Stromata

All things belong to one God, and no one would be by nature a stranger to the world, since the substance is one and God is one; but the elect man lives as a stranger, knowing all things as both possessions and non-possessions. As for the threefold goods which the Peripatetics posit, he uses them, but also the body, like one setting out on a long journey uses inns and wayside lodgings, tending and adorning the place where he stays, but leaving the dwelling and the possession, as also the use, without attachment, readily following the one who leads him from life, never turning back for any reason, having given thanks for the sojourn, blessing at the departure, embracing the abode in heaven. For we know that if our earthly house of the tent is dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made by hands, eternal in the heavens. And indeed in this we groan, longing to put on our dwelling from heaven, since if we have put it on we shall not be found naked; for we walk by faith, not by sight, as the apostle says. We are more pleased to depart from the body and to dwell with God. The "more" is by comparison, and comparison applies to things that fall under likeness, as the braver man is braver than the brave, but bravest of the cowardly. Hence he added: Therefore we strive, whether departing or dwelling, to be pleasing to him, that is, to the one God, whose work and creation are all things, both the cosmos and the supracosmic. I admire Epicharmus, who says clearly:

A man naturally pious in mind, not in passions, and having died no evil, his spirit continues above in heaven. And the poet sings: "The souls of the impious, under the sky, flit about the earth in deadly griefs, under inescapable yokes of evils, but those of the pious dwell in the heavens, singing in hymns the great blessed one." Therefore, a soul is not sent down from heaven to here to inferior things, for God works all things toward the better, but the one who chooses the best life exchanges earth for heaven from God and righteousness. Naturally, then, Job, having attained knowledge, said, "Now I know that you can do all things, and nothing is impossible for you. For who announces to me things I did not know, great and marvelous things I did not understand? And I thought little of myself, considering myself to be earth and ashes." For the one who is in ignorance is both prone to sin and is earth and ashes, but the one established in knowledge, being assimilated to God as far as possible, is already spiritual and therefore elect. That Scripture calls the foolish and disobedient "earth" is clear.

Jeremiah the prophet speaks against Jehoiakim and his brothers, saying: "Earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord; write this man down as an outlaw, a man." Another prophet says: "Hear, heaven, and give ear, earth," having spoken of understanding as hearing, and of heaven as the soul of the gnostic, which has taken up the contemplation of heaven and divine things, and by this he has become an Israelite. Conversely, he has called the one who chooses ignorance and hardness of heart "earth," and he has named "give ear" from the organs of hearing, the ears, assigning the fleshly things to those who attend to the sensible. These are those concerning whom Micah the prophet says: "Hear, peoples, the word of the Lord, who dwell in pains." And Abraham said, "By no means, Lord, the one judging the earth," since the one who has disbelieved according to the saving voice is already judged. And it is written in the books of Kings that the judgment and the sentence of the Lord are as follows: "God hears the just, but he does not save the impious," because they do not wish to know God; for the Almighty will not accomplish absurd things. What do the heresies still utter against this voice, when the scripture proclaims the Almighty as a good God and not responsible for evil and injustice, since ignorance arises from not knowing, and God does nothing absurd? "This," it says, "is our God, and there is no one besides him who saves; for there is no injustice with God," according to the Apostle. And the prophet clearly teaches the will of God and the gnostic progress through these words.

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you, but to fear the Lord your God and to walk in all his ways and to love him and to serve him alone? This he asks of you, who have the power to choose salvation. Why then do the Pythagoreans command that one pray with a voice? It seems to me not because they thought the divine could not hear those speaking quietly, but because they wished prayers to be just, which one would not be ashamed to make with many witnesses. We, however, will discuss prayer at the proper time as the discourse proceeds, but we ought to have our deeds crying out as if walking in the daytime. Let your works shine. And behold, a man and his works before his face. For behold, God and his works. One must imitate God as far as possible for the gnostic. And it seems to me that the poets also call their elect godlike and divine and godlike in counsel and like the gods in mind and godlike, nibbling at the image and likeness. Euripides says, "Golden wings on my back, and I fit the lovely sandals of the Sirens, and I will go, lifted into the vast air, to mingle with Zeus." But I would pray that the spirit of Christ might wing me to my Jerusalem. For the Stoics say that heaven is properly a city, but the places on earth here are no longer cities; they are called so, but are not.

For the city is a serious thing, and the people are a refined system and a multitude of men governed by law, just as the church is governed by reason—a city on earth that cannot be stormed or tyrannized, a divine will on earth as in heaven. The poets also create and describe images of this city; for the Hyperborean and Arimaspian cities and the Elysian fields are constitutions of the righteous. And we know also the city of Plato, a model lying in heaven. BOOK FIVE OF CLEMENT'S STROMATA Concerning the Gnostic, then, so much by way of summary. Let us now proceed to what follows, and indeed faith must be examined again. For there are those who distinguish, saying that our faith concerns the Son, but our knowledge concerns the Father. But it has escaped them that one must truly believe in the Son—that he is Son, and that he came, and how, and why, and concerning the passion—and it is necessary to know who the Son of God is. But neither is knowledge without faith, nor faith without knowledge, nor indeed is the Father without the Son; for the Father is at the same time father of the Son, and the Son is a true teacher concerning the Father. And in order for one to believe in the Son, one must know the Father, toward whom the Son also is. And again, in order for us to recognize the Father, we must believe in the Son, because the Son of God teaches; for from faith we proceed to knowledge, through the Son to the Father. And knowledge of the Son and the Father, according to the Gnostic rule, is the true Gnostic's application and apprehension of truth through truth. We, therefore, are the faithful in what is disbelieved, and the Gnostics in what is unknown—that is, Gnostics in that which is unknown and disbelieved by all, but believed and known by few.

The Gnostics, however, are not those who record deeds in word, but by contemplation itself. Blessed is the one who speaks into the ears of those who hear; faith is the ear of the soul, and the Lord hints at this faith when he says, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear," so that having believed, he may understand what he says, as he says. Moreover, even Homer, the most ancient of poets, using the specific for the general in the case of perceiving by hearing, writes, "They themselves heard most clearly." For the whole concord and harmony of both kinds of faith is directed toward one end, salvation. A truthful witness for us is the apostle, saying, "I long to see you, so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you for your strengthening"; this is to be mutually encouraged among you through the faith in each other, both yours and mine. And again, going on, he adds, "The righteousness of God is revealed in him from faith to faith." So the apostle appears to proclaim a twofold faith, or rather one faith that admits of increase and perfection. For the common faith lies as a foundation (indeed, to those who desired to be healed, the Lord said to those moving faithfully, "Your faith has saved you"), while the exceptional faith, built upon it, is perfected with the faithful and is completed together with it, the faith that comes from learning and from fulfilling the commandments of the Word, such as were the apostles, of whom it is said that they could move mountains and transplant trees by their faith.

Therefore, perceiving the magnitude of the power, they deemed it right to add to themselves faith like a mustard seed, which bites the soul beneficially and grows within it mightily, so that discourses about celestial matters rest upon it. For if someone knows God by nature, as Basilides thinks, understanding exceptional intellection as both faith and kingdom and creation of the beautiful, interpreting it as being a substance worthy of the creator near him, as substance but not authority, and as nature and hypostasis, an undefined beauty of unpostponed creation, and does not call faith the rational assent of a self-determined soul. Then the commandments, both those according to the old and those according to the new covenant, are superfluous, since someone is saved by nature, as Valentinus wishes, and someone is by nature faithful and elect, as Basilides supposes. And even without the presence of the savior, nature would at some time be able to shine forth. But if they were to assert that the advent of the Lord is necessary, their natural peculiarities vanish, since election is saved by teaching, purification, and good works, not by nature. Was Abraham, then, who believed through hearing the voice under the oak at Mamre, which promised, "I give this land to you and your seed," either elect or not? But if he was not, how did he immediately believe, as if by nature? And if he was elect, their hypothesis is dissolved, since election is found and indeed saved even before the advent of the Lord; for it was counted to him for righteousness. For if someone

Daring to speak, following Marcion, he says that the creator saves the one who has believed in him, and that before the Lord's coming there is an election, and indeed that his own salvation is being saved, the power of the good will be outshone by him, late and after the creator celebrated by them, applying itself to save either by learning or by imitation of him. But even if the good one saves in this way according to them, he does not attempt salvation either for his own or with the consent of the one who made the creation, but by force or deceit. And how is he still good, being such and later? And if the place differs and the abode of the Almighty is inferior to the abode of the good God, yet the will of the one who saves does not fall short of the good, since it began first. Therefore the unbelievers are shown to be foolish from what we have previously accomplished; for their paths are distorted and they do not know peace, says the prophet. And the divine Paul exhorted us to decline foolish and uneducated inquiries, because they generate strife. And Aeschylus cries out: Do not toil in vain over things that bring no benefit. For we know that inquiry which proceeds with faith, building upon the foundation of faith the magnificent knowledge of truth, is best. And we know that neither are obvious things inquired into (for example, whether it is day when it is day), nor are obscure things that will never become clear (such as whether the stars are even or odd), nor yet are reciprocal things (reciprocal are those which it is equally possible to state in support of the opposite argument, such as whether the fetus is a living being or not).

The fourth mode is when an irrefutable and insoluble argument is proposed from one of these two parts. If, then, the cause of inquiry is removed in all modes, faith is established; for we set before them that irrefutable argument, which is God speaking and presenting in writing concerning each one of the things they investigate. Who, then, is so godless as to disbelieve God and to demand proofs from God as if from men? Again, of the questions, some require sense perception, such as if one inquires whether fire is hot or snow white; some require admonition and rebuke, as Aristotle says, like that question, whether one should honor parents. There are also some worthy of punishment, such as the demand for proofs whether providence exists. Providence, then, existing, it is impious to suppose that not all prophecy and the economy concerning the Savior have come about according to providence, and perhaps one should not even attempt to demonstrate such things, since divine providence is manifest from the sight of all visible things, both technical and wise works, and from some things happening in order and others being revealed in order; and He who gave us being and life has also given us reason, wishing us to live both rationally and well; for the Word of the Father of all is not this uttered word, but wisdom and the most manifest goodness of God, and an all-powerful and truly divine power, not unintelligible even to those who do not acknowledge it, an all-ruling will. But since some are unbelieving and some contentious, not all attain the perfection of the good.

For it is not possible to attain without choice, nor does everything depend on our own judgment, such as the outcome. For we are saved by grace, yet not without good works; but we must, being naturally disposed toward the good, apply some zeal toward it; and we must also possess a sound judgment that is unrepentant in the pursuit of the good, for which we especially need divine grace, right teaching, pure obedience, and the Father's drawing of us to himself. For bound as we are to an earthly body, we apprehend sensible things through the body, but we touch intelligible things through the power of reason itself. If anyone expects to comprehend everything sensibly, he has fallen far from the truth. The apostle writes spiritually concerning the knowledge of God: "For now we see as through a mirror, but then face to face." For the vision of truth is granted to few. Indeed, Plato says in the Epinomis: "I affirm that it is not possible for all men to become blessed and happy, except for a few, at least as long as we live; this I determine. But there is a fair hope for the one who has died to attain all things." The same meaning is intended by the words in Moses: "No one shall see my face and live." For it is clear that no one can ever clearly comprehend God during the time of life. But those pure in heart will see God when they reach the final perfection. For since the soul was weak in its comprehension of beings, we needed a divine teacher.

The savior is sent down, teacher and provider of the possession of the good, the holy token of the great providence, which is not to be spoken. Where then is the scribe? Where the disputant of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? he says. And again: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and I will set aside the understanding of the intelligent, meaning of course these conceited wise and contentious ones. Very beautifully, then, Jeremiah says: Thus says the Lord: Stand on the roads and ask the eternal paths, which is the good road, and walk on it, and you will find purification for your souls. Ask, he says, and inquire of those who know, without contentiousness and without strife. And having learned, let us walk straight on the road of truth without turning back, until we encounter what is desired. Reasonably, then, the king of the Romans (Numa by name), being a Pythagorean, was the first of all men to found a temple of Faith and Peace. And to Abraham, who believed, righteousness was reckoned. This man, pursuing the lofty philosophy of things happening in the air and the celestial philosophy of things moving in the sky, was called Abram, which is interpreted as "lofty father." Later, having looked up to the sky, whether seeing the son in the spirit, as some explain, or a glorious angel, or otherwise recognizing a god greater than creation and all the order in it, he takes on the alpha, the knowledge of the one and only god, and is called Abraham, having become wise and god-loving instead of a natural philosopher. For he is interpreted as "father of a chosen sound.

The sounding word resounds, and its father is mind, and the chosen mind is that of the earnest man. And I am strongly moved to praise the Acragantine poet, who hymns faith in this way: "O friends, I know that truth is present in the tales which I shall tell; but the impulse of faith is very difficult for men and hard to attain for the mind." Therefore the apostle also exhorts that our faith should not be in the wisdom of men who promise to persuade, but in the power of God, which alone and without proofs, through bare faith, is able to save. For, as the Ephesian says, "those who seem to know the most sure thing guard it; and indeed justice will overtake the craftsmen and witnesses of falsehoods." For he also, having learned from barbarian philosophy, knows the purification through fire of those who have lived wickedly, which the Stoics later called conflagration; according to which they also dogmatize that the individual quality will rise again, thus treating the resurrection. And Plato says that the earth is purified at certain times by fire and water in this way: "Many destructions of men have occurred in many ways and will occur; the greatest are by fire and water, and countless others, lesser ones." And after a little he adds: "But the truth is that there is a change in the things moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a destruction of things on earth by much fire occurring over long periods." Then concerning the flood he will add: "But when the gods again purify the earth by flooding it with waters, some are saved in the mountains, herdsmen and shepherds, while others in our cities are carried to the sea by the rivers.

We demonstrated in the first Stromateus that the philosophers of the Greeks are called thieves, having taken the most essential doctrines from Moses and the prophets without gratitude. To these we will add that those angels who had received the higher lot, having slipped into pleasures, revealed the secret things to women, as far as they had attained to knowledge of them, while the other angels concealed them—or rather, preserved them until the coming of the Lord. From that source flowed the teaching concerning providence and the revelation of celestial matters. And when prophecy had already been disseminated among the poets of the Greeks, the systematic treatment of doctrines arose among the philosophers, in part true as they applied themselves by conjecture, in part erroneous because they did not understand the hidden meaning of prophetic allegory—which it is our purpose to indicate briefly, running through the urgent matters. We say, therefore, that faith must proceed not as idle and alone, but together with inquiry. For I do not say not to inquire at all; for it says, seek, and you will find. The object sought is attainable, but what is neglected escapes, according to Sophocles. And the comic poet Menander says similar things: the wisest say that all things sought require care. But one must extend the discerning power of the soul toward discovery and clear away the obstacles—namely, contentiousness, envy, and strife itself, the worst thing that perishes from among men, and cast them off completely. For Timon of Phlius writes very beautifully: "Strife, the bane of mortals, goes about babbling emptily, sister and companion of man-slaying Discord.

