become pure, it is called gold — earth cleansed. "For ask, and it will be given you," is said to those able of themselves to choose the noblest things. And how we say that the activities of the devil and the unclean spirits sow themselves into the soul of the sinner, I need not many words to present, having set out as witness the apostolic Barnabas (and he was of the seventy and a fellow-worker of Paul), saying somewhat thus, word for word: "Before we believed in God, the dwelling-place of our heart was corruptible and weak, truly a temple built by hand; for it was full of idolatry and was a house of demons, through the doing of all that was contrary to God."

20.117. He says, then, that the sinners accomplish the activities corresponding to the demons, but does not say that the spirits themselves dwell in the soul of the unbeliever. For this reason he adds: "Take heed, that the temple of the Lord be built gloriously. How? Learn. Having received the forgiveness of sins, and having hoped upon the name, let us become new, again created from the beginning." For not the demons are driven out of us, but the sins, he says, are forgiven, which we accomplished, like them, before believing. With reason, then, he set over against this what follows: "Wherefore in our dwelling-place God truly dwells in us. How? His word of faith, his calling of the promise, the wisdom of the ordinances, the commandments of the teaching." I know that I met with a certain heresy, and the one who presided over it asserted, through the use of pleasure, that one must fight pleasure by pleasure — this noble gnostic (for he asserted himself to be a gnostic too) deserting to pleasure through a pretended fight; since, he said, it was no great thing to abstain from pleasure for one who had not tried it, but, being in it, not to be mastered; whence one must exercise through it within it.

20.118. But the wretch, over-reaching himself by the pleasure-loving art, escaped his own notice. To this opinion, evidently, Aristippus of Cyrene too inclined, the sophist who boasted of the truth. Reproached, at any rate, for continually consorting with the Corinthian courtesan, he said: "For I have Lais, and am not had by her." And such too are those who assert themselves to follow Nicolaus, bringing forward a saying of the man, by perversion, that one must abuse the flesh. But the noble man showed that one must cut short both the pleasures and the desires, and by this exercise wither away the impulses and assaults of the flesh. But they, poured out unto pleasure like goats, outraging the body as it were, give themselves to soft living, not knowing that the body wastes away, being by nature in flux, while their soul is buried in the mire of vice — pursuing the doctrine of pleasure itself, and not that of an apostolic man. For in what do these differ from Sardanapallus, whose life the epigram shows: "These I have, all that I ate and outraged and the pleasant things I suffered with love; but those many and blessed things are left behind. For I too am ashes, who reigned over great Ninus." For in general the passion of pleasure is not necessary, but a consequence of certain natural needs — hunger, thirst, cold, marriage.

20.119. If, then, without it one could drink, or take nourishment, or beget children, it would be shown that there is no other need of it. For pleasure is neither an activity nor a disposition, nor any part of us, but came into life for the sake of service, as they say salt does for the sake of the digesting of food. And pleasure, having thrown off the rein and mastered the house, begets the first desire, which is an irrational longing and appetite for what is pleasing to it — which persuaded even Epicurus to set pleasure as the end of the philosopher. He deifies, at any rate, "the stable condition of the flesh and the trustworthy hope concerning it." For what else is luxury but pleasure-loving daintiness and a superfluous excess toward soft living of men given over to it? Plainly Diogenes writes in a certain tragedy: "Those who, in the unmanly and beslimed luxury, stuffed in heart with pleasures, are unwilling to toil even a little." And the things upon these, as many as are shamefully said, yet worthily of the pleasure-lovers.

20.120. Wherefore it seems to me that the divine law necessarily hangs fear over us, that, by caution and attention, the philosopher may gain and keep freedom from anxiety, remaining unstumbling and sinless in all things. For peace and freedom are not otherwise won than through the unceasing and unresting counter-struggle against our passions . . . For these antagonists are stout and Olympic, sharper, so to speak, than wasps — and especially pleasure, which not only by day but also by night, in the very dreams, plots and bites alluringly with sorcery. How, then, are the Greeks any longer just in running down the law, when they themselves too teach the enslaving of pleasure by fear? Socrates, at any rate, commands to guard against the things that persuade us to eat when not hungry and to drink when not thirsty, and the glances and kisses of the beautiful, as fit to inject a venom worse than that of scorpions and spiders.

