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In which the one who takes refuge does not fear the demons who raid this desert—I mean the nature of things visible—and who lead the mind astray through the senses and drag it down into the darkness of ignorance. And he hewed out many cisterns, that is, the various states of those who are better, which are receptive of the lessons in knowledge supplied from God. Because he had many cattle in Shephelah and in the plain, and vinedressers in the hill country and in Carmel, because he was a farmer. He who contends lawfully for the truth through the weapons of the right hand and the left, from the various states pertaining to virtue and knowledge, as from hewn cisterns, anoints the cattle in Shephelah—that is, the movements of the soul in relation to the body that are exercised through the experience of involuntary temptations—for endurance, watering them with the principles concerning steadfastness; but the cattle in the plain—that is, the movements of the soul that prosper through the right hand in the breadth of the virtues—he waters with the principles concerning humility and moderation of feeling, so that he may neither fall among the left-hand things nor be exalted by the right-hand things. And vinedressers in the hill country and in Carmel. Vinedressers in the hill country are the pious thoughts that remain at the height of contemplation and cherish the ecstatic and ineffable love of the beautiful knowledge; and in Carmel, the thoughts that cultivate the principle concerning perfect impassibility and purification through the removal of all things, as of a certain foreskin lying around the fruitful part of the soul, and that, as it were, in a gnostic manner wholly circumcise the mind's attachment to material things. For Carmel is the knowledge of circumcision.

He says that Uzziah is a farmer, because every mind that has God's strength for contemplation is also a true farmer, keeping the divine seeds of good things pure from weeds through its own zeal and care, until it has the memory of God preserving it. For he says, "And he was seeking the Lord in the days of Zechariah, in the fear of the Lord." The text knows that Zechariah, translated into the Greek tongue, means "memory of God." Therefore let us always entreat the Lord that his saving memory be preserved in us, so that what is rightly achieved may not corrupt the soul, when it has been lifted to a height and, like Uzziah, has dared to attempt things beyond nature. SCHOLIA 1. He calls the holy flesh of God formed from us a wonderful tabernacle (as having received its existence in him without seed), and the rational soul a house. For the Word, becoming man, ineffably united to himself flesh rationally ensouled, cleansing like by like. And the place is the Word himself, who by hypostasis immutably established the nature in himself. To this tabernacle, then, the flesh, we pass through, sanctifying our own flesh through the virtues, by which it has naturally become conformed to the body of his glory according to the grace of the Spirit; and as far as the house of God through undefiled contemplation, according to the simple and indivisible

...knowledge, arriving at the very noetic soul of the Lord; so that we too may have the mind of Christ, according to the Apostle, through participation in the Spirit, becoming by grace through him all that he himself became by nature through his dispensation for our sake. 2. He has called the cornerstone the joining of the corner, that is, of the Church. 3. He calls the corner gate the incarnation, which is the gate of the Church; and the towers, the orthodox doctrines concerning the incarnation. 4. He called the corner of the valley both the union of the flesh with the soul according to nature, and the soul's conjunction in the Spirit with it as the servant of virtue. 5. He speaks simply of corners as the various unities of beings; that is, the unities of the various more general natures with one another into a single convergence. 6. That every union of the creatures mentioned has a principle of wisdom, according to which it comes to be; these the text has called towers of the corners. For the fortification and tower of each of beings is both the knowledge of them according to essence and the principle that binds all things to one another into a single convergence. 7. He calls towers in the desert the principles concerning nature. 8. He called cisterns the hearts that receive the heavenly gifts of holy knowledge, hewn out by the firm word of the commandments; and casting off like rubble both the friendship toward the passions and the attachment of nature to sensible things; and being filled with the cleansing power that comes from above, which purges the passions and gives life and, as it were, nourishes the virtues in the Spirit of knowledge. 9.

The beasts of Sephela, he says, are those who are being trained in the ethical philosophy through many afflictions, and who need words that teach endurance. 10. The beasts of the plain, he says, are those who run well in the virtues and remain impassible as regards what is worse, and who need words and teachings concerning thanksgiving. 11. He calls the mountain country simply the lofty contemplation in the Spirit of nature, which those who have departed from the phantasies of sensible things cultivate, and who have passed over to the noetic principles of those things through the virtues as intermediaries. 12. Carmel is the height of the knowledge that comes through circumcision. And circumcision is either the removal of the disposition toward generation according to nature, or the departure of the mind from its dispositional relation to beings. Of this state the vine is manifestly the word of providence that grants the sober ecstasy; this vine is cultivated by the men and thoughts that are moved toward the simple and unoriginate Monad alone. For the one who is moved toward this alone has cut off, as it were, his own foreskin—the disposition that covers the cause of the generation of beings.

13. He has called the fear of the Lord the practical philosophy: from the beginning, the end. For the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. 14. The lofty word concerning divinity is a tower in the soul, fortified by the workings of the commandments. 15. The words concerning particulars, he says, when they draw near to the universal, bring about the unifications of things divided. For the more universal words encompass the words of the more particular in a unified way; and the things that are partial have a natural reference to them. 16. That there is also a certain relative word in the Spirit concerning these things, giving them their union with one another. 17. He who has acquired the pious opinion concerning each thing does not fear the demons who deceive men through appearances. 18. The vine produces wine; wine, drunkenness; drunkenness, ecstasy. Therefore the active word also, which is the vine, cultivated by the virtues, begets knowledge; and knowledge begets the good ecstasy, which drives the mind out of its relation to sense perception. 49. QUESTION 49. What is it again in the same book: And Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib had come, and his face was set to fight in Jerusalem, and he took counsel with his elders and mighty men to stop up the waters of the springs that were outside the city, and they strengthened him. And he gathered a great people and stopped up the waters of the springs and the river that ran through the city? What do these things wish to signify in contemplation?

Answer. The intellect that pursues practical philosophy with knowledge and is girded with every divine discernment against the opposing power is Hezekiah, interpreted according to his name as divine strength, and for this reason reigning over Jerusalem, that is, over the soul or the vision of peace, that is, over the gnostic contemplation freed from the passions. When this intellect sees the opposing power stirred up against it, it rightly takes counsel with its elders and mighty men to stop up the waters of the springs outside the city. The rulers of such an intellect are the principle of faith, the principle of hope, and the principle of love, which rule in an elder-like manner over all the divine thoughts and reasonings of the soul and wisely counsel the intellect, at one and the same time both lending their strength against the opposing power and pointing out the means of its destruction. For without faith, hope, and love, nothing evil is completely abolished, nor is anything good wholly accomplished. Faith persuades the intellect, when it is at war, to draw near to God, becoming for it a preparation of every kind of incorporeal weapon as a consolation for confidence. Hope becomes for it the most truthful guarantor of divine assistance, promising the destruction of the opposing powers. Love disposes it to be hard to move, or rather entirely immovable, from the divine affection, and when it is at war, it nails its whole power of desire to the divine longing. And the names of the rulers, when interpreted, are in harmony with these words.

And the rulers of Hezekiah at that time were Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, the steward, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah the son of Asaph, the recorder. Now Eliakim is interpreted as the resurrection of God, and his father Hilkiah as the portion of God. Therefore the first and only son of the divine portion, that is, of true knowledge, is the word of the divine resurrection within us according to faith, rightly excelling, together with the stewardship of knowledge that is fitting, that is, discernment, over the risings of both voluntary and involuntary temptations. (And Shebna the scribe is interpreted as turning, clearly signifying through itself the most complete word of divine hope, without which a turning toward God can by no means ever come about in anyone in any way, since it is the property of hope to serve as scribe, that is, to teach and to bring before the eyes as present the things to come, and to persuade that God, the defender of those who are warred against by the opposing power, is in no way absent—God, for whose sake and through whom the war is waged by the saints. And Joah the son of Asaph, the recorder, is interpreted as the brotherhood of God, and Asaph his father as the gathering. Therefore, of the gathering and union of the soul's powers concerning divine things in the same manner, that is,

Of the rational, the incensive, and the desiring [powers], love is established as the offspring; by which, inscribing in memory the beauty of divine comeliness, those who have already received through grace the equality of honor with God—for brotherhood clearly signifies the grace of that equality—keep unceasingly the desire of divine love, while the ruling faculty of the soul records and imprints the undefiled beauty. Since, then, these things are so, the discourse has in some measure hit upon the truth from the interpretation of the names. Every mind, girded like Hezekiah with divine power, possesses as it were certain elders and rulers: the rational power, from which the gnostic faith is naturally begotten, by which it is taught ineffably that God is always present, and through hope it associates with future things as though present; and the desiring power, in which divine love consists, by which, having willingly fastened itself to the longing of the undefiled Godhead, it has an unbroken desire for the beloved; and further also the incensive power, by which it clings firmly to divine peace, checking the motion of desire toward divine love. Every mind has these powers cooperating with it for the destruction of vice and for the establishment and preservation of virtue—as elders, because they are the first powers of the soul and complete its essence; and as rulers, because they have the beginning of the motions that come from them and, by the will of the mind that moves them, authority over the activities subject to them.

These things also counsel him and join forces with him, so that he may block up the waters of the springs that were outside the city—or rather, to speak more accurately, that exist there. For always the past that comes through history is mystically present through contemplation. Having these sound and undeceived, he gathers the great multitude—that is, the pious natural movements and thoughts that come from them. And the waters outside the city, that is, outside the soul, which make the river that divides through the middle of the city, are the thoughts conveyed and flowing into the soul through each sense from the sensible object according to natural contemplation; from these the word of the knowledge of sensible things, passing through the soul as through a city, is produced like a river. As long as the soul has this passing through it, it does not cast off the images and phantasies of sensible things, through which the evil and destructive power, standing against it, is naturally disposed to wage war. Therefore Hezekiah says: Let not the king of Assyria come and find much water and prevail—as if the discerning mind were saying to its own powers in the time of the uprising of the passions:

Let us cease from natural contemplation and apply ourselves solely to prayer and to the hardship of the body according to the practical philosophy, of which the ascent of the king to the temple of God bore the type of prayer, and the putting on of sackcloth the type of bodily hardship, lest the evil one, slipping in unseen with the thoughts of sensible things, should craftily force his way in along with the forms and shapes of sensible things—through which passions are naturally produced upon the surfaces of visible things, since the passage of the rational activity within us toward intelligible things is halted by the intermediate sense—and should prevail to sack the city, that is, the soul, and drag it down to Babylon, I mean the confusion of the passions. He, then, who in the time of the uprising of the passions has bravely shut his senses and wholly thrust away the imagination and memory of sensible things, and has altogether contracted the natural movements of the mind toward the investigation of things outside, in the manner of Hezekiah has blocked up the waters of the springs that are outside the city, and has cut off the river that runs through the middle of the city—the aforementioned powers joining forces with him, and the great people that was gathered, I mean the pious thoughts belonging to each power—and has put them to shame, conquering by the divine hand the

the evil and tyrannical dominion that rose up against him, and by the divine command, as if by some angel, through the word whose nature it is to destroy the passions, having killed the hundred and eighty-five thousand, that is, the productive habit of evil, which unreasonably grows upon the three powers of the soul through things perceived by the senses, and the activity of the senses upon them. It is necessary, therefore, that the intellect which knows how to escape the invisible entanglements in a gnostic manner neither pursue natural contemplation nor do anything else in the time of the assault of the evil demons except only to pray and to subdue the body by labors and to make the destruction of the earthly mindset with all zeal and to guard the walls of the city—I mean the protective virtues of the soul or the methods that guard the virtues, I mean self-control and endurance—through the innate good thoughts, with no thought at all answering in contradiction to any of the external intelligible enemies, lest, having deceived through the right-hand things, he lead you away from God, having stolen your desire—he who waters the soul with a murky overthrow, and through things thought to be good drags the mind that seeks good things toward the worse, speaking in Jewish fashion—Rabshakeh, the commander-in-chief of Sennacherib king of Assyria. And Rabshakeh is interpreted as "much watering with kisses" or "having great kisses.

For the evil demon, who is accustomed to wage war against the mind through the right side, speaks in Jewish fashion through what is thought to be virtue but is not, pouring the turbid overthrow into the soul, showing it the deceived and destructive friendship, whose wounds are better than the friend who strikes; for he says, "Wounds of a friend are more trustworthy than the kisses of an enemy." And Sennacherib is interpreted as a temptation of drought or sharpened teeth, which is the devil, who in truth through thoughts sharpened toward evil—for this is what I understand "sharpened teeth" to mean—dries up in us the inflow of the knowledge of divine streams, according to the operation he is naturally disposed to produce in those who receive him, having obtained a name suited to his calling, being and being called truly a temptation of drought, since he makes those who fall under his deceits desolate of every life-giving transmission in the Spirit. Or perhaps Sennacherib, that is, the devil, has been called a temptation of drought, as being resourceless and poor and deprived of any power of his own for the uprising against us, and without the sensible things through which he is accustomed to wage war against the soul, able to harm us in nothing, and for this reason needing the tyranny devised against us from the springs outside the city, that is, the material thoughts, with which he is naturally disposed to join in assaulting the soul with the shapes and forms of sensible things.