Blindness rolls about everything, then fixes its head upon a mortal and casts it upon hope. Then, after a short interval, it adds: For who brought these together to fight in deadly strife? A crowd that runs with Echo; for, angered by their silence, it roused a talkative disease against men, and many perished over the false-denying argument and the horned one, and the concealed one, and the crocodile one, and the heap one, and the veiled one, and concerning ambiguities and sophisms. But to seek concerning God, if it tends not to strife but to discovery, is saving. For it is written in David: The poor shall eat and be filled, and those who seek him shall praise the Lord; their heart shall live for ever and ever. For those who seek according to the true search, praising the Lord, shall be filled with the gift from God, that is, with knowledge, and their soul shall live; for the heart is allegorized as the soul which supplies life, because the Father is known through the Son. Nor must one offer one's ears indiscriminately to all who speak and write, since even cups, when taken by many by the ears, become dirty and lose their ears, and besides, falling off, they themselves are broken. For in the same way, those who have defiled the pure hearing of faith with much nonsense, finally becoming deaf to the truth, become useless and fall to the ground.

Therefore, it is not in vain that we exhort children, when taken by the ears, to kiss their relatives, hinting by this that through hearing comes the perception of love. And love is God, known to those who love, as the faithful God is delivered to the faithful through learning. And we must appropriate ourselves to Him through divine love, so that we may behold like by like, listening to the word of truth without guile and purely, like the children who obey us. And this was what was hinted at by whoever it was who inscribed on the entrance of the temple in Epidaurus: "One must be pure who enters within the fragrant temple; and purity is to think holy thoughts." And unless you become like these children, He says, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven; for here the temple of God, founded on three foundations—faith, hope, and love—appears. Concerning faith, then, we have adduced sufficient testimonies from the writings of the Greeks. But that we may not digress at length, and concerning hope and love, being ambitious to collect many things, it suffices to say only this, as Socrates says in the Crito, before living.

He who posits living well and dying well thinks to have some hope of another life after death. For also in the Phaedrus, saying that the soul when it becomes by itself alone is able to partake of true wisdom and of that which is superior to human power, when love from here wings it to heaven, he says that through philosophical love it arrives at the goal of hope and takes the beginning of another eternal life. And in the Symposium he says that a natural love is mingled in all for the generation of the like, and for men only of men, but for the excellent man of that which is similar. But it is impossible for the excellent man to do this without having perfect virtues, according to which he will educate the young who approach him and, as he says in the Theaetetus, will generate and complete men; for some are pregnant in body, others in soul, since also among the barbarian philosophers to catechize and to enlighten is called to regenerate, and "I begat you in Christ Jesus," the good apostle somewhere says. And Empedocles in his principles also enumerates love, understanding a certain unitive love, "which you may see with the mind, not be amazed with the eyes." But also Parmenides in his poem, hinting at Hope, says such things: "But behold also things absent as firmly present to the mind; for being will not cut off from holding to being, neither being scattered everywhere throughout the cosmos nor being brought together"; since also he who hopes, just like he who believes, sees with the mind the intelligible things and the things to come.

If, then, we say that something is just, and we also say that it is beautiful, and we also speak of truth as something, yet we have never seen any such thing with our eyes, but only with the mind, and the Word of God says, "I am the truth," therefore the Word is perceptible to the mind. "But the true philosophers," he said, "whom do you mean?" "Those who are lovers of the vision of truth," I replied. In the Phaedrus, speaking of truth as an idea, Plato will make it clear. The idea is a thought of God, which the barbarians have called the Word of God. The text runs thus: "For it is necessary to dare to speak the truth, especially when speaking about truth; for it is a substance without color, without shape, and without touch, truly existing, visible only to the mind, the pilot of the soul." And the Word, having advanced, is the cause of creation, and then also generates itself, when the Word becomes flesh, so that it may be seen. The just man, therefore, will seek a loving discovery, toward which he hastens and is fortunate; for it is said, "To the one who knocks, it will be opened; ask and it will be given to you." For those who seize the kingdom by force are said to compel, not by contentious arguments, but by the perseverance of a righteous life and unceasing prayers, wiping away the stains of former sins. Vice, indeed, can be chosen like mud. But to the one who labors, God also lends a hand. For the gifts of the Muses, hard to fight against, do not lie in the middle for anyone to bear. The cessation of ignorance is the first lesson for one who proceeds according to reason.

If someone, being ignorant, sought, and by seeking found the teacher, and having found believed, and having believed hoped, and having loved, from that point on becomes like the beloved, hastening to be what he loved when he attained it—Socrates indicates some such method to Alcibiades when he asks: "Do you think you could know about just things in any other way?"—"Yes, if you should find them."—"But do you think I could find them?"—"Certainly, if you should seek."—"Then do you think I would not seek?"—"Yes, if you thought you did not know." In this way also the torches of the wise virgins, kindled by night in the great darkness of ignorance—which darkness the Scripture has hinted at—wise souls, pure as virgins, understanding themselves to be placed in worldly ignorance, kindle the light, rouse the mind, illuminate the darkness, drive out ignorance, seek the truth, and await the manifestation of the teacher. Now, a multitude, I think, cannot become philosophical. "Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few the Bacchants," according to Plato. Many

For many are called, but few are chosen; and the apostle says that knowledge is not in all. Pray that we may be delivered from absurd and wicked men; for not all have faith. And Cleanthes the Stoic philosopher writes something similar in his poetry: "Do not look to glory, wishing to become wise quickly, nor fear the uncritical and shameless opinion of the many. For the multitude has neither intelligent judgment nor just nor good judgment, and you would find this among few men." And the comic poet says more sententiously in brief: "It is shameful to judge noble things by the great noise." For they have heard, I think, that noble wisdom speaking to us: "In the midst of the foolish, preserve the opportune moment; in the midst of the thoughtful, persevere." And again: "The wise will conceal perception." For the many demand proof as a pledge of truth, not being satisfied with bare salvation from faith. But "it is very much the custom of evil men to disbelieve in order to prevail; but as from our Muse it is commanded to give assurances, know the word divided in the inward parts." For it is customary for evil men, says Empedocles, to wish to prevail over truths by disbelieving. And that our teachings are glorious and worthy of belief, the Greeks will know when the word is more closely examined through what follows; for like is taught by like. "Answer the fool," says Solomon, "according to his folly." Therefore, to those who ask for wisdom, one must offer what is appropriate to them, so that they may most easily arrive at belief in the truth through their own means.

For I became all things to all people," he says, "in order to win all, since the rain of divine grace is sent down upon both the just and the unjust." Or is God only of the Jews? Is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, also of the Gentiles, since God is one, the noble apostle cried out. But since they are unwilling to believe rightly in the good or in knowledge for salvation, we ourselves, considering their own things as ours because all things belong to God, and especially since the beautiful things originated from us for the Greeks, we undertake to address them as they are naturally able to hear. For this multitude judges the intelligent or the just not from the truth, but from what pleases them. And they would be pleased by nothing more than by things like themselves. For as long as it is still blind and deaf, having neither understanding nor the fearless and keen-sighted vision of a soul that loves contemplation, which the Savior alone implants, like one uninitiated in mysteries or unmusical in choruses, not yet pure nor worthy of pure truth, but discordant, disorderly, and material, it must still stand outside the divine chorus. For we compare spiritual things with spiritual. For this reason, the manner of concealment, being truly divine and most necessary for us because of the holy word deposited in the sanctuary of truth, was intimated by the Egyptians through what they call the adyta, and by the Hebrews through the veil, through which only their consecrated ones—that is, those devoted to God, those who have circumcised the desires of the passions through love for the divine alone—were permitted to enter. For it seemed also to Plato that it is not lawful for the impure to touch the pure.

Hence prophecies and oracles are spoken through riddles, and the initiations are not shown openly to those who encounter them, but with certain purifications and preliminary announcements. For the Muse was not then greedy nor a hireling, nor were sweet honey-voiced songs, with faces softened by silver, ever sold for Terpsichore. Immediately, those educated among the Egyptians first learn the method of Egyptian letters, called epistolographic; second, the hieratic, which the sacred scribes use; last and finally, the hieroglyphic, of which one kind is literal through primary elements, and the other symbolic. Of the symbolic, one is expressed literally by imitation, another is written as if tropically, and another is directly allegorized through certain enigmas. For instance, wishing to depict the sun, they make a circle; the moon, a crescent shape, according to the literal form. Tropically, by transferring and transposing according to affinity, they engrave some things by altering, others by transforming in many ways. Thus, they record the praises of kings, handing them down through theological myths, by means of reliefs. As an example of the third kind, that according to enigmas, let this suffice: they likened the other stars, because of their oblique course, to the bodies of serpents, and the sun to the body of the scarab, since it fashions a spherical shape from cow dung and rolls it facing opposite. They also say that this animal lives six months under the earth and the other half of the year above the earth, and that it deposits seed into the sphere, and gives birth, and that no female scarab exists.

All, so to speak, who have theologized, both barbarians and Greeks, have hidden the beginnings of things and handed down the truth through riddles, symbols, allegories, metaphors, and certain other such modes, just as among the Greeks the oracles are, and Apollo Pythius himself is called Loxias. Moreover, the sayings of those called wise among the Greeks, in few words, manifest the indication of a greater matter; for instance, "spare time" means either that life is short and one must not waste this time in vain, or, by contrast, to spare private expenses so that, even if you live many years, as it says, you may not lack necessities. Likewise, "know yourself" indicates many things: that you are mortal, that you were born human, and that in comparison with other preeminences of life you are of no account, whether you are called glorious or rich, or, on the contrary, that being rich and glorious you do not pride yourself on a transitory advantage; and "know," it says, what you have become, whose image you are, what your essence is, what your creation is, and what your kinship with the divine is, and similar things. And the Spirit says through the prophet Isaiah: "I will give you dark hidden treasures." And the treasures of God and inexhaustible wealth are wisdom, which is hard to hunt out. Moreover, the poets who learned theology from these prophets philosophize much through underlying meaning—I mean Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, Homer, Hesiod, and those wise in this way. And for them, poetic entertainment is a screen before the many.

dreams and symbols, all more obscure to men, not out of envy (for it is not right to think of God as subject to passion), but so that inquiry, slipping into the meaning of the riddles, might run up to the discovery of truth. Thus Sophocles, the tragic poet, says somewhere: "And I know God to be such: always a riddler of oracles to the wise, but to the foolish a poor teacher even in brief," using "poor" in the sense of "simple." Indeed, concerning all our scripture, it is written in the Psalms that it is spoken in parable: "Hear, my people, my law; incline your ear to the words of my mouth; I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter problems from the beginning." And the noble Apostle speaks similarly in this way: "But we speak wisdom among the perfect, wisdom not of this age nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away; but we speak the wisdom of God in mystery, the hidden wisdom, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory; which none of the rulers of this age has known; for if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." The philosophers, however, were not moved to insult the presence of the Lord. It remains, then, for the Apostle to rebuke the conceit of the wise among the Jews; therefore he adds: "But we proclaim as it is written," he says, "what no eye has seen and no ear has heard and has not entered into the heart of man, which God has prepared for those who love him. For God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

For the spiritual and gnostic man knows the disciple of the Holy Spirit, which is supplied from God, that is, the mind of Christ. But the psychic man does not receive the things of the spirit; for to him it is folly. For instance, the apostle, by way of contrast to gnostic perfection, calls common faith sometimes a foundation, sometimes milk, writing in this manner: "Brethren, I was not able to speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to fleshly men, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able. But not even now are you able, for you are still fleshly. For where there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly and walking according to man?" The things chosen by sinful men, but those who have abstained from these think divine things and partake of gnostic food. "According to the grace," he says, "given to me, as a wise architect I have laid a foundation, but another builds on gold and silver, precious stones." These are gnostic superstructures upon the foundation of faith in Jesus Christ, but the adornments of the heresies are straw and wood and grass. And what each man's work is, the fire will test. Hinting at the gnostic building also in the Epistle to the Romans, he says: "For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you." But it was not possible to commit such gifts openly to writing. Indeed, the Pythagorean symbols are very closely dependent on the barbarian philosophy, which is extremely concealed.

The Samian, then, advises not to have a swallow in the house, that is, not to receive a talkative, whispering, and forward-tongued person, unable to keep what he may have shared. For the swallow and the turtledove, field sparrows, knew the times of their entrances, says Scripture, and one should never dwell with foolish talk. Indeed, the murmuring turtledove, indicating ungrateful slander of blame, is rightly expelled; as in, "Do not murmur at me, sitting around from one side and another." The swallow, which hints at the myth of Pandion, is worthy of being purified because of the passions noised about concerning it, from which we have received that Tereus suffered some things and also did others. It also pursues the cicadas, the musicians, whence the pursuer of the word is justly rejected. "Yes, and I have a faithful treasury for tongues, looking upon the scepter-bearing Hera who sees Olympus," says the poet. And Aeschylus: "But I also have a key, a guard upon my tongue." Again, Pythagoras ordered that when the pot is taken from the fire, one should not leave the impression in the ash, but stir and disturb it, and when rising from bed, to disturb the bedclothes; for he hinted not only that one must obliterate pride, but also leave no trace of anger, and when it has boiled over and ceased, to calm it and wipe out all remembrance of injury. "Let the sun not set on your anger," says Scripture; and the one who said "you shall not desire" removed all remembrance of injury; for anger is found to be an impulse of desire of the soul's day, irrationally aiming at revenge in excess.

In the same way, it is advised that the bed be disturbed, so as not to remember any dream, nor sleep by day, nor even the pleasure of the night. Perhaps it was also hinted that the gloomy phantasy must be confounded by the light of truth. "Be angry and do not sin," says David, teaching that one must not consent to the phantasy nor bring the deed to completion, confirming the anger. Again, "Do not sail on land" is a Pythagorean symbol, indicating that one must decline ends and the like of wages, which are turbulent and unstable. For this reason, the Word says that tax collectors will with difficulty be saved. Again, Pythagoras enjoins not to wear a ring nor to engrave images of gods on them, just as Moses long ago explicitly legislated that one must not make any carved, molten, molded, or painted statue or likeness, so that we may not attend to the perceptible but pass on to the intelligible; for the familiarity of the sight at hand debases the dignity of the divine, and to venerate the intelligible essence through matter is to dishonor it.

through sense-perception. Hence the wisest of the Egyptian priests set apart the roofless seat of Athena, just as the Hebrews established the temple without an image. There are those who, reverencing God, have made an imitation of the heaven and worship the stars it contains. Indeed, since Scripture says, "Let us make man according to our image and likeness," I consider it worthwhile to cite also the saying of Eurytus the Pythagorean, which runs thus: in his work On Fortune, having said that the demiurge made man using himself as a model, he added: "The body is like the rest, as being made from the same material, but wrought by a better craftsman, who crafted it using himself as an archetype." And in general, Pythagoras and his followers, together with Plato especially among the other philosophers, conversed very closely with the lawgiver, as can be inferred from their doctrines themselves. And by some felicitous utterance of prophecy, not without divine guidance, they concurred in certain prophetic voices, having grasped the truth in parts and forms, and honored it with appellations that were neither obscure nor foreign to the manifestation of things, having received an intimation of the affinity for truth. Hence Greek philosophy resembles the lamp flame that men kindle, stealing light from the sun by artifice; but when the Word was proclaimed, that whole holy light shone forth. Then, by night, the stolen light serves in houses, but by day the fire is outshone, and the whole night is illuminated by the sun of that intelligible light.