20.121. And Antisthenes too chooses rather to go mad than to feel pleasure; and Crates the Theban says: "But of these be master by a soul exulting in character, neither enslaved by gold nor by love that melts with longing, nor if there be any companion of outrage." And in sum he adds: "Unenslaved and unfulled by slavish pleasure, they love the immortal kingdom and freedom." The same man writes elsewhere outright that the poultice for the uncontrollable impulse toward the things of love is hunger, and, if not, a noose. And to Zeno the Stoic the comic poets bear witness of his teaching, though deriding it, somewhat thus: "For this man philosophizes a new philosophy: he teaches hunger and gets disciples; one loaf, dried figs for relish, and water to drink upon them."

20.122. All these, then, are not ashamed plainly to confess the benefit that comes from caution. But the true and not irrational wisdom, trusting not in bare oracles and divinations, but in shelters that cannot be wounded and in effective mysteries, the divine commandments, . . . practising itself by joint-exercise and joint-training, receives a divine power according to the part of it that is inspired by the Word. So already they write of the aegis of the poetic Zeus that it is terrible, "about which on all sides Fear is wreathed; in it is Strife, in it Valour, in it chilling Pursuit; and in it the Gorgon head of the dread monster, terrible and grim, the portent of aegis-bearing Zeus."

20.123. To those able rightly to discern the saving thing, I do not know if anything will appear dearer than the gravity of the law and its daughter, caution. But when it is said to sing "too high a pitch" — as the Lord too sang to certain ones, that none of those who emulate him might sing out of pitch and off the string — I understand it thus: not as too high a pitch, but to those unwilling to take up the divine yoke it is too high a pitch. For to the slack and weak the moderate seems too high, and to the unjust the fitting seems extremely just. For all whom pardon enters in because of their friendly disposition toward sins, these suppose the truth to be harshness, and the austerity severity, and the man who neither sins with them nor is dragged down with them, merciless.

20.124. Well, then, does the tragedy write concerning Hades: "And to what a god you will come, as to a Love that knew neither fairness nor grace, but cherished only bare justice." For even if you are not yet able to do the things commanded by the law, yet, perceiving that the noblest examples lie before us in it, we can nourish and increase the love of freedom; and here too we would be benefited, more eagerly, according to our power, in some things calling ourselves on, in some imitating, in some too being put to shame. For neither were the just men of old, who lived according to the law, "from oak of olden tale or from rock"; but by their willing to philosophize genuinely, bearing themselves whole, they offered themselves up to God, and it was reckoned unto faith.

20.125. Most nobly Zeno said of the Indians that he would rather see one Indian roasted than learn all the demonstrations about pain. But to us there are ungrudging springs of witnesses, beheld every day before our eyes, roasted, impaled, having their heads cut off. All these the fear from the law, having schooled them toward Christ, trained to display their caution even through bloods. "God stood in the assembly of gods, and in the midst he will judge gods." Who are these? Those superior to pleasure, those who surpass the passions, those who know each thing they do, the gnostics, those greater than the world. And again, "I said, you are gods, and all sons of the Most High." To whom does the Lord speak? To those who decline, so far as may be, all that is human. And the Apostle says: "For you are no longer in the flesh, but in the spirit." And again he says: "Being in the flesh, we war not according to the flesh; for flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption; but behold, you die as men" — the Spirit has said this, convicting us.

20.126. One must, then, train oneself toward caution about the things that fall under the passions, banishing, as the true philosophers do, the foods that lead to passion, and the slack relaxation at the bed, and luxury and the passions toward luxury, . . . a heavy contest to others, but to us no longer; for self-control is the greatest gift of God. For he himself has said, "I will not loose you, nor will I forsake you," having judged us worthy on account of our genuine choice. So, when we try to approach cautiously, the good yoke of the Lord will receive us, "from faith to faith," one charioteer driving each of us, according to advance, toward salvation, that the fitting fruit of happiness may result. And, according to Hippocrates of Cos, exercise is not only of the body, but also of the soul: "health is freedom from sluggishness in toils, freedom from satiety in food."

21.127. But Epicurus, setting the happiness equal to the gods in the not being hungry nor thirsty nor cold, uttered, speaking impiously, "In these things I would fight even with father Zeus" — dogmatizing a blessed victory of dung-eating pigs, and not of rational and philosophic beings. For of those who begin from pleasure . . . are the Cyrenaics and Epicurus; for these say outright that the end is to live pleasantly, and that pleasure alone is the perfect good. And Epicurus says that the removal of pain too is pleasure; and he says that to be chosen is what first, of itself, draws toward itself, being plainly in motion. And Dinomachus and Calliphon said the end is to do all that depends on oneself for the sake of attaining and obtaining pleasure; and Hieronymus the Peripatetic said the end is to live without disturbance, but the final good is happiness alone. And Diodorus likewise, being of the same school, declares the end to be to live without disturbance and nobly.