Through these things, sensation, being naturally shaped by attachment, often becomes for the devil a wicked and deadly weapon for the overthrow of the soul's divine comeliness, betraying the whole to the enemy through the flattery of pleasure, [and weakening] the power of the reason within us. But the one who has bravely closed his senses through reasoned self-control, and through the powers of the soul has walled off the entrances of the sensible forms toward the mind, easily destroys the devil's wicked devices, turning him back with shame by the road he came. And the road by which the devil comes is the material things that seem to contribute to the body's constitution—into his own land, I mean confusion—and killing him by the evil thoughts born from him, transferring them to the setting forth of rest. For the one who has been able to overcome the devil by his own thoughts, through the right use of contemplation toward the better, has killed Sennacherib through his own sons and driven them in flight to the land of Armenia, having transferred them, clearly, to the setting forth of the

the thoughts that confuse the soul through sensation, [turning them] toward rest. For "Armenia" is interpreted as "a placing beside of rest." And the placing beside of rest is the projection of the divine virtues; transferring toward it the thoughts that once dragged him down toward the shameful passions of sensation, the mind kills the devil who begets them for the destruction of human nature. Well, then, and very wisely, Hezekiah acted according to the meaning of the Scripture, stopping up the waters of the springs that were outside Jerusalem, through Sennacherib king of the Assyrians. The springs, then, are outside the city—that is, outside the soul—namely all sensible things; and the waters of these springs are the meanings of sensible things; and the river that divides through the middle of the city is the knowledge gathered from the meanings of sensible things according to natural contemplation, passing through the middle of the soul, as being the boundary between mind and sensation. For the knowledge of sensible things is neither wholly alien to the noetic power nor entirely assigned to the activity according to sensation alone, but as it were occupying a middle place in the union of the mind with sensation and of sensation with the mind, it makes through itself their conjunction with one another, being shaped according to sensation by the forms in the shapes of sensible things, and according to the mind transferring the impressions into the principles of the shapes. Therefore the knowledge of things seen was reasonably called a river dividing through the middle of the city, as being between the extremes—I mean mind and sensation.

Blocking this at the time of the disturbance of the passions, because of the assault of the material forms falling upon the mind, the one who with knowledge dissolves the invisible entanglements of the evil demons kills the hundred and eighty-five thousand—I mean the productive habit of evil, which, as I said, irrationally assails the three powers of the soul through sensible things, and the activity of the senses upon them, that is, the irrational activity of the natural powers upon the senses. For the number six, whether it has its composition from units or from tens or from hundreds or from some other number, indicates the productive habit of virtue or of evil, according to the proportion of the multiplication of the composition, presenting the disposition that perfects this or that habit to those who apply themselves to numbers with understanding. And with this sixfold number, the number five, when joined or added or compounded to it, signifies the senses, that is, the power or habit or activity of sensible things, lying beside or imposed upon or compounded with the natural powers of the soul. For example, if the number five is joined to the six according to units, as simple to simple, it presents the productive aptitude for senses alone; but if the number five, simple from units, is added to the number six that is composite from many, it indicates the productive habit in relation to the senses according to power.

But if the composite five made up of many is combined with the composite six made up of many, it signifies the productive activity that works through the senses, in respect of power and habit and operation—that is, the completion of virtue or of vice, according as the number happens to be, whether blameworthy or praiseworthy, in the place of Scripture that is being contemplated, that is, examined. The number six, then, composed of tens, makes sixty; and sixty, tripled because of the three generic powers of the soul, with five added because of the innate senses, makes the number one hundred and eighty-five, and it indicates the productive habit of vice through the senses in respect of the natural powers, since this number lies in a blameworthy sense in this place of Holy Scripture—which habit the mind kills, as through some angel of the divine Word of knowledge, by resting more in prayer upon its own power and ascribing to God alone the cause of every right action and every victory over the demons. Therefore the

At the time of the uprising of temptations, abstaining from natural contemplation and holding fast to prayer through the concentration of the mind from all things upon itself and upon God, he puts to death the habit productive of evil that arises from the soul's natural powers being moved contrary to nature in relation to the senses, and he turns away with shame the devil, who has cast off the aforementioned habit, in which he trusted when he came with his own boastfulness to the soul, exalting himself against the truth through proud thoughts. This the great David both knew and suffered and did, he who more than all others had experience of the array of the intellectual wars. "When the sinner stood against me," he says, "I was deaf and was humbled and kept silence from good things." And after him the divine Jeremiah, commanding the people not to go out of the city because of the sword of the enemies encamped round about. And this, if the blessed Abel had guarded it and had not gone out with Cain into the field—that is, into the breadth of natural contemplation before impassibility—he would not have risen up and killed him with deceit, stealing with his right hand in the contemplation of beings before perfect habit—the law of the flesh, which Cain both is and is called; which the first man Adam first acquired as the fruit of transgression, according to the meaning of his name, begetting the law of sin, which God did not create for him in paradise; for Cain is interpreted as "acquisition.

Likewise also Dinah, the daughter of the great Jacob, would not have been humbled by Shechem the son of Emmor rising up against her, if she had not gone out with the daughters of the local inhabitants, that is, with the sensory impressions. Shechem is interpreted as "back," and Emmor as "donkey," that is, the body. So the back—that is, Shechem—of Emmor, that is, of the body, is the law that comes behind, not in front, that is, later, not first. For in the beginning, that is, in front, before the transgression of the divine commandment came to be, this human body—that is, Emmor—did not have this law of sin, I mean Shechem, but later the law of sin grew upon the body because of the disobedience of sin; and the true Word, having examined it, called it Shechem because of its later origin, that is, "back," which is what is behind; for the back clearly indicates what is behind by nature. So it is good, before perfect habit, not to touch natural contemplation, lest, seeking spiritual meanings from the visible creatures, we unwittingly collect passions. For in the imperfect, the visible shapes of things seen have more power over the senses than the meanings of created things hidden in those shapes have over the soul.

1. The unerring contemplation of beings requires a soul freed from passions—a soul that is called Jerusalem, both because of its even virtue and its immaterial knowledge; and this comes about not only through the privation of passions but also of sensory images, which the text has called waters of the outside springs. 2. Faith comforts the mind when it is under attack, strengthened by the hope of help; and hope, bringing the help that was believed before the eyes, repels the assault of the adversaries. Love, in the mind that loves God, renders the attack of the enemies dead, utterly obscured by the longing for God. 3. The first resurrection in us, it says, of the God who was put to death in us through ignorance, is faith, well administered by the works of the commandments. 4. Things, it says, are in harmony with their names. For without some expectation, whether difficult or easy, a turning toward the good has never naturally come about for anyone. 5. Nothing, it says, gathers the scattered like love, and makes their mind one, held together by a shared breath; its character is the beauty of equal honor.

6. He says that without the rational power there is no scientific knowledge; and without knowledge, faith is not established, from which proceeds the noble offspring, hope; through which the faithful one associates with things to come as though they were present. And without the desiring power, longing is not established, whose end is love. For to love something is proper to desire. And without the spirited power, which gives sinew to desire for the union with the pleasant, peace can in no way come to be—if indeed peace truly is the undisturbed and complete possession of what is desired. 7. He says that the reason rules over the gnostic thoughts, just as spirit and desire rule over the spirited and desiring thoughts. 8. He contemplated Hezekiah in the anagogical sense as the philosophic mind engaged in practice; the city as the soul; the springs as the various kinds of sensible things; the waters as their images or thoughts; the river as the knowledge gathered from sensible thoughts through natural contemplation; the river as the opinion, that is, the supposition, gathered from them—at which one must wholly close the senses, when the passions rebel against the reason. 9. He says that one who has not been purified from the passions must not touch natural contemplation, because the images of sensible things can stamp the mind toward passion, if one has not been completely freed from the passions.

10. The mind that remains, through the imagination, in the appearances of sensible things because of sensation becomes the creator of unclean passions, not passing over through contemplation to the kindred intelligible realities. 11. When the reason becomes mindless, and the temper rash, and the desire irrational, ignorance and tyranny and licentiousness rule over the soul; from these the habit of vice naturally becomes practical, having been entwined with the manifold pleasure of the senses. For the number of the 185 thousand reveals this. For having combined thrice sixty because of the perfect movement of each power in evil, and adding also five because of the pleasure that is in actual operation upon the senses, you clearly fill this number, which signifies the productive habit of evil. Having this, the devil tyrannically assails the soul; which God, as through an angel—the reason according to gnostic wisdom—puts to death, and saves the soul that is truly Jerusalem, and the mind within the soul unenslaved to vice. 12. He calls innate thoughts the people on the walls. 13. Here the Lord is a friend; and his wounds are the forms of the discipline brought upon each one for salvation, for the chastisement of the flesh, that is, of the fleshly mind, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. And the devil is an enemy; and his kisses are the forms of pleasures according to sensation; through which, deceiving the soul, he persuades it to be separated from the love of the One who created it. 14. Sennacherim is interpreted as a temptation of drought, in one respect because it dries up the hearts of those who endure it, separating them from the fountain-like grace of holy thoughts;

But in another sense, because he himself is dry, as being poor and resourceless, and having nothing of his own. And for this reason he lurks craftily, like some thief, hidden in the appearances of sensible things, for the uprising against us. 15. All excess, and what is beyond natural need, he calls incontinence, which becomes a road for the devil to the soul, through which he returns with shame to his own land, while self-control disciplines nature. Or again, it is the natural passions themselves that are the road: in the manner of use that is beyond need, they lead the devil to the soul; but in the manner of use according to need, through themselves they send him back to his own land. And his land is the settled habit and confusion of wickedness, to which he has always stepped, and to which he leads those defeated by the love of material things. 16. He who has transferred his thoughts toward virtue has given them rest, having made them far from the unstable confusion of the passions. 17. The mind, having joined sensation to itself naturally through reason, gathers the true knowledge that comes from natural contemplation, which was called a river, dividing the soul because of the understanding directed upon sensations. 18. The power according to aptitude lies naturally close to the judgment; and the habit is superimposed, for it comes upon the aptitude; and the activity is always compounded with the habit, even if it is not always readily displayed, often because of the lack of materials. 19. He calls the conjunction of number the utterance of the simple numbers within the decade, distinguished by the conjunction "and"; for example, six and five.

And it shows whether the Scripture lies for evil or for good, the productive capacity in potential of virtue or of vice. He calls "addition of number" the addition made to the simple number from units by the number multiplied by itself, distinguished by the conjunction "and," for example sixty and five, or one hundred twenty and five, or one hundred eighty and five, as the present number has. And it shows not only the production according to capacity in the senses, but also the productive habit of virtue or of vice in the senses. He calls "composition of number" the coming-together of numbers multiplied from themselves into themselves, one with another, distinguished by the conjunction "and": for example 60 and 50, or 600 and 500, and the like; and it shows not only the production in potential according to capacity and the habit, but also the activity in the senses according to the habit of virtue or of vice. Therefore the one who knows the power of each of the numbers within the decade—as the monad shows the unmixed; the dyad, the different; the three is both equal and intelligible; the four, sensible; the five, sensitive and circular; the six, active and perfect; the seven, circumscribed and unmixed; the eight, stable and immovable; the nine, intermediate between matter and form, that is, between sensible things and sensation; the ten, most complete—will know what each number signifies in Scripture, whether it is by conjunction, or by addition, or by composition. 20. Cain is the law of the flesh, which Adam first begets when he transgresses the divine commandment.

Abel is the mind of the spirit, whom the same man later begets through repentance, but Cain kills him before he reaches perfect habit, casting him among natural visions. Having killed him, God says, he paralyzed seven avenging ones. This one the same man in the Gospels called an evil spirit, and one that takes along with it seven spirits more evil than itself. And this perhaps is the self-loving, that is, the gluttonous thought, which is necessarily accompanied by the thought of fornication, and that of avarice, and that of grief, and that of anger, and that of listlessness, and that of vainglory, and that of pride. So then, the one who has killed Cain according to the divine vote—that is, gluttony—has slain together with it also the passions that subsist alongside because of it, according to the saying, "Whoever has killed Cain shall be paralyzed by seven avenging ones." 21. That the law pertaining to the generation and corruption of the body, he says, was later imposed on the nature of men, according to which we beget and are begotten, because of the transgression, since we did not keep the deifying law of the Spirit according to the first commandment.

N (50). CONCERNING THE PRAYER OF HEZEKIAH AND ISAIAH. 50. QUESTION 50: What again is the meaning in the same book of the passage, "And Hezekiah the king prayed, and Isaiah the son of Amos the prophet, concerning these things, and they cried out to heaven. And the Lord sent an angel, and he destroyed every mighty man and warrior and prince and captain in the camp of the king of Assyria, and he turned back with shame of face to his own land"? Answer. The word of Holy Scripture, even if it admits of limitation according to the letter, coming to an end together with the times of the things narrated, nevertheless according to the spirit it remains forever without limitation in the contemplations of the things understood. And let no one, being vexed at this, disbelieve it, knowing that God who spoke is by nature without limitation; and those who wish genuinely to hear the will of Scripture ought to believe that the word spoken by him is more like him. For if God is the one who spoke, and he is without limitation in essence, it is clear that the word spoken by him is also without limitation.