For example, Pythagoras made an epitome of what was said by Moses concerning justice, saying, "Do not step over the balance," that is, do not transgress the equality of distributions, honoring justice, which always binds friends to friends, cities to cities, and allies to allies; for equality is naturally lawful for men, but the lesser always becomes hostile to the greater and begins an enemy day, according to poetic grace. For this reason the Lord says, "Take up my yoke," because it is good and light. And to his disciples who were contending about precedence, he recommends equality with simplicity, saying that they must become like children. Likewise the Apostle writes that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, nor Greek nor Jew; for the new creation in Christ is free from strife and covetousness, and is just equality; for envy stands outside the divine chorus, and also jealousy and grief, on account of which the initiates forbid eating the heart, teaching that one should never bite and consume the soul with vexations and pains over things that happen unwillingly. Wretched, then, is that man whom even Homer speaks of as wandering alone, consuming his own heart.

Again, the Gospel and the Apostles, like all the prophets, posit two ways, calling one narrow and confined, constrained by commandments and prohibitions, and the opposite one, broad and spacious, leading to destruction, unhindered by pleasures and passion, and they declare blessed the man who did not walk in the counsel of the impious and did not stand in the path of sinners. The myth of Prodicus of Ceos concerning Virtue and Vice proceeds, and Pythagoras does not hesitate to forbid walking on the highways, commanding that one must not follow the uncritical and inconsistent opinions of the many. Aristocritus, in the first book of his *Contradictions to Heracleodorus*, mentions a letter running thus: "Ataias, king of the Scythians, to the people of Byzantium: Do not harm my revenues, lest my horses drink your water." For the barbarian symbolically intimated the war he was about to bring upon them. Similarly, the poet Euphorion introduces Nestor saying: "We have not yet watered our Achaean horses in the Simois." For this reason too the Egyptians place sphinxes before their temples, because the discourse concerning God is enigmatic and obscure, and perhaps also because it is necessary to love

It is necessary both to revere and to fear the divine, to love it as gracious and benevolent to the pious, and to fear it as inexorably just to the impious. For the sphinx signifies the image of both beast and man together. It would be a long task to go through all the prophetic and legal passages spoken in enigmas, selecting them. For almost the entire scripture is somehow or other divinely inspired in this way. But it is sufficient, I think, for one who possesses understanding, for the demonstration of the subject in hand, to have set forth a few examples. For instance, the concealment is acknowledged by the reference among the Hebrews to the seven enclosures of the ancient temple, and by the arrangement of the priestly robe, which, through various symbols relating to the visible world, signifies the covenant from heaven to earth. The veil and the curtain were embroidered with hyacinth, purple, crimson, and fine linen, and signified, as the nature of the elements encompasses, the revelation of God: for purple comes from water, fine linen from earth, hyacinth is likened to the dark air, just as crimson is to fire. Between the veil and the curtain, where it was permitted for the priests to enter, stood the altar of incense, a symbol of the earth lying in the middle of this cosmos, from which arise the vapors. And that place was also in the middle, between the interior of the curtain, where only the high priest was permitted to enter on specified days, and the outer court which was open to all Hebrews; therefore some say it is a symbol of the midpoint of heaven and earth, while others say it is a symbol of the intelligible and the sensible cosmos.

Now the veil is a barrier to lay disbelief, stretched before the five pillars, keeping out those in the enclosure. In this way, most mystically, five loaves are broken by the Saviour and multiply for the crowd of hearers. For many are those who cling to the sensible as if it alone exists. "Look then around you," says Plato, "lest any of the uninitiated overhear." These are those who think that nothing else exists but what they can grasp with their hands, and do not accept actions and generations and everything invisible as part of being; for such are those who cling only to the pentad of the senses. But the understanding of God is inaccessible to ears and their like. Hence the Son is called the face of the Father, being the Word who, incarnate through the pentad of senses, is the revealer of the Father's character. "But if we live by spirit, let us also walk by spirit. We walk by faith, not by form," says the good apostle. Within the veil, then, is hidden the priestly ministry, and it keeps those who labour in it far from those outside. Again, the curtain of the entrance into the holy of holies: there are four pillars there, a sign of the holy tetrad of the old covenants, and also the tetragrammaton, the mystical name, which was worn by those alone for whom the innermost sanctuary was accessible; it is pronounced Iˉaˉoˉuˉe, which is interpreted as "the one who is and the one who will be." And indeed, even among the Greeks, the name of God contains a tetrad of letters. Into the intelligible world, only the Lord enters as high priest, penetrating through the passions into the knowledge of the ineffable, withdrawing beyond every name that is known by speech.

Indeed, the lampstand was placed in the southern part of the incense altar, through which the movements of the seven light-bearers are indicated, as they make their revolutions in the south. For three branches grow out on each side of the lampstand, and on them the lamps, since the sun, like the lampstand, being stationed in the middle of the other planets, imparts its light to those above it and those below it according to some divine music. The golden lampstand also contains another enigma of the sign of Christ, not only in its form, but also in that it sheds light in manifold and various ways upon those who believe in him, hope, and see through the ministry of the first-created. And they say that the seven spirits are the seven eyes of the Lord, which rest upon the rod that blossoms from the root of Jesse. On the northern side of the incense altar the table was placed, upon which the arrangement of the loaves was set, because the northern winds are most nourishing for the spirits. These would be certain abodes for one body and one assembly of churches converging together. And the things recorded concerning the holy ark indicate the things of the intelligible world, which is hidden and closed off to the many. Indeed, those golden figures, each with six wings, whether they signify the two Bears, as some suppose, or rather the two hemispheres, the name Cherubim intends to denote much knowledge. But both have twelve wings, and through the zodiacal circle and the time carried along it, they signify the sensible world. Concerning these matters, I think, the tragedy also speaks, philosophizing about nature, saying:

Unwearied time, full of eternal flux, goes about, begetting itself; and the twin bears, with the swift strokes of their wings, guard the Atlantean pole. Atlas, the impassive pole, may be the fixed sphere, but it is perhaps better to conceive of it as the unmoved aeon. I consider it better that the ark, called Thebotha from the Hebrew name, signifies something else. It is interpreted as "one in place of all places." Whether it is the ogdoad and the intelligible world, or the God who encompasses all things, formless and invisible, is revealed, let it be set aside for now to speak of these things. But it indicates rest, with the doxological spirits, which are hinted at by the Cherubim. For he who advised against creating a graven image would never himself have fashioned a statue of the holy ones, nor is there originally some composite and sensible living being in heaven having such a form; rather, the face is a symbol of the rational soul, the wings are the ministries and high-soaring energies of both right and left powers, and the voice is grateful praise in unceasing contemplation. It is sufficient to have advanced the mystical interpretation this far. The high priest's long robe is a symbol of the sensible world; the five stones and the two carbuncles correspond to the seven planets, because of Cronus and the Moon. For the former is southern, moist, earthy, and heavy, while the latter is airy; hence Artemis is called by some "air-cutter," being something that cuts the air, and the air is dark.

Those who cooperate in the generation of earthly things, the overseers of the planets according to divine providence, he fittingly depicts as established on the chest and shoulders, through which the generative action, the first hebdomad, takes place; the chest is the dwelling place of the heart and soul. There could also be, in another sense, variegated stones, modes of salvation, some placed among the transcendent beings, others among the lower beings, of the entire body that is being saved. The three hundred and sixty bells suspended from the robe are the yearly time, the acceptable year of the Lord, proclaiming and teaching the greatest epiphany of the Savior. Moreover, the golden cap that is raised indicates the royal authority of the Lord, since the head of the church is the Savior. The cap above it is a sign of the most sovereign rule; besides, we have heard, as it has been said, that the head of Christ is God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, the pectoral, consisting of the shoulder-piece, which is a symbol of work, and of the logion (this alludes to the Word), by which it is constituted, is an image of the heaven that came to be by the Word, which is subject to the head of all things, Christ, and moves in the same manner and uniformly. The luminous emerald stones on the shoulder-piece indicate the sun and moon, the cooperators of nature. The shoulder, I think, is the beginning of the hand. The twelve stones arranged in four rows on the chest delineate for us the zodiacal circle according to the four turnings of the year. Besides, it was necessary that law and prophets be placed under the Lord's head, through whom the righteous are indicated according to each of the two covenants.

For if we say that the apostles are both prophets and righteous men, we would speak well, since one and the same Holy Spirit is active through all. And just as the Lord is above the whole world, or rather beyond the intelligible realm, so too the name inscribed on the petalon is deemed to be above every beginning and authority; it is inscribed both because of the written commandments and because of the sensible presence. And it is called the name of God. For, as the Son sees the Father’s goodness, he acts, being called God the Saviour, the principle of all things, which is imaged from the invisible God first and before the ages, and has formed all things that come after it. Indeed, the logion signifies the prophecy that proclaims and preaches by the Word, and the judgment that is to come, since the same Word both prophesies and judges, distinguishing each thing. And they say that the garment, the full-length robe, signifies the economy according to the flesh, through which he appeared more directly in the world.

Then, having removed the consecrated tunic, the high priest—for the world and the creation in the world have been consecrated by the one who has beautifully assented to what comes into being—washes and puts on the other holy tunic, so to speak, the one that enters with him into the inner sanctuary, signifying, as it seems to me, the Levite and Gnostic as ruler, as it were, of the other priests, while those others are washed with water and clothed only with faith and await their own station, he, having distinguished the intelligible from the sensible, hastening by way of ascent beyond the other priests toward the passage of the intelligible, being washed no longer with water, as he was previously purified when enrolled in the Levitical tribe, but now with the gnostic Word. So, pure in his whole heart, having also perfected his conduct to the utmost, having grown beyond the priest to something greater, genuinely purified in both word and life, having put on the luster of glory, having received the ineffable inheritance of that spiritual and perfect man, which no eye has seen, no ear heard, and which has not entered into the heart of man, having become son and friend, he now fills himself face to face with the insatiable contemplation. And nothing is like hearing the Word himself, who gives greater understanding through Scripture. For he speaks thus: "And he shall take off the linen garment which he had put on when entering the holy place, and shall lay it aside there. And he shall wash his body with water in a holy place and put on his garment.

In another way, I think, the Lord both takes off and puts on when descending into sense-perception; in another way, the one who has believed through him both takes off and puts on, as the apostle also indicated, the consecrated garment. Hence, in the image of the Lord, high priests were chosen from the consecrated tribe—the most approved—and those chosen for kingship and for prophecy were anointed. Whence also the Egyptians did not entrust their mysteries to just anyone, nor did they divulge knowledge of divine things to the profane, but only to those who were to advance to kingship and to the priests judged to be most approved, on the basis of their nurture, education, and lineage. At any rate, the riddles of the Egyptians are similar to the Hebrew ones in respect of concealment. Some Egyptians depict the sun on a boat, others on a crocodile. They signify that the sun, making its journey through sweet and moist air, generates time, which the crocodile hints at through some other priestly account. Indeed, also in Diospolis of Egypt, on the so-called gateway of the temple, a child is depicted as a symbol of generation, an old man of decay, a hawk of god, as a fish of hatred, and, according to another meaning again, the crocodile of shamelessness. So then, the whole symbol appears to be indicative of this: O you who come into being and pass away, god hates shamelessness. And craftsmen, fashioning ears and eyes from precious material, dedicate them to the gods, setting them up in the temples, hinting at this, namely, that god sees and hears everything.

In addition to these, the lion is for them a symbol of courage and strength; just as, of course, the ox is of the earth itself and of agriculture and nourishment, the horse of courage and frankness, and the sphinx of courage combined with intelligence, having the whole body of a lion but the face of a human. Similarly to these, the human being, hinting at understanding, memory, power, and art, is engraved by them among the sacred symbols. Already, too, in the so-called processions of the gods among them, they carry around golden statues—two dogs, one hawk, and one ibis—and they call the four statues four letters. The dogs are symbols of the two hemispheres, as it were circling and guarding; the hawk of the sun, for it is fiery and destructive; indeed, they attribute pestilential diseases to the sun; and the ibis of the moon, the shadowy parts being represented by the black, and the luminous by the white of its feathers. Some wish the dogs to indicate the tropics, which indeed guard and gatekeep the passage of the sun to the south and north; the equinoctial circle, being high and burnt, the hawk signifies, just as the ibis signifies the oblique circle; for the ibis seems to have provided the Egyptians with the beginning of the concept of number and measure, as the oblique circle does of the cycles. But not only the most learned of the Egyptians, but also of the other barbarians who pursued philosophy, emulated the symbolic form.

They say, then, that Idanthyrsus, king of the Scythians, as Pherecydes of Syros relates, when Darius had crossed the Ister and was threatening war, sent him a symbol instead of a letter: a mouse, a frog, a bird, an arrow, and a plow. And when there was perplexity, as is likely, over these, Orontopatas the chiliarch said they would surrender their rule, inferring from the mouse the dwellings, from the frog the waters, from the bird the air, from the arrow the weapons, and from the plow the land. Xiphodres interpreted them in the opposite way; for he said: unless we fly like birds, or go under the earth like mice, or dive into the water like frogs, we would not escape their arrows, for we are not masters of the land. And they say that Anacharsis the Scythian, even when sleeping, held his genitals with his left hand and his mouth with his right, intimating that both must be controlled, but that it is greater to master the tongue than pleasure. And why should I dwell on the barbarians, when I can show that the Greeks themselves made great use of concealment? Androcydes the Pythagorean, for instance, says that the so-called Ephesian letters, which are much talked of among many, have the character of symbols, and that Askeon means darkness, for it has no shadow; Kataskion means light, since it illuminates the shadow; Lix is the earth according to an ancient name, and Tetrax the year because of the seasons, Damnameneus the sun that tames, and the Aisia the true voice. And the symbol signifies, then, how the divine things are ordered, such as darkness in relation to light, and the sun in relation to the year, and the earth in relation to the whole generation of nature.