21.128. Epicurus, then, and the Cyrenaics say the first thing proper is pleasure; for virtue, they say, came in for the sake of pleasure and produced pleasure. But according to those about Calliphon, virtue entered in for the sake of pleasure, but afterward, in time, having beheld the beauty about it, presented itself as of equal honour with the beginning — that is, with pleasure. But those about Aristotle render the end to be living according to virtue, but say that neither happiness nor the end is present to everyone who has virtue; for the wise man, when tortured and falling into unwished-for fortunes, and on account of these willingly wishing to escape from life, is neither blessed nor happy. For virtue too needs some time; for it does not result in one day, and it is constituted in a perfect being, since, as they say, a child is never happy; and the perfect time would be the human life. Happiness, then, is filled up out of the threefold kind of goods. So neither the poor, nor the obscure, nor the sickly, nor, if anyone be a slave, is happy, according to them. . . .

21.129. Again, Zeno the Stoic holds the end to be living according to virtue; Cleanthes, living in agreement with nature; and Diogenes held the end to lie in good reasoning, which he took to lie in the choosing of the things according to nature. And Antipater, his pupil, supposes the end to lie in continually and inviolably choosing the things according to nature and rejecting the things contrary to nature. And Archedemus again thus expounded the end to be, living, choosing the greatest and most authoritative things according to nature, which it is not possible to overstep. Besides these, Panaetius declared the end to be living according to the occasions given us from nature. And above all, Posidonius declared the end to be living, contemplating the truth and order of the universe, and helping to constitute it so far as possible, being led in nothing by the irrational part of the soul. And some of the younger Stoics rendered it thus: that the end is to live in keeping with the constitution of man. Why should I reckon up Ariston for you? He said the end is indifference; but the indifferent simply leaves the indifferent. Or should I bring into the midst the things of Herillus? He sets the end to be living according to knowledge. For some hold that the younger ones from the Academy render the end to be the secure withholding of judgment toward the impressions. Indeed, Lyco the Peripatetic said the true joy of the soul is the end, as Leucimus said the joy over noble things. And Critolaus, himself too a Peripatetic, said it is the perfection of a life flowing well according to nature, indicating the threefold perfection filled up out of the three kinds.

21.130. We must not, then, stop, contenting ourselves with these things, but must be as ambitious as possible to set out also the things dogmatized by the natural philosophers about the matter before us. For they say that Anaxagoras of Clazomenae said that the end of life is contemplation and the freedom that comes from it; and Heraclitus of Ephesus, well-pleasing. And Heraclides of Pontus relates that Pythagoras handed down that the science of the perfection of the numbers of the soul is happiness. But the Abderites too teach that there is an end: Democritus, in his work On the End, cheerfulness, which he also called "well-being" (and he often adds: "For delight and lack of delight are the boundary of things at their height"); and Hecataeus, self-sufficiency; and Apollodotus of Cyzicus, leading of the soul, as Nausiphanes, freedom from astonishment — for this, he said, was called by Democritus "freedom from amazement." Further, besides these, Diotimus declared the all-completeness of goods, which is named "well-being," to be the end. Again, Antisthenes said freedom from conceit; and those called Annicereans, from the Cyrenaic succession, set down no defined end of the whole life, but said that of each action the proper end is the pleasure that results from the action. These Cyrenaics reject Epicurus' definition of pleasure — that is, the removal of pain — calling it the condition of a corpse; for we rejoice not only over pleasures, but also over companionships and ambitions. But Epicurus thinks that all joy of the soul comes about upon the flesh as primarily affected.

21.131. And Metrodorus, in his work On the fact that the cause in ourselves toward happiness is greater than that from things, says: "What good of the soul is there other than the stable condition of the flesh and the trustworthy hope concerning it?"