Therefore, having spiritually contemplated the things that happened typically in the times of Hezekiah and that received their fulfillment in the outcome of the events then recorded, we shall marvel at the wisdom of the Holy Spirit who wrote them—how He assigned to each of those who partake of human nature a meaning of what was written that is fitting and appropriate, so that anyone who wishes to become a student of the divine word and to hold nothing of the present and passing things as equal in worth to virtue can become another Hezekiah in the Spirit and another Isaiah, hindered by no one from both praying and crying out to heaven and being heard and receiving from God, through an angel, the destruction and ruin of those who war against him in a spiritual sense. But since one who receives the Holy Scripture in a spiritual sense, in accordance with Christ, must laboriously exercise himself also in the interpretation of the names—an interpretation that is itself able to clarify the whole meaning of what is written, if indeed he cares about the accurate understanding of what is written, and does not, in a Jewish manner, drag down the height of the Spirit to body and earth and circumscribe the divine and pure promises of spiritual goods by the corruption of things that pass away, as some of those called Christians among us have supposed without realizing it, falsely applying to themselves the name derived from Christ, of which they are shown by the very facts to have completely denied the power, and they plainly walk the road opposed to Christ, as the discourse will briefly show.

For if, along with the other mysteries, which no account could reach, God also came to this—having become man—so that he might fulfill the law spiritually in the abolition of the letter, and might establish and make manifest its life-giving power (I mean the law's), by the removal of what kills—and what kills in the law, according to the divine apostle, is the letter, just as also the life-giving power of the law, according to him, is the spirit; for he says, "The letter kills, but the spirit gives life"—then clearly those who buried the power of their mind in the letter alone, and who did not wish to be according to the image and likeness of God, but rather to be earth, according to the threat, and to depart into earth, through their attachment to the letter as to earth—preferring, instead of the heavenly things (I mean the spirit), to be caught up into the air, that is, into spiritual illumination, in the clouds, that is, in the lofty contemplations, to meet the Lord and thus always to be with him through knowledge—have manifestly chosen the portion opposed to Christ and have ignored the whole mystery of his incarnation. For these things it is right to be grieved, since the loss from ignorance is unbearable

...of those who endure the fall from the truth, but to grieve, since they provide the Jews with many occasions for the confirmation of unbelief. But let us leave them to their own devices and return to ourselves and to the discourse, making the beginning of the spiritual investigation of the present chapter from the interpretation of the names. Hezekiah, then, is interpreted as "strength of God," while Ahaz his father is "might." And Isaiah is interpreted as "exaltation of God," that is, "height of God," while Amos his father is "people of toil." The strength of God is the virtue that destroys the passions and guards the thoughts of the pious, which the practice of the commandments gives birth to—"might" understood figuratively, through which we destroy the evil powers opposed to the good by the cooperation of God, or rather by the sole power of God. The height of God is the knowledge of the truth, which the toil of the contemplation of created things gives birth to, along with the sweat of the practice of the virtues, becoming fathers of toil, through which we utterly obliterate the power of falsehood opposed to the truth, humbling and casting down every high thing of the evil spirits that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. Prayer is the petition of those things which God is by nature accustomed to grant to men for salvation. And very reasonably so. For if a vow is a promise of the good things offered by men to God according to their profession, prayer, by a reasonable account, will clearly be the request of the good things supplied by God to men for salvation, bringing a recompense for the good disposition of the things previously offered.

A cry is the offering and increase of virtuous ways in practice and of gnostic contemplations in contemplation, in the time of the uprising of the wicked demons—a cry which God naturally hears above all, accepting the disposition of those who cultivate virtue and knowledge in place of a loud voice. But "heaven" is often said in Holy Scripture of God himself, as somewhere the great herald of truth, John the Forerunner, says: "A man cannot receive anything of himself unless it be given him from heaven," meaning "from God," since every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights. In this sense the passage of Scripture in the present chapter must be understood. Again, Scripture is accustomed to call "heaven" also the heavenly powers, according to "Heaven is my throne," that is, clearly, as he rests upon the holy and incorporeal natures. And if someone should say that the human intellect, purified of every material fantasy and adorned with the divine principles of intelligible things, is a heaven, he has not, it seems to me, departed from the truth. And if someone should call the height of noetic knowledge among men a heaven, he would not miss what is fitting. For in truth, as a heaven, true knowledge becomes a throne of God, receiving God enthroned upon it according to the unchangeable state of a firm and lofty aspiration toward the good; just as the pure practice of the virtues is also called a footstool, receiving the divine footsteps upon itself and not permitting itself to be defiled at all by the filth that comes from the body as from earth.

Therefore, since Hezekiah the king bears a pattern of virtue according to the interpretation of his own name—for this name means "strength of God" in the Greek tongue—and the strength of God alone against the opposing powers is established to be virtue, and Ahaz, the father of Hezekiah, is interpreted as "strength," which the word previously brought forth into practice, from which the divine strength according to virtue naturally is begotten, and the prophet Isaiah signifies the knowledge of things on high—for being interpreted he is called "height of God," declaring through himself the height of the knowledge according to God, which is begotten from the labor of the various contemplations concerning beings—for Amos is called "labor of the people," as was set forth previously—since, therefore, as has been said, the significance of the names has this power, evidently every philosopher and pious man, guarded by virtue and knowledge, that is by practice and contemplation, whenever he sees the evil power risen up against him through the passions, as the king of the Assyrians against Hezekiah, has one assistance for the dissolution of evils: God, whom he propitiates by crying out without words through the greater intensification of virtue and knowledge, and he receives for alliance, or rather for salvation, an angel, evidently a word greater than wisdom and knowledge, wiping out every mighty man and warrior and ruler and commander in the camp of the king of Assyria, and turning him back with shame of face to his own land.

The evil and destructive kingdom of the devil, prefigured by the kingdom of the Assyrians, gathering together the war against virtue and knowledge against men, contrives through the powers innate to them to turn the soul to rout—first provoking desire into an appetite for things contrary to nature and persuading it to prefer sensible things to intelligible things; then rousing the spirited part to fight beyond measure for the sensible object chosen by desire; and teaching the rational part to devise the modes of pleasures that come through the senses, and ordaining the earthly law to rule over these powers—that is, to lord it over the powers of the soul. Therefore Scripture called "mighty" the evil demon that lies upon desire and inflames it toward the unseemly appetites of shameful pleasures; for nothing is mightier or more violent than a natural appetite. And it named "warrior" the demon that sits upon the spirited part and prepares it to fight ceaselessly on behalf of pleasures. And it called "ruler" the demon that invisibly grows up against the soul through the appearances of sensible things and deceptively calls the soul's appetites to itself through each sense. The word called him "ruler" because the sensible object that is attached to a passion is by nature fitted to rule over every passion; for without some underlying subject, and one that stirs the powers of the soul through some sense, a passion could never arise at all. And it said "general" of the demon that misuses the power of the soul's rational part for the invention of evils and the discovery of all the methods that belong to vice.

The face of the devil is the smoothness of pleasure, through which he is by nature able to rule over every soul that yields to him, and the pleasant things of the senses are preferred to the contemplation of intelligible things that fattens the mind. This face is put to shame by the one who through prayer has received from God the word of wisdom that utterly wears away every evil power—that is, the word that completely destroys the evil tyranny that troubles the soul. For he wore it away, says the word, but did not merely grind it. For grinding is the destruction of passionate action only, whereas wearing away is the complete obliteration even of evil movements in the mind. And the country of the king of Assyria—I mean of the evil and author-of-evil demon—is the stubborn and steep habit of vice and ignorance, deprived of all the life-giving warmth of virtue and of all the spiritual light of knowledge, to which the devil alone turns aside, having been unable, after the experience of his assault, to transplant it into his own habit—Jerusalem, that is, the God-loving and most passionless soul, which has within itself the perfect word of practice, like Hezekiah, and the illumined mind of knowledge, like Isaiah, propitiating God and through an angel destroying the evil power. I have understood these places in this way, according to the power that is in me. But if anyone is able to receive what has been said in a loftier sense, he grants a favor both to himself and to us.

revealing, as is necessary, the meaning of what is written as more precious. For I said before that the word of divine Scripture remains forever uncircumscribed, circumscribing all who speak, but itself in no way circumscribed by those who speak, so that even if I have said something according to my ability, and this boldly, yet I have not encompassed the whole power of what is written, which is set infinitely beyond my power. SCHOLIA 1. That just as God in essence does not fall under knowledge, so neither is His word comprehended by our knowledge. 2. Those who, in a Jewish manner, have bound their understanding to the letter alone, he says, expect in this age the promises of the undefiled good things, being ignorant of the goods of the soul that are according to nature. 3. He who bears the image of the heavenly, he says, hastens to follow the Holy Scripture through all things by the Spirit; in which, through virtue and knowledge, the preservation of the soul exists; but he who bears the image of the earthly cherishes the letter only; in which the worship according to sense toward the body consists, creating the passions. 4. Practice, he says, gives birth to virtue, as Achaz to Hezekiah. 5. Contemplation, he says, gives birth to knowledge, as Amos to Isaiah. 6. He who knows with practice, he says, and acts with knowledge, is the throne and footstool of God. A throne, indeed, because of knowledge; a footstool, because of practice. 7. The encampment of the king of Assyria is the gathering of evil thoughts, in which he is powerful, who stirs the natural appetites toward pleasure; and a warrior is he who rouses the irascible part to the guarding of pleasures; and a ruler is he who provokes the senses by the appearances of visible things;

the general, the one who forms the passions and devises both their material and the modes of their activity. 8. For without a sensible object, he says, passion does not subsist. For if there were no woman, there would be no fornication; and if there were no foods, there would be no gluttony; and if there were no gold, there would be no passion of love of money. Therefore, of every passionate movement of the natural powers within us, the sensible object is the beginning—that is, the demon who through it stirs the soul to sin. 9. Attrition, he says, [produces] activity; but effacement destroys even the very thought of evil. 10. For as the north wind, he says, has no sun passing through it, so neither does the evil habit, in which the devil dwells, admit the illumination of knowledge. 51. CONCERNING "AND MANY BROUGHT GIFTS TO THE LORD AND PRESENTS TO THE KING." 51. QUESTION 51: And many brought gifts to the Lord in Jerusalem and presents to Hezekiah king of Judah, and he was exalted in the eyes of all the nations. What are the gifts, and what are the presents? And why gifts to God, but presents to the king? And what is being exalted in the eyes of all the nations?

Answer. Having brought into existence all visible nature, God did not leave it to be moved by sensation alone, but implanted in each of the forms that complete it both spiritual principles of wisdom and modes of gentle guidance, so that not only through the silent creatures should the Maker of creation be proclaimed with a great voice, being made known by the principles of the things that have come to be, but also that man, schooled by the natural laws and modes of the things seen, might easily find the road of righteousness that leads to him. For this was proper to the supreme goodness: not only to establish the divine and incorporeal essences of intelligible things as images of the ineffable and divine glory, receiving wholly, as far as is lawful, in proportion to themselves the incomprehensible beauty of the inaccessible loveliness, but also to mingle with sensible things—which fall far short of the intelligible essences—echoes of his own majesty, able to carry the human mind, as it is poured into them, unerringly across to God, as it comes to be above all things seen, inasmuch as it has stepped upon the supreme blessedness and has put behind itself all the intermediate things through which it cut its way and completed such a journey; and not only this, but also so that none of those who served the creature rather than the Creator might have ignorance as a pretext for defense, hearing creation proclaim its own Maker more clearly than any voice.

Therefore, since the nature of visible things has, sown in it by the Creator, both spiritual principles of wisdom and modes of gentle conduct, every mind rightly crowned with virtue and knowledge, as one allotted to reign like the great Hezekiah over Jerusalem—that is, over the habit that sees only peace, or rather the state that is stripped of all passions (for Jerusalem is interpreted as the vision of peace)—such a mind has all creation under its hand through the forms that complete it: it brings to God through itself, as it were gifts, the spiritual principles of knowledge that are in creation, and it provides for itself, as it were gifts, the modes toward virtue that exist in creation according to the natural law, and through both it welcomes the one who is able to be most excellently approved in both respects—I mean the philosophical mind perfected in reason and life, in action and contemplation. Now the word has expressly said that gifts and presents are brought to the Lord and to the king, since, as those who have devoted their study to these matters say, "gifts" is distinctly used of those things brought to those who have no need, while "presents" are those given to those in need. Therefore also the common custom of men has called the things offered to kings "gifts," perhaps having regard to the needlessness of those who receive them. And one might say, for this reason, that even the things offered by the Magi to the Lord, who became as we are through love for mankind, were called gifts, saying nothing at all that departs from the truth.