And Dionysius the Thracian, the grammarian, in his work On Emphasis, says concerning the symbol of the wheels, word for word: "Some, then, signified actions not only through speech, but also through symbols; through speech, as the so-called Delphic maxims have it, 'Nothing in excess' and 'Know thyself' and similar sayings; through symbols, as the revolving wheel drawn in the precincts of the gods from the Egyptians, and the offering of branches to those who do obeisance. For Orpheus the Thracian says: 'Of the branches, as many works as are cared for by mortals on earth, none has a single portion in the mind, but all circle around, and it is not lawful to stand still in one part, but each has, as they began, an equal share of the course.' The branches are either a symbol of the first food, or so that the many may be drawn to understand that the fruits continue to flourish and increase for the longest time, while they themselves have been allotted only a short time of life; for this reason they wish the branches to be given; perhaps also so that they may understand that, just as these

They are burned, so they too must quickly leave this life and become the work of fire. Therefore, the form of symbolic interpretation is most useful for many things, contributing both to correct theology and to piety, and to the display of intelligence, and to the practice of brevity and the indication of wisdom; for it is the mark of a wise man to use symbolic expression skillfully, says the grammarian Didymus, and to recognize what is indicated through it. Indeed, the elementary teaching of children has encompassed the interpretation of the four elements. For the Phrygians are said to call water "bedy," just as Orpheus does: "and bedy, the bright water of the nymphs, flows down." And likewise the sacrificer Dion appears to write: "and taking bedy, pour it over your hands and turn to the inspection of entrails." On the other hand, the comic poet Philyllius recognizes "bedy" as the life-giving air through these words: "I pray to draw in the saving bedy, which is the greatest part of health, to draw in pure air, not turbid." Of the same opinion is Neanthes of Cyzicus, writing that the priests of the Macedonians in their prayers invoke "bedy" as propitious for themselves and their children, which they interpret as air. "Zaps" is fire, which some have ignorantly derived from "zein" (to boil); but the sea is called thus, as Euphorion in his replies to Theodoridas: "and zaps among the rocks destroys ships." And Dionysius the Iambus similarly: "the salty zaps of the raging sea surrounds." Likewise the younger comic poet Cratinus: "the zaps brings forth shrimps and small fish." And Simmias of Rhodes: "the salty zaps was the mother of the Ignites and Telchines.

Earth is called chthōn because it is spread out in magnitude. Some say that plēktron is the pole, others the air that strikes and moves everything into nature and growth, or that which fills all things. These people have not read Cleanthes the philosopher, who openly calls the sun plēktron; for at sunrise, pressing its rays as if striking the cosmos, it leads the light into harmonious motion; and from the sun the other stars also receive their significance. Sphinx is not the binding together of all things and the revolution of the cosmos according to the poet Aratus, but perhaps it could be the penetrating spiritual tension that holds the cosmos together; it is better to understand it as the aether that holds and binds everything together, as Empedocles says: "But I will tell you first the beginning of the sun, from which all things now seen have come into being, both earth and the much-waved sea and the moist air, Titan and the aether binding all around in a circle." Apollodorus of Corcyra says that these verses were uttered by the seer Branchus when he was purifying the Milesians from a plague. For he, sprinkling the crowd with laurel branches, began the hymn somewhat like this: "Sing, O children, of Hekaergos and Hekaerga"; and the people responded, as it were: "Bedy, zaps, chthōm, plēktron, sphinx, knaxzbich, thyptēs, phlegmo, drōps." Callimachus also mentions this story in his iambics. Knaxzbich, by derivation, means disease, from knaiein (to scratch) and diaphtheirein (to destroy); and thypai means to burn with a thunderbolt. Thespis the tragedian, however, says that these words signify something else, writing somewhat as follows: "Behold, I pour to you knaxzbich, the white [liquid] pressed from the breasts of knakai.

Behold, I mix for you a cheese-cake with red honey, and place it upon your holy altars, Pan of two horns. Behold, I pour for you the blazing flame of Bromius. This, I think, hints at the first milky nourishment of the soul from the twenty-four elements, after which the food is curdled milk, and finally the blood of the vine of the Word, the blazing wine, which teaches the perfecting joy of the discipline. And the active Word is the reaper, which from the first catechesis leads to the growth of a man, to the measure of maturity, inflaming and illuminating the human being. But also a third childish pattern is brought forward: seize, bind, steal, with difficulty. This means, I think, that through the administration of the elements and the cosmos, the path for us must lead to the knowledge of more perfect things, with force and toil securing eternal salvation. For "to seize" means to grasp, and the sphinx indicates the harmony of the cosmos, "with difficulty" indicates the hardship, and "steal" reveals the hidden knowledge of the Lord together with the day. What then? Does not Epigenes, in his work on the poetry of Orpheus, when setting forth the peculiarities in Orpheus, say that the curved-colored rods signify the plows, the warp-threads the furrows, the thread is allegorized as the seed, the tears of Zeus signify the rain, and the Moirai in turn the parts of the moon, the thirtieth, the fifteenth, and the new moon? For this reason Orpheus calls them white-robed, being parts of light. Again, "anthion" is spring because of its nature, "argis" is night because of rest, "Gorgonion" is the moon because of the face in it, and Aphrodite is the time when one must sow, as said by the theologian.

Such also the Pythagoreans hinted at, allegorizing the planets as the dogs of Persephone and the sea as the tear of Cronus. And we could find countless such things said enigmatically by both philosophers and poets, where indeed entire books display the concealed intention of their author, as does Heraclitus’ work On Nature, for which very reason he was called the Obscure. Similar to this book is the theology of Pherecydes of Syros. For the poet Euphorion, and the Aetia of Callimachus, and the Alexandra of Lycophron, and works like these are set as an exercise in exegesis for the children of grammarians. Therefore it is not unlikely that the barbarian philosophy, which we are about to discuss, also prophesies in a concealed manner and through symbols in some places, as has been shown. Such, then, are the things that Moses also enjoins—these common precepts: you shall not eat pig, nor eagle, nor sharp-wing, nor raven. For the pig indicates a pleasure-loving and unclean desire for food and sexual indulgence, gluttonous and polluted licentiousness, ever itching, material and lying in the mire, fattened for slaughter and destruction. Conversely, he permits eating the cloven-footed and the ruminant, indicating, says Barnabas, that one must cleave to those who fear the Lord and to those who meditate on the commandment of the word which they have received in their heart, to those who speak the ordinances of the Lord and keep them, to those who know that meditation is a work of joy and who ruminate the word of the Lord. And what is the cloven-footed? That the righteous man both walks in this world and awaits the holy age. Then he adds:

See how well Moses legislated. But how could those others understand or comprehend these things? We, having rightly understood the commandments, speak as the Lord intended. For this reason he circumcised our ears and our hearts, that we might understand these things. Indeed, when he says, "You shall not eat the eagle, the sharp-winged one, and the kite and the raven," he means, "You shall not cleave to nor be likened to those men who do not know how to procure their food through toil and sweat, but live by plunder and lawlessness." For the eagle signifies plunder, the sharp-winged one injustice and greed, and the raven [signifies these]. And it is written: "With a blameless man you will be blameless, and with a chosen man you will be chosen, and with a crooked man you will become crooked." Therefore it is fitting to cleave to the saints, for those who cleave to them will be sanctified. Hence Theognis writes: "From the good you will learn good things; but if you associate with the bad, you will destroy even the mind you have." And again, when in the Song it says, "For he was gloriously glorified, he threw horse and rider into the sea," it means that the many-legged, bestial, and impulsive passion, desire, together with the charioteer who has mounted it and surrendered the reins to pleasures, he threw into the sea, casting them away into cosmic disorders. Thus also Plato, in his work On the Soul, says that both the charioteer and the rebellious horse (the irrational part, which is divided into spirit and desire) fall down. And Phaethon, through incontinence of the

The myth hints at the fall of the foals. And indeed in the case of Joseph: his brothers, envying him because he was young and foresaw something more in knowledge, stripped off his variegated tunic and, taking it, threw him into a pit, and the pit was empty of water. Having scorned the variegated knowledge of the zealous man from love of learning, or using only the bare faith according to the law, they threw him into a pit empty of water, intending to sell him into Egypt, the desert of the divine word. The pit is empty of knowledge, into which when thrown and having stripped off knowledge, the wise man who had escaped notice seemed naked of knowledge to his brothers. According to another meaning, the variegated garment would be desire, leading into a vast abyss. But if someone opens a pit or quarries, it says, and does not cover it, and a calf or an ass falls in there, the owner of the pit will pay silver and give it to the neighbor, and the dead animal will be his. Here bring me that prophecy: The ox knew its owner and the ass the manger of its master, but Israel did not understand me. So that none of these, having fallen into the knowledge taught by you, becoming incapable of controlling the truth, might disobey and fall away, be safe, it says, in the use of speech, and to those who approach without reason close off the living spring in the depth, but offer drink to those thirsting for the truth. Concealing, then, from those not fit to receive the depth of knowledge, cover the pit.

The lord of the pit, the gnostic himself, will be penalized, it is said, bearing the cause of the one who stumbled or was swallowed up by the magnitude of the word, while still being petty-minded, or having moved the worker to contemplation and withdrawn him through the pretext of makeshift faith. He will give silver, rendering account and recompense to the all-ruling will. This, then, is the type of law and prophets up to John; but he, although having spoken more clearly as if no longer prophesying, but already showing the one proclaimed from the beginning symbolically, yet says, "I am not worthy to untie the strap of the Lord's sandal"; for he confesses he is not worthy to baptize such power, since those who purify must release the soul from the body and its sins as the foot from its bond. Perhaps he also means the final activity of the Savior toward us, the immediate one, that through the presence, concealed by the riddle of prophecy; for he who by autopsy showed the one being prophesied, having announced from afar the approaching presence that was coming into the open, truly loosed the end of the oracles of the economy, having uncovered the meaning of the symbols. And the practices among the Romans concerning wills have received an order, those scales and assaria for justice, the harvestings and the touching of the ears, some so that things may be done justly, others for the division of the price, and one so that the bystander, as if some burden were placed on him, standing may hear and receive the role of mediator. But, as it seems, I have unwittingly digressed further than necessary due to a love of demonstration.

Life will fail me if I set down the multitude of those who philosophize symbolically. For the sake of memory, brevity, and stretching toward the truth, these are some of the writings of barbarian philosophy. They wish that all things belong only to those who frequently approach them and have given proof both in faith and in life, who truly possess philosophy and true theology. Indeed, they intend that we need an interpreter and a guide; for thus they supposed that these things would be more earnestly pursued and would benefit those worthy of them, and that these would be undeceived, receiving them from those who know well. Besides, everything that is revealed through some veil shows the truth as greater and more august, just as the forms that appear through water, and the shapes that through veils add certain suggestions to them. For the illuminations are refutative, besides the fact that obvious things are understood in a single way. So it is possible to take more comprehensive meanings, just as we take them from things spoken with concealment. Since this is so, the inexperienced and ignorant are deceived, but the gnostic comprehends. Indeed, they did not wish all things to be openly exposed to just anyone, nor the goods of wisdom to be made common to those who have not even in a dream purified their soul; for it is not lawful to offer to those who encounter them the things procured with such struggles, nor to relate the mysteries of the word to the profane.

They say, then, that Hipparchus the Pythagorean, having been accused of writing the doctrines of Pythagoras clearly, was expelled from the school and a pillar was erected for him as for a dead man. For this reason, in barbarian philosophy they call those who have fallen away from the doctrines and have subordinated the mind to the passions of the soul "dead." For what participation has justice with lawlessness, according to the divine apostle, or what communion has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Beliar? Or what share has a believer with an unbeliever? For the honors of the Olympians and the dead are separate. Therefore, "Depart from their midst and separate yourselves," says the Lord, "and do not touch the unclean; and I will receive you and will be a father to you, and you will be sons and daughters to me." Not only, then, did the Pythagoreans and Plato conceal many things, but also the Epicureans say that some things are ineffable even by him and that not everyone is permitted to encounter these writings. Moreover, the Stoics say that Zeno the First wrote some things which they do not readily allow their students to read, unless they have previously given proof of whether they philosophize genuinely. And the followers of Aristotle say that some of his writings are esoteric, while others are common and exoteric. But also those who established the mysteries, being philosophers, buried their own doctrines in myths, so that they might not be clear to all. Then, some, having hidden human opinions, prevented the ignorant from encountering them, but was it not more fitting that the truly holy and blessed contemplation of beings be concealed from everyone?

Nevertheless, neither the barbarian philosophy nor the Pythagorean myths, nor even the tales in Plato—such as Er the Armenian in the Republic, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus in the Gorgias, the Tartarus in the Phaedo, Prometheus and Epimetheus in the Protagoras, and the war of the Atlantians and Athenians in the Timaeus—are to be allegorized simply in every name, but only those elements that are significant of the universal meaning; and these we might discover as being indicated through symbols under the veil of allegory. Indeed, the school of Pythagoras and its twofold communion with his associates, calling the many "acoustics" and certain others "mathematicians"—those genuinely devoted to philosophy—hinted that one thing was to be spoken, while another was to be concealed from the many. Perhaps also that twofold form among the Peripatetics, the so-called "endoxic" and "scientific" in arguments, is not free from dividing opinion from both reputation and truth. "Nor shall you be compelled to pluck the flowers of honor from the well-reputed among mortals, on which to speak more than is holy." At any rate, the Ionian Muses explicitly say that the many and the would-be wise follow the songs of the people and use their customs, knowing that many are bad, but few are good; while the best pursue glory. For they choose, it is said, one thing above all: the best choose everlasting glory among mortals, but the many are glutted like cattle, measuring happiness by belly and genitals and the basest parts within us.

The great Parmenides of Elea introduces a twofold teaching of paths, writing somewhat as follows: "The one, the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth; the other, the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true trust." Reasonably, then, the divine apostle says according to revelation: "The mystery was made known to me, as I previously wrote in brief, to which you can, by reading, understand my insight in the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to other generations of the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets." For there is also a learning of the perfect, concerning which, writing to the Colossians, he says: "We do not cease praying and asking for you, that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord in all pleasing, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened in all power according to the might of his glory." And again, according to the economy of God given to me, he says: "To fulfill for you the word of God, the mystery hidden from the ages and from the generations, which has now been manifested to his saints, to whom God wished to make known what the wealth of the glory of this mystery is among the nations.