22.131. Indeed, Plato the philosopher says the end is twofold: the one participable and primary, existing in the very forms — which he also names "the Good"; and the one participating in that and receiving the likeness from it, which comes about among men who lay claim to virtue and the true philosophy. Wherefore Cleanthes too, in the second book On Pleasure, says that Socrates taught at every turn that the same man is both just and happy, and cursed the first man who divided the just from the advantageous, as having done an impious thing; for in truth impious are those who separate the advantageous from the just that is according to law. And Plato himself says that happiness is "to have the daimon well" (eu ton daimona echein), and that the governing part of our soul is called daimon, and that happiness is the most perfect and fullest good. And sometimes he calls it a life that is in agreement and harmony, and sometimes the most perfect according to virtue; and this he sets in the knowledge of the Good and in the being made like to God — declaring the likeness to be to become just and holy with prudence. For is it not so that some of our own people take it that man received the "according to the image" straightway at his generation, but is to receive the "according to the likeness" later, at his perfecting?

22.132. So Plato, teaching that this likeness will come to the virtuous man with humility, somewhere interprets that saying: "Everyone who humbles himself shall be exalted." He says, at any rate, in the Laws: "God, then, as the ancient saying too has it, holding the beginning and the middle and the end of all things, brings them to fulfilment by a straight course, going round according to nature; and upon him there ever follows Justice, the avenger of those who fall short of the divine law." You see how he too brings caution toward the divine law? So he adds: "To which the man who is to be happy clings and follows, humble and adorned." Then, having joined the things that follow upon these, and having admonished by fear, he adds: "What action, then, is dear to and follows God? One, and having one ancient saying: that the like is dear to the like, being measured; but the unmeasured is dear neither to one another nor to the measured. The man, then, who is to become dear to God must of necessity become, so far as possible, such a one himself."

22.133. And according to this account the temperate man among us is dear to God, for he is like; and the man not temperate is unlike and different. Having said that this doctrine is ancient, he hinted at the teaching that came to him from the law. And in the Theaetetus, having granted that the evils about mortal nature and this place go round of necessity, he adds: "Wherefore one must try to flee from here to there as quickly as possible; and the flight is likeness to God so far as possible; and the likeness is to become just and holy with prudence." And Speusippus, the nephew of Plato, says that happiness is a perfect state in those who are according to nature, or a state of goods, of which condition all men have appetite, but the good aim at freedom from disturbance. And the virtues would be productive of happiness. And Xenocrates of Calchedon renders happiness the possession of one's own virtue and of the power that serves it. Then, as that in which it comes to be, he plainly says the soul; as that by which, the virtues; as that out of which, as of parts, the noble actions and the earnest states and dispositions and motions and relations; and as those without which it is not, the bodily and external things. For Polemo, the pupil of Xenocrates, plainly wishes happiness to be self-sufficiency in all goods, or in the most and greatest. He dogmatizes, at any rate, that without virtue happiness can never exist, but that, apart from the bodily and external things, virtue is self-sufficient toward happiness.

22.134. And let these things be so; but the refutations of the opinions stated will be set down in due time. For us ourselves it is set forth to come to an endless end, obeying the commandments — that is, God — and having lived according to them blamelessly and with knowledge, through the knowledge of the divine will. And the likeness, so far as possible, to right reason is the end; and the restoration, through the Son, to the perfect adoption, which ever glorifies the Father through the great High Priest, who deigned to call us brothers and joint-heirs. And the Apostle, briefly describing the end in the Epistle to the Romans, says: "But now, freed from sin and enslaved to God, you have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end eternal life." And, knowing hope to be twofold — the one expected, the other received back — he teaches that the restoration of hope is already the end; "for endurance," he says, "works proof, and proof hope; and hope does not put to shame, because the love of God is poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us." On account of which love is also the restoration to the hope, which he elsewhere says is laid up for us as a rest.

22.135. The like you would find in Ezekiel too, running thus: "The soul that sins, it shall die. And a man who becomes just and does judgment and righteousness, who has not eaten upon the mountains, and has not lifted up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, and has not defiled his neighbour's wife, and has not approached a woman in the separation of her uncleanness" (for he does not wish the sowing of man to be outraged), "and, it says, has not oppressed a man, will restore the debtor's pledge, will not seize plunder, will give his bread to the hungry, and will clothe the naked, will not give his money at interest, and will take no excess, will turn his hand from injustice, will do true judgment between a man and his neighbour, will walk in my ordinances and has kept my ordinances to do truth — he is just, he shall surely live, says the Lord Adonai." And Isaiah, exhorting the believer toward gravity of life, but the gnostic toward attention, presenting that the virtue of man and of God is not the same, says thus: "Seek the Lord, and in finding him call upon him; and when he draws near to you, let the impious leave his ways, and the lawless man his ways, and let him turn to the Lord, and he will obtain mercy,"

