Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| He who arranges the pledges of reward in advance now grants him crowns of thirty years, completed through fortunate cycles of time; and having already gone round three circuits of decades, he permits all people to celebrate festivals that belong to whole nations, or rather to the entire world.
2| While things on earth are made bright with the flowers of the knowledge of God, it would not be beside the mark to suppose that the choirs of heaven, drawn by the laws of nature, rejoice with those on earth, and that the King over all himself, like a good father over good and God-fearing sons, is glad, and for this reason above all honors the one who leads the way and is the cause of these blessings with honors of many years, so that three cycles of decades are not enough for his reign, but he extends it to the greatest length and carries it forward into a long age. And the age as a whole is ageless and without end; by nature it allows neither its beginning nor its boundary to be seen by mortal reasoning; it cannot even be grasped from a midpoint at its center, nor does it allow those who wish to lay hold of it to seize even what is called its present, let alone the future or the past of time. For the past is not, since it has gone by; the future is not yet here, and so it is not either; and what is called its present slips away faster than thought and the sound of a word. It is not possible at all to take hold of it as something standing still. One must either look forward to it as coming or survey it as gone, for it glides away and escapes in the very moment of thinking. So the age as a whole does not submit to being made subject to mortal reasoning, but refuses to be their slave.
4| Yet it does not decline to acknowledge its own King and Master; it carries him riding on its back, and takes pride in the adornments it receives from him. He who drives it as a charioteer from above, binding it not with a golden cord, as the poet has it, but bridling it with the bonds of ineffable wisdom as if with reins, laid down within it months and seasons, times and years, and the alternating intervals of nights and days, all in perfect harmony, and tied it around with varied boundaries and measures. For the age is stretched straight and extends without limit; it has received the name "age" as being always; it is like itself in its parts, or rather has no parts and no intervals, and grows by lengthening in a single straight line. But he took it and divided it by sections in between, and as one divides a straight line drawn out in length by points, he laid down a great multitude within it; and though it was one and resembled a unit, he bound it with numbers of every kind, establishing in it, out of what had no form, a variety of many forms.
5| First of all he set within it, as one, formless matter, as a kind of essence that receives everything. Second, he made quality in matter, by the power of the dyad producing form out of what was formless. By the number of the triad he fashioned body, extended in three ways, in breadth, length and depth, composed of matter and form. From the doubled dyad he devised the tetrad of the elements (earth, water, air, fire) and put them forth as ever-flowing springs to supply this universe. The tetrad gives birth to the decad, for one, two, three and four together make up the number ten. The triad, joined with the decad, found out the nature of the month, and the month, by twelve turnings, completed the circuit of the sun. From this the cycles of years and the changes of seasons gave shape to the age, formless and without figure as it was, as in the variety of a picture full of flowers, for the rest and delight of those within it who ride the course of life.
6| For just as, for those who run their races in a contest in hope of prizes, the distances are marked out by stades, and for those who travel long journeys the highway is divided by certain stations and markers, so that no one, stretching his expectation out without limit, may lose heart, in the same way the King of the universe has surrounded the whole age with the ordinances of wisdom, and drives and carries it, guiding it in varied ways as seems good to him. He himself clothed the age, which before had no shape, with lovely colors and fresh flowers. He made the day white and bright with the sun; he spread night beneath it in a darker color, and made the brilliance of the stars glitter in it like flecks of gold woven into cloth. Kindling the shining rays of the light-bearer, the varied lights of the moon, and the radiant gatherings of the stars, he crowned the whole heaven like a great robe with every kind of beauty of design. He stretched out the air into depth from on high, and gave life through its power to the breadth and length of the whole world; he let all winged creatures take their forms, and spread out a great sea through which those that move through the air, unseen and seen, might swim. He fixed the earth in the middle, like a center; he cast the ocean around it, and the sea roars upon it; so the earth is adorned with the deep blue color of the waters that encircle it.
7| Having shown this earth to be the hearth, mother and nurse of all the living creatures on it, and having watered it with rain and with spring streams, he granted that it should flourish with plants of every kind and with seasonal flowers, for the cheerful enjoyment of life. Among the creatures in it he fashioned the most honored one, dear to himself, after his own image: a rational human being, possessed of intelligence and knowledge, the offspring of reason and wisdom. To this being he gave power to rule, with authority, over all the rest that creep and graze on the earth. For of the creatures on earth the human was the most beloved of God, and to him, as a father, he handed over even the races of the unreasoning animals to serve him. For the human he made the sea navigable and crowned the land with plants of every kind; under his hand he placed the creatures that crawl in the depths and the birds that fly on high; to him he gave the powers of knowledge, able to receive learning of every kind; to him he unveiled the study of the heavens, making plain the courses of the sun, the turnings of the moon, and the revolutions of the planets and the fixed stars. The human alone of those on earth he appointed to know the Father in heaven and to honor with hymns the great King of the whole of time.
8| But beyond all this, the maker of the world girded the unwearying age of time with the four turnings of the year. He bounded the wintry seasons with spring; spring, the beginning of the year's seasons, he weighed on evenly balanced scales; and when he had crowned the whole age with the abundant fruitfulness of spring, he handed it on to the full strength of summer. Then, as though giving it rest from its toil, he restored it in the interval of autumn, and with the wet downpours of winter rains, as one might curry a royal horse, he washed it clean and made it shine with its own streams. When he had fattened it richly with the watering of the rains, he set it once more at the gates before the doors of spring.