Thus, the mysteries hidden until the apostles and transmitted by them as received from the Lord (hidden in the Old Testament), which are now revealed to the saints, are one thing; the wealth of the glory of the mystery among the nations, which is faith and hope in Christ, whom he elsewhere calls the foundation, is another. And again, as if emulating to make knowledge manifest, he writes somewhat as follows: admonishing every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ—not simply every man, since then no one would be unbelieving, nor indeed every believer perfect in Christ, but he says every man, meaning the whole man, as it were purified in body and soul, because, since knowledge is not for all, he explicitly adds: united in love and in the full wealth of assurance of understanding, for the recognition of the mystery of God in Christ, in which are all the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Persevere in prayer, being vigilant in it with thanksgiving; thanksgiving occurs not only for the soul and spiritual goods, but also for the body and the goods of the body. And still more clearly he reveals that knowledge is not for all, adding: praying together also for us, that God may open for us the door to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also bound, that I may reveal it as I must speak it. For there were some things transmitted unwritten.

Thus, to the Hebrews, who ought to be teachers because of their time, he says, as though they had grown old in the old covenant, you again have need of being taught what are the elements of the beginning of the oracles of God, and you have become in need of milk and not solid food; for everyone who partakes of milk is inexperienced in the word of righteousness, for he is an infant, entrusted with the first lessons; but solid food is for the perfect, for those who by their habit have their senses trained for the discernment of good and evil. Therefore, let us leave behind the word of the beginning of Christ and be carried on to perfection. But Barnabas also, who himself preached together with the apostle in the ministry to the nations, says, I write to you more simply, that you may understand. Then, going on, he now more clearly sets forth a trace of the gnostic tradition and says: What does the other prophet Moses say to them? Behold, this is what the Lord God says: Enter into the good land, which the Lord God, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, swore, and inherit it, a land flowing with milk and honey. What does knowledge say? Learn. Hope, he says, in Jesus, who is about to be manifested to you in the flesh; for man is earth suffering; for the formation of Adam came from the face of the earth. What then does it say: Into the good land, a land flowing with milk and honey? Blessed is our Lord, brothers, who has placed wisdom and mind in us of his hidden things.

The prophet says: "Who will understand the Lord's parable, unless he is wise and knowledgeable and loves his Lord?" Since it is for few to grasp these things. For it is not out of envy, he says, that the Lord commanded in some gospel: "My mystery is for me and for the sons of my house," making the choice in security and freedom from care, so that the one who has taken what belongs to him from among those he chose may become superior to envy. For he who does not have knowledge of the good is evil, because the good is one, the Father. And ignorance of the Father is death, just as knowledge is eternal life through participation in the power of the incorruptible. And not being corrupted is to partake of divinity, while corruption is brought about by the departure from knowledge of God. Again the prophet says: "And I will give you hidden, dark, invisible treasures, so that you may know that I am the Lord God." Consistent with these things, David also sings: "Behold, you have loved truth; you have revealed to me the hidden and secret things of your wisdom." For day belches forth word to day, the written word openly, and night announces knowledge to night, the knowledge hidden mystically, and there are no words nor speeches whose voices are not heard by God who said: "Will someone do something in secret, and shall I not see it?" For this reason, discipleship is called illumination, which has revealed the hidden things, the teacher alone having opened the lid of the ark, contrary to the poets who say that Zeus took hold of the jar of good things and opened that of evil things.

I know, he says, that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ, the spiritual gift and the gnostic tradition, which he longs to impart to them when present with them (for these things could not be indicated by letter), having called it the fullness of Christ, according to the revelation of a mystery kept silent for eternal times, but now made manifest through prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God for the obedience of faith, made known to all the nations, that is, to those from the nations who believe, that it exists; but to few of these also what these things are in mystery is shown. Reasonably, then, Plato also in his Letters, when discussing God, says: "I must speak to you in riddles, so that if the tablet suffers anything in the folds of the sea or land, the reader may not know." For the God of all, who is beyond every voice and every thought and every conception, could never be committed to writing, being ineffable in his own power. This very thing Plato has also indicated, saying: "Therefore, considering these things, beware lest you ever regret what has now fallen out unworthily; the greatest safeguard is not to write, but to learn by heart; for it is not possible, it is not possible for what is written not to fall out." Similar to these things the holy apostle Paul says, preserving the prophetic and truly ancient concealment, from which the noble doctrines flowed to the Greeks: "We speak wisdom among the perfect, wisdom not of this age nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away; but we speak the wisdom of God in mystery, the hidden wisdom.

Then, going on, he teaches the caution of expounding the discourses to the many in this way: "And I, brothers, was not able to speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to fleshly men, as to infants in Christ; I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able; but not even now are you able; for you are still fleshly." If, then, milk is for infants, and solid food is nourishment for the perfect, as the apostle has said, milk will be understood as catechesis, the first nourishment of the soul, so to speak, and solid food as the epoptic contemplation; these are the flesh and blood of the Word, that is, the comprehension of the divine power and substance. "Taste and see that the Lord is good," he says; for thus he imparts himself to those who partake of such food in a more spiritual manner, when the soul itself already nourishes itself, according to the truth-loving Plato. For the eating and drinking of the divine Word is the knowledge of the divine substance. Hence also Plato says in the second book of the Republic: "Having sacrificed not a pig, but some great and difficult offering, thus one ought to inquire about God." And the apostle writes, "Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed," a truly difficult offering, the Son of God being sanctified for us. Sacrifice is the irrevocable separation from the body and its passions, acceptable to God. This is true piety. And is it not for this reason that philosophy has been called by Socrates a meditation on death? For he who, in thinking, neither employs sight nor draws upon any of the other senses, but encounters things with the pure mind itself, pursues true philosophy.

This, then, is what Pythagoras intends by the five-year silence which he enjoins upon his disciples, that, turning away from the sensible, they might contemplate the divine with the pure mind. The foremost of the Greeks philosophized such things from Moses. For he commands that the victims for the whole burnt offering be flayed and divided into parts, since the gnostic soul, having become bare of the material hide, must be consecrated to the light without bodily nonsense and all the passions which empty and false opinions produce, having stripped off the fleshly desires. But most men, clothing themselves in the mortal like snails, and rolling themselves up like hedgehogs around their own incontinence, think such things about the blessed and incorruptible God as they do about themselves. But it escapes them, even if they happen to be near us, how many things God has given us, of which he himself partakes not, being unbegotten as to generation, needing no food, existing in equality as to growth, and being immortal and ageless as to good old age and easy death. Therefore, let no one suppose that hands and feet and mouth and eyes and entrances and exits and angers and threats are said of God among the Hebrews; by no means, but certain things are allegorized more piously from these names, which we will clarify in due course as the discourse proceeds. "Wisdom is the panacea of all things," writes Callimachus in his epigrams; "One man is wise from another, both long ago and now," says Bacchylides in his Paeans; "For it is not easy to find the gates of unspeakable words.

Isocrates, then, rightly says in his Panathenaicus: "Whom then do I call educated?" and then adds: "First, those who handle well the matters that arise each day and have a judgment that hits upon the right moment and is generally able to aim at what is advantageous; next, those who always associate with others appropriately and justly, bearing the unpleasantness and burdens of others easily and readily, while presenting themselves as light and moderate as possible to those with whom they associate; further, those who master pleasures and are not overly overcome by misfortunes, but conduct themselves manfully in them and in a manner worthy of the nature of which we partake; fourth, and this is the greatest, those who are not corrupted by successes nor lose their composure nor become arrogant, but remain in the order of the right-minded." Then he adds the capstone of his argument: "And those who have the disposition of their soul harmoniously attuned not only to one of these but to all of them, these I say are both prudent and perfect men and possess all the virtues." Do you see how even the Greeks, though not knowing how one ought to know, extol the gnostic life? But what knowledge is, they do not even know in a dream. If, then, it is agreed that knowledge is a rational food for us, truly blessed according to Scripture are those who hunger and thirst for truth, for they will be filled with eternal nourishment. The philosopher of the stage, Euripides, is found to be in harmony with what we have said through these words, somehow hinting at father and son together:

To you, the ruler of all, I bring a libation and a cake, whether you are called Zeus or Hades, you who are pleased. And do you accept from me a sacrifice without means, a full outpouring of all fruits. For the offering without means on our behalf is Christ. And that he speaks without knowing the Saviour himself, he will make clear by adding: For you among the heavenly gods wield the sceptre of Zeus, and among the chthonic gods you share in the rule of Hades. Then he says outright: Send up to the light the souls of the dead for those who wish to learn beforehand from what source they sprang, what is the root of evils, what sacrifice of the blessed ones must be made to find rest from toils. Not unreasonably, then, among the mysteries of the Greeks, the purifications come first, just as among the barbarians the bath. After these come the small mysteries, which have some basis of instruction and preparation for what is to come, while the great mysteries concern the whole, where there is no longer anything left to learn, but only to contemplate and comprehend nature and reality. We might take the purificatory mode as confession, and the contemplative mode as analysis, proceeding to the first intellection, making our beginning from the things underlying it through analysis, having removed from the body its natural qualities, then having stripped away the dimension into depth, then into breadth, and after these into length; for what is left is a point, a monad so to speak having position, and if we strip away its position, a monad is conceived.

If, then, having removed all that attaches to bodies and to so-called incorporeals, we were to cast ourselves into the magnitude of Christ and from there advance into the boundless by holiness, we would somehow approach the conception of the Almighty, not knowing what He is, but what He is not. And we must by no means conceive of shape or motion or rest or throne or place or right or left of the Father of all, even though these things are written; but what each of them intends to signify will be shown in its proper place. Therefore the first cause is not in place, but is above both place and time and name and conception. For this reason Moses says, "Show me yourself," most clearly hinting that God is not teachable by men nor expressible, but is knowable only by the power that comes from Him. For the search is formless and invisible, but the grace of knowledge comes from Him through the Son. And Solomon will bear witness to us most clearly, speaking somewhat as follows: "Wisdom of man is not in me, but God gives me wisdom; and I know holy things." Immediately Moses, allegorizing divine wisdom, named it the tree of life planted in paradise, which paradise can also be the world, in which all things from creation have grown. In this, the Word also blossomed and bore fruit, having become flesh, and gave life to those who tasted of his goodness, since not without the tree has knowledge come to us; for our life was hung for our faith. And Solomon again says: "It is a tree of immortality for those who cling to it." For this reason he says:

Behold, I set before you life and death, to love the Lord God and to walk in his ways and to hear his voice and to believe in life; but if you transgress the ordinances and judgments which I have given you, you will be utterly destroyed; for this is your life and the length of your days, to love the Lord your God. Again: Abraham, coming to the place which God had told him on the third day, looking up, sees the place from afar; for the first day is that through the sight of beautiful things, the second is the soul's desire for the best, and on the third the mind discerns spiritual things, the eyes of the understanding having been opened by the teacher who rose on the third day. And the three days might be a mystery of the seal, through which the true God is believed. From afar, then, he sees the place accordingly; for the country of God is hard to attain, which Plato has called the place of ideas, having taken from Moses that it is a place, as encompassing all things and the whole. And naturally it is seen from afar by

Abraham, because he was in the process of becoming, is also initiated directly through an angel. Hence the apostle says, "Now we see as through a mirror, but then face to face," referring to those pure and incorporeal applications of the mind. It is possible, even in discourse, to divine God, if one attempts, without any of the senses, to advance through reason to that which each thing is, and not to deviate from beings, until, ascending to the things above, one grasps with the mind itself that which is the good. This is, according to Plato, being at the very end of the intelligible. Again, Moses, not permitting altars and precincts to be constructed in many places, but having established one temple of God, proclaimed a single-begotten cosmos, as Basilides says, and the one God, as no longer seems to Basilides. And that the gnostic Moses does not encompass the incomprehensible in space, he dedicated no image in the temple as an object of veneration, indicating that God is invisible and indescribable, but somehow leading the Hebrews to an understanding of God through the honor of the name in the temple. Yet the Word, forbidding the construction of sacred places and all sacrifices, hints that the Almighty is not in any place, through what it says: "What house will you build for me?" says the Lord. "The heaven is my throne," and so forth. And similarly concerning sacrifices: "I do not want the blood of bulls and the fat of lambs," and all that the Holy Spirit forbids through the prophet. So Euripides also beautifully agrees with these things, writing: "What house, fashioned by craftsmen, could enclose the divine form within the folds of walls?

And concerning sacrifices he likewise says: "For God, if he is truly God, needs nothing; wretched are the words of the poets." For God did not make the world out of need, so that he might reap honors from men and from the other gods and daimons, as Plato says, like some revenue derived from creation, receiving from us smoke, and from gods and daimons their proper services. Therefore Paul most instructively says in the Acts of the Apostles: "God who made the world and everything in it, being lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in hand-made temples, nor is he served by human hands as though needing something, but himself gives to all breath and life and everything." And Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, says in his book On the State that one should neither build temples nor make statues; for no construction is worthy of the gods, and he does not shrink from writing these very words: "There will be no need to build temples; for one must not consider a temple to be something of great value and holy; no work of builders and craftsmen is of great value and holy." Naturally, then, Plato also, knowing the cosmos to be the temple of God, designated for the citizens a place in the city where the images were to be dedicated, but forbade any individual to possess statues of gods. "Let no one," he says, "otherwise consecrate sanctuaries to the gods; for gold and silver, both in other cities and in private hands and in temples, are an invidious possession; ivory, being a body from which the soul has departed, is not a pure offering; and iron and bronze are instruments of war.

Let anyone dedicate whatever they wish, whether of wood or of stone, as a single piece, for the common temples. Reasonably, then, in the great epistle he says: "For it is not at all like the other subjects of study, but from much association arising concerning the matter itself and from living together, suddenly, like a fire leaping forth, a light kindled in the soul, once born, thereafter nourishes itself." Are not these things similar to what was said by the prophet Sophonias? "And a spirit took me up and carried me into the fifth heaven, and I beheld angels called lords, and their diadem placed in the holy spirit, and the throne of each of them was seven times brighter than the rising sun, dwelling in temples of salvation and hymning God, the ineffable most high." For to find the father and maker of this universe is a task, and having found him, to declare him to all is impossible. "For it is not at all like the other subjects of study," says the lover of truth, Plato. For he had heard well that the all-wise Moses, going up into the mountain (for the sake of holy contemplation to the summit of the intelligible), necessarily distinguishes himself, not allowing the whole people to go up with him. And when the scripture says, "Moses entered into the darkness where God was," this signifies to those able to understand that God is invisible and ineffable, and darkness is truly the disbelief and ignorance of the many, which stands in the way of the light of truth. Orpheus the theologian, having been benefited from this, said: "One there is, self-complete, all things are the offspring of one" (or "have grown," for it is written both ways), and he adds: "No one of mortals sees him, but he himself sees all.