Bringing to the Lord the spiritual principles drawn from created things, we offer them as gifts, since He is by nature in need of none of these things. For it is not as though He were in need that, along with other things, we bring to the Lord the principles of existing things, but so that we, to some small extent according to our capacity, might hymn Him as is owed from His own creatures. And he who eagerly pursues divine philosophy receives gifts, as one who by nature needs both modes of conduct for virtue and principles for knowledge. Or the gifts may be understood in another way as well. Since a gift is again that which is given to those who have contributed nothing beforehand, the gnostic mind receives gifts from the contemplation of existing things—the principles of faith that hold it together, brought to the Lord through itself without rational demonstration, faith for which no one in any way contributes anything beforehand, beholding its own Maker naturally and without any technical method in arguments, while creation proclaims it (for what could anyone contribute beforehand that could be compared to faith, so as to receive faith in God as a debt rather than as a gift?). And he receives gifts by imitating in his conduct the natural laws of existing things, that is, by contributing beforehand, from the acquisition of these things, the labors of repentance, through which one is naturally enabled first to put off the old man and thus to go out to gather the fruits of righteousness, which have been made in existing things

Gathering for himself modes of conduct toward virtue, which he could never approach unless he had first, through many labors and sweats, swallowed and stripped off the old man entirely, as a snake does its skin. Therefore the gnostic intellect reasonably receives as gifts for God the principles drawn from created things that are constitutive of faith, bringing forward and giving nothing of these at all beforehand (For who, it says, has first given to him, and it shall be repaid to him?), but it receives gifts, imitating in its modes the natural laws of created things. I mean something like this: the discerning intellect, imitating the natural law of heaven, receives gifts, preserving within itself the most level and always uniformly constant motion of virtue and knowledge, bearing firmly, like stars, the luminous and most radiant principles concerning created things. And imitating the natural law of the sun, which exchanges one place for another according to the needs of the whole, it receives another gift: the understanding to adapt fittingly with wisdom to all that happens, in no way relinquishing its own identity in illumination according to virtue and knowledge.

Again he takes on the eagle's keen, straight-straining gaze toward the divine gleam of the undefiled light, in no way blunted in his noetic pupil by the all-shining ray. He imitates the deer as well, pursuing, like mountains, the heights of divine contemplations, and destroying by the word of discernment, as if by antidote, the passions that lurk in the nature of beings, and quenching with the many and varied springs of knowledge the poison of evil that is trapped in memory by circumstance. He imitates also the keen sight of the gazelle and the safety of the bird, leaping over and bounding past, like a gazelle, the snares of the demons who war against virtue, and flying over, like a bird, the traps of the spirits who fight against knowledge. Some say that a lion's bones, when struck against one another, give off fire. The gnostic and God-loving mind imitates this natural property too, striking the pious thoughts against one another like bones through inquiry according to truth, and kindling the fire of knowledge. He becomes wise as the serpent and guileless as the dove, preserving faith as a head unbruised through all things, and clearly laying aside from himself the bitterness of wrath, like the dove, so as not to know how to bear malice against those who afflict and eagerly insult him.

He also receives from the turtle-dove, as it were a gift, the imitation of chastity, making works of his own judgment all the things that belong to natures by necessity. Thus, then, having approached the generation of beings with knowledge according to the reason and manner of each nature, the most philosophical mind, as being capable of knowledge, receives the spiritual reasons of beings as gifts offered to God by creation, and as being practical, receives the natural laws of beings as gifts, imitating them in his manners, unveiling in himself throughout his life the magnificence of the divine wisdom invisibly borne in beings. But if someone should also say this, that the word stated that gifts are offered to God, in order to set forth the infinity of the divine goodness, as though, since it brought nothing beforehand, it receives from us the gifts as gifts, reckoning the whole of the contribution to us—this he said not outside what is fitting, having shown the great and ineffable goodness of God toward us, who receives as ours the

offered to him by us on his own behalf, and confessing the debt owed for them as for things belonging to another. And Hezekiah, it says, was exalted in the eyes of all the nations. He who by practice and contemplation has brought virtue and knowledge to the highest point, like Hezekiah, is reasonably exalted above all the nations—I mean both the fleshly and the slandered passions—becoming superior to them in practice, and above the so-called natural bodies, and, to speak concisely and sum it up, in contemplation passing through all the principles in them in a knowing way, above all the forms under perception; these too are figuratively called nations in Scripture because of what is naturally alien and foreign to the soul and the mind; which things, since they do not war against the mind, God did not command to be warred against at all. For we were not commanded to war against the created things outside us that pertain to perception, but we were ordered always to struggle against the passions of dishonor that dwell unnaturally within us ourselves in the earth of the heart, until we destroy them from it and possess the land alone, remaining unshaken by the removal of alien passions. Therefore also, with careful distinction, in the place concerning the bringing in of the gifts of God and the presents of the king, Scripture did not say simply that all brought gifts to God and presents to the king, but many—that is, not all the nations, but many nations—it being clear from this that there are things called nations, from which nothing is brought to God or to the king.

For he says that the created things that complete the nature of things that have come to be reasonably bring gifts to God—the more divine principles in them, according to which they were also created, as having come from God—and to the king their own laws, evidently according to nature, as having subsisted for his sake, by which the human mind, being ordered, establishes the cohesive ways of virtue. But the derivative existence of the nations not having come from God within us—I mean the passions—brings nothing to God or to men, because it has not come from God. For it was from us, who disobeyed the divine commandment, and not from God, that the passions of dishonor had their origin; from which no one ever offers anything to God in any way, since they have no principle of wisdom or knowledge at all, inasmuch as they subsist derivatively by the loss of wisdom and of knowledge.

In the place of the same Hezekiah, who was also lifted up before the eyes of all the nations—the king—he has spoken with marked significance, "of all the nations," the word indicating that the one who has obtained to dwell in impassibility as in Jerusalem through his labors in practice, and who has been released from every disturbance that comes from sin, and who both does and speaks and hears and thinks only peace—after he has received through natural contemplation the nature of things visible, bringing to the Lord through itself the more divine principles in it as gifts, and bearing to Him as to a king the laws in it as presents—is lifted up before the eyes of all the nations, becoming, clearly, above all: both above the passions of the flesh through practice, and above natural bodies and all the forms under sense perception through contemplation, having passed beyond the spiritual principles and modes in them. Thus I have understood also the "many brought," but not "all"—that is, the nations outside, that is, created things, but not the nations within us, that is, the passions. For all the created things that complete the world hymn and glorify God with unutterable voices. And their hymn becomes ours; "through which I receive the power to hymn," says Gregory, the great one surnamed of theology.

Therefore the Holy Scripture, as has been shown, having set forth its own will as free and open to all who wish to be saved, has not shut itself up entirely in one person. For each one can become a Hezekiah, imitating Hezekiah in the Spirit, and through prayer cry out to God and be heard and receive an angel—I mean the word of greater wisdom and knowledge—in the time of the uprising of the wicked demons, and to wipe out every mighty man and warrior and ruler and general, that is, the passionate motions of desire and anger and the attachment to sensible things, and the reasoning that, like a general, devises the ways of sin, and thus to come into peace through release from the passions and to have leisure for the contemplation of beings, and to receive the principles that hold knowledge together as gifts and the ways that establish the virtues as presents, offered to him by the whole creation for the glory of God and his own progress, and after this to be lifted up fittingly before the eyes of all the nations, that is, to become above all the passions in virtue and above all created things in knowledge, and to guard through humility the grace of salvation, and not to suffer the things that follow these according to the Scripture.

SCHOLIA 1. For these three reasons God sowed spiritual principles and modes of noble conduct in the visible nature: so that the Creator of created things might be proclaimed; and so that man, educated by the natural laws and modes, might easily find the path of righteousness that leads to Him; and so that no one among the unbelievers might have ignorance as a pretext for excuse. 1. Sensible and intelligible things are between God and men; rising above these, the human mind journeys toward God: not enslaved to sensible things in practice, and not at all dominated by intelligible things in contemplation. 2. The creation, he says, becomes an accuser of ungodly men: through the principles within it, proclaiming its own Creator; and through the natural laws within it, each according to its kind, educating man toward virtue. The principles are recognized in the cohesion of each particular kind's permanence; the laws are seen in the sameness of each particular kind's natural activity; not applying ourselves to these according to the intellectual power within us, we have both ignored the cause of existing things and become attached to all unnatural passions. 3. Man, understanding the spiritual principles of visible things, is taught that there is a Creator of things that appear; leaving unexamined the conception of what He is, as unattainable. For the creation wisely provides the apprehension that He is a Creator, but not what sort of Creator He is. Therefore the Scripture has called the principles of visible things gifts, as being declarative of His dominion over all things.

But gifts, their natural laws, through which he teaches man, recognizing by species what sort of thing each of existing things is, not to corrupt what is according to nature by a foreign law. 4. He says that we have received faith in God as a gift, a knowledge existing and established immediately concerning God; which has its understanding without demonstration. For it is the substance of things hoped for, since none of existing things has yet been comprehended by knowledge. 5. Faith, he says, is brought forward before virtue; and virtue before knowledge; but nothing at all before faith. For faith is the beginning of the good things among men; of which nothing by nature is brought forward from us. 6. Nothing, he says, is of equal weight to faith. 7. The gnostic mind, he says, receives the principles of existing things as advocates of faith in God, but not as producers of faith. For the principles of things that have come to be are not the beginning of faith; since then the object of faith would also be circumscribed. For that whose beginning for demonstration is comprehended by knowledge, this very thing is by nature comprehensible by knowledge.

8. It is a law of heaven to be carried in a circle in the same way; from it the man of knowledge receives his steadfast motion in the good, imitating the heaven's ceaseless motion around the same point of virtue. 9. It is a natural law of the sun to produce by its transits the difference of the times; from it the man of knowledge receives the ability to adapt himself to various dealings, preserving by reason the brightness of virtue, dimmed by none of the things that happen against his will. 10. It is a natural law of the eagle to receive the sun's ray striking its pupil; from it the man of knowledge receives, according to his purpose, that his mind be ever illumined by the divine light. 11. What does the man of knowledge also learn from the natural law of the deer, as he surveys the nature of existing things? 12. What too, taking by imitation from the gazelle and the bird, does he who cuts the road of knowledge through action keep virtue inviolate? 13. What beauty does he who philosophizes about divine things learn, transferring to himself in a rational manner, according to his purpose, the natural contemplation of the lion? 14. How must one, imitating the serpent and the dove, become a philosopher?

15. How can we also be benefited by the turtle-dove? 16. The virtuous man, who transfers the laws of beings by imitation to his own law, reasoning out the motion of those deprived of reason; but he who changes his own law by imitation to the laws of others is passionate, carrying the power of reason out into irrationality. 17. He calls natural bodies all things under generation and corruption. 18. It is a fine observation that we ought not to wage war against creation, of which God is the craftsman, but against the disordered and contrary-to-nature motions and activities of the powers within us that pertain to its essence. 19. Practical philosophy, he says, places the practical man above the passions; and contemplation establishes the gnostic above the things seen, leading the mind up to the kindred intelligibles. NB (52). CONCERNING "HE DID NOT RENDER TO HIM ACCORDING TO THE RECOMPENSE WHICH GOD RENDERED TO HIM; HEZEKIAH RENDERED." 52. QUESTION 52: And Hezekiah did not render according to the recompense which God rendered to him, but his heart was lifted up; and wrath came upon him and upon Judah and upon Jerusalem. And Hezekiah was humbled from the height of his heart, and those who dwell in Jerusalem, and the wrath of the Lord did not come upon them in the days of Hezekiah. What is the recompense, and what follows? Answer.

For after many and varied benefactions, which God in due season granted and preserved for Hezekiah, redeeming him from every necessity and circumstance, Hezekiah himself did not, as he ought, refer the whole thank-offering of his salvation to God, but some human blemish clung to him and divided the power of his successes, so that, by way of recompense—which God repaid him—Hezekiah did not repay. For he did not, in proportion to the greatness of the divine successes wrought in him, raise up thanksgiving with grateful mind, but his heart was lifted up, since he did not escape the disease of the conceit that puffs up on account of virtue and knowledge. And wrath came upon him and upon Judah and upon Jerusalem. The wrath of God is, in a single onset, the painful perception of those being disciplined. And the painful perception is the infliction of involuntary pains, through which God often brings the mind puffed up on account of virtue and knowledge to compunction and humility, granting it to become its own judge and conscious of its own weakness; perceiving which, it lays aside the vain swelling of the heart. For it says: after the wrath came, Hezekiah was humbled from the height of his heart, and those who dwelt in Jerusalem, and the wrath of the Lord did not come upon them in the days of Hezekiah.