9| So it is that in the cycle of the whole year the great King has bound his age with reins of wisdom of this kind, and he appointed it to be carried along under a lesser pilot, his only-begotten Word, the common Savior of all things, to whom he handed the reins of the universe. The Word, having received this inheritance from a good Father, bound together in one harmony everything that the vault of heaven holds within and outside itself, and steers it on a straight course, watching over justly what suits his rational creatures on earth. He laid down the measures of life for those who run the course of mortal existence, and in this life he allowed all people to practice beforehand the preludes of the life beyond the present age. For there is, there truly is, a divine and blessed life beyond the present age, and he taught that it is stored up, in hopes of good things, for those who have contended well, and that those who have lived soberly and piously will pass from here to better things and a new home, while to those found guilty in this life he will assign the place they deserve.
10| Then, as in the prizes of a contest, having proclaimed crowns of every kind for the victors, he crowns different people with different rewards of excellence. For the good emperor who has adorned himself with reverence for God he announces that still greater honors among the prizes have been prepared in advance, and of these he already grants him to celebrate the preludes here and now, in a festival composed of perfect numbers: tens, threes, and units tripled,
11| of which the first, the triad, would be the offspring of the unit. The unit is the mother of numbers; it takes precedence over all months, seasons, years and every cycle of time, and it might reasonably be called the beginning, foundation and element of all multitude. It is called the monad from "remaining," because, while every multitude diminishes and grows by the subtraction and addition of numbers, the unit alone has received fixity and remaining, being set apart from all multitude and from the numbers generated from it. It bears the image of the indivisible essence, distinct from all others, by whose power and participation the nature of all that exists is held together.
12| For the unit is the maker of every number, since every multitude is established by the composition and addition of units, and there is no other way to conceive the essence of numbers apart from the unit. It itself stands outside multitude, far removed from every number and superior to it, making and sustaining all things, yet never stretched by anything.
13| The triad is akin to the unit, likewise unsplit and undivided, and it is the first of the numbers made up of even and odd. For the even number, taking the unit to itself, produced the first odd nature of the triad. The triad was also the first to reveal the justice of equality, taking the lead in it, since it has a beginning, a middle and an end that are equal. These things are an image of the mystical, most holy and royal Triad, which, depending on the unbegun and unbegotten nature, has received the seeds, the principles and the causes of the essence of all that is begotten.
14| So the power of the triad may fairly be considered the beginning of everything. The decad, in turn, which has received the limit of all numbers, brings the whole to rest within itself, and it is fittingly named full and all-complete, since it contains every form and every measure of all numbers, ratios, concords and harmonies. The units, at any rate, as they grow by addition, are bounded by ten; they take it as their mother and as their fixed goal, possessing it as their limit and boundary, and they run around it as around the turning post in a racecourse.
15| Then, having completed a second lap, and again a third and a fourth, and so on up to ten, they fill out the hundred from ten tens; and after that they run back to their first starting line, and beginning again from there and advancing to ten, and running around the hundred ten times, they turn back on their course through the same turning posts and run long double laps, circling out of themselves and back into themselves.
16| Of the ten, then, the tenth is a unit; ten units make up one decad; and the decad is the limit of the units, a boundary and a turning post that brings them back to the start: a turning post for the endlessness of numbers, and a boundary and end for the units. And when the triad is woven together with the decad and makes the circuit of the ten laps three times, it begets the most natural of numbers, thirty; for what the triad is among units, thirty is among decads.
17| This number is also the fixed boundary of the second great luminary after the sun. The moon's course from one conjunction to the next completes the cycle of a month, after which, taking up again a beginning of new birth, she begins fresh light and fresh days, adorned with thirty units, honored with three decads, and made radiant with ten triads.
18| By these very numbers the reign of the victorious emperor, whose world-ruling power has been honored by the Giver of all good things, now lays hold of the beginning of new blessings. Until now it has been completing its thirtieth-year festivals, but from here on it reaches toward longer spans and courts the hope of blessings to come in the heavenly kingdom, where armies of countless lights dance around the King of all. There it is not one sun; all the beings there bring lights greater than the sun, shining and gleaming with the radiance of the flashing rays of the eternal fountain.
19| There the life of the soul is spent among the untouched beauties of good things; there life is free of every burden; there is the enjoyment of a pleasure that is temperate and all-holy; and time there is timeless, age-long and without end, stretching on to a limitless close, no longer measured by intervals of days and months, nor by the cycles of years, nor by the rounds of seasons and times, but lasting in one life that extends into infinity. That life is not lit by the sun, nor illumined by the host of the stars and the rays of the moon; it has as its luminary God the Word himself, the only-begotten Son of the King of all.
20| For this reason the secret theologies of sacred words initiate us into calling him the sun of righteousness and a light beyond all lights. They teach that he himself illumines the all-blessed powers with the rays of righteousness and the beams of wisdom, and that he receives into his own bosom, in place of the heavenly vault, the souls made ready by piety, and so confirms the promises he has given by fulfilling them in deed.
21| No mortal eye has seen, no ear has discerned, nor could any mind clothed in flesh perceive what has been prepared for those who have ordered their lives in piety. So it has been prepared for you too, most God-fearing emperor, for to you alone of all who have lived since the beginning of time has God himself, the King of the universe, granted to cleanse human life even here and now. To you he revealed his own saving sign, by which he overcame death and raised the triumph over his enemies. This victorious trophy, a charm that drives away demons, you set in array against the idols of error, and with it you have won victories over all the godless and the enemies and barbarians, and now over the demons themselves, who are barbarians of another kind.
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