He says more clearly: "But I do not see him; for a cloud is fixed about him. For all mortals have mortal pupils in their eyes, small, since flesh and bones have grown into them." The apostle will bear witness to what has been said, for I know that he speaks of a man snatched up in Christ as far as the third heaven, and from there into paradise, who heard unspeakable words, which it is not permitted for a man to utter, thus hinting at the ineffability of God, not adding "it is not permitted" by law and fear of some command, but indicating that the divine is unutterable by human power, since it begins to be spoken beyond the third heaven, as is right, by those who there initiate the chosen souls. For I know also from Plato (for the examples from barbarian philosophy, being many, are now set aside by my writing, awaiting the time according to the first promises) that many heavens are conceived. At any rate, in the Timaeus, being at a loss whether to think there are more worlds or this one alone, he is indifferent about names, calling world and heaven synonymously. The wording is as follows: "Whether then have we rightly spoken of one heaven, or would it be more correct to speak of many and infinite? One, if it is to have been fashioned according to the model." But also in the Epistle of the Romans to the Corinthians it is written: "an ocean boundless to men, and the worlds after it." Consequently, again, the noble apostle exclaims: "O depth of wealth and wisdom and knowledge of God!

And perhaps this is what the prophet was hinting at when he commanded to make hidden loaves of unleavened bread, indicating that the sacred word concerning the unbegotten and his powers must truly be concealed from the initiate. The apostle, confirming these things in the Epistle to the Corinthians, has spoken plainly: "We speak wisdom among the perfect, wisdom not of this world nor of the rulers of this world who are passing away; but we speak the wisdom of God in mystery, the hidden wisdom." And again elsewhere he says: "For the knowledge of the mystery of God in Christ, in which are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden." Our Savior himself seals these things, speaking somewhat as follows: "To you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of heaven." And again the Gospel says, as our Savior told the apostles the word in mystery; for the prophecy concerning him says: "He will open his mouth in parables and will bring forth what has been hidden from the foundation of the world." And already through the parable concerning the leaven, the Lord reveals the concealment; for he says: "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, until the whole was leavened." Either the tripartite soul is saved through obedience because of the spiritual power hidden in it according to faith, or that the power of the word given to us, being intense and strong, draws to itself, hiddenly and invisibly, everyone who receives it and acquires it within himself, and brings his whole system into unity. Most wisely, then, these things are written by Solon concerning

of God. But the hidden measure of prudence is most difficult to conceive, which alone holds the limits of all things. For the divine, as the Acragantine poet says, cannot be approached so as to be reached by our eyes or grasped by our hands, nor does the greatest highway of persuasion fall into the mind of men. And John the apostle says: No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, that one explained, naming the invisible and ineffable the bosom of God. Some have therefore called him depth, as encompassing and holding in his bosom all things, unattainable and infinite. Indeed, this discourse about God is most difficult to handle. For since the beginning of every matter is hard to find, the first and most ancient beginning is certainly hard to demonstrate, which is the cause for all other things both of coming to be and, having come to be, of being. For how could that be expressed which is neither genus nor difference nor species nor individual nor number, nor yet an accident nor that to which something accedes? Nor could one rightly call him a whole, for whole is predicated of magnitude, and he is the father of the wholes. Nor should one speak of parts of him, for the one is indivisible, and therefore also infinite, not understood as impassable, but as without extension and having no limit, and hence shapeless and nameless.

even if we name it at some time, calling it not properly either one or the good or mind or being itself or father or god or creator or lord, we do not speak as uttering its name, but from perplexity we use good names, so that the mind may have something to rest upon, not wandering about other things. For not each single one is indicative of God, but all together are indicative of the power of the Almighty; for the things said are either from the properties belonging to them or from their relation to one another, but none of these can be apprehended concerning God. Nor is it grasped by demonstrative knowledge; for this is composed of prior and more known things, but nothing pre-exists the unbegotten. It remains, then, to conceive the unknown by divine grace and by the word from him alone, as Luke in the Acts of the Apostles records Paul saying: "Men of Athens, I see that you are in every way more superstitious. For going around and reviewing your objects of worship, I found even an altar on which was inscribed: 'To an unknown god.' So whom you worship in ignorance, this one I proclaim to you." Everything, therefore, that falls under a name is begotten, whether they wish it or not. Either the father himself draws to himself everyone who has lived purely and has arrived at an understanding of the blessed and imperishable nature, or the free will in us, having arrived at knowledge of the good, leaps and jumps beyond the limits, as the gymnasts say, but not without the exceptional grace is the soul winged and raised and lifted up above the things above, putting off and giving back everything heavy to its kindred.

Plato also says in the Meno that virtue is god-given, as the following words show: "From this reasoning, then, Meno, virtue appears to us to come by divine dispensation to those to whom it comes." Does it not seem to you that he hints at the gnostic disposition, which does not come to all, as a divine portion? And he adds more clearly: "If now in this whole argument we have inquired well, virtue would be neither by nature nor teachable, but coming by divine dispensation, not without mind, to those to whom it comes." Wisdom, then, is god-given, being a power of the Father; it urges our free will, accepts faith, and rewards the understanding of choice with the highest communion. And now I will present Plato himself to you, directly deeming it necessary to trust the children of God: for in the Timaeus, having made his discourse about visible and generated gods, he says concerning the other daimons, to speak of and know their origin is greater than we can manage, but we must trust those who have spoken before, who are offspring of gods, as they said, clearly in some way.

...their own ancestors. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve the children of the gods, even if they speak without probable and necessary demonstrations. I do not think it possible for a clearer testimony to be borne by the Greeks to our Savior and those anointed for prophecy, the former being proclaimed children of God, the latter being the genuine Son, that they are true witnesses concerning divine matters; therefore he added that one must believe them, since they are inspired. And if someone speaks more tragically, it is not that Zeus proclaimed these things, but let him know that God himself proclaimed the Scriptures through his Son. The one who announces his own things is trustworthy, since the Lord says that no one knows the Father except the Son and the one to whom the Son reveals him. So one must believe him, even according to Plato, even if he proclaims and speaks without probable and necessary demonstrations, through both the Old and the New Testament. For if you do not believe, says the Lord, you will die in your sins; and conversely, the one who believes has eternal life. Blessed, then, are all who trust in him. Trust is more than faith; for when one knows that the Son of God is our teacher, he trusts that his teaching is true. And just as learning, according to Empedocles, increases the mind, so trust in the Lord increases faith. We say, then, that it belongs to the same people to blame philosophy and to attack faith, to praise injustice and to consider the life according to desire happy. Now faith, even if it is a voluntary assent of the soul, is a worker of good things and a foundation of right action.

Even if Aristotle, in his technical discourse, teaches that "making" is assigned to both irrational animals and inanimate things, while "acting" belongs to humans alone, let him correct those who call the God of all things "maker." He says that the practical is either good or necessary. Injustice, then, is not good (for no one does injustice except for the sake of something else), and nothing necessary is voluntary; but injustice is voluntary, so it is not necessary. The good differ from the base most of all in their choices and their noble desires. For every depravity of the soul is accompanied by incontinence, and he who acts through passion acts through incontinence and depravity. It occurs to me, then, at every point to marvel at that divine saying: "Amen, amen, I say to you: he who does not enter through the door into the sheepfold, but climbs in from elsewhere, that one is a thief and a robber; but he who enters through the door is a shepherd of the sheep; for him the doorkeeper opens." Then, explaining, the Lord says: "I am the door of the sheep." Therefore, it is necessary that those who have learned the truth through Christ be saved, even if they happen to have philosophized in Greek philosophy. For now it has been clearly shown what was not known in other generations to the sons of men: now it has been revealed. For an impression of one God, the Almighty, was always natural among all right-thinking people, and most, even those not completely shameless toward the truth, partook of the eternal beneficence according to divine providence.

Xenocrates of Chalcedon, at any rate, does not despair of the concept of the divine even in irrational animals, while Democritus, even if unwilling, will admit it through the consistency of his doctrines; for he has made the same images fall upon both humans and irrational animals from the divine substance. Far be it that the human being should be without a share of divine conception, since he is recorded to have received the breath in generation, having partaken of a purer substance than the other animals. Hence the followers of Pythagoras say that intellect comes to humans by divine portion, just as Plato and Aristotle agree. But we say that the Holy Spirit is breathed in additionally to the believer, while the followers of Plato settle intellect as an emanation of divine portion in the soul, and the soul in the body. For it is said openly through Joel, one of the twelve prophets: "And it shall be after this, I will pour out from my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy." But the spirit is not as a part of God in each of us. How this distribution occurs and what the Holy Spirit is will be shown by us in the works On Prophecy and On the Soul. But the depths of knowledge are to be hidden, as Heraclitus says, "good disbelief," for disbelief escapes being known. The following must also be added, and the Greek theft from barbarian philosophy must now be presented more clearly. For the Stoics say that God is body and spirit in substance, just as indeed the soul is. All these things you will find directly in the scriptures.

Do not think now of their allegories as the gnostic truth hands them down, if they show one thing while, like skilled wrestlers, they indicate another. But some say that God pervades all substance, while we call him only creator and creator by word. They were led astray by what is said in Wisdom: "It pervades and goes through all things because of its purity," since they did not understand that this is said of the wisdom first-created by God. Yes, they say, but the philosophers posit matter among the principles—both the Stoics and Plato and Pythagoras, and also Aristotle the Peripatetic—and not a single principle. Let them know, then, that what they call matter is said by them to be without quality and without form, and more boldly already said by Plato to be non-being. And if he knew most mysteriously the one truly existing principle, in the Timaeus he says in these very words: "Now then, let our account be as follows: concerning all things, whether the principle or principles or however one thinks about these, it is not now to be spoken, for no other reason than that it is difficult to declare one's opinions in the present mode of exposition." Besides, that prophetic phrase "and the earth was invisible and unfurnished" has provided them with starting points for material substance. Indeed, for Epicurus, the intrusion of the spontaneous came from not following the text, whence "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." And for Aristotle, it came from this psalm to bring providence down as far as the moon: "Lord, your mercy is in the heaven and your truth as far as the clouds.

For the revelation of the prophetic mysteries had not yet been disclosed before the Lord’s coming. Moreover, the punishments after death and the penalty through fire were appropriated from the barbarian philosophy by all poetic inspiration, and also by Greek philosophy. Plato, at any rate, in the last book of the Republic, says in these very words: “There, then, fierce men, fiery to behold, standing by, listening to the voice, took some aside and led them; but Aridaeus and the others they bound hand and foot and head, threw them down, flayed them, and dragged them along the road outside, carding them on thorny bushes.” For the fiery men are intended to signify angels, who take and punish the unjust. “He who makes,” he says, “his angels spirits and his ministers a burning fire.” It follows from these things that the soul is immortal; for that which is punished or disciplined, being in a state of perception, lives, even if it is said to suffer. What? Does not Plato also know rivers of fire and the depth of the earth, poetically naming Tartarus what is called Gehenna by the barbarians, and introducing Cocytus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, and suchlike places of punishment for the sake of discipline? And concerning the small and the least, he does not hesitate to write, indicating the angels who see God, and also the oversight that comes to us through the presiding angels: “Since all souls had chosen their lives, as they had obtained by lot, they approached Lachesis in order, and she to each one, whom

He chose a guardian spirit to accompany him through life and to fulfill his choices. Perhaps even Socrates' daimonion hinted at something of this sort. Indeed, the philosophers, having taken from Moses the doctrine that the world is created, taught it. And Plato himself has plainly said: "Was it, having no beginning of generation, or has it come into being, having begun from some beginning? It has come into being; for being visible it is tangible, and being tangible it has body." And again, whenever he says, "Now the maker and father of this universe it is a task to find," he not only showed that the world is created, but also indicates that it has come into being from him as a son, and that he is called its father, as if it came into being from him alone and subsisted from non-being. The Stoics also hold that the world is created. As for the devil, the ruler of the demons, who is talked about by barbarian philosophy, Plato in the tenth book of the Laws says that he is a maleficent soul, in these words: "A soul governing and dwelling in all things that are moved—must we not say that it also governs the heaven? Why not? One or more? More, I will answer for you. Let us posit at least two, the beneficent one and the one capable of producing the opposite." Similarly, in the Phaedrus he writes this: "There are indeed other evils, but some spirit has mixed pleasure with most of them at the immediate moment." And again, in the tenth book of the Laws, he plainly shows that apostolic saying: "Our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the spiritual forces in the heavens," writing somewhat as follows:

Since we have conceded to ourselves that the heaven exists full of many goods, and that there are also opposites, though more of the former, such a conflict, we say, is immortal and requires a marvelous guard. Again, barbarian philosophy knows the intelligible cosmos and the sensible cosmos, the one as archetype, the other as image of what is called the paradigm; and it assigns the former to the monad, as intelligible, and the sensible to the hexad; for among the Pythagoreans the hexad is called marriage, as a generative number. And in the monad it constitutes an invisible heaven, a formless earth, and intelligible light; for it says, "In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth; and the earth was invisible." Then it adds, "And God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light." But in the sensible cosmogony it creates a solid heaven (and the solid is sensible), a visible earth, and light that is seen. Does it not seem to you that from this Plato leaves behind ideas of living beings in the intelligible world and creates the sensible forms according to the intelligible kinds? Reasonably, then, Moses says that the body is molded from earth, which Plato calls the earthly tabernacle, and that the rational soul is breathed in from above by God into the face. For here they say the ruling part is established, interpreting the entry of the soul through the sense organs as the entrance in the case of the first-formed man, for which reason man came to be according to image and likeness. For the image of God is the divine and royal Logos, the impassible man, and the image of an image is the human mind.

If you wish to take up the assimilation under another name, you would find in Moses the sequence called divine; for he says: "Walk behind your God and keep his commandments." Followers and, I think, servants of God are all the virtuous. Hence the Stoics have said that the end of philosophy is to live in accordance with nature, and Plato that it is assimilation to God (as we set forth in the second Stromateus); and Zeno the Stoic, taking from Plato, who took from the barbarian philosophy, says that all the good are friends of one another. For Socrates says in the Phaedrus that it is not fated for evil to be friend to evil, nor for good not to be friend to good, which he also demonstrated sufficiently in the Lysis, that in injustice and wickedness friendship could never be preserved. And the Athenian Stranger similarly says that an action is friendly and in accordance with God and has one ancient principle, when like is friendly to like that is moderate, while immoderate things are friendly neither to immoderate nor to moderate things. God would be the measure of all things for us. Then, going on, he adds again: For every good man is like a good man, and accordingly is like God and is friend to every good man and to God. Having reached this point, I recalled that at the end of the Timaeus he says that one must assimilate the understanding to the object understood according to the ancient nature, and having assimilated it, one has the end of the best life set before man by the gods for both the present and the future time. For these things are equivalent to those: the seeker will not cease until he finds.