Or again, the anger of the Lord is the suspension of the supply of divine gifts, which comes advantageously upon every lofty and elevated mind that boasts greatly over the good things given to it from God as though they were its own achievements. And it is worth pausing to consider and see why it was that the anger came not only upon Hezekiah, whose heart was lifted up, but also upon Judah and upon Jerusalem. This will especially persuade those who diligently sit at the mere letter of Scripture that lovers of God must make all diligence concerning the spiritual contemplation of what is written, if indeed the word of truth is to them more precious than all things. For if we follow the mere letter, we shall, as is likely, condemn the divine judgment of great injustice, since it punishes together with the one who sinned those who did not sin at all. And how will the true word be, that says, "A father shall not die for a son, nor a son for a father; each shall die in his own sin," and "the soul that sins, it shall die," and "you will render to each according to his works," spoken to God by David?

And "his heart was lifted up," it says, "Hezekiah's." And it did not add, "and the heart of those who dwell in Jerusalem and Judea." How, then, it lumped together the innocent with the guilty, I cannot see, according to those very men. For it says: "And Hezekiah's heart was lifted up; and wrath came upon him and upon Judah and upon Jerusalem," concerning whom the text has not written that they were lifted up. Therefore, since the solution of these difficulties is unmanageable for those who preside over the letter and prefer the literal sense to the meaning, let us come to the spiritual understanding of what is written, and we shall find without toil the truth hidden by the letter, shining forth like light for those who love the truth. Every gnostic and philosophical mind, then, has both Judah and Jerusalem: Judah, taken spiritually in the mode of confession—that is, the habit of repentance together with its cohesive thoughts, practically growing together with the progress of the mind's ascent (for Judah is interpreted as confession)—and Jerusalem, allegorically understood as the peaceful habit of impassibility together with the divine contemplations that complete it. And to speak briefly, it has Judea as practical philosophy and Jerusalem as theoretical mystical initiation.

Whenever, then, through divine grace, the mind that loves God, having by both the practical and the contemplative philosophy wholly beaten back every power opposed to virtue and knowledge, is perfectly crowned with the victory over the spirits of wickedness, and does not render the due thanksgiving to God, the cause of the victory, but is lifted up in heart, deeming itself the cause of the whole achievement, then, as not having repaid God according to the recompense which he repaid to it, it receives—not itself alone—the wrath of abandonment coming upon it, but also Judah and Jerusalem, that is, the habit of practice and of contemplation, immediately with the dishonor of the passions, by the permission of God, when the passions rise up against the practice and defile the conscience that was until then pure, and false notions are entangled together with the contemplation of beings and pervert the opinion of knowledge that was until then right.

For truly a divine boundary and law exists in created things by providence, permitting those who have shown themselves ungrateful for better things to be instructed through opposites toward gratitude, and to gain from the experience of things opposed a divine knowledge of the power that accomplishes good things—so that we may not, having been allowed by providence to hold our conceit wholly unassailable in better things, slip down into the god-opposed disposition of pride, thinking that the possession of virtue and knowledge is ours by nature and not acquired by grace, and so be found using the noble for the generation of evil, and through those very things by which the divine knowledge ought rather to have been bound fast in us and to remain unshaken, through them—as ought not to have happened—we fall sick with ignorance of it. For he who thinks he has himself attained the goal of virtue will no longer seek the fountaining cause of good things, having confined the power of his striving to himself alone, and defrauding himself of the boundary of salvation—I mean God. But he who perceives his own natural poverty in regard to good things does not cease running eagerly toward the one who is able to give the fulfillment of his need.

Therefore anger, that is, abandonment, justly comes upon the high-minded mind—namely, the permission granted to demons to harass it both in practice, as Judah, and in contemplation, as Jerusalem—so that it may receive a sense of its own natural weakness, and knowledge of the divine power and grace that shelters it and sets right every good thing, and so that it may be humbled, putting far away from itself the alien and unnatural height, so that the other anger—that of the removal of the gifts given—may not come upon it. This did not come upon Hezekiah, because he was immediately humbled by the first anger that came upon him, that is, the abandonment, and became aware of the one who provides good things. For it says, after "and anger came upon him and upon Judah and upon Jerusalem": "And Hezekiah was humbled from the height of his heart, and those who dwell in Jerusalem, and the anger of the Lord did not come upon them in the days of Hezekiah"—clearly the other anger, that of the removal of the gifts—because the first abandonment became for him a teacher of good discernment.

For the one who has not been brought to his senses by the first kind of anger—that is, abandonment—so as to come to humility, clearly receives the other anger coming upon him, which takes away from him the working of the gifts and leaves him desolate of the power that had hitherto guarded him: "And I will remove his hedge," says God concerning the senseless Israel, "and he shall be for a plundering, and I will throw down his wall and he shall be for a trampling underfoot, and I will let go of my vineyard and it shall not be pruned nor dug, and thorns shall come up in it as in a dry land; and I will command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it"—as it was also proclaimed that Saul, the first king of Israel, suffered. For he, having received grace at the same time as the kingdom through the anointing and the prophecy, since he did not keep it, receives as a first anger the working of the evil spirit; and having no perception of this, he was stored up for the other anger and came to the same end, having become—because of his folly—stripped of all godliness before death. And he makes this clear by what he suffered, first being energized by the demon, and then later deserting willingly to them through the ventriloquist, calling up the demons and, perhaps, performing for the demons the rite of divination, as the godless do.

Since, then, we have taken Hezekiah to mean the philosophical mind, Judea to mean practice, and Jerusalem to mean contemplation, whenever we perceive that the mind has in any way whatsoever been affected, we shall certainly believe that its practical and contemplative power have been affected together with such a mind, according to the principles that hold them together; for it is not possible for the subject to be affected without the things in the subject being affected along with it. Well, then, does the account of contemplation accord with the literal text of Scripture, bringing no slander against the divine verdict of the judgments, nor effecting the overturning of another commandment. For according to the contemplation of the account that has been given, Hezekiah alone—that is, the mind—is exalted, thinking great things over his achievements, while Judea and Jerusalem, that is, practice and contemplation, are not exalted with him, because they are not naturally disposed to undergo this, since they are not contemplated as subsisting in themselves. And upon Hezekiah alone, that is, the mind, anger does not come, but also upon Judah and Jerusalem. For practice and contemplation are certainly stained together with the mind when it is in some way defiled, even though they are not participants in the cause of anger.

Let us, then, also become partakers of the meaning of what has been written. For even if these things happened to them typically according to the history, yet they were written for our sake, for spiritual admonition—for us, to whom the things written continually happen, since the opposing power is always being arrayed against us in a noetic sense—so that, having transferred the whole Scripture, if possible, to the mind, we may enlighten the mind itself with divine thoughts, and make the body radiant with the modes of the more divine words that have been understood, making it a rational workshop of virtue by the removal of the innate passions.

Every man, then, who loves God and is virtuous, having in a gnostic manner, like Hezekiah, girded himself against the power of the demons—if some assault of evil spirits should come upon him, wrestling invisibly against him in his mind, and through prayer he should receive an angel sent to him from God—I mean a word of wisdom greater than himself—and having utterly crushed and scattered the army of the devil, he should not ascribe the cause of such victory and salvation to God, but rather dedicate the whole victory to himself, such a man has not repaid God according to His recompense, not having matched the abundance of his thanksgiving to the greatness of the salvation, nor measured his own disposition against the beneficence of the one who saved him—for recompense is the disposition of the one saved, measured out in works toward the one who saved him—but he lifted up his heart, being magnanimous over the gifts he received as though he had not received them. Such a man justly receives the wrath that comes upon him, God permitting the devil to be joined with him in thought and to shake the ways of virtue pertaining to practice and to obscure the clear words of knowledge pertaining to contemplation, so that, having learned his own weakness, he may recognize the only power that subdues the passions within us, and being humbled may repent, casting off the bulk of presumption, and may propitiate God and turn away the wrath that comes upon those who do not repent—the wrath that removes the grace guarding the soul and leaves the ungrateful mind desolate.

The Scripture has perhaps called the days of King Hezekiah the various illuminations that every pious and God-loving mind receives, applying itself to the contemplation of created things for the understanding of the wisdom variously signified through all things; and for such a mind, as long as practice and contemplation are duly ordered, deprivation of virtue and knowledge does not naturally occur, since the Sun of righteousness creates such days in such a mind through His own rising. SCHOLIA 1. That the one who exalts himself on account of practice is succeeded by the dishonor of passions; but the one who is lifted up on account of knowledge, just judgment permits to stumble in true contemplation. 2. He speaks of the boundary and law that divinely inheres in existing things, meaning the providence that holds together all things, which by just judgment, through the scarcity of goods, disciplines toward gratitude those who, in the abundance of goods, have shown themselves ungrateful to its own provider; leading them through opposites to a perception of the discernment of the One who grants good things. For presumption based on virtue and knowledge, remaining undisciplined, naturally gives birth to the disease of pride, which brings with it a disposition opposed to God.

3. He who has recognized his inexperience of virtue never ceases from the course that leads to it, lest he be deprived of virtue's beginning and end—I mean God—by having set the motion of his desire around himself, and lest he unknowingly think he has attained perfection while enduring the fall from what truly is, toward which every earnest man's motion hastens. (4. He says that the road to impiety is steep, namely the insensitivity concerning the loss of virtues. For he who has accustomed himself through the pleasures of the flesh to disobey God will also deny God himself when an occasion calls for it, preferring the life of the flesh to God, whose pleasures alone he has held to be greater than the divine wills. 5. He calls the intellect the subject, as being receptive of virtue and knowledge; and in the subject are practice and contemplation, which hold the place of accidents in relation to the intellect; therefore in every way they also suffer together with it when it suffers, having the particular motion of the intellect as the beginnings of their own alteration. 6. The natural passions of the body, when governed by reason, carry no blame; but when moved without it, they bring blame. He says, then, that there must be a casting off of those whose motion is natural, but whose use often becomes contrary to nature, not being governed by reason.

7. Saving anger is the divine concession by which the high-minded mind is permitted by the demons to be warred against by the passions, so that, suffering dishonorably while vaunting himself in virtues, he may learn who is the giver of these; or that he may become stripped of the things belonging to others, which he thought he possessed as though he had not received them. 8. He calls Judah and Jerusalem action and contemplation according to the principle of spiritual ascent. 9. The Lord and God is the Sun of righteousness, and Christ Jesus is the Savior of all things. 53. CONCERNING "AND THEY BURIED HIM IN THE ASCENT OF THE TOMBS OF THE SONS OF DAVID." 53. QUESTION 53. Again he says concerning Hezekiah: "And they buried him in the ascent of the tombs of the sons of David, and all Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem gave him glory and honor in his death." What is "in the ascent of the tombs of the sons of David," and what follows? Answer. David is, in the spiritual sense, our Lord Jesus Christ, the stone which the builders—the priests and rulers of the Jews—rejected after examining it, which became the head of the corner, that is, of the Church. For the Church is a corner according to the Scripture. For just as the corner becomes the union of two walls, binding them together into an indissoluble cohesion, so also the holy Church has become the union of the two peoples, binding together those from the nations and the Jews by one principle of faith and joining them into one harmony, of which the cornerstone is the

Christ, as the head of the whole body. For the name of David, when interpreted, means "Despisement," who is the Word and Son of God, who for my sake put on the form of a servant and became a reproach of men who disbelieve the truth and a despisement of a people full of sins, the good shepherd who lays down his life for us the sheep, who killed the lion and the bear—I mean the anger and the desire—having despoiled them from nature, the things that tear apart the form of the divine image in us according to the reason, the ruddy one, through the suffering of death, with beauty of eyes, that is, with the glory of the higher reasons according to providence and judgment; for the eyes of the Word would be judgment and providence, through which even in suffering for us he makes his visitation of the whole, the slayer of the noetic and proud Goliath—I mean the devil—who has his stature of five cubits because of the passionateness of the fivefold senses in us; for the devil has his greatness of stature in evil exalted to the extent that the power of sense in us is passionately extended to sensible things, the king of the true Israel and of him who sees God, even if Saul, the old people according to the law, rages, consumed by envy through unbelief; for he does not bear the deprivation of temporary glory, whose spear and whose water-flask David my king is deprived of and is pursued—that is, the strength of practical virtue and the grace of gnostic contemplation (and even again, lending these, he gives them to those who pass over to him in faith, because of those from the Jews who are about to inherit

...salvation, receiving the proclamation of the kingdom), whose fringe of the cloak is again taken away in the cave as he sits for the casting out of refuse—that is, the height of the dignity belonging to ethical philosophy, or the lofty eminence in thoughts of the covering of the legal symbols and riddles—judging it neither worthy nor indeed just that the people of the Jews, who sit as in a cave in this age or in the dark letter of the law, being truly earthly and body-loving and circumscribing the divine promises of incorruptible things by the corruption of things that pass away, should have the mystical beauty of the legal ordinances, as it were the fringe of a cloak, understood in a worthy manner. This is the David perceived by the mind, the true shepherd and king and destroyer of the opposing powers—a shepherd of those who still pursue the practical philosophy and feed like grass on natural contemplation, but a king of those who by spiritual laws and words have renewed the beauty of the given image to its archetype, and who, with the great King himself directly present to the mind of the ages and, as it is right to say, beholding the inaccessible beauty as in a mirror.