22.136. "for your thoughts are far from my thought." We, then, according to the noble Apostle, await from faith the hope of righteousness. "For in Christ neither circumcision avails anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith working through love." "And we desire each of you to show the same diligence toward the full assurance of hope," down to "having become, according to the order of Melchizedek, a high priest forever." The like to Paul the all-virtuous Wisdom too says: "But he who hears me will dwell upon hope, trusting"; for the restoration of hope is called, by the same name, "hope"; wherefore to the word "will dwell" it most nobly added "trusting," showing that such a one is at rest, having received back the hope which he hoped; wherefore it adds: "and he will be at ease, without fear, from every evil." And plainly the Apostle, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, says outright: "Become imitators of me, as I also am of Christ" — that that might come about: "if you are mine, and I am Christ's, then become imitators of Christ, and Christ of God." The being made like to God, then, so far as was possible — to become just and holy with prudence — he lays down as the aim of faith, and as the end the restoration of the promise that is upon faith. From these, then, gush the springs of those who dogmatized about the end, which we have spoken of before. But enough of these.

23.137. Since marriage seems to fall under pleasure and desire, we must treat of this too. Marriage, then, is the first union of man and woman according to law, for the sowing of legitimate children. So the comic poet Menander says: "For the begetting of legitimate children I give you my own daughter." And we inquire whether one should marry, which is one of the things named as somehow "in relation to something." For who should marry, and being in what condition, and whom, and being in what condition? For neither should everyone marry, nor at all times; but there is a time in which it is fitting, and a person to whom it befits, and an age up to which. So neither should everyone marry every woman, nor at all times, nor at all, nor without restraint, but the man in a certain condition, and such a woman as he ought, and when he ought, and for the sake of children, and one in all respects like-minded, and not loving the husband by force or necessity.

23.138. Whence Abraham says concerning his wife, pretending her to be his sister: "She is my sister by my father, but not by my mother; and she became my wife also" — teaching that those of the same mother must not be taken in marriage. Let us run over the history in brief. Plato sets marriage among the external goods, providing for the immortality of our race and a kind of continuance, as it were, handed down like a torch through children's children. But Democritus declines marriage and the begetting of children, on account of the many unpleasantnesses from them and the distractions from more necessary things. And Epicurus too is ranged with him, and all who set the good in pleasure and freedom from disturbance, and further in freedom from grief. Further, according to those from the Stoa, marriage and child-rearing are indifferent, but according to those from the Peripatos a good. In sum, these, having brought their doctrines as far as the tongue, were enslaved to pleasures — some using concubines, some courtesans, and most of them boys. And that wise tetrad in the garden, with the courtesan, gloried in pleasure by their works.

23.139. So they would not escape the Buzygian curse, all who, not approving certain things as advantageous to themselves, enjoin upon others to do these, or, again, the contrary. This the Scripture has shown briefly, saying: "What you hate, you shall not do to another." But those who approve marriage say: Nature has made us well-fitted for marriage, as is plain from the constitution of the bodies, both of the males and of the females; and they continually cry out the "Increase and multiply." And even if these things are so, yet let it seem shameful to them that man, fashioned by God, should be more incontinent than the irrational animals, which do not mingle with many and without restraint, but with one and of their own kind — such as the wild pigeons and the ring-doves and the race of turtle-doves and the like. Further, they say, the childless man falls short of the perfection according to nature, as not having set in his own place a successor of his own; for the perfect man is one who has made from himself the like, or rather, when he sees that one too having done the same — that is, when he has set the begotten into the same nature as the begetter.

23.140. One must, then, by all means marry, both for the sake of the fatherland, and for the succession of children, and for the completing of the world, so far as in us lies. Since the poets too pity a certain marriage that is half-finished and childless, but bless the one with both parents flourishing. And the bodily diseases especially show marriage to be necessary; for the care of the wife and the intensity of her staying-by seem to surpass the perseverances of the other kindred and friends, by as much as she chooses to differ in sympathy and to attend most of all; and in truth, according to the Scripture, she is a necessary helper.