Having found, he will be amazed; having been amazed, he will rule; having ruled, he will rest. What then? Are not those sayings of Thales dependent on these? That God is glorified unto the ages of ages and that he is called the knower of hearts is plainly interpreted by us. For when Thales was asked what the divine is, he said, that which has neither beginning nor end. And when another inquired whether the divine is unaware of anything a man does, he said, How could it be, since it is not even unaware of what he thinks? Indeed, barbarian philosophy knows only the good as noble and virtue as sufficient for happiness, whenever it says: Behold, I have set before your eyes the good and the evil, life and death; choose life. For it calls the good life and the choice of it noble, and evil the choice of the opposite. The end of both good and life is to become a lover of God; for this is your life and your long-livedness, to love what is true. But those matters are clearer. For the Savior, having commanded to love God and one's neighbor, says that on these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets. The Stoics prattle these doctrines, and before them Socrates in the Phaedrus prays: O Pan and other gods, grant that I may be beautiful within. And in the Theaetetus he says explicitly: For he who speaks well is noble and good. And in the Protagoras he admits that it is more beautiful to meet Alcibiades than the companions of Protagoras, if indeed the wisest is the most beautiful; for he said that virtue is the beauty of the soul, and conversely that vice is the ugliness of the soul.

Antipater the Stoic, then, having composed three books on the theme that according to Plato alone the beautiful is good, demonstrates that also according to him virtue is sufficient for happiness, and he adduces many other doctrines in agreement with the Stoics. And to Aristobulus, who lived under Ptolemy Philometor, whom the compiler of the epitome of the Maccabaean books mentions, substantial books have been written, through which he demonstrates that the Peripatetic philosophy is dependent on the law of Moses and the other prophets. And let these matters stand thus. That we are brothers, as being of the one God and of one teacher, Plato also somewhere seems to call us, in some such way: "For you are all brothers in the city," as we shall say to them in mythologizing, "but the god, in molding, mixed gold into the generation of those of you who are capable of ruling, wherefore they are most honorable; silver into the auxiliaries; and iron and bronze into the farmers and the other craftsmen." Whence he says it has come about that they are compelled to welcome and love these for the things of which there is knowledge, and those for the things of which there is opinion. For perhaps he is prophesying this elect nature that yearns for knowledge, unless, positing three natures, he is delineating three constitutions, as some have supposed, and that of the Jews is the silver one, that of the Greeks the third, and that of the Christians, into which the royal gold, the Holy Spirit, is mixed. And indicating the life of Christians, he writes verbatim in the Theaetetus: "Let us speak, then, about the foremost. For why should one speak of those who spend their time poorly in philosophy? These, you see, know neither the way to the marketplace nor where...

a court or council or any other common assembly of the city, but they neither see nor hear written laws and decrees. And pursuits of clubs and associations and revels with flute-girls do not even in a dream occur to them. Whether someone has been born well or badly in the city, or what evil has befallen someone from his ancestors, escapes them more than the so-called measures of the sea. And they do not even know that they do not know, but in reality his body lies and sojourns there, while he himself flies, according to Pindar, "beneath the earth and above the heaven," stargazing and investigating every nature in every way. Again, to the saying of the Lord, "Let your yes be yes and your no no," that must be likened: but for me to allow a falsehood and to obliterate the truth is in no way lawful. And with the prohibition concerning swearing, this saying in the tenth book of the Laws agrees: "Let praise and oath be absent from everything." And altogether, Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato, saying they hear the voice of God, by accurately observing that the construction of the universe was made by God and is continuously sustained, have heard Moses saying, "He spoke, and it came to be," describing the word of God as deed. And concerning the formation of man from clay, the philosophers constantly declare the body to be earthy; and Homer does not hesitate to use as a curse: "But may you all become water and earth," just as Isaiah says, "and trample them as mud." And Callimachus writes explicitly:

That was the year in which the winged creature, the creature in the sea, and the four-footed creature spoke just as the Promethean clay did. And again the same one said, "If Prometheus molded you and you did not come from another clay," and Hesiod, concerning Pandora, says, "And he ordered Hephaestus, the famous one, as quickly as possible to mix earth with water and to place in man voice and mind." The Stoics define fire as a technical fire proceeding in a path toward generation, nature. But fire and light are allegorized as God and his Word by Scripture. What then? Does not Homer also, paraphrasing the separation of water from earth and the visible revelation of the dry land, say concerning Tethys and Oceanus, "For a long time now they have held themselves apart from each other's bed and love"? Again, the most learned among the Greeks attribute power in all things to God. Epicharmus, who was a Pythagorean, says, "Nothing escapes the divine; you must know this: it is our overseer, and nothing is impossible for God." And the lyric poet says, "But for God it is possible to raise up from black night an undefiled light, and to cover with dark cloud the pure radiance of day" (he says that only God, who is able to make night when day is present, is this God). And Aratus, in the work entitled Phaenomena, having said, "Let us begin from Zeus," says, "We never, men, leave him unspoken; all streets are full of Zeus, all marketplaces of men, the sea and harbors are full; in everything we all have need of Zeus." He adds, "For we are also his race," that is, his creation, "and he, gentle, gives favorable signs to men and rouses the peoples to their works.

For he himself fixed these signs in the sky, distinguishing the stars; and he considered the stars for the year, which especially, being well-formed, would signify the seasons to men, so that everything might grow in due order; and they always propitiate him as first and last. Hail, father, great marvel, great boon to men. And before this, Homer, in his description of the cosmos on the shield made by Hephaestus, says, following Moses, "On it he wrought earth, on it heaven, on it sea, on it all the constellations with which the sky is crowned." For Zeus, celebrated through poems and prose writings, refers the concept to God. Already, so to speak, in the light of day, Democritus writes that there are some few men who, stretching out their hands to what we Greeks now call the air, say, "All things are spoken of as Zeus, and this one knows all and gives and takes away, and this one is king of all." More mystically, Pindar of Boeotia, being a Pythagorean, hands down that "one is the race of men, one the race of gods, and we both breathe from one mother," matter, and one is the craftsman of these, whom he calls the father, the supreme artisan, who has granted advancements according to worth toward divinity. For I pass over Plato. He clearly appears in the letter to Erastus and Coriscus to indicate father and son, somehow from the Hebrew scriptures, urging verbatim: "Swearing with earnestness not unmusical and with the play that is sister to earnestness, by the god who is cause of all things and by the father of the leader and cause, the lord, whom, if you philosophize rightly, you will know.

The speech in the Timaeus calls the father the creator, speaking somewhat as follows: "Gods of gods, of whom I am father and creator of works." So that when he says, "Around the king of all are all things, and for his sake are all things, and he is the cause of all that is beautiful; second around the second things, and third around the third things," I for my part understand nothing other than that the holy Trinity is indicated: for the third is the Holy Spirit, and the Son is the second, through whom all things came into being according to the will of the Father. And the same author, in the tenth book of the Republic, mentions Er the Armenian, of the race of the Pamphylians, who is Zoroaster; indeed Zoroaster himself writes: "These things I, Zoroaster the Armenian, of the race of the Pamphylian, having died in war, wrote, having learned them from the gods when I was in Hades." This Zoroaster, Plato says, lay on the pyre for twelve days and came back to life. Perhaps, then, he hints at the resurrection, or perhaps at those things, that through the twelve zodiac signs the path for souls to the assumption takes place, and he himself says that the same descent into generation occurs. By this one must understand that the labors of Heracles also became twelve, after which the soul obtains release from this whole world. I do not pass over Empedocles either, who in a physical manner thus mentions the assumption of all things, as a transformation into the substance of fire that will one day take place. And Heraclitus of Ephesus most clearly holds this opinion, having judged that one cosmos is eternal, and another is perishable, knowing that the one according to the ordering is not other than that one in a certain state.

But that he knew the world, individually qualified from the whole of substance, to be eternal, he makes clear by speaking thus: "This same world of all things neither any god nor any man made, but it always was and is and will be ever-living fire kindling in measures and being extinguished in measures." And that he also taught it to be both generated and perishable, the following words indicate: "Fire's turnings: first sea, and of sea half is earth, half is lightning-bolt." For he means, in effect, that fire, by the governing reason and god, is turned through air into the moist, which is like the seed of the world-order, and this he calls sea; and from this in turn come earth and heaven and the things contained within. And how it is again taken up and set on fire, he clearly shows through these words: "Sea is dispersed and measured into the same proportion as was before it became earth." Similarly concerning the other elements, the same. The most eminent of the Stoics teach things similar to this concerning the conflagration and the administration of the world and the individually qualified world and man and the persistence of our souls. And again, Plato in the seventh book of the Republic has called the day here night (on account, I think, of the world-rulers of this darkness), and sleep and death the descent of the soul into the body, in accordance with Heraclitus. And did not the Spirit through David foretell this concerning the Savior, saying: "I slept and slumbered; I awoke, because the Lord will support me"?

For he allegorizes not only the resurrection of Christ as an awakening from sleep, but also the descent of the Lord into the flesh as sleep. The same Savior himself enjoins: "Watch," that is, practice living and endeavor to separate the soul from the body. And Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, prophesies the Lord's day through these words: "But when for each of those in the meadow seven days have passed, they must arise and go from there on the eighth day, and arrive on the fourth day." Now the meadow is to be understood as the sphere of the fixed stars, a gentle and pleasant region and the place of the holy ones; and the seven days as each motion of the seven planets and every productive art hastening toward the end of rest. The journey after the wandering stars leads to heaven, that is, the eighth motion and day. And he says the souls depart on the fourth day, indicating the journey through the four elements. But not only the Hebrews but also the Greeks know the seventh day as sacred, on which the whole world of all living and growing things revolves. Hesiod speaks of it thus: "First the fourth and the seventh, a sacred day." And again: "On the seventh again the bright light of the sun." And Homer: "On the seventh then came the sacred day." And "The seventh was sacred." And again: "It was the seventh day, and all was accomplished." And again: "On the seventh dawn we left the stream of Acheron." And indeed the poet Callimachus writes: "On the seventh dawn all things were accomplished." And again: "The seventh is among good things, and the seventh is birth." And: "The seventh is among the first, and the seventh is perfect." And:

Seven are all things wrought in the starry heaven, appearing in cycles as the years come round. And the elegies of Solon greatly extol the hebdomad. What then? Does not Plato, almost prophesying the salvific economy, say something similar to the scripture that says, "Let us remove the just man from us, because he is troublesome to us," in the second book of the Republic, speaking thus: "The just man, being in such a state, will be scourged, racked, bound, have his eyes burned out, and finally, after suffering every evil, will be impaled." And the Socratic Antisthenes, paraphrasing that prophetic utterance, "To what have you likened me?" says the Lord, "God is like no one; therefore no one can learn him from an image." And Xenophon the Athenian says similar things verbatim: "He who shakes all things and keeps them still is manifest as something great and powerful, but what form he is, is invisible; nor does the sun, which seems all-bright, permit one to look at it, but if anyone shamelessly gazes at it, it destroys his sight." For what flesh can see with its eyes the heavenly and true immortal god who dwells in the pole? But not even can men, being mortal, stand opposite the rays of the sun, as the Sibyl foretold. Well then, Xenophanes of Colophon, teaching that God is one and incorporeal, adds: "One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way like mortals in body or in thought." And again: "But mortals think that gods are born, and have their own clothing, voice, and form." And again:

But if oxen or lions had hands, so as to draw with their hands and accomplish the works that men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and they would make their bodies of the same kind as their own bodies." Let us then listen again to Bacchylides the lyric poet speaking about the divine: "They are untamed by ever-constant diseases and without wound, in no way like men." And Cleanthes the Stoic, in some poem about God, has written this: "You ask me what the good is like? Listen then: ordered, just, holy, pious, self-controlled, useful, beautiful, fitting, severe, straightforward, always beneficial, fearless, painless, profitable, without grief, helpful, pleasing, safe, friendly, honorable, consistent, *** glorious, unpretentious, careful, gentle, vehement, enduring, blameless, always remaining." And the same author, in what is left unsaid, attacking the idolatry of the many, adds: "Every man is unfree who looks to reputation, as if he will obtain something good from it." Therefore we must not conceive of the divine according to the opinion of the many. For I do not think that secretly, imitating the shapes of a wicked light, Zeus came to your bed like a man, Amphion says to Antiope. And Sophocles writes straightforwardly: "For Zeus married this man's mother, not in the form of gold nor clad in a swan's feather, as he bedewed the Pleuronian maiden, but as a whole man." Then, going on, he added: "Swiftly he stood by the nuptial steps, the adulterer." Concerning which, he narrates even more clearly the incontinence of the mythologized Zeus in some such way:

But he who has touched neither feast nor lustral water goes to bed with a wounded heart; and all that night he was distressed. Let these things be dismissed to the follies of the theaters. Directly, Heraclitus says: "Of this account which holds forever, men become uncomprehending, both before they hear and after they have heard for the first time." The lyric poet Melanippides, singing, says: "Hear me, O father, wonder of mortals, ruler of the ever-living soul." And the great Parmenides, as Plato says in the Sophist, writes something like this concerning the divine: "Much indeed, as it is ungenerated and indestructible, whole, only-begotten, and unshaken, and ungenerated." But also Hesiod himself says: "He is king and lord of all the immortals; no other contends with your power." Indeed, even tragedy, drawing away from idols, teaches us to look up to heaven. Sophocles, as Hecataeus, who compiled the histories in his work Against Abraham and the Egyptians, says, directly exclaims on the stage: "One in truth, one is god, who made the heaven and the broad earth, the bright swell of the sea, and the force of the winds. But mortals, many in heart wandering, have set up as consolation for our sufferings images of gods from stone, or bronze, or gold-wrought, or ivory figures; and to these we offer sacrifices and wretched festivals, crowning them, and thus we think we are pious." Euripides, on the same stage, in his tragedies, says: "Do you see this high, infinite aether, holding the earth in its moist embrace? Consider this Zeus, think this god." And in the drama Peirithous, the same poet also writes these tragic lines:

you the self-grown, who have woven the nature of all things in the ethereal whirl, around whom light, and around again dark night of changeful hue, and the unnumbered host of stars ceaselessly dance in a circle. For here he has called the self-grown the creative mind, and the following words are arranged concerning the cosmos, in which are also the opposites of light and darkness. And Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, speaks very reverently concerning God: Zeus is aether, Zeus is earth, Zeus is heaven; Zeus is all things and that which is above them. I know that Plato also bears witness to Heraclitus writing: The one wise thing alone is said and is not willing and is willing to be called by the name of Zeus. And again: Law is to obey the counsel of one. And if you wish to refer to that saying, "Let him who has ears to hear, hear," you would find it somehow indicated here by the Ephesian: The uncomprehending when they hear are like the deaf; the report bears witness for them that they are present but absent. But do you desire to hear directly and from the Greeks also of one first principle? Timaeus of Locri in his physical treatise will bear witness for me word for word as follows: There is one first principle of all things, ungenerated; for if it were generated, it would no longer be a first principle, but that from which the first principle was generated. For from there the true opinion has flowed: Hear, he says, O Israel, the Lord your God is one, and you shall serve him alone. This, behold, is clear and unerring for all, as the Sibyl says. And already Homer appears to speak of father and son through these words, as if by a fortunate prophecy, saying: If indeed no one forces you, being alone, but there is no way to escape the sickness of great Zeus. For the Cyclopes do not heed aegis-bearing Zeus. And before this

Orpheus, borne along against the subject at hand, has said: "Son of great Zeus, father of aegis-bearing Zeus." Xenocrates of Chalcedon, calling one the highest Zeus and the other the youngest, leaves an indication of father and son. And most paradoxically, Homer appears to know the divine while introducing the gods as subject to human passions—whom not even so does Epicurus revere. He says, then: "Why do you pursue me, son of Peleus, with swift feet, you yourself being mortal, a god immortal? Do you not yet know that I am a god?" For he has made clear that the divine is not to be captured by a mortal nor comprehended either by feet or by hands or by eyes or at all by the body. "To what have you likened the Lord? Or to what likeness have you likened him?" says Scripture. "Did a carpenter make an image, or a goldsmith, having melted gold, gild it?" And so forth. The comic poet Epicharmus clearly speaks about the Word in his *Republic* somewhat as follows: "Human life greatly needs reasoning and number; we live by number and reasoning; for these preserve mortals." Then he explicitly adds: "The Word governs humans, preserves them according to their manner." Then: "If there is reasoning in a human, there is also divine Word; the one in a human is naturally concerned with the reversals of life; but the divine Word accompanies all arts, always teaching them itself what it is beneficial to do; for a human did not discover the arts; the god brings these." And: "The human word is naturally derived from the divine Word." Indeed, through Isaiah the Spirit cries out: "What is the multitude of sacrifices to me?" says the Lord.