All the saints from the beginning of the age are therefore sons of this David, born of him in the Spirit. The tombs of these sons are the memorials of their life lived on earth according to God. The ascent of these tombs is the height of their knowledge of and love for God, where all Judah and those who dwell in Jerusalem bury, establishing in the place corresponding to their worth of the blessed dwelling both the modes of action and the words of knowledge that inhabit true contemplation, the mind that has died praiseworthily to all existing things—to sensible things by the setting aside of sensible activity, and to intelligible things by the cessation of intelligible motion. Therefore Hezekiah, interpreted as "strength of God," as a mighty mind most radiant in action and in knowledge, all Judah and those who dwell in Jerusalem bury when he has died—that is, when he has departed in intention from all existing things and has come to be toward what is beyond existing things—namely, his action according to virtue and his true contemplation according to knowledge, in the ascent of the tombs of the sons of David, I mean in the height

...of the memory of the saints from the beginning of the age, having given him glory and honor—glory, as being above all things according to the intellectual knowledge of the principles (logoi) in created things; honor, as having become pure from all passions and having acquired motion free of blame according to sense perception with respect to the natural laws in created things. Perhaps one of those exceedingly fond of the good will say, in a spirit of generous rivalry, that glory is the highest beauty according to the image, and honor is the unvarying imitation according to the likeness; for the one is by nature the true contemplation of spiritual principles, and the other is the precise and unadulterated practice of the commandments. These Hezekiah the Great possessed, and was buried "in the ascent of the tombs of the sons of David"—as one might put the saying more clearly: instead of "they buried him in the ascent of the tombs of the sons of David, and they placed the memory of Hezekiah in the height of the memory of the saints from the beginning of the age." Let us consider that it is not said "in the tombs of David" or "in the ascent of the tombs of David"; for incomparable to created things—not to men only, but to angels as well—and utterly beyond containment is the Word of the Lord according to the flesh, and His manner of life, not to mention the unattainable conception of His infinite divinity. Therefore it is a desirable thing for everyone who has even strongly perceived His majesty—at least to be "in the tombs of the sons of David," or, at best, "in the ascent of the tombs of the sons of David." For no one is recorded in Scripture as buried in the tombs of David, much less in the ascent of the tombs of David; for the life according to the flesh of our Lord and God and Savior is, as I said, incomparable in every principle and manner.

For he says, His virtue covered the heavens—that is, the very righteousness according to man, through the flesh of the Lord, also covered the powers above by the excess of its preeminence in all things according to righteousness. For he was not a mere man, but God become man, in order to renew through himself and in himself the nature of men grown old by itself, and to make it a partaker of the divine nature, having laid aside all corruption and alteration, through which, having been made like the cattle, it had sense prevailing over reason. To him be the glory unto the ages; amen. Scholia 1. The devil is five cubits tall, he says, on account of the senses. (For without these, the irrational motion of his wickedness concerning the soul does not admit advancement of growth according to sin. 2. The spear, he says, is a symbol of the strength according to virtue; and the torch is a token of the mystery of the water, of that which is according to knowledge. 3. He calls this world a cave, and the letter of the law; and Saul to be the people of the Jews, whose mind, having turned away from the divine light of things intelligible, sits down with the darkness of things sensible and the shadow of the letter, making the creation of God and the law a means to the generation of corruption. For he who circumscribes the immortal promises by the letter alone and by the appearances of things sensible, makes his excrement suitable as food for corruption, showing the beginning of his own opinion concerning God from the end. And the double cloak, he says, is the covering of the legal enigmas.

Its wing—the preeminent height in thoughts of spiritual contemplation—is cut off from those who receive the Holy Scripture according to sense alone. 4. That the Lord is called Shepherd of those guided through natural contemplation to the fold above; and King of those subjected to the law of the Spirit, and who stand before the throne of the grace of God through the undivided knowledge of the mind's simple contact. 5. He calls the ways of practice according to virtue those who dwell in Judea; and the words of knowledge according to contemplation he calls those who dwell in Jerusalem. 6. He calls the praised death of the mind the deliberate turning away from all things that exist, after which it is naturally disposed to receive the divine life by grace, having incomprehensibly received in place of all else the Cause of all things. 7. He calls glory the undefined knowledge, bounded by no principle; and honor, the unrestrained movement of the will according to virtue toward nature. 8. The unerring knowledge, he says, having an undefined character concerning the divine infinity—the movement of the mind beyond thought—images through its indefiniteness the transcendent glory of the truth. And the voluntary imitation of the goodness wise in providence brings honor—the mind's clear likeness, as far as is possible, to God according to disposition.

9. He says that according to the anagogical sense David is Christ; and his burial is the remembrance in righteousness that is incomparable to every rational nature. For the Word of God, having become man, did not measure righteousness by the natural laws of the flesh, but worked through the flesh the righteousness that belongs to him naturally as God, since natural activity is not without a share in it. From the same Tomos... continuation... TO THALASSIUS 54. CONCERNING ZERUBBABEL AND HIS PRAYER. (54. QUESTION 54. In the first book of Ezra it is written concerning Zerubbabel: And when the young man went out, lifting up his face to heaven before Jerusalem, he blessed the King of heaven, saying: From you is the victory, and from you is the wisdom, and yours is the glory, and I am your servant. Blessed are you, who have given me wisdom; and to you I confess, Master of the fathers. What does it mean to lift up the face to heaven before Jerusalem, and what follows? Answer. Zerubbabel, according to the exactness of the Hebrew, admits both a rough breathing and a smooth breathing, and both composition and division and stichometry.

And this name, when aspirated, means "a sowing of confusion"; when unaspirated, "a rising of confusion"; when compounded, "a rising in confusion"; when divided, "a rising of dispersion"; when divided into lines, "he himself is rest." Zerubbabel, then, is the philosophical mind, first through repentance being sown in the "confusion" of the captivity of the passions according to "righteousness"; second, a "rising of confusion," making manifest the shame of the confounded passions; third, a "rising in confusion," giving illumination through knowledge in the confusion of the activity of the senses toward sensible things, and not allowing them to assail sensible things without reason; fourth, a "rising of dispersion," providing to the powers of the soul that have been dispersed about sensible things a rising of works of righteousness, in which the practice accompanied by reason consists, not lacking gnostic contemplation, which leads back the dispersed powers to intelligible things; and fifth, "he himself is rest," as having made all peace, and having joined the practical to the good according to nature, and the contemplative to the truth according to nature. For every practice is naturally disposed to come about for the sake of the good, and every contemplation seeks knowledge for the sake of truth alone.

When these things have been accomplished, there will be nothing at all to strike the practical faculty of the soul, nor indeed its contemplative faculty by sharpening it through foreign speculations, since it has come to be beyond every being and every object of thought, and has entered into God himself, the only good and true one, who is beyond all substance and thought. Such a mind, having become so through the various advances of the virtues, when it goes out after the victory from Darius the king—that is, from the natural law—having shown to him the power of love and of truth in the comparison of the virtues against the passions, and having received a vote lawfully, one that confirms its own projection but invalidates those of others, recognizing whence the grace of victory has come to it, lifts its face to heaven before Jerusalem and blesses the king of heaven. The face, then, of such a mind is the disposition understood in the hidden depth of the soul, in which all the characters of the virtues exist; this it lifts toward heaven—that is, the height of contemplation—before Jerusalem, that is, the dispassion according to habit; or again, to heaven before Jerusalem, seeking the dwelling-place in heaven and the city of those enrolled in the heavens, of which David says, "glorious things have been spoken." For it could not otherwise bless God unless it lifted to the height of contemplation and knowledge, according to the habit of dispassion—that is, of the blameless and peaceful state—the face of the soul's disposition, which is composed of many and various virtues, as it were of characters.

And what does he mean by saying, "He takes away the face"? "From you is the victory," declaring the end of the practical faculty against the passions through victory, and, as it were, the prize of the divine struggles against sin; and "from you is the wisdom," the end through contemplation, that is, according to knowledge, which removes all ignorance from the soul; and "yours is the glory," calling "glory" the beauty of the divine comeliness that is displayed from these things, as far as is lawful—which is the union of victory and wisdom, of practice and contemplation, of virtue and knowledge, of goodness and truth. For these, united with one another, flash forth one glory and radiance of God. Therefore he fittingly adds, saying, "and I am your servant," knowing that God accomplishes all practice and contemplation in us as instruments, virtue and knowledge, victory and wisdom, goodness and truth, while we contribute nothing at all except the disposition that wills what is good. Having this disposition, the great Zerubbabel says in addition to what has been said: "Blessed are you," he says to God, "who have given me wisdom; and to you I give thanks, Master of the fathers." As a grateful servant he attributed all things to God, who has bestowed all things, from whom he received and had wisdom, confessing to him as Master of the fathers the power of the graces given. And he calls God "blessed" as having wisdom that is infinite—or rather, being Wisdom itself; from whom he confesses that he received the grace.

He calls him "master of fathers," wishing to show that all the achievements of the saints were plainly gifts of God, since no one possesses anything at all, or any good that has been given, except as measured by the Master God in proportion to the gratitude and goodwill of the one who receives, and he possesses only those things that are present to the Master who gives. He calls "fathers" the saints from the beginning of the ages, whose faith he received and whose life he imitated, and by willing to be born of them in the Spirit he succeeded, having become a son of parents who were voluntary, himself voluntary—which is as much more honorable to God than fathers and sons who come to be from the flesh against their will, as the soul differs from the flesh by the superiority of its essence. This Zerubbabel is one of the young men who stood before King Darius—I mean the natural law—and he encompassed the whole power of the divine goods among men in two words, and scattered the rashness of the others, and drew to himself the ruling law of nature, which decrees release for the powers of the soul held in slavery to the alteration of the passions. For since the evil spirits that preside over the body, as being more material, are two, by the very peculiarity of the number the passible and perishable was indicated. But the mind that champions the soul, being one, since it is simple in essence, bore the image of the indivisible monad, which death is by no means naturally able to touch at all, since it is not a cutting of division.

For the one, that is the first young man, bringing forward the passionate luxury of the body, says, "Wine prevails," calling wine, in a summary, every delusion and drunkenness of the passions in pleasures, as being ecstatic of the mind and counterfeiting the use of natural reasonings. For "the fury of dragons," he says, "is their wine, and the incurable fury of asps," calling the boiling of fleshly pleasures "the wine of dragons," and naming the tyrannical and arrogant contempt of disobedience "the wine of asps." For this beast, as they say, beyond all the beasts of the earth, stops its ears against incantations, tyrannizing over those who enchant it out of arrogance. The other, that is the second, says, "The king prevails," calling king also every empty glory in wealth and power and the other distinctions, the generative cause of ignorance, according to which the scattering of nature occurs, all being ignorant of one another and all dashing against all for one thing—the desire to be glorified more than one another in power or wealth or luxury and the other ways in which those who have ignored the divine and abiding glory and who despise the might according to it wish to be glorified. These men, having encompassed, so to speak, all the mire of the depth of the passions contrary to nature with these two propositions, were making King Darius the judge of what was said—the one who, as I said, held the law of nature—hoping that he would incline to their doctrines.

The third, which is the mind presiding over virtue and knowledge, and which has willed that the soul be deprived of the evil slavery of the passions, says, "Women prevail" and "Truth conquers," calling "women" the deifying virtues, from which the love that unites humans to God and to one another is constituted, snatching the soul away from all things under generation and corruption and from the intelligible essences above them, and entwining it with God himself in a certain erotic union, insofar as it is possible for human nature, and mystically creating the undefiled and divine cohabitation; and calling "truth" the one and only cause of beings and principle and kingdom and power and glory, from which and through which all things have come to be and do come to be, and are held together in being by it and through it, and for the sake of which every zeal and motion exists for those who love God. And to speak briefly, through the "women" he indicated the end of the virtues—love, which is the unfailing pleasure and undivided union of those who partake, according to desire, of the good that is by nature; and through the "truth" he signified the limit of all knowledges and of all things known themselves, into which, as the principle and end of all beings, the natural motions are drawn together by a certain generic principle, all

...since the principle and cause of beings, as truth, prevails according to nature, and draws the motion of things that have come to be to itself. Having thus conversed with the law of nature, the philosophical mind repels every deception of the wicked demons, persuading it to vote freedom to the thoughts and powers of the soul that are held in subjection to the slavery of the passions, and to proclaim release and remission from the bonds of the captivity that is understood to those who are shut up in darkness—I mean, in the attachment to sensible things—so that they, having gone up to Judea, which I call virtue, may build in Jerusalem, which I call the state of dispassion, the temple of the Lord, that is, the knowledge that is receptive of wisdom. Great and altogether wise, then, is Zerubbabel, as one who received wisdom from God, and through it was able to set against each of the things put forward for deception to the destruction of the human race by the wicked spirits that fight on behalf of the body, and to conquer and overthrow them, and through each of his own propositions to make utterly vanish the proposition of each of the adversaries, and to ransom the soul from the wicked slavery of the passions. For since those men sought, by means of wine, that the boiling of fleshly pleasures be honored, and by means of the king maintained the dominion of worldly glory, he introduced through the women the spiritual pleasure that has no end, and through the truth demonstrated the unshakable dominion, and persuaded them to despise the present goods and to cling to those to come.

Such, in my judgment, is the meaning of these questions: good and wise, and not unworthy of the Spirit to be written for our admonition. And if anyone is able to contemplate the meaning of what is written in a loftier way, according to the power of understanding divine things granted to him, there is no envy, since the grace of the Spirit is not by nature diminished in those who partake of it—which is precisely where the passion of envy is chiefly engendered—even if one has more and another less of the grace. For each one possesses the energy of the Spirit made manifest according to the proportion of the faith within him, so that each is the steward of grace for himself, and no one who is rightly minded would ever envy another who is well approved in the graces, since the disposition that receives divine goods lies with himself. Let us come also to another mystical contemplation, which sets forth the original truth of what is written. Zerubbabel, true and new, and typified by the ancient one, is our Lord and God Jesus Christ, who was conceived and carried and born in the confusion of our nature, and became a perfect man by nature, in order to lead back to himself the nature that had revolted from the confusion—he who was not made a captive with us, nor deported to the confusion of the passions; for he did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth, but was born among us captives as a captive, and reckoned with us the lawless, becoming in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, out of love for mankind.

in the likeness of the flesh of sin, because, being by nature God impassible, he deigned without change, by economy, to become by nature passible man; and for sin, because for our sins he was led to death and for us he suffered pain, and for our sins he was wounded and was made weak for our lawless deeds, so that we might be healed by his bruise. For the Spirit says, before our face, Christ the Lord was taken in our corruptions, of whom we said, In his shadow we shall live among the nations. This is the righteous "rising" of our "dispersion" from sin, concerning which the Holy Spirit says through the prophet: a righteous rising shall rise for you, and behold, a man, Rising is his name, and from beneath him he shall rise, and the sun of righteousness and healing in his wings, "from beneath" signifying the ineffable mystery of the Word's incarnation, from which the salvation of all things rose; and the wings of the sun of righteousness would be the two Testaments, through which the Word, flying in us, heals the wound of transgression and grants the perfect strength that comes from virtue, through the Old making the removal of evil, and through the New working the establishment of virtue. Or again, the wings are providence and judgment, through which the Word, flying, invisibly rides upon things that exist, healing with words of wisdom those who are willing, and curing with modes of instruction those slow to move toward virtue, and cleansing some from the defilement of the flesh, and healing others of the stains of souls.

This is the one who leads back the captivity of the true Israel—not from land to land, as the ancient Zerubbabel did when he transferred the people from Babylon to Judea, but from earth to heaven, and from vice to virtue, and from ignorance to the knowledge of the truth of God, and from corruption to incorruption, and from death to immortality, and, to speak briefly, from the visible and flowing world to the stable and intelligible one, and from dissolving life to the indissoluble and abiding life. This is the true builder of the rational temple that had dissolved through transgressions and been set ablaze by a foreign fire—which we ourselves kindled, having walked in the light of our own fire and in the flame that we kindled, not only by slavishly causing the soul's intelligent part to follow the fleshly mindset, but also by recklessly igniting the material of the passions through activity. This is the one who by wisdom persuaded Darius the king—that is, the law of nature; for it is not lawful in this place to take Darius as the devil, since he became a willing cooperator in the grace of the people's release, having been persuaded that nothing is stronger than faith and a good conscience, nor more beneficial by nature for salvation. For faith holds the place of truth, and a good conscience occupies the place of the divine love allegorically understood through the women, in which there is no transgression at all of the divine commandments.

This is the one who built within himself, through an ineffable and indivisible union, the fallen tabernacle of David—I mean the nature corrupted by death because of sin. This is Zerubbabel, who with glory raised up the fallen house of God, concerning which the Holy Spirit says: The glory of this house, the last, shall be greater than the former. For the Word shared a second communion with nature, far more wondrous than the first: inasmuch as, having first imparted of the better, he afterward partook willingly of the worse, so that he might both save the image and immortalize the flesh, and, having utterly obliterated the word of the serpent that had been breathed into nature, might again present nature pure of evil as it was from the beginning, surpassing the first formation by deification, and might restore what had flowed away, just as he had established it when it was not from the beginning, having hardened it against falling by immutability, and might fulfill upon it the whole counsel of God and the Father, having deified it by the power of the incarnation. For, he says, the hands of Zerubbabel the spiritual have laid the foundation of this house—that is, the man—and his hands shall complete it, meaning the first formation and the final re-formation in him through ineffable union. This is the true Zerubbabel, the redeemer of the captives, who holds in his hand the tin stone, adorned with the seven eyes of the Lord, through which God looks upon all the earth. According to the history, Zerubbabel appears never to have had in his hand a tin stone having seven eyes, and those the Lord's, looking upon

upon the whole earth. Since, then, it is altogether impossible for this to stand according to the letter, let us proceed to the meaning of what is written. Zerubbabel is, as I have often said before, our Lord and God Jesus Christ. The stone of this one is faith in him; and "in the hand" means that faith in Christ is made manifest through the practice of the commandments; for faith without works is dead, just as works are dead apart from faith. And the hand is plainly a symbol of action. Bearing the stone, then, in his hand, the Lord teaches us to have faith in him that is active, adorned with the seven eyes of the Lord, that is, with the seven energies of the Holy Spirit. And there shall rest upon him, it says, seven spirits: a spirit of wisdom, a spirit of understanding, a spirit of knowledge, a spirit of understanding, a spirit of counsel, a spirit of strength, a spirit of the fear of God. The spirit of the fear of God is the abstention from evils in actual practice; the spirit of strength is the eager impulse and movement toward the actual doing and practice of the commandments; the spirit of counsel is the habitual disposition of discernment, by which we perform the divine commandments with reason and separate the worse from the better; the spirit of understanding is the unerring knowledge of the ways of virtuous action, according to which, in acting, we never fall away from the right judgment of reason; the spirit of knowledge is the comprehension of the reasons contained in the commandments, according to which the ways of the virtues consist;

The spirit of understanding is assent to the ways and principles of the virtues—or, to speak more properly, a transformation, by which a blending of the natural powers with the ways and principles of the commandments takes place. The spirit of wisdom is the reception and union with the cause of the more spiritual principles within the commandments, by which, being initiated in an unknowable way, as far as is lawful for humans, into the simple principles of beings in God, we bring forth the truth that is in all things in various ways to other humans, as from some gushing spring of the heart, ascending in a way and order from the last things that are from God but close to us, to the first things, which are far from us but close to God. For from inactivity in evils, through fear, we come to the practice of the virtues through strength; and from the practice of the virtues to the discernment of counsel; and from discernment to the habit of the virtues, that is, knowledge; and from the habit of the virtues to the knowledge of the principles within the virtues themselves; and from this to the transformative habit toward the known principles of the virtues—I mean understanding; and from this to the simple, precise contemplation of the truth in all things. Starting from this, we shall render many and various pious words about the truth from the wise contemplation of beings, both sensible and intelligible substances.

Ascending, then, through these eyes of faith—that is, illuminations—we are gathered to the divine unity of wisdom, gathering the division of the gifts that has come about for our sake back to the cause of the gifts by our partial ascents of the virtues, leaving nothing of what has been said undone, with God's cooperation, lest, growing negligent little by little, we make our faith blind and eyeless, having no illuminations through the works of the Spirit, and be justly punished unto endless ages, as having, in ourselves, so far as lies in us, blinded the divine eyes according to the faith. For everyone who has dug out such eyes of faith in himself through the idleness of the commandments is altogether condemned, no longer having God looking upon him. And I think it is for this cause that Scripture calls faith a tin stone, because the same thing is both punitive for those who do not adorn it with the commandments and preservative for those who keep it.

adorned by the energies of the Spirit. For, says the great Symeon, speaking concerning the Lord, he shall be for a fall and a rising again of many in Israel—a fall of the unbelieving, but a rising again of the believing. For some say that tin is a composite of silver and lead. Therefore lead bears the symbol of instruction and punishment and chastisement and the weight of condemnation, while silver is likewise the type of brightness and glory and renown. If this is so, then faith too, which is signified by tin, both instructs and punishes and chastises and condemns those who have become reprobate in it through the idleness of the commandments, having, as it were, the weakness of the flesh as lead, made strong in the Word according to the union, and again it makes bright and glorifies and illumines and leads to deification those who have become approved in it through the working of the commandments, having, as it were, the divinity of the Word as silver, wholly flashing forth upon the worthy as far as is possible.

Some have taken the tin stone to signify our Lord Jesus Christ, as being composed of two natures, divinity and humanity. But if one wishes to contemplate the faith of Christ, or Christ himself, more gnostically, the faith is lead, and Christ himself is lead, as disciplining the soul and chastening the flesh and punishing the passions and condemning the demons; but he is silver, as illumining the mind with virtues and glorifying it with knowledges and by deification making it light, a likeness of the first light. According to this understanding one must also take the fall and the resurrection that come from him: for he brings about a fall of the flesh, that is, of the fleshly mind, and of the passions and sin and demons, but a resurrection of the mind, that is, of the spiritual mind, and of the natural powers and of virtue and of the thoughts that are constitutive of knowledge. And simply, in those who are worthy the Word brings about a fall of the whole old man according to Adam and of the letter of the law, and a resurrection of the new man according to himself and of the spirit of the law. And perhaps for this reason also, according to the Scripture, the faith of those who are able, in the things that darken its virtue or its knowledge, to be illumined again through repentance in practice and contemplation and to recover again their own bright translucence of life is likened to the tin stone. (SCHOLIA 1. They say that the end of practical virtue is the good; and this is the fulfillment of divine activity, to which the rational part of the soul leads, using anger and desire according to nature; in which the beauty according to the likeness naturally shines forth.

They say that the end of contemplative philosophy is truth, which is the indivisible, uniform knowledge of all things pertaining to God; the pure intellect is carried toward it, having completely extinguished its own judgment according to sense; and in this knowledge the genuine dignity of the divine image is shown clearly. 2. He contemplated the women as virtues, of which love is the end; and truth he led up to the knowledge that has no limit; and of these, love and knowledge, he says, the law that rules nature, having recognized the character, is cast off like wine—the pleasure of the passions of the flesh—and like a king, the vainglory that clings to all things without restraint. 3. The disposition according to virtue, he says, is the face of the contemplative intellect, as it is raised up to heaven, to the height of true knowledge. 4. Another contemplation concerning the same: according to which he says that the enrollment in the heavens belongs only to those who, by their own purpose, offer themselves wholly to be enrolled by the pen of the Spirit; for the Holy Spirit enrolls in the heavens those who wish it, not those who are compelled.

5. No one, he says, can truly bless God without having sanctified the body by the virtues and illumined the soul by the knowledges. 6. Victory, he says, is the end of the divine struggles pertaining to the practical part of the soul; which is the unmixed good. And wisdom, he declares, is the end of the mystical visions pertaining to the contemplative part of the soul; which is the simple truth, toward which both the intellect, having become pure of sense-based imagination, and the reason lead, having yoked to itself the vital faculty of the soul; and the conjunction of these—of victory, he says, and wisdom, that is, of goodness and truth—shows forth one glory of the likeness, pure and radiant, in those in whom it comes to be. 7. The Fathers according to the Spirit, he says, become Fathers by their teaching of willing sons, willing themselves, forming them in word and life according to God; and the sons according to the Spirit become by will, through learning, sons of Fathers who are self-chosen, being formed by them willingly in disposition according to God, in word and life. For the grace of the Spirit effects a dispositional birth of those who beget and are begotten according to it, which fleshly fathers do not have, becoming unwilling fathers of unwilling sons; for the formation of those who beget and are begotten naturally is the work of nature, not of disposition. 8. The dyad here signifies matter and form; the conjunction of these produces the generation of a body, while their dissolution naturally brings about its corruption. Therefore, things that exist from matter and form have their end naturally opposed to their beginning, since corruption is the destruction of generation.

The two powers, that of desire and that of anger, defend generation and corruption: the one seeking by itself to prevail toward being, that is, generation, the other struggling to repel the dissolution that comes from corruption. The evil demons set themselves up as advocates of these powers—some urging the soul's ecstasy from divine things in accordance with desire (of which wine is a symbol), others putting forward the tyranny of the irascible power over material things (of which the kingdom is an image)—against the law of nature, wishing to persuade it to vote for a life enslaved to passions in accordance with these powers. The monad signifies the soul that is simple in essence, as an image of the supernaturally simple, three-personed monad in essence; of this soul—I mean the soul's intellect—as one, it is the advocate of the one, demonstrating faith in God through truth, and love for him through the women, stronger than all things, by the law of nature, and persuading it to vote for the dominion that accords with them. 9. He says that by the transcendent privation of the many, truth naturally appears as one and only, covering the cognitive powers of all things that can think or be thought, as being beyond being in subsistence, above things that think and things thought, and by infinite power, circumscribing the extremes of the beginning and the end of beings, it draws every motion of all things to itself, granting to some manifest knowledge, of which they were deprived of grace; and to others granting ineffable perception, of which they had the desire, making the knowledge evident through participation in goodness.

10. He understands allegorically the people in Babylon as the thoughts held captive in slavery to the passions, and Darius as the natural law, and Zerubbabel as the gnostic intellect; and Judea as virtue, and Jerusalem as the state of impassibility, and the temple as the knowledge receptive of wisdom, and the ascent from Babylon to Judea as the transition of the mind from bodily things to spiritual things through repentance. 11. He says that the measure of each one's faith is the cause of the distribution of divine goods; for according as we believe, we also have the corresponding measure of readiness for action. So the one who acts demonstrates the measure of his faith in proportion to his action, receiving the measure of grace as he believed; but the one who does not act demonstrates the measure of his unbelief in proportion to his inaction, receiving the deprivation of grace as he disbelieved. Therefore the envious man does evil in being jealous of those who succeed, since the choice of believing and acting lies clearly in himself and not in another, and it is by choice that grace comes to be received according to the measure of faith.

12. The type was rightly shown to correspond to the truth. For just as Zerubbabel was not a captive, but was born of those who were then held captive in slavery in Babylon, and became their redeemer, so too the Lord, being without sin, was counted from us and among us as one of us, voluntarily assuming the passibility of our nature, in that he endured the natural weakness of our nature in truth, and freed us from the destructive power, and led us up from earth to the heavens: by the power of his incarnation, receiving the whole nature to himself without deficiency in an ineffable union; but by the call of grace, only those who gladly received the call and who, through their works, revered the grace of the re-formation. 13. Flesh of sin is that which has its origin from the seed of a man; for in the same way it has sin in potential and corruption by nature, having the one as the beginning and the other as the end of its own generation. But the flesh in the likeness of flesh of sin is the flesh of the Lord, which came into being without the seed of a man; having corruption by nature, according to which he was like us; but by nature having sinlessness in potential, according to which he was unlike us.

14. Since, he says, as regards the most pure and highest theology, the word of the incarnation is second; for the one belongs to the word concerning the highest essence, while the other is the connecting principle of the highest activity according to providence—it was called from below a rising by the Spirit. For in the word of the divine incarnation is contained the generation of the ages and of the things within the age, and the extension of beings toward the indefiniteness of the life beyond the ages according to grace. 15. The lover of good things, he says, is urged voluntarily, according to the providence of wisdom, by words toward the grace of deification; but the one who does not love these things is led involuntarily away from evil, according to the just judgment of discipline, by ways of correction; the one, as a lover of God, is deified through providence; the other, as a lover of matter, is not permitted to come to condemnation through judgment. 16. Our blameworthy fire is the law of the flesh; and the light of this fire is the movement in the habit of the passions against this blameworthy law; and the blameworthy flame is the kindling of the passions through activity. Or again, the blameworthy fire is evil; the blameworthy light is the habit of evil; and the flame is the activity. It is not right, then, for the mind to be warmed by this fire, nor to be illuminated by this light, nor to be consumed by this flame; for the light that is pleasant to the senses is the deepest darkness to the mind. 17. True faith is constitutive of truth, having no falsehood; and a good conscience brings with it the power of love, as having no transgression of a divine commandment.

18. The resurrection is a remoulding of nature, surpassing the formation of nature in paradise: generally, by the universal immutability of all things; specifically, by the ineffable deification by grace of the saints. 19. Perhaps the word of the spiritual Zerubbabel called "hands" the creative power, by which we receive generation unto well-being; and the renewing power, by which we receive the grace of always being well; or His beneficent grace in us according to the practice of the virtues, and the undispersed outpouring of knowledge upon it according to contemplation. 20. Faith was called a stone, because of the firmness, immutability, and stability, and the wholly unmoved character of the truth according to it; and because it in no way yields to the assaults of falsehood. And "in the hand," because of its practical activity in operation, and its comprehensive grasp, by definition, of all the virtues. And having seven eyes, because of its discerning and contemplative power, and its comprehensive grasp of the wholly faultless knowledge of things under time, and its receptivity of the undefiled, sevenfold, as it were in numbers, energy of the all-holy Spirit.

21. A demonstrative analysis of the property of the spiritual gift. For it is the property of fear to abstain from evils; of strength, the practice of good things; of counsel, the discernment of things opposed; of knowledge, the unadulterated understanding of things that are fitting; of gnosis, the comprehensive grasp, in actual operation, of the divine principles within the virtues; of understanding, the soul's entire co-disposition toward the things known; of wisdom, the undiscernible union with God, through which the longing of the worthy becomes enjoyment, making the participant God by participation and establishing him as a herald of divine blessedness, according to the ever-flowing, unproclaimed projection and procession of the divine mysteries toward those who need them. 22. The first good in actual operation with respect to us, he says, which is fear, the word of Scripture has enumerated last as the beginning of wisdom; from which, being moved, we ascend to understanding, the end of wisdom; after which we come near to God himself, having only wisdom as the mediator of our union with him. For it is not possible for a man to lay hold of wisdom unless he has first, through fear and the remaining gifts in between, wholly shaken off from himself the film of ignorance and the dust of vice. For this reason, the order of Scripture has set wisdom near to God, but fear near to us, so that we might learn the measure and law of good order.

23. Wisdom, it says, is a unity, contemplated indivisibly in the various virtues that come from it, and gathered in a single form by the activities of all the virtues, and again shown to be a simple unity by the restoration of the virtues that come from it back to itself—whenever we, for whose sake it makes its procession at the generation of each virtue, are gathered up to it through each virtue in an ascending way. 24. Blind, it says, is the faith of the one who does not perform the divine commandments that pertain to faith. For if the commandments of the Lord are light, it is clear that the one who does not practice the divine commandments is without divine light, and bears the name of faith in vain, and not truly. 25. If, it says, the Word called the activities of the Spirit the eyes of the Lord, then the one who does not open these by the practice of the commandments does not have God looking upon him. For it is not in the nature of God, as is likely, to oversee those on earth through other eyes, since our illumination according to virtue is a ray of divine vision.

26. Tin, it says, having by nature the property of both silver and lead, characterizes faith; for it punishes faith when it is not kept, having lead as the accusation, for all ages, of those who did not keep it, and it glorifies those who keep it, having silver, transparent and bright, as the advocacy, for all ages, of those who kept it. 27. No one, it says, who sins can have the weakness of the flesh as an advocate of his sin. For the union with God the Word restored the whole nature by the dissolution of the curse, making our inclination of will toward the passions without excuse; for the divinity of the Word, being always present by grace to those who believe in him, withers away the law of sin in the flesh. 28. Just as, it says, tin when it grows black is made bright again, so also those who believe, even if they grow black by sinning, are made bright again by repenting; for which reason faith was perhaps likened to tin. NE (55). CONCERNING THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE AND CATTLE THAT CAME OUT OF BABYLON.

55. Question 55. All these were from Israel, from twenty years old and upward, apart from children and women: four thousand three hundred and sixty myriads; their male and female children, seven thousand three hundred and seven; singers and singing-women, eight hundred and fifty-five; camels, four hundred and thirty-five; and horses, seven thousand seven hundred and thirty-six; mules, eight hundred and forty-five; beasts of burden, five thousand five hundred and twenty-five. Give an answer worthy of such great and lofty things spoken by the Holy Spirit through the prophets concerning the return from captivity: what is this great lowliness and untimely, unlettered exposition and unworthiness of the Spirit, to make mention of camels and horses and mules and asses, and that with exactness of number? Answer. To speak with exactness concerning these things alone belongs to those who, through great purity of mind, have received from God the whole grace of the Spirit attainable by men; according to which, coursing knowingly through the sea of mystical visions, they see only the principles of the things written, stripped of the typical marks upon them, making no account at all of the symbols that typify them, unless perhaps they wish wisely to typify them bodily for the sake of those who, through childishness of mind, are unable to rise above sense, so that, having first been exercised in the types according to sense, they may desire to come to the archetypal principles that are without sense.

To apply oneself by conjecture to the higher things, because of the power naturally present in us that desires the knowledge of divine things, is not unreasonable, since from conjecture two good things are shown forth for those who have acquired pure reverence concerning divine matters. For either the one who makes a conjectural approach to divine things succeeds in attaining the truth of what is understood and joyfully offers a sacrifice of praise, thanksgiving to the one who gave the knowledge of what was sought, or he finds the meaning of what is written eluding him and reveres the divine things all the more, learning that they surpass the comprehension of his own power. Therefore I too, applying myself conjecturally to what lies before us, call upon God to become the helper of what will be said, finding in every way the power of my own mind weak in relation to the height of the scriptural riddles. For even if I succeed, the whole achievement is God's, leading me through comprehension to thanksgiving; and even if I do not, yet again in this way the good of incomprehensibility is God's, since the

...preventing beforehand the conceit that would be born in me from knowledge according to providence, and making incomprehension a ground of moderation for me. Therefore, approaching the meaning of what has been written by conjecture, as has been said, I begin from here the writing of what lies before us. In the chapter before this it has been written concerning Zerubbabel: and when the young man went out, lifting up his face to heaven before Jerusalem, he blessed the king of heaven. It is clear that after the advancement that came about from the questions put to Darius the king, he went out from the presence, evidently of Darius the king. Darius, then, is, as I said already in these words before, the law that governs nature. And thus understood, it clearly accords with the interpretation of its own name. For "generation" or "genealogy" or "one being traced in genealogy" signifies the name of Darius, as those who know the exactness of such a word say. And the name of generation and genealogy is proper to the natural law; for the race and the things traced in genealogy belong to things under nature, and genealogy to things concerning nature. Therefore Darius has rightly been taken to mean the law of nature. For the law of nature encompasses both the genera and species that are brought under nature and the things contemplated concerning nature—I mean time and place. For of every generated thing, the things without which it cannot be are naturally contemplated together with it.

Darius, then, is, as I said, the law of nature, and Zerubbabel is the contemplative mind, which has come forth as if from Darius, the law of nature, and has transcended the ordering of things that appear, which is subject to time and place, and has lifted up the face of the gnostic disposition according to virtue to heaven, that is, to the height of the intelligible essences, over against the Jerusalem that is understood in the heavens—I mean that Jerusalem which has its walls painted on the hands of the Lord, in which is the dwelling of all who rejoice, to which the true return of the captives takes place, of those who seek the dwelling place from heaven according to the divine apostle, of those who with the great David are able to say, If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten; let my tongue cleave to my throat, if I do not remember you—calling "right hand," perhaps, the spiritual practice of things divine and praiseworthy, and "tongue cleaving to the throat" the gnostic activity of reason within us, which from ignorance cleaves to the throat, that is, which is fixed in the passion concerning the throat and remains motionless in its desire for the ineffable good things, and for this reason is unable to taste the goodness of the Lord.

But if Zerubbabel, hastening toward Jerusalem, goes out beyond the principles of time and nature—whether he is the contemplative mind in us or the creative Word beyond us, who became in us according to us and for this reason became man, so that through incarnation he might lead back to himself those who by impassibility and life had thrust themselves out toward the passions and the death of the flesh—then reasonably he leads out together with himself those who have become like him, as far as is lawful, and guides them to the heavenly Jerusalem, whose utmost peak of virtue and of knowledge the Word has variegated symbolically by the aforementioned species and numbers, and has compared. For every God-loving and righteous man, making the return to the Jerusalem above in a noetic manner, completes the aforementioned numbers of the various species, gathering the principles of each species and number into one fulfillment of virtue and knowledge. And the word of the Scripture set before us for examination makes this clear, having thus: But all those from Israel from twelve years old, apart from children and women, were four thousand three thousand three hundred sixty. Well done, the precision of the Oracles of the Spirit, which has noted that none of those numbered in Israel

and had gone out of the Babylonian confusion—and this I say is the confusion of the present age—entirely within the twelve-year period, the account mystically showing that only he who has become beyond sense and time (for the number twelve clearly signifies this, being gathered from five because of the senses and seven because of time) and who has cut off the soul's relation to these things goes out of their confusion, hastening toward the city above, having, apart from children and women, four thousand three thousand three hundred and sixty. Children are perhaps the reasonings concerning natural and blameless passions that are not in our power, and women are either the inclinations or the natural appetites and pleasures, which bring no reproach to those who possess them, since they stand as a necessary consequence of natural appetite. For even food that comes to hand produces pleasure according to nature, even against our will, relieving a preceding want, and drink, driving away the annoyance of thirst, and sleep, renewing the power expended by wakefulness, and whatever else of our natural faculties there are, being necessary for the constitution of nature but useful to the zealous for the acquisition of virtue; these things, even if they are not counted together with the men, nevertheless go out together with every mind that flees the confusion of sin, so that it may not, on their account, remain held in slavery to the passions that are in our power and blameworthy and contrary to nature, which have no other beginning in us than the movement of the natural passions.