23.141. So the comic poet Menander, having run down marriage, but setting against it also the useful things, answers the one who said: "I am ill-disposed toward the matter." "B: For you take it the wrong way." Then he adds: "You see in it the troublesome things and those that will grieve you, but you do not look upon the goods," and the rest. And marriage helps also in the case of those advanced in time, presenting the wife who cares, and rearing the children from her as nurses of old age. "And children, to a man who has died, are tokens of fame; like corks they hold up the net, saving the spun line of flax from the deep," according to the tragic Sophocles. And the lawgivers do not allow those who have not married to seek the greatest offices. So the lawgiver of the Spartans set a penalty not only for celibacy, but for bad marriage and late marriage and solitary living. And the noble Plato commands that the man who has not married pay the maintenance of a wife to the public treasury, and render the fitting expenses to the magistrates. For if men who do not marry will not beget children, they will, so far as in them lies, make a scarcity of men, and dissolve both the cities and the world that is from them.

23.142. And such a thing is impious, of men dissolving the divine generation. And it is, besides, unmanly and weak to flee the common life with wife and children. For of that whose loss is an evil, the possession is altogether a good; and so it is with the rest too. But indeed the loss of children is among the greatest evils, they say. The possession of children, then, is a good. And if this, then marriage too. "And without a father," he says, "there could never be a child, and without a mother not even the conception of a child."

23.143. And marriage makes a father, as a man makes a mother. So Homer too sets it as the greatest prayer, "a husband and a house" — but not simply, but "with noble like-mindedness"; for the marriage of others is of one mind toward soft living, but that of those who philosophize leads to the concord according to reason — the marriage that bids the women adorn not their form but their character, and does not enjoin the men to use their wives as mistresses, having made the outrage of bodies their aim, but to win marriage as a help in the whole of life and the best temperance. For of wheat, I think, and of barley too, cast down at their proper seasons, more precious is the man who is sown, for whom all things grow; and those seeds the husbandmen cast down sober. Everything filthy and defiled in conduct, then, must be purified away from marriage, that we be not reproached with the union of the irrational animals as agreeing more with nature than human wedlock, according to the agreed definition.

23.144. Some of them, at any rate, having mounted at the season commanded, straightway depart, leaving the creation to the administration. And by the tragic poets Polyxena, though she is being slaughtered, is recorded — even dying, yet to have taken much forethought to fall decently, "hiding what must be hidden from the eyes of males." And for her too the calamity was a marriage. To fall under, then, and to yield to the passions is the utmost slavery, just as, indeed, to master these is the only freedom. So the divine Scripture says that those who transgress the commandments are "sold to strangers" — that is, to sins unsuited to nature — until, turning back, they repent.

23.145. Marriage, then, must be kept pure, like some sacred image, from the things that defile it — by those who rise from sleep with the Lord, and go to sleep with thanksgiving and prayer, "both when you lie down and when the holy light comes," calling the Lord to witness throughout the whole of our life — having gained godliness in the soul, and bringing temperance even to the body. For it is in truth dear to God to lead orderliness by the hand from the tongue to the works; and the way to shamelessness is shameful speech, and the end of both is shameful deed. And that the Scripture counsels marrying, and never permits departing from the wedlock, it plainly legislates: "You shall not put away your wife, except for the matter of fornication"; and it reckons it adultery to marry again while either of the separated is living.

23.146. And it shows a woman unsuspected of slander by her not adorning herself, nor decking herself beyond what is fitting, but devoting herself earnestly to prayers and supplications; guarding against the many goings-out of the house, and shutting herself off so far as possible from the sight of those to whom she does not belong, holding housekeeping more important than untimely chatter. "And he who takes a divorced woman commits adultery," it says; "for if anyone puts away his wife, he makes her commit adultery" — that is, he forces her to be adulterated. And not only the man who puts her away becomes the cause of this, but also the man who takes her in, furnishing the woman an occasion of sinning; for if he did not receive her, she would turn back to her husband.

23.147. What, then, does the law do? For the checking of the proneness of the passions, it commands the adulteress, when convicted of this, to be put to death; and if she be a priest's daughter, it commands her to be given over to fire. And the adulterer too is stoned, but not in the same place, that not even their death be common. The law does not, then, fight with the Gospel, but agrees with it. For how should it not, the supplier of both being one, the Lord? For she who has played the harlot lives indeed to sin, but has died to the commandments; while she who has repented, as though reborn through the turning of her life, has a regeneration of life, the old harlot having died, and the woman born according to repentance having come again into life. The Spirit bears witness to what has been said, through Ezekiel, saying: "I do not wish the death of the sinner, so much as his turning back." So they are stoned, as having died, through hardness of heart, to the law which they did not obey; but for the priest's daughter the punishment is intensified, because "to whom more was given, of him will also more be required." Let this second Miscellany too be here circumscribed for us, on account of the length and multitude of the chapters.