I am full of burnt offerings of rams and fat of lambs and blood of bulls; I do not want them. And after a little, adding: Wash yourselves, become pure, remove the wickedness from your souls. And in addition to these, Menander the comic writer writes in these very words: If someone, Pamphilus, offering a sacrifice of a multitude of bulls or goats, or by Zeus of other such things, or constructions, making golden or purple cloaks, or figurines of ivory or emerald, thinks he is making the god well-disposed, that man is deceived and has empty wits. For a man must be useful by nature, not corrupting virgins and committing adultery, stealing and slaying for the sake of money. Do not even desire the thread of a needle, Pamphilus; for the god sees you, being present nearby. I am a god approaching, and not a god from afar; or will a man do something in secret and I not see it? He says through Jeremiah. And again Menander, paraphrasing that scripture, "Sacrifice a sacrifice of righteousness and hope in the Lord," writes something like this: Do not ever desire, dearest one, another's needle; for the god delights in righteous works and not in unrighteous ones, and he allows the one who labors to raise up his own life, plowing the earth night and day. Sacrifice to the god continually, being righteous, not being splendid in your cloaks as in your heart. If you hear thunder, do not flee, having nothing on your own conscience, master; for the god sees you, being present nearby. While you are still speaking, the scripture says, I will say: Behold, I am here. Diphilus the comic writer again discusses something similar about the judgment.

Do you think that the dead, Niceratus, having partaken of every luxury in life, have escaped the divine as though unnoticed? There is an eye of Justice which sees all things. For we believe that in Hades there are two paths: one for the righteous, and another for the impious. And: If the earth will cover both (he says) for all time, seize and go, steal, defraud, stir up trouble; do not be deceived: there is judgment even in Hades, which the god, the master of all, will execute, whose name is fearful, and I would not even utter it; he who gives length of life to sinners. If any mortal thinks that by doing evil under the sun he has escaped the notice of the gods, he seems wicked and, even while seeming, is caught, whenever Justice, being at leisure, overtakes him. See, all of you who think there is no god. There is, there is; and if someone does good while being wicked by nature, let him gain time; for in time he will later pay the penalty. The tragedy agrees with these things through the following: For there will be, there will be that time of ages, when the gold-bright aether will open a treasury full of fire, and the nurtured flame, raging, will burn all things on earth and in the air. And after a little, it adds again: And when the whole is extinguished, the entire depth of the waves will be gone, the earth will be bereft of its foundations, nor will the air, burning, still carry winged creatures, and then it will restore all that it previously destroyed. We will find similar things in the Orphic writings, written somewhat as follows: For having hidden all things, and again brought forth light into great joy from his sacred heart, performing dreadful deeds.

If we live piously and justly, we are blessed here, and more blessed after our departure from here, possessing happiness not for a time, but able to rest in eternity, dwelling with other immortals, and at banquets being without a share of grievous sorrows, unyielding, as the philosophical poetry of Empedocles says. No one will be so great, even by Greek standards, as to surpass justice, nor so small as to escape notice. And the same Orpheus says these things: "Look to the divine word and attend to it, guiding the intelligent vessel of your heart; walk well on the path, and behold only the immortal king of the cosmos." And again concerning God, calling him invisible, he says that he is known only to one of a certain kind, a Chaldean by race, whether he means Abraham or his son, through these words: "Unless one is a unique offshoot of the race of the Chaldeans from above; for he was skilled in the course of the star and the motion of the sphere around the earth, how it revolves circularly in equal measure according to its own axis, and he guides the winds around the air and the stream." Then, as if paraphrasing the saying "The heaven is my throne, and the earth is the footstool of my feet," he adds: "He himself is again fixed upon the great heaven on a golden throne, and the earth is set beneath his feet. And he has stretched out his right hand around the limits of the ocean, and the base of the mountains trembles within from his wrath, and cannot bear his mighty strength. He is himself both celestial and on earth, and he brings all things to an end, having himself the beginning, the middle, and the end. It is not lawful for you to say otherwise; my limbs tremble in my mind. He rules from on high, and so on.

Through these things he has revealed all those prophetic sayings: "If you open the sky, trembling will seize mountains from you and they will melt, as wax melts before fire"; and those through Isaiah: "Who measured the sky with a span and the whole earth with a fist?" Again when he says: "Ruler of aether and Hades, of sea and earth, who shakes the mighty house of Olympus with thunder; whom daimones dread and the assembly of gods fears; whom the Moirai obey, though they be inexorable; deathless, mother-father, by whose wrath all is shaken; who stirs the winds, covers all with clouds, cleaving the broad aether with thunderbolts; your order runs among the stars with unchangeable decrees; and around your fiery throne stand much-suffering angels, who care for mortals that all may be accomplished; your spring shines new with purple flowers; your winter comes with cold clouds; your harvests Bromius once distributed to the revelers." Then he adds, expressly naming the God pantokrator: "Deathless, immortal, spoken only to the immortals. Come, greatest of all gods, with mighty necessity, fearful, unconquered, great, deathless, whom the aether crowns." By "mother-father" he not only indicated generation from non-being, but also gave occasions to those introducing projections perhaps to conceive of a consort of God. He paraphrases those prophetic writings: both that through Hosea, "I strengthen thunder and create wind, whose hands laid the foundation of the army of heaven," and that through Moses: "See, see, that I am, and there is no other god besides me; I will kill and make to live; I will strike and I will heal.

and there is no one who will be rescued from my hands. But he himself plants evil for mortals from good, and chilling war and tearful pains, according to Orpheus. Such things also the Parian Archilochus says: "O Zeus, father Zeus, yours is the power of heaven, and you see the reckless and lawless deeds of men." Let the Thracian Orpheus sing to us again: "He has stretched out his right hand at the edge of Oceanus on all sides, and the earth stands beneath his feet." These things are clearly taken from there: the Lord will save inhabited cities, and will seize the whole inhabited world with his hand as a nest; the Lord who made the earth with his own strength, as Jeremiah says, and set the inhabited world upright by his wisdom. Furthermore, Phocylides, calling the angels demons, represents through these that some of them are good, others base, since we too have received that some are apostates; but then demons are among men, different at different times: some to deliver men from approaching evil. Well then, the comic poet Philemon also cuts out idolatry through these: "There is for us no goddess Fortune, there is not, but the spontaneous thing that happens to each as it chances is called fortune." And Sophocles the tragedian says that not even to the gods do all things come of their own accord, apart from Zeus; for he has the end and the beginning. And Orpheus: "One power, one daimon came to be, great, burning the sky, and one is all things made, in which all these revolve: fire and water and earth, and the things upon them." And Pindar the lyric poet, as if inspired, says outright: "What is god? That which is the all." And again: "God, who fashions all things for mortals." But when he says:

What do you expect from wisdom? Little does one man surpass another. To search out the plans of the gods with a mortal mind is difficult; he was born from a mortal mother, and from there he drew his understanding. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has become his counselor? And Hesiod also agrees with what has been said through what he writes: "There is no seer among earth-dwelling men who would know the mind of aegis-bearing Zeus." Reasonably, then, Solon the Athenian, himself following Hesiod, writes in his elegies: "The mind of the immortals is wholly invisible to men." Again, when Moses prophesied that the woman would give birth to toils and labors because of the transgression, a certain not obscure poet writes: "Never by day will they cease from toil and misery, nor by night will they cease groaning; the gods will give grievous cares." Furthermore, Homer, by saying "the father himself held out the golden scales," indicates that God is just. And Menander the comic poet, interpreting God as good, says: "A daimon stands by every man immediately at birth, a good mystagogue of life; for one must not consider there to be an evil daimon that harms a good life." Then he adds: "That God is entirely good," either meaning that every god is good, or, more likely, that God is good in all things. Again, Aeschylus the tragedian, setting forth the power of God, does not hesitate to address him as "Most High" through these words: "Separate God from mortals and do not think him similar to yourself, as fleshly. You do not know him; sometimes he appears as fire, an irresistible force, sometimes as water, sometimes as darkness; and he himself becomes like beasts, like wind, cloud, and lightning, thunder, rain.

The sea and rocks serve him, and every spring and body of water. Mountains and earth and the vast deep of the sea and the great height of mountains tremble when the master's fierce eye looks upon them. For the glory of the highest god is all-powerful. Does it not seem to you that this paraphrases the phrase, "The earth trembles at the presence of the Lord"? In addition to these things, the most prophetic Apollo, bearing witness to the glory of God, is compelled to speak about Athena, when the Medes were marching against Greece, how she begged and supplicated Zeus concerning Attica. The oracle runs thus: Pallas cannot appease Olympian Zeus, beseeching him with many words and subtle counsel; many temples of the immortals will he give to devouring fire, which now stand dripping with sweat, quivering with fear, and so on. Thearidas, in his work On Nature, writes: The beginning of existing things, a beginning truly real, is one; for that in the beginning is one and only, and there is no other apart from the great king, says Orpheus. The comic poet Diphilus, persuaded by him, says most sententiously: Honor this one alone, the father of all, to the end, the discoverer and creator of so many goods. Reasonably, then, Plato also accustoms the best natures to arrive at the study which we previously said is the greatest, to see the good and to make that ascent. This, as it seems, is not a turning of a potsherd, but a turning around of the soul, a return from a kind of nocturnal day to the true reality of being, which we shall call true philosophy.

He judges those who have partaken of this golden race, saying, "You are all brothers," and those of the golden race judge most precisely and in every way. Therefore, the father and maker of all things is apprehended by all, innately and without instruction, through everything and by everyone: inanimate things sympathizing with the living, among animate beings some already immortal working day by day, and among those still mortal, some in fear, even carried in their mother's womb, others by free rational choice, and among humans, both Greeks and barbarians. No race anywhere, whether of farmers or nomads, nor even of city-dwellers, can live without being previously seized by faith in the superior. Hence every eastern nation, every western nation touching the shores, the northern and all those toward the south, have one and the same preconception about the one who established the sovereignty, since even the most universal of his activities have permeated all equally. Much more so, the polymaths among the Greeks, the philosophers, starting from barbarian philosophy, have given preeminence to the invisible, the only, the most powerful, the most skillful, and the cause of the most beautiful things; but the consequences of these, unless they are instructed by us, they do not know, nor even how God is naturally conceived, but only, as we have often said, by way of circumlocution, truly. Therefore, does the apostle say, "God of Jews only?" Is he not also God of Greeks?

not only speaking prophetically and indicating that even those from among the Greeks who believe will know God, but also revealing this: that while the Lord and God of all is potentially and in reality the Almighty, yet according to knowledge he is not God of all; for they do not know what he is, nor how he is Lord and Father and Maker, nor the other economy of the truth, not having been taught by it. Likewise, the prophetic writings have the same power as the apostolic word. For Isaiah says: "But if you say, 'We have trusted in the Lord our God,' now mingle with my lord the king of the Assyrians." And he adds: "And now, have we not gone up against this land to make war without the Lord?" Jonah, also a prophet himself, hints at the same thing through what he says: "And the shipmaster came to him and said, 'Why are you snoring? Get up, call upon your God, that he may save us and we may not perish.'" For the phrase "your God" was said to one who knew by knowledge, while the phrase "that God may save us" indicated the awareness of the nations that had set their minds on the Almighty but had not yet believed. And again the same prophet says: "And he said to them, 'I am a servant of the Lord, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven.'" And again the same: "And they said, 'By no means, Lord; let us not perish because of the soul of this man.'" And the prophet Malachi directly reveals God saying: "I will not accept sacrifice from your hands, because from sunrise to sunset my name has been glorified among the nations, and in every place sacrifice is offered to me." And again:

because I am a great king, says the Lord Almighty, and my name is manifest among the nations. What name? Among those who have believed, the Son indicating the Father, and among the Greeks, the god creator. Plato indicates self-determination through these words: virtue is without a master, and by honoring and dishonoring it, each will partake of it more or less. The cause lies with the one who chooses; God is blameless. For God is never the cause of evils. O Trojans dear to Ares, says the lyric poet, Zeus the high-ruler, who sees all, is not the cause of great griefs for mortals; but in the middle lies the holy Justice, accessible to all men, the companion of pure Good Order and prudent Themis; blessed are the children of those who find her dwelling with them. Pindar directly introduces Zeus the savior dwelling with Themis, a king, a just savior, interpreting somewhat as follows: first, the Moirai led well-counselled heavenly Themis with golden horses from the streams of Ocean to the sacred ladder along the shining path of Olympus, to be the ancient consort of Zeus the savior; and she bore the golden-filleted, bright-fruited, true Hours. Therefore, the one not persuaded by the truth, but puffed up by human teaching, is ill-fated, wretched, and according to Euripides, one who, seeing these things, does not perceive God, but has cast aside the crooked deceptions of the meteorologists, whose harmful tongue shoots at random about unseen things, partaking of no judgment. So, having arrived at true learning, the one who wishes should listen to Parmenides of Elea, who